Текст книги "Collateral Damage"

Автор книги: Dale Brown

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

3

Sicily

Danny Freah rubbed his tired eyes, trying to clear the fatigue away. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go to Africa,” he told Rubeo. “Nobody can guarantee your safety.”

“People go back and forth between Libya all the time. Westerners generally aren’t harmed.” Rubeo rocked back and forth, as if he was having a hard time keeping himself contained in the small office. Danny couldn’t remember seeing the scientist more animated. “I don’t really need your permission, Colonel.”

“I don’t know about that. I am in charge of Whiplash,” said Danny.

“Really, Colonel, you have no rank to pull over me. If you’re not going to help me, I’ll go on my own. I have Jons, and other people to call on. Really, Colonel, I have given this some thought. I need to see the crash site and the environs if I’m to figure out what happened.”

“All right, listen. Give me a little time. I’ll figure something out, something that gives you some protection. Beyond your own team,” Danny added. “It won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest. I’ll have to arrange an escort.”

“I think it would be better to travel without the UN people.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. We’ll have more of our people here tomorrow,” Danny said. “Right now, it’s just me and Boston.”

“I don’t need an entourage.”

“Two troopers and an Osprey to get you around quickly. You can’t argue with that.”

Rubeo looked as if he could, but he pressed his lips together and said nothing. Danny half expected him to ask for the Osprey now, but he had a ready answer—he had loaned both to the UN commission investigating the bomb strike.

“Do you really think you’re the best one to go?” he asked Rubeo. “You have a dozen people over here looking into the incident—”

“Two dozen,” corrected Rubeo. “Plus the team that was here to begin with. But yes, I do think it’s a good use of my time. If one of your people had been involved in an accident or something similar, you’d want to investigate firsthand, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess.”

“I’m sure you would.”

Conceding, Danny leaned back in the seat and changed the subject.

“You know, Doc, I think sometimes accidents like this—and even blue-on-blue incidents . . .” He stumbled for the right words. “These things are terrible, but you know, you have to put them in perspective.”

“I’m trying to,” said Rubeo, rising to leave.

4

al-Hayat

The black scorches on the walls looked as if they had been painted on, a kind of postmodern expressionism as interpreted by the god of fire.

The rubble in front of them was less poetic. What had once been a row of houses was now flattened stone, wood, and scraps of material too charred to recognize. The stench of death still hung in the air. The government could not have arranged a better scene if they had staged it.

Kharon was amazed at the damage the missiles had done. He had seen the results of the war firsthand before, but everything else paled compared to this.

The government said sixteen people had been killed and another twenty wounded. If anything, the number seemed miraculously low.

He curled his arms around his chest, suddenly cold. The slightest, very slightest, hint of grief poked at the very edge of his conscience. But it was more a rumor of remorse, less actual guilt or regret than an unease. It was easily ignored.

Two dozen reporters, most of them Western freelancers, had been admitted to the area by the government troops in anticipation of the special UN investigation commission’s arrival. Kharon’s phony credentials were more than enough to get him past the guards. They hadn’t even bothered to search him, though he had thought it prudent to leave his weapon back with Fezzan in the truck at the edge of town.

He’d seen a few of the reporters in Tripoli. He nodded at anyone who said hello, but kept to himself as much as possible. There was always the possibility that someone might start asking too many questions about his credentials. If necessary, he could mention the German and the Australian Web sites which he had legitimately sold stories to, but anyone who really dug would come up with questions.

Even a simple one could be devastating: What did you do before Libya?

When he first arrived in Libya, he was surprised at how few of the reporters actually spoke Arabic. He was also surprised at how little they knew of the actual conflict. And he was stunned at how lazy most of them actually were. Not that they weren’t willing to risk their lives—that, most had no trouble with. But nearly all settled for the first answer they got. And most would sooner walk barefoot in the desert than question the simple dichotomy they had arrived with: rebels good, government bad.

This story, at least, promised to make things a little more complicated.

The government had posted “facilitators” at different spots around the ruins. While their function was essentially that of press agents, Kharon suspected that they were high-ranking officers in the army or other government officials, well-trusted and dependable. He listened as one detailed the lives of the three people who had been killed in the building a few yards away. The man, a middle-aged Libyan, handed out glossy photos of the dead bodies with an enthusiasm that would have seemed more appropriate at a movie preview.

The government’s interior minister was overseeing the press briefing, preening for the cameras as he talked about how the civilians were going about their everyday lives when the American plane struck.

Almost on cue, a pair of aircraft appeared in the distance. They sounded a bit like helicopters, but as Kharon stared he realized they were American V–22 Ospreys, tilt-rotor aircraft that flew like planes but landed like helicopters.

“The UN commission is arriving,” said the minister in his heavily accented English. “They are going to land in the field across the way. Please give them room to arrive. We assume that they are unarmed.”

Some of the reporters sniggered.

Kharon’s heart began pumping hard in his chest. Some of the reports he had seen overnight indicated that the Americans had assigned technical experts to accompany the investigators.

Was Rubeo among them?

He thought it was very possible. The scientist was a control freak. He would insist on seeing something like this firsthand.

If Rubeo came himself, Kharon would stay back and avoid the temptation to confront him. It would be difficult, though, extremely difficult.

Kharon wanted to see the pain on his face.

Then, he would kill him. But first he needed to know that he had suffered.

Zen glanced at Zongchen as the Osprey settled. The former Chinese air force general had seemed visibly nervous the entire flight. Now as the rotors swung upward and the aircraft descended he clutched the armrests at the side of his seat for dear life.

It was funny what made some people nervous.

“A little different than flying in a J–20, eh, General?” Zen asked as they gently touched down.

“Very different,” said Zongchen, with evident relief. “There, I am in control. Here, very different.”

As the crewmen headed for the door, Zen unstrapped his wheelchair and pushed it into the aisle. The maneuver into the seat was tricky, but Zongchen held the back of the wheelchair for him.

“You notice that my chair just fits down the aisle at the front,” Zen told the general.

“Yes, very convenient.”

“They did that especially for me.”

It was a white lie, actually, but it amused the general. Zen rolled over to the door. A lift had been tasked to get him down; it rolled up, and after a bit of maneuvering and a few shouts back and forth, the plane crew turned him over to the lift operator.

Zen held himself steady as the ramp descended. It was the sort of thing workmen used while working on buildings, and it had only a single safety rail at the front. It moved down unsteadily—truly, it was scarier than almost anything he’d experienced in an airplane for quite a while.

“Do you get tired of being in a wheelchair?” Zongchen asked when they were both on the ground.

“Always,” admitted Zen.

The crowd of news people seemed to have tripled since the Ospreys first appeared in the sky. Kharon wondered about the security—there were plenty of government soldiers around, but they seemed more focused on holding back the local villagers than watching the reporters.

Kharon slipped toward the front of the group. His heart thumped in his throat. He regretted leaving the gun.

Relax, he told himself. Just relax.

The UN team had brought security with them—a dozen soldiers, all with blue helmets, fanned out from the first Osprey, along with a few plainclothes agents. All of the dignitaries seemed to be in the second aircraft.

There was one in a wheelchair.

Kharon wasn’t quite close enough to see his face, but he guessed that it must be Jeff Stockard, the former Dreamland pilot who was now a United States senator.

Zen.

His mother had told him stories about Zen. He was “just” a star pilot then, before his accident and struggle turned him into something approaching a national hero.

A real hero, whom even Kharon admired. Not a phony legend like Rubeo.

A wave of damp sadness settled over Kharon. Zen had been at his mother’s funeral. He remembered shaking the pilot’s hand.

“We all loved your mom,” he said.

Rubeo hadn’t even spoken to him.

Kharon craned his neck, trying to see if the scientist was with the UN committee. He spotted someone of about the right height and moved up in the line, bumping against one of the armed guards before realizing that it wasn’t Rubeo.

“Back,” said the soldier. He was Pakistani, wearing his regular uniform below the blue helmet and armband.

“Sorry.”

Kharon shifted back, joining the throng of reporters as they followed the commission walking up the road to the ruins. There was a light breeze; every so often a burst of wind would send grit in their faces.

As a fighter pilot, Zen had the luxury of distancing himself from the effects of ground war. Rarely had he seen firsthand damage to anything other than an airplane.

Now it was all around him.

It was horrific. While the government guide was a bit heavy-handed, there was no question that the bombs sent by the Sabre had inflicted a terrible toll.

Zen reminded himself that the government, too, was to blame. It was inflicting a heavy toll on the populace, robbing and stealing from the people. In the roughly two years it had been in power, thousands of people were imprisoned without trial. The new leaders were repeating many of the outrages that had flourished under Gaddafi.

But that didn’t make this any less tragic.

He wheeled slowly along, gradually falling behind the main pack as they moved along the sides of the battered buildings.

“Excuse me, are you Senator Stockard?” shouted one of the journalists trailing them.

The man had an American accent. Zen debated whether to ignore him, but finally decided it was better to speak.

“Yes, I am,” Zen told him.

“I’m Greg Storey from AP. I’m interested, Senator—what’s your impression?”

“It’s terrible,” said Zen. “A horrible accident.”

“The government is claiming that it was done on purpose, as a terrorist act.”

“That’s clearly not what happened,” said Zen.

“How do you know?”

Zen controlled his anger. He had enough experience with reporters to know that they often tried to provoke people to get an extreme reaction.

“NATO doesn’t go around targeting civilians. We hope to get to the bottom of what happened, and then fix it so it doesn’t happen again. That’s the committee’s aim.”

Seeing that Zen was taking questions, the other reporters quickly gathered nearby and asked a few of their own. The government minder ran over, but by the time he arrived there were so many other people around that he had a difficult time pushing through the crowd and was in no position to reshape the conversation.

A few of the questions were things Zen couldn’t answer in any detail—what exact aircraft had been in the raid was one he just ignored. But most were thoughtful, and he answered as fully and honestly as he could.

The U.S. was not controlling the investigation. He was an honorary member, willing to help as much as possible. Zongchen, a respected Chinese air force officer as well as diplomat, was a careful man and would sift through the evidence. It was unfortunate that the government of Libya had chosen to take a hard line against the rebels. There was room for a negotiated peace, if the sides would come to the negotiating table.

Zen admitted that he didn’t know the exact ins and outs of the local politics, and would have to defer to others on specific grievances. He was interested in finding out why things had gone wrong with the air attack.

“Was it because the planes were UAVs?” asked the American reporter.

“Assuming that they were—I’m not sure that’s one hundred percent yet—there’s no reason to think the tragedy would have been avoided with a manned plane,” said Zen.

“Really, Senator?”

“Obviously, we have to see the circumstances of the accident,” he said. “But manned planes make mistakes, too. Unfortunately.”

“UAVs seem more dangerous.”

“Not really. UAVs have helped reduce casualties,” Zen answered. “Now some people—pilots especially—long for what are thought of as the good ol’ days, when every aircraft was manned. But remember, back in the very old days, collateral damage was a serious problem. World War Two saw horrendous civilian deaths. We’ve come a long way.”

A voice from the back shouted a question. “Why are robots making the decisions now?”

Zen tried to ignore the question, turning to the right, but the reporter he glanced at asked the same thing.

“I don’t know that they are,” said Zen.

“There have been anonymous reports to that effect,” said the first reporter. “Several news organizations have gotten leaks.”

“I don’t have information on that, so I guess I can’t address it,” said Zen.

“Are the UAVs acting on their own?” asked Storey.

“It’s not a robot rebellion, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Zen. “Men are in the loop.”

“I’ve heard from sources that they are not,” said the reporter in the back.

“I’ve given you pretty much the details I know and can give,” said Zen. He noticed Zongchen standing nearby. “We’re looking into everything. Probably the person you really want to talk to about the committee would be General Zongchen.”

Zongchen gave him a look that said, Thanks a lot.

The reporters began peppering him with questions. Before Zongchen could answer, a rock sailed overhead. Zen looked up and saw several more flying from the direction of the ruins.

Suddenly, there were many rocks in the air.

The riot took Kharon by surprise. He moved to his left, looking for a way out of the crowd.

People surged from the edge of the ruins, pushing toward the thin line of UN soldiers. Clearly, the action had been planned by the government. A foolish, stupid move.

But then, what did they do that wasn’t foolish?

The cameras shifted their aim from the dignitaries to the crowd. The people yelled about killers and murderers, and threw more rocks—they couldn’t quite see the irony.

The journalists moved toward the rock throwers, most thinking they were immune to the violence. Kharon realized they were just as much the target as the dignitaries were—and they didn’t have anyone to protect them.

It was time to leave.

He pocketed his ID and moved quickly back through the ruins, walking at first, then running back to his truck.

Zen made it to the Osprey just as the UN soldiers fired warning shots into the air. He wheeled himself toward the platform but was intercepted by two of the plainclothes security people who had traveled with them but stayed in the background.

“Sorry, Senator. We’re getting you out of here,” said one of the men gruffly. He grabbed him under the arm.

Zen started to protest but realized it was too late—he was half carried, half thrown into the Osprey. The props were already spinning.

“My chair!” he yelled.

No one heard him in the confusion. The door closed and the aircraft veered upward.

Zen crawled to the nearest seat and pulled himself up. Someone helped him turn around.

It was Zongchen.

“This did not go as well as I hoped,” said the Chinese general. He was sweating profusely. His pants were torn and his knee was bleeding.

“No, I would say it didn’t go well at all,” said Zen, wondering how long it would take to find a wheelchair as good as the one he had left behind.

5

Tripoli

The fact that the government thought staging a riot at al-Hayat would have any beneficial effect toward their cause showed just how far removed from reality the leaders were.

Kharon brooded about this on the drive back to the city, worried that the government would collapse before he was able to exact his revenge. If so, years of effort would have been wasted; he would have to begin fresh.

He was so distracted that when they arrived in Tripoli he agreed to pay Fezzan an extra hundred euros to help him carry the box of drives and CPUs up the stairs of the small house he had rented in the western quarter. Taped shut in a cardboard box that had held bags of cashews, the components were neither large nor particularly heavy. Fezzan left as happy as Kharon had ever seen him.

A few minutes after he left, Kharon took the devices from the box and put them in a large, padded suitcase. He went downstairs—he used the building only for his sporadic contacts with Fezzan and other locals—and found his small motorcycle in the alley at the back. He tied the suitcase to the rear fender with a pair of bungee cords, put on a helmet to obscure his face, then set out on a zigzag trail through the city.

His paranoia poked at him a few blocks later, when he came to an intersection blocked by police vehicles. Officially neutral like the city, the Tripoli police were generally considered pro-rebel, though you could never tell whose side they were on. And given Kharon’s situation, either could instantly decide he was their enemy.

But the police were investigating a routine traffic accident, and waved him past as he approached.

Kharon drove to the dense residential districts north of Third Ring Road. After making sure he wasn’t being followed, he pulled down an alley and raced toward a building at the far end. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a garage door opener and pressed the button in the middle. Then he hit the brakes, skidding under the thick branches of several trees as he turned into a bay whose door was just opening. He took the turn so hard that he had to steady himself with his foot on the cement floor, half crashing to a halt.

He jerked his head back and forth, making sure he was alone. Then he hopped away from the bike and went to the empty workbench a few feet away. Reaching under it, he found a key taped to the underside. He used it to open the circuit breaker box above the bench just as the door opener’s automatic lights turned off. With his fingers, he hunted until he found the switch at the very bottom of the panel. He threw it to off, and then, still in the dark, walked to the side of the room and found the light switch.

When the lights came on, he glanced to the right, looking for the red light connected to his security system. The light stayed off. No one had been inside since his last visit.

Kharon went to the door to the garage and opened it. He glanced around the small room, making sure it was empty. Then he went back outside to the garage and the power panel, turned the breaker back on, and went inside.

The garage was the side end of a small workshop used as a sewing factory some years before. All of the machinery had been removed, a perfect place for Kharon to set up shop had he wanted. But he had decided it could be too easily surrounded; he used it only as a temporary staging area.

Inside the large room, he retrieved a touchscreen computer hidden in a small compartment beneath the tile floor. He activated it, then used it to interface with the security system, running a second check to make sure it had not been compromised. Satisfied, he pulled a large duffel bag from the compartment, replaced the tile, and went back to the garage, where he put the CPU drives in the bag. Then he locked down the building and went out through a side door.

An hour later Kharon carried the duffel bag down the steps of a lab building at Tripoli University to the subbasement where the utilities were kept. He waited at the bottom of the stairs, listening to hear if anyone was following. Then he slipped a thin plastic shim into the doorjamb to get around the lock. He stepped into a corridor lined with large pipes. Closing the door, he found himself completely in the dark.

The confined space stoked his claustrophobia. His hand began to shake as he reached for the small flashlight in his pocket.

It’s nothing, he told himself. Nothing.

But that didn’t stop his hand from shaking. Kharon’s fingers finally found the light. He switched it on and played it across the space in front of him.

Breathe.

He took a step forward, then turned back and made sure the door was locked. Lifting the duffel onto his shoulder, he walked swiftly to the end of the hall, where he found a set of steps leading off to his right. He went down cautiously, one hand tight on the rail. Then he ducked under another set of large pipes and electrical conduits and walked through an open space to another door. This one led to a second hallway, lit by a dull yellow light at the far end.

There was a door near the light, guarded by a combination lock. Kharon pounded the numbers quickly, pushing inside as the lock snapped open. Still breathing hard, he reached for the two switches to the left. One killed the light outside; the other turned on a set of daylight fluorescents that lined the ceiling.

The light helped him relax. He was inside a hidden lab complex that was once part of the Libyan effort to build a nuclear weapon. It had been abandoned for years when Kharon stumbled upon it.

He walked through what had been a large security/reception area. There was a lab room at the far end, guarded by another coded lock. Inside, he found his two workstations in sleep mode just as he had left them.

After making sure that his security had not been breached, Kharon unpacked his boxes and began downloading the information from the hard drives into his native system. While the drives spun, he booted a third computer that was tied into the university’s mainframes. He used it to get onto the Internet and scan the news relating to Libya.

Most of the stories about the riot either hinted that it had been staged or said so outright.

Idiot government.

The commission had returned to Tripoli. They said all the right things—the accident had been inexcusable, the loss of life was horrible.

And the questions he had asked about the autonomous drones?

Not even mentioned. The reporters were too stupid to understand what was going on.

Frustrated, Kharon began scanning stories from several days before, looking to see if the tips he’d planted had borne fruit. Rubio’s name didn’t even come up in the stories related to the incident.

Kharon leaned his elbow on the bench in front of the keyboard. He put his chin against his hand, then bit his index finger. He bit it so hard and so long that when he finally let go, his finger was white.

Embarrass Rubeo? Ruin him?

Hardly.

He was going to have to just kill him and be done with it.