Mercer winced, remembering.
“When we finally ousted the Ethiopians, they practiced a scorched-earth policy during their retreat,” Selome explained. “They burned villages, destroyed roads and bridges and irrigation dams. They even cut down nearly every tree in the country in an effort to demoralize us. The trees lining the streets in Asmara are the tallest in Eritrea because all others were hauled back to Ethiopia. No matter how bad off we were when the Ethiopians withdrew, it is nothing compared to the ruin found in the Sudan. There are roving bands of guerrillas, terrorizing everyone, some allied to the government, others to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and still others that are just mercenaries looking to capitalize on the bloodshed. Slavery is rampant and some say government sanctioned.”
“What’s the reason for their war?”
“Religion. The government in Khartoum is Islamic and has made life unbearable for those in the south who are mostly Christian and animists. If this war is allowed to spread, we will see the same thing in Eritrea. And you are the key for preventing this from happening. It’s an old axiom that hatred is the fuel of the hopeless and peace the progeny of the satisfied.”
Watching her face, Mercer felt confident that Selome Nagast’s loyalties lay in her native Eritrea. He didn’t doubt that she also worked for the Israeli secret police, but for this mission her only goal was the welfare of her people in Africa. Knowing this peeled away only one layer of complication, however. He felt there were still depths here that he didn’t know.
Before leaving home, Mercer had spoken extensively with Dick Henna about the preliminary findings of Harry’s abduction. The private jet that had spirited him out of Washington had been chartered by a corporation in Delaware, but the company was just a post office box, a front. They had been unable to track the fleeing Gulfstream except for a report that it was seen flying over Maryland’s eastern shore low enough to burn leaves off trees. They also had a sighting in Liberia, where it landed to refuel before continuing east. The plane’s final destination was Lebanon. A CIA agent arrived at the airport in Beruit just in time to see an older man bundled into a van and taken away. He’d lost the vehicle in traffic near the city’s Christian Quarter.
A Mideastern connection was further confirmed by Harry’s few neighbors who had heard the abduction. The language they described spoken by the kidnappers sounded like Arabic. The only neighbor to see anything reported that the four men all wore black coats and jeans and had dark complexions and dark hair.
All this matched with what Mercer and Henna had seen at the airport. Henna still didn’t have any identification of the one kidnapper’s body, but he assured it was only a matter of time. He did, however, have better luck tracing the weapons.
“The U.S. Army maintains the largest database in the world of the ballistic characteristics of various individual weapons,” Henna explained. “Each weapon has microscopic differences from its mass-produced counterparts, small flaws that affect the shape of the rounds they fired. Identifying these traits is painstaking, but it’s possible to trace a single weapon from just the smallest fragments of expended bullets or shell casing.
“The Army Ballistics Laboratory,” Henna said, “has been looking for these weapons for a while. The Kalishnikovs were traced back to our peacekeeping mission in Lebanon in the late eighties. Both recovered weapons had been used against our Marine garrison. One gun, carried by the man who jumped into the jet engine, has claimed an American life before, an Army sergeant sitting in a cafe in 1984 near the harbor in Old Beruit.”
There was that Beruit connection again. “How the hell did they get here?” Mercer asked.
“Good question, but what’s got me wondering is: where have they been for the past fifteen years?”
Mercer and Henna had talked about the weapon’s significance and that Harry’s kidnappers were apparently Islamic fanatics — who but a fanatic would allow himself to be sucked into a jet engine — but neither man could explain how these facts meshed with a potential diamond mine in Africa. Selome’s affiliation with Israel only deepened the mess. But having talked with her as the Boeing hurtled across the Atlantic, he felt certain that her interest was with Eritrea, not Israel.
“Are you okay?” Selome placed her hand on his wrist, a reassuring touch. “You faded away for a moment, and it looked like you were in pain.”
“I’m all right,” Mercer lied. He so wanted to talk with her, with anyone really. Bottling up his concern for Harry was tearing him apart. He noticed Selome’s hand on his arm. Her fingernails were as long as stilettos, bloodred from multiple coats of varnish. She saw Mercer staring at her hand and let it lie there a moment longer before withdrawing it. He looked at her with a kind of longing, not of desire, but of the need to express himself. He wanted to trust her so he could release some of what he held inside. He wanted to tell her about Harry and about how it was his fault that he’d been kidnapped and beaten. He needed to talk, but he just looked at her mutely. His pain must have been obvious because she reached over and caressed his cheek. It was an intimate gesture that surprised them both.
“I’m all right,” Mercer said again, feeling something new sparked by that touch. He found he couldn’t look her in the eye.
Southern Lebanon
Harry White woke with a raging thirst, not for water, but for bourbon. He’d consumed at least two bottles of Tennessee whiskey a week for years. Though he rarely got drunk — his tolerance having been built up over the years — his body needed liquor as surely as it needed oxygen. His hands trembled, adding a new agony to his broken but splintered finger. For the first few days after his abduction, he’d been sufficiently drugged so he didn’t know how long it had been since alcohol had passed his lips, but after a couple of conscious hours in the cell, he knew down to the second.
Every waking moment was a torture crueler than anything he’d ever conceived of. He shivered in the twelve- by-twelve room despite the heat that soaked through the stone walls and beaded his body with perspiration. He kept the ragged blanket he’d been given clutched around his bony shoulders.
His need for a drink was an overpowering craving that was driving his mind beyond the realm of sanity.
He used the blanket not only to ward off the chills, but also to protect him from the flying monkeys that circled the room with the maddening persistence of hornets. He knew they were a DT-created hallucination, but they were terrifying nevertheless.
He’d seen the first one only an hour after waking and had called out in horror. The rational part of his mind told him it wasn’t real, but he was too weak to prevent its wheeling attack. A guard had come to check on him, a red and white
Two more appeared to terrorize him. They flew at him without mercy, breaking off their aerial charges just inches from his face. He could feel the air move from their swift passage, and their unearthly screeches were like nails drawn across a chalkboard. They would swoop by briefly and then land on the walls, their sharp little claws digging into the stone.
None of the monkeys had touched him yet, but it was only a matter of time.
“There’s no place like Tiny’s,” he moaned aloud, praying the invocation would transport him away from here.
After three long hours his hallucinations ended, and Harry fell into a nightmarish sleep more haunting than his periods of wakefulness. Demons more cunning than the monkeys were after him, chasing him down an endless hallway. They carried bottles of Jack Daniel’s, which they tried to pass to him like relay runners, but the bottles slipped out of Harry’s hands.
When he woke, his mind had cleared some. A breakfast tray lay on the floor near the bed, the coffee still steaming. His stomach was too knotted to eat the fruit or the jam-smeared bread, but he drank the coffee quickly. And then his lungs reminded him that he’d smoked a couple packs a day for the past six decades and he wanted a cigarette. Needed one.
“For the love of God, you sadistic sons of bitches, give me a smoke,” he yelled.
The guard appeared again, and Harry repeated his request with a little more civility, shouting just a few decibels quieter. The guard didn’t seem to understand the words, so the octogenarian pantomimed smoking a
