Treason (22 page)

“I don't recall how detailed those reports were. I do remember that your friend Walks Many Miles was one of the SAD team members who was listed as being part of that mission. I'm certain you are worried about him. Your uncle told me Miles quit the Marines so he could date you.”

Brooke was surprised. Her uncle was not a gossip. “I didn't realize my uncle discussed personal matters about me with you.”

DeMoss grinned like a schoolboy. “Having a Marine quit the Corps—that's quite a compliment.”

She averted her eyes. She didn't feel comfortable speaking to him about her personal relationships. Moments of stress and tragedy often made casual acquaintances feel a familiarity with each other forged by empathy, which she understood. But she didn't know much about DeMoss's personal life and only a few details about his military career. She knew DeMoss had been decorated in Iraq and had been taken prisoner by the Taliban later in Afghanistan. She knew he was considered a promising up-and-comer, hence his appointment to the NSC. But he was a lieutenant colonel and she was a major, so there had been no personal familiarization between them.

“I have some information that Special Agent Parker might not have shared with you, assuming he knows it,” DeMoss said. “Al-Shabaab has contacted the State Department. They're demanding one million dollars for the return of each body that was recovered from the SAD helicopter crash. If either the government or the men's families refuse to pay, they will desecrate the corpses and post videos of them on the Internet.”

“And these animals claim to be pious Muslims,” she said bitterly.

“If I remember correctly, during the Somalia embassy crisis you referred to one of them as a flea feeding on a camel turd.” He chuckled.

“How'd you hear that?”

“You were wearing a microphone that was connected with Langley, the Pentagon, and White House at the time, remember? When we heard about that description at the NSC, it made the rounds.”

“I didn't realize the NSC knew about that conversation.”

“You'd be surprised at what we have at our fingertips. There's not much we can't access.”

“I'm afraid my comment wasn't very diplomatic. I tend to be blunt when I am angry.”

“I thought it was spot on.” He grinned but quickly turned serious. “In addition to Miles, the other missing SAD team member has been identified as Jason Angel, who was known by his buddies as Ironman. He apparently was thrown from the helicopter when it was struck by an RPG.”

“How do you know that?”

“Al-Shabaab posted a photo of his body less than an hour ago and the CIA identified him in an intel bulletin sent to the White House. It came from Director Grainger personally so Parker and his teams might not have gotten word yet.”

“That troubles me.”

“Angel's death?”

“Yes, but also that Grainger bypassed us. How many other reports are being circulated without us knowing? No wonder the Viper can learn what we're doing. We need to compartmentalize information and keep tighter controls on what is being shared.”

“You're right,” he said. “I'll mention that to my superiors.” DeMoss took a last bite of his egg sandwich, and when he finished chewing, he said, “Did you know all of the SAD team members on that crashed helicopter had nicknames, such as Ironman?”

“Everyone uses nicknames because they don't want terrorists to know anything about their personal lives and families back home if they overhear them talking,” Brooke said.

“Do you know Miles's nickname?” he asked her.

“Yeah, he mentioned it to me and it wasn't overly creative. His buddies called him ‘The Chief.'”

DeMoss nodded. “When I was in Iraq, I was called Banjo.”

“Because you play the banjo, I assume.”

“No, I don't play any musical instruments. It's because of the movie
Deliverance
.”

“I've never seen it.”

“There's a scene in the movie called ‘Dueling Banjos,' where an inbred kid from the backwoods and a city slicker with a guitar go head-to-head. I'm from West Virginia so I got tagged Banjo. What was your nickname in Somalia?”

“I wasn't part of the guys—the Marine embassy guards there—I was a liaison officer. If I had a nickname, they didn't share it with me.” Actually, Miles had later told Brooke that the Marine guards in Somalia had nicknamed her “Legs,” but none of them had dared use that sexist term around her, even though they meant it as a compliment. She didn't see any need to share that information with DeMoss.

“I believe,” he said, “there are two possibilities of what happened to Miles. He either got blown out of the aircraft like Ironman, and his body has not been found and may never be. Or, he somehow survived and has managed to evade capture.”

“If he'd been captured,” Brooke said, “Al-Shabaab would have posted video of him.”

“Exactly, the problem is that our people can't send in a rescue team because we don't know where Miles is or even if he survived. And it's not safe to send another helicopter into hostile territory to search for him. If Miles did survive that crash and is still alive, he's completely on his own.”

Near the border city of El Wak

Northeastern Kenya desert

W
alks Many Miles followed the tire tracks leading away from the helicopter crash toward the Isiolo Mandera highway, the main route that snaked up Kenya's northeastern border into Ethiopia and Somalia. Without those tracks directing him, he might have spent days wandering in the sameness of the African terrain. About a thousand yards from the crash, the tracks vanished on a patch of wind-swept landscape that had turned raw and hard.

After walking for an hour, Miles looked for a shady spot to escape the blistering afternoon sun. There were fewer
Acacia karroo
bushes here, but he spotted a lone tree stubbornly growing from a crack in the dried earth. The Kenyans called it a “toothbrush tree,” so named because natives used its twigs to brush teeth and gums. Its bark suppressed bacteria growth and plaque. It was an oddly shaped evergreen, resembling a bush more than a tree, with its branches hovering close to the ground as if the sun had beaten them down. The Al-Shabaab fighters would be returning soon to retrieve the sentry whom they'd left behind. Discovering him dead would lead to both outrage and a manhunt. The tree would provide Miles with much needed shade and a hiding spot.

Miles noticed a baseball bat–sized branch that had broken from the tree and was lying on the ground. He swung it against the toothbrush tree and then swept it under its branches. A half dozen scorpions scampered into the sunlight. The venom in most scorpions was not powerful enough to kill a man, but these were deathstalker scorpions, commonly found in Ethiopia and Somalia, and their stings could be fatal to the elderly or small children. If bitten, Miles would survive, but he would be in incapacitating pain for several days—something he couldn't afford.

After again sweeping the branch under the lowest limbs to scatter insects, he crawled under the foliage. His cracked ribs were even more painful as he lay on his back. He put a pinch of the khat between his teeth.

Being raised on the Crow reservation, southeast of Billings, Montana, and northwest of Sheridan, Wyoming, Miles had often purified himself by spending time in a sweat lodge. In comparison, the desert heat that he was now feeling seemed mild. He felt sleepy and the khat made him relax. His mind wandered and he found himself thinking of his grandfather. The old man had been a powerful force in Miles's life. In the 1960s, his grandfather had been an activist in the emerging American Indian Movement and had occupied Alcatraz Island with other native people. By age forty, he'd become the subject of a rather thick FBI file. But now at age seventy-two, he was a respected professor at Big Horn College, where he taught tribal history.

Miles idolized his grandfather and had wondered how such a powerful figure had fathered an abusive, alcoholic son who had cared only about himself and had never wanted a son of his own. Cirrhosis of the liver had killed Miles's father. Alcohol, introduced by the white man, had killed more Crow than bullets, his grandfather had told him. Neither Miles nor his grandfather had wept at the funeral.

From his grandfather Miles had learned how to mask his emotions. His grandfather was well liked by whites off the reservation and at educational conferences. But Miles knew his grandfather privately felt only contempt for whites. Associating with them was a necessary evil. His grandfather's mantra, which he often told Miles, came from a quote attributed to Plenty Coups, the last of the great Crow chiefs. “With what the white man knows, he can oppress us. If we learn what he knows, then he can never oppress us again.”

His grandfather had wanted Miles to do well in school. But he'd never been a good student. Books had not interested him. He had little interest in reading about what others had done or seen. He wanted to learn and see for himself.

The khat reminded him of another important moment in his childhood. Many of his peers had abandoned the old ways, but Miles's grandfather had insisted that his grandson abide by the traditions that made him a Crow. At puberty, Miles had been driven by his grandfather past the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn where Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had defeated General George Armstrong Custer. They had stopped in the mouth of a canyon at the base of the mountains. Despite his tender age, Miles had been left alone for four days. Among the meager supplies that his grandfather had given him was peyote to help him have a dream during which he would come to understand his purpose in life. The first night, Miles had chewed it and fallen asleep without any effect. By the third night, he'd decided that he was immune to the hallucinogen and that talk of visions and visits by spirits was nothing but tribal folklore. But on the last night, Miles had fallen into a trance, no doubt helped by his hungry belly and exhaustion, and during a dream a talking coyote had visited him. When his grandfather had come to fetch him, Miles had told the old man about the coyote, and that had pleased his grandfather because among the Crow, it was Old Man Coyote who had created the earth, the first man, and the first woman. A visit from the coyote was a good omen. But Miles had not told his grandfather, nor anyone else, what the coyote had told him about his future. After his vision quest experience, Miles stopped using his white name—Jonathan Walks Many Miles—and insisted on being called only by his native surname.

As he drifted off to sleep under the toothbrush tree's branches in the African heat, Miles found himself feeling strangely optimistic. He was alone and being hunted by terrorists in the African desert. He was a man on foot. What better name to have than Walks Many Miles?

Miles had been asleep about two hours when he was awakened by the sounds of gunfire. Peeking from under the branches, he saw the same three pickup trucks that he'd observed earlier at the helicopter crash site. It was the Al-Shabaab terrorists about five hundred yards away from his hiding spot under the tree. He guessed the gunmen had returned to the crash site, discovered their dead comrade, and now were searching the area for him. Instead of finding Miles, they had come upon an old man tending a herd of goats. As Miles watched, one of the terrorists drew a pistol and struck the man across his face. The blow knocked him to the ground, but he pushed himself up onto his knees and then stood. The gunman struck him again, causing the man to again hit the desert, and this time when he tried to stand, another gunman kicked him several times until he stopped moving. Apparently satisfied, one of the gunmen fired his pistol, killing a nearby goat before the gang boarded their trucks and continued their search.

Miles watched the man slowly rise to his knees and then fall back against the hardscape. Several moments later, he rose again and this time, he managed to stand. Holding his side, the man inspected the dead goat while the other animals in the herd milled around, oblivious. The man tried to lift the carcass but couldn't hoist it to his shoulders. When he tried again, he stumbled back and again collapsed. It took him longer to stand and when he did, he began dragging the goat by its legs, but after traveling less than fifty yards, he fell.

Miles watched for several moments as the animals walked around the fallen herder. All of Miles's instincts told him to ignore what he was seeing and to slip away. He had enough problems of his own. But there was something about the man's determination and unwillingness to leave the dead goat behind that he admired. Although the fallen man was a stranger, Miles felt obligated to help. He crept from under the branches of the toothbrush tree and approached the herder cautiously while cradling the AK-47 in his arms.

The goats cleared a path when he reached the fallen man. The herder appeared to be as old as Miles's grandfather, but Miles knew that African nomads often seemed much older than they were due to their harsh living conditions. He was bony and had weathered, leather-like skin. His lips and cheeks were puffy from being pistol-whipped, and he seemed defeated, but there was no fear in his eyes.

“
No gattee hindeemin
,” the herder said.

“Do you speak English?” Miles replied.

“
No gattee hindeemin
,” he repeated.

Miles offered him a drink from his canteen, which the man gulped down. The herder touched his rib cage where he'd been kicked and moaned. Miles assumed the beating had cracked the old man's ribs, but it didn't appear he had suffered a punctured lung or other internal damage.

“Phone?” Miles said. He raised his hand to his right ear as if he was talking on a cell phone.

“
No gattee hindeemin
,” the herder repeated.

Miles shook his head and again said “Phone,” only this time louder, as if that would help the man understand. It didn't.

“Can you stand? Walk?” Miles asked. He moved two fingers on his right hand to imitate legs moving.

The herder reached up to grasp Miles's shoulder. With Miles's help, he stood and pointed his hand to the north.

The herder was still holding onto Miles as a crutch, but when Miles began walking, the old man stopped and began jabbing a finger at the dead goat.

“You got to be kidding me,” Miles responded. He shook his head, indicating no.

The old man released his grip on Miles shoulder. He was not going to leave the dead goat behind.

“I should've stayed under that tree,” Miles complained.

“
No gattee hindeemin
,” the herder said.

“Yeah, I heard you the first time.
No gattee hindeemin
,” Miles repeated. “Whatever the hell that means.”

Shaking his head in disgust, Miles said, “I can't believe I'm doing this.” Bending down, he grabbed the goat's front and back legs and lifted the dead animal onto his shoulders. The old man steadied himself by taking hold of Miles's upper arm.

“I'm not carrying this goat far,” Miles declared, as he and the old man began walking. The other goats fell into step behind them. If the terrorists returned, Miles was sure that both of them would be killed. As they marched, Miles quietly rebuked himself. It would have been smarter for him to have remained under the tree until nightfall. He should not have shown his face to a stranger. And he should not be carrying a forty-pound dead goat across the African desert with a crippled old man clinging to him, especially since both of them had cracked ribs.

But he also knew that he had no choice.

More than twenty years earlier, a coyote had spoken to him in his peyote-induced vision. In his dream, Miles had been wandering in a strange land far from the reservation, lost, hungry, thirsty, and alone. The ground had been burning his naked feet and the sun had scorched his skin. The coyote had told him that he would encounter a stranger. Miles felt a sense of déjà vu. Either that, or it was the khat.