“You jivin’ me,” Jamal said.
Thorn smiled. “Nope. You get on the American team, I’ll cover your expenses to the World Games. Airfare, hotels, food, walking-around money.”
Jamal shook his head. “I appreciate it, but—why?”
“Two reasons, Jamal. One, I can afford it. Two, it’s not every day I get to sponsor a world-champion fencer.”
“I ain’t even got on the national team yet, Mr. Thorn, and you got me winnin’ the worlds?”
“Aim high, hit high,” Thorn said.
Jamal shook his head in wonder.
Thorn’s smile slipped into something more serious. “Look, Jamal,” he said. “Up until now, if you lost a big bout, you could just shrug and say, ‘Well, so what, I couldn’t have afforded to go anyhow.’ Now, you have to come up with another reason.”
Jamal looked at him for maybe five seconds without saying anything. “You a mind reader, too?”
“I grew up on a rez in Washington State, and we didn’t have any spare change lying around. ‘No money’ was my favorite excuse—until my grandfather went out and hustled enough from the tribe my senior year of high school to pay my way to the nationals.”
“You win?”
“Nope. Came in third in epee, fifth in foil, didn’t place in saber. Bronze wasn’t gold, but it might as well have been when I brought it home. No kid from our rez had ever won squat against a room full of white guys. That medal is still hanging in the trophy case outside the principal’s office.”
Jamal laughed. “They put a trophy case in my school, the whole thing would be gone the next morning, right down to the bolts holding it to the floor.”
“Yeah, yeah, your school is bad. You ever scalp a white man?”
Thorn kept his face deadpan, and for just a second, Jamal looked at him as if he was serious.
“Get out my face with that,” the young man said.
Thorn laughed. “Had you for just a second there, didn’t I?”
“No way.” But he grinned, too. “So, Mr. Thorn, what’s the deal with you and the fine sistah? You serious about getting married?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Salt and pepper. You gonna catch grief on both sides of the table.”
“It’s the twenty-first century, Jamal. Fifty, a hundred years from now, it is gonna be like Julian Huxley said, we’ll all be tea-colored, and the world will be better off for it.”
“Uh huh.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I don’t think the world is as far down that road as you do.”
Thorn shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Marissa is worth any amount of grief anybody else has got to offer. Screw ’em if they don’t like it.”
Now Jamal’s grin got real big. “That’s what a man says about his woman. You all right, Mr. T.”
Thorn grinned back. He hoped so.
The Army base at Hana was brand-new, small, specialized, and nobody local much liked it being there. Some kind of land swap with the government was the only reason it was. It wasn’t enough that the tourists filled the narrow road leading to Hana so you never could get anywhere. Now there were soldiers clogging things up—that’s what a man paying attention at a local cafe would hear, and certainly Carruth was a man who paid attention. . . .
As he lay in the lush growth ten meters away from the still-shiny chain-link fence surrounding the base, Carruth wasn’t so sure this mission was worth the trip. Still, it was what Lewis wanted, and it was her command. On the one hand, she was a fine-looking woman and he’d love to get to know her better; on the other hand, she was a cold bitch and he didn’t doubt she would shoot a man just to watch him bleed. But for the moment, he was willing to go along with her, because if things went the way she planned, he was going to walk away with enough money to buy his own tropical island and stock it with as many good-looking women as he wanted. He could put up with a little ball-busting for that.
Carruth had only two men with him on this one—Hill and Stark—and they were backup. Carruth was the only guy going onto the base proper.
Into his LOSIR headset, he said, “Two minutes, mark.”
“Copy,” Hill came back.
“Affirmative,” Stark added.
The fence patrol guard, a PFC who must have done something to get on somebody’s shit detail, strolled by in front of Carruth’s position, M-16 slung over his shoulder, not even bothering to look at the fence most of the time. Once he was past here, it would be thirty minutes before he came back to this spot, and if Carruth wanted to bother to try and hide them, the doofus probably wouldn’t even notice the clipped links in the wire.
Speaking of which . . . On the two-minute mark, Carruth crawled to the fence, came up to a squat, and applied the wire-cutters to the links, snipping out just enough of a gap to slide through. This position was one of many that wasn’t covered by security cams, and was far enough away from anything so nobody but the perimeter guard would likely see you come through.
Once he was inside, Carruth moved fifty steps to the SSW, then altered his direction and did thirty-six more steps directly east.
This kept him out of any security cam’s view—so the intel said.
At that point, he started walking as if he owned the place. He was dressed in the uniform of the day, Army tropical, and wearing the insignia of a master sergeant. Anybody who saw him on a cam probably wouldn’t call out the MPs—they’d figure he belonged here.
His goal—another stupid one, far as he was concerned—was the enlisted soldiers’ mess hall, at the south end of the complex, a three-minute walk from his entry point. At ten-thirty hours, the place should be relatively empty —breakfast was long over and lunch wasn’t being plated yet.
The maps he’d studied and the photographs he’d memorized were accurate—he had no trouble recognizing his route to the target.
A few enlisted soldiers passed along the way, none close, and he offered a snappy salute to the one officer who came within range, a young lieutenant, who returned the salute and did not speak.
The hall lay just ahead.
Carruth circled to the back side of the place, where the Dumpsters were lined up. He opened the lid of the largest, using a handkerchief so as not to leave prints. He caught the spoiled-milk reek of food rotting in the steel bin. Phew! What a stench!
He removed the device from his pocket, started the timer, and dropped it onto a mass of overcooked scrambled eggs,
The bomb was a simple composition device—RDX/PETN blended with dense wax and a little oil, a C-4 knockoff from India stabilized for hot climates, cheap and untraceable—at least nobody could trace it to him. The electronic timer was a throwaway quartz runner’s watch he’d bought at a Kmart, no prints anywhere, and if he built another one, he’d do it differently, so as not to leave a signature the bomb guys could read.
Ten minutes from now, the Dumpster was going to pop the lid and spew a goodly portion of its stinking contents into the air—the steel walls would almost surely hold, it wasn’t that big a boomer—and the result would be a nasty mess for some poor bastard on kitchen patrol to clean up. Come all this way to blow up a garbage can? Well, it was what Lewis wanted, and probably she had some reason, though he damn sure didn’t know what it was.
He turned and started to walk away. In ten minutes, he’d be halfway back to where they’d anchored the
