Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Gideon's War and Hard Target

President Diggs’s expression darkened. He knew what...

“I’ll take it in the Oval Office.” Before heading to the door, the president turned to General Ferry and said quietly, “Do whatever you have to do to take back that rig.”

General Ferry nodded once. “I’ll give the order, sir.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IT WAS ONLY AFTER their parents died that Gideon and Tillman learned that their father had gone bankrupt following a series of poor investments. They were literally left with nothing.

The day after the funeral, Uncle Earl had driven them up to the portico of their stately old family home and said, “Your aunt has asked me to bring you out here. The house and the property are all going to be sold. You can take whatever you can fit in the back of the car. Your aunt tells me that everything else will be sold. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way.”

In the end, they hadn’t taken much. Thellother ir clothes, a few toys, some family pictures. As they looked through the house, Tillman had found a metal container inside the open safe where some of their father’s guns were stored. Written neatly in black Magic Marker was a legend: FOR MY BOYS.

“You want to take it?” Gideon had said.

“Hell no,” Tillman growled.

Tillman hadn’t wanted to talk about their father, or to keep any material reminders of the man. Not even something their father had deemed worthy of placing in a separate box inside his safe and designating for his sons. So Gideon had taken the metal container with him, placing it inside one of the few cartons of books, photographs, and other small personal items. But for reasons he had only dimly understood, Gideon didn’t open the container. Not until many years later.

Gideon woke to a sharp crack. He sat up, heart pounding. For a moment he was disoriented. He had been dreaming about the box, the one with FOR MY BOYS written on the side. It was the only tangible legacy left to Gideon and Tillman by their father. And he’d awakened with a question in his mind, a question that he’d never resolved about what their father’s true legacy to his sons really was. Gideon was beginning to think that he might be on the verge of finding out here, in this remote part of the world, what that legacy had been—and that maybe it had been hiding inside him all these years.

It took another cracking sound before he realized the noise was gunfire. He tore his mind away from the dream. Now was not the time for gloomy speculation.

The first light of dawn was slipping through the thick jungle canopy. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the highlander who’d been acting as a sentry lying facedown about thirty feet away, blood pouring from his chest. The other highlanders were leaping to their feet, yelling at one another and scrambling for cover.

One of the men caught a burst in the leg and fell, his face twisted with shock and agony.

Gideon grabbed the fallen man’s spear and jumped behind the broad trunk of a tree. He could tell from the intensity of the sound that the shooters were no more than a hundred feet away. He peeked out from behind the tree. There was a fair amount of broad-leafed foliage between him and the shooters. But he managed to catch a glimpse of them.

They weren’t highlanders. So he figured they must belong to the same group of jihadis who had followed him up the river and up the cliff. He was astonished. What could possibly have motivated them to track him all the way up the river from Alun Jong, climb a thousand-foot cliff, and then pursue him half a day’s hike into the jungle?

His mind quickly moved from the speculative to the practical. How many of them were there? He was sure he’d killed all six of them during the landslide back on the cliff. There must have been others he hadn’t seen. He closed his eyes and listened.

Two. There were two guns firing at once.

The firing ceased. He looked around. The highlanders were all flattened against the trees. Including him, there were six men with spears. Against two with AK-47s. Gideon could hear them moving slowly forward, rustling in the underbrush.

A plan formed in his minrin‘€†d. He motioned to the other men, trying to communicate his plan with hand signals. He looked questioningly at the old highlander, wondering if his men understood. The older man nodded.

Gideon dropped to his belly and began wriggling forward under the cover of the underbrush, trying hard not to make a sound.

His idea was simple enough. There was a tree in front of him, right next to the trail. One of the highlanders needed to make a break for it down the trail, drawing the jihadis toward him. If Gideon stationed himself behind it and waited for the jihadis to pass by it, he could spear one of them.

Then it would be six on one. Six spears versus one AK. That was if the highlanders understood the plan and played their part.

He reached the tree, turned to look behind him. He could still see the old highlander. Gideon signaled that he was ready.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, one of the highlanders leapt out from behind the tree and raced down the trail.

Gideon could hear the jihadis now. Footsteps pounding toward him. He watched one pass by, then the next. As he was preparing to step out and hurl the spear, another jihadi flashed by.

There were three of them.

He cursed himself for miscalculating, but it was too late to do anything about it. He stepped forward and hurled the spear. The third jihadi was no more than five feet from him when he released the missile. It was just like the game of Spartan that he’d played with Tillman all those years ago, the spear passing cleanly into the man’s body. Only this time he hit the jihadi dead center in the back. The spear must have severed his spinal cord, because he fell like a bag of wet sand.

Hearing the noise, the second jihadi turned. His eyes widened as he saw his comrade fall. He swiveled to fire at Gideon, who realized he had no choice except to dive straight at the man. Reacting to Gideon’s forward motion, the jihadi backed away and stumbled slightly.

It wasn’t enough to make him fall—just enough to keep him from bringing his gun around in time. Gideon grabbed the barrel with one hand, clamping the other on the stock just behind the receiver. The jihadi was a typical Mohanese—barely more than five foot three, probably a buck and a quarter soaking wet. He didn’t have much chance against a six-foot-one, two-hundred-pound American.

Gideon wrenched the gun out of the man’s hand in a sweeping motion, then reversed direction, swinging the stock backhanded. It connected with the man’s face. He staggered backward. Gideon hit him again, and the man crumpled.

He heard a scream, turned in time to see the third jihadi clawing at a spear. Three of the highlanders had thrown spears at him. One had missed, but two had found their target—one in the groin and one in the thigh. The man dropped his gun and tried to pull the spear out of his thigh.

The old man stepped calmly out from behind the tree, kicked the jihadi in the stomach, then jammed a third spear into him as the man doubled up. It entered the side of his neck and drove deep into his body.

The man fell to the ground, gurgling and moaning. The highlander who had missed his throw picked up his spear and stabbed the man in the back until he stopped moving.

The highlanders whooped loudly over the dead men, then began rifling through their clothing and packs. They collected a Swiss Army knife, several ammo clips, three wads of Mohanese currency, and three cardboard rectangles the size and shape of a passport. Each of the jihadis had been carrying one.

The old man’s eyes narrowed as he laid them on the ground and studied them. He looked up at Gideon, repeating a single word in an accusatory voice. “Look!” he seemed to be saying.

Gideon saw that they were photographs. He moved closer, and a chill ran up his spine.

The photos were of a smiling man wearing a white shirt, a necktie, a pinstriped suit coat with an American flag pin in the lapel. Printed in English at the bottom of each picture: SPECIAL U.S. ENVOY GIDEON DAVIS.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

This confirmed Gideon’s fear. It was no accident. These men...

But who had sent them? Islamist sympathizers within the Mohanese military working under General Prang? Unlikely. They would have sent locals who spoke Malay, and Gideon had heard these men speaking English. Plus, how could they even have known Gideon was in the country? The answer came to Gideon in the form of two chilling questions: Could it be Tillman? If it wasn’t him, who else could it be?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CAPTAIN AVERY TAYLOR HAD been waiting for three hours in the anteroom of the opulent offices of the commanding general of the Mohan Defense Forces when his phone rang. Captain Taylor was not an easy man to rattle. But when he found himself talking directly to General Ferry, the commander of SOCOM, he broke into a sweat.

The general did not engage in pleasantries. “Where is your platoon, Captain?” he demanded.

“Here in KM, sir, making arrangements for the SEALs and Delta to—”

“Negative, son. Not anymore. You have new orders. By direction of the president of the United States I’m now ordering you to lead your platoon in an assault on the Obelisk. You need to seize the rig on or before twelve hundred hours your time.”

Captain Taylor’s mind briefly went blank. Back in Coronado he’d had access to the finest equipment available in the world. But here in Mohan, his men had arrived with nothing but sidearms, M4 carbines, and a paltry amount of ammunition. Political considerations made it impossible for them to bring any materiel that was deemed to have “offensive capability,” as they were here solely in a training capacity. They had no boats, no chutes, no scuba gear, no comms equipment, no grenades, no night vision . . . The list of what they didn’t have that they ought to have for a night assault on a well-defended naval target could have gone on for pages. “Twelve hundred hours today, sir,” Taylor said in confirmation. “Local time?”

“Today. Twelve hundred hours, Mohan time.”

The room Captain Taylor stood in was a huge, echoing marble chamber with the air of a mausoleum.

“Sir, wegrent, n don’t have much in the way of gear.”

“The president is speaking to the Sultan right now. Anything you need, he will supply.”

“Twelve hundred hours.”

“Captain, I am fully aware of the difficulty of this mission. Therefore I will not detain you any longer. If you get one iota of shit about anything from the Mohanese, you call me direct on this number. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Captain, this is how humble soldiers like you and me get into the history books.”

As Captain Taylor thumbed the off button on his phone, a Mohanese soldier, an immaculately groomed adjutant whose coat dripped with gold braid, opened the massive teak door and said, “Captain, the general can spare five minutes for you.”

Captain Taylor said, “Sorry, but I can’t spare five for him.” Before the gawking adjutant could reply, Taylor was sprinting down the long marble hallway. Praise the Lord! he thought. This was the real shit!

After they found the pictures of Gideon, the surviving highlanders had a heated argument. It didn’t take them long to come to a decision.

Gideon didn’t need to speak their language to understand what they’d concluded: being in proximity to Gideon Davis was hazardous to their health. They shouted angrily at him, pointed at the trail leading deeper into the jungle, and threatened him with their spears.

“Okay, okay,” he said softly, backing away from them. “I’m going. I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was chasing me. I’m sorry about your friends.”

Once he was comfortably beyond spearing range, he turned and jogged down the trail a couple of hundred yards, then stopped and hid behind a tree. The shouts faded after a few moments. Oddly, the tribes men walked back in the direction from which they had come, toward the river, silently carrying their dead comrades. Gideon waited until they were gone before he returned to the scene of the battle.

The three jihadis lay on the ground, arms splayed, mouths open. It made him a little queasy looking at them. They seemed half like men, half like sacks of meat. Who were they? They were all small-statured Asians. Mohanese? Maybe. But why did they speak English? Were they led by someone who spoke English? Or were they Americans who just looked Mohanese? Were they Asians—jihadis possibly—from various countries who spoke English because it was their only common language?

Gideon steeled himself for an unpleasant task. Each of the dead men carried a small backpack. Gideon unzipped each pack in turn and went through it systematically, looking for food, water, and information. The highlanders had already ransacked their gear . . . but they might have left something that would give him a clue as to who had sent these people after him.

He found precious little.

There were a few pieces of spicy beef jerky tucked into an inside pocket. Another had an unfinished candy bar hidden in his shirt, the silver foil carefully folded over the crescent of bite marks. A half-full canteen lay in the weeds near the third man. Gideon wolfed down the jerky and the chocolate, then chased it with a few mouthfir ¡€†uls of water. He knew he had to ration his water. There was plenty of water in the rain forest, but it wasn’t potable. In all likelihood it would give him dysentery– uncomfortable in a civilized area, but potentially deadly up here.

Everything else that might have been of any use to him—cell phones, radios, tools, weapons—was gone, taken by the highlanders.

The men carried no IDs, no wallets, no credit cards. The highlanders might have taken currency. But credit cards? IDs? They’d have left them. And yet there was nothing here. These men had been sanitized before they had been dispatched.

After he finished his modest meal, Gideon crouched in the dim light and tried to think what to do next. Whoever these men were, there would be more of them waiting if he went back the way he’d come. Getting to Kampung Naga was still the only way he’d find his brother.

He and the highland tribesmen had hiked at a pretty good clip for most of the previous afternoon. They might have made ten miles. He pulled out the map. If he was reading the scale correctly, he still had at least fifteen miles to go. Maybe more. And that was assuming he was even heading in the right direction. The town was due south. He could orient himself based on the direction of the rising sun, of course. But that wasn’t like navigating by compass. If he veered east or west by a few degrees, he might miss his destination entirely.

He looked around. Daylight was beginning to filter down through the heavy canopy of foliage. Everything was strange to his eye—the broad-leaved bushes, the gnarled trunks of the tall trees, the curious-looking fruit hanging here and there, the vines that twined upward into the green distance.

When he was a kid, he and Tillman had spent hours and hours wandering in the woods and fields around his house. By the time he was in junior high, he knew every plant and bush and berry—which were good to eat, which weren’t, which berries gave you the runs, which plants made you itch or break out, which ones cut you or stung you. Here he was like a baby—completely at the mercy of the jungle. Even the hoots and cries of the animals rising up around him meant nothing to him.

He had to move. Every minute he spent here was a minute closer to death. He figured the faster he got to wherever he was going, the faster he’d know if he was in the wrong place or the right place.

Gideon stood, feeling more acutely the blisters that had formed on his feet. He measured the dead men with his eyes, removed the boots and socks from the tallest one, and put them on. They were tight, but still better than his soggy wingtips.

He began trotting down the trail—just a slow jog, enough for him to make ten miles in a matter of a little over ninety minutes. The pace would force him to use up his water a little faster. But he determined it was still his best course of action. If he’d been at home, lost in a national park, then a conservative, hunker-down-and-wait-for-help strategy would probably be the smart play. But help wasn’t coming here. And the only people looking for him wanted to kill him.

As he ran, he counted his strides. He figured he had a stride of about four feet. That was roughly fifteen hundred strides to the mile. Back home, he ran regularly—four miles, most days. Sometimes five. He hadn’t run more than seven miles at a stretch since college. Could he run fifteen?

Probably. It was no good thinking about it, though.

So he just kept running and counting, counting and running.

He came to the first village at just past the two thousand mark. Unlike the village he’d passed through with the tribesmen on the previous day, this one hadn’t been burned. But it was abandoned. Food was rotting in the houses. Whoever had left here had bailed out so quickly they didn’t have time to take their food with him.

There were several small trails leading out of the village, but only one large trail heading south. He took a few sips of water, chose the large trail, and plunged on.

At the eight thousand mark, he reached another village. This one was larger than the last and seemed closer to civilization. There was no electricity, but there were lamps, gallon cans of kerosene, tire tracks in the ground. The tracks weren’t for a car, though. Something smaller, like an ATV. Gideon estimated that a couple hundred people had lived in the town, but the surrounding fields and houses had been burned to the ground.

What was going on around here? This was starting to look like a full-fledged war—a war accompanied by something resembling ethnic cleansing.

As he paused, he saw something red lying on the ground. A flower. A red flower. He reached down and picked it up.

It was a poppy. He surveyed the field. And then he saw it. Much of the field was burned. But not all. Opium poppies. Someone was growing opium up here.

There was no time to think about what this meant—if it meant anything at all. He ran.

The trail had widened as it left the burned village and had parallel ruts—presumably formed by the wheels of regular ATV traffic. Though it was wider than the trail he’d been running on earlier, it was covered in weeds, as though it hadn’t been used much lately.

By the time he passed ten thousand, Gideon’s body started rebelling. At home, with a good pair of running shoes, a good night’s sleep, and plenty of food, a five-mile jog would have been routine. But he’d only eaten a few morsels in the last twenty-four hours and hadn’t slept worth a damn in forty-eight. So there was nothing routine about this run. He kept running, but his limbs felt leaden, his head throbbed, and his lungs ached. Every stride seemed to be an act of will.

But he didn’t stop. The heat was not too bad here in the highlands—but he knew he was operating on a water deficit. He wouldn’t last much longer without water. When he reached fifteen thousand, he finally stopped to drain the canteen. He leaned against a tree. Next thing he knew, he was sitting, staring blearily up into the dark canopy of the jungle. For a moment he couldn’t remember where he was. A monkey appeared, stared curiously down at him, then leapt to another branch, screamed once, disappeared back into the dim distance. Gideon tried to force himself to his feet, but his body kept coming up with reasons not to.

He closed his eyes and thought back to the day when his father and mother had died. That’s who I’m here for, he thought. Whoever my brother has become, whatever he’s become, I’m here for him. He pictured his brother sitting on the front steps of the house, that terrible empty expression in his eyes.

And then Gideed ¡€†on was on his feet, pressing on into the jungle. Occasionally he passed through a stream. It was all he could do not to stop, lie down in the stream, and suck the water into his mouth.

He knew there was a point where dysentery was less of a danger than immediate dehydration. But he kept telling himself that he hadn’t reached that point quite yet.

The sun was higher in the trees now. He felt himself getting more and more light-headed, less and less clear in his thinking.

The trail he’d been on had been going due south for a while. There was no trick to navigating it. It simply headed south. But suddenly the trail split.

He stopped. Which way? He looked up, trying to determine by using the sun which way was south. But the sun was high in the sky now, and it was harder to tell east from west. Both trails were equally rutted. There were no signs, no marks, nothing to indicate where they were heading.

He realized after a while that he had been standing, staring up in the air for a long time. How long, he wasn’t sure. His mouth felt like a bag of sand.

Somewhere in the back of his mind a voice said, Okay, this is it. Time to find water.

But where?

Earlier it seemed like he’d been splashing through a stream every five minutes. He looked around. No streams were visible anywhere. He knew that if he just pressed on, he’d find one. And yet . . .

And yet neither his mind nor his body seemed capable of moving. He couldn’t make up his mind. Which way? The trail on the left or the trail on the right? He stared up at the sun. A shaft of light pierced the leaf and plunged into his eyes, blinding him momentarily. He realized vaguely he’d pushed himself too far, let his body dry out too much. He closed his eyes.

How far had he come? Gideon wondered. Was he even close to Kampung Naga? He realized he had stopped counting strides a long time ago. How long was a long time? Five minutes? Five hours? He really wasn’t sure.

Gideon stood, swaying, eyes closed, waiting to fall.

It was just a matter of time before his legs gave out, he thought. Just a matter of time.

But he didn’t fall. Instead, he smelled something.

Smoke.

A vague signal penetrated his consciousness. Smoke. Smoke equaled people. People equaled water.

Opening his eyes, he saw the leaves stirring in a bush near his face. The wind was pushing them to the right. Which meant the smoke was coming from the east. If he took the trail on the left, that would lead him to the fire.

He swayed, almost losing his balance, before he was running again. It might not have been actual running. In reality it might have been a slow, painful, tottering walk. But it felt like a sprint.

As he stumbled forward, Gideon’s mind drifted, going back to the last time he’d seen his brother. Politics. That’s what they’d fought over.

What could be more absurd than a fight over politics? A discussion—even a heated one?—sure, nothinHe ¡€†g wrong with a couple of brothers having a few sharp words over political differences. But for a pair of grown men, brothers, to sever their relationship over a difference of political opinions? It was crazy. And if Gideon faced the issue honestly, it was his fault.

It had happened a little more than seven years ago. At the time Gideon was still on the Princeton faculty, teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School of International Relations. But he was frequently in New York for work he did with the UN. Tillman had called late one afternoon saying that he was passing through New York before heading off on what he implied was some sort of covert operation. He said he wanted to talk.

Gideon had recently been offered a permanent fellowship at the UN, a dream job that allowed him to stay on the Princeton faculty while being dispatched as a special mediator to various conflict areas throughout the world. At the time it seemed as if he had reached the pinnacle of his life’s work. He wanted to share the news about the appointment with his brother. In his excitement about the job, he had made the mistake of inviting Tillman to meet him at the Princeton Club in Midtown.

Gideon had joined the Princeton Club on a whim and rarely ever attended the wood-paneled Forty-third Street clubhouse. But when the call had come from Tillman, Gideon had wanted to show that all the years of penny-pinching through grad school, all the years of shacking up in the library, all the years of sacrifice and hard work had added up to something. Here I am, he wanted to say. Look what I’ve achieved.

Gideon had arrived late—his meeting at the UN had run long—and Tillman was waiting in the lobby with a scowl on his face. “That asshole over there has come up to me at least five times to ask if he can help me,” Tillman said acidly, pointing at a supercilious man behind the reception desk. “Do I have a sign on my back that says ‘Not Princeton Material’ or something?”

Tillman had left the military several years earlier, but everything about him shouted army noncom. He still cut his hair as if he was ready for the parade ground—closely shaved sidewalls topped by a bold stripe of dark, crew-cut hair. Or maybe it was his carriage—the coiled anger that looked as if it might erupt at any moment. Whatever it was, something about him seemed out of place here.

“You’re fine,” Gideon said. “It’s probably just because they don’t know you.”

While they were speaking, a floppy-haired twenty-something breezed in the door with a squash racket under his arm. He gave Tillman a brief look like he was something from the zoo.

“What?” Tillman said softly, giving the young man a glare of sleepy-eyed malice. “Something wrong?”

The young man gave him a wincing smile: “I don’t know what your problem is but . . .” He gave Tillman a slow, condescending shrug.

Tillman rose to a half crouch, ready to pounce on the young man. Gideon put his hand on Tillman’s thigh. The young man backed away nervously, clutching his squash racquet, as if he might have to use it as a shield.

Gideon managed to steer Tillman up to the Tiger Bar before anything happened. But he could see things were already heading in the wrong direction.

Tillman had always claimed allegiancedes¡€† to the blue-collar world, professing a dislike that ranged from mistrust to outright hatred of anybody who had occasion to wear a necktie at anything other than a wedding or a funeral—bureaucrats, bankers, lawyers, doctors, college professors. Bringing Tillman to the Princeton Club was pretty much like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Tillman finished his first glass of single malt in a single swallow as he started in on one of his standard diatribes. Pointy-headed liberals and media pundits were destroying the country by refusing to support our troops, while the UN kept sucking up to terrorists and Third World dictators. It went on and on. He quoted Earl Parker liberally. “You know Uncle Earl always says . . .” or “Just last week Uncle Earl told me . . .” Not that there wasn’t some truth to what he was saying. But Tillman never allowed even the possibility that sometimes it took more courage to talk than to fight. He seemed to think there was no human problem that couldn’t be solved by force.

Gideon had intended to start the conversation by telling Tillman about his upcoming appointment at the UN. But Tillman wouldn’t let his brother get a word in edgewise.

By the time he started working on his fourth Glenfiddich, Tillman’s voice had gotten loud and ugly. People were eyeing him, wondering who this loudmouthed jerk with the military haircut was. It only seemed to make Tillman louder and angrier and more insulting.

Finally Gideon had had enough. It was time to change the direction of their conversation. “Wait a second,” Gideon said, holding his hands up. “Take a break from your lecture and let me talk for a minute. I have some good news.”

“I already know your good news,” Tillman said, giving the final words a sarcastic twist. “You got a job working for those pansies at the UN.”

Gideon felt his eyebrows rise in surprise. “How did you know that?”

Tillman hesitated before answering, “I heard about it.”

Which is when it dawned on him: Uncle Earl. It had to be. Only Uncle Earl was well connected enough to have known about the job offer before Gideon had even had a chance to tell anybody about it.

Gideon had known for several years that there was some kind of professional connection between Tillman and Uncle Earl. He knew that Uncle Earl had been instrumental in recruiting him from the military to covert operations. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that Uncle Earl would actually send him to talk Gideon out of a job he’d created for himself, the culmination of his life’s work.

“Uncle Earl sent you,” Gideon said incredulously.

“He didn’t send me,” Tillman insisted.

“Yes, he did. He sent you to talk me out of taking this job.”

Tillman held his brother’s accusatory glare before he finally spoke. “He thought maybe I could talk some sense into you, make you see that you’re about to become—” Tillman broke off suddenly, as if stopping himself from crossing some red line that he knew he could never step back from. But it was too late.

“What?” Gideon said, feeling a flush of molten anger rising into his cheeks. “That I&alk¡€†#8217;m about to become a traitor to my country? A dupe? A tool of terrorists? Go ahead. Say it.”

Tillman locked eyes on Gideon. His eyes slowly narrowed.

“Seriously, Tillman,” Gideon said. “Did he honestly think sending you here was going to change my mind? You two are so profoundly wrong about—”

“You don’t know anything, Gideon,” Tillman interrupted. “And what you think you know is more dangerous than you can even imagine. All this high-minded talk of yours? It’s all bullshit. Six days ago a friend of mine bled to death while I held him, trying to keep his guts from falling out in his lap. For what? To protect you and the rest of these Princeton phonies? We’re fighting the same bunch of thugs and monsters that drove airplanes into the Twin Towers, while you and your friends are selling out this country by making excuses for evil and trying to figure out why they hate us.”

The manager beelined toward Gideon and Tillman, a tight smile on his face. “Perhaps the gentlemen would be more comfortable if—”