by Gordon Kent
The little group passed almost directly overhead. The escorts both had their tails deployed. They were looking for him. Good. There was plenty of noise here to hide in.
He followed them some fifteen miles astern. When he had a good set of hydroacoustic conditions, or when his hunches told him the time was right, he would sprint for a kilometer or two and close the gap. On the surface, the weather was deteriorating, increasing his advantage. By midnight he was close. Two thousand yards behind the Fort Klock, he increased buoyancy slightly, to drift toward the surface while barely maintaining maneuvering speed. He raised his periscope and his radio mast and fired a burst transmission toward a distant Russian satellite. Then, according to plan, he submerged twenty meters, retrieved his periscope with a beautiful photograph of the storm-tossed Philadelphia in the cross hairs, turned sharply to port, and roared off to the east at twenty knots.
Aboard the Fort Klock, a sailor woke Captain Cobb in his at-sea cabin. “The Russian sub is back, sir. We detected him within the formation.”
Cobb rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked out his porthole at the black water.
“Bastard,” he muttered. “Inform the flag. Increase the ASW screen.” Bastard, he thought again. The Russian’s games were using up his assets. And he didn’t like losing.
Nalut border crossing, Tunisian-Libyan border. December 7.
“What were you coming to Libya for, Colonel?”
“To rest my men. Spend some time at the beach. Spend some US dollars. It was agreed, Captain. We have done this before.”
“You brought two plane-loads of weapons, Colonel.”
“It was messy at the end down there. Mobutu’s finished; we were getting out. The weapons represent money to me.”
The captain nodded. The man with him fidgeted. Zulu couldn’t place him, but he was no Arab peasant. It was clear from his face that he followed the conversation in French with ease. A Frenchman? Maybe some colleague of Jackie’s?
“You have heard of Lockerbie, Colonel?”
He made a gesture: Get on with it.
“You are here to get on a hired Libyan speedboat. No, no, don’t deny it—Major Al Benyazi told us all about it. We weren’t as easy-going with Major Al Benyazi as we have been with you—so far—but we needed to have what he knew in a hurry. We’ve found the speedboat and have impounded it and, mmm, arrested its captain. Now—in your luggage was a dedicated radio with codes for communicating. Eleven of your men told my colleagues, while we drove here, that they have been training for two weeks to board a ship. This suggests, I am sorry to say, a conspiracy to commit piracy.” He shook his head like a man who was infinitely sorrowed by the thought of conspiracy. “In Libyan waters, at that.”
Well, Lascelles’s scheme was blown, that was obvious. And not his fault that it was. He was almost cheered: sometimes things happened for the best.
“What do you want?”
“I want to know everything about your mission. Explain your plans in detail. If I am convinced, and if what you say checks out, I will have you driven to Tunis and put on a plane for Belgrade. Your men—and your weapons; we are not thieves—will follow within thirty-six hours. Or, you may choose to be heroically silent, and I will send you on a different plane to an air base that the Italians share with the American Air Force, and the FBI will be waiting there to ask you the same questions. You see how attractive the second plan is to me: if I willingly turn you over to the Americans, then Libya is that much less a terrorist state and Lockerbie is that much more obscured. So, persuade me that I should not turn you over to the Americans, Colonel Zulu.”
He talked. An hour later, he was driven to a luxury hotel.
The officer who had interrogated Becque did not return to Tripoli but went to a scrambler radio-phone in a military scout car. There, he got in touch with a civilian intelligence office in the Tripoli suburbs and made his report. When he was finished, he said, “I think we can go forward. A dozen men to replace the assault crew is all we need. I know, I know time is short—No, I think we simply get rid of him. No, no, not like that—better if he is alive, but not here, not in Libya. You see? He represents this foreign plan to exploit Libya. Let me suggest a procedure to you. The French officer, Duboucq, sat in on the interrogation, so we have shown our cooperativeness; now he knows about this plot that has originated in their country, about this old man, this Lascelles. So, you see, we let this Zulu or whatever his real name is start running. Yes, a running target is always interesting, yes—you see my point. But the timing must be just right. Yes, exactly—the French will be grateful; we will take the American missile; the Americans will be humiliated—” He was persuasive. It seemed like a fine idea.
34
December 8
Zaire.
They had carried Djalik all day on a litter they had made out of branches and soft things from their packs. He was unconscious—not raving, never a sound, always asleep. His temperature was pushing a hundred and four and his hand had a smell that they agreed was probably gangrene.
They came down a hill through the mud of what had been a path, the trees dripping from the rain that had stopped only minutes before. Alan got the rank, vegetable smell he’d first caught when he had landed at Kinshasa—a million years ago. Ripe and rot. He was exhausted, but he didn’t know how Harry was keeping on at all, because he had been weaker to start with. Yet on he went, plodding, not talking any more.
He was afraid of what he would see when they got to the airfield. More refugees, more tents, more humanity? He had thought they were ahead of the flood of people, but he was no longer sure.
They didn’t see the airfield until they were almost standing on it. There was no view over it from the path, only a descent to the plain and then more trudging through scattered forest and openings rank with grass. And then, suddenly, brightness through the trees, and a sense of everything opening out.
It was a graveled strip that had been built with care, plenty long enough for the short takeoff Nomads or light planes like the Cessna. The strip looked new. It was perfect.
No refugees. No tents, no stench of excrement, no noise of babies and anger.
But, parked on the runway five hundred feet apart, two big earth-working machines so old they looked as if they should have been steam-driven. They effectively turned the strip into three five-hundred-foot gravel patches. The only thing that could land on this strip now was a helicopter.
It had to be deliberate. A way, surely, of keeping the FAZ and its smuggling out of the area. Dog in the manger.
“What d’you think?” Harry said.
He was looking far down toward the end of the airstrip. “I think somebody’s pointing a rifle at us, is what I think.”
The sun came out and steam began to rise from the mud, and they put Djalik in the shade of one of the earth-movers. Alan tried to raise the boat on the radio while Harry, weapon at the ready, watched the guy with the rifle. From the new vantage point they could see that there was a small building down there, too, probably one of the cave-like, windowless houses built of concrete block that represent a step up from the mud banda here.
“Big Bear, this is Bear Cub, over.” He checked the comm plan he’d scribbled in the first-aid book. Yeah, these dumb codenames were right. If this was a day divisible by two, he was Bear Cub. “Big Bear, this is Bear Cub, over.”
Harry sniffed. “I smell cooking.” They hadn’t eaten in almost two days.
“Big Bear, this is Bear Cub, over.”
“BEAR CUB THIS IS BIG BEAR, WE HEAR YOU LOUD AND CLEAR OVER.” He held his ear and adjusted the volume. “Big Bear, this is Bear Cub, I’m at Point Three and it is no-go on conventional aircraft, do you read me?”
“Read you no-go on conventional. Confirm.”
“Confirm no-go on conventional, Big Bear. Choppers okay. Choppers okay. We, um, haven’t checked the site, but there’s no bandits and no locals, nobody. One guy. Do you read me?”
“I read you okay on choppers, no s
ite check yet, no people. Over.”
“When can you get us out?”
Pause. Then: “We’re working on that, Bear Cub.”
“Goddamit, I’ve got a man dying of gangrene here! Jesus, we’re at the designated point, why the fuck—” He’d lost it. Harry was staring at him. He made himself calm down. “Big Bear, we need to get lifted out. I have a man who hasn’t been conscious in twenty-four hours; we think he has gangrene. Do you read me, over?”
“Loud and clear, Bear Cub. They’ve put a lock on over-flights. We feel for you, man. Over.”
He wanted to shout, Stop feeling for me and start flying for me!, but he made himself breathe slowly, and he said, “What about the French? I thought that was an option. Over.”
“Bear Cub, most of them have moved across the river, and apparently it’s now falling apart over there. Maybe—You just have to give us a little time. Over.”
He stared at the little radio. “I don’t have any time. We’re about done.” He clicked the mike, then clicked it back on and said, “Over.”
The silence was like a deafness, which filled with an enormous whirring of insects, then shrill cries of birds that sounded as if they were being tortured. He and O’Neill both looked at Djalik, then at each other. “What if they can’t do it at all?” O’Neill said.
“Maybe we can walk to the Congo. Find a boat. It’s seven hundred miles to the coast, at least two sets of cataracts. Kinshasa and Brazzaville war zones when we get there.” He sat down with his back against the big road-grader and felt so tired he thought he’d never get up again. He hung his head between his knees, his arms stuck out in front of him. For a moment, a voice was saying It’s over; it’s hopeless; they can’t do it—He sighed. He struggled to his feet. “I see a Coke sign on that building down there, so I guess it thinks it’s some kind of store. I’m going to stroll down and see what they’ll sell us to eat.”
“That guy is still there with his rifle.”
“Well, you’re going to be the guy up here with his AK-47. If he shoots, waste him.”
Alan walked down toward the building. When he got close enough, he could see that a name had been painted, somewhat crudely, in big white letters across the front of the building: Grand Super-Store A Go Go. It looked to be the size of a one-car garage.
“Arrêtez!” the man shouted.
“Aw, shut up,” Alan mumbled. He shouted back in his mediocre French that if the man fired his gun, he would be eliminated by an automatic rifle. At least that was what he thought he said. “Je voudrais acheter de la nourriture! J’ai de l’argent! Je payerai!”
When he said he would pay, a woman appeared in the doorway of the building. She was big, majestic, got up in the cleanest clothes he’d seen in weeks. She said something to the man and walked right into the line of fire.
“You English?” she said. In English.
“American.”
“You got money?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“American dollar?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I make you very nice food. Ten dollars US.”
Good God, you could eat all day in Africa for ten dollars. “For two men,” he said. Djalik wouldn’t eat any more.
“Twenty dollars US.”
“Chicken,” he said.
“Rice,” she said. “Rice, ten dollars. Also peas, ten dollars.”
“Forty dollars for rice and peas for two?”
She smiled. Big smile. “You got it,” she said. “Okay?”
“Coca-Cola?”
“Ten dollars.”
Sixty dollars for rice and peas and a Coke. He might as well be back in Washington. He reached inside his shirt and felt for the gold coin he’d taped there. When he had it, he held it out.
“Dollars,” she said.
“Gold.” He wanted to hold on to his goddam dollars. Anyway, he wasn’t sure that they had that much any more. She came close to him and took the coin and bit it, sniffed it, weighed it in her hand. “Okay.”
“Like hell okay, that coin is worth more than a hundred!” He reached for it. She waved him off and disappeared into the store, and when she came out, she had a gold scale. She had everything, he thought; there was probably a computer in there with a direct link to Wall Street. She weighed the coin and figured on her black skin with a matchstick and said, “Ninety dollars, this coin. I cut it for you.” And she did, with a chisel and a hammer, giving him a good deal less in change than he thought he ought to get.
“You cheat your own people like this, too?” he said.
“These are not my people here! I am from Nigeria!” She made herself seem to expand. “People here are his people.” She jerked her head at her husband.
The rice and peas were wonderful. And there were a lot of them. The Cokes were warm and were in cans that had been manufactured in about 1960, but the contents were the right liquid. After they had stuffed themselves, they put their bowls near the door and went back to stand by Djalik, whom they’d carried down to a patch of shade by the building, which was both house and store. Alan had peeked inside and seen sacks of rice and beans, machetes, matches, cloth. “With prices to match,” he said to Harry. “She’s going to greet the refugees like the witch greeting Hansel and Gretel when they get here.”
Then they looked at the sky. At the earth-moving machines. The husband was watching them, squatting by a tree, his back against it. The bolt-action rifle leaned next to him.
Alan kept looking into the sky. “It’d be a piece of cake to drop a chopper in here,” he said.
The female entrepreneur was standing behind him. “You want to buy an airplane?” she said, smiling.
The plane was on another airfield a mile away. It was the old airfield; the one where the road-graders were sitting was the new one. Both belonged to a French oil company, and when they had flown their big plane away two weeks ago, they had flown the little one to the old field and hidden it there.
The Nigerian woman told them all this as they walked to the field, Alan and O’Neill carrying Djalik. She had contempt for the whites who had left, contempt for her husband, who had stayed. “He calls himself the police! The manager! Because they gave him an old rifle and told him to keep an eye on things.” She spat. She was one tough bird.
When he saw the plane, he knew he could fly it. It was the French version of the Cessna 182, built by Reims, filthy dirty now; they’d probably thrown mud on it to camouflage it. But, as he walked around it, he saw that it was probably okay. “How much?” he said.
“How much gold you have, darling?”
He shook his head. “Uh-uh. You have to tell me. And I want the keys, and petrol. I’m not going to buy it from you a piece at a time. No hundred-dollar-a-liter petrol.”
“I got the keys.” She reached into her front, pulled them out. At the same time, she’d taken an ancient Star M .45 from somewhere and was pointing it at him. “Don’t mess me, darling.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake—! How much?”
“Five hundred in gold for the plane. Three hundred for the petrol. One hundred for the keys.”
“No deal until I see if the engine works.”
She insisted on getting in beside him, the gun still in her hand, as if he might fly away with the aircraft that wasn’t hers to begin with. He was taking part in a theft, he thought. He found it didn’t bother him in the least.
The engine resisted, coughed, backed, then turned enough to show it had compression, and then it fired and the prop spun. He revved it up, pushing the throttle forward, feeling the plane try to go as the engine roar deepened. The Nigerian woman screamed. He laughed at her and cut the engine.
“Deal,” he said. “Half now, half when we leave.”
She wasn’t going to let it happen that way, but he took the gun away from her and made her sit down, and he counted out half his SA gold pieces and dropped them in her lap and told her to amuse herself counting them.
“Petrol!” he said. She pointed at a sunke
n spot a hundred feet away. There was a shovel and three machetes in the plane, left from their bringing it in, and he took the shovel and dug until he hit a jerry can, and he wrestled it out and opened the cap and got a good whiff.
“Tie her up,” he said. “Then go back and get her husband and tie him up. Then you dig up the gasoline and find something to strain it through—that cloth she’s got her head wrapped in will do—because I sure as shit don’t want a plugged fuel line when we’re over the middle of nowhere.”
Harry stared at him. “You really going to fly that thing?”
“I sure am.”
“Alan—can you fly that thing?”
“Can you?” He jerked his head. “Tie her up. I’m going to do the landscaping.”
He took one of the machetes and started on the runway. Probably the greenery hadn’t been too bad before the rains started; maybe they had kept it cut. But there was grass now, and tough little bushes, and wild bananas that were over his head. He kept himself from looking the length of the runway, because he figured he’d never do it if he knew how far he had to go; instead, he put his head down and started cutting. He had thought he was exhausted when he started, but that was the middle of the day, and he went up the field, swinging and cutting and throwing crap aside for five hours. The rain came in the afternoon, and it was like a blessing on his back.
He let himself straighten now and then, fire running across his shoulders, but he went back to it. His right hand blistered, so he went to his left, then back; the blisters broke, bled. I’m getting us out of here; I’m getting us out of here, he told himself over and over and over. When something like a sob broke from him because he hurt so much, he dared to raise his head and saw that he was thirty feet from the end. He looked at his watch. How could he have done that? All that! He looked at his raw right hand. It hurt now to grip the machete. He gripped it anyway and swung at a banana plant and bent, pain singing up his back and across his shoulders. This was the kind of work some people did all their lives, all day, all week, all year. He hit the stalks: all day, all week, all year. Sugar-cane workers. If they could do it—He came to the wall of bush at the end of the field.
