by By Jon Land
“There are twelve men in a Special Forces A-team, Major.”
“I’m aware of that, sir.”
“You’re telling me one member of my son’s unit survived, aren’t you, Major?”
“I’m telling you that eleven of them died.”
“But one remains unaccounted for. You can confirm that much.”
“Only so far as the transition reports allow. I was hoping to provide you some closure, a sense of finality.”
Winters took a step closer to Jefferson, lowered his voice. “How do we find out more about these eleven bodies, Major?”
“Mr. Ambassador—”
“Who do we call about identifications, officially or unofficially?”
Jefferson shrugged. “I know some people in dispatch who are expert at handling below-the-board transfers. They might be able to provide more details.”
“Give me their names.”
“They won’t talk to you, sir.”
“I don’t want you risking your career.”
“I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for you, Mr. Ambassador,” Jefferson said, and started to turn around.
“I need to know, Major. You understand that.”
“Yes, sir,” Jefferson replied, holding his ground. “I do.”
* * * *
Chapter 70
J
amila Lalliou sent Ben to the Old Harbor in search of a fishing trawler called The Chanot. He found the boat in a berth set off by itself, a barnacle-ridden relic that at first glance hardly looked seaworthy. Ben handed the ship’s captain the ace of diamonds and asked if The Chanot was available for charter. The captain, a man named Villechese, grumbled, scratched at his beard, and nodded. No price was discussed. His fee would be paid by Lalliou upon completion, in keeping with procedure.
They didn’t set out until after dark on a moonless but clear night. The island of Pomeques was located only three miles west of the Old Port. Villechese brought The Chanot to within a half-mile of Pomeques’s rocky shoreline before dropping anchor and casting his fishing nets. Only then did he reveal to Ben the inflatable rubber raft camouflaged in the trawler’s stern.
Together they lowered it off The Chanot’s port side, using the trawler’s bulky frame for cover. Ben had expected an outboard engine and was disappointed to find a pair of oars inside the raft instead. When he asked about a waterproof pouch to keep his equipment safe from the churning waves, Villechese produced what looked like a common garbage bag and fished through his pockets for a twist tie.
Fort Pomeques, as it had come to be known, had been chosen by the Germans in large part thanks to its natural fortifications that rendered the fort invisible from the sea. The island itself was basically one giant boulder chiseled away by time and the elements. As a result, the fort was built amidst the layered stone, watched over by twin rock-layered sentinels that rose into the night like opposite prongs of a pitchfork. The formation on the eastern side of the island, according to Jamila Lalliou, offered a better spot for landing, with more footholds and pathways for an easier climb.
Ben’s plan after reaching the island was to claim the highest ground he could safely attain. Then he would contact Vordi and target the fort to assure its total destruction by the American F-16s that would be in the air even now.
Once inside the raft, the currents cooperated with him until he was swept within reach of the eastern shoreline. Here huge rock formations that would have eaten the bottoms of any boat venturing too close poked out of the sea and created havoc with the waves. Ben found himself paddling feverishly just to avoid losing ground before surging forward a few precious yards when a brief calm arose. He was panting with exertion by the time he leaped out of the raft into thigh-high water and tied it down to a boulder on the rock-encrusted shoreline.
He removed his satchel full of equipment from the garbage bag Villechese had provided and shouldered it, then began making his way awkwardly across the island’s slippery rock surface for the eastern stone tower that overlooked the fort. The going eased a bit as the stone surface grew less slippery farther from the shore. But this brief respite ended as soon as Ben began his ascent up the rock formation. The going was easy at times, precarious mostly, and at times treacherous. Although he never had to struggle finding hand- and footholds on the sheer surface, the climb grew so steep in places that it was all he could do not to slip and slide downward. In the dark, progress came agonizingly slow and on more than one occasion, a dead end forced Ben to retrace his steps downward and find another path.
The top of the stone face, he soon discovered, was unreachable and unnecessary for his purposes. He stopped his ascent on a wide ledge affording a clear view into the ruins of Fort Pomeques below. At first glance, through his high-tech binocular disguised as a camera, Ben thought Jamila Lalliou’s information must have been wrong. There was no sign of life inside the ruins, much less movement of any kind, and what was left of the fort itself seemed utterly uninhabitable. But Ben reminded himself of the caves of Afghanistan, where remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban had lived for months on end, and the bunkers of Baghdad, where some loyal to the Saddam regime were found months after the city itself was finally taken.
Ben had no idea what lay beneath the fort’s ruins, what complexes of bunkers and tunnels the Germans might have constructed to defend themselves. But he wanted to be sure, wanted some sign that this was in fact the hiding place for the secret army Ibrahim al-Kursami had called Black Sands, a key component of Al Awdah.
Ben rotated the extended lens of the camera slowly from side to side. On the fourth pass, his patience finally paid off when he caught a slight flicker of light followed by a wisp of smoke rising. A guard perched on the remnants of an ancient parapet had lit a cigarette. Ben twisted the lens and zoomed in. The man sat cross-legged with a Russian-made assault rifle shouldered behind him. He puffed his cigarette lovingly, gave no notion he had any idea the sanctity of the island had been compromised.
Black Sands ... So they are here, after all. . . .
Ben pulled the satellite phone from his satchel and hit the preprogrammed Send button.
“Vordi,” the familiar voice answered.
“I’ve got their location in my sights.”
“You know what to do.”
“So long as the equipment works.”
“It’ll work. Aim the designator at the center of the target and hold it for ten seconds. That’s all the F-16s need for acquisition. Stay on the line until I receive confirmation.”
Ben kept the satellite phone pressed against his ear, as he felt through his bag for the laser target designator. It fit easily into his palm and was surprisingly simple to operate. Just line up a target through the cameralike viewfinder and press the button. As per Vordi’s instructions, Ben focused on the center of the ruins, then pushed the button inward until he felt a click.
He expected to see a bright beam of blue light, like something out of a video game. But the laser designation being relayed to the F-16s cruising high in the sky was invisible to the naked eye. It didn’t even radiate any heat. Nothing.
Ben counted slowly to ten, then removed his finger. A wave of both euphoria and expectation washed over him. He had done it! The village of Bureij had been avenged, averting a much worse disaster looming in the offing.
“We’ve got confirmation of target acquisition,” Vordi told him. “I’m terminating this call. Enjoy the show.”
Ben listened to the sky, waiting for the telltale roar of the F-16s as they banked into their attack run. Perhaps they did so from so high up that he’d never hear them, not even know they were here until their bombs impacted on the old fort below. He returned the camera binocular to his eye, as if to reassure himself he had done everything properly.
A number of figures were visible on the surface now. He turned the focusing wheel, concentrating on the small group moving for a cavelike entrance at ground level of the fort, prepared to descend into its bowels.
Ben froze,
lost a breath and then a heartbeat, having caught a glimpse of the impossible in the lens: Danielle Barnea.
* * * *
Chapter 71
D
anielle remembered little after being gored by the bull at the Arena in Nimes. The two remaining gunmen had approached and crouched alongside her. Then they’d hoisted her upward, pretending to be rescuers.
She knew the effects of a drug-induced haze well enough to realize she’d been the victim of a mind-numbing drug that had blurred time. Had they tried to question her already, discern what she knew, who else she had spoken with? It didn’t matter. Although she now knew the shape of the plan in its entirety, she had shared that knowledge with no one.
As four escorts dragged her across the ruins of some ancient fortification, Danielle tried to figure out exactly where she was. They hadn’t taken her a great distance, she felt certain of that much. Meanwhile, the fresh clean smells and view of a nearby coastline she had managed to glimpse narrowed the setting down to somewhere still in the south of France. A port city. Marseilles, if she had to guess.
Danielle had woken from her trance numerous times in the last several hours, finding herself laid out on an old mattress in a room guarded by a pair of men standing on either side of the door. Each time, she was able to cling to consciousness only briefly before it slipped away again. Now that she had regained it fully, she assumed they were taking her somewhere else in the fortification, probably to be questioned.
Danielle tried to sharpen her senses by recalling the final moments in the Nimes museum office when the computer had provided translation of the last prophecy’s final line:
And each-of the fifty stars shall slide from their heavenly perch, never
to find the same sky again.
The line made no sense in and of itself. But when placed in the context of the entire quatrain, Nostradamus’s vision was terrifyingly clear.
In an age of two’s four, in a land of many
An army rises from midland afar on a day of equal light and dark
Beneath the flames of the bringer of fire, a darkness will reign eternal
And each of the fifty stars shall slide from their heavenly perch, never
to find the same sky again.
She understood it all now, what the United States was facing, the terrifying form the attack barely three days from now was going to take. But she still lacked the specifics, and clung to the hope that Ben’s pursuits had brought him closer to them than hers.
Her escorts led Danielle down a set of stone stairs into a flood of chilly air. A single ceiling-mounted light, probably battery powered, glowed at the foot of the steps. Danielle took a series of deep breaths, checking her strength, her reflexes. Were they sufficient to mount an attack and try for an escape? No, her four escorts were all armed and spread too far apart to overcome in her current condition. She might be able to do something about her bound hands, but not quickly enough to do her much good against an opposition formidable in number as well as skill.
Danielle resigned herself to being patient and descended farther into the bowels of the fort.
* * * *
Chapter 72
K
amal,” David Vordi snapped, “you shouldn’t be operating on this—”
“You’ve got to call the strike off!” Ben interrupted, shouting the words into his satellite phone.
“What? Did you say—”
“Listen to me, Danielle’s here! They’ve got her prisoner!”
“It’s too late.”
“No, you told me it would take ten minutes, probably more. You still have time to raise the F-16s, have them recalled.”
“I can’t.”
“Vordi, you’re not listening to me! Danielle’s—”
“I am listening. I’m telling you, it can’t be done.”
“You bastard.”
“I’m signing off, Inspector.”
“For God’s sake, call the Americans! Tell them to—”
Ben heard the click, stopped talking.
Damn Vordi! Credit for this strike would take him out of National Police and back into the Ministry of Justice.
How much time had elapsed since Ben had designated the targets, how many minutes were left before the night exploded in the fury of five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs?
Some. Enough.
Ben lunged to his feet, yanked the pistol from his satchel along with a thin yet high-powered flashlight. Depending on how far away the F-16s were when they received their target designations, he could have fifteen, twenty minutes at most. How long had it taken him to get up here?
His mind calculated feverishly as he began his descent of the rocky formation overlooking the fort. He quickly abandoned the pointless effort and concentrated on the route before him in the darkness, slowing only to negotiate the steepest, most precarious parts. A few times it might have been safer to backtrack and retrace his steps over safer ground. But he didn’t dare waste the precious moments that would take to manage. He slipped and fell twice, the first time plummeting ten feet down a slippery slope to a ledge; the second, landing face first on a weed-infested embankment.
At the bottom of the rock formation, Ben checked his watch. The glass was shattered, the hands frozen from a previous impact. He thought he could hear the distant whine of the fighter jets speeding into their attack approach, hoped it was the wind.
Ben rushed across the rocky ground, using only the night to conceal himself from the guard he had glimpsed in one of the parapets, along with any others. The front of the crumbled fort was open to anyone who wanted to enter; tourists almost exclusively until recent months when new tenants had taken up residence here.
The fort came into clear view in the darkness, as the sound of jet engines echoed through the night breeze. Ben tripped, landed with a thud, and regained his feet to find the guard he had seen earlier through his long-range lens turning his way. Ben yanked his pistol free, fumbled with it briefly, which allowed the guard to get his assault rifle steadied first.
Something sizzled through the air, trailed by a wailing hiss and sharp screech. The first laser-guided bomb impacted just short of the parapet and blew it apart. The guard disappeared in a huge shower of chunks of rock and stone. Ben was spared from the debris’s onslaught by the cover provided by the still-whole entry archway to the fort, the heavy barricade door removed long ago.
Ears ringing, he threw himself into motion again just as another five-hundred-pound bomb struck the rear of the fortress. A third blew him into the air. He landed on layers of jagged stone, his spine numb, the feeling gone from his legs Around him Ben heard men screaming and shouting, voices struggling to rise over the percussion of more bombs exploding with dizzying regularity.
Dazed, Ben somehow managed to regain his feet and surge onward, listing to one side and limping. He remained fixed on the position of the stairs down which he had seen men take Danielle. The explosions had coughed up smoke and dust that stole the stairs from view. Fires from the blasts lingered, providing glowing light that pierced the stained air.
Ben heard another whistling whine and hit the ground covering his head. More missiles came roaring in toward the fort. Ben risked a climb back to his feet, feeling the entire ground shake beneath him, and realized the last few missiles must have been of the bunker-buster variety, burrowing beneath the fort’s rocky surface to the rooms contained below before detonating.
The ground quaked. The rocks beneath his shoes shifted. Ben staggered on, closing finally on what remained of the stairs down which Danielle had disappeared minutes before. There were no stairs left that he could see, yet an opening remained between the piles of rock and the crumpling ceiling.
Ben threw himself over the pile, pushing with his legs and hands. The air at the bottom was cleaner so that he was able to expel the dust-soaked debris from his lungs. Another blast shook the fort and a portion of both walls and the ceiling collapsed on a pair of bodies felled by the initial attack wav
e.
Ben ducked and turned sideways to move through a narrow fissure that had once been a corridor. Only then did he yank the Mag-Lite from its clip on his belt and switch it on.
“Danielle!” he shouted. “Danielle!”
No response.
Ben emerged on the other side of the fissure into a section of tunnel still intact, leading to a heavy door that had been blown inward. Another two bodies lay just beyond it and he looked at them only long enough to assure himself neither was Danielle’s.
“Danielle!” he called again, peering inside the room.
