Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon's War and Hard Target

For the first time, Gideon glanced at the piece of paper....

screaming monkey

Screaming monkey? Before Gideon could think any more about it, bullets started slamming into the wall next to his head.

CHAPTER NINE

OMAR HAQQ WAS LATE for work. He hurried toward the helipad for Trojan Energy’s storage and logistics facility, which took up several square blocks of the industrial zone on the outskirts of Kota Mohan. Being a security officer here had once been considered a plum job. But over the past few months, several oil depots and processing plants in Mohan had been sabotaged by insurgents. At least a dozen of his colleagues had been killed, and twice as many wounded. Because of this, a day didn’t pass without some new security procedure being instituted.

Before, company employees only had to show their badges at the facility’s main gate and that was the end of it. Now every badge was embedded with a microchip that only gave you access to those parts of the facility for which you were specifically cleared. People were always walking into the wrong areas and setting off the alarm. When that happened, Omar was supposed to run to the site of the breach with his gun drawn. No walking. He had to run. If you didn’t run, you were subject to a fine of at least five rupiahs.

And now Omar’s heart sank when he saw his boss, Abdul Momat, standing at the counter of the security office by the chopper pad. He expected his boss to give him grief for being four minutes late. He would probably fine him for that, too. Oddly, his boss didn’t even seem to notice that Omar was late. In fact, he was surprisingly cheerful.

“Biometrics!” Abdul said, smiling with paternal pride as Omar rushed to his station behind the security desk and logged on to his computer. “Biometrics will stop the terrorists.”

“Biometrics,” Omar repeated, although he had no idea what the word meant.

Abdul patted a wall-mounted panel beside the door to the helipad. In the center of the panel was a glass circle, like an unblinking eye. Next to the eye was a green button. Omar had never seen anything like it.

“They installed it last night,” Omar’s boss said, brushing some invisible dust from the surface of the panel. “Starting today, we will be identifying every employee and visitor by scanning their retinas. Their biometric information will be digitized and stored. If the retinal scan doesn’t match? Boom!”

Omar was not quite sure what a retina was, much less how you scanned one, but he smiled broadly anyway. “Excellent, sir!” he said. Omar always made a poke thingint of agreeing with whoever his boss was, and for the last year, it was Abdul Momat. Omar hoped to be the boss himself one day. He knew the only way to become a boss was to agree with everything your current boss said.

“A lot of my people just complain,” Abdul said. “But you? You see the big picture.”

“I try, sir.”

Their conversation was cut short by the sound of a fist rapping impatiently against the counter. The man standing there was white, his face covered by a heavy but neatly trimmed beard. He wore a baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses. “Sorry to interrupt your important conversation,” he said in a tone that didn’t sound the least bit sorry, “but I’m supposed to be on that chopper out to the Obelisk.” He pointed toward the idling chopper outside. “Dr. Cole Ransom.”

The white people who worked at Trojan Energy generally talked to Mohanese people as if they were children. But this man was different, more than simply dismissive or patronizing. This man seemed to be looking through Omar, as if his face were made of glass.

“Name, please?” Omar said.

The bearded man raised his sunglasses and looked at Omar, who preferred it when the man had been looking through him. The man smacked his knuckles against the counter again, once for each syllable he spoke. “Cole. Ran. Some. Same name as I had when I told you thirteen seconds ago.” He waved his passport in Omar’s face.

“Thank you, sir,” Omar said, smiling as he took the passport and swiped it over the reader. Scrolling through the passenger manifest on his monitor, Omar’s fake smile began to hurt his face.

The bearded man glanced out the tall windows that faced the helipad. The chopper that was about to head to the Obelisk was spooling up its engine. The other passengers were already on board.

Omar found the man’s name. Normally he would have simply waved him through. But Abdul was watching him now, so he made sure to follow procedure to the letter. He typed the man’s name into the log, then slid a clipboard across the counter. “Signature, please.”

The man signed his name, picked up his bags, and started walking toward the door. Omar traded a look with Abdul, who rolled his eyes. Even a man like Abdul got tired of kowtowing to pompous white people. Suddenly Omar noticed something on the manifest.

“Sir?” Omar called.

The white man stopped and turned. Omar had noticed on the manifest that the man’s retinal signature had been recorded yesterday and he thought this was a great opportunity to impress his boss. “I need to scan your retina.”

“Huh?” the man demanded, narrowing his eyes.

Omar pointed at the box on the wall. “Retinal scan, sir. For identification.”

For a moment the man didn’t move. His jaw worked. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. But then he walked over, stood before the box, and pressed his eye to the round glass panel. He thumbed the green button. A line of light ran back and forth across his eye.

Oh, Omar thought. It’s one of thog h¡€se things. He’d seen them in movies before, but he never knew what they were called.

Suddenly, a high-pitched alarm filled the room. The same irritating beeping sound that went off when somebody swiped their ID card in an area they weren’t cleared to enter.

Omar instantly regretted that he had tried to impress his boss. He looked to Abdul, who was looking at the bearded man. “Sir, I’m sure this is just a computer glitch, but I need to call my supervisor. So if you’ll please step away from the scanner—”

But the man stood his ground, as if he were the boss. “I don’t have time for this shit,” he said.

Abdul eyed Omar, whose chest tightened. Something about the bearded man scared him. Maybe they should just let him go through. Whoever he was, he obviously wasn’t a terrorist. White people were many things, but they weren’t terrorists.

“Sir, please step away while I call my supervisor.” Abdul picked up the phone.

What happened next happened so fast that Omar couldn’t quite make sense of it until it was too late. The white man somehow pulled Omar’s Glock from its holster and fired twice. The side of Abdul’s head exploded in a spray of blood and bone.

Omar stared as Abdul collapsed in a heap, his legs twisted at impossible angles beneath him. The phone receiver he’d been holding a second ago now dangled from its cord, bouncing, until the white man caught it and shoved it at Omar.

“Call dispatch and tell them it was a false alarm,” the white man said.

Omar did as he was told, hoping they would hear the fear in his voice and come anyway.

“Drag his body into that closet,” the man said calmly, indicating a storage locker.

Omar felt sick. But he couldn’t move. His brain still couldn’t quite process what was happening.

“Now,” the man said, lowering his voice.

Omar didn’t want to die. So he lifted Abdul’s feet and dragged his dead boss toward the closet. Abdul had somehow broken his left leg as he fell, and the bones made a grinding noise as Omar dragged him. Stuffing the dead man into the tiny closet was a messy, horrible, and slow process. After Omar was finished, he turned to find the bearded man setting an object beside the computer. It was gray, roughly the size and shape of an egg. The bearded man stuck the twin prongs of some small mechanism into the soft material.

“Come here, Omar,” the bearded man said. “Put your finger on this.” He pointed to the device he’d stuck into the egg, which was ovular and concave.

“How do you know my name?”

“Don’t make me ask you twice.”

Omar did as he was told.

“Now, Omar, from the retinal scanner over there, I can see that you know something about biometrics. Facial recognition, retinal scans, fingerprints, blah blah blah—turning biology into data. You understand what I’m saying, right?”

&¡€em">Omar nodded.

“Outstanding,” he said. “This device you’ve got your finger on? It’s a biometric trigger. If it senses any interruption in your pulse, say from taking your finger off the device and breaking contact, it will detonate this.” He pointed to the egg-shaped object. “It’s a military-grade explosive called Semtex,” the man said. “Enough to make your entire body look like your friend’s head. Do you want that to happen to you?”

Omar shook his head.

The bearded man pressed a button on the device, and a small red light started blinking.

“So I have a mission for you. It’s called Operation Omar-Doesn’t-Blow-His-Own-Ass-Up. The way it works is this: you sit here for the rest of your shift, keep your finger on the button, and smile at every asshole who walks through that door. Anybody asks you about Cole Ransom, you just shrug and act stupid. If anybody asks where your buddy went, you shrug and act stupid. I imagine you’ll be good at that.”

Omar was tempted to explain how a lack of finances was all that had prevented him from going to university, but he realized it was pointless at this particular moment.

“If you complete your mission, I’ll call you later and tell you how to disconnect the bomb. But if I get arrested or shot or the chopper gets called back or if I get spooked for any reason—obviously, I won’t be coming back. And whatever bomb squad you’re thinking of getting over here? Trust me, they’ll never figure out how to disarm this bomb.”

Omar felt a drop of sweat trickling down his neck.

“Operation Omar-Doesn’t-Blow-His-Own-Ass-Up.” The bearded man gave him a cynical smile. “You and me. We’re on the same team now, right?”

Omar nodded.

“You gonna screw up your mission?”

“No, sir. I want to live.”

“Outstanding!” The bearded man pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number, and spoke to someone on the other end of the line as he walked back out the door toward the waiting chopper, in no particular hurry. His voice was too low to hear, but Omar had managed to hear the man on the other side of the line greet the bearded man. Abu Nasir.

As soon as the bearded man boarded the chopper, it lifted off. Omar watched the chopper until it disappeared from view. Was it possible that he was really Abu Nasir?

Omar sat trembling for what seemed like an hour. He looked at the clock. Barely a minute had passed. Was the bomb really rigged the way the bearded man had said it was? Probably. Would Abu Nasir ever tell him how to defuse the bomb? Probably not.

Omar’s hand was already beginning to hurt. He began thinking about his three-year-old son. He remembered how he felt in those first few minutes after Hakim was born. The sun was just about to rise, and the sky was glowing a deep ruby color. This is the color of happiness, he remembered thinking. Another drop of sweat trickled down Omar’s neck, and he wondered if he’d ever see his son again. Probably not, Omar thought miserably. Probably not.

CHAPTER TEN

GIDEON’S FATHER HAD KEPT his guns in a windowless room with two dead-bolt locks. Whenever his father went inside that windowless room, he’d secure both locks. And when he left, he’d lock the door again, first the top lock, then the bottom, in unvarying succession.

No one was allowed inside, not even the few men his father counted as friends. But Gideon was always standing nearby, waiting for his father to enter or exit, in order to glimpse the mysterious interior for the brief moment when the door was open. Day after day, Gideon inhaled the sharp smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 bore solvent that wafted through the open door and peered inside until he’d memorized every inch of the room. Its walls were mahogany paneled, decorated with the mounted heads of deer and elk and even a brown bear. The guns were lined up in a long glass-fronted cabinet—shotguns first, then rifles, oldest to the left, newest to the right, starting with a twenty-bore Holland & Holland hammer gun, and ending with an AR-15 chambered in .223. A wooden rifle cleaning rest, worn with age, sat on the spotless workbench next to a reloading press.

Other than the occasional addition of a new firearm, nothing ever changed in the room. Gideon’s father was a man of rigid habits and fixed ideas. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Any variation from routine drove him into an immediate and merciless fury. You didn’t knock on the door—or even make loud noises—when Father was in the gun room.

Gideon was given his first firearm, a Marlin .22, when he was five years old. He learned early that one thing, and one thing only, could ensure his father’s affection. That one thing was good shooting. When you went to the range with Father, you didn’t mess around, you didn’t talk, you didn’t smile, you didn’t shuffle your feet. You simply loaded and fired. With precision and accuracy.

From the moment he touched the Marlin .22, Gideon knew he had a gift. Trap, skeet, air pistol, bench rest, offhand, prone, practical handgun shooting—no matter. He had it—that magical trick of eye and brain and finger that allowed him to aim a gun and hit what he wanted to hit. Kill was the word that Father used.

For the first three years, his father taught him. After that, all his father had to do was man the spotting scope and let the boy work. “Good kill, son,” he’d whisper. “Good kill.”

Tillman, on the other hand, struggled to keep up on the range. Compared to any other kid, he was excellent and could drive tacks with a rifle or run clays set after set. But he did it through gritted teeth, flinching under his father’s perpetual scrutiny. Every near miss, every stray shot earned him an ear-ringing slap on the back of the head, a pinch on the inside of his upper arm, or—worst of all—a few cutting words. These ranged from “useless fool” to “you’re no son of mine, boy.” Always whispered softly. Even at his most violent, Father never raised his voice.

But the violence was always there. When the dark rage came on him, he struck out at anyone within reach. Anyone except Gideon. While their mother sometimes absorbed his wrath, Tillman was always their father’s main target. It had taken a long time for Gideon to see it, but Tillman hadn’t absorbed the belittling and the beating and the abuse by accident. As the older of the two, Tillman had rou220±€tinely stood between their father and Gideon—deflecting his anger, absorbing his blows, protecting the younger boy. In fact, Tillman had been his protector throughout his childhood—whether it was from bullies at school or opposing linemen on the football field. Thanks to Tillman, nobody messed with Gideon Davis. People came to understand that if you put a late hit on Gideon Davis, when the next play rolled around, Tillman Davis was going to cut you off at the knees.

It was only as he grew older—and increasingly estranged from his brother—that he began to understand what that protection had cost Tillman, how much pain he had absorbed on Gideon’s behalf. The realization came only slowly and grudgingly. But eventually Gideon realized that only through Tillman’s self-sacrifice had Gideon been given the space to grow into the man he had become.

It was a debt that Gideon knew he had never adequately repaid.

There had been a time when Gideon’s forebears owned half of Yancey County, Virginia, a rural county to the west of Washington. But a succession of poor business decisions had stripped the family of their land, until Gideon’s father had been left with nothing but their house and the small plot of land around it that he hadn’t sold off. In the early 1970s, Gideon’s father sold what was left and invested the proceeds in a final speculative venture, which quickly failed.

The week before Gideon’s fourteenth birthday, the entire thing had caved in.

The day the bank seized Father’s office, Father came home, parked his Cadillac outside the house, unlocked the gun room, took out the old Remington 10, walked into the bedroom, and shot Gideon’s mother in the chest. She was a beautiful woman, and being a vain man who prized her face as one might prize a good setter or a matched pair of Purdeys, he had not wanted her spoiled. Then he went into the gun room and ended his own life.

Gideon came running after he heard the first shot and found his mother lying in a blooming pool of blood. His desperate attempt to keep her alive was interrupted by the familiar sound of the door slamming shut on his father’s secret room. Then Gideon heard another shot.

When Sheriff Wright came, he found the gunroom unlocked. He just turned the knob and walked in. Gideon’s father lay dead on the floor, the back half of his head gone. There had been no investigation, no securing the crime scene, no bits of evidence collected and stuck in numbered plastic bags. After all, it was obvious what had happened. So the sheriff had simply called the funeral home and had the bodies carted away.

A few weeks later, when he and Tillman finally returned to the house to gather their personal possessions, Gideon found himself piling his father’s guns on a blanket, dragging them down to the pond behind the house, and throwing them into the water, one by one. The Holland & Holland, the matched pair of Purdeys, the Weatherby double rifle, the Kimber 1911, the Luger, the K-frame Smith, the Model 70—the only things his father had ever really loved. And now all Gideon cared about was knowing that none of those guns could ever be fired again.

After he was finished, he walked to the front porch steps and sat down next to Tillman and said, “Why do you think he did it?”

Tillman snorted but said nothing.

That was it. Since that day, neither of them had ever said another, ±€r word about what happened. And since that day, Gideon Davis had never touched a firearm.

The AK-47 is not an especially precise rifle. But in the right hands it can cut a man in half, and Gideon could tell that the man shooting at him knew how to handle his weapon. The next burst would take his head off. So he did the only thing he could, bounding from his hiding place and sprinting for the river, hoping that his movement would throw off the shooter’s aim.

In front of him were three turbaned young men on the quay. One held his gun by the barrel, the butt hanging over his shoulder. The other two had leaned their guns against creosote-smeared mooring posts.

Gideon had no choice except to keep going.

Hearing the gunfire, the men whipped around and saw him, before noticing the man from the alley pursuing him and firing at him. None of the bullets found Gideon, but a stray slug hit one of the three jihadis, opening his neck in a spray of blood and gristle. Before the two surviving jihadis even had a chance to level their weapons, Gideon blasted between them and rocketed off the quay and into the brown water. He swam underwater as far from the quay as his lungs would allow until finally he had to come up for air.

The moment he cleared the surface, he heard sharp snapping noises all around him. Bullets, slapping into the water. Some of them ricocheted off into the air and some tore down into the water.

He turned and looked back. He was about forty yards out. Gideon counted seven turbaned men gathering at the edge of the water, blasting away, as he sucked in as much air as his lungs would hold and dove again, this time heading for cover behind an ancient teak river barge.

Surfacing slowly, he pressed his cheek flush against the algae-slick hull of the wooden barge. There was no gunfire. Just shouting and the slap of cheap plastic flip-flops and running feet coming toward him. He panted as quietly as he could, trying to get oxygen back in his bloodstream.

He felt a soft thudding against his cheek, footfalls on the barge deck.

If he could only talk to them, make them understand that he was no threat to them. Of course, he understood, that was a ridiculous thought. Right now, escape was his only chance to survive.

He looked down the row of boats for shelter. About forty yards down, a modern twin-hulled catamaran lay among the many old-fashioned wooden boats. If he could swim the full distance under water, he could hide between the two hulls of the cat. He was skeptical about making it, though. A ten-yard gap yawned between the cat and the next boat. If he came up in that gap, they’d have a good chance of blowing his head off.

Gideon took a couple of deep breaths, then dove again. He could scarcely see anything in the brown water, just dark shapes floating above him. He passed one boat, then a second, then a third. Don’t push too hard, he told himself, trying not to burn up all his air.

How many boats had there been between the barge and the cat? He couldn’t remember. Then he saw the pale wobbly sky above him. He was in the gap now. Ten yards from the cat. Well, it had looked like ten yards from where he’d been before. Now that he was here, he was afraid it might be more. His lungs were already burning.

Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick.

His vision narrowed as he felt the oxygen deficit shutting down his brain. Just a few more yards.

But the urge to breathe was getting hard to suppress. His arms and legs felt like rubber. He could see the wavering dark shape of the cat, two long dark streaks of shadow running down into the water.

Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick.

Everything was getting gray now. He wasn’t going to make it.

Stroke, kick.

Then . . . something dark.

Forcing the cobwebs from his mind, he kicked once more before surfacing. A gasp broke from his lips. He hoped it wouldn’t be audible from the quay. Air rushed into his lungs as he panted again, so weak that he could barely hold on to the nylon rope that trailed into the water near his hand.

But he had made it.

Above him was the fiberglass deck of the cat. He took two weak strokes, repositioning himself underneath the center of the deck. He couldn’t see the quay. Nothing was visible except the lower hulls of the nearest boats. If he couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see him.

There was some more shouting. Obviously the men who’d been after him were getting frustrated. Occasionally they fired into the water, shooting at nothing.

Then, after a while, it all stopped. No shouting, no shooting. Just silence.

Now that the excitement was over and he had time to think, he also had more time to get worried. How was he going to get out of here? He supposed he could work his way from boat to boat until he reached the end of the quay. But what then?

The jihadis would be on the lookout for him now. He had no friends here, no money, no contacts, no phone or radio. Gideon hung on to the nylon rope, treading water with as much physical economy as he could manage.

He waited for what seemed an endless amount of time, then worked his way down to the end of the cat and looked out. A row of boats bobbed gently in the water. The quay was deserted.

Then he saw it. At the far end of the dock was a large modern speedboat. Crudely painted on the stern was some sort of large monkey. It had wild eyes and its mouth was wide open in what was either hysterical laughter or a threatening grimace. Gideon whispered a silent apology to the kid from Indiana for having doubted him, as he worked his way silently through the water toward the speedboat bearing the image of a screaming monkey.

Sometimes the jihadis reappeared on the quay or on the boats. They seemed to be looking for him—but not that hard. They must have assumed that he had drowned or been shot, because they didn’t seem to be breaking their necks to find him.

Finally, he was getting close. Another forty yards and he’d reach the speedboat. As he swam slowly and silently past an old wreck of a fishing boat, a face appeared over the side. Two black eyes stared right at him. He froze. It was an old woman, toothless and wrinkled, her head covered with a black scarf. For a moment neither of them moved. She was caught as much off guard as he was. His heart hammered in his chest.

Finally, he lifted one finger to his lips. The old woman continued to stare. Then her head dem"±€isappeared.

He waited for a cry, a noise, an alarm. But he heard nothing.

The old woman hadn’t given him away. Maybe she was no more a fan of the jihadis than he was. He took a few last strokes, found himself alongside the boat with the monkey painted on its hull. He worked his way to the front, found a mooring line, grabbed it, and swung himself up onto the deck. For a river speedboat, it was a sizable craft, well over twenty-five feet. In the front was a sort of wheelhouse. Behind that, a deck lined with tie-downs and sturdy alloy cargo rails, which were clearly designed to carry some kind of freight.

Housed in the aft were a pair of massive inboard engines. Gideon wondered what kind of freight required being carried at forty or fifty knots. Probably not anything legal, Gideon reflected, when he smelled cigarette smoke.

Before he had a chance to see where it was coming from, the door of the wheelhouse opened and a small man stepped out. A thin brown cigarette protruded from his mouth. His face was horribly disfigured, lipless, so that he had to clench the cigarette between the few rotting teeth still in his mouth. Had the man been burned or was it some kind of congenital deformity? Gideon couldn’t tell, but the guy looked a lot like a screaming monkey.