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Gideon surveyed the town as he walked. Whatever had happened here was different from what had happened in the other villages, which had clearly been attacked and burned by foot soldiers. This place had been bombed from the air. Straight-up, good-old-fashioned aerial bombing. Numerous craters dotted the rocky soil. He’d been around enough of them when he was mediating the Waziristan crisis to know what he was seeing.
Dead men were everywhere. And pieces of dead men—hands, arms, a foot still wearing a boot, a hank of hair still rooted to a clump of clotted scalp. Some had been shot or hit by frags, but others were intact, having been killed by the concussion of the bomb blast. The men all wore uniforms, jungle camo. The uniforms looked American, but the men wearing them were obviously locals, with the same distinctive features as the highlanders who had escorted him earlier.
Blowflies and flesh flies were buzzing around the bloating bodies. Gideon looked for the small maggots from these flies that appear within the first few days of death but saw none. Which meant this massacre had happened recently.
The closer he got to the one remaining building, the sicker he felt.
Could Tillman have survived this? And who was responsible? It could only have been the Mohanese government. Gideon was begi
Chadeev danced after Gideon, gri
Gideon entered the ruined building. There he found more corpses, all of them men, all wearing the same uniforms as the men outside. Unlike them, these men had been shot.
Sickened as he was by the carnage, Gideon could barely think about anything but food. At the far end of the building stood a makeshift stove composed of two gas cook rings welded to the top of a rickety table. On each cook ring was a wok. A refrigerator sat next to them.
Gideon opened the door. To his astonishment, a light came on. The refrigerator was still working. He heard it then, the hum of a small generator over in the still-intact corner of the building.
The refrigerator was crammed completely full of Budweiser. But not a scrap of food.
He shook his head.
Chadeev saw the beer, scurried over and started grabbing as many bottles as he could fit in his arms. “Beer! Is totally prohibit in my focking religion. Is Allah’s joke on Muslims. He make beautiful beer and then he only give it to focking infidels.” He twisted off the cap, tipped it up, and drank until he’d drained it completely.
Gideon looked around, saw a bowl full of food on the ledge of a low wall. Fli he±€†es buzzed around it. He moved toward the food, waving the flies away, when he saw behind the low wall the body of the man who had probably been preparing the meal for himself when he’d been shot. Gideon picked up the bowl, respectfully turning away from the man who’d been deprived of his last meal, and took a sniff. It smelled fantastic. Curried vegetables and a few bits of chicken over rice. The town had obviously been attacked so recently that the food hadn’t had time to rot.
Gideon virtually inhaled the entire bowl of food.
Chadeev opened another beer and began drinking. “Your brother is genius,” he said. “I come to this place after fight in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, all kind of place. Now I go
“He did, huh?” Gideon said. He looked around the room at all the dead men. Now that his belly was full, he was able to see them more clearly. Before the food it had been almost as if they were just obstacles in the way of his eating. Now . . .
“This.” Chadeev made a sweeping motion with his hands. “This is nature of God.”
“Is my brother dead?”
Chadeev winked and pointed surreptitiously above them. The roof had been blown off, so the building was open to the clear blue sky.
“What’s that mean?”
“Eye in the sky!” Chadeev whispered. “Eye in the sky!” He motioned with his thumb to the one corner of the building where the roof still stood. “Over there.”
“What?”
“Over there. We talk over there.” Chadeev’s voice had dropped to a whisper.
Gideon followed the crazy man to the far side of the building where they were shadowed by the roof.
“Eye in the sky can read lips. Don’t never talk in open.”
“Did Abu Nasir teach you that?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Chadeev laughed. “Is al Qaeda doctrine.”
“You’re al Qaeda.”
“Labels! Responsibility!” Chadeev laughed again, then put his hand gently on Gideon’s arm. “Your brother, when he see you, he always make a toast and say, ‘Here’s to my naive brother The Peacemaker . . . and to all his kind.’”
“What do you mean, whenever he saw me? How could he see me?”
Chadeev shrugged. “CNN! Your face on CNN all the time. They love you, love your cute little dimples.” He reached out and rubbed the side of Gideon’s face.
Gideon swatted his hand away. “Is my brother here?”
Chadeev offered a cryptic shrug.
Gideon took a threatening step toward him. “Do you know where he is or not?”
“You don’t want to see Abu Nasir, my friend. T th±€†rust me. You will not like what you find.”
“Then you know where he is.”
The Kabardian nodded in sad resignation. “Come. I show you his room.”
Chadeev led Gideon into an adjacent concrete building, half of which had been leveled. They climbed over the rubble and entered through a jagged hole in the wall. Inside were more dead bodies, and some folding chairs arranged around a stove. Gideon checked the bodies to see if any of them were Tillman.
Beside a neatly made cot stood a makeshift nightstand made from an ammunition crate. It held a book, its binding no longer stiff and its pages well thumbed. Other than a thin skin of dust, the room had been left untouched by the bombing.
“He sleep here,” Chadeev said.
Gideon idly picked up the book on the nightstand and was fairly shocked when he brushed the dust from the cover.
The Way to Peace by Gideon Davis.
It was a book he’d written a decade earlier, an expansion of his doctoral thesis, which had led to his job at the UN. He opened it, saw a paragraph underlined. Then another. Tillman had gone through the book carefully and thoroughly.
Gideon flipped back to the title page, read the simple dedication: “To Tillman, who has fought too many wars.” Gideon had sent his brother the book when it was published and had never heard a word of response. He had nursed a minor grudge about it all these years, imagining that Tillman had never even bothered to crack it open and had probably thrown it in the trash. Yet here it was, the pages worn soft as if from repeated readings.
Gideon curbed his rising anger when he noticed a flickering light coming from a flat-screen television lying facedown on the floor, having been blown off its mount by the bomb blast. Not only was it still working, but it was tuned to CNN.
Chadeev mumbled to himself in Russian as he lifted the top edge of the television and set it down against the base of the stove while Gideon stared down at the screen. Wolf Blitzer was moving his lips silently. Behind him was a file photo of an oil rig. The words crawling across the bottom of the screen stopped Gideon cold. OBELISK SEIZED . . . He recognized it as the rig where Uncle Earl was waiting for him to bring Till-man. But Gideon felt a wave of cold realization when he read the rest of the crawl: . . . PIRATES LED BY ABU NASIR DEMANDING COMPLETE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. FORCES FROM THE REGION.