by Gordon Kent
Burke went up the walk of a neat house with a neat white porch and combination storm-screens, and he thought that if he went down into the cellar of this house he’d find a woodworking shop and power tools, but he’d look for a computer in this house in vain. A big TV, yes; FM radio, no. Maybe not a newspaper; maybe some fringe “newsletters” that came by mail.
He rang and waited. He heard footsteps. White fingers parted the thin, taut curtains of the window next to him and a frightened eye appeared. Burke smiled. He waited. The gap in the curtains widened to show a small female face framed by gray hair. The expression was still frightened. The woman shook her head. Burke smiled some more. He held up his badge.
He counted three locks on the door as she opened them—a chain, a deadbolt, and the bolt that had come with the seventy-year-old door. She kept the storm-door between them even after the wooden door was open.
“Agent Burke, Mrs Panic—Naval Investigative Service.” He waited. “It’s about Zoltan.”
She shook her head almost violently. “My husband ain’t here!”
“It’s about Zoltan, Mrs Panic. Your son. I just want to talk to you.” He held up his badge again. The woman was apparently terrified of her husband, perhaps terrified of the world. But she was more terrified of the US government and its desire to find her deserter son. They never gave up, she knew; she watched a lot of shows about criminals who were wanted, and some of those things were twenty-five, thirty years old. They never gave up.
Burke put on his “if-you-don’t-let-me-in-somebody-even-worse-will-come” smile.
She unlatched the storm-door. “We don’t hear from him. We don’t know nothing,” she said.
The living room had a little fireplace with a gas log, and brown-and-green tiles that had been put in in the 1920s. Above it was a mantel in dark wood with lots of varnish, and on the mantel an array of photographs, some clearly older than the house. Burke looked at one and saw the Cyrillic printing in the corner and said, pointing to another photo, “This must be your mother.”
“My husband’s.”
“Before you came to the States.”
She nodded. Her hands twisted each other’s fingers. “Back in the old country.”
“Zoltan isn’t a Yugoslav name, is it, Mrs Panic?”
“I was from Slovenia. Lot of Hungarians there. My father’s name.”
Burke smiled and manufactured a cough. Another cough. “Could I have a glass of water, Mrs Panic?”
As soon as she was out of the room, he reached for a color photo that had no frame and leaned against the wall behind the other pictures. It showed a man in camouflage with a gun of some sort raised over his head.
Burke turned the photo over. On the back, an aggressive hand had scrawled, “Your boy at the Battle of the Crows!”
That was what he had come to find.
It was when he was leaving that he found out about the computer. She had said, with the anger of the terrified, “You’re supposed to phone before you come here. Next time, you phone.”
“I did, Mrs Panic. I tried three times, yesterday and the day before. Nobody answered.”
Her anger fled, and she was the terrified little woman again. “I don’t hear so good,” she said, twisting her fingers. He remembered the loud television. He started to reach for the doorknob, and she murmured, “You should better phone my husband, but you can’t get him no more. That internet!”
He had actually had a moment of wondering what she meant—what’s an internet? he was thinking, because it was so out of context—and then it clicked, and he took his hand away from the doorknob, and he said, “Your husband has a computer, Mrs Panic?”
He knew she had told him something she wasn’t supposed to, but it was too late. She looked stricken.
Zaire.
Djalik’s hand was getting bad. It didn’t look so bad—swollen, too white in the thumb, too red in the area around the wound—but it was still bleeding and they couldn’t stop it.
“You keep that tourniquet on, I’m gonna lose the hand from gangrene,” Djalik said. “I’m not gonna lose this hand!” It was only part of a hand, at best; the two outer fingers were gone, and a lot of the meat up to the wrist, blown away by the bullet in the fight on the trail. He looked at Alan with a stare that took him back to the flight out of Kinshasa: If you leave me face-down in goddam Africa, you tell my wife you did it for your friend! He started to say, “I’m not a doctor,” and he got only a couple of words out when Djalik shifted his glare to O’Neill and said, “He understands.”
O’Neill grunted.
Djalik was sitting on the ground. His ruined hand was held out, the arm resting on one knee, as if he meant to beg from passers-by. “Cauterize the fucker,” he said to Harry. It was between the two of them, then; Alan was out of it. He said something about trying to tie off the artery, but they ignored him. He knew they were right. He couldn’t see any artery in that ruined meat. Only blood.
They found one of the half-abandoned villages where it was at least possible to build a fire, and O’Neill heated a knife blade in the coals. Djalik sat nearby, staring into the heat.
“Going to give you morphine,” O’Neill said.
“No! Save it!”
O’Neill looked at Alan. The knife blade was cherry-red. Djalik looked at Alan. “Hold me down.” Alan looked at O’Neill, and he nodded. Alan grabbed Djalik by the shoulders and pulled him back until he was flat, and abruptly O’Neill was there with one of their morphine tubes, and he put the needle in and squeezed before Djalik even knew it, and Djalik swore. Alan supposed he had to be grateful, somewhere inside.
“You ready?” O’Neill said a couple of minutes later.
“Yeah, Bud. Listen—you got to let it spurt, so you know where the artery is. Then tighten right down so the blood stops, okay? Then—burn it.” He was sweating, but then, they all were. “Make it quick, if you can, Bud.”
The people who hadn’t left the little village looked on. They might have been looking at something inconsequential, even boring.
O’Neill put one big hand on Djalik’s shoulder. “Think of your family. Okay.” He loosened the tourniquet. Blood shot across the dirt. O’Neill peered at the hand. “Think of your wife. Your kids. Are they all there?” He nodded quickly at Alan and at the tourniquet, and he tightened, screwing the stick into the fabric on Djalik’s wrist. “Look real hard—look hard—look right into their eyes, Dave—concentrate on their eyes—”
There was a smell of grilling steak. Djalik convulsed under them, and one of the villagers looked away, and the smell filled the air.
31
December 1–2
Sarajevo.
In the depths of a dry season, an unexpected bonus landed in Dukas’s message traffic: he had put out a shotgun request in the American intelligence community for hits on the names Zulu or Z, and he had learned that the CIA “inferred” that a mercenary called “Z” had been in Africa two years before. No source was given to Dukas, and he could not know that the inference was the result of pressure within the Agency to come up with information about O’Neill’s captors. An alert analyst had made the connection with O’Neill’s report of Elizabeth Momparu’s story, and someone higher up in the Agency had channeled a vetted version of the analysis to Dukas.
Message traffic went back and forth, and at the end of the day, Dukas had a cropped photo of the man who had been called “Z.” Not quite Eureka!, or even Bingo!, because the photo wasn’t very good, but certainly, Hey, maybe! The photo had been taken at a distance (by Elizabeth Momparu, although he was not to know that), and it was fuzzy, but there was a face. He compared it with the face of Zoltan Panic from his Marine Corps file—could have been the same, he thought, but there were years between the photos, and the African one had something wrong with his nose that didn’t show in the marine.
In his own mind, it made sense: Zulu could have been in Zaire in 1994 to shoot down the aircraft, and perhaps Zulu was there now. But there was no proof. If he
could get proof, he could report Zulu-Panic as a deserter; he might also get some action in Zaire, although from all reports it was a chaotic mess, with military from six countries and two guerrilla armies flailing at each other, and half a million refugees fleeing across the battle zone. A line from a poem learned in high school had stuck with him, because it seemed so often apt for his profession—“where ignorant armies clash by night.” From the sound of it, that was Zaire.
So, he wanted proof that Z was Zulu was Panic. That, he decided, was what he was going to use Mrs Obren for.
“Michael, she’ll run! She’ll spill her guts.” Pigoreau was snarling around the eternal cigarette.
“Maybe. So we won’t give her any contacts—nothing she can sell. She goes in, she gets what I want, I meet her at the border and debrief her, we’re through with her.”
“You’re going to send her to Belgrade with no escape plan? No contact?”
“You got it.”
Pigoreau stared at him, his eyes half-closed against the smoke. “You’re a harder rock than I ever guessed, Michael. What’s the big deal?”
“Zulu’s a heavy hitter, and I’m gonna nail him.” Dukas tapped on the desk with a fingernail that needed cutting. “Zulu’s in the middle of something. The guy has his own web site, only not under that name. The way I know, the FBI grabbed the old man’s computer. See, the NCIS guy who went out and talked to the old lady, he was, thank God, smart. She blabbed that the old man was on the internet all the time; the agent wanted to get at the computer right then, but he knew he couldn’t, not legally, so he says to her something like, ‘Well, we’ll just let that be your husband’s toy,’ or something, hoping she won’t say anything to the old man because she’s so scared of him. And she didn’t, because when they grabbed the computer—it took two days to get a warrant, and they were on to me three separate times for verification of war crimes—everything was intact. And I mean everything—the son’s web site was right there under Favorites; he had three e-mails from him in his Delete bin; and he’s got files they’re still going through, stuff he’s downloaded that they think came from Zulu. The old man’s a Serb nationalist; he’s nuts on the subject, so he’s got all this hate shit and a lot of stuff he’s downloaded from all over the net; we don’t know yet what came from his son and what from elsewhere. But it lets us look into part of what Zulu’s doing. He’s a player, Pig. He’s not just a thug. He’s an operator.”
“And this is the same guy your friend shot at in Bosnia?”
“I can’t get to my friend to confirm it.”
“A torturer. And you’re going to send a woman you’ve—Michael, when you’ve been to bed with a woman, you can’t—”
“What, suddenly you’re concerned about her?”
“She’ll know how dangerous it is. She won’t do it.”
“Yes, she will.” He looked straight into Pigoreau’s eyes. “I’ve found her husband. She’ll do anything I want to get him.”
They stared at each other. Pigoreau shrugged. “Okay.”
Dukas met Mrs Obren at the safe house. At his insistence, Pigoreau and one of the female cops were there. It was clammy in the apartment—an icy comment on their lack of success, because they so seldom had use for the place. Dukas sat on a hard little chair, the chair turned backward so that his gut pushed against the ladder-back. Everybody had coats on. Ms Obren wore mittens and a wool hat and looked as if she was dressed for traveling. Nothing passed between them: she understood the situation perfectly.
He laid it out for her. She was to return to RS, spend two days explaining that she had been picked up and held by the rotten border cops, and then she was to go to Belgrade. There, she was to try to contact Zulu.
“But I don’t know how to contact him!”
He ignored the voice, what it used to do to him. “I’ll tell you how. He’s living under the name Zoltan Kousavik—his mother’s maiden name.” He didn’t tell her that NCIS had found the phone number in the father’s computer, tracked the address and the name from there. “He’s got a wife and two kids. He’s got an apartment in a suburb. You go try to contact him.”
“But—” She licked her lips. They were chapped and peeling. Her skin looked dry. “He will know. Why would I go to see him?”
“Because I told you to. Because I gave you his address and told you to take a message to him. The message is that he’s a deserter from the US Marine Corps, and if he’ll turn himself in to me and undergo interrogation, I’ll promise him they’ll go light in the States.”
She was standing. Everybody was standing but Dukas. She looked hopeless. “He would never do that.”
“Anyway, you say he isn’t there. You told us he’s gone away. If he’s gone away, he won’t be there and you won’t have to tell him anything. So, instead of giving him a message, you get me some information. I want to know where he’s gone and when he’s coming back. I want you to set it up so you’re told where and when he returns. You find that out for me.”
Her mouth hung a little open. She looked dim-witted. “How?”
“You go to the wife. Become her friend. She’ll tell you.”
“I can’t! Get somebody else!”
“There isn’t anybody else.”
“I won’t! No!”
“You will, or you’ll never see your husband again. I know where he is. If you don’t do this, I’ll see that he’s put where you’ll never find him. Not ever. If you do it, I’ll give him to you.”
Pigoreau and the female cop were expressionless, like nurses who stand by while the doctor gives bad news. Working hard at alienation.
“You know?”
“He’s in a hospital on our side of the line.”
Her face changed, illuminated and hopeful. “How is he?” she cried.
“I’ll tell you when you get back from Belgrade.”
Pigoreau’s jaw showed a momentary spasm, as if he had started to flinch and thought better of it. In fact, his alienation had slipped. Dukas was an even harder rock than he had thought.
At sea, aboard the Jackson.
Sneesen was holding himself together pretty well. That was how he thought of it—holding himself together, so that he wouldn’t fly apart like a spring that had been coiled and let go.
But it was hard. Nobody much spoke to him, even the white guys. They didn’t get it. It was just as Chief Borne had said; they were all sucked in by the bullshit about diversity and getting along, and they didn’t want to listen to him, they just wanted to pretend to be mud-people, pretending they could do hip-hop, jive, play b-ball. Mud-shit.
Today he’d found that the skipper was a Jew. It made a lot of things fall into place, but it was hard. Nobody else realized it, but Sneesen could tell from the way in the ready room the man dropped Jewish words—chutzpah, mushoogeneh, tuchus—and kept touching the top of his head, where they wore little beanies when they were with each other. It explained a lot—why the mud-bitch always flew with Commander Rafehausen, and why now there was a mud-man, McAllen, supposed to be a hot-shit ASW enlisted guy as SENSO, but he couldn’t be, so it was part of the whole thing to surround Commander Rafehausen with them and suck him down.
He could see it. Why couldn’t anybody else see it?
Sneesen prayed a lot now. He prayed that God would open white guys’ eyes to the truth. He prayed for Rafehausen. He wrote another letter to the chaplain.
Washington.
Rose was sitting in her office at IVI. That, in itself, was unusual. More unusual was that she was rolling a bit of paper between her fingers and then, when it felt like a smooth ball, throwing it at the wastebasket. Then she would tear another bit of paper off an envelope without looking at it and start rolling a ball. Two days before she joined the Philadelphia in Naples, and she was rolling paper balls.
Valdez looked in. He seemed about to say something, then stopped himself. “Hey, man,” he said. He was worried about her now. He was afraid she’d crack.
“What?”
“You�
�re not doing anything. I don’t think I ever saw you not do anything before. You sick?”
“Hey, Valdez.”
“Hey, Lieutenant-Commander Siciliano.” He came in. “Hey, you okay? Why don’t you take some time off, go—”
“Listen, Valdez, what happened to the noise you were making about the data stream for Peacemaker?”
“You told me to shut up about it.” So she was going to stiff his sympathy. Okay.
She tossed the paper ball at the basket, watched it bounce from the rim. “Did you do anything more about it?”
“I asked a couple questions. I got told if I was smart I’d stop asking.”
She frowned. “Or what?”
He shrugged.
“Remember when they tried to transfer you out of here?”
“Yeah.”
“That was when you were asking questions.”
“Yeah. I figured that out all by myself.”
She started to roll another paper ball. “It was Suter tried to get you transferred.”
This didn’t seem to surprise Valdez at all. “I figured he didn’t want me around, he got the hots for you, pardon my Spanglish, but then I start putting two and two together, I think maybe it’s the questions about the data stream, not having the hots for you. I told you when they called me into Security and asked me, then you went to bat for me. They’re fucking Nazis; they wanted to polygraph me, I told them I got twelve-year-olds I could find on the streets could beat a polygraph. I think all that was Suter. It seemed a lot to do because he got the hots for you, so I decided my questions really did push somebody’s buttons, and I shut up.”
