by AJ Stewart
The image of the soldier filled his mind. Fontaine. The traitor. He was here. Had he gone? Dennison’s guts suddenly filled with fear. Was the traitor still around? Did he take the shipment? He opened his eye again. The truck was still there. The container was still on it. The traitor hadn’t taken it. Then his mind flashed with the explosion, and back to being shot. The traitor had shot him. He felt at his arm—dried and crusted blood—and then at his chest and found body armor. A smile formed in his mind but his face wasn’t capable of it. Then he remembered. He had shot the traitor. The traitor had gone down. And Dennison had set fire to the room. To the traitor. And then the explosion.
He recalled climbing out the hole in the wall that masqueraded as a window. He had lit the straw floor on fire with the fuel in the building, but it had turned on him, trapped him from leaving via the door. He had landed hard on the dirt as he fell out the window, and then he had used the window ledge to drag himself up. He leaned his upper body back into the room to help stand. Then the room had exploded.
He tensed as pain wracked his body once more. It shot through him like electricity. A charge that split him in half like an atom. But another feeling overtook him. Dousing the pain like an extinguisher. It was a feeling that at first didn’t reveal itself. Then slowly it came. Not as an image. It had no physical form. But the dots connected and the idea completed and Dennison knew.
He had won. The traitor was in the room. When the blast engulfed the space and shot Dennison out like a cannon the traitor was still in there. He wasn’t out there in the desert, waiting for him. He was nothing more than a memory now. Billions of atoms separated and blown away on the wind. He was a carbon footprint. Nothing more.
It took him a long time to sit up. Had he known the process had taken ninety minutes he would not have believed it. But once he was sitting against the truck tire he found new purpose. He dragged himself up the wheel until his hands were on top of the tire. Then up to the mud guard. Before he knew it he was standing. His legs felt in relatively good shape. He pulled the latch and opened the cabin door. It swung wide and over his head. Then he took hold of the grab bar and worked his way into position. It was like climbing Everest. A test of human determination against the elements. Again he used the large wheels of the truck, this time as footholds. He edged his way up the precipice until finally, he fell forward into the cabin. He felt simultaneous pain and elation. Four hours of effort.
Task one was first aid. He located the medical box and thrust it open. Then he covered his face in a topical antiseptic. It didn’t feel good but it felt better. There was some kind of pain reliever in it. He didn’t know what. He didn’t work with medical supplies. He wished for something strong like morphine, but the US Army didn’t leave stuff like that lying around in transports. Dennison took a large handful of acetaminophen and then wrapped a bandage around his head. Every contact point with his face hurt, but he worked as fast as he could. He needed treatment and he needed to get out of the desert before someone came.
The truck started the first time. That was the key performance indicator of any army vehicle. Not load capacity or comfort or speed. To even be considered for a DoD contract every vehicle tested had to show its ability to start first time, every time. Under any conditions. The big truck hit its KPI and Dennison moved slowly out onto the track. The headlights lit a tunnel ahead but the track wasn’t anything more than two depressions in the dirt. They could be easily lost if he moved too fast, especially with his impaired vision. His single good eye peered through the bandages, watering profusely.
The sky offered pre-dawn light as the truck reached the Baghdad-Karbala road. Having some light made the going easier but also brought more traffic. Dennison didn’t dare increase his speed. His perspective was off and he repeatedly drove onto the shoulder of the road, throwing dirt and stones in the air behind him.
He didn’t head for Camp Victory immediately. His condition was too hard to explain and he couldn’t risk the shipment. The army took personnel injuries very seriously. They would want to know the who and where and how. There would be an investigation. He couldn’t afford that yet. The eight would not want that. They would not care about his pain. So he drove around the outskirts of the city, toward the road out to Fallujah. To a cinderblock building with paper-covered windows.
He stopped the truck behind the building and slid out of the cabin. He hit the ground hard and his legs collapsed and he fell splayed across the dirt. Someone helped him up. His good eye told him it was his man.
The man wore a white shirt under a white lab coat. He had trained as a veterinarian but after the fall of Baghdad had found little work helping animals and much work repairing people. He would repair Dennison, to the extent he could. He would pump the staff sergeant full of morphine that Dennison himself had acquired. He would reapply the antiseptic and the bandages and allow his patient to recuperate for a day.
As it was the recuperation took a little longer. Dennison passed out and came back only periodically, to scream and moan and take a little water. When he finally awoke he discovered he had been out for four days. His absence would have been noted and his last location traced and his movements projected. The choppers would have been sent but they would have found nothing. The smoke would have died away and the building and the canopy would be as invisible to the spotters in the choppers as they were to the satellites. That was if the choppers even left the corridor along Route 1, which was unlikely.
The bandages had their pros and cons. They attracted the eye, but they also made him invisible. He took a hit of morphine and drove the truck to the airport. The guard on duty at Camp Victory asked him if he was okay, and Dennison said he had gotten a touch of the sun. The dispatch sergeant, however, asked no such questions. He took his money and kept his mouth shut as he had before.
Everything the army had in-country was on a spreadsheet somewhere. Everything was accounted for. So everything that left the country was checked off on a spreadsheet. The army had gotten good at accounting for its stuff, but there was plenty of room for stuff that never made it onto the spreadsheet in the first place. A wink, a nod and some cash. The shipment was removed from the truck and weighed and then driven up into the bowels of a large C-19 transport aircraft. The dispatch sergeant queried the bandaged staff sergeant about the weight. It was marked as twenty-five tons gross but showed on their scale as only twelve tons. The staff sergeant suggested that was a good thing. They could fit more on board. The dispatch sergeant shrugged. He didn’t care. He made his money and he had received his orders. He was shipping out in three weeks anyway. And the army had trained him not to ask questions. So the rear of the C-19 closed like the mouth of a whale and the aircraft taxied out and received its clearance and the pilot pushed the throttle home and the beast of an aircraft sped away and then up. Dennison watched it bank and head away toward Germany. Then he walked to the edge of the tarmac, where he found a private with a jeep and asked him to take him to the on-base medical facility.
Now the shipment was gone there was no story to tell. The staff sergeant would remember nothing. The assumption would be that he was attacked somewhere en route from Basra to Baghdad. Severely injured he was clearly suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. The manifestation of PTSD would be his complete inability to recall how he came to get away and get his transport back to base. It was heroic stuff. Maybe medal-worthy. Certainly, it would get him out of the desert as soon as he could fly. Back to a base facility in Germany, and then stateside. The VA would take care of his injuries. He would get not only what was coming his way for delivering the shipment, but also a significant pension from the army with an honorable discharge.
Dennison walked into the medical facility looking like a mummy coming in from the desert. He was dropped into a wheelchair and hustled away to be assessed and diagnosed and written up and prepared for home. All of which would happen after they gave him another hit of morphine.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The medic pushed him out into the night air. It felt cool. There was an army vehicle waiting. Not a medical van. A Humvee. Dennison was lifted into the back and the door slammed and the vehicle let out a throaty roar and pulled away.
They drove for an hour. There were three of them. A driver, another guy in the front and another in the back with Dennison. Without his morphine drip he grew more lucid. And more worried. The pain ebbed back into his body. He saw the lights of the city flash by and then disappear. Replaced by star-filled sky. None of the men spoke.
After an hour they stopped. Dennison was pulled from the vehicle and then propped up against it. He was unsteady on his feet. The three men moved away from him. For a moment he had visions of a firing squad, and he longed for a blindfold.
Then a fourth man approached. He was built the same as the other soldiers but dressed differently. His clothes looked like an army combat uniform that had been through the laundry and had its camouflage washed off. Plain sand. Dennison closed his good eye and opened it again. They were in the desert. There was no light but for that coming from the gibbous moon. The desert felt even more endless at night. The man stepped closer. The staff sergeant couldn’t make out his face. But he knew the accent. And he knew he was in trouble.
“Where is it?” asked the voice.
Dennison wobbled his head in response. He tried to frown but he couldn’t, and even if he had the man would not have seen it behind the bandages.
The man smiled. “You really are a mess. You need medical attention.”
Dennison nodded.
“So where is it?”
Dennison tried to speak. It came out as a wheeze.
The man stepped in close and put his ear to Dennison’s mouth.
“Huh?”
Dennison forced out some sound. “Journey.”
“Journey?” asked the man.
Dennison shook his head. “Germy.”
“Germy? Oh, you mean Germany?”
Dennison nodded.
“No, you see, that’s the problem. They got the container you sent to Germany. But when they opened it, you know what they found?”
Dennison shook his head.
“They found cotton. Twelve tons of cotton fabric. Great if they wanted to make new suits.”
Dennison’s pain was replaced by fear. Were they double-crossing him? Or had the shipment gone wrong? And if so, how?
“They weren’t expecting cotton, were they? So where’s the real shipment?”
Dennison tried to think. It wasn’t working. The angles, the plays. He couldn’t process the information. He shook his head again.
“There are two options at this time, my friend. Either you took it, or you lost it. Now, if you took it, that would make you the dumbest person on the face of this planet. Dumber than plankton. Because you know what the eight are capable of. You know what they can do. You could not possibly think you could hide from them.” The man leaned in close to Dennison, almost touching his bandages with his forehead. “You’re not that stupid, are you?”
Dennison shook his head again.
“Well, then, that leaves option two. You lost it. Somewhere between the handoff and the aircraft you lost it. Now we’ve checked your little hideout. We found part of Fontaine’s body armor. Badly burned. And there’s no trace of him leaving. The wind made sure there were no footprints. So did he take it?”
Dennison shook his head once more and whispered. “Dead.”
“He’s dead? Really? Well, without a damned CSI unit we’ll never know. Maybe his ashes are inside, maybe not. Either way, you lost the shipment and he was after it. So dead or not, he’s suspect number one.”
The man turned and stepped away as if he were thinking. He looked up at the night sky and then around at the endless desert. Then he turned and marched back to Dennison.
“We have to find it. There isn’t another option. You get that, right? You don’t want to end up like those women in your little hideout, do you? Like those little kids? No? I didn’t think so. We’re already looking, and so will you. You’re gonna stay here until it’s found. You get that? As of now, you are AWOL. You are not going back to the army. They will pack up and leave. They don’t care about you and they won’t look for you here. Nobody goes AWOL just to stay in this dung heap. But you will. If it takes five days or five months or five years. You’ll stay here until you find it. Unless we find it first.” The man smiled. “So don’t try to sneak away, now. We’ll be watching. Always. And we’ll be in touch.”
The man made to walk away but stopped. “And you’d better hope you find it before we do. Or you might end up being here for the rest of your life.” He looked around the desert night again and smiled. Then he walked away.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Colonel Laporte put the call into Paris. Henri answered the phone on his desk on the first ring. Perhaps he was waiting on the call.
“Mon Colonel,” he said, “tell me something.”
“Fontaine is dead.”
The man in Paris breathed heavily into the phone. “I am sorry, mon Colonel.”
“As am I.”
“I fear this does not solve our problem.”
“Two good men are dead. How does this not solve our problem?”
“An American is also missing,” said Henri.
“A thief and a traitor.”
“That is for the Americans to decide, mon Colonel. But if his death can be linked to Fontaine, if the arms fall into the hands of insurgents . . .”
“They won’t.”
“I do not share your confidence, mon Colonel.”
“The shipment of arms is gone, perhaps even destroyed. Fontaine completed his mission prior to going after the American.”
“Still, there is the American. This could hurt the unit, and perhaps the president.”
“Let me explain to you what happened, Henri.”
The man in Paris sat up. “S’il vous plaît.”
“I inserted a team into Iraq under the provisions as agreed by Général Papin and signed off by the president. I had been working with a contact in the US military—do not ask his name, Henri, I will not tell you—and we discovered a plot to move US arms into the hands of terrorists. Fontaine’s team was tasked with finding the arms and preventing them from getting into the wrong hands. Destroying them if necessary. They were to then, if possible, find the perpetrators and hand them over as they have done with citizens of our allies previously. But they were thwarted at every turn. An agent was inserted in Iraq without the approval of your office with a remit to disrupt Fontaine’s investigation.”
“An agent? You mean a French agent? Inserted by who?”
“Who called you about this, Henri?”
Henri took a long slow breath. He knew where the initial intel had come from. He had seen the politics in it then, but this was something more serious.
Laporte said, “It was Général Thoreaux, correct?”
“How do you know that?” asked Henri.
“The general’s man is suspected of killing at least one of our troops, and maybe a second. Perhaps he also killed the American.”
“That would not be good news, mon Colonel.”
“I agree.”
“Where is this man?”
“He has vanished.”
“What if he reappears?”
“He won’t,” said Laporte.
Henri thought about Thoreaux. The general wasn’t going to share his man’s whereabouts, or even his existence, but then
he couldn’t make waves about the disappearance of a man he didn’t admit to ever existing.
“What do you suggest, mon Colonel?”
“This man was never there. Anyone with knowledge of him should be kept as far away from command and the office of the president as possible. For the good of the army and for the good of France.”
“Oui,” said Henri. He thought of General Thoreaux’s play for the post in Lille. Henri knew that the general knew he wasn’t of sufficient rank for such a posting. He suspected the general was actually positioning to take over command of the 3rd division in Marseilles. But Henri had a better idea. General Thoreaux was far too valuable to be moved from his current post in Africa. It was there he must remain. For the good of France.
“And Fontaine?”
“Killed in action by terrorists. Location classified.”
“The Americans are asking about the shipment.”
“Destroyed. Never to be used by terrorists anywhere.”
“And your other men?” asked Henri.
“Legion men never speak of yesterday.”
“D’accord, mon Colonel. That is what happened. I will advise Général Papin.”
“And the president?”
“That will be up to Général Papin.” Henri had his mobile phone in his other hand and was pulling up his friend Deschamps in the contacts. The president might learn the story even before General Papin.
“Of course,” said Laporte.
“Merci, mon Colonel.”
“De rien, Henri, de rien.”
The trip brought back many memories and few of them were good. He had fled the Middle East as a young man in the wake of the deaths of his father, mother and brother. He had crossed the Mediterranean and landed in Marseilles, where he met Colonel Laporte and began his new life in the French Foreign Legion. Now he crossed the Med again. This time he took a different route. He stayed far from familiar cities. He made landfall in Europe in Bari, Italy. He wished to avoid France altogether, so he found passage on a fishing boat out of Naples to the island of Sardinia, and then onward by ferry to Barcelona.