“That would be great,” he said. “But you look wonderful, and fried eggs with sausage and hash browns comes a very distant fourth to the obvious.”
“Shhh,” she said, staring into his gray-blue eyes. “Or you’ll persuade me to cast care to the winds. And we have to be at the hospital at noon. Tommy’s test results are ready. They may even want to keep him there overnight.”
“Does he mind that?”
“Not really. I put him to bed and stay in the room with him. But he gets very tired, very quickly, and then I drive back here by myself, and worry about him for the rest of the night.”
Mack kissed her again, and said, “Can I have my breakfast out on the front stoop? And do we have a newspaper yet?”
“I’ll just check Tommy, and then I’ll bring it. Go and sit down. I’ll get you some coffee.”
Mack’s father had long ago turned the front stoop of the house into a screened porch, and Anne had set a milk-white cloth on the table, with a small vase of pink beach roses in the center. The wicker furniture was wide and comfortable with broad blue-and-white-striped cushions. Mack sank gratefully into the rocker and stared out, down to the ever-widening estuary of the Kennebec. The great tidal flow, which had started far to the north in Moosehead, would soon be spilling out into the ocean. Within two miles it would surge past its lonely guardian island of Sequin, a place for which President George Washington personally signed the deeds more than two hundred years ago.
Above the island stands one of the most famous, and indeed the second oldest, lighthouse on this vast and rugged coastline. The Sequin light towers 180 feet above the ocean, just two miles offshore. Mack Bedford, despite his wonderful seaward view, could not quite see it, even on the clearest day. But when the autumn fog banks rolled in and a dank, hollow white blanket spread over the inshore waters, Mack could hear the powerful lighthouse foghorn boom out its warning, as stark and as lonely as a Basin Street trombone.
He loved this place. He passionately loved Anne. And he loved his little boy. What a cruel trick of the Almighty to deliver two such hammer blows to his life—charged with murder and effectively sacked from the SEALs and the monstrous threat of Tommy dying from an untreatable disease.
Still, there had to be hope, and when Anne came sashaying onto the porch bearing hot coffee and that morning’s copy of the
Portland Express,
the clouds lifted from him, and he smiled at her and pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her yet again. “I love you, Mrs. Bedford,” he told her. “And I’m always thinking of you, no matter where I am.”
“Even at that firefight on the Euphrates?” she said.
“Even then. Especially then. Because I thought for one awful moment our marriage might end the only way it ever could—until I reloaded, that is.”
Anne, as ever, laughed at him. “You want burned sausage and hard-boiled eggs?”
“Not really.”
“Then you’d better let me get up.”
Mack released her and reached for the coffeepot, poured a mugful, and hit it with a couple of lumps of brown sugar. He stirred it thoughtfully and then picked up the newspaper and scanned the front page.
FIVE MORE U.S. DEATHS IN IRAQ—ILLEGAL MISSILE BLAMED
Baghdad. Tuesday. The French-built tank-buster missile known as the Diamondhead hit and destroyed one tank and one armored vehicle on the desert road west of Baghdad yesterday. Five American combat troops were killed in the attack, which was launched from a derelict house in the northern suburbs.
It was not conducted in battle conditions. The Americans were returning to base after a mission against an insurgent cell operating in the bombed-out regions near the Tigris River. The attack was sudden, without warning. There were no survivors in either of the two armored vehicles, and reports again confirm the victims were burned alive.
The U.S. military has protested in the strongest possible terms to the UN Security Council, which has unanimously banned the missile throughout the world as “a crime against humanity.” The UN secretary-general confirmed that the attack had all the hallmarks of the banned missile, and that a formal warning was being issued to the government of Iran against supplying the Diamondhead to Iraqis or any other Muslim terror group currently operating in the Middle East.
A spokesman for the U.S. armed forces in Iraq stated last night that the insurgents seemed to have a constant supply of this missile. “Either that,” he said, “or they still have a large stockpile—probably hidden in the desert with Saddam’s goddamned uranium 235, which was also difficult as hell to find.”
The spokesman, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, was clearly very angry at this latest attack. “We’re all angry,” he said. “You’d be angry if you saw how these guys died. The worst part is we have twice been close to intercepting the supply.
“Both times we were just a fraction too late. We believe the missiles come through the foothills of the Zagros Mountains and then cross the frontier into Iraq, somehow getting across the river to the north of Abadan. But that’s a huge area to patrol, and we have limited resources.”
A White House spokesman said last night, “The president has sent a signal to the government of Iran pointing out that the Diamondhead is officially banned in all countries. And that the world community will not tolerate any Middle Eastern regime continuously ignoring the UN edict.” The president had warned the Iranian prime minister that if there was one more American death from the missile, the Security Council would meet in emergency session to consider the possible launch of military action against Iran.
The names of the American dead will not be released until after the families have been informed. But it is believed that at least two of them were U.S. Navy SEALs, one of them a lieutenant junior grade.
Mack Bedford shook his head and muttered, “Those murdering bastards.” Then he turned inside the newspaper to an Associated Press feature, which concentrated on the source of the missile, France. The writer, a retired U.S. Army colonel, claimed the Diamondhead was still being shipped to Iran. He also believed the French government had a duty to find the arms factory and bring the owners to justice. He stated that the current scandal was bringing no glory to the French Republic and indeed reflected very badly on the nation as a whole. “The mere image of anyone growing rich off the lives of U.S. military personnel being burned alive would, in the end, sicken all right-thinking nations.” However, his contact in the Elysée Palace gave something of a Gallic shrug and told him, “France has always been the world leader in the manufacture of heat-seeking guided missiles, and the industry has many branches in many departments throughout the country. Sometimes things happen which are beyond our control.” He added, unhelpfully, that France was a very big place, and they had no idea where the Diamondhead was made. “There is a shady side to the arms industry,
monsieur,
as I am sure you realize. Mostly, both buyers and sellers cover their tracks very well.”
Mack put down the newspaper and sipped his coffee. In his mind was a vision of the Phantom of the Opera in a black cloak hoisting the killer missile onto a horse-drawn farm wagon driven by cackling Arabs wearing robes and turbans. “Murdering bastards,” he said for the second time in as many minutes.
Midnight Montpellier Munitions Forest of Orléans, France
It was impossible to see precisely what was being loaded onto the sixteen-wheel freight truck that was backed up to the concrete dock on the deserted south side of the arms factory. A huge tarp was draped over the entrance and right over the back end of the truck. Only someone standing inside the cargo area could possibly have seen the five-foot-long wooden crates, three feet high and three feet wide, being transported on forklift loaders and then stacked inside the heavy-duty vehicle. They piled them three wide, and three high, and there were four stacks, thirty-six crates, each one containing six guided missiles. The crates were unmarked.
Beyond the loading dock, six armed guards patrolled. There were four more constantly walking around the chain-link perimeter fence. The gates that led out to the private road that cut through the forest between Montpellier and the highway were locked. Two armed guards manned the concrete security office outside the gates, where a steel barrier formed another line of Montpellier defense. Until that barrier was raised, no one was going anywhere.
Inside the canopy the first shipment was loaded and secure, attended personally by Montpellier’s chairman and owner, Henri Foche himself, attired as usual in his immaculate dark suit, shiny black shoes, white shirt, and dark-blue tie. No overcoat. Just his trademark scarlet handkerchief placed jauntily in his breast pocket. Satisfied that almost eleven million dollars worth of military hardware was safely in place, he ordered the rear door of the truck to be slammed shut and locked. Not even the driver would be told the combination that would open it. The chairman would take care of that personally. Only his trusted number two, rocket scientist Yves Vincent, was privy to that information, and he was waiting in the black Mercedes with Marcel and Raymond, ready to accompany the convoy on its journey.
There were three more trucks waiting to be loaded, which would bring the total number of missiles to 864, with a street value, as they say in the drug trade, of one hundred million dollars. Wholesale value to Henri Foche was a little over forty-three million, paid before shipment from the coffers of the Iranian government, which had been, literally, awash with cash since oil prices went straight through the roof of the mosque.
Not all the missiles were going to the Iraqi insurgents. There would be a shipment of 200 for the army of Hezbollah, currently hunkered down in Beirut, awaiting their next chance to strike out at Israel. There would be 200 for the embattled warriors of Hamas, in their grim but hopeless fight against the iron-souled regulars of the Israeli defense force. Around 200 were earmarked for the Afghan tribesmen of the Taliban in their war against the United States and Great Britain. And there would be 162 for the insurgents fighting in Iraq, to be distributed by terrorist commanders. The rest would remain in Iran.
The remaining three security trucks were loaded within an hour, and at one thirty the convoy pulled out, running through the blackness of the forest toward the city of Orléans, which was, essentially, deserted. They drove past several thousand statues of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans, who, right here in 1429, persuaded King Charles VII to attack the besieging forces of England and liberate the city. Joan thus provided the turning point in the Hundred Years’ War, and the city fathers, ever since, have been determined that no one should ever forget
La Pucelle,
the French peasant girl-warrior from Lorraine. There was thus something gruesomely poetic about Henri Foche’s convoy of death, speeding through the historic cradle of French military defiance in order to provide hardware for several different wars.
Also, it was raining like hell. With wipers slashing the downpour off the windshields, they rumbled over the bridge that spans the Loire River and headed south through the Forest of Sologne, forever the refuge of the French aristocracy, a flat, damp, and dismal area. Here French kings for centuries hunted wild boar and deer across the empty heathlands. The area is redolent with marshes, lakes, and wetlands. It also boasts some of the most beautiful châteaus of the Loire, including the mighty Chateau Chambord, the largest and grandest on the entire river. This is a gigantic palace of 440 rooms and 85 staircases, built by King François I in 1519 in a bold attempt to outshine the pope.
François was schizophrenic, since he claimed his chateau would establish him as “one of the greatest builders in the universe.” Yet to the end of his days he referred to it only as his “little hunting lodge.”
Henri Foche, who nursed similar grandiose ambitions as a national leader, charged straight past this monument to sixteenth-century French architecture, leading the way at the head of his convoy, speeding down Route A71, a few miles east of Chambord. They ran on for another twenty miles before turning west off the highway onto a truly desolate landscape, flat, featureless, and very, very wet. The rain continued to lash down, and the headlights from the trucks cast the only light as far as the eye could see.
Eventually, they turned off and ran through a wide path cut though a small woodland area. When they emerged from the trees on the far side, there before them was a one-mile-long blacktop surface, with small bright lights on either side running into the far distance. They were switched on only when Foche’s four trucks growled their way out of the woods.