by Gordon Kent
“Where do we go?”
“Right on the datum. He’s deep, too quiet for Esek Hopkins to hear. He’s got to find us in the morning, and he has to be able to hear the carrier. He’s not going to be far from where the Elint guys put him.”
“You sure?”
“No, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?” Craw laughed again. He had no nerves at all.
Rafe turned south, broadside to the wind. He had to yaw the plane to keep his heading. Maintaining an altitude down low was like playing a video game. Everything moved, from the air to the surface of the sea.
“Ready for drop,” Craw called from the back. He dropped only two buoys. They had five left, four passive and one active. They flew on another mile and Craw dropped another while Hetzer brought the two new buoys up on his screen. She felt a little sense of competence when she managed it; then she lost one. Craw cursed.
“Big seas. Buoy just sank. Something must have happened when it hit the water.”
“Problem?” asked Rafe.
“Maybe. Anybody have any coffee? The show’s about to start.”
Campbell passed his thermos back with some cookies.
“Almost as good as having Mr. Craik.” Craw was talking with his mouth full.
And don’t I wish he was here, thought Rafe.
“I’ve got something on the 40dB line.” Hetzer began to be excited.
“On buoy fifteen?”
“Twelve.”
“Can’t be right all the time. Sir, please come to 270 true.”
Rafe brought the plane up sharply, almost spilling Craw’s coffee. A wind gust threw them back into their seats. “Sorry about the ride, folks. Just a little turbulence.”
“Ready for drop.”
Thunk. Thunk.
“He’ll drive through those in about two minutes, and then we’ll get him.”
Every eye in the plane was glued to the screens, except Rafe’s. He couldn’t even look at his tiny screen. He had to fly. This flight, he had to fly every meter.
“Now that I can see his grams, I can see he’s on fifteen and eleven, too.”
“Good on you, Ms. Hetzer. We’ll make a subhunter of you yet.”
“Esek Hopkins say they have contact.” Hetzer was busy on the link, more than holding her end up.
The noise of the engines and the rattle of the rain on the canopy.
“Here he comes.” Lines on the master chief’s screen resolved themselves into a single point of green with a numeric marking. “Put that in the link, Ms. Hetzer.”
Hetzer started to process it, her fingers flying. In a moment, every terminal in the world showed a hostile red half-diamond, point down. UnID Sub. Rafehausen/Campbell/Craw/Hetzer. She felt a moment of pride.
“Permission to go active?”
“Go ahead.” Rafehausen sounded sure.
“Ready for drop.”
Thunk.
“Care to do the honors, Ms. Hetzer?”
“Master Chief, if it’s all the same to you, she’s your sub.”
“That’s kind of you, Ms. Hetzer. Going active.”
A hundred meters down, a narrow tube of electronics let loose a banshee wail.
Shreeeeeeeeep.
“Now he’ll turn for the coast,” said Craw.
“Where do you want us, Master Chief?”
“Anywhere you like, sir. We’re just ruining his day, from here on. The traps are out, an’ he’s our lobsta’.”
“He’s turning west!” Hetzer was pounding her armrest with her fist. “How’d you know?”
“I ain’t done yet, neitha’.” Craw’s accent betrayed his excitement.
“He’s coming up on buoys three and four.” They were the southernmost buoys from their first field.
“Permission to go active?”
“Damn, you’re good, Master Chief.”
“I have my good days, Captain.”
“Go ahead.”
Craw tabbed up the first active buoy he had dropped, more than a half-hour before.
Shreeeeeeeeep.
“Now he’ll turn north.” Craw’s north sounded like “no-ath.”
“He’s getting louder and moving. Maybe twelve knots.”
“Esek Hopkins has him off our active and on passive.”
“Fourteen knots.”
“He’ll turn. He thinks he has a sub after him.”
The half-diamond jumped on the screen, moving another half-inch in a new direction. North.
“Wow!” said Hetzer.
“Buoys six and seven should have about ten minutes left before they sink.”
“No one is ever going to believe this back in Jacksonville.” Hetzer was so excited she had forgotten her mike was on.
“Permission to go active on buoy eight?” asked Craw formally.
“Go ahead, Master Chief. Have a ball.”
“Going active.”
Shreeeeeeeeep.
“An’ now he has just one place to run,” said Craw, deeply satisfied. “Can’t go north, can’t go south, can’t go west.”
“We don’t have another active buoy.”
“Don’t need one. He can run east until he gets home to China, for all I care. We’re done, Mr. Rafehausen. Out of buoys.”
“Let’s go get some coffee.”
It was a short flight back, but Craw was asleep when they landed. He woke up to the tug of the harness as Rafe caught the wire, and he had to think back a ways to remember the last time he had slept through a landing. He never did with Mister Soleck, that was for sure.
“Nice landing, Cap’n.”
Rafe sneezed.
31
Coast of East Africa.
Colonel Lao drove slowly and carefully past the potholes that marked the neutral zone between Tanzania and Kenya. Neither country excelled at road maintenance, but the short half-mile around the border seemed to suffer from utter neglect, as if neither country would admit responsibility for the road. There were other patches in Tanzania that were much worse, but something about the ruined macadam and foot-deep holes on this stretch made Lao fear it more than any other. That, and the constant, nagging fear of border crossings that had been with him since his first mission to Hong Kong as a very junior officer twenty years before.
The bored Tanzanian guard waved him forward, looked at his passport, and collected the U.S. ten-dollar bill folded inside. Lao was traveling under his cover name, Wu, with a diplomatic passport. He had nothing to worry about, but that didn’t keep him from worrying through the guard’s careless walk around his car.
“Have a good day.”
Lao accelerated away into Tanzania, passing the rows of vendors who waited at the border. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and eventually, Lao had to admit that it was more than his habitual fear of border crossings. It was the meeting—and the barbarian.
Colonel Lao was not a bitter or a cynical man. He was an idealist, and, if asked to describe himself, would happily have used the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution. He was a patriot, a true believer. He knew that there were aspects to his beloved Chung Kuo that were unsavory, but China was, to him, “all under heaven.”
It was difficult for him even to frame his thoughts about what he had just learned, because they did far more than threaten his views of himself or his country. They as much as threatened the idea that cherry blossoms would bloom in their usual color, or that Li Po had been the greatest admiral of all time. It was as if it were now possible that the universe was a distinctly different place.
“And yet,” he said aloud, the words startling in the quiet car. He pulled over on the grass at the verge. His hands were shaking. He rubbed the top of his head for a moment, wished for a cigarette, though it was years since he had indulged himself.
He had always been suspicious of this task. He had always been suspicious of Chen and his “friends,” those party magnates and corps commanders whom the young openly and derisively called “the warlords.” He had always avoided any sense of faction in his
own work, staying to the simple commandments of the party. Because of that, he was a lieutenant-colonel with no friends. He had no mentor to call, and no relatives.
He looked out over the savanna. He and his wife had both hated Africa when he was first assigned here, as much because it was the lowest priority in Chinese intelligence as for itself, but time, opportunity, and education had brought them both to a love of the place. He could walk here, watching the insects and the smaller animals, in total contentment. For a moment, he allowed himself to consider leaving his car and walking into the bush. Managing his own death. He touched on both the real and the fake death, but the real death doomed his wife and his son, and the fake death left him staring at the same impossibilities he had been staring at since meeting the barbarian in Nairobi.
Meet me again.
How often had he used those words himself, when he had had his prey trapped in a web of his own devising. “Meet me again” meant that you had the target in a position where his only choice was to come over.
If Chen was really dead, and the money was the real object, he was dead right now. He could predict the chain of events, from his own report to Beijing to the recall for “consultation.” His wife a widow in a reeducation camp, or worse. His child an orphan on a farm.
He had condoned such actions against other men, not because they themselves were in any way guilty, but because it was for the good of the whole. He was disappointed with himself that, having seen his fate, he now flinched from it, but behind the flinching was a pit of anger. This was not for the good of China, or for his party. This was so that a group of men who defied every principle of good living could hide their crimes.
He couldn’t fully form that thought. His mind touched it, licked around it like a flame on a new piece of wood, but he wouldn’t quite finish it. If he admitted that those men were rotten, the cherry blossoms might change color. He took a deep breath and put his car in gear, resolved to submit his reports and follow the path of the patriot to the end.
He would not go to meet the barbarian again. That would be a small victory, all of its own.
Seattle.
Marvin Helmer had a telephone call. His secretary put it through, but when Helmer heard the voice, he frowned. “I told you not to do this,” he said. He meant, You were told never to call me here.
“This is urgent.” There was a silence. Helmer waited. The caller was male, educated, middle-aged or older, from the voice. Helmer looked at his call recognition and saw that at least the fool wasn’t calling from his office at Langley.
“Ray Suter’s dead,” the voice said.
Helmer stiffened. “How?”
“They won’t say. Foul play, it sounds like. Did it themselves?”
But Helmer wasn’t really listening. He was thinking, Suter’s dead!
And then, not being able to suppress a smile, I’m home free!
Over Southern Kenya.
Alan cleared the Hunter-Nairobi airspace in the rented Cessna and picked up the A104, the main north-south road that runs from Arusha in Tanzania through Nairobi and all the way to the Uganda border beyond Eldoret. He knew some of the country from the ground but was not so secure from the air; the highway below them provided a clear pointer.
“We’ll head south as far as Kajiado and try to pick up the road west to Magadi there,” he told Triffler, who was sitting in the right-hand seat. It was a plane Alan knew well; he had flown Rafe’s for almost two years when he was at the Newport War College. And it was the aircraft he had landed on a marine helicopter carrier two years before. “You got it on the map?”
Triffler, looking African and elegant in a short-sleeved safari suit that he had bought within an hour of arrival, pursed his lips. “Of course I have.” One long, brown finger was resting on the map, an intricate shading of yellow and the palest green, with Mount Kilimanjaro a cinnamon oval rising from a ring of bright green. They would stay well east and north of Kilimanjaro, but they could see it clearly off to their left. “Beautiful,” Triffler said. “I wish my wife was here.”
“Me, too!” Alan said. “My wife, not yours, I mean.” He glanced aside at the map. The road from Kajiado over to Magadi twisted like a snake, a sure sign of fast descents as it went down into the Rift Valley. Alan pointed to their right. “You can see the far wall of the Rift—the forest off there, see it? Sort of blue-green? We’re heading just this side of it.” He couldn’t see Lake Magadi yet in the ground haze. A car would be waiting for them there. “Tomorrow, we get to drive past Kenyatta’s presidential guard’s camp. Tough guys—until he died, they were the terror of the country. Still are, to some extent, but they’re getting old.”
Triffler was silent, looking out, and then he said, “Difficult for me to come here.”
Alan digested that and then said, “Too primitive?”
“Too African. I told my wife on the phone, it’s not at all like ‘coming home.’ A black man in a black country, you’d think I’d be walking on air.”
“They think you fit in.” Wherever Triffler had gone in Nairobi, the locals had thought him local. He had the long, thin face of the northern people, the Rendile and the Ethiopians. His slender body was like the Masai and Samburu. If he had spoken good Swahili, he could have passed. “You could have a great career running agents over here, Dick.” Triffler made a face.
Harry O’Neill had been a CIA case officer in Tanzania. Alan had heard the same reaction from him. “It’s when you find what the limits on being black are, and where being American kicks in,” O’Neill had said.
Alan saw what had to be the roofs and trees of Kajiado below him, and he banked and picked up the concrete ribbon of the Magadi road, losing altitude as the land dropped beneath them and the Rift opened. They could see the lake now, a skinny ribbon of white and pink with a rim of startling white in the sunlight. Magadi was a soda lake, home of one of Kenya’s major industries, a jarring industrial landscape in the middle of wildness. Alan turned north and then west again so they could look at the lake from the top. The town, little more than the buildings of the soda works and the houses of its executives and workers, sat halfway down where a causeway ran all the way across the three-mile-wide lake.
“That’s water?” Triffler said. The surface looked scummy with soda crust. “What’s the pink?”
Alan flew the length of the lake, dropping altitude. Toward the south end, thousands—hundreds of thousands—of flamingos waded in the shallow water. “That’s the pink—the birds. Mike says it stinks down there,” he said.
“Birds or potash?”
“Dunno, maybe both.” He glanced at the map and then swung sharply west toward the forested escarpment on the far side of the Rift. “Pick up a river running north-south,” he said. “Runs down toward Lake Natron—”
“Got it—”
“Natron’s in Tanzania, but it pushes right up almost to the border, so Lao’s got to come up one side or the other of it. We pick him up there, before he reaches Mike.” He swung south again, the Ewaso Nyero River winding through green swamp below him. He was flying at a thousand feet above the terrain, the wall of the escarpment rising well off on the right, twenty miles away. Lake Natron was straight ahead, a broad, dead-looking expanse of water in an arid plain. The river seemed to disappear into the swamp; if there was a channel that actually ran into Natron, it was invisible. Immediately ahead, guarding the passage to Natron, were two fifteen-hundred-foot hills, one in Kenya and one nominally in Tanzania. Alan pointed at the hill on the left.
“Shompole,” he said. “That’s our landmark. The meeting’s at the foot.”
“Got it, got it—there’s a village of Shompole, too—”
Tin roofs flashed beneath the wings. He banked around the flanks of the big hill, which had put out ridges like the roots of a big, old tree. Between the ridges were clustered huts and a corral. Alan could see lanky cattle among the acacia trees. “Masai,” he said.
He flew into Tanzania. There was no border post, no fence, no
marker, no radar. There might as well have been no border. Lao would be coming from the east, their left. “See any roads down there?”
Triffler was craning over to look down. “I don’t even see a rut, man! That is desert down there!”
“That’s Africa, Dick.” There were a few acacias, their shade probably sheltering a cheetah or a zebra they couldn’t see. Natron, also a soda lake, had a broad, white rim, and the land around it was gray with soda dust. Alan banked and flew over the lake, circled and came back and dropped down to five hundred feet. “Think I could land down there?”
“Don’t!” Triffler almost squealed. He looked at Alan with horror. “You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Not this trip. But suppose Lao gets cute? We might want to put down.”
He went down to three hundred feet and flew back and forth south of Shompole. There was no road anywhere. “He’s going to have to bring a four-wheel drive, and I think he’s going to have to walk the last click or two.” He banked and pointed. “See those gullies? I don’t think you’d get a four-wheeler out of one—too steep.” The rains, which came in November, had cut deep, straight-sided erosion gullies in the now-parched soil.
When they had seen enough, he flew back to Magadi and put down on the strip there. Triffler, who’d never landed on an undulating dirt surface before, sat up very straight. They’d been given a radio frequency for the field, but nobody had answered. Alan taxied the plane close to the only building, a prefab the size of a one-car garage, and shut down.
“There’s our ride,” he said. A Land Rover was parked in the shadow of the building. Leaning on it was the head honcho and general factotum of Magadi International, a well-fed Kikuyu who spoke to Triffler in Swahili and Alan in English; Triffler answered in English, Alan in Swahili. The man seemed delighted that they wanted to leave the plane there overnight. Hakuna matata was said several times—“no problem.” The parking fee was less than he’d have paid for a car in Washington.
“I want to drive down to Shompole,” Alan said to their driver. “Mzuri?”
“Okay,” the driver said. He was a Masai. He eyed Triffler speculatively and decided something, thereafter spoke to him in beautifully accented English.
