“Apparently this is just some of it,” Klea said.
Jonah studied the pile. Collecting for years, it’d easily take four or five semis to even attempt to remove it all. He leaned as close as he dared, coughing as toxic fumes poured off the pile. He recognized multiple warning labels and military designations in Italian and Cyrillic Russian. Jonah guessed it was a collection long-obsolete munitions. Hell, a couple of the larger barrels looked like Cold Warera submarine depth charges.
“They’ve got to get rid of this stuff,” said Jonah, more to himself than anyone else. If even one of the explosives nestled in the pile cooked off—
“How?” asked Klea.
“I have no goddamn idea. Can’t burn it. Can’t bury it. Hell, stick it on a raft and mail it back to sender. Makes sense that the rest of the world would send their shit out here. Nobody’s going to be looking for it, not in this godforsaken corner of the ocean.”
“Everybody in the village seems affected,” said Klea. “When I was being dressed, I noticed most of the women had sores and burns. I didn’t know what to make of them at first.”
“Ask him about the children,” said Jonah, his voice catching on a lump in his throat. Klea nodded, and passed the message along. Burhaan responded animatedly as they backed away from the toxic pile.
“He says Qaasin and Madar are not growing as they should and that he’s worried for them. He’s already lost a son and two daughters to disease. And the same ailments have struck many of the village children. Many stillborn babies, too many to be by chance. He says he feels sometimes that his village is cursed by Allah.”
“It’s no curse,” Jonah said through gritted teeth. “This was done intentionally.”
Klea didn’t catch up to Jonah until he was already nearly two full miles down the beach, walking alone in the moonlight. He hadn’t said much since seeing the pile, disappearing soon afterwards. Old habits die hard—and for him, solitude was a familiar respite.
“Don’t leave me like that,” said Klea, half-running, half-walking to match his pace.
Jonah nodded, slowed his step and came to a stop. He sat down on the sand, looking towards the moonlit waves. Klea sat down next to him and slipped her hand around the back of his arm.
“Burhaan says we can hitch a ride on a truck,” said Klea. “His brother-in-law is on his way down to Mozambique with a load of sheep and he always stops by the village for a meal. They’re expecting him soon, maybe even tomorrow. There’s a US consulate there. We may have to hide in the back through some of the militia checkpoints, but that will be a cakewalk compared to what we’ve already done.”
“It’s a good plan,” said Jonah.
“We could go home.”
“Home for you,” he said. “Not for me.”
“You’re an American,” said Klea. “Why can’t you go back? What did you do?”
“Not me. I didn’t do anything. It was my father.”
“What could your father have possibly done?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long night.”
Jonah squinted at Klea. She wasn’t going to give up, they both knew it. He begrudgingly set aside his resistance and started to speak about things he’d long held inside.
“Growing up, it was just my father and I,” he said. “On paper, he was a mid-level functionary that specialized in security requisitions for American consulates and embassies in hot spots, areas with sudden political or social upheaval.”
“But off paper … he was what? CIA?”
“Yeah, CIA. By the time I was in the picture, his boots-on-the-ground days were long over. He was a section chief, ran all intelligence and covert operations in whatever region they’d placed him, usually to clean up someone else’s mess.”
“And your mother?’
“No memories of her. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I’m fairly certain she was one of his intelligence assets. I think she was killed not long after I was born. My father rarely spoke of her.
“I was left with my grandparents when I was very young, but that couldn’t last forever. Pops eventually took me with him. I spent a few months at a time in DC getting dropped into upper-crust private schools. We didn’t have the money—government salary, after all—but my father certainly had the right connections. Then we’d spend the rest of our time at whatever embassy he’d been assigned. If the CIA needed him there, it usually meant that most of the other kids had already left for home due to safety concerns. I got pretty good at sneaking out and hanging with local kids, when that was too dangerous, I’d hang with the marine guards.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure. Once they got over the fear of my hard-ass dad coming down on them for letting me follow them around, they were usually pretty cool. Treated me like a mascot. Dressed me up in oversize battle-rattle, took me down to the weapons range, let me pop off some rounds. They’d have me play hostage sometimes, and when I got older I got to be the ‘hostile’.”
“You liked being the bad guy,” Klea said with a smile.
“Loved it,” said Jonah. “Speaking of which, have to tell you this one story. So we get a new squad into the embassy, right? They think they’re tough shit. Commander says he’s putting them through the ‘kill house’—the standard urban combat room-clearing exercise on base. They’re talking among themselves; they say they’re going to set a new course record.
“Commander laughs, says they’re going to be up against one guy. And then he trots me out. I’m fourteen at the time. All the Marines can do is stare; they think it’s some kind of a joke or something. Eight tough-as-shit Marines against a fourteen-year-old Foreign Service brat.
“Suspecting a set-up, they take no chances. I find a hiding spot in the kill house and they come in hard. They figure the commander is lying to them and they’re going to face off against a whole squad. After all, Marines have turned fucking with each other into an honored art form.”
“But it was just you.”
“Just me. And I’m hiding in the ceiling, wearing my fake haji clothes. They clear the place, then they’re all just standing around, baffled. Wondering what they’re doing, why they’re all just standing around with nobody to shoot at. Some of them start saying they got the time wrong, they’re not supposed to be there for another hour or two. One of the Marines separates from the others; I drop out of the ceiling and pop a paintball into his facemask.”
“Was he pissed?”
“Hell no. He got it instantly. You ever play sardines as a kid? It’s the type of hide-and-go-seek with a bunch of people. They all break apart, whenever someone finds the hiding person they have to squeeze in with them. So sure, I pop him in the face, but now he’s on my side. He can barely keep from laughing out loud as I steal his helmet, vest, and rifle, put it on myself. Now I’m looking like a mini-marine.”
Klea laughed, trying to picture the ridiculous scene.
“So I stalk from room to room, shooting these guys one at a time. None of them know what’s going on, they just know that they started with eight, now there are five, then three, the bodies are stacking up. And once these guys are down, they say nothing. They’re in on it too. Comes down to the last guy—the squad leader. I walk right up to him and stick a rubber shock-knife up against his nutsack. Never saw it coming. They called him electro-nuts for the next six months.”
“And your father didn’t care that you were running around, electrocuting Marines?”
“At the time, I thought he didn’t know. Eventually, I realized he knew everything. Hanging with Marines, dating local girls, all the other shit I got up to.”
“He didn’t care?”
“I think … I think he just knew me well enough to let me explore the world. Growing up in embassies was tough, especially when your dad was up to his eyeballs in secretagent shit. He knew I needed to find my own way.”
“He sounds like a hero,” said Klea. “Not a traitor.”
“Maybe both. Maybe neith
er. All I know is that one day he just disappeared. Happened just before my eighteenth birthday. Everybody was freaking out, thinking he was captured or killed. I wasn’t too worried at first. But then, well, it was different this time. I actually got delivered back to the states under armed guard, supposedly for my protection. I started college not long after, studied marine engineering. About a year and a half after his disappearance, the story went wide. Apparently a lot of classified files went missing at about the same time he did. I didn’t know what to do, but it wasn’t looking good for dear old Dad, so I got out of the country. I think leaving pretty much confirmed what everybody already thought of me.”
“That he was a traitor, and you were in it as well.”
“Yeah, as if I knew what my father was up to and missed the chance to jump ship with him. I tried college overseas at first but the fact I was no longer in the US meant the gloves could come off as far as the intelligence services were concerned. I’d catch cars following me and the stuff in my apartment wasn’t always where I’d left it. They hacked my computer. Eventually, a couple of my remaining backchannel connections got in touch and warned me that my name was being floated as a potential grab target. So I left again, hooked myself up with a pretty decent set of fake papers, and went underground.
“I’d always been interested in diving, so I completed my saturation certification in Norway. Really took to it. Spent the next few years bouncing from one salvage or energy sector dive job to the next. Some of it was legal, the betterpaying jobs weren’t. So that was that, until I ended up in prison for an illegal salvage mission off Morocco.”
Klea nodded and sighed. “You think we’ll see Fatima and Hassan again?”
“The good doctor got what he wanted. Maybe not the way he wanted it, but I don’t think they’re looking for us.” He stretched out his legs, tipped his head back and looked up at the star-spangled sky. “I think getting to Mozambique’s a good start. Maybe I can jump a cargo ship towards the South Pacific. Seems like one of the few places a wanted American can still make a go of it.”
“I don’t have a life to go back to either,” Klea said. “Not sure I’d want to go back to MIT after Colin … and things were very bad with my parents when I left.”
“Make up with them. Let bygones be bygones.”
Jonah leaned back and laid on the sand, his hands behind his head.
“So that’ll be it? I go my way, you go yours?” She turned to look at him.
“Was there ever another plan?” He met her eyes, dark, moonlit. “I’ve got nothing, Klea. If not for Dr. Nassiri, I would have eventually died in prison. Maybe I’ll find somewhere to land, maybe I won’t—but I know for certain I’ll be running for the rest of my life.”
She laid back next to him and looked up. The constellations, familiar friends all those endless nights of captivity, seemed cold and soulless.
“You, on the other hand, will be a returning hero,” Jonah whispered, his voice soft, rough. “A survivor.”
“I don’t feel like a hero. Just a survivor.”
“What will you do?”
“I guess finish grad school. Get a job. Get on with life.”
“Write a book and do all the morning shows,” he said. “Just don’t make me look like some reckless asshole.”
“I do have an obligation to the truth to consider,” she laughed and rolled onto her side. “What about you? You have to have thought about it. Dreamed about what would happen if you ever escaped.”
“I’ll get on with life, too. In my own way, at least. Maybe I’ll be a salvage diver or SCUBA instructor in Thailand, Vietnam. Somewhere beautiful and very, very far away from here.”
“Is there a woman in this vision for the future?”
“There are lots of women in this vision,” joked Jonah. “But none like you.”
“There could be,” she said as she laid back and deftly unraveled a single central knot in her robes. Her headscarf slipped back, revealing her short, dark hair, shimmering in the moonlight. She slipped off her embroidered belt and opened her dress, revealing her full naked form, her freshly-scrubbed skin nearly glowing.
Jonah raised himself to his elbow and drank in the sight, marveling at the way her fresh henna tattoos danced their way up her arms, down her clavicles, collecting like a teardrop in her solar plexus, emphasizing the curves of her small breasts. He crept onto her laid-out robes, pausing for one last look before he kissed her. And for the first time, he felt she was actually making love to him, not to the ghost of her lost fiancé, not some long-ago memory fading on a burning funeral pyre, and not some desperate stranger in a life raft, but to him, Jonah Blackwell, and him alone.
Jonah and Klea walked slowly back to the compound, fingers intertwined, every step soft and measured, as if together they could float across the surface of the moonlit sand without leaving so much as a footprint. Jonah gave Klea one last deep, silent kiss and opened the front gate to the sleeping compound, the wooden panel gently sliding opening as chickens and goats stirred from their slumber.
Multiple lights flashed, blinding him. He held a hand up to his face to shield himself when a rifle butt caught him in the side of the head at the same time the back of his legs were kicked out from underneath him, forcing him to his knees. With harsh, white light still overwhelming his vision, he felt a dozen rough hands feeling over his arms, his legs, inside his kilt, searching for hidden weapons. Several voices barked out orders in English. Finding nothing, the unseen men threw him forward. Jonah landed face-first on the concrete slab, his arms held behind him as a rope wound around and between his wrists. Eyes adjusting, he caught a glimpse of the orange-haired father, his two boys held back by his single arm, wives holding up their hands in surrender as several mercenaries held them at gunpoint.
A hulking, mammoth man leaned over him, muscles slithering underneath a too-tight synthetic shirt, twisted face squinting as his eyes darted over Jonah’s prone form. The colonel, the man who’d stumbled drunk onto the Fool’s Errand a lifetime ago. The mercenary stank like sour sweat.
“I should have gunned you down in the bar of your stolen boat,” drawled Colonel Westmoreland. “I saw you itching to pull on me—should have given you the bullet you deserved right then and there.”
Jonah raised his head and opened his mouth to issue a smarmy response, but the wind left his lungs as the massive soldier kicked him in the back of the head, slamming him back into the concrete. Klea screamed from beside him, her wail piercing the stillness of the night.
The colonel lifted Jonah a second time, pulling him to his feet as his knees buckled beneath him. Jonah tried to make sense of his blurry vision, the bitter, metallic taste in his mouth, his pulse ringing in his ears like a gong. He caught a single glimpse of Klea’s dark eyes staring at him in horror and for he realized that for one infinitesimally small moment he was Colin, staring back at her as he was torn away, bottomless loss welling up in her eyes.
“You just made one of these skinny-ass sand niggers a rich man,” bellowed the colonel. “They couldn’t fucking wait to drop a dime on your ass.”
The colonel pulled back a single fist, ramming it like a piston into Jonah’s left kidney. Jonah collapsed, blacking out just long enough to wake up to the sound of his own gasping breath. Mercenaries grabbed fistfuls of his borrowed clothing, dragging him bodily out of the compound—and into a hail of stones and chanting.
The village had awoken. Men and women—from young, tall sons to hunched grandmothers—surrounded the mercenaries, massing and indistinct in their flashing lights. Eyes and teeth glinted white in the glare, fists waved in the air with righteous fury. A cascade of unintelligible shouting and chanting was accompanied by an irregular rain of arcing rocks, pummeling the men from all directions.
Panicking, one of the mercenaries jerked his rifle to his shoulder, eye already at the custom scope as he yanked back the plunger back to chamber a live round.
“Did I say you were cleared to engage?” barked the colo
nel, slapping the twitching man’s barrel to the ground before he could loose a bullet. “Push your way through!”
The mercenaries shoved back at the building crowd, Jonah wriggled free of the colonel’s grip for just long enough to shove Klea free of her captor. She spun, her light frame launched sideways. In an instant, she tripped on the hem of her beautiful dress, stumbled and fell, disappearing into the mass of villagers.
Swearing, three mercenaries rushed into the spot where she’d fallen, beating the crowd back with kicks and rifle butts. But she was gone, vanished into the mob as if she’d never been anything more than a figment of Jonah’s imagination.
“Leave her!” shouted the colonel as the churning body of villagers pushed against the mercenaries, threatening to envelope them as well. Furious, the three soldiers retreated to the colonel’s side.
Having taken a prize from the mercenaries, the crowd grew ugly, daring, bravely advancing on the them, grabbing at their leveled weapons.
“You’re going to regret that,” whispered the colonel to Jonah, his lips pulled back to reveal gold-capped molars and a cruel sneer.
Jonah met the sneer with a smirk, watching as the colonel drew his pistol, cocked it, and aimed it at Jonah’s head, oblivious to the crowd. Reconsidering, he thumbed the safety back on, drew his hand back and slammed the butt of the gun into the side of Jonah’s face once, twice, three times, each with a sickening sound of metal on bone.
Jonah lapsed into forced unconsciousness with a sick feeling of total satisfaction seeping into his very soul.
You go your way, he thought, holding Klea’s dimming image in his mind. I’ll go mine.
CHAPTER 17
The convoy wound its way through the scrublands of Somalia, a mismatched collection of rusting Land Cruisers following the faint ruts of a long-forgotten trail. Perhaps a hundred thousand years ago the area was lush jungle and fertile savannah wetlands. Now it was little more than motley drab brown underbrush with the odd patchy tree defending any ground where moisture briefly accumulated. A handful of tiny white clouds spread across the radiant blue sky, too slight to even cast a shadow as they passed across the rippling sun.
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