'A' for Argonaut (5 page)

“We had it all set up. Look like PFLEC slaughtered the village. The trap would have triggered the end of dos Sampas and his PFLECs. Would have been perfect,” Vangaler snapped. “You fucked it up. Had to take hostages. Bring in the U.S. Army. You know what we got? A fuckin’ Special Forces assault team!”

“We lost control,” al-Amriki said. “We didn’t count on just how crazy those Ninja kids would get. At first they wanted to take all the blondes, then they decided to take all the American women. They murdered the rest.”

The room overlooked a garden that decorated a brick patio. Unlike the office, it was immaculate. Tuscan porcelain garden tables threw a profusion of Italianate colors into the mosaic of bougainvillea. Vangaler stepped to the window, cleared his throat, and hocked into the flowers.

“The Brotherhood believes in this mission. Our pillars of faith will propel us to prevail. Allah is our objective; the
Quran
is our law;
Jihad
is our way; dying in the name of Allah is our highest hope,” al-Ebrahyim said.

The stumpy terrorist turned back from the window to al-Ebrahyim, nodded and said,
“Allahu akhbar!”
He could go along; he was pragmatic, focused.

“But now they know too much. Dos Sampas gets off the hook and Boyko still gets his support from the Americans.”

“CIA,” al-Ebrahyim frowned.

“No. Boyko may be an asshole, but he’s not stupid. He gets it right from the source. Still needs ready cash to operate; diamonds are even better, compressed wealth. He moves them around with a bundle of series certificates of origin from his customs buddies in Libya. Gives him diplomatic immunity, a walking diplomatic pouch. He can pass that on to anyone he wants.”

“Why should you take orders from a white man anyway?”

“He has the power‌—‌for now,” Vangaler said. “The whites still control the money, and the power.”

As a white man, Boyko had no chance to exert long-term control over the black cast-offs from Africa’s civil wars without black African help. Vangaler was the proxy he needed to run the Ninjas for Security Solutions. Inc.

“Boyko’s cute. Speaks six languages, owns four different airlines. Got every corrupt dictator in West Africa in his pocket,” Vangaler said.

“Boyko is Georgian,” al-Ebrahyim interjected.

“So what? Came here years ago, Russian GRU then Mafia,
Vory v Zakone
, ‘Thieves in Law.’ They say, carry-over from the days when you’d never do it to a peasant‌—‌‘OK then steal from the czar.’ He’s got their starburst tattoo on his shoulder. Before that he was in East Germany, posted with STASI,” Vangaler snorted.

“When he first came,” he continued. “Way back, the CIA was using deep cover, secretly backing dos Sampas and his fucking PFLECs against Moscow’s and Castro’s Communists. He came back again with VVZ when the Soviet spies turned Mafia. He worked against the Americans, Chinese, and Europeans for contracts to supply President Bombe with everything Russian, from fine wine to ultimate weapons. It was a fucking cluster fuck. It still is and it always will be.”

“Bombe got rich,” al-Ebrahyim observed.

“With my sacred diamonds. He lined his private bank accounts as soon as he took over. He went to Boyko for American weapons when Washington reneged on their promise for arms.

“But Boyko’s running out of rope. Interpol ‘red noticed’ him with a warrant out for anyone who can arrest him. And if anyone wants anything from Interpol’s member countries they’d better honor it if they have the chance,” Vangaler added.

Five

U.S. European Command Hospital, Landstuhl, Germany

S
everal days after his rescue, Maran awoke groggy in the hospital at the U.S. European Command, Landstuhl, Germany. In the meantime, the Army levied charges against him. The fact that he was in a coma made no difference to them.

The hospital used the same methodical procedures with which the Army so callously charged him. This time, however, it was to his advantage; they provided him with top-shelf care. As his head cleared, his body shuddering with waves of anxiety, he began to realize where he was.

What happened in Cabinda? They knew we were coming. How? When?

The pain. He lifted the sheets, checking his legs. Both there. Sticky. Blood soaked through the casts. He shouted for a nurse.

“You’re up! How can I help, Colonel?” the nurse asked, looking intently into the slits through the head bandages, his cobalt green eyes still bright with incandescence.

Her words floated through the fog. He was awake, but he was nowhere near being up.

“The blood. The pain. My legs. My head.” He reached up under the sheets to scratch under the chest dressing.

“Don’t do that,” she warned. “I’ll get you something.” Just for a moment, the gloom lifted as he thought of all the gentle nurses he had met in his violent career.

Again.

My men! All lost.

Pain shot through his head like a fireball.

Cabinda!

He had gone over it a hundred times in his coma, abstractly. Now it crashed to the fore. Different. Electric flashes, psychedelic blasts slammed through his bandaged head, careened off the aching brain cells like a pinball while anxiety wracked his body. He clawed at the irritation that gnawed at his skin like an army of red ants; gummy sweat soaked his bedclothes. His heightened senses picked up his body odor. Unable to prop himself on the pillows, he squirmed, inched from one side of the cot to the other to find just a shard of comfort. Chaos. A rattle of discordance. His head.

Goosebumps rippled over his skin. He was struck by an onslaught of tremors. Recall battled with denial, unbending remorse shocked him with the truth.

Cabinda!

A cog in a vast wheel that churned out oil, diamonds, and weapons to the world’s terror networks. The clarity of Maran’s vision now clapped him like a back-hander from drunken hooligan. His knuckles went white, hands balled. He fought to regain his grip on reality.

Betrayed!

Two days later a
team of doctors was at his bedside. They had found thirty pieces of shrapnel in his legs and dug them out. There would be scars and long-term pain. The wounds to his head, back, chest and legs were acute. They would have killed him had the “dust off” medivacs not got to him in time and taken him out when every minute counted. He was just lucky they found him. The hospital was set with minimally invasive endoscopic surgical instrumentation. They went in through a nostril, avoiding cutting and intruding on his brain. The equipment allowed them to use a light source and camera connected to a monitor that magnified the affected area a hundred-fold.

They warned him about the other complications. The force of the blast from the tank had smashed his head against the boulder. The Kevlar ACH, Advanced Combat Helmet, saved his life. The fissure on the right side of his skull would heal; the fracture would forever pose a threat that could flare up unexpectedly at any time.

Panic attacks. They said panic attacks!

“What’s the tattoo all
about, Colonel?” one of the young interns had asked him.

“What’s it look like, patriot?”

“A Magen David superimposed on a shamrock.”

“Right. Or the other way around, depends on your view.”

Above the symbol was stenciled: “
Erin go Bragh
”: “Ireland Forever.”

Although he had acquired the tat as an aspiring teen tough guy in his old Irish-Catholic neighborhood; an inscription below was in Hebrew: “
HaMe’ez Menatzeakh
”: “Who Dares Wins,” the slogan of Israel’s elite special police paramilitary counterterrorism unit, Yamam,
Yehida Mishtartit Meyuhedet.
The unit was developed jointly by the Israeli Police and the Israeli Defense Forces specifically to combat Palestinian terrorism in-country and in Gaza. He added the motto as a soldier in memory of his best friend from that unit who had died fighting Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.

“Bold,” the doctor observed. “Very Southie. Especially the Hebrew motto,” he wisecracked. “Isn’t that where you’re from, South Boston?”

Maran just smiled. Like every son of Southie, he was proud of it.

It had been a baptism of fire, the way Maran was raised black and Jewish-American in irrepressible, two-fisted but decidedly fair Irish-Catholic Southie. It was a town where he was accepted as one of the gang under the code of urban loyalty to its own citizens of every stripe and variety, most of whom, like himself, traced their families back to immigration sometime in the not-so-distant past.

His old neighborhood had a reputation. But it drove him crazy to hear his hometown maligned in one-sided, biased movies and nation-al newspapers like the New York Times that pictured Southie as a hotpot of hopeless second- and third-generation Irish bigots. Like most American urban communities, it had a healthy sprinkling of streets filled with other ethnics. In Southie’s case there were Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians. He knew the truth. Firsthand. Simple class-based bigotry that infected truth in the liberal media. And he knew the difference between those same propaganda dicks who distinguished between blue collar and white collar workers with the old Soviet-catchphrase, “Working Class,” as if human beings were broken down into different species according to their education or wealth or jobs. He hated that jarringly divisive phrase as the kind of Cold War propaganda that launched “class struggle” and “people’s democracy” as American political concerns, among the evil Communist movement’s greatest coups. It was something he only heard from the so-called “elites” but never back home in the old neighborhood.

“Old Harbor Village housing projects. Great place to grow up, have some fun, patriot,” he bragged to the doctor. “They called me ‘Cocoa.’ But that never bothered me. We were all in the same gang. We had an Arab kid we called ‘Ahab’ and a Greek, ‘Adonis.’ Just fun.”

He didn’t feel like explaining his identity confusion, mixed loyalties, fear of isolation. It was painful. So he never did. Avoidance and denial were specialties. He was what they called ‘complicated.’ That’s why he didn’t bother to worry about who he was and why he kept his uncertainty masked when he could. It was also what led him into the U.S. Army and branded him with a fierce loyalty to its principles. There, he never had to worry about confused identity. There, allegiance was clear and he considered himself a patriot, All-American, just the way he felt as a teenaged member of the project’s South Boston Shamrocks, the street gang and football team he left to attend West Point, endorsed by Jack O’Bryan, Southie’s congressman.

“Mack, you have a decent chance of recovery. The MRIs and CAT Scans of your brain show a slight bruise, however,” the neurologist told him.

“How bad?” Maran asked.

“Some of the effects could be permanent. We won’t know for, let’s say for the sake of argument … six months. In the meantime, relax. Most important, if you don’t want a recurrence, it’s vital that you stay away from stress. If you’re lucky you might avoid a recurrence, but even normal life could throw you right back to Cabinda. Trauma like this can repeat. We think you’ll get through this, and if you do, you should opt for serenity. You can still have a full life.”

“So, no harm done. I just get cut down to a pitiable gimp,” Maran murmured.

“Look at this talk as a Bomb Damage Assessment. If these attacks come on, you’ll be faced with fear and guilt all in the same blow, rough for a combat soldier, an operator. It’s obvious that you love to live on the edge. But panic syndrome can be random. If it hits you, remember these words. You’ll be better off in a stress-free world.”

“Sure, Doc. Scout’s honor. I’m all yours.”

“The nurses tell me you’re into the Wolfe Tones and hip hop. Have a hard time with choices?”

“Go and duck yourself in a cold tub.”

“Great. Can I suggest you switch to Vivaldi and Bach?”

“Want me to enroll in Bible study, too?”

Six

Kinshasa, DRC‌—‌Months earlier

I
f there was hell on earth, Kinshasa was its capital. It had once been a French colonial center known for old world gentility. Now it was a morass of poverty, crime, and disease. The most dangerous city on the world’s most dangerous continent, the rape capital of the world.