Tom Clancy Duty and Honor (31 page)

Effrem, too, seemed fascinated by the scenery. “Have you ever seen
The Boys from Brazil
?” he asked. “You know, Nazis in South America?”

Jack laughed. “I’ve seen it.”

“Déjà vu, only desert instead of rainforests.”

Jack called Mitch. Munich was an hour ahead of Namibia. Mitch asked, “Where are you?”

“On the road,” Jack replied. He had no reason to mistrust Mitch, but Jack had over recent years become
habituated to the need-to-know rule. It was the norm in their business. “You have news?”

“Yeah, a couple things: I’ve got Klugmann’s exact location nailed down. He’s staying at the Hilton Windhoek, somewhere near the top floor. Give me a little time and I can give you the floor.”

“Windhoek has a Hilton?” Jack asked.

“Based on the pictures, it’s beautiful—something you’d see in Chicago or New York.”

“What’s the other news?”

“The name of the woman you gave me, Janine Périer, didn’t match any of the Red Cross rolls for Africa, but there was a Janine Pelzer assigned to Abidjan for about six weeks last year. Her home country is listed as Germany—Munich, to be exact. I’m sending you her picture now. It’s from her official ID card.”

It took a minute for the image to arrive. Immediately Jack saw it was the same woman René had gone to meet the night of his kidnapping. Jack had hoped to be wrong about this, but it seemed clear Janine had been working for Rostock as a honeytrap.

“Current location?” Jack asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Where are you with Bossard’s company portal?”

“I’m into it. There’s a lot of data, some of it encrypted folder by folder, and since I’m hijacking idle user logins I can
only work in spurts. The system doesn’t allow multiple terminal logins.”

“I’m not following you.”

“When one of Bossard’s staff goes to lunch or the bathroom they log out of their terminal. I get an alert, then use their login to gain access to the portal. When they come back and log in again I get kicked out, so I have to find another idle username. And repeat ad nauseam.”

“Got it,” said Jack. “How long until you’ve got it all?”

“I should have everything collated tonight after they shut down the office. By the way, you got the FedEx I sent?”

“Yes, before we left Zurich.”

“If anything needs explaining, call,” said Mitch.

—

J
ack hadn’t bothered making hotel reservations in Windhoek, but now that they knew where Gerhard Klugmann was staying, Jack searched his phone for whatever was closest to the Hilton, which turned out to be AVANI Windhoek Hotel & Casino, one block north of the Hilton.

After handing their Land Cruiser over to the valet, Jack and the others collected their bags and went through to lobby reception. Jack asked for and got a top-floor suite, a multi-bedroom space of one thousand square feet with a walkout balcony overlooking the downtown district.

“I went to Las Vegas once. That’s what this reminds me
of,” René said, hands braced on the balcony railing. “If there was anything like this in Abidjan, I never saw it. Then again, we never saw much outside the base.”

“Make yourself at home and relax,” said Jack.

—

T
hey chose bedrooms, then parted company for a couple hours of rest and decompression. Jack was exhausted; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten more than five hours of sleep in one stretch. Effrem likely felt the same; as for René, there was no telling the last time the soldier had any real peace, let alone untroubled sleep. He’d been on the run for a long time, made even more grueling by his mental state, Jack guessed. Part of Jack wondered if he should have taken Marshal Allemand up on his offer to fly René back home. On the other hand, the man had already been kidnapped once. Who knew what a second time might do to him?

—

A
s agreed, at five-thirty they met back in the suite’s main room. Jack ordered room service, baked salmon and crab-and-orzo salad for him and Effrem; prime rib, roasted asparagus, and spring potatoes for René.

As they waited for the food, René sat on the coffee table
before the flat-screen television and surfed channels until he found a game show, what looked like the Namibian version of
Wheel of Fortune
, then sat down on the couch to watch. The host and contestants were speaking Oshiwambo.

Effrem looked over at Jack and shrugged; Jack reciprocated. He doubted it was the show’s content René enjoyed, but rather the normalcy of the activity.

Their food arrived and they ate in silence and watched
Wheel
. When the credits rolled, René used the remote to shut off the television. “Thank you for the meal, Jack.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What is the plan? Are we going after this Klugmann?”

As he’d been with Möller, Jack was of two minds about their best course with Klugmann. Grab him and squeeze him for information, or play the waiting game and hope Klugmann led them to something significant?

“Right now I’m more interested in Bossard’s plane. There’s only one airport aside from Hosea Kutako—Eros. It could have landed there—”

“Actually, if you count airstrips, there are dozens of places within fifty miles of here,” Effrem said. “I couldn’t sleep. I did some research. The Wi-Fi here is excellent.”

“Dozens of airstrips,” Jack repeated.

“But only six with runways long enough to accommodate a Pilatus PC-12. Subtract from that three that lie within
state-controlled game preserves, and you’re left with three airstrips Bossard’s plane could put down at—Midgard, Pokewni, and Osona.”

“I’m impressed,” Jack replied.

“It was either this or Minesweeper.”

“You made the right choice. Okay, we’re going to split up. René, I want you to stay here—”

“Why?”

“Because I need someone to stay close to Klugmann’s hotel.”

This was a white lie. Even if Klugmann was there, without the exact location of his room they had no way of knowing whether it was visible from their suite. Jack was more interested in giving René more decompression time.

“If we get word that he’s moving, you’ll have to follow him,” Jack added.

René nodded. “I can do that.”

“Effrem, you’re checking Eros Airport. Take a taxi there and have a look around. From what I could tell, all the on-site hangars are reserved for repairs. If the Pilatus is at Eros, chances are decent it’s sitting outside.”

“And what’s my excuse for loitering about?”

“You’ll think of something. I’ll take the Land Cruiser and check the other three airstrips. Can you send me their locations—”

“Done,” Effrem said, thumbing keys on his cell phone.

—

O
f the three airstrips in question, Osona and Midgard not only were the closest to Windhoek, but also were within thirty miles of each other and a straight shot north from Windhoek, so Jack chose to investigate these first.

Knowing his phone’s signal coverage was likely to be nonexistent much beyond Windhoek’s outskirts, Jack took several screenshots of his phone’s navigation screen, then used these to get on the four-lane Western Bypass highway toward the town of Okahandja.

It was night by the time Jack put the capital’s lights in his rearview mirror. As before, the sky was a cloudless black backdrop sprinkled with pinpricks of light. The moon was so bright Jack almost found his headlights unnecessary.

Forty minutes later the Land Cruiser’s headlights illuminated mile marker 17 and Jack began coasting. According to his map, there were no official signs for Osona Airstrip, but rather a faded wooden one pointing toward the now abandoned Bergquell Farm about a half-mile northwest of the runway.

The sign was so small that Jack overshot it and had to do a U-turn. He guided the Toyota off the highway, down a dirt driveway, then onto a broad frontage heading east. He had covered several hundred yards when he realized that he was actually on the airstrip’s mile-long runway. He killed the
Toyota’s headlights and drove on using only the moonlight to guide him.

There was nothing here, Jack realized. The head of the airstrip was nothing more than a large cul-de-sac, a turnaround for departing aircraft. When he reached this he turned left onto another dirt road, which led him to Bergquell Farm, nothing more than a cluster of rusting sheet-metal huts, none of them large enough to hide even the smallest of planes.

One down.

—

T
he second airstrip, Midgard, was thirty miles east of Osona, but the only route there took Jack first north to Okahandja, then on a looping road that followed the edge of Swakoppoort Dam Reservoir. On Jack’s phone the satellite view of Swakop looked like a giant starfish crushed flat, the reservoir’s waters a startling blue against the otherwise brown landscape.

For twenty miles Jack followed the wide gravel road as it wound deeper and higher into the hills, until finally he saw a sign that read M
IDGARD
A
IRSTRIP—
K
HORUSEPA
L
ODGE
. The latter didn’t appear on his map, but he suspected resort lodges came and went around Windhoek, failing under one owner before being renamed and revived by another.

Jack made the turn, followed the road for another half-mile as it wound its way through a series of ravines to a fork in the road divided by another sign. To the left, Midgard Airstrip; to the right, Khorusepa Resort Lodge. Jack turned left and after only a few hundred yards found himself at the edge of a runway. He shut off the headlights.

Parked opposite him at the edge of the tarmac was a white single-engine airplane. The tail number read HB-FXT. It was Bossard’s Pilatus. The plane’s windows were dark, its wheels chocked, the side door closed.

No one was home. Or so he hoped.

He grabbed his rucksack from the passenger seat, climbed out, and walked across to the plane, where he ducked beneath the nose cone. He rapped his knuckles against the aluminum fuselage. Nothing stirred inside the plane, so he knocked again, this time louder. He then walked to the side door, lifted the latch, and twisted. With a hiss of hydraulics the door swung downward, extending the built-in steps as it went. Jack climbed inside and paused to look around.
Did it matter?
he wondered. The instructions Mitch had included in the FedEx package made no mention of where to place the GPS tracker.

Jack found the bathroom just aft of the cockpit. He removed the tissue-paper box from its cubby, dropped the tracker inside, then replaced the box and left.

—

B
ack in the Toyota, he retraced his path to the fork in the road and turned down the road to the resort. Abruptly he rounded a corner and found himself on a palm tree–lined cobblestone avenue at the end of which a thatched entryway spanned the width of the road. Through this he glimpsed a circular driveway, lighted brick pathways, and what looked like individual bungalows.

He braked to a stop and doused the headlights.

This was unexpected.

He checked his watch: It was one-fifteen. He saw no one moving about, no lights in the bungalow windows.

“The hell with it,” Jack said.

He drove down the avenue and through the entrance, then eased the Toyota under the lobby awning. Through the windshield he saw flames rising from a circular stone fire pit. Seated around it were eight people. Jack pulled the binoculars from his rucksack and zoomed in on the group. All were men. Three of them had their backs to him; the five facing him he didn’t recognize, and he wondered if one of them was Gerhard Klugmann.

Something tapped against Jack’s window. He turned his head and found himself looking into the face of Stephan Möller.

Ah, shit
, Jack thought.

“Kann ich Ihnen helfen?”
Möller called. His tone and posture were relaxed.
“Haben Sie Sich verlaufen?”
Are you lost?

Jack didn’t give himself a chance to think. He rolled down his window an inch, put a little gravel in his voice, and replied in Spanish,
“Estoy perdido. Hablas español?”

“Nein, Deutsch.”

Jack said,
“Onjala Lodge?”

Möller was shaking his head now, getting annoyed.
“Nein. Sie sind an der falschen Stelle. Gehen Sie weg!”
Go away!

“Lo siento, lo siento,”
Jack replied.

He put the Toyota in reverse, did a U-turn, and drove off.

—

I
t was almost four a.m. when Jack pushed through the door to their hotel suite. Effrem was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the only illumination coming from the glow of his laptop screen.

“Hey,” he whispered.

Jack turned on a table lamp and plopped down in an armchair. “Hey.”

Without looking up from his screen, still typing, Effrem said, “I struck out at Eros. You?”

“The plane’s sitting on the tarmac at Midgard. I found Stephan Möller staying at a lodge nearby.” Jack gave Effrem the details of his night, then added, “There were about eight of them, all German I’d be willing to bet.”
And all with a similar skill set,
Jack guessed. “Möller was the only one I recognized.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Effrem. “Good job. Mitch hit the motherlode with the Bossard portal, by the way. I forwarded you the link to the server. I’ve been going through the documents for the last couple hours.”

“Anything interesting?”

“A lot, actually. For starters, I know why Rostock wants you dead.”