by AJ Tata
400 feet.
Deployment had taken three hundred feet. Perfect. He would soon be below the horizon.
He began steering the square toward the spot where he had last seen the flickering light. He raced about three hundred meters, then began to spiral down. The ground was nearby now: tree tops, a lake about a half mile away, then level with the trees, open field, a ditch, some high scrub. He released his rucksack and then yanked down on both steering toggles. He let the ground come up to him as he kept his feet and knees together. The ground smacked him, and he rolled with it. His landing was soft enough for him to stand quickly and roll his parachute, stuffing it into an aviator’s kit bag. On one knee, he retrieved the necessary equipment from his ruck.
He snapped his night-vision goggles onto his head harness, screwed the silencer on his M4 carbine, attached his night scope, then chambered a round, putting his weapon into operation—the first priority.
He quickly broke the brush toward the wood line. Instinctively, he walked toward the lake he had seen out of his periphery on his way down. Chest-high ferns swayed in a cool breeze, brushing against his gear. He walked in the green world of the night-vision lens. Pale greens were lighter objects; dark greens and blacks were darker. The ferns and shrubs reached up toward him like the hands of begging children. The trees were about fifty meters to his front.
A sudden brightness raced across his field of view. It appeared to come from his right. He waited. There it was again. Another flash. He lifted his goggles and looked in the direction of the flash. He waited. Nothing. Snapping the goggles back on, he immediately saw the infrared beacon. He walked toward it, secured it, and switched a small button to turn it off. He extracted the small map Rampert had given him, and using his infrared light, he read the instructions.
Two hundred meters, 349 degree azimuth. Hit a small stream, follow it on azimuth of 11 degrees. Equipment at stream and lake intersection. That was it. Simple note. Simple job.
After twenty minutes of walking, he found the boat tied to a tree with pine branches draped across its bow. He found the plug sitting loose and replaced it.
So far, so good. Everything was just like the rehearsal. Nagging at the back of his mind was the fact that, as he descended through the sky, there were flashes of memory, things he couldn’t recall outright.
He would deal with that later.
He checked his watch: 0200 hours. He had about five hours until daylight. He wanted to use the night to his advantage. If he could take the shot tonight, he would. The sooner, the better, Rampert had told him. But he needed to find the operations center and shut it down.
All the right things were going through his mind. He was aware, like a panther. He could feel the wind against his skin. He could pick out the different smells: the pine needles, the bream going to bed in the lake shallows. The night sounds were amplified in his ears: a squirrel jumping from branch to branch, an anonymous animal burrowing in the underbrush, the smack of a fish against the water’s surface.
Lying in the prone, he tested the AN/PAQ-4C night lasing device using his night-vision goggles. The small device attached to the muzzle of the weapon pulsed an infrared laser to the point of aim. He sighted on a distant shore line, picked out a log rising above the water, steadied his aim, and then lowered the weapon. It seemed okay.
Time to move. He switched the infrared beacon on and placed it in the nook of a branch in an oak sapling. Focusing his night-vision goggles, he depressed the azimuth indicator on his monocle.
Turning until the indicator read 36 degrees, he struck out through the woods in search of Ballantine.
CHAPTER 18
Moncrief Lake, Quebec
Ballantine watched the rhythmic motion of her breasts as she slept. The sex had been great, starting in the kitchen and finishing in the bedroom, her black body grinding against his olive skin. They had fallen asleep after two hours of ravishing each other. It was better than a good workout. Hell, it was a great workout, he thought. He wished they could do it more often.
But he had other priorities now.
The red numbers of the clock told him it was three in the morning. Ballantine was normally a heavy sleeper, and it wasn’t like him to rise before sunrise. But something had told him to wake up—instinct maybe. He leaned on his elbow, watching Virginia. Her soft skin glowed in the moonlight. He had never truly loved any woman. Virginia, though . . . she had beauty, power, and raw sensuality. She acted with a controlled abandon that continued to attract him. Love, he didn’t think so. But perhaps.
He had met her shortly after his release from the POW camp in Riyadh. They shipped him back to Baghdad in the back of a five-ton truck, having gained an early release by cutting a deal with his interrogator, an American military officer who ironically was still serving the U.S. government. Ballantine had remained in intermittent, coded contact with the man until recently. Once Ballantine was back in Baghdad, Saddam had given him an award and asked him to stay to remain in command of the Tawalkana. He declined, telling Saddam he wanted to return to Paris to think about his life without Henri. Today, he was satisfied with both his decision and the instructions Saddam had given him since his departure.
As he stared at Virginia’s mocha skin, Ballantine recalled meeting her in France. He had resumed his painting and started writing once he returned to Paris. He was on the River Seine doing a watercolor.
He was unhappy with the blue he had put into the river. Too light. He tried to darken it with some browns, but that didn’t give him the contrast he wanted with the sandy hue of the ivy-shrouded villas sitting on the bluffs. Frustrated, he stood and walked away from the easel to clear his mind. Pacing across the concrete path that bordered the river, he spotted a young black woman watching him from a bench.
He sensed her following him with her large brown eyes, tracking him as he paced away from his easel, then back toward it. He scratched his head and slowly turned toward her. He was wearing his standard painting garb—an old blue T-shirt with multiple paint stains and olive army pants cut off at mid-thigh. His hair was almost shoulder length at the time, and he had grown a black mustache that drooped down on either side of his mouth. After that terrible moment in the desert, he had altered his appearance to the point that sometimes even he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror.
He wasn’t sure what she was seeing or thinking, but she was definitely looking. She was dressed in a bright yellow halter top that revealed ample breasts and a taut stomach. A matching hair band held her straight black hair away from her forehead. She was wearing black shorts that, with her legs crossed, showed her slim brown legs all the way up to her buttocks.
He approached her, and as he did, she flashed a large grin of white teeth.
“Hello. Jacques. Jacques Ballantine.” He offered his hand in greeting, and she shook it firmly as she stood.
“Virginia. Virginia Winfield.” She laughed as she spoke. “I think we both just sounded like James Bond.”
He stared into her eyes, realizing she was as tall as he. She had a thin but muscular body, part natural, part honed in the gym.
“You are more beautiful than any of the Bond women,” he said, smiling.
“That’s quite a compliment. Is painting your profession or your hobby?” They had begun slowly, carelessly walking toward the easel.
“I could either take that as a compliment or as an insult,” he said with a smile.
“Either way, you do it quite well.”
“What’s that? Deflect the question or paint?”
She laughed again, looking at the canvas, then at Ballantine. “Both. But something’s not right about the river. Too light, I think, but I see you were going for a contrast between that and the villas.”
“Could I offer you dinner tonight? I’ll make it at my place. Something simple, a bottle of wine, maybe some pasta?” Ballantine offered.
They ate the pasta, drank the wine, and made love all night.
He reflected on that night and so ma
ny others like it over the past six years. She had helped him heal, to both assuage the pain and to develop a plan that would put it all to rest, forever. The fishing camp, the bombs, the germs—the ultimate plan was borne out of discussions late at night after world-record sex. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, he thought about killing Matt Garrett to get revenge. It would be easy to find Garrett’s house, go there, and kill him. Too easy. Too trite. Not what he wanted.
Zachary Garrett had killed Henri in an epic struggle between two of the world’s largest armies. Sure, killing Matt would be part of the solution, but he also blamed America for his loss. In Ballantine’s mind, the Americans had no right to be there in the first place. It was a regional issue that could have been solved by regional powers. Kuwait had been stealing oil from Iraq, millions of barrels a day. Kuwait’s pampered princes and non-practicing Muslims deserved to be roughed up a bit, as far as Ballantine was concerned.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis had been killed along with Ballantine’s brother. He owed it to Saddam, his countrymen, and his brother to exact revenge in whatever measure he could upon those that had led the charge into Iraq. Jacques and Virginia had developed a detailed plan they believed could work. The Central Committee was eager for his participation, but so was someone else. After discussing the matter with Virginia, he determined he could satisfy both entities.
So he reestablished contact with his United States government source (the “someone else”) and communicated that he was prepared to honor the debt he had incurred when he was released from the filthy detainment center in Riyadh. The source required two commitments: to have a hand in the plan and to get the last copy of the tape. The Central Committee only required that his actions be timed in concert with theirs and that he synchronize his efforts with the admiral commanding the Fong Hou, a Chinese commercial ship with special cargo.
Agreeing to the conditions, Ballantine had begun spiriting small amounts of Ricin, botulism, VX nerve gas, and other lethal weapons of mass destruction into his fishing guide camp. Moving chemicals and biological agents from Iraq to Syria and onto ships in the Mediterranean had been the easy part. Landing his Sherpa at night along the St. Lawrence River as these ships churned toward their final destinations was more difficult. Yet, in so doing, he was able to rapidly move the supplies. Luckily for Ballantine, the American government was a warm-blooded animal, looking south toward the heat—toward Florida, Texas, California—what the government saw as its porous underbelly.
Very little thought was given to the North. Too cold. Too friendly. No problems. Virginia had said, “Why not just set up a small business in Canada and start going back and forth with your supplies?”
He had agreed; developing the fishing-camp concept gave him a reason to have a plane, which in turn gave him unrestricted access, complete freedom. The Iraqi government had given him half a million dollars for his service. And loyalties ran deep, even in countries that were on the brink of poverty because of international sanctions.
Ballantine had said to Virginia, “I remember the planes coming over Baghdad, dropping bombs, the cruise missiles. The sheer terror of it all. I want to strike the same fear into the hearts of Americans. An unpredictable fear that they feel every day because they don’t know what is going to happen next, but they know something is going to happen.”
His mind spun back to the present, fighting off the feeling that someone was watching him. He lit a cigarette and shook the match as he tossed it into the ashtray. Try as he might to discard the notion that eyes were upon him, his instincts were wide awake, screaming at him. He snuffed the cigarette and slid from the bed, reaching between the mattress and the box springs for his Glock. He pulled on some sweatpants, a T-shirt, and running shoes and grabbed a pair of AN-PVS-7B night-vision goggles before quietly padding out of the bedroom into the great room of the cabin. He edged through a sliding glass door onto a small balcony where the lighting was mediocre under the quarter moon.
He held the night-vision goggles to his eyes, turning the world lime green, and scanned the wood line from the lake’s edge on his right to the back of the second cabin thirty meters to his left.
The woods were dense, but there was enough moonlight to give him visibility well into the forest. He saw nothing. No deer, no fox. Nothing.
Then he heard a slight rustling in the leaves to his left coming from behind the cabin. He trained goggles on the area, waiting, moving them back and forth. But he still saw nothing. The rustling was so slight it could have even been a mouse. But still, it was there.
Virginia came stealthily onto the balcony, looking instinctively in the opposite direction, covering his flank. “What is it?” she whispered.
He didn’t respond initially. “Let’s go back inside,” he said after a moment. “We have a visitor.”
CHAPTER 19
Boudreaux could feel the dew settling on his face. The warm days and cool nights of Quebec in April created temperature extremes that could range forty degrees. A cloud of mist wafted in front of him as he breathed slowly and stared at the fifth cabin through his night-vision goggles.
He had looked into four of the five structures and then moved toward the last cabin, the one closest to the water. He always moved perpendicular to the foundation of the cottage, never parallel, so as to minimize his visual signature. Stepping quietly along the wood line, he slipped up to the back of a cabin, looked in the bedroom window, and then moved to the next one, still not sure whether he was in the right place. His land navigation certainly told him he was. And his global positioning device gave him a precise grid coordinate.
This location was one of the three suspected sites. The first turned out to be a dilapidated stand of buildings that looked as though they had once housed miners. Those small huts weren’t near the lake, and he thought he saw some dark spots in his goggles as he scanned the hillside. Caves, maybe. Or old mine shafts. He would check on that location last, as his target folder had indicated that there was a large amount of signals intelligence in that specific area. If he could find Ballantine alone, unguarded, that was best. The assumption was that he was using the mineshafts as a command center and would be heavily guarded accordingly.
This group of cabins was directly on the lake, but they were a good kilometer from the command center location that Rampert had given him. Perhaps it was all one large complex.
He moved from behind a large pine and looked up at the A-frame of the final cabin. There was a large deck outside a sliding glass door and a smaller deck near a large window on the second floor. He guessed that the room by the upper deck was a loft. There was a porch light, but it was not on. He could feel that someone was in the cabin, awake maybe, thinking, maybe sensing that he was out there casing the place.
Boudreaux stepped from the wood line and began to move toward the cabin. He chose a route following a string of shrubs that separated the last two cabins. He did not want to approach from the lake side, where he would be silhouetted against the smooth, glassy water.
He watched the ground to avoid fallen branches or leaves that might make noise. As he did so, he heard an almost imperceptible sound, like something heavy was sliding. He paused for a second before he realized it was a window to his left. The noise was coming from the target building.
Boudreaux quickly crawled through a gap between two bushes, cursing himself when he snapped a branch off a dead boxwood. He held his position and steadied his breathing.
Boudreaux held still, huddling against the thick hedge, hoping whoever was there was just going out for a nightly smoke or enjoying the fresh country air. But he doubted it. He sensed immediately that he was in the right place. And if he was in the right place, whoever it was would probably have some sort of night-vision device. Maybe not the best in the world, but good enough to see with a quarter moon. So he held still and didn’t risk a look. Any movement might be noticed.
Boudreaux heard talking. It sounded like a woman’s voice, and then he heard the deeper baritone of a
man. They were whispering, as if they expected something, someone to be out in the shadows. They were on the defensive.
He was in the right place. This was Ballantine’s cabin. He felt a surge of adrenaline coupled with a tightening of his stomach.
He experienced another flash, like before. A flash of memory, maybe. The flash was a face matched to words. A sound, actually. He was picking out intonations, bits of words they were saying. Something about “inside,” then the sliding of the window. He waited, listening. Had they seen him?
And what was the flash? Like a camera snapping a picture in the night, he had a blind spot in his eyes until he could focus again. In the flash, he saw a face, a haggard, worn man, worried about something. What triggered the flash? The location, the mission, the voice, what?
Five minutes turned to twenty. The rhythmic croak of a frog kept him company as he slowly shifted his vision 360 degrees, watching, listening. Another fifteen minutes. It was almost four o’clock. Serious fishermen would be waking in an hour or two. He needed to move.
He slowly edged his way back using his hands to push into a reverse low crawl. He got to the edge of the shrubs and scanned the cabins one last time. Seeing no movement, he raised himself to all fours and crawled until he reached the dense undergrowth about fifty meters into the woods. The pines began to envelope him, heightening his sense of security. He began to walk hunched over, increasing his speed until he was deep into the forest.
Boudreaux shifted his attention to his front, expecting that he had been spotted near the cabins and that Ballantine had alerted security. It was the worst case scenario, he knew, but it was how he operated. Plan for the worst and expect it to happen. Now he was sliding through the trees, upright, with his M4 carbine at the ready, the reassuring weight of the 9mm pistol slapping his thigh. His goggles pressed against his face and the thin sapling branches reached out, clawing at him, making light scratching noises.
