Didn’t make him better, just different.
Offered proof that he had been tested and come through.
That wasn’t cynicism.
Maybe it was just his own medals he didn’t care about, the way smart kids in school were about grades. Dean had been an OK student, but even his B’s came with considerable effort. One of his best friends, Mikey, yeah, good ol’ Mikey, he always got A’s, but just shrugged.
“Ain’t nothing.”
Mikey became an officer in the Army and died in a dumb accident in Panama two years before the invasion.
They didn’t give medals for that.
The shot that had killed Fu Manchu hadn’t been an accident. Skill, a good idea, a lot of patience, training, experience — Turk’s mostly — those made the shot, not luck.
There was luck involved, though. Dean had turned left at the edge of the stream a half hour earlier, when he wasn’t sure which way to go. Turn right, and things would have been different.
Not to mention the luck involved in not being in Fu Manchu’s sights.
“Beautiful country, huh?” said Fashona.
“From a distance, everything’s beautiful,” said Dean, his mind rising back to full consciousness.
“You never saw my first wife. You all right?”
“Just tired.”
“You want to sleep, go ahead.”
“It’s not that easy in a plane.”
Fashona glanced behind him. “Karr’s snorin’ up a storm back there.”
“Yeah.” Dean was surprised to see Karr sleeping, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. “He’s a piece of work.”
“Yeah, he’s a real asshole.”
Dean hadn’t meant it the way Fashona took it.
“I guess we all are sometimes,” he told the pilot.
The side of Fashona’s face turned bright red. “You aren’t, Charlie. And I hope I’m not.”
“You’re not, Ray. You’re just a damn good pilot.”
Fashona didn’t answer — or rather, if he did, Charlie Dean didn’t hear what he said; he surrendered to fatigue, slumbering against the side of the plane.
67
“There’s a problem with Lia’s helicopter,” said Rockman. “She’s not moving forward.”
“Are they landing?” asked Telach.
“I’m not sure. Her com system’s off.”
Telach glanced up at the map screen displayed at the front of the Art Room. Agents’ positions were tracked in two different ways. One was by a simple locator that worked with the communications satellites. It was similar to the global positioning technology embedded in many cell phones and 911 systems. Because it involved radio signals, however, it could be detected. Since field ops had the option of turning off communications for safety (and, Telach knew, to get the Art Room off their back), there was also a backup system using implanted radioactive isotopes. The system had technical limitations, but it was working now and showed Lia’s position about eighty miles north of La Oroya.
“She’s definitely not moving,” said Rockman. “Can’t tell if they’re in a hover or what. Maybe they landed. Map shows a village nearby.”
Telach leaned over to look at his screen. The locator showed they were about a half mile south of a settlement on the side of a mountain. The latest satellite image showed rough terrain, and it was an unlikely place to land.
One of the occupational hazards of working in the Art Room was something Telach called Mother Hen Disease — a tendency to worry that something had gone wrong simply because information had stopped flowing back. The field ops — Lia especially — were constantly complaining about it.
“What are the flying conditions?” Telach asked Rockman.
“Clear skies. Unlimited visibility.”
“How long has she been at this position?”
“Two minutes.”
“Call her on the sat phone. If she doesn’t answer, see which one of the U-2s is closest to her, and get it over the area.”
68
The security procedures seemed almost routine to Hernes Jackson now, and he donned a benign smile for the security people as he passed through their checks. Down in the Desk Three bunker, he found that he remembered the sign-in procedure for the computer networks without having to resort to the prompts or call the librarian for assistance.
A message popped up on the screen with a new assignment for Rubens: did any of the Peruvian guerrillas seem interesting in any way?
Amused by the broad, open-ended query, Jackson began paging through the accumulated files on the terrorists, including video clips from the discovery of the bomb and the attempted post office takeover several days before.
Nothing jumped out at him beyond the obvious: the guerrillas were more organized than the Peruvian intelligence service believed. The car bombings alone showed a great deal of coordination across a wide geographic distance.
Far more interesting, Jackson thought, was the fact that the warhead was a fake. Had it started that way? Had its weapons kernel been removed?
Taking a weapons core from a nuclear bomb was not technically difficult — if you were a nuclear weapons expert. Did the guerrillas have access to those kinds of people? A number were college-educated, but their majors were in subjects like literature. Someone could have been hired, perhaps. Jackson spent about an hour learning how to use a watch list as a cross-reference before giving up. There were plenty of potential experts, most of them Russian, but no direct link to Peru or Ecuador that he could find.
But working with the lists gave Jackson another idea: how to determine who Sholk was. Jackson found the list immediately after Iron Heart and began comparing it with other watch lists, including several intercepted ones from foreign governments (allies as well as enemies). By fishing through the lists and several passenger manifests from the Middle East, he found four candidates. Only one was unaccounted for at present (two were in jail; another had committed suicide), and he happened to be Russian: Stephan Babin.
Babin was mentioned in a Department of Defense Intelligence Agency report from the early 1990s as a Russian military officer who might be worth cultivating. He was apparently serving as a liaison in Bosnia at the time. The NSA had Russian military files, but Jackson couldn’t figure out how to access the special database. He called the librarian for help, but the man had gone out for a late lunch.
Was it lunchtime already?
Discovering Sholk’s identity felt like a personal triumph, but Jackson didn’t stop there. If there was a weapons expert with the rebels, it might very well be Babin.
Jackson paged through information on the encounter during which the bomb had been found by the Peruvian army. There was no list of the guerrillas taken. Nor did Babin’s name show up in any of the lists of known or suspected guerrillas compiled by SIN, Peru’s intelligence service.
If names were out, what about photos?
He’d need to find a picture of Babin in the Russian data; he wasn’t sure whether one would exist or not. In the meantime, he brought up photos of the guerrillas, thinking he might be able to narrow down possibilities on the basis of age.
But there were almost no photos of the people connected with New Path. The best he could find were photos of a few of the dead bodies. Jackson tried a wider search and got names and photos from the post office takeover by the guerrillas a few days before in Lima, along with some additional incidents.
Still waiting for the librarian to return, Jackson opened the system’s facial features tool — it used several hundred specific points to match faces — and began playing with it, capturing faces and applying searches to familiarize himself with the program. The tool was extremely easy to use. He moused a box around a face, “capturing” it, then simply clicked one of the search buttons on the toolbar and waited while the computer checked the face against a database. Of course, behind the scenes, the program went through a billion gyrations, computing and checking, but to Jackson the process seemed no more difficult tha
n using the primitive drawing program one of his neighbor’s little girls had shown him at Christmas.
The first search came back with what the computer called “no definites.” However, it did give him about ten possible matches, none of which actually looked close when he opened the window under the dialogue box on the screen. He tried again, selecting the same face. This time the computer beeped immediately and gave him an error message: he was repeating the search against the same database. He opened the list of searches and saw that the computer had helpfully highlighted several databases that he might be interested in, based on the terms of the first search. Jackson carefully looked through the list, but it didn’t include Russian military files. It did have Peru’s, however, and he checked those off along with the computer’s other suggestions. The computer returned with no match.
He moved the cursor to another person and repeated the search. This time he got a hit — the suspected guerrilla was an army lieutenant who, according to the small bio that popped on the screen, was still on active duty.
And in the same division that had discovered the nuclear warhead.
69
Lia felt the body on top of her, pushing and grunting, the devil incarnate. She struggled with all her might, resisting and fighting, cursing the others holding her down. She knew she would lose the battle, but it was the struggle that was important. To resist meant salvation, survival — she would be wounded, but in a greater sense still whole, the most important part of her preserved.
And then suddenly she was free, the rapist gone, light streaming in around her.
Voices murmured in her head. The Art Room?
“Hello?” said Lia. “Hello?”
She wasn’t in Korea. She was in the helicopter, the ruins of the helicopter — they had crashed in the Andes.
She was pitched at an angle, her head and right arm resting on something soft.
Fernandez.
The aircraft had augured in on its starboard side, crushing the cabin downward. She couldn’t see Fernandez’s face, but his left arm next to her chest was drenched in blood. Lia looked toward the front of the helicopter. Bits of metal and wire hung like vines in front of her. Beyond them, instead of the pilot and the rest of the cockpit, she saw rocks and dirt, some scrubby brush. The sky.
Lia slipped down a little farther when she undid her seat belt. The door of the helicopter was above her left arm. It was intact. She pulled back the latch and pushed against the panel, but the door snapped back down, pushed back by gravity.
Squirreling around in the seat, she stood on Fernandez and pushed her way up and out of the aircraft. They had crashed against a mountainside. Rocks loomed above her. Moving as gingerly as possible, she got out, crawling head-first down and around the crushed fuselage onto the slope, then through the dirt to a level spot a few feet from the bits and pieces of the helicopter that lay scattered along the ground.
It was always the easy assignments, she thought, that ended up being trouble.
Lia took a breath, then pushed along the ground a few yards more, going across the slope. Finally she clambered to her feet, pulling herself up on the side of a big rock.
“Just peachy,” Lia said out loud.
She reached to the communications switch. “Are you there?”
“Lia, are you OK?” said Rockman instantly.
“I’m in one piece.”
“I called you on the sat phone twice. Why didn’t you answer?”
Lia realized she had left her bag in the helo and started back to get it.
“Lia, what’s your situation?” asked Marie Telach.
“Tangled and confused. The helicopter crashed. Everyone else is dead.”
“Was it shot down? Or something mechanical?”
“I’m not sure. I was dozing, then I heard a bang.”
“An explosion?”
“I’m not sure.”
She looked into the fuselage. The bag with her clothes and the sat phone peeked out from under a large piece of metal that was anchored by part of the helicopter engine; there was no way she was getting it. But the briefcase with her laptop — and the envelope with the replacement voter cards — had wedged itself near Fernandez’s body. She might be able to snake in and grab it.
“Lia, please,” insisted Telach.
“I’m OK, Marie. The helicopter crashed.”
“Was it shot down? Or was it a mechanical problem?”
“It happened all of a sudden. I heard a boom, but it might have been the engine. I don’t know. I’m going to retrieve the briefcase and voter cards. Hang on. I’ll get the PDA and take a picture for you.”
“Don’t do anything foolish.”
“By whose definition?”
Lia ignored Rockman’s suggestion to put a video bug on her clothes so he could see what was going on. She climbed into the helicopter head-first, leaning as gingerly as possible on Fernandez. She hadn’t actually made sure that he was dead, and though it seemed obvious enough, she put her hand onto his neck to feel for a pulse.
A bone or vertebra had sheered through the skin. She moved her thumb farther up, stubbornly refusing to accept the obvious. His head had been wedged against a metal spar that had flown through the cockpit during the impact. Thankfully she couldn’t see much of it from where she was, she thought, settling her fingers where she supposed his jugular would be.
Nothing.
What if he had gotten in first? Then she would have been sitting on this side of the helo. Dumb luck had saved her.
“Lia, what are you doing?” asked Rockman.
“I’m getting my laptop bag,” she grunted, pushing herself to the left and wedging into the space in front of the seats. She had to push her left hand forward and down, snaking past part of the seat cushion to get the bag. It came easily — for about six inches. Then it caught against something and she dropped it.
Cursing, Lia pushed herself closer so she could get a better grip. She yanked, scraping her hand against the metal, but whatever was holding the bag down gave way.
“All right,” she said, backing out. “Got it. I’ll take some pictures of the wreck so you can figure out whether it was shot down or not. Stand by.”
Lia thought she heard someone in the Art Room mumble something.
“I can’t hear you,” she said, pulling herself out of the helicopter. As she got to her knees on top of the twisted fuselage, she realized the Art Room hadn’t been talking to her — six or seven men were standing a few yards from the wreckage.
“Buenos dias,” she told them.
They didn’t answer.
“Lia?” said Rockman.
“I have company.” Lia eased herself down from the helicopter. She knelt, propping the briefcase so that she could remove the small Glock pistol strapped near her ankle without it being seen. She palmed the gun, holding it against her side; she’d use it only as a last resort.
“My helicopter crashed,” she said in English.
“Helicóptero,” started a translator in the Art Room, feeding her the sentence and then a few lines about wanting to call the authorities for assistance.
Lia repeated the words, twice, but got no response.
“Try it in Quechua,” said Rockman, and another translator gave her a few phrases in the native Indian language. But that didn’t work, either.
Several more men appeared, apparently coming from a trail that ran to the right. They didn’t seem hostile, but they also weren’t overtly friendly. They seemed puzzled by her appearance, almost as if they weren’t sure what a helicopter was. But their clothing was modem, if somewhat worn and mismatched, and certainly helicopters must fly overhead here all the time.
“Are they guerrillas?” asked Rockman.
“How can I tell?” Lia asked.
“Ask them.”
Lia kept her sneer to herself. That was just the sort of thing the Art Room would suggest — a naive question that could get you blown up no matter what the answer was.
“I h
ave to get help,” Lia said in Spanish. When they didn’t respond, she repeated it, this time more emphatically. “iSocorro!” she said, pointing to the helicopter, though she knew Fernandez was dead. “Help!”
Even that didn’t break the spell. There were now a dozen men standing four or five yards from her, staring but saying nothing.
“This is just too weird,” she muttered, starting toward the trail. As she did, two of the men stepped aside. Two more men appeared from behind the bend. They had AK- 47s in their hands. The men raised their weapons and she stopped.
“Well, at least we know where we stand,” she said. “Two bozos with AK-47s,” she added for Rockman in a quick stage whisper. Then in Spanish she told the newcomers that there had been a helicopter crash and help was needed.
One of the men with a rifle shouted something quickly in Spanish to the men who were standing near the helicopter. But they were as uncommunicative with him as they had been with her.
“What’s this about?” Lia asked the Art Room. “Can you hear?”
“They’re trying to decide who you are, and what to do with you. They’re confused about the helicopter — they thought it was military, but it’s not. They said something about waiting for a commander. Offer them a reward — tell them you can pay them if they’ll help you.”
Lia folded her arms in front of her chest. The briefcase was in one hand, the gun hidden in the other.
“What you’re going to do,” she told the men in English, “is call the local police.”
“Lia, why are you using English?”
“Don’t try and bluff them,” said Telach, breaking in.
One of the men with the guns told Lia in Spanish to shut up.
“Why?”
As long as the men stayed relatively close together, she thought, she could take them — shoot them quickly in the heads, then dive for their guns.
Maybe not even dive for their guns. As long as she was closer to the weapons than anyone else, she could ward off the others long enough to retrieve one.
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