Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Deception

“How do you do this?” he asked as they walked to the next bed.

“How not?” brushing a wisp of hair out of her eyes. “Besides, there are always others. Thousands. And you, David? What are you running away from?” she asked. Scorpion was using the cover name, David Cheyne, an American from Los Angeles.

“What makes you think I’m running away?” he said, thinking in an odd way that Shaefer, the CIA station chief in Bucharest and his closest friend in U.S. intelligence, had implied the same thing when he had called him from Rome before coming to Africa. He and Shaefer had history together; the only two survivors of a Taliban ambush at FOBE, Forward Operating Base Echo, in North Waziristan.

“Where are you?” Shaefer had asked.

“Not Herzliya,” he said, naming the suburb north of Tel Aviv where the Israeli Mossad had its headquarters, meaning he had decided not to take on the mission the Israelis and the CIA had wanted him to. As an independent operative, a gun for hire, he had the option. But he didn’t want another mission. Not after Ukraine, he thought. “I’m done.”

“It’s not that simple. You can’t just walk away,” Shaefer had said.

“I know,” he said.

“What will you do?”

“Get clean,” he said, ending the call and immediately contacting a private arms dealer he knew in Luxembourg, to make sure he was equipped in case someone came after him in Africa.

“People think they come to Africa to do good. But,” Sandrine, the French woman doctor said, sliding into French, “ tout le monde ici est aussi fuyant .” Everyone here is also running away.

She had been surprised that this athletic-looking American with the strange gray eyes, a scar over one of them, spoke French. But then, everything about him was a mystery. He had just suddenly appeared at the camp. When asked, he wouldn’t talk about himself. But the truck and the medicines he had brought with him had been a godsend.

“Including you?” he asked. It was impossible, he told himself. What you’re feeling for her isn’t real. It’s too soon. A rebound after having to leave Iryna behind in Kiev. Except he knew better.

“Of course me. Why do you think I asked?”

A Somali woman in a vivid Van Gogh blue and yellow direh robe came by then and told them about the children trapped and starving in a school across the border in Baidoa.

Later, outside the MPLM tent, passing around what Cowell, the red-headed Scot, said was his last bottle of Glenlivet, Moreau, the handsome French surgeon, a craggy Louis Jourdan with a three-day stubble, had said: “It’s shonde about those kids in Baidoa,” using the Swahili word for shit.

“A few of us could go. Bring them here,” Jennifer, the Canadian nurse, said.

“Don’t be bloody daft,” Cowell said. “There’s fighting all over there. You’d have to go through two sets of front lines. Twice! Going and coming, plus tribal pirates, assorted bandits, and Al-Shabaab all over the fucking place. It’d be bloody suicide.”

“So we do nothing,” Sandrine said, her profile outlined in fire by the last rays of the setting sun.

“Too bloody true. They’re buggered,” Cowell said. “Poor little sods.”

That’s when Scorpion understood why he had come to Africa and what he was going to do. He had skills they didn’t have. Skills honed in his youth in the Arabian desert, in the U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a highly trained operative in the CIA. After an assassination operation, he had left the CIA to work as a freelance agent known only to certain top echelons within the intelligence community. With a little luck-no, be honest, a lot of luck-he might get through where they couldn’t.

That night, Sandrine came to his tent in the CARE compound. He started to say something, but she put her finger to his lips. She pushed him back on the cot and got on top of him, kissing his face and lips, then working her way down his body, tugging at his undershorts, followed by the brief fumble to put on protection.

It’s impossible, he thought, even as her lips grazed him. He had seen the way the men all looked at her. There was a rumor she had turned down a marriage proposal from one of the richest men in France. Earlier that day, Moreau had caught him looking at her and told him, “Don’t even think about it. Many have tried. She is d’un abord difficile .” Unapproachable.

The feel of her was unbelievable. Smoother than any silk. She was like a drug. The two of them moving together on the creaking cot like the rhythm of the sea.

Afterward, pulling on her clothes in the dark, she said, “Don’t think this means anything, because it doesn’t.”

“Why me?”

“Who should it be? Moreau, who thinks he’s so handsome, and because he doesn’t wear a wedding ring thinks I don’t know he has a wife and two kids in Neuilly-sur-Seine? Or Cowell, who’d fuck a monkey if it would let him? God, men are idiots.”

“True,” he said. “But why me?”

“I know how they look at me. A not-so-bad-looking white woman in Africa. .” She shrugged. “It’s not about me.” Sitting on the edge of the cot, she brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. “Maybe it’s the scar over your eye. I don’t know.” She stood up. “Don’t ask women to explain themselves. Half the time even we don’t know why we do things.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t bullshit,” he said. “It insults both of us. Just tell me the truth. Why me?”

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. She took in his lean, muscled torso, dark bed-tousled hair, the scars on his arms and ribs. His stillness.

“I don’t want this talked about,” she said. “You seem the type who can keep a secret.”

He had to smile to himself. Given that barely six weeks earlier he’d been lying naked and tortured in a freezing cell in Ukraine waiting for them to put a bullet in the back of his head, there was more than a little truth to that.

She turned then stopped as she lifted the tent flap and peered out into the darkness.

“I’ll see you in the morning?” she asked.

“I’ll be gone. I have some things I have to do,” making a mental checklist of what he would need to get through to Baidoa.

“I was right. You are running away,” she said. For an instant her silhouette was framed against the stars, and then she was gone.

“No, walking away,” he said aloud to himself.

But nothing prepared him for Baidoa. There was fighting around the city, which was held by Al-Shabaab of the Mirifle tribe, and he had to bribe his way through two front lines, African Union troops and Al-Shabaab’s, to get into the city. The school was a one-story concrete building on a dirt street in the hilly Isha district, which, like most of the buildings in this part of the city, was shot full of holes, the concrete crumbling like moldy cheese.

Around the building were more than a dozen bodies, women, children, a barefoot soldier, bloated and discolored in the sun. The stench was indescribable. It looked like one of the women had been raped before she was killed, her direh pulled up around her neck, a dried bloodstain between her naked legs splayed wide. Scorpion took a moment and pulled the direh down to cover her.

Inside the school the smell was even worse. Boys from ages three to about ten or eleven lay on the concrete floor in a large room, some stirring, most still. They were pitifully thin, covered with fecal matter, some in pools of diarrhea and urine. Others were clearly dead. The walls were scarred by bullets and political slogans spray-painted in Arabic that read: “Death to the African Union!”

A boy in shorts and bare feet, about ten, came up to him, holding an empty plastic bowl.