Scorpion Deception (27 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dagmada Yaaqshid,

Mogadishu, Somalia

T
he car bomb exploded just after one in the afternoon outside a hotel on Jidka Sodonka Road favored by foreign aid workers and freelance journalists working on the cheap. Somali government troops first on the scene brought the wounded—there were scores of wounded and dead—to Medina Hospital. Government troops surrounded the warren of narrow twisting alleys of the nearby Dagmada Yaaqshid neighborhood, but as soon as they tried to move in, they were fired upon and forced to pull back. No way to avoid ambushes and heavy casualties in those cramped narrow streets. As the hospitals filled up, they began bringing some of the wounded to the makeshift hospital tent at the Badbaada refugee camp.

Sandrine was directing her cadre of helpers, a half-dozen Somali women refugees and one male, to make cots ready for the wounded when Ghedi pulled her outside. A boy she had never seen before, about Ghedi's age, was standing there, hatless in the blazing sun.

“This is Labaan,
isuroon
,” Ghedi said. “He has news.”

“Salaam aleikem,”
Sandrine said to the boy, who didn't respond, only looked at her. She turned to Ghedi. “We have wounded coming. I don't have time.”

The boy said something to Ghedi in Somali.

“Labaan say al Qaeda is coming. He says they want my sister back. He says we must run away now,” Ghedi said.

“How soon?” she asked, squinting at the boy in the sun. Ghedi translated.

The boy showed her his arm and pants. There was blood on his sleeve and pants but no wound.

“Achi,”
Labaan said.

“His brother,” Ghedi said. “They killed him. We must go now.”

“The one in the House of Flowers? With the orange hair? He's dead?”

Ghedi nodded.

“What about the children, the little girls, in the house?”

Ghedi asked Labaan, who answered.

“He says al Qaeda will be here in ten minutes. He doesn't know about the girls, but he wants to come with us. He says they will kill him. Where do we go,
isuroon
?” Ghedi asked.

“The airport,” she said. “Get Van Zyl and your sister. Bring everything you can carry, especially your papers, and meet me back here in one minute. Run!”

She ran to her tent, grabbed her passport, wallet, and money, Médecins Pour le Monde paperwork, and the papers she'd arranged for Ghedi, though she had nothing for his sister, and ran back to the hospital tent, her heart pounding. People were coming in, carrying wounded men, women, and children on doors, blankets, and other makeshift stretchers. Some were missing limbs; nearly all were bleeding and in various stages of shock. The tent began to fill, everyone shouting, the wounded groaning and a woman in a purple
direh
screaming. Ghedi, carrying a sack in one hand and holding his sister, Amina, with the other hand, rushed in, followed by Van Zyl and Labaan.

“I bloody warned you, didn't I?” Van Zyl said. He was going to say more but there was shouting outside, screams, and then at least twenty armed Somali men rushed in carrying a wounded Somali. Van Zyl started to step in front of Sandrine and one of the Somali men clubbed him to the ground with an M4 carbine. Another Somali, a tall bearded man with one eye milky-white, wearing a
ma'awis
and an
imaamad
shawl over his left shoulder, fired a burst from a submachine up into the air.

The tent fell silent, except for the groans of the wounded. The man with the white eye—cataract, she thought automatically—and the submachine gun looked at Sandrine. His face was hard, set. She tried to swallow and couldn't.

“You are the one they call ‘doctor woman'?” he said in English.

“I'm Dr. Delange, yes,” her throat so dry the words barely came.

“My brother,” gesturing at the wounded man they'd brought in with them and put on a cot. “The car bomb. You fix him.”

She tried to take a deep breath and couldn't. She couldn't breathe or move. He stared at her with his good eye.

“What are you waiting for? You're a doctor. He's dying. Fix him!”

“Yes,” she said, and ran over to the cot. The man on the cot was in his twenties. There was blood on his chest and sleeve and he was gasping for air. Bleeding, possible pneumothorax, she thought, rubbing her hands with Purell, because there was precious little running water, and pulling on latex gloves. One of her assistants, Nadifa, handed her shears and turned away. It was not fitting for a Somali woman to see a grown man undressed. The man with the white eye, who appeared to be the leader, and several more of his men crowded around as Sandrine began to cut off the wounded man's shirt.

“Have you come to kill us?” she asked.

“What are you talking about, doctor woman?” the leader said.

“Al Qaeda is coming to kill us.”

“I
hooyadaa
was
the mothers of al Qaeda,” the leader growled. “Let them come. We'll see who kills who. Why do they want to kill you?”

She motioned with her head at Ghedi and Amina.

“I took the girl from the House of Flowers so she would not be a whore. She is still innocent.”

“Give the girl back,” the man said, making the twisting gesture with his hand that in Somalia meant no or get rid of it. “No one dies.”

The man on the cot gasped, his breathing rapid, shallow, fighting for air. She could see the wound in the chest. About three centimeters. A metal fragment had probably punctured the lung, blood bubbling pink out of the wound. The big gash in his arm was rhythmically spurting blood. An artery. She straightened up.

“Another minute or two, your brother will die. But I won't help him unless you help me first.”

“Fix him now, doctor woman,” the leader said, putting the muzzle of the submachine gun against her head. “Or I kill you and give the children and anyone else they want to al Qaeda.”

“Kill me, your brother dies,” she said, looking straight into his eyes, trying to keep a quaver out of her voice. “Kill me now or help me get the children away from al Qaeda, away from Mogadishu,” her heart beating a mile a minute. She wondered if she was about to die.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked, glancing down at his brother.

“Kenya.”

“You crazy, doctor woman? A thousand kilometers. Better I shoot you,” aiming at her head. She closed her eyes and heard a wheezing strangling sound coming from the patient, who moved his arms, the blood spurting out in an arc.

“I mean it. I'll let him die,” she said.

“What kind of doctor are you?” he demanded angrily, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“The only one you've got,” she said, surprised she could get the words out.

He let the submachine gun hang down and scratched his beard.

“You crazy, doctor woman. But for a female, you're braver than most men. You save him, I'll get rid of al Qaeda and take you to Mombasa.”

“The children too. All of them,” she demanded.

“The children too,” he made a face. “Even the girls.”

She was already moving, giving orders to Nadifa, Ghedi, and Van Zyl, whom she told to get his bottle of vodka, since they had no boiling water or steam ready to sterilize instruments. The two most critical things to stabilize the patient were to deal with the pneumothorax so he could breathe and to stop the bleeding. She heard shooting outside the tent and looked at the man with the cataract, who was already herding his men outside, but from the sides, crawling under the tent flaps. Suddenly there were the sounds of explosions and a storm of firing. Inside the tent people screamed and nearly everyone hit the floor. Sandrine continued to work on the patient.

This is insane, she thought, working furiously and trying to ignore the bullets ripping holes in the sides of the tent. She wasn't a surgeon or an E.R. doctor. She had almost nothing to work with and the patient was showing early signs of hypoxia, the skin starting to tinge blue. In France she'd already have him on pure oxygen, be typing him for transfusion and preparing an occlusive dressing and intercostal chest drain.

She checked his vitals. Heartbeat erratic. Blood pressure too low. He's in trouble, she thought. And he needed fluids. Ghedi came with a couple of plastic sandwich bags and an IV. Nadifa brought adhesive tape, syringes, antibiotics, a surgical dressing, and a couple of hemostats. Van Zyl brought the vodka, which she had him pour into a bowl to use to sterilize the plastic bag and the hemostats.
Dieu
, she thought, feeling inside the chest wound for bleeding blood vessels. The wound wasn't bleeding too excessively, though the blood made it hard to see. She couldn't feel blood spurting; there was a chance no major blood vessel had been hit. The main thing was to seal the wound. The patient could survive on one lung, and with any luck, if no vessels were hit, the bleeding would coagulate on its own and the collapsed lung might partially reinflate.

She flushed the wound with saline, then put the plastic Baggie over it and taped it tightly on all sides to seal the wound, hopefully relieving the collapsed lung and minimizing infection. To make sure it was sealed, she secured the heavy dressing on top of it. Almost immediately the patient began to breathe more normally. She found the torn artery in the arm, put a hemostat on it, and started a saline IV in the other arm.

While she worked, the man with the cataract came back with a number of his men.

“He's breathing better,” he said. “Will he live?”

“There's a good chance, but there's still a lot to do.”

“You're not from Mogadishu, are you, mate?” Van Zyl said to him.

The man looked at Van Zyl and then at Sandrine.

“Who is this?” he asked her.

“God knows,” she said. “A South African. With the UN. Name's Van Zyl.”

“I
khara
in the milk of the mothers of the UN,” the man said. And to her: “I am Abdirahman Ali Abdullahi. From Puntland.”

“What do you do?” she asked, working.

“I am commander,” he said, grinning broadly.

“Of what?”

“The Puntland Coast Guard,” Ali said.

Van Zyl leaned close and whispered in her ear.

“Coast Guard, my bum. He's a bloody pirate.”

“What about al Qaeda?” she asked the pirate, Ali. At some point she would have to deal with infection. She needed a tissue culture and there was no lab. She had no way of knowing what kind of infection she might be dealing with and therefore no way to know which antibiotic to use. She only had two anyway: gentamicin and penicillin. The former would deal with most gram negative bacteria. Penicillin would handle staph and anaerobic bacteria, the more likely infections in this environment. She decided on penicillin, thinking it was as good as it was going to get.

“We chased them away.” He grinned, showing yellowed, broken teeth and gums green from
qat
. “My men went to the House of Flowers, but it's better if we leave. They will be back.”

“When?” she asked.

He looked at his watch, a Rolex, and she had a sudden absolute conviction it had been stolen.

“Now,” he said.

An hour later they were driving in a convoy of Land Rovers to the Old Port, some of them mounted with big .50 caliber machine guns on the roofs, manned by men sitting there, scanning the streets. Ali had kept his word. The Land Rovers were crammed with the children from the House of Flowers, Ali and his men, and as many of the wounded from the hospital tent as they could manage, bandaged arms and legs sticking out of the open windows.

“It's like the bloody Exodus from bloody Egypt,” Van Zyl said.

They boarded a rusty small coastal merchant ship with motorized skiffs tied to its sides and stern. As they went up the gangplank, she noticed men carrying RPGs and machine guns and a small cannon mounted near the bow of the ship.

“Pirate mothership,” Van Zyl muttered.

They might have been barefoot pirates, but they were efficient, she thought. Within minutes they cast off. She stood on the bridge with Ali and two of his men, Ghedi, Amina, and Van Zyl, watching the city recede as they headed out into the blue waters of the Indian Ocean.

“I'll go below. I need to take care of your brother,” she told Ali. “Thank you.”

He shoved a few
qat
leaves into his mouth and started chewing.

“Listen, doctor woman,” moving the wad to his cheek, “maybe when we get to Mombasa, I sell the children. Sell you too. Mombasa is a good market for human traffic. Good prices.”

“You won't,” she said, heading toward the ladder, trying to balance against the sway of the ship.

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because Allah is watching,” she said, pointing a finger at the sky. “You keep your word.”

“She's a lioness, this one,” Ali said to Van Zyl. “Maybe I take her for my fifth wife.”

“You can't,” she said, pausing on the ladder.

“Why not?”

“I'm already taken,” she said, the thought of the American, Nick, suddenly flashing in her mind. She wondered where in the name of God he was and suddenly realized that what she had just said was true.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Piranshahr,

Iran

“I
think you broke my jaw,” Ghanbari said, holding the reddened side of his face. They were sitting on the carpet facing each other, Scorpion holding the pistol on his thigh.

“No, but I might if I don't get the answers I want,” Scorpion said.

“I don't understand,” Ghanbari said, looking bewildered. “You told me yourself you killed Sadeghi. What's this about?”

“I didn't say Sadeghi. I said the Gardener.”

Ghanbari's eyes narrowed.

“Sadeghi is the Gardener. You said so yourself.”

“No, actually you did,” Scorpion said. “You and Zahra.”

“If you weren't sure he was the Gardener, why'd you kill him?” Ghanbari said, wincing as he spoke.

“Because I wasn't sure. But now I am.”

“What are you saying?”

“Sadeghi wasn't the Gardener. But you already knew that, didn't you, Muhammad
jan
?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about. What are you saying?”

“Bashe,”
Scorpion exhaled. All right. “We'll do it by the numbers. You sent Zahra to Sadeghi.”

“You wanted her to go too,” Ghanbari said hotly. He was breathing hard, and although the temperature was a little cool, he was sweating. The air in the farmhouse was still, particles of dust visible in a shaft of sunlight from a window.

“Yes, but for different reasons. When we were on the run, you brought us to the safe house. You equipped me. You gave me the motorbike and the Nakhir rifle. You sent Zahra to him knowing he wouldn't trust a word she said. You wanted to get rid of Sadeghi and you used Zahra and me to do it for you. She flushed him out; I did the killing.”

“And what did I get for it? Look at me! My life is ruined. I'm on the run. I'm probably going to die, and even if I don't, I'll be cut off from my family, my country. You've ruined me, you
madar ghahbeh
!”

“Or maybe not.”

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying, maybe your life isn't ruined after all.”

“How can you say that? Look at me! Look at where we are!” Gesturing at the farmhouse. “We're being hunted like animals. They're looking for us everywhere.”

“I doubt that, Muhammad
jan
. I think they know exactly where we are.”

“Are you insane?” Staring at him, wide-eyed. “How could they know?”

“Because you told them.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“Bashe.”
Scorpion gestured. “Not you. Your cell phone. They've been GPS-tracking you all along. That was no ordinary roadblock on the road to Chalus. There must have been thirty Revolutionary Guards military vehicles. They knew we were coming.”

“But you said yourself it was logical. The only road to Chalus and the Caspian coast,” Ghanbari sputtered.

“I lied. A sea or air-sea operation is the most complex thing possible and requires full communications and setup; something they assumed we didn't have because they've got every piece of COMINT—communications intelligence—blanketed over the country, especially Tehran. Besides, there are easier ways to get out of Iran. Like I said, they knew we were coming.”

“All right, so they figured out how to track my phone. How can you blame me?”

“No good. We bought the new cell phones together, remember? I programmed yours myself. You've had it less than twenty-four hours. There's no way they could've gotten the number to GPS-track unless you gave it to them.”

Ghanbari straightened.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“Sure you do. Scale made a cell phone call from Begur, Spain, to you. Zahra thought she was helping you, her sister-in-law's brother, by deflecting the identity of the Gardener to Sadeghi, which was what you had planned all along because the rivalry between you two had gotten so intense only one of you could survive.” Scorpion took a deep breath. “You know, I think it's the hypocrisy that gets to me the most. All that moral outrage when I killed those two Basiji. But you,” he said accusingly. “Knowing what Sadeghi would do, you sent her to her death without turning a hair, you
lashy
piece of shit.”

The two men glared at each other in silence.

“What makes you say Sadeghi wasn't the Gardener?” Ghanbari said, never taking his eyes off Scorpion.

“Sherlock Holmes.”

“What?”

“In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the key clue was a dog that didn't bark.”

“A dog? What are you talking about?”

“The clue was that the dog didn't bark but should have. It's the negative; a thing that should have happened, but didn't. Sadeghi said a number of things. But what was curious was not what he knew, but what he didn't know.”

“This is absurd,” Ghanbari said, looking around as if for a way out.

“Don't even think about it,” Scorpion said. “And hand me your cell phone. Carefully,” aiming the pistol at Ghanbari's face. Ghanbari reached into his pocket and after a second's hesitation tossed his cell phone on the carpet in front of Scorpion. “Where were we?” Scorpion continued. “Right. The dog that didn't bark. Or in this case, the curious fact of
Scorpion
.”

Ghanbari's eyes behind his glasses revealed nothing. Scorpion couldn't tell if he'd ever heard of Scorpion before.

“What's that?”

“You've never heard the term ‘Scorpion,'
aqrab
, before?”

“I told you. I don't know what you're talking about,” Ghanbari said, rubbing the side of his face where he'd been hit. It was turning red and beginning to swell on that side like the mumps.

“Just before he died, Sadeghi seemed to be suggesting that everything that happened, the attack on Bern, the crisis, everything, had to do with this Scorpion. You wouldn't know anything about that either, Muhammad
jan
?”

Ghanbari threw up his hands.

“I don't know anything about this ‘Scorpion.' I think you're making it all up.”

“But that's not the dog that didn't bark.”

“Will you please either explain or shut up!” Ghanbari snapped.

“He didn't know what Scorpion looked like.”

“Who? Sadeghi? Why should he?”

“Because the Gardener would have,” Scorpion said, thinking he should have realized it at the time. The Olympic Torch software had changed it for everyone else, but the Gardener had seen the original Kilbane file photo from Bern. The real Gardener would have known that Laurent Westermann was Scorpion. But Sadeghi didn't.

“This is a total fantasy. You can't prove anything,” Ghanbari said. He started to get up. “I'm leaving.”

“I don't have to prove anything,” Scorpion said, aiming. “And move another centimeter and I will shoot you.”

Ghanbari sat back on his heels. “Maybe you're Scorpion,” he said. “We already know you're CIA.”

“Maybe I am,” Scorpion said, a little tingle of electricity going through him at hearing it actually said. “In any case, this is all beside the point. Why do you suppose I left you alone and went for petrol on my own this morning?”

“So you could make your own arrangements on the escape,” Ghanbari said.

Scorpion smiled. “True, but that's not why. It was to give you a chance to make a call without me being there.”

For the first time Ghanbari looked disconcerted.

“You mean it was a trap?”

Scorpion stood up.

“I think we should have that
chai
now. We'll know very soon, one way or the other. If PJAK shows up, I'm delusional and I'll apologize to you and do everything I can to make it up to you. If the Kta'eb Hezbollah or the Revolutionary Guards show up, you're the Gardener.”

Keeping the gun on Ghanbari, they made tea and sat down again on the carpet in the main room. He watched Ghanbari sip the tea, his hands trembling. While they waited, Scorpion decided that if it went bad, he wouldn't be taken alive. If necessary, he would use the gun on himself. He caught himself straining to hear sounds outside. From nearby, perhaps under the eaves of the roof, he heard the sound of a bird and thought about the bird in Laleh Park. Then the bird went silent. They waited.

He could hear Ghanbari breathe. The sound of his own heartbeat. Then there was a rumble. An undefined noise, far off, a sudden rush of sound.

The house began to tremble. The liquid in the tea glasses rippled and danced. The glasses began to rattle and fell over, spilling on the carpet. The house started shaking as if in an earthquake. Then the unmistakable
whop-whop
of a helicopter overhead, then multiple helicopters and the house began to shake even more. Through the windows they could see military vehicles racing on the road toward them, one after the other, kicking up storms of dust. Outside the window they saw one helicopter, then two, landing in the fields. The minute they touched down, Revolutionary Guards in camouflage uniforms piled out and began running toward the farmhouse, assault rifles ready to fire. There was so much noise and dust it was getting hard to see outside the windows.

With his free hand Scorpion tossed the cell phone to Ghanbari.

“If you want to live another minute, call Scale,” he shouted over the noise.