by AJ Stewart
“I know you were in Afghanistan before here.”
“Okay.”
“And if my sources are any good, you and your boys found the most wanted terrorist in the history of the world.”
“That sounds like a fishing story. The one that got away.”
“Except he didn’t get away. We got him.”
Fontaine shrugged and bit into a forkful of fries. Hutton drank some beer and was quiet for a moment.
“I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t care. I don’t care who you are. If there is even a real you. I don’t care who you’re working for. I think you’re one of the good guys. I think you’ll see the job through. Whatever it takes.”
Fontaine put his fork down and leaned his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands. He looked at her and she looked at him.
“I appreciate it.”
She smiled again and ate some more and they finished their dinner, chatting about best meals ever and places they had always wanted to visit. Paris was her top choice. She’d never been. He told her he knew it well. His choice was San Francisco. The bay and the cable cars and the Dungeness crab.
They finished their meal and strolled back toward the hotel. The night was still warm and heat radiated from the buildings around them in the Green Zone. The area wasn’t well lit and there were no other people on foot, but Fontaine wasn’t worried. He carried a sidearm, as did Hutton. And the Green Zone was like a small-town neighborhood compared to the places Fontaine spent most of his time.
They passed a vacant block that had a pile of rubble at its center. It had been a building, perhaps an office. Perhaps it would be again. They walked in silence, listening to the night and each other’s breathing. The sounds of the city surrounded them. Cars and horns and people. In the distance they heard a chopper roar to a landing. Vehicles passed by. The city felt normal. Fontaine had a distorted frame of reference, but he imagined this was what regular people did in regular cities.
The headlights came slowly at first. Then they sped up, the engine of the dark SUV screaming with acceleration, and then just as suddenly it diverted off the road onto the dirt siding, right at Fontaine and Hutton. They both tensed as the brakes bit and dust flew and the vehicle stopped before them. Spotlights burst from the top of the vehicle, a bar of light blinding them. Fontaine put his arm up to shade his vision. He heard a door open and the metallic crack of a semiautomatic rifle being cocked. Then a voice.
“Hands up. Move slow to car.”
Not a native English speaker. Accented. But not a local Baghdad accent. Maybe Kurdish, from the north. Perhaps in Baghdad looking for work, and finding it. Fontaine put his hands up. Hutton did likewise. As Fontaine took a small step he bent slightly and whispered to Hutton.
“Flank.”
He hoped she understood. There wasn’t time for a great discussion about tactics. And she wasn’t military. However, she was smart and she was well trained. They took two steps each, forward but away, him right, she left. They moved to within ten feet of the vehicle but spread so they were each now under the glare of a separate spotlight. Neither of them stopped moving. A pattern. Essentially one step forward two steps out. They were each on the periphery of the spotlights when the voice with the rifle caught on.
“Stay in light,” he yelled.
“How do we get in then?” returned Hutton.
“Can’t get in the car through the windshield,” called Fontaine. His right hand was now in darkness. And for all the blindness the spotlights were causing him, they were doing the same for the voice with the rifle. The spots gave the sharp blue tint of LEDs. Very bright. The light was absolute. So was the dark.
“What do you want?” called Hutton. Fontaine broke a tight smile as she drew the attention back to herself. He didn’t wait for the response. He broke right, dropping from full light to full dark in two steps. He pumped his arms hard, lots of momentum, like an Olympic sprinter. But it was all for show. He heard the voice yell something unintelligible to him and the drop of boots onto the hard ground. The guy had been standing on the running board and had dropped down. Exactly what Fontaine expected. As soon as he was in darkness he cut left, along the dark side of the wedge of the light coming from the spotlights. He got low and pushed hard and in less than two seconds he crashed his shoulder into the open door of the SUV.
The metal gave way some. A body work guy was going to have to remove a shoulder shaped dent from the door. The door drove back hard, right into the guy standing behind it. Fontaine drove the door hard into the guy and heard the wind get knocked from him. He was still night-blind so he edged along the door and raked it open with his left hand and used the momentum to swing himself around. His right fist sped around on the outside of the circle of momentum, gaining the greatest speed, before it ended its journey against the jaw of the guy behind the door. His punch landed and he felt the rifle wedged between them. Fontaine wasn’t the biggest guy in his unit, let alone in the Legion, but he was fast. So what he lacked in mass he made up for in acceleration, such that the force behind his punch was devastating. The guy’s face crumpled and his head shot back into the sidebar of the vehicle, solid metal covered by thin rubber. The guy dropped to the ground. Not unconscious but not far from it. Fontaine reached down to take the guy’s rifle.
“No move,” said the second voice.
Fontaine glanced up to see another guy with a rifle leaning across from the passenger seat of the car. Fontaine noted the distinctive curved magazine of the AKM rifle, the Kalashnikov model that had superseded the famous AK-47. The AKM had long been superseded itself, but was a hardy weapon that Fontaine did not wish to tangle with at such short range. He lifted his hands slowly, and stood. The guy in the car looked worried, even though he had the gun. He looked scared. Like this was not how things were supposed to turn out and going off plan was not something he had been prepared for. The gun was unsteady in his hands. Fontaine waited for him.
“Put the gun down. Now.”
The voice was Hutton’s. It was firm and loud and not to be messed with. Fontaine looked past the guy with the AKM and saw Hutton standing on the other side of the vehicle, arms extended through the open window, her Glock 23 aimed directly at the back of the guy’s head. The guy looked at Fontaine for a moment, and suddenly Fontaine felt scared. He knew the look. He’d seen it before.
It was the panicked, sweaty look of a suicide bomber.
Not just any suicide bomber. It was the look of a suicide bomber caught between a rock and a hard place. Few suicide bombers wore peaceful expressions as they prepared to meet their maker. Most people, even extremists, knew the outcome was not a positive one for them. They often felt unsure, perhaps even had changes of heart. Most suicide bombers were caught because most of them didn’t detonate. When the crunch came they changed their mind. It wasn’t a natural part of the human condition to want to die. People were driven to it by circumstance, threats or illness. But humans were, for the most part, built to live. To continue. To survive.
The guy facing Fontaine wanted to live. The fear in his face was absolute. He had no desire to blow himself to pieces even if he wished that upon Fontaine. But the look on his face said that failure was not an option. Someone else held the cards and he had nothing but a losing hand. Perhaps a wife, or a daughter, held against their will with a promise of release. His life for hers. A promise that would never be kept. Not in Fontaine’s experience. Sometimes the bomber came to that realization. Fontaine had seen an operation in Pakistan where the bomber had returned to the men holding his kin and had detonated the explosive there, taking the kidnappers and his family with him on his own terms. But sometimes they believed what they desperately wanted to believe, that freedom was imminent for their loved ones. Perhaps promises of money and houses and security. Every mind on the planet was capable of such self-deceit.
“We can find them,” said Fontaine. He felt the adrenaline rise through his system. It was another riddle he couldn’t answer. A small campfir
e could send him into cold sweats but facing a suicide bomber his breathing was regulated and his mind alert. He was almost reveling in it, if such a thing were possible. He didn’t take his eyes from those of the bomber. The man had heavy stubble on his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. He seemed to consider Fontaine’s words. Fontaine wasn’t even sure the man spoke English. It didn’t matter either way. Slowly the man shook his head. A soft but definitive motion. Then he took his hand from the rifle and moved it toward his chest.
“Bomb!” screamed Fontaine. It was pointless. He turned and dove for the compacted dirt roadside, but there was no getting away. He was too close. And Hutton was closer. He was too late. He waited for his life to flash before his eyes, but there wasn’t time.
The sound was a crack in the night. Not a huge resounding boom. Fontaine felt no explosion, no heat, no light. Just a crack and then silence. He had barely hit the ground when he realized that Hutton had shot the guy. He was glad he had ducked. The round would have passed right through the passenger and onward to where Fontaine’s face had been seconds earlier. Fontaine jerked into a pushup position, and then skipped up and turned back to the car. Then he reconsidered everything.
The would-be-bomber was dead all right. The majority of his head was missing. But the remains of him were splattered across the back of the vehicle, not toward where Fontaine stood. Hutton stood on the other side of the SUV but now she faced front. Her arms extended, cupping her sidearm in firing position, looking for something in the darkness in front of the vehicle. In the direction they had walked from. The spotlights from the SUV still shone. And Fontaine realized too late that the round he heard had been all wrong. Not a handgun at all. It was deeper, more resonant. Further away. It was a rifle shot.
A beam of light penetrated the darkness beyond the spotlight coming from the SUV. The two opposing lights competed for a moment, and then the distant light drew nearer. A vehicle pulled forward with urgency, skidding to a stop three meters from the grill of the dead guy’s SUV. Doors opened. Boots hit the ground. Fontaine grabbed the rifle from the semiconscious guy on the ground. As he lifted it he noted it felt strange, so he slipped out the magazine. It was empty. He quickly pulled back the slide to check if there was one in the chamber. No round fell out. He dropped the gun onto the ground.
“Freeze,” called Hutton. “United States FBI. Freeze.” She was tracking her gun across the facing vehicle, side to side. Fontaine looked back to the vehicle and realized it was a Humvee. As wide as two normal vehicles. A utility vehicle on steroids.
“Friendlies,” came the call from the Humvee. “Down weapons. Friendlies!”
Hutton didn’t drop her weapon an inch. Fontaine was thankful for that. Then he saw a soldier step into the light. He had his hands out. Away from his side, not in the air.
“Laura, can you point that thing somewhere else?”
Fontaine recognized the voice before he recognized the man. He knew the Scottish brogue. Had listened to it ramble on for years. Hutton hesitated and then lowered her gun. Neil McConnell wandered forward and met them in front of the SUV.
“Nice evening for a walk,” he said.
“It was, two minutes ago,” said Fontaine.
“You really should stick to a vehicle after dark. This place may look like Kansas but looks can be deceiving.”
“So it seems.”
“Did you shoot that guy?” asked Hutton.
McConnell nodded. “Aye. One of my guys.”
“He’s a good shot,” said Fontaine. “Dark into spotlight into dark.”
“This ain’t your dad’s army, Fontaine. We pay good money, we get good people.”
Fontaine flinched at the mention of his dad’s army. He knew McConnell wasn’t being specific, but it hit home anyway.
“Did you have to kill him?” asked Hutton.
McConnell laughed. “You’re welcome, Laura. Seriously. Did ye no hear your buddy here yell bomb?”
Hutton frowned and slipped her gun back into its holster.
“I’m just glad we were out,” McConnell said. He looked at Fontaine. He didn’t say that Fontaine owed him one, and neither did Fontaine.
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride home. My guys will take it from here.”
“I need to file a report,” said Hutton.
“Laura, trust me. You don’t want to be anywhere near this. We’ll file a report, don’t worry. All proper like. But you don’t want to be in it. The FBI doesn’t want this kind of PR.”
Fontaine nodded and stepped forward and touched her on the shoulder and she dropped in beside him. Several men jogged forward from the Humvee to assess the semiconscious guy on the ground. Fontaine and Hutton climbed up into the rear of the big vehicle. McConnell hit the button and the diesel engine roared to life and he pulled out onto the road with a violent tug. He drove without speaking. He didn’t ask why they were there. He didn’t ask why they were walking and not driving. He didn’t ask about the men in the SUV. And Fontaine was thankful for the silence.
McConnell drove in through the checkpoint in front of the hotel and then pulled up to the curb like a taxi. They all sat for a moment, the engine rumbling deeply.
“I best get back,” said McConnell.
Hutton pushed the door open and jumped down onto the concrete with a slap. Fontaine followed her down. His head was throbbing. Not from pain but from blood flow. His heart was pumping so hard he wasn’t sure his arteries could contain it. The adrenaline was coursing through him like a drug. He turned back to the Humvee.
“Thanks,” he said to McConnell.
The big Scot just nodded.
“Legio Patria Nostra,” he said, and then hit the accelerator and roared back out into the night.
Bandy watched McConnell drive away from the hotel. He had been following Fontaine and the woman, from the hotel to the restaurant and on. Following pedestrians in a lightly populated area wasn’t easy in a vehicle, so he had driven ahead of where he anticipated they would walk. He was sitting in the darkness at a corner when the large SUV had sped by his position. He watched as it came to a stop, with Fontaine and the woman in the spotlights, and he saw them raise their hands. Then the driver went down, and the Humvee approached from the other direction. Clearly whoever this other unit was, they had saved Fontaine. Bandy didn’t know if they had been there by luck or design, but he wasn’t a big believer in luck. He figured after his close call Fontaine would stay in for the rest of the night. Bandy knew he needed some sleep himself. But he had two things to do before he rested. First, he called General Thoreaux. He told the general about the apparent attack on Fontaine, and about the American called Dennison and his safe house. The general told Bandy he would find out what he could about the American, and to get some sleep and then be on Fontaine. Nothing must happen to Fontaine, but he should learn nothing. Bandy thought killing Fontaine would settle a lot of problems, but the general told him that Fontaine was a golden boy in Paris right now, and his death would draw attention. Bandy ended the call. He hadn’t arranged any accommodations, but he had slept in worse places than the back of an SUV. He just needed somewhere to do it without being rousted. He decided on a position that was not within the GZ, where random US patrols might ask questions, but was still safe enough to not need a lookout. An area that had been a nice suburb under Saddam. A place where an American soldier would feel comfortable to establish a safe house. It would give him a chance to kill two birds with one stone.
Hutton and Fontaine strode into the lobby. Hutton was looking all around, as if danger lurked behind every potted palm. Fontaine could see she was as wired as he was. Near death could do that. He had never been a great sniper. He could shoot as well as the next guy, and he could wait too, with the best of them. But when it came down to taking the shot, the secret was in being calm. The great ones dropped their heart rate to a point just shy of coma. Steady and unwavering. It couldn’t be learned. It was a gift, or a curse. Thorn had it. But Fontaine didn’t. The closer to the ac
tion, the more adrenaline hit him. He could usually keep a clear head, stay calm, make good decisions. But he knew he couldn’t have made the shot that had taken out the bomber. That was a great shot.
Hutton broke away from him and headed through the lounge. He hesitated. He wasn’t sure if the fireplace would be burning in between the buildings but he didn’t feel like finding out so he waited at the door. Hutton walked into the next building, where the bar was situated. She went to the bar and spoke to the bartender. He poured amber liquid into a small glass. Hutton threw the drink back and then slammed the glass down on the bar like in the old cowboy movies. Hit me again. The bartender did. She slammed another. Then she nodded to him, turned and marched out.
“Let’s go,” she said as she passed Fontaine. He followed her again. Up the stairs. She kept going, past his floor. He followed. She pushed the door open on the stairs and he caught it as it tried to close. She was halfway down the hall when he stepped through. She reached her door and unlocked it. He stepped forward and then hesitated. Then he stepped forward more. There was no light on in her room. She stood inside with her boot against the door, holding it open. He stepped into the room and she moved her foot and the heavy door gained momentum and swung its full arc and then slammed home with a heavy clunk.
The only light came through the windows from nearby buildings. He looked at her. She was looking at him. Not up and down the way law enforcement types do. She was locked onto his eyes. She looked at him for what felt like hours. Fontaine lost all sense of time. He had done since the spotlight had first hit them on the roadside. He hadn’t gotten it back. Then he spoke.
“Are you—”
Hutton thrust herself into him. Her mouth hit his. Furious and wanton. She clawed at his t-shirt and he ripped hers right off her body. Then they hit the mattress, a tangle of limbs and uniforms and frantic energy. Energy that had to be expelled lest it explode.
Chapter Eight