by Jack Du Brul
Lead streaked from the weapon like water from a hose, chunks of concrete exploding from the taxiway. Several rounds pierced the Lear's thin skin, though the engines continued to pour out thrust.
"That's it, pal," the pilot screamed. "Chase is off."
"Keep after them."
"We're hit, man. There's no way I'm flying without assessing the damage."
"You can ram them," Mercer said more coolly than he felt. "Not hard enough to destroy their plane, but enough to prevent them leaving."
"You're out of your fucking mind."
"They just killed four people in the airport and they're kidnapping a fifth. We're the only ones who can stop them."
The pilots exchanged glances and came to a mutual agreement. The Lear increased speed, careening onto the runway, dipping so hard into the turn that the wing-mounted fuel tank scraped the ground in a shower of sparks. The kidnapper's Gulfstream came to an abrupt halt fifty yards ahead of the Lear to allow a United 747 to loop in for its landing, its shadow racing along the ground to catch the hurtling jumbo jet.
The Lear's pilot saw his opportunity and further increased power. The plane ate the distance to the Gulfstream with the grace of a cheetah on the hunt. From the Gulfstream, a face appeared in the hatch again. Realizing what was about to happen, the terrorist leaped to the tarmac just as his aircraft started rolling again, building up to rotation speed.
"Oh, shit!" the Lear pilot shouted.
The gunman raised his AK as he charged, but either the magazine had been emptied earlier or the weapon had jammed. It did not fire. He tried for a frantic half second to clear the chamber, then realized the gun wouldn't work in the moments before the Lear reached him. He tossed it aside.
"What the hell is he doing?" the copilot asked.
" Mercer srunning at the low-slung aircraft, judging distances, and at the critical second he leaped. One foot landed on the Lear's left wing, momentum making him tumble, but he had enough coordination to twist as he rebounded, aligning himself with his intended target. His arm went in first, the titanium blades of the Garrett TFE 731 turbofan having little trouble liquefying both muscle and bone, but when his shoulder and head hit the whirling turbine, the engine came apart, blades exploding off the roller-bearing shaft and blowing through the aluminum nacelle.
The Lear's pilot shut down both engines when he realized the gunman's suicide mission and prevented a spontaneous detonation. The Gulfstream lifted off the macadam a mile down the runaway, trails of exhaust marring the air like angry brush strokes. Mercer gave little thought to the pilots or the man who'd allowed himself to be sucked into the jet engine and watched as Harry's kidnappers flew off into the distance.
Because he hadn't done enough, his friend was gone. He'd been so close, but then again, he'd been only forty yards away when Tory was murdered. His hands began to tremble with rage and frustration. And guilt. He could have done more. He could have driven faster or run harder or shot out a tire rather than allow himself the grim satisfaction of using his last bullet to kill one of them. He wanted to believe he'd given it his best effort, but with these high stakes, it was obvious that his best wasn't good enough.
He was sitting on a grassy verge bordering the runway when an airport security car whooped its way to the stationary Lear. There were knotted muscles at the base of his jaw as he tried to keep his mouth firm. Dick Henna jumped from the car and approached slowly. Mercer was as close to breaking down as he had ever seen him, and the sight sent a chill through Henna's guts.
"Are you okay?"
Mercer took a long time to answer, his face blank, but beneath his eyes, rage boiled. "Yeah, I'm fine," he whispered. "You?"
"I lost a man in there and another is already on his way to the hospital. Listen, Mercer, I've got to get you the hell out of here. Marge has already called for an FBI forensics unit, and they'll be here shortly. I can explain away this thing as an arrest gone bad, but as a civilian, you can't be involved." He held out a hand. Mercer used it to hoist himself to his feet.
"What about the Gulfstream?"
"I don't know. I guess someone has it on radar, but I'm not sure."
"What a fuck-up, Dick," Mercer said. "I am so sorry."
They got into the car. "It's not your fault. Neither of us had any idea the men who took Harry are terrorists lugging machine guns. We had no way of knowing." Henna's voice was calm and soothing. "Chances are, that plane's heading outside the country, and that makes this an international incident. I'm going to call Paul Barnes at the CIA, and if we can figure out where they're headed, I'll have him get some agents there to meet it."
"Do you think the CIA can get him back?"
"Frankly, I doubt we'll have the time to learn where they're going to land. A jet with extended tanks can be in Europe, Africa, or South America in just a few hours. But, hey, there's a ton of evidence lying around here and a paper trail for the jet lease, so there is hope of finding them."
Mercer didn't speak until the sedan's driver circled around the te Henna forestalled any questions with a sharp look, so Marge gave Mercer's shoulder a pat and went into the building.
Her commiseration shook Mercer back to the present. Harry was beyond his reach, and for the time being, there wasn't a thing he could do about it. "You're right," he said. "Maybe you can find these bastards through the abandoned weapons or the guy I capped on the runway. I have to get to Eritrea and help Harry that way. Have you found anything on that front? Anything on Selome Nagast?"
"You're not going to believe this one. When I was following your lead about her not working at the Eritrean embassy, I got a call from the ambassador himself. He said that she was in the country under his authority and that she was working without the support of his staff. They know nothing of her or her mission here."
"Which is?"
"According to the ambassador, securing private funding for humanitarian programs within Eritrea. He didn't get more specific than that, and before I could press, he'd hung up on me." Henna paused. "I dug a little deeper and things got real interesting. I cross-referenced her name through the CIA database, and within minutes I got an angry call."
"Eritrea's ambassador again?"
"No. Are you ready for this? Paul Barnes."
"What?"
"You heard me. The director of the CIA. Typing her name into the computer sent up all sorts of red flags. Part of our system is indexed with the Mossad's, and when her name came up, alarms must have screamed all over Tel Aviv. Barnes's opposite number in Israel called and read him the riot act about interagency cooperation and a bunch of other shit. The upshot is, Israel did not like me poking into the background of Miss Nagast."
"Why in the hell would the Israelis care if you're researching an Eritrean national?" This was one turn Mercer hadn't expected.
"Because she's not," Henna said. "Selome Nagast holds duel citizenship, Eritrea and Israel, and she has an officer's commission in the Israeli Defense Force as well as a position in their government."
"I don't get it." If Selome was Israeli, that could mean Harry was being held by one of the Jewish state's legions of enemies.
"Neither do I. But ten minutes after getting off the phone with Barnes, Lloyd Easton called."
"The Secretary of State?" This was going far outside Mercer's realm, and the implications were beginning to scare him.
"No other. He told me that he'd just received a call too, this one from Israel's foreign minister. We are to back off Selome Nagast or face serious consequences. She's one of theirs, operating in the United States on a mission--get this--'not detrimental to America and therefore none of our concern.' The guy told us to piss off in our own back-yard. He said by investigating her mission, we are jeopardizing our close alliance with his nation."
"What the hell is going on here, Dick?"
"You tell me," Henna shot back. "I thought this would be a routine inquiry, and the next thing I know, I've got shit coming down on me faster than I can shovel. What do you think?"
"Lucky, I guess. What'd you find at Harry's?"
"Too early to tell. The team went to his place just as I was heading for the airport. What can you tell me about the night Harry was grabbed? It'll help sift through the evidence the forensic team picks up."
"There's nothing I can tell you that would help. It was a night like any other. We were drinking at Tiny's until Selome arrived. We had a couple more after she left, then Harry took off and I headed home too."
"I guess there's nothing we can do unless we can track that plane." Henna rested an arm on the Jag's open door as Mercer finally swung into his car. "Except wait for the forensics reports."
"When do you think you'll have something from Harry's apartment?"
"A couple hours for a preliminary, I'd think," Henna replied, watching his friend critically. "After this mess, I won't be going to California, so why don't you come over to my place tonight and we'll go over it? We'll have a couple of drinks."
"I know what you're trying to do and I appreciate the gesture, but don't bother. I've got too much work. I know my limitations better than anyone." Mercer fired up the Jag's throaty V-12. "When I reach the end of my rope, I'll stop."
"I just hope the end of your rope isn't a noose, you crazy son of a bitch," Henna muttered at the receding car.
Venice, Italy
Giancarlo Gianelli brooded with his back to the windows in the spacious drawing room of his ancestral home located on the Grand Canal. The windows--huge floor-to-ceiling affairs of leaded glass and wrought iron--were over three hundred years old, made at a time when the glassmaker's art was still being perfected. There was a blister in each of the eight hundred individual panes where the blower's pipe had once been inserted into the molten glass. The sunlight streaming through them cast a grid shadow on the floor that matched its checker pattern of beige and rose carrera marble.
The room's furniture were all antiques, each piece exceptional in its own right but coming alive when blended with the rest of the surroundings. It was a room of extraordinary wealth and was only one of forty-three in the home. Gianelli, too, looked as if he were a furnishing for the house, an elegant addition placed just so. His sports coat had been custom made in Milan, his shirt of Egyptian cotton, and his tie had been given to him personally by the late Gianni Versace. He was the epitome of an Italian merchant prince, comparable with the Renaissance Medicis.
Today, the planet was a small place. Anyone had global accessibility in just a few hours with jet aircraft or instantly with the telephone and the Internet. Thus the days when men with vision could generate wealth in direct accordance to the risk were all but gone. Only a few still retained the kind of independence to function without the constraints of obfuscating lawyers and miserly bankers. Giancarlo Gianelli was just such a person.
width="1em">"And then?"
"Well, Eritrea may be a small country when you look at it on a world map, but when you're exploring it on foot or from a vehicle, it's a big, rugged place."
"Are you any closer to getting a copy of the Medusa photographs?" Gianelli asked. "Those pictures are a sure way of narrowing our own search."
"No," the caller replied. "I explained to you before. Hyde never lets them out of his sight. I've already checked the National Reconnaissance Office's archives, and there was only that one set created, something to do with the material they are made from being impossible to photocopy or scan." He paused. "I'm sorry."
"Will Hyde give them to Mercer?"
"I believe so, yes. But he doesn't have them now. Hyde won't turn them over until Mercer is ready to leave."
"Hyde's reason being security?"
"Or paranoia."
"We should be able to get those photos from Mercer once he's in Eritrea." Gianelli was speaking more for his benefit than his listener's and realized that this discussion went beyond the caller's need to know. He changed tack. "When is Selome Nagast going back to Asmara? Will she be with Mercer?"
"I don't know yet. I'd guess she'll be flying with Mercer. When I find out her travel plans, I'll let you know."
"Anything on your suspicions about her?"
"Nothing. But my intuition tells me that there is more to her than she's saying."
"Your intuition also made you sell those pictures to Hyde for a fraction of what I would have paid," Giancarlo said acidly. "She'll be out of Washington in a few days. If there's anything to discover about her, I will handle it from this end. More than likely your instincts are picking up the fact she's sleeping with Hyde."
"It's possible, but I doubt it. He's a pig and she's a living goddess," Major Donald Rosen of the National Reconnaissance Office said.
"It doesn't matter. Just keep me informed. You may be able to atone for your earlier mistake." Gianelli hung up the phone.
So, he mused, Hyde has found his expert to dig in the desert for him. While it was a complication that Gianelli didn't particularly relish, it wasn't totally unexpected and he might be able to make it work for his own needs. He would have preferred getting the Medusa pictures from Major Rosen, but Hyde had beat him to them. Now he had to try and steal them from Mercer in Asmara. He thought about taking both Mercer and the pictures and using the American as his own prospector. Giancarlo currently had people scouring the Eritrean wastelands, but his teams certainly didn't have Mercer's expertise. Taking Mercer alive, however, wasn't the priority, the pictures were. He reached for the phone again to put into motion just such a plan, recalling how it had all started.
Eritrea had been an Italian colony starting at the end of the nineteenth century and had been the major staging point for their conquest of Ethiopia in 1935. That war had been particularly brutal, fought between a modern mechanized army on one side and horse soldiers on the other. The outcome was almost inevitable, especially after the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on the region that Italy, with her own weapons manufacturers, including the Gianellis, totally ignored.
Soon after taking power and long before the war that preluded World War Two, Mussolin. Just keet about creating a modern nation in the hardscrabble desert. For decades there were fortunes made in Eritrea, and it happened that Gianelli's family made most of them. Such was their interest in Eritrea that Giancarlo's great-uncle, Enrico, had lived in a villa outside Asmara and ran much of the country as a virtual slave state.
Enrico was not as shrewd as his older brother, who ran the entire corporation, but he was a Gianelli and knew how to wring profits from every venture: plantations of fruit trees and coffee, timber, salt production, and the importation of amenities for Eritrea's growing Italian population. However, Enrico did have one interest outside the family's traditional spheres that he pursued vigorously. He was an amateur geologist and spent countless months casting about the countryside in search of raw minerals.
He'd convinced himself, and to a much lesser extent, his older brother, that there was gold in the mountains near the border with Sudan. Enrico spent a fortune digging into nearly every mountain that looked interesting. He kept poor records of his work, and most mines were abandoned and forgotten the day they proved barren. Frustrated, his elder brother finally ordered Enrico to stop wasting money and resources on his foolish hobby, but this j Frustrated the unclean work. "On the sanctity of your confession in the eyes of God, I will never again look at this book."
It now lay just inches from his hands, bathed in eerie moonlight. Ephraim knew he had to read it. A cold wind rattled the fr
agile windowpane and flickered the nearly spent candle sitting in a pool of its own wax. The weak flame cast bizarre shadows on the raw stone walls, familiar shapes in the room taking on ominous dimensions. He felt a chill run the length of his spine.
Why do you test me so, Lord? Am I to be like Job, forced to endure hardships so you can prove to Lucifer that man's love for you can not be corrupted? I fear that I am not strong enough. Is my test not to read this book? Is it Your will that these words are never again seen by the eyes of man? Or is your mission for me to read it and bring its truths to light?
The night wore on, Ephraim lighting another candle from the embers of the last, filling his room with fresh light. The moon tracked across the sky so that it no longer beamed onto the table but instead rested on the simple crucifix hanging over Ephraim's bed. He stared at the image intently, feeling His suffering on the cross, and for the first time in days, Ephraim felt a lightness in his chest. The answer to his dilemma was before him. Christ had died for our failures and to knowingly fail Him was sinful, but it was still to be forgiven, the deed condemned, not the man.
At almost the same instant he turned back to his desk and undid the book's clasp, Brother Dawit cried out in his sleep and died in his own room. But by the time Ephraim learned of this the following morning, he had read the book, and the death of the aged monk was no longer such a tremendous concern.
Somewhere over the Atlantic
Mercer sprawled across two first-class seats, his mouth agape and his jaw covered by a thin shadow of beard. His flight to Rome, Europe's only major hub with connecting flights to Asmara, had left early, so he'd shaved and showered the night before. He desperately needed to review his work and correlate his findings with the Medusa photographs Prescott Hyde had finally sent him, but his eyes had refused to stay open. He had purchased two adjoining seats, planning on using the extra space to spread the material, but best intentions are just that: intentions. He fell asleep even before the jetliner took off.
Mercer's sleep was troubled, and every once in a while a flight attendant would check on him as he muttered aloud in his dark dreams. There was a sheen of clammy sweat on his forehead. When he woke, his eyes were red-rimmed and gummy, and his mouth tasted awful. He looked around the quietly humming cabin, momentarily dazed, trying to clear the cobwebs of sleep from his brain. He was thankful to be released from his nightmares, but a thought had come to him in his sleep, something buried deep in his mind that vanished when he came awake. Once again he thought there was an inconsistency somewhere, something either Hyde or Selome or the kidnappers had said that didn't make sense. Something, but he didn't know what. Damn.