The Secret Soldier (9 page)

“Something like that.”

“How you gonna find him?”

“We got to you, didn’t we?”

Ridge closed his eyes.

 

 

GAFFAN TOPPED OFF THE
van’s tank at a twenty-four-hour gas station while Wells bought a gallon of water from the clerk behind the bulletproof counter. Back in the van, he tried to clean Ridge’s wounds, but Ridge shrank from him.

They rolled off. A few minutes later, Ridge coughed uncontrollably. He was breathing shallowly, almost panting, his forehead slick with sweat. “I’m not playing, man. I think my skull’s fractured. You gotta stop.” Wells touched Ridge’s scalp. Ridge yelped, and Wells felt the break under the skin. His fingers came back red and sticky.

“Get through this village,” Gaffan said. Five minutes later, he pulled over. The van was on a hillside, the nearest building a concrete church a half-mile away. The sweet, heavy stink of marijuana wafted from the fields across the road. Wells helped Ridge out of the van. Ridge leaned over and vomited, a thin stream. “I need a hospital.”

“When we’re done. You’ll live.” Wells gave him some water and a washcloth to clean his face, and bundled him back in the van.

 

 

THEY ARRIVED IN MONTEGO
as the sun rose. “What now?” Gaffan said.

“We can’t leave him, and we don’t have much time. We’re going in the front door.”

“The badges.”

At the hotel, Wells waited in the van while Gaffan showered and shaved. When Gaffan was done, they switched places. Wells stank fiercely, his sweat mixed with Ridge’s fear. He rinsed himself under the lukewarm shower, and with the help of Visine and a shave, he looked halfway human. Though Ridge might have called that assessment generous.

Wells pulled on the suit that he’d hidden in the bathroom vent. It was lightweight and blue and slightly tight around his shoulders. And it came with a DEA badge and identification card. The DEA operated fairly freely in Jamaica—at least when it was chasing traffickers who didn’t have government protection.

Wells looked around for anything that could identify him. He was on a fake passport and had prepaid for the room. Most likely, the hotel wouldn’t even notice he and Gaffan were gone for at least a day. Wells tucked his pistol into his shoulder holster, put a do-not-disturb tag on the doorknob, left the room behind.

As Gaffan drove them toward Unity Hall, Wells knelt beside Ridge, lifted the duct tape. “Another couple hours and you’re done.”

“I don’t get it.” Ridge’s mouth was dry, and Wells could hardly hear him. “You guys aren’t DEA. DEA doesn’t play like this.”

“We’re not DEA.”

“You gonna kill this guy?”

“That’s up to him.”

“Either way, I’m dead, man.”

“We’ll get you to a hospital.”

“Not what I mean. Soon as I get out, Sugar will put this mess on me.”

“You want to get back to the States, I can help. But I’ll have to make sure that the DEA knows who you are when we get back to Miami.”

Ridge shook his head. Then winced.

“Then you’re going to have to handle it yourself.”

“I don’t need any morality lessons from you,” Ridge said. “I sell people a good time. Nothing more or less. Pot, coke, they’re just like booze. Safer, probably. I don’t force my stuff on anybody, and I don’t hurt anybody. Unlike you.”

Wells didn’t argue, just slapped the duct tape back on Ridge’s mouth. Though maybe the guy had a point. In his years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Wells had seen a dozen men executed for dealing or using drugs. Mostly heroin, occasionally hashish. The youngest was a boy, no more than fourteen, only the slightest peach fuzz on his chin. He’d been caught smoking heroin by the Talib religious police. His family lacked the money to buy his freedom or his life.

The incident had happened a decade ago, but it was etched into Wells’s mind as deeply as the first man he’d killed. The central square in Ghazni, a town southwest of Kabul. The boy’s father waited silently as the Talibs tied the boy to a wooden stake, pulling his arms tight to his body. Hundreds of men waited in a loose cluster. Wells stood on the fringes. The binding seemed to last hours, though it couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. The kid didn’t say a word. Maybe he was still high. Wells hoped so.

He wanted to step in, raise a hand to stop the slaughter. The penalty might be legal under
sharia,
Muslim law, but Wells couldn’t believe that Allah or the Prophet would smile on this scene. But he stayed silent. He had spent years building his bonafides with the men around him, even fighting beside them in Chechnya, an ugly, brutal war where both sides committed atrocities every day. He couldn’t risk his mission to save a heroin addict. And he’d be ignored in any case. He held his tongue.

The Talibs finished their binding. The leader of the religious police, a fat man with a beard that jutted off his chin, spoke to the boy too quietly for Wells to hear. A pickup truck drove up. The fat Talib opened the liftgate and stood aside as dozens of stones, baseballsized and larger, rolled out.

The crowd moved forward, men pushing at one another, reaching down to grab the rocks. Wells had a vision of the last time he’d been bowling, in Missoula with friends on his sixteenth birthday, picking up a ball and squaring to toss it.

Finally the boy seemed to understand what was happening. He pulled at the stake, but it held him fast. “Father, please,” he said. “Please, father. I won’t do it again. I promise—”

The big Talib raised his arm and fired a long, flat stone at the boy, catching him in the side of the head. The boy screamed, and suddenly it seemed as if the air was full of rocks. The screaming grew louder, and then ended as a softball-sized stone smashed open the boy’s skull. His face went slack, and he collapsed against the stake.

That was the Taliban policy on drugs. Zero tolerance. Yet heroin and hashish were everywhere. Men staggered glassy-eyed through Kabul, their mouths open, smiling to themselves even on the coldest days of winter. Once, in a hailstorm on the Shamali plain, north of Kabul, Wells had stepped inside an abandoned hut for shelter and found a half-dozen men huddled in a semicircle around a low flame, cooking a fat ball of opium. They turned and growled at him like hyenas at a kill. He raised his hands and backed away. Even at the time he’d thought,
If the death penalty doesn’t stop this stuff, what will?

 

 

NOW HE LOOKED DOWN
to Ridge, who was pale, eyes closed, an unhealthy shine on his cheeks. “Ridge.”

“What now?”

“You want out, I’ll get you home. Get-out-of-jail-free card. No DEA or anything.”

“You can do that?”

Wells nodded.

“Man,” Ridge said for the second time. “Who
are
you?”

“I have friends.”

“The original original gangster.”

“You want it or not?”

“Maybe.” He looked Wells over. “What, I’m supposed to say thanks? After you kidnapped me, bashed my head in? You’re a real humanitarian.” Ridge closed his eyes. Wells decided to do the same.

 

 

Wells scrambled up beside Gaffan. “Where are we?”

“About three minutes from Unity Hall. So how do I play this?”

“Show them your ID and tell them as little as possible. Tell them to call the embassy if you have to, the JCF”—Jamaica Constabulary Force. “They won’t want to.”

“If they ask where we’re going?”

“Tell them you can’t say.”

At the gatehouse, the guard was a small dark-skinned man who wore a blue shirt with a seven-pointed star. “Yes?”

Gaffan flashed his badge.

“Let me see that,” the guard said. Gaffan handed his badge and ID over. Wells followed.

“This is Jamaica. Not America.”

“The man we want, he’s a U.S. citizen.”

“What’s his name?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“No name, no pass.”

“Call our embassy.”

“Tell me his name or I call the constables myself—”

Wells leaned across the seat. “His name’s Mark Edward. Drives a Toyota with a big spoiler on the back. Celica.”

The guard nodded. “That one a cheap bastard. Gwaan, then. You know where to find him?”

“End of the second row on the left.”

“Exactly wrong. Right and then left. House one-forty-three.”

The barrier rose, and they rolled ahead. “His son’s first name and his middle name,” Gaffan said. “Nice guess.”

“Looks like he should have tipped the guards better at Christmas.”

 

 

THE HOUSES AT UNITY
Hall were a mix of brick mansions on narrow lots and semi-attached town houses. Robinson’s was one of the latter. His Celica sat in the driveway in front, black, a spoiler jutting off the back deck. A pink flamingo and three dwarfs in Rasta hats graced the concrete front landing. Gaffan drove past, dropped Wells in front of the house. He walked ahead and rang the doorbell. A chime inside boomed.

“Who is it?”

Wells rang again, heard a man stepping slowly down the stairs in the front hall. He unholstered his pistol, held it low by his side.

“Yes? Who’s there?” The voice was raspy and low. He’d heard it a few days before, on the phone in Janice’s house in Vienna. But not in person. Until now, Wells and Keith Robinson had never met.

“Keith.”

“You have the wrong address.”

“Keith. It’s John Wells. It’s over.”

THE AMERICAN EMBASSY COMPOUND IN SAUDI ARABIA WAS A FOR
tress within a fortress, the most heavily guarded building in Riyadh’s high-walled Diplomatic Quarter. The Saudi government had built the zone in the 1980s, on a low mesa on the western edge of Riyadh. Unsmiling Saudi soldiers in armored personnel carriers guarded its gates, subjecting vehicles to inspection by explosives-sniffing dogs. Trucks and SUVs faced undercarriage examinations with long-handled mirrors, the bomb-squad version of the reflectors that dentists used to see inside their patients’ mouths. Drivers who grumbled about the searches found themselves forced to turn off their engines—and their air-conditioning. With summer afternoons in Riyadh topping one hundred twenty degrees, complaints were rare.

Behind the walls, the quarter stretched three square miles. It should have been a pleasant place, especially compared to the rest of Riyadh. The Saudi government had spent a billion dollars on the district, hoping it would attract executives at multinational companies, and even wealthy Saudis. The quarter was subject to the same strict Islamic laws as the rest of the Kingdom, but it had coffee shops, parks, even a riding club. Date palms lined its boulevards. Its central square had won an award for fusing traditional Islamic architecture with modern design. In 1988, a local magazine had bragged that with its picnics and bicycling children, the zone could be mistaken for Geneva or Washington.

No more. The hassles at the checkpoints had driven Saudis out of the zone, but they hadn’t reassured Americans and Europeans. Following attacks on other Western compounds, multinational companies had shrunk their staffs in the Kingdom to a minimum. The quarter felt besieged, its avenues empty, gardens run-down. It had turned into Paris in 1940, with the Wehrmacht approaching. Anyone with a choice had left. The remaining expats huddled in houses with thick steel doors and barred windows, in case a band of suicide attackers penetrated the checkpoints.

The American embassy was the ultimate target, of course. The embassy occupied six acres near the quarter’s western edge, on the oddly named Collector Road M—though its location was no longer disclosed on the State Department’s website, as though that omission might stop terrorists from finding it. It had opened in 1986, at a ceremony presided over by then Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush.

At the time, Osama bin Laden was just another young Saudi heading to Afghanistan to fight jihad. Still, the attacks on American embassies in Pakistan and Iran in 1979 had made the State Department aware of the Islamic terror threat. The new embassy in Riyadh had been built to withstand a sustained attack. Its concrete exterior walls were a foot thick. The embassy itself was a modern castle, built around a courtyard, with few exterior windows.

Security had been tightened further since September 11. Today, visitors parked outside the compound and then passed through explosive detectors at a marine-staffed checkpoint. Besides M-4 carbines, the marine guards toted shotguns, their fat barrels projecting immediate menace. Without exception, the guards had seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were ready for war.

 

 

AMBASSADOR GRAHAM KURLAND HOPED
they’d never have to use their skills.

Kurland and his wife, Barbara, lived inside the embassy compound in a mansion formally called Quincy House. The name referred to the USS
Quincy,
the cruiser where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had met Abdul-Aziz, the first Saudi king, in February 1945.

The king had never seen a wheelchair until he met Roosevelt, who used one because of his polio-damaged legs. Abdul-Aziz, who was severely overweight, found the contraption fascinating. Roosevelt gave the king his spare chair, cementing the partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia. That was the legend, anyway.

In fact, chair or no chair, the two countries had good reason to ally as World War II ended. By 1945, vast oil deposits had been found under the sands of the Kingdom’s Eastern Province. Having seen oil’s strategic importance during the war, neither Roosevelt nor the king wanted the oil to fall into Soviet paws. And the Saudis were predisposed to trust the United States, which had avoided the Middle East empire-building of France and Britain.

To commemorate the fateful meeting, a model of the
Quincy
sat in the lobby of the ambassador’s residence. And the United States and Saudi Arabia had stuck to their bargain. Even after the formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Saudis tried to keep oil cheap. In return, the United States made sure that Iran and Iraq never seriously threatened the Kingdom.