The Falconer's Tale (28 page)

“Probably too dangerous. The park might not let that
happen.”

Hackbutt raised an eyebrow, no longer the guilty
schoolboy, now the submarine captain. “You say these guys
can bribe the park to let them hunt elephants, but they
can't get permission to do a little falconry down on the
plain?”

Piat nodded slowly. “Touché, Digger. That's good thinking.”

Hackbutt went to the door. “I'm going to go find Irene.”
He paused. “Do you want to eat with us?”

Piat shook his head. “Better if we don't spend too much
time together in public. Besides, I'm going to go find Mike.”

Hackbutt reached out and touched Piat's arm. “Sorry, Jack.
I know this means a lot to you.”

When he was gone, Piat spent a moment considering that
last sentence.
He's doing this for me.
Despite the money and
Irene's installation and another month with Bella, Hackbutt
was doing the whole thing for him. Piat didn't do guilt most
of the time, but just then, with the red sun light bleeding
all over his room and too much scotch in his system, Piat
glanced in the mirror and didn't like what he saw.

It's a nasty business, boys.
Some pompous snot had said that
at his graduation from the Ranch.

Piat went out to find Mike.

The three shacks had lights on and the front door open.
Of course,
Piat thought,
the drivers don't get air-conditioning
.
Piat walked over to the middle hut.

“Mike?” he called out.

Mike appeared behind the door. “Bwana?” He looked past
Piat. “Is there a problem?”

Piat shook his head.
“Hakuna matata,
buddy. No problems.
I need a favor.”

Mike made no move to let him in. “Sure,” he said. His
tone was flat.
I'm off hours and this better be good
.

A female voice called something from the kerosene-lit
darkness behind Mike. And a laugh.

Piat felt like a fool. “Sorry, bud. I'll come back later.” He
took a step away from the door.

Mike shook his head. “No—sure, I can help you. You
shouldn't be here. If you need me, you can just call the desk,
right?”

Down on the plain, a hyena howled. The woman's voice
laughed again.

“This is a special thing.” Piat hoped that sounded right,
that Mike got the nature of the call.

“Sure,” Mike said. “Sure. Give me ten minutes, okay, boss?
I'll meet you at the car.”

Piat passed the ten minutes reviewing all the bad operational
decisions he'd made, first on the one op, then over
the course of his career. Mike was a driver—a paid hireling,
even if he did come recommended by Partlow. Piat was
about to use him operationally, a big no-no. Like kissing
one of your agents, or two-timing another agent—hell, it
was a pretty long list, and involving Mike didn't seem the
worst of it.

“Sorry, boss.” Mike materialized by the driver door. His
shirt was ironed and it glowed in the late evening light.

“No, I'm sorry, Mike. I didn't mean to haul you out of
your rack time (and your bedmate). And I don't like to be
called bwana, or boss. Just Jack.”

Mike stood a good four inches taller than Piat. He smiled,
a flash of white teeth. “Sure, bwana,” he said.

Piat had heard special forces guys in Afghanistan use ranks
as an insult (Right away,
Captain
.) Mike was giving him the
gears.

Whatever. “Mike, I need to know where the prince is going
to hunt tomorrow. Can you find that out?”

Mike glanced at his watch. “Sure, Jack.”

Piat peered through the sudden darkness at him, looking
for hidden meaning. “Sure, as in,
sure
? Or sure as in, I want
to get back to bed?”

Mike laughed.
“Hakuna matata,
Jack. Everybody back here
knows what everybody does.” He laughed.

Piat had expected that was the case. And he knew what
that implied for his own operational security.

But what the hell. “I need to—stay close—not too close.
Tomorrow.”

Mike slapped the car for emphasis. “Sure. Sure. No
problem. I come to your room—maybe an hour? I'll know
then. Okay?”

“Sure,” said Piat.

Mike was as good as his word. “I know where they'll go. It's
close—maybe ten miles. One of the rangers—KWS guys,
right?—says they go to hunt with the bird, yes? Where the
people in the lodge can't watch. They're taking food, flasks
of coffee—big day. Out all day. Easy to find. Maybe with
some money, easier to find.”

Piat waved Mike into a chair, poured him a scotch. Mike
made a curiously British gesture—on taking the glass, he
raised it in the air as if toasting his host.

“How much money?” Piat had a fair amount, but he'd
never tried to bribe a Kenya Wildlife Service ranger before.

“Fifty dollars,” Mike said.

Piat paid him fifty and another fifty. “That's for you and
the girl you left behind.”

Mike slammed back the rest of his scotch. “Sure,” he said.
“There is one problem. Okay? We're supposed to stay on the
roads. Everybody is. We lose our park license if we go off
the roads. Okay? And—bwana—Jack—it is sometimes no
picnic, yes? Off the roads?”

Piat took a drink. He wished that Mike were an expert
falconer—he was clearly a man who thought things through.
“So what do we do?”

“Rent one of the lodge trucks, so we can drive where we
want. That Suzuki we have from Mombasa is useless out here.
Okay? And let me get a ranger to say we can drive around.
Cost more money—but they hate the Arab guy. You know?”

“I don't know.” Piat leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“All the rangers—all used to be poachers, right? And when
KWS gets them, they train them to protect the animals.
Right? Sure. And when rich Arabs come to kill the animals,
rangers get to be the guides. Right? Sure.” Mike sounded
increasingly vehement. It was obviously a subject about
which he felt strongly.

Piat counted two hundred dollars from his dwindling
supply of US twenties. “That enough?”

Mike made the money vanish. “More than enough,” he
said, and downed his second drink. “You don't want this
Arab guy to know we're out there, right—Jack?”

“Right.”

Mike nodded, straightened his neat white safari shirt in
the mirror and smiled at his own reflection. “We should leave
late. Okay? Ten o'clock. Maybe you want to talk-talk this
Arab guy?”

Piat tossed his operational security over the cliff. “Yeah,
maybe. If it happens that way.”

“Sure,” said Mike. He smiled.

“You're in charge,” said Piat. He had just felt the first cool
breeze of a wind change. Luck. Operational daring.

“Sure.”

* * *

Al Craik had got the report he had asked for from Mrs
Stillman and Sergeant Swaricki. The report on Perpetual
Justice task numbers was short: they had found eleven listings
under the suspect number, all buttoned up tight with
the Perpetual Justice code classification. The system
wouldn't kick out data the other way, however: going in
with “Perpetual Justice” produced no hits, so if there were
more operations under it—and he was sure there were—
they were, in Abe's words, buried under the flag.

Mrs Stillman's report on Muhad al-Hauq, the target of
Partlow's operation, was fuller. It told him a lot he didn't
find useful (al-Hauq had three wives and seven children;
he swam in a saltwater pool every morning; he wrote
poetry) but several things he did: Muhad al-Hauq was the
nephew of the governor of Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province.
His uncle was said to be both lazy and ignorant, and the
nephew was effectively the region's governor. The Eastern
Province was the poorest in Saudi Arabia; its people were
mostly Shiites (which might explain why they were kept
in poverty); but it was the location of most of Saudi Arabia's
oil. It bordered the Persian Gulf, a bit of the Emirates,
Kuwait, and Iraq.

Muhad al-Hauq was a devout Sunni but not necessarily
(the sources weren't sure) a dedicated Wahhabist. He was
believed to support financially jihadists going into Iraq, but
the little that was known of him suggested that he wanted
to get an invader out of an Arab state, not that he was
either in favor of restoring Saddam or (virtually the opposite
case, so weak was the intelligence on him) of helping
al-Qaeda. His alleged support for al-Qaeda was based on a
CIA list put together in 1997; an intelligence summary of
pre-Nine-Eleven 2001 that, if read carefully, used the word
“assumed,” meaning that the evidence wasn't there; and
the contact report that had started Alan down this trail.

The information made him wonder why Clyde Partlow
thought that al-Hauq was a good target—and for what.
The use of falconry as a contact suggested recruitment.
Would a devout Sunni who funded Iraqi jihadists be a
likely recruit, a likely agent? Or was Partlow cynically
using the name and the alleged al-Qaeda link as a way of
floating an operation, fulfilling a task, justifying an appropriation?

Or did Partlow have something else in mind?

That question raised the further question of what you
might have in mind for the effective governor of the Eastern
Province. What might you do in a region that had most of
Saudi Arabia's oil, and on the other side of whose border
stood thousands of American troops?

Or, perhaps, what might you do there without him?

Irene made no protest at staying behind at the game lodge.
One part of Africa was as irritating to her as another: where
she wanted to be was in her studio.

At ten a. m., Hackbutt and Piat were in a white Land
Rover Defender, a vehicle so old the Toyota Land Cruisers
parked on either side dwarfed it. It had the green shield
of the lodge on its doors and a heavy luggage rack on the
roof. Piat, dressed in khaki shorts and a khaki shirt, felt as
if he were playing a part in a movie. Like Monaco.

Hackbutt had acquired a pair of pants whose legs zipped
off—shorts, trousers, and shorts again by turns as the
weather changed. He loved them and couldn't stop talking
about them.

Mike felt much the same way about the Land Rover.
“This is a car to drive in Africa,” he said. He enumerated
its features, most of which amounted to a lack of gadgets
and robust engineering.

They drove down the mesa from the lodge, took the
main road north, and drove ten miles before Mike turned
off the road across the plain.

“I thought we were only going a few miles,” Piat said.

Mike flashed him a smile. ‘I promised the ranger that
we wouldn't be seen from the lodge. And you don't want
the Arab guy to see you, right?”

Piat thought, not for the first or last time, that Mike
knew a good deal more than he ought. “No, Mike, I don't.”

“So we go around,” Mike said, one hand on the wheel
and the other tracing a wide arc on the map in his lap.

“Do you have a compass?” Piat asked.

Mike shook his head. Piat produced one out of his bag,
but Mike shrugged it off.

Away from the water holes, the plain was a desert. There
wasn't an animal to be seen, and the sun seemed to come
through the car's white roof to grill them inside. Below
his shorts, Piat's knees stuck to the seat every time he tried
to change position. He was sweating sitting still.

“There's another grouse!” called Hackbutt. “That's what
he ought to be hunting.”

“Probably is,” Piat said.

Mike had slowed while he looked at the map and then
swiveled his head around, comparing it with the big mesas
in the middle distance. He didn't seem to like to stop the
car. Then he drove on a distance, past a dry water hole
and a deep wadi, and then he slowed to a crawl again and
checked his map.

“Okay, Jack,” Mike said. “See this ridge? See the anthills
there—see them? Just past that. They'll be there.”

There was a ridge that rose eighty meters tall, rich dark
red soil and sand and rock. A climber's paradise. Piat said,
“Over the ridge?”

Mike nodded. “There's a mound—not so tall. This wadi
has water in it. So there will be animals. That's where he
will have lunch and fly his bird. And Jack—the talk at the
lodge is that tomorrow the other Arab comes.”

“Shit,” said Piat, who knew that the uncle's arrival meant
more security and less opportunity. He looked up the ridge.
“We'll be pretty naked out there.”

“Sure, Jack.”

Hackbutt was restless. “What are we doing?”

Piat looked up the ridge, popped his door, and pulled
out his binoculars. “We're going to climb that ridge.”

Hackbutt pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay! Then
what?”

Piat looked at Hackbutt. “We wait until we get lucky.”
Or we try something desperate
.

Despite its forbidding appearance, the ridge was an easy
climb. It was so easy that Piat narrowly avoided crossing
the central contour line into full view of the party at the
wadi on the far side. He and Hackbutt found a pair of rocks
that looked like rubble from a glacier (unlikely at the top
of a mesa in Africa) and hunkered down with their binoculars.

The prince, his falconer, and two men with rifles were
on a twenty-meter-tall mound in the valley below, the men
with rifles squatting in the shade of rocks. The prince and
the falconer stood under the full weight of the sun. The
bird had the only shade on the mound, a parasol set up
just for him. Beyond, in the shade of the big trees on the
wadi, were three vehicles: a gleaming white Toyota Land
Cruiser, a dingy green Land Rover with KWS markings,
and a small rental truck.
There's the truck
, Piat thought.