by Jack Du Brul
Mercer deflected the question quickly. “Why did you pick me in the first place?”
“That’s easy. You’re reputed to be one of the best in the world at finding valuable minerals.”
“Keep talking like that and we’ll need another seat for my ego.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Why did you change your mind?”
Mercer gave her his most honest look. “I guess you could say that going after the impossible has become one of my trademarks. God, does that sound pretentious. But it is sort of true. After I refused Hyde, I spent that afternoon and most of the night looking for any indication that what he was saying was true,” he said, mixing fact with fiction. “While I couldn’t find any proof, I walked away with a gut feeling. I’ve learned to trust them before, and I just couldn’t refuse this time.”
“Does that mean you believe that the diamonds exist?” There was a breathless quality in her question.
“No, it means I don’t mind spending six weeks and a lot of your money searching.” Mercer meant to sound harsh. He was not about to get trapped into giving her any false hopes.
The sun coming through the porthole caught the claret highlights in her hair. “You may convince yourself with talk like that, Dr. Mercer, but you don’t convince me.”
“Well, maybe I believe a little bit. But not much.” He grinned. “Tell me about yourself.”
Before responding, Selome ordered tea for herself and a croissant. Mercer downed the last of his coffee and ordered a third cup. “My mother is Eritrean and fell hopelessly in love with an American serviceman stationed at Kagnew Base, a U.S. military installation on the outskirts of Asmara that was used to monitor Soviet communications during the Cold War. When my family learned of the affair, my mother was forbidden from ever seeing him again. But they were one night too late, I’m glad to say, or I wouldn’t be here now.
“When he learned of her pregnancy, my grandfather sent my mother to Italy, where we have other family, but she snuck back soon after I was born. As I understand the story, when my grandfather saw me for the first time, he took me in his arms and laughed aloud when I peed on him. After that, I became his favorite grandchild. My mother was forgiven.”
Selome Nagast smiled again. For the first time Mercer felt she was showing her true self. “I went to school in Italy and spent two years in London studying economics. Afterward, I worked for the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in Europe, raising awareness of what was happening in our country.”
“I did some research on your war for independence,” Mercer cut in, “and found the parties involved more than a little confusing.”
“While they may be fierce fighters, my people are not known for originality,” Selome agreed. “At various times during our war with Ethiopia, we were represented by the ELF, the PLF, and eventually the ELF-PLF, none of whom agreed with each other. We wasted years with factional fighting. Believe me, it’s confusing for an Eritrean too.” There was little pride in her voice. “The war would have ended much earlier if we had left the political squabbling until after victory.”
“And after the war ended, how did you get involved in the government?” asked Mercer. “Don’t be offended, but I know it’s… shall I say, difficult… for an African woman to be as highly placed as you.”
“Difficult isn’t the word,” Selome concurred, her tone bitter. “In most African nations, the only prerequisite for leadership is a penis. It really isn’t important if there’s a brain attached to it. Someday Africans will learn not to allow dictators and despots to rule their lives.”
“And until then?”
“We’ll blame European colonialism and Western bigotry and continue to slaughter each other wholesale.”
“Harsh,” Mercer replied.
“But true,” Selome rejoined quickly. “You’ve been to Africa. I know you’ve seen it.”
She went silent for a long time. He had seen her expression a hundred times. It was on the local news nearly every night in D.C. It was the look of a mother whose child lay dead in the streets from drug-related violence she was powerless to stop.
“It’s not hopeless,” he said softly, seeing tears at the corners of her eyes.
“That will be up to you,” Selome replied. “At least for us. We’ve known peace for only a short time, and already factionalism is starting to pull us apart. Religion will be the curse of Eritrea, not the tribalism that has torn apart a lot of other African nations. But the outcome will be the same. Devastation.
“Muslims and Christians are already rattling their sabers from church and mosque alike, calling for the elimination of the other. Sudan’s Muslim government isn’t helping, exporting their version of fanaticism. Bandits raid us constantly, killing those who don’t believe in Allah. Have you ever been to the Sudan?”
“No.”
“Pray you never go. I’ve been to the refugee camps a number of times. In fact, I was on the trip where those photographs Bill Hyde showed you were taken.”
Mercer winced, remembering.
“When we finally ousted the Ethiopians, they practiced a scorched-earth policy during their retreat,” Selome explained. “They burned villages, destroyed roads and bridges and irrigation dams. They even cut down nearly every tree in the country in an effort to demoralize us. The trees lining the streets in Asmara are the tallest in Eritrea because all others were hauled back to Ethiopia. No matter how bad off we were when the Ethiopians withdrew, it is nothing compared to the ruin found in the Sudan. There are roving bands of guerrillas, terrorizing everyone, some allied to the government, others to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and still others that are just mercenaries looking to capitalize on the bloodshed. Slavery is rampant and some say government sanctioned.”
“What’s the reason for their war?”
“Religion. The government in Khartoum is Islamic and has made life unbearable for those in the south who are mostly Christian and animists. If this war is allowed to spread, we will see the same thing in Eritrea. And you are the key for preventing this from happening. It’s an old axiom that hatred is the fuel of the hopeless and peace the progeny of the satisfied.”
Watching her face, Mercer felt confident that Selome Nagast’s loyalties lay in her native Eritrea. He didn’t doubt that she also worked for the Israeli secret police, but for this mission her only goal was the welfare of her people in Africa. Knowing this peeled away only one layer of complication, however. He felt there were still depths here that he didn’t know.
Before leaving home, Mercer had spoken extensively with Dick Henna about the preliminary findings of Harry’s abduction. The private jet that had spirited him out of Washington had been chartered by a corporation in Delaware, but the company was just a post office box, a front. They had been unable to track the fleeing Gulfstream except for a report that it was seen flying over Maryland’s eastern shore low enough to burn leaves off trees. They also had a sighting in Liberia, where it landed to refuel before continuing east. The plane’s final destination was Lebanon. A CIA agent arrived at the airport in Beruit just in time to see an older man bundled into a van and taken away. He’d lost the vehicle in traffic near the city’s Christian Quarter.
A Mideastern connection was further confirmed by Harry’s few neighbors who had heard the abduction. The language they described spoken by the kidnappers sounded like Arabic. The only neighbor to see anything reported that the four men all wore black coats and jeans and had dark complexions and dark hair.
All this matched with what Mercer and Henna had seen at the airport. Henna still didn’t have any identification of the one kidnapper’s body, but he assured it was only a matter of time. He did, however, have better luck tracing the weapons.
“The U.S. Army maintains the largest database in the world of the ballistic characteristics of various individual weapons,” Henna explained. “Each weapon has microscopic differences from its mass-produced counterparts, small flaws that affect the shape of the rounds they fired. Id
entifying these traits is painstaking, but it’s possible to trace a single weapon from just the smallest fragments of expended bullets or shell casing.
“The Army Ballistics Laboratory,” Henna said, “has been looking for these weapons for a while. The Kalishnikovs were traced back to our peacekeeping mission in Lebanon in the late eighties. Both recovered weapons had been used against our Marine garrison. One gun, carried by the man who jumped into the jet engine, has claimed an American life before, an Army sergeant sitting in a café in 1984 near the harbor in Old Beruit.”
There was that Beruit connection again. “How the hell did they get here?” Mercer asked.
“Good question, but what’s got me wondering is: where have they been for the past fifteen years?”
Mercer and Henna had talked about the weapon’s significance and that Harry’s kidnappers were apparently Islamic fanatics — who but a fanatic would allow himself to be sucked into a jet engine — but neither man could explain how these facts meshed with a potential diamond mine in Africa. Selome’s affiliation with Israel only deepened the mess. But having talked with her as the Boeing hurtled across the Atlantic, he felt certain that her interest was with Eritrea, not Israel.
“Are you okay?” Selome placed her hand on his wrist, a reassuring touch. “You faded away for a moment, and it looked like you were in pain.”
“I’m all right,” Mercer lied. He so wanted to talk with her, with anyone really. Bottling up his concern for Harry was tearing him apart. He noticed Selome’s hand on his arm. Her fingernails were as long as stilettos, bloodred from multiple coats of varnish. She saw Mercer staring at her hand and let it lie there a moment longer before withdrawing it. He looked at her with a kind of longing, not of desire, but of the need to express himself. He wanted to trust her so he could release some of what he held inside. He wanted to tell her about Harry and about how it was his fault that he’d been kidnapped and beaten. He needed to talk, but he just looked at her mutely. His pain must have been obvious because she reached over and caressed his cheek. It was an intimate gesture that surprised them both.
“I’m all right,” Mercer said again, feeling something new sparked by that touch. He found he couldn’t look her in the eye.
This could be a real complication, he thought.
Southern Lebanon
Harry White woke with a raging thirst, not for water, but for bourbon. He’d consumed at least two bottles of Tennessee whiskey a week for years. Though he rarely got drunk — his tolerance having been built up over the years — his body needed liquor as surely as it needed oxygen. His hands trembled, adding a new agony to his broken but splintered finger. For the first few days after his abduction, he’d been sufficiently drugged so he didn’t know how long it had been since alcohol had passed his lips, but after a couple of conscious hours in the cell, he knew down to the second.
Every waking moment was a torture crueler than anything he’d ever conceived of. He shivered in the twelve-by-twelve room despite the heat that soaked through the stone walls and beaded his body with perspiration. He kept the ragged blanket he’d been given clutched around his bony shoulders.
His need for a drink was an overpowering craving that was driving his mind beyond the realm of sanity.
He used the blanket not only to ward off the chills, but also to protect him from the flying monkeys that circled the room with the maddening persistence of hornets. He knew they were a DT-created hallucination, but they were terrifying nevertheless.
He’d seen the first one only an hour after waking and had called out in horror. The rational part of his mind told him it wasn’t real, but he was too weak to prevent its wheeling attack. A guard had come to check on him, a red and white kefflaya headdress covering his features. As Harry cowered, the man determined that nothing was wrong and left. The monkey clung to the wall near where it joined the ceiling and winked.
Two more appeared to terrorize him. They flew at him without mercy, breaking off their aerial charges just inches from his face. He could feel the air move from their swift passage, and their unearthly screeches were like nails drawn across a chalkboard. They would swoop by briefly and then land on the walls, their sharp little claws digging into the stone.
None of the monkeys had touched him yet, but it was only a matter of time.
“There’s no place like Tiny’s,” he moaned aloud, praying the invocation would transport him away from here.
After three long hours his hallucinations ended, and Harry fell into a nightmarish sleep more haunting than his periods of wakefulness. Demons more cunning than the monkeys were after him, chasing him down an endless hallway. They carried bottles of Jack Daniel’s, which they tried to pass to him like relay runners, but the bottles slipped out of Harry’s hands.
When he woke, his mind had cleared some. A breakfast tray lay on the floor near the bed, the coffee still steaming. His stomach was too knotted to eat the fruit or the jam-smeared bread, but he drank the coffee quickly. And then his lungs reminded him that he’d smoked a couple packs a day for the past six decades and he wanted a cigarette. Needed one.
“For the love of God, you sadistic sons of bitches, give me a smoke,” he yelled.
The guard appeared again, and Harry repeated his request with a little more civility, shouting just a few decibels quieter. The guard didn’t seem to understand the words, so the octogenarian pantomimed smoking a cigarette. With a sympathy known by smokers the world over, the guard pulled a half-empty pack from his pocket and tossed them on the floor with a book of matches.
“How about some booze, you bastard,” Harry said halfheartedly as he scooped up the rumpled pack. The splint made it difficult to light one of the cigarettes, and it took him several tries.
As the nicotine coursed through his system, he looked at the monkey that had appeared on the wall again, its teeth bared in an aggressive display.
“Screw you, too,” Harry said to the apparition, a filterless cigarette hanging from his lips. He knew from experience that the DTs would pass quickly and the monkeys wouldn’t bother him much longer.
He sat back on the bed, keeping one eye on the monkey just in case, and massaged his injured hand. He didn’t know where he was or who had grabbed him, or even why. He hadn’t seen the guard’s face, but the colorful headdress made him pretty sure they were Arabs and that his abduction involved Mercer and his search for the diamond vent.
Harry chuckled darkly. He’d seen what Mercer was capable of when he was riled and knew that his kidnappers were going to pay. Still, Harry wasn’t the type to sit back and wait to be rescued. He’d gotten himself out of a few tough scrapes before. Former Senator John Glenn was only three years younger when he went into space, he thought. If Glenn could pull that one off, surely he could escape this bunch. The guard had given him cigarettes, and it was only a matter of time before Harry figured a way to get the man to give him his freedom too.
Washington, D.C
Dick Henna was at his desk when his secretary buzzed his intercom and told him he had a call that should not be ignored.
“Who is it, Susan?” The investigation into the Dulles attack had more than eaten up the time he’d saved by not going to California. The day was just starting and already he felt behind.
“Admiral Morrison. I know you don’t want to be disturbed, but I thought you’d want to take this one.”
“I guess maybe I do.”
Henna knew C. Thomas Morrison, the charismatic chairman of the Joint Chiefs, both professionally and in Washington’s social scene and had always liked and respected him. Knowing that Morrison was going to be a strong presidential contender in the next elections, and possibly his boss if he won, Henna adopted a respectful tone. “Admiral, Dick Henna here. What can I do for you?”
“Hello, Dick, how you doing?”
If informality was what the African-American naval officer wanted, Henna was more than happy to comply. “Fine, Tom, fine. How are you?”
“I was doing great unt
il a couple of hours ago,” Morrison replied somberly. “A problem’s come up that’s going to involve your office sooner or later, and I thought it best to bring you in on the ground floor.”
“Shoot,” Henna invited.
“I’m sitting here with Colonel John Baines from the Air Force’s Criminal Investigations Division and he’s much better suited to speak legalese with you than I am. I’d like to get the three of us together.”
Henna felt the beginnings of political strong-arming. Like the military, the FBI had chains of command, and Henna felt that Morrison was using his clout to go straight to the top. “Listen, Tom, I appreciate that you want to bring this to me directly, but is this something that should be going to Marge Doyle’s office or another assistant director’s?”
“I know what you’re thinking.” Morrison’s voice took on a brittle edge. “Let’s just say even this little chat falls into the ‘Ultra Top Secret’ category.” Henna whistled softly. The government had no higher classification. In fact, several presidents had been denied access to UTS documents, most recently former President Clinton’s 1993 request to read the real file on the Roswell, New Mexico, incident. “Dick, you don’t know me well enough to know that I don’t make idle calls and that I never go outside the military unless absolutely necessary.”
Henna looked up at the Seth Thomas clock against the far wall of his office. “All right, I can give you an hour at about eleven.”
“This can’t wait. I’m calling from my car phone. We’ll be at the Hoover building in ten minutes.” Morrison hung up before Henna could protest.
Eleven minutes later, Henna’s secretary showed the two officers into his office.
Admiral Morrison’s black uniform, only a shade darker than his skin, was covered with gold braid, decorations, and a chestful of combat medals. He cut the perfect image of a sailor, hard and straight, with an imperious bearing that cracked into a smile when he strode across the room to shake Henna’s hand. Colonel Baines, in his Air Force blues, looked lusterless next to the Admiral, his uniform nearly bereft of commendations. Where Morrison was tall and good-looking, Baines was shrunken, his voice barely above an apologetic whisper. Only his eyes betrayed the shrewd mind beneath the unassuming exterior.