Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05] Page 20

  “And what is that?” Matabu asked, not missing a beat.

  Karim, a tall rugged man with a white scar down his left cheek, laid the sack at his feet. “An opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I taught those bastards a lesson right in their own backyard. You could smell the car exhaust from Freetown.”

  “You violated the cease-fire,” Matabu accused, trying to stay calm. “You have threatened our entire plan.”

  Karim spit on the floor between them. “I killed no civilians. Only government troops. And a few British.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “I have struck a mighty blow.”

  “You have forced their hand!”

  “So what? Whatever comes, comes.”

  “You had orders.”

  Karim spit again. “I spit on your orders. We were better off on our own. Freetown would still be ours now, if your father had listened to me.”

  “And how many more civilians would have lost limbs in the process, General?”

  “You spend years with the Americans, then come back here and lecture me?I was making the future while you were still wetting your pants.”

  Matabu’s face twitched slightly. “I meant no disrespect,” she said in conciliation and looked down at the sack Karim had laid on the floor. “Have you brought me the spoils of your victory?”

  The tall man’s face beamed with pride as he leaned over and reached into the sack. “A gift, General, courtesy of the British.”

  And he extracted a sword bearing a head run through with the blade. “The bastard killed six of my men before he was shot. He was still alive when I took his head.”

  Matabu strode calmly forward, each move followed by the other eleven members of her cadre. “Then your actions were justified and I accept your token with pleasure.”

  She took the sword from Karim by its hilt and held the blade up so she was looking into the glazed, marble-like eyes of the severed head. “Kohni-man dai, kohni-man behr am.When a cunning man dies, it’s a cunning man who buries him,” Matabu said, looking into the corpse’s shriveled face.

  General Sheku Karim accepted the compliment with a grateful smile. He was still smiling when the Dragon leveled the sword and thrust it into his midsection just below the thorax. Karim gasped, air rushing from his mouth and severed lungs. Spittle frothed at the corners of his mouth.

  Latisse Matabu used her free hand to draw her pistol and shot Karim’s two lieutenants as they stood dumbfounded by his sides. Then she jerked the sword in further until the head Karim had severed jammed against his own blood-soaked chest. He crumpled to his knees and fell forward, propped up by the sword’s hilt, when the Dragon stepped back.

  She wiped her hands together, the gesture more symbollic than practical.

  Matabu kicked Karim’s corpse so it toppled to the floor. “So much for traitors,” she said simply and turned back to the rest of her commanders. “Now, where was I . . .”

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Chapter 58

  T

  he two brothers had shared a sleeping bag so Ben could have one of his own. But it made little difference in the cold night. After midnight the mist turned frosty, spreading an unwelcome frigid blanket of ice particles through the woods. The boys had argued for a fire, but their father shot the idea down quickly, afraid it might draw the attention of any soldiers still patrolling the woods.

  “What choice do we have?” Shavel Stepanski asked Ben as they stood near the pile of collected sticks and branches they would not be burning. Her husband sat nearby whittling wood with an old, worn pocketknife. The condition of the blade made the effort considerable. But the pile of shavings before Victor Stepanski continued to grow. “It’s for our children we must run. Who can bear to watch them grow sick as so many others have?” She gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re not really American, are you?”

  “What makes you say that?” Ben’s head still throbbed, but the Stepanskis had given him aspirin which had dulled the rest of his pain.

  “Your Russian. The accent is different.”

  “I’m American, but Palestinian, too. I learned Russian from my father when we still lived in the West Bank.”

  “That explains it,” Shavel Stepanski said before she retreated to her own sleeping bag, leaving Ben to his thoughts and ultimately his dreams.

  He dreamed of being with Danielle in a scene similar to this, but the air was warmer and a fire burned. And they weren’t alone; Ben’s two murdered children, the son and daughter slain long ago, were with them in the dream; well, not with them exactly. Just a pair of sleeping bags waiting expectantly to be filled.

  In the dream his children would be returning. In the dream he did not question why he was with Danielle instead of his wife, killed that same night almost nine years ago. That’s what Ben liked about dreams but what also confused him. How could the unconscious mind so willingly accept what the conscious mind knew to be impossible? There was clearly a gulf between the two worlds and somewhere in that gulf was the happiness he hadn’t known since the night that had changed his life forever.

  Tonight, though, in addition to dreams, he was haunted by thoughts. Thoughts of his father, spurred by the picture of him taken in 1967 just days before Jafir Kamal’s death. Ben slid it out of his pocket as soon as he gave up trying to go back to sleep. He couldn’t see the faces of his father and the unidentified boy in the darkness, but pressed the picture with his fingers just the same, imagining the things he remembered best about his father, like the way he drummed his fingers on his chin and the fresh smell of his aftershave. Ben sniffed the picture, as if it might impossibly yield some of that scent.

  You think you can put things behind you, but you never really do.

  Not his father.

  Not Danielle.

  The morning dawned cold and crisp, leaving Ben reluctant to pull himself out of his sleeping bag which had at last warmed up. The stiffness from the car accident had left his body and most of his headache was gone.

  Victor Stepanski knelt alongside him, while the rest of his family went to fill their canteens with water. “It’s a long way to the storage facility,” he whispered. “I will take you there myself.”

  “What about your family?”

  “We’ll meet up later.” Stepanski paused. “You have an idea of what was being stored there, don’t you?”

  “Something left over from the Cold War. A weapon, never used.”

  “You’re telling me that’s what got out. But why did the spraying make everyone sick? Why didn’t the government tell us what was happening?”

  “Because they were afraid,” Ben said. “Just like we are.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 59

  Y

  ou asked for an awful lot in exchange for a few stones, Pakad Barnea,” Sasha Borodin told Danielle, hours after accepting her terms. “The price was many, many favors called in.”

  “Ten million dollars worth of blood diamonds with a finished value of more than five times that,” Danielle reminded sharply, “should be worth plenty of favors.”

  The night before Borodin had provided her with a beautiful room overlooking the sea, but Danielle had slept only fitfully. Sitting up with her eyes on the door and a vase propped against it in case Jim Black or someone else tried to gain entry.

  “In any case,” the Russian responded indifferently, “your tapes are on their way here now. You will not view them until the cowboy comes back with the diamonds.” He hesitated, dressed elegantly this morning in a silk sport shirt and slacks which draped neatly over his smooth, tanned skin. “I could have you killed once I have the diamonds. You know that.”

  “You won’t, once you’ve seen the tapes.”

  The tapes arrived at Sasha Borodin’s beachfront home in Netanyah just before Jim Black returned from Tel Aviv with the diamonds. Danielle had left all the gems lifted from the Holocaust Torah scroll in a large box she had rented yesterday at a private postal facility in Tel
Aviv. She had secreted the diamonds there well before the two Russians she had followed to Little Moscow arrived at Katz & Katz, where they picked up the emptied scroll.

  Such postal facilities, just recently approved and subject to stringent regulations, were springing up all over the more populous areas of Israel thanks to the long lines and slow service at traditional post offices. Security comes with a price and it was almost always one Israeli citizens are willing to pay. But new policies directed at a recent terrorist mail bomb campaign tested the patience of even the most stalwart of citizens.

  Danielle had simply given Jim Black the box key and the address, and the rough diamonds Ranieri had smuggled into Israel inside the Torah scroll were waiting for him inside just as she promised. Borodin inspected the blood diamonds only cursorily, while she looked over the video cassette tapes. The cases were marked PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT—AUTHORIZED USE ONLY, with good reason.

  Inside were U.S. satellite reconnaissance tapes of the Mediterranean for the twenty-four hour period preceding the time she and Ben had discovered the crew of the Peter the Great murdered and her cargo gone. Danielle had provided the specific longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates -required. She was aware of the Americans’ incredible technological abilities, thanks to a number of security briefings she had attended over the years. Of course, such tapes never left the U.S. government’s possession . . . unless they were vital to someone with the power and contacts of Sasha Borodin. Danielle guessed the favors he paid out were to contacts in Israel who had done the dirty work of obtaining the tapes for him from their American counterparts.

  “Very good,” Borodin said, his inspection of the rough stones complete. “Now let us take a look at your tapes, Pakad. . . .”

  Borodin led Danielle and Jim Black into a spacious recreation room dominated by a wall of windows, the central air-conditioning humming softly. A flat-screen television had been affixed to the front wall directly across from the glass. The glare from the sun streaming in would have made viewing anything impossible until Borodin stopped at a control panel built into the wall and activated mechanical blinds which descended over the windows, darkening the room and making it feel instantly cooler. The glare was gone. Borodin touched another button on the panel and the television brightened to life. Then he crossed the room to a VCR placed out of sight inside an elaborate shelving system that bracketed the flat-screen television on both sides.

  The picture was grainy, lacking so much in clarity that even the high-definition television screen couldn’t do much to help. It was good enough, though, to clearly make out the freighter Peter the Great anchored at sea, just as Danielle and Ben had found it.

  Seeing it from this distance made Danielle think of Dov Levy. His return into her life had provided not only the spark she so desperately needed, but also a last link to the era of her father that had so dominated her upbringing. Now they were gone. Levy, her father, her National Police mentor Hershel Giott. The era was finally over. There could be no more looking back in the hope of seeing something that made more sense, or of finding the support she sought.

  The picture on screen moved in splotchy burps, not in real time but in a jump speed created by a computer that extrapolated digital images transferred from the satellites and stitched them together. The only way to judge the passage of time effectively at all was in the length of the shadows as they increasingly fell across the bow to indicate the coming of night.

  The picture was also difficult to follow because of the constant stream of data scrolling down the far side and bottom of the screen. Gibberish to Danielle but extremely meaningful, she knew, to someone with a knowledge of how to read these tapes.

  Several hours after darkness fell, a boat appeared on the scene. It approached the Peter the Great in what looked like stop-action photography enhanced by advanced computer imaging that created visual coherence from thousands of miles up. The boat, a large trawler perhaps a third the freighter’s size, anchored nearby. Danielle moved closer to the flat-screen television to better interpret the data scrolling across the picture.

  “This is from the night before I got to the Peter the Great and found her crew dead,” she told Borodin and Jim Black.

  They continued to watch as a half dozen figures boarded the freighter, watched from the deck by several armed crew members. Obviously the trawler had radioed ahead, perhaps pretending to be part of the planned exchange or in some kind of distress. Either way, the scattered motion of the tape made the ensuing battle difficult to follow, especially since it was over very fast.

  Danielle felt a lump rise into her throat, recalling the bodies she and Ben had found gathered in the cargo hold. The Peter the Great’s deck hands had been swiftly overcome and taken below where they and the other crew members had been massacred.

  “Looks to me like somebody’s carrying stuff across the deck,” Black said, shocking Danielle back to the present.

  “Crates,” she noted, thinking of the freighter’s empty refrigerated hold where something heavy had been neatly stacked.

  “More like coffins,” Black followed.

  “Look!” Danielle pointed, as the tape continued to move forward in splotchy fashion. “They’re using a winch to lower the crates in a cargo net from the freighter onto their trawler.” She turned toward Borodin. “The cargo Anatolyevich was selling to the Africans.”

  “But who are they?” Borodin wondered.

  Danielle returned her gaze to the screen. “Let’s see where they take the crates and maybe we’ll find out.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 60

  T

  he storage facility is just a mile or so away now,” Victor Stepanski said to Ben, as they crouched behind tree cover within sight of the one main road that led into Dubna. “We must be very careful. The soldiers could be anywhere.”

  “You’re not scared to go on?”

  Stepanski shrugged. “If whatever got out of that place was going to kill me, I’d be dead already.”

  It had taken them all morning and well into the afternoon to get this far. The long and strenuous walk had brought the stiffness and pain back to Ben’s body. Stepanski never even seemed short of breath, even though he smoked a cigarette every time an opportunity presented itself, careful to bury the butt when he was finished to conceal any evidence of their presence.

  He and Ben had covered twelve miles of rough terrain in just under six hours, stopping for water but no food save for a single candy bar they split between them. Without the sun to warm it, the day stayed cold and raw. But sweat still glued Ben’s shirt to his flesh, forcing him to remove his jacket on numerous occasions just long enough for the chilly air to cool his body and leave him coughing. His calves kept cramping up. His knees throbbed, and the final hill had taken the last his thighs could give him, while the heartier Stepanski climbed it effortlessly with a lit cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “I have many friends who once worked in these facilities,” the Russian said distantly. “They are all gone now, dismissed for lack of money. Some were reassigned. Most remain unemployed. I don’t know who is there still. It will be interesting to find out.”

  Ben reached up and stopped Stepanski before he could lead on. “You’ve done enough. Go back to your family. Get them away from here.”

  Stepanski nodded reluctantly and frowned. “Whatever is there, why didn’t they destroy it? Why did they just leave it here?”

  “Maybe because they thought someday they might need it.”

  Ben looked back at Stepanski once he was across the road. The Russian slowly waved a callused hand. Ben waved back and felt his fingers stiffen in the cold before he ducked into the woods. According to Stepanski, he had another half-mile to go before reaching the storage facility where whatever happened in Dubna had started. Mid-afternoon and the gray sky gave up no warmth, as if in anticipation of another chilling night. Ben zipped his jacket all the way up, suddenly cold again.

  He picked up his pace,
hoping it would help recharge him. The path through the forest was easily recognizable and well trodden. Brambles and low-hanging branches scratched at him. Thick vines tried to trip him up.

  It felt so strange being here. His father’s death had been directly connected somehow to arms smuggled into Palestine from the Soviet Union. Now his own life was in danger because Russians were selling off wares stockpiled during the Cold War. In 1967 the arms were offered for free to Palestinians by the Soviet government. Today they were offered for profit on the black market by the Russian underworld. Ben shook his head, contemplating the irony.