Gordon Kent - The Spoils of War

Pop, pop.

“Hawk One, this is Palm Two. He’s gone. No hits.”

“Is it safe to move?” Dukas asked. He was soaked; runoff from the hillside was going right down his pants.

“Wait one.”

It took the Canadians ten minutes to clear the hillside. They found a small patch of dark khaki polyester and a one-inch square of flannel.

“That’s off his ghillie suit,” a black Nova Scotian sergeant said. He presented them to Dukas and Shlomo. “That flannel he used to wipe the optics on his rifle.” He sounded as if he was from Boston.

Dukas knelt by the body. It was impossible to establish whether this was, in fact, the man they’d come for; a fiftycaliber sniper round had removed most of his head. Dukas began to search the corpse. The man had a wallet with American dollars and several forms of ID. His clothes were all international—a Gap sweatshirt with a hood, blue jeans. The briefcase was locked to his wrist; the keys were in his jeans.

Shlomo leaned in to see what was in the case and Dukas rotated it so that he could see everything.

“This guy was an arms dealer?” Dukas said.

Shlomo shrugged. “We make mistakes, too.” Shlomo didn’t seem surprised by the contents.

Dukas pointed with a booted toe at the remnants of the jawline and lack of a head. “Was that a mistake?” he asked.

Shlomo raised his hands. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting.”

“You going to tell me that the Albanians shot him?” Dukas exhaled sharply. “With a fifty-cal?”

Shlomo glanced up the hill at the Land Rover. “It wasn’t right, what David said, but he is political and thinks he rules the world, okay?”

Dukas knelt again by the briefcase and began to inventory the contents. He pulled plastic freezer bags from the zippered liner of his raincoat, assigned a chain-of-custody code to each item, placed it in the freezer bag, and stuck the number on the outside. Most of the items in the briefcase were Roman coins. He did the inventory carefully, because he was angry and he didn’t want to do something stupid. Shlomo watched him for a while and then walked over to the car the dead man had arrived in and began to question the three other occupants in English and then in Turkish. Then Arabic.

In the inner pocket, Dukas found a red leather calendar book. Once, its edges had been gold-leafed, but it had been used for too many years. The calendar date was 1987. He flipped it open to the back—penciled addresses and phone numbers in Arabic and in roman script, in cities throughout the Mediterranean.

David thrust out a hand. “I’ll take that.”

Dukas hadn’t seen him come down the hill, but it looked as if he had taken the longer and drier route on the tarmac.

Dukas didn’t reply. He placed the calendar in a plastic bag, put a sticker on it, and wrote a number. He tossed the bag on the pile.

David stepped around him and bent over the pile. Dukas stood up suddenly, his hip grazing the younger man and sending him sprawling.

“Sorry,” Dukas said, offering his hand. “I’m clumsy.”

David crab-walked away and rose to his feet. His jaw worked as if he was chewing, and his face was red, but he kept his distance.

Shlomo came back from the car.

“He attacked me,” David said.

Dukas shook his head. “A misunderstanding.”

“He attacked me,” David said, his anger causing his voice to rise. “He is interfering.”

Dukas talked over David. “Get this guy out of here.”

David began to use his hands. He wasn’t speaking English now, but Hebrew, and he was speaking only to Shlomo.

Shlomo didn’t move. David went on talking. Shlomo ignored him and looked at the briefcase and then at Dukas, his head bent slightly to one side as if he were asking a question. Dukas locked the locks on the briefcase and put the keys in the pocket of his raincoat. The Canadian sergeant was standing by the Zil, watching the three terrified Kosovans and smoking. From time to time he glanced at the two Israelis.

David wiped his hands on his coat, turned away from Shlomo in obvious disgust and faced Dukas. “Give me that briefcase.”

“Don’t tempt me to start this as a homicide investigation.” David raised his hand and pointed at Dukas. “You don’t even understand what you are interfering with. Give me the briefcase.”

Dukas walked past the younger man and started up the hill, then turned. Instead of anger, he found only fatigue and boredom, as if he had played this scene too many times. “This is evidence in a war-crimes-tribunal investigation. You never mentioned a briefcase in our memorandum of understanding. You told me that this guy was some kind of terrorist heavy hitter. I don’t know why you wanted him dead, but he’s dead. Now—”

“We wanted him dead? The Albanians shot him!” David shouted, turning to Shlomo for support. Shlomo said nothing. His attention had switched from Dukas to David. He eyed him with distaste, the way tourists look at panhandlers.

Dukas shook his head, looked away, glanced back at a flicker of movement. The younger man had taken a long sliding step forward and his hand hit Dukas’s elbow hard, numbing it. Dukas dropped the briefcase but managed to pivot, block the follow-on blow, and stand over the case. Dukas had plenty of time to see that the Canadians were too far away to do anything. He risked a glance at Shlomo, who hadn’t moved.

David crouched, a relaxed martial arts position. He looked confident. “Give us the fucking briefcase.”

Dukas shook his head. He didn’t think the briefcase was worth a crap to him or any of the cases he was making, but this was too stupid a point to concede. He picked it up and held it to him like a schoolgirl holding her books and hoped that the heavy case would deflect a blow.

Shlomo stepped up behind his partner and elbowed him in the head so that he sat abruptly on the wet road. Again.

The Canadian ordered all three Kosovans to the ground and started bellowing into his radio for backup.

“It would be better if you gave us the briefcase,” Shlomo said. He sounded as tired as Dukas felt.

“Put in a request through channels.”

David moaned.

“That guy’s dangerous,” Dukas said.

“More dangerous than you know, my friend.” Shlomo wiped the rain from his eyes. “I think you’d better get out of here.”

Tel Aviv, Israel, January, 2002

Abe Peretz told the old joke about the Polish immigrant woman and the boy on the bus. It was practically archaic, he said, from the early days of Israel, but still funny: A mother and her little boy are riding on a bus in Jerusalem. The boy speaks Hebrew but the mother keeps speaking Yiddish. A man sitting across the aisle leans over and says, “Lady, the little boy speaks wonderful Hebrew; why do you keep talking to him in this wretched Yiddish?” “Because,” she says, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”

Outside, the night was coming down like a lavender curtain, darker to the east behind them but brightening into orange on the undersides of the clouds out over the Mediterranean. The apartment was high above Ben Yehuda but the sounds of the street came up; and the smell of evening, a swirl of salt sea and car exhaust and cooking food, rose with them.

“They say that if you breathe really deep, you can smell the desert,” Abe Peretz said.

“Only if you’re a Jew,” his wife said with a smile. “You, you’d have trouble.”

The Peretzes lived in Tel Aviv but had been there only a few months; the Craiks were old friends passing through. The two men had served on a ship together fifteen years before, when one had been new to the Navy and the other had been in too long; now Peretz was the FBI’s deputy legal attaché at the US embassy, and Alan Craik, long ago that young newbie, was the Fifth Fleet intel officer in Bahrain.