Whiplash (7 page)

“Fine.”

Nuri began mentally checking off what he’d have to do. They’d need a cover, first of all. And gear. He could get most of it in Alexandria.

“You’ve done very well, Nuri,” said Reid as he parked. “Luo’s death was not your fault.”

“Thanks.”

“One more thing before you go,” said Reid. “Accounting needs to talk to you about some expenses.”

Port Sudan, Sudan
Ten days later

D
ANNY
F
REAH PULLED HIS YELLOW BASEBALL CAP LOWER
as the boat approached the pier. He stepped up toward the bow, holding his bag tightly against his leg as someone jostled against his side. The small ferry had set out hours earlier from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. When it left the dock there, the sun was about at eye level over the water; now it was long gone, sunk into the gray mass of Africa.

The passengers crowding Danny were mostly poor Sudanese returning from work. There were a few pilgrims mixed in, devout Muslims who had performed the hajj, or holy trek, to Mecca. The rest were operators, thieves, and pretenders.

Danny fell firmly into the last camp. His passport and papers declared that he was a doctor of paleontology, a claim backed up with several official letters from the Sudanese and Egyptian governments. Each seal had been bought for five thousand dollars cash, a price high enough for him to consider turning them over to a legitimate paleontologist when his job here was done.

Except few legitimate paleontologists would dare travel to the Sudan.

“How’s the dock look?” Danny muttered.

“Rephrase question,” answered the Voice.

He pushed the earphone in his right ear a little deeper. Though designed specifically for his ears, the plugs didn’t feel very comfortable.

“Are there armed men on the dock?” he asked.

“Affirmative. Six guards within customs area. Additional men beyond the gate. One armored car.”

“Why do they need the armored car?”

“Rephrase question.”

Danny didn’t bother. He had been using the MY-PID “ap
pliance” for several days, but it still felt uncomfortable. Nor had it been particularly useful. He knew where he was going and what to do. The Voice’s contribution to his mission so far had been to tell him how warm it was and how unlikely it was to rain.

He squeezed his eyes together, fighting off fatigue. He’d flown from Cairo via Rome with barely an hour stopover, and from there to Saudi Arabia. Immediately on landing he’d rented a car and driven halfway across the country to the ferry. All told, he’d spent roughly eighteen hours traveling. He’d napped for a little less than four hours during the first flight. Those were the most he’d had in a row since starting his new assignment.

Searchlights flashed on above the pier as the ferry closed in. Through the glare, Danny saw men armed with automatic rifles waiting for the ship to dock. Behind them was the armored car the Voice had mentioned.

Danny gripped his bag as the ferry bumped against the dock. A deckhand sprung across, tying the ship to the wharf. Another removed the spar from the rail and stepped back. People began jumping across. Danny waited until it was clear that the boat wasn’t getting any closer, then leapt as well, crossing over to the worn wooden planks.

The rickety dock was bisected by a metal fence that enclosed the customs and passport control areas. To get into Sudan, a visitor or resident had to queue in the single line that started at the center of the fence and spread willy-nilly in front of it. Occasionally, a customs officer or one of the soldiers guarding them attempted to form the wedge-shaped mass into order, but it was hardly worth the effort; as soon as one person moved forward, the order collapsed, and the crowd once more jockeyed for position.

Like nearly everyone who’d gotten off the ferry, Danny was black. But his fresh, Western-style clothes and confident manner stood out from the others as sharply as if his skin had been green. One of the customs officers waved at him, calling him around the press of the line. He had Danny walk
to a chained gate at the far end of the pier. One of the soldiers accompanied him, glancing backward every few seconds to make sure none of the other passengers followed.

They didn’t. While a few were jealous that a foreigner would be allowed to cut in line, they also knew the reason. The foreigner represented money, to both the customs agent who would expect a “fee” for the convenience, and to the country, which collected for an instant visa whether he had one already or not.

The natives watching, on the other hand, were merely a nuisance.

“Papers,” said the customs officer.

Danny reached into his pocket for his passport. He’d been well-schooled on the procedure; inside the passport was a crisp hundred dollar bill.

The bill disappeared into the agent’s palm so quickly Danny thought it had been vacuumed up his sleeve.

“What is your purpose here?” asked the man in English.

“I am on a dig,” said Danny. “We’re looking for dinosaurs.”

“Hmph.” The customs agent could not have been less interested. “That bag is all you have?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Open it, please.”

He gestured toward a table nearby. Danny had been told that once he gave the official the bribe, he would be waved through. Now he started to feel apprehensive. He had no money for a second bribe.

The customs agent stood over him as he unzipped the small black case. He was not looking for additional money, but rather, doing his job. In his mind, the hundred dollar bill was a tip from a beneficent westerner, accepted custom rather than corruption. It would not influence him one way or another. If he found any contraband—literature against the regime, a gun, drugs of any sort, including prescription medicine—he would arrest the American.

The bag contained a change of clothes, extra socks, and two pairs of sunglasses. Nothing illegal.

“You are listening to an iPod?” asked the official, pointing to the headphone.

“It’s off.” Danny showed him the control unit. He worried for a second that the officer would take it, but he merely frowned at the device.

“Go,” the man said, dismissing him with a wave.

Danny made his way off the pier, ducking his eyes from the glare of the lights. The rotten fish smell of the seaside gave way to the scent of rotting meat. Crates of goats were stacked along the path that ran from the pier into the start of the city. The animals bleated and moaned, hoping they might convince someone to let them roam the port. Peddlers huddled near the end of the fence, selling various wares. Anything that wasn’t on display, said a crude sign in Arabic, could be obtained.

A stocky black man in a long Arab robe approached Danny from the cluster of people milling near the entrance. Danny saw him from the corner of his eye and tensed.

“Welcome to the hell-hole capital of the world,” said Ben “Boston” Rockland as he took Danny’s elbow. “Our ride’s this way.”

“How you doing, Boston?”

“Good. I was beginning to think you’d never get here.”

“Me, too.”

“Don’t use too much English around here. The natives are pretty restless as it is.”

Boston had been in Port Sudan for several hours, more than enough time to form an impression of the place. He had seen two muggings in that time, one by a police officer. There surely would have been more, but most of the people in the city were too poor to bother robbing.

“The thing is, this is the good part of the Sudan,” he told Danny, leading him toward the bus they had leased.

D
ANNY AND
B
OSTON HAD FIRST MET AT
D
REAMLAND SOME
fifteen years ago, when Boston replaced one of the original members of Whiplash who’d been killed during an opera
tion. Though the sergeant had an impressive record, he also had what some of his superiors politely termed “issues with authority.” He’d seen action in the first Iraq war, where he served as a pararescuer. He’d also done time as a combat air controller and was “loaned” to the Marines under a special program that put combat veterans on the front lines with other services. But Boston had also nearly come to blows with at least two officers in the past three years, one of whom pressed but then dropped formal charges against him.

“A misunderstanding,” said the captain on the record. Off the record, the captain called Boston a hothead but said he’d also saved three men in combat the day after the incident, and so the captain decided to forget the matter out of gratitude.

Serving with Danny and Colonel Bastian had changed Boston’s perspective considerably. He still thought most officers were jerks. But he also knew that there was an important minority who weren’t. That knowledge had helped Boston advance after Whiplash was disbanded. He was now a chief master sergeant, a veritable
capo di capo
in the military’s chain of command.

It hadn’t been easy wresting Boston away from his assignment, a cushy job as senior Air Force enlisted man in Germany. Not because he didn’t want to go—he started packing as soon as Danny gave him the outlines of what he was up to. Boston’s commanding officer, however, put a premium on his chiefs, especially those whose extensive combat experience made them instant father figures for the “kids” in the unit. Danny had to get General Magnus involved; fortunately, Magnus had been responsible for one of the CO’s early promotions, and eased Boston’s transfer as a personal favor.

After the briefest introduction possible to the new Whiplash concept, Boston had shipped out to the Sudan to scout out locations for a base. Danny remained in the States, recruiting more members and arranging for their gear.

“You’re going to love this bus,” said Boston. “Got a port-a-john and everything.”

“As long as it runs.”

“Walks more than runs. But it’ll get us there. When’s the rest of the team showing up?”

“Couple of days.”

“Nuri’s waiting for us. Interesting fellow.”

“Why’s that?” asked Danny.

“Just interesting. Knows a bunch of stuff. Pretty good cook.”

“Yeah?”

“You should taste what he does with goat and garlic.”

“Can’t wait,” said Danny.

“You’re also going to need this.”

Boston held out a pistol. It was a large Dessert Eagle, more than twenty years old.

“Got it in town,” he said. “Everything else I saw was just peashooters, .22s and revolvers, pretty useless to stop anyone. I figured it would do until we’re settled. No spare ammo, though.”

Danny took the weapon in his hand. The pistol had a heft to it that made it a clearly serious weapon. Chambered for .44 Magnum, it held eight rounds and could stop anything lighter than an elephant in its tracks.

He slid the gun under his belt, tucking it beneath his jacket.

The bus was an old French municipal bus, converted to private service. It came with a driver, Amid Abul, an Arab who had lived in Derudeb for ten years, occasionally hiring himself out to the CIA as a driver and local “consultant.” Nuri had hired him to provide transportation to their base in the hills to the south, and to help in whatever capacity seemed practical.

Nuri had dealt with Abul before, but even he didn’t fully trust him; it would have been foolish to do so. Though as the owner of a bus, he was relatively well off, the inhabitants of the war-torn country were so poor that most would gladly give up a relative to a sworn enemy for a year’s supply of food and water. Nuri had given Abul a cover story, telling him that
his friends were paleontologists. Abul, who knew Nuri was CIA, was smart enough not to ask any questions.

Danny kept up pretenses by asking whether he had ever seen any bones in the sands nearby.

“Plenty of bones, Doctor,” answered Abul. “But all of men.”

The buildings and houses they passed were mostly black shapes barely discernible in the darkness of the night. They faded as the bus wound its way beyond the city, illusions conjured by a stage manager designed to convince an audience that Port Sudan was a real place.

The landscape, harsh and mostly barren during the day, looked surreal at night, the endless darkness punctuated by black stalks and hulking mounds, silhouettes of gray hills and mountains.

After about an hour and a half, Danny began to relax. There was almost no traffic on the road, though it was the only highway to the south from the coast. It was easy to believe they were the only people left on earth.

The area was warm, but not as warm as he’d thought it would be; the night became more pleasant as they left the moist air of the coast. The mountains and foothills of the eastern part of the country received much more rain than the desert to the west. While the fields and hillsides were hardly lush at this time of year, grass, shrubs, and trees grew in the thin but well-drained soil. Here and there farms made a stab at civilizing the land.

Danny felt his eyes start to close. He shifted often, shaking himself, trying to stay as alert as possible.

Boston had no trouble staying awake. He’d been drinking coffee practically nonstop since arriving in Africa, but it wasn’t the caffeine that made his muscles buzz. The idea of being back in action after so many years thrilled him.

As far as he was concerned, he’d spent the last few years as a mascot for the Air Force brass. He’d had plenty of responsibility, but responsibility and action were two different things. His job really didn’t call for him to
do
all that much. The
men and women he directly supervised were mostly chiefs or senior NCOs themselves.

It had been years since he’d really
done
anything. The elite nature of the units he’d served in meant that even the lowest person on the totem pole not only knew his job, but did it in textbook fashion. Boston had sometimes perversely hoped that a screw-up would find his or her way to the unit; it would give him a project.

All of this might have been a tribute to his organizational and leadership skills—or maybe just colossal good luck—but in truth Boston was not comfortable with the role that had settled on him: that of father figure. He had always looked up to the chief master sergeants he’d known; even in the few cases where he didn’t respect the men, he always admired the rank. But becoming chief made him feel not so much honored and respected as simply old. He didn’t mind the kids at all, and having people jump when you said boo was easy to get used to. But there was also a kind of distance between him and the others that made him uncomfortable. He felt as if he was always on stage, a plastic role model who could not deviate from what preconceived notion the audience had. Inside, he knew he was just good old Ben “Boston” Rockland, tough kid from the streets, snake eater ready for action…not the rocking chair.