The Paris Option Page 15

  He had made it just in time. Elizondo was striding off the bridge. Beneath his beret, his sun-darkened face held a somber, angry expression. He looked like a man with a problem. When he turned left, Smith slipped from between the cars and trailed behind, keeping him in sight. Elizondo led him past an area of gracious country houses, cigarrales, where rich professionals lived, on up a hill and beyond the Parador hotel and past tractlike modern housing. Eventually they were in the countryside, with only the stars, the moon, and the fields for company. Somewhere cattle lowed.

  At last Elizondo turned left again, this time onto a dirt road. During the long hike, he had looked back several times, but Smith had been able to use trees, bushes, and vehicles to hide from the probing gaze. But this dirt road was too lonely and isolated, too little cover. Smith slipped into a woodland windbreak and wove through it parallel to the road.

  Because his Hawaiian shirt had short sleeves, bushes scratched his exposed arms. He could smell the cloying odor of some night-blooming flower. At last he plowed to the end of the windbreak, where he stayed back in the woods, studying the large clearing that spread before him. There were barns, chicken coops, and a corral that formed an L with a farm house, all bathed eerily in moonlight. This was his lucky night—just one house to choose from.

  He studied the vehicles. Three cars were parked at the edge of the open area near the L. One was an old Jeep Cherokee, but the two others were what held his attention—a sleek, late-model black Mercedes sedan and an equally large new black Volvo station wagon. The farm appeared modest, not wealthy enough to support two new, expensive cars. All of which made Smith think that Elizondo was meeting more than one member of the Crescent Shield.

  When Elizondo reached the front door, it opened before he could knock. As Smith watched, the terrorist hesitated, took a quick breath, and disappeared inside. Low to the ground, Smith left the cover of the windbreak and moved toward a lighted window on the right side of the house. When he heard the brittle crunch of shoes on gravel, he slid into the cover of an old oak, his nerves taut. The sound came from his left.

  A craggy black man emerged from around that corner of the house, silent and phantomlike, dressed in the white robes of a desert Arab. He stopped there, barely twenty feet from Smith, cradling a British-made L24A1 5.56mm assault rifle as he scanned the night. He looked like a man accustomed to weapons and distances. A desert warrior, but not an Arab, or even a Tuareg or Berber. Perhaps a Fulani from the tribe of fierce nomads who once ruled the southern edge of the Sahara.

  Meanwhile, a second man materialized around the house’s other corner, the right side, farther from Smith. He was carrying an old Kalashnikov assault weapon. He moved into the farmyard.

  Huddled beneath the tree, Smith tightened his grip on his Sig Sauer as the guard with the Kalashnikov turned and advanced toward the corral. He would pass within ten feet of Smith. At the same time, the tall bedouin said something in Arabic. The one with the Kalashnikov responded and stopped, so close to Smith that he could smell the onions and cardamom on him. Smith lay motionless as the two men talked more.

  Suddenly it was over. The Kalashnikov-armed guard turned and retraced his steps, passed the lighted window that had been Smith’s goal, and disappeared, perhaps to a post at the back of the house. But the bedouin in the white robes remained a statue, his head rotating like a radar antenna, searching the night. Without realizing it, he was preventing Smith from approaching the house. Smith imagined this was how the deep-desert warriors of the Sahara had always stood night watch, but on a high sand dune waiting for the foreign troops that had made the mistake of marching into their desert.

  At last the white-robed bedouin patrolled out into the yard and around the corral, chicken coops, and cars, still watching everywhere. Then he returned to the farmhouse, his head oscillating, until he reached the front door. He opened it and backed inside. It was a remarkable display—and warning—of two highly trained sentries at work. They would miss little.

  On his belly, Smith crawled quickly back from the tree until he was in the cover of the windbreak again. He circled wide through the vegetation and once more left its shelter, this time to hurry across the open space toward the rear of the farm house, where the light was less, the windows fewer—only three—and all were barred. Thirty feet away, he dropped onto his back, cradled his Sig Sauer against his chest, and slithered toward the left window. Above him, gray clouds scudded across the night sky, while beneath him, an occasional rock bit into his flesh. He gritted his teeth.

  Near the house now, he raised up and peered around, checking for the guard with the old Kalashnikov. The man was nowhere to be seen. Smith searched wider in the night, heard voices, and saw the glow of a pair of cigarettes. They were in the field behind the house, two men, and beyond them the bulky shadows of three helicopters. The Crescent Shield was both well organized and well supplied.

  Smith saw no other guards. He crawled closer and raised up to peer in through the first window. What he saw was an ordinary sight: a lighted room, and through an open door across from him, a second lighted room. In the more distant one, Elizondo was seated in a stiff armchair, his nervous gaze following a figure who paced, appearing and disappearing across the open doorway.

  Short and thickset, the pacer wore an impeccable dark gray business suit of English cut. His face was soft, round, and somehow enigmatic. Not an English face despite the suit, but of no particular ethnicity Smith could identify. Too dark for a northern European, lighter than many Italians or Spanish, with neither Oriental nor Polynesian features. Nor did he appear to be Afghan, Central Asian, or Pakistani. Possibly Berber, Smith decided, recalling the bedouin robes on the statuelike sentry he had first seen.

  Straining to hear, Smith realized he was listening to a polyglot from many countries—French, Spanish, English, others. He heard “Mauritania,” “dead,” “no more trouble,” “excellent,” “in the river,” “count it,” and, finally, “I trust you.” The last phrase was spoken by Elizondo in Spanish as he rose to his feet.

  The small, round-faced man stopped pacing and extended his hand. Elizondo shook it. It appeared that some kind of transaction had been completed amicably. As Elizondo disappeared, and Smith heard the front door open and close, he wondered about the word Mauritania. Had they been talking about someone from Mauritania? Smith thought that might be it. He also thought Elizondo had been the one who had spoken the name, and his tone indicated that whatever it meant, it was good news for him.

  On the other hand, Smith decided, Mauritania might be where the Crescent Shield, if that was who they were, or even the Black Flame, was headed next.

  Still thinking about Elizondo and the other man, Smith dropped low and crept through the night’s shadows to the second window, which was also barred. He raised up and looked inside.

  This time the room was small and empty, a bedroom with a simple iron cot made up for sleeping. There was a side table and chair, and on the cot lay a wooden tray that held an untouched meal. Smith heard a noise in the room, but from off to the side, out of sight. It sounded as if a chair had scraped across the floor. He moved to the side of the window and listened as footsteps sounded.

  Someone was walking slowly, heavily, toward the cot. Excitement surged through him. It was Thérèse Chambord. He had been afraid she was as dead as her father. Air seemed to catch in his throat as he studied her.

  She was dressed as he had last seen her, in her white satin evening suit, but it was smudged with dirt, and one sleeve was torn. Her lovely face was bruised and dirty, too, and her long black hair was snarled. It had been at least twenty-four hours since she was kidnapped, and judging by her appearance, she had fought her kidnappers more than once. Her face looked older, as if the last day had stolen her youth and enthusiasm.

  As he watched, she sat heavily on the edge of the iron cot. She shoved away her dinner tray with a gesture of disgust and leaned forward, her head falling into her hands, her elbows resting on her knees, the picture of
despair.

  Smith checked the night, concerned one of the sentries might surprise him. The only sound was the low sighing of the wind through the distant woods. Above him, clouds drifted over the moon, and darkness deepened over the farmyard. A welcome help against discovery.

  He started to tap on her window. And stopped. The door to the room opened, and in walked the short, stout man Smith had seen pace the front room as he spoke with Elizondo. His Savile Row suit was elegant, his face composed, and his demeanor certain. He was a man who led, who had opinions that mattered to himself. There was a smile on his face, but it was a cold smile that had no impact on his eyes. Smith studied him. This nameless man was important to the group in the house.

  As the man stepped into the room, another appeared behind. Smith stared. An older man, several inches over six feet tall. He was stooped, as if he had spent his lifetime talking to much shorter people or hunched over a desk…or a laboratory bench. In his early sixties, he had thinning black hair that was more than half gray, and a long, lean face aged into sharp planes and ridges. A face and characteristic stoop that Smith knew only from the photographs Fred Klein had supplied him, but had been burned into his mind forever by the bombing of the Pasteur Institute.

  Thérèse Chambord stared up as he walked into the room. Her right hand searched blindly behind until she grabbed the end of the iron bed for support. She, too, was shocked. But the tall man was not. Eagerness filled his face, and he rushed to Thérèse. The great French scientist Dr. Émile Chambord pulled his daughter to her feet and enfolded her in his arms.

  Part Two

  Chapter Fourteen

  Aboard the Aircraft Carrier Charles de Gaulle The Mediterranean Sea

  Two hundred miles south-southwest of Toulon, France, the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle cruised silently through the night, a great beast of the sea, sleek, graceful, and lethal. Only its running lights were on, and its matching pair of PWR Type K15 nuclear-pressure water reactors propelled the carrier at a steady twenty-seven knots, leaving behind an iridescent wake as straight as a razor cut.

  The Charles de Gaulle was the newest and largest addition to the navies of Western Europe, and anyone observing, who knew the telltale signs, would realize something significant was happening aboard that Wednesday night. For in the air above, ten Rafale M fighter jets and three E-2C Hawkeye early-warning aircraft were aloft, creating an aerial screen, while the crewmen on duty at the Aster 15 surface-to-air missiles and the eight Giat 20F2 20mm guns were on full alert.

  Belowdecks in a small, secure conference room, five military men, wearing the uniforms of general officers in the armies of the key European Union nations, were listening with varying degrees of concern to their host, who was not only a French general but also Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe for NATO—Le Comte Roland la Porte. Hulking and regal, the general stood with his pointer poised before a large map of Europe as he surveyed his fellow generals with his unblinking pale blue eyes.

  “This, gentlemen,” he said, tapping the chart with his pointer, “shows all the new multinational consortiums that have arisen across Europe to manufacture advanced military weapons and systems.”

  To his annoyance, he was addressing his guests in English, an insult to French, the historic language of diplomats, the mother tongue of Western civilization. But the truth was, more than half of the EU’s military leaders did not speak French well enough to understand him.

  So in English, but definitely with a French accent, the massive general continued: “BAE Systems in the UK. EADS in France, Germany, and Spain. Finmeccanica in Italy. Thales in France and the UK. Astrium in Sweden, which, as you know, is a coalition of both BAE and EADS. European Military Aviation in the UK and Italy. So far, these corporations have further combined with others, as well as among themselves, to produce the Eurofighter aircraft, the NH-90 military transport helicopter, the Tiger combat helicopter, the Stormshadow cruise missile, and the Meteor air-to-air missile. Under discussions that we hope will come to fruition are the Galileo global-positioning system and the Sostar airborne ground-surveillance system.”

  La Porte slapped the pointer against his palm for emphasis. “I think you will agree that it is an impressive list of cooperation and accomplishment. Add to it the recent political support for pooling all of our research and development funds to create a European program to match Washington’s, and I think we can all see the military handwriting on the wall.”

  There was silence as the generals glanced warily among themselves. Finally, Lieutenant General Sir Arnold Moore, in his dry, clipped, very British voice, asked, “Aside from increasing European trade at the expense of the United States, what’s your point, Roland?” General Moore had cobwebbed cheeks, a high forehead, and the same long, narrow aquiline nose that reminded those who knew English history of the first Lancaster king, Henry IV.

  The French general turned his gaze upon the British general approvingly. He liked that question and had hoped someone would ask. “Quite simply, Sir Arnold, I believe we are swiftly approaching the time when we can and must have a fully combined European military, so strong that it will no longer need the Americans. Any Americans at all. Completely independent from them. We are ready to resume our rightful leadership role.”

  As the Englishman registered doubt about what he was hearing, General Valentin González of Spain narrowed his eyes, cautious. He was a dapper, swarthy man with a jaunty tilt to his general’s cap. “You mean an army beyond the sixty thousand combined troops that we now have under the command of the Rapid Reaction Force, General La Porte? After all, the EU controls it. Don’t we already have basically what you’re proposing?”

  “Non!” La Porte said bluntly. “It’s not enough. The Rapid Reaction Force is intended only for deployment on humanitarian, rescue, and peacekeeping missions, and even then it still requires U.S. weapons, support systems, and communications systems so it can operate. Besides, it’s too damn small to handle any major problems. What I’m arguing for here is the full integration of the militaries of all our member nations, the entire two million soldiers, so that we have all the capabilities of a self-sufficient army, navy, and air force.”

  “But to what purpose, Roland?” Sir Arnold wanted to know. He crossed his arms and frowned. “Why? Aren’t we all NATO allies anyway, working for a peaceful world? Competing in many ways, yes, but with our military enemies in common?”

  “Our interests are not always the same as those of the United States.” La Porte stepped closer to the group, his enormous girth momentarily intimidating. “In fact, in my opinion, they are far from the same now, as I have been trying to convince the EU for some years. Europe was, and is, too great to be a mere satellite of the United States.”

  Sir Arnold repressed a chuckle. “Remind your own country of that, Roland. After all, this grand aircraft carrier, this futuristic French warship that’s carrying us, has made-in-the-USA steam catapults and arresting cables, since nothing else is available. And the Hawkeye surveillance and early-warning planes that you’ve got up there circling are also made in the United States. Rather critical points, wouldn’t you say?”

  Italian General Ruggiero Inzaghi had been listening carefully. He had large dark eyes, as hard as flint, and a wide mouth that was habitually set in a straight, no-nonsense line. He had been studying the big Frenchman, but now he turned to the Englishman. “I think General La Porte has a point. The Americans often brush off our immediate and long-range needs, especially when they don’t easily coincide with what they think they want.”

  The Spaniard, General Valentin González, wagged a finger at the Italian. “Your own problem in Albania some years ago wouldn’t be on your mind, would it, Ruggie? As I recall, it wasn’t just the United States that had no interest in such a minor matter. Neither did the rest of Europe.”

  General Inzaghi retorted, “With a fully integrated European army, we’d back each other with all our concerns.”

  “As do each of the American states
, which once were so contentious that they fought a long, savage civil war among themselves,” La Porte pointed out. “They still disagree, but they’re all one on the larger issues. Consider, gentlemen, that we Europeans have an economy one-third larger than that of the United States, and most of our citizens enjoy levels of medical, educational, and social benefits that are superior, too. There are more of us, and we’re better off. Yet we still can’t engage in a crucial military operation alone. That was made painfully clear by our inability to deal with the crises in the Balkans. Once more, we had to go to Washington with our hats in our hands. It’s too humiliating. Are we to remain stepchildren forever to a nation that owes its very existence to us?”

  The only general in the conference room who still had taken no part in the discussion, preferring, it seemed, to watch and listen, was Bundeswehr General Otto Bittrich. As usual, the expression on his rawboned face was thoughtful. His blond hair was nearly white now, but his ruddy complexion seemed decades younger than his fifty-two years. He cleared his throat, his Prussian expression severe.

  “The Kosovo campaign occurred in an area that’s cost Europe millions of dead over the centuries,” he said with a sweep of his gaze to make certain that he had their undivided attention, “a tumultuous region, dangerous to all our interests. The Balkans are, after all, our powder keg. Everyone knows this. Yet to do what was necessary to control the fighting in Kosovo and stabilize Europe again, it was Washington that had to provide eighty-five percent of the equipment and systems.” The German general’s voice rose with indignation. “Yes, our member nations have some two million soldiers, fully operational air forces, and excellent navies, all well equipped to fight…but what good are they? They stay home and inspect the space between their toes. Useless! We could go back into the past and fight World War Two again, ja. We could even destroy cities with dumb bombs now. But without the Americans, as General La Porte has correctly said, we can’t transport troops and matériel to a modern war, much less fight it. We have no operational planning capability. No command structures. Technically, electronically, logistically, and strategically, we’re mastodons. I am, in truth, embarrassed by this. Aren’t you, too?”