Hard Asset: A Cobra Elite Novel

by Pamela Clare

  “Yes. It’s also why my parents named me Shanti. My name means ‘peace.’” She gave him a sad smile. “After I was born, when the pogroms against Hindus began, my father decided to leave Bangladesh for good.”

  “I can’t blame him.”

  “I grew up hearing my family’s story, seeing the grief in my grandparents’ eyes, wondering about the aunt, uncle, and cousins I never met. I decided when I was a teenager that I would dedicate my life to nonviolence and helping victims of genocide.”

  He drew his hand away. “I can see why you’re uncomfortable with soldiers and firearms. But what happens when those who dedicate themselves to violence like General Naing gain the upper hand?”

  Shanti met his gaze. “We have to learn to prevent those situations, to stop conflict through peaceful means before it turns to violence.”

  “For good people like you to build a better world, Shanti, there have to be people like me willing to back you up with force. Otherwise, the bad guys win.”

  5

  Connor watched out the rear passenger side window, HK416 in his hands, McManus riding in the helicopter overhead, giving Connor regular updates. Trees and pools of rainwater stretched along a highway that was busy with tourists in green auto-rickshaws and locals on bicycles. Grazing deer. Seagulls. Pedestrians with umbrellas. The wide expanse of the Naf River, the Mayu Mountains of Myanmar in the distance.

  Shanti sat in the middle, sandwiched between Connor and Cruz, her hands folded in her lap, a large handbag holding her camera, digital recorder, encrypted phone, and files on the floor at her feet. She’d worn a long white blouse, brown pants, and boots, a white cotton scarf draped around her shoulders, her eyes hidden behind shades.

  She hadn’t said a word since they’d left the hotel, and Connor couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d upset her. He’d tried to make a point last night. Courts and laws and noble intentions were only as strong as the force that backed them. But the moment he’d said those words, the happiness had faded from her face.

  “I understand what you’re saying, and I’m grateful for your protection,” she’d said. “But too often when government leaders put weapons in people’s hands, it’s only because they’re not achieving political goals by peaceful means. When those goals change, so does the target.”

  He’d had to fight not to feel insulted by that. He was no politician’s puppet.

  You sure?

  She’d grown quiet after that, almost withdrawn, though she’d smiled and thanked him for his company.

  When he’d gotten back to his own room, he’d looked up the 1971 Bangladesh genocide online. Images of bodies had filled the screen—at least three hundred thousand killed and hundreds of thousands more raped and tortured by Pakistani soldiers.

  He’d felt like a fucking idiot.

  She’d described how soldiers had murdered members of her family, grief on her pretty face, and he’d more or less told her that killing was sometimes a necessary and good thing. Not his best move.

  What would she think of you if she knew?

  Darkness twisted in his chest.

  He pushed the thought aside. That had been different. It hadn’t been deliberate. Shit happened on a battlefield, and it wasn’t pretty.

  Corbray and Tower always told them never to let down the professional barrier between them and their clients. Connor had broken that rule this time when he’d asked her to have dinner. Then again, Tower was a fucking hypocrite. He’d ended up sleeping with a Cobra client last year at the compound in Afghanistan. He hadn’t even tried to hide it. He and Jenna were getting married soon.

  “Team One, this is Helo One.” McManus’ voice came through Connor’s earpiece. “Two vehicles are sittin’ on the side of the road about two klicks ahead. It looks like an accident or a puncture. Copy?”

  “Helo One, Team One, good copy.” Connor didn’t need to relay this information to anyone as they were all listening in on the same frequency. When they neared the two vehicles, the drivers accelerated and shifted into the right lane, giving them ample room.

  On the shoulder, two men changing a flat stopped to look up at the helicopter.

  Connor turned to Shanti. “How are you holding up?”

  Yesterday’s grenade had been a first for her, and now she was sitting in a speeding armored vehicle with three men holding military rifles.

  Her lips curved in a forced smile. “I’m glad finally to get to work. It’s been almost two years since I started collecting evidence.”

  “You’ll get the job done.”

  She let out a breath. “I hope so.”

  It was beginning to sprinkle when they rolled into Kutupalong Refugee Camp. The helicopter veered off and headed north toward the airport.

  “You two remember your rain gear?” Connor asked Cruz and Jones.

  “Hell, yeah,” Jones said.

  Connor unclipped his HK416 from his harness, Shanti watching. He, Cruz, and Jones would leave their rifles locked in the vehicles with Isaksen and Segal and the others and carry concealed pistols inside the camp.

  “I appreciate that. Thank you.” She drew her scarf over her hair, draping one end over her left shoulder.

  “We’ll do whatever we can to support your mission—as long as we can still complete ours.” He shouldered his pack—it held extra magazines, a first aid kit, food, and his rain gear—and stepped to the ground, turning back to help Shanti.

  Ms. Montreux was waiting for them together with Shanti’s interpreter, a young Rohingya woman named Noor who lived in the camp. The women greeted each other, Noor giving Shanti a shy smile.

  “It’s a ten-minute walk to the hospital. I’m afraid it’s going to rain.” Ms. Montreux looked up at the leaden sky. “Did you bring an umbrella?”

  Shanti nodded. “It’s in my bag. I used to play in the streets during the monsoons.”

  Connor could almost imagine that—little Shanti playing in the rain.

  Ms. Montreux gave Connor a piece of paper. “The list you wanted.”

  He tucked it into a pocket in his body armor. “Thanks.”

  “This way,” Ms. Montreux said.

  “Heads on a swivel.”

  “Copy that.”

  Shanti followed Pauline and Noor along a maze of muddy paths that were lined with sandbags, passing countless shelters made of tarps and bamboo poles and heading uphill toward a large white building with a blue roof. “Is that the hospital?”

  “Yes. It’s not far now.”

  The witnesses and survivors she interviewed this week risked potential shame and retaliation by sharing their stories. To protect them, she and Pauline had arranged for the witnesses to be interviewed at the hospital under the pretext of seeing a doctor. If anyone asked who Shanti was, Pauline would say she was a trauma therapist. Shanti would record the interviews with a small camera and digital recorder and upload the files to The Hague when they got back to the hotel.

  They reached the hospital just as the sky opened up and rain began to fall. Shanti dashed after Pauline, laughing as cold raindrops hit her skin.

  Connor was right behind her. “Cruz, take the front entrance. Jones, take the back.”

  “You got it.”

  “Copy that.”

  Shanti followed the two women inside the hospital and down the main hallway to a door marked PRIVATE, Connor behind her.

  Pauline turned to Connor. “You’ll have to wait here, I’m afraid.”

  “I’d like to check the room first.”

  Pauline looked troubled by this but nodded.

  Connor opened the door, stuck his head inside, then closed it again. “Is there any other way to enter this room?”

  Pauline shook her head. “No.”

  Connor gave Shanti a nod.

  Shanti entered, followed by Noor. She found a young woman sitting on the floor, a veil covering her hair and the lower part of her face. She used the few words of Rohingya she’d learned. “Assolamu Aláikum. Añár nam Shanti.”

 
Peace be with you. My name is Shanti.

  The woman watched through brown eyes that ought to have belonged to someone much older. She said something Shanti didn’t understand.

  “She wants to know who that man was,” Noor said.

  “He works for me. He is here to keep us safe and make sure no one disturbs us.”

  Noor sat beside the woman and translated Shanti’s words.

  The woman seemed to relax.

  Shanti sat, too, and took out her files. “Your name is Sareema, right? Thank you for meeting with me.”

  Noor asked the girl. “She says yes, she is Sareema.”

  Shanti explained why she had come to the camps, pausing every so often to let Noor catch up. “I need to record this interview so that it can be used in court as evidence against the men who hurt you. I know it will be difficult, but please tell me everything you can remember.”

  Sareema replied, Noor translating. “She says she understands. She wants these bad men to be punished.”

  “I will do my best to make sure that happens.”

  Shanti set up the small camera, making sure it caught Sareema’s face, then set it to record. She sat on the floor across from Sareema, her backup digital recorder in hand. “What village do you come from, Sareema?”

  “Myar Zin.”

  Shanti was familiar with Sareema’s story, but listening to her tell it over the next hour and a half left her feeling sick.

  Soldiers had come to Sareema’s village in the middle of the night and forced their way into people’s homes, shooting the men and dragging the women outside. They’d killed Sareema’s young husband and his parents in front of her. Then four of them had dragged Sareema into her home and took turns raping and beating her even though she was heavily pregnant.

  “One cut my breast with a knife. They kicked my belly again and again until I began to bleed between my legs. I passed out.”

  Smoke had revived her, waking her to a nightmare. All the homes of the village, including her own, had been set on fire, women and children trapped inside.

  “She thought she would burn to death. It was hard to walk. She was in so much pain. She broke through one of the bamboo walls and ran into the forest. She could hear women screaming. She recognized her sister’s voice. They were burning alive. She wanted to help them, but the soldiers were still there and shooting people.”

  Sareema’s baby boy had been stillborn under a tree the next day. Though she’d lost a lot of blood, she’d met other survivors, some of whom had given her food and water. She’d managed to make it with other refugees to the Naf River, where a fisherman had agreed to take them across in exchange for their valuables.

  “They had nothing. The fisherman demanded that one of the women give him sex instead. He didn’t want Sareema because she was bleeding.”

  Sareema had arrived at Kutupalong feverish from postpartum infection and weak from blood loss. There had been burns on her hands and feet that needed treatment, too.

  “She has not felt happy since that night. She never got to raise her baby boy. She misses her husband. She misses her parents and her sister. None of them escaped. At night, she can still hear her sister screaming.”

  Sareema didn’t shed a tear as she recounted this horror, but Shanti could see she was trembling. “You are brave, Sareema. I know it must be hard to make yourself talk about this. I am so sorry that you were made to suffer and that your family was killed. What happened to you was a terrible crime. These men should be punished. Are you certain they were soldiers and not border guards or men from another village?”

  Noor translated Shanti’s words, gave Shanti Sareema’s answer. “They wore green uniforms with red patches on their sleeves.”

  The uniform of the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s army.

  Shanti asked her if she would recognize any of the men who’d been part of the attack, whether she’d gotten a good look at their faces.

  “It was dark, and I was so afraid, but there was one face. He told the other soldiers what to do. When he stepped out of his truck, the headlights lit up his face. They called him Naing.”

  Shanti set a folder of photos in front of her—officers who served with Naing, henchmen, and Naing himself. “Can you point to him if you see him here?”

  Tears filled Sareema’s eyes. She pointed to Naing, answered.

  Noor translated. “Yes. It was this man.”

  Connor stood watch as three different women met with Shanti to offer testimony against General Naing. The walls weren’t thick, so he couldn’t help but overhear. He’d seen some pretty sick shit in his time as an operator, but their stories were among the worst he’d ever heard.

  Babies torn from their mothers’ arms and thrown into fires. Little girls and women gang-raped, mutilated, murdered. Old men left to bleed out, their limbs hacked off. Grandmothers paraded naked in front of lines of laughing soldiers who filmed it on their cell phones before killing the women.

  Connor wanted to find Naing and make him eat his own fucking balls.

  How strange it was. This hospital was full of volunteers from around the world trying to save lives, while across the border, men made a game of taking them. What the fuck was it about human beings anyway? What other animal systematically slaughtered its own kind?

  Are you sure you want to look in that mirror?

  Connor ate a snack bar from an MRE pack for lunch, rain still falling in sheets beyond the windows, battering the roof.

  A small boy with bare feet rolled something along the floor. He must have been five or six years old, his yellow shirt dirty, his cutoff shorts worn. He stopped when he reached Connor and looked up at him through big brown eyes.

  Connor held out his hand. “May I see?”

  The boy trustingly dropped whatever it was onto Connor’s palm.

  It was a little car. The chassis was a small piece of bamboo. Plastic bottle caps had been nailed into it to serve as tires.

  Connor nodded, met the boy’s gaze, gave him back his toy. “That’s a nice car. Did you make it?”

  The boy smiled—and dashed back to his mother, who sat near the front entrance.

  Connor found himself wishing he had his old box of Hot Wheels from home. There must be a hundred little cars in that box. His mother had saved them for the day when he had children of his own, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Cruz’s voice sounded in his ear. “O’Neal, this is Cruz. There’s flooding out here. We might have trouble getting back to the vehicles.”

  Shit.

  Connor put on his rain gear, making sure he still had quick and easy access to his concealed Glocks. Then he checked in with Segal, who said the vehicles were high and dry. “Let’s hope we’re out of here before it gets much worse.”

  The helicopter was scheduled to arrive in less than an hour, which meant they needed to be back to the vehicles by then.

  From inside the room, Connor heard the interpreter recounting new horrors.

  “… slit her husband’s throat and shot her children…”

  Twenty minutes later, the door opened, and the last witness stepped out, veiled head to toe with only her eyes showing, her gaze on the floor.

  Shanti appeared a few moments later, Noor behind her, both women’s eyes filled with shadows, lines of grief on their faces. “Thank you, Noor. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “I’m glad to be able to do something to help.”

  Shanti gave her a hug. “I’ll see you here tomorrow morning.”

  Connor spoke into his mic. “Jones, meet us out front. We’re moving.”

  “Copy that.”

  A crowd had gathered under the broad awning that stretched out above the hospital’s front entrance, men, women, and children taking shelter from the downpour.

  Without a word to Connor, Shanti opened her umbrella, stepped out from beneath the awning, and started down the hill. What had been a path was now an ankle-deep stream of muddy water.

  “Be careful.” Connor was glad
that most people had gone inside. It gave him fewer potential threats to watch. “It’s going to be slick.”

  They all slipped and slid down the path, cold water filling his boots. From overhead, he heard the thrum of a helicopter’s rotors.

  “Right on time.”

  Shanti looked up, raindrops on her face.

  No, not raindrops. She was under an umbrella. They were tears.

  She was crying.

  He couldn’t blame her for that.

  As they neared the bottom of the hill, the torrent rose until it reached her knees.

  “Take my hand.” Connor took her cold, wet fingers in his, steadying her as they made their way back to the camp’s entrance, Cruz and Jones keeping a sharp eye out.

  By the time they reached the vehicles, Shanti had gotten control of her tears, her emotions now cloaked. She closed her umbrella, shook it out, and climbed inside the Land Rover, handbag over her shoulder. Her jeans and boots were soaked.

  Connor sat beside her, wet to the skin despite his rain gear. “Let’s roll.”

  6

  Shanti held it together on the drive back to the hotel, grateful that Connor hadn’t asked her why she’d been crying or how she was doing. She would’ve had to say she was fine when, in truth, she felt sick to the depths of her soul.

  You won’t be any good to them as a prosecutor if you let your emotions take over.

  He sat beside her, still in his rain gear, rifle in his hands, his gaze focused once more on the world outside. He’d taken her hand to keep her from falling, but the contact had been a lifeline, helping her to get control of her emotions again. She would never be able to tell him that, but it was true.

  When they got back to the hotel, she went straight to her room, took off her muddy boots and socks, and went to work uploading the raw video and digital sound files via secured internet to the ICC’s cloud site. She wanted the files safely in Bram’s hands as soon as possible. That way, if anything happened to her or her equipment, Bram would already have the women’s statements.

  Each of the three women had identified Naing as being present and in charge when their villages were destroyed.