The Bourne Initiative

by Robert Ludlum

  “Don’t feel a thing,” Bourne said. “Same for my shoulder.” But his eyes were going in and out of focus.

  Using the knife to make strips out of the Russian’s trousers, she fashioned compression bandages by wrapping the strips around his palm and over his shoulder under his armpit. “Not the most antiseptic, but what the hell.”

  Waving off Mala’s help, he got to his feet.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “Right now.”

  Bourne nodded. “We’ll take the powerboat.”

  The climb up to the crest taxed neither of them, but the way down to the shingle and the curling combers was dauntingly steep for Bourne in his condition. Nevertheless, they began their descent without hesitation.

  Despite the difficulties, their progress was easier than the night before in darkness and the beginnings of the storm. The wind had lapsed to the lightest of breezes, the air was still night-cooled, and the way was sunlit.

  Bourne did not give the slightest indication of the level of pain he was in, now that his body’s trauma defenses were wearing off. There was no option other than to keep moving.

  Nevertheless, two-thirds down, he was obliged to pause. Despite the still, cool air, sweat ran down his face, trickled along his spine and from under his arms. The throbbing in his shoulder and hand was a palpable thing, spiking his heart rate. Black spots danced before his eyes. He realized his breathing was coming in shallow gasps; he slowed it down, taking deep, even breaths, reoxygenating his lungs.

  Mala, realizing something was wrong, paused below him, turning an inquiring gaze back at him.

  He made a shoveling motion with his good hand, indicating she should continue on. This she did without another word, and, relying on his second wind, he followed close behind.

  An eternity of pain accompanied him, during which nothing existed beyond the next hand- and foothold, the search for the best path, bypassing deadfalls, perilous crevasses or cracks, and loose rocks. Following Mala made all this easier and more difficult at the same time. She was lighter than he was by a good margin; sections that held her might not hold him, which made him doubly cautious. On the other hand, this intense concentration kept his attention from the pain, which was so excruciating he was only partially successful in compartmentalizing it.

  But, at last, even eternity must end. He slid the last three feet to the shingle, keeping his knees bent as if he were a parachutist landing, in order to cushion the shock to his feet and legs. They were several hundred yards to the east of where the boats had been left. They seemed to have weathered the storm better than he expected.

  He and Mala set off at once, with him taking the lead. Mala did not protest. In fact, she had said nothing at all since their brief conversation while she was jerry-rigging his bandages and binding his wounds, both of which were deep, bloody, and angry. He’d need expert medical attention, the sooner the better, in order to stave off infections that would put him in the hospital, weak and vulnerable.

  They were a dozen feet from the powerboat when he collapsed. Mala ran, knelt beside him, and gasped. The wound in his shoulder had bled right through the thick cloth, soaking it. His entire right side was dark and sticky with blood. The wound must have punctured the brachial artery.

  She lifted the lid of one of his eyes, said, “Shit,” wasted no time in a vain attempt to revive him; it would take too long, and time was now in short supply. She understood the extreme peril Bourne was in. Reaching under his armpits, she dragged him directly into the water, kept him afloat as she swam to the port side of the powerboat. Grabbing on to his bloody shirt with one clawed hand, she levered herself over the gunwale, then, feet firmly planted on the deck, hauled Bourne up and over, onto the deck.

  For a moment, she stared at his face, pale and bloodless. Despite her efforts at field dressing, he was still bleeding. In fact, now that she had a chance to study him closely, it was clear to her that he was dying.

  PART TWO

  Keyre

  13

  As Jason Bourne lay slowly bleeding out on the deck of a water-swilled powerboat, purchased by a cutout offshore middleman for Dreadnaught, a veritable shitstorm was exploding in the face of General Arthur MacQuerrie, head of that most secret of government entities, in the form of the latest LeakAGE bombshell, a hacked trove of eyes-only documents from the NSA’s very bowels. They revealed that, in the first place, NSA, that most august, feared, and reviled surveillance division of the American clandestine services, which prided itself on its SIGINT, electronic and satellite spying, and turned its nose up at the CIA and its outmoded HUMINT, boots-on-the-ground form of intelligence gathering, had on its blackest of books its own HUMINT division code-named Dreadnaught. In the second place, that Dreadnaught was heavily and, needless to say, illegally, funded from various named sources, none of which, apparently, existed. In the third place, that said Dreadnaught was in the business of targeting enemies of the American homeland—controversial, gray-area entities, to a person—and terminating them with extreme prejudice, without the knowledge, never mind the consent, of Congress. In the fourth place, that these bloodletting assignments were decided upon and meted out solely by one General Arthur MacQuerrie without any kind of oversight whatsoever.

  And in the fifth place, and most damning for MacQuerrie, were a raft of files spewed out into cyberspace documenting the eye-opening amounts of money salted away by the aforementioned General Arthur MacQuerrie in a briar patch of shell companies in the Caymans, Panama, Argentina, Gibraltar, and Cyprus. As an adjunct to this perfidy visited upon the federal government and the American people was the treasonous way these shell companies appeared to rub shoulders with those known to belong to certain high-level officials and billionaire oligarchs of the Russian Federation.

  The flurry of documents was released at three in the morning, Eastern Daylight Time. Before first light in D.C., emissaries of Homeland Security, accompanied by a contingent of heavily armed military personnel, confronted a sleep-bedazzled MacQuerrie on his front doorstep. Moments later, under the teary gaze of his wife, he was handcuffed, hustled down his McLean walkway, past prize azaleas and rhododendrons, ushered with only a modicum of courtesy into the back of one of three gleaming black Chevrolet SUVs. Four minutes after they had arrived, the modern-day caravan was gone, leaving only faint bluish exhaust fumes that dissipated even before the distraught Mrs. MacQuerrie closed the front door and dialed their lawyer’s home phone number.

  Meanwhile, the ominous caravan made its next stop at the home of Lieutenant Francis Goode. Goode, having received advance warning of the intentions of the long arm of the federal government, had tried to do a runner, but too late. As the SUVs hurled themselves around the corner to his street, he sprinted back into his house and barricaded himself inside. A fierce firefight ensued, in the midst of which the good lieutenant, having determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no way out, put the muzzle of his pistol into his mouth and blew his brains out.

  At around the same time as the LeakAGE barrage began, Fulmer, having deplaned at the VIP side of Dulles International, and true to his word, deployed the full flower of his influence, gaining Morgana her freedom from NSA custody. As dawn broke over D.C., she was aboard a military transport on her way to Stockholm and thence, via a far more comfortable commercial flight, to Kalmar, where Françoise was anxiously awaiting her arrival.

  Not many things gave Françoise anxiety; doing nothing but waiting was one of them; meditation was not her thing. Of course, as recompense, she experienced the delightful diversion of watching the LeakAGE shit-bomb light up the Internet like a line of napalm detonations. The speed at which LeakAGE stories went viral still astonished her, but this one, as expected, flashed around the globe at what seemed light speed. And why not? Not only was an American general implicated in nefarious dealings, but the NSA itself—everyone’s favorite whipping boy since Snowden—was caught with its pants down. As she had foreseen, everyone wanted a piece of that action. And, no
t so incidentally, the pressure on Fulmer’s own not so very kosher interests domiciled in Panama was lifted. This story was so big it would defy the usual mayfly-short news cycle; it would build and build, and then linger for months. More than enough time for Fulmer to leave Musgrave-Stephens and reassign his interests to Fellingham, Bodeys.

  Which reminded her. Hunched in front of a laptop shielded from ISP snooping, she began the long, laborious process that would ensure her another airtight get-out-of-jail-free card to play should the necessity arise.

  —

  The Angelmaker was reluctant to leave Bourne alone on the rocking powerboat, but there was no help for it. Slipping over the gunwale, she swam the short distance to where the shingle came up to meet her just before the creaming surf, if that’s what you could call these laughably small waves. But that’s what you got in what was essentially a landlocked sea.

  Picking her way across the prickly shore as quickly as she could, she approached the area where she had been waiting for Bourne as he drove toward her in the Nym’s runabout. Down on her knees at the base of the cliff, she dug beneath the surface, extracting a neoprene waterproof bag, which she unzipped. Inside were a mobile and a sat phone, two different caliber handguns, extra ammo, a serrated knife in a thick rubber sheath, a coil of nylon rope, and a first aid kit in a long red plastic box. After assuring herself that it hadn’t been disturbed and that everything was there, she made an encrypted emergency call on the sat phone, not trusting to mobile service here. Then she put back the phone, zipped the bag, and returned with it to the powerboat.

  Back on deck, she placed the bag next to Bourne, pressed her fingers against his carotid. Relief flooded through her: he was still alive. Then she opened the bag, took out the first aid kit. First, she applied tourniquets to stop the bleeding. Then she cut off the bloody field dressings and commenced to clean the wounds, first with an antiseptic solution and then with a powerful antibiotic powder. Lastly, she bound them with Elastoplast, sealing them temporarily. Still, there was nothing she could do about the blood he had lost, and that was a real worry.

  She sat back on her haunches. Bourne’s blue-white face looked like a three-day-old mackerel. It made her sick in the pit of her stomach. Bending over from the waist, she placed her lips against his. They were cold as ice, as if he were already dead. She opened his mouth with hers, breathed warm air into him, as if this were a fairy tale, as if she had magical powers and she could breathe life into him. Why not? She had done everything else she could think of to save him.

  Fuck those fucking Russian fucks, she thought. Their day will come, and when it does I’m going to use their guts for balalaika strings.

  A moment later, she heard the deep, rumbling sound of the heavy diesels, and the ship came into view. On the elevated rear deck of the ship was a helo, which airlifted them to Skyros Island International Airport. There, a newly minted Bombardier 8000 long-haul private jet was ready and waiting for them. Customs and immigration had been arranged following her call, and they wasted no time in taking off. The Bombardier 8000, the company’s newest flagship jet, cost nearly $69 million, cruised at a speedy Mach 0.85, and was as comfortable as could be.

  Preparations had been made for Bourne to be transferred onto a locked-down gurney. Every conceivable blood type was available. As soon as the surgeon on board had determined Bourne’s blood type, his nurse commenced the first of what would no doubt be a number of transfusions. A saline drip was arranged on Bourne’s other side, to deal with his dehydration. By that time they were six and a quarter miles high, the sky was a shell of bright purple-blue, and the Angelmaker could finally relax. For a time, from the aspect of her cushy leather seat, comfortable in dry clothing, she drank bottle after bottle of water, observing the surgeon, who looked very grave indeed, and his nurse expertly attending to Bourne. When it was that her eyes closed and she dropped into the arms of sleep she could not, afterward, recall.

  It was just over 2,688 miles from the Skyros airport to Somalia. The Bombardier 8000 touched down just over four hours after it had taken off, one of its passengers still more dead than alive.

  14

  Bourne, lying insensate in a spotless room near the center of Keyre’s camp, hung suspended between yesterday and tomorrow. The camp, riding the Horn of Africa, still on the shores of the Arabian Sea, would have been unrecognizable to him. Since Bourne had made his first nocturnal visit, it had grown into something resembling a medium-size village, complete with its own airfield with runways long enough to accommodate jet planes even larger than the Bombardier 8000, for cargo shipments were constantly being flown to and from the camp, executing Keyre’s arms traffic. Thanks to extensive dredging, the area was now a deep-water port for cargo ships, which came and went with the same purpose as the air traffic. Too, the tents Bourne had encountered when he snatched Mala and her sister had given way to sunbaked brick buildings. Cranes rose into the air, bulldozers, and all manner of earthmoving equipment rumbled and thudded, as more and more buildings were constructed. Cart paths had been widened and paved, altered here and there to form a semblance of a grid within the perimeter of the village, which was protected, like military bases the world over, by high fences, barriered gates, and three shifts of armed sentries. There was even a radar tower, along with a pair of anti-aircraft missile launchers.

  But all of this bristling modernization was at present unknown to Bourne. His mind, teetering on the verge of an abyss with no bottom, had returned to the Somalia he had known. To the pitch-black night of an AWOL moon and stars, filled with the ominous rumbling of what would rapidly develop into a monstrous thunderstorm. As if in a grainy film he saw himself planting the two incendiary bombs on the north end of Keyre’s tented camp. Detonators set for six minutes, he threaded his way through the darkness, passing up at least three opportunities to break the necks of sentries; he wanted no evidence there was anyone near the camp except in the north.

  In the days previous, he had made a map of the camp during a series of clandestine forays at dawn and twilight, when daylight was at its weakest. Mounting the heights slightly inland of the camp, he sighted through powerful binoculars, taking mental notes of the comings and goings of everyone within the camp. Occasionally, he saw the girls, and he determined, sadly, there were too many for him to free them all. He saw the line of wooden spears upon whose sharp tips were jammed severed heads, some fresh, others reeking beneath their crawling carapace of flies, still others meatless, dark and leathery from sun and salt wind. Bony cattle roamed through the compound, heads down, in a vain attempt to forage scraps amid the pyramids of plastic bottles.

  One dawn he observed a contingent of jihadists firing machine pistols at a cracked and bullet-pitted Western toilet, lying on its side in an open space of dust and porcelain shards. The next morning, assaulted even at this remove by the horrific stench of rotting flesh, he bore witness amid the wreckage of the ruined toilet to five wooden stakes to which had been crudely bound five headless corpses. The same contingent fired their machine pistols at these targets, making them dance as the bullets struck them. The jihadists laughed obscenely.

  The morning before his planned raid, he observed Keyre using a crude but enormous machete to sever a man’s head. His men kicked the head around like Aztecs at their ball game before hoisting it onto an available spear. During his twilight recon, Bourne was unfortunate enough to see one of the girls being dragged out of the communal tent. It was not Liis—he had been given portrait photos of both sisters by their father. To his horror, the girl could not have been more than twelve. Perhaps she had been recalcitrant, perhaps she had spat in Keyre’s face, or tried to escape. In any event, she now faced the ultimate punishment. Quitting his position, Bourne sprinted as fast as he could manage while keeping himself hidden, but he was too far away to come close enough to do something to save her—though precisely what that might be without getting himself killed he could not say. And yet it was impossible for him to stand by and do nothing. But, apart
from attacking the compound with a company of well-armed soldiers, there was nothing to do. And this knowledge pierced him deeply and completely.

  The poor girl’s death, barbaric and inhuman as it was, served to confirm every horror story Mala and Liis’s father had told him about Keyre and his jihadist cult of personality. Feeling helpless in the face of such evil was one of the worst moments in Bourne’s life, a nightmare that would stay with him for years to come. There was no good way to bear witness to such an atrocity, except for him to promise himself that the people responsible—especially Keyre—would pay with their lives. And in the here and now, he knew the best thing he could do was to save Mala and Liis from such a monstrous fate.

  —

  Even in the dead of night he knew where every tent was and who or what resided inside each. Most important, he knew where Keyre spent most of his time and where his girls were kept. For reasons he had yet to determine, Mala was stashed in a separate tent next to Keyre’s, perhaps for easy access. But her sister, Liis, was in with the other girls. It made things awkward—more difficult, but not impossible. It didn’t help to see how much other death lay around the camp like so much fallen snow; it made it worse. He wanted nothing more than to rid this camp, this spot of beautiful coastline, of torture and death-dealing. But virtually the whole of the Horn of Africa was an abattoir, a cesspit of tribal warfare and bug-eyed revolutionaries, maddened by their own religious zeal.

  The night had come, the darkness around the tented camp absolute. The incendiary explosive devices were in place. Less than ten seconds to go until the twin detonations, causing panic, shock, and chaos.

  Seven, six…