Westview Cemetery, Atlanta
The next morning
Lang turned off I-20 onto Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, made a left and drove through the arch that marked the entrance to Atlanta’s largest cemetery. Passing the newer grave sites marked only by bronze plaques, he entered the older section, rolling hills dotted with an eclectic selection of gravestones, statues and funerary monuments. He parked the Porsche behind a vintage Cadillac. It and the Porsche were the only cars in sight. He climbed a slight rise, walking toward a giant oak tree whose winter-bare limbs seemed to be supplicating the heavens.
A few yards to his left, an elderly woman in black leaned on the arm of young Latino in chauffeur’s uniform as she hobbled up the hill, using her free hand to clutch a flat of pansies. He had seen her here on more than one occasion.
Just short of the tree, Lang stopped in front of three headstones. Dawn, his first wife, Janet, his sister, and Jeff, her adopted son. Lang came here to visit just before every trip he took out of the country. It was as if he were saying a possible farewell to the only kin he had before Gurt had re-entered his life with Manfred. For reasons he could not have explained, he never mentioned these trips to the cemetery. Although he was sure Gurt would understand, he felt some vague sense of disloyalty to his present family that had kept him silent on the subject of visiting his previous one.
Facing the three graves, he sat on the base of a statue of an angel, its arms reaching out as though imploring observers to follow through a closed door behind it, an early and exuberant display of early-twentieth-century family wealth by people he had never heard of.
Not far away, the old woman was directing the planting of the pansies around the marble figure of another angel, this one weeping.
If Lang could have spoken to his wife, his sister and much-loved adopted nephew, what would he tell them? Dawn, he knew, would be proud of his success in the legal world, thrilled he had the son she could not give him. Conversely, she would be less than happy about the violence that had stalked his life. Like the affair in Venice.
“Dammit,” he said aloud. “I don’t go looking for trouble.”
Not quite true, he reproved himself. He and Gurt weren’t leaving for Haiti entirely for a vacation.
“I can’t just sit by,” he explained to the breeze that was gently ruffling his hair. “I can’t just hope those people will go away.”
The woman in black interrupted the instructions to her chauffeur to glance sternly in his direction. Lang had not realized his voice had carried. He gave her an embarrassed smile.
Turning slightly, he faced Janet’s headstone. A pediatric orthopedist, she had spent four or five months of the year donating her services to the children of undeveloped countries. In Central America she had encountered the small boy on the dirt streets of a nameless village, homeless and parentless. She had fought a two-year paper war to adopt him.
Lang took a deep breath. She would be proud of the foundation he had created to provide children’s medical care across the globe. But perhaps not so proud about how he had funded it with an accord with the very organization responsible for her and Jeff’s deaths.
Lang stood, weary of the accusations of the dead, perhaps a little angry. It always ended this way.
“I did the best I could,” he said, not caring whether the old woman heard him or not.
Lang walked back down the hill, stopping for a final look at the three headstones before driving away. For reasons as inexplicable as his failure to tell Gurt of these visits, he felt he had completed a duty.
Cap Haitien
Two days later
Miles and Lang had decided that arrival in Haiti would be less likely observed if made at the north-coast port of entry. With the country’s communications system still somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, there was an excellent chance they would be gone by the time the paperwork associated with their landing found its way into any central system.
Scheduled service to Cap Haitien by commercial carriers having been long abandoned, Gurt and Lang had taken Delta to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands and chartered a flight from there. Lang was in the right front seat of the lumbering antique Beech B18, nervously watching the number-two engine spew oil onto a wing whose white paint had been bleached into chalk by the Caribbean sun. There were more empty holes in the instrument panel than instruments.
Lang had mentioned this when he and Gurt first boarded the venerable old machine nearly an hour ago.
“No worry, mon,” the native pilot had assured them. “Ain’ no radio, no instrument landin’ equipment at Cap Haitien nohow.”
Lang looked apprehensively at the panel. “I don’t see any GPS. How do you find it, the airport?”
The pilot shrugged. “You goes to the first ocean and turns right. Afta ’bout an hour, you looks for de tallest clouds. Haiti be unner ’em. Ain’ but one airstrip on de no’th coast.”
Unmollified but out of objections, Lang had uneasily strapped himself in. Before GPS, before navigational instrumentation, this was how flying was done, right? Lindbergh had made it all the way from New York to Paris with only a compass, right? Jimmy Doolittle had found Tokyo with not much more, right?
None of the above eased his concern in the least.
A flash of green caught his eye and in the next moment the aircraft banked left to parallel golden sands. On the right side of the plane jagged mountains seemed to grow from the beach’s edge and claw at the clouds like the talons of a raptor.
There was a grinding sound and the Beechcraft shuttered. Lang desperately hoped he was experiencing only the lowering of the landing gear into the airstream. As if to reassure him, the plane banked again. When it rolled out, an airstrip filled the windscreen, increasing in size as the plane descended. The paving seemed out of place among what looked like postage-stamp-sized fields of sugarcane. At the runway threshold, and what Lang guessed was no more than a hundred feet, the pilot leveled off, flying the length of the strip without farther descent. At the end, on the edge of the ocean, he added power and began a 180-degree turn back toward the other end.
“What…?”
“Livestock, mon,” the pilot replied nonchalantly. “Natives’ pigs sometimes gets loose and onto de runway. De airplane go over low, scare ’em off. You got any idea what a mess o’ dis plane hittin’ a pig make?”
It was something Lang had rather not consider.
The next approach was uneventful.
The instant the Beechcraft slowed to taxi speed, Lang felt as though he had been covered with a warm, wet blanket. The old aircraft had no air-conditioning and the hot, humid air filled the cabin not only with a cloying, prickly grasp but with a faint odor of sewage and wood smoke.
As the plane taxied back up the runway, two figures emerged from a small concrete-block building on the edge of the tarmac. One wore a guayabera, the short-sleeve, four-pocket shirt worn over the top of trousers, common in the Caribbean. The other was tall for a Haitian, perhaps six feet, and wore a long-sleeve olive drab uniform. Both were black. Not the browns and tans of most islands’ natives but the soot black of undiluted African lineage.
“Customs and immigration,” explained the pilot, hastily shutting down the left engine, then the right.
The temperature and humidity seemed to leap upward as Lang and Gurt exited the plane, followed by the pilot.
On closer inspection, Lang noted the tall Haitian’s uniform was wool, yet he seemed unperturbed by the searing heat and drenching humidity. In his belt was stuck a Webley revolver, the standard British military sidearm for the better part of the twentieth century. This one looked as though it might have seen service in Flanders Fields or in the 1916 Somme offensive. Lang would have guessed, if fired, the weapon would present as much peril to the shooter as the target.
The man in the guayabera accepted a sheaf of papers from the pilot. First-, second- or third-world country, one thing never changed: the paper required by bureaucracy.
“Passports?”
Lang and Gurt each handed over the German passports they had used to exit the United States. The man compared them with the papers the pilot had given him, studying so long Lang was getting edgy even though he assured himself these had been prepared by the Agency’s very talented forgers.
The customs official’s brow wrinkled.
“Is there something wrong?” Gurt asked.
The man brightened, showing white teeth that seemed to glitter against the black velvet of his face. “You speak English!” He held up one of the passports. “I have never seen a Dutch one before.”
Lang and Gurt exchanged glances.
“German,” she corrected.
“But it says, ‘Dutch.’”
Gurt stood beside him, her finger pointing to the word, “Deutsch. It is the German word for ‘German.’ ”
His smile widened as he produced a stamp from his pocket and imprinted both passports. “Dutch, German. Welcome to Haiti. Do you have a hotel reservation?”
Gurt reached into her purse, producing a slip of paper. “No, but we were told the Mont Joli is quite nice.”
“No matter. I do not think either hotel in Cap Haitien is full at the moment. I-”
He was interrupted by the sound of an unmuffled engine. What had at one time been a sixties-vintage Ford sedan, now painted a vibrant blue, rumbled up to the building. Its bodywork looked as though it had been modified with a baseball bat, and the tires showed more cord than rubber.
“Ah!” the customs man exclaimed. “Someone saw the plane come in. This is Andre, my cousin, who has a taxi ser vice.”
He turned to speak to the new arrival in a language Lang could not even begin to understand. Leaving the engine running, Andre dashed for the plane as though afraid it might suddenly take off on its own. He stood by while the pilot opened the nose baggage compartment and handed him two bags.
“Is that all your luggage?” the customs man wanted to know.
Lang and Gurt assured him it was.
Another burst of what Lang gathered was Creole and the cab driver lugged the two suitcases to the rear of his car, set them down and began to unwind the wire holding the trunk shut.
“Do those luggages have any tobacco, liquor or firearms in them?”
Lang and Gurt shook their heads. “No.”
The customs man nodded approval. “Good. That will be fifty dollars American, landing, arrival and customs fees.”
Lang and Gurt exchanged glances.
“That’s over a month’s pay here,” Lang said softly, reaching into a pocket. “You have any dollars on you?”
“I changed some euros in Providenciales,” she answered, digging in her purse, “when I bought a pair of sunglasses.”
“But you didn’t need another pair.”
“No, but we needed someone to remember we had euros in case someone should ask,” she whispered. “We are Germans, remember?”
No doubt Gurt was more current in tradecraft, Lang thought. He had completely forgotten creating a legend, the practice of leaving a series of believable clues supporting whatever identity one was using. More often than not, no one would be checking. But if they did, they would only confirm what they had been led to believe.
“Here.” Gurt was proffering five ten-dollar bills.
“Fifty, all right. How big a bill did you change?”
“A hundred. I wanted to make sure we were remembered as having euros, not dollars.”
“Lucky for us the Turks and Caicos’s currency is the dollar.”
As the cab drove away, Lang turned to look through a very dirty rear window. The man in the guayabera and the man in the uniform were dividing the money.
The road was a series of interconnected potholes, any one of which could have snapped the Ford’s axle had the car been moving faster than a quick walk. A power line followed the road, periodically hosting clumps of purple orchids contrasting with the mean-looking scrub at the base of the poles. On the right, an emerald surf licked at a litter-strewn beach. Offshore, the sails of small fishing boats darted back and forth across the mouth of the bay. To the left a series of mud and daub huts faced yards of bare dirt surrounded by ragged, waist-high fences of prickly cactus. Lang was puzzled at both the choice of material and the lack of height of the cactus. Then he saw a pig with a stick tied horizontally around its neck, a stick too long to squeeze through the perimeter.
The Haitians might be poor but they didn’t lack ingenuity.
A flatbed truck rumbled past, its muffler not even a memory. The sides were wooden slats painted with religious motifs and idealized scenes from Haiti’s tropical forests, or what was left of them. People sat on benches running lengthwise, clutching squawking, flapping chickens or small pigs. The top was a pyramid of less-valued cargo: cardboard suitcases, furniture and bunches of both green and ripe bananas.
Tap-taps, Haiti’s only public transportation.
The cab crossed a filthy creek that fanned out to make a small, gooey delta of mud and sand on the other side of the road. Mud huts with tin roofs shouldered each other to the waterline, many covered with a spiderweb of drying fishing nets. Scattered in the few available spaces, a few boats lay on their sides while owners and their families caulked or painted. The odor of open sewer filled the car, and Lang was appalled to see malnourished naked children playing in the very muck that was causing the smell.
Then the car was passing one- and two-story buildings painted every color imaginable. The predominant scent now was of charcoal coming from small braziers, around which squatting people cooked things Lang thought he would prefer not to recognize. All the women wore skirts, not a pair of pants among them. The street was crowded not by automobiles but by people, chickens and hand-drawn carts on truck tires. The impression was one of constant motion.
Then the taxi was headed up a steep hill, leaving the town’s noise, sights and smells below. Halfway up, the car stopped, its engine revving furiously.
“What’s the problem?” Lang asked.
The driver got out, motioning Lang to do the same. Warily, he noted the car was in park, the only thing preventing Gurt and the taxi from a quick and uncontrolled return to town. Unwilling to trust the antique’s transmission, Lang motioned her to get out, too.
The driver came around the car, waving his hands “no.” He then indicated that he and Lang would push. And that is how Lang and Gurt arrived at the Mont Joli Hotel, with Gurt riding like an elegant medieval lady in a sedan chair and Lang and the driver behind, pushing for all they were worth.
In the lobby, an open, airy room finished in what Lang guessed was native mahogany, a young woman imprinted his credit card.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Lowen,” she said, using the name on the passports in lilting English, “but I do not speak German.”
“Just as well. Give me a chance to practice my English.”
After establishing the room rates at seventy-five dollars a night if paid in dollars rather than euros, she handed him a key. “Enjoy your stay.”
“What happens if I want to pay my bill in gourdes?”
From her expression, he might as well as well have suggested a particularly deviant sex act. “Gourdes?”
“Your national currency.”
She ran a hand across the bottom of her chin, still agitated. “Er, it is our national currency, yes, but I know of no hotel that will accept it. If you wish…”
Lang waved a dismissive hand. “No problem. I was just asking.”
She watched Gurt and Lang follow a porter toward their room. When they turned a corner, she pulled a cell phone from the pocket of her skirt and hit speed dial.
“ Oui? ” a male voice answered.
“We have some guests at the hotel,” she said in Creole, bending over the desk to make sure those guests were out of earshot. “Guests with German passports.”
There was silence on the other end.
“I do not believe they are German. His English is American. You wanted to know…”
“ Merci.”
The other end of the conversation went dead.
Mont Joli
Cap Haitien
An hour later
Lang stood on the balcony outside his room, waiting for Gurt to get dressed after the shower they had shared. Immediately below him was a sparkling blue pool surrounded by grapefruit, oranges and limes dripping from trees. A huge ficus was draped in white orchids whose roots were exposed to the moist air that sustained them. The bloodred petals of a poinsettia the size of an oak reflected in the still water. Below the pool, the ground dropped off in a steep cliff to meet the sea. Turning to his right, he could see part of the town and the sweeping coastline of the bay against which it had been built. The height muted the sounds and, thankfully, the smells.
Now what?
Miles had wanted them to come to Haiti, land here on the north coast and look around a day or so before driving to Port-au-Prince if they found nothing here. Looking for what?
Miles had been less than specific: take note of anything amiss, anything unusual. Not very helpful in a place where natural beauty contrasted so sharply with the ugliness of a poverty-stricken population. It was all unusual. Everything grew in profusion, yet the people were starving, if what Lang had read was true. The flowers, the beaches, the majestic mountains rivaled anything Lang had seen in the Caribbean, yet tourists stayed away because of what was perceived as political unrest.
Gurt came up beside him, her hair still wet and gathered in a bun. “Is beautiful, no?”
Lang noticed she had changed into a skirt out of respect for the natives. Extending an arm around her waist, he pulled her up beside him. “Is beautiful, yes.”
For a moment neither spoke. Then Lang pointed toward the range of jagged mountains behind the town. “What is that?”
Gurt squinted. “I see only mountains.”
Lang took her by the shoulders, positioning her so she could look down his arm as if it were a gun sight. “Right there, on top of one of the peaks.”
“You mean the little square knob?”
Lang nodded, gratified she could see it, too. “Yeah. What do you suppose that is?”
“A mountain?”
“When’s the last time you saw a perfectly square mountain peak?”
“It might just appear square from this angle.”
He took her hand. “Let’s go down to the town and look around.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I think I saw all of it I wanted on the way up here.”
Lang chuckled. “Hey, you’re the one that wanted to come to Haiti.”
She sighed. “OK, but just for a short while. It is hot here.” She pointed. “Down there, hotter.”
On the way to the road up which Lang had pushed the taxi, Lang stopped at the desk.
The same young woman looked up. “May I help you, Mr. Lowen?”
“A question. Actually, several. First, what’s worth seeing down in the town?”
She pursed her lips in thought. “I recommend the marketplace. You will see all sorts of native foods and goods. You might also want to look at the church. The carved wooden doors are considered to be works of art. And speaking of art, you will find a number of art shops.”
“We were on our balcony and I noted the mountains south of town. There seems to be a square structure of some sort on top of one of them. What is it?”
Her face screwed up in thought. “A structure? On top of one of the mountains? You must be mistaken. There is nothing in those mountains other than a few mud huts.”
“As I said, it just looks square,” Gurt added.
Hand in hand, Gurt and Lang stepped from the area of the desk into the searing sunlight on the road. Immediately, a group of four or five men who had been sitting in the shade of a mahogany tree jumped to their feet and came trotting over.
“Need guide?”
“Very best guide, sir, madam.”
“Show you Cap Haitien? Five dollar, American.”
Lang had heard about these “guides.” A tour of the local area was their secondary function. The primary duty was to keep at bay the child beggars and overly aggressive vendors that swarmed the few tourists like flies to rancid meat. He selected the youngest of the group. A man-boy, really-whose legs were visibly twisted by pellagra, polio or some other symptom of dietary deficiency and the country’s lack of health care. Only two canes allowed him to walk, an exaggerated swagger that was painful to watch.
“How much?” Lang wanted to know as the other candidates sullenly retreated back to the shade.
“Five dolla, American.”
That seemed to be the standard price.
“What’s your name?”
“Paul.”
“OK, Paul, what are you going to take us to see?”
“We go market, church.” He nodded toward Gurt. “Then lady shop.”
Despite the horribly malformed legs of his guide, Lang was having to walk quickly to keep up with Paul, whose adeptness with his walking sticks would have been admired by a Special Olympics athlete.
Lang touched his arm, stopping him about halfway down the hill and pointing. “Paul, can you see that square thing on top of the mountain?”
The afternoon haze made the mountains little more than shadows but Paul immediately saw what Lang was talking about. “Citadelle.”
“Citadelle?”
Paul nodded vigorously. “After French leave Haiti, Henri Christophe no want them to come back. Build Citadelle.”
“Ah,” Lang exclaimed. “So, it’s a fortress of sorts.” He looked closer. “But what is it, twenty miles away? It could hardly protect the town from that distance.”
Paul treated Lang to a grin. “Christophe not defend town. Plan was to burn it and all crops, then go where big French guns could not reach: top of the mountain, where he could exist with five thousand people for a year, block mountain pass to interior of country. You want to see? I can arrange.”
Sound military strategy, Lang thought. Leave the invading French with nothing but ruins, nothing to sustain their army that they hadn’t brought themselves. “Yes, I’d like that. But, Paul, is this Citadelle something everyone around here knows about?”
Paul studied Lang’s face for a second as though he thought Lang might be joking. “Everyone know about Citadelle, yes.”
“OK. How do we get there?”
“Take taxi most of way. Last mile or two be by horse.”
“Can we go now?” Gurt asked. “I’ll need to change into pants.”
Paul nodded. “Twenty minutes. Cab be at hotel. We go.”
Gurt and Lang watched him move down the hill with both a speed and agility that belied his deformity before they turned to climb back toward their room.
“Why do you suppose the woman at the front desk said there was nothing up in those mountains but mud huts?” Lang pondered.
“Perhaps she was ignorant,” Gurt suggested.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
“Maybe she did not want us to be spending money outside the hotel.”
A logical answer but not one Lang believed any more than the first.
Minutes later, he was watching Gurt wriggle into a pair of jeans. “Do you always buy them so tight?”
She inhaled to button the front. “They shrink after the first washing.”
“So why not buy a size larger?”
Gurt sniffed, the answer obvious to any woman. “Because I wear a size eight or ten. If I bought a size larger, everyone would think I was getting fat.”
Lang knew better than to pursue that. Instead, he said, “I’m not happy about having to ride horses.”
Gurt inhaled again, this time for the zipper’s benefit. “The exercise will do you good.”
“Maybe, but I don’t like anything both bigger and dumber than I am.”
Milo, Haiti
An hour and a half later
Lang need not have worried about something bigger than he was. The horses gathered around a central corral were smaller than most burros. Astride one, his feet cleared the ground only by inches. The worn saddle did little to protect him from the razor back of his mount.
The town, Milo, was a small agricultural community of wooden huts amid small fields of coffee plants and banana trees. Several sheets spread on the ground displayed reddish beans that would turn chocolate brown as they dried. A second source of income was tourism or, as Paul explained, had been, before the fall of the last Duvalier over twenty years ago had precipitated a series of leaders, elected or otherwise, who were soon ousted by the next aspirant to power.
The three, Paul, Lang and Gurt, set off uphill on their diminutive mounts.
Gurt held her reins loosely. “It is as if they know where we go.”
Paul gave her a smile. “The only trip they know, here to the Citadelle and back. If you let go, they go there and return.”
Within minutes, the trail passed massive ruins of stone. At one time a structure far larger than anything Lang had seen in Haiti had been there.
Paul noted his interest. “Palace of Sans Souci, built by Christophe between 1810 and 1813. When he committed suicide, people pull down most of the buildings and earthquake in 1842 pull down whatever left.”
Past the sloping field on which the former palace was located, the path narrowed and began to rise sharply. Lang was beginning to wish he had brought a sweater. The air was no longer pregnant with moisture, but cool to the skin. They were sheltered from the sun by increasing vegetation on each side of the trail. Vines bigger around than Lang’s arm swooped low from massive branches of trees he could not identify. Unseen birds chattered in impenetrable shadows. Clearly this part of Haiti had not been deforested. At irregular intervals, the trio passed tiny mud huts squatting amid a row or two of stunted corn. Their arrival prompted naked children playing homemade flutes and drums to dance for coins tossed from horseback. Mangoes and stubby green bananas seemed to flourish without cultivation. Smiling women with huge jugs of water on their heads danced down the ragged path with steps as light as they were sure.
Twice Lang pulled his little horse to a stop and listened. He was certain he had heard something behind them, the ring of a steel shoe striking a rock, the whinny of a horse. He did not recall seeing any other tourist in Milo, and he was fairly certain no Haitian would ride up to the Citadelle for the fun of it. There was something wrong, though he could not have enunciated exactly what.
Squeezing between Gurt’s horse and the encroaching growth to ride side by side, he watched Paul in the lead. His bent, crooked legs seemed to present no impediment to his riding. In fact, he looked more comfortable than Lang felt.
Leaning over to place his mouth next to her ear, he said, “Someone is following us.”
“Following?” she repeated. “It is the only path through the forest. Anyone coming this way would use it.”
“But why would they come this way at all?” Lang argued. “I imagine everyone around here has been up to the old fort as many times as they might wish.”
“And you intend to do what?”
Lang slid from his horse, handing the reins to Gurt. “I intend to see who’s shadowing us. Go about another hundred yards and wait for me.”
“Lang…”
Before she could voice an objection, he had used a hanging vine to climb into the dense leaves of an ironwood tree. She shook her head slowly and led his horse away.
Lang did not have long to wait. Gurt had just vanished into the twilight of the natural canopy of vegetation when two horsemen appeared. They both were dressed in khaki uniforms, and both had sidearms in covered holsters. Despite the meager light, both wore reflective sunglasses. They passed within five feet of Lang. He watched them go, then dropped to the trail and followed. With the steep grade, the horses’ pace was easily one he could match.
He had been trailing them only a couple of minutes when the junglelike growth stopped as abruptly as the opening of a stage curtain. The two horsemen were silhouetted against a gray background that ebbed and flowed like running water. It took Lang a second to realize that he was at an altitude that touched the clouds.
A whiff of a breeze and the gray parted, revealing a sight he would not soon forget. Where the dense vegetation ended, it opened onto the open vista of a rocky meadow ending in a peak. Perched like a ship on an ocean wave, a massive stone structure stuck its bow into a sea of swirling mist. Lang had seen many forts, but never one with a shiplike prow. The object of fortification was not only to protect but provide a platform for heavy artillery, weaponry that could be concentrated on the enemy’s positions. Here, the pointed bow achieved the opposite effect, diffusing rather than concentrating fire. But it made little difference, Lang could see. The fortress sat on a bluff with a straight drop-off on three sides. The only approach was the narrow path no more than two feet wide that crowned the slope up to the Citadelle’s gate. A misstep would result in a fall of a thousand feet or more.
He could see Gurt and Paul waiting along this path, their horses nibbling at what little vegetation poked through the rocky surface. Then they disappeared in swirling gray cloud. By the time Lang could see Gurt and Paul again, the two horsemen he was following had reached them. Paul was engaged in an animated conversation. A few yards farther along toward the massive structure, two more men in uniform were approaching on horseback from the fort.
The two new arrivals reached the group at the same time as Lang. The discussion stopped and everyone turned to look at him, the only person not mounted.
“Tell them I had to answer the call of nature,” Lang said to Paul, swinging back onto the little horse.
Although he was unable to understand the words, Lang could tell Paul was unhappy at what the men were telling him. The tone was getting angry and the gestures increasingly aggressive.
“What are they saying?” Gurt asked.
Paul took a deep breath. “Say we cannot enter Citadelle. Is dangerous, floors and walls not safe. We must go back. These men have orders not to allow anyone inside.”
“The place has been there for nearly two hundred years,” Lang argued, “and it’s just now unsafe?”
“Go!” One of the men was pointing in the direction of Milo, perhaps exhausting his entire English vocabulary.
Lang took a long last look at the amazing structure perched on its lofty height. He could see guns of different sizes bristling through ports. The walls of stone rose well over a hundred feet and were smooth even though they had withstood the elements for nearly two centuries.
“Go now!”
The man knew more English than Lang had anticipated.
It was obvious no amount of argument was going to change the minds of these uniforms. Gurt reached into her purse and produced a twenty-dollar bill. In these latitudes, dead American presidents frequently spoke with more authority than mere orders.
The response was silent stares from four pairs of sunglasses.
Lang pulled the reins to his left. The little horse took dainty, careful steps to turn around on the narrow path. The animal was not only as small as a burro but just as surefooted.
“No point in arguing,” he said sourly. “Let’s go.”
In single file, they reentered the coolness of the tropical forest. It was not until they were almost back to Milo that the trail permitted two riders side by side.
Gurt reined her horse in to let Lang catch up to her. “You do not plan to see this marvelous place, this Citadelle?”
Lang’s response was a grunt. “First the woman at the hotel has never heard of the biggest attraction in Haiti, perhaps the whole Caribbean, and then we find at least four armed cops, militia, whatever, guarding the place to keep away the tourists for which the country is starving. I’d say there’s something there more important than tourist dollars, something someone doesn’t want seen.”
Gurt smiled knowingly. “I suppose we have shopping to do, as Paul suggested.”
“Indeed we do.”
Cap Haitien
20:29 that evening
For dinner, Lang and Gurt had shared a pot of tenaka soup, vegetables done in an oxtail broth. She had the poulet kreyol, he the griot, a highly spiced pork, all washed down with icy bottles of Prestige, Haiti’s beer, served in different-sized and different-shaped bottles clearly recognizable from their former lives as containing Budweiser, St. Pauli Girl, Coors and a number of other brands stamped on the bottom of the glass, a model of recycling but more a tribute to the Haitian mentality of wasting nothing. The meal was served at the hotel’s open-air restaurant beside the pool. Lang had warned Gurt to forgo the salad on the theory that in third world countries, that which isn’t bottled, cooked or canned can lead to irresistible impulses to inspect plumbing facilities.
Even if there are none immediately available.
Retreating to the lobby, another open room furnished in native carved mahogany, Lang treated himself to a Cuban cigar, a Montecristo #2. It had been his favorite smoke before Manfred’s arrival in his life had resulted in the secondhand-smoke treaty with Gurt, who had given up her beloved Marlboros.
“Do you not wish Cognac with that?” Gurt queried.
“Wish it?” Lang puffed contentedly. “You bet! But drink one? Not with what we have planned for the evening.”
Gurt lowered her voice even though the room was otherwise empty. “We have everything we need?”
Lang contemplated the glowing ash of his cigar tip. “We checked before dinner, remember?”
Gurt stood, giving Lang a seductive look. “I think I will take a nap. Perhaps you will join me?”
Lang eyed his cigar, barely half-smoked. “Perhaps you will wait a little?”
She twisted her hips suggestively. “Poor Lang. He must choose between two of his delights.”
“Haven’t you heard? The president of the United States has forbidden torture.”
Gurt parted her lips to run her tongue along them. “We are not in the United States.”
Lang brightened. “Which means there is no such thing as a ‘no smoking’ hotel room.” He stood. “Lead on, my lady! My cigar and I follow!”
She preceded him across a small but attentively landscaped courtyard, down stairs lit by gaslights, and stood in front of the door. Even in the poor light he could see her stiffen.
She turned and took the few steps required to stand beside him. “Someone is in our room.”
Lang’s joy of anticipation evaporated faster than early-morning dew in July. “You’re sure?”
“The tall tale…”
“Telltale, the little strip of tape under the doorknob.”
“It is gone.”
“Perhaps the maid, turning down the bed.”
“She did that while you were waiting for me at the restaurant.”
Lang slid by her, squatting beside the door. He listened for several minutes before rejoining her. “Whoever it is is still there. I can hear someone moving around.”
“We will have the hotel call the police.”
Lang thought of the woman behind the desk who might be the only person in Cap Haitien unaware of the Citadelle, remembered his remark at dinner with the waiter hovering nearby that he intended to enjoy a cigar in the lobby afterward. “Not so fast. It might be the hotel.”
“Lang, we cannot just burst into the room. He might be armed.”
Just then, a shaft of light shone from the door. Whoever was in the room was coming out.
As though by prior agreement, both Lang and Gurt flattened themselves against the building. An indistinct shape exited their room, pulling the door closed behind it and furtively scurrying toward Lang and Gurt.
Lang waited until the person was almost abeam of him before sticking out a foot. Something tripped over it and went down amid what were understandable as curses in any language.
Lang was on top of the form, his knee pressing against shoulders as he held on to the wrists, jerking them upward. Once he had a firm grip, he stood, snatching the person to their feet. He was surprised at how light, how small, the would-be burglar was.
“Mr Lowen!”
“It is the woman from the front desk!” Gurt exclaimed just as Lang reached the same conclusion.
He spun her around to face him, pushing her toward the nearest gaslight. “Care to explain what you were doing in our room?”
Her eyes sparkled with either fear or fury. “To check your air-conditioning. Several of our guests have complained the units were not working. I knocked on your door, and when I got no answer…”
Lang had seen no other guests, had the distinct impression he and Gurt were the only ones. Nonetheless, he let her go.
She took a step back, rubbing her wrists. “You should be more careful who you attack,” she said angrily.
“You should leave the door open when you are in someone’s room,” Lang countered. “It might help avoid unpleasant surprises for both you and your guests.”
She gave him a glare, turned on her heel and was gone.
Inside the room, the window unit was doing a workmanlike job.
Lang glanced around. “I don’t see anything missing.”
Gurt held up a paper bag that held the afternoon’s purchases. “Perhaps not missing, but someone has moved the contents around.”
At the same time, on the deserted road beside the hotel, a woman stood, talking into a cell phone.
“Yes, I looked carefully. The woman’s clothes mostly have German labels. The man’s… His jeans are American, but that means nothing. The wealthy all have American jeans. Two of his shirts are French; they still have the price tag.”
She paused, listening.
“No, I found no weapons but I did find something interesting: several lengths of rope, a boat anchor-a small one-and flashlights. Whatever they plan, they plan it for tonight. They are scheduled to leave tomorrow. They saw me leaving their room, but I gave them an excuse.”
Another pause.
“Yes, tonight. I would expect them tonight.”
Milo
02:40 the next morning
The cab ride from Cap Haitien had been uneventful if expensive. Andre, operator of the vibrant blue Ford taxi, had asked no questions as to why anyone would choose to visit the little hamlet in the morning’s earliest hours. If he had curiosity, the hundred dollars pressed into his palm quenched it.
As bidden, he let them out at the bottom of the hill that rose to Milo and became a mountain as it reached ever upward to the Citadelle. Wordlessly, he wheeled the old car around and headed back the way he had come. Gurt and Lang shouldered the small backpacks they had purchased the previous afternoon.
Gurt was carefully picking her way in the ghostly light of a three-quarter moon. “You could have let him drive us into town,” she observed.
“And wake everybody? The car had no muffler, y’know.”
“Still, riding would not risk breaking our necks walking in the dark.”
“Easy enough for you to say. Last time you rode uphill, I pushed, remember?”
They finished the gentle slope in silence. At the top, the scattering of huts was dark. Somewhere, a dog barked, someone shouted and the animal went silent. To their left, a gentle whinny led them to a low wooden fence around the central corral. Lang slipped a saddle and bridle from the top slat and was approaching a horse made skittish either by the dark or the fact he was facing a stranger.
“It will give trouble if we are caught taking horses,” Gurt predicted.
“If we don’t have them back by sunup, being horse thieves will be the least of our problems.”
“Do they not hang horse stealers?”
Lang managed to slip a bridle over the horse’s head. “That was Lonesome Dove. Don’t know about Haiti. Whatever they do, we don’t want to be here when it gets light. Now, get one saddled up.”
Each leading a horse toward the increasing slope, Lang and Gurt waited until they were well past the last silent hut before mounting. The trail narrowed to the point of invisibility as it snaked upward. Lang had not been willing to follow a path he could not see with an abyss on either side, as would be the case approaching the Citadelle. Instead, he had remembered the little sure-footed horses and how they had needed no guidance from riders to find the Citadelle or home. He could only hope they knew their directions well enough to navigate without actually seeing their way.
The moon was playing peekaboo behind puffy, silver-lined clouds, drenching the mountainside in inky darkness for minutes at a time. The surrounding coolness was Lang’s first clue they had entered that part of the route that passed through tropical forest. One of the horses’ hooves struck a rock, and there was a sound from the side of the trail that could have been a sleeping human mumbling in one of the mud habitations beside the trail.
There was no doubt when they emerged from the canopy of trees. A panoply of diamond chips sparkled in the eastern sky, undimmed by the fickle moon. Like a stage setting, the Citadelle was an undefined mass of foreboding, black against the array of stars. For once the area was not cloaked in clouds. Lang would soon find out if the tiny horses could navigate by memory alone. Between here and the bastion the narrow path was a bridge across oblivion.
The both saw it at the same time: a pinprick of light flashed and died near the base of the fortress. Someone had lit a cigarette.
“If there’s one, there’s more,” Lang whispered, although the distance to the Citadelle did not yet mandate silence.
The shadow that was Gurt nodded. “But how many more?”
Lang slipped from the saddle. “With a little luck, we’ll never know.” He edged past her horse to stand behind it, placing a hand on its rump. “I’ll walk awhile, following your horse. When we get a little closer, you stop, hold my horse.”
“But you cannot see.”
“If I get close enough, I won’t have to. I’ll move on hands and knees, feel my way along.”
“But-”
“No buts. If we get any closer and one of the horses whinnies or strikes a rock…”
Although clearly unhappy to be relegated to the role of holding the horses, Gurt knew this was neither the time nor the place for an argument. Reluctantly, she rode ahead in silence until Lang touched her arm.
“Here, wait here.” He handed her the reins of his mount. “If I’m not back in an hour and a half, take the horses back to Milo and get to the hotel. I’ll need help.”
She started to offer a final protest, but Lang had slipped away into the darkness.
On hands and knees, Lang felt his way along the rocky path. Within minutes, his back began to throb at the unusual angle at which it was bent. Progress was slow, one hand in front of the other, making sure where he could place each knee. Once or twice, he had to stop as unseen rocks were dislodged and tumbled noisily into the void on either side. He would pause, listening for any human reaction.
So far, there was none.
After what seemed like painful hours, but his watch’s luminous dial described as twenty minutes, Lang could no longer see the Citadelle’s form against the sky. He was so close it filled his vision. Starting to stand, he froze in midcrouch as an orange dot caught the periphery of his vision. Either the cigarette smoker they had seen from the trail or another nicotine lover.
Lang moved a few inches to his right and squatted, trying to pick up a silhouette, a shape, anything that might give him an idea as to the smoker’s exact position. The mass of the old fortress and its shadow from the moon blacked out everything in front of him. His fingers searched the uneven ground at his feet and closed around a stone slightly larger than a softball.
He waited.
The cigarette glowed with what turned out to be the last puff before it was discarded in an arc of burning ashes against which Lang could see a single figure not three feet away.
Lang purposely cleared his throat.
The man in front of him grunted in surprise and Lang was close enough to hear the small sounds of movement. Pebbles underfoot crunched; metal struck metal as a weapon struck a belt buckle.
Lang timed his swing with an accuracy learned on the Agency’s long-ago training fields. Rock met skull with a grinding crunch and a grunt. He fell against Lang.
Quickly moving from under the still body, Lang searched his victim until his hand touched a weapon still grasped in unconscious hands. Running a hand down a stubby barrel, Lang quickly identified the gun as an AK-47, type 63/68. There was no chance he could see the markings stamped into the metal that would reveal its origins. He set it down beside him and fumbled off his backpack.
Minutes later, he was finishing binding the man’s arms and legs with duct tape. Task completed, he taped the man’s mouth shut and stood, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. No doubt the guy would regain consciousness shortly-he was already moaning-but Lang intended to be long gone before his companions found him in the early-morning light.
For a full five minutes, Lang stood still, listening for any evidence his presence had been detected. He heard none. Still, he didn’t dare approach the fortress by the front, the site of the only entrance. Surely it would be guarded. He had prepared for a less-orthodox entry. He moved gingerly to the side of the path. Keeping a precarious balance, he reached a point where he could see a slice of the night sky, its stars outlining the wall of the Citadelle.
Climbing that wall was out of the question without some sort of help, help that just might be provided by…
Lang took a length of rope from his backpack and uncoiled it. Blindly, he tied a slipknot into one end. Twirling the rope above his head like a cowboy chasing an errant steer, he let it slide through his fingers. Rope met rock wall with a faint slapping sound and Lang reeled it in to try again. On the third effort, the rope settled around a cannon’s muzzle protruding a foot or so from its gun port. Lang threw his weight backward, drawing the knot tight. He gave several exploratory tugs to make sure it was fast before he slung the pack back onto his shoulders and began to climb.
Unlike many fortifications that had been built with a slight slope to deflect artillery fire, the Citadelle’s walls were vertical. Above the gun port toward which he was climbing, Lang could see two more, their silent barrels protruding into the night like the gargoyles of a Gothic cathedral.
His foot found a niche in the mortar between two stones. Pulling on the rope as he braced against the wall, he was able to “walk” up the face of the fort perpendicular to it. Above his head, he could see the cannon getting ever closer. Another step, perhaps two, and he would be there.
The gun was finally within his reach. Taking one hand from the rope, he stretched toward it. At the same time his foot hit a trickle of water, a patch of moss, something slick that broke the traction between his rubber-soled shoe and the rock surface, sending him swinging pendulum-like across the face of the stone.
He clung to the rope, an umbilical cord of life that held him above a drop of thousands of feet. The swing ended abruptly as his momentum slammed him into a protruding stone, perhaps the top of another gun port. The impact knocked the breath out of his lungs and blurred his vision with colorful spots that spun in front of his eyes. Gasping to refill his lungs, he felt his grip on the line slip before his concentration could return from the pain of colliding with unforgiving rock.
He drifted back and forth in space, the cannon’s muzzle taunting him with unreachable proximity. His shoulder muscles were in rebellion, sending jolts of pain radiating from neck to wrist. Hands beginning to spasm from the physical tension, he forced one after the other to inch his way up the remaining few feet of rope toward the gun.
He was almost there when he felt an almost imperceptible slack in the line. The swinging motion had somehow loosened the knot in the rope. It was coming loose.
If it did, the next stop would be nearly a half mile below.
Gurt was trying to get comfortable sitting on a craggy rock, the reins of the two horses in her hands. Her watch told her Lang had been gone only a few minutes, but the wait was becoming burdensome. They could just as easily have found some outcropping of stone to which to tether both horses. Unspoken had been the thought that the two of them, Gurt and Lang, should not be at risk at the same time. Manfred should not be in danger of becoming an orphan at a single stroke. She accepted the reasoning, but being left out of any action still rankled her.
Waiting was something she had been trained to do. The hours or days she had spent in anticipation of completing some Agency operation had taught her the virtue of patience. At a time when gratification was expected instantly, satisfaction even quicker, where information could be exchanged in nanoseconds, waiting was an acquired talent that exceeded simple inactivity. In the world Gurt had inhabited, long periods of apparent idleness could be terminated violently and unexpectedly.
Waiting, professional and useful waiting, required mental alertness behind a facade of indolence.
For all of those reasons, Gurt was sufficiently attuned to her environment to detect the sound. It wasn’t the light breeze whispering among the boulders that littered the mountainside, it wasn’t the exfoliation of a rock contracting as it cooled from the previous day’s heat and it wasn’t the sound of some stray animal. She was unsure what she had heard but it was none of those.
She released the horses, who made no effort to escape or even stray but stood dumbly, heads down as though confused as to what to do next. She lay flat, making certain she would not be outlined against the starry sky.
This time she identified the sound: horses slowly walking down from the Citadelle above. The muffled creak of leather against leather told her these were not grazing animals but saddled mounts, presumably with riders. And they were definitely coming her way, because there was no other way to go.
She could hear voices now, words she could not understand, but their inflection indicated surprise, perhaps at finding two saddled, riderless horses in the middle of the precarious trail between fortress and forest. A beam of a flashlight ran across the ground, missing her by inches. The next time she might not be so lucky.
And there would be a next time, probably in the following few seconds if the tone of curiosity she heard in the voices increased. If these men were guards of some sort, the two riderless horses would not be ignored.
She reached out, preparatory to moving as far down the slope as she could before the sheer drop-off. Her hand touched something solid, rough. A large outcropping of rock. She belly-wriggled toward it. Looking up, she saw two figures, half horse, half man, dark cutouts against stars beginning to dim as they were devoured by the moon’s brighter light. She could not be certain but she thought she saw what might be a weapon slung across each man’s shoulder.
She made out each careful step of the two newly arrived horses. She even imagined she could detect the impact of each hoof on the stony surface. They had to be within feet of her. The light breeze brought her the smell of horse sweat and damp leather. Could she also feel the animals’ body heat on her skin?
Another beam of light swept the area, barely giving Gurt time enough to roll behind what she hoped was the protection of the rock. She seemed to have succeeded. The prying light swept by.
The jingle of tack and a grunt told her at least one of the riders was dismounting. On foot, sweeping the area with light, he would find her in minutes. She thought wistfully of the Glock 19 safely if uselessly stored in the drawer of her bedside table at home. She might not have to use it were it here, but it would certainly put her in a better bargaining position when she was discovered. So much spilt milk, as the Americans would say, though she never really understood why one would cry over spilt milk. Sour or spoiled milk, yes. But spilled?
Spilled, sour or rancid, the difficulty of getting a firearm through U.S. security at departure had seemed at the time to outweigh the possible benefits, not to mention the off chance Haitian customs might actually have an interest in luggage other than visitors’ wallets.
Like most decisions with a bad result, the effect of leaving weapons behind now seemed foolish.
Foolish or not, the man was approaching Gurt’s hiding place. She could see his form against the sky. Perhaps her height, maybe a little shorter. He held the light in one hand, a rifle in the other. His head seemed misshaped. No, he was wearing a short cap of some sort. Part of a uniform? Whatever, within seconds, a minute at most, she was going to be discovered. It was time to act.
But how?
She slowly got to her knees, ready to spring.
Waiting, waiting.
In a second or two, the knot would slip through, leaving Lang with a useless length of rope and a fall he would not survive. It was time to do something, even if it was wrong.
He swayed his body back and forth on the rope, gaining momentum like a child on a playground swing set. He could only hope he reached a wide enough arc before the line slipped free. On the third swing, he sensed rather than felt the slackness.
The knot was undone, the rope loose.
Ignoring the fire that burned along the muscles and tendons of his back, shoulders and arms, he hurled himself into space.
His left hand slapped something, then his right. His fingers were scraping the cannon’s muzzle, trying to find purchase on a circumference far larger than they could encircle.
He was not going to be able to hold on.
Sucking in his breath, he used what little traction he had to jackknife, sending his feet above his head like a circus trapeze artist. By wriggling, he got one leg over the cannon as far as the knee, then the other. Now he was head down, knees hooked over the cannon barrel, hanging like a giant bat in some third-rate horror film.
He tried to bend outward so that he could get his hands on the iron of the gun again. No luck. He hadn’t been that supple since grammar school.
He slid the leg closest to the wall a few inches. Then the other. Already he could hear the buzzing in his ears, feel the dizziness of being head down too long. The muzzle of the AK-47 slung over his shoulder rapped the back of his head. He shoved the symptoms of inversion away, concentrating on inching forever closer to the opening of the gun port.
At last a hand touched the rough rock surface of the sill of the opening. Contorting his body, Lang twisted so his other hand could also grab hold. For a second, he hung by his arms, legs dangling in space as his feet sought purchase against the stone face.
He took a deep breath and chinned himself upward. For an instant, he hung half in, half out of the portal before he flopped inside like a hooked fish being pulled over the transom of a boat. For a full moment, he lay still, waiting for his breathing and heartbeat to return to a semblance of normal. He smelled a mixture of mustiness and the sweet air of a tropical night.
A fragile shaft of moonlight filtered through the aperture through which he had entered, a beam dividing the night into equal parts of darkness. Using touch more than sight, Lang got to his feet. It took only a minute or two to determine he was in a small room, perhaps ten by ten. At his feet was a semicircular iron rail, the open part toward the port. Although long rotted away, the wheels of the gun’s carriage would have moved along this track to cover an arc of perhaps ten degrees or so. The gun, a massive twenty-four-pounder, judging by its girth, lay amid the rusting remains of carriage-wheel rims, aiming screw and things Lang could not identify by touch. Beside the cannon, balls were neatly stacked in a pyramid near hoops of powder barrels. Lang had the eerie feeling the gun’s crew had taken temporary leave and would return any minute.
The ghostly impression was reenforced as a cloud slowly enveloped the old fortress, turning what little light there was into gray fog. The sudden drop in temperature caused goose bumps along Lang’s exposed skin. Or was it the spookiness of the place?
The damp shreds of the cloud reluctantly dispersed. Lang could see the rear of the room was open, allowing a gauzy film of moonlight to paint a parade ground from which mouths of similar gun rooms yawned. Above him, he could make out at least two more levels, each with openings to rooms he was certain were similar to the one in which he stood. At another time, he would have been curious as to how newly freed slaves had obtained the expensive ordnance that he had seen bristling from the Citadelle’s walls the previous afternoon. There must have been at least a hundred guns here in one of the world’s more remote places, almost twice as many as Henry Knox had been able to supply to the Continental Army for its siege of Boston in 1775.
Lang stood just inside the room, listening and trying to command his eyes to somehow penetrate the darkness. If whatever was here merited a guard-the one he had left bound in duct tape-logic dictated there would be others.
Keeping his back to the wall, he edged toward the courtyard, a hand feeling his way. His foot struck something along the stone just as his hand felt a wooden surface. Wood? Any wood, like the gun carriages, would have long fallen victim to the humid tropical climate and the insects that flourished in it.
Turning to face the wall, he spread his arms. Crates, long wooden crates, were stacked to the low ceiling of the gun room. This was hardly something left by Christophe’s militia nearly two centuries ago.
He slipped the AK-47’s strap from his shoulder, removed his backpack and fumbled in it until he touched the tiny penlight he had purchased in Cap Haitien. A larger flashlight would have been more help, but the smaller version had a concentrated beam, one less likely to be seen by other eyes. His back to the room’s opening, he turned the light on, playing it across the boxes. They were marked with Asian characters, either Japanese or Chinese. Since kanji, the Japanese writing system, had been adapted from the Chinese centuries ago, the subtle differences between the Chinese onyomi and the Japanese kunyomi were indistinguishable to anyone not literate in one or both.
In light of what Miles had said, though, it was an easy guess which one he was looking at.
He switched off the light and looked over his shoulder. He neither saw nor heard any indication his presence had been detected. He went down on hands and knees, fingers searching the dusty floor. He found what he was looking for, a rusty piece of iron that could have been part of the gun carriage, a piece of the track or any number of military items.
He touched the end. Sharp enough, but had the rust of time made it too brittle? One way to find out. Using only touch, he found the edge where the lid of a crate had been hammered onto the sides. He worked the edge of his newfound tool between the two, working it up and down like a crowbar.
With an almost human groan, the nails pulled loose and Lang inhaled a familiar odor, the sweet smell of gun oil. His fingers blindly fumbled aside an oily cloth and touched what was unmistakably a dozen or so gun barrels. The other parts would be in other crates.
He sat back on his haunches and thought for a moment. There was no way to tell how many small arms might be stored here at the Citadelle without a count he doubted he would have time to make. For that matter, the old fortress was more than ample to also contain more serious weaponry-missile components, for instance.
Now there was a happy thought: Chinese rockets with potential nuclear capability right on America’s doorstep.
Almost equally disturbing was the way the rifle barrels had ben packed: with oily cloths instead of Cosmoline, that Vaseline-like substance that prevents moisture from reaching the inner working of machinery, widely used for the storage of firearms. But Cosomoline required detailed removal from intricate nooks and crannies such as firing pins and ejection mechanisms. It was not a method of storage for weapons which would see use soon.
For whatever purpose, rifles were going to be issued to someone in the near future.
What other surprises did the old fort hold?
Easing the crate’s top back in place, Lang slid along the wall and into the parade ground. The night air brought him the heavy fragrance of citrus blooms, of the sea and a tiny trace of burning tobacco.
Lang turned his head slowly in hope of a visual clue as to the source of the last. The moon, now overhead, painted the interior of the old fort a monochomatic gray-silver, corners delineated by smudges of black shadow. The spasmodic breeze whispered through the open gun ports as it pushed a small piece of paper across the parade ground.
Lang could have been the only human on earth had it not been for the persistent smell of tobacco.
He unslung the AK-47 not because he feared he might have immediate use for it as much as the comfort it gave him to have a weapon in his hands in this seemingly deserted and ghostly place. Facing the parade ground, he walked backward up a ramp that led to the next level, careful to use the shadows as cover as long as possible.
As far as he could tell, the upper gun level resembled the one he had just left. He looked around carefully before moving toward the nearest gun room. His foot touched something on the stone. Kneeling, he felt a wire, what seemed to be an electrical wire that ran from the edge of the ramp he had just traveled.
He squatted, the wire in his hand. Why would it be necessary to install electricity here unless there was some activity besides storage? There was certainly no need at the moment, as indicated by the absence of the chugging of a generator. Like the rifles stored below, wiring the Citadelle was an indication of action planned rather than undertaken.
But what?
Following the wire, he entered another room, this one without a gun port and, he estimated by touch, larger than the one he had seen below. Its lack of opening to the outside indicated its use had perhaps been that of magazine, a place where powder and shell could have been temporarily stored until distributed to the guns on this level.
The hand not holding the rifle extended in front, he touched another surface, this one metal. Exploring with his hand, Lang estimated whatever he was touching to be at least twenty feet long and four or five wide. He guessed this container held something more than small arms. A brief probe with the flashlight revealed more Chinese characters.
An idea. Returning the light to his pocket, he pulled out his BlackBerry. Now, if he could manipulate the settings… Ah, the screen lit up. Taking a picture was going to involve a flash, but he saw no other way of getting an image of whatever military hardware this might be to Miles. Before leaving the States, Miles had given him an e-mail address, which Lang had dutifully stored.
So, all he had to do was take the picture, e-mail it and get the hell out of this creepy place before anyone was the wiser.
Now to get the hell…
The thought vanished as the room was flooded with light. For an instant, he thought he had been blinded by the tiny flash of the BlackBerry’s camera. Had he turned it upon himself instead of the containers?
“Drop the weapon,” came a voice from behind him. “Drop it, put your hands on your head and turn very slowly.”
Lang did as he was told, his eyes slow to adjust to the brilliance of two very bright flashlights in his eyes. He could make out the forms of maybe a half-dozen men, but their faces remained obscured in darkness. Likewise, he could not see who was speaking.
“Mr. Lowen,” the disembodied vice said, using the name on Lang’s passport, “or should I say Reilly? We have been expecting you.”
“And who might you be?” Lang asked.
Rough hands grabbed him, shoving him toward the ramp he had just climbed. He tripped over the cord, his hands getting cut as they braced against the stone to break the fall.
“Careful, Mr. Reilly,” the unseen voice mocked him. “We would not want you to get hurt. At least not until we have had the chance to.. . what do you say? Visit, not until we have had a chance to visit awhile.”
Someone behind him found this funny, snickered, someone who was prodding Lang’s back with what felt very much like a gun barrel. Hands patted his body and dug into his pockets, removing his BlackBerry, flashlight and money clip. The watch was taken from his wrist. His wallet was slipped from its pocket.
Not a good sign. Wallets were the first place investigators looked when trying to identify a corpse.
The moon was to the rear of the rock behind which Gurt was hiding. She could clearly see the man walking slowly toward her, searching the ground with the beam of his flashlight. Carefully, she edged around the stone, keeping it between him and her. She could not go much farther without being clearly visible in the moonlight to his companion, who, she assumed, was still sitting on his horse.
She got as close to the ground as she could with her feet still underneath her.
The flashlight’s beam hit her face and she uncoiled like a broken spring. Her hands, open to cover as much area as possible, hit the man square in the middle of the chest. He grunted, stumbling backward in surprise.
Before he could regain his balance, Gurt shoved from the side, pushing him toward the precipice. He was waving his arms to regain some form of equilibrium when she stuck a foot between his ankles and snatched it back, knocking his feet out from under him.
He windmilled backward. Even in the dim light, Gurt could see eyes enlarged and bright with terror as he lost his footing and toppled backward over the edge.
She was surprised he did not scream. The only sound was of rocks knocked loose by his fruitless efforts to find a handhold.
She didn’t have the time to find out if she could hear his body’s impact below. Instead, she rushed the man on horseback. Spooked by her charge, the animal whinnied and stepped back nervously, throwing off the aim of the rider trying to bring a weapon to bear.
Before he could level his rifle again, she was upon him, tugging at his belt. He steadied himself in the saddle with one hand as he raised the barrel of the gun with the other to bring it down on her head.
It was a move Gurt had anticipated. She sidestepped, the muzzle sizzling in the air as it missed her cheek by fractions of an inch. She grabbed his wrist, and using his momentum in delivering the blow, she yanked downward as hard as she could.
His cap flew off and he seemed to leap from the saddle, performing a flip from the horse’s back that would have done credit to an acrobat. Except that he landed headfirst with a lung-emptying thud.
She was on him as he shook his head and tried to stand. Before he reached his knees, she delivered a kick with all her strength that caught him squarely on the chin. He spun backward and fell on his back. This time he made no effort to get up.
Straddling the prone body, Gurt patted him down. Her search revealed a flashlight hanging by a clip to his belt and a long knife-a bayonet, she assumed-in a scabbard also on his belt.
He was starting to moan as Gurt unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. The pants were a little more difficult, requiring her to tug at the cuffs to dump him out of them. He had recovered consciousness sufficiently to mumble words she could not understand. She dragged him over to the rock behind which she had been hiding and found where she had shrugged off her backpack.
It took mere seconds to locate the roll of tape, one of two Lang had purchased. Only a little more time was required before the man was trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey. He was trying to say something as she slapped the final strip across his mouth, reducing him to grunts and squeals.
Gurt slid the shirt on over her own, trying not to notice the odor of stale sweat. The top and bottom buttoned easily, but no way was the fabric going to stretch across her breasts. She stepped into the pants, a little short at the bottom, and the belt lacked enough notches to tighten it enough to keep the trousers around her waist. No matter. She was going to be sitting anyway. She made certain both flashlight and bayonet were still in place.
It took several minutes to locate the man’s rifle and his cap. She put the latter on her head, tucking her long blonde hair under it. A soft whinny led her to one of the horses, which she mounted as she slung the rifle over her shoulder.
If whoever was in the Citadelle had sent a patrol along the treacherous path in the dead of night, it was a near certainty she and Lang were expected. They could well have been waiting for him. Besides, she had no intention of simply waiting for his return.
Just like a man to assume she would obey him simply because of his gender.
Lang was ushered into a small room he guessed had served as an officer’s quarters. He was again nearly blinded by the light. As his eyes adjusted, he noted the small Yamaha generator softly chugging in a corner. The stone walls must have insulated its sound from the outside. He got a glimpse of a pair of iron cots with thin cotton mattresses. He was less than surprised to see a poster bearing the likenesses of Sun Yat-sen, Mao and Chou En-lai hanging over two packing crates that served as a dresser. Across the room a blanket hung over what Lang surmised was an entrance to one of the corridors outside the gun rooms.
Hands snatched his arms behind his back and pressed him into a reed-bottomed chair to which his wrists were tightly bound before he was spun around to face the door.
An Asian of undeterminable age peered back at him. The man wore a woodland-pattern camouflage uniform whose epaulets bore two stitched stars. His fatigue cap had a single red star pinned above the red band above the bill. If Lang remembered correctly, he was facing a Zhong Xiao, lieutenant colonel, of the People’s Liberation Army.
The man reached somewhere beyond the angle that Lang’s bindings permitted him to see and produced the mate to the chair in which Lang sat.
Dragging it to within a few feet of Lang, he reached into a pocket, produced a cigarette without removing the pack and lit it as he sat. “I am Lieutenant Colonel Shien Dow,” he announced in American-accented English, “and I have a few questions for you.”
Lang said nothing.
Dow took a long drag, expelling the smoke somewhere above Lang’s head. “First, who sent you?”
“I came on my own.”
“With a false passport? Why would you enter Haiti on a false passport? That could get you in serious trouble, you know.”
“With whom? The People’s Republic of China?”
The lieutenant colonel stared at him a moment, and then Lang’s head seemed to explode. He never saw the blow coming. The next thing his brain registered was the chair, with him still in it, sideways on the floor. Unseen hands righted both.
“Let us try again, Mr. Reilly…”
“My name is Lowen and I am a German citizen.”
This time he saw what was coming but was unable to prevent it. His interrogator’s fist smashed into Lang’s mouth and he tasted blood as the chair toppled over again.
By the time Lang was propped up, Dow was rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the left, cigarette dangling from his lips.
He gave a deep sigh. “We know who you are. Your name is Langford Reilly; you are a lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. We even have your address, where you and your wife live with your young son. Speaking of your wife, she came here to the Citadelle with you. If you cherish her safety, you will cooperate.”
Implicit and direct bluffs? Lang suspected so. Harming Manfred or Gurt would not produce the immediate result this man wanted. Besides, Gurt should be on her way back to the Mont Joli by now, fully alerted for trouble when Lang didn’t return. The question was, how did they know who he was? Some sort of face-recognition equipment used in conjunction with a surreptitious photo taken, perhaps in Venice? Perhaps the credit-card receipt for the costume? No matter. What was important was that they did know who, and what did he do now? The sole weapon Lang had was to stall, to drag things out as long as possible to give Gurt time to get help. The problem was that this guy was going to use Lang as a punching bag or worse in the meantime.
He was not disappointed over the next hour.
Time ceased to exist. Only pain was real, throbbing pain from the places Lang had been hit, stabbing pain as another blow was delivered. If Lang gave them the information they sought, they had little incentive to let him live. He had to hold out, delay until Gurt came up with a plan.
He tried to withdraw his mind from this place, a technique Agency training had included. He saw the azure waters caressing the verdant cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast, the majesty of the Austrian Alps draped in winter white. He almost smiled as he recalled something Manfred had said, a particular wild romp in bed with Gurt.
But always the pain intruded, shattering his thoughts like a china plate hitting the floor. The pain was sapping his energy as well as his will. At some point, his resistence to it would be gone. Why suffer the agony? Tell them what they wanted now. Death would take the pain away.
And I’ll never see Manfred or Gurt again.
His head snapped up from his chest and he realized with a start Dow’s face was inches from his own, close enough that the spittle from his screaming mouth sprayed Lang’s cheeks.
Lang was familiar with the interrogation tactic: soft voice rises unexpectedly to yelling, a sudden about-face designed to keep the person being questioned off balance. He also had a pretty good idea of what came next. If physical beating did not produce the desired result, there were two options. The first was to put the prisoner someplace where sleep and a sense of time would be impossible, nothing to occupy his mind but the dread of future beatings. Lang thought that scenario unlikely. Dow would not wait for days to find out why Lang and Gurt were here. The second option was to simply increase the pain factor: electric shock of the genitals, pull a few teeth, some form of mutilation.
The options were both limited and unpleasant.
As though to confirm Lang’s fears, Dow nodded to someone behind Lang. Fingers grabbed his shirt and tore it from his body. An instant later, the Chinese colonel stubbed out a burning cigarette against Lang’s left nipple.
Lang was almost deafened by the sound of a scream, a sound he hardly realized came from him.
Gurt was close enough to see the men just inside the massive entrance to the Citadelle. Darkness prevented her from making out their features, but there was enough light from the declining moon to see there were two of them, one on each side of a portal that must have been twenty feet high. She leaned forward along the narrow spine of the small horse, hoping to diminish her stature. Unless one of them chose to use a flashlight, she would appear as indistinct to them as they to her, just one more man returning from a patrol.
She entered without challenge. Her little mount picked up its measured pace, perhaps in the realization the stable and feed were near.
She was abeam the two guards when one of them spoke, a low, guttural sound with a definitely inquisitive inflection.
A question, of course. He wanted to know where the other member of the patrol was. How was she going to answer a question in a language she did not know?
Lowering her voice into what might, possibly, be the range of a male tone, she growled a muttered response imitating the sound of the words she had just heard.
The man who had asked the question spoke again, this time louder. She could see him approaching as his partner reached for the strap of the rifle slung over a shoulder.
Gurt pulled her horse to a stop, slowly slipped her right foot from the stirrup and began to swing a leg over her mount’s spiny backbone in a slow dismount, the casual movement of a man weary from both the hour and his duties just now complete. From the corner of an eye she measured the closing distance between her and the question asker. It would not do to appear too deliberate or in a hurry.
She timed it so he came in range just as her right foot cleared the saddle. With her weight shifting to her left leg, she pivoted in the stirrup, her right foot swinging in a blur of an arc that connected neatly with the man’s jaw.
He staggered backward, just far enough to give Gurt room to unsling the rifle from her back. Dropping both feet to the ground, she grabbed the gun’s barrel and brought the stock down on the man’s head with a crunch that left him sitting on the ground, too dazed to present any immediate threat.
Spinning on her toes, she faced the second guard, now moving to get around the horse between them. Gurt could easily have shot him, but the sound would have alerted anyone within a mile, including whatever garrison now occupied the old fort.
He had no such qualms, as evidenced by his efforts to bring his weapon to bear around a nervous, diminutive horse.
Gurt dropped to a squat, merging her silhouette with that of the animal and effectively disappearing in the darkness. She used part of the one or two seconds before her adversary could find her to draw the bayonet from its scabbard and test its balance in her hand.
With her left hand, she slapped the horse’s rump, causing it to shy away. The man with the gun swung the rifle in her direction. She cocked her right arm. And threw.
The bayonet had not been designed for this sort of use and Gurt had not had time to explore its characteristics. Nonetheless, she had little choice but to throw it. Because of its weight, she had done so not like a knife but more like a spear, straight rather than end over end, more shoulder than the wrist action required to accurately toss a blade.
A thump and a strangled half gargle, half grunt, told her she had hit the mark.
The rifle clattered against the stone of the parade ground. She visualized the man clutching with both hands at the steel that protruded from his stomach or chest.
The rifle now in both hands, she stepped over to where he had been. A figure, faceless in the dark, sat or knelt on the ground, issuing a low moan. With a foot, Gurt pushed him onto his side, bent over and tugged at the hilt of the blade. It was caught on something. She tried to wiggle it free, eliciting a scream of pain. It stubbornly refused to come loose and Gurt doubted she had a lot of time before someone came to investigate the yell.
There was little choice, one she made intuitively on the side of safety rather than humanity. She could tape him up, taking precious seconds, or…
She leaned on the hilt of the bayonet until the blade went in all the way and the struggles at the other end ceased.
In a couple of steps, she was beside the first man, whose darkened form was shakily trying to get to its feet. Grasping the rifle by its muzzle again, she swung the stock as hard as she could to connect with the base of his skull. He collapsed in a boneless heap without a sound.
She paused only to scoop up his rifle and add it to the one she already had.
Instinctively, Gurt was moving toward the deepest shadows, the place she would be safest. She was almost there when she heard a scream. It was neither of the men she had encountered, no cry of alarm, but a long, wailing expression of agony more animal than human. But she knew of no animal capable of such a sound.
Whatever its source, she thought it had come from straight ahead, although the rock walls were capable of distorting and displacing sound. She looked closely. Was that a glimmer of light leaking around the edge of a doorway?
Her back to whatever wall was available, she flitted from one pool of darkness to another, one rifle slung over a shoulder, the other at the ready. In less than a minute, she had traveled around half the parade ground and was at the end most distant from the fort’s entrance. She could hear a voice on the other side of the wall, though the stone made it impossible to discern what was being said.
She ran a hand along the stone, inching her way forward until her fingers touched wood. A quick exploration by touch revealed a smooth surface, not the roughness and rot exposure to the elements for two centuries would have produced. A door, a newly installed door, behind which the voice continued.
Gurt was considering what to do next. She peeled back a sleeve and checked her watch. The grayness of predawn would arrive in less than an hour. If she was going to find Lang, she did not have long to do it.
She started to slide past the door when she froze, ear to the wood.
“… name is Rolf Lowen. I am a German citizen…”
Lang!
Gurt’s fingers raced across the door’s surface until she found the latch, hesitated and returned to the weapon in her hand. When she had taken it on the trail in front of the Citadelle, she had given it the briefest of examinations. Her touch had told her it was an AK-47. She had not had the time to make a more thorough examination.
She opened the slide to slip a finger into the chamber, since she could not see. Empty. She cocked it and began searching for the safety button and automatic-fire switch. Then she put the weapon down and went through the same procedure with the gun strapped across her back.
Satisfied she was as ready as she could be, she depressed the latch and kicked the door open.
The first thing she saw was Lang, strapped to a chair. His face was bloody, eyes nearly swollen shut. There were ugly marks in the skin of his bare chest.
In the instant it took for her eyes to adjust to the light, she saw movement behind his chair-two men, two uniforms…
No time for analysis.
Making sure she cleared Lang’s head, she squeezed the trigger, a short burst. The sound of the gunfire was magnified by the stone walls but not loudly enough to cover a scream as one of the men behind Lang threw his hands to a bloody pulp that had been his face. The second danced a macabre jig as five or six bullets pinned him momentarily to the wall before he slid slowly to his knees, leaving an abstract painting of red streaks on the light-colored stone.
For an instant, Gurt feared Lang had been hit. He lunged forward, chair and all, colliding with the third man in uniform, knocking him to the floor.
Gun still in hand, Gurt closed and latched the door before drawing the bayonet from the belt of one of her victims and cutting Lang’s bindings and handing him the second AK-47.
Both her and Lang’s eyes were beginning to swim with tears from the acrid cordite smoke, which was confined by the low ceiling.
He took the weapon, pointing it at the man on the floor while he affixed the bayonet. “What took you so long?”
Gurt shrugged. “Trying to decide if your order to return to the hotel was suicidal or just stupid.”
Lang was yanking the man to his feet, muttering, “Comedian, everybody thinks they’re a comedian.” He shook his head in resignation. “Gurt, this is Lieutenant Colonel Shien Dow, late of the People’s Liberation Army.”
“Late?”
“I have experienced his hospitality and wish to reciprocate. He’s coming with us.”
“But there is no time…”
There was a banging on the door.
Dow stood, tugging at his uniform blouse as though to straighten it. “You two are going nowhere.”
Lang ran a hand through Dow’s pockets and came up with his own watch, money clip and BlackBerry. He began to furiously punch the keyboard.
“Lang,” Gurt said as the assault on the door increased, “there is not now the time to send all the ‘wish you were here’ messages you want to Sara and our friends at home. We have need to get out of here first.”
“Just sharing some of the scenery with Miles.” He jammed the BlackBerry into a pocket and pointed to where the blanket hung. “I think the exit is that way.”
The muzzle of his rifle pressed against Dow’s head, they crossed the room single file. Gurt pulled the blanket aside, revealing Lang had been correct: it was the entry into the fort proper. As the last one to leave, Lang fired a single shot into the generator, instantly turning the room into blackness. A couple more shots at the door were intended to discourage those eager to get in. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it sure might slow them down.
Behind Gurt, Lang was pushing Dow, holding the rifle against the Chinese’s head with the other. “Turn left. I think there’s a ramp there leading up to the next row of guns.”
“But we need to get out, not up,” Gurt protested.
“Right through how many armed Chinese soldiers? We sure as hell can’t shoot our way out.”
“But-”
“But turn here and start up the ramp.”
At the top, they stood behind a circular row of entrances to gun rooms that opened off the common ramp. The outside of the ramp, the one facing the parade ground, was bordered by a low wall perhaps four feet high. Over the wall, they were afforded a view of an anthill of activity as flashlights darted back and forth in a pattern that suggested confusion more than purpose.
“Now what?” Gurt wanted to know. “We fly out like birds?”
“Not quite yet.”
For the first time since leaving the lower level, Dow spoke. “Mr. Reilly, your situation is hopeless. You are surrounded by over a hundred trained officers and men of the People’s Liberation Army, enough to completely search this place as soon as it is light. When they see what you have done to two of their comrades down below, I doubt they will be in a charitable mood. I certainly am in no position to guarantee the woman’s safety…”
Lang cut him short. “You’ve just seen what ‘the woman’ can do and you’re concerned about her safety? I’d worry about your men, were I you.”
Dow bobbed his head. “You may joke now but as soon as it is light, you will find little to amuse you.”
Lang shoved Dow against the wall with one hand, handing the rifle to Gurt with the other. Then he removed the bayonet, pressing its point against the colonel’s crotch.
“If we’re here by the time it’s light, you’ll be eligible for the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”
“Surely you don’t think you can threaten-”
Lang pushed a little harder, gratified by Dow’s gasp. “Get your men’s attention. You are to instruct them exactly as I say.”
Dow snorted. “Absurd! You’ll kill me.”
“Actually, I have other plans for you, but they don’t have to include the first part of your sex-change surgery.”
Lang lowered the bayonet and grabbed a handful of the colonel’s crotch through his pants. He raised the cutting edge of the bayonet about a foot above the clump of cloth. “On three you join Eunuchs Anonymous. One, two…”
Dow had apparently experienced a speedy attitude adjustment. Or perhaps a realization Lang wasn’t kidding. “Wait! What is it you require of me?”
Lang told him.
“Absurd! You will never succeed!”
Lang shrugged, a gesture he realized was now visible in the smoky light of predawn. “For your sake, you’d better make sure it does.”
Dow stood against the low wall, cleared his throat and began to speak in a loud voice. Crouched behind him, Gurt and Lang could see the men below cease their frenetic activity and look upward to their commander.
“How do we know he is not telling his men where we are? You do not know Chinese.” Gurt whispered.
“I don’t, but you must admit he has a major incentive to do as I ask. Forget the hearts and minds. When you literally have someone by the balls, they are very likely to agree with you.”
The light had grown sufficiently for Lang to see the skeptical look on her face. “You better be right or…”
The alternative was never spelled out. Below, the men fell into lines forming ranks. At a command from Dow, echoed by a half-dozen subordinate officers, the men crisply did a right face and marched toward the Citadelle’s entrance.
Although they moved too quickly for Lang to count, he noted they moved five to the rank, five files to the group. He guessed he was watching between a hundred and a hundred and ten men march parade-style out of the fortress.
Dow, his face now visible in the light growing in the east, wore the expression of a man whose team is well ahead of the point spread. “I did as you asked, Mr. Reilly. My men will cross the pathway to where the forest begins. No matter what they do, they will be between you and escape.”
“Can he order them to let us through?” Gurt asked.
“A little too risky,” Lang answered. “If he changes his mind… I hope I’ve solved that problem.”
Keeping the rifle pointed at the Chinese officer, Lang gestured with his free hand. “OK, nice and slow, let’s go down and out of here.”
At the entrance, Lang could see the last of the soldiers carefully picking their way single file along the narrow crest that formed the only approach to the fortress. He guessed it would take at least thirty minutes for the last of them to disappear into the forest.
The steep sides of the path were still obscured in shadows, darkness that was retreating with reluctance before the dawn’s probing fingers.
In the latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, neither sunrise nor sunset is a prolonged event. Dawn comes with a grayness that seeps rapidly across the sky as though spilled from some giant container. It reaches the western horizon just as the tip of a burnished-copper sun seems to squeeze between water and sky in the opposite direction, setting aflame fleecy clouds that have ventured too close. The entire process from night to sunlight unravels in less than fifteen minutes.
“And now?” Gurt wanted to know.
Lang checked his watch. “And now we wait.”
“For what?” she insisted.
“For Miles.”
The surprise was clear on her face. “Miles? Here?”
“As soon as it gets light enough.”
Dow chuckled. “I do not know for whom you wait, Mr. Reilly, but unless they drop from the sky, how will they get here? You have no choice: you cannot get past my men. Surrender and save us all time.”
Lang looked around until he found a reasonably flat rock. He motioned Dow to sit before seating himself so the officer was between him and any potential sniper among the Chinese troops. “I believe your people view patience as a virtue, do they not, Colonel?”
Dow did not reply. Instead, he asked, “May I smoke?”
Lang nodded amiably. “Your lungs. But make sure your hand moves slowly. If I recall, your cigarettes and lighter are in your right breast pocket. I wouldn’t recommend reaching anywhere else.”
The three sat in silence as the light breeze of the morning succumbed to the day’s increasing heat. Mist was rising from the gorge below, soon to give birth to the day’s clouds, which would embrace the old fort in misty arms. Hopefully, after Miles’s arrival. Lang watched his prisoner closely but the man did little other than chain-smoke, lighting one cigarette with another.
At first Lang was conscious only of a sound, a noise he could neither place nor identify as it beat like a bird’s wing against the mountainsides. It was alien to the call of the birds from the forest or the whinny of horses back in the Citadelle, impatient for their morning feed. Slowly the rhythmic whop-whop of rotor blades became distinguishable. As though from a magician’s hat, a black object seemed to pop out of the very ground beneath their feet as a helicopter rose from the gorge below. Someone had been skimming the uneven Haitian terrain to evade radar.
Though it had no markings, Lang recognized the machine as an old Russian Mi-8 “Hip,” an aircraft that had served both as a civilian airborne office and military command post. Over ten thousand had been manufactured, enough sold abroad to make the aircraft’s nationality neutral.
“As you suggested, Colonel, from the sky.” Lang raised his voice to be heard over the racket as he spoke to Gurt. “Keep our friend here covered while I make sure they see us.”
Lang walked away from the sheltering walls of the Citadelle, waving his arms until the helicopter hovered directly above him. The moment it stopped, the crack of a rifle, then another, echoed from mountaintop to gorge and back again. Dow’s troops were not going to stand idly by.
Lang ducked behind a boulder as some sort of heavy weapon from the chopper chattered a reply. His guess was a. 50-caliber mounted along the open port in the ship’s fuselage. Toward the forest, he could see puffs of dust as the gun traced the tree line with lead and rock chips, deadly as bullets, flying through the air. The rifle fire went quiet.
Above him, a rope ladder unfurled to within a foot or so of the ground. The saddle between forest and Citadelle was too narrow for a landing. He turned to motion Gurt. She had already seen what was happening and was prodding Dow toward the hovering aircraft. Rifle at the ready, Lang kept behind a trio of rock protrusions until she and her prisoner disappeared into the helicopter.
As the aircraft dipped its nose preparatory to moving off, Lang dashed for the ladder. He had reached the second rung when he felt it being reeled in.
Once he was inside, a man in a uniform without insignia handed him a headset, which he put on. A nudge at his shoulder caused him to turn. He was standing less than a foot from a smiling Miles.
The grin vanished as he saw Lang’s face. “Shit, Reilly,” the words crackled through the earphones. “What did you shave with this morning, a meat grinder?”
Dominican airspace
Fourteen minutes later
Coffee had never tasted better, even though it was out of a thermos. Thermals, already building in the day’s increasing heat, made a bumpy road of the air at an altitude of only three hundred feet just off a ribbon of golden sand, shaking the helicopter like a terrier with a rat. Gurt, indifferent to the turbulence, was dozing, leaning against the leather restraints that kept her from being thrown from the canvas seat. Dow, securely handcuffed, glared at Lang and Miles, who were seated across from each other.
“Those pictures you sent me along with your GPS position indicators, you have any idea what they were?” Miles asked through Lang’s headset.
“Packing containers of some sort. I figured someone might be able to read the Chinese characters.”
Miles bobbed his head. “The containers themselves told us all we needed to know.”
“Which was?”
“Warheads, most likely for DF-15, Dong Feng, or East Wind missiles.”
“Like, guided missiles?”
“Like. Chemical, nuclear or conventional, solid propellant, and MARV.”
Lang’s eyebrows rose in an unasked question.
“Maneuverable reentry vehicle. The warheads themselves can be guided as to speed and alter course to evade defensive weapons.”
Lang had almost forgotten the Agency’s love of technical jargon. “All of which means what?”
“Which means, once installed on a launch base, usually an eight-wheeled truck, anything within three hundred and seventy miles is a potential target.”
Lang mentally called up a map of the Caribbean. “We, the U.S., is out of range, then.”
“The Chinese are in the process of modifying a lot of their hardware. Wouldn’t surprise me if south Florida was within range in the not-too-distant future.”
“And Puerto Rico, where we still have a few military installations.”
Lang thought for a moment. “You think the Chinese are preparing to attack, what, a naval refueling base and former gunnery range?”
“Not my call. The higher-ups will make that decision.” He nodded toward Dow. “Along with the help of your friend there.”
Lang snorted. “Over tea and crumpets with his lawyer at his side? I doubt the Agency’ll get more than an ass reaming by some congressional oversight committee after a presidential apology for inconveniencing the peace-loving People’s Republic of China by interrupting a perfectly innocent trade mission. Hell, if you yell at him and make him cry, you’ll be regarded as a criminal.”
Miles smirked, the self- satisfied grin of a man who has been dealt the fourth ace in the hole. “Were he going to be turned over to the Agency, the newer, kinder, warm and fuzzy Agency, which is obligated to share its secrets with notoriously loose-lipped politicians, what you say would be true. As it is, I am merely a private citizen doing my civic duty for one of my country’s firmest allies.”
Lang leaned forward in his seat. “This I got to hear.”
“Very simple: I am vacationing in the Dominican Republic like hundreds of thousands of sun-loving Americans do every year. An official who happens to be a golf-playing and fishing buddy of mine mentions that Haiti, a country less than friendly to the DR, is harboring a fugitive…”
“But this guy, this Chinese, is no fugitive from the Dominicans,” Lang protested. “He’s probably never even been there.”
Miles held up a hand, dismissing an irrelevant point. “So, the DR has made a terrible mistake. You know how these Caribbean bureaucracies can be. Now, this friend also knows I have another friend, one who was kind enough to place a helicopter at my disposal, saving me the time of driving from one golf resort to the next fishing charter. This Dominican official friend of mine asks if I would have any objection to his government using said helicopter during the three or four hours I will be on the golf course.
“What am I to do, spoil the relationship between his country and mine? Of course not. I lend him the chopper.”
“But he”-Lang pointed at Dow-“is not a fugitive. He is an officer in the fucking Chinese army.”
“I’m sure a full apology will be forthcoming.”
“So…” Lang took up where he knew Miles had left off. “The Dominican security forces or army or whoever treat the man to the old-fashioned third degree until they get what they want, by which time the proverbial horse has departed the barn. In the meantime, you continue your golfing-fishing vacation unaware of what has happened.”
“Wasn’t it Thomas Gray who observed, ‘Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise’?”
“How do you guys keep your noses from growing so long you can’t get through a door?”
Beijing Olympic Tower
Two days later
Wan Ng watched the chubby general of the People’s Liberation Army use a thick thumb to turn the pages of the file. In a silence loud enough to have an echo, he wondered which was worse: the disapproval of Undersecretary Diem or somehow falling under the jurisdiction of this porcine military man. Either way, his sudden recall from the States and the state of affairs with this man Reilly had less than optimistic overtones.
One thing he did know: the disaster in Haiti was somehow going to become his fault. That was the Party way, having shit run downhill. The higher ups, such as the undersecretary, blamed the fiasco on the military. Since the officer in charge of the garrison in Haiti, a Colonel Dow, was conveniently unavailable to accept blame-no one was certain where he was at the moment-the army brass had turned to the Guoanbu, state security. That made the problem Ng’s. His position was not high enough to pass the blame farther down the line.
The nameless general looked up, his eyes hooded by heavy lids. “This American, Reilly, why has he not been disposed of?”
“My orders, Comrade General, were from the undersecretary himself. I was to observe him and the woman.”
The general sniffed unappreciatively. “It says here you were to eliminate them should you determine they worked for the American intelligence services.”
“I have not so determined, Comrade General.”
The corpulent officer sighed, the intake and expulsion of breath shaking multiple chins. “After what took place in Venice and in Haiti, you still believe they are ordinary American citizens instead of threats to the policy of the People’s Republic?”
Ng could have explained that his orders did not authorize terminal action upon supposition or guess.
He could have, but he didn’t.
The orders would say whatever the general chose to remake them to say.
Few government workers in the People’s Republic were punished for failure to properly carry out directives from above. Clerks misfiled things on computers, tasks went undone or were done poorly. That was expected in a massive bureaucracy. Problems occurred when someone of rank in the government, say, this general, felt their position threatened, whether by incompetence or just plain rotten luck.
The culprit, almost always with no one below him onto whom to pass the failure, would be accused of some heinous crime, harboring unpatriotic sentiments, stealing from the state or bribery (both of which went unnoticed without some additional offense), or the ever-popular but rarely clearly defined “counterrevolutionary activities.” The accused could receive, at the whim of a revolutionary tribunal (usually influenced by the official instigating the action), anything from a term in a labor camp up to a large-bore bullet into the back of the head and an unmarked grave where his family would be unable to honor his spirit, the spirit officially disavowed by the state but very real to the people of Ng’s province nonetheless.
Ng was more than painfully aware of how the justice system in the People’s Republic functioned.
“How may I atone for my failure, Comrade General?”
The beefy officer took his time replying, no doubt aware of Ng’s thoughts. “You will return to the United States just as you departed, by way of the Mexico-California border, so there will be no record of your entry. You will keep watch on this man, Reilly, and his family until you have the opportunity to eliminate them both, the man and the woman.”
Ng nodded. “And if they leave the country again as they did when they went to Haiti?”
The general leaned back in his chair, the casters groaning under his weight. “Like most Americans, the man has a cell phone, a BlackBerry. We have ascertained that as well as the number. It is amazing what puny security measures American companies take with their information. When you return, there will be a handheld tracking device that will tell you the latitude and longitude of the location of that particular BlackBerry anywhere on the face of the earth, give or take thirty meters. See that you use it well.”
The meeting was over. Ng felt a weight lift from his shoulders, a reprieve he was lucky to receive. “I will not fail, Comrade General.”
The general was already looking at another file. He dismissed Ng with the wave of a hand. “See that you don’t.”
From the diary of Louis Etienne Saint Denis No. 6 rue Victoire, ^ 1 Paris January 2, 1803 Leclerc is dead of the Siamese fever! ^ 2 There was no means by which we could have known of the tragedy until the news arrived via a fast packet from the Indies to Cherbourg and then by horse courier to Paris. It was not until December 28 the frigate Swiftsure arrived at the Hyeres Islands carrying Pauline, her and Leclerc’s four-year-old son, Dermide, and the lead coffin encased in cedar bearing the general’s body. ^ 3 Pauline, distraught and clad in the dreariest of widow’s garb, appeared here three days later. With sobs, she fell into the arms of her brother, the First Consul. He greeted her affectionately but within seconds escorted her into the house’s library, closing the door behind them. The last words I heard before the doors were pulled to were not those of consolation, but query as to the location of a certain box with which Leclerc had been entrusted. I could not but wonder if this was the selfsame box that my employer had taken from Egypt.
1 When Napoleon first lived in the house in 1797, the street was rue Chanterine. After his victory in Italy, the departement de la Seine, Paris’s municipal governing body, changed the name.
2 Yellow fever. It killed more French military than did the rebels. The slaves had an immunity derived from their origins in Africa.
3 As was the contemporary custom, a separate lead box contained an urn with his heart and brain.