Gideon's War/Hard Target (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

The few people who were on the street looked at him strangely and gave him a wide berth. He supposed that was natural when you saw a muddy, tuxedoed white guy who smelled like a cesspool.

He spotted the broad expanse of the river from a low hill at the edge of town. Getting there was just a matter of following the main road straight through town.

The closer he got, though, the stranger everything seemed. The sun was well above the horizon now. And there were still only a few furtive people on the street. No cars, no buses, no trucks.

He was close enough now to the river that he could see boats moored along a quay. As he passed before a storefront, a voice hissed at him from somewhere in its dark recesses.

“Are you insane?”

A young Asian man was standing behind the counter of the open-fronted shop. He wore a black shirt and an Indiana Pacers cap, canted low over his taut, anxious face.

His nose wrinkled at the smell of the stranger. “What the hell happened to you?” The young man had a perfect American accent.

Gideon considered how to answer. “Long story.”

“Get in here.”

Gideon looked around, then walked inside.

“Dude, this town’s crawling with those jihadi assholes.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Did you just get dropped off a spaceship?”

“Something like that,” Gideon said.

“Are you not aware that the insurgents took over like half the province yesterday? Look at them the wrong way, they’ll drag your ass off the street and shoot you.”

“Good to know,” Gideon said, peering out the door before turning back to the young man. “Do you have a phone I could use?”

The guy shook his head. “They cut the lines. And cell coverage has always been shit around here. But listen, my family’s heading to KM as soon as it gets dark. You can come with us. If my grandfather wasn’t sick, we’d have been gone already.”

“Kota Mohan’s downriver. I’m going upriver.”

“Upriver?” The young Chinese guy stared at him. “What the hell for?”

“I’ve got someone waiting for me with a boat. His name’s Daryl Eng.”

“I don’t think so, dude. Daryl headed for KM like eight hours ago. Took his whole family.”

Gideon felt a spike of dread. “How do you know this?”

“Daryl’s Chinese, se y‘€ame as me. We pretty much stick together around here. My people have been here for like three hundred years, but the Muslims still consider us outsiders and infidels and all that shit.”

For a moment, Gideon considered taking the young man up on his offer. But only for a moment. “I need to get upriver. Do you know anyone who might be able to help me?”

The young man laughed. “Maybe a psychiatrist.” When Gideon didn’t laugh, the young man shrugged. “Your funeral, bro.”

Gideon smiled. “You sound like you’re from Ohio.”

“Indiana. Lived in Fort Wayne for ten years, then went to college at IU in Bloomington.” He held up his hand, showing off a heavy gold college ring. “Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. Came back here temporarily to help out with a family business situation and—”

His words were cut short by a burst of machine-gun fire somewhere in the distance. A truck engine raced, getting closer and closer.

“Get down!” the young man said.

Gideon was barely able to conceal himself behind the counter when a Toyota pickup packed with heavily armed young men, some of them only boys, cruised down the street. Gideon waited for the truck to pass before he stood.

“You wanna buy an AK?” the young man said. “Four-seventy-five, U.S. If you want something cheaper, I got a nice Mossberg pump with a pistol grip and—”

Gideon shook his head. “I have to go.”

The young man cocked his head and studied Gideon’s face. “You’re serious. You’re really gonna head upriver . . . unarmed. What are you, a missionary?”

Gideon felt compelled to tell him his story but decided to keep it simple. “There’s some family business I need to take care of.”

The young man nodded sympathetically. “Same reason I’m here. Family’s family, right?” Then he wrote something on a piece of paper, handed it to Gideon. “You got enough money, this guy’ll take you anywhere.”

Before Gideon could look at the paper, he heard tires screeching outside. The Toyota pickup was doing a U-turn somewhere down the street.

“They’re coming back. Someone ratted you out.”

“Is there a back way out of here?”

The young man ushered Gideon toward the rear of the shop, into a small room that smelled of fried food. Eight people were crammed inside, staring fearfully at him as he moved past them and out the back door, which deposited him in a squalid alley. Beyond its narrow mouth the river was visible. Gideon thanked the young man and started working his way toward the river.

He’d gone about a block when he heard automatic gunfire in the near distance. Hiding behind barrels and boxes in the narrow alleys that paralleled the main road, he made it to the river within ten minutes.

Almost.

Only a broad avenue separated him from the long wooden quay running along al‘€side the river. A jumble of boats was moored there, from tiny rowboats to large flat-bottomed river barges.

Gideon paused behind a pile of rubbish.

Three young men wearing turbans and carrying AK-47s lounged by one of the boats. This was not turban country. If someone wore one around here, it was because they were consciously adopting the uniform of their Middle Eastern confederates.

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.