Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(39)
Preparations had been made for Bourne to be transferred onto a locked-down gurney. Every conceivable blood type was available. As soon as the surgeon on board had determined Bourne’s blood type, his nurse commenced the first of what would no doubt be a number of transfusions. A saline drip was arranged on Bourne’s other side, to deal with his dehydration. By that time they were six and a quarter miles high, the sky was a shell of bright purple-blue, and the Angelmaker could finally relax. For a time, from the aspect of her cushy leather seat, comfortable in dry clothing, she drank bottle after bottle of water, observing the surgeon, who looked very grave indeed, and his nurse expertly attending to Bourne. When it was that her eyes closed and she dropped into the arms of sleep she could not, afterward, recall.
It was just over 2,688 miles from the Skyros airport to Somalia. The Bombardier 8000 touched down just over four hours after it had taken off, one of its passengers still more dead than alive.
14
Bourne, lying insensate in a spotless room near the center of Keyre’s camp, hung suspended between yesterday and tomorrow. The camp, riding the Horn of Africa, still on the shores of the Arabian Sea, would have been unrecognizable to him. Since Bourne had made his first nocturnal visit, it had grown into something resembling a medium-size village, complete with its own airfield with runways long enough to accommodate jet planes even larger than the Bombardier 8000, for cargo shipments were constantly being flown to and from the camp, executing Keyre’s arms traffic. Thanks to extensive dredging, the area was now a deep-water port for cargo ships, which came and went with the same purpose as the air traffic. Too, the tents Bourne had encountered when he snatched Mala and her sister had given way to sunbaked brick buildings. Cranes rose into the air, bulldozers, and all manner of earthmoving equipment rumbled and thudded, as more and more buildings were constructed. Cart paths had been widened and paved, altered here and there to form a semblance of a grid within the perimeter of the village, which was protected, like military bases the world over, by high fences, barriered gates, and three shifts of armed sentries. There was even a radar tower, along with a pair of anti-aircraft missile launchers.
But all of this bristling modernization was at present unknown to Bourne. His mind, teetering on the verge of an abyss with no bottom, had returned to the Somalia he had known. To the pitch-black night of an AWOL moon and stars, filled with the ominous rumbling of what would rapidly develop into a monstrous thunderstorm. As if in a grainy film he saw himself planting the two incendiary bombs on the north end of Keyre’s tented camp. Detonators set for six minutes, he threaded his way through the darkness, passing up at least three opportunities to break the necks of sentries; he wanted no evidence there was anyone near the camp except in the north.
In the days previous, he had made a map of the camp during a series of clandestine forays at dawn and twilight, when daylight was at its weakest. Mounting the heights slightly inland of the camp, he sighted through powerful binoculars, taking mental notes of the comings and goings of everyone within the camp. Occasionally, he saw the girls, and he determined, sadly, there were too many for him to free them all. He saw the line of wooden spears upon whose sharp tips were jammed severed heads, some fresh, others reeking beneath their crawling carapace of flies, still others meatless, dark and leathery from sun and salt wind. Bony cattle roamed through the compound, heads down, in a vain attempt to forage scraps amid the pyramids of plastic bottles.
One dawn he observed a contingent of jihadists firing machine pistols at a cracked and bullet-pitted Western toilet, lying on its side in an open space of dust and porcelain shards. The next morning, assaulted even at this remove by the horrific stench of rotting flesh, he bore witness amid the wreckage of the ruined toilet to five wooden stakes to which had been crudely bound five headless corpses. The same contingent fired their machine pistols at these targets, making them dance as the bullets struck them. The jihadists laughed obscenely.
The morning before his planned raid, he observed Keyre using a crude but enormous machete to sever a man’s head. His men kicked the head around like Aztecs at their ball game before hoisting it onto an available spear. During his twilight recon, Bourne was unfortunate enough to see one of the girls being dragged out of the communal tent. It was not Liis—he had been given portrait photos of both sisters by their father. To his horror, the girl could not have been more than twelve. Perhaps she had been recalcitrant, perhaps she had spat in Keyre’s face, or tried to escape. In any event, she now faced the ultimate punishment. Quitting his position, Bourne sprinted as fast as he could manage while keeping himself hidden, but he was too far away to come close enough to do something to save her—though precisely what that might be without getting himself killed he could not say. And yet it was impossible for him to stand by and do nothing. But, apart from attacking the compound with a company of well-armed soldiers, there was nothing to do. And this knowledge pierced him deeply and completely.
The poor girl’s death, barbaric and inhuman as it was, served to confirm every horror story Mala and Liis’s father had told him about Keyre and his jihadist cult of personality. Feeling helpless in the face of such evil was one of the worst moments in Bourne’s life, a nightmare that would stay with him for years to come. There was no good way to bear witness to such an atrocity, except for him to promise himself that the people responsible—especially Keyre—would pay with their lives. And in the here and now, he knew the best thing he could do was to save Mala and Liis from such a monstrous fate.