The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

  I was de-attaching the silencer from the H&K. I used my eyes for her. I called her name softly, “Therese”, continuing what I was doing. Nobody else had moved yet. Shit! Was this ‘Slow Time” and I didn’t even know how to tell the difference? A sudden shot of adrenaline on a normal level hit me, and my panic subsided immediately.

  “Oui?”

  “Terry is fine. He’s working with us now, but we’re going to have to leave this hotel now for the safe house. See to your stuff, and maybe if you want a quick freshening up, whatever. Okay? We’ll leave in about ten minutes. Can you handle that? Do you need any help?”

  “Non, non, merci. Mon bagage est déjà prêt. J’ai que besoin cinq minutes.”

  The whole time, we’d been eye to eye, no blinking. She held up her hand and splayed her fingers out. Five. Cool. She just got better and better at this.

  Godsen came and gave me a hand to get the bleeding stopped for poor old Terry. A couple of bathroom towels and four buckets of ice were all that we needed, by the time we’d accomplished our goal. It made me wonder about my reflexes, but just a bit. I’d meant to part his hair with a slug. Resulting in a grazing bullet wound, accompanied by unconsciousness, and probably a mild concussion. Well, I think we were well on the positive side of a mild concussion. It worked out better this way than if I’d made it too obviously safe.

  I resembled my grandfather in many ways on the inside, one of them was accuracy with a firearm. Twenty-twenty vision, with added far-focus capability. I remember sitting in the big kitchen at his house on the farm. It was the late fall, so even in the daytime we had the kitchen stove going. I was a chief log feeder, so I knew about these things. Beside the table where we ate and played cards and read the Bible together, there was this big window. It had no curtains, because it faced the woods and the river. Small river. Salmon Creek. The last time anyone had seen a salmon in it was something that had been lost down the generations. About a mile and a half away, to the left downstream, there was a turn in the river as it wound its way out of sight. Down in the little river valley, about fifty yards down.

  We were sitting there one day, and out of the blue, he says to me: “Look down there, a mother duck, and a string of ducklings following her, coming around the bend in the creek.” I looked and looked, but I couldn’t see them, so we got the binoculars out, and Lo and Behold! There was the mother duck and all of the little ducklings. The full five he had counted as they came around the bend. But he hadn’t needed the binoculars.

  Then my uncles would come to visit, and they’d have shooting matches with the .303 and the .30-30. None of them were able to beat him. And the .303’s were the Lee-Enfields that were brought home after the war. In my family they were all in the war, or working two jobs a day in weapons and munition factories, for the girls. I had thirteen aunts and uncles. There were a lot of kids too. I had more cousins than the original Mr. Smith.

  I dug the slug out of the wall of the far side of the bedroom, just in case. When Evie had finished preparing all of her gear, I gave her the keys to the van, and instructions to sweep the car for bugs, then meet us in the alley off the kitchen in ten minutes.

  Therese and I went with the first load, taking just the personal luggage. On the second trip, we brought the small dolly with the equipment, courtesy of the push-power of Ronnie, and Therese and I held up Terry. Fortunately, he had never been a big guy to start with.

  By the time we got to the back door of the kitchen, the kitchen boy—always lowest rung on the hotel ladder—was there, as was the Manager, who had greeted us that same morning. It turned out that he was the owner of the place as well, and was worried about his reputation. Didn’t we like the accommodations, and by the way, was our friend dead? That sort of thing.

  I gave Monsieur La Forge sixty seconds and ten thousand francs at the same time. I peeled the thousand-franc notes off my special roll. I had my back to the crew, and La Forge two inches in front of me. Nose to nose so to speak. To clear up the whole matter. The opportunity to get the Suite started on had presented itself, and I firmly believed in taking each and every opportunity that came along, as long as it was headed in your preferred direction. There was work to be done.

  I mentioned this to him as I pulled off note after note, firmly, but not fast, and keeping count verbally as I mentioned that the suite would need some redecorating. Starting in maybe five minutes or so would be good, as far as the timing for the start of these renovations. There was a hole in two of the walls, which meant that both walls would have to be redone from scratch if the job was to be done up to the standards. The sofa might need to be replaced as well, what with the blood stains and all. We were talking serious renovations here. I wanted him to be happy with the results, after all.

  The ten thousand francs, plus the thought of what he would have to undergo in negative publicity if anything action-oriented, with physical evidence, blah, blah, blah, was detected, then blah, blah, blah. As I reached ten thousand, the thought of ‘Bullet the blue sky’ by U2 came to mind. The part where he’s talking about one hundred dollar bills—“Slapping them down, one hundred, two hundred,”—Monsieur La Forge never moved his eyes from the roll. I noticed that his eyes were a watery grey and set too close together for him to ever have a classic ‘look’ that would suit him. I kept going and only stopped when it was apparent from La Forge’s heart was happy. Twenty thousand. Pretty steep for not even one day’s stay. But then.

  The .45 round, after grazing poor old Terry, had carried on to go through the wall of the sitting room and partway through the bedroom’sopposite wall as well. It had stopped after penetrating about two inches of the original brick layer sandwiched between the exterior wall surfacea full foot or more of stone masonry—and the same light plaster over drywall on the inside.

  The sitting room wall was a light plaster coat over modern drywall, over plaster again, two or three inches deep—a rough mix, with a steel web mesh in the middle—in front of which was modern drywall, covered with a light coat of plaster. I knew, because I had dug the slug out of the wall before we left the room on this last trip. It was in my jeans pocket. Intact.

  Those thousand franc notes were like magic. Letting him feel Terry’s pulse helped too. As we finished up our agreement that we were never here, and if we were, we didn’t look like us, we looked like American tourists, right down to the cameras and loud shirts and the whole deal. A kitchen boy was already sent to fetch the necessary tool kit to start the work on the redecorating.

  Meanwhile, everyone was carrying out my instructions without a pause, and by the time I turned around to go, everyone was in the van, the motor was running, and Monsieur La Forge hurried to let me out into the night, forever would be nice, I was sure he was thinking, as he closed the door behind me, and I hopped into the open side door and we took off. I grabbed my seat and buckled myself in. With my leverage, I then slammed the side door shut.

  We were off into the Zurich night again. This time with a dangerous stop along the way. To plant Terry.

  The Niederdorf was still being scoured by the Zurich Police for any clue they could find. All of the patrons in the pub would be given counseling, and questioning, and they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two. All bystanders were being questioned, and Big Bob would probably get grilled for the rest of the night. I didn’t want any of our team joining him. Spending the rest of our night trying not to explain our involvement would have been unacceptably tedious.

  The place we were dumping Terry was behind the recycling bin I had told him about, maybe three blocks or so from Big Bob’s pub. We managed that without incident, thankfully. That was where he would wake up, about a minute of two after we’d gone. Evie was going to give him a stimulant, but intra-muscularly—a quick shot in the butt—so he would wake up fast, but not fast enough for us to still be there when he did.

  Then we were off to the safe house that I was becoming more suspicious about as time went by. Like I’d been thinking before, f
or Terry to be in the state he was in, and Mark not to recognize a problem when he saw it, meant that Mark was paying attention only to personally selected cases, or issues, and to only those few men directly around him, including his main advisor, whom we didn’t meet today. Mark knew better than that.

  I probably would have thrown him out of the train window at the very least if he’d shown up. I had given him his one chance, just like I do with all of the ‘Good Guys’, and he had broken that trust. As a result, I lost a leader on one of my missions. A good man, with family and all that goes with that. I had insisted on being the one who told his wife and little girl. Roland Vachon was the Major who’s rank I had taken when he went down. That was under sealed orders that I only opened when Roland was killed.

  One other team member, our point man, had been hit by the same sniper before I’d been able to get to him. It was a neck wound that necessitated my leaving one man behind to keep him alive. The least important man in the plan was the one who was going to block the road on the southern side of our objective. A small bridge on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere. To the north we had allies. Or better put, we were allied to the democratic government in the north. It was shortly after the newly installed Yemeni communists had broken the country in two, keeping the southern part for themselves.

  Communist troops disguised as Free Yemen troops, and some of them had once been exactly that, had been making sorties across the bridge up there in the foothills of the mountains. The town of Sana’a was bearing the brunt of the raids without any protection to speak of. There had been a small armoury, with a contingent of ten soldiers and two officers. The first raid had cut that in half and had diminished the materiel placed at the armoury by at least a third. Now all they had left was mostly hand-held weaponry, and one APC, armoured personnel carrier.

  We were sent to make sure the bridge went down. And it had a long way to go. The short span joined the two sides of a gorge that was almost a full kilometer straight down, with an undercut at the bottom. As you went further down, the gorge opened up until you hit the bottom, where there was room for a creek and plenty of camping space on both sides as well. Because of the tight spaces and the overhangs from the surrounding mountains, many separate attempts to take the bridge out with airpower had been made by the Free Yemen state, without success. The hills and cliffs on all sides of us were pock-marked with small rocket craters. The mountains around here were based on basalt and a granite of some kind, and the rockets didn’t really do much when they hit the cliff sides. It was a hands-on job, so naturally, we got it.

  The sniper was almost a full kilometer away as I recall, but he had good gear. As soon as the armed chopper had pulled out, he’d started firing, and it was just luck that I wasn’t the one wearing the team leader’s cap. The sniper’s first shot dropped our chief like a hot potato. It took me almost twenty minutes to get behind him and stop the deadly rain of lead he was pouring down on us.

  I still believed that it was Lieutenant-Major Salter and his tendency to talk when he was drunk, which was all of the time, that had leaked this particular mission. There were only two people other than us who even knew about the job. Salter was one, and the SAS Commander was the other. It seemed like a pretty simple equation to me.

  For some reason, Mark never could see the faults with Salter. He did his job well for Mark, and as for the rest of us, we were just ‘tools’. Mark hadn’t been part of our force at that time, and so he didn’t really know us from Adam. That changed the very next year, when he’d been instructed to ‘integrate’ with our force. That had been unsuccessful in the long run, but I’d already quit the force before the end of that particular stroke of upper-level genius had played itself out.

  I had gone on to complete the mission with what was left of the team, my demolition man, and my cover man, a Yemeni named Abdul Minahd. He had taken a hit from the sniper as well, but the round had failed to penetrate his backpack. The radio was directly affected in a rather absolute fashion though. It had been in the backpack at the time. As the old saying goes: ‘If anything can go wrong, it will’. That night it did, but we accomplished our objective anyway.

  I’ll never forget the sight of that bridge going down. It fell in large pieces, and fell and fell and fell and, well you get the drift. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and by that time I thought I’d seen it all. Just when you start feeling like you’ve got it all figured out, life throws a curve-ball when you were certain that it would be a fast-ball. Go figure.

  We might find out some answers to new and old questions soon enough. I intended to go over Mark’s safe-house with a microscope if need be, but I would find something to help explain it. I didn’t like to think of some of the more distasteful things I might find, or find out about. Mark had been a good player in those past years. I liked to think that the core of the operations in Zurich, which was Mark now-a-days, was beyond reproach, but in the end I trusted nothing, and nobody but the ‘Team’. So I would look, and maybe I would find. Maybe.

  ~

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  T

  he drive from where we dropped Terry off to the safehouse was about twelve, fifteen minutes, maximum. We got there in thirty. There were no other cars on the roads we took, choosing to go the whole way through the residential sections of the town. Ronnie drove taking direction from myself in the far-rear passenger seat. Therese sat up front with Ronnie, making an innocent picture for the occasional vehicle we did cross paths with. Evie was in the middle seat, and both her and I stayed low. That, plus the tinting gave the van the look we were going for. Two women. Safe.

  On the way over I talked about what I’d been formulating as the day wore on. The idea was that we treat the house as a hostile environment until we’d secured it properly, which we would do. Both women team members listened carefully, and opposed nothing. Therese excerpted herself from the entire exchange, until it got to the part where we leave her in a secure position between the car and the house, while we assaulted it. Basically.

  Then she turned her head and made eye contact with me. I nodded, and she said “D’Accord”, and turned back to the road and the empty night, with houses and apartments all around and only a light here or there, but mostly dark.

  We parked two streets over from the lane entrance to the garage. Before we left the van, I went over it as well as I could in the dark. Under the carpet below the middle seat I found a small latched cover. It was about three feet wide and two feet long. The lock on the latch was built into the cover. It held its own against me for about twenty or thirty seconds. Good lock.

  When I opened it, Evie was as close to the floor as I was. This was intriguing. These vans didn’t come with this little lock-box, so it was a custom job that Mark had had done for him. What I would find in it, I had no sure idea, but I would have bet my shorts it was money or weapons. They were two of the three commodities Mark and his people dealt in. The third was information, and I didn’t expect to find any records or microfilm here.

  Just before I opened it, I leaned my head to the right a bit, putting me next to Evie, who was heads down on the floor beside me. In a quiet voice I said, “My bet is ‘Weapons and Identification Papers’. You?”

  She kept looking at the door to the lock-box. Then she softly answered me.

  “Just be careful Jeffry, I think it’s rigged. My bet is Money and Papers.”

  I swiveled my head from Evie to the lock-box again and thought about Mark. If I imagined the worst, it would be Weapons and Papers. Mark’s family had money to start with, and if he needed any, I was sure he had accounts everywhere. But would he rig the lock-box? No, I was certain that he wouldn’t think of that. It wouldn’t even cross his mind. I opened the inset box.

  Evie had shut her eyes tight when I pulled the lid up. Nothing happened, so she opened them again. I reached into my side jacket pocket and pulled out a MiniMag flashlight. The small, small one. I twisted it on, setting the beam very tight, about one inch
across, and stuck it between my teeth. There was a cover of oilcloth over the entire contents. A nice black oilcloth. I followed my hands with the small beam of light as I reached out and lifted the edge of the cloth.

  Carefully set into form-fitted, plasticized foam, was a pair of shoulder mount mobile missile tubes. They were definitely of recent vintage. They were short, maybe two and a half feet long, that’s it. At the left hand side of the lock-box was a selection of rounds for the launchers. Evie looked at me questioningly.

  “I think it’s fine, Mark had no expectation that anyone would be going over the van with the intent of discovery. Go ahead.”

  She gingerly lifted one of the sleek little missiles up and out of the box, then pulled up the corner of the form-fitted foam they were resting in. That revealed a second row of missiles laid underneath. There were eight on top, so it was quite probable that there were eight underneath as well.

  I motioned with the light, and she put the missile back in its foam bed. Then I lifted both of the shoulder mount launchers, one at a time, setting them on the seat beside me, and lifted my corner of the foam. Underneath were two more launcher tubes.

  The tubes were lighter than any I’d played with before, and I’d played with plenty. This was definitely new technology. Four rocket launchers and sixteen missiles. A serious method of self-defense? Or maybe just a sample for a buyer? It was pretty hard to know at this stage. I laid the corner of foam back down, and returned both of the tubes to the box.

  Evie shook her head at me.

  “Give me one, we may need it according to you.”

  I thought about that for a second or two, but she was right. If there was a trap laid for us at the safe-house, then we would need all the defense we could muster. If we had a fire fight, we’d have to leave the neighbourhood ASAP anyway, so it couldn’t hurt to have a bigger gun than the other guy. Especially if the other guy was wearing one of those bloody ‘suits’.