Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon's War and Hard Target

She pulled back on the hydraulic lever, and the rope...

She couldn’t tell if he was in the line of fire from the other part of the rig, so she grabbed him and propelled him to shelter behind the bulkhead at the center of the deck.

Gideon Davis wiped the blood and seawater from his face. “Thank you,” he gasped. “You must be Kate Murphy.”

“And you must be the cavalry,” she said.

Gideon squinted at her, unsure whether she was being facetious. “I’m afraid so,” he said wearily.

“Well, I sure hope you brought a gun.” She regarded him soberly. “Because that’s the only way any of us are getting off this rig alive.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

GIDEON RECOGNIZED THE WOMAN who rescued him as the hostage he had seen on CNN. Even under these circumstances, Kate Murphy looked more beautiful in person than she had on television. But he had to focus. She was asking him what efforts were being made to rescue her crew. Gideon explained the president’s plan to insert a Delta team through the eye of the hurricane eleven hours from now.

She looked at her watch. “That’s cutting it close to Abu Nasir’s deadline,” she said, adding, “and it assumes that the eye of the hurricane passes directly overhead. Meanwhile, there’s a bomb on my rig.”

“I know.” Gideon stood slowly on his rubbery legs. “Which is why I need to get to Abu Nasir.”

“For what possible reason?”

“So I can talk some sense into him. He’s my brother,” Gideon said in a voice that contained equal parts shame and defiance.

“I know.” She described everything that had happened until now, how she had been on the chopper deck with Abu Nasir when he targeted Gideon’s approaching boat, and how the incident had distracted the jihadis long enough for her to escape.

“I’m still having a hard time believing my brother is doing this. I know him.”

“Maybe not as well as you think you do. I heard him give the order to blow you out of the water!” Her voice rose to a shout. “I’m sorry, your brother told his men to kill you. I can’t say it any plainer than that.” The rig manager was one of those women whose beauty was only accentuated by anger. Her high cheekbones were flushed, and her green eyes flashed.

Gideon still couldn’t reconcile the man who had just ordered him killed with the big brother who had always been his protector. Even when they’d fought, Tillman had always stood between Gideon and anyone who would harm him. But as much as he wanted to deny or rationalize what he’d been told, the evidence against Tillman was overwhelming. The pain of that acknowledgment was almost physical. He felt something seizing up in his chest, like a fist tightening around his heart.

As much as Gideon wanted to confront Tillman face-to-face, to at least try to figure out what was going through his mind, what tortured thinking had brought him to this terrible place, Kate Murphy was right– now was not the time for talking. As long as Tillman had the bomb, he was in control. Gideon’s immediate goal was clear. Whatever it took, he had to stop his brother before any more innocent people died.

“All right then,” Gideon said. “We’ve got to disarm that bomb.” Gideon asked her, point-blank, “Do you know where they planted it?”

Kate frowned. “Even if we manage to find this bomb, would you know how to defuse it?”

“I’ve cleared a few land mines and IEDs over the years,” Gideon said, not wanting to waste another moment talking about his experience. Kate nodded uncertainly as Gideon asked again, “So do you have any idea where this bomb might be?”

?omb.&;When your brother took over the rig, he ordered his men to wheel this big metal case off the chopper.”

“You think the bomb was in that case?”

“At the time I couldn’t figure out what it was. But when they forced me to read their demands, I made the connection. I saw them using the crane to winch it down the drill shaft.”

“Then you didn’t actually see where they took it.”

“Somewhere on D Deck . . .” Kate trailed off and shook her head ruefully.

“You know this rig better than anyone, where it’s most vulnerable structurally.” Something about Gideon’s voice calmed her mind, made her feel safe. “If you wanted to take down this rig with a bomb, where would you plant it?”

Kate thought for a moment, then said, “Let me show you something.” He followed her to a peculiar object cantilevered off the side of the deck. It looked like an elongated egg made of Day-Glo orange plastic, about twenty feet long and eight feet in diameter.

“What is this?” he asked.

“An escape pod. It’s got a weighted keel, so it’ll float in the roughest waters. The egg shape makes it ungodly tough. There’s a transponder, a signal beacon, a radio, and five days’ worth of food and water for fifteen people. There’s also a schematic of the rig.”

Attached to the wall was a schematic of the Obelisk marked with red and green arrows to show fire drill and escape plans. Kate traced one section with a slender finger. “This is the D Deck, the lowest above-water section on the rig. The struts that support the rig are made of reinforced concrete. They terminate here at D Deck, and the superstructure of the rig is held on top with a set of very large bolts. If a bomb took out those bolts, you wouldn’t have to blow up the whole rig. The superstructure would shear off the struts under the pressure of the waves.”

“And the rig slides into the ocean,” Gideon said. She nodded grimly.

“Show me exactly where those bolts are.”

Gideon scrutinized the point on the schematic that Kate indicated, a room labeled D-4. “That’s on the other part of the rig, right?”

“The drilling platform, yeah.”

Gideon looked at the narrow steel bridge that connected the section they stood on with the drilling platform. A steady gout of fire was still burning from the damaged gas pipe. “And that bridge is the only way for us to get to the drilling platform?”

Kate nodded. “It’s also the only thing keeping the bad guys from getting over here.” Beyond the fire, Gideon saw the jihadis, some of them patrolling, a clutch of them still trying to close down the gas line that was feeding the fire.

“How soon before that fire burns out?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe sooner.”

“And there’s really no other way to get onto the platform except over that bridge?”

“Not unles21;¡€†s you want to climb under it.” The rig manager didn’t realize the significance of what she’d said until she actually said it. She squinted into the blinding rain and frowned. “Which may not be as crazy as it sounds . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“See how the bridge is made? It’s a series of trusses with a steel deck on top. If you’re willing to risk slipping in the rain, getting blown off by the wind, and falling sixty feet into those waves, we might be able to sneak across there without them seeing us.”

Gideon looked out at the narrow bridge. Its struts extended from the side of the rig. He’d have to clamber up onto the railing, then stretch to reach the struts. The wind was blowing unmercifully now, gusting at well over fifty miles an hour. Maybe more. Far from optimal conditions to be swinging from one wet piece of steel to another. Gideon tried comforting himself with the thought that the rain would at least limit the jihadis’ visibility, even as he realized that crossing beneath the bridge was his only option.

Gideon turned back to Kate, who was shrugging out of her fluorescent yellow jumpsuit. Within seconds, she was down to a pair of nylon shorts and a bra. Her body was lean and athletic.

Gideon raised an eyebrow as he looked from the yellow jumpsuit crumpled on the deck to the woman who had been wearing it only a few moments ago.

“If I wear that, I may as well be wearing a neon sign,” she said. “I’m not about to give those sons of bitches a target to shoot at.”

“Maybe you should just hide in the escape pod,” he said. “No point putting both of us in danger.”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

“Hide in some plastic egg while my crew’s lives are on the...

She was right. Even if she weren’t, Gideon understood intuitively that this was not a woman who could be easily talked out of something once she’d made up her mind.

Kate balled up the jumpsuit and tossed it overboard. “You’re sure you know how to defuse that bomb?”

Gideon looked back at the bridge. The gas fire was a few feet lower than it had been just moments earlier. “The fire’s dying,” he snapped. “We’d better get going.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

“I know.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

GIDEON’S FATHER HAD NEVER spoken to his sons about his military service. He had no scrapbooks full of photos of his war buddies, no framed medals hanging on the walls of his office. For a man who spent so much time around guns, it would have seemed a near certainty that he would have mentioned his time in the military at least once.

But he hadn’t.

So it had come as a surprise to Gideon and Tillman when they discovered their father had requested to be buried in Arlington N"0et momational Cemetery. They were sitting in a lawyer’s office during the reading of his will.

“Uh . . . don’t you have to be a veteran or something?” Gideon said.

Mr. Faircloth, the attorney, had looked up and raised one eyebrow. “Your father served in the United States Marine Corps for four years, son. You were aware of that, were you not?”

The boys had looked at him blankly.

Afterward Tillman and Gideon had discussed it. “Four years in the Corps and he never told us?” Gideon said.

“Maybe he got thrown out for punching an officer or something,” Tillman ventured. “I mean, why wouldn’t he have told us unless he did something bad?”

Gideon shook his head. “I don’t know, but they wouldn’t let him get buried there if he’d been dishonorably discharged.”

“I don’t really give a damn either way,” Tillman said. “The bastard killed our mother. As far as I’m concerned, he can rot in a pauper’s grave.”

Although Gideon shared Tillman’s anger, Tillman shared none of Gideon’s curiosity. The incident in Mr. Faircloth’s office had made him wonder what else their father had hidden from them.

But the two brothers never spoke about their father. From the moment Gideon had joined his brother on the front steps—the bodies of their parents lying in the house behind them—it was as if they had made some unspoken pact to draw a curtain over the past. The life they’d had before was gone, buried along with their parents.

Looking back, Gideon couldn’t recall a single conversation during which they had discussed their father. Sometimes they would reminisce about their mother, but mentioning their father was strictly off limits– what he’d done during his life, the kind of man he’d been, or the way he’d died.

And yet year after year, Gideon had held on to the box his father had kept in his safe with the words FOR MY BOYS written on top in thick block letters. Tillman had wanted to throw it away. So Gideon had kept taking it with him wherever he lived, from dorm room to apartment, but he never looked inside. Sometimes he thought he couldn’t bring himself to look inside the box because he was afraid of what he’d find, some dark secret about his past he didn’t want to face. Or maybe he just needed to wait until some time had passed, when he didn’t feel quite so angry at the old man.

Eventually, the right moment came.

Gideon had been working at the UN for almost a year and dating Miriam Pierce for half that time. Raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as the only child of high-powered corporate lawyers, Miriam had forsaken the law to become a successful freelance photographer. She had been hired by Gideon’s publisher to take the jacket photo for his first book. After their session, Miriam joked that he’d been the most difficult subject she’d ever photographed, and Gideon confessed that he hated having his picture taken. Which was true. But what he didn’t tell her was how distracted he’d been by her beauty. He mustered the courage to ask her to dinner, and they found themselves walking and talking through Central Park until well into the night. Their connection was for±€†instant and intense. Miriam asked questions about Gideon, direct but not invasive, and he was struck by how comfortable he felt telling her about himself. Even the hard things. And she made him laugh as she described her own colorful life as the daughter of overachievers. Because she’d been left alone as a little girl for hours at a time, her imagination had become her only companion, and she took herself around the world within the confines of her bedroom.

Six months after they’d started dating, he’d stepped into her Gramercy Park apartment. “They’re sending me to Cambodia next week,” he said.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“One of the Tampuan guerillas has agreed to sit down with me and hash out terms for a cease-fire,” he said. “Assuming he’s not lying through his teeth and trying to rearm his militia, I may be able to back-channel a deal with the minister of defense.”

Although she had been smiling, the corners of her slate gray eyes lowered slightly, as if pulled down by an invisible thread. It was the sad, knowing smile of a patient woman who was bracing herself for bad news she’s been expecting for a long time.

“You’re breaking up with me,” she said.

Gideon didn’t say anything for a moment. He had come to break up with her. He reminded her that he’d already been absent for two of the six months since they’d been seeing each other, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d be away this time. Not that he hadn’t warned her when they’d started seeing each other. Their first night together in Central Park, he told her bluntly that his work wasn’t compatible with being in a long-term relationship, and that he’d resigned himself to living his life alone. Miriam had accepted it then, and she accepted it now, without self-pity, and with a grace that made Gideon miss her before he’d even left the apartment. Her only regret, she said, was that she had allowed herself to fall in love with him.

“Good luck trying to save the world, Gideon. You’ll do great.”

Trying to save the world.

Said with not even a hint of irony. As absurd as it sounded, Gideon sincerely felt that he was trying to save the world. Or at least save as many lives as he could. A naive project, maybe, but one that required the freedom to leave on a moment’s notice and to stay away for long periods. And so he had ended his relationship with Miriam Pierce as he had with so many other women, without any words of consolation other than to say that he was sorry.

As he left the apartment, she closed the door behind him. He heard the lock snick closed behind him.

Gideon stood for a moment, unable to move, rooted there by a sudden and deep loneliness that descended over him like a shadow. He raised his fist to knock on her door, ready to tell Miriam that he’d changed his mind, but he stopped himself. This breakup felt like more than just another casualty of Gideon’s outsize ambition to save the world. Standing there, he realized that his decision to keep the people who cared about him at arm’s length came at a steeper price than he’d ever acknowledged, even to himself.

Twenty minutes later, he was sitting on his neatly made bed, taking off his shoes and lying back on the hard pillow, his n He±€†ecktie still tight and perfectly knotted. As he lay staring at the ceiling, Gideon felt drained and vaguely restless. He looked around the room. He’d been living here for nearly two years, and yet there were no family photos on the wall, no artwork, nothing that would tell you anything about the individual who lived here. It could just as well have been a hotel room, or some rent-by-the-month apartment in a strange city.

He found himself walking to the spare bedroom and looking in the nearly empty closet. In the back of the closet lay the container with the words FOR MY BOYS written in thick marker across the top. Inside was a smaller, older box, its sides worn and creased with age. He took the box back to his bedroom and set it in the middle of the bed.

He stared at the box for a long time before he finally opened it.

Inside were several small stacks of photographs, each held together by a brittle rubber band. The first set showed his father as a boy and as a very young man. Gideon’s father—only a teenager, his hair slicked back– grinning as he stood next to an early 1960s Chevy. What struck Gideon was that he’d never seen his father smile like that. A big, fat, shit-eating grin. The few times his father had smiled, it was usually hard, grudging, and slightly bitter.

The next set were photos of his father and mother. Again, they just looked so . . . happy. Gideon couldn’t quite fathom it, his father in a tux with a cockeyed boutonniere, his mother laughing, her head thrown back, showing off her throat. Another picture showed her pressed up against his father, who held her like he was protecting her from all the ugliness of the world. He’d never seen them look happy like that. Especially not together. Not once.

The second sheaf of pictures were Marine Corps photos. On top was a young man, posing proudly in his dress uniform. It looked like it had been taken right after basic training. Behind that were more pictures from his time as a marine, one of them showing his father arm in arm with Uncle Earl, whom Gideon suddenly realized had probably taken most of these photographs. Gideon checked the inscriptions on the back as he worked his way slowly through them. Mostly early 1965. The first few were taken in the United States, then later pictures were obviously in Vietnam. But he continued to be the same grinning kid in picture after picture.

Until the last picture. Gideon barely recognized the boy. It was the same boy . . . and yet, it wasn’t. It wasn’t just that he was unshaven, or that his uniform was worn and covered with mud, or that his left leg and torso were wrapped in bandages. It was something in the boy’s eyes—a darkness that Gideon recognized all too well.

It was that dark, distant expression—anger buried under a hard, dead-eyed veneer. The young private carried an M-60 machine gun across his stomach, his hands cradling it with the same soft, loving familiarity that his father always used when holding his guns.

This is the man I knew, Gideon thought.

It was the last photograph in the stack. He flipped it over. 1966. In a year, he’d gone from a grinning kid to . . . this.

Now the bed was empty, except for a small blue rectangular case. It resembled a jeweler’s case for a diamond necklace. Only, this case was embossed with the seal of the United States of America.

Gideon opened it. Insidwid±€†e was a small star-shaped medal attached to a pale blue ribbon.

He knew what it was, knew immediately, and yet he couldn’t believe it.

Folded on top of the medal was a yellowed piece of paper. He unfolded it and read it once, then a second time, then a third.

When he was done reading, he picked up his phone and dialed the last number he had for Tillman. A man answered, but the line was so full of static that the answering voice was inaudible.

“Tillman?” Gideon said. “Tillman, can you hear me?”

The man’s voice was lost in the noise, but Gideon was so excited that he couldn’t wait to share with his brother what he’d found.

“I opened the box Dad left us.”

There was more crackling.

“Listen to this,” he said, not knowing if he was reading to his brother, to a stranger, or to an empty line. “At the top, it says ‘citation.’ Then it says this:

“Rank and Organization: Private First Class, U.S. Marine Corps, First Battalion, Seventh Marines, First Marine Division (Rein.). Place and Date: Thua Thien Province, Vietnam. March 10, 1966. Entered service at: Washington, D.C. Born: 13 September 1945, Staunton, Virginia. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and courage at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. In the course of a routine patrol, Pfc. Davis’s platoon was ambushed by a company-sized force of NVA regulars. Eleven marines were killed and three of the five survivors wounded. Pfc. Davis ordered Pfc. Earl Parker to retreat with the surviving members of the platoon, remaining behind to lay down cover fire. A superior and judicious marksman, Pfc. Davis killed the enemy company commander, three sergeants, a machine gunner, and a mortar team before his ammunition was exhausted and his position was rushed by the remaining enemy forces. Armed with only his sidearm and a grenade, Pfc. Davis engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat, killing all five enemy soldiers, while sustaining a bayonet wound, a gunshot wound, multiple shrapnel wounds, and a broken ankle. He then crossed two kilometers of steep and muddy terrain, eventually reaching his base at dawn. Through his efforts, Pfc. Davis saved the surviving members of his platoon from certain destruction by a well-trained and numerically superior force. Pfc. Davis’s extensive injuries required nearly a year of convalescence. His courageous initiative and heroic spirit of self-sacrifice reflect the noblest traditions of the Marine Corps and the U.S. Naval Service.”

“Dad won the Medal of Honor,” Gideon said. “Tillman?”