Freedom's Ransom Read online

  “More than enough. Can we make soup out of it, too?” he asked Kris, pointing to the rock squats. “They look like chickens.”

  Kris laughed. “Chicken soup is good for colds. I don’t know as we ever used it specifically for that on Botany, but it does make a good soup.”

  “You have saved us, then, Eric,” Eddie said with great solemnity, clasping his hands together against his chest.

  “The backpack isn’t ours to trade,” Kris said when she heard Jelco clear his throat. “And I could use the flat tray back, too, if you don’t mind.”

  “A minute, please,” Eddie said and, flipping up the counter leaf, stepped out. He started for the hall down which Suzie had disappeared and then whipped back, neatly picking up a rock-squat half before he was off again.

  They could hear a shriek and then a gabble of excited comment before Eddie came back with a tray and a bread basket. He upended the backpack into the basket and carefully transferred the roasted meat to the tray, licking his fingers when he had finished the operation.

  “Hmm, not bad.” He grinned like a happy gnome. Eric held out his hand. “Then we have a done deal?”

  Eddie grasped it, shaking firmly. “Best deal I’ve been able to make in weeks.”

  Then Eric carefully packed away his supplies in the canvas carrier and pulled the loops over his arm.

  “Will you be back again from this Botany place, Dr. Sachs?” Eddie asked as everyone shifted toward the door.

  Eric gave a diffident shrug. “Who knows?”

  They exchanged more good wishes as Eddie saw them to the door. Once in the alleyway, they could hear him closing bolts and turning keys.

  Urchins had gathered around the truck, Murray trying to shoo them away while Wylee stood, legs spread, in the truck bed, trying to look fierce.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” Jelco said, motioning for Kris and Zainal to get back in the front seat. “Didja get everything you needed, Doc?” Jelco asked as Eric carefully handed the backpack up to Dover, advising him to place it carefully.

  “Actually, more than I hoped I’d find,” Eric said, swinging up onto the back of the truck. “Eddie Spivak always kept his inventory current. Nothing here is close to its use-by date.”

  Kris gave a chortle. “‘Use-by’ date has probably lost its significance. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m hungry. We’ve enough rock squats for lunch, you know. And about two dozen more rolls.”

  “Let’s do this down the road a bit,” Jelco said, motioning to the kids who were now standing back from the truck. “I don’t want to cause a minor riot, being seen to have food.”

  “Oh!” was all Kris could say. “Maybe we should…” she began, thinking of the wizened, hungry little faces.

  “Charity begins at home,” Jelco said so firmly that Kris put her usual compassion on hold. They really didn’t have enough to share.

  They pulled up farther down Thirteenth, where there was no audience looking out of upper stories. Murray almost gulped down his portion of rock squat, licking his fingers for any juice, before he pulled apart his ration of roll. No one asked for seconds. But there were still supplies left.

  They proceeded back to the Lincoln Tunnel, Kris trying not to look at the pathetic little clusters of people at street corners, ragged and hungry-looking. They stopped only long enough for the Eastside guards to check them off as returning, though the cargo was eyed with curiosity.

  Kris didn’t even give a thought to the air she was breathing in this second pass under the Hudson River. She wouldn’t die of a lung-full of tainted air. She took a deep breath once they came out on the other side.

  “Hey, New Jersey smells pretty good.”

  “Even Secaucus smells pretty good now there ain’t no more pigs raised there,” Murray said. “Mind you, I wouldn’t mind the smell if it’d get me a roast of pork now and again.”

  They proceeded south on the turnpike until they saw the airport on the right. Also visible was the unmistakable bulk of the BASS-1, sitting on the runway just where they had left it.

  Chapter Six

  Their return must have been observed because Jelco’s phone buzzed. He answered it with an affirmative—evidently a response to a query about their mission’s success. He listened silently for a moment, casting a sideways glance at Zainal before closing the phone.

  “As soon as we unload the stuff, coord wants to have a chat with you. Nothing serious,” he added when he noticed Kris was anxious. “Sort of kinda to get your impressions, I think. He’s real proud of our sector and wants to be sure the other coords did right by you, too. Gotta keep discipline, y’know”

  “You guys were marvelous,” Kris said with genuine appreciation.

  “Sometimes it works out that way, ma’am,” Jelco admitted, saluting her with two fingers. “Glad we could oblige.” He licked his lips, blushing when he realized what he had done. “Bread was super … and so was lunch. Those squats of yours are real tasty.”

  “Chickens all gone?” she asked, trying to put him at ease.

  “Ages ago. Don’t even think there are any eggs anywhere.”

  “Well, we’ve been farming rock squats awhile now so a supply of them is guaranteed.”

  “What’s Botany like, huh?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s like this continent was before the White Man came. We got a coupla bad things—night crawlers.” Even the thought of them made Kris’s spine shiver. “And an avian beast about the size of a dive-bomber. But they’ve been quiet awhile. We got six-legged critters we call loo-cows, good eating, too, but they don’t give milk. Say, anywhere we could trade for cinnamon or raisins?”

  Jelco chuckled, raising his eyebrows like “you gotta be kidding?” before he shook his head. “Long gone. We could trade for spices if any were coming in. And if any were coming in, they’d be landed at New York.” He gave a helpless little shrug. “We’d get some from the Waterfront Coord but we ain’t had any. Raisins? Grapes come in the autumn, don’t they? I remember my gran making grape jelly.”

  “A peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich,” Kris sighed with nostalgia.

  “Now and then we get some peanuts up from the south, but we don’t waste time making butter out of them.”

  She sighed again and then the truck pulled in front of the terminal and stopped.

  Jelco got out and beckoned for Zainal and Kris to come with him, then issued a few low words to Murray to take the truck around to the BASS-1 to unload. Kris asked Eric for the last of the rock squats and any leftover rolls. Zainal hooked the straps of the depleted back-pack over his arm while Kris took the last flat of rock squats.

  “Would the coord have had lunch already?” she asked as she balanced the flat carefully. Wouldn’t do to tip good food into the dirt and debris on the once well-swept sidewalk.

  There was a bit of a delay while the door guards vetted them, and since the female assigned to frisk her pinched her, Kris was not of a mood to reward her clumsiness with a roll.

  “You get to go in the front way this time,” Jelco said and led them down a wide corridor.

  She was surprised that most of the glass sides of the promenade were still intact, though several showed that the airport had not entirely escaped attack. There were a few bullet holes with cracks radiating out from the hit and some windows had been patched with duct tape. That was one item she had many requests for. How the world had run prior to its invention she didn’t know. Not that she thought they should trade gold for it, but she might get an argument out of Herbie Bayes or Pete Snyder on that score. She smiled, and then they were swinging into the plush-carpeted executive area. This was well kept with even a few potted plants—of a high survival type—set about to give it a “decorated” look.

  There was a busy inner office, with cell phones burping and buzzing, several PC stations and everyone busy. But not too busy to glance up and react to the sight of a Catteni being formally ushered in. Almost as if Zainal had taken a hint from her previous regal pos
e, he nodded to workers on either side of the walkway as they passed. A plaque on the door said VICE-PRESIDENT and below that a roughly printed sign read, DANIEL X. VITALI, COORDINATOR, NEWARK AIRPORT HQ. She took a firmer grip on the flat as Jelco tapped on the door. One of the secretaries, busy at her keyboard, looked up and jerked her head to indicate they should go right in.

  The divine smell of coffee—real coffee, ground and dripped— assailed them as they entered. Dan Vitali, coordinator, looking no more rested than he had the previous evening, was pouring himself a cup. He greeted them genially, waving at the guests to help themselves at the coffee station.

  “Real coffee,” he said. “In your honor.” He raised his cup in a toast.

  “Real food to go with it,” Kris said, knowing how to make a drama out of this fortuitous entrance. “And bread.”

  “More of the stuff you passed out last night?” The green coordinator smiled with considerable pleasure, seating himself at the big desk amid a stack of paperwork and clipboards. Kris served him first, ‘Eric passed around the pack of rolls, and Vitali’s expression was incredulous. “Real bread?”

  “Fresh this morning,” she said and served them to the half-dozen people in the room working at desks or waiting to present papers and letters to their commander.

  “We eat, kids,” Dan Vitali said, pushing his chair away from the desk and leaning back as he took his first bite of the roll, Kris was pleased to see him enjoy it.

  “Oooh, that goes down easily, Kris Bjornsen, very easily. Jelco says everything went well?”

  “He’s right and we can’t thank you enough for setting everything up for us,” Chuck said, pulling up a stool and sitting down. He found a blank piece of paper, carefully folded it into quarters, then placed his coffee cup on a corner of the desk.

  “I hope you take it black,” Jelco was saying as he poured coffee into enough mugs to go around. “We ain’t had creamer in ages.”

  “We take it black,” Kris said. “Unless you have some sugar?”

  “Packet?” Jelco said, holding up several of the packets that used to be served in restaurants.

  “One’ll do me fine.”

  When she caught his eye going to the sagging backpack, she gestured for him to take another roll. He did and once he had served everyone coffee, he leaned against a map-filled table at one side of Vitali’s desk.

  Vitali was busy with his impromptu snack. He, too, licked his fingers, drying them on a towel that he took from a lower desk drawer and wiping his mouth as well.

  “That was an unexpected dividend,” he said, burping once. He looked up and suddenly everyone in the room save Jelco found business that took them from the office. “Now,” and he gestured to a sack on one end of his desk—a sack that bore the logo of a well-known pharmaceutical company, “I gotta deal pending I’m hoping you can help me with—since I know what humanitarians you are.” His grin was devious. “You ain’t got any restrictions on you about where you fly while you’re in Earth’s atmosphere, have you?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Chuck said. “Though I might need a reason if I’m asked.”

  “Good! I didn’t know if you had only an in-and-out license or not.”

  “I set it up to be able to get the stuff we need to trade with,” Chuck said.

  “Great! Now, that package is drugs, badly needed in Kenya.”

  Chuck hmmmed diplomatically and glanced at Zainal to see if he understood. Zainal gave a quick nod.

  “We don’t have enough gasoline in any of our planes to make such a flight. How’s your fuel situation?”

  “Where do we have to go?”

  “Like I said, Kenya. Outside Nairobi. If that ship of yours can do another short flight, it would help immensely if you could make a small detour to the west, to the Kiambu Ridge area-near the Great Rift Valley, to give you a landmark few could miss.”

  Kris’s eyes went wide. Chuck knew what that place meant and he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, to listen more intently.

  “It also happens to be one of the big coffee-producing areas of Africa. They do the robustas, if you know the difference. Kiambu Ridge coffees are the crème of the crème for full flavor. Use ‘em to give more taste to lesser beans. I gotta deal going with the local coord that if I can get those medicines to him, he’ll see I can fill my plane”—and now there was a decidedly wicked twinkle in the coord’s eyes—“full of coffee beans. Roasted beans. Oh, we got a facility in Newark that roasts but they’d want their cut, too.”

  “Wow!” Kris said. Since Catteni had become addicted to coffee during their stay on Earth, to be able to trade roasted beans would mean they’d have a surefire commodity few Catteni would pass up. Maybe they could even set up a coffee bar to serve those dealing with Zainal and the others for more important items, like spare comm sat parts, tires, batteries, and what was the other thing so desperately needed? Spark plugs, she thought, but they wouldn’t be at the top of the list.

  “My deal is that if you take that … KDM did you call it? … you can keep ten percent of whatever you bring back to me.”

  “How do you know we’d come back with a KDM-load of coffee beans?” Chuck asked, grinning.

  “You’re the only one I’d trust to do so, Mitford,” Dan Vitali said, looking straight into the sergeant’s eyes. “Now I’ve met you, I believe everything I been told about you.”

  “Thank you,” Chuck replied with a nod of his head, but the grin hadn’t left his face.

  “Of course, Jelco will come with you as he’s dealing for me,” the coord added with a sly grin of his own.

  “Of course,” Chuck agreed affably.

  “Is ten percent much?” Zainal asked.

  “That’d be one in every ten sacks of raw beans.”

  “Not raw, Chuck,” the coord said firmly. “Roasted. And I don’t want to split more than I have to. Each sack of beans weighs fifty pounds.”

  Kris sighed and Vitali laughed.

  “We could do a lot with a KDM-sized load.”

  “They made a deal for a plane load,” Chuck reminded him, “not a spaceship full.”

  “Jelco will handle that detail. The stuff we bring is more than they asked for but it will stop the epidemic of typhoid they got on their hands right now”

  “Typhoid?” Kris said. “Is that back?”

  “I don’t think it ever went away in some parts of the world,” Chuck said.

  “There’s broad-spectrum antibiotics in the package, polio, the latest cholera vaccine, on account of that’s endemic where there’s so little hygiene and lots of starvation, and some other stuff ointments for the kind of sores that are rampant in Africa, which the laboratory said could be useful there. But Kenya is willing to trade for it. Especially as there won’t be any ships going that way for a while. Not even by sea.”

  “Then we can be, as you said, philanthropists as well as haulers,” Chuck said and looked at Kris and Zainal to see if they agreed.

  “Coffee,” Kris said with a sigh. “Wow!”

  “There is an area down by the Masai encampment on Botany,” Zainal mentioned idly, “hot enough and with sufficient rain on the mountains to grow coffee beans. It might be worth it to try cultivating our own coffee on Botany. If we were going straight back to Botany, I’d risk bringing some plants,” Zainal said and shook his head in regret.

  The coord leaned forward across the table. “How can someone get into Botany?”

  “Like, immigrate?” Chuck asked. “We discussed that before we left, sir. We can only accept so many invalids before our economy is disrupted. We took in a shipload of those folks the Eosi tried to brain wash and they’ve integrated well into our population. We agreed to accept applications, preferably people who have some sort of skill that can help the commonweal,” at which Vitali nodded sagely, “but we could use a discreet number of young folk to increase the gene pool for future generations.”

  “All sorts?” Vitali asked, his expression intense.

  “All sorts,�
� Chuck agreed. “We’re pretty representative of races, creeds, and colors to begin with, on account of we had no choice in the first place getting dumped there.”

  “Hmm. So, what sort of occupations are you aiming for?”

  “Anyone trained in biology, botany, medicine. Even another dentist.”

  “Will you be coming back here soon?”

  “Oh, we’ll be back when we spring loose some of the stuff the Catteni heisted,” Chuck said with a wave of his hand. “We can also send back more wheat, I think.” He looked for approval at Zainal and Kris, who nodded solemnly. “Maybe some protein. We got these loo-cows. Got six feet and no milk, but they make good eating.”

  “Meat? Red meat?” Vitali asked in an almost wistful voice.

  “I like the rock squats better myself,” Chuck said amiably, “but any kind of steak goes down easily.”

  “Even rhinoceros, I hear tell,” Kris murmured, overcome by whimsy. Vitali flashed her a startled look.

  “Yes, well, I can see that this might be the beginning of a mutually profitable association,” Vitali said. He lifted the medicinal package toward them and some papers, including a map and airplane charts.

  “Got these from one of the airlines in case they’d be any use to a spaceship,” he said, handing them across to Chuck, who slipped them inside his shirt before shaking hands with the coord. “We don’t, by the by, intend to hog all the coffee beans to ourselves, you know”

  “Glad to hear it, Vitali,” Chuck said, and then the man offered his hand to Kris and Zainal.

  Jelco came forward and plucked the medicines from the desk and accepted his superior’s handshake.

  “Glad we could make a deal, Mitford “

  As they left the coord’s office he was calling his assistants back in, searching through clipboards to see which had the priority of his immediate attention.

  “Coffee’” Chuck said under his breath as Jelco led them down corridors and steps and eventually back onto the deserted expanse of the airfield. “We can sure use ten percent of what the KDM can hold.”