The Bonaparte Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  She was on him as he shook his head and tried to stand. Before he reached his knees, she delivered a kick with all her strength that caught him squarely on the chin. He spun backward and fell on his back. This time he made no effort to get up.

  Straddling the prone body, Gurt patted him down. Her search revealed a flashlight hanging by a clip to his belt and a long knife—a bayonet, she assumed—in a scabbard also on his belt.

  He was starting to moan as Gurt unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. The pants were a little more difficult, requiring her to tug at the cuffs to dump him out of them. He had recovered consciousness sufficiently to mumble words she could not understand. She dragged him over to the rock behind which she had been hiding and found where she had shrugged off her backpack.

  It took mere seconds to locate the roll of tape, one of two Lang had purchased. Only a little more time was required before the man was trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey. He was trying to say something as she slapped the final strip across his mouth, reducing him to grunts and squeals.

  Gurt slid the shirt on over her own, trying not to notice the odor of stale sweat. The top and bottom buttoned easily, but no way was the fabric going to stretch across her breasts. She stepped into the pants, a little short at the bottom, and the belt lacked enough notches to tighten it enough to keep the trousers around her waist. No matter. She was going to be sitting anyway. She made certain both flashlight and bayonet were still in place.

  It took several minutes to locate the man’s rifle and his cap. She put the latter on her head, tucking her long blonde hair under it. A soft whinny led her to one of the horses, which she mounted as she slung the rifle over her shoulder.

  If whoever was in the Citadelle had sent a patrol along the treacherous path in the dead of night, it was a near certainty she and Lang were expected. They could well have been waiting for him. Besides, she had no intention of simply waiting for his return.

  Just like a man to assume she would obey him simply because of his gender.

  Lang was ushered into a small room he guessed had served as an officer’s quarters. He was again nearly blinded by the light. As his eyes adjusted, he noted the small Yamaha generator softly chugging in a corner. The stone walls must have insulated its sound from the outside. He got a glimpse of a pair of iron cots with thin cotton mattresses. He was less than surprised to see a poster bearing the likenesses of Sun Yat-sen, Mao and Chou En-lai hanging over two packing crates that served as a dresser. Across the room a blanket hung over what Lang surmised was an entrance to one of the corridors outside the gun rooms.

  Hands snatched his arms behind his back and pressed him into a reed-bottomed chair to which his wrists were tightly bound before he was spun around to face the door.

  An Asian of undeterminable age peered back at him. The man wore a woodland-pattern camouflage uniform whose epaulets bore two stitched stars. His fatigue cap had a single red star pinned above the red band above the bill. If Lang remembered correctly, he was facing a Zhong Xiao, lieutenant colonel, of the People’s Liberation Army.

  The man reached somewhere beyond the angle that Lang’s bindings permitted him to see and produced the mate to the chair in which Lang sat.

  Dragging it to within a few feet of Lang, he reached into a pocket, produced a cigarette without removing the pack and lit it as he sat. “I am Lieutenant Colonel Shien Dow,” he announced in American-accented English, “and I have a few questions for you.”

  Lang said nothing.

  Dow took a long drag, expelling the smoke somewhere above Lang’s head. “First, who sent you?”

  “I came on my own.”

  “With a false passport? Why would you enter Haiti on a false passport? That could get you in serious trouble, you know.”

  “With whom? The People’s Republic of China?”

  The lieutenant colonel stared at him a moment, and then Lang’s head seemed to explode. He never saw the blow coming. The next thing his brain registered was the chair, with him still in it, sideways on the floor. Unseen hands righted both.

  “Let us try again, Mr. Reilly . . .”

  “My name is Lowen and I am a German citizen.”

  This time he saw what was coming but was unable to prevent it. His interrogator’s fist smashed into Lang’s mouth and he tasted blood as the chair toppled over again.

  By the time Lang was propped up, Dow was rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the left, cigarette dangling from his lips.

  He gave a deep sigh. “We know who you are. Your name is Langford Reilly; you are a lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. We even have your address, where you and your wife live with your young son. Speaking of your wife, she came here to the Citadelle with you. If you cherish her safety, you will cooperate.”

  Implicit and direct bluffs? Lang suspected so. Harming Manfred or Gurt would not produce the immediate result this man wanted. Besides, Gurt should be on her way back to the Mont Joli by now, fully alerted for trouble when Lang didn’t return. The question was, how did they know who he was? Some sort of face-recognition equipment used in conjunction with a surreptitious photo taken, perhaps in Venice? Perhaps the credit-card receipt for the costume? No matter. What was important was that they did know who, and what did he do now? The sole weapon Lang had was to stall, to drag things out as long as possible to give Gurt time to get help. The problem was that this guy was going to use Lang as a punching bag or worse in the meantime.

  He was not disappointed over the next hour.

  Time ceased to exist. Only pain was real, throbbing pain from the places Lang had been hit, stabbing pain as another blow was delivered. If Lang gave them the information they sought, they had little incentive to let him live. He had to hold out, delay until Gurt came up with a plan.

  He tried to withdraw his mind from this place, a technique Agency training had included. He saw the azure waters caressing the verdant cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast, the majesty of the Austrian Alps draped in winter white. He almost smiled as he recalled something Manfred had said, a particular wild romp in bed with Gurt.

  But always the pain intruded, shattering his thoughts like a china plate hitting the floor. The pain was sapping his energy as well as his will. At some point, his resistence to it would be gone. Why suffer the agony? Tell them what they wanted now. Death would take the pain away.

  And I’ll never see Manfred or Gurt again.

  His head snapped up from his chest and he realized with a start Dow’s face was inches from his own, close enough that the spittle from his screaming mouth sprayed Lang’s cheeks.

  Lang was familiar with the interrogation tactic: soft voice rises unexpectedly to yelling, a sudden about-face designed to keep the person being questioned off balance. He also had a pretty good idea of what came next. If physical beating did not produce the desired result, there were two options. The first was to put the prisoner someplace where sleep and a sense of time would be impossible, nothing to occupy his mind but the dread of future beatings. Lang thought that scenario unlikely. Dow would not wait for days to find out why Lang and Gurt were here. The second option was to simply increase the pain factor: electric shock of the genitals, pull a few teeth, some form of mutilation.

  The options were both limited and unpleasant.

  As though to confirm Lang’s fears, Dow nodded to someone behind Lang. Fingers grabbed his shirt and tore it from his body. An instant later, the Chinese colonel stubbed out a burning cigarette against Lang’s left nipple.

  Lang was almost deafened by the sound of a scream, a sound he hardly realized came from him.

  Gurt was close enough to see the men just inside the massive entrance to the Citadelle. Darkness prevented her from making out their features, but there was enough light from the declining moon to see there were two of them, one on each side of a portal that must have been twenty feet high. She leaned forward along the narrow spine of the small horse, hoping to diminish her stature. Unless one of them chose to use a flashlight, she would appear as
indistinct to them as they to her, just one more man returning from a patrol.

  She entered without challenge. Her little mount picked up its measured pace, perhaps in the realization the stable and feed were near.

  She was abeam the two guards when one of them spoke, a low, guttural sound with a definitely inquisitive inflection.

  A question, of course. He wanted to know where the other member of the patrol was. How was she going to answer a question in a language she did not know?

  Lowering her voice into what might, possibly, be the range of a male tone, she growled a muttered response imitating the sound of the words she had just heard.

  The man who had asked the question spoke again, this time louder. She could see him approaching as his partner reached for the strap of the rifle slung over a shoulder.

  Gurt pulled her horse to a stop, slowly slipped her right foot from the stirrup and began to swing a leg over her mount’s spiny backbone in a slow dismount, the casual movement of a man weary from both the hour and his duties just now complete. From the corner of an eye she measured the closing distance between her and the question asker. It would not do to appear too deliberate or in a hurry.

  She timed it so he came in range just as her right foot cleared the saddle. With her weight shifting to her left leg, she pivoted in the stirrup, her right foot swinging in a blur of an arc that connected neatly with the man’s jaw.

  He staggered backward, just far enough to give Gurt room to unsling the rifle from her back. Dropping both feet to the ground, she grabbed the gun’s barrel and brought the stock down on the man’s head with a crunch that left him sitting on the ground, too dazed to present any immediate threat.

  Spinning on her toes, she faced the second guard, now moving to get around the horse between them. Gurt could easily have shot him, but the sound would have alerted anyone within a mile, including whatever garrison now occupied the old fort.

  He had no such qualms, as evidenced by his efforts to bring his weapon to bear around a nervous, diminutive horse.

  Gurt dropped to a squat, merging her silhouette with that of the animal and effectively disappearing in the darkness. She used part of the one or two seconds before her adversary could find her to draw the bayonet from its scabbard and test its balance in her hand.

  With her left hand, she slapped the horse’s rump, causing it to shy away. The man with the gun swung the rifle in her direction. She cocked her right arm. And threw.

  The bayonet had not been designed for this sort of use and Gurt had not had time to explore its characteristics. Nonetheless, she had little choice but to throw it. Because of its weight, she had done so not like a knife but more like a spear, straight rather than end over end, more shoulder than the wrist action required to accurately toss a blade.

  A thump and a strangled half gargle, half grunt, told her she had hit the mark.

  The rifle clattered against the stone of the parade ground. She visualized the man clutching with both hands at the steel that protruded from his stomach or chest.

  The rifle now in both hands, she stepped over to where he had been. A figure, faceless in the dark, sat or knelt on the ground, issuing a low moan. With a foot, Gurt pushed him onto his side, bent over and tugged at the hilt of the blade. It was caught on something. She tried to wiggle it free, eliciting a scream of pain. It stubbornly refused to come loose and Gurt doubted she had a lot of time before someone came to investigate the yell.

  There was little choice, one she made intuitively on the side of safety rather than humanity. She could tape him up, taking precious seconds, or . . .

  She leaned on the hilt of the bayonet until the blade went in all the way and the struggles at the other end ceased.

  In a couple of steps, she was beside the first man, whose darkened form was shakily trying to get to its feet. Grasping the rifle by its muzzle again, she swung the stock as hard as she could to connect with the base of his skull. He collapsed in a boneless heap without a sound.

  She paused only to scoop up his rifle and add it to the one she already had.

  Instinctively, Gurt was moving toward the deepest shadows, the place she would be safest. She was almost there when she heard a scream. It was neither of the men she had encountered, no cry of alarm, but a long, wailing expression of agony more animal than human. But she knew of no animal capable of such a sound.

  Whatever its source, she thought it had come from straight ahead, although the rock walls were capable of distorting and displacing sound. She looked closely. Was that a glimmer of light leaking around the edge of a doorway?

  Her back to whatever wall was available, she flitted from one pool of darkness to another, one rifle slung over a shoulder, the other at the ready. In less than a minute, she had traveled around half the parade ground and was at the end most distant from the fort’s entrance. She could hear a voice on the other side of the wall, though the stone made it impossible to discern what was being said.

  She ran a hand along the stone, inching her way forward until her fingers touched wood. A quick exploration by touch revealed a smooth surface, not the roughness and rot exposure to the elements for two centuries would have produced. A door, a newly installed door, behind which the voice continued.

  Gurt was considering what to do next. She peeled back a sleeve and checked her watch. The grayness of predawn would arrive in less than an hour. If she was going to find Lang, she did not have long to do it.

  She started to slide past the door when she froze, ear to the wood.

  “. . . name is Rolf Lowen. I am a German citizen . . .”

  Lang!

  Gurt’s fingers raced across the door’s surface until she found the latch, hesitated and returned to the weapon in her hand. When she had taken it on the trail in front of the Citadelle, she had given it the briefest of examinations. Her touch had told her it was an AK-47. She had not had the time to make a more thorough examination.

  She opened the slide to slip a finger into the chamber, since she could not see. Empty. She cocked it and began searching for the safety button and automatic-fire switch. Then she put the weapon down and went through the same procedure with the gun strapped across her back.

  Satisfied she was as ready as she could be, she depressed the latch and kicked the door open.

  The first thing she saw was Lang, strapped to a chair. His face was bloody, eyes nearly swollen shut. There were ugly marks in the skin of his bare chest.

  In the instant it took for her eyes to adjust to the light, she saw movement behind his chair—two men, two uniforms . . .

  No time for analysis.

  Making sure she cleared Lang’s head, she squeezed the trigger, a short burst. The sound of the gunfire was magnified by the stone walls but not loudly enough to cover a scream as one of the men behind Lang threw his hands to a bloody pulp that had been his face. The second danced a macabre jig as five or six bullets pinned him momentarily to the wall before he slid slowly to his knees, leaving an abstract painting of red streaks on the light-colored stone.

  For an instant, Gurt feared Lang had been hit. He lunged forward, chair and all, colliding with the third man in uniform, knocking him to the floor.

  Gun still in hand, Gurt closed and latched the door before drawing the bayonet from the belt of one of her victims and cutting Lang’s bindings and handing him the second AK-47.

  Both her and Lang’s eyes were beginning to swim with tears from the acrid cordite smoke, which was confined by the low ceiling.

  He took the weapon, pointing it at the man on the floor while he affixed the bayonet. “What took you so long?”

  Gurt shrugged. “Trying to decide if your order to return to the hotel was suicidal or just stupid.”

  Lang was yanking the man to his feet, muttering, “Comedian, everybody thinks they’re a comedian.” He shook his head in resignation. “Gurt, this is Lieutenant Colonel Shien Dow, late of the People’s Liberation Army.”

  “Late?”

  “I have
experienced his hospitality and wish to reciprocate. He’s coming with us.”

  “But there is no time . . .”

  There was a banging on the door.

  Dow stood, tugging at his uniform blouse as though to straighten it. “You two are going nowhere.”

  Lang ran a hand through Dow’s pockets and came up with his own watch, money clip and BlackBerry. He began to furiously punch the keyboard.

  “Lang,” Gurt said as the assault on the door increased, “there is not now the time to send all the ‘wish you were here’ messages you want to Sara and our friends at home. We have need to get out of here first.”

  “Just sharing some of the scenery with Miles.” He jammed the BlackBerry into a pocket and pointed to where the blanket hung. “I think the exit is that way.”

  The muzzle of his rifle pressed against Dow’s head, they crossed the room single file. Gurt pulled the blanket aside, revealing Lang had been correct: it was the entry into the fort proper. As the last one to leave, Lang fired a single shot into the generator, instantly turning the room into blackness. A couple more shots at the door were intended to discourage those eager to get in. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it sure might slow them down.

  Behind Gurt, Lang was pushing Dow, holding the rifle against the Chinese’s head with the other. “Turn left. I think there’s a ramp there leading up to the next row of guns.”

  “But we need to get out, not up,” Gurt protested.

  “Right through how many armed Chinese soldiers? We sure as hell can’t shoot our way out.”

  “But—”

  “But turn here and start up the ramp.”

  At the top, they stood behind a circular row of entrances to gun rooms that opened off the common ramp. The outside of the ramp, the one facing the parade ground, was bordered by a low wall perhaps four feet high. Over the wall, they were afforded a view of an anthill of activity as flashlights darted back and forth in a pattern that suggested confusion more than purpose.

  “Now what?” Gurt wanted to know. “We fly out like birds?”