The First Casualty

48

Breakfast consisted of rice porridge floating in sorghum and injera, a bread made from flour, honey, and rosemary. And, of course, coffee, thick, aromatic African-bean coffee. Overhead, a fan spun lazily, doing little but rearranging the already hot, dry air in a room empty except for the four men at the same table. The one next to theirs could have been a display case at a photography store: cameras with varying attachments, tripods, strobe lights and klieg lights on stands.

The four were dressed almost identically: khaki safari jackets over V-neck T-shirts and cargo pants stuffed into military-style combat boots. Only in headwear was there a difference: One Indiana Jones — style broad-brimmed hat, a tightly woven straw Stetson, and two long-billed caps.

Jason was finishing relating the events of last night. “… And I’ll be damned if I can figure out why they didn’t try something more certain. A gunshot, perhaps. Why would they put a two-foot horned viper in my bed?”

Emphani smiled. “Perhaps because they could not find a five-foot cobra.”

“You complaining, Artiste?” Andrews chimed in. “Advantage of your dying of snakebite is that the police could treat it as something other than murder. I’m sure the one in your bed wasn’t the first varmint to creep in from the desert.”

Jason put down the piece of bread at which he had been nibbling. “Why do I have the feeling the sudden demise of a foreign infidel would not cause a great deal of concern among the local gendarmerie?”

Viktor, astonishingly chipper in view of the volume of vodka he had consumed the previous evening, spoke for the first time. “Important thing is someone knows is not crew from magazine.”

“Thanks a lot, asshole,” Jason said good-naturedly.

Viktor grinned, holding up both hands. “Mistake. Is important next to you being alive.”

Andrews pushed back from the table, the legs of his chair protesting against the floor’s tiles. “OK, now that someone knows our business isn’t glossy pictures in a magazine, what do we do?”

Do? What the hell could they do, Jason thought. Damn Momma and her duplicity that put him and his men in a place synonymous for remoteness with their cover likely blown and no way to identify their enemies.

“Don’t see we have much choice,” he answered. “We continue the masquerade.”

“Continue?” Viktor protested. “How is possible? Our enemies know we are here.”

“What would you suggest?” Jason asked patiently, all too aware Emphani and Andrews were listening with more than passing interest. “We can pack up and run, leaving the good folks who tried to kill me in our rear, free to contact their Tuareg buddies to set up an ambush if they don’t get to us first. It’s not like we can just go to the airport and skedaddle.”

“And why not, Artiste?” Andrews wanted to know. “You sure as shit aren’t planning to return the same way we came.”

Jason turned to face the former Navy man. “Our extraction plans do, in fact, call for us to depart by air, although hardly by commercial service. They also call for pretty precise timing, which we can discuss tonight along with our attack plan for tomorrow. The Timbuktu airport has only two flights a week direct Paris. All the others go to Mopi or Bamako. If we succeed, I doubt anyone will be eager to wait at either place for a flight out of country. No, I believe the safest thing is to stick with the plan we have. We’ll just have to be extra careful.”

There was grudging agreement around the table.

“OK, Artiste, you win. So, what are our plans for today?”

Jason glanced around assuring himself he would not be overheard. “Emphani, it’s too late for Fajr, the prayer said before sunrise…”

“Tell me about it,” Andrews grumbled. “Surely, I wasn’t the only one that screeching from the mosques woke up.”

“I was already awake,” Emphani replied coolly. “Saying my Fajr.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean…”

A smile twitched across Emphani’s lips. “Recording the muezzin’s call to prayer instead of having a live person call from the minarets hasn’t done a lot for the tone.”

Jason looked from one to the other. “If I may, gentlemen.”

When he was certain he had their attention, he began. “Emphani, you are the only one who speaks both Arabic and French…”

“But not Koyra Chiini.” The dialect spoken along the Niger Valley and by far the most popular dialect in Timbuktu, one of over fifty in Mali.

Jason continued. “Do the best you can. French is the country’s official language and you’re sure to hear some Arabic if the people we think are here are here. You go to Dhur prayers shortly after noon at the Sankore Mosque, snoop around. Oh yeah, no point in playing with a disguise. If anyone asks, you’re with the magazine’s mission here because of your linguistic skill but, more important, because you are a Moslem. The mosques here are not open to us infidels. And, of course, you want to look around, maybe take some pictures if the local imam doesn’t mind. Naturally, you’d be interested in the older parts of the place like the southernmost of the two minarets.

“Chief, you take in Djinguereber, the Great Mosque, on the western side of the old town. Viktor, the Sidi Yahya Mosque. Don’t slink around. You are legitimate journalists, OK? Just remember, non-believers are not welcome inside, and we don’t want to cause a ruckus.”

The rule regarding non-believers in mosques varied according to two seemingly conflicting verses of the Koran. In Turkey, for instance, tourists are welcome during non-prayer hours as long as dressed appropriately. In most African mosques, not so.

“No one ever accused Moslems of being open-minded,” Andrews grumbled.

“That is one person’s view,” Emphani replied tartly. “Had it not been for such mathematical devices as the invention of zero as a number, you will still be counting on fingers and toes.”

A glare from Jason silenced them both.

Andrews and Viktor exchanged glances before the former asked, “Anything in particular we should be looking for? I mean, if we can’t go inside…”

“Well, from the wreckage of the Air France plane, the angle of damage to certain parts of the aircraft, the French triangulated back to this area of Africa, give or take a hundred kilometers or so. Assuming this ray, or whatever it is, can’t jump sand dunes, trees, and the like, it would have to have been launched from a relatively high point…’’

“Only one of which in maybe fifty kilometers of here would be tower, er, minaret of one of the mosques,” Viktor interrupted.

“Precisely,” Jason continued. “So, what we are looking for is anything suspicious around a mosque.”

Emphani cleared his throat. “But you think it is the one we can see from our windows. Why?”

“Making another assumption, that the beam or missile or whatever moves in a more or less straight line, it would have had to depart in a westerly direction. According to the guidebook I read on the plane, the southern minaret of the Sankore Mosque is the only one with an opening facing away from Mecca, westerly.”

“And you, Artiste, what is going to occupy you this morning?”

Jason drained the dregs of his coffee. “I’m going to take advantage of the height on which this place is built. I can see damn near the whole town.”