Al Jihad

NINE

Julie Giraud landed the Osprey on the runway near the sabotaged planes. When I walked up she was sitting in the shade under the left wing with an M-16 across her lap.

She had undoubtedly searched the area before I arrived, made sure no one had missed the plane rides to hell. Fire had spread to the other sabotaged airplanes, and now all three were burning. Black smoke tailed away on the desert wind.

"So how does it feel?" I asked as I settled onto the ground beside her.

"Damn good, thank you very much."

The heat was building, a fierce dry heat that sucked the moisture right out of you. I got out my canteen and drained the thing.

"How do you feel?" she asked after a bit, just to be polite.

"Exhausted and dirty."

"I could use a bath too."

"The dirty I feel ain't gonna wash off."

"That's too bad."

"I'm breaking your heart." I got to my feet. "Let's get this thing back to the cliff and covered with camouflage netting. Then we can sleep."

She nodded, got up, led the way into the machine.

We were spreading the net over the top of the plane when we heard a jet. Getting company," I said.

Julie was standing on top of the Osprey. Now she shaded her eyes, looked north, tried to spot the plane that we heard.

She saw it first, another bizjet. That was a relief to me — a fighter might have spotted the Osprey and strafed it.

"Help me get the net off it," she demanded, and began tossing armloads of net onto the ground.

"Are you tired of living?"

"Anyone coming to visit that crowd of baby-killers is a terrorist himself."

"So you're going to kill them?"

"If I can. Now drag that net out of my way!"

I gathered a double armful and picked it up. Julie climbed down, almost dived through the door into the machine. It took me a couple minutes to drag the net clear, and took Julie about that long to get the engines started and the plane ready to fly.

The instant I gave a thumb-up, she applied power and lifted off.

I hid my face so I wouldn't get dirt in my eyes.

Away she went in a cloud of dirt.

She shot the plane down. The pilot landed, then tried to take off when he saw the Osprey and the burned-out jets. Julie Giraud used the flex Fifty on him and turned the jet into a fireball a hundred yards off the end of the runway.

When she landed I got busy with the net, spreading it out.

"You are the craziest goddamn broad I ever met," I told her. "You are no better than these terrorists. You're just like them."

"Bullshit," she said contemptuously.

"You don't know who the hell you just killed. For all you know you may have killed a planeload of oil-company geologists."

"Whoever it was was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Just like your parents."

"Somebody has to take on the predators," she shouted at me. "They feed on us. If we don't fight back, they'll eat us all."

I let her have the last word. I was sick of her and sick of me and wished to Christ I had never left Van Nuys.

I got a little sleep that afternoon in the shade under a wing, but I had too much on my mind to do more than doze. Darkness finally came and we took the net off the plane for the last time. We left the net, the Humvee, the trailer, everything. I put all the stuff we didn't need over and around the trailer as tightly as I could, then put a chemical fuse in the last of the C-4 in the trailer and set it to blow in six hours.

When we lifted off, I didn't even bother to look at the Camel, the old fortress. I never wanted to see any of this again.

She flew west on autopilot, a few hundred feet above the desert floor. There were mountain ranges ahead of us. She used the night-vision goggles to spot them and climbed when the terrain forced her to. I dozed beside her in the copilot's seat.

Hours later she shook me awake. Out the window ahead I could see the lights of Tangier.

She had the plane on autopilot, flying toward the city. We went aft, put on coveralls, helped each other don backpacks and parachutes, then she waddled forward to check how the plane was flying.

The idea was to fly over the city from east to west, jump over the western edge of the city and let the plane fly on, out to sea. When the fuel in the plane was exhausted it would go into the ocean, probably break up and sink.

Meanwhile we would be on our way via commercial airliner. I had my American passports in my backpack — my real one and Robert Arnold's — and a plane ticket to South Africa. I hadn't asked Julie where she was going when we hit the ground because I didn't want to know. By that point I hoped to God I never set eyes on her again.

She lowered the tailgate, and I walked out on it. She was looking out one of the windows. She held up a hand, signaling me to get ready. I could just glimpse lights.

Now she came over to stand beside me. "Fifteen seconds," she shouted and looked at her watch. I looked at mine too.

I must have relaxed for just a second, because the next thing I knew she pushed me and I was going out, reaching for her. She was inches beyond my grasp.

Then I was out of the plane and falling through the darkness.

Needless to say, I never saw Julie Giraud again. I landed on a rocky slope, a sheep pasture I think, on the edge of town and gathered up the parachute. She was nowhere in sight.

I took off my helmet, listened for airplane noise.. nothing.

Just a distant jet, maybe an airliner leaving the commercial airport.

I buried the chute and helmet and coveralls in a hole I dug with a folding shovel. I tossed the shovel into the hole and filled it with my hands, tromped it down with my new civilian shoes, then set off downhill with a flashlight. Didn't see a soul.

The next morning I walked into town and got a room at a decent hotel. I had a hot bath and went to bed and slept the clock around, almost twenty-four hours. When I awoke I went to the airport and caught a flight to Capetown.

Capetown is a pretty city in a spectacular setting, on the ocean with Table Mountain behind it. I had plenty of cash and I established an account with a local bank, then had money wired in from Switzerland. There was three million in the Swiss account before my first transfer, so Julie Giraud made good on her promise. As I instinctively knew she would.

I lived in a hotel the first week, then found a little place that a widow rented to me.

I watched the paper pretty close, expecting to see a story about the massacre in the Libyan desert. The Libyans were bound to find the wreckage of those jets sooner or later, and the bodies, and the news would leak out. But it didn't.

The newspapers never mentioned it.

Finally I got to walking down to the city library and reading the papers from Europe and the United States. Nothing. Nada. Like it never happened.

A month went by, a peaceful, quiet month. No one paid any attention to me, I had a mountain of money in the local bank and in Switzerland, and neither radio, television, nor newspapers ever mentioned all those dead people in the desert.

Finally I called my retired Marine pal Bill Wiley in Van Nuys, the police dispatcher. "Hey, Bill, this is Charlie Dean."

"Hey Charlie. When you coming home, guy?"

"I don't know. How's Candy doing with the stations?"

"They're making more money than they ever did with you running them. He's got rid of the facial iron and works twelve hours a day."

"No shit!"

"So where are you?"

"Let's skip that for a bit. I want you to do me a favor. Tomorrow at work how about running me on the crime computer, see if I'm wanted for anything."

He whistled. "What the hell you been up to, Charlie?"

"Will you do that? I'll call you tomorrow night."

"Give me your birth date and social security number." I gave it to him, then said good-bye.

I was on pins and needles for the next twenty-four hours. When I called again. Bill said, "You ain't in the big computer, Charlie. What the hell you been up to?"

"I'll tell you all about it sometime."

"So when you coming home?"

"One of these days. I'm still vacationing as hard as I can."

"Kiss her once for me," Bill Wiley said.

At the Capetown library I got into old copies of the International Herald Tribune, published in Paris. I finally found what I was looking for on microfiche: a complete list of the passengers who died twelve years ago on the Air France flight that blew up over Niger. Colonel Giraud and his wife were not on the list.

Well, the light finally began to dawn.

I got one of the librarians to help me get on the Internet. What 1 was interested in were lists of U.S. Air Force Academy graduates, say from five to ten years ago.

I read the names until I thought my eyeballs were going to fall out. No Julie Giraud.

I'd been had. Julie was either a CIA or French agent. French, I suspected, and the Americans agreed to let her steal a plane.

As I sat and thought about it, I realized that I didn't ever meet old Colonel Giraud's kids. Not to the best of my recollection. Maybe he had a couple of daughters, maybe he didn't, but damned if I could remember.

What had she said? That the colonel said I was the best Marine in the corps?

Stupid ol' Charlie Dean. I ate that shit with a spoon. The best Marine in the corps! So I helped her "steal" a plane and kill a bunch of convicted terrorists that Libya would never extradite.

If we were caught I would have sworn under torture, until my very last breath, that no government was involved, that the people planning this escapade were a U.S. Air Force deserter and an ex-Marine she hired.

I loafed around Capetown for a few more days, paid my bills, thanked the widow lady, gave her a cock-and-bull story about my sick kids in America, and took a plane to New York. At JFK I got on another plane to Los Angeles.

When the taxi dropped me at my apartment, I stopped by the super's office and paid the rent. The battery in my car had enough juice to start the motor on the very first crank.

I almost didn't recognize Candy. He had even gotten a haircut and wore clean jeans. "Hey, Mr. Dean," Candy said after we had been chatting a while. "Thanks for giving me another chance. You've taught me a lot."

"We all make mistakes," I told him. If only he knew how true that was.