Against All Enemies

by Richard Herman

  Sutherland tapped his pencil as Toni told him about the blank she drew from the IRS on the Jeffersons. He broke the pencil when she said Cooper was representing Jefferson for free. “Bullshit! Cooper doesn’t do pro bono.”

  Toni stood her ground. “Maybe he’s got a guilty conscience. Or do they surgically remove that at law school?”

  Blasedale gave a silent cheer. Go get him, girl. “Actually, it’s exorcised once you pass the bar exam. It’s a very impressive ceremony.”

  “Well,” Sutherland humphed, trying to recover, “knowing Coop, it’s for the publicity.” He turned to safer ground. “Has Harry turned up anything?”

  “I’m meeting him today before he goes to work.”

  “Well, let us know if he’s got anything. Personally, I think he’s enjoying his work too much.”

  The two women glanced at each other. “Getting cranky?” Toni asked. Sutherland ignored her. “Cathy, I want to reinterview Sgt. Miner and Col. McGraw today. Can you be there?”

  “I’m working on the graphics and going over the geography and movement of Khalid in relation to Jefferson.” Blasedale paused for a moment. “Maybe Toni can help. It wouldn’t hurt to get another perspective on their testimony.”

  Toni gave her a knowing look. “I should be back about two o’clock.”

  “Good,” Sutherland said, “see you then.”

  Toni walked as slowly as she could out of the office. She hurried over to the gym, changed into her running togs, and headed for the state park just outside Spirit Gate. As she expected, Harry was walking along a deserted trail. She slowed and walked with him. “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “That son-of-a-bitch Ramar,” Harry grumbled.

  “I thought he left last week,” Toni said.

  “He did. But he’s back.” Harry stared at his feet. “He hassles the girls something fierce.”

  “Feeling protective?” Toni asked.

  Harry thought for a moment, examining his own feelings. “Yeah, I guess I am. After a while, you get to know them.”

  “And?” Toni asked, pursuing the subject.

  “Most of them are young and pretty single mothers whose husbands or boyfriends took off. It’s a job of last resort.”

  Toni shook her head. “It’s an easy job that pays big bucks. How many of them support a drug habit or a worthless boyfriend?”

  “More than a few,” Harry conceded. “I talk to them quite a bit, trying to get a handle on Ramar. They sort’a treat me like a father.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Ramar talks to one of the bartenders, a guy named Mo Habib, more than he does the manager. There’s something going on there, but I don’t know what. I think some of the girls know, but they won’t talk about it.”

  They walked in silence. Finally, Toni said one word. “Andrea.”

  Harry looked at her. “You think we should try to get her inside?”

  “Why not?” Toni asked. “As far as I know, she’s still dancing at Reno.”

  Harry considered the possibilities. “I’ll get on it.”

  “Don’t take too long. Meanwhile, I’ll check out this Habib guy.”

  “It’s Mohammed Habib,” Harry told her.

  “A Moslem bartender?”

  “They don’t drink the profits,” Harry replied. “Besides it’s a juice bar. No alcohol.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go. Ramar is bringing in a bunch of hired guns for tonight’s show, Miss Nude Missouri.”

  “Lovely,” Toni said, jogging away.

  Harry watched her until she disappeared down the trail. Then he sat down on a nearby bench to wait. He didn’t want a chance encounter with anyone from the bar to link them together. Thirty-five minutes later, he walked slowly back to the park where he had left his car. Years of experience had made him naturally cautious and he paused to scan the parking lot before going to his car. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he muttered. The bartender, Mo Habib, was standing by the driver’s window of a black Mercedes Benz. He and Toni weren’t the only ones to use the park as a rendezvous. A hand reached out of the window and grabbed Habib’s necktie and pulled his head into the car.

  Harry caught a glimpse of Ramar’s swarthy face and heard his distinctive growl. “It was fifty thousand, mutha.” There were more words he couldn’t understand but Harry almost purred in satisfaction. The money trail now led to Habib. He retreated away from the parking lot, certain that Ramar had seen his car. It was salamander time.

  “Hey,” the manager called when Harry entered the bar, “you’re late. Introduce yourself to the ladies and then Mr. Ramar wants to talk to you.”

  Harry grunted an answer and wandered over to the bar. The eight hired guns brought in for the show were talking to the bartender. “Mo,” Harry said, “who are your friends?” Habib made the introductions and Harry quickly sorted the girls out. Four were neophytes from Kansas City, two were professional dancers, one an aspiring actress down on her luck, and one a porn star. “How many movies have you starred in?” he asked.

  “Over two hundred,” she answered.

  “Well, ladies, I’m in charge of security here and deal with the sheriff. It’s nude onstage but keep your shoes on, topless for table and lap dances. Charge whatever the traffic will bear, but normally it’s twenty bucks a dance on a show night. Don’t let the customers touch you and if one causes any trouble, stand up and pat the back of your hair with either hand. I’ll be all over him like stink on a skunk. Any questions?”

  “You’re cute,” the porn star said.

  Harry knew what she was after. “Not that cute, honey. No freelancing allowed on the premises and that includes the parking lot. Don’t even make dates.”

  “You’re still cute,” she said in a hurt voice.

  He smiled at them and ambled back to the office. The door was ajar so he knocked twice and pushed on through. Ramar was sitting behind the desk with a nude girl on his lap. Harry glanced down. Ramar’s trousers were bunched around his ankles. “I got big bucks in tonight’s show,” Ramar growled. “Why were you late?”

  “Car trouble,” Harry answered. “I had to hitch a ride.”

  “Call a taxi next time.”

  “We only got one and he was busy,” Harry replied.

  “Where’s your car?”

  So you or Mo did make my car, he thought. “Where I left it last night—in the state park. It wouldn’t start.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “The same thing you’re doing. Man, was she pissed when we had to walk.”

  “Give me your keys,” Ramar demanded. “A mechanic owes me. I’ll get it fixed.”

  You mean you’ll get it checked out. Harry threw his keys on the desk, confident that it would take an expert mechanic to find the short that had disabled his car. It was all part of his salamander training.

  5:20 P.M., Sunday, June 20,

  El Obeid, The Sudan

  Kamigami stuck the microdot microphone in a crack next to the ceiling. “It should pick up sound reflected from the ceiling,” he told al Gimlas.

  “They’ll never see it from here,” al Gimlas said. The two men reexamined the cell, making sure the American pilots could find the video camera and the first, and much more obvious, microphone. “Will they know what to do?” al Gimlas asked.

  “They should. Time to check out the warehouse.” Kamigami took one last sweep of the cell and, satisfied it was ready, closed the heavy steel door as they left. Outside, the driver snapped to attention and held the car door for his captain. Unsure of what to do about Kamigami, he rushed around to open his door. Kamigami had been in El Obeid two weeks and the soldiers were already afraid of him. The driver made the short drive to the warehouse and breathed a sigh of relief when Kamigami disappeared inside.

  “My men are afraid of you,” al Gimlas said.

  “They have nothing to fear from me.”

  “That is good to know,” al Gimlas replied.

  Kamigami was silent as they walked through the wr
eckage of the B-2. To the untrained eye, it was a mass of charred and twisted wreckage. Some of the bits and pieces were recognizable; the ejection seats, the engines, part of the instrument panel, the beaver tail that had broken off in the crash, but little else. The self-destruct mechanisms had worked well. “Have the Chinese technicians examined this?” Kamigami asked.

  “Not yet,” al Gimlas answered. “They are getting most impatient at the delays. Our weather doesn’t agree with them.”

  “Good. Maybe, they’ll be willing to help us in return for a chance to examine the wreckage.”

  “We can always ask,” al Gimlas allowed.

  It was just after two in the morning when the guards came for Mark Terrant, the B-2’s mission commander. The burly men barged into the major’s cell and jerked him to his feet. They unchained him from the wall and slapped handcuffs on his badly chaffed wrists. Then they jerked a canvas bag over his head, brushing the heavy bandages wrapped around and under his chin. Although his jaw was healing nicely from the beating by Assam’s thugs, he groaned loudly, using anything he could to gain an advantage.

  The guards dragged him out of the cell, down the long corridor, and outside. For a moment, he was certain that he was going to be executed. Much to his relief, they lifted him into a truck and banged the tailgate closed. Terrant looked out the bottom of the hood and through the slats of the truck, trying to get his bearings as they drove through the night. Then it came to him, they were going in a circle and trying to confuse him. The truck slammed to a halt and the guards dragged him inside another building. A hand straightened him up. Another hand grabbed his hood and jerked it off.

  He blinked in the bright light. He was standing in a big room, probably a warehouse, he reasoned. Strewn out in front of him was the wreckage of his B-2, all arranged inside a broad white stripe painted on the floor. At first, it didn’t make sense to him. But as the guards pushed him around the wreckage, he realized the white stripe outlined a B-2 and the wreckage was placed in its approximate location. It was obvious someone knew a great deal about the B-2. “What do you see?” one of the guards barked.

  “Wreckage from an aircraft,” he mumbled.

  “Your aircraft!”

  Terrant knew better than to lie at this stage, so he mumbled some incomprehensible words and staggered as if he was on the edge of physical collapse. The canvas bag was jammed back on his head and the guards half-dragged, half-prodded, him back to the truck. They drove around for about the same length of time, and this time he was certain they were going in circles before they reached their destination.

  Again, the guards dragged him down a corridor and pushed him into another room. Out of the bottom of his hood, he counted five pairs of boots standing in a semicircle. What now? he thought. His hood was removed, more gently this time, and he was looking at the biggest Asian he had ever seen. The man stood about six-foot-six and was shaved bald. He wore a People’s Liberation Army uniform with the rank of general. Where did you come from? Terrant chanced a glance around the room. Half were Arabs, the other half Chinese.

  Kamigami cut loose with a stream of Cantonese as one of the Asians interpreted. “The general wants to know about the BLU-113 bombs you were carrying.”

  How did he know that? Terrant thought. “We weren’t carrying bombs,” he lied. A torrent of Cantonese and Arabic erupted around him. A slight flick of Kamigami’s hand and the room fell abruptly silent. A long pause. Then, in a soft and quiet voice Terrant found at total odds with the image in front of him, Kamigami spoke a few more words in Cantonese. Again, the Asian translated.

  “The general is a patient man but you must not lie to him.” The interpreter handed him two sheets of paper.

  “No doubt the confession you want me to sign,” Terrant said, letting the pages slip to the floor.

  “No,” the interpreter replied, “these are questions the general wants answered. The general has directed that you have time to consider your answers. The next time, he will expect the answers, not lies.”

  “And if I have no answers?”

  “That would be most unfortunate for Capt. Douglas Holloway.”

  On cue, the guards pushed Terrant out of the room, this time without his hood. They led him down a side corridor and stopped in front of a heavy steel door. They removed his shackles, opened the door, and shoved him inside. Much to his surprise, they only dropped the two pages of questions on the floor and left, not bothering to chain him to the wall as before. Capt. Douglas Holloway was standing in the middle of the cell.

  Without a word, the two men shook hands, their grips strong. They held on to each other, finding strength and hope after eight weeks of solitary confinement. But they knew better than to speak. Holloway stepped to a wall and pointed to a micro TV camera above his head. From directly underneath, he was outside the camera’s angle of view. He motioned Terrant to his side and gestured for him to get down on all fours. Holloway stood on his back, now able to reach the camera. With a maddening slowness, he tilted the camera so it only viewed the far corner of the cell. Out of sight of the camera, he showed Terrant the microphone he had found. With a care that would have done a neurosurgeon proud, Terrant separated the thin black leads and snapped the filaments without breaking the black insulation.

  Terrant mouthed the words, “Can we talk?” Holloway shook his head and motioned for them to continue searching the cell. Together, they went over the cell, looking for other bugs. Satisfied there were no more, Holloway sat down on a bunk. “Fuckin’ ragheads,” he muttered.

  “Are you okay?” Terrant asked.

  “Still bruised, but I’m fine. How ’bout you?”

  “The jaw’s much better, but I’m faking it. Did they show you the wreckage?”

  Holloway shook his head. “What about the fuckin’ Chinaman?”

  “Yeah, we met.” Terrant picked up the two pages of questions and handed him one. “He wants an answer to these.” He looked at his friend. “Doug, he’s threatening you if I don’t comply.”

  “Hold out as long as you can.” Holloway said. “But I would appreciate it if you’d start throwing some bullshit around before he gets serious about the threat.” He scanned the page of questions. “Jesus H. Christ! Someone knows a hell of a lot about the Beak. What the hell were we trying to bomb anyway?”

  “Not what,” Terrant replied, “but who?”

  “You think the Chinese?”

  “Seems like it.”

  17

  11:20 A.M., Monday, June 21,

  Over Florida

  Art Rios let the plush leather seat of the Hawker Horizon, Durant’s latest business jet, suck him into a state of drowsy bliss. The sixteen-million-dollar, two-engine aircraft was a honey to fly, and Rios would have preferred sitting in the left seat on the flight deck. But circumstances change and his real job was to dance careful attendance on his employer, who was sitting in the seat opposite him. For some reason, Durant preferred facing backward when he was not at the controls. Although Durant’s eyes were closed, Rios knew he was hard at work.

  “Are you sure?” Durant asked without opening his eyes.

  “We are now,” Rios answered. He consulted his folder, making sure he had all the facts straight. Two of his best agents had been back-flushing the source of Meredith’s information about the downing of the B-2 bomber for three weeks. At first, they had encountered a stone wall. Then a significant amount of money had changed hands. But like all “bought” information, it had to be verified and that had taken time. “We would never get a conviction, but Serick did leak it to Meredith. We just don’t know why.”

  Durant’s eyes opened and flashed with anger. “Consistency has never been Stephen’s strong suit. He wants an excuse for an aggressive and hard-line policy in the Middle East. If the Arabs won’t give him one, he’ll manufacture it.” He thought for a few moments. “I suppose I should tell Agnes.” He lay back in his seat and closed his eyes. Rios waited while he worked another problem. “Are we okay with FinCEN?”<
br />
  “Everything’s shortstopped,” Rios said.

  “And Geneva?”

  “A bit more problematic,” Rios replied. “But we should be okay.”

  “I’ll talk to Heydrich and reinforce his backbone,” Durant said. Heydrich Mueller was the president of Credit Geneve, an obscure Swiss bank with huge reserves owned by Durant.

  Rios laughed. “He’ll find that an uplifting experience.”

  Durant switched subjects again. “How close are we on the rescue mission?”

  “Close, very close,” Rios answered. “We’ve got a few details to work out but other than that, we’re ready to go.”

  “Good,” Durant said. “We’ve almost run out of time.” The FASTEN SEAT BELT light came on warning them to strap in for landing at Hurlburt Field, the home of the 16th Special Operations Wing.

  Lt. Col. Gillespie prowled back and forth like a caged tiger in front of the small crowd that was gathered in the mission planning section of the wing’s intelligence section. The helicopter pilot’s bright red hair and green flight suit bagging on his skinny body made Durant think of a lean and hungry tiger in search of a good meal. A schematic of the compound at El Obeid and a chart showing their route were tacked to the wall behind him. “Sir, the secret of success in special ops is to plan the hell out of the mission, practice until it’s second nature, then improvise like mad when we do it.”

  He traced the route on the chart. “The plan is simplicity itself. We launch out of Bangui in the Central African Republic with Combat Talon MC-130s and Pave Low helicopters. The Combat Talons will airdrop Delta Force onto the objective.” He pointed to a schematic of the barracks at El Obeid. “They will free the two pilots and move to this point”—he pointed to an area near the compound—“and the helicopters will extract them approximately twenty minutes after the attack begins. Sir, I’ll let the commander of Delta Force outline how they plan to free the pilots and move them to the pickup point.”