The Night Ranger (31 page)

“Yes. He asked you to give him at least one minute. He said he’s going to move a bunch of guys up after he meets with Awaale.”

“He say how? Because I can’t believe Red Team would allow that.”

“I didn’t ask.” But Wells realized that Shafer was right. He didn’t know how Wizard would get armed men forward when he was more or less surrendering to Awaale.

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll see it if it happens. So we’ll give him that minute, but he’s got to know that the bomb will be most effective when the other side’s all clustered up.”

“He knows.”

“And you know if things set up good, we’re not going to give you a heads-up. Be ready.”

“Fantastic tip. Where would I be without you?”

“I know why you’ve made it this long, John. You’re too big a prick to die.”

“Roger that. Over and out.”

Wells wondered if he ought to tell Wizard that they were headed for twelve technicals. But the Somali would go ahead even if Wells told him they were facing an entire mechanized brigade. He’d roused his men and he couldn’t back down.

Wells would just have to seize his chance when it came. And remember that his responsibility was to the hostages, not the White Men.

—

In the Rover ahead, Wizard made his own calculation. He’d promised to let the wazungu go home to their families. He would keep his word. He had no choice, anyway. Too many people wanted them. But the man who’d come for them was a soldier. He’d come on his own, even offered to trade himself for the three.

Wizard decided to take the man up on that offer. After he destroyed the Ditas, he would set the others free. But not this one. A single hostage would be easy to hold. Wizard wouldn’t make the same mistakes as he’d made before. Handcuffs and hoods for him. Wizard would sell him back after a few weeks. Maybe not for a million dollars. But even a hundred thousand would be enough with the Ditas gone. His men would see Wizard had destroyed their enemies and found another mzungu to ransom. Wizard relaxed in his seat, hands loose on the wheel, eyes smiling behind his sunglasses. This new mzungu had arrived at just the right moment. Wizard didn’t feel a twinge of remorse for betraying him. The man had killed four of his soldiers.

The sun rose, filling him with its power. Wizard realized he’d been a fool to lose his confidence. How could he have imagined his magic would leave him?

28

L
ANGLEY

S
hafer and Duto stood side by side behind Tomaso’s workstation, watching the convoy chug northeast through the empty plains. Wizard and Awaale had set their meeting at an abandoned watering hole ten kilometers from Wizard’s camp. They were less than three kilometers apart, close enough that they would soon glimpse each other through the scrub that covered the pancake-flat land. Tomaso dialed back the Reaper’s main camera to pick up both the White Men and the Ditas simultaneously.

“The God view.”

“The Old Testament God,” Shafer said. “All-seeing and vengeful and loaded for bear.”

“Just wish we had a little more ammo.”

“A B-52’s worth, yeah.”

“What’s a B-52?”

This kid. “Ever heard of the Cold War? Dr. Strangelove—”

Tomaso grinned. “Messing with you, Ellis. Course I know what a B-52 is.”

“I hope you choke on your hair.”

But the joke was on them both. Maybe they didn’t need an eight-engine bomber, but they could have used an A-10 with a full load of depleted uranium shells. The gap between the two militias was painful to see.

The Dita Boys had showed up at the meeting site a few minutes before Wells called Shafer from the convoy. As Shafer had warned Wells, the Ditas had come with a dozen technicals, enough to keep four in reserve in case Wizard tried to circle and attack from the rear. Each technical was mounted with a 12.7-millimeter NSV machine gun draped with belts of copper-jacketed ammunition. Shafer recognized the NSVs immediately. They had been the Red Army’s frontline machine gun during the seventies and eighties. They were sleek, nasty weapons that fired thirteen rounds a second. They were easily lethal at five hundred meters, and capable of serious damage at three times that distance. A skilled NSV gunner could take out a light plane.

The Ditas didn’t bother with unarmed pickups, either. Their soldiers traveled in three open-topped five-ton trucks, the same troop transport that real armies used. At this distance, even their uniforms were convincing, the mismatched jumble of their camouflage blurring together.

Meanwhile, the White Men looked like a bunch of recruits on their way to their first day of basic training. Or worse, kids headed for camp, with those ridiculous Range Rovers that belonged in a Connecticut suburb.
Coach said if we were good we could ride with him after practice.
Their lone technical was a couple hundred meters ahead. The rest of the convoy was bunched close, running single file down the track, spinning up mud.

Shafer had worried that Awaale might set an ambush near Wizard’s camp, trapping the White Men before the meeting. Instead, the Ditas hadn’t even bothered with scouts. Shafer could see why. No doubt Awaale saw the meeting itself as all the trap he needed. The technicals gave the Ditas an overwhelming advantage. Once Wizard brought his men within firing distance of those machine guns, Awaale would decide whether they left.

Whether the White Men survived this battle or not was irrelevant to Shafer. The alliance between Wells and Wizard didn’t even deserve to be called a marriage of convenience. It was more like a one-night stand. But if the White Men were overrun straightaway, Wells and the hostages would be captured. Wells might be killed on the spot. For them to have any chance at all of getting away clean, Tomaso would have to land the Reaper’s five-hundred-pounder perfectly and Wizard would have to move instantly in the chaos that followed.

—

Duto tapped Shafer’s shoulder. “Come.” Duto had been furious since Wells asked for help, confirming what they all knew anyway, that the White Men were badly outgunned.

“This is not the time.”

“Now, Ellis.” Duto kept his voice even, walked out loose and easy, like he was inviting Shafer for lunch. But once they were outside the operations center he grabbed Shafer’s arm and pulled him back to the ice-cold conference room.

“You should have found a way to slow this down, given us time to bring in more drones.”

Like Duto hadn’t signed off, too, making his own selfish calculations.

“You keep forgetting, Vinny. That guy on the ground, Awaale, gets a vote, too. And he wasn’t waiting on us.”

“If Wells hadn’t been so in love with doing this himself, we could have put guys in the air hours ago.”

“Funny. I didn’t see John in your office with a gun to your head to stop you from telling the Pentagon about this. Anyway, what are you worried about? You made the call your eleven-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer told you to make. You’re protected.”

“Not the point.”

They were standing close now, and Shafer took some small pleasure in seeing the row of tiny pimples high on Duto’s forehead. Duto was appearing regularly on CNN and Fox News and Sunday-morning talk shows, raising his profile for his Senate campaign, and he had the bad skin that came with television makeup. Duto could have his teeth brightened until they were supernova white and wear two-thousand-dollar suits, but he’d never be handsome. Shafer knew he shouldn’t care, he was hardly the best-looking guy in the room himself, but he took some small pleasure in Duto’s ugliness. “That’s always the point with you,” Shafer said.

“You let him gamble with these hostages.”

“You’re so upset, I almost forgot it’s his ass on the line out there and not yours, Vinny.”

“We put ourselves in this corner for no reason. Because you couldn’t talk him down last night. He ran all over you. Like he always does.”

“We both know he’s earned the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you should save the blame game until we see whether he pulls it out.”

“This crush you have on him—”

Shafer felt his cheeks sting like Duto had slapped him. “Loyalty. A word I know you can’t imagine.” He brushed past Duto. “If it’s all the same to you, we should get back, see what’s going on over there before you write John’s obituary.”

—

Back at Tomaso’s workstation, they watched in silence as the convoy edged closer. On screen, the technical turned off the track, rolled through a pool of rainwater. The rest of the convoy followed. Fifteen hundred meters from Awaale, the lead three pickups spread out and rode side by side by side, the Rovers single file behind them.

Shafer couldn’t tell if Wizard had a tactical reason for the change or if he simply hoped the T shape might make his force seem larger than it was. Either way, if the White Men tried to charge the Ditas in open pickups, the technicals would tear them apart before they got close, as Wizard surely knew.

Tomaso’s hands never stopped moving, adjusting the cameras, making sure the Reaper was flying smoothly despite the weight imbalance that came from having a five-hundred-pound bomb on one wing and not on the other. He looked up at Shafer.

“The air looks good. Unless you object, I’m going to go brain, fly autopilot on a two-click hold around the Red Six. That way I can focus on the payload. But we’ll only have partial visuals on the friendlies.”

“In English,” Duto said.

Tomaso’s eyes slid to Duto, like he’d just remembered who his real boss was. “We have smooth air right now, nothing the software can’t handle. I want to set the Reaper on autopilot to circle at a two-kilometer radius around those four technicals in the middle. We’re assuming that’s where the enemy commander is—”

“Awaale—” Shafer said.

“Awaale is. That way I don’t have to worry about keeping the Reaper in the air, I can focus on putting the GBU and the Hellfires on target. Only downside is that we may lose visual contact with the friendlies.”

“Sounds fine,” Shafer said.

“Great,” Tomaso said. But his eyes stayed on Duto until the DCI nodded approval.

29

L
OWER
J
UBA
R
EGION

T
he convoy emerged from the last of the scrub and the White Men fell silent.

Even from five hundred meters away, the technicals loomed over the empty plain. They were Toyota Hilux pickups, crew cabs with wide tires and roll bars, built to be indestructible on the world’s worst roads. The White Men drove them, too. But each of the Dita Hiluxes carried a machine gun, its long steel barrel poking over the top of the cab. Three men stood in each pickup, one to aim and shoot, one to handle the ammunition, and one in reserve.

If Wizard had commanded the Ditas he would have turned around half the Hiluxes so that the guns could shoot out the open bed of the pickups for maximum visibility and flexibility. But the Ditas didn’t seem worried. Wizard couldn’t hear them, but their hands told the tale, loose and relaxed. Awaale stood in the center, a head taller than most of his men.

Wizard wasn’t surprised. In truth, this meeting would have been suicide for the White Men if not for the drone. Even with it he would need every bit of magic in the world. He slipped the Range Rover behind his pickups to give it a few extra seconds of cover if the Ditas opened up. When the Ditas opened up.

The hostages had been silent during the drive. Now Gwen leaned forward.

“Be careful,” she said.

Just then Wizard knew he would never see her again, whatever happened in the next few minutes. He’d be gone, or she would. He missed her already, her and her magic, the magic of her blond hair and blue eyes, the magic she’d won just by being born in America. In his pocket he found a plastic bag that held a sheaf of miraa. The bag was mostly empty, the miraa growing stale. He had nothing else to give her. Nothing else she could possibly want. He handed it to her. She seemed to understand as well as he did.

“You tell everyone at home about Wizard.”

“You know it.”

He popped his sunglasses back on, stepped out of the Rover. His men leaned against their pickups, their sad naked Hiluxes. Their feet sank into the mud as they snuck glimpses at the technicals.

Wizard faced his soldiers one final time. “What I told you before, it’s still true. You acting like these Ditas got tanks. Look over there.”

One by one, the White Men lifted their heads.

“You see tanks? I don’t see no tanks. I see technicals. And I see a bunch of boys never could be White Men. Stupid boys. Weak boys. We the ones with the secret. This all gonna look different soon. So different.” He turned to the Donkeys. “You know what you supposed to do, when you supposed to do it.”

“When you wave,” Donkey Junior said.

“Right. Keep it tight and keep coming. Everyone else, when the shooting start, remember, it the Ditas gonna be scared. Not us. They not expecting this. Done and done.”

“Done and done,” his men said without enthusiasm. Wizard knew that if the bomb didn’t hit quickly, many of them would lose their courage and run. Without further delay he took off his pistol and held it high where Awaale could see and handed it to Donkey Junior. “You ready to give this back to me,” Wizard said.

He started the long walk toward Awaale. The sun stared into his eyes, but he stared straight back, wouldn’t blink even as his eyes sprouted tears behind his sunglasses.

Awaale was taller than Wizard remembered. He stood with arms folded across his chest like he was posing for a statue of himself. Leader of the Dita Boys, Savior of the Somali Nation. He wore a pistol on his hip and the shiniest mirrored sunglasses Wizard had ever seen. He had a new gold bracelet, too, thick and shiny. His men stood close, their AKs trained on Wizard, their lips full of miraa.

“Awaale.” Wizard extended a hand. Awaale looked at it like it was made of dung. “Shake my hand, Awaale. Man to man.”

Back at camp, the American had told him to touch Awaale, nod while he did.
Then the people watching with the drone will know they have the right target,
he said.
They can see that from the drone,
Wizard said.
They can see that. They can see everything.

Awaale’s lips formed the briefest of smiles, as if to underscore the meaninglessness of the shake to his soldiers.
We’re making peace with a man who’s
already dead,
the smile said. He extended his big right arm. Wizard clasped Awaale’s hand in both of his and nodded to the sky.

“So these you new boys,” Wizard said. “They good for anything but eating?”

“You find out soon enough. You got the wazungu in your Rover?”

“Yes.”

“You tell them they coming with me?”

“Two conditions first.”

Awaale shook his head. All around them men snapped off safeties.

Showy fool. You think you in control, but you backwards as ever. Death up there in the sky, coming for you.

“Just hear me before you say no,” Wizard said.

“Quickly, then.”

“First, you take men of mine who want to come with you.”

“Soldiers leaving you, Wizard? White Men quitting you?”

“Traitors begging to join your rabble. I don’t want them anyway.”

“How many?”

“Twenty, twenty-five maybe.”

Awaale hesitated. Then he seemed to see that Wizard was giving him a cheap way to build his force and that he could always shoot the ones he didn’t like. He grinned. Wizard knew he’d taken the bait. “All right. I show your men mercy, even though they stupid enough to let you lead them.” His smile broadened. “But not you, Little Chicken. I won’t have you.”

“You think I gonna play your slave. Second, you give everyone else one day to break camp, leave the province. We never fight again. You win. Just let us live.”

“You giving up.”

Wizard nodded like it hurt him too much to say yes.

“Say it, then.”

“Yeah. We giving up. I giving up.”

“And I get all you vehicles. You be walking out of this province.”

“Take the pickups.”

“Think I want them pickups? The Rovers.”

“No.”

“Come to me begging for your life and then say no. All balls and no brains, Little Chicken, only you no balls, either.”

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“All right, you get the Rovers, too. We walk back to camp, take our stuff, leave.”

“Go to Dadaab with the rest of the women.”

Wizard shrugged.

“You know what, Wizard? I in a good mood this morning, now that you roaches not bothering me no more. Gonna let you live. Can’t take anything, though. Can’t go back to camp. Soon as you leave this field you gone to Kenya.”

For a moment, Wizard wondered whether Awaale might mean to keep his word, let him live. Then Awaale looked over his shoulder and nodded at one of his men and Wizard knew he was lying. He and the White Men who didn’t defect would die within the hour.

“Thank you, Awaale. Thank you.” The words stuck in Wizard’s throat. Even knowing they were a lie, he could barely force them out. “I tell my men who want to come to you, split from the rest of us, walk over.”

“No tricks. Or we shoot all everyone.”

“I swear, no tricks. You too much for me.”

“And the wazungu?”

“Told you. In the Rover. You going to hurt them? Sell them to Shabaab?”

“No business of yours, Chicken. They mine now. Like them Rovers.”

“I tell you they much much trouble.”

“Maybe for you.” Awaale patted Wizard on the cheek. “What happened to that magic, Wizard?”

Wizard was thankful he’d left his weapon with Donkey Junior. He had the desperate urge to put it to the big man’s chest, squeeze the trigger. He knew the drone would do its work so soon. Still his fingers itched for the pistol. A bomb was too sudden, too quick. Wizard wanted Awaale to know that Wizard had killed him.

“Go on,” Awaale said. “Wasted too much time. Send me my wazungu.”

Wizard turned, walked back across the field. “Everyone who want to go with Awaale, his no-teeth Ditas, walk now,” he yelled.

Men stepped forward, until two dozen walked across the field toward him, heads down in defeat. The Donkeys led the way. If Awaale had known the White Men, he might have wondered why Wizard’s most loyal soldiers were defecting en masse. For his part, Wizard screamed abuse at his men.

“Traitors! Wizard protected you, looked out for you, now you quit me! Awaale gon’ shoot all you fools!”

Step. Step. Step. Mud caked the bottom of his pants. He wondered if even now Awaale was getting ready to open fire. He didn’t look back. Nothing to do but play the role of the defeated commander. He hoped the Americans would wait long enough to let his men get close but still drop the bomb while they were outside the blast area. He trudged through the mud, shoulders slumped.

Halfway across the field when he passed the first of his men. Of course, it was brave, stupid Donkey Junior. “Junior,” Wizard said quietly.

“Wizard. It okay?”

“Keep walking.”

Then Wizard heard the sound he’d been waiting for, the whistle that meant the drone had let loose its magic egg—

He turned and grabbed Junior and pulled him down and—