The Bonaparte Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  “Not quite yet.”

  For the first time since leaving the lower level, Dow spoke. “Mr. Reilly, your situation is hopeless. You are surrounded by over a hundred trained officers and men of the People’s Liberation Army, enough to completely search this place as soon as it is light. When they see what you have done to two of their comrades down below, I doubt they will be in a charitable mood. I certainly am in no position to guarantee the woman’s safety . . .”

  Lang cut him short. “You’ve just seen what ‘the woman’ can do and you’re concerned about her safety? I’d worry about your men, were I you.”

  Dow bobbed his head. “You may joke now but as soon as it is light, you will find little to amuse you.”

  Lang shoved Dow against the wall with one hand, handing the rifle to Gurt with the other. Then he removed the bayonet, pressing its point against the colonel’s crotch.

  “If we’re here by the time it’s light, you’ll be eligible for the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”

  “Surely you don’t think you can threaten—”

  Lang pushed a little harder, gratified by Dow’s gasp. “Get your men’s attention. You are to instruct them exactly as I say.”

  Dow snorted. “Absurd! You’ll kill me.”

  “Actually, I have other plans for you, but they don’t have to include the first part of your sex-change surgery.”

  Lang lowered the bayonet and grabbed a handful of the colonel’s crotch through his pants. He raised the cutting edge of the bayonet about a foot above the clump of cloth. “On three you join Eunuchs Anonymous. One, two . . .”

  Dow had apparently experienced a speedy attitude adjustment. Or perhaps a realization Lang wasn’t kidding. “Wait! What is it you require of me?”

  Lang told him.

  “Absurd! You will never succeed!”

  Lang shrugged, a gesture he realized was now visible in the smoky light of predawn. “For your sake, you’d better make sure it does.”

  Dow stood against the low wall, cleared his throat and began to speak in a loud voice. Crouched behind him, Gurt and Lang could see the men below cease their frenetic activity and look upward to their commander.

  “How do we know he is not telling his men where we are? You do not know Chinese.” Gurt whispered.

  “I don’t, but you must admit he has a major incentive to do as I ask. Forget the hearts and minds. When you literally have someone by the balls, they are very likely to agree with you.”

  The light had grown sufficiently for Lang to see the skeptical look on her face. “You better be right or . . .”

  The alternative was never spelled out. Below, the men fell into lines forming ranks. At a command from Dow, echoed by a half-dozen subordinate officers, the men crisply did a right face and marched toward the Citadelle’s entrance.

  Although they moved too quickly for Lang to count, he noted they moved five to the rank, five files to the group. He guessed he was watching between a hundred and a hundred and ten men march parade-style out of the fortress.

  Dow, his face now visible in the light growing in the east, wore the expression of a man whose team is well ahead of the point spread. “I did as you asked, Mr. Reilly. My men will cross the pathway to where the forest begins. No matter what they do, they will be between you and escape.”

  “Can he order them to let us through?” Gurt asked.

  “A little too risky,” Lang answered. “If he changes his mind . . . I hope I’ve solved that problem.”

  Keeping the rifle pointed at the Chinese officer, Lang gestured with his free hand. “OK, nice and slow, let’s go down and out of here.”

  At the entrance, Lang could see the last of the soldiers carefully picking their way single file along the narrow crest that formed the only approach to the fortress. He guessed it would take at least thirty minutes for the last of them to disappear into the forest.

  The steep sides of the path were still obscured in shadows, darkness that was retreating with reluctance before the dawn’s probing fingers.

  In the latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, neither sunrise nor sunset is a prolonged event. Dawn comes with a grayness that seeps rapidly across the sky as though spilled from some giant container. It reaches the western horizon just as the tip of a burnished-copper sun seems to squeeze between water and sky in the opposite direction, setting aflame fleecy clouds that have ventured too close. The entire process from night to sunlight unravels in less than fifteen minutes.

  “And now?” Gurt wanted to know.

  Lang checked his watch. “And now we wait.”

  “For what?” she insisted.

  “For Miles.”

  The surprise was clear on her face. “Miles? Here?”

  “As soon as it gets light enough.”

  Dow chuckled. “I do not know for whom you wait, Mr. Reilly, but unless they drop from the sky, how will they get here? You have no choice: you cannot get past my men. Surrender and save us all time.”

  Lang looked around until he found a reasonably flat rock. He motioned Dow to sit before seating himself so the officer was between him and any potential sniper among the Chinese troops. “I believe your people view patience as a virtue, do they not, Colonel?”

  Dow did not reply. Instead, he asked, “May I smoke?”

  Lang nodded amiably. “Your lungs. But make sure your hand moves slowly. If I recall, your cigarettes and lighter are in your right breast pocket. I wouldn’t recommend reaching anywhere else.”

  The three sat in silence as the light breeze of the morning succumbed to the day’s increasing heat. Mist was rising from the gorge below, soon to give birth to the day’s clouds, which would embrace the old fort in misty arms. Hopefully, after Miles’s arrival. Lang watched his prisoner closely but the man did little other than chain-smoke, lighting one cigarette with another.

  At first Lang was conscious only of a sound, a noise he could neither place nor identify as it beat like a bird’s wing against the mountainsides. It was alien to the call of the birds from the forest or the whinny of horses back in the Citadelle, impatient for their morning feed. Slowly the rhythmic whop-whop of rotor blades became distinguishable. As though from a magician’s hat, a black object seemed to pop out of the very ground beneath their feet as a helicopter rose from the gorge below. Someone had been skimming the uneven Haitian terrain to evade radar.

  Though it had no markings, Lang recognized the machine as an old Russian Mi-8 “Hip,” an aircraft that had served both as a civilian airborne office and military command post. Over ten thousand had been manufactured, enough sold abroad to make the aircraft’s nationality neutral.

  “As you suggested, Colonel, from the sky.” Lang raised his voice to be heard over the racket as he spoke to Gurt. “Keep our friend here covered while I make sure they see us.”

  Lang walked away from the sheltering walls of the Citadelle, waving his arms until the helicopter hovered directly above him. The moment it stopped, the crack of a rifle, then another, echoed from mountaintop to gorge and back again. Dow’s troops were not going to stand idly by.

  Lang ducked behind a boulder as some sort of heavy weapon from the chopper chattered a reply. His guess was a .50-caliber mounted along the open port in the ship’s fuselage. Toward the forest, he could see puffs of dust as the gun traced the tree line with lead and rock chips, deadly as bullets, flying through the air. The rifle fire went quiet.

  Above him, a rope ladder unfurled to within a foot or so of the ground. The saddle between forest and Citadelle was too narrow for a landing. He turned to motion Gurt. She had already seen what was happening and was prodding Dow toward the hovering aircraft. Rifle at the ready, Lang kept behind a trio of rock protrusions until she and her prisoner disappeared into the helicopter.

  As the aircraft dipped its nose preparatory to moving off, Lang dashed for the ladder. He had reached the second rung when he felt it being reeled in.

  Once he was inside, a man in a uniform without insignia hande
d him a headset, which he put on. A nudge at his shoulder caused him to turn. He was standing less than a foot from a smiling Miles.

  The grin vanished as he saw Lang’s face. “Shit, Reilly,” the words crackled through the earphones. “What did you shave with this morning, a meat grinder?”

  Dominican airspace

  Fourteen minutes later

  Coffee had never tasted better, even though it was out of a thermos. Thermals, already building in the day’s increasing heat, made a bumpy road of the air at an altitude of only three hundred feet just off a ribbon of golden sand, shaking the helicopter like a terrier with a rat. Gurt, indifferent to the turbulence, was dozing, leaning against the leather restraints that kept her from being thrown from the canvas seat. Dow, securely handcuffed, glared at Lang and Miles, who were seated across from each other.

  “Those pictures you sent me along with your GPS position indicators, you have any idea what they were?” Miles asked through Lang’s headset.

  “Packing containers of some sort. I figured someone might be able to read the Chinese characters.”

  Miles bobbed his head. “The containers themselves told us all we needed to know.”

  “Which was?”

  “Warheads, most likely for DF-15, Dong Feng, or East Wind missiles.”

  “Like, guided missiles?”

  “Like. Chemical, nuclear or conventional, solid propellant, and MARV.”

  Lang’s eyebrows rose in an unasked question.

  “Maneuverable reentry vehicle. The warheads themselves can be guided as to speed and alter course to evade defensive weapons.”

  Lang had almost forgotten the Agency’s love of technical jargon. “All of which means what?”

  “Which means, once installed on a launch base, usually an eight-wheeled truck, anything within three hundred and seventy miles is a potential target.”

  Lang mentally called up a map of the Caribbean. “We, the U.S., is out of range, then.”

  “The Chinese are in the process of modifying a lot of their hardware. Wouldn’t surprise me if south Florida was within range in the not-too-distant future.”

  “And Puerto Rico, where we still have a few military installations.”

  Lang thought for a moment. “You think the Chinese are preparing to attack, what, a naval refueling base and former gunnery range?”

  “Not my call. The higher-ups will make that decision.” He nodded toward Dow. “Along with the help of your friend there.”

  Lang snorted. “Over tea and crumpets with his lawyer at his side? I doubt the Agency’ll get more than an ass reaming by some congressional oversight committee after a presidential apology for inconveniencing the peace-loving People’s Republic of China by interrupting a perfectly innocent trade mission. Hell, if you yell at him and make him cry, you’ll be regarded as a criminal.”

  Miles smirked, the self- satisfied grin of a man who has been dealt the fourth ace in the hole. “Were he going to be turned over to the Agency, the newer, kinder, warm and fuzzy Agency, which is obligated to share its secrets with notoriously loose-lipped politicians, what you say would be true. As it is, I am merely a private citizen doing my civic duty for one of my country’s firmest allies.”

  Lang leaned forward in his seat. “This I got to hear.”

  “Very simple: I am vacationing in the Dominican Republic like hundreds of thousands of sun-loving Americans do every year. An official who happens to be a golf-playing and fishing buddy of mine mentions that Haiti, a country less than friendly to the DR, is harboring a fugitive . . .”

  “But this guy, this Chinese, is no fugitive from the Dominicans,” Lang protested. “He’s probably never even been there.”

  Miles held up a hand, dismissing an irrelevant point. “So, the DR has made a terrible mistake. You know how these Caribbean bureaucracies can be. Now, this friend also knows I have another friend, one who was kind enough to place a helicopter at my disposal, saving me the time of driving from one golf resort to the next fishing charter. This Dominican official friend of mine asks if I would have any objection to his government using said helicopter during the three or four hours I will be on the golf course.

  “What am I to do, spoil the relationship between his country and mine? Of course not. I lend him the chopper.”

  “But he”—Lang pointed at Dow—“is not a fugitive. He is an officer in the fucking Chinese army.”

  “I’m sure a full apology will be forthcoming.”

  “So . . .” Lang took up where he knew Miles had left off. “The Dominican security forces or army or whoever treat the man to the old-fashioned third degree until they get what they want, by which time the proverbial horse has departed the barn. In the meantime, you continue your golfing-fishing vacation unaware of what has happened.”

  “Wasn’t it Thomas Gray who observed, ‘Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise’?”

  “How do you guys keep your noses from growing so long you can’t get through a door?”

  Beijing Olympic Tower

  Two days later

  Wan Ng watched the chubby general of the People’s Liberation Army use a thick thumb to turn the pages of the file. In a silence loud enough to have an echo, he wondered which was worse: the disapproval of Undersecretary Diem or somehow falling under the jurisdiction of this porcine military man. Either way, his sudden recall from the States and the state of affairs with this man Reilly had less than optimistic overtones.

  One thing he did know: the disaster in Haiti was somehow going to become his fault. That was the Party way, having shit run downhill. The higher ups, such as the undersecretary, blamed the fiasco on the military. Since the officer in charge of the garrison in Haiti, a Colonel Dow, was conveniently unavailable to accept blame—no one was certain where he was at the moment—the army brass had turned to the Guoanbu, state security. That made the problem Ng’s. His position was not high enough to pass the blame farther down the line.

  The nameless general looked up, his eyes hooded by heavy lids. “This American, Reilly, why has he not been disposed of?”

  “My orders, Comrade General, were from the undersecretary himself. I was to observe him and the woman.”

  The general sniffed unappreciatively. “It says here you were to eliminate them should you determine they worked for the American intelligence services.”

  “I have not so determined, Comrade General.”

  The corpulent officer sighed, the intake and expulsion of breath shaking multiple chins. “After what took place in Venice and in Haiti, you still believe they are ordinary American citizens instead of threats to the policy of the People’s Republic?”

  Ng could have explained that his orders did not authorize terminal action upon supposition or guess.

  He could have, but he didn’t.

  The orders would say whatever the general chose to remake them to say.

  Few government workers in the People’s Republic were punished for failure to properly carry out directives from above. Clerks misfiled things on computers, tasks went undone or were done poorly. That was expected in a massive bureaucracy. Problems occurred when someone of rank in the government, say, this general, felt their position threatened, whether by incompetence or just plain rotten luck.

  The culprit, almost always with no one below him onto whom to pass the failure, would be accused of some heinous crime, harboring unpatriotic sentiments, stealing from the state or bribery (both of which went unnoticed without some additional offense), or the ever-popular but rarely clearly defined “counterrevolutionary activities.” The accused could receive, at the whim of a revolutionary tribunal (usually influenced by the official instigating the action), anything from a term in a labor camp up to a large-bore bullet into the back of the head and an unmarked grave where his family would be unable to honor his spirit, the spirit officially disavowed by the state but very real to the people of Ng’s province nonetheless.

  Ng was more than painfully aware of how the justice sys
tem in the People’s Republic functioned.

  “How may I atone for my failure, Comrade General?”

  The beefy officer took his time replying, no doubt aware of Ng’s thoughts. “You will return to the United States just as you departed, by way of the Mexico-California border, so there will be no record of your entry. You will keep watch on this man, Reilly, and his family until you have the opportunity to eliminate them both, the man and the woman.”

  Ng nodded. “And if they leave the country again as they did when they went to Haiti?”

  The general leaned back in his chair, the casters groaning under his weight. “Like most Americans, the man has a cell phone, a BlackBerry. We have ascertained that as well as the number. It is amazing what puny security measures American companies take with their information. When you return, there will be a handheld tracking device that will tell you the latitude and longitude of the location of that particular BlackBerry anywhere on the face of the earth, give or take thirty meters. See that you use it well.”

  The meeting was over. Ng felt a weight lift from his shoulders, a reprieve he was lucky to receive. “I will not fail, Comrade General.”

  The general was already looking at another file. He dismissed Ng with the wave of a hand. “See that you don’t.”

  From the diary of Louis Etienne Saint Denis

  No. 6 rue Victoire,1 Paris

  January 2, 1803

  Leclerc is dead of the Siamese fever!2

  There was no means by which we could have known of the tragedy until the news arrived via a fast packet from the Indies to Cherbourg and then by horse courier to Paris.

  It was not until December 28 the frigate Swiftsure arrived at the Hyères Islands carrying Pauline, her and Leclerc’s four-year-old son, Dermide, and the lead coffin encased in cedar bearing the general’s body.3 Pauline, distraught and clad in the dreariest of widow’s garb, appeared here three days later.

  With sobs, she fell into the arms of her brother, the First Consul. He greeted her affectionately but within seconds escorted her into the house’s library, closing the door behind them. The last words I heard before the doors were pulled to were not those of consolation, but query as to the location of a certain box with which Leclerc had been entrusted. I could not but wonder if this was the selfsame box that my employer had taken from Egypt.