by Ian Slater
“What is it?” she whispered.
“A vehicle,” he answered. “Maybe a truck.”
“Not the plane?”
“No. If—when—that comes, we’ll know it. They’ll use a four-engined Herk for our pickup.”
Although warming, Melissa still felt desperately cold. It was as if the cogs in a wheel in her brain had slowed with the precipitous drop in her temperature. For a moment she was confused by him mentioning “our pickup.” She thought he’d mentioned a plane, not a pickup truck.
It was a pickup truck the general had heard, and it was being driven by a sallow-skinned man in the navy blue padded uniform of Chinese and Russian workers and peasants along the border between the two countries, the map line separating the two running across the top quarter of the lake, about forty miles north of the tunnel exit.
Next to the man in the small Jinlin pickup, whose motor sounded like nothing much more than a two-stroke lawn mower, sat a blue-eyed boy of about twelve, his skin so fair that he was often thought by the others in Wadi El-Hage’s cell to be a European. On missions, he and El-Hage never spoke Arabic, only English, the world’s language of business, El-Hage pronouncing it in a halting, schoolboylike fashion, the blue-eyed boy with the fluency and colloquialisms of an educated American schoolboy, a youngster who, at Hamas’s expense, had spent five of his years in a tightly controlled madrassa in the U.S. There the boy had grown up in a North American cultural sea, his task, as he was reminded daily, to immerse himself, to learn as much as he could about the infidel nation.
“You must be happy,” said El-Hage, “to be so soon in Paradise.”
“Yes,” said the boy. “I am ready.”
“Think of Azzah,” El-Hage told him, recalling the woman he’d used to help indoctrinate the blue-eyed boy. “She taught you the pleasure a woman can give a young man. In Paradise there will be seventy-two virgins like her, yes, all waiting to pleasure you. Most men much older than to you—”
“Older than you,” said the boy dispassionately. “Not older to you.” El-Hage always made such elementary grammatical mistakes.
“What? Oh yes. I am sorry, Jamal. Older than you. Well, you see, not even those older than you obtain such pleasuring.” El-Hage saw yet another parachute canister, this one poking out from a clump of bushes that were barely visible amid the encroaching reeds. He and the boy had seen several of the milk-pail-sized canisters which, attached to small parachutes, had floated down from the infidels’ giant helicopters before they all left, the pilots and crew unable to see any more survivors in the thick smoke that had spewed out from the tunnel explosion and soon filled the evening sky. El-Hage had already stopped several times on the narrow, raised roadway through the low-lying marshes, and had waded in knee-high water to retrieve one of the canisters and thrown it into the back of the Jinlin, though even the boy could not tell El-Hage what to make of “STAR” in the canister’s written directions. But whatever it was, the phrase “pickup,” he told El-Hage, meant just that, and indicated that this infidel general and some soldier called Thomas were still missing. If they saw an infidel cross spread out, no doubt a signal for the infidel’s rescue, it would also locate Freeman for El-Hage and the boy.
“There it is!” said the boy, sitting abruptly forward, pointing to a spot almost a quarter of a mile to his left. The light was fading, and while neither he nor El-Hage could see a parachute, the white cross could be seen atop a reed island.
“Yes, yes, now remember—” El-Hage, though he had switched to English, was speaking more quickly than he normally did when giving his Hamas cell its instructions. “—you are looking for help for your poor father, a pond fisherman who is ill, and—”
“I know,” said the boy sharply, also in English. “I know. Our engine has broken down. Could he please help us?”
“Yes, and I will stand by the engine’s hood and look into the engine and I will appear—” El-Hage now allowed himself a small laugh. “I will — I will appear how? The word you taught me.”
“Mystified,” the boy told him.
“Yes, very mystified.”
The boy laughed, and El-Hage saw the imperturbable courage, the cool determination in the boy’s eyes. This time the boy, unlike other martyrs of Islam, would not be wearing a bomb belt. The Americans, the British, and other degenerates had grown wise to the dynamite-belted bombers since the infidels’ occupation of Iraq. “Do not speak English very well,” advised El-Hage for the umpteenth time. “Otherwise they will—”
“Too well,” the boy corrected him. “I know, I must sound like a peasant. I am begging the American for help.” He adopted a forlorn look, his pleading, snuffling manner in keeping with the rumpled Russian garb, selected and dirtied for the mission by El-Hage himself. “‘Please, you help my father. His car. No go. It no good. You help, please.’”
“Good,” said El-Hage. “But remember, if they ask how it is you know a little English?”
“At school. Yes,” said the boy in the exasperated tone of a much older, more mature boy who had learned not only of the pleasures of the beautiful Azzah, but English as well.
“Who’s that?” Melissa asked Freeman. The voice coming down the exit shaft from above was that of a child. It wasn’t loud, but its “Hello!” was persistent, and Melissa whispered to the general that it sounded as if whoever it was must be very near the spot where they put the cross. Melissa felt resentful, then ashamed. The marine in her wanted to help anyone in trouble, especially a child, but the woman in her wanted more warmth and the safe, protected feeling she had while being held by the general, telling her she was alive, coming back from the brink of hypothermia to the present, the insect bites that had saved her now starting to itch so badly that all she wanted to do was rip off the clothes and scratch till there was no tomorrow.
“Quiet, dammit!” said Freeman, his ill temper surprising him almost as much as it did Melissa, but he had a soldier’s sixth sense of danger. For an instant much of his earlier life, the times of maximum danger, flashed through his mind with a vividness he’d not experienced before but which other soldiers had spoken to him about moments before their death. For all his self-confidence, Douglas Freeman was not a man who had lived with the belief that things always work out for the best. For him, that was demonstrably false in the utterance of one word: Holocaust. And he knew someday would be his day to die. The best anyone could do was try to avoid it, but if you couldn’t, then for him there was only one way to deal with it: bravely.
Extracting himself from the layers of now-warm clothing, and picking up his weapon, trigger finger on the guard, he walked up through the malodorous tunnel, up into the pale square of evening. He heard two things: A boy’s voice calling, “Help, please?” and Melissa Thomas coming out behind him.
When Freeman saw the Jinlin with its hood up, apparently conked out, about a hundred yards away, he was surprised to see a peasant in the ubiquitous quilted blue jacket, pants, and thick fur cap — either Chinese or Russian, it was difficult to tell — staring into the motor as if he didn’t know what to make of it all. Only now did Freeman notice the boy, probably Russian, Freeman thought, off to his left. The boy, who must have walked around the large, marshy depression nearby, was now waving at the general and asking, “Please, you help my father. He sick and truck no go. It no good. You help, please. My English not good but you, you understand?”
“I understand,” said Freeman, trying to quickly assay the situation. “But you just stay where you are for a jiff.”
“Jiff?” asked the blue-eyed boy. “What does this ‘jiff’ mean?”
“It means stay still.”
From almost a mile away Abramov was watching, his nerves rattled by his near-death experiences in the shot-up transport helo and the minefield. He could barely move, so tightly stuffed was his battle uniform and backpack with three different currencies and a back brace belt he’d personally ordered to be altered so that it would carry a bag of ten big-candy-bar-sized ingots of gold.
“A walking bank,” the crew of Nureyev’s tank had called him as they’d fished him out of the minefield.
“What’s the American doing?” Abramov demanded angrily, standing atop the tank next to its cupola with two other bonus-hungry terrorists. Abramov was using the cupola to brace himself, his legs and arms still spasming in reaction to his having had to stand perfectly still and then bear his own weight and that of the gold while dangling from the huge 125 mm gun.
“General Abramov!” called out the tank’s radio operator. “Our crew in Tank 1 has been badly mauled. Only one survivor. He’s withdrawing to H-block.”
“What for?” Abramov snarled. “There’s nothing left for him there. Doesn’t he know what the Cobras did? They’ve destroyed H-block; it’s burning. Computers and everything. Gone!”
“Sir,” Nureyev cut in, “the American must be telling the boy to take off his jacket. Why is he making the boy—”
“Shut up!” ordered Abramov, the weight of his binoculars straining his wrists. “The boy’s in my employ. His guardian’s a big customer of ours — paid half your wages. This Freeman bastard must be suspicious.”
“Looks like he is telling the kid to turn around,” said Nureyev.
Despite his nervous state, or perhaps because of it, Abramov gave a short, guttural laugh. “He suspects the blue-eyed boy. Thinks he might be wired with explosives.”
“Is he?” Nureyev dared to ask. He, as well as his crew, were exhausted by the ever-present threat of being taken out like the others at the beginning of the U.S. raid. “He hasn’t got a bomb belt on,” said Nureyev, watching through his binoculars and still waiting for Abramov’s confirmation of whether or not the boy was wired. “Maybe a grenade?” proffered Nureyev.
“No,” Abramov said, having to lower his binoculars, hands atremble. “But he’s Freeman’s death warrant.”
* * *
Freeman glimpsed movement, side right. It was Melissa Thomas coming closer, still in Russian garb, but wearing her American helmet. Hunched over from the weight of the clothing, she looked like a crone. The boy started with fright when he saw her, the suddenness of her appearance rather than her Russian uniform and American helmet surprising him.
“Now take off your pants,” Freeman told the boy slowly.
“But mister, I wish to tell I am not Russian soldier. I am no soldier. I am only twelve years—”
“Be quiet!” snapped Freeman. “Take them off!”
The boy first took off his boots, then the trousers, revealing khaki cotton long johns.
“I am cold,” he complained.
“So am I,” the legendary general told him. “Everybody’s cold. Now take off your long johns.”
“General!” said Thomas. “I hear aircraft—”
She was right. There were three of them. Two were less loud than the other, which seemed slower and was out of sight above the gray three-thousand-foot-high stratus. Night was almost upon them, and the man, Melissa saw, purportedly this boy’s father, was still visible by the Jinlin but becoming more difficult to see in the fast-descending dusk.
“Joint Strike Fighters,” Freeman answered, without turning toward her, watching the boy taking off his underwear and shivering. Melissa didn’t avert her eyes. She’d been trained not to, not after the number of marines lost in Iraq to innocent-looking children who had wandered up to U.S. soldiers with a smile and a “Hi, Mac!” then blown themselves and the marines to pieces.
The blue-eyed boy had no grenades tucked into the crotch of his long johns. He was shivering violently. The rule was not to let them speak, to “chat you up,” as the Brits called it, chat you up all friendly and innocent and then the grenade.
“All right,” Freeman said. “Put your long johns on and pull your jacket and trousers inside out. Pockets as well. And pat them down so I can see.”
To help the boy understand, Freeman, still holding his AK-74 in his right hand, patted his left leg with his left hand, miming what he wanted the boy to do. The kid seemed smart enough, older than his young, blue-eyed innocence would suggest.
Melissa Thomas saw the first two planes, black specks beneath the gray stratus, the thunder and speed of their passing so fast she had only a few seconds to see they were in fact two American Joint Strike Fighters; the third plane, the one the JSFs were obviously protecting, sounded higher and was still hidden by the clouds of stratus, its drone much heavier and slower than the low-level scream of the two JSFs.
Freeman hadn’t seen the planes, “total focus,” as he used to tell Aussie and Co., being the necessity of the moment. Freeman still felt there was something weird. Yes, they’d seen the road track when they landed, and he himself had told the MEU force on Yorktown they might see the occasional rice farmer who spent the winters huddled in the hamlets around the lake, using bundled dried reeds collected during the summer for fuel, but he was cautious nevertheless.
“All right,” said Freeman, pointing down at the boy’s pile of inside-out clothes. “Put your hands up, like this — spread fingers — and walk back from the clothes.”
“Sir,” said Melissa Thomas, “he’s going to die of chill.”
“He’ll die of dynamite if he’s got a stick or two sown into that quilting,” though the general could see that none of the quilted segments was big enough to conceal a stick of dynamite. But you could kill a man with much less. Melissa Thomas had heard just how meticulous the elite forces, such as the SAS, SEALs, Spetsnaz, and Freeman’s SpecFor were. And she’d heard the story about Aussie and the “woman” with the baby. Freeman was quickly but gingerly feeling the quilted clothing, fur cap, and then the boy’s boots, upending and smacking them. Det cord could by itself cripple and maim.
“Sir,” said Thomas. “There’s a container coming down.”
It wasn’t one of the small ones holding white infrared X cloths but was much larger, about twice the size of a forty-five-gallon drum, under a full-size chute. Freeman figured, correctly, that this was all being coordinated by McCain’s Signals Exploitation Space via satellite. They’d homed in on the points of the X that Melissa Thomas had spread out, and had now given the big plane, which sounded like a Herk, the X’s exact GPS address.
Freeman’s concentration on the boy and the indistinct man down by the Jinlin truck didn’t falter for a second. The general didn’t even look in the direction of the descending chute. But as he began patting down the boy’s quilted trousers he could see the peasant by the truck was standing motionless. Why wouldn’t the father be over here by now to see what’s going on? the general asked himself. His son had been made to strip and still he hadn’t moved? But the general could not feel any explosive or triggering device or any unusual heaviness as he lifted the jacket and pants up to gauge their weight. They felt just about right.
“Okay,” he told the boy, pointing down at the clothes. “Put those back on.”
“Okay?” said the boy.
“Yes, it’s okay.”
“You help my father now?”
“Yes.” Freeman turned to Melissa Thomas, who was watching the big canister float down, keeping the scope eye of her M40A1 on Abramov’s unmoving tank. The tank’s crew was no doubt wondering what to do now that there were two state-of-the-art MANPAD-invulnerable Joint Strike Fighters in the area, with tank-busting rockets and cannon.
“Let’s go help your dad,” said Freeman. “Marine Thomas?”
“Sir?”
“Inside the canister you’ll find two dry, insulated boilersuits, a five-hundred-foot cord of reinforced nylex rope, and a seaman’s kit bag — it’s the rolled-up balloon-dirigible bladder — and a tank of helium with an easy-to-release—”
Suddenly his voice was lost in a thunderous roar as the two JSFs screamed out of the stratus in a tight turn and swept over them, rocking wings to say “hello,” and assuring them that if yonder T-90 tank was to cause any trouble, there would be no more T-90.
The boy was zipping up his jacket as Freeman continued. “Th
ere’ll be two body harnesses. Put one on.”
“Should I start filling the balloon?”
“Just enough to get it off the ground,” said Freeman. “No more till I get back. Fully inflated, the dirigible’s like a house-sized Goodyear blimp.” He smiled. “But no gondola.” He turned to the boy. “Okay, Let’s go help your father.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about making you cold,” Freeman apologized. “You understand? Sometimes bad people use children. Do you understand me?”
“Oh yes,” said the blue-eyed boy. “That’s why I want to tell you that this man we’re walking toward is the regional Hamas leader Wadi El-Hage and they told me all this bullshit about how Americans were evil and sent me to school over there to learn English.” He paused. “And where I found that American kids were great.”
Freeman was stunned by the boy’s mature self-confidence and sudden switch from the halting vocabulary one would expect of a peasant to the kind of A-plus high school student he himself had been. The general almost stopped walking, he was so surprised, but the boy continued walking and talking. “But these Hamas assholes have kept me like a prisoner and told me that if I ever left them, they’d hunt me down and kill me, no matter where I went. My pants and jacket are padded with explosive — with what Hamas call spun Semtex. You know what that is?”
“Semtex, yes, but not spun.”
“The detonator is a fine wire and a tiny watch battery in the jacket in a seam tucked into the collar label. The theory is that I tear it and you and I go to Paradise. I don’t believe any of it.” The boy paused now and looked knowingly at Freeman. “In the Middle East, girls can marry at twelve. I know about women. There’s Paradise here if you’re alive. Hamas is nuts. If I went with you, General, they’d chase me down, but if you take El-Hage and me prisoner, people’ll think we’re both locked up. You can take me back to America where I’ll be safe. I’m young, and you have the world’s best plastic surgeons in your witness protection programs.”
