by Mike Lawson
Kelly didn’t understand the politics of Uganda. He didn’t know why the LRA and its boy soldiers were so determined to exterminate people who looked just like them and who were just as poor. He didn’t know—and he didn’t care. All he cared about was reaching the refugee camp alive.
Before leaving Kampala, Kelly had studied maps and Google Earth photos looking for spots where they might be ambushed, and one of those places was about twenty miles from the refugee camp where the road crossed a river. Thanks to a five-year drought, the river was now dry, but at one time a bridge had passed over it, and the bridge had been destroyed for God knows what reason by the warring factions. The remains of the bridge were now on what had become the right-hand side of the road, as vehicles were forced to drive down into a shallow gully to cross the dry riverbed. Just beyond the river crossing, the road turned sharply to the right. Kelly figured that the fallen bridge would be a good place for LRA troops to hide behind and that if they set up a roadblock right before the curve, the LRA would occupy the high ground in front of the convoy.
Half a mile from the river crossing, Kelly raised a hand to stop the convoy and studied the way ahead through his binoculars. He saw a flash of red near a twisted bridge trestle, focused on it, and smiled. One of the attackers was wearing a red baseball cap on his head. Kelly then made what appeared to be a gesture for the convoy to proceed forward. The gesture was actually a signal for Nelson and the men in the trucks to expect an attack. Each of the six trucks contained a driver and a passenger, and the passenger was armed with a new M4 carbine that, on full automatic, fires approximately seven hundred rounds per minute. Kelly and Nelson had M4s as well, but their weapons were also equipped with grenade launchers that fired a 40mm grenade.
As Kelly’s jeep crossed the riverbed, he dropped the front windshield down onto the jeep’s hood so it wouldn’t get in his way. Then, and just as he had expected, an ancient Range Rover rounded the curve ahead of him. The top had been chopped off the Rover with a cutting torch, turning the vehicle into a crude-looking convertible, and it was filled with teenagers. It looked like a circus Volkswagen overloaded with homicidal clowns. Kelly counted eight people crowded into the Rover, and all but the driver were armed with automatic rifles.
The boys in the Rover stood up and fired their weapons into the air. At the same time, a dozen more boys popped up from behind the fallen bridge and aimed their weapons at the convoy. But Kelly knew they wouldn’t fire immediately; they didn’t want to shoot up the convoy if they didn’t have to. They wanted the trucks intact so they could move them off the road and later sell them, and they didn’t want to damage whatever goods might be in the trucks. They expected that the men in the convoy, once they saw what they were up against, would offer a bribe to pass or simply run away and abandon the trucks.
Kelly had no intention of running. He raised the short-barreled M4 and fired a grenade at the Range Rover. Then, in rapid succession, he fired two more—and the Rover was turned into a mass of twisted metal and flame and screaming human beings. At the same time, Nelson began launching grenades at middle of the fallen bridge, immediately killing half a dozen teenagers hiding behind that portion of the structure, and the armed passengers in the convoy also opened fire, spraying down everyone who was visible. Some of the boys returned fire but most ducked down behind the fallen bridge trestles—and Kelly and Nelson fired more grenades at the bridge. Ten minutes after the attack began, five boys hiding behind the bridge ran off. Kelly assumed the others were all dead or wounded.
Kelly got out of his vehicle and walked back to each truck in the convoy. A passenger in one of the trucks had been killed, and one driver was slightly wounded, but that was the worst of it. More important, all the vehicles were still drivable. He ordered that the dead man’s body be removed from the truck and tossed to the side of the road. When he reached Nelson’s vehicle, Nelson—who looked like a six-foot-four-inch gingerbread man, he was so covered with red-brown dust—just shook his head and said, “That was pathetic.”
Kelly returned to his jeep and directed the convoy forward. As his vehicle pushed aside the smoking wreckage that had once been the Range Rover, he noticed that one of the boys from the Rover was still alive but missing an arm. He turned to look behind him to make sure the trucks in the convoy were able to get past the wreckage and watched the driver in the lead truck deliberately run over the one-armed boy. This was a hard land.
The refugee camp was surrounded by coiled razor wire and covered more than a hundred acres. It was teeming with people lying under makeshift shelters constructed of plastic tarps, blankets, and cardboard. That is, the lucky ones had cardboard; half the refugees just sat with the sun beating down mercilessly on their heads. Kelly doubted the supplies the convoy had brought would feed them for more than a few days.
There were a few uniformed soldiers walking the perimeter of the camp. Kelly didn’t know if they were African Union or United Nations, but whoever they were, their charter was to protect the camp. He also knew they were useless and that if the camp was attacked, they’d run.
Lizzie Warwick was waiting near the main gate when the convoy arrived, and standing next to her was Earl Lee and two other armed men. These men were Ms. Warwick’s personal security detail and they worked for Kelly and Nelson. Lizzie waved gaily when she saw Kelly, and Kelly smiled and waved back.
Lizzie was forty-two years old, although she looked younger, and she was dressed as she typically was on these missions of mercy: well-worn boots, khaki pants, and a long-sleeved shirt. Because she always wore a large-brimmed hat when she was outdoors to protect her delicate skin, her complexion was unnaturally pale, and where her flesh stretched over her cheekbones it seemed almost transparent.
She was about five foot six, and slender thanks to a vegetarian diet and the fact that she was in constant motion. She had curly red hair that was normally tied back in a practical ponytail, blue eyes, a cute upturned nose sprinkled with freckles, and full lips. She was an attractive woman in a wholesome, little sister way, but Kelly had always thought that if she ever wore makeup and tarted herself up a bit, she could be a stunner.
He jumped down from the jeep and approached her with a genuine smile. She was a flake, but a nice flake, and her commitment to the unfortunate was certainly genuine. Nelson, on the other hand, found her naïveté and her perpetual bubbliness annoying, so consequently Kelly was the one charged with talking to her whenever they encountered her on an assignment.
She hugged Kelly and said, “How was the trip? Any problems?”
“None at all,” Kelly said, and that was true—or at least true on the scale that he and Nelson measured problems. The convoy had arrived intact and she didn’t need to know that one of the people in the convoy had been killed. Nor would he tell her that they had slaughtered more than a dozen teenagers—and this is what annoyed Nelson about Lizzie Warwick. She knew their job was to protect the convoy, and she must have known that the convoy might be attacked by the same people who had slaughtered the relatives of those in the camp and raped half the women there, but Lizzie believed that all Kelly and Nelson had to do was show that they were ferocious and heavily armed and they’d make it through without a fight.
Lizzie directed men to begin removing the supplies from the trucks and, as this was happening, the inhabitants of the camp—those who were still ambulatory, mostly women and children who looked like walking skeletons—started moving toward the trucks. Kelly watched for a moment to make sure Lizzie wasn’t going to be trampled by the hungry refugees, and when he was satisfied she was safe, he made a motion for Earl Lee to join him and Nelson.
Neither Kelly nor Nelson liked Earl Lee, and they’d had a long discussion between themselves before they hired him. Like them, Lee was a former Army Ranger, and like them, he was a big-muscled man who was good at killing people. He was also a braggart, a boor, and a bigot but if you needed a man to protect a client, he wasn’t
a bad choice—just a disagreeable one.
“Kelly,” Lee said, nodding his head. Then he looked over at Nelson and grinned. “You look like a pig my daddy had that liked to roll in the mud.” Nelson didn’t say anything, but his eyes, looking out through his dust-covered face, seemed unusually bright. Kelly knew that Nelson was dying to kick Lee’s redneck ass and that if Lee ever gave him the slightest reason to, he would. And Lee was always doing what he had just done: making some snide comment that could have been an insult but wasn’t quite one.
“How’s it going here?” Kelly asked.
Lee shrugged. “Fine. The good darkies ain’t misbehaving and we haven’t seen any sign of the bad darkies.”
Kelly, who was black, didn’t react to Lee’s language. He knew Lee had served with a lot of black men and got along okay with them, although he wasn’t a friend to any of them. He just liked to say things like that in front of Kelly, hoping to get a rise out of him.
“Okay,” Kelly said. “You need anything?”
“Yeah. A bottle of JD and some pussy.”
“What an asshole,” Nelson said as they walked away.
“He does his job.”
“Yeah, but one of these days …”
Kelly looked around for René Lambert but didn’t see him and hoped that he wasn’t going to have to walk all around the foul-smelling refugee camp to find the doctor. Finally he saw him, not more than fifty yards away, squatting on the ground next to an old man. The man looked like he was in his seventies—but maybe not. In this place, a man in his fifties could look like he was in his seventies. A few minutes later, the doctor finished his examination and waved to two of his African assistants. The assistants helped the old man to his feet, and Kelly could see that his left foot and ankle were grossly swollen from elephantiasis.
“Doctor,” Kelly called out, and Lambert turned and treated Kelly to that marvelous smile of his.
“Ah, Kelly,” he said. “Any problems?”
“No. I’ve brought the latest batch from Dr. Ballard. You’ll get an e-mail tomorrow explaining what needs to be done. Where do you want me to put the drugs?”
“In my tent,” Lambert said, and pointed to a tent that had been erected just inside the main gate of the camp.
The small box in the cooler containing fifty ten-milliliter clear glass vials was in fact the only thing that really mattered. It was the reason that Kelly and Nelson had accompanied the convoy and killed a score of African boys.
Everything else was window dressing.
The chopper took them to Nairobi, Kenya; a long-range jet chartered by Hobson would be there tomorrow to fly them out of Africa. It was a long trip from the refugee camp to Nairobi—about three hundred miles—and they slept the whole way, and were feeling somewhat refreshed by the time they checked into a large suite at the Hilton.
Nelson came out of the shower with a towel wrapped round his waist, and when he turned to reach into his duffel bag for something to wear to dinner, Kelly looked, as he always did, at the scars on Nelson’s broad back: three puckered, circular scars the size of dimes that were starkly white against Nelson’s tanned skin. Nelson had saved Kelly’s life three times, once in Somalia and once in Iran, but the first time was in Iraq, and the scars were a permanent, vivid reminder of that occasion.
They’d been in a Ranger unit then—this was before they were selected for Delta—and members of a six-man squad patrolling an al-Qaeda-infested section of Fallujah. At one point, the patrol passed a teenaged girl sitting on a sidewalk selling flowers, but because they’d seen the girl on previous patrols, they dismissed her as a threat. She was wearing a hijab on her head, blue jeans, and a long-sleeved blouse; she had no flowing robes or anything else to conceal a weapon. They concluded later that she’d been sitting on the Uzi.
Nelson and Kelly were at the tail end of the squad, bullshitting about something as their eyes continually and automatically scanned nearby buildings for threats. When Nelson glanced to his right at a curtain fluttering in an open second-story window, he saw, with his peripheral vision, that the girl had a weapon in her hands. Nelson had better peripheral vision than any man Kelly had ever known; there were times when it seemed as if he literally had eyes in the back of his head. A second before the girl pulled the Uzi’s trigger, Nelson shoved Kelly so hard he fell to the ground, and the girl’s first volley hit Nelson. She stitched three bullets in a line across the middle of his back; fortunately, none of the bullets hit his spine. Before she had a chance to shoot anyone else, Kelly punched a hole through the flower girl’s chest with his M4, pulverizing her brave young heart.
The investigation into why the Uzi rounds had been able to penetrate Nelson’s body armor like it was made of crepe paper took eighteen months to come to the conclusion that the vendor generally made a good product and Nelson just had the bad luck to get armor that was defective.
They both ordered fish for dinner because they knew it would be fresh, most likely caught in Lake Victoria that day. They also ordered predinner gin martinis and were not surprised that the bartender made them perfectly; Kenya, after all, had once been part of the British Empire. They toasted each other silently for a mission well done, and just as Kelly was about to take a sip from his drink, his cell phone rang.
“Hello,” he said.
“Is this Mr. Shaw?”
Shaw was the name Kelly gave to people when he didn’t want those people to know his real name.
“Yes,” he said. “Who is this?”
“It’s Bob Ryan, Mr. Shaw.”
Kelly had no idea who Bob Ryan was.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Ryan?”
“You told me to call you if Brian Kincaid received any visitors other than his mother or his trial lawyer, and that you’d pay me five hundred bucks to tell you if he did.”
It was no wonder he couldn’t remember Ryan. Ryan was a guard at the prison in West Virginia where Brian Kincaid was incarcerated, and Kelly hadn’t spoken to the man in almost two years.
“Who visited him, Mr. Ryan?”
“Are you going to send me the money if I tell you?”
“Sir, my word is my bond,” Kelly said—and he wasn’t being facetious. “I’m out of the country right now, but you’ll get the money by the end of next week. In cash. I promise. Now, who visited Kincaid?”
Kelly closed the phone.
“Do we have a problem?” Nelson asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, and told Nelson what Ryan had told him.
Kelly sat there, trying to decide if he should do something right away or wait until they returned to the States, and thinking about Ryan’s phone call became a distraction to what would have otherwise been a pleasant dinner. Finally, he muttered, “Goddamnit,” took out his phone, and made a call. He had no idea what time it was back in the U.S.—and he didn’t give a shit. Hobson answered on the fourth ring.
The relationship that Kelly and Nelson had with Bill Hobson was odd. Technically—and as far as Lizzie Warwick was concerned —the ex-soldiers worked for Hobson. The reality was that Hobson worked directly for Fiona West, but often took his orders from Kelly.
“This is Kelly. Do you have a pen?”
“Uh, yeah,” Hobson said. It sounded as if Hobson had been sleeping.
“A man named Joseph DeMarco visited Brian Kincaid in prison. He’s a lawyer,” Kelly said. When DeMarco had checked into the prison to see Kincaid he had to log in, and the log-in procedure required that he show identification and provide an address and phone number, and Kelly now gave those numbers to Hobson.
“I want you to hire a private detective named Dave Unger. He has an office someplace in the D.C. area, Arlington or Alexandria, I can’t remember which. I’ve met Unger, and I served with his son in Iraq. Tell him I want him to find out everything he can about DeMarco and to follow him until we get
back to the States. I also want him to bug the guy’s home phone. I don’t think he has the capability to monitor cell phone calls, but if he does, tell him to monitor DeMarco’s cell phone as well.”
“That sounds like overkill,” Hobson said. “I mean, just because this guy visited Kincaid in prison—”
“Hobson, shut up. I didn’t call to ask your opinion. Tell Unger you want daily reports from him, including tapes of any calls DeMarco makes. Nelson and I will be back in a few days, but if Unger turns up something important, call me. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Hobson said.
Kelly closed the phone, feeling better because he’d taken some action. Tomorrow he’d call Fiona and tell her what he’d done—something he hated to do because Fiona had a tendency to overreact. But he’d worry about that tomorrow. Right now he was going to enjoy his meal with Nelson, have a good bottle of wine with dinner, and while they ate and drank they’d talk about the house in Montana—without a doubt, their favorite topic of discussion.
9
The D.C. Beltway had turned into a parking lot because of a three-car pileup, but DeMarco didn’t really mind; he was in no hurry to meet Brian Kincaid’s mother. As he sat there looking at four lanes of stationary vehicles ahead of him, he wondered, as he often did, what it would be like to have a normal job—or simply a job he liked.
When he’d graduated from law school, his father had just been killed—and his father, according to large-font headlines in the New York Post, had been a hit man for the mob. And the Post wasn’t wrong. Young DeMarco quickly discovered that most respectable law firms had no desire to employ a lawyer with relatives in the Mafia. Unfortunately, DeMarco also looked like his father—like a guy you could imagine working as a leg breaker for a loan shark in Queens.
Then DeMarco got lucky—or at least, at the time he thought it was luck. One of his aunts had worked in D.C. when she was young and, like many other young women, she’d had an affair with John Mahoney. When she heard about her favorite nephew’s employment problems, she convinced—or maybe blackmailed—Mahoney to give him a job. And Mahoney did. He stuck DeMarco in a closet-sized office in the subbasement of the Capitol and then introduced him to the rank underbelly of American politics.