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Which was why the refugee camp of Barehda lit a flicker of hope inside her punished body, rubbery legs finding energy at the sight of the food lines near the massive transport plane. Her only thought that food might sustain life until God opened another door.
The net veil was some protection against the buzzing hordes of flies, but she gagged as the fumes from the initial wave of rotting and diseased flesh and bodily waste clawed her senses. She followed the others toward the plane, appalled and pained at the sight of their stick figures, bodies sheared of muscle by malnutrition, dark, sagging flesh like leather, aware she looked every bit a walking corpse herself.
They skirted the outer northern perimeter of the camp, weaving past camels, goats and mules, their hides likewise worn to the bone. She heard the faint sobs of children, saw mothers cradling tiny bodies in spindly arms, skeletal fingers pushing some sort of grainy oatmeal into their mouths. But the infants, and even the older children, appeared almost too weak to chew. God, she had heard, might create drought, but man made the famine. What had been created here as the result of man’s inhumanity, she thought, had to be an abomination in the eyes of God.
She looked at the smattering of plastic tents, spotted shells of dark figures stretched out inside the flimsy covering, but most of the refugees were forced to bake under the sun, the suffocating heat, she knew, only compounding their suffering. She fell farther behind the others, shrouded in dust, her heart sick at the sight of so much misery, aware she and her son would most likely die here.
The refugees were eating all around her, a hopeful sign, she thought, the older males—teenagers mostly—shoveling the gruel into their mouths, slurping some white liquid from small plastic containers. There were a number of men, even small children, with missing arms and legs, cruel and sudden amputations as the result of countless land mines buried across both Ethiopia and Somalia.
She scoured the sea of displaced and starving, head spinning from the stink and the sight of so many living dead. She felt the cry of anguish burn in her chest, the thought that this would soon be the open burial ground for so many too much to bear when she saw tin containers suddenly falling to the ground. Refugees began clutching their stomachs, men, women and children convulsing, vomit spewing from mouths like burst faucets, bodies slumping over. Paralyzed by horror, she watched, listened to the cries fade, infants spilling from the arms of mothers who tumbled, thrashing on the ground. It was no mystery, she knew, disease was a major killer throughout Somalia, but something else was happening across the camp. The ravages of whatever the affliction were too sudden, too violent, to be any illness she had ever seen.
She found herself alone, the others now falling into the food line far ahead, unaware of what was happening, caring only about whatever food was being dispensed. She watched those she had made the trek with, fear mounting, something warning her to flee this place. There were armed men, wearing filter masks and white gloves, she saw, some of them barking orders to the refugees to hurry, other gunmen handing out the tin containers from the ramp of the silver transport plane. Why were they protecting themselves from breathing the air? No Red Cross or United Nations relief workers she’d ever seen came to the camps, heavily armed, donning protection as if they feared close contact with the local populations. That was no UN plane, either. She strained to make out the emblem on the fuselage: a white star inside a black ring, a fist that looked armored inside the star. They were westerners, that much she could tell. Another group of white men, she could see, stood on a ridge where the plain gave way to a jagged escarpment, far to the east, well beyond the camp. There were the dreaded technicals, she noted; Toyota pickups with mounted machine guns, too many armed Somalis to count, their eyes watching the camp over scarves or from behind black hoods. Why were they laughing among themselves?
It struck her as a bad dream, food being distributed by armed men laughing at the sight of so much suffering and death. It all felt so hideously wrong…it was evil, she decided
She flinched, gasped when she felt a hand tug at her shoulder.
“You just arrived?”
He spoke Amharic, the language of her country. There was fear in his stare. She answered, “Yes… I…”
“Did you eat the food?”
She shook her head.
“Come,” he said. “They have all been poisoned.”
“But what of the others?” she said, nodding toward the refugees around the plane. “I must warn—”
“No. If you do that, the Somalis and the white men will most likely kill you and your child. We must make our way to the farthest edge of the camp. Night will fall soon, then we will make our way out of here and run to the Kenyan border. I have family there. You will be safe. But we must make our way now.”
Could she trust this stranger? she wondered. Why, if what he said was true, poison all of them? It made no sense. But in a lawless land like Somalia, where only violence and mayhem ruled, why wouldn’t mass murder of refugees, viewed as a blight and a burden, be acceptable?
She watched in growing horror, knew she couldn’t stay here, counted perhaps another ten refugees toppling to the ground, then let the stranger take her arm and lead her and her son deeper into the camp. She avoided looking anyone in the eye, felt like a coward for fleeing, leaving them to die without warning. But perhaps, she decided, it was God’s will she and her son survive. Afraid more than ever, Nahira Muhdu found the strength to silently implore God to deliver them from this evil.
YASSIF ABADAL WAS thinking God did, indeed, work in mysterious ways, bestowed wondrous gifts to those who remained faithful and loyal and patient. Sometimes God even used the Devil, he thought, to do his work.
As chieftain of his Nurwadah clan, controlling the deep southwest edge of Somalia, he had his sights set on far loftier goals than simply dominating an area populated mostly by nomads and bandits. Mogadishu was the ultimate prize. But he needed a mighty sword’s clear edge, some overwhelming power that would see him crush rivals, bring the entire country under his rule.
The white men, he believed, had brought him, it appeared, all the power of the sword he could have ever hoped or prayed for.
The refugees were spilling all over the camp in droves, their feeble cries flung from his ears as his warriors chuckled and made jokes among themselves. Snugging the bandanna higher up his nose, he watched as the white men quickly handed out the tin containers and the milky-looking drink to the newest Ethiopian horde. They were so concerned with only filling their bellies, they seemed unaware their fellow countrymen were right then dying in their midst.
Toting one of the new G-3 assault rifles, he looked at the white men fanned down the ridge beside him. It was, indeed, the strangest of alliances, he thought, looking at their blond heads, blue eyes that were as cold as chips of ice, catching the arrogance and contempt in their voices for these refugees as they barked in their native guttural tongue.
He had never seen a German in the flesh, but his predecessor had somehow gotten his hands on an old black-and-white film of World War II. It had galled him, back then, how their late leader had so admired white racist barbarians who would have enslaved the indigenous peoples of North Africa if they hadn’t been driven off the continent by the British and Americans. But when the role as leader was passed on to him, Abadal came to see the stunning power of their blitzkrieg and other military tactics, understood the brutal discipline and the steely professional commitment to war that even he now preached to his clan.
If these Germans could propel him into the future glory of complete victory over every rival clan, and if he was destined to sit in the presidential palace in Mogadishu with their help, he had no problem walking into tomorrow with the devil by his side. Nor did it matter how many rivals, refugees or common Somalians died in the bloody path to the crown.
They had flown in a group of emissaries for the first round of negotiation a month prior. It was an unauthorized landing in a country so hostile to the west, Abadal had been, at first, anxious, even unnerved by their brazenness, their lack of fear, but perhaps whatever intimidation they felt was only masked with contempt. The ice was broken, however, when the Germans came bearing gifts of cash and weapons, including heavy machine guns, handheld multibarreled rocket launchers, flamethrowers. The high-tech gear—cell phones with scrambled lines, the ground and air radar, night-vision goggles and other state-of-the-art wonders only dreamed of in Somalia—had required some lengthy instruction. But Abadal and his top lieutenants had gotten the gist, enduring gruff explanations by the Germans until they felt proficient enough to at least get the high-tech goods up and running.
For their generosity, these Germans had a proposal, and they had chosen him to be ruler of all Somalia. Why him? he’d asked. They had grunted, shrugged and answered, “Why not?” Did he wish to remain a nomad in the desert with a few old AKs, some rusty technicals and indulging wishful thinking about greatness? Of course not, he’d countered. What did they want in return? They had claimed nothing more than a possible base of operations when the other clans were wiped out and he controlled the destiny of his country. They had a weapon, the first group had claimed, one that was as potentially devastating as any weapon of mass destruction.
Now that he had seen the almost instant and clear catastrophic effects of this invisible killer, Abadal had questions, most of which were based on concern for his own safety. He found their leader; the tall, muscled one named Heinz with the bullet head and black leather jacket, and walked up to him.
“Ah, my Somali friend. What do you think?” he said, admiring the view as shriveled figures in rags thrashed throughout the camp. “As good as promised, I hope?”
“Tell me something. This virus in the food, can it be spread to others who have not eaten it? Can it be caught through the air? By touch?”
“First of all, this was an experiment. Our way of showing you the future that, uh,” he said, voice thick with his native tongue, “we are prepared to place solely in your hands. Second, it is a biologically engineered parasite, not a virus, taken from the female Anopheles mosquito.”
“I am seeing an outbreak of malaria?”
Heinz shook his head, chuckled. “Yes and no. The details are very complex, scientific jargon you would neither understand, nor do you need to concern yourself with. And if you are worried about contamination, you will only become infected two ways. If you eat what is basically pig slop made from simple microyeast or you come into direct contact with bodily fluids.”
“Blood?”
“That would be a bodily fluid.”
The German was talking to him like a child now. Abadal scowled. “But you said you can deliver an airborne plague, that you have the vaccine.”
“That is true.”
“When?”
“Shortly. I will consult with my superiors. But, I must tell you, there may be a few more conditions before we are prepared to hand this country over to you. A plague that is spread deliberately…well, it is something that requires serious planning, contingencies to be thought out, and so forth. There is also the question of loyalty, compensation, reward and the like.”
And there it was, Abadal thought, suspecting all along it was too good to be true. “So there is more in it for you than using my country as simply a base for whatever your intentions.”
Abadal heard the quiet laugh again as Heinz told him, “A man of vision such as yourself surely must understand personal greatness and glory comes with a price.”
“And what will mine be?”
“We will be in contact with you. In the meantime, I suggest you thoroughly sanitize the area as we discussed.”
Abadal clenched his teeth, angry that the German, this arrogant foreigner who had come to his land as if he owned it, would just walk away, dismissing him, a flunky. “You realize I could either decline your offer…or take what I want from you.”
Abadal watched as the German kept walking, smiled at the death being spread below, then laughed out loud. “Yes, perhaps you could do just that, my Somali friend, but there would yet be another price to pay.”
THE HORROR BEGAN just after nightfall.
She was struggling to keep up with the man who told her his name was Mawhli. Beyond his name, she knew nothing about him, but if promised flight to Kenya…
At the moment safe passage into the unknown future was her only option.
Nahira Muhdu stumbled, Mawhli turning at the sound of her cry. He caught her before she was flung into a headlong tumble down the steep incline for the wadi, a fall that might have ended any hope of escape with broken bones or her son crushed in her arms.
There was screaming behind her, brief hideous wails that chilled her to the bone. She gasped when she saw the tongues of fire, glowing waves shooting from hoses extended in the hands of shadows moving away from the technicals, a ring of death that encircled the camp.
“There is nothing you can do for them, Nahira.”
“Why?”
“Only God knows that.”
“Then he knows he cannot allow such evil men to go unpunished.”
“I believe that, also. Come, we must hurry!”
She hesitated, sick to her stomach, the stench of burning flesh carried to her nose on the wind, the heat from the fires touching her face. The breath of Satan. She turned, began following Mawhli into the wadi, melting into the darkness. She prayed for the life of her son, for safe passage into Kenya, then asked God for something she would have never believed herself capable of doing.
Nahira Muhdu asked God to deliver retribution against the warlord and his murdering beasts.
CHAPTER ONE
“Sixteen years old, and Boise is the closest she’s been to a big city. Hops a Greyhound and I find out about this two months ago—no clue, no threats, no kiss-my-ass. Not even Mrs. Evans number three—Ilsa of the SS I tell ya—with all her keen female intuition, saw this bomb dropping. And here I was, thinking I was father of the year. The cop the press maggots used to call Dirty Harry on Steroids, lower than the lowest now. I can’t even hold my family together. Three-time loser, huh. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking?”
“That’s not what I was thinking, Jim. And I’m not the enemy.”
“Right, yeah, you’re a buddy, ex-cop, once my partner.”
The man he knew from the old L.A.P.D. days was on an angry roll, fueled by whiskey and the torment of the day, steaming more mad at the world with every snarl and speck of flying froth. Carl “Ironman” Lyons figured the best thing to do was to let him vent, expend all the fury before he started firing off his own questions.
“Fuck me raw. I keep asking myself why? It’s like some sick tape I keep running through my head, all these horrible images of everything that could happen to her. Wandering the street, maybe on drugs, some pimp… Goddammit, Carl. All I wanted was for her to have a decent life—you know, clean air, big sky, small town. No drugs, no crime, no gangs, a little slice of peace and sanity to grow up in, not drowning with all the other human turds in that toilet we knew, Los Angeles. We know the city can eat up someone her age. And with her looks… You see a picture of her, you’re looking at an angel, a goddamn princess. Now I track her here, one of my worst fears comes true. I find out she’s been dancing in a strip joint, for God’s sake.”
Lyons didn’t believe in coincidence or fate, didn’t cater to psychic babble or all those crystal-ball hotlines that mapped out someone’s destiny, cradle to grave, fame and fortune and bliss on earth written in the palm of the hand. A former detective of the Los Angeles Police Department and currently a commando working out of Stony Man Farm—an ultra-covert intelligence agency nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains—he believed in action, truth and just the facts. But, he had to admit, bumping into another cop he had partnered with for more than a year in a police department clear on the other side of the country—a man he hadn’t seen, heard from nor thought about in well over a decade—was on the hinky side of coincidence.
But there Jim Evans had been, seconds away from either getting bounced on his ear out of the bar or breaking the joint up with collateral damage to doormen and patrons, a guest stint in a D.C. jail with the kind of unsavory characters he loathed, had busted up and feared his daughter falling into league—or bed—with. Bizarre fluke or some guiding cosmic hand, Lyons couldn’t help but wonder, just the same, about the events leading up to the chance encounter.
After three days decompressing from the latest mission, Lyons had rounded up the other two-thirds of Able Team for a quick getaway until duty called again. Restless, feeling confined at Stony Man Farm in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, Lyons, the leader of Able Team, had piled the three of them into the oversize War Wagon—which wasn’t supposed to leave the Farm’s premises for a mere joyride—then driven them to the Key Bridge Marriott where he’d paid for a penthouse suite for a week. Still restless, tired of watching Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario Blancanales enthralling themselves with the same movies on cable or playing computer games until he was sure they were bug-eyed, he had set out by himself for a few belts and beers, a tour of downtown D.C. strip joints on the play-card, fantasies of getting lucky urging him on. Cheap thrills had a way of bringing trouble to Lyons, and this time out had proved no different. It had been touch-and-go back at the titty bar, wrestling Evans free of the bouncers, packing the ex-L.A. detective, drunk and belligerent, into his Lexus rental, trying to get both the story and the facts straight.
Lyons, sensing Evans about to launch himself on the verbal rampage again, was not sure he was willing to sit through another diatribe. Judging from whiskey fumes strong enough to gag a buzzard, one cloud of cigarette smoke after another blown out in long, angry exhales, he didn’t see the man calming down anytime soon. Add the snail’s pace the Stony Man warrior was forced to keep the rental creeping through Georgetown and Lyons found his own aggravation level rising.
He looked over at Evans, found a wrinkled, leather-faced, heavier version of the cop he’d once known. With his black Stetson, sheepskin coat and cowboy boots, Evans in his Wild West garb was damn near a circus act in a coat-and-tie Beemer and Evian town that looked down its nose at anyone who didn’t fit the yuppie and PC parameters. Then again, Lyons, with his knee-length black leather trench coat, aloha shirt alive and flaming with palm trees, flamingos and scantily clad island girls, with white slacks and alligator shoes… Well, he knew he didn’t have much room to judge the fashion show. In fact, he recalled one of the musclebound punks with an earpiece back at the bar tagging him “Don Ho” and ordering him to get his buddy, Wyatt, back home to the ranch.
Kids these days, he groused to himself, no respect for their elders.
Evans, he recalled, hadn’t been a particularly good cop, nor a bad one, at least not the renegade he was purported by the press to be when Lyons had worked with him. There were rumors of brutality, charges of racism, L.A. media making a big stink over a couple of questionable shootings before the man had transferred to Lyons’s division. They had gone through some doors together, solved some tough cases, but Lyons had never found himself ready to cozy up to the man, on or off the job.
He had never been able to put a finger on his feelings toward the man, supposed he was just plain mean-spirited, with or without a badge, the whole world crap, not a decent human being anywhere, a borderline bully out to control, dominate or punish. He wasn’t the kind of man Lyons would sit down with and drink a few beers, but Evans had jumped in front of a bullet for him, getting seriously wounded in the process, commendations eventually pinned on both of them.
What was this moment supposed to mean? he wondered. Was Fate, after all, calling in a marker? Was some cosmic force urging him to extend a helping hand, if not for Evans, but for the innocent life of a young girl? Whatever the emotional quandary, it was a rare day on the planet, he figured, when just about any man’s intentions and motives were altruistic.
So far, Lyons had the gist of why Evans had come to town. Up to a point he supposed he could understand the man’s pain and anger over a runaway child. Hadn’t he once been married? It was true, he had a son, Tommy, but he hadn’t spoken to either the ex or his boy—now fully grown—in quite a while. What was he feeling now? What was he thinking? Did he regret the path in life he’d chosen, sloughing off whatever responsibilities as a father he should have seen through? If so, why? Because it was a big bad savage world out there, after all, and his skills as a warrior were more needed for the greater good of humankind, instead of raising a family? Was he on the verge right then of doing some voyeuristic dance through another man’s broken family life? Was he thinking he could and should help Evans find his daughter, despite his true feelings for the guy?
Lyons jostled through a bottleneck of vehicles playing bumper cars, lurched ahead as a light turned red and a few horns blared their ire at him.
“Did you report her missing?” Lyons asked when Evans fell silent.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Hell, I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know, or think I’d failed as a father. Judy, even though she’s not Deirdre’s real mother, somehow found plenty of ways to want to blame me, but that’s another stinger to pull out of my hide at some point. Didn’t come right out and say it, but she had her way of telling me she’s my problem, I deal with it. How do you like that?”
Another marriage made in hell, Lyons thought. “Seems you picked up the trail pretty quick.”
“She left with an older girl, a Susan Barker. I heard she’d been hanging around with her. Susie’s something of the town good-time girl, nice way of saying she’s just a whore. I own a bar—maybe I told you that—and I hear things. One rumor led to another. I had a talk with this girl’s sometime boyfriend.”
“And a little chat with the boyfriend pointed you east to this fair city?”
“Let’s just say I got a few answers the old-fashioned way. And, my daughter absconded with a couple of my credit cards. Easy enough to track them both to a motel here—the bills started coming in—but Susie’s sometime squeeze filled in a few blanks about their little jaunt to D.C. Seemed Susie filled Deirdre’s head with a lot of nonsense about how they could make it big here, she had friends in the area, some kind of big shots in the entertainment business. I already had my head crammed with visions of pure assholes she’d come here and get scammed by, or worse. Only I get the impression it was something more than just…stripping for a bunch of assholes who oughta be home with their wives and kids. Just today I found Susie holed up in some crack motel up New York Avenue, staked it out, followed Susie to work, where you found me. She goes by the name of Candy. Get this. Walk in, like a regular asshole, I see my daughter’s picture on the wall in this dump, goes by Dee-Dee. The bastards—no better than pimps—had her all dolled up in some cowgirl outfit.”
“Did you, uh, run into your daughter back there?”
Evans scowled. “No. I was told she was off tonight.”
“I got the impression you were making a hard pitch.”
“Yeah, like telling the manager he’s got a sixteen-year-old girl taking her clothes off in his place, and if he didn’t want the cops shutting him down or my fist doing a rectal probe, he’d better tell me where my daughter was. That’s where you entered the picture.”
Lyons cleared his throat, already knew the reaction he’d get when he dropped the bomb. “I have to ask, Jim. Are you leaving anything out?”
“Such as?” Evans growled.
“Kids run away from home for a reason.”
“Why don’t you just come out and ask it, Carl, instead of tap-dancing on my nuts.”
“Okay. Was there any abuse?”
Lyons found his former partner staring at him, steady, no sign of anger or resentment.
“No. None whatsoever of any kind. But I understand you asking. I may be a mean SOB on the streets, but I take care of my kids, never raised a hand to them or touched them in any way. End of story.”
Lyons fell silent, wondering how far he should go with this. Then Evans asked, “If you don’t mind me asking, what are those two cannons you’re packing? Couldn’t help but notice. I figure you’re into something needs punch like that.”
The question didn’t catch Lyons off guard, but he felt uncomfortable with the sudden glint in Evans’s eyes—the Stony Man warrior sure his former partner was entertaining ideas about going vigilante if he discovered any more dark secrets about his darling DeeDee. They were twin .45s, butts-out, stainless-steel, the double bulging package obvious beneath his coat, Lyons knew. But he had the bogus Justice Department ID just in case the issue of concealed weapons was pushed by any law on the prowl. The twins had been made by John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s resident weaponsmith. With fifteen Rhino or body-armor-piercing rounds in each clip, Lyons had let Kissinger talk him into trying out hardware other than the .357 Magnum Colt Python he usually carried. Lyons told Evans what they were, but left out the details.
Evans chuckled. “We might have lost touch over the years, but I figured you put in your twenty, retired, maybe got yourself a boat, move up north like a lot of L.A. cops do when they leave the job, maybe write crime novels.”
“I did. Retire, that is. But sitting still on a sailboat or in front of a keyboard isn’t my speed.”
“So what are you doing to keep busy these days?”
“I do freelance security work.”
Evans nodded, looked at his cigarette, savvy enough to know not to push the subject. He paused, working on his smoke, then said, “Know what I’m thinking right now, Carl? I’m thinking I played a bad hand back at that toilet bowl, blew any chance maybe getting Susie to talk, find my daughter. My gut tells me she’s into something way over her head, and you could see I was in no mood or shape for any subtle approach.”
