Frank's Independence Day (The Night Stalkers) (7 page)

Food and water didn’t prove hard either. Everyone was out and about with the city at war.

She went back to their hideaway by a long, circuitous route, dragging the tail of her skirt the last few hundred feet to erase her footprints.

The hut was so silent when she returned that she feared they’d actually been stupid enough to leave, or worse, been captured. She stood motionless. Staging a one-woman rescue across the landscape of Bissau wasn’t her idea of a movie that had any chance of a happy ending. Rambo she wasn’t.

She hadn’t seen any footprints outside, but in the soft moonlight, she might have missed them.

Then she heard it.

The ambassador and his assistant were trying to be quiet. They clearly hadn’t heard her return as they moaned softly together.

Beatrice moved back outside the hut and sat in the dirt, resting her back against the doorframe. It was in moonshadow, she would be close enough to invisible resting here. She could afford to wait a little while.

Sometimes people in fear for their lives needed a little privacy.

Chapter 15

Beat: 1989

Beat really didn’t need
any more alone time.

Six months she’d been traveling in Africa and, she really hated to admit it, she missed Frank. She’d decided after her parents had been such total pains about Frank, that she didn’t need any family. They’d hounded her so badly about “that boy not being good enough” that she’d cut them off. Had even taken to screening her calls with the answering machine. Finally, she’d decided that no one, including Frank, would have that hold over her and she wouldn’t let herself need anybody at all.

But, she hated to admit it, she’d missed him.

She’d returned from the Africa security assignment to Brooklyn both exhausted and turbo-charged. She’d showered in every barracks, hotel, and Secret Service office that had one, from Johannesburg to Cairo to Ramstein to JFK airport, trying to wash off the last six months.

She’d missed the premieres of
Field of Dreams
and
Dead Poet Society.
And she’d wager that without her guidance, or “hounding his ass” as he called it, Frank had probably gone to see nothing except
Batman
and the unpredicted hit
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
She’d been stuck with that on the commercial flight from Germany and could have shot herself. She’d fix his movie habits straight off.

After spending six months overseas, she thought maybe they could get together. At least for movies. There was no real question in her mind that Frank was the kind of man who would wait for her, simply because he said he would. He was just that much a man of his word.

The rest of it, well, she’d have to wait and see. Some great no-strings sex, that she’d definitely be up for. He’d be up for that. Wouldn’t he? She certainly wasn’t going to have with-strings sex, so it had better be good enough.

When she’d left, he hadn’t laid any guilt trip on her about staying single or anything, but there hadn’t been even one man on the road who’d measured up to the Frank Adams’ standard. More than once she’d cursed the damn street punk for ruining her for casual sex with other men. Whoever she hooked up with, they had a whole new level of fine they’d have to rate. And none had.

After her third shower, a meal, and sixteen hours of sleep, just to prove she didn’t need him that badly, she dialed his phone.

She had to get the Chinese grocer three times before she checked the number. She dialed it a fourth time to be sure.

Where the hell was he?

It might be six a.m. Friday morning here, but her body was still on Africa time and she’d been up for hours. Thought she was being nice by not calling him when she’d woken up at two a.m.

Well, she was supposed to have the next five days off, but it was clearly high time to head into the office. Someone would know where he’d gone.

# # #

Frank sat in the Secret Service liaison office at Fort Sam Houston. The U.S. Southern Command in San Antonio, Texas had given them one tiny room for the four of them to cram into.

He looked at his watch. Beat’d be home by now, probably still sleeping off the flight. Back from six months of silence in Africa.

He’d kept a track on her schedule, but had decided it would be better if that remained very quiet. She’d made it damn clear before she left, and by her utter lack of communication while gone, that the next move was up to her.

Focus, he ordered himself for about the four-thousandth time in the last forty-eight hours. Knowing she was on her way home, his focus had seriously sucked. Not enough for others on the Fort Sam team to comment on it, but pretty bad.

She’d missed some interesting times.

Earlier in June the Ayatollah Khomeini had died and the next day halfway around the globe had been the Tiananmen Square massacre. Two days later, back in Iran, the Ayatollah’s body had almost been dumped to the ground during a hastily aborted funeral as thousands of grief-ridden mourners had tried to snag a piece of his death shroud to remember him by.

Emergency Secret Service teams had been formed to assess dangers to both U.S. diplomatic security in China and possible terrorism threats from an Islamic right wing seeking opportunities among an entire people gone mad with grief.

Frank got pulled into active service two months ago. He’d gotten his orders about two hours after he graduated training and been declared an agent. He’d made it through as head of his class, a distinction he shared with Agent Beatrice Ann Belfour. He closed his eyes for a moment, ignoring the pain that had grown as she hadn’t called throughout that day. He’d known she was at the Nairobi Embassy all that week. It would have been so easy for her to find out how he was doing. Easy to have called or sent a god damn telegram. Would faxing an inter-office memo saying, “Congratulations!” have frickin’ killed the woman? Apparently.

She hadn’t done any of it, and that had been a bitter pill.

Focus.

He looked at the cork board he and the four other agents had been covering with information over the last two months. His first assignment had landed him on a Panama diplomatic security planning team in San Antonio. As if the back-to-back messes in Iran and China weren’t enough, bloody Noriega had to add this drug-gang-boss shit on. The world was really cracking at the seams this year.

Manuel Noriega had run completely out of control. Originally nurtured to power by American support, things started to go bad in the 1970s. By 1986 it became clear that it was bad, and President Reagan had tried to force him to step down. By 1988, the Pentagon was pushing for an invasion but Reagan had refused. Presidential-hopeful Bush had ties to Noriega from his years as Director of the CIA and heading the Task Force on Drugs, and President Reagan hadn’t wanted to damage his Vice-President’s chances of election, so he’d held off.

It looked as if it would finally fall to President Bush to deal with his former colleague. It now appeared that Bush had carefully ignored numerous reports regarding Noriega’s activities in money-laundering and drug-trafficking.

Noriega had just lost an election and then declared the results invalid. Two thousand U.S. troops had been sent in to secure American interests in the Canal Zone. And Frank’s team was building scenarios on how to protect and, if necessary, cleanly extract American diplomatic personnel if it all went to hell.

The phone on the table rang and Frank answered it for something to do, because he sure hadn’t been following the latest conversation on the on-going Operations Sand Flea and Purple Storm. The idea was to stage numerous military exercises in Panama that showed U.S. might, to prove “Freedom of Movement” rights throughout the Canal Zone and into surrounding countryside, as well as to utterly overwhelm and confuse Panamanian observers with the sheer volume of the exercises.

Nine different military operations, most grouped under Operation Prayer Book, formed a dazzling confusion that kept the Secret Service almost as bewildered as the Panamanians about what the American military was up to. Like an old razzle-dazzle move in a street fight. “Don’t look over here, because if you do, we gone kick your sorry ass from over there.”

“Adams here.”

“What the hell are you doing in Texas?” Beatrice Ann Belfour sounded pissed.

And he was so damn glad to hear her voice, that his knees folded right out from under him, and he dropped into a chair. The other three guys startled and turned to see what was up. What was up was a huge grin that he couldn’t stop from spreading across his face.

“Workin’ is what I’m doin’.”

“But in Texas?”

He loved that she was pissed that he wasn’t in Brooklyn. It felt so damn good, he could really get to enjoy this. Did she even realize how upset she sounded? Man, this was the kind of ego stroke he’d been needing and needing bad.

“You missed some good movies.”

She growled, actually growled at the change of topic. It also clearly told him what she’d expected him to go see. So, he didn’t mention
Cyborg
with his man Van Damme kickin’ ass.

“
Indiana Jones III
came out, funny as hell. Had Sean Connery as his dad, I know you’re all hot for him.” One of the guys in the room laughed loud enough that Frank knew the phone had picked it up and shot it straight to Beat’s earpiece. Beat would know he was sitting in a room full of guys while teasing her. That should make her crazy. And worse, it really had been her kind of movie. He’d sort of gone to it so it would feel like they were connected. All it had gone and done was make him sad.

“The new
Star Trek
sort of sucked. All about Spock’s brother or some kinda crap.” She had a weak spot for Nimoy, too. She’d gotten him hooked on the series so he’d have gone to that one on his own anyway.

He could feel her fuming all the way down the phone line.

“Texas?” With a single snapped word, she refocused the conversation where she wanted it.

“It be where de action at, man.” Again, the other agents were eyeing him strangely. They were used to his cleaned-up NYU use of language. To tease Beat, he’d slid right down into Morningside Heights street.

“What kind of action?”

“You cleared for this?” God, this was just way too much fun.

“I damn well will be.” And she hung up on him.

He couldn’t suppress his smile. He wasn’t sure what her response would be, but he couldn’t wait to find out.

Chapter 16

Frank: Now

Frank ground his teeth
as the President’s Southeast Asia trade meeting ran for an extra half hour. It was all he could do to retain his position at the end of the Woodrow Wilson Reading Room, the center of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library.

Down the left wall, a long line of built-in card catalogs filled the entire long wall. And the U.N. people were using them. He wasn’t sure the last time he’d seen a card catalog in use. Of course, this catalog was everything from the League of Nations, which predated the U.N. A lot of what existed in this catalog were still the foundations of international law. His head hurt just thinking of the automation nightmare to catch that up.

The room was twenty-plus feet wide and about eighty long. Several low bookcases against the right-hand glass wall partially blocked his view, so he kept a very careful eye on who went to those. Frank had checked the glass and the view of the central fountain. The glass was thick enough to stop low-caliber fire. A double-tap with a big sniper rifle like a Barrett would get through and a Steyr probably wouldn’t even deflect. That Steyr had designed a hand-carried rifle that could punch holes in an armored personnel carrier creeped him out.

What would it do to the “Beast” if targeted while the President was inside. It might resist it. He ran some foot-pound force comparisons in his head, Steyr vs. armor. They might be okay. The “Beast” was a tough car. But maybe not.

Deep breath. Focus.

Lesson number eight-ninety-three, worry only about what you can control. But so damn much was out of his control. Any of a half-dozen apartment buildings that he could see out the window could have a shooter on the balcony. There were a pair of Secret Service counter-snipers tasked with watching for that, but that was a whole lotta apartments to cover. And if the shooter was standing back in the shadows of an open window…

His mood had gotten way too dark.

The G-B ambassador had at least called back promptly on the hour and made it thoroughly clear, by how much he’d said without saying anything at all, that he couldn’t reach anyone in his government.

The President already had U.S. armed forces moving some heavy assets down onto the Cape Verde Islands which lay just five hundred miles offshore to the northwest. The Air Force was planning to put the assets in place after dark fell there, with hopes they could be done and gone before daybreak.

There was a Carrier Strike Group within six hundred miles of Guinea-Bissau that was already shifting position. They could halve that distance in the next eight hours which would shift possible operation scenarios. The President had made it clear that he’d be moving them anyway because of the coup, but that was his careful political side talking. The comforting hand he’d rested on Frank’s forearm told him that was definitely not the only reason he was moving so fast.

And Frank had no proof Agent Belfour was dead.

He needed to remember that.

The last report, between dinner and this meeting, had placed two C-135 Stratotankers, used for mid-air refueling, ready on the runway at Cape Verde. A trio of C-17 transports were also enroute from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany with fully manned APCs in their cargo bays, just in case they found a use for Armored Personnel Carriers during the rescue. Also, one more transport with a bellyful of 75th Regiment U.S. Ranger paratroopers armed for some serious trouble, in case they needed to jump in and take the airport by force. But all that was a level of international involvement that no one on either side wanted to get into.

Except him. Right now it was a good thing he wasn’t the one holding the go button.

He scanned the room again. They were in the peaceful center of the U.N.’s library. The ceiling rose in gentle, wood-sheathed waves rising from the card catalog to the outer window, which washed the room with soft northern light. At a small table near the west end of the room, President Matthews sat casually with the ambassadors of Laos and Cambodia. Also at the table were the Vietnamese ambassador and one of their Deputy Prime Ministers.

And there was a woman who was the cause of all Frank’s pain.

It had started as a trade meeting, and the woman had been seated quietly between the Laos and Cambodia ambassadors. But then she’d started talking.

And the President had listened, started drawing her out, much to the consternation of the men who had thought it was their meeting.

Frank could see why she’d so grabbed the President’s attention. She reminded Frank of Carole Bouquet, the Bond girl from
For Your Eyes Only.
He’d been thirteen and madly in lust with her enough to slide into the theater an extra couple times. All long dark hair, that actually billowed, light eyes, and a serious body. The best part was that she didn’t hang around going, “Oh James,” with a sigh. She bought a crossbow and kicked ass.

This woman looked like that, but with almond-shaped eyes and the dusky skin of a Vietnamese Eurasian. France and Vietnam twisted together into one fine-looking woman. Fine enough to turn even the President’s head which was saying something. Since his own wife had died in that helicopter crash during his first year in office, he hadn’t looked at a single woman. Well, except his childhood friend Emily Beale, who’d already fallen for Major Mark Henderson, even if it took her a bit to figure it out.

As the trade meeting stretched long past any reasonable ending time, she took over the conversation, gently at first, so smoothly Frank thought she’d make a good agent. There was no ripple as she took full control. Watching her political savvy, Frank moved past irritation and began to wonder more about who she really was.

“Hank,” he triggered his mike and whispered into it. “I know we cleared this Kim-Ly Beauchamp. What have you got on her?”

“Chief of Unit, Southeast Asia for the World Heritage Center of UNESCO. As far as I can tell, that’s a pretty serious role.”

He clicked his mike once to acknowledge receipt.

“We’ve got scenarios for the President when he’d done.”

Another click and a deep-rooted effort not to scream with impatience.

The lady wasn’t making her points with her beauty, she was making it with her brains. He could hear bits and pieces about at-risk heritage sites and how their protection should be an essential requirement before the settling of any trade agreement, because they needed large levers to enforce protection of fragile environments.

Frank could get to like her, she had the Laotian and Cambodian ambassadors squirming about something, though he couldn’t quite tell what. Seventeen billion dollars of yearly trade on the table compared with a couple of old temples and she was taking it on as if it made sense. He wished her luck.

The thing was, she was having some as she talked about tourism dollars. She’d sure caught the President’s ear. More than his ear, she’d caught his attention.

“Hank, read me the longer version.”

It all appeared very friendly, but he wasn’t paid to trust to appearances. As the woman’s background sounded in his ear, thankfully read by one of the techs without Hank’s twisted sense of humor, he kept his eyes and his attention on the room.

Frank and the other three bodyguards lined the west wall like statues, except for their roving eyes. They each stood a little over an arm’s-length apart. It provided each of them with a maximum field of vision and range of action. Frank had to admit, these guys were acting like a cut above. He’d met Kim Jong-un, the North Korean ruler’s bodyguard last Christmas. He’d been less than impressed. These three guys were either trying to show off for him, the head of the U.S. Presidential Protection Detail, or they were just that damned serious about their jobs.

Probably a bit of both.

Now he just had to wait.

# # #

As they sat in darkness on the hut’s dirt floor and ate the stolen spicy peanut
fufu
with their hands, the starchy cassava sticking to their fingers, Beatrice filled in the ambassador and Charlotte on the situation. Despite the food being cold, it burned the tongue and forced them all to drink a lot of water, which was good. Beat could tell by the sharp stench of their urine, despite the hole they’d dug in the corner of the hut and reburied, that they were all badly dehydrated. She was no exception, not daring to go out in the daytime to get water.

“We’re being actively hunted.” Beat kept her voice soft and slightly breathy. That would make it harder to distinguish directionally. “They appear to know that we survived the attack on the airport.”

“But that makes no sense, why would they hunt us?” Charlotte handed her blue pumps over to Sam Green who slid them into his burlap bag with his briefcase. The sandals fit just fine and would be far more comfortable. That should help their speed.

“Regrettably, it does.”

Beatrice tried to see the ambassador’s face in the darkness of the hut, but couldn’t make it out.

“How? I haven’t been able to make sense of it.”

“Last April…”

She whispered, “softly,” to him and he tried, but didn’t succeed much.

“… we captured their former Chief of the Navy in a drug-running and arms-trade bust at sea. He had thirty million dollars of cocaine and two dozen MANPADS.” Sam Green’s whisper became more assured. They were getting back into his territory.

“MANPADS?” Charlotte hadn’t heard that one yet.

“Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems. Shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles. They were headed to the Colombian drug lords for shooting down the U.S.’s D.E.A. helicopters. We’re close to tying him back to the acting President of Guinea-Bissau and, with time, about a third of the
power elite. If we can prove that, we can perhaps convince the U.N.
Coalition Forces that it’s time to clean this place up.”

“But that didn’t work in Somalia.” The U.S. had tried to do exactly that about twenty years ago and the country still wasn’t working.

“But Somalia,” Green pointed out, “had no functioning government at that time. G-B still does, mostly. If we can get control of that back into the voters’ hands, where their constitution says it belongs, this country might stand a chance.”

“And that’s what’s in your briefcase.”

“Right,” he rested a protective hand on his burlap bag. “I’m carrying a proposal to the people we were unable to connect to the drug-running, and if they agree, we’ll land heavily on their side. If we can even get U.N. peacekeepers and international election monitors in the door, maybe we can start working on free elections and shifting their economy off the drug trade. Then, eventually, we can end this disaster that started the day they claimed independence in 1973. But these documents also include their names, a death sentence to these people who might be our friends, and the death of all our hopes if it falls into the wrong hands. My notes and appointments would become a kill-list of every potentially reliable politician and leader.”

Maybe he wasn’t quite the lost cause Beatrice had thought him to be. Terrified out of his skull, definitely, but he’d hung onto that stupid briefcase for a reason. And maybe something about making love to Charlotte in a darkened West African hut, or being hunted like a criminal, had given him a focus.

“But why would they want to kill you?”

He shrugged. His white
dashiki
just catching the light from the one window to reveal the gesture.

“Different factions. One faction sees a chance to lash out at the U.S. by killing me, not realizing the world of hurt that will land down upon them should they succeed in doing so. The more rational factions think my death would send a clear message to stay out of G-B politics, not that it would work any better. Others would perchance prefer me alive as a bargaining chip. They’d use me to save their own skins with transport to a country they can disappear in, the Congo and Senegal don’t have an extradition treaty with us. Perhaps a few people think they can gain a favor from the U.S. government if they save my life, maybe the politicians and military leaders on my list, but maybe not. How can I tell them from the others until we’ve had a chance to meet and talk?”

Beatrice let it all process. It fit. Not all of it, but enough that she knew what was going on and what had to come next.

“Okay, this is going to get harder, starting right now. Are you two up for it?”

By their too-bright hair, she could see them turning toward one another. Sam reached out and took Charlotte’s hand, then brought it to his lips.

They turned back to Beat.

“Okay, we’re ready.”

Beatrice moved to the door, checked both directions, listening to the silence of the streets, and moved them out. They had four, perhaps five more hours of darkness and a lot of ground to cover.