The Final Tour

by AJ Stewart

  He remained against the wall, in the corner of the room, low and alert. He was in the shadow of the light sticks. He reached out with his foot and kicked one of the sticks to the other corner.

  Two women lay on the floor, side by side. There was no mattress. The women didn’t move. The dark splatter marks across the wall told Fontaine why. Each had been shot through the head. Hutton spun into the room and stopped. Neither of them spoke. They just looked. Perhaps a wife and sister. Both women looked too young to be the bomber’s mother. Fontaine and Hutton glanced at each other in the green light. Faces set hard.

  “Mon Adjudant,” came the call from Gorecki in the next room.

  Fontaine snapped to attention and stepped into the corridor. Manu stood in the hall, facing the room. His face usually wore a smile. The smile was nowhere to be seen. Fontaine marched forward and into the room. It was the same size and condition as the room he had just come from. Anything of value had been pilfered long ago. Gorecki stood in the middle of the space. He was looking down and glanced up at the movement of Fontaine entering. He said nothing. Just stepped aside.

  Fontaine saw the three small children on the floor. There was no mattress again, and no splatter on the walls. The shots had all come from a standing position down toward the floor. Fontaine crouched. Two boys, one girl. The eldest looked no more than eight or nine. The youngest couldn’t have been walking for more than a year. Three little lives ended on a dirty floor. Fontaine hoped that they hadn’t comprehended what was happening to them, but he knew that thought would never really take root. Even at a young age humans understood the concept of fear. They could feel it in the air like humidity. The eldest of the children was plenty old enough to understand a bad man with a gun, and the others were old enough to read the fear their brother would have been pulsing from every pore.

  Hutton stepped into the room behind Fontaine and took in the scene for a moment.

  “Oh, hell,” she said. No one else spoke. They looked at the small bodies on the floor. Then Gorecki opened the channel on his radio.

  “Babar, we’re moving out.”

  He stepped past Fontaine and Hutton and out into the hall. Fontaine followed. He didn’t look at Hutton. Manu led Gorecki out the back door and Fontaine marched back out the front. He wasn’t sure if Hutton was following. He couldn’t hear her footsteps on the dirt beneath their feet. All his ears picked up was the pulsing of blood through his head. Red mist descended. He threw open the door to the SUV and jumped in. Hutton followed on the opposite side. Yusuf said nothing. He started the vehicle and pulled around the block and dropped in behind the other Highlander, and Babar led them back toward the hotel.

  Hutton stared at the seat back in front of her. Yusuf drove with his eyes glued to the rear of the SUV ahead. He didn’t ask about what had happened or what they saw. The answers were in the air, inside the vehicle, in their eyes.

  Fontaine thought about French pop psychology books. About breathing and stress. He didn’t care about the stress. That was his life. But to move forward he needed to clear his mind. He was a good step or two behind this staff sergeant and whoever else was involved. And it was time to get out in front.

  It was time to do what he always did. To take the faces and the small bodies and hide them away in the dark corner of his mind. Not forever. His reading, his informal training with his mentor, Colonel Laporte, told him that was not possible. The human mind was not truly compartmentalized. It could be trained to be more so than less, but the walls between the compartments were not lead. They were ethereal, and they leaked. Bad thoughts hidden away would eventually leech out into the everyday part of the mind. And as surely as depleted uranium tossed to the bottom of an ocean would come to poison the environment around it, so those dark thoughts would poison the thinking of the mind that tried so hard to hide them.

  Fontaine smelled the dirt and the diesel and hint of cinnamon on the air, and fought the compulsion to close his eyes. He pushed the images and the emotions into their cage, to be dealt with later. When he turned to Hutton she was looking at him silently, and his mind was clear. He had no plan, but he knew that with a clear mind he would find one. He always did.

  Then the radio piece in his ear crackled to life and he heard the stilted French of Peter Thorn.

  “Go, Thorn.”

  “Mon Adjudant, I am at Camp Victory. Dennison is gone.”

  Fontaine frowned at Hutton even though she couldn’t hear the conversation.

  “Repeat.”

  “Dennison is not here. He’s gone.”

  “Stateside?”

  “No, mon Adjudant. He left this morning with a supply convoy. They went south. To Basra.”

  “Dennison has gone to Basra?”

  “Oui, mon Adjudant.”

  “Babar? You get that?”

  “Oui, mon Adjudant. We need fuel. Will you drop Officer Hutton back at the hotel?”

  Fontaine looked at Hutton. “Will we drop Special Agent Hutton at the hotel?”

  Hutton gave him an emphatic head shake.

  “Negative, Babar. Special Agent Hutton is coming with us. We’ll get Thorn from Victory and rendezvous for fuel.”

  “Oui, mon Adjudant. Out.”

  Fontaine called to Yusuf in the front.

  “That okay with you, Yusuf? Basra?”

  “I take you where you wish, sayidi.”

  “You need to tell your family.”

  Yusuf held up an old flip phone. “I call when we get petrol, sayidi.”

  Fontaine nodded and turned to Hutton. “You okay with this?”

  “What exactly is this?”

  “The mission hasn’t changed.”

  “You’re still going after the arms?”

  “Yes. Events prove that whatever they are bringing here is a bigger deal than just a few old Soviet rifles. We need to find it and stop it.”

  “And Dennison?”

  “We apprehend him and pass him to the US Army. That’s plan A, anyway.”

  “What’s plan B?”

  “He’s not getting away with it. That’s what we do.”

  “But plan A is the first option?”

  “Always.”

  “You’re okay with that? They might sweep him under the carpet.”

  “Not with a federal agent as witness. You don’t answer to them.”

  “Eventually I do. The buck stops in the same oval-shaped office.”

  “You won’t whitewash this,” said Fontaine, looking out as they passed the River Tigris. The water shone like jewels in the Arab sun, as oblivious to this conflict as it had been to all others.

  “You’re confident of that?” she asked.

  “Cent per cent.”

  “Because I was closest to the bomb?”

  “Yes,” he said, watching the river disappear behind the gray and tan cityscape. “And so much more.”

  Chapter Ten

  They made good time on the road south to Basra. There was a fair amount of traffic outside of Baghdad but it thinned out after an hour. It was 450 kilometers of hard country. There weren’t many towns along the route. Most of the villages in the south of Iraq had followed the route of the Euphrates River to the west or the Tigris River to the east. Between the two rivers was land as fertile as this part of the world ever got. There were farms either side of the road, and tinges of green among brown fields, waiting for the summer to end. The road punctuated the landscape more or less in a straight shot, south and east from Baghdad to Basra. The two mighty rivers came together north of Basra, and the landscape became more hospitable, and tan landscape gave way to pockets of green. Not the rolling fields of Europe, but the local equivalent. On the horizon, Fontaine saw the black smoke of the oil field burnoffs.

  The city of Basra had been rich, perhaps the richest in the country. Its proximity to the southern oilfields was a boon. Once upon a time. A failed revolt against Saddam saw recrimination and murder and a city in despair. The British had been based in Basra after the Second Gulf Wa
r, and Fontaine knew that had improved the situation somewhat. But the British were long gone. And despite local taxes on every barrel of oil, corruption meant the city had not regained any of its previous glory.

  There was one reputed five-star hotel in the city. Fontaine’s team didn’t go anywhere near it. Yusuf had family who worked in a small suburban hotel frequented mainly by Iraqis making their way between the oilfields and homes far away. The convoy pulled around the back of a small peach-colored building that looked like an apartment block. There was no signage for any kind of hotel. The roof was terracotta tile and the windows featured the classic arches of Persian architecture.

  A well-fed man in a plain white button-up shirt came out of the building and offered Yusuf a boisterous hug. He then shook the hands of each team member in turn, repeating the words welcome, welcome. He reserved a bow of the head for Hutton. The man ushered them inside. The interior was cooler as fans moved air about and closed shutters kept the sun at bay. What might have been the front apartment of the building was turned into a lounge. Red sofas and plush chairs. Tea and coffee were being served. Every face in the room wore the heavy features of a local. Fontaine knew his team wouldn’t be hiding out here. News of foreigners in this part of town would defy physics and spread faster than sound.

  They were offered drinks. Their host’s smile never left his face. Fontaine wondered if the man was a natural hotelier, or just hopeful of foreign currency. After tea they were shown to their rooms. Where an apartment might have been designed Yusuf’s relative had transformed the space into two or three separate hotel rooms. Fontaine climbed the stairs and passed one room that was packed tight with bunks. The room he was shown to was a single. It was the size of child’s bedroom in Europe. Babar and Thorn took rooms in the same section. Hutton continued upstairs. The three men stood in the doorways to their rooms and shrugged to each other.

  “You know anyone in this town?” asked Thorn.

  Fontaine shook his head.

  “The American will have gone to the base?” asked Babar.

  “Most likely. We need to find a way in. It’s time to make a call.”

  Fontaine threw a daypack over his shoulder and went for a walk. The area was in better repair than the suburb he had met Dennison in. But for all the intact buildings there was that slack vibe of poverty about the place. Men stood on street corners, wasting time that needed wasting. He passed a small store with mostly empty shelves. There were few cars, and those he saw were moving through, full of men. There were no women on the streets. There were no children. He passed another store, and then another. Then he found one he liked the look of.

  The store owner smiled wide. He spoke broken English, but enough to get the idea. Fontaine passed him some US currency and the man stepped into a back room and returned with an old push-button landline telephone. He plugged it into a socket, tapped the levers twice to ensure there was a line, and passed it to Fontaine. The store owner stepped out into the street and lit a cigarette.

  Fontaine called the number from memory. The phone made a squelching sound and then went dead. Fontaine was about to reset the handset and try again when the voice broke the silence.

  “Laporte.”

  “Mon Colonel. C’est Fontaine.”

  There was silence for a moment. Calls from the field during operations were a rarity between the mentor and his pupil. The colonel spoke in his raspy thick French.

  “How are you, mon ami?”

  “These are interesting days, mon Colonel.”

  “Tell me.”

  Fontaine explained events to his commanding officer back in France. Of the French general and the suicide bomber and the slain women and children. The colonel listened and did not speak. He took the news without comment of another general, one outside the Legion issuing orders without his knowledge. When Fontaine was finished he waited.

  “This is troubling, my friend. I will make some calls. I am sure you are correct. This staff sergeant will have gone to Camp Bravo. There is nowhere else to go. I have friends there. I will confirm it.”

  The line went quiet but Fontaine didn’t speak. He felt like the colonel had more to say.

  “My friend, you have prepared for every eventually, oui?”

  “Oui, mon Colonel.”

  “As we discussed?”

  “As we discussed.”

  “D’accord.”

  “I don’t think we are there yet, mon Colonel.”

  “Nor do I, my friend. But events are turning unexpectedly. We must be prepared. For anything.”

  “We’re ready, mon Colonel.”

  “I will contact you.”

  Fontaine returned the handset to its cradle and stepped out onto the street. The store owner was watching nothing happen. He put his cigarette in his mouth and took the packet from his breast pocket and offered it to Fontaine. Fontaine shook his head.

  “There is something else I need,” he said.

  Colonel Laporte leaned back in his creaky chair and let out a sigh as he looked around his office. It had been his home for many years and said much about him. It was ordered and clean to a fault, but the industrial-design furniture and fixtures were all aged and worn. The desk looked like it had come from a schoolhouse circa 1800, full of dents and chips and scratches. The bookcase held a sample of Laporte’s library, tomes on military history and psychology, the latter of which he had spent many a night discussing with his protégé. Laporte knew with absolute conviction that all people were capable of both good and bad. He knew this because the concepts of good and bad were not absolute themselves but rather value judgments, shades of gray. People who were considered evil rarely saw that quality in themselves. There was usually a moral justification, even if that justification didn’t mesh with the ideals of greater society.

  People could be depended on to act in accordance with their own moral code. He knew that about Jacques Fontaine. He had seen it in the boy he met in Marseilles, afraid and confused but determined. Laporte knew he could trust Fontaine to act according to his own code and he considered him a good man because of it. He knew Fontaine had and would put his own life in peril to save the life of innocents, despite knowing there were few true innocents in the world. Fontaine had and would take a human life to that end. Some would not consider that the action of a good man. Laporte would disagree.

  But now Laporte grew concerned, for he knew that within himself lay the capacity for both good and bad. As a Legionnaire he had learned that lesson the hard way. The Legion was a blunt stick of an instrument, a tool of his nation designed to aid its defense with men who were not of France. He had joined the regular French army and as an ambitious young officer he had taken an officer’s post with the Legion to aid his future promotion. When, years later, the opportunity came for Laporte to be promoted out of the Legion he found himself declining the offer. It wasn’t that his ambition had died, but something else had grown inside him. A sense of brotherhood that he had never felt before. For years he had assumed he was just an officer in the Legion, until the day he realized he had, in fact, become a Legionnaire.

  Laporte turned his eye to a tattered old poster in a plastic frame on his wall. It showed the insignia of all the regiments of the French Foreign Legion. It was this poster as much as anything that troubled him. He stared at the insignia and for the thousandth time noted the absence of the insignia of one regiment. His regiment.

  In 1961 the nation of Algeria was in a state of war. Still a colony of France, the separatist Front de Libération Nationale had been at war with French forces since 1954. The conflict would eventually become a civil war and would lead to French president Charles de Gaulle opening negotiations with the FLN aimed at bringing independence to Algeria. In January of 1961 a majority of French and Algerian people voted in a referendum in support of such independence. A group of French officers who were in favor of a French Algeria attempted a coup against President de Gaulle. During the night of April 22, the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment took co
ntrol of all major strategic positions in the capital of Algiers. The plan was to then take other cities in Algeria, followed by an assault on Paris. When officers in those cities refused to cooperate, and conscript soldiers in France refused to move against their government, the coup failed. But in retribution for their part in events, the Legion’s 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment was disbanded.

  Until it was secretly reformed by order of President Jacques Chirac as an elite terrorist fighting unit. A unit headed by Colonel Laporte. Laporte’s remit had been simple. Find them. Kill them. The objective was put plain and simple. But there was a subtext behind the plan. The clandestine unit had been formed as part of the Foreign Legion so France could distance itself from their activities if they were caught or discovered. Or, as Laporte understood, it became politically expedient to do so.

  Laporte’s first recruit had been his protégé, Jacques Fontaine. Fontaine had excelled in his previous role, hunting down deserters from the Legion. His team was tight and experienced. And they were successful. They found and eliminated enemies of the French people in Africa, in Asia and in South America. Their biggest success had been in Pakistan. But now it seemed the unit was venturing into territory that was unknown even for them. They could find anyone and fight anyone. But political battles were well outside their skill set.

  Laporte took his eyes from the wall and stared down at the paper on his desk. It was a communication that had come from the DGSE, France’s military foreign intelligence agency. It was a demand for information on activities of the French Foreign Legion in Iraq. The words Central Intelligence Agency were not written on the paper, yet they were all over it. The Americans knew Laporte’s team was there, and they wanted to know why.

  Laporte picked up his phone, tucked it under his chin and glanced at the paper again. He thought about the good and bad inside himself. His loyalty to his country, and to the Legion. And to his men. And in what order those loyalties ranked. Someone outside didn’t want to know what his team was doing in Iraq. They already knew what they were doing there. What they wanted from Laporte was confirmation that the operation was his to shut down. But Laporte wasn’t ready to do that. He dropped the phone back in the cradle and stood. He would go for a walk and think it through. Marching helped him clear his thoughts. And it kept him away from phones and computers, and the people at the other end of those machines.