Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05]

by By Jon Land

“Just do it and start walking fast down the hall, toward the front of the building! It’s our best chance!”

  Ben did exactly as Danielle instructed, while she watched their backs, clinging to the hope that the cowboy might have been hit or retreated by now.

  “We give up! We give up!” Danielle repeated, when another team of guards spun round a corner and converged on them just before the main guard post in the jail section of the building.

  Danielle felt rough hands strip the weapon from her grasp and thrust her against the wall. She actually had just begun to breathe easier when fresh gunshots boomed down the hall.

  The guards twisted in agony, falling one after the other. Ben recovered his Uzi and surged past them, bursting through the heavy door into the main entryway, firing the weapon purposely wild and high to discourage any police guards who might have been lying in wait here.

  “Danielle!” he yelled just before she spun through the doorway, which coughed bullet-riddled concrete chips in her wake.

  She sprayed single rounds at the cowboy. But he must have ducked into the stairwell for cover, and her bullets clacked harmlessly into the wall.

  Black slammed a fresh clip into his pistol, doing his best to still his breathing to regain control of the situation.

  Barnea was escaping!

  So many things he had not bothered to take into account: that she would not be in her cell; that she might be able to escape; that she would not be alone.

  Looks like I fucked this one up, he thought to himself, but glad in a way since it placed him and the woman, a pair of pros, on equal ground. See which of them was better.

  Black spun round the corner of the wall firing, trying to keep Barnea and the man from getting outside.

  Ben and Danielle had just reached the vestibule perched before the main doors when the shooting started again. They swung simultaneously and returned fire from behind the thin cover of the wall, trying for a bead on the tall man. A siren wailed, signalling the arrival of the first ambulance to be summoned by the alarm.

  “Go!” Danielle said. “I’ll cover you!”

  Ben darted across the open stretch leading to the exit when Danielle spun out firing. Her bullets held the cowboy at bay long enough for Ben to make it outside and down the steps of the old building.

  On cue, the ambulance screamed onto the scene and halted almost directly before him.

  Ben leveled his gun straight for the paramedic in the driver’s seat. “Out!”

  “But we’re—”

  “Out!” Ben repeated, throwing open the door on his side.

  “Okay, okay,” the driver relented, exiting with his hands in the air along with the man in the passenger seat. In the same moment Danielle rushed down the steps firing the last of her bullets back through the glass, shattering it to further slow the cowboy’s pursuit.

  Ben watched her leap into the passenger side of the ambulance and immediately slammed his own door behind him, as policemen poured out of the station from two adjacent doors in the main Megrash Haruseim building and opened fire on the ambulance.

  “Get down!” he screamed, crouching below the dashboard himself.

  Danielle caught a glimpse of the cowboy crashing through the bullet-weakened glass and firing non-stop with a pair of pistols toward the policemen who were caught totally by surprise.

  Ben lowered his Uzi to the floor, slammed his foot on the accelerator, and tore away from the jail, the sound of gunshots lost to the screech of the ambulance’s tires against the pavement.

  * * * *

  Chapter 20

  I

  know him!” Danielle said suddenly, hunched low and staring into the side view mirror. “I know that son of a bitch!”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know his name, only his looks. He took out a Sayaret strike team in Beirut a dozen years ago. I was the only survivor.”

  “It looks like someone sent him to finish the job.”

  Ben tightened his hands around the ambulance’s wheel, approaching an intersection where a soldier was busily diverting all traffic off the heavily congested Jaffa Road to avoid a protest march just up ahead. The soldier saw him coming, started to raise his hand, and for just a moment Ben thought the soldier was going to order the ambulance to stop. Instead, though, he held traffic up so Ben could continue down Jaffa Road, unencumbered by the yarmulke-clad marchers stabbing the air with their picket signs.

  “The eyeglasses!” Danielle realized suddenly.

  “I’ve got them right here,” Ben said, pulling the case from his pocket.

  Danielle took the case and held it tight instead of opening it. “You can drop me off a few blocks up.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Danielle’s features flared. “This isn’t your fight.”

  “If it s yours. . .”

  “It’s Israel’s problem. This is all about military supplies, lots of them, being sold on the black market through brokers here. In exchange for diamonds smuggled out of Africa.”

  Ben’s mind flashed back to his arrest of the Russian Anatolyevich two days before. “Assault rifles, rocket launchers ...”

  “Yes!” Danielle said, her mouth wide with surprise.

  “Keep talking.”

  “I was given the identity of a middleman, a courier named Ranieri, who was coming into the country to close another deal. I was supposed to track the shipment back to its source, destroy the pipeline.”

  “Which led through East Jerusalem.”

  “I followed Ranieri there—”

  “But his source never showed up,” Ben completed for her.

  “How could you know that?’

  “His name is Anatolyevich and he was in Palestinian custody at the time,” Ben said flatly, turning to look at Danielle. “I know because I arrested him.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 21

  T

  hank you for coming with me, Doctor.”

  “I thought it might give me more opportunity to convince you to start taking the medicine,” Dr. Sowahy said to Latisse Matabu.

  They sat together in the backseat, while the driver and Matabu’s personal guard sat in the front. This final checkpoint on the road leading to Kono was merely cursory; it had been months since any government troops had dared to show their faces in the eastern part of the country once again controlled by the Revolutionary United Front.

  “The problem with that exchange your officer spoke of,” the doctor started.

  “What about it?”

  “He said it was serious.”

  “It’s not like you to involve yourself in my affairs, Doctor.”

  “Your affairs are having an adverse effect on your health, General. That leaves me no choice.”

  Matabu weighed Sowahy’s words. “The lost shipment is an inconvenience—nothing more. You’ll see what I mean when we reach our destination.”

  Their car neared a clearing that had the look of a tiny meadow sliced in two by the roadway. Matabu stiffened, then reached across the front seat and grasped her driver’s shoulder.

  “Pull over here.” She turned toward Sowahy, not seeming to see him. “This is where it happened ...”

  The old doctor looked, trying to get his bearings.

  “Three years ago, after the RUF failed to retake Freetown and lost Tongo, the government told my father they were ready to conduct peace talks, that there had been enough violence, that enough innocent people had died and been displaced. They asked him to pick a spot and he chose to meet here, because it was a place he always felt safe.”

  Latisse Matabu took a deep breath and stepped out of the car. Her boots crunched atop the gravel. She drifted from side to side, as if searching for something she had lost. Behind her, Sowahy emerged from the car hunched over with a grimace and hobbled toward her.

  “The delegations were to meet at this checkpoint. Right here, I think.” As Matabu spoke, her hands clenched into fists by her side. Beads of sweat began to form on her foreh
ead. She stood rigid amidst the knee-high grass, ignoring it brushing against her legs. “My father and his top staff came in their uniforms, the government representatives in their suits. They climbed out of their cars simultaneously and approached. When they were halfway to each other, the men wearing suits drew their weapons and opened fire.” She stopped and looked at Dr. Sowahy again. “They were soldiers. Mercenaries from the bastard Executive Outcomes hired by the government.”

  Matabu spat on the ground to enunciate her point.

  “My father never suspected an ambush. He thought himself too powerful, too . . . respected. He did not realize that the government knows nothing about respect, only fear. Fear is what they respond to. Intimidation is what they respond to.”

  Latisse Matabu squeezed her eyes closed.

  “The soldiers who came to our house later that morning were in uniform—government troops, not paid mercenaries. They came without fear, because my father was already dead. A lesson needed to be taught to any who might choose to follow in his footsteps. My mother saw them coming and tried to hide my younger brother and sister. But the soldiers found them. They found them and made my mother watch while they cut off their limbs. She threw herself on one of their blades but it still took a long time for her to die. A terrible death she did not deserve, this woman who fought to feed the poor and organized the only welfare system Sierra Leone ever had.

  “Of course the government denied they were responsible. They have continued to deny they were responsible right to this day. They blame insurrection on the part of the RUF, rebels who had tired of my father’s leadership. The story is all bullshit but that never stopped the international community from accepting it.”

  Latisse Matabu opened her eyes and stared into the distance.

  “You know where I was when all this was happening?”

  Sowahy coughed and had trouble catching his breath. “Studying in the United States, where your parents wanted you to be.”

  “They wanted to spare me being raped again, while the government forces raped this country.” Matabu swung toward him with a suddenness that startled Sowahy. “It was you who contacted me, Doctor.”

  He nodded grimly. “I felt it my duty. But I warned you not to come back.”

  “You said there was a death warrant on my head, as I recall.”

  “There was.”

  She turned again toward Sowahy. “Well, I came home anyway, to find a government publicly advocating peace while privately determined to destroy us. The government troops we captured told us interesting tales when we tortured them. Tales of American Green Berets training and equipping them. Tales of yet more mercenaries who came to their aid in the guise of peacekeepers. No matter how many we killed, it was not enough.”

  “And it never will be, General. You do this out of hate for the enemy, not love of the people. After what was done to you . . .”

  “I could live with the rape, but it wasn’t enough for that monster.” Matabu’s voice drifted, as if aimed at someone far away. “We tried to hide the truth from him, but he found out. He found out and came to my home. . . .”

  “I know the rest,” Sowahy interrupted, trying to spare her.

  “My parents sent me away and I might never have come back, if they had lived.” Latisse Matabu hardened her gaze. “And now that I am back, I intend to win this war.”

  “How? How can you possibly win?”

  Matabu smiled at Sowahy and started back for the car. “Come,” she said. “Come and I’ll show you.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 22

  V

  asily Anatolyevich,” Ben elaborated. “Member of the Russian mafia currently thriving in Israel.”

  Danielle still couldn’t believe what she had just heard.

  Ben had arrested the man Ranieri was waiting to meet with in East Jerusalem!

  “It was an undercover operation in Beit Jala,” Ben continued. “Anatolyevich delivered a shipment of guns to me a few hours before he was supposed to meet you in East Jerusalem.”

  “You’re saying he’s in custody?”

  Ben nodded. “At one of Colonel al-Asi’s safe houses.”

  Their ambulance approached a gridlocked snarl of cars across from Safra Square typical of Jaffa Road. Ben waited for the cars in his way to make room for him, gave the horn a few honks to further punctuate his point.

  Danielle stuck the eyeglass case into the pocket of the slacks she’d been wearing for three days now. “We’ve got to get to the West Bank. I need to see this—”

  A bullet shattered the side view mirror, then a second spiderwebbed the glass on the passenger side window.

  “It’s him!” Ben screamed, watching in his mirror as the assassin dressed as a jail guard veered toward them on foot just a few cars back in the traffic that had snarled behind the ambulance. “Your cowboy!”

  Jim Black realized he should have waited a bit longer before opening fire. Draw a little closer, be sure he had a clear shot. Trouble was, getting that close to Danielle Barnea meant she would be that close to him. Fear was something he never experienced in these situations but risk, risk was something to be avoided at all costs.

  Black figured if he got lucky and took out the man driving the ambulance, he’d have a much easier route to Barnea. It was a tough shot, yes, but he’d managed tougher.

  Firing as he sprinted down Jaffa Road, he knew almost instantly his shots were errant. But the ambulance remained mired in traffic, and he retrained his aim on its rear tires and clacked off another series of shots.

  “Move! Move!” Danielle roared, ducking low in the seat now.

  “The bastard shot out the tires! We won’t make it to the next intersection!”

  “Turn right, then! Just up ahead onto Shadal Street!”

  The assassin was just two car lengths back when Ben jerked the ambulance to the right and gave it gas. The vehicle cracked into a pair of small passenger cars and shoved them slowly aside, shredding its blown-out tires. Ben pulled the Uzi from the floor and started to look toward the driver’s side window.

  “Wait, how many shots do you have left?” Danielle asked him.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  “Don’t waste them!’’

  “But—”

  “Just drive!”

  The rattling in the ambulance’s rear end intensified, as Ben aimed the vehicle for the entrance to the street that was barely wide enough to accommodate it. Next to him, Danielle twisted round and pushed herself through an opening in the seats into the rear compartment.

  “Drive on another twenty yards, then stop,” she instructed.

  The jarring ride made her clutch the side of the vehicle to keep her footing in the ambulance’s rear. The stretcher had already been jostled free of its bonds and kept banging up against the rear doors. Danielle quickly located the four oxygen tanks and turned on the spigots that opened the flow of gas from them. Then she yanked the tubing and masks away, so the oxygen was free to fill the whole of the cramped rear compartment.

  Danielle had just finished when Ben jerked the ambulance to a full stop.

  “Leave the engine running,” she said, returning to the front and then opening the passenger side window. “And give me the Uzi.”

  Ben handed the submachine gun over and then squeezed himself through the driver’s window while Danielle did the same on her side. As he emerged, bullets singed the air beside him. But he clambered over the ambulance’s hood and scrabbled away to join Danielle.

  She steadied the Uzi and fired as soon as Ben drew even with her, a series of neat shots through the ambulance’s grille toward its radiator and engine block. The initial burst sent a burst of flames out of the hood and ignited the oxygen released in the rear of the ambulance

  “Get down!” Danielle yelled, and fired the last of the Uzi’s bullets into the engine block.

  The resulting blast coughed rubble from the buildings lining both sides of the street into the air, scattering it in all di
rections as well as atop Ben and Danielle like chips of stone rain. A few secondary explosions ignited, further heightening the wall of flaming steel that had been effectively placed between them and their pursuer.

  “I guess you’re stuck with me now,” Ben said, his ears still ringing from the noise, and then ran with Danielle toward the other end of the street.