by Gordon Kent
“That’s our business,” Hamy said, but Belloc waved a hand at him and muttered something about white mercenaries working for Mobutu. “Not ours,” he said.
“You assure me that this Zulu is not your guy?”
“Absolutely.”
Hamy scowled. Clearly, he didn’t like being absolute about anything.
“Then he’s the Old Guard’s guy, right?” Pigoreau lit up, blew smoke in what sounded like an exasperated sigh. “Lascelles. Right? Well?”
Neither of the other men was going to commit himself on that point; even the name Lascelles seemed to make Belloc unhappy. Still, they didn’t dispute it: everybody had a good idea where the troglodytes were in France, and who led them.
Belloc began to draw invisible pictures on his desk with the back of a ballpoint pen. He had his coat open, and Pigoreau could smell his sweat all the way across the desk. Belloc’s pen moved, moved, and finally it seemed to have written words that Belloc could read. “If we could get something definite, we’d move on Lascelles. What we need is a hard connection. If this Yugo, this—?”
“Zulu, also Panic, also some other names.” Pigoreau waved a hand, meaning, a long story, boring. Hamy took one of Pigoreau’s cigarettes and began to smoke.
Belloc went on. “If this Zulu could be connected directly to Lascelles, placed inside his compound, even, we could do something.” He looked at Hamy. “Couldn’t we?”
Hamy shrugged, as close as he came to saying yes.
“You have somebody inside?” Pigoreau said. Hamy flinched; Belloc frowned. “Inside Lascelles’s place, yes, that’s what I mean. Come on, Belloc! I wasn’t born yesterday—you must have somebody inside Lascelles’s. Well? If you have, he can ID Zulu and place him there, and you have a connection.” He took out photos of Becque/Zulu from several sources—the Marine Corps, the wall of the torture house at Pustarla, the CIA analysis.
Belloc picked up the photographs, glanced at Hamy. “I have to go to the chief with this.”
“When will you move?”
Belloc shook his head.
“What? What’s the matter? Lascelles is too big a fish for the Quai d’Orsay to catch?”
Hamy cleared his throat and leaned toward Pigoreau. He had an odd voice, almost a whisper, as if something was seriously wrong where sound was produced. “Somebody’s been putting together a crew for a mini-sub. Somebody leased a mini-sub and had it shipped to Tunis. The whole department’s upset about it because the Americans are doing some stupid missile business down there, and it’s big trouble, because it’s in our lake. If it’s Lascelles, and he makes shit that the Americans blame on France, the government will roast our asses.”
“It isn’t like you guys to care about the Americans.”
Belloc grunted. “Money. We can’t afford to have the US pull out of Bosnia. Them and their goddam hamburgers.” Belloc made some more circles on the desk and said, “Thanks for bringing this to us. I’ll see what they say up the line.”
Pigoreau laughed. “That’s it—thanks?”
Belloc opened a hand, as if to show how empty it was. “You want to make a speech to the President?”
“No, I want this asshole, this Zulu! My unit has turned themselves inside out to get this bastard; my boss, a fine cop, a great cop, he’s destroying himself over the bastard! He tried to kill us, did kill one of us, remotely detonated bomb! Come on, Belloc—”
“We haven’t got him.”
“No, but you have somebody inside Lascelles’s place, and you’ve got people all over Africa, still!”
Hamy cleared his throat again and leaned close. His voice sounded as if he was strangling. “If we had him, we’d have to terminate him. Too dangerous. The man must know a lot.”
“He’s a war criminal. He’s going to trial, if we get him.”
“Too dangerous.”
Belloc shot up, a quick move for such a fat man. “Don’t argue about a man nobody has yet! It’s no good. Maybe he’ll stay in Zaire, who knows?”
But Pigoreau wouldn’t let it finish with that. “He’s a fanatical Serb; he’ll come back to Serbia. We want him.”
Belloc shrugged, wriggled, tapped a pudgy hand on the desk. “I’ll do my best.”
“You owe me.”
“I know, I know. I said, I’ll do my best.”
Pigoreau had to be satisfied with that. He rose, shook hands with both men, and went out, retrieving his cigarettes from the desk at the last moment and beginning to burrow in the pack as he went through the door.
When Pigoreau was gone, Belloc looked at Hamy, then picked up the photos and dropped them in front of the other man. “Show these to Benoit, find out if this is the ‘Quebecois with the ruined nose’ who’s visited at Lascelles’s place. If it is, I’ll ask for a congé judiciaire to move in. Put a team together—helo, two cars, civilian clothes, body armor underneath—you know. Benoit to meet us at the gate and let us in. We’ll take Lascelles out by helo, maybe a medevac—lay one of those on, too—he’s an old man, I don’t want him dying on us. Go.”
Hamy stood. “What about that one?” he said, jerking his head toward the door where Pigoreau had left.
“Mmp. We’ll see how it plays. He’s a good man, but—” He shrugged. “Maybe we can throw him a bone.”
Tehran.
Efremov and Anna worked in harness, patching together the conspiracy and its target from tiny bits of information, rather like two devoted archeologists reassembling a shattered vase from the tiny flakes that they dug, each day, from the ground outside. Anna was taking to the kingdom of the World Wide Web as if she was to the ether born. Efremov excelled at puzzles.
Anna had little to do in a house run by servants. She was a courtesan, and she spent hours each day on her body, coating it in glittering artifice and honing it with exercise. Efremov had begun to buy her loyalty when he got her a martial arts instructor. Martial arts were, as far as Anna was concerned, more exciting and more fun than calisthenics and Western aerobics. She settled on Aikido. It gave her a chance to meet the Japanese executives who came so often to Iran. Her lover appreciated what she told him. She enjoyed doing something well that didn’t require sex. She also enjoyed Western fencing. This was a contest where she could meet Efremov on level ground. He had years of fencing experience. She was becoming very, very good.
The internet was her second achievement. She had hours at home. She could research things by herself, then show them off at dinner. Her languages were good, her typing nonexistent, but Efremov gave her a tutor in typing and sent his secretary, who had a degree from London University, to teach her the basics of computing. Anna loved the anonymity of the net. She chatted on chat rooms and lied about her gender, her bias, and her profession. She asked questions of Western universities and often got answers. Twice in a month she acquired classified information from the West by chatting with a scientist. Increasingly, she was not only Efremov’s mistress, she was also his researcher. And she had no loyalty but to him. That he knew.
When Efremov got the information about Lascelles and the mini-sub, it already had a framework in which to lodge. Anna had found the movement of a French-flagged merchant ship from a Pakistani port that matched Efremov’s sourced report of a North Korean sale of a mini-sub to a false end-user certificate in Karachi. Anna knew from a pimply teenager in the Loire valley that he had hacked the plans to the USNS Newport, a sister ship of the Philadelphia, from the Merchant Marine Academy web site.
And then, there it was. Some of it was still supposition, but the theory was well supported with fact: Lascelles, once the pillar of the French intelligence system, was going to try to grab the Peacemaker missile from the Philadelphia just hours before it began its launch sequence. He had surrogates from Sri Lanka. He had a boarding team from Yugoslavia. He had a mini-sub from North Korea. And he was running the whole thing through Libya. In two days.
But Lascelles did not concern Efremov tonight. What concerned him was the possible mole in the CIA—somebody who was se
nding data to Beijing disguised as porn.
He set out five dossiers. They held the results of the questions he had sent his analysts earlier.
“So,” he said to Anna. “Which one?”
She looked at the dossiers, each labeled with a name. She had read them and done her own research.
“This one is dead,” she said, putting a folder labeled Dvorkin aside.
“Good.”
“This one has not been with the CIA long enough, and before that he was in the wrong arena.” She put aside the folder labeled Suter. Efremov nodded.
“Of the other three, I can’t choose—not enough data.” She looked up at him with a cautious smile. “But I have a feeling.”
“Feelings are for fools,” Efremov said. “Well, what does your feeling say?”
She put her hand on the folder farthest to her right and looked up at him again.
Efremov grinned. “My instinct agrees with your feeling,” he said.
The folder was labeled Shreed.
Zaire.
They walked. The rain fell like a curtain, shutting them into their own world. O’Neill was stronger, and Djalik weaker. When they stopped, he sank down and stared into the rain and sometimes fell asleep, sitting there. They filled him with antibiotics and dressed the hand, but his temperature went up and the hand looked dead. Djalik could no longer feel it.
They made sixteen miles. Then eleven. Then six.
Alan was often gone. Now he was the scout, the man who walked twice as far. Sometimes, the first two days, O’Neill and Djalik talked. O’Neill was spilling out the ideas that had been forming all those weeks he was a prisoner, weeks when he had to walk day after day, moving west with the retreating Hutus. Now, ideas about tribal warfare and ethnic cleansing bubbled up, and Djalik listened, and they were as serious as two old men solving the problems of the world.
“—the family. That’s always the bedrock of primitivism. It’s very African. You help your relatives, you take graft so you can parcel it out among the family—”
“Clan?”
“Yeah, like the Scots. The tribe. It gives new meaning to the expression ‘blood relation.’ Because it always ends in blood, my family against some other family.” They were slopping through mud, the rain teeming down.
“The Hatfields and the McCoys.”
“Or the MacDonalds and the Campbells, or the Hutus and the Tutsis, or—It’s bullshit. Murderous fucking bullshit.”
“I’d put my family ahead of anybody,” he heard Djalik say.
“Then you’re a dumbfuck. On the surface of it, I suppose it makes sense to think your family is closer or more valuable or something. At least you know where they’re coming from, or something. But it’s bullshit. There isn’t a reason in the world why your family or my family or his family is any better or any worse or any different from any others.”
Djalik said, “I love my family and I’d die for them.”
“Of course you would, but that’s love. That’s not mysticism! You mean you’d die to save your wife and your kids and your mom and dad. Right? But your uncle? Your second cousin? Your mother’s brother’s daughter’s fourth child by her second husband, whom you’ve never even met? Come on! You’re going to stand in the doorway with an M-16 in each hand and a grenade shoved up your ass to protect strangers who don’t even have the same name but are ‘the same blood’? That’s the kind of bullshit that got all these people moving across half of Africa!”
And, later or the next day, “—because you’re an American and you’re not a goddam peasant, which is what we’re talking about. Primitives are peasants. The Interahamwe are peasants. What’s-his-name, the dictator in Belgrade—”
“Milosevic—”
“Whatever, he’s a peasant. Peasant means you live a life of social paranoia, trusting only the people you’re related to. It means that the mysticism surrounding language and religion defines your existence—my God, my words, my accent—and anybody who’s different is an enemy—kike, nigger, wop! The peasant is the embodiment of narrow-mindedness. He’s never been anywhere, he’s never really talked to anybody, he’s never dared to think, because if he did any of those things, he’d have to open up and let in some of the enemy and he’s sure they’d stab him and steal his women. That’s peasant. That’s ethnic. That’s the intractable crap upon which ethnic cleansing is based.”
And, later, “You can’t believe in democracy and be a peasant.”
And then, because Djalik said nothing, “In a democracy, people are political more than they’re familial. Get it? They believe in politics. Political parties. Consensual politics. Yes?”
And then, because Djalik said nothing, “You can’t hate politics and be an American. See?”
But Djalik said nothing.
Next day, they had to carry him.
Zaire-Dehibat, Tunisia.
Zulu was flying out of Mobutu’s homeland with the remains of his two companies. He could have got all the ones who could still walk into one aircraft. His men, like him, were bitter: a quarter of them were dead, most from disease or bad medical care. A third were in hospitals in France and Yugoslavia, most of them, again, because of disease, not wounds. They had been in two major battles and been on the losing side in both; they had been shelled by their supposed allies; they had reached the point where they couldn’t turn their backs on the Hutus for fear they’d be fragged or shot. Now they were pulling out, leaving half a million dollars’ worth of loot behind. And seven men killed by Americans.
Shits, cowards. The FAZ was worse even than the Hutus; if they were protecting your flank, you were dead. They’d just fade away.
Acceleration pressed him back into the seat and he heard the wheels of the Fokker clunk into the wells and he felt relief. Goodbye, Africa. Fuck you, Africa. That was all he could think of on the long, boring flight to Chad, during the layover, then on the long, boring flight to Tunisia with the long wound down his arm burning all the way to his mangled elbow. Fuck you, Africa. Take me back, Serbia.
He was always in a rage these days. All because of Africa. It had been a failure from the beginning. He had believed that white troops would smash through black ones, that one trained white man was worth twenty blacks. But the Rwandans and the Ugandans had proven to be tough soldiers. It was his men who had been smashed. On the other hand, if they had been fighting the Zairian Army, they would have triumphed as he had expected; the FAZ was shit. He was on the wrong side, that was all. And that, too, was Lascelles’s fault.
He moved in the seat, flexed his injured arm. That last morning—the ambush. His own stupidity. And the American had shot him again. The white American he had thought was the one from Pustarla, that bastard who had driven him into the snow. And the other one, who had had a gun and was the fastest shooter he had ever seen. And then that shit Ntarinada with his prancing and his posturing; if he had simply given the American back as he’d been ordered, at least that would have been all right. But he had wanted drama! What he had got was full-scale war between Zulu’s whites and his blacks. The Yugoslavs had hardly got out of there in one piece, and as it was they had left half their heavy equipment behind.
The Libyans were waiting for him when he stepped off the plane in Dehibat, the stupid Tunisian airport where they had to land because of the stupid international embargo on Libya, and everything should have been all right then, all the bad part over, only one last stupid mission to do for Lascelles, and then home.
But these weren’t the right Libyans.
There was a limousine for him; there were trucks for his men, just the way there should have been—but the people he expected weren’t there. He had thought he would be met by Lascelles’s usual people—bribed military officers. But he wasn’t.
The ones who met him this time hadn’t been bribed and they weren’t Lascelles’s. He felt it like a sickness in his gut: it wasn’t going to go right.
They were polite but firm. Two squads of soldiers in full battle dress, with a couple
of armored cars, blocked the plane. The Tunisians stayed away; this was some sort of done deal, carried on out on the runway, no Tunisian customs or cops or anything. The Libyans cut him out while he was still on the aircraft and took him off first, and then they told the others to come out or they’d blow up the planes. His men came down the stair, depressed, angry, allowing themselves to be disarmed with little fuss.
“Where are you taking my men?”
“They will be returned to Yugoslavia. When depends on you.”
“Where is Major Al Benyazi?”
“He is under arrest.”
Two of the Libyan soldiers searched Zulu with a thoroughness that was almost a compliment and pushed him into the limo. The last he saw of his men, they were lined up on the tarmac, and one of the sergeants was calling them to attention to salute him as he went by. He was driven over the border into Libya.
Aboard Shark, south of Naples.
Suvarov had worked hard to place Shark where she could intercept the Fort Klock and her group wherever they went after Naples. He waited near the Strait of Messina. He joked to his friend’s son, his second officer, that they were between Scylla and Charybdis. When this met with a blank stare, he went to his cabin, fetched a copy of the Odyssey, and brought it back. Suvarov could not tolerate ignorant officers who knew nothing but the sea. Neither could Lebedev’s father, the admiral. The younger Lebedev was a competent, even gifted, subordinate. But submarine knowledge was not the only kind. “Read this,” he said. Lebedev pretended enthusiasm.
He waited for days, cruising off to the south as far as Lampedusa and as far north as Palermo, but always returning to the strait. By his second repetition, Sergei’s son knew the reference. By the third, he was quoting the Odyssey as often as he could work it in. Suvarov gave him the Iliad.
He almost missed them, they stayed so long in port. Twice he had surfaced to get reports from Moscow because he had lost faith in himself and assumed the Philadelphia had gone the long way around Sicily. When they finally came, he was too ready.
