Aftershock Read online

  I remember that sadistic scum like it was yesterday. Smiling at our pain. I didn’t bless him like he’d once promised I would. But I reluctantly acknowledged that, were it not for that training, I might not still be moving.

  There’s a reason why the finest credential any merc could carry back in those days was to have served in La Légion Étrangère. I’d only done the minimum—five years. Long enough to earn my citizenship, but not long enough to qualify for speciality instruction.

  That last, it was only for lifers. Why would I want that? That whole “loyalty to France” they never stopped preaching was a one-way street down a blind alley. The citizenship you earned by war didn’t make you French. All you really earned by signing on was the right to be expendable.

  But the training was the finest—if you survived it. The Legion lost more recruits during training than any other fighting force in the world. Gave the survivors still another useless medal to show off.

  Today, they say it’s different. Now they ask questions. The Legion’s image as a haven for those who wanted to leave their past behind is out of date. Now aspiring recruits are subjected to detailed Interpol background checks.

  “We don’t accept the hardened criminals anymore, the murderers or rapists,” the paper quoted an officer, “so this makes our job easier.”

  I didn’t need to be fluent in French to understand what the officer was saying: “We have no more colonies, so we have no need of disposable outlaws.”

  I don’t know how much ground I actually covered. When I woke up, I was in some kind of medical tent, lying on a cot, an IV running into each arm. I twitched the toes on the leg that had taken the shrapnel, and gave thanks for the pain that followed.

  I kept my eyes slitted so I could gather data. There was a lot of movement inside the tent, but I couldn’t see any weapons, so I knew I wasn’t a captive. Or a comrade.

  Voices. Not frantic, but tight and clipped, the way medics talk in the field. English, French, Italian, Spanish. Couple more languages I couldn’t recognize.

  I made a little noise, opened my eyes just as she came over.

  Dolly, I mean.

  “Vous parlez le français?”

  “Un peu,” I lied.

  “English, then? American?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too. I’m a farm girl. Born and raised in Indiana.”

  I didn’t say anything more. I didn’t know if she was asking me where I was born and raised, but I did know that answering her by claiming I was a citizen of any country would brand me for what I really was—no armed white man had any business being where they found me.

  “My name is Dolly. I’m a nurse. The surgeons took a little metal out of your leg. The IVs are an antibiotic feed and a saline solution. You won’t be able to move for a while, but you should make a full recovery once you’re evacuated.”

  “Where am I?”

  “In the Triangle. Just north of the RBC.”

  “RBC” was what the French used to call the area that the Belgians held on to for such a long time. For us, it was just “the Congo.”

  Mercenaries might tell you all kinds of stories about why they’re fighting, but the only truth is that they get paid to do it. Who the paymaster is, that’s a question you don’t ask. The money’s always in hard currency, directly into your “home” account.

  They have to pay good. Whether a merc claimed he signed on to fight Communism or liberate the downtrodden proletariat, it wouldn’t matter if he was captured. There’s a Geneva Convention for POWs, but fighting under a foreign flag meant you weren’t entitled to that protection. Ask whoever’s the current dictator of Equatorial Guinea.

  Not so when I’d been a légionnaire. Every one of us—not officers, they weren’t “us”—was fighting under a foreign flag. None of us were French. But the Legion was exempt. If any of us were ever captured, we’d be entitled to POW status.

  Some said that this was only right. After all, why should we be regarded as mercenaries if we could only be called into action by one country?

  They told us this POW business many times. What they didn’t tell us was that guerrilla fighters didn’t give a damn about any Geneva Convention.

  Some of us, you could see they didn’t care if they lived or died. Such feelings were permitted, but only if they accepted that the enemy had to die before they did.

  None of that ever mattered to me. I knew how the French regarded all of us. We might be citizens on paper, but none of us could ever be one of them.

  And I knew that any merc claiming to be a former légionnaire wouldn’t buy himself mercy from anyone, anywhere.

  “The Triangle” could mean Chad or the Sudan. My money was on Chad. Even if Qaddafi had another aneurysm and again proclaimed that Chad was actually part of Libya, he wouldn’t send troops this far south.

  And even if that foaming-mouth psycho did send them, they wouldn’t go all the way. You can order soldiers only so far. If it’s a choice between jumping off a cliff or lobbing a grenade into an officer’s foxhole, somebody’s going to handle it. And nobody’s going to talk about it.

  I didn’t say anything about Chad. I wasn’t posing as a historian, and I didn’t think telling her that La Légion had done some work there before I’d even enlisted would be a smart idea.

  “How are you going to get out?” I asked her.

  “There’s a road. Not much of one, but good enough. It’ll be a bumpy ride, but we’ll get … we’ll get to where there’s a plane waiting. Probably in less than three hours. Unless we run across some hostiles.”

  “Who?”

  “You mean, which side? It doesn’t matter. Either they’ll let us through or they won’t,” she said. A warrior’s fatalism: You fight. You live or you die. There is nothing else.

  “Where are my … my weapons?”

  “The only weapons you had when we found you were a pistol and some sort of hatchet.”

  “Can I have them back?”

  “No. I’m sorry, but we never carry weapons. If we’re stopped, the only chance we have of being allowed to proceed is if they take our mission for what it really is. A weapon, that would make it seem as if—”

  “I don’t mean this minute; I mean, when you drop me off.”

  “Drop you off?”

  “What else could you do?”

  “Everyone goes back the same way. At the end of the truck road is where we have the plane waiting.”

  “To where?”

  “This time? Switzerland.”

  I calculated my chances. Didn’t take long. I’d have a better chance in Switzerland, even if they turned me over to the UN. The blue helmets would know what I’d been doing in the Congo, but they wouldn’t do anything about it. Far as they were concerned, the Congo was a stable area.

  Working as a mercenary was only a problem if I was captured by the wrong side. So, if I could get to a place that thought all sides were wrong, I’d be at true north.

  Of course, I knew they wouldn’t let me stay there long.

  After I healed, I went back to work, but I wasn’t going back to a jungle. Between surviving the land mine and not catching malaria, I figured I’d used up any luck I’d ever have down there.

  In the haze of recovering from the wound, getting my hands on my money, and crossing the ocean, I was never sure if I had just fever-dreamed Dolly. But, years later, I saw her again. In an AIDS ward in San Francisco. I wasn’t a patient; I was there for the same reason she was—to do a job.

  My job was the opposite of hers. But no less merciful. The people who hired me loved the man who had to die. The man who wanted to die. But the doctors were keeping him alive—human guinea pigs were hard to come by, and who better to test the latest advances in pain management on?

  Dolly remembered me. But all we had time for was a cup of coffee—she was moving on again. Some terminal-cancer-cure thing they were trying out. High up in the Chiricahua Mountains, where they could see anyone coming for miles around. Mercenaries
work in America, too.

  I wished she would stay, but that wish was buried inside a place I couldn’t let show. So I was glad when she left—I couldn’t do what I’d come there to do with her around. It wasn’t that I thought she’d finger me or anything, it was that I … just couldn’t stand the idea of her thinking of me as still doing the same work I’d been doing when we first met. And I couldn’t back up my story by burning the people who hired me—that would be the same as breaking my word.

  That cup of coffee was long enough for me to learn her whole name. I didn’t trick it out of her.

  I might have told her a bunch of lies, but, considering what I’d been doing when we met, that would have been stupid. Not stupid because she would have seen through them, but stupid because I didn’t want her to think I would lie to her. Ever.

  Just because I couldn’t explain any of that to myself didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I somehow knew I needed her to trust me if there was ever to be a chance for … for things I couldn’t allow myself to think about.

  A few months passed. She never called the number I’d left with her, and I tried to make myself stop wishing she would.

  It was as if trying so hard not to wish for something made it happen. When she called, I didn’t waste the chance. I asked her if she would sit with me long enough for me to say what I wanted to say. She didn’t bother with a bunch of questions, not even “Why?” She just told me where she was.

  I didn’t tell her a story. I told her the truth. Not just about what I’d been, but what I wanted to be.

  We had plenty of time then. Almost a week. Mostly, I listened. I found out that Dolly had seen too much war—too much pain, suffering, death. The worst had been right in Switzerland, in a place where they treated torture victims. She told me she’d had to get out before she became like one of them. I didn’t understand what she meant, not then.

  Dolly’s dream was to live somewhere on the Oregon coast. She loved the idea of being so near the ocean. One day, she was going to buy a little cottage there. She had scouted around for a long time before coming to that decision. But now she was sure—all she wanted was to be in a place where she could live in peace.

  The only part of what she said that I felt inside myself was what she wanted. True north. That had always been my dream, too. I’d never had another one. Not until Dolly.

  By the time we parted, I had my mission statement. For a man like me, there was nothing more. “La mission est sacrée” had been drilled into me long ago.

  It took longer than I’d hoped to settle all accounts. But I knew impatience could turn fatal in a heartbeat. So I painstakingly erased my back-trail, then I waited alongside it like a wounded Cape buffalo. After a full year went by without anyone following, I was ready.

  I held the phone in my hand for a long time. I still remember watching my hands tremble. I stared at them as if they belonged to a stranger. My hands don’t tremble.

  I managed to dial the number. The new one I’d memorized the last time we met. She had been griping about her lousy cell phone, and I told her I could probably fix it, me being so handy with tools and all. Only took a few minutes.

  “Please don’t be afraid” is all I could think of saying when I heard her voice.

  “I’m not,” she said, very calm. “But there better be more to this call or I will be mad.”

  I didn’t play around. I’m no good at it. I knew I had only a little slice of time. And only one round chambered, anyway. So I let it loose.

  “I have the place,” I told her. “The one you wanted. I want to show it to you. I could pick you up wherever you are. Or, if you didn’t want me to do that, I could meet you at the airport. Eugene—Eugene, Oregon—that’s the closest airport to the place I found.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll do anything you want.” I stopped her from saying anything more. “Just tell me what it is, and I’ll do it. On my life.”

  It took her a few more weeks, but she did take that flight. And even then she only stayed a couple of weeks at the cottage I’d found.

  After that, it was almost six months before she could do the same thing with her last job that I’d done with mine.

  “Before” doesn’t matter anymore. Not to me, not to Dolly. We both gave up our opposite pasts. I mean, Dolly gave up being a healer; I gave up being a killer for hire.

  I was honest with her about that from the beginning. She’d have to start over, so she couldn’t transfer her credentials. She’d always be a nurse in her heart and with her hands, but she couldn’t work as one.

  Giving up my past—for me, that was nothing. I’d done it before. It was no more than shoveling coal into a furnace, waiting, then shoveling out the ashes into a wheelbarrow. Finally, carrying them to a place where the wind would scatter them.

  I’d had to do that before. This time, I wanted to. Still, that wasn’t enough. It was Dolly who told me I could never really leave my past until I atoned for it. Otherwise, it would haunt me from inside—I could never be at peace.

  I remembered those torture victims in Switzerland, so I knew what she said was true. I never wanted to go back. To my work, I mean. As it turned out, the price of leaving that work behind forever was to do one more job of it.

  The man who created the paperwork for Dolly’s new life was a genius. Not like some guy on TV who’s good at answering questions—the real thing. He was the same caliber as the one who’d told me to put every penny I had stashed into gold back when it was under three hundred U.S. an ounce. I did that. When he told me it was time, I cashed it all out.

  So, when he told me to put it all back into gold, and then pull it away again, I did that, too.

  I would have been shocked at how much money I ended up with, except that the genius never said anything he didn’t know. Which meant that most of the time he didn’t say anything.

  I’m the same way, except for the genius part.

  The ID man, he was so smart that he even said to my face that he wouldn’t want his daughter to be with anyone like me. And this was after I got her back from the man who had taken her.

  It hadn’t been a kidnap thing. Not a grab, I mean. She went with this guy willingly. That was what he did, get girls to go with him.

  “I never paid any attention to her,” the genius told me. “She was my … daughter, I suppose. But she was really only her mother’s child, and her mother was too busy spending the money she extorted from me to spend time with her. It couldn’t have been too difficult for that fils de pute to convince my daughter that she wasn’t wanted. Not by me, not by anyone.”

  “Except him.”

  “Oui, except him. Except for that vulture. My Dominique was not … gifted in any way. She was not beautiful, she was not talented. She was just—and this I admit I could know only from reports—a good, decent girl. So when … ah, it must have been so easy for him.”

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “Je veux la récupérer.” Before I could ask him what “I want her back” meant to him, he switched to English, like he was downshifting to help him climb a steep hill: “No! Damn it! I don’t want her ‘back.’ She was never with me. Truth? I don’t want her at all. I just want her to have what she deserves. And no girl deserves …”

  I switched to English, too. I was more comfortable saying certain things in that language—it must have been my native tongue. When I ran from that hospital, it was all I spoke.

  I learned a few words of French on the street. More from Luc. And still more from La Légion. But now I use it only when I must reach back into my past.

  “With all the information you have already gathered, I could … remove the vulture. But you have to know that your daughter will only return to the same—”

  “Not if a message is left,” the man said in response to my unspoken statement that any abandoned child will go to the foulest flesh-peddler if she believes she is wanted. This I knew to be true.

  He wanted more than death for that vulture�
�he wanted his skull on a stake, for all those of his tribe to see.

  “He does his work alone, you said?”

  “Yes, I said that! And, yes, he deserves the fate I wish for him. Just tell me the price.”

  That’s when I spoke with Dolly’s voice. “There is only one price, payable on delivery.”

  “Yes, yes. Just name it and—”

  “Penance, that is the price.”

  “Vous êtes dingue ou quoi?!”

  “No, I’m not insane. I am saying this to you: If all you want is to remove an enemy, and perhaps leave behind a warning for others, I am no longer the man for such a job. But if you want to recover your daughter, if you want to atone for your abandonment that made her such easy prey, that I will attempt. And if you accept my terms, I will succeed or I will die.”

  “I asked those in my employ to inquire. And your name came up, again and again. C’est un tueur que je veux engager, tu piges? Pas un prêtre.”

  I translated the words easily enough: “I want to hire a killer, not a damn priest.” And I answered only: “I am no priest.”

  “Yet you demand—”

  “I demand nothing. I ask, I plead for an opportunity. I have much to atone for myself. This would be my chance as well as yours.”

  He looked at me with the amoral measuring gaze of a buyer evaluating a blood diamond.

  “Be clear” is all he said. “Be very clear, now.”

  “I will remove the vulture. And any of his comrades necessary for me to complete that task. I will leave behind a warning that any who approach your daughter again will meet the same fate. I will return your daughter to you. What you will do is provide all the identifications I need. For that, I will pay you. For returning your daughter, you will pay her. You will pay what you owe her.”

  “And you will succeed or you will die?”

  “If you looked for me as you said you did, this you already know.”