3:53 P.M.
Dawsonville, Maryland
“Just put the chips and soda down over on the island, Jack,” the middle-aged woman announced, glancing up from the stove as Richards materialized in her kitchen, grocery bags hanging from his right arm, a 12-pack of Pepsi in each hand, “right there by the beer. Glad you could make the drive up.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it, Donna,” Richards replied, the ghost of a smile passing across his face as he looked at her. Donna Mellinger was a rare breed—one of the kindest women he had ever met, even if that kindness was often hidden behind a rough, hardened exterior. Perhaps not that much different from his own. “Long as I was Stateside.”
She nodded, brushing a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes as she reached for a pair of oven mitts lying off to one side on the counter. She knew that score—had lived it for a lot of years. Her husband had been infantry, 3rd ID, Rock of the Marne, and his third tour to Iraq had been one too many.
“Mitt’s out back,” she went on, as she extracted something that looked like a pie from the oven, “at the grill with a couple of the guys. He’ll be glad to see you.”
“How’s he doing?”
She set the pie down on the counter, turned to look at him. “He’s all right.”
There was a volume of emotion in those three simple words, as much hidden as disclosed.
“So he’s told me.”
A long, heavy sigh escaped her lips, something of resignation set in the lines of her weathered face. She was older than Mitt, by several years—and the years had taken their toll. “It’s going to be a while before we’re back out on our Harleys together.”
That brought a smile to Richards’ face.
It was how she and Nakamura had met, years before—after the death of her husband in Anbar. Their love of the open road bringing them together, forging a relationship that had now lasted half a decade. They’d never married, but what they shared. . .it was stronger than many who had.
“They released him from the hospital too early,” she went on after a moment, and he could see the worry in her eyes—the mask cracking ever so slightly. “He ought to still be there, with what he’s gone through.”
Richards shook his head. “That’s the VA for you.”
“You were there with him when it happened, weren’t you?” And that was a question she’d been wanting to ask for weeks, he knew—had seen it in her face the couple times he’d visited at Bethesda. But she wasn’t going to ask in front of Mitt.
He simply nodded. Remembering that hellish day in the Sinai following the drone strike—the desert heat beating down on all of them . The lull following the firefight, broken by the crack of a single rifle shot. Sniper.
Nakamura, collapsing face-down in the sand.
“Not much more I can say. Still think there ought to have been something I could have done,” he replied, the words coming hard, as words always did for him, “to have prevented it.”
He had been the team’s designated marksman, after all. The weight of responsibility, always resting heavy on his shoulders. Even heavier now, since he’d been entrusted with Mitt’s team.
She reached out, her hand on his arm. A quiet smile of assurance passing across her face. The mask falling back in place. “You brought him home, Jack. That’s all that matters. Now go out back, and let him show you his grill.”
He caught sight of Nakamura, seated in a deck chair on the back patio by the oblong-shaped Green Egg grill as he stepped through the sliding door and back out into the August heat, closing the door behind him. A Hispanic man in a Ranger Up t-shirt and cargo shorts, standing a few feet away—lifting up the grill’s heavy lid, steam billowing out around him as he examined the meat within.
Donna hadn’t been exaggerating—Mitt was pale, paler than Richards ever remembered seeing him, and his arms had lost their accustomed muscle tone. He looked bad.
But his eyes lit up when he saw the big Texan emerge from the house, setting his beer on the table as he rose to greet him.
“Good to see you back on your feet, brother,” Richards said, wrapping an arm around the smaller man’s shoulders as he gripped his hand fiercely. “You’re still as ugly as sin, but I suppose modern medicine has its limits.”
His former team lead laughed, slapping him on the back—lacking something of the force of the old Nakamura. But the spirit remained. “Look who’s talking. Glad you could make it up here, Jack. The other guys are running late, but they’ll be with us soon.”
Richards glanced over his shoulder to the steaks sizzling on the grill, making eye contact with the other man. “Make sure mine doesn’t moo when I put a knife to it.”
“You heathen,” Nakamura laughed, shaking his head as he returned to his seat. “Some days I don’t know how we’re still friends. Jack, this is Hector Quiroz, an old friend of mine from the 2/75. We were in the ‘Stan together.”
“Good to meet you, man,” Quiroz said, switching the big fork to his other hand and reaching over to clasp Richards’ hand. “Mitt’s the only reason I came home from over there. Any friend of his. . .”
Richards nodded, gripping his hand firmly. That’s how it went in this world. Your brother’s brother, your own.
He glimpsed Nakamura out of the corner of his eye, shaking his head. “I did my job, nothing more. You held your own.”
“That’s debatable. I understand you’ve been in the sandbox a time or two together as well,” Quiroz went on, his attention turning back to Richards as he closed the Egg’s lid. He shook his head. “Mitt’s like me—he doesn’t know when to quit.”
“You’re still in the Regiment?” Richards asked, favoring the man with a keen look. He had to be careful how much he said here, as did Nakamura—though he had no doubt that he had been careful. He’d always been good at that.
Quiroz laughed, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Nah. I ETS’d five years ago—spent a couple years trying to settle down, found civilian life didn’t agree with me or the wife, either one. Finally went to work for a private mil/intel firm called the Svalinn Security Group. It’s run by a former—”
“I know who runs it,” Richards replied, his voice suddenly as cold as ice. “I think it’s best that—”
“Mitt!” He turned at the sound of Donna’s voice, seeing her standing there in the open door, anger and fear written in her eyes. “You all need to see this. There’s been an attack, in Paris. . .”
11:53 P.M. Central European Summer Time
A house outside Béville-le-Comte
Eure-et-Loire Department, France
Four guards. He had counted them, carefully—maintaining surveillance on the secluded property over the last couple hours, since the arrival of Gamal and Ghaniyah Belkaïd.
Grigoriy Stepanovich Kolesnikov leaned back in the seat of his car, touching the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir beneath his shirt as he murmured a brief prayer.
Reaching over for the pistol case that lay beside him on the seat, unsnapping the latches to reveal the Smith & Wesson M&P Compact nestled within.
This was going to be close. Even with the edge of surprise that he would gain in the confusion of Belkaïd’s men recognizing him. . .he stood a very good chance of never walking back out of that house alive.
The Centre would never have approved, he thought, a mirthless smile crossing his face. Even with the overall failure of Belkaïd’s attack on the Stade, the survival of the French President—who was due to appear on television in twenty minutes—they would have viewed eliminating him as far too risky.
But he. . .he had known from the moment he had first laid eyes on the Algerian’s file. That it would end like this. One way or the other.
“For you, Sasha,” he whispered, hefting the pistol briefly in his hand before leaning forward in the driver’s seat to tuck it into the holster on his hip. The two spare mags going into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. For all the years we could have known.
And it seemed al
most as if he could see his brother’s face before him—no, not face but faces—a bewildering, dizzying collage of images, passing before him in rapid succession. A life in fast-forward.
Sasha, his hockey stick raised in his upraised fist following a goal—a cheer of defiance ripping from his throat as he glanced up at his little brother in the stands. The pride they had shared in that moment. Countless such afternoons on the ice.
But there had been other moments. . .and he could see Sasha the way he looked when he had visited him in prison, a decade before. The last time the two of them had ever stood in the same room.
His brother had been pale, strung-out, and haggard—a shell of his former self. Only the defiance remained, turned, like everything else in what remained of his life, into the service of his addiction.
A mockery of the man—the hero—he had once revered, the older brother who had taken on the role of a father in his life.
Until men like Gamal Belkaïd had taken that away from all of them. Everything that could have been.
He had taken the excuses, the endless defiant denials that day, until he could take no more—lashing back out at his brother, rage taking the place of tears so feebly dammed.
Feeling his brother’s defiance rise to meet him, anger flashing in those worn-out eyes. Hate.
And they had parted that day, never to meet again. He was out, Grigoriy knew that much—had been in and out five or six times over the intervening years—but he’d never gone to see him again. That afternoon in the prison, confirming to him that the man who had spent nearly a decade and a half drifting in and out of prisons in Moscow Oblast was not his brother.
That man was long since dead. Killed by heroin, and the men who made their wealth from its trade.
Enough. He swore softly beneath his breath, cursing the past and all its memories. There would be time enough for them on another day.
He reached forward and turned the key in the ignition, the Peugeot’s lights illuminating the desolate stretch of roadway. The drive leading to Belkaïd’s residence, barely half-a-kilometer away.
It was time. . .
12:01 A.M., August 8th
Southbound on the N10 near Rambouillet
Yvelines Department, France
Walk away. Just turn your back and walk away from all this. Run.
But running was what had brought him to this place, Harry thought—catching a brief glimpse of his own face in the rear-view mirror of the stolen Opel, stark and pale, every sunken hollow illuminated in the headlights of a car accelerating past him into the right-hand lane as they sped south through the night.
Or was it vengeance? His own quest for revenge in the wake of Vegas, driving him onward, into madness. One domino, crashing into another, and another, and another. And another. Until the cascade became unstoppable, and not even the force which had set them in motion could suffice to avert disaster.
We all fall down.
Marwan’s voice, a darker whispering in his ear. “Avenge me. You took my life to save your own—now avenge my death.”
“No,” Harry murmured, scarce aware that he had spoken aloud—his eyes fixed on the highway ahead, a high retaining wall mounting up on his right, the dark mass of woods surrounding the Etang D’or looming across the oncoming lanes of traffic to his left—shadowy and threatening. “I killed you to save countless lives, not just mine. It had to be done. There was no other choice.”
The old lie. And he could still feel the agony, the horror of that moment—the feeling of the blood-slick blade in his hand.
The triumphant look in the eyes of all that had surrounded them. Driss. Aryn. Faouzi. Nora. Yassin. . .
“But you didn’t, did you? Those people died anyway, trampled to death in their flight from the Stade. Because you couldn’t pull the trigger when it mattered. When it would have made a difference.”
Yassin’s body, shuddering against him in the semi-darkness there outside the stadium—jerking spasmodically as each round smashed its way through his flesh.
A last act of expiation, arriving far too late. When it no longer mattered. When nothing mattered, any more.
Any more than this would.
“I did everything I could,” he spat back, anger in his voice—some last shredded vestige of his sanity protesting against the madness of this. An argument with a ghost. “All that anyone could have done.”
“No,” he could hear the demon reply, remorseless, unrelenting, “enough with the lies. You did nothing. Until it was too late. Because you loved them. They took you in, cared for you when there was no one else. When you had no one else. And you loved them for it.”
He fell silent, unable to find the words to reply, unable to deny the truth. The knowledge that had come to him there in the street before the Stade, Yassin’s dying body huddled against his own—that then, if never before, he had slain his brother.
And the Lord set a mark upon Cain. . .
“You took my life to save your own,” the voice repeated, “now give your life to kill the man who destroyed us both. Kill Gamal Belkaïd. Kill yourself. And come and be at peace. At peace. . .”
And he could see Belkaïd standing there in the bright lights of that basement room, extending the knife in his outstretched hand. The compact C75 seeming to shudder beneath his blood-drenched undershirt. Come and be at peace.
He had a single magazine left. Fifteen rounds.
It would have to be enough. He glimpsed a road sign in the headlights of the Opel, giving the distances to Chartres. To Etampes. To Orleans. Nearly ninety kilometers to that last.
His own destination, not nearly so far. At the bottom of the sign, in white, there was a fourth listing. Ablis. 9.
He would keep left onto the D910 there, sweeping west-southwest toward the little rural commune of Béville-le-Comte. And the residence of Gamal Belkaïd.
Twenty-five minutes.
12:11 A.M.
The Palais de l'Élysée
Paris, France
Denis Albéric took a deep breath, endeavoring to collect himself as he faced into the cameras, hearing the technician count down the moments until they were live, on national television.
He tented his hands before him on the desk, only to realize they were still trembling, the sounds of the explosions still seeming to ring in his ears. The screams of fear and terror as thousands tried to flee from the Stade.
He could still hear all of it, feel every moment—the panic which had overwhelmed him.
One hundred and sixty-five dead. As of now, a number expected to rise—almost all of them in either the stampede, or the subsequent bombings. The explosions above the stadium itself, remarkably enough, causing only a handful of minor injuries among the footballers out on the pitch.
And there had been another VBIED discovered, abandoned, parked out on the Rue de Brennus, its interior spattered in blood, resembling an abattoir—two bodies found within and nearby. A young woman and an older man, both stabbed to death.
But its bomb had not gone off, whatever the reason, and that was an unlooked-for mercy.
“Quatre. . .trois. . .deux. . .un. . .”
“My dear compatriots,” Albéric began, aware his voice was shaking, even now, ever so slightly, “as you are no doubt already aware, this evening there was a savage terrorist attack on the Stade de France in Seine-Saint-Denis. I was myself the target of the attack, but as you can see, they failed in their objective. The reports of my death which spread across foreign media earlier this night, are false. However, many of my fellow citizens were not so fortunate, and the reported numbers of dead and injured are still climbing. C’est une tragêdie.”
He took a deep breath in the effort to calm himself before continuing. “We have, on my authority, mobilized all available forces to neutralize any remaining terrorists and prevent further attacks. I have also asked for military reinforcements, which are now moving into the Paris area. In a few moments, I will be meeting with my cabinet, to proclaim a state of emergency throug
hout the territory of France, and to once again, as we have before in times of such tragedy, close the borders of the Republic. We must ensure that those who have committed these crimes do not escape justice. Faced with terror, France must be strong. . .”
12:13 A.M.
The house outside Béville-le-Comte
Eure-et-Loire Department, France
“. . .there is indeed reason to be afraid. There is dread, but we stand in the face of this dread, a nation that knows how to defend itself. . .”
On-screen, President Albéric continued to stare into the cameras, his voice emanating through the television’s speakers into the darkness of the room, but no one was listening.
The form of Ghaniyah Belkaïd lay sprawled face-down in the carpet only a few feet away, nearly hidden by the voluminous folds of her abaya, her face turned sideways, one sightless eye staring out across the floor, both carpet and abaya now wet with her blood.
Something of resignation on that aged, leathery face—now frozen in death. She had known they had failed, before the end. Known, and accepted it, like she had accepted so much of life, from the earliest horrors she had known as a young woman in Algiers. The French paras in the streets—one of them, the father of the man whose face now stared down on her death.
“. . .and I ask that, despite tonight’s tragedy, you keep all your trust in what we can do, with the security forces, to protect our nation from further such terrorist acts. Vive la Republique! Vive la France!”
Somewhere, off in some other part of the house, another gunshot punctuated the words.
12:15 A.M.
DGSE Headquarters
Paris, France
“Based on the videos released in the last couple hours, we have reason to believe that the attacks earlier tonight received foreign support, perhaps from the remnants of Daesh, likely through the work of this man,” Anaïs Brunet continued, pulling up a balaclava-masked visage on-screen, “Ibrahim Abu Musab al-Almani. We do not know if he survived the operation against the Stade, but we have to assume that he did, until we have proof to the contrary. Finding this man, and Gamal Belkaïd, is of paramount importance. We must not fail.”
Presence of Mine Enemies Page 61
