by Gordon Kent
“To film what?”
“To film an event? That’s all I know, I swear it—an event! They call me; somebody comes, takes me someplace—there is an event!”
Triffler thought of the Cairo AID building. Rubble, twisted steel, stink, a human arm hanging on a piece of stair rail. An event. “Who goes with you?”
“Two guys. Film crew. They know nothing; they’re nobodies—I pick them up as I go—”
“Cameramen?”
“One for the camera, one to, mm, carry?—what you call a ‘grip’—?”
“Where are they?”
“Number four room—downstairs—all they know is to be ready—”
“When?”
The telephone rang. It was six-thirty. Triffler drew the .380 and motioned Balcon across the bed. When the journalist’s hand was on the telephone, Triffler put the muzzle against his right temple. “One wrong word, and you’re dead.”
Somali-Kenyan Coast.
“Major Arnolt Vervoert,” the man said. Standing, he was big. He had a sneering smile and a confident voice and a South African accent that Alan hated.
Fidelio leaned around Alan. “I could just waste him.”
“Sit,” Alan said.
Vervoert’s smile got meaner. “I am a major, Mister—?”
“You’re a fucking terrorist! Now sit, before I have somebody kick your feet out from under you!” Alan looked at Fidelio.
The South African stared at him, shrugged, sat with a slowness that was supposed to show that he was humoring Alan. “Your Marines are good men,” he said. “Better than my blecks. You—”
“Shut up.”
“I have a right to be treated as—!”
Alan put his face down close. “You haven’t got the right to piss standing up! You’re a fucking civilian playing soldier! Shut up!”
“Twenty-one years in the South African Def—!”
Alan grabbed the man’s hair with his good hand and twisted the head up and around, the pistol in his left with the muzzle just under the man’s jaw. “Shut the FUCK up!” They stared into each other’s eyes. Vervoert didn’t flinch—but he didn’t fight, either. Alan dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “It doesn’t matter what you used to be. This is now, and now you’re a piece of shit who’s been poaching animals and killing civilians. Understand?” His fingers tightened. Vervoert grunted an assent. His face scowled with pain. Alan let go.
“All secure,” a panting voice said on his left. It was the Marine second lieutenant. His absurdly young face was suddenly mature. And very dirty. “My guys are in good shape, all accounted for. Two light wounds and Gunny Fife took a round in the body armor. Twenty-three prisoners in all, plus we count at least thirteen bodies. Nine of their wounded.”
Alan felt some of the postcombat rage drain away. Gunny Fife was okay.
“Where’s the KWS guys?”
The Marine officer bobbed his head. “Their head guy took off after a bunch of baddies; his guys followed. They did some fancy shooting and blew away all the weapons teams that this asshole tried to organize.”
Alan remembered hearing firing beyond the camp after they had moved in. Opono would have gone after them, of course. Killing poachers was my business.
“See if you can make contact with them. Then we need to get the hell out of here—call in the chopper. There’s a landing area where we came out of the bush—”
“Already on it, sir. As for the Kenya Wildlife guys, they—” His eyes took in something beyond Alan’s shoulder. Alan turned his head. He saw green shirts, black skin, four men trotting with their heads down and their bodies twisted because they were carrying weight among them. They didn’t look up as they came into the open, but plodded on, small steps, rifles slung over their shoulders and the other hand grasping a leg or an armpit. David Opono was being carried in their midst. His head lolled back so that Alan couldn’t see it, but he knew it was Opono from their faces, and he knew he was dead.
“We tried,” one of the rangers said when they had put him down. He had saluted the two Americans, his long fingers raised to touch his slender forehead, tears running down his cheeks. “He died as we carried him. We tried. . . .” His voice trailed off.
Fidelio looked at the mercenary. “Fuck,” he said clearly. “Opono was a right guy.” But his eyes said, Let’s waste him.
Ismailia.
Triffler put his ear close to Balcon’s, loverlike, their hair touching. He moved the gun to Balcon’s throat.
“Answer it. Warning, Balcon—I understand French.”
In fact, his high-school French wasn’t up to it, but Balcon didn’t know that, and he did get the other man saying something about chevaux—horses—to which Balcon said something in which Triffler recognized only the word for three. Mostly, after that, Balcon grunted. He said “oui” a couple of times. Triffler heard the word “sept”—seven—from the other.
Balcon put the phone down, his hands trembling. He didn’t dare move because of the .380. Triffler took the gun away from his throat and stood, pushing the gun into the holster, and Balcon looked up as if for approval, as if needing Triffler to tell him that he’d done well. “Seven o’clock,” he said. “Outside in the parking lot.”
“What was that about horses?”
“A greeting, a, mm, recognition? He says he is looking for a man who wants horses, and I say I need three. Because we will be three—me, my crew. Okay?”
Triffler was already at the door.
Somali-Kenyan Coast.
Opono had taken a burst of fire in his chest, his green shirt black now. His face was untouched, made not peaceful but passionate by death. Alan closed the eyes, which were too staring, too hungry still for whatever dream he had pursued. “Did you kill them?” Alan said to the ranger, voice husky.
“We killed them.”
“We’ll take the body back,” Alan said to the Marine lieutenant. “See if you can find something to cover him—”
The game rangers sat on the brown earth around Opono like guards, their weapons pointing at the sky. One of them began to speak in a language Alan didn’t know, and he turned away; the words were not for him.
Vervoert had recovered his cockiness. He asked for a cigarette. Alan looked down at him, aware that he hated the man and blamed him for Opono’s death and had to be very careful or he would kill him. “I want to know what you were doing here, and I want to know what was going on in the lagoon.”
“My name is Vervoert. Major.” He smiled.
Alan kicked him in the crotch. The second lieutenant recoiled a little and then set his face. Fidelio smiled at Alan as if he he’d just displayed a virtue hitherto lacking. The Kenyan ranger spat.
Vervoert curled around his testicles, rolling on the ground. It was dusty at the edge of the beach, dry despite yesterday’s rain.
Alan squatted in front of him. “Tell me now, or—”
“I’m an officer.”
Alan smiled unconsciously, a little smile that his men would have recognized as trouble. His voice became very quiet.
“You are not a major. You are a criminal apprehended in the act of conducting a terrorist operation against the United States.” Alan looked over at the Marines, most of whom were busy. Two were behind him. “Take off all your clothes.”
“Like fuck I will. Look, Yank—”
Alan tried to sound bored. He motioned to Fidelio, who raised one of the captured pistols so that Vervoert was staring down the barrel. “Take off your clothes or I’ll kill you and get another.”
The major started to strip. In Alan’s experience, few men were brave when naked and helpless. He waved one of the Marines forward. “Hog-tie him.”
The Marine obliged. Vervoert tried to stare at Alan but the Marine wouldn’t let him, and kept moving him, rolling him on the hard earth until his body was coated in the fine grit. Fidelio laughed, a strange, high-pitched sound.
Alan knelt by him.
“You’re a fucking terrorist, dickhead. You are a
lready dead, and if I waste you, no one will ever care. See? Good. There is no fucking Geneva Convention for mercs, got me? You are just a fucking criminal, and this is Africa.”
The man rolled himself to face Alan, who got up and walked around until he was behind him. The man tried to roll again. “You can’t!” The strong voice had a touch of a whine in it. Alan thought the man might have been stronger if he believed in his cause, but as a mercenary, he would know that all heroic defense of his employers offered was a road to dusty death.
The man tried to roll up on his knees and fell over, banging his head on the ground, and Alan moved again, outside his vision.
“You fucking can’t—”
Alan watched him thrash, panicked in his bonds, using his energy. Alan continued to move slowly around the bound man, careful to remain mostly invisible, using the time to master his rage at Opono’s death. When Vervoert stopped thrashing, Alan went and knelt behind him again.
“A better man than you’ll ever be just died because of your shit! Those four men sitting over there loved him.” Alan took the man’s head and jerked it viciously, his pent-up aggression making him too violent. For a moment he feared he had broken the man’s neck. “See them? Now, you tell me what I want to know, or by God you’re theirs.”
“You’re crazy.”
“One chance. Tell me, or you’re theirs. I’ll give them ten minutes in the bush with you. Then I’m out of here and you never will have existed!”
Fidelio laughed again. It was a sound that Alan didn’t like, as if by pleasing Fidelio, he was breaking a law.
Vervoert lay in the dirt and panted. He was hyperventilating. This was a big, dangerous man, and Alan was breaking him. He felt the press of time, but he also knew he was winning.
Alan hated it.
The man’s eyes were starting to dilate, and he was ashamed of his filth and his nudity. It made Alan a little sick and giddy.
Vervoert’s eyes slid over toward the four Kenyans. He was having difficulty speaking. “I ha-ad a contract. Train those blecks and then—”
“Yes?” Alan laid his pistol gently against the man’s head.
“Go into Somalia!” Vervoert could hardly speak. Alan let up on the pistol. “To an airfield. Kusdasii.”
“To do what?”
“Take it, hold it—that’s all! I swear. That’s all I know. It was a job—train fifty blecks, go up there in the trucks, take it. That’s all.”
“There’s more.” He pushed the pistol, saw blood flow where the front sight was cutting the man’s scalp. Vervoert’s eyes searched for him, hated him. “Tell me!”
“We would be relieved. By air.” He still tried to hold something back. Alan got up and walked away a few feet.
“All I have to do is leave you, you worthless piece of shit.”
Vervoert groaned and muttered something, and Alan went back, this time squatting down in front of the man. Alan saw the sweat and dust crusting on his body. Alan leaned down close. “You don’t have to die here.” He wished he had time to coach Fidelio. It was less effective, acting as good cop and bad cop. “Just stop lying. I’m in a hurry, and I don’t really give a shit about you.”
“A force, okay? An occupying force! That’s all I fucking know; they don’t tell me more! I was to hold the fucking airfield until the planes arrive, the main force, armor. Big mortars, they said. A force.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know! What the fuck you think you do with a force in a shithole like Somalia?”
Alan thought he knew. Drugs, he thought. They want to wall off southern Somalia and put the new poppy fields there. He could see it: the quick grab, the local governments paid off, the U.S. cut off from reprisal by selected terrorist acts. He was silent for a moment, and then he wrenched his attention back to interrogation. He lengthened his pause deliberately, like a man trying to think of something to ask. In fact, he had it: the real question, the pressing one. Hidden in the list, just like at school. “And the lagoon? What were they doing in the lagoon?” He didn’t even sound curious.
“They played with toy boats. Not my people; that wasn’t my operation. Different people. They blew up little boats against that thing out there, that’s all I know!”
“What thing?” Alan’s eyes went to the lagoon. He remembered the odd radar return from out there, the brief flicker they had thought was an explosion. Toy boats. Explosions. He bent over Vervoert. “Who were they?”
“Just—guys. Little guys—Asians—”
“Not Africans?”
“Asians, man—Jesus, I’m telling the truth—”
Asians. The Sri Lankan Tamils had been known to use radio-guided boats to blow up ships in the narrow waterways of Sri Lanka.
“Where are they now?”
Vervoert’s eyes went to the lagoon as if he was looking for the people with the toy boats. “They left yesterday in the helicopter. I don’t know where they went. I swear, I don’t know. They weren’t my people.”
Yesterday. Sri Lankans training to blow up ships in narrow waterways.
Alan ran for the radio.
Ismailia.
Triffler grabbed Keatley’s shirtfront and told him what he had got from Balcon. “It’s got to be the canal!”
He indicated the newsman. “Get him dressed.” He pushed al-Fawzi in front of him out the bedroom door and into the other room, glanced at Kassim and Balcon’s woman in chairs, the woman recovered enough to be smoking a cigarette. She pouted at him. “Tell Kassim there are two men in Room Four; they have to be neutralized. Also this woman. Maybe he has to arrest them—suspicion of conspiracy, or something. The men should have equipment—cameras, boxes—stuff like that. Leave the equipment but get rid of the men. Okay?”
“Okay!” The sergeant’s look of enthusiasm was back. He spewed Arabic at Kassim.
Triffler strode back into the bedroom. “You and I are going with this yo-yo,” he said to Keatley, pointing a thumb at Balcon. “He’s being picked up at seven by somebody who’s going to take him to the action. He goes with a cameraman and a gofer. You cameraman, me gofer. You got any problem with that?”
Keatley spread his hands. “Me, have problems? He-e-e-y—!”
He pulled Keatley away from Balcon and lowered his voice. “The new BG started its transit yesterday—canal’ll be full of U.S. ships.” He plucked at the front of Keatley’s shirt. “Franklin D. Roosevelt entered last night.”
“Oh, shit.”
Triffler tried to call Dukas’s cell phone while putting on a pair of Balcon’s blue jeans and a soiled T-shirt he found on the floor. No answer. He tried the det at Mombasa, got a duty EM; it was an open line, so little could be said, but he got through the idea that something was going to go down near the canal and he’d be there, and he asked to have Dukas call him back. But Dukas was on his way to Cairo, he was told, so he had to settle for an open-line promise from the duty EM to inform everybody he knew, starting with Rafehausen on the Jefferson, that something, something big, was going down near the canal. Only then did he call Geddes, still out where they had left him at the edge of the motel parking lot, and set up a two-car surveillance on whoever picked them and Balcon up at seven, al-Fawzi to go with Geddes.
Somali-Kenyan Coast.
Flying at thirteen hundred feet, Soleck listened to Commander Craik’s tense voice. “Soleck, pass this at once to the Jefferson as urgent priority, must be passed at once to Captain Rafehausen. The next terrorist target will be a ship in enclosed waters. The method’s one used by the Tamil Tigers—two small powerboats joined by a line that gets trapped by the ship’s bow; the small boats are drawn against the hull by the line and explode. You understand me?”
“Yessir. What enclosed waters?”
“I don’t know. It’s within twenty-four hours’ travel by a small chopper, because that’s how they got out of here.”
“The Suez Canal.” Soleck said it without even thinking. It seemed obvious to him.
Craik was silent
on the other end and then said, “That’s a good possibility, Evan. Pass it on to Captain Rafehausen.”
But Soleck’s mind was leaping on. “The FDR’s in the canal, sir. She’s relieving the Jeff in the Red Sea; it was on the message traffic—”
“I know where the Roosevelt is, Evan. My wife’s on board.” Then, astonishingly, Soleck heard Craik laughing, the laugh turning quickly to a groan. “Jesus God, that’s what all that cell-phone activity was about—the Roosevelt! That was the day the Roosevelt got delayed—they were scrambling to reschedule their attack!” He groaned again. “Get on it, Soleck. Tell them there’s something about attacking an airfield in Somalia, a place called Kusdasii—they’re expecting more troops by air—get on it!”
Soleck tightened his grip on the yoke. “Message will go out to the boat ASAP, sir.” But Soleck’s brain was making a discovery, too—something he’d read in the last few days about aircraft and a troop buildup—where? And then he remembered: Sierra Leone, two ex-Soviet aircraft, a lot of ground troops.
He put the S-3 into a slow turn seaward and said to Campbell, “Raise the Jefferson on guard.”
Ismailia.
With Keatley, Triffler raced down to Room Four and began to paw through the equipment there. They found a television camera, shoulder-portable, and two aluminum suitcases, plus assorted and, to Triffler, mostly unrecognizable stuff. The suitcases were fitted inside with battleship-gray foam, into which wells had been cut for lenses, a meter, a still camera, and the gadgets of sound recording. An umbrella-shaped reflector had been tossed into a chair; an attaché case and a light bar were on one of the beds; the claptrap of a craft he didn’t understand was spread over a cheap table and two chairs. The gofer carried a lot in this crew, he saw.
Triffler tore the foam away from the inside of one suitcase and cut a rough well on its underside and put his nine-millimeter in it. Replaced, with a lens on top, it would do. Maybe.
“Your cannon. It’s got to be hidden, Keatley. They may search us.”
“Bullshit.” Keatley’s .45 was part of his personality, a Detonics with a short barrel and no sights, made for what Keatley called “close work.”