Free Havoc - v4 by Jack du Brul Page A

that.” Mercer reconsidered. “Well, kind of. If I come across anything out of the ordinary when I’m in the field, I write it up and forward it along to a deputy national security advisor named Ira Lasko. Truth be told, I’ve only passed on a couple of things in the two years since I agreed to take the job, and nothing’s ever come of them.”
    “And you are going to follow up on this.”
    “Cali, we just saw a village butchered and then some other mystery group come out of nowhere and annihilate the vanguard of a rebel army. How could I not follow up on it?”
    They had reached the truck. It was almost dark. The jungle canopy was a silvery gray and the waters of the Chinko River ran black. They spied curious puffy white shapes milling around the battered cargo truck. Mercer held out a hand to take Cali’s wrist and lower her to the ground. A pair of figures stepped from the far side of the vehicle. Mercer cursed himself for not retrieving his Beretta. It was hard to make out details, but both people carried something long in their hands. Weapons?
    One of the figures brushed aside one of the odd pale shapes and it protested with an angry bleat. They were sheep. As soon as Mercer realized it, the details came into focus. It was a man and a woman. They had just forded the river with the twenty-five or so sheep to flee Dayce’s army. The animals must represent the sum of their wealth. As Mercer and Cali watched, a pair of naked toddlers joined their parents. The mother lifted the youngest to a hip and allowed him to slide her breast from her blouse and begin to feed.
    “What do you think?” Cali asked.
    Mercer was pretty sure that all of the men with Dayce were dead, but he couldn’t take the chance a few were still out in the jungle. He couldn’t leave these people here, vulnerable. He stood, holding his arms wide in a friendly gesture as the family’s father saw him and lowered his staff as if to joust. It was all just too bizarre, but that was Africa. Mercer chuckled. “I think we’re making our escape from the CAR with a frightened family and a flock of wet sheep.”
    It took Mercer and Cali three days to get from Rafai to the capital, Bangui, and from there a flight to Lagos and finally to New York’s Kennedy Airport. To Mercer it seemed the closer to home she got, the more withdrawn Cali Stowe became. He suspected it was a defense mechanism to distance herself from the horrors of the past days. She had compartmentalized the episode and was slowly building a wall around the memory, locking it deep in her soul so it would only return as nightmares, and given time even those would fade.
    Mercer recognized the technique. He’d done it himself dozens of times. He’d seen savagery on a scale Cali couldn’t possibly conceive. Not the slow death by international apathy someone from the CDC would witness in refugee camps or in rural AIDS clinics, but wholesale violence for violence’s sake. He’d seen wars on four continents, regional dustups that barely made the evening news but left thousands dead; he’d rescued enslaved miners in Eritrea, and he’d held a woman he loved in his arms as she died.
    Harry White had been in a particularly philosophical mood one night not long after Tisa Nguyen’s death and told Mercer that God didn’t place a burden on a person that He felt couldn’t be handled. Look at Job, Harry had said by way of example. The guy had it all when God took it away—family, money, friends, health, the whole magilla. But God also knew old Job could take it. You soldier on, Harry had continued; you take the shit life tosses at you and keep on going. There’s really only one alternative.
    “Yeah, I could turn into a bitter drunk like you,” Mercer had replied, “hanging out in a bar twelve hours a day waiting for some dupe to pick up your tab.”
    Harry had grinned at that, his lopsided grin that turned the eighty-year-old rogue into an eight-year-old scamp, if only for an instant.