by AJ Stewart
“Of course, bon ami. I will do it. But I must tell you, the president is happy with these men now, but his happiness is not guaranteed. It would be best for such problems to be solved before they reach his desk.”
“I understand. Merci, Deschamps.”
“You must come for a Paris St. Germain game. I can get nice tickets.”
“I would like it.”
Henri hung up his phone and looked at the time. Yes, he would still be in his office. He made another call.
“Laporte.”
“Mon Colonel, c’est Henri.”
“Henri, how are you, my friend?”
“I am well, but I do not call with such high feelings.”
“Go on.”
“Tell me about Fontaine’s group.”
“What do you wish to know?”
“What are they doing?”
“You know I don’t share operational information without good cause, Henri. That was one of my stipulations in the beginning—one that Général Papin very much agreed with.”
“I understand, mon Colonel. I know you told me they were in Iraq. This I don’t care about. But you said they would not get in the way of our political maneuvers with our American friends. Now I hear a report suggesting Fontaine is arming insurgents, not hunting them.”
“Who says this?”
“I cannot tell you right now, mon Colonel.”
“And you believe this?”
“No, mon Colonel. I have met this man. I know what he did. I don’t believe it. But Général Papin was one of those responsible for reconstituting the 1er REP, and with its history, well, it could be very embarrassing for him.”
“Of course. But it is not so. I put Fontaine there. There are Americans potentially selling their own arms to the enemy.”
“What will he do if he finds proof?”
“You are worried that Fontaine will eliminate the American? Did his previous mission not prove anything? He knows what to do. He will stop the arms from being used, and then he will hand the perpetrators over to the Americans.”
Henri let out a breath. “D’accord. I apologize, mon Colonel.”
“Not necessary, Henri. You would be negligent in your role if you did not ask these questions.”
“Keep me informed, s’il vous plaît.”
“Of course.”
Henri ended the call and looked out the window again. It was good fortune that General Thoreaux had called him. The general had no way to know that Henri’s boss, General Papin had been instrumental in reconstituting the 1er REP and had hand-chosen Laporte to lead it. Laporte’s failure was Papin’s failure. Henri knew he must do what he could to ensure its success. But there were things he could not control, and those things were what worried Henri. It was prudent to prepare to distance the general from events should it become necessary.
Colonel Laporte had no window to look out. He knew that outside the wind blew but the weather was fine. Yet dark clouds were forming. He knew his men were prepared but he would never stop confirming it. They would see the mission through, whatever the cost. Of that he was sure. Laporte stood from his desk. He felt the urge to call Fontaine but he held off. There was nothing he could say that Fontaine didn’t know. He needed to let his man focus on his mission. Laporte stepped out in the cool night air. It was a twenty-minute walk from the Legion barracks into the Aubagne old town. The walk helped clear his head. He headed out under the autoroute that cut the barracks off from the civilian population and made for the old town and a quiet bar that served pastis and small plates. He would think through his questions and his problems, and come up with a solution.
Chapter Twenty
They watched Dennison leave Camp Bravo in the pre-dawn light. The landscape was flat and barren and provided no hiding places. The US military provided the hiding places. There was debris all along the roadside. Concrete blast walls that had cracked during transport were stacked by the roadside. There were mounds of gravel brought in for roads and not used. The Highlander sat in a dry channel off the road behind pallets of cinderblock. Fontaine got the call from Major Bradshaw, and they watched the headlights of the jeep pass through the guardhouse and drive past them. Yusuf waited until the taillights were a good distance ahead and then pulled out onto the road.
They didn’t know where the jeep was going so they stayed close but not too close. Thorn, Manu and Gorecki were taking care of the real container. But Fontaine didn’t want to lose contact with Dennison again. Dennison didn’t drive too fast. He wasn’t afraid of getting a speeding ticket. The only place that would happen was on base. Out here he could open up the jeep and skip across the road like a hydrofoil. But he didn’t. He drove like a man who knew how long it would take to get to a place, and how long he had to get there, and that his margin of error was plenty large. When Dennison’s taillights moved onto Route 8 and headed southwest out of the city, Fontaine started to wonder. Dennison was an urban warrior, comfortable in the anonymity a city provided. His environment wasn’t the endless expanse of sunbaked earth that constituted most of the southern region of Iraq. They left the city behind and headed out onto the open road. Yusuf let the taillights get further away, and then pulled closer as the lights disappeared and the sun broke the plain ahead of them.
“Where’s he going?” asked Hutton.
Fontaine had been thinking on the very question. “He’s meeting someone.”
“Who?”
“That I don’t know. But he didn’t bring the truck out here. This is the wrong direction. He’d want to be closer to Baghdad, not further from it. Basra is like a mental barrier he wouldn’t want to have to cross to get where he’s going. And he’s going to go back to Baghdad. That’s his patch. No reason for him to be involved otherwise.”
“Well, this isn’t the way to Baghdad.”
Fontaine shook his head. It wasn’t the way to Baghdad.
It took an hour to find out. The traffic was light but at least they weren’t the only ones on the road. They approached some sort of compound. They saw it, small in the distance. But the distance was significant, which made the compound large. As they got closer what they saw resembled a prison. It was built low and large. The way things are when space is no issue. The entire area was surrounded by security wire fencing. Too tight to get a foothold in and topped by razor wire. But there was something wrong with the wire. It was cantilevered out from the fence at an angle of thirty degrees from the vertical. That meant they weren’t looking at a prison. Prisons angled their fences in, not out. This was designed to keep people out. Then as they got closer and the sun got higher they saw the billowing black smoke in the distance.
“Rumaila oil fields,” said Fontaine.
Yusuf slowed and they saw Dennison’s jeep turn into the gate of the compound. Beyond the fence it looked a little like Camp Bravo. But only a little. There were no blast walls. There were no tanks or other visible munitions. There was a vast expanse of dirt. Space as yet unused, or a security perimeter. Beyond the open area there were clusters of structures. Holding tanks. Perhaps for water. There were rows of cabins. Not military. These cabins were larger than the ones at Camp Bravo. They were sided with aluminum and anodized in complementary colors of sand and tan. The buildings gave a sense of semipermanence, unlike the cabins at Bravo which looked like they could up and leave of their own accord. Through the wire Fontaine could see roads running around and between the buildings. Not gravel. These roads were blacktop. As good as any suburban street in Ohio. There were paved sidewalks. Fontaine knew what he was looking at. He was looking at money.
But there was a problem. Waiting for Dennison on the road outside the wire was the problem. There was no debris around the compound. No disused gravel or cinderblock. Just hard-packed dirt leading out to the oil fields or back to Basra. No way Dennison wouldn’t spot them. And that was assuming the compound’s security didn’t home in on them first. Fontaine thought the chances of that were pretty good. A solitary car sitting outside in the incr
easingly baking sun. Watching, waiting. That would make even the most mediocre security crew nervous. And Fontaine was betting the money behind this fence afforded better than mediocre security.
“Lewis Bence,” Hutton said. She was on her phone. Fontaine was surprised she had reception until he noted the telecoms tower standing tall in its own fenced off area beyond the building compound. There would be generators there, too. Near but not too near to the living and working spaces. Generators were noisy and hot. The army didn’t care about that. The money inside the fence surely did.
“Lewis,” said Hutton. “Laura Hutton. I need a favor.”
Fontaine smiled. He liked the way she got down to business. Pleasantries were for dinner parties and weddings and other occasions Fontaine was unfamiliar with.
“I’m out your way. Any chance of a visit?”
Hutton listened for a moment and then winked at Fontaine.
“At the gate,” she said. She nodded. “See you in five.”
“You know more people out here than you’re letting on,” said Fontaine.
“You’re not the only one with a past,” she said. “Let’s roll.”
Yusuf turned into the gate. There was a small gatehouse. A private security container in a blue uniform nodded at them. Yusuf pulled his window down. The guard didn’t look at Yusuf. He was local. He was the driver. He had no business here. The guard looked in the back and then stepped to the rear window and Fontaine hit the button and his window eased down.
“Sir,” said the guard.
“I’m here to see Lewis Bence,” said Hutton.
The guard looked across at Hutton and nodded. “Yes, ma’am. ID?”
Hutton pulled out her FBI credentials and leaned across Fontaine and handed them over. The guard looked at Fontaine.
“I’m security,” Fontaine said.
“You’ll need ID to get in.”
Fontaine shook his head and the guard watched him and then nodded and returned to his gatehouse. He made a quick call. He knew the number. Or maybe he had it on speed dial.
“Who’s this guy?” said Fontaine.
“He’s assistant head of security for BP.”
Fontaine nodded.
“Formerly FBI.”
The guard came back. He handed Hutton’s ID back to her.
“Ma’am, Mr. Bence will be right with you.” He glanced at Fontaine. “Sir, you can wait to the side here.”
“It’s getting hot out,” said Fontaine.
“Yes, sir,” said the guard. He turned on his heel and walked around to Hutton’s side and opened the door like a valet. Hutton got out.
“Keep your radio open,” she said.
“Roger that,” Fontaine replied.
The guard walked Hutton into the compound. The barrier between the Highlander and the compound didn’t open. They walked into the gatehouse and then out the other side. Another Toyota Highlander approached from inside the compound. It was exactly the same model as the one Fontaine sat in. It stopped by the gatehouse and Fontaine saw Hutton offer a familiar smile, and the guard opened the front passenger door for her and she got in. The guard marched back to his gatehouse and the Highlander on the inside pulled a wide U-turn and drove away.
“Let’s turn around,” Fontaine said to Yusuf.
Bandy drove on. He had followed Fontaine’s SUV out on the long road to Rumaila but had been forced to keep driving when Fontaine had stopped at the refinery compound. There was no cover, nowhere to hide. He thought to drive on a kilometer and then watch through his binoculars, but he knew if he could see Fontaine then Fontaine could see him. He drove on for twenty minutes, further into the middle of nothing, before he turned around and drove back. Fontaine’s SUV was waiting by the gate when he drove back past, as if he hadn’t gained admission to the complex. Bandy decided there was nothing for it. He had to keep going. He returned to his original position. He would wait on the roof of the apartment building. He expected Fontaine to return to his accommodations. Eventually.
“I heard you were in Baghdad,” said Lewis Bence. He looked like a G-man from a comic book. He had trimmed brown hair and a strong chin. His chest pushed at his blue oxford shirt like he was Clark Kent.
“Training,” said Hutton. “Just in Basra for a short spell.”
“This ain’t Basra.”
“No. What do you know about the drawdown?”
Bence pulled the SUV into a parking space in front of a yellow building. An air-conditioning unit sat between them and the building.
“Apart from a lot of hiring, not much.”
They got out of the vehicle and Hutton felt the heat already pushing a hundred.
“Hiring?” she asked as they walked around the building to a door on the other side.
“Yeah. This place is about to go to hell.”
Bence opened the door and Hutton stepped into the cool space. It was a reception area. The desk was dark wood. There were pictures on the taupe wall. Images of oil wells and pipes and tankers. The floor was linoleum rather than carpet, but in every other way the space could have been an office in almost any city in the world. Bence led Hutton down a corridor to a large office. There was a clean desk and a meeting table and an indoor plant. Bence offered her a seat and some water.
“So you were saying something about going to hell?”
“Sure. The army is bugging out. And with all due respect to what you’re doing, the locals aren’t trained or equipped to fill the void. And it’s a pretty big void. We’ve got insurgents, we’ve got Al Qaeda. There are political parties of all religious stripes posturing. And we’ve got billions of dollars of oil to protect.”
“So you’re hiring more people.”
“Exactly.”
“From where?”
“From the talent pool that are about to get honorable discharges.”
“The US Army,” said Hutton.
“You got it. A lot of good people about to get downsized. So we’re hiring.”
Hutton thought about Dennison. Was he being hired by the oil companies? Was he at the compound for an interview?
“So what has all that got to do with you?” asked Bence.
Hutton watched her former boss. He had been an assistant special agent in charge in New York. A plum position. The sort of position that led to someone becoming an FBI lifer. Maybe ending up in the Hoover building, making visits to the White House on a regular basis. But Bence had not done that. He had left. She hadn’t heard any negative rumors, any whispers of impropriety. He had just left the FBI to take a role in the private sector. In Iraq.
“Why are you out here?” Hutton asked.
Hence nodded. “You wonder why I left the Bureau? Simple. Opportunity. I was a field agent. Like you. I went as far as I was going to go. What do they call it? The Peter principle. In an organization, people will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. Then they don’t get promoted anymore. They either stay at a job they aren’t equipped to do, or they leave.”
“Not equipped to do? You were a good agent.”
“I appreciate that, Hutton. But that’s my point. I’d reached the point where I was no longer required to be a good agent. To go further I needed to become a politician. To play the games. I wasn’t good at that. So I was at the level of my incompetence. I wasn’t a field agent anymore, but I wasn’t good at the political side of my role. And then I got an opportunity.”
“The private sector.”
“Exactly. It’s not exactly New York City, but you wouldn’t believe the pay. My girls are in private school in Virginia. I couldn’t afford that on a Bureau salary. A few years in the desert and I’ll be set for life. I won’t be living like a king or anything, but a bit of consulting here and there, and the girls will be through college debt-free and I’ll have plenty of time to work on my golf handicap.”
“Sounds like a deal.”
“I’ll be honest. It wasn’t how I saw it all going. But it’s not too bad. The isolation is the thing. You either de
al with it, or you don’t. And I do. But you didn’t come here for my recent history. Did you?”
Hutton shook her head. “I’m following a guy. An army staff sergeant.”
“What’s he done?”
“I can’t get into that, but he’s here. Right now. You got a list of those soldiers you’re interviewing for jobs?”
Bence nodded. “Sure.” He stood and dropped in behind his desk and tapped at the keys. “Name?”
“Staff Sergeant Ox Dennison.”
“Ox?”
“Oxnard.”
“That’s a hell of a name. He from California?”
“No, Pennsylvania.”
Bence shrugged and tapped some more. Then he looked at the screen.
“I’ve got no such name on the list of potential hires. I assume if he comes up we don’t want him?”
“No, you don’t.”
Bence made a note in his computer. He scratched his chin and then tapped some more.
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“He’s not here.”
Hutton frowned. “What do you mean, he’s not here?”
“I mean officially. I’m looking at our entry log. He’s not here. No Ox Dennison is listed as entering the facility in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Does it take time to complete?”
“As long as it takes for the electrons to move from the gatehouse to the server room.”
“Is that unusual for an army visitor?”
Bence looked at Hutton. “It’s unheard of. If the president of the United States visited, he’d get logged. This is not a nice neighborhood, Hutton. We’re serious about this stuff.”
“I saw him go through the gate, Bence.”
Bence stood. “What was he driving?”
They crawled around the outside perimeter of the compound in Bence’s SUV. It looked like one of those fake towns from the movies, built in the middle of the Nevada desert to be blown up by a nuclear bomb test. They kept their eyes moving, searching the roads that ran between the cabins. They didn’t see a US Army jeep. Bence did a lap of the compound and then cut in and began crossing the area like he was following a hash pattern from a game of tic-tac-toe. He drove the length of one street and then turned back and along the next. A quarter of the way along Hutton saw the familiar green.