by Gordon Kent
Nobody.
He was aware of movement behind. He swung his head, alert for one of the pursuers. No, an old guy in a blue Jimmy. Still, he waited, throbbing. Always be suspicious. The old guy got down. Flexed his knee. Bad leg. Come on! The old guy was wearing a tractor hat, which he now took off so he could rumple up his hair. He looked around. Stretched. Come on! Then he took out a lot of keys that were chained to his belt by something you could have docked the QE2 with, and he selected a key with the care of a Baby Boomer selecting a blush wine, and at last he jerked the hose out of its cradle and jammed it down into his tank and began to pump. Whistling.
That was okay, then. O’Neill tried not to think of the gas running into the tank, the sound of liquid.
O’Neill leaned into the phone’s transparent shelter and heard the dial tone. Inserted the phonecard. The call was to another area code; the numbers seemed to go on and on. Then the ringing. Two rings, hang up. Good. Wait. Don’t think about pissing. Listen for the dial tone. Card. Area code. Number. Ringing. One, two, three, four—picked up. No voice.
“Seventeen,” O’Neill said. “Yes.” Oh, thank God! End of exercise.
He hung up, ready to run for the men’s room—and the old guy from the pickup truck was standing there, about five feet from him. The old guy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a card and held it up. The card was black, otherwise blank, but O’Neill knew what it meant.
“Oh, shit.”
“You left skid marks back at the turn,” the old guy said. “C-minus.”
O’Neill sagged. “You going to wash me out of the program?”
“That’s not my decision. I’ll say you did pretty good up to the last part.”
O’Neill started to say something, and then his bladder really pulsed, and he said, “If I don’t get to pee, I’ll wet my pants.”
“Oh, we would flunk you out for that.” The old guy grinned. “Got to learn to carry a bottle, son.” And, as if to prove that he was a mean old sonofabitch, he made a sound: “Pssssssss—”
O’Neill ran.
That evening, he learned that he had made the second cut, despite the low grade on the surveillance exercise. Three others hadn’t—two young civilians who hadn’t a clue and shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and a marine captain whose flunkout was a real surprise. He seemed tough and smart to O’Neill, but he was out and Harry was still in. And Richmond had left on his own hook three days before. The class was shrinking.
Why him and not me? he wondered, thinking of the marine captain. I stay, he goes. Makes no sense. He found he wasn’t entirely pleased that he hadn’t been bounced. Relieved, yes. Ego-relieved. But deeper, no. He wasn’t sure he belonged here.
After the posting of the flunk list, they’d put up for the first time a list of after-graduation assignments. The better you did, the better your chances of getting a good one two months from now when it was over. He had identified two he wanted, and he knew he would have a lot going for him in both because of his near-native French and his experience in-country. Paris and Marseille. Wow. You bet. Then all the others, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia … Jesus, Yugoslavia! Surely nobody would send a black man to Yugoslavia!
Would they?
Near Nice, France.
The man called Zulu was riding in the back seat of a chauffeured Daimler and enjoying it. He liked the idea that other people envied him without knowing who he was, some wealthy man made invisible by tinted glass. He was a little wound-up, not bad, nothing like before a fight or the other—a couple of black pills, pulling him up, then a silver to smooth him out. A civilian dose. He touched his sunglasses, which were very dark and very sleek, wrapped back around his temples like the windows of a jet (Bolle, expensive) and a further step toward invisibility. No, toward disguise. This made him smile, too. Zulu was forty and looked younger. A lot tougher than most men of forty. The disfigured nose was a badge of honor, and some women loved it.
The car purred through electronically operated gates that closed behind it, and it swung right and then curved widely left up a semi-circular drive. A man with a rake and a man with a two-way radio watched it; the man with the rake went back to work on a flowerbed, and the man with the radio murmured something and looked intensely serious.
Lascelles was waiting on a terrace. Lascelles was old, old enough that his face had started to show cross-furrows between other furrows, like the cracks in dried mud where a lake had once been. Lascelles had been a colonel, a mayor, a minister, and the real but invisible head of France’s security apparatus. Until he had been forced out. Now he was an angry old man. Not to be underestimated, however. A dangerous, angry old man.
Zulu got out of the big car quickly, his hands just touching the front of his trousers as if he expected the edges of the door to be dirty, swinging his hips out as a woman does, sliding. Erect, he touched the sunglasses and checked his inner self. Was he just a little too high? No, just right. Not nervous. Zulu had not been nervous since he had got big enough not to fear his father’s belt.
“You like the Daimler?” Lascelles said, shaking hands. Meaning nothing.
“Very nice.”
“You picked a pleasant day.” Lascelles’s eyes flicked over the almost fresh cuts on Zulu’s face, then flicked to his hands. Lascelles missed little. “Yesterday, we had rain. Cold!” Lascelles led him along the terrace, making these human sounds, although neither man was very human, smiling a little smile, as if it amused him to be leading this creature, this thing, this gorille manqué along his terrace. He had used all those terms to talk about the man they called Zulu. Not that he wasn’t something of a creature himself.
“Everything is working all right?”
Zulu used silence for his answer. If everything was not all right, he would speak.
They went in through a door to a big, pleasant room full of soft colors like those on the terrace, fabrics with a sheen, a couple of good but unassertive oil paintings. The room did not smell quite right. “I have a task for you,” Lascelles said once they were inside, as if in there it was safe to get serious.
“I need some things, too.” Zulu reached into his jacket, took out a folded paper and handed over a computer-printed list of weapons.
“Well—” Lascelles sat, motioned toward an armchair. “Tit for tat. I have something I want you to do, fairly big.” His face furrowed still more deeply. His head was round, bald, mottled brown. It drew back into his collar.
“My plate is full at home.”
“Nonsense. They have this ‘peace accord,’ NATO have drawn a wavy line on the ground, you are all at peace.” He laughed. “The Americans are putting their nose into something and I need to slice the end off. That will not offend your sensibilities, I think?”
“You know what I think of them.”
“Exactly.” Lascelles went off on a rant that Zulu had heard before, on and on—moral decay, the Jews, Brussels, NATO, the UN. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, Zulu said to himself, his thoughts invisible behind his tinted glasses, although he had his own reasons for hating NATO and the UN.
“I am an exile in my own country,” Lascelles was saying. “I! An honorable exile! A patriot!” His face was red. Like all the French of a certain kind, the ghost of Napoleon always hovered close by him. “The current government of France is deeply unpatriotic, completely subverted by the world state!”
“What do you want me to do?” Zulu said, letting his impatience show.
“Africa,” Lascelles said.
“Africa, oh, shit—Not again!”
Lascelles leaned forward. “The UN patched together some of their internationalist crap and stopped the Rwandan genocide before a satisfactory conclusion was reached. That’s how they work, to put their army in place. Now they are setting up subversion centers all over that part of Africa. The Americans have satellites up above there, too. Hand in glove. But central Africa is French territory. It has always been French territory. One cannot be soft about such matters. One mus
t be hard. Whatever one’s humanitarian feelings, one must be hard. For the greater good.”
“Absolutely.”
“The UN and the Americans must be driven out of central Africa. I will put Africa back together later, after the threat is finished. They will welcome me, you will see. I—we—have old friends there, old clients, I need only speak a word—” His eyes narrowed. “Mobutu!” he whispered. “Very powerful. Very rich. Absolutely my client.”
“Oh, God, Africa.” Zulu rolled his head on the back of the couch. One day in and out, shooting down that airliner, that had been all right. Once in a way, it was all right. Still, he needed weapons. And his war in Bosnia was on hold. “NATO-compatible weapons this time. No old Russian stuff, Lascelles.”
“Yes, yes, yes—!” Lascelles waved the list. “I don’t do these things myself.” He sounded whiny, at the same time arrogant. I give it to some underling, he meant. Arms dealing was a detail, he meant. “You will get your weapons.”
“Soon, it has to be soon, or no deal. To go to Africa, you know—”
Lascelles’s eyes looked shrewd. Like a child saying a naughty word, he said, “One of your centers in the Serbian zone got knocked over, I heard, is that what I heard?” His eyes flicked over Zulu’s face and hands again. “You were there?”
Zulu made a face. “A little one, nothing.” It definitely had been more than nothing, but he wouldn’t admit it to this old spider; it had outraged him, some bunch of shitkickers from UNPROFOR driving him out of one of his own places. Forcing him to jump through a fucking window with some American shithead shooting at him! The amphetamines pushed his anger up and he almost let it show, but he brought himself down, stayed quiet. Pretended to deal with it. “Pustarla, big deal—! The fucking UN!” He flexed his right knee and felt the pain of the long gash he had got, jumping through that window.
“Internationalism!” Lascelles cried. “You see? You see? It’s all part of their plan!”
Zulu didn’t in fact see. He didn’t care a dog’s fart about internationalism. He believed that Greater Serbia could exist in and of itself, separate from the world, above the world. When they had exterminated the Muslims, when the Croats were subdued, when Greater Serbia was a clean and pure state, then they would close their borders and be themselves. To hell with the UN and the US, was his view. To hell with Europe. And fuck France. But, just now, he needed Lascelles.
“What do I have to do in Africa?” Zulu said.
“For now, go back to Serbia and select good men. Say two companies. Elite. Then I will need to send you down there to start things, and if it really explodes, I will need you and your men there perhaps for a month. White troops go through Africans like a hot knife.”
“Money?” Zulu said shrewdly. “White men get good money to fight in Africa.”
Lascelles’s furrows folded in on themselves a little, as if he were pulling into himself. This was his version of a smile. “France will be fair.”
He meant that he would be fair, but he thought of himself as France.
He put his head back, closed his eyes. The meeting was over.
Zulu waited a few seconds to show that he couldn’t be dismissed like a flunkey, but Lascelles ignored him, and he got up and put on his sunglasses and went out to the terrace. As soon as he got out there, the air was sweeter. The odd smell inside was Lascelles.
Zulu went down the terrace, thinking about his war and the loss of the place in Pustarla. Him, the commander, being forced to go out a window and run through the snow like a naked girl. Some goddamned American shooting at him—he’d heard the voice, knew that accent all too well. Rage surged up again and he let it go this time. Rage was good for him, he believed, a rush like a drug. He could do a lot on rage. Africa. For a little while, maybe, while things were quiet back home, until the “peace accord” fell apart. But he had to stay focused. Not get sidetracked by Lascelles’s adventures in Africa. A means to an end. There was no rage for him in Africa. The American who forced him out that window. Yes, he felt rage about that. Greater Serbia. Yes, there was rage. The fucking Muslims, the goddam Croats. Lice. Vermin. Things. Rage. Rage.
The Med, aboard USS Jefferson.
Alan had Ensign Baronik working on the squadron IOs brief, the intel specialists prepping the visuals, and his senior chief cruising the ASW spaces in case there was any chance of running anything against a real target. He felt a pang of envy for the guys who would do it if he found anything. Alan had been a pretty good back seat not so long ago, and he’d run a line on a Russian sub that had almost got his S-3B goosed with the periscope when it had surfaced. Great days. Great for a young man, anyway. Now, he was a senior lieutenant, about to become an acting CAG AI, in—he checked his watch—six hours and thirty-nine minutes.
Because LCDR Suter was leaving.
Leaving his IO’s post, leaving the ship, leaving the Navy. To take “something better,” he’d said with that sneer-smile he used, as if the something better was really better, and none of you merely mortal shmucks would understand how much better. Resigning usually took six months to a year.
Alan’s guess was that Suter had had a greatly accelerated resignation because somebody out there, somebody with real clout, wanted him enough to twist arms.
The raid on the torture center in the Serbian zone seemed like a distant memory now, except for flashes of the man he had shot and of that shadow on the wall—the witch. Or gargoyle. Or whatever that had been. And the name Zulu, which had been on the photograph and which the men who had been tortured there had spoken with fear.
He had got some medals out of it, for what that was worth—one from the Italians that said Coraggio e onore, and a letter from the Canadians, commending him for “extraordinary efforts in intelligence support and acquisition.” The Kenyans had been downright embarrassing (“glorious achievements to enhance our medical work under the banner of the United Nations”).
Had he done well? Had it meant anything, that dawn raid? Men had died; he had killed—what had it accomplished? They had saved two men from more torture, he supposed. One of the victims they’d brought out had had a fractured sinus, wa Danio had said, a broken nose and broken teeth, three broken ribs where they had kicked the water out of him. One had died. One of the bodies had had both eyelids cut away. And for what? Nobody seemed to know. For being young and Muslim. When he thought of the man who had had his eyelids cut off, Alan thought, How can a human being do that? and then he felt a revulsion and anger that gave the Bosnian raid a bad taste.
He had tried to write to a friend who was a Navy cop, Mike Dukas, about it. What kind of people do these things? Maybe a cop would understand. Mike, it’s you guys they need there, not me. They need law. Was that what peacekeeping was?
Now, back on the boat, Alan was going down the list of classified pubs for which Suter was responsible, because Suter was leaving and had to sign off on the classified pubs in his care. The list had already been done and checked by Suter himself, but Alan knew that Suter would screw him somehow if he could. So on and on he went, Alan sinking lower and lower in his chair, until, as he had feared, he found two titles that had been checked off by Suter but that in fact couldn’t be found. Alan wrote a memo and put it in the folder, and then he indicated the missing two as unaccounted for on Suter’s sign-over receipt, initialed the two, signed “with exceptions as noted,” and sent the pages off to Suter. Another stack arrived shortly after.
Suter put his head in at 1717. “I’m out of here in a half-hour.”
Alan went on signing.
“I hear you found two docs missing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“They were there this morning when I did them.”
“They’re not there now.”
“You know they’ll turn up.”
“Yep.” He went on signing. “I’m sure that right now they’re under somebody’s rack, and when we do a final fore-and-aft sweep before hitting the beach, they’ll come out on the end of a broom and we’ll get them ba
ck.” Scrawl, flap.
“Why not just sign off for them now, then?”
“Because they’re not in my possession, and that’s what I have to sign for.” He looked up, grinned. “It’s the law.”
“You know, Craik, you’re the most arrogant cocksucker I’ve ever had to serve with.” He sounded almost genial.
Alan finished signing and pushed the orders across the desk. Later, he would wish he had thought to say, Clearly, I don’t have your experience with cocksuckers, but he didn’t. “You’ll miss your flight if you don’t hurry, sir,” is what he said.
Suter stared into his face, Alan into his. Finally, Suter uncrossed his arms, picked up the orders, and straightened. “Jesus, I’m glad I’m leaving the Navy,” he said. He started out. “I hope you fall on your ass trying to do my job, Craik.”
Alan stopped by the mail slots and found a letter from his wife, which he read in the quiet of the maintenance office, with Senior Chief Prue thoughtfully giving him some space. Everything was good at home—Mikey was growing like a weed; the dog had eaten part of a sweater Rose’s mother had knitted specially; Rose thought she had a line on a great posting for her next tour, some project called Peacemaker. He headed for a briefing with a grin on his face.
Near Atlanta, Georgia.
Mike Dukas was thoroughly pissed. He had just taken part in a bust that was supposed to be a big coup for the FBI and his own agency, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and all they had got was an empty house, five hours of tedium, and a U-Haul full of computers and computer disks. Never mind that the disks were loaded with pornography; nobody knew that yet, and, anyway, the porn wouldn’t have any significance to him for months.