Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon stood, blocking the manager from getting any closer, knowing full well that if he did, Tillman would put him in the hospital. “We’re okay here.” The manager nodded tightly and retreated.

Gideon turned toward Tillman, who eyed him for a hard moment, then bumped past him as he half-stumbled toward the door. Gideon followed him outside onto Forty-third Street, where his brother wheeled around in a silent challenge, as if to say, We’re past words, so let’s just settle this man to man. Which was when Gideon realized that he wanted to tear out Tillman’s throat, wanted to tear the flesh and muscle from his neck with his bare hands. And that urge to kill his own brother had sobered him instantly.

“You’re not the only person who’s taken risks in his life,” Gideon shouted in Tillman’s face. “You can disagree with me all you want. But I’m not gonna stand here and let you lecture me like I’m some kind of fool. You’ve taken your stand. Fine. So have I. It’s a principled stand, something I believe in. And if you can’t respect that, then go back to your jungles and your deserts and watch your buddies die to your heart’s content. But don’t put their deaths on me. Because I believe there’s another way.”

With that he turned his back on his brother and walked away.

It was the last time they’d spoken.

What Gideon hadn’t gotten the chance to tell Tillman was that he was about to put his own life on the line, embarking on his first major political mediation in his new capacity. It was a program he’d developed from his doctoral thesis and had been refining ever since. He was going into a mountainous and war-torn province where he would have little or no personal security—no gun, no air force, no navy, no world power at his back—armed only with the trust he’d developed with members of the warring parties. If he succeeded, he’d save the lives of countless innocent civilians. If he failed, he might look like a fool to his peers and maybe derail what had once been a promising career. Or worse, he could end up beheaded, his wallet and watch stripped, and his teeth pulled out for the gold fillings—another hapless do-gooder left dead in an unmarked ditch.

But Gnal¡€†ideon never got to tell Tillman any of that because of the widening abyss defined by their political differences—which Gideon had since come to realize weren’t nearly as important as the fact that they were brothers. Tillman had sacrificed a lot in his life, had chosen for himself a path that was arduous, dangerous, and frequently unrewarding. The lesson Tillman had taken from their rough childhood had been that you had to confront, to battle, to fight. And Gideon had benefitted from his brother’s protection, no question about it, and he should have cut his brother a little more slack.

But he hadn’t. And that had been that.

And now it was time to make peace.

The first thing Gideon saw was the smoke. He tottered weakly up the small ridge, and there it was, nestled in the valley below him. A village. And the village was on fire, a huge column of black smoke rising high into the air. Whatever this place was, though, it was different from the earlier villages he’d come through.

There were concrete block buildings with corrugated iron roofs, and something approximating a road ran through the middle of the town. It was like the other villages, though, in that he saw no people. No living people anyway. There were human-shaped figures lying here and there in the streets and alleys, a few more scattered across the field of poppies that climbed up the far side of the mountain.

But other than the smoke, nothing moved. Some of the buildings were not simply burning, they had been flattened.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Gideon stumbled down the path until he reached the burning...

At the edge of the town he saw something glinting on the ground. A metal sign lay smashed into the dirt. It appeared to have been run over by a vehicle. He walked slowly to the sign, looked down. Written in English were two words.

KAMPUNG NAGA

I’m here, Tillman, he thought. I’m here.

Then his legs gave out and he collapsed onto the ground and closed his eyes.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CAPTAIN AVERY TAYLOR ASSEMBLED his team on the Sultan’s boat dock, their backs to the Pacific Ocean. The Sultan had loaned his personal speedboat to the team. It lay in the water behind them, bobbing up and down on the waves so violently that it threatened to tear the gangway from its mounts.

Because Mohan had briefly been a possession of the British Empire, its military continued to use British weapons. As a result Taylor’s men had been forced to buy .223 ammo for their M4s directly from a gun shop on the outskirts of Mohan. From the Mohanese Defense Forces they’d scared up some grenades, a 1960s-era British rocket launcher, three rockets, some scuba gear commandeered from a dive shop on the beach, and a set of blurry blueprints of the Obelisk faxed from Trojan Energy’s headquarters in Houston. None of the men said so, but they all knew they were under-armed and ill-equipped for an ill-conceived mission that had been planned too quickly with too little intel.

“Everybody knows our mission,” Captain Taylor said. “We’ll complete the briefing on the boat. All oha PaciI have to say is that I’m proud as hell of you guys. You’re the finest soldiers I’ve had the privilege to command. Which is why I know we will succeed.”

“Hoo-ah!” shouted the men.

He turned to Chief Petty Officer Ricardo Green. “Chief? Any words of wisdom?”

“You bastards don’t need no goddamn words of goddamn wisdom because you already know your goddamn jobs better than any sixteen other sons of bitches on planet earth!” Green shouted. The standing joke in the unit was that the last time the Chief had uttered a complete sentence that did not contain a curse word was when he’d said “I do” to Mrs. Chief Petty Officer Green eighteen years earlier. “Now get your goddamn shit and get on the goddamn boat.”

The men began struggling up the gangway with their heavy gear. The boat pitched and rolled in the heavy surf. The fourth man onto the boat slipped on the polished teak gangway and plunged into the punishing surf between the boat and the pier.

By the time they managed to haul him out of the water, blood was pouring from his left arm. A needle sharp length of bone protruded through the fabric of his sleeve.

“Motherfucker,” Green muttered as the injured man was ushered away by one of the Sultan’s smartly dressed boating staff.

Green’s black eyes briefly met those of his commanding officer. The two men didn’t speak. But they didn’t need to. This mission was a cluster fuck from the get-go.

Four minutes later, the Sultan’s boat was battering its way through the heavy surf toward the Obelisk. As they rounded the protective jetty at the tip of the Bay of Mohan, the waves immediately reared up to even greater heights. In nearly ten years in the navy, Captain Taylor had never seen waves like this—great black foam-capped wedges of darkness, coming at them like skyscrapers rolling sideways down a giant hill.

Captain Taylor saw Green’s lips moving, but this time he couldn’t hear him. For a moment Captain Taylor thought he was cursing. But then he realized he was wrong. Oh, my! Taylor thought. The Chief is praying.

That was not good.

When Gideon regained consciousness, he felt someone cradling his head and pouring water onto his face. He choked and sputtered.

For a moment he had no recollection of where he was or how he’d gotten here.

It was a man, a white guy, muttering something Gideon didn’t understand but recognized as Russian. The guy was speaking Russian.

Gideon sucked down the water, then tried to sit up.

“Don’t move yet,” the man said, this time in heavily accented English.

But Gideon sat up anyway. Not that he didn’t appreciate the help. But sitting with his head in a strange man’s lap felt a little awkward. He winced as he sat up. His head was pounding.

“Is clean water,” the Russian said. “Don’t worry. You won’t get sick.”

Gideon took the cup of water and drank until it was gone.

“Slow. You gonna puke, you drink too much.”

Gideon nodded, then handed the empty cup back to the Russian. “My name is—”

“I know who you are,” the Russian said. “The one who got medal at UN. Abu Nasir’s brother.”

Gideon looked around at the burning village. “Is he here?”

“Does it look like he is here?”

“You’re here.”

The Russian shrugged and stood up. For the first time Gideon saw how strangely the man was dressed. His clothes had been military uniforms at one time. Not one uniform, but many of them. They had been cut into strips and squares and triangles, crudely reassembled into a sort of ragged camouflage harlequin costume. He was also painfully thin and sick-looking. He wore a long beard and a small skullcap. His eyes had a lunatic glint.

“Who are you?” Gideon said.

“Chadeev.” He patted the center of his chest with a bony hand.

“You’re Russian?”

“Fock no.” The man spit on the ground. “Kabardian.”

“Kabardian?”

“We live Georgia, Chechnya, Russia, Turkey. Focked on by everybody.”

“Ah,” Gideon said. “First I heard of Kabardians.”

“You and everybody else.”

“So where is Abu Nasir?”

Chadeev shrugged. “Gone. Everybody dead.”

“Who’s responsible for this?”

Chadeev looked around. “You Americans, you always looking for responsibility. This is nature of universe, man. Is one long focking war. Everybody against everybody.”

Gideon stood. His legs felt wobbly. But the water had helped. “Do you have any food?”

Chadeev laughed. “Food.” He looked over and spoke as though to an invisible third person. “He talk about responsibility. God see it and make it so.”

“Where did Abu Nasir go?”

“Abu Nasir don’t talk to Chadeev,” he said. “Chadeev live out there.” He pointed at the endless green forest. “God wills it to burn down this place, Chadeev come.”

“Did the jihadis do this? The government? Who?”

Chadeev pointed at the sky. “Is the eye in the sky.”

Was he talking about Predator drones or satellites? Or was the guy just nuts? Whatever the case, there seemed little likelihood of getting a straight answer from him. He decided to start foraging for food.

There was one concrete block building that seemed to have incurred less damage than the others. Other than the half-collapsed e g±€†roof there was little damage. He decided to check there first.

As he walked toward the building, Chadeev followed. He began speaking—apparently to himself—in Russian. Or maybe it was Kabardian—if there even was such a thing. Gideon had earned his doctoral degree in international relations and he’d never heard of Kabardians.

Gideon surveyed the town as he walked. Whatever had happened here was different from what had happened in the other villages, which had clearly been attacked and burned by foot soldiers. This place had been bombed from the air. Straight-up, good-old-fashioned aerial bombing. Numerous craters dotted the rocky soil. He’d been around enough of them when he was mediating the Waziristan crisis to know what he was seeing.

Dead men were everywhere. And pieces of dead men—hands, arms, a foot still wearing a boot, a hank of hair still rooted to a clump of clotted scalp. Some had been shot or hit by frags, but others were intact, having been killed by the concussion of the bomb blast. The men all wore uniforms, jungle camo. The uniforms looked American, but the men wearing them were obviously locals, with the same distinctive features as the highlanders who had escorted him earlier.

Blowflies and flesh flies were buzzing around the bloating bodies. Gideon looked for the small maggots from these flies that appear within the first few days of death but saw none. Which meant this massacre had happened recently.

The closer he got to the one remaining building, the sicker he felt.

Could Tillman have survived this? And who was responsible? It could only have been the Mohanese government. Gideon was beginning to think that maybe this whole thing had been orchestrated, that he had been sent as some kind of stalking horse, drawing Tillman out so that the Mohanese Air Force could get a fix on him in order to level the village that had provided sanctuary to him and to his followers. But that scenario meant that General Prang and his men had been set up as well. The puzzle still had too many missing pieces.

Chadeev danced after Gideon, grinning and talking to himself.

Gideon entered the ruined building. There he found more corpses, all of them men, all wearing the same uniforms as the men outside. Unlike them, these men had been shot.

Sickened as he was by the carnage, Gideon could barely think about anything but food. At the far end of the building stood a makeshift stove composed of two gas cook rings welded to the top of a rickety table. On each cook ring was a wok. A refrigerator sat next to them.

Gideon opened the door. To his astonishment, a light came on. The refrigerator was still working. He heard it then, the hum of a small generator over in the still-intact corner of the building.

The refrigerator was crammed completely full of Budweiser. But not a scrap of food.

He shook his head.

Chadeev saw the beer, scurried over and started grabbing as many bottles as he could fit in his arms. “Beer! Is totally prohibit in my focking religion. Is Allah’s joke on Muslims. He make beautiful beer and then he only give it to focking infidels.” He twisted off the cap, tipped it up, and drank until he’d drained it completely.

Gideon looked around, saw a bowl full of food on the ledge of a low wall. Fli he±€†es buzzed around it. He moved toward the food, waving the flies away, when he saw behind the low wall the body of the man who had probably been preparing the meal for himself when he’d been shot. Gideon picked up the bowl, respectfully turning away from the man who’d been deprived of his last meal, and took a sniff. It smelled fantastic. Curried vegetables and a few bits of chicken over rice. The town had obviously been attacked so recently that the food hadn’t had time to rot.

Gideon virtually inhaled the entire bowl of food.

Chadeev opened another beer and began drinking. “Your brother is genius,” he said. “I come to this place after fight in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, all kind of place. Now I gonna put it to the focking infidel here in Mohan. But your brother, he open my eyes. He reveal to me real nature of God.”

“He did, huh?” Gideon said. He looked around the room at all the dead men. Now that his belly was full, he was able to see them more clearly. Before the food it had been almost as if they were just obstacles in the way of his eating. Now . . .

“This.” Chadeev made a sweeping motion with his hands. “This is nature of God.”

“Is my brother dead?”

Chadeev winked and pointed surreptitiously above them. The roof had been blown off, so the building was open to the clear blue sky.

“What’s that mean?”

“Eye in the sky!” Chadeev whispered. “Eye in the sky!” He motioned with his thumb to the one corner of the building where the roof still stood. “Over there.”

“What?”

“Over there. We talk over there.” Chadeev’s voice had dropped to a whisper.

Gideon followed the crazy man to the far side of the building where they were shadowed by the roof.

“Eye in the sky can read lips. Don’t never talk in open.”

“Did Abu Nasir teach you that?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Chadeev laughed. “Is al Qaeda doctrine.”

“You’re al Qaeda.”

“Labels! Responsibility!” Chadeev laughed again, then put his hand gently on Gideon’s arm. “Your brother, when he see you, he always make a toast and say, ‘Here’s to my naive brother The Peacemaker . . . and to all his kind.’”

“What do you mean, whenever he saw me? How could he see me?”

Chadeev shrugged. “CNN! Your face on CNN all the time. They love you, love your cute little dimples.” He reached out and rubbed the side of Gideon’s face.

Gideon swatted his hand away. “Is my brother here?”

Chadeev offered a cryptic shrug.

Gideon took a threatening step toward him. “Do you know where he is or not?”

“You don’t want to see Abu Nasir, my friend. T th±€†rust me. You will not like what you find.”

“Then you know where he is.”

The Kabardian nodded in sad resignation. “Come. I show you his room.”

Chadeev led Gideon into an adjacent concrete building, half of which had been leveled. They climbed over the rubble and entered through a jagged hole in the wall. Inside were more dead bodies, and some folding chairs arranged around a stove. Gideon checked the bodies to see if any of them were Tillman.

Beside a neatly made cot stood a makeshift nightstand made from an ammunition crate. It held a book, its binding no longer stiff and its pages well thumbed. Other than a thin skin of dust, the room had been left untouched by the bombing.

“He sleep here,” Chadeev said.

Gideon idly picked up the book on the nightstand and was fairly shocked when he brushed the dust from the cover.

The Way to Peace by Gideon Davis.

It was a book he’d written a decade earlier, an expansion of his doctoral thesis, which had led to his job at the UN. He opened it, saw a paragraph underlined. Then another. Tillman had gone through the book carefully and thoroughly.

Gideon flipped back to the title page, read the simple dedication: “To Tillman, who has fought too many wars.” Gideon had sent his brother the book when it was published and had never heard a word of response. He had nursed a minor grudge about it all these years, imagining that Tillman had never even bothered to crack it open and had probably thrown it in the trash. Yet here it was, the pages worn soft as if from repeated readings.

Gideon curbed his rising anger when he noticed a flickering light coming from a flat-screen television lying facedown on the floor, having been blown off its mount by the bomb blast. Not only was it still working, but it was tuned to CNN.

Chadeev mumbled to himself in Russian as he lifted the top edge of the television and set it down against the base of the stove while Gideon stared down at the screen. Wolf Blitzer was moving his lips silently. Behind him was a file photo of an oil rig. The words crawling across the bottom of the screen stopped Gideon cold. OBELISK SEIZED . . . He recognized it as the rig where Uncle Earl was waiting for him to bring Till-man. But Gideon felt a wave of cold realization when he read the rest of the crawl: . . . PIRATES LED BY ABU NASIR DEMANDING COMPLETE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. FORCES FROM THE REGION.

“See?” Chadeev looked down sadly at the television. “There is your brother.”

Gideon found the remote control and thumbed up the volume. “Remote control—another great blessing of Allah, praise be unto him.”

Wolf Blitzer’s voice echoed in the empty room. “President Diggs is expected to comment shortly on the seizure of the rig and its connection to the unfolding civil war in Mohan. But we do have information from the video put up on YouTube by the terrorists showing one of the hostages—”

Chadeev grabbed the remote. “All right. You see enough.”

Chadeev changed the channel. A woman with lots of blond hair and a bright red dress that looked like>Wo±€† 1980 came on the screen.

“Look!” Chadeev crowed. “Dallas! Is excellent show. You know who is big fan of Dallas TV show? Osama bin Laden. Seriously. He love Dallas. He got whole series on DVD.”

“Wait! Go back!”

“Go back? No way. Is Dallas! You know how long since I watch Dallas?” Chadeev held the remote protectively against his chest.

“Go back!”

“Fock you, man,” Chadeev said. “Look. Is ‘Who Shot JR?’ episode. Most famous episode in history of—”

“Give me the remote,” Gideon said.

“No.”

Gideon snatched the remote from the crazy Kabardian, changed the channel back to CNN. A grainy video now filled the screen. Standing before a group of masked and armed men was a woman wearing a brilliant yellow jumpsuit. She was in her early thirties, her long auburn hair framing a face that was beautiful even without makeup. She looked frightened but defiant as she read from the terrorists’ script.

“My name is Kate Murphy. I am the executive in charge of the Obelisk, which is now under the control of Abu Nasir . . .”

Gideon couldn’t quite process what he was hearing, some part of him still clinging to the possibility that there had to be another explanation. But then he saw one of the masked gunmen lift his arm to adjust his mask, and the denial he’d been clinging to fell away. On the back of the gunman’s wrist was a small tattoo. Gideon had seen that tattoo before. It was two numbers: an 8 and a 2. His brother had tattooed an 82 on his wrist the day he’d finished jump school with the 82nd Airborne Division. Gideon felt the truth twist and writhe in his gut. Tillman had betrayed him. He’d been behind the ambush and the subsequent attacks along the river. And now he had taken the rig and was threatening to kill dozens of hostages, including Uncle Earl.

“I want Dallas!” Chadeev said, grabbing feebly at the remote.

If the situation weren’t so bizarrely horrific, it would have been funny—two grown men fighting over a remote control in the middle of the jungle.

“Give me a minute,” Gideon said. “Then you can watch all the Dallas you want.”

Chadeev knelt next to a dead man. Draped over the dead man’s shoulder was an AK-47, held on by a worn leather strap. Chadeev yanked on the gun, but the strap caught on the dead man’s belt. Chadeev put his foot on the dead man’s neck and heaved.

On the television, Wolf Blitzer had replaced the beautiful hostage. “The South China Sea has seen a sharp increase in piracy over the past year, but this latest situation clearly has broader geopolitical implications. The consensus among foreign policy experts is that any capitulation to Abu Nasir would be seen as a victory for the insurgency—”

“Give me remote.” Chadeev had finally freed the AK-47 from the dead man and was pointing the barrel at Gideon’s head.

“You’re gonna shoot me over . &±€†Dallas?” Gideon said.

“Remote!” Chadeev screamed, a tiny bead of spit flying from his mouth. “Give me focking remote!”