Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05]

by By Jon Land

  Ben’s ears had gone numb from the gunshots. He could hear Danielle shouting something to him between bursts but couldn’t discern exactly what. Fought the temptation to sink to the ground, hide in the darkness and cover his ears.

  A helicopter gunship soared overhead, pumping staccato bursts from its front-mounted guns. Enough, Ben hoped, to make the rebels retreat, but their fire resumed as soon as the gunship was past, even more intense than before as they drew a bead on his and Danielle’s position.

  This was his father’s world from the first war with Israel in 1948 and then again in 1956. This was the world his father had fled when a third war became inevitable and why Jafir Kamal returned to Palestine in its bloody wake. Ben understood that world truly for the first time; why his father loathed it so much and refused to accept the hero’s mantle of leadership his people tried to thrust upon him.

  Because war accomplished nothing. Not for Israel, Palestine, or Sierra Leone. Ben didn’t want to be Jafir Kamal anymore, didn’t want to live in his world.

  He wished he could tell his father he understood him now, didn’t hate him for the impossible legacy he had left or for leaving his family behind in the first place. Jafir Kamal lived to stop nights like this from returning to Palestine. And, very likely, the night he had blown up the Russian trucks as they crossed the Allenby Bridge, the night that had cost him his life, he had done just that.

  Another helicopter gunship soared overhead, spitting light instead of bullets. The rebels turned their guns up to the air and fired them wildly, futilely, exposing their positions to the second gunship following just behind.

  “Now!” Danielle signaled, as the gunship opened fire with its dual-mounted sixty-caliber machine guns. “This is our chance!”

  She dashed into the street and rushed away from the gunship’s deadly spray. Ben followed, spinning to cover her back. Danielle lunged up onto the sidewalk and pressed her shoulder against the row of buildings as she sprinted along, clinging to the darkness. Ben did the same and felt jagged glass prick him when he drew too close to a shattered window.

  Ahead, Danielle stopped at a corner and waited for Ben to catch up.

  “Across the street,” she huffed, trying to catch breath. “See it?”

  “A church ...”

  “Refuge.” Danielle gazed through the wafting smoke up the hill toward the ghostly specter of the State House. “We’ll never be able to reach Kabbah tonight.”

  She and Ben exchanged a glance, all they needed. This time they sprinted together, assault rifles at the ready. The stained glass windows of the Anglican St. George’s Cathedral had been shattered like all the others in Freetown. Its majestic double front doors were locked from the inside, forcing Danielle to turn her rifle on it from a safe angle. Ben backed off a step or two and covered his ringing ears when she opened fire.

  The wood splintered and coughed sideways. The latch gave. The doors opened inward. Danielle slid through, Ben right behind her.

  They both froze.

  Around them the pews were full of milling, sobbing Freetown residents. They cowered in fear and clutched loved ones for support.

  “It’s all right,” Danielle said softly, expecting a number of them would understand English, perhaps as many as their native Krio. “We’re not your enemy.”

  She and Ben had just reached the rearmost pew when the clack of assault rifle bolts being jammed back halted them. They looked up toward the balcony to see a dozen Revolutionary United Front rebels angling Kalashnikovs and M-16s stripped from government troops dead on them.

  They had walked straight into the place where hostages had been concentrated!

  Neither Ben nor Danielle could have felt more foolish if they tried.

  “Drop weapons! You should drop them now!” one of the rebels ordered in broken English, and Ben and Danielle let their rifles clatter to the floor.

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  Chapter 92

  T

  hey were shoved around, passed from rebel to rebel. One of them struck Danielle, and Ben was staggered by a rifle smashed against his skull when he rushed to her aid. He crumpled and she hovered over him protectively to prevent a further attack.

  It was easy to tell why they were being singled out. Snippets of conversation revealed that the rebels believed they were part of the international relief forces attached to the U.N. mission, forces thought to be covertly supporting the Kabbah government. Strangely, instead of summarily executing Ben and Danielle, the rebels segregated them along with several captured uniformed members of the peacekeeping force. Blindfolded, gagged, with wrists laced tightly behind their backs, they were led out through the rear of the church and packed into a single Red Cross truck, stolen during a lull in the fighting.

  “We’re hostages now,” Danielle whispered. “To be used as barter.”

  One of the rebels spoke good enough English to effectively warn them to remain still and silent. The truck rumbled to a start and sped through the streets, dodging bullets and huge depressions blown out of the asphalt, until it slowed upon reaching a dirt road. Then it lumbered along the pitted, unleveled route that led uphill into the higher ground of Sierra Leone’s central and eastern regions.

  Both controlled by the rebels.

  Time had lost meaning what felt like several hours later, when they were yanked harshly from the truck’s rear and shoved down a dank tunnel into some sort of underground bunker that chased all the warmth from the night. Only then were their gags and blindfolds removed. Ben and Danielle spent the rest of the night huddled against each other for warmth and later protection, once the tight congestion of bodies had raised the temperature and humidity of the bunker to near unbearable levels.

  They shook each other alert when a troop of grim-faced, angry rebels appeared in the bunker and rousted them with the barrels of their assault rifles, then stood at attention as a tall, lithe figure strode in and sized up the motley collection of hostages:

  General Latisse Matabu, leader of the Revolutionary United Front.

  Matabu’s inspection seemed cursory until she reached Ben and Danielle, both standing now but neither tall enough to look Matabu in the eye. She gazed down as if she recognized them.

  “The hawk and the eagle,” she muttered, shaking her head in wonder and what looked like recognition. Her expression seemed ironic more than anything else, perhaps the slightest bit fearful. She turned back to her guards. “Bring these two to the bunker,” Matabu said, and continued on down the line.

  The guards made doubly sure Ben and Danielle’s arms and legs were bound to the twin wooden chairs before complying with Latisse Matabu’s order to leave her alone with them in the RUF command bunker. It had been here that she had presided over the failed battle that might well have destroyed her cause forever.

  “You have come here to kill me, yes?” the Dragon asked them both.

  “Only if we had to,” Danielle answered. “Whatever it took to stop you from releasing the Black Death in the United States.”

  Matabu’s eyes narrowed, head tilting to the side curiously. “You know very much.”

  Danielle stole a quick glance at Ben. “More than you can possibly realize.”

  “These are among the last words you will ever speak. You should choose them more carefully. Who sent you here to kill me? Speak, and your deaths will be swift.”

  “We already told you. We came here to stop you from releasing the Black Death,” Ben said.

  “And why should assassins care about such things?”

  “We’re not assassins,” said Danielle. “We’re policemen.”

  “I’m Palestinian,” Ben picked up. “She’s Israeli.”

  Latisse Matabu’s expression wrinkled in surprise. “A long way out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?”

  “Why America?” Ben posed.

  “A Palestinian needs to ask me that? You should be rooting for me to succeed in destroying them, for all the good they’ve done you.”

  “The Israelis ne
ed no help from the Americans in oppressing the Palestinians.”

  Matabu nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose they don’t. They learned their lessons well, I imagine. The oppressed becomes the oppressor. . . . You don’t find that strange?” she asked Danielle.

  “You make it sound much more cut-and-dried than it really is.”

  “Of course I do, for all of us, because it is. The Jews, the Palestinians, my people—we have all fought, or continue to fight, the same battle. Against tyranny, oppression, brutality.”

  “Is that why there are thirty thousand maimed civilians in your country, why a million people have been displaced by the civil war you’ve been waging?” Danielle challenged her. “What battle are you fighting when your troops hack off limbs, General? Please, don’t compare us to you.”

  “Why not, Officer? Aren’t you forgetting the efforts of your own Irgun and Haganah, conducted on behalf of your government, in the early years of your state? Were they any less brutal?”

  “They didn’t slice off the arms and legs of children.”

  “No, they threw those children out of their homes, turned them into lifelong refugees who lived only to hate. You were just like us then, just as your man friend’s people are like us now. We have all faced defeat and refused to succumb to it. We have all fought always with the best interests of our people in mind.”

  “Us,” Ben said, “not you.”

  “I fail to see the distinction.”

  “We never deserted our people the way you’re about to.”

  “What’s the difference who’s in charge so long as the real enemy lies far from our shores?” Matabu hovered over Ben. “The days of passively accepting that as inevitable are gone. Inevitable is something you don’t bother to change. I intend to cause change.”

  “Destroy America’s crops with the Black Death and millions,hundreds of millions will die,” Danielle reminded.

  “So let them.”

  “It won’t be limited to Americans,” Ben interjected. “Take away the food the United States grows and produces, and a quarter of the world will starve.”

  “Perhaps as much as half,” Latisse Matabu corrected. “The United States controls more than sixty percent of the world’s exportable grain and other foodstuffs basic for human existence. The country maintains more of a monopoly on food exports than all of the OPEC nations combined have over oil. So once the Black Death spreads, white bread will end up costing more than caviar. America’s balance of trade will cease to exist.”

  “And that’s what you want?”

  “I want my government back under the control of its people. I want the free elections we have been denied in Kabbah’s police state. Neither will ever come to pass so long as the United States has its say.”

  “That’s not what this is about,” Danielle said surely, stiffening.

  “Who are you to tell me what this is about?”

  “A woman who has lost a child, too. To violence, just as you did.”

  “You know nothing of me! Or my child!”

  Danielle glanced at Ben. “We know more than you think. More than youknow.”

  Matabu whipped the pistol from her belt and aimed it at Danielle. “I’m going to shoot you myself!”

  “Then hear what I’ve got to say first. Listen to why all this is for nothing.” Danielle saw Matabu’s grasp on her pistol grow tentative and lowered her voice. “You killed General Nelson Treest.”

  “So you know about Treest. Is that supposed to surprise me?”

  “He raped and impregnated you. You gave birth to a son.”

  “Whom he killed once he learned of the child’s existence.”

  “Treest didn’t kill the baby,” Danielle said flatly.

  “What? That is madness!”

  “The basket he tossed into the river was empty. He kept the boy to raise as his own. Which he did.” Danielle held Matabu’s faltering gaze. “Untilyou killed him.”

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  Chapter 93

  M

  atabu stood motionless, the color drained from her face. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but no words emerged.

  “General Treest used to boast about what he had done to Jordanian intelligence officers he worked with,” Danielle continued, seizing the moment. “That’s how we found out.”

  Before her, Latisse Matabu was trembling, suddenly unsteady on her feet. She stared straight ahead, at nothing, her mind elsewhere.

  “You murdered your own son. How does that make you feel?” Danielle challenged, unable to disguise the loathing in her voice.

  Matabu didn’t seem to hear her. She staggered backwards, looking like a person who’d walked away from a car wreck. She held the pistol lightly, aimed nowhere, as if forgetting it was there.

  “You’ve betrayed yourself worse than anyone else ever could,” Danielle said, hoping the futility of if all might stop the Dragon in her tracks when nothing else had been able to.

  But Matabu opened the door and called to the guards she had posted there.

  “Kill them,” she ordered emotionlessly, her eyes locked coldly on Ben and Danielle.

  The guards prodded them up the hastily constructed wooden stairs outside into the cool breeze-blown night. Ben could see Danielle searching for an opening, a weapon,something. With their hands still bound, though, there wasn’t much even she could do.

  From the surrounding landscape of luxuriant foliage and the cascading sound of a nearby river, Danielle guessed this RUF stronghold was located in remote, northeastern Sierra Leone; most likely the Outbamba-Kilimi National Park. The air smelled sweet, lush, and alive—a vivid contrast to the choking, blood-soaked streets of Freetown.

  When they were twenty yards from the bunker Danielle caught Ben’s gaze, alerting him to be ready. He had barely realized whatever she was going to do was coming fast, when Danielle lashed her left leg backward and crunched one of the rebel’s knees. The man screeched in agony and fell, as she wheeled toward the second rebel and kicked the rifle from his grasp before he could fire it. A single shot echoed in the night, all the time Danielle needed to smash a knee into the second rebel’s groin, then twist round and tear the knife with her bound hands from the sheath wedged through his belt.

  The first rebel had managed to resteady his gun by then and Ben crashed into him with his shoulder. The rebel nearly went down again, but righted himself and cracked Ben in the gut with his rifle’s butt. By then, though, Danielle had spun toward the rebel, angling the knife, held blindly behind her, for him. She couldn’t possibly have seen where the blade was going, Ben remembered thinking, yet Danielle’s slash caught the rebel across the midsection nonetheless. When he started to double over, she rammed the blade into his throat.

  Blood burst outward, drenching her, some of it spraying onto Ben. The second rebel scrambled desperately away into the woods, not even bothering to retrieve his fallen rifle.

  Ben watched Danielle jam the hilt of the blade into the narrow gap between two tree trunks. Then she angled her wrists behind her and effortlessly sliced the rope binding her hands together.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Danielle said surely, tearing the rope from her wrists. Then she retrieved the knife and slashed Ben’s bonds as well.

  Ben shook the blood back into his hands and followed her as they raced through the woods, ignoring the branches scraping at his face. He couldn’t have said how far they ran, only that his lungs burned and chest ached terribly. He was gasping for breath when all at once a sudden burst of light caught them in its spill.

  Danielle froze and threw her arms up instantly, keeping them in view to show the men she recognized as government soldiers that she was unarmed. Ben followed her lead, but the soldiers kept their rifles leveled and ready to fire.

  Danielle sank to her knees, closing her hands atop her head. “Friends!” she said in English, hoping for the best. “We’re friends!”

  “We know who you are,” an older uniformed officer said, coming forward. “We’ve
been looking for you.”

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  Chapter 94

  I

  ‘m sorry we weren’t able to locate you earlier,” President Kabbah apologized after greeting Ben and Danielle in his office at the State House two hours later, just after sunrise, “and for the confusion when my soldiers came upon you in the woods. But, with all that’s been going on, the Jordanian U.N. delegate was unable to reach me until the battle’s conclusion.”