The Price of Honor

ONE
Mogadishu Somalia
0800 Hours21 August, 1993

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

Anger beat a familiar cadence in Sandy Caine's head.

Sprinting off the training ground, he headed into the dry riverbed that ran alongside police headquarters. Some moat. You could drive a herd of goats across it. Or a truck filled with plastique.

Dumb, dumb, dumb . . .

Running harder now, the heels of his worn-out soccer shoes kicking up little puffs of dust in the wadi.

What was it that made General Rushman such a jerk? If they gave out oak leaf clusters for stupidity, the guy's ribbons would be sagging down there right next to his double-digit IQ.

It was only 0800 hours, but already the August sun hanging in the cloudless blue sky over Mogadishu was bringing the city to its morning boil. With each stride he felt the hot desert air tearing at his lungs.

Dumb, dumb . . .

Chest pounding, sweat coursing down his back, he no longer felt much like a Special Forces officer. He damn sure knew he didn't look like one. For the day's mission he was wearing a pair of chinos cut off at the knees and a faded blue soccer jersey in the colors of the Honduran World Cup team. As he scrambled up the far bank of the wadi, he could smell the pepper gas oozing from the jersey. It clung to his short, dirty-blond hair like bad perfume.

Dumb . . .

And suddenly it came to him.

General genes.

That had to be it. Evolution rolled the dice and out came these corporate types who could care less if they got you killed.

Until the summons from Rushman, the morning's mission had been relatively simple. All he had to do was convince Major Mustafa Kalil that even in times of national crisis it wasn't necessary to grease every enemy of state in sight. Not always. Sometimes you could tear gas them.

The major and the green recruits for the new Somali National Police were just starting to get it when Sandy heard Sergeant Santana's voice come crackling over the walkie-talkie.

"Hawk 6, this is East LA. You need to get back here. Over."

Sandy punched the button and identified himself. "Come on, Sarge. Give me a break."

"I'd move it, sir. Excelsior is pissing in his boot."

Excelsior was the radio handle of Colonel Willard Jenkins, General Rushman's executive officer and brown-nose-in-chief. Which figured. Cursing softly, Sandy punted his gas mask ten yards down the training field.

SOS--Same Old Shit. One minute you were doing your job, the next you had your heels locked in the commanding general's headquarters, taking crap from a perfumed prince who could ruin your life if he didn't like your attitude.

Damn right, he had an attitude.

That's what it all came down to, he reflected, slowing to a trot. Attitude protected his mind the way a sheath protects a fine knife. It was essential to his survival, like wound dressings in a medic's kit. He was pushing thirty. A brooder. On the days when he thought he should bag the Army, it occurred to him that he knew a dozen ways to kill a man for every way of being one.

He was a captain with a golden name and a platinum future. Five years out of West Point and he spent half his time wondering why he didn't quit and get a life. He came from a tradition--eight generations of Caine warriors, six from the Point. But he was no traditionalist. He broke things, rules, icons, not just gas masks. Before the voice of authority, what he felt was a trickle of contempt, not the terror that made lifers grovel.

For a moment he stood there, waiting for the anger to cool. On the far side of the wadi, he saw Summar the mop man coming out of the command post. Summar was wearing the same faded cotton shirt and torn trousers he put on every day. Most of the time he went around barefoot. This morning he had on a new pair of Air Jordans.

The sun and wind had mummified his face. When he saw Sandy, he gathered his skinny body into a travesty of attention and saluted. Nice old guy. Mopped the floors every morning with muddy water from an old bucket, swirling fresh arabesques of filth over the patterns he had laid down the day before. After work he went over to the Bakar Market and reported the day's intelligence from police headquarters to the Somali National Liberation Front. The Nikes had to come from somewhere.

Summar's treachery was transparent, perhaps even useful. Sandy used him to spread disinformation. From across the wadi, he returned the mop man's salute. Soaked in sweat, he double-timed it to the rear of the four-story building that housed his command post. The rest of the Bakar Market district consisted of colonial villas faded to soft brown, mud houses with earthen roofs, and thousands of wooden shanties. Towering above them, the walls of police headquarters reminded him of a castle looking over a medieval slum.

The concrete walls were scarred from old battles. On the second floor, the dark smudge left by an exploding RPG round looked like the bruise circling a black eye. Sandy pushed open a steel door and went down a splintered flight of stairs to the cellar. When he came into the command bunker, he found Santana bent over a Sabre MX. The radio was lying on a crate covered by a frayed prayer rug. Talking quickly and softly into the hand mike, the A-Team's commo expert sounded like a man trying to calm a barking terrier.

"Yes, sir. I know, sir. Hawk 6 knows you're looking for him. He's on the way, sir."

Santana was a tall Latino from East Los Angeles. Cool, a little eccentric, even for Special Forces--sometimes the meditation and tai chi got to be too much for the other men. They read war stories and thrillers. Santana read American Anthropologist. In his footlocker, he kept a travel-tattered copy of his master's thesis--"The Guayaquil Tribe and the Shining Path"--along with the wooden flute the tribe's ghost talker had given him at the end of his field work. He spoke Japanese and Italian as well as Spanish and English. The CIA was always trying to steal him. For his mind, and for his other assets. He could do twenty-five one-armed push-ups and kill silently with either hand.
Right now, he was just trying to buy Sandy some time.

"Yes, Colonel. He knows who's looking for him. Sergeant Caldwell went over to the training field himself to get him."

Panting as if he'd just run the Boston Marathon, Sandy leaned against the wall of the bunker and let Santana play the spluttering colonel. On the wall behind the radio, two lizards were hunting flies. Sandy watched them until his breathing returned to normal. When Santana gave him the hand mike, he hefted it gingerly, as if it were a live grenade. Then he pressed the push-to-talk button.

"This is Hawk 6," he said. "Is Thundering Eagle having a nice day?"

Colonel Jenkins registered the jab at Rushman's handle but saved it for later. "Cut the crap, Captain. Where the hell have you been?"

"Across the wadi, sir. Training. East LA told me you called."

"You're damn right I did. Twenty minutes ago."

Over the hand mike, Jenkins sounded like an air horn in an end zone--pompous and a long way from any danger on the field. Sandy drummed the top of the Sabre. Gray dust covered his slender fingers. "I'm here now, sir. What's this all about?"

"What it's about, Captain, is Abu Bakar." Jenkins paused for effect. "We've got twenty-four dead Pakis and four Americans KIA over the last ten days. You are aware of that, I assume, Captain Caine?"

"That I am, sir."

"Well, the little bastard's right out there laughing at us. Thundering Eagle wants to talk to you. And the word he used was now. I suggest you get here ten minutes ago." He...