Morgan saw a sadness in her eyes, but it did not seem to be for the painful scorn of her father and the loss of her family. Rather it was a sadness of fear, the kind Morgan had seen in the eyes of many who were about to die; it was a sadness not of something that had already happened to her, but of something that was going to happen to her, and she knew it.
At once, as he looked at her, she became appealing to him, her despair coupled with a longing, all of it concealed to some degree by her effervescent aggressiveness — no, not aggressiveness, he rethought it — more like assertiveness, an anxious assertiveness. Morgan felt something emanating from Liban Adnan that he could not define or understand. But he knew he had to respond to it.
“All right, I’ll help you, Lee,” he told her, suddenly deciding. “I’ll give you your story.”
A glimmer of a smile came tentatively to her lips. “Thank you, Mr. Tenny.”
“Call me Morgan,” he said.
Later that night, back in the office of the Dingo Club, Morgan again sat across the desk from Michaleen Donahue.
“I want a hundred thousand for myself,” Donahue said.
“You want it now?”
The Irishman’s thick black brows went up. “That would be nice.”
Morgan unlocked and unzipped the bag that constantly hung from his shoulder, and from it counted out ten banded sheaves of hundred-dollar bills, fifty to a sheaf, and twenty sheaves of fifty-dollar bills, also fifty to a sheaf. “That leaves me with nine hundred thousand, Donny. Will that do us?”
“I think so. I put a pencil to it earlier—” He pushed a yellow lined pad across the desk, which Morgan picked up and began to study. “I figure twenty thousand each for the two guard contacts we’ll need on the inside,” he told Morgan. “Four explosives men at forty each is a hundred-sixty. Two rocket-launcher men at thirty-five apiece is seventy. Six ground troops to back up you and me at—”
“You and me?” Morgan interrupted. “You’re coming along?”
“Certainly,” Donahue said, taken aback slightly. “You think I took a hundred thousand just to sit on my ass?”
Morgan shrugged self-consciously. “Well, I–I mean — well—”
“Well, hell! A well’s a hole in the ground, lad! Your brother’s a friend of mine. And so are a few others in that hellhole of a prison. Yeah, I’m coming along. You bet your ass I am.” Donahue cleared his throat. “Now, as I was saying: Six ground troops at twenty-five per is another one-fifty. The half-track, used but in good condition, will cost us two hundred thousand. And the two armored Humvees will run seventy-five each, that’s one-fifty.” Donahue got out a bottle and poured drinks for them while Morgan studied the figures. Taking a long sip of his own, he sat back and licked his lips appreciatively at the taste. “I make it seven-seventy,” he concluded. “That leaves one-thirty for weapons and ammo.”
“One-thirty will be a stretch,” Morgan guessed, frowning.
“Might, might not,” said Donahue. “Depends on where I have to buy. If I can run at least half of what we need from Uzbekistan, we’ll be okay. If I have to deal with the Pakistanis, those bloody bastards will try to rob us blind.” He paused for a moment, then said, “It might be possible to steal some ammo from the U.N. forces arsenal down in Qandahar. I don’t know how you’d feel about that, you being a Yank and all—”
“Steal it anywhere you can,” Morgan said flatly. “I don’t owe the U.N. anything.”
“Right. Well, then.” Donahue rose and drained his glass. “I’ll get the ball rolling first thing in the morning. You want to interview personnel?”
“Not unless you want me to.”
“I’ll do it meself then. How do you plan to get Virgil out of the country?”
“Same way I got in. Billy Cone.”
“Billy might not be up for anything that heavy. What if he says no?”
Morgan locked eyes with the Irishman. “Then I’ll kill him, take his plane, and fly it myself.”
The next night, Lee invited Morgan to her apartment, where they would have the privacy to talk more openly.
Lee lived in one of the older, modest buildings in a more or less grubby section of south Kabul, but she said she liked the location because it was convenient to the traditional Afghan food markets as well as a newer, Western-style superstore that sold canned items imported from the U.S. Plus, the sparsely but comfortably furnished apartment offered a parking shed for her little green Volkswagen. Morgan noticed at once that the apartment’s cracked and pitted walls were colorfully concealed with a variety of posters: Emiliano Zapata, Muhammad Ali standing over a prone Sonny Liston, Mother Teresa touching the forehead of a sick child, Roy Rogers with six-guns blazing.
“Roy Rogers?” Morgan said in surprise.
“Yes. I watch his old films on the new satellite station. They have subtitles, of course. I think his horse is nice. And I like the way he sings.”
She had prepared a cold supper for them.
“Samboosak,” she told him. “Cold meat pies with leeks and mild spices. And there are boiled eggs and a spinach-and-chickpea salad with pine nuts. And,” she added proudly, “just for you—” She produced a bottle of Australian wine. “Another reason my father has disowned me: I like a glass of wine now and then.”
As they ate, Morgan outlined for Lee in detail his plan to breach Pul-e-Charki prison with a small armed force, an armored vehicle, and two armed Humvees, to liberate his twin brother Virgil from Block One, where the high-profile prisoners were kept, and then how the two of them would escape the country in Benny Cone’s plane.
“What about the other prisoners in Block One?” Lee wanted to know. “And in the other blocks?”
Morgan shrugged. “They’ll be pretty much on their own. If they can get to the main gate, a lot of them can pile onto the half-track and the Hummers when they retreat.”
“And the guards?”
“Most of them at the main gate and around Blocks One and Two will probably be killed in the initial assault.”
Lee looked down at the table. “A lot of those men are just ordinary family men, working men, most of them not political at all.”
“They chose to work there,” Morgan said evenly. “They knew the risks involved.” He paused, then continued in a softer tone. “Look, Lee, everyone makes their own choices in life. Everyone pays their own prices for those choices. That’s just life.”
“Or in this case, death,” she amended.
They finished supper and went outside to sit on the building’s back steps and drink the rest of the wine.
“I try very hard to understand you Westerners,” she said. “All of you who are here in my country: Americans, British, Irish, Australians, the mixed Europeans. I try to understand the little regard you all seem to have for human life if something stands in the way of what you want.”
“I’ve been trying to understand your people, too,” Morgan said, “since I saw your own father stare so hatefully at you, and you told me how you’d been ostracized by him from your family. I don’t understand that. My brother Virgil and I are twins; we were together in the womb, born together. We grew up together as dirt-poor Catholics in a steel-mill town in a place called Pennsylvania. Our father was a drunk; our mother washed other men’s dirty, stinking mill clothes to feed us. We got made fun of as free students in a hard-knock Catholic school because of the shabby hand-me-down uniforms we wore. We never got invited to join school teams or clubs, or come to school parties. But we got away from all that. When we were old enough, we joined the Marine Corps. We went through boot camp together, then weapons school, where they taught us to use rifles, pistols, machine guns, flamethrowers, hand-held rocket launchers. Finally we went to sniper school together and learned to kill. We lived by the sniper motto: One shot, one kill. When we left the Corps, we both had confirmed body counts in the high twenties. The day we were discharged, we were recruited for a mercenary team to fight in Zaire. We’ve been fighting, and killing, ever since.”