Mission of Honor (9 page)

“Collecting intel about rivals,” Herbert said.

“You never really know who your rivals are-“

“Or who they might be fronting for,” Herbert said. Political activism often hid behind a new religious idea. That made it easier to sell to the masses.

“Exactly,” Kline agreed. “We take digital pictures of events like these and load them into a master file. We like to know whether they originate at a grassroots level or elsewhere. Real religious movements tend to peak at a certain point and return to the underground. Sects concealing a political agenda tend to be well financed, often from abroad. They don’t usually fade away.”

“Making them more of a threat,” Herbert pointed out.

“Yes, but not just to the Church’s goals,” Kline said. “They’re a danger to the political stability of the continent. We take a very real interest in the lives, health, and well-being of the people to whom we minister. This is not just about the state of their immortal souls.”

“I understand,” Herbert assured him.

“After we ID’ed Seronga, we went back and checked photographs from previous Dhamballa rallies,” Kline went on.

 “Were these large rallies or small ones?” Herbert interrupted.

“Small at first, just about a dozen people at the mine,” Kline said. “Then they began to grow as family members attended. He began holding them in village squares and in fields.”

“Talking about?”

“The same things he discussed in the mines,” Kline said.

“Gotcha,” Herbert told him. “Sorry to interrupt. You were saying about Leon Seronga-?”

“That he was not the only member of the former Brush Vipers to have been present,” Kline said.

“I see,” Herbert said. “Which is really why you came to Washington. If this is the start of a new political action in southern Africa, you want Americans to help contain it.”

“Let’s just say I’d like you to participate in the process of containment,” Kline said. “That can take many forms, though right now I need intelligence.”

Kline seemed somewhat embarrassed by that. He should not have been. Herbert welcomed honesty. Everyone wanted America to become involved in international scuffles. The United States gave backbone to friends and took the heat from enemies.

“Edgar, do you have any idea why Father Bradbury was targeted?” Herbert asked.

“Not really,” Kline said. “As I said, we lack information.”

“Was there something special about his ministry?” Herbert asked.

“Father Bradbury presided over-forgive me. I mean, he presides over the largest number of deacon missionaries in the nation,” Kline said. He shook his head and tightened his lips. “I can’t believe I said that.”

“It’s a natural mistake,” Herbert said. “I’ve probably done it a million times without being smart enough to catch it.” He paused. “Unless you know something you’re not saying.”

“No,” Kline said. “If we thought something else had happened, I would tell you.”

“Sure,” Herbert said. “Okay, then. Back to the stift-presiding Father Bradbury. Who has the next-largest number of deacon missionaries?”

“There are ten other parish priests, each with three or four deacon missionaries,” Kline said. “They are all being watched.”

“By?”

“Local Botswana constables and by undercover elements of the Botswana military,” Kline said.

“Good,” Herbert said. “And I assume no one at the Vatican has received a ransom demand?”

Kline shook his head.

“That means the kidnappers need him,” Herbert said. “If kidnappers don’t want money, they want the victim to do something for them. To sign a document, make a radio or TV broadcast, renounce a policy or idea. They may even want his dead body to scare converts or other priests. Do you have any idea where they’ve taken Father Bradbury?”

“No,” Kline said. “And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Within one hour, the Moremi Wildlife rangers were looking for the militia on the ground. The military was up in two hours doing an aerial search. They didn’t find anything. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of ground to cover. The kidnappers could have dispersed, hidden, or disguised themselves as a safari group. There are hundreds of those in the area at any given time.”

“Did anyone talk to truck drivers, check with amateur radio operators?” Herbert asked.

“Both,” Kline said. “The police are still talking to CB operators. It was silent running all the way. This was a well planned operation, but we have no idea to what end.” The VSO officer stopped pacing and regarded Herbert. “That’s everything I know.”

“Pretty much in line with other neopolitical grab-and-runs I’ve encountered,” Herbert said.

“I agree,” Kline said. “This is more like the act of rebels than religious acolytes.”

“One thing I don’t see is Botswana complicity with this militia,” Herbert said. “The economy is strong, and the government is stable. They would have nothing to gain by this.”

“I agree again,” Kline said. “So what does that leave us with? Are we facing some kind of religious-military hybrid? The Brush Vipers fought to obtain the independence Botswana now enjoys. Why would they want to be involved with a potentially destabilizing force?”

“I’m not sure,” Herbert said. “But I agree with what one of my coworkers said. General Mike Rodgers was the one who called the incident to my attention this morning. I believe a message was being sent. That’s why this Leon Seronga moved against the tourist office in daylight. They had the weapons and personnel to have massacred everyone. But they did not.”

“What kind of message do you think he was sending?” Kline asked.

Now it was Kline who was fishing. Since this part was speculative, Herbert did not mind going first.

“It could be any number of things,” Herbert said. “They may have done it this way to assuage the government. To show them that while they had weapons, they did not use them. That will probably encourage a more moderate response from Gaborone.”

“A wait-and-see approach,” Kline thought out loud.

“Exactly.”

“Even though a Botswana citizen was kidnapped,” Kline said.

“The term citizen is a legal one,” Herbert pointed out. “To most Botswanans, a citizen is probably someone who can trace his ancestry back hundreds, maybe thousands of years.”

“All right,” Kline said. “That’s reasonable. What else could the form of this kidnapping signify?”

“Well, it can also simply mean that Dhamballa is not strong enough to engage in military action but will if they’re forced,” Herbert said. “That might also soften the government’s response. They pride themselves on being one of the most stable regimes on the continent. Gaborone will probably try to present this as an aberration. Something that can be handled. Maybe they’ll want to wait and see what, if anything, happens next before stirring things up.”

“But at some point, the Botswana military must move against them,” Kline said.

“Not if Dhamballa’s end game is a modest one,” Herbert said. “And we don’t even know that this is Dhamballa. We also don’t know what the master plan may look like, but I researched some of our databases before coming here. The Brush Vipers were one of four paramilitary groups that used to operate in that region of Botswana. Do you know where they got their weapons from?”

“Not from the Botswana military, I hope,” Kline replied.

“No,” Herbert replied. “Worse. They came from someone we dealt with years ago.”

“Who?” Kline pressed.

“The Musketeer,” Herbert replied. “Albert Beaudin.”

Paris, France Wednesday, 3:35 A.M.

He had always worked late. Ever since he was a young man in occupied France.

Albert Beaudin sat on the terrace of his apartment overlooking Champ de Mars. The night was cool but pleasant. Low, thin clouds were colored a murky orange black by the nighttime lights of Paris. To his left, the aircraft warning lights of the Eiffel Tower winked on and off. The top of the tower flirted with the passing clouds.

Beaudin’s earliest memory of the monument was also at night. It was after the Allies had come through Paris. That was when it was finally safe for his father and him to come to the city. What a night that had been. They had ridden for nearly twenty hours straight with little Albeit sprawled in the sidecar of a stolen German staff motorcycle. Albert was used to being up at night. Much of the work he had done was in the dark. But that night was special. He could still smell the diesel fuel. He could still hear his father and himself singing French folk songs as they sped through the countryside. By the time they reached Paris, they had no voices left. Albert had no derriere left either, after bumping around in the sidecar.

But it did not matter. What a journey it had been. What a childhood he had lived.

What a victory they had won.

Maurice Beaudin had worked with Jean LeBeques, the legendary Le Conducteur de Train de la Resistance, the “Train Conductor of the Resistance.” LeBeques ran a locomotive between Paris and Lyons. Lyons was where spare parts for the railroad were manufactured. Because of the city’s central location and relative proximity to Switzerland, the French Resistance was also based in Lyons. Personnel could be dispatched quickly to other parts of the nation or smuggled to safety in a neutral country.

The Germans always sent a substantial military force with LeBeques. They wanted to make certain he was not bringing supplies to the Die Schlammgleisketten, as the Germans derisively referred to them. “The Mud Crawlers.” The Germans were derisive, but they were not dismissive. From the time France surrendered in June of 1940 until the end of the war, the French Resistance was relentless. They sabotaged the German war effort and forced the enemy to keep much-needed resources in France.

Albert and his father were among the earliest members of the resistance. Maurice Beaudin was a widower. He had a small plant that manufactured the fishplates used to join sections of rail. Maurice had known LeBeques for nearly thirty years. Both men happened to share a birthday, March 8, 1883. One evening, shortly after arriving, LeBeques presented Maurice with a cake. Written on the paper doily underneath was a message asking le receptif, the recipient, if he would be willing to fight for a free France. If so, he was to cut an X-shaped notch on the top left corner of the first crate he put on the train. Maurice did so. From that point forward, the men found ways to smuggle ammunition, spare parts for radios, and personnel on LeBeques’s trains. By some miracle, both men managed to survive the war. Tragically, if ironically, LeBeques died in a train wreck late in 1945. He was busy transporting former resistance fighters home after the war.

Albert was just six years old at the time. He attended school until two in the afternoon then went to the small factory to sweep. It was important to collect metal filings every day. Iron was scarce, and the scraps were melted down and reused. To this day, in his own munitions factories, the pungent smell of oiled metal, fresh from the lathe, brought Albert back to his youth.

So did the idea of working with other dedicated individuals on a paramilitary undertaking.

Maurice had never hesitated to involve his young son in resistance operations.

If France remained enslaved, Maurice reasoned, what was the point of growing older?

Sometimes Albert had to distract soldiers by fighting with another boy or picking on a young girl. At other times he had to slip things onto the train while the adults created distractions. Throughout the rest of his life, Albert was never able to communicate to others the excitement of risking death. He had seen others, including his fourteen-year-old cousin Samuel, murdered for suspected acts of sabotage. He had watched men and women dragged in front of stone walls and shot, hanged from trees and streetlights, and even lashed to tractors or bales of hay and used for bayonet practice. Any of those things could have happened to Albert. He learned to accept danger as a part of life, risk as a part of reward. Those sensibilities remained with Albeit after the war. Fearlessness enabled him to expand his father’s business into aircraft in the 1950s and munitions in the early 1960s.

By the time he was in his mid thirties, Albert Beaudin was a very wealthy man. But he had two regrets. The first was that his father died before he saw how vast the Beaudin empire had become. And the second was that France had failed to become a military and political force in the postwar world. The strongest free nation on the European continent, France was weakened militarily and politically by the defeat of its troops in Indochina in 1954 and then in Algeria in 1962. Hoping to restore French prestige in world affairs, France elected resistance leader Charles de Gaulle as president. De Gaulle made military independence from the United States and NATO one of his priorities. Unfortunately, that left France a virtual non player in the Cold War. Instead of being embraced by the Soviet Union and the United States, France wanted to be independent. That left the nation mistrusted by both. The emergence of Germany and Japan as financial powers in the 1960s and 1970s was also something the French had not anticipated. That left France with wine, films, and posters of the Eiffel Tower as their legacy for the latter twentieth century.

But while the century was finished, Albert Beaudin was not. Growing up as a resistance fighter had taught Albert never to be afraid of anything. It taught him never to accept defeat. And it taught him how to organize a small but devoted band into a powerful force.

Albert heard a jet. He looked up. He watched as a low flying aircraft threw cones of white light above the clouds. There must be severe storms to the south. Aircraft usually did not fly directly over the city this late.

Albert listened until the roar of the jet engines had faded. Then he let his green eyes move across the rest of the dark Parisian skyline.

There were indeed storms to the south. Storms that were going to sweep the world. Albert found himself staying up at night, recapturing the drama, risk, and excitement of the last great war he fought for his homeland.

However, the results of this war would be different. It would be fought without the loss of French lives. It would be fought in a foreign land. And it would show the world what ingenuity and stealth could accomplish.