The Janson Option (16 page)

J
anson saw a slight figure push the door open just enough to slip through and close it behind him. He tsked a heads-up into his lip mike to Kincaid, who was covering the opposite door, and shifted his weapon to single-shot. The flash- and noise-suppressed MTAR would take the intruder down without alerting the men behind him. But Janson held his fire. He saw no weapons.

Moving swiftly in utter silence, he halved the distance between him and the intruder, who was sticking by the door, staring into the dark interior, and halved it again. Janson was nearly beside him when he turned. Janson saw his face. A boy. Not even a teenager, but a tall, thin boy of ten or twelve dressed in a ragged striped shirt, shorts, and plastic flip-flops.

He saw Janson, six feet away. His eyes widened and his whole face lighted up. “SEALs!”

It was a vivid reminder that while they were dressed in black and armed to the teeth, the NGO papers they carried in the event of running into EU patrols, AMISOM troops, or American Special Forces wouldn't pass the giggle test. But they passed the boy's test. He looked ecstatic.

“SEALs,” he exulted. “SEALs. Thank Almighty God.”

Janson pressed a finger to his lips. “Quiet,” he whispered. “Who are you?”

“Abdi. I am kidnapped when I came home from school.”

“When?”

“Months. Al-Shabaab. I ran when the tanks came. Now they're chasing me.”

“How many?” whispered Janson.

The boy's joy turned to terror as behind him armed fighters pushed in the door. Janson switched to full auto. Then he saw that they were dressed like Abdi and were boys themselves, only slightly older if at all, but cradling AKs and pistols. One held an old Soviet grenade launcher bigger than he was. Another was tripping over a long belt of machine-gun cartridges draped around his neck like a beach towel.

Janson felt as if the building had dropped on him.

He sensed Kincaid gliding across the room to take them with enfilading fire.

“Shit!” he heard her whisper in his ear bud. “They're kids.”

Angry children chasing frightened children.

He had seconds, if that, to make “Janson Rules” work for him. He could hear Denny Chin mocking him. Janson Rules.
Fann-tass-tic.
Children were by definition civilians. The rules said no civilians in a cross fire. But these children were armed like soldiers and about to unleash automatic weapons with reflexes that would outspeed adults. No torture? At least there was no time for that. No killing anyone who's not trying to kill us. Fair enough. They would try to kill him and Kincaid. They were a single heartbeat from firing their weapons. But they were children.

If a single, soft tsk in his ear bud could sound like a question, Kincaid was asking him,
What do we do?

The paradox of atoning for violence with violence was staring at Paul Janson from the empty eyes of the child soldiers. These were the children who had scrawled the graffiti of pistols and assault rifles. Like children who would not pick up their toys, they had left the place littered with parts of road mines and suicide vests.

“Talk to them, Abdi,” Janson told the boy cowering at his side. “Tell them to put down their guns and we'll give them safe passage.”

Abdi shouted toward the doors. There were three at the door, crouched in firing stance, two with AKs, one with the grenade launcher. They shouted over their shoulders in high-pitched voices. A mob outside shouted back. It sounded, Janson thought, like a community-theatre production of
Peter Pan.

“What are they saying?”

Abdi said, “They ask, ‘Where?'”

“Anywhere they want.”

Abdi called again in Somali. The boys inside the door and those behind them started shouting back and forth. Then they shouted at Abdi.

“What?” said Janson. “What are they saying?”

“They don't know anywhere. Only here.”

“OK… Tell them…” They were children. He had to make up their minds for them. He said, “Tell them we'll all stay here tonight. Tell them I will ask—tell them I will make the AMISOM general give me a cease-fire.”

Abdi translated. The boys started arguing.

Janson said, “Tell them tonight we are safe here.”

“They don't believe you.”

“Tell them I have MREs to eat.”

Abdi started to translate.

Suddenly every head swiveled toward the rumble of a tank in the dark.

They'll run, thought Janson. They'll run and hide.

For one second it seemed he was right. The mob of boys still outside the door whirled and ran. But for the boys trapped inside, fear turned to anger and they turned their anger at him. The one in the lead whipped up his weapon. For the first time in his life, Paul Janson froze.

“Wing 'em!” said Kincaid, opening up before they could pull their triggers, cutting their legs out from under them with well-placed shots of her silenced bullpup. Galvanized, Janson fired too, but missed completely. He could not believe it. He was so close to the target that the shot could not be missed, but it was as if an unseen hand had reached from the depths of his mind to jerk the gun.

The boy he missed whirled in Kincaid's direction and sprayed a burst from his AK. To Paul Janson's horror, she flew backward, flung ten feet by the impact. Janson fired at the boy's legs. He missed again, stitching a slug through the kid's belly.

It was over in two seconds.

Janson bounded to Kincaid and yanked an I-FAK, infantry first-aid kit, from his pack.

“Where?”

“Left leg, inside.”

“Bone?”

“Jesus, I hope not.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Fix it,” she said through gritted teeth.

Janson used the kit's shears to widen the bullet hole in her wet suit.

“Paul? Is it the bone?”

The bone would be bad enough. His first fear was the femoral artery. It would be damned-near impossible to tourniquet a severed artery so near her groin.

He had already almost gotten her killed by screwing up. He could not screw up now and let her die by mistake. He had to put his head back in a clear and cold place.

He found the pencil hole of the wound where the bullet had entered and pressed against it with an anticoagulant gauze. Dreading the wound he would find at the back of her thigh, he cut swiftly through the wet suit.

AK-47s fired a full metal jacket slug an inch and a half long and a third of an inch wide. At a velocity of 2,900 feet per second, the bullet traveled through flesh on a straight path for seven inches before it yawed sideways. If it yawed and turned sideways before it exited Kincaid's thigh, it would blast a wide cavity, shredding her biceps femoris muscle, severing hamstrings, and threatening the many blood vessels that branched so vigorously from the femoral artery. If the bullet yawed it would exit explosively, opening a large, ragged wound shaped like a star and she would be lucky to live, much less walk.

He found an exit wound only slightly wider than the entry wound. Minimal tissue disruption. And judging by the trickle of blood, her main vessels were intact. Lucky breaks he didn't deserve. He pressed on more anticoagulant gauze and secured them both with an elastic Israel bandage.

Heart in his throat, he felt for more damage. He could never forget tourniqueting an operator's leg while Doug Case was alongside him working on the guy's arms. After they got the hemorrhaging stopped, they found a grapefruit-sized cavern in his gut. He found no wounds in Kincaid's torso. She had taken only the one hit.

But Janson's relief that a so-called flesh wound had spared her internal organs and spine was undercut by the possibility of damage by the shock wave that the bullet's high-energy impact could rocket through major blood vessels to her brain. Thank God she seemed to be breathing normally, as apnea would be an immediate effect of that ballistic pressure wave.

She spoke suddenly. “How's the exit look?”

Again he felt relief because she sounded alert and aware.

“No muscle hanging out.”

“Hope scars don't turn you off.”

“Dr. Olsen will be acquiring another Delahaye,” he answered. Olsen, the finest plastic surgeon they knew, collected antique French automobiles.

“Did you do the kids?”

The boy who had shot Kincaid and whom Janson had shot was dead. Two boys writhed on the floor with wounds to their legs. Janson grabbed his I-FAK.

“Abdi, help me talk to them.”

There was no answer, and when Janson looked, he saw the kidnapped student dead with a bullet hole between his eyes.

The door flew open. Green-beret Uganda troopers smashed through it, weapons poised to fire. The kids on the floor whipped up their guns. The troopers opened up with a roar and in seconds both al-Shabaab were shot to pieces. The troopers whirled toward Janson and Kincaid.

Paul Janson blocked Jessica Kincaid with his body and reached for his MTAR. He was still holding the surgical scissors in his left hand and the lead soldier saw it and the bandage and gauze-pack wrappers. “Don't shoot!” he shouted to the troopers behind him. “Only a medic.”

40°56' N, 74°4' W
Paramus, New Jersey

T
ell me why I shouldn't hang up.”

“Catspaw,” said the woman on the phone.

“Hold on.”

Morton threw money down for his breakfast and hurried out of the diner into the parking lot and climbed into his car.

“What can I do for you?” As if he didn't know he hadn't yet found the Russian yacht. She did something new in his experience, saying, as if desperate, “It is more important than ever and terribly urgent that we find that yacht. Nothing we've tried has worked. We're counting on you to save the operation.”

“That could get expensive,” Morton suggested, to see what the market might bear.

It was scary how much ice she could pack into her musical voice. “Friends, Mr. Morton, never take advantage of friends in need.”

Morton did not know who these friends were. All he knew was that they paid what they promised and had never tried to screw him yet. “You know,” he said, “you are absolutely right. I apologize for any misunderstanding I might have caused. I'll get right on it.”

“May I count on you to redouble efforts?”

“Triple,” said Morton. “I won't let you down.”

“Thank you.” She hung up and Morton kicked himself. He had just broken his first rule of business: never promise what you're not sure you can deliver.

“G
OOD EVENING,
D
OUGLAS
,” said a digitally morphed voice on Doug Case's satellite telephone. “What is the most pernicious threat to ASC?”

Listening to this voice, and obeying its owner, whoever he or she was, had made Doug Case not only rich but now an American Synergy Corporation division president—an ASC baron—one of the king's men.

Doug Case answered what the voice wanted to hear: “China is the most pernicious threat to ASC.”

He had encountered early voice transformation systems years ago at Cons Ops. These days, exotic technology to fool voice-print ID systems was simple stuff. Third-gen VTS15 software reproduced subtle nuances of timbre and pitch, vibrato and tremolo, which made generating impersonations a snap.

The voice had chosen, this evening, an oral disguise that sounded like Barack Obama telephoning from a restaurant. The synthesized clinking of glassware and the background babble of conversation from imaginary nearby tables were the cool third-gen touches you got when artists displaced engineers.

When these telephone calls started shortly after he snagged his job at ASC, Case had presumed that it was one of the division presidents looking for an ally in the viper fight to succeed the Buddha.
You were the best covert officer who ever served his country,
the voice had said, buttering him up.
Serve me, and I will repay you
. Case had gone along with it, listening patiently, answering obediently. He had hoped it was CEO Bruce Danforth, the Buddha himself. Now he was 99 percent sure it was the Buddha, teching up a time-honored custom of whispering orders that could never be traced back to him.

It had paid off Buddha-big. Huge money, at first—tons of it in safe accounts. Now the far more valuable division privileges: his seat on the executive board, the helicopters and jet planes at his beck, and virtual autonomy in any act involving company security.

“What is the immediate threat?” the voice persisted.

“China,” Case answered again. The voice had become obsessed with China. More proof that it was Bruce Danforth.

“Think, Douglas! What is the
more
immediate threat?”

Not China tonight. That left only: “Paul Janson.”

“Your old friend.”

“I have told you before, we were colleagues, not friends.”

“Warriors are never ‘colleagues.' Warriors are brothers.”

“Cain and Abel were brothers.”

“Then why isn't Abel dead?”

“Abel got lucky in Beirut.”

“Thank luck. Never blame it.”

“Well put,” said Case, thinking, pure Buddha. Bruce Danforth loved rules and he loved them stated as aphorisms. He was getting old.

“Have you any idea where Janson has gone?”

“Mogadishu.”

“Perhaps your people will perform better than they did in Beirut.”

“I'm on my way.”

“Personally?” asked the voice with unconcealed surprise, and maybe, Case thought, admiration.

“I took off four hours ago,” said Doug Case.

He cast an appreciative eye about ASC's luxuriously fitted Bombardier Global Express, a twin-engine jet with a longer range than Paul Janson's Embraer, and faster. Hidden in the cabin were hermetically sealed lockers. In the corrupted flyblown nations where Doug Case did business, it was unlikely that local constabulary would ever dare search an American Synergy corporate jet. If some fool tried, Case would make a phone call and long before the fool found guns, money, or drugs he would find himself shackled in a secret-police dungeon by direct order of his pissant dictator.