Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05] Page 18

  “He didn’t have a choice.”

  “That’s what they all say. Explains why I got out of the official end of things where you got to explain yourself. Account for every bullet and put in for mileage.” Black shook his head demonstratively. “Uh-uh, Danny girl, not for me.” He flung his toothpick aside and smacked his lips. “Look at it this way. I kill you back there in Beirut with the others and we’re not having this conversation today.”

  “So what’s stopping you now?”

  “I’m supposed to get those stones back. I can’t kill you until you turn them over.”

  “I get to talk to your boss, he can have them.”

  “That simple?”

  “I need his help.”

  Jim Black stretched out his legs and folded his hands behind his head, letting Danielle see the pair of nine-millimeter pistols holstered under his jacket. “Man, you are one screwed-up bitch. You got to stop caring so goddamn much. Takes the fun out of everything. My way’s better. All the fun and none of the baggage.”

  Jim Black sat up, his two pistols clacking against his sides. He leaned forward again, hands flat on the table close enough to Danielle’s to feel their heat. That’s what the cowboy seemed like to her: liquid heat poured into a wrinkled khaki suit.

  “What I think we should do now is fuck all these pleasantries and just have at it.” His eyes beamed as if a bulb had suddenly switched on in his head. “What say I hand you one of my guns and we get at it right here?”

  “Do I get to pick which one?”

  “Don’t trust me?” He lowered his hand to the table, as if expecting a glass to be waiting there, then pulled it away when there was nothing to close his grasp upon.

  Danielle shrugged, could tell the cowboy meant every bit of his offer. “An empty one’s not much good in a gunfight.”

  “Didn’t bring one of your own?”

  She shook her head. “Left it in the car.”

  “Got a preference?”

  “Beretta.”

  Jim Black scoffed at her with his eyes. “Too slow and cumbersome by a long shot. Here, try my Sig,” he said and yanked one of the pistols from its holster and handed it to her.

  Danielle tested the weight and heft of the Sig Sauer, had to admit the cowboy was right. “Nice,” she said and handed it back across the table to him when he made no motion to go for his second gun.

  He flashed that grin again, as he slipped the pistol back into a comfortably worn leather holster. “Want me to take mine out now?”

  “That really what you came here for?”

  Jim Black looked disappointed. “You’re right. I guess we should get moving.”

  Danielle watched him stand up, staying in her seat. “Where?”

  “You want to talk to the boss,” Black told her. “That’s good, ‘cause he wants to talk to you, too.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 52

  H

  e’s still alive.”

  Ben could hear the voice, but wasn’t sure where it came from. His eyes were still closed and he wanted to leave them that way until a pair of rough hands grasped his shoulders and yanked him forcibly from the crushed confines of his rental car. Pain exploded through one of his arms all the way to the shoulder, and his right leg felt on fire. His mouth was sandpaper dry.

  He forced his eyes open.

  Four figures loomed over him, impossible to clearly discern through the darkness and mist.

  “Why?” Ben managed.

  “What’s he saying?” a woman’s voice asked the others.

  “Why did you shoot out my tire?”

  “Your Russian’s lousy,” one of the men said. “And we didn’t shoot out your tire.”

  “Blew out on its own,” the woman followed. “Your car’s a piece of shit.”

  “He must have gotten lost in the fog,” a younger voice chimed in.

  The woman crouched down closer to him. Ben was vaguely conscious of the scents of unwashed hair and skin.

  “That the case, stranger?” she asked him. “If it is you’re about the unluckiest bastard I ever met, getting yourself stuck in Dubna.”

  “What’s left of it,” the younger voice interjected.

  Ben forced himself to sit up and felt throbs of agony rack his skull. “Is that where I am?” The words felt like marbles sliding around his mouth, making his teeth ache.

  “We were trying to make our way out, when we saw you go off the road,” the man said. “Hike through the woods after dark where the soldiers won’t follow.”

  “Soldiers,” Ben repeated.

  “He’s not Russian,” the younger male voice decided. “Definitely not Russian.”

  “Is my son right?” the woman asked him.

  Ben felt his head clearing. This must be a family that had stumbled upon him, a family that had stopped to help in the midst of their own flight from Dubna. The parents and two sons, if his eyes weren’t deceiving him. The boy who had spoken earlier was in his mid-teens. A younger one, who had remained silent, looked to be eleven or twelve.

  “Yes,” Ben answered. Adding, “I’m American,” because it was easier than saying Palestinian.

  “What are you doing out here?” from the man again.

  “We can’t take him with us,” the older son charged. “Don’t even think of taking him with us.”

  “Shut your trap, Misha,” the boy’s mother snapped. “He was heading into Dubna, not going out.”

  “What’s happening here?” Ben rasped, the words broken and staticky. He realized he was very thirsty.

  “Dubna’s under martial law,” the father told Ben. “Whole city’s quarantined.”

  Ben stared at the man through the misty night. His face was tired and worn, his hands carrying the calluses of hard outdoor labor that in the new Russia paid barely enough to eat. Ben’s mind remained a bit lethargic, but the word “quarantined” brought back a flood of memories. The deadly weapon Anatolyevich had refused to identify, the one that had been stolen off thePeter the Great,had come from Dubna. And now Dubna was under quarantine.

  “People were . . . infected?” Ben posed to the family tentatively.

  “Infected? I guess you could say that. Some got it worse than others. Depended on the wind and where they were.”

  “What was it?” Ben asked them all. “Where did it escape from?”

  The family looked at each other.

  “I think he must’ve hit his head,” said the oldest son and the younger one twirled his finger at the side of his head.

  The father frowned. “That’s not why Dubna was quarantined.”

  “Dubna was quarantined because of what they sprayed in the air to kill it,” the mother explained.

  “To kill what escaped? Is that what you’re saying?” Ben asked. As he spoke, a vehicle came barreling down the road above with headlights blazing.

  “Why so many questions?” the father demanded, after the vehicle had passed by. “Why does this matter to you so much?”

  “Because I’m here to find out exactly what happened.”

  “You help us? Tell the world what’s going on?”

  “If I can.”

  Ben heard a rustling sound and before he could continue, the mother and father latched a hand on either of his shoulders and dragged him into the trees, followed closely by their children.

  “The soldiers,” the younger son, silent up until now, muttered fearfully.

  * * * *

  Chapter 53

  P

  resident Ahmed Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone walked across the blood-soaked center of the Benguema Military Training Center.

  “There was nothing I could do, sir, I swear!” insisted Captain Jonathan Marks, his uniform streaked with blood and sweat. “By the time the sergeant-major and I realized—”

  Kabbah swung toward Marks fast enough to make his bodyguards stiffen. “What sergeant-major?”

  “Reese, sir. The man in charge of the exercise.”

  “And where is he?�
�

  Marks swallowed hard and shook his head.

  Kabbah turned away from the British officer in disgust. The parade grounds that hours before had been turned into a combination infirmary and morgue lay deserted before him, the hard ground a patchwork of ugly purplish stains that from his helicopter had looked like a freakish impressionist painting. The stench of blood and fear hung in the hot air, refusing to relinquish its grasp on the site even after all the bodies had been carted away.

  President Kabbah had arrived well after the scene had been secured, but the events that had transpired in the surrounding woods were easy to imagine, since he had seen so many similar ones during his tenure in office.

  Men screaming and writhing as rescue personnel struggled to wrap bandages around the gaping wounds where arms or legs had been hacked off.

  Cries of fear that the rebels were coming back to finish them off.

  Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone itself, had looked much like this after the rebels’ failed attack in January of 1999. Kabbah recalled the slow walk he had made through the Old Market in Susan’s Bay, its festive decor replaced by bullet-shattered windows and blast-riddled streets. The marketplace, too, had been turned into a makeshift infirmary, the sights of women and children with their limbs severed by animals with guns and swords but without conscience certain to haunt him for all time. The stench had been the same there then as it was here today, and Kabbah honestly believed the market had never shed it entirely, the smells clinging to the old wood-frame buildings like bad memories.

  He had grown up on the outskirts of the capital amidst the shantytowns of Lumley, recalling the much different scents of fresh produce that filled the roadside markets nearby. He watched the country he loved degenerate into an escalating cycle of violence an endless succession of politicians and soldiers was powerless to stop. Believing things could be different, he had entered politics himself and was elected president of Sierra Leone in 1996. Then, after surviving a coup by his armed forces, who installed the RUF in power, he was reinstated by a Nigerian-led opposition force in 1998. From that point, war with the rebels had been more or less constant, broken intermittently by peace talks which offered hope but never amounted to anything.

  “How many rebels did we kill?” President Kabbah demanded of Captain Marks, as if that might have provided some solace.

  “Sir?”

  “How many killed of the opposition?”

  Marks shook his head helplessly. “Mr. President, our troops were carrying rifles loaded with paint.”

  Kabbah swallowed hard. “Losses?”

  Marks’ lips barely moved as he replied. “Three hundred and fifty.”

  Kabbah gazed over the blood-soaked ground again. “We can assume four hundred, then. Perhaps as many as four twenty-five.”

  He moved on and Marks struggled to keep up. “That doesn’t count the members of the other troop whose places the rebels took.”

  The President of Sierra Leone sighed. “How many more?”

  “One hundred dead and two hundred missing, sir.”

  “Missing?”

  “We, er, haven’t found their bodies yet.”

  “How much of this did you witness?”

  “I was in the tower, sir. By the time I got down, it was almost over. Couldn’t see a thing with all the smoke.”

  “I see. And Sergeant-Major Reese?”

  Marks gulped down some air. “He joined the battle, sir. Mr. President, if I may...”

  “Go ahead, Captain.”

  “I’m told the two battalions being trained by the Americans in Nigeria are ready. Several thousand men, sir. Easily enough to put the bloody RUF down once and for all.”

  “I’m quite aware of the Nigerian troops, Captain. They are not your concern. This is not your war.”

  Marks straightened his spine and gazed about the barren yard. “With all due respect, sir—”

  “I will take your advice under consideration.”

  “Again, sir, today’s bold and murderous action by the RUF can only mean they’re preparing to launch a major offensive. I beg you to take action before it’s too late.”

  “Send the Nigerians into rebel-held areas?”

  “They’re far better trained than your own troops, sir.”

  “All the same, that strategy will turn my country into a slaughterhouse.”

  “With all due respect, sir, but isn’t that what it’s already become?”

  “It is civilians who will suffer the brunt of such an all-out attack. Enough innocent people have already died in Sierra Leone. I ask you to leave the decision of what to do with the Nigerian troops to me.”

  “Begging your pardon, Mr. President, but I can no longer do that.” Tears were falling from Marks’s eyes, and he didn’t bother to wipe them. “They cut Sergeant-Major Reese’s head off, they cut off his head with his own sword!”

  “He will be avenged. You must trust me, Captain,” Kabbah said with an assurance that defied the circumstances.

  Before Captain Marks could respond, a jeep sped through the training center’s open gate, and defense minister Daniel Sukahamin lunged out. Kabbah watched his most trusted advisor approach in a near trot, his clothes covered in a murky film of dirt and dust. Left behind in the jeep was an American woman Kabbah had never seen before, struggling to light a cigarette in a trembling hand. Sukahamin’s stride took him over the ground where men had died or bled mere hours before. But he seemed not to notice, his glassy gaze that of a man who had seen something just as bad or even worse.

  “We must talk, Mr. President,” the defense minister huffed.

  “I quite agree, Minister,”

  “Not about this, sir,” Sukahamin said grimly, surveying the area. “Something else even more important. Believe me.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 54

  P

  retty impressive,” Danielle commented, after Israeli soldiers waved Jim Black through the checkpoint with barely a second glance. They were traveling together in his car, Danielle having left the one she had appropriated in Tel Aviv back in Little Moscow.

  “Yeah, well, Sash bought himself a permanent get-out-of-jail-for-free card.”

  “Sasha Borodin? That’s who you’re working for?”

  The grin on Black’s lips lingered a bit. “And smart to boot.”

  Sasha Borodin, Danielle knew, was a Russian who immigrated to Israel shortly after being acquitted of charges that he orchestrated the double murder of a cabinet minister and his wife in Russia. Rumors of his connections to organized crime here and in other countries were rampant, but nothing had ever been proven and Borodin’s twelve years in Israel had proven remarkably arrest- and incident-free.

  He boasted openly of donations he made to those whose interests mirrored his own and, although he professed to have no political aspirations, never shied away from supporting candidates who courted his favor. A number of countries had tried unsuccessfully to extradite Borodin for alleged criminal enterprises he had undertaken, only to be continually rebuffed by Israeli authorities.

  After all, Borodin had proven himself a prime benefactor of his own people, responsible for erecting schools and community centers in Russian neighborhoods, then investing in the unfinished settlement and building it into Little Moscow. He had established orientation programs for Russian immigrants and helped find employment for them once they were settled.

  Many of those jobs had once been held by Palestinians with work visas that permitted them to enter Israel daily. The violence, unrest, and resulting new administration had changed all that, leaving convoys of cars stalled at West Bank checkpoints into Israel as rocks and bullets flew mere miles away. Often Palestinians hoping to be let through claimed they could smell tear gas when the wind was right and hear the sound of gunshots and rockets even when it wasn’t. As a result, car windows often remained rolled up and people hunkered low beneath the cover of dashboards on the worst days.

  Some went as far as to suggest that B
orodin had encouraged, if not orchestrated, much of the violence and continued to perpetuate it to assure gainful employment for as many of his people as possible. Danielle thought back to the arms delivery Ben had prevented the same day she had been in East Jerusalem. No wonder Israel’s Russian mafia was willing to do business with Palestinian militants; it suited their ends as well.