Gideon's War/Hard Target (6 page)

Read Gideon's War/Hard Target Online

Authors: Howard Gordon

BOOK: Gideon's War/Hard Target
12.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

It was only as he grew older—and increasingly estranged from his brother—that he began to understand what that protection had cost Tillman, how much pain he had absorbed on Gideon’s behalf. The realization came only slowly and grudgingly. But eventually Gideon realized that only through Tillman’s self-sacrifice had Gideon been given the space to grow into the man he had become.

It was a debt that Gideon knew he had never adequately repaid.

There had been a time when Gideon’s forebears owned half of Yancey County, Virginia, a rural county to the west of Washington. But a succession of poor business decisions had stripped the family of their land, until Gideon’s father had been left with nothing but their house and the small plot of land around it that he hadn’t sold off. In the early 1970s, Gideon’s father sold what was left and invested the proceeds in a final speculative venture, which quickly failed.

The week before Gideon’s fourteenth birthday, the entire thing had caved in.

The day the bank seized Father’s office, Father came home, parked his Cadillac outside the house, unlocked the gun room, took out the old Remington 10, walked into the bedroom, and shot Gideon’s mother in the chest. She was a beautiful woman, and being a vain man who prized her face as one might prize a good setter or a matched pair of Purdeys, he had not wanted her spoiled. Then he went into the gun room and ended his own life.

Gideon came running after he heard the first shot and found his mother lying in a blooming pool of blood. His desperate attempt to keep her alive was interrupted by the familiar sound of the door slamming shut on his father’s secret room. Then Gideon heard another shot.

When Sheriff Wright came, he found the gunroom unlocked. He just turned the knob and walked in. Gideon’s father lay dead on the floor, the back half of his head gone. There had been no investigation, no securing the crime scene, no bits of evidence collected and stuck in numbered plastic bags. After all, it was obvious what had happened. So the sheriff had simply called the funeral home and had the bodies carted away.

A few weeks later, when he and Tillman finally returned to the house to gather their personal possessions, Gideon found himself piling his father’s guns on a blanket, dragging them down to the pond behind the house, and throwing them into the water, one by one. The Holland & Holland, the matched pair of Purdeys, the Weatherby double rifle, the Kimber 1911, the Luger, the K-frame Smith, the Model 70—the only things his father had ever really loved. And now all Gideon cared about was knowing that none of those guns could ever be fired again.

After he was finished, he walked to the front porch steps and sat down next to Tillman and said, “Why do you think he did it?”

Tillman snorted but said nothing.

That was it. Since that day, neither of them had ever said another, ±€r word about what happened. And since that day, Gideon Davis had never touched a firearm.

The AK-47 is not an especially precise rifle. But in the right hands it can cut a man in half, and Gideon could tell that the man shooting at him knew how to handle his weapon. The next burst would take his head off. So he did the only thing he could, bounding from his hiding place and sprinting for the river, hoping that his movement would throw off the shooter’s aim.

In front of him were three turbaned young men on the quay. One held his gun by the barrel, the butt hanging over his shoulder. The other two had leaned their guns against creosote-smeared mooring posts.

Gideon had no choice except to keep going.

Hearing the gunfire, the men whipped around and saw him, before noticing the man from the alley pursuing him and firing at him. None of the bullets found Gideon, but a stray slug hit one of the three jihadis, opening his neck in a spray of blood and gristle. Before the two surviving jihadis even had a chance to level their weapons, Gideon blasted between them and rocketed off the quay and into the brown water. He swam underwater as far from the quay as his lungs would allow until finally he had to come up for air.

The moment he cleared the surface, he heard sharp snapping noises all around him. Bullets, slapping into the water. Some of them ricocheted off into the air and some tore down into the water.

He turned and looked back. He was about forty yards out. Gideon counted seven turbaned men gathering at the edge of the water, blasting away, as he sucked in as much air as his lungs would hold and dove again, this time heading for cover behind an ancient teak river barge.

Surfacing slowly, he pressed his cheek flush against the algae-slick hull of the wooden barge. There was no gunfire. Just shouting and the slap of cheap plastic flip-flops and running feet coming toward him. He panted as quietly as he could, trying to get oxygen back in his bloodstream.

He felt a soft thudding against his cheek, footfalls on the barge deck.

If he could only talk to them, make them understand that he was no threat to them. Of course, he understood, that was a ridiculous thought. Right now, escape was his only chance to survive.

He looked down the row of boats for shelter. About forty yards down, a modern twin-hulled catamaran lay among the many old-fashioned wooden boats. If he could swim the full distance under water, he could hide between the two hulls of the cat. He was skeptical about making it, though. A ten-yard gap yawned between the cat and the next boat. If he came up in that gap, they’d have a good chance of blowing his head off.

Gideon took a couple of deep breaths, then dove again. He could scarcely see anything in the brown water, just dark shapes floating above him. He passed one boat, then a second, then a third. Don’t push too hard, he told himself, trying not to burn up all his air.

How many boats had there been between the barge and the cat? He couldn’t remember. Then he saw the pale wobbly sky above him. He was in the gap now. Ten yards from the cat. Well, it had looked like ten yards from where he’d been before. Now that he was here, he was afraid it might be more. His lungs were already burning.

Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick.

His vision narrowed as he felt the oxygen deficit shutting down his brain. Just a few more yards.

But the urge to breathe was getting hard to suppress. His arms and legs felt like rubber. He could see the wavering dark shape of the cat, two long dark streaks of shadow running down into the water.

Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick.

Everything was getting gray now. He wasn’t going to make it.

Stroke, kick.

Then . . . something dark.

Forcing the cobwebs from his mind, he kicked once more before surfacing. A gasp broke from his lips. He hoped it wouldn’t be audible from the quay. Air rushed into his lungs as he panted again, so weak that he could barely hold on to the nylon rope that trailed into the water near his hand.

But he had made it.

Above him was the fiberglass deck of the cat. He took two weak strokes, repositioning himself underneath the center of the deck. He couldn’t see the quay. Nothing was visible except the lower hulls of the nearest boats. If he couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see him.

There was some more shouting. Obviously the men who’d been after him were getting frustrated. Occasionally they fired into the water, shooting at nothing.

Then, after a while, it all stopped. No shouting, no shooting. Just silence.

Now that the excitement was over and he had time to think, he also had more time to get worried. How was he going to get out of here? He supposed he could work his way from boat to boat until he reached the end of the quay. But what then?

The jihadis would be on the lookout for him now. He had no friends here, no money, no contacts, no phone or radio. Gideon hung on to the nylon rope, treading water with as much physical economy as he could manage.

He waited for what seemed an endless amount of time, then worked his way down to the end of the cat and looked out. A row of boats bobbed gently in the water. The quay was deserted.

Then he saw it. At the far end of the dock was a large modern speedboat. Crudely painted on the stern was some sort of large monkey. It had wild eyes and its mouth was wide open in what was either hysterical laughter or a threatening grimace. Gideon whispered a silent apology to the kid from Indiana for having doubted him, as he worked his way silently through the water toward the speedboat bearing the image of a screaming monkey.

Sometimes the jihadis reappeared on the quay or on the boats. They seemed to be looking for him—but not that hard. They must have assumed that he had drowned or been shot, because they didn’t seem to be breaking their necks to find him.

Finally, he was getting close. Another forty yards and he’d reach the speedboat. As he swam slowly and silently past an old wreck of a fishing boat, a face appeared over the side. Two black eyes stared right at him. He froze. It was an old woman, toothless and wrinkled, her head covered with a black scarf. For a moment neither of them moved. She was caught as much off guard as he was. His heart hammered in his chest.

Finally, he lifted one finger to his lips. The old woman continued to stare. Then her head dem"±€isappeared.

He waited for a cry, a noise, an alarm. But he heard nothing.

The old woman hadn’t given him away. Maybe she was no more a fan of the jihadis than he was. He took a few last strokes, found himself alongside the boat with the monkey painted on its hull. He worked his way to the front, found a mooring line, grabbed it, and swung himself up onto the deck. For a river speedboat, it was a sizable craft, well over twenty-five feet. In the front was a sort of wheelhouse. Behind that, a deck lined with tie-downs and sturdy alloy cargo rails, which were clearly designed to carry some kind of freight.

Housed in the aft were a pair of massive inboard engines. Gideon wondered what kind of freight required being carried at forty or fifty knots. Probably not anything legal, Gideon reflected, when he smelled cigarette smoke.

Before he had a chance to see where it was coming from, the door of the wheelhouse opened and a small man stepped out. A thin brown cigarette protruded from his mouth. His face was horribly disfigured, lipless, so that he had to clench the cigarette between the few rotting teeth still in his mouth. Had the man been burned or was it some kind of congenital deformity? Gideon couldn’t tell, but the guy looked a lot like a screaming monkey.

Gideon's War and Hard Target
The man’s face was so arresting, in fact, that it took...

He was barking at Gideon in a sharp, raspy voice. Although Gideon didn’t understand the words, he didn’t need a translator to understand their meaning. Don’t move, asshole! Or some less polite equivalent. So he didn’t move.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

KATE SLIPPED INTO THE control room, brushing her still-damp auburn hair. “What’s their ETA?”

Big Al set down the radio handset. “Just talked to the pilot. He’s two minutes out. He’s got the ambassador on board, along with the State Department press attaché, plus this Earl Parker guy, two marine bodyguards, and a Secret Service agent. And he’s got that engineer, Cole Ransom.”

“Where are the news crews?”

“On a second chopper, right behind the first one.”

“How’s that supposed to work? They can’t both fit on the deck.”

“The news chopper will hover.”

The last thing she wanted was a bunch of newshounds wandering around her rig. “After it’s over, I want the news crews restricted to the mess or the rec room. Tell them it’s a safety issue.”

“I got you.” Big Al nodded.

The radio crackled. “Obelisk, this is State four-seven-one, request clearance to land.”

Kate looked at the security camera monitors. The chopper deck was visible on one of the small windows. Big Al keyed the handset. “Clearance granted, State four-seven-one.”

“I better get up there,” she said.

As she prepared to move, she felt it again—a slight tremor coming up through the steel deck. In her last conversation with Ransom, the engineer had said that he was confident that the passive damping system would hold as long as the seas stayed below thirty-five feet. Waves that high occurred rarely in the South China Sea, and even then, only during the harshest typhoon conditions.

She scanned the control room equipment, checking the gauges, dials, and readouts. It was a habit with her. From the moment she accepted this job, she had felt compelled to know every last detail about what was happening on her rig at all times. And she knew that she wouldn’t have a chance to check anything again until after her VIP guests were gone. Her eyes settled on the wave height monitor. The moving average graph was inching slowly upward. A large red number gauged the height of the latest wave.

32.

Thirty-two feet. That was worrisome.

The monitor blinked and a new number popped up.

33.

“Let’s go,” she said. “We need to get this thing over with as fast as possible.”

Gideon stood motionless, hands chest high. “Do you speak English?”

The boat captain’s eyes twitched to the side, briefly scanning the quay. “Down!” he said in strongly accented English. “Now!”

But Gideon didn’t move. The captain leaned closer, whispering conspiratorially, “Before they see you.”

Gideon knelt, ducking below the gunwales of the speedboat.

“Who are you?” the boat captain said.

“My name is Gideon Davis. I was sent here by the American president.”

The man ran his eyes over Gideon and cackled, forcing smoke through his broken teeth. Gideon realized how absurd his story sounded and tried to explain himself.

“My motorcade was ambushed. Someone in town gave me your name. He said I could hire you to take me upriver.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Upriver? You crazy.”

“A thousand dollars.”

The man laughed.

“Two thousand.”

The boat captain stopped laughing. Despite his better judgment, he actually seemed to be considering the offer, when a noise on the quay drew his attention. Someone was shouting at him. The boat captain tried to hide his pistol as he shouted back at the person on the quay.

Gideon heard footsteps coming toward them. Then the unmistakable sound of a gun being racked.

“Shit,” the captain whispered. Then he dove into the cabin. The huge Mercuries roared to life. “Get the mooring line!” the captain shouted.

Bullets started thwacking into the sides of the boat. Gideon could see he’d be shot if he jumped onto the quay to take the mooring line off the cleat. So he grabbed the pocketknife he’d taken from Genth=Á€eral Prang, flicked it open, and severed the yellow nylon cord in a single quick motion.

The boat surged away from the quay, throwing up a massive rooster tail and showering the three jihadis on the quay with water. Gideon ducked behind the gunwale, still gripping the knife tightly in his hand.

As he crouched behind the gunwale, he studied the blade of the Bench-made liner-lock. It had a pocket clip for easy access, and you could open it one-handed with the flick of a wrist. His father had always carried a knife. Always. He used to say, “A man who doesn’t carry a knife is like a woman who doesn’t carry a pocketbook.”

The captain looked over his shoulder at him, his gaze resting briefly on the knife.

“Which way are you going?” Gideon said.

“Downriver to KM.”

Gideon shook his head. “Turn the boat around. We’re going upriver.”

“You want to die, find somebody else to take you.”

“I told you, I’ll give you two thousand dollars,” Gideon said.

“Show me,” the captain said.

“I don’t have it now. I’ll get it.” But the captain held his course. “Please trust me, I really am an envoy for President Diggs. You’ll be paid.”

Still, the captain didn’t turn the boat around.

Gideon extended his arm, pointing at the captain’s face. “Up! River! Now!”

Gideon realized that he was not pointing with his finger but with the knife. He had intended not to threaten the man, just to make a strong point. But it was too late. The deed was done. He also knew that if he showed any weakness, he would never reach his brother.

The captain’s eyes flicked around the boat, and Gideon followed his look to the Colt on the floor. He had apparently set it down when he started the boat, but when he pulled away from the quay, the centrifugal force had caused it to slide away from him, and it was now out of reach.

For a moment, their eyes locked. Finally the man spun the wheel hard, and the boat headed back upriver.

Gideon scooped up the Colt and instinctively worked the slide, checking the chamber. He held the weapon over the side, hit the magazine release, dropping the clip into the water, then racked the gun and ejected the round in the chamber.

“What the hell?” the captain said. “Why you doing that?”

“I don’t like guns,” Gideon said, tossing the empty weapon on a bench seat in the aft of the boat.

The man scowled in disgust. “We get where you want to go, you gonna wish you never did that.”

The steady roar of the Mercuries was not quite deafening, but it was loud enough to discourage conversation. Eventually Gideon closed the knife blade against his thigh and slid it back into his pocket.

Noticing that the threatening blade had been stowed, the captain of the boat finally spoke againe aÁ€. “You really work for President Diggs?”

Gideon took out his soaked wallet, peeled out a wet business card, and set it on the wheelhouse. “That’s me.”

The captain stared at the card for a moment, raised one eyebrow, then said, “My name is Monyet. But people call me Monkey.”

Gideon pulled out General Pang’s map of Mohan, indicating the spot deep in the island’s interior. “There’s a city right here called Kampung Naga. That’s where I want to go.”

“City?” Monkey laughed derisively. “There ain’t no city there. That’s the end of the earth.”

“End of the earth?”

“You know what Kampung Naga means? It means ‘Town That Doesn’t Exist.’” Monkey dragged a dirty thumb across the middle of the map, leaving a smudge. “See this? That’s where you hit the waterfalls. No boats past that line.”

“Then get me as close as you can. I’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”

The captain lit a cigarette. “They’ll kill you before you get there.”

“Jihadis?”

“Jihadis?” The man looked at Gideon like he was a fool. “You been listening to me or not? There’s no jihadis up there! How you have jihad, you don’t have no God?”

“Then who lives up there?”

“Tribesmen. Jungle people. Stick you with arrows, eat your ass.” Gideon heard fear in the man’s voice. “Why you want to go to this place anyway?”

“To find my brother. You might have heard of him. His name’s Till-man Davis.”

Monkey shrugged.

“He calls himself Abu Nasir.”

Monkey’s face went stiff. He studied Gideon’s face, as if noticing him for the first time. “I should have known. You look like him.”

“We don’t look a damn bit like each other,” Gideon said. The words came out stronger than he’d intended. As someone who generally thought before he spoke, he was a little surprised at the vehemence of his response. Gideon didn’t look a thing like his brother. Gideon was tall and muscular, like his father, while his brother favored his mother’s side of the family—short and wiry.

“The eyes,” Monkey said, staring hard into Gideon’s face. “You both got them scary green eyes.”

Scary eyes. It was something he’d heard once from a girlfriend. He’d been taken aback by her observation, since he’d never thought of himself as a scary-eyed kind of guy. But now the one physical trait he shared with his brother seemed to confirm Uncle Earl’s claim that Tillman was in fact Abu Nasir. “So you’ve actually met him.”

“Once.” The air whistled loudly through Monkey’s teeth as he drew on his cigarette. “But he’s not someone you forget.&#m">Á€8221;

“Why is that?”

“Wherever he goes, people die.”

A sick feeling washed over Gideon. But before he could ask anything more, Monkey narrowed his eyes and pointed toward a bend where the river snaked around a low island, barely more than a sandbar covered by a few miserable-looking trees. A powerboat was making a sweeping curve toward them.

“They must have radioed ahead,” Monkey said. The distant silhouettes of the men in the boat became clear enough to see that they were carrying AK-47s.

“Can they catch us?”

“We find out soon enough.” Monkey firewalled the throttle and the big Mercuries howled in response. “Hold on.”

The noise was deafening as the speedboat slammed into the chop. It was obvious Monkey meant it literally when he said hold on. Gideon’s fingers whitened as they clenched the gunwale. Every tiny wave jarred his teeth.

Monkey pointed at the pistol Gideon had taken from him. “You gotta shoot. There’s more clips in the storage compartment under the seat back there.”

Gideon eyed the pistol but didn’t move from the gunwale as Monkey steered toward a small channel on the far side of the island. The boat was getting closer. In his mind, Gideon could feel the Colt’s grip on his fingers, its texture, weight, and heft. He could feel the dance of his hands on the slide, the safety, the magazine release. His father’s favorite pistol was a Kimber 1911, pretty much the same model as this one, and Gideon had shot endless piles of ammo through it.

“Take the gun!” Monkey was sweating, his face a mask of concentration. “I saw how you handled that gun. I know you know how to shoot. Shoot.”

They weren’t going to make it. Gideon could see the intersection of the two arcs. Monkey’s was the more powerful boat, but the jihadis were tracing the interior arc of the circle, and there was nothing Monkey could do to avoid being intercepted.

“Shoot!”

Gideon took a tentative step toward the rear of the boat where the pistol lay. It would be so easy. All he had to do was—

The boat shuddered and slammed into the air. They must have hit something—a submerged log, a sandbar—Gideon wasn’t sure. But whatever it was, the whole boat went airborne for a moment, the Mercuries jumping up in pitch for a moment as they clawed for purchase in the air.

Gideon lost his balance, grabbing for the railing as the boat slammed back into the water. When he looked toward the back of the boat, the Colt was tumbling in a high slow arc through the air. And then it was gone, swallowed by the boiling wake of the speedboat.

Gideon surveyed the deck, looking for something he could use to fend off the attackers. Within seconds a plan was forming in his mind. Grabbing a life ring attached to a yellow nylon rope, he flicked open the Benchmade he’d taken from the Prang and sliced the ring free. Then he grabbed an axe that was duct-taped to the bulkhead, and wrapped two loops around the axe head, securing it with a quick square knot.

“gonÁ€Turn toward them!” he shouted, jabbing his finger at the pursuing speedboat.

“What?” Monkey said.

“We’re not gonna make it. Head straight for them.”

Monkey gripped the wheel, his teeth gritted. For a moment he kept barreling straight toward the inlet. But then, he yanked the wheel in the direction Gideon was pointing.

Suddenly the two boats were heading toward each other at a combined speed that probably exceeded a hundred miles an hour. The eyes of the jihadis went wide with surprise. The distance had closed to only a matter of a few hundred feet by the time the first of them managed to shoulder his AK and start shooting.

“Straight for them!” Gideon shouted. “Straight for them.”

Gideon heard the bullets snapping in the air around him and thudding into the hull.

“Hold steady . . .” Gideon was swinging the axe over his head in a slow circle.

Monkey held his bearing, turning what had moments ago been a chase into a game of high-speed chicken. As the distance closed, Gideon saw it register on the face of the jihadi boat’s pilot. Seeing that a collision was inevitable, he suddenly swerved. The shooters lost their balance and, for a moment, stopped firing.

That was all the time Gideon needed.

When the boats flew past each other, missing by inches, Gideon let the axe fly. It sailed through the air, trailing yellow rope in its wake. The bow of the jihadis’ boat passed under the rope, which caught on the edge of the windscreen. The axe whirled around in a short arc, snapping like a whip and embedding its blade in the driver’s chest.

A heavy thump jarred Monkey’s boat as it caught the weight of the man’s body. The contest between man and boat was no contest at all. With the axe still buried in his ribs, the jihadi was hurled fifteen feet into the air. For a moment he was pulled behind the boat, flailing like a fallen skier caught in a tow rope, before the axe blade tore free from his chest. He sank immediately.

Other books

Lady Gallant by Suzanne Robinson
Mr. Sunny Is Funny! by Dan Gutman
His Last Fire by Alix Nathan
RUINING ANGEL by S. Pratt
Her 24-Hour Protector by Loreth Anne White
Starman by Alan Dean Foster
Cast in Flame by Michelle Sagara