Chasing the White Lion

by James R. Hannibal

  Finn lifted the Russian’s body as a shield.

  Tyler pulled Talia down and pounded on the bed. “Mac, get us out of here!”

  The trees of Volgograd weren’t large, but they were everywhere, lining even the busiest streets. They grew in the empty lots and the train yards, gradually turning a gray former Soviet city into Sherwood Forest. Now the forest whipped past while gunfire splintered every trunk.

  Talia rolled over to yell at Tyler. “A pickup truck? This is what you chose for an urban rescue?” They both lay on the bed, keeping their heads below the cover of the tailgate and the dead forger. She raised herself on an elbow, emptied the Glock, and dropped down again to change magazines. “Poor turning radius. Limited cover. Limited speed.” She slammed her spare mag home and chambered a round, passing the weapon to Tyler. “Why bring a 4x4 when a lighter, faster vehicle will do?”

  The next volley hit the trees to their right. Tyler raised the Glock with one arm and fired blind. Glass shattered. Tires squealed. Talia stole a glance over the tailgate and saw the sedan back off four car lengths, one headlight shot out.

  How did he do that?

  Using the Glock, he gestured at the road ahead. “That’s why we needed a 4x4.”

  She looked forward through the cab. The end of the street was coming on fast, and beyond it, nothing but a mile-wide stretch of the Volga river, guarded by a dirt berm. Mac hit the curb at full speed, bouncing Oleg up into the air. The body landed next to Talia with an ugly thud.

  She gave Finn a look.

  He shrugged. “Sorry, princess. I didn’t have as good a grip as I thought.”

  The truck barreled over rough ground, and it took all Talia’s strength and coordination to avoid smacking her head repeatedly into the bed. She could barely speak. “This will slow them . . . down . . . but they’ll still . . . be coming. Your plan . . . won’t work.”

  “Oh, it’ll work,” Finn said. “Trust us.”

  What were they up to? The engine surged. By now, the river had to be close. “Mac?”

  “Hang on!” Finn shouted.

  The HiLux roared up the berm and sailed out over the river. Talia went weightless, floating in space with the dead Oleg.

  The truck splashed down with water flying high on all sides. Talia groaned and pressed up to her knees and saw Mac climb out through the driver’s window just as the river began pouring in.

  He cast a sour look at Tyler. “Ya said I’d get to fly on this partic’lar job. Ya didn’t say I’d be flyin’ a truck.”

  A motorboat pulled alongside them, piloted by a young black woman, Darcy Emile, Tyler’s chemist and demolitions expert. She helped Mac into the boat first and gave him the wheel before helping the others into the back. “Nice of you all to drop in, yes?” she said to Talia in a singsong French accent, handing her a towel.

  “Hilarious.” Wiping the river from her eyes, Talia looked warily back at the berm. Where Darcy went, explosives were sure to follow. Something was about to go boom.

  She hoped.

  Before following the rest of the team, Tyler took the time to strap Oleg into the sinking truck with a set of tie-downs.

  “What are you doing?” Talia asked.

  “Keeping options open.”

  The Russians had carried enough momentum to drive the sedan to the top but not over. Five men piled out, all armed with submachine guns.

  Talia pulled Tyler into the boat. “You’ve given them the high ground. If you’ve got another trick up your sleeve, now’s the time.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith.” He pulled a wet handkerchief from his rear pocket and scrubbed at a spot of Oleg’s blood staining his jacket. “Darcy, you’re on.”

  “Wait.” The French woman watched the pack of thugs with interest, as if watching lemurs at the zoo. “I want to see their smiling faces, yes?”

  A fusillade of bullets peppered the water, and more than a few poked holes in the fiberglass at the back. Mac revved the engines. Everyone but Tyler shouted at the chemist.

  “Darcy!”

  “Yes, okay. Here goes.”

  With a tremendous foomp, an entire section of the berm rose skyward. Five thugs and one car went flying on a cushion of dirt.

  Finn poked Talia on the shoulder and laughed. “I told you it would work.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  BAN DOI HENGA REFUGEE CAMP

  THAI/BURMA BORDER

  MAE HONG SON PROVINCE, THAILAND

  NINE-YEAR-OLD THET YE jogged barefoot down the steps of the wooden church, squinting in the early light as he scanned the main road of the refugee camp. “Hla Meh?” He didn’t see her.

  A few girls sat in the dirt and played e-keb, tossing a stone in the air and sweeping up pebbles with their hands. Hla Meh was not among them. Other children raced, rolling woven bamboo hoops past a line of wobbly houses, also bamboo. Hla Meh was not among those either.

  What had become of his best friend?

  She could not have gone far. Hla Meh had better not have gone far. Only a few minutes remained before the school day started. Attending classes beneath the thatch shelters beside the church was a privilege. He didn’t want Hla Meh to lose hers.

  At the bottom of the steps, Thet Ye caught the shoulder of another boy, Aung Thu. “Where is Hla Meh?”

  “Who knows? Your best friend is a girl. You never know what’s going through their brains.”

  The other boys often picked on Thet Ye for choosing a girl as a best friend. He gave Aung Thu his usual answer. “When you best her in a foot race or take the ball away from her in a soccer match, maybe I’ll pick you.”

  “Psh.” Aung Thu flopped his hands in the air and walked up the steps.

  The church steps. The butterfly. “Hla Meh!” Thet Ye ran around the church to the thin patch of wild grass separating the building and the jungle. Hla Meh had chased a butterfly in that direction before Thet Ye had run inside to get a drink of water.

  “Where do you think she lives?” Hla Meh had asked him.

  “Wherever the other butterflies live, of course.”

  “And where is that? We should find out.” Hla Meh followed the creature from the rail of the church steps, to the shoulder of a girl playing e-keb, to a stalk of grass at the rear corner of the church. And Thet Ye followed Hla Meh, until he became thirsty.

  Fresh water was not so easy to come by in the mountain refugee camp. Thet Ye knew that well. His mother had given him the daily job of walking down to the river with empty jugs and trudging back with full ones. Lately she boiled the water. The teacher at the school had taught her how. But the church had fresh, cool water, brought in each week by the American group that helped the pastor open a school. Thet Ye could drink as much as he liked. And he had, leaving Hla Meh to follow her butterfly to its home.

  “Hla Meh?” Thet Ye jogged to a stop in the middle of the grass patch. She wasn’t there.

  Something rustled in the trees. “Hla Meh?” They weren’t supposed to go into the jungle, but Hla Meh was not always good at following the rules. He ran toward the sound.

  The morning sun faded quickly to dim green shadows. Thet Ye pushed a tangle of vines aside, stumbled over a dead branch, and then paused to listen. The rustling continued, ahead and to his left. “Hla Meh?” At a small clearing, near the base of a big yang na tree, he found her. Thet Ye let out a huge breath. “Hla Meh.”

  “I lost the butterfly.” Hla Meh picked at the underbrush with a stick. “She was right here, but then I lost her.”

  Girls. Aung Thu had been right about one thing. You never knew what was going through their brains. “We have to get back. School is starting.”

  “One more minute. I know she’s here. Look at that tree. It must be her home.”

  “Her what?” Thet Ye struggled to understand Hla Meh’s words sometimes. When distracted, she often reverted to Kayah, her native tongue. Most of the children in the school had grown up in the camps and learned Thai from an early age. But Hla Meh had crossed the b
order from Burma with her mother, fleeing the most recent purge of Christians. Thai came harder for her.

  Nearly everything came harder for her. It was the main reason Thet Ye had taken her on as a best friend.

  “There she is!” Before Thet Ye could stop her, Hla Meh pushed apart a pair of saplings and disappeared again.

  He chased after her, but a few steps in, he caught his toe on a low vine. He crashed into Hla Meh, and the two tumbled down a hill into a larger clearing.

  Thet Ye groaned, sitting up. “Now look what you’ve—” He stopped. Hla Meh’s eyes had grown wide with fear, staring at something behind him. He turned.

  Three men wearing the camouflage uniforms of soldiers glared back at the children—two a little younger than Thet Ye’s father and one teenager. The teenager had been digging. The shorter of the two older men took a menacing step toward Thet Ye and his friend. He reached for them with a grubby, burn-scarred hand.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  BAN DOI HENGA REFUGEE CAMP

  THAI/BURMA BORDER

  MAE HONG SON PROVINCE, THAILAND

  THE SOLDIER LIFTED THET YE TO HIS FEET and dusted him off. “That was quite a tumble.” The instant he spoke, his uniform and the burn scars on his hands became less frightening. Many grown-ups and teens at Ban Doi Henga had similar marks. A great fire had burned the camp on the night Thet Ye was born. It was the reason for his name—Brave Life. His mother always said he’d come out to brave the fire instead of hiding.

  But these soldiers were not from the camp.

  When the short soldier tried to help Hla Meh to her feet, she scrambled back. He looked at her hard, then the hardness evaporated, and he smiled. “Where are your teachers, little ones?”

  Behind him, the other soldier barked an order at the teen, and the boy continued his work. This sparked Thet Ye’s interest. “What are you digging for? Are you looking for treasure?”

  The soldier’s face turned serious. “Landmines. And that is why this area is off-limits. This jungle is a war zone.”

  Thet Ye knew that well. His parents had been driven into Thailand because of that war, the same as Hla Meh and her mother.

  “Do your teachers know you are here?”

  Thet Ye shook his head.

  “I see. Well, that is a big problem.”

  “It is?”

  The man looked past them through the trees. “You attend the new school in the camp, yes?”

  Thet Ye nodded.

  “Your teachers are responsible for your safety, even before the school day begins. If the government finds out they let you wander into a mine-filled jungle, the school will be shut down.”

  “But we love our school. Isn’t that right, Hla Meh?” Thet Ye looked back at his friend, but she only continued to stare at the soldier. Her eyes remained as wide as Thet Ye had ever seen them.

  The man paced back and forth for a few moments, then crouched down to the children’s level. “How about this? I will not tell anyone you were here as long as you do not tell anyone. That way, your teachers will not get into trouble. Do we have a deal?” He offered his hand.

  Thet Ye shook it, feeling the strange smoothness of the burn scars. “Deal.”

  With a helpful point from the soldier, Thet Ye and Hla Meh made their way back to the church. She held his hand the whole way, so tight it hurt. Thet Ye did not want to offend his friend, but he could not allow the other boys to see them holding hands. He wrenched his hand free before they pushed out from the last of the vines. Even then, Hla Meh said nothing. She ran off to the school shelters where the day’s session was starting.

  Thet Ye did not tell the teachers about the soldiers. Hla Meh remained silent the whole day as well, though she had never agreed to keep the secret. After school, Thet Ye caught up to her in a muddy track between bamboo houses, a shortcut to the newer section of the camp. The narrow gap between thatched roofs left them both in shadow.

  “You’re going to stick to the deal, right?” He took her hand from behind.

  She jerked it away.

  One minute she wanted to hold his hand, the next she did not. Aung Thu seemed wiser by the second. “What’s wrong?”

  “There is no deal—not with those men.”

  “But what about our teachers? Those men could tell the government. They are soldiers.”

  “They are liars. They are Burmese militiamen who hate us.”

  Now Thet Ye understood. He’d heard stories of the war, but Hla Meh had lived it. She had seen the militias destroy her village. He tried reassuring her. “No, silly. The soldiers were nice to us, and they spoke Thai.”

  “You speak Thai. But you are not from Thailand.”

  Thet Ye could not argue. None of the children in the camp belonged in Thailand, even those born there. Refugees did not belong anywhere. He shook his head. “Yes, but the uniforms.”

  “Militias wear uniforms too.” Hla Meh sat down and cried.

  Oh, how he should have listened to Aung Thu the Wise. At a loss, Thet Ye kneeled in the mud and held her shoulders.

  Hla Meh leaned into him. “Do you know what happened to Peh?” she said between sobs.

  Thet Ye knew enough Karenni children and grown-ups to understand that by Peh, she meant her father. He swallowed. “No.” He’d asked about her father not long after they’d met, on the day the school opened, but she had turned sullen, so he had never asked again.

  “Peh stood up to them, men wearing uniforms just like those. They came to purge the village of Christians. He said someone had to stop them.”

  Her sobs grew stronger. Thet Ye held her shoulders. If a grown-up saw, they wouldn’t understand, and he would be in trouble. But what else could he do?

  “Mua tried to hide my eyes. She tried to pull me into the trees, but I saw Peh. I saw him fall. They shot him, and then they burned our church to the ground.” She looked into Thet Ye’s eyes. “If they could do that in our village, they can do it here too.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  GAGARIN AIRFIELD

  SARATOV, RUSSIA

  TALIA LISTENED TO THE GEAR of Tyler’s Gulfstream 650 swing up into the well.

  Tyler’s gear. Tyler’s Gulfstream. Tyler’s rescue. She was grateful, sure, but did he have to hover around her like a helicopter mom? She sank her aching body into soft white leather and frowned across a walnut table at Finn. “Where’s Val?”

  The Aussie opened his mouth to answer, but Darcy cut him off, squeezing between his knees and the table to take the window seat. “Russian hotels do not meet Valkyrie’s standards.” She sat down and breathed on the window, drawing shapes in the fog.

  “What she means is, Val had a previous engagement.”

  Darcy joined a pair of circles to a triangle. “But our Val has a lot of these previous engagements, yes?”

  Valkyrie, the team’s grifter, had missed several of Tyler’s outings, and the darkness in Darcy’s tone told Talia it had become a sticking point. To be fair, Talia had missed a lot as well. Her promotion to the Russian Operations desk in the Directorate’s Russian Eastern European Division—REED for short—had come with a mountain of new work and plenty of travel.

  In Talia’s first six months, Mary Jordan had sent her out on no less than eight high-visibility assignments—Estonia, Siberia, Rostov, Kirov. Tyler’s little off-the-books charity projects, like undercutting a corrupt banker in Zambia or removing a drug lord from the Chilean parliament, had taken a back seat to Talia’s day job.

  “So,” Finn said. “Oleg got the drop on you. Do all CIA officers take such a slapdash and devil-may-care approach to the job?”

  “I didn’t need rescuing.” Talia felt a snide remark brimming on Tyler’s lips and shifted her glare his way, cutting him off with a preemptive denial. “I didn’t.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “And I don’t need babysitting.”

  “Of course you don’t. I never thought you did. Volgograd was an anomaly, an intersection of
operations. It was a onetime thing.”

  “Except for Moscow,” Finn said. “Don’t forget Moscow.”

  “And what about Minsk?” Darcy had fogged up the window again and was drawing what Talia took to be a dollhouse blowing apart. “Talia was in the embassy across from our hotel, yes?”

  Tyler pulled a finger across his throat in the international Please shut up sign. “Thank you, Darcy. Thank you very much.” He tilted his head, motioning for Talia to join him in the next set of seats.

  As Talia followed, Darcy raised her drawing finger. “And Vladivostok. Was not Talia the woman you were watching at the port authority building in Vladivostok?”

  “Yes,” Tyler said without looking back. “Yes she was. Again, thank you. So helpful.”

  When they came to the rear table, he stepped aside and offered Talia the forward-facing chair, a thoughtful gesture implying he knew she always preferred to face forward while flying. Yet somehow it irked her. Tyler knew so much about her. Too much.

  Before they’d met on Talia’s first mission for the CIA, Tyler had spent fifteen years watching her from the shadows. A guardian angel. Except this guardian angel had assassinated her father. She’d forgiven him, and with his help, she had returned to the God her father loved. But those fifteen years of watching made her uneasy. Now it seemed he hadn’t given up the habit.

  Talia crossed her arms. “Shouldn’t you be flying the plane?”

  “Over Mac’s dead body. I’m a hobbyist. He’s a professional. I know when to step back.”

  “Do you?”

  A spark in his green eyes acknowledged he had walked right into that one. “Okay, so I picked a few jobs with locations near your assignments. Let’s call it operational overlap. Can you blame me?”

  She let her hard stare do the talking.

  “I get it. You’re trying to leave the past behind, and that’s good. But the fact is, your past is still a big part of your present.”

  The two had covered the same ground time and again. Tyler and Frank Brennan, Talia’s first section chief at the Agency, believed a spy known as Archangel had ordered her father’s death nearly sixteen years earlier. And they believed this spy was still haunting the CIA. But Tyler had no more proof than a cryptic name on a fifteen-year-old slip of paper.