by Sean Parnell
“What’s NAFT?” Ralphy whispered to Steele.
Lansky heard him and said, “Not a fucking thing. Just crabs. And finally, also last night, we received hot intel that in fact that Level Five lab in China was not destroyed in a mishap, but was subjected to a helicopter-borne assault. All laboratory personnel were killed except one, and that person has found shelter . . . here.” He tapped the tablet again, and the wall screen switched to lower Mongolia. “She’s a full bird colonel in the CCP and she’s being protected by some very accommodating Mongol villagers. We don’t know who wants her dead, but if we don’t get to her first, she will be.”
Lansky looked up from his tablet at the team members there in his SCIF, but he was seeing the previous evening’s late-night rendezvous with Thorn McHugh, on the grounds of the Army Navy Country Club. McHugh had called the meet, and Lansky had found him sitting on a bench in the dark, wearing a smart fedora, a trench coat, and holding a worn paperback copy of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. But he knew he wasn’t going to get a lecture about American literature. Old spies used old ways.
“I received a transmission from a very old and trusted source,” McHugh had said as Lansky sat down.
“Using what method? Morse code?” Lansky had quipped, then was jabbed by such a hard glare from McHugh that he thought, Jesus. That’s probably true.
“Belay the flippancy, Theodore. This is serious business,” McHugh had said. He opened the book, showed Lansky a page with many words circled in pencil, then closed it again. “We have some very precious human cargo, who may prove to be the most valuable Beijing defector of your lifetime, requesting rescue and recovery, posthaste.”
Then McHugh had gone on to lay out the details, including the precise location in the lats and longs relayed by Tenzin, and he added that should the monk wish to come along too, Lansky should ensure that happened as well.
None of this was relayed by McHugh in the form of a suggestion or request. Only a small slice of the Program’s multimillion-dollar budget was formally linked, under heavy classification and cover, to the DoD, and only that so Mrs. Darnstein and Penny Amdursky could utilize government resources. The rest was completely ghosted from all federal records and supplied by wealthy persons unknown. Thorn McHugh was the point man for those silent patriots, as well as the informal chairman of Cemetery Whisper, an organization of like-minded, former intelligence officers worldwide. If McHugh “suggested” a mission, he’d already consulted with someone high above Lansky’s pay grade, perhaps even the president himself.
Lansky had quickly understood the importance of what McHugh was telling him, and had promised to fire off an urgent flash.
“Yes, very good.” Thorn had patted his knee, taken his book and his cane, and said as he left, “Make the eggbeaters whirl. . . .”
Then Lansky was back in the SCIF, his flashback having lasted mere seconds.
“All right, people. Assets,” he said and looked at Allie Whirly. “Let’s start with you. What’ve we got for transport left over at Langley AFB?”
“Um, just a Little Bird, sir.” She meant an MD 500 light assault and reconnaissance helicopter. “The Gulfstream’s gone.”
“Well, beg something from the air force, and a crew. If they give you a hard time, call NSA Garland’s aide and have her twist some nuts.” Lansky looked next at Miles Turner. “What’s our status on Alphas?”
“We’ve accepted two so far,” Miles said. “But they just started OTC. An SF team sergeant from Third Group and an air force shooter.”
“Is that the Moody chick?” Lansky asked.
“I thought she was pretty nice,” Betsy Roth offered.
“Moody Air Force Base, genius,” Lansky snapped at his adjutant. Betsy blushed.
“No frickin’ way are they ready,” Dalton Goodhill growled. “That SF dude’s shaky on urban cover. . . .”
“Slick is ready,” Shane Wiley said about his prospective new Alpha. “She’s good in the woods, good on the street, and blooded. Everybody makes fun of those air force Base Defense Squadron types, but she took down a motorcycle bomber at Kandahar with a 249 from the top of an MRAP, and when it jammed, she got down and finished off his partner with her M9.”
“I like her,” Lansky said. “Take her. But we need one more besides Steele, in case he gets KIA’d.” He said that without apology or emotion, then looked back at Miles and said, “You’re on.”
“Damn.” Miles shook his head. He’d promised his wife that he’d never again deploy and he murmured, “I was gonna stay married this time.”
Lansky turned to Penny Amdursky.
“S, what you got for support out there? Let’s say if our FOB’s somewhere in range of the target, like Vladivostok.”
“Sir, all of our safe houses and slicks were shut down.” Penny raised her palms like a helpless-looking emoji. “When it looked permanent, Mrs. D had sort of a liquidation sale. We haven’t reconstituted yet. I don’t have any assets out there.”
“I do,” Steele said.
“Reliable?” Lansky asked him.
“Yeah, but pricey.”
“Okay,” Lansky said, and then to Goodhill, “Watch his spending.”
“I’ll keep my hand in his pocket,” Goodhill said.
“I knew it.” Miles grinned at Blade, who shot him the bird.
“All right, people,” Lansky said. “You’re going to work this problem all day, and you’re going to launch tonight. Persko, I want you sucking intel from all sources so Stalker Seven and his crew don’t wind up in the shit. Betsy, go through State, lie your ass off, and get me clearances for cargo from Russia to Ulaanbaatar. I’ll handle the Mongolian airspace. Clear?”
They all mumbled rogers and yessirs, and Lansky turned to Steele.
“You’re point on this mission. Got anything to say?”
“No, sir,” Steele said. “Show up, kill the bad guys, rescue the damsel in distress. What could possibly go wrong?”
Chapter 26
Ankililoaka, Madagascar
He was a very small boy, in a very large jungle.
He was called Fanamby, which meant “challenger” in the Merina dialect of Malagasy, the national language of Madagascar, and he’d been so named by his father and mother because he’d barely survived his birth.
At nine years old, Fanamby was not much larger than a fully grown bamboo lemur, a koala-like primate found only in the rain forests of their tropical island off the coast of eastern Africa. Fanamby was fascinated by the elusive, cocoa-colored furry creatures, and he and his best friend, Tombovelo, would often shed their pink buttoned shirts and leather sandals, and in only their blue shorts, stalk the creatures through the dripping canopies and shadows of the enormous baobab trees. The boys loved the cuddly jungle mammals, they had similar large, gleaming dark eyes, and the lemurs laughed at them while they looked down at the boys from dizzying heights and chewed their bamboo shoots.
Fanamby’s mother, Lanitra, spent her mornings hiking for miles with a plastic yellow jerrican to fetch fresh water from pools of rain—their small village of thatched huts had no wells or pipes or faucets. Lanitra and her sisters spent the afternoons weaving colorful scarves from harvested silkworms, which they sold in Ankililoaka to the tourists from Europe, who always loved the simple people for two days or so and then went home. Fanamby’s father, Haja, was a constable with the La Gendarmerie Nationale, and Fanamby was very proud of him in his dark green tunic with his shiny badge and his French képi policeman’s cap. Lanitra and Haja were poor, but they loved each other very much, and that made Fanamby a happy boy.
Fanamby would venture alone, and often very far, into the jungles of the vast Parc National Mikea, to bring a full basket of wild silkworm cocoons to his mother, which she called “living gold.” Sometimes he would meet Tombovelo, who also collected cocoons for his mother, and they would hike all the way through the forests, ten miles, to the emerald waters of the African sea. By sunset, Fanamby would be very tired, and would struggle back up
the long grassy hill to their village west of the thunder ridge with his burden.
But today, he wasn’t dawdling on his way home for his dinner of stewed zebu beef, fat rice, and lasary tomato and onion salad.
Today, he was running.
“Why do you run, Fanamby?” Haja had come home to the village for dinner and was sitting beside Lanitra on a three-legged stool. “Was it a lion?” He grinned at his son, who had dropped his basket of gray-white cocoons and was bending over, gripping his small knees and breathless. There were no lions in Madagascar.
“No, Father, no,” Fanamby gasped. “It was a whale.”
Lanitra looked up from where she was sitting cross-legged on a straw mat with her three sisters. They were spinning silk from the sticky cocoons with bamboo rods that they turned in their brown palms.
“A whale? Do not spin tales to your father, boy.”
“I am not lying, Mama.” Fanamby’s dark eyes were very wide and his small face glistened with sweat. He pointed back at the edge of the jungle far below their hill, where the farmers’ bony white-and-black cattle were nosing at the shoots and grass. “It is so big!” He stretched his little arms as wide as he could. “It is white and just like the whales we saw when Uncle Andry once took us out in his fishing boat.”
His father frowned and got up from his stool. His son had been taught to never lie. He picked up a metal tin cup and poured some water from Lanitra’s jerrican and made Fanamby drink.
“Slow down, Fanamby,” he said. “How could a whale be in the jungle?”
“I do not know, Father.” Fanamby slurped and then gripped the cup in his trembling hands. “But it is there, in the small valley between the tallest baobabs, covered by many leaves, and I was frightened and I threw a stone at it.”
“Did it move?”
“Don’t be silly, Haja,” Lanitra said to her husband while her sisters grinned and shook their heads.
“It did not move, Father,” Fanamby said, “but it made a sound.”
“What sound?”
“A sound like when we play Kudoda and the stones fall in the metal bowl.”
Haja thought about that for a moment. A whale. A whale with a skin like a Kudoda bowl. It made no sense, but Fanamby never lied.
“Show me,” he said, and Fanamby turned and started right off back down the hill, and his father followed.
“Haja!” Lanitra called. “You are working!”
Haja touched the revolver on his hip and called back to her over his shoulder. “I am investigating, woman. That is my work.”
Even though Fanamby was exhausted, he was only nine, and the village children of that age—and everywhere else in fact—have reserves of strength that have long left their elders. It was hard for Haja to keep up with his little boy and he kept calling out to him to slow down. At last he had to order him to stop while he caught up and took his small hand.
“Father, we must hurry,” Fanamby said. “The whale might get away.”
“He will not get away, son.” Haja was still wondering what this creature might be, or how it had found its way so deep in the jungle from the sea. But he supposed such things were possible. The typhoons could wash many strange things ashore and deeper inland than one could imagine. “And if it does, then perhaps it was only sleeping.”
“Yes, yes, but let’s hurry!”
Fanamby pulled away again, and Haja quick-marched after him into the jungle. It was already growing dark and he wished he’d thought to bring his large policeman’s flashlight. The night owls were cooing, the ring-tailed lemurs were howling in the trees, and an ominous roll of thunder fluttered the high canopies of leaves beneath glimpses of angry charcoal clouds.
They tramped across the rotting floor of fallen tapia and Bismarck palms, with Haja swinging his muscled arms to strike away clinging vines, and Fanamby hopping over clusters of Darwin’s orchids as their silky white petals spun to the ground behind his sandaled feet. And then they were rising up through the brush, along a steepening slippery grade, where at the top Haja could see the crowns of the baobab, like the wigs of sinful dancers, silhouetted against the sky. They broke out onto a ridgeline where the jungle thinned, and breathless from that last climb, they both looked down.
It was there, below, in the lush moist valley, which was filling with evening shadows. And indeed it looked like a giant white whale. Its bloated body was the size of the missionary school bus in Ankililoaka, and its thick tail was as long as that and more. It had a pair of large gleaming glassy eyes above a bulbous black nose, and fat black protrusions below its belly that certainly looked like fins to Fanamby. It had been covered with a blanket of what looked like a fisherman’s net woven with palm fronds, but there’d been a furious storm from the sea just one day before, and the winds had swept most of it away. There were strange black markings on the body just behind its gills.
“You see, Father?” Fanamby was practically hopping up and down as he gripped Haja’s uniform pant leg. “You see?”
“Yes, my son. And I am proud of you, and pleased that you did not lie.” Haja pulled Fanamby close and gently tousled his wiry hair. “But it is not a whale.” He opened a leather pouch on his belt and unholstered a walkie-talkie. “It is a helicopter.”
Chapter 27
Lebombo, Mozambique
Hank Steele only emerged from his alias, George Wheelwright, when he was completely alone.
Even then, it would have been hard to discern. His voice didn’t change. He wore the same clothes. Their culinary tastes were identical. As George, he’d smoked the same pipe for eight years in Africa, as he had for a decade as Rick Granger in Ho Chi Minh City, and before that as Marshal Fenault in French Polynesia.
All of those covers had been provided by members of Cemetery Whisper, the ghostly group of veteran spies and special operators of loosely allied nations, who cared for one another once they were burned. A desperate man or woman, somewhere in the world on the run, would find salvation in a fresh passport, supporting papers and funds, usually in a graveyard dead drop, and there they would bury their pasts. After that, they could only confess who they really were to themselves. Those were the rules of redemption.
Hank spoke fluent Russian, French, and Vietnamese, but George would never reveal those skills because they were the sorts of clues that could expose a man’s trail. Hank was an expert in firearms, ballistics, explosives, and unusual modes of transportation. George knew a lot about these things as well, but ostensibly only from books. Hank had a second-degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, the Korean martial art that combines tae kwon do, subak, and Chinese kung fu. George knew how to handle himself, but mostly from back-alley brawls as a kid in Connecticut. Hank eschewed cell phones, smartphones, tablets, and computers of any type, because they were the nemeses of any man who didn’t want to be found. George also eschewed such devices, but because he was sure they caused cancer.
They both liked animals. They both liked kids. They both had secrets, but who didn’t?
There had only been one great love of Hank’s life. He never expected to find that kind of love again, nor did he try. George occasionally flirted with the ladies, but only because they thought him attractive, and such innocent encounters reminded his true self, Hank Steele, that he was still alive.
If anyone wanted to see the real Hank Steele, it would happen as it did on this balmy evening at his house on the hill, when George Wheelwright opened his hollowed-out copy of a novel called Winter by Len Deighton. There in the carved-out space between the pages was an old black-and-white photo of Hank Steele in his U.S. Army Special Forces dress greens, with Susan Steele as his beautiful young wife, and their eight-year-old son, Eric—all of them grinning, all of them happy, and none of them imagining that very soon after, the three would never be together again. . . .
Hank heard a horse on the narrow road that rose up from Mabuda Farms. He looked once more at the old photograph, placed it back in the hardcover book, and the book went back on his shelf of old cl
assics and tomes. Then he listened to hear if the horse would pass by or whether its hooves would crunch on his perimeter of seashells and stones. A moment later, they made that sound, and he got up from his rattan chair and went out on his front porch. The teakwood slats creaked loudly under his feet. He’d built them that way on purpose, just as the samurais built their homes.
“Boa noite, George.” A young girl greeted him in Portuguese from the spotted mare’s saddle. She was twelve and pretty with beaded hair.
“Boa noite, Carlota.” George walked over and stroked the horse’s nose. He was still wearing his jeans and bush shirt from his excursion with Kruvalt, but no shoes. Carlota was one of the girls who worked with him at the stables.
“I have for you a telephone.” She grinned with very white teeth and dimples. She liked practicing her English with George. She handed him an open flip phone that he recognized as one from Mabuda Farms’s front office. It was a little slick because she’d been clutching it for the entire mile’s ride.
“Wheelwright,” he said into the phone.
“Carlota told me her whole life story, mate.” It was Kruvalt, with a smile in his voice.
“She’s a lovely girl and will be Mozambique’s beauty queen someday.” Wheelwright smiled up at Carlota, and she giggled and blushed. “But you made her ride up here for a reason.”
“I did in-bloody-deed,” Kruvalt said and his voice turned darker. “That fat fuck Boondo from SERNIC got a call from the Gendarmerie in Antananarivo.”
“Madagascar?”
“That’s right. Seems some constable and his kid from Ankililoaka were out tramping about in the Parc National Mikea. Know where that is?”
“Southwest, on the sea.”
“Spot on. Guess what they found.”
“Don’t make me guess, Rod. Carlota’s waiting.” He’d walked a few feet away, and he glanced back up at her and winked. She blushed again.
