'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  She used a pair of tweezers to add a series of Lilliputian weights in the opposite pan until the scale balanced.

  “High whites,” he assured her. “Thirty-six stones. The smallest is a half.”

  She reached back into the purse. Her hand emerged with a small leather pouch. Three stones tumbled onto the marble table, her masters. She used them to grade the goods and kept a set of thirty of them at the apartment she kept in Antwerp. Except for the rarified fancy blues, greens, and reds, everyone wanted pure whites, colorless diamonds. She pushed a color-corrected 10X loupe into the socket of her right eye, the one she favored to key the quality of stones before she made her bids.

  “How is Tony?” he asked. Her seven-year-old son suffered from what she had learned was diagnosed as Type 1 near fatal brittle asthma, a life-threatening condition.

  “Still on the prednisone,” she answered. Her worry about Tony’s health was constant.

  “Hope he feels better,” the dealer said.

  “Thanks. OK. Forty-point-oh-three carats total,” she said as she resumed her inspection. She tweezed out the smallest stone and poured the rest of the lot back into the envelope. “I can always count on you. But they’ve got a lot of inclusions, pretty dirty, low-grade, they’ll cut at about GIA S-1, S-2.”

  “OK. You’re right. But the smallest’s a half-carat. OK. Ninety dollars a carat. Thirty-six hundred U.S. cash for the lot.”

  “I’ll give you fifty, two thousand, and I’ll throw in this bag of eights.” She threw a small bag on the counter. They were less desirable and they were not worth the money; she knew how to make them go to pink, added value, with just a dab of nail polish on the culet.

  “You’ve got a bargain,” Faisal assured her.

  She would have to get them across two borders, Angola and Belgium, to her Antwerp cutter, the best in the business.

  “No one cares,” he said. He read her mind.

  “Everyone gets a cut,” she admitted. “They don’t care where the stones come from. Conflict diamonds? Don’t make me laugh. Call them what they are. Blood diamonds. I couldn’t give a fuck less.” Her language was in character with her attitude. Everyone knew she had more balls than a juggler.

  AS SHE STEPPED OUT over the threshold onto the porch in front of Faisal’s shop on Avenue Equateur, she snapped her Bluetooth headset over one ear, turned on her HTC Incredible, multi-app smartphone, took off the straw fedora, unwrapped the camo-patterned bandana from her head, wiped her sweaty brow, rewrapped the bandana, and replaced the fedora. A second later, she was tuned into a pirated copy of Leki’s Congolese-Belgian hip hop sensation, “Warrior Girl.” She noted how the city looked.

  It’s looked like this for as long as I can remember.

  The streets outside were lined with fruit and diamond stores and shopping vendor cars hawking everything from dirty bars of homemade soap to rubber tire sandals.

  What a shithole to be thrown into.

  The din of the street’s hustle and bustle suddenly broke. Gunshots exploded, blasting the monotonous cacophony of the street. Shouts. Screams. Revving engines. More automatic rifle reports. Flashes of gunfire. Amber turned. The security guard dropped his rifle. He ran into the diamond exchange. Soldiers poured in behind him.

  No, not soldiers. What?

  SEVEN

  U.S. European Command Headquarters Hospital

  Still on his back in the hospital bed, Maran squirmed, trying to move his torso, but the sedatives were too strong. If he could just roll over a little bit. The restraints gripping his wrists, his legs, only amplified his angst. A sense of doom settled in like sulfur fumes, so heavy it even dulled the knife-like pain in his leg. His mind kept drifting back to the arch moment of his life, back and forth from the past to the present to the pain.

  His head reeled, torn by flashes of horror.

  Creatures crawled from other, still darker worlds, dragging him through fearsome, impossibly narrow tunnels that stank like dead fish, back and forth, across, and up and down. Black as a coal mine. If one route gave brief respite, the next found him thrown into a bottomless pit where he saw his son, Dennis, screaming for help, out of his reach, beyond his protection. Delirium. Sweat poured out of every pore. It trickled down his face. It dripped down the hair at the nape of his neck into the wet pillow. Three-dimensional nightmares piled on top of nightmares, rolled like a tsunami, filled him with fears of hopelessness. Visions of his slaughtered team mingled with memories of childhood failures: grief and guilt and regret, exaggerated by the intense rage that burned in his stomach like a corrosive.

  The scene shifted to his last fishing trip with his son. It brought mist to his bloodshot eyes.

  ON LEAVE FROM FORT BRAGG two years before his Cabinda assignment, Maran had driven with Dennis to the Old Ferry Landing fishing piers at Coronado Beach outside San Diego. The world was bathed in sunlight. The wind wafted through the open car windows like a softly cleansing wash. Years earlier, Maran and his Army unit had trained there with the CIA’s Joint Special Operations Group in an amphibious exercise with a Navy SEAL Team on the sands at the U.S. Naval Amphibious Base. The base didn’t look much different now. But there had been no festive family atmosphere when he raced up and down the wet sand carrying a 500-pound pine log with his Army pals and the Navy’s BUD/S recruits, BUD/S for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. The joint training was the Pentagon’s response to a number of earlier U.S. military failures.

  He rented a 21-foot motorboat at Fisherman’s Pier to take ten-year-old Dennis Maran fishing for Bonita and yellowtail amberjack off the cliffs at Point Loma. A fishing line, taut with a fighting fish, took his mind away from his fears. Maran watched his son’s face beam. He thought the boy looked a lot like his own mother, Sharon, who had proudly kept her maiden name and passed it on to Maran. A redhead, she was the daughter of a Hasidic rebbe from Brooklyn who had gone to Nigeria to run a synagogue in Port Harcour, that country’s main oil port. The translation of her father’s last name, Maran, came from the Talmud, “Our Master.” Maran’s reddish hair was certainly his mother’s. Yet its tight curls came from his Nigerian father who had abandoned them. His mother later, inexplicably, fell in love with an Irish-American International Longshoreman’s Union steward from South Boston who was visiting Nigeria on an exotic vacation in West Africa. She took Maran with her when she moved back to Boston from her home in Lagos after marrying the longshoreman. Maran could actually feel himself in his son, a sense not of ownership, but of identity.

  Dennis had meant everything to him.

  AFTER FISHING, THEY TOOK the freeway back to the Sunset Cliffs home where Dennis’ mother now lived in Point Loma. A fiery red Trans Am convertible forced Maran to brake. The driver, about twenty years old, leered as he cut in front of them at ninety miles an hour. A younger boy stood up on his feet in the passenger seat of the passing sports car, his face contorted by laughter. Maran jerked the steering wheel to the right. His car veered to the side of the road. Just then, traffic in the fast lane braked to an abrupt stop. The driver of the Trans Am accelerated to overtake a ten-wheel tanker full of fuel to the left of Maran in the fast lane; the truck driver hit his brakes. The rig spun into Maran’s lane. The sun bounced off the Trans Am’s trunk, blinded Maran momentarily. When he recovered, he saw the tanker jackknife into the Trans Am. The front right tire of the red car blew out. In his panic to recover, the driver of the truck whipped his vehicle to the right. It separated from the huge fuel tank. The car flew across the breakdown lane, sparks shooting out behind like a flame-thrower. The right, now-tireless front wheel gouged into the grass and dirt on a knoll alongside the freeway; the vehicle flipped. The tanker tore away from the truck cab, shooting sparks and flames. When it hit the dirt off the breakdown lane, it somersaulted onto the Trans Am in a mushroom ball explosion.

  “Oh, please‌—‌no!” Dennis cried. “Are they alive?”

  Maran pulled off the road. He jumped out of the compact. He reached into the back seat and whipp
ed out a blanket that he had brought along for a possible picnic.

  “Dad!” his son screamed.

  The younger kid was just visible, enveloped in the thick blanket of smoke. He crawled out of the fumes, choking, his screams stultified as he rolled over and over in the grass trying to smother the flames that enveloped him.

  Maran could smell the burning flesh. His mind leaped to his past combat scenes.

  “Call an ambulance,” he yelled as he ran to the boy.

  “My brother. My brother,” the boy pleaded, his voice nearly in-audible. The words gurgled through his teeth, the lips had already been burned away. The pyre was so close the heat scorched Maran’s skin, consumed the driver.

  Maran covered the boy’s head and shoulders with the blanket. He reached down to pick him up and the hair on his arms evaporated in tiny haloes of white smoke. As he tried to pull the boy to safety, he felt the skin slip off. It stuck to his hands and brought to life his worst experiences. In haste to move the boy to safer ground, he didn’t have time to look at his face. Now, even his past exposure to the horrors of death failed him. He fought not to wretch and lay the boy on the grass. He fell to his knees, cupping his mouth over the burned-away lips and blew his life’s breath into him as hard as he could. He watched the blackened chest pulse and blew harder as a crowd grew around him.

  Against hope, Maran kept on until the paramedics arrived. They eased him away. Maran held his own son close as they lifted the lifeless bodies onto the stretcher and into the ambulance.

  STILL LYING IN HIS hospital bed, reality intervened briefly. He realized where he was now and how he got there. He looked up at the intravenous drip bag hanging over his head.

  The nightmare shifted again.

  What!

  A face hovered.

  The Animal! How? How? How? My men, all butchered. My mission betrayed. Who? Where does it begin? Where does it end? How far up does it go?

  The face from the Cabinda ambush faded as quickly as it appeared as he went in and out of consciousness, only to be haunted by the worst trauma in his life.

  Dennis!

  Hate burned in his guts, blending with heartache, wracking his soul. First the ultimate loss of the one he loved over all else, then the unfathomable betrayal by his own. His skin was sloughing away, staining the sheets with sticky jigsaw pieces. He stank. Raw flesh, exposed by jagged wounds, bubbled with pus under the saturated dressings. His bones were sludge; he was melting into the mattress.

  The nightmare evolved into another hospital scene.

  “No! No! Not Dennis! Don’t‌—‌Don’t! Not‌—‌gone!” Maran cried out, flailed the air, screamed against all reason, driven near insane with the nightmare, the reality.

  He remembered getting the news.

  “A yeast infection in his joints.”

  “From what?

  “Acute myelocytic leukemia‌—‌advanced.”

  Pain wracked back and forth over his body feeling as though he was lying in a cornfield and a thresher was rolling over him back and forth. Every organ in his body screamed for relief. His own cries awakened him as he strained against the safety restraints.

  He had to clear his name; he owed that to Dennis.

  The nurse hurried to his bed. She carried a syringe. The agony of Cabinda, the pain of Dennis’ death, had faded. He had to get up‌—‌out.

  The nurse shot him the morphine, so quick, so gentle he was out instantly. The turmoil of the nightmare melted into a soft dread. It seeped through his dreams, gradually syncopating into Bach’s “Concerto in C Minor” coming from the little portable CD player next to his bed, a gift from the nurses.

  BY THE TIME MARAN got out of the hospital, the truth had sunk in. They wanted to get rid of him.

  Why? Who?

  It was hard to believe.

  Railroaded!

  Someone in the command wanted him out of the way.

  After twenty years of dedicated service to his country?

  The Army prosecutor had rushed through the Article Thirty-two investigation and set the secret court-martial for one week after Maran’s release from the hospital. They levied multiple charges against him: insubordination, dereliction of duty, and disobedience under fire in combat leading to the loss of his men. His assigned JAG defense attorney told him to expect damning testimony. To offset the odds against him, the attorney had fought hard to get a select panel of combat veterans, fellow warfighters and operators, to sit on the panel.

  Maran was ready to agree to anything. He just wanted it over.

  The questions haunted him. Beneath the fragments of control he retained, they ripped his faith like stitches torn from a raw wound.

  The day he limped out of the military hospital on crutches, his head bandaged and his neck in a stiff brace, fury shivered through his body. The agony of losing those men under his area of responsibility paired with the heartbreak of his shredded military career.

  Betrayed!

  He knew he wasn’t the first. The history of Washington’s political duplicity tore through his mind like a sick documentary. He recalled the foreign aid program that gave billions to North Korea’s nuclear reactor program in 1994, a move the U.S. came to regret as an impending threat and one that nullified the heroism of Americans killed or maimed in the Korean War. It might have been official White House policy, but it was treachery all the same. The memories seared through his head like a hot poker, centered on the treason done to him.

  God! What is it? What is it?

  He clasped his hands to his ears. It took all his strength to stifle a wail. Into what dark depths had his world sunk?

  Images faded in and out.

  They had desecrated his honor. For the first time in his life, he tasted the bittersweet bile that bubbles up from deep inside with the uncivilized craving to kill.

  The Animal. The Pentagon. Damn them to hell!

  He had been in the hospital eight days.

  EIGHT

  Kinshasa‌—‌Months earlier

  Panic raged outside Faisal’s store. A large black Humvee materialized from the smoke. Several armored personnel carriers followed it. They pulled up through the dust and mayhem and gangs of men and boys piled out, pouring into the street. They were armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, automatic rifles, spears and machetes.

  She stood, mouth agape, nowhere to flee. Momentary relief passed through her body as the rebel terrorists barreled past.

  Devils!

  Crocodile skin capes adorned with small cowbells and gourd rattles flapped from what she recognized as U.S. Army multi-cam battle uniforms they were wearing, their bodies protected by U.S. body armor, rifle-bullet-proof vests with armored neck-nape pads. They ran around the shops and through the street in front of her.

  Shouts of fear turned into screams of pain all around her. The street was overrun with military vehicles, armor, and ordinance. The crazed invaders fired automatic weapons and slashed with machetes through the crowd of people who were fleeing in every direction. The mutilated bodies of old men, women, and children lay splayed in the mud. One small child threw himself on his mother’s corpse, his arms encircling her, pleading for her to get up. The screams pierced Amber’s heart.

  Amber knew who they were.

  Vangaler’s Ninjas branded themselves as crocodile devils and zombies. Ostensibly, they were freedom fighters demanding independence for the Cabinda exclave which was still shackled by the Angolan government and its army. In fact, they were just an organized gang of savages who wreaked horror for profit on superstitious natives from Kinshasa to Cabinda. The tactic worked. The entire region lived in the fear of a visit from them. It was so bad that villagers under threat would sleep in one of the missionary churches. That worked until the Ninjas caught on and began burning those down.

  Amber turned back to the dealer. A hulking Ninja appeared, gold-framed mirrored sunglasses on his flared, diamond-studded nose. Packed in combat gear with an H-harness over his shoulders draped with g
renades and flares, he held a machine gun aloft, waving it around over his head with one huge hand. Two full cartridge belts crisscrossed his chest. Several heavy diamond-encrusted gold necklaces played alongside them as his body moved. Most noticeable, however, was the cape of crocodile skin, knotted with a gold clasp at the neck and draped over his shoulders. He had rolled up the sleeves of his camouflaged combat jacket. Ropy muscle rippled along his arms like writhing adders. Splashes of blue, white, and crimson grease paint warped his dark features into a gargoyle-like grimace.

  He reached for Amber’s bag containing her stones.

  Instinct triggered her adrenaline, overcame her fear.

  She crouched and spun into a serpentine curl.

  “Yi!”

  The skills Amber had employed in Xing Yi Quan were passed on through her family roots from the great sifu father Xu Shih Sheng of the Jai Song Lan Mountain Temple in Northern China. The practice was just one of the many martial arts skills she had learned.

  Her snarl exploded with the first Cantonese word of the Yi Quan fighting count. Her right arm shot in the air; her left hand gripped her upper right arm around the biceps as she used all her force with both arms to smash her right elbow across the man’s forearm.

  “Er!”

  She swiveled her torso to her left, leaned as far over her left foot as she could, cocked her right leg, her knee folded against her chest and jackknifed a fierce Yoko-geri side kick with her right foot. The kick caught the man under the breast bone and blew the wind out of him. He crashed into the cluster of dealers crowded behind him.

  “San.”

  She completed her maneuver and crouched, poised in the Fighting Dragon position.

  A man sauntered over from a Humvee that had pulled up. “That’s enough. You’ve proven your worth, Miss Chu. He’s bosbefok, a madman,” the thick-bodied man said, broadcasting his authority. His lips were rubbery; a thick, wide, black mustache covered the upper one. Odd that he is white, she thought. His stride was accented by the shine on his shell cordovan hunting boots. Amber noted the pistol on his belt. She recognized it from her father’s manuals as a Russian PSS silent automatic, used by GRU and STASI agents in the old days of the Cold War. He stopped to look at her with an eerie calm.