The First Casualty (27 page)

67

36° 45' 47” N, 3° 3' 2” E

Algeria

42,000 feet

Twenty-Six Minutes Later

Colonel Hasty had never flown in Algerian airspace but he had heard the stories: Strict adherence to ATS routes to avoid endless military airspace, no matter how circuitous, constant fuel consuming changes of altitude and controllers whose English was unintelligible despite the fact the language was the lingua franca of aviation.

That was why he was pleasantly surprised to hear a very American voice in his head phones. “Air Force One, descend to and maintain flight level three-one-oh. You are cleared Cairo International direct. Stay with me. Oh yeah, give my best to your chief passenger.”

Though non-aviation-related chatter was discouraged on the airways, the controller had started it, and rank does, in fact, have its privileges, and Air Force One ranks right on up there.

“Uh, I'll do that, Algiers Center. You sound like an American. Midwest, if I'm guessing right.”

“Indianapolis originally. Worked Atlanta Center till '82. Listened to the damn union and went on strike in '81. Got fired and been here ever since. Not half bad if you don't mind sand, heat, and couscous with every meal. Good news is there's no retirement age here, not if you have any aviation experience. Sure would like to go home, though. Maybe you could put a word in with your boss.”

Hasty had come across the world's most garrulous air-traffic controller. Surprising he hadn't been fired before defying a presidential order to return to work.

As is so often the case for people who work closely together over a long period of time, Patterson knew what his superior was thinking. “Maybe the guy just gets long-winded when he has a chance to chat with a fellow American. '82? That's before my time.”

“Maybe so but just our luck to run into an air traffic controller who likes to talk.”

Had Hasty any idea of what had happened just more than thirty minutes ago in arguably the most obscure place on Earth, he might have had a different concept of luck.

68

Timbuktu, Mali

With one hand Jason held on to the side of the truck bed while he picked up the Barrett with the other. He had no intent to kill or injure the men behind. They were simply doing a thankless job of trying to keep order in a lawless place in a fourth-world country. On the other hand, he had no intent of spending time in some hellhole of a jail while explaining the destruction of part of the mosque as well as the deaths of several of its occupants, either.

Kneeling, he rested the Barrett's barrel on the truck's tailgate. The precision sight was worse than useless in the bouncing truck. He removed it, clumsily dropping one of the mounting screws. No matter. If he failed in what he was about to attempt he would have to ditch the incriminating rifle anyway. He used his knees to wedge himself into a corner of the bed while one hand held the rifle and the other searched the pockets of his cargo pants until he found what he was looking for. Then he spread out in a position as close to the prone as possible.

Although probably not doing forty miles an hour, the rutted road made the ride bone jarring. Without the scope, there was no rear sight, only the circled post sight well aft of the muzzle. With the following vehicle bouncing above and under his aiming point, a single sight would do. This was an imperative shot, but one that did not require great precision.

Patiently, Jason waited. The front of the truck behind jounced into the air as it hit a rock, something, then dove as its front wheels dug into a pothole or rut. The process repeated itself irregularly. As the bumper came up again, he fired.

For an instant, he thought he had missed. He was already jacking another round into the chamber when the truck disappeared behind a geyser of steam. A .50-caliber armor-piercing bullet into the already overheated radiator will do it every time.

He made his way forward, careful to hold on and tapped on the glass. The response was a thumbs-up from Andrews.

Jason's smile faded as he put down the rifle and knelt beside Emphani. The man's eyes were closed and the slight rise and fall of the chest bespoke shallow breathing. Jason removed, replaced, and tightened the tourniquet, more because it was the only thing he could do than because he thought it would do any good. As if to mock him, the blood seemed to pump even faster than before. Emphani's lips moved slightly although his eyes remained closed. Perhaps a final prayer to Allah before he went to meet the Prophet in person?

The roar of aircraft engines overhead made Jason look up to see a venerable old DeHavilland Twin Otter descending. To Jason's right was the two-story brown terminal building, its sole decoration fading red letters across the front proclaiming
a
é
roport de tombouctou
. There was no parking lot per se, but a gaggle of vintage Japanese trucks with varying degrees of body damage was double-parked in front.

Past the terminal, an olive drab Bell UH-1 “Heuy” helicopter sat among rusting remnants of general aviation aircraft. Only the slowly rotating blades and the characteristic
wump-wump
of its jet turbine engine indicated it was not a part of the aviation graveyard. Jason knew the identification numbers along the rear fuselage probably belonged to some long dead plane, possibly one in Vietnam where the model had starred on nightly newscasts into the 1970s.

As Viktor drove the Toyota closer to the left side, the overhead blades whined into a blur. Two men in flying helmets and uniforms without insignia appeared at the open cargo door. They placed what looked like a Browning .50-caliber machine gun into a mount and fed in an ammunition belt.

Viktor screeched to a stop within a few feet of the open door. He and Andrews were on the ground almost before the truck's engine died and began ticking with heat. The two men lowered the truck's tailgate. Viktor climbed in and slid his hands under Emphani's limp arms, started to lift, stopped, and looked at Jason, shaking his head.

Emphani was gone.

Jason jumped to the ground and took each of Emphani's boots in a hand before snapping at Viktor. “Go ahead and lift. We'll put him aboard. We don't leave our dead.”

Viktor's face showed that the Russian Spetsnaz did not share that tradition with the U.S. Army's Delta Force. Nonetheless, he did as Jason requested. As gently as possible, Jason and Viktor carried Emphani to the helicopter where the two men inside, faceless behind the shields of their helmets, lifted him aboard.

As Andrews, Viktor, and Jason threw their backpacks aboard and climbed in after them, the intensity of the whine from the rotor blades increased, the aircraft pitched forward, and the ground dropped away. There was no sound of a radio from the headphones inside the helmet one of the crewmen offered Jason. He guessed the 'copter was taking off without clearance from the tower. And why not? The Twin Otter was probably the sole traffic in the area for the next hour or so, and Mali had no air force to enforce order on departures.

But the country did have an army of militia, four or five of whom were gathered on the tarmac in front of the terminal with raised rifles. Although altitude and rotor noise prevented the sound of gunfire from being audible, Jason could hear the occasional rattle of small arms piercing the helicopter's aluminum skin. The odds were the Huey would be out of range before a lucky shot hit an engine, fuel line, or rotor blade.

The ship's crew elected not to take the chance. The .50 caliber rattled, sending a whiff of cordite throughout the cabin. Below, the tarmac erupted in a line of shattered pavement only ten feet or so from the men in uniform, sending them scattering for cover.

At what Jason guessed was about 2,500 feet, the Huey leveled off. Below, the silver ribbon of the silted up Niger River sparkled in the morning sun before the ship changed course. Now the scenery below was uniform, the trackless sands of the world's largest desert.

He shifted his view from the open cargo door to the Chief and Viktor. Both were staring straight ahead, their thoughts no doubt on what had happened, the mission completed, though at the cost of a comrade. Jason knew the feeling well. The adrenaline drained away, leaving an empty shell of weariness. The humor and bravado of the pre-mission minutes were replaced by quiet reflection.

Jason was not looking forward to delivering Emphani's body to his wife and daughter. He could, of course, simply have the remains shipped, but that was the coward's way, a violation of the sacred duty comrades in this line of endeavor owed one another. At the same time, he would turn over Emphani's share of Momma's largess, more money than he guessed the family had ever seen.

Then there was Maria, questions he would find difficult to evade, the issue of where to live next. He sighed. Sometimes combat was easier than the peaceful life. Before he knew what was happening, he fell into a light sleep. Had Andrews or Viktor noticed, they might have wondered why he was smiling. There was no way to know he was dreaming of a large, shaggy dog and a very fat cat with half an ear missing.

69

Eden Rock

St. Barts, French West Indies

The Following December

7:47 p.m. Local Time

The Eden Rock is just that: a rock jutting out into the small bay forming the beach at Saint-Jean. The promontory offers a splendid view from hotel's restaurant, an establishment that thinks nothing of charging the euro equivalent of thirty dollars for a hamburger of stringy, European-style beef. A side is, of course, extra, perhaps because here they are
pommes frites
rather than fries. That is just lunch.

Lobster, the clawless Caribbean variety, is priced by the gram so that a single tail can easily exceed a hundred dollars, which, as Jason had observed during his first visit, was chicken feed compared the price of rooms with a view of the beach. Those overlooking the parking lot or the very busy and noisy road for only slightly less.

Jason had a strong preference for the superior views and closer-to-reasonable prices at the nearby Village Saint-Jean and the quality of food served at Eddy's in Gustavia. But his preference was not what had brought him, Maria, and their just-arrived guest to the Eden Rock. At Maria's insistence, he had politely declined Viktor's invitation to stay at the Russian compound at Gouverneur. She had taken an instant dislike to the man for any number of reasons she enunciated except the real one. He treated women, particularly his wife, rudely; he drank far too much; and was way too loud for her comfort. Jason suspected none of those things really mattered to her. What did was that, with that intuition peculiar to the female sex, she somehow detected the smell of violence and death on him, a stench she only occasionally noted on Jason.

She had deemed the hotel “more appropriate.” It was a phrase Jason had learned to simply accept since questioning it usually induced an argument he could neither understand nor win.

They sat at a table illuminated by candles, clothed in white linen, and set for three placed on a niche carved into the rock below the main dining room, watching luminescent waves fill and empty the crescent of the beach. Faint music floated from one of the many seaside bistros, a discordant rap beat as out of place on a French island as a polar bear in a jungle. Jason plucked the slice of lime from his Havana Club and tonic, squeezed it, and dropped it back into the tall glass.

Maria held up a pale glass of Pinot Grigio, sloshed it around, and took a tentative sip as she gazed around. “Simply lovely.”

“Very romantic,” Jason added, knowing this was small talk, a prelude to the interrogation that would follow.

He was never sure whether Maria's total intolerance of violence of any kind blinded her to the truth or made her unable to accept it. Just as she had brushed off his explanation of the injury to his leg, she had dismissed Timbuktu as the site of his last adventure.

“Timbuktu?” she had sniffed. “Why do you choose such outrageous stories? First, you are attacked by a woman with a knife on a train. Now you expect me to believe you were looking for something in a place I am not sure even exists. Isn't this Timbuktu, what is the word, the one that means the same thing?”

“Synonym?”

“Yes, a synonym for some place that does not exist?”

“I think that would be ‘Shangri-La.' ”

“Anyway, if you do not want to discuss what you have done, just say so.”

He had, many times, uniformly resulting in being presented with her back in bed, if, in fact, she deigned to share the covers with him at all. A stony silence would rule their waking hours until one or the other found an excuse to be gone from the common residence for a few days.

And the same storm clouds were gathering again.

“Good evening, everyone.”

Jason looked up to see Margot, her café-au-lait skin golden in the candlelight. She wore a long, diaphanous dress, more illusion than fabric, that was the rage among young women that season, as defined by the displays in the windows of Chanel, Prada, Christian Dior, and the other mavens of fashion that lined Gustavia's main street. Jason had noted that when it came to beach dress, the prices varied in inverse ration to the amount of fabric employed.

A white-jacketed waiter appeared just as Margot sat.

“I will have the same,” she said, nodding toward Maria.

Jason chose not to comment on the anomaly of a young French woman drinking a very un-French Italian wine. Instead, he asked, “Did you have a pleasant flight?”

She rewarded him with a dazzling smile. “Other than a being a little late leaving Boston, yes.” She knitted her eyebrows in a mock scowl. “But you should not have paid the extra for first class.”

“You're worth it,” Jason said.

The smile returned “Perhaps, but all the college boys are in coach.”

A real sense of intrinsic versus extrinsic value.

“So, how do you like Harvard?” Maria asked.

“I love it. I cannot thank Monsieur Peters enough.”

“That's Jason,” Jason said. “All I did was pull a string or two.”

Actually, a single string: Momma. He had not asked, nor did he dare speculate, what had persuaded the dean of admissions to accept a seventeen-year-old graduate of a French parochial school over the best and brightest the United States had to offer. Knowing Momma's lack of subtlety, it had possibly involved innuendos questioning his (or her) personal safety as well as that of the family, including the dog. Ah well, if the woman had no qualms about tricking Jason into risking his life, a metaphoric arm twisting of an academic would hardly trouble whatever semblance of conscious she had.

After all, she owed Jason far beyond the money. Seeing the joy on Margot's face every time she mentioned her school made him feel well compensated.

“And your mother is OK with you spending part of your holiday with us?” Maria wanted to know.

Her wine arrived and she waited for the waiter to depart before answering. “Mama is. With the money Papa left, she has purchased the restaurant building where we also live and the one next door. She is busy combining the two. It will be the grandest bistro on Marseille's waterfront. She is happy to have me out of the way for a few days.”

The conversation turned to matters feminine: the best beaches as defined as to how many college-age boys might be there, when the shops downtown opened tomorrow.

Jason tuned it out. With a smidgen of luck, Maria would be so occupied with her new young friend, she would forget whatever he had been doing in Timbuktu, if, in fact, he had really been there.

Make that a couple of smidgens.