Goodbye Paris

by Mike Bond

  Less than a month ago I’d left Maine for Tahiti with my three bedmates, promising myself I’d give up trying to improve the world.

  I was going to surf and make love and care for hungry animals and injured buddies and let the world go to Hell all by itself.

  But now I’d left Tahiti for a rainy May in Paris, on a well-paid but non-existent loan to the Agency I disliked. Not that for them I even existed. Which meant if I got in trouble they’d never heard of me. Or if I got too cumbersome they might just deal with me themselves.

  There were three good reasons why I did this:

  I wanted to kill Mustafa al-Boudienne.

  I wanted to protect our country, our freedom, and our way of life. For which I’ve risked my own life so many times.

  Most important: Mack asked me to.

  —

  AFTER 9/11 when I decided to drop marine biology and go into the Marines, my father, as a former SEAL, advised in his usual cogent manner against it. “Nah, don’t be a bullet sponge in the Marines, go in Special Forces. Those guys have all the fun. And unlike the SEALS don’t have to spend all their time in the damn ocean.”

  The first step to SF was Ranger training at Fort Benning – incredibly tough, exhausting and exhilarating exertion – marching and running with heavy packs, climbing vertical hills and jumping off tall walls into muddy rivers and nasty bush and every other unfavorable kind of terrain you could imagine.

  I’d grown up on the Big Island barefoot and nearly naked, climbing trees and mountains, surfing and windsurfing monster waves, swimming and running everywhere, even to the top of 14,000-foot Mauna Kea, avoiding school as much as possible – the typical Hawaiian back-country kid.

  Thus Ranger training wasn’t a piece of cake but not that hard. Most of my fellow applicants were in good shape, but not nearly as tough as guys used to be – too much beer, TV, video games, and the misperception that watching football made them men. So while these guys were dying out there I was having fun.

  But the fun ended at the Special Forces selection course at Fort Bragg – another twenty-four days of astoundingly unpleasant physical challenges, after which I was admitted as a Weapons Sergeant candidate to Special Forces Qualification Course, which made everything before it seem like kid’s play.

  Next thing I knew I was in Afghanistan.

  And if you aren’t crazy by the time you leave Afghanistan then you were crazy to begin with. Because you have to be crazy not to go crazy there.

  —

  “YOU’RE TOO LATE,” Thierry said, when I’d walked the three minutes from the Bistrot du Poinçonneur to DGSE.

  “Screw you.” I hugged him. “I just got here!”

  “Too late to find Mack.” He looked the same but not. It had been eight years. Still slender and intense, he now stooped a bit, maybe due to the old shrapnel in his back. His face was less tanned and weathered than in Afghanistan, his now-silvery hair still cropped short.

  His office was on the third floor of DGSE’s central rectangle overlooking a square of greening branches and bright new grass. “What’d you find in Mack’s car?” I said.

  “PTS is checking prints, but I doubt there’ll be anything.” The PTS, he didn’t need to tell me, is the Technical and Scientific section of the French police. “The blood, it’s surely his –”

  “Gisèle says there was no bullet ...”

  “No trace of a bullet in the door or elsewhere. We think he was hit with something, a steel bar, a wood club ...” Thierry raised his hands, a furious expression of not knowing.

  “Who hit him, and how did they get close?” No one surprised Mack; he was always alert; when he drove down a street he watched everything on both sides – the cars, the pedestrians, the building doorways, windows and rooftops – the way we all do ... We’d learned this long before Afghanistan, but being there had only made it deeper.

  “We don’t understand.” Thierry shook his head. “We’ve towed the car to the lab, they’re working on it now.”

  “Whoever did it had to be following him. Or waiting for him.”

  “Why wait till he was using a car? Why didn’t they take him one day in the Métro?”

  “It’s too public. And covered with cameras. No angle not seen.” Or maybe, I wondered but didn’t say it, did Mack get grabbed to prevent him talking to me? How could that be? “My side, what do they say?”

  Thierry glanced at his watch. “It’s not even eight a.m. in Washington. We’ve called his people – your people –”

  “Harris?”

  “They’re studying everything they got off the Embassy roof since yesterday. NSA’s geared up, they’re screening every internet connection to or from the Paris region ... we have new algorithms we’ve developed together ... all the information sharing agreements are in place, no worries there ... But on the physical side we’re taking the lead.”

  The US Embassy roof, in fact the entire top floor, is one huge listening device that picks up every cell phone conversation in the greater Paris area. NSA covers Paris like a digital blanket, all of France ... all the world. How many trillion exchanges a second did NSA store away in Utah? Every single event in time? In them, could you find the truth?

  “The cathedral?” I said. “What’s the real deal?”

  “The real deal is we don’t know. It could be terrorists at the computer level, or somebody climbing up there with an untraceable fuse ... Not that we can find anything in what’s left of the rubble.”

  “And Mustafa,” I said. “What’s new?”

  “Mack was working with people here, tracking him since he came into France from Freiburg on March fifteen – we think –”

  “And from Freiburg?”

  “Mustafa was in a tan 2013 Volkswagen Passat with Austrian plates. Stolen in Torino. We put a drone on it but lost it in the Fontainebleau Forest, south of Paris.”

  “I know where Fontainebleau is.” The former NATO HQ in Europe until General de Gaulle took France out of NATO in 1966, Fontainebleau is a beautiful town surrounded by huge oak forests, the private hunting grounds of King François in the 1500s, now one of the world’s loveliest places to hike, rock climb, hunt deer and boar, and revel in the magnificence of the French countryside. And only forty minutes by road or train from Paris.

  “You know there’s lots of terrorist safe houses in the surrounding towns, Avon, Melun, with direct road and rail access to Paris ...”

  Thierry needn’t say more: now that French intelligence had intensified its search for terrorists in the many Islamic-ruled districts around Paris and other cities, their prey was shifting to the less-populous nearby regions. It was like hunting boar: when you focus on one area, the boar, who are smarter than most hunters, simply slide into a new location.

  “And Fontainebleau is where you lost him.”

  “For the moment.” Thierry leaned back, fingers linked behind his neck, his long legs stretched under his desk. “But we will find him, never fear.”

  “Fear is all I’ve got right now. Fear for Mack. For France. For all of us.”

  Thierry nodded, chin out. “We’ve faced Muslim invasions before. And won. Today the French media’s so left-wing it thinks Israel, the only European democracy in the Middle East, is a fascist state and Saudi Arabia and Iran, which enslave women and execute many people per week, are the world capitals of liberté, égalité and fraternité.” He raised his hands. “And our former education minister wanted to replace French history with Islamic Suras, and Muslim criminals get shorter jail sentences because French culture made them do it?”

  “Fuck it, Thierry, this is old news ...”

  He stood, as if affronted. “We’ve given you a broom closet for an office and a partner named Anne Ronsard. She’s been working with Mack since Mustafa reappeared. Very bright and tough; she’s been hunting terrorists for years. She’s also a recent widow with two kid
s, so keep your hands off her.”

  “A widow? How?”

  “I’ll let her tell you about that. If she wants to.”

  A Matter of Time

  “HOW MANY CAMERAS,” I asked Thierry, “you got in Fontainebleau?”

  “Anne’s working on that. But we don’t have a single image of Mustafa. That’s where you come in.”

  “I don’t keep any in my wallet.”

  “Stop joking. Find this bastard!”

  I smiled. “I just remembered one night four of us SF guys stumbled into some firebase near the Paki border, exhausted and near-frozen. Hadn’t found one bandit, but still scared by what could’ve happened ... we’d damn near got killed. I wanted so bad to get out of Afghanistan. Then I hear your voice, you’re sitting at a table talking your crappy English –”

  “It’s better than your French –”

  “– and I forgot how tired I was, just felt happy you were there.”

  “We took care of each other, mon cher.”

  “We all took care of all of us.”

  He grabbed his phone and punched in a number. “Il est là. Tu viens le chercher?”

  A woman’s voice on the other end said, “D’accord.” Which even I knew means okay.

  “I need to see Mack’s car,” I said.

  “Anne will take you. She’ll issue you a sidearm, phone and radio, all that shit.”

  “I want a Glock 19. And an AAC silencer –”

  He stood. “That’s up to Anne.”

  His five other lines were blinking. His phone sat companionably beside gold-framed photos of a beautiful woman and four tousle-haired kids, two boys and two girls. From our time in Afghanistan he’d told me about his wife, back then with only two kids. The great gift of life.

  But he was not the Thierry I’d known. It was as if he’d just learned that someone he loved was dying. Like Notre Dame, that everything and everyone he loved was dying.

  I shook his hand, pained by his fear of this war we might lose. Then he gave me a big-toothed grin. “One thing is not allowed.”

  “What’s that?” In France, everything is allowed as long as you don’t brag about it.

  “Tu n’as pas le droit de le tuer.” (You don’t have the right to kill him.) He went on in English: “Not until we have talked to him all we want.” Again the raised hands, the Gallic shrug meaning then we’ll see.

  Not that I gave a damn. For me, Mustafa al-Boudienne was dead meat, no matter how we got there.

  —

  THERE ARE MOMENTS THAT SCAR the rest of your life. Usually they’re when the rest of your life won’t be very long: a few seconds maybe.

  I’ve been there not a few times. They stay with me. Especially at night.

  This time Mack and I were knocking down doors in Mosul with the rest of the squad behind us, a normal street-clearing operation that, one way or another, had already killed so many of us. A narrow rotten alley jammed with two-story broken-stuccoed pale-painted buildings, electric wires hanging like nooses between them, ratty cars lurking along the sides.

  You know the drill, one guy either side of the door, you kick it in and your buddy dashes inside right, you go left, ready to spray bullets at whoever is stupid or crazy enough to want to stop you.

  Mack dashed right and me left into an empty room, low couch, yellow-orange afghan, three puffy pillows, polyester rug on a dirty concrete floor. Rough concrete walls, low ceiling, bare light from a single filthy window. A door to the left – my side – one to the right, Mack’s.

  We slid along the walls, one on each side. Mack motioned to my door. I nodded at the other door, showing my concern that we not leave his side unguarded. Mack tossed his head toward the street outside: Okay, so we wait for the other guys. A smattering of fire outside, a rattle of bullets along the far side of the street, and I worried should we go back to check on our guys but there was no need, plus the useless risk of going out the door when the shooters had seen us go in. Mack nodded his head again at my door: Let’s check yours first.

  He seemed to have a reason. I turned the handle. It opened. I backed against the wall and shoved the door wider, ducked my head around the jamb, saw a long dim corridor with two side doors off it and an open window at the end. Through it I saw a patch of hills and a few houses stacked against it like dice thrown at a wall.

  I was breathing so hard it was rattling the comms in my ear. There was something wrong here but I couldn’t figure what. Often you think that, only to find that no, there’s nothing different, it’s just the normal horror and constant misery of war.

  We checked the two doorways in my corridor – a move that can easily lead to death. But no problem: two bedrooms with plastic sleeping mats on the floors, four mats in the first room, five in the second. Both rooms empty. I sidled up to the window at the corridor end and glanced down on a dusty courtyard maybe ten feet by fifteen, garbage, plastic bottles, rusty cans and a dead goat lying on its side as if sleeping – but it wasn’t sleeping because it was raising an extensive colony of flies. The wind was blowing away from us but the smell was still terrible.

  A flash of movement out the window to my right, a white sleeve or something that vanished. I nodded to Mack, pointed. Your side.

  We went back and lined up on both sides of the other door. In the street outside, the firing had slowed; I could hear our guys calling up and down the street as they moved toward our building, others doing backup. I kicked the door open and dashed in.

  No motion in the corridor, a window open at the end with the same view of the brown hill and crappy houses. The same two doors along one side, both closed. I tiptoed down the corridor and kicked open the first door: another empty room with sleeping mats on the floor and a pile of trash in one corner.

  What was going on?

  Whoever had flashed that white cloth must be in the second room. A truce flag? Someone wanting to surrender? Three guys in another squad had died that way last week.

  We slid along the corridor walls. I kicked open the second door and we dashed in, Mack right, me left.

  Kids. Lots of kids backed up against the far wall. Little ones in front, big ones behind. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Maybe fifty.

  Taking shelter among the kids were four bearded bastards with AKs. Two had vests, what seemed the real deal. “You do anything, we blow you up,” one said in shitty Arabic. “And all these kids.”

  If we tried to duck back out the door they’d shoot us both. If we tried to shoot them we’d blow up the kids.

  I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want Mack to die. And I especially didn’t want all these kids to die.

  We’d had detailed training on how not to get captured. Because if we did they’d torture us interminably, then kill us.

  I actually thought of outshooting them. Insane.

  How silly that when you’re going to die you’ll do anything to postpone it, for even a few seconds.

  ­­­I heard our guys in the street, their voices dim beyond the concrete walls.

  The bearded bastards took our weapons, roped and gagged us and shoved us ahead of them down a ragged stairway at the back of the corridor, the kids following, sandals slapping on the stairs.

  The stairway opened into a stinking tunnel with damp walls and urine puddles. They’d planned this, I realized: the kids, the dark corridors, the seeming innocence of the place. I was furious with myself, but there was nothing either Mack or I could do. Our buddies would soon discover the empty rooms, then the stairway. But by then we’d be long gone.

  The tunnel ended in another stairway that climbed to a wide, low garage with a halal butcher truck to one side. The concrete floor of the garage was sticky with grease and desert dust and other things. They shoved us into the back of the halal truck, two bearded bastards with us.

  “We could have shot you. But we didn’t,” one smiled. “We wa
nt to have fun with you.”

  My life as I’d known it was over. It was just a matter of time.

  Black and Blonde

  TOO STUNNING to be pretty, Anne Ronsard was in her late twenties maybe, not that you could tell. Slender and mid-height in a short black skirt and black cashmere sweater, black hair in a page boy across high-boned cheeks, flashing black eyes, a slender face with dimples, a sharp nose just a little too big, a tough smile in a wide, voluptuous mouth. A sense about her of adventure: someone who loves. And the stern glance of someone who’s seen too much and therefore doesn’t believe in much of anything.

  Except protecting family and friends, and the country she loves. And with the strength, courage and power to do it.

  “Voilá!” She moved aside in the corridor so I could see my “office.” Like most intelligence folks, Thierry had misspoken: it was smaller than a broom closet. A desk with a phone and a bunch of buttons – “internal,” Anne said. Four computers with keyboards in Arabic, French, Russian and English – “internal” also. A chair that had survived the 1870 German siege of Paris and howled like a burnt cat every time it moved. A second chair of the aluminum type and, as the French would say, vastly degraded.

  “On est bien ici,” (This is great) I said sarcastically.

  “Oh oui,” she replied enthusiastically. “On a de la chance.” (You’re lucky)

  “Comment ça?” I replied (How is that?).

  Her chin rose: the icy look of a French woman about to admonish a dumb but dutiful servant. “You don’t like?”

  “Let’s go see Mack’s car.”

  She led me down corridors out the back to the garage and a gleaming red Indian Scout motorcycle, unhitched two helmets from the saddle and gave me one.

  My heart sank. I’d been in three bad motorcycle wrecks and had sworn off bikes forever. Have a number of friends now dead or crippled for life from riding them. Every motorcycle, statistics show, will kill or badly injure at least one person in its lifetime.