'And the other NightStalker pilots, well, they liked to joke with me—like sending one of the hospital nurses over to my table in the mess hall to talk all sexy with me. Or putting me down for briefings that I wasn't meant to attend. Stuff like that. Instead of calling me Rufus, they called me "Doofus".
'Then some of the Rangers at the base started calling me that, too. I hated it. But Captain Knight, he never called me that. Never once. He always called me by my name.
'Anyway, one time, he was walking past my dorm just after some of them pilot bastards had taken all my bedside books while I was sleeping and switched 'em with some dirty magazines. They was all laughing at me when Captain Knight asked what was going on.
'A pilot named Harry Hartley told him to fuck off, mind his own business. Knight just stood there in the doorway, dead still. Again Hartley told him to beat it. Knight didn't move. So Hartley approached him angrily and took a swing at him. Knight dropped
the asshole using only his legs, then he pressed a knee to Hartley's throat and said that my pilot skills were very much his business and that I was to be left alone ... or else he'd come back.
'No-one ever played a joke on me again.'
Mother said, 'So what happened with the thirteen soldiers who died in Sudan then?'
'When he went out on a mission,' Rufus said, 'Knight often worked alone. Delta guys are allowed to do that, run solo. One man acting alone can often do more damage than an entire platoon.
'Anyway, one night, he's in Port Sudan, staking out an old warehouse. Place is a ghost town, deserted, run-down to all hell. Which is why Al-Qaeda had a training camp there, inside a big old warehouse.
'So Knight gets inside the warehouse and waits. That night, there's a big meeting there but this ain't your usual backstreets-of-Sudan meeting between Al-Qaeda buyers and Russian arms dealers. No, it's fucking Bin Laden himself and three CIA spooks, and they're talking about the Embassy bombings.
'Knight sends a silent digital signal out, giving his location, calling for back-up, and indicating that OBL himself is there. He offers to liquidate OBL, but command tells him to stand down. They're sending a Delta hit team in on his signal.
'The Delta team is sent from Aden, sixteen men in a Black Hawk, flown by me. Of course, by the time we get to the warehouse in Port Sudan, Bin Laden is gone.
'We meet Knight at the rendezvous point on the coast—an abandoned lighthouse. He's pissed as hell. The leader of the Delta hit squad is a punk named Brandeis, Captain Wade Brandeis. He tells Knight that something bigger is at stake here. Something way over Knight's head.
'Knight turns on his heel, heads for the chopper in disgust. Then, behind him, that fucker Brandeis just nods to two of his guys and says, "The chopper pilot, too. He can't go back after seeing this." And so these Delta assholes raise their MP-5s at Knight's back and at me in my chopper.
'There was no time for me to shout, but I didn't have to. Knight
had heard 'em move. He told me later that he heard the sound of their sleeves brushing against their body armour—the sound of someone raising a gun.
'A second before they fired, Knight dashed forward and tackled me into my own helicopter's hold. The Delta guys rushed us, silenced guns blazin' away, hammering the chopper. But Knight is moving too fast. He pushes me out the other side of the chopper, yanks me across a patch of open ground and into the lighthouse.
'You wouldn't believe what happened inside that lighthouse after that. The Delta team came in after us, the whole Delta hit team. Sixteen men. Only three came out.
'Knight killed nine Delta commandos inside that lighthouse before Brandeis and two other guys cut their losses and headed outside. Then, knowing that Knight was still inside fighting with four of his own men, Brandeis planted a Thermite-Amatol demolition charge at the front door.
'Don't know if you've ever seen a Thermite charge go off before, but they are mighty big blasters. Well, that charge went off and that old lighthouse fell like a big old California redwood. The whole area shook like an earthquake when it hit the ground.
'When the dust settled, there was nothing left—nothing—just a pile of rubble. Nobody inside could have survived. Not us. Not the four Delta guys Brandeis had left in there.
'So Brandeis and the other two took off in my chopper and headed back to Aden.
'As it turned out, the building's collapse did kill the last four D-boys. Squashed 'em like flapjacks. But not Knight and me. Knight had seen Brandeis leave the lighthouse, and guessed that he'd blow the building. So Knight zip-lined us down the hollow well-shaft of the lighthouse—past the four Delta guys on the stairs—and bundled us both into a storm cellar at the base of the building.
'The lighthouse fell, but that storm cellar held. It was strong, concrete-walled. Took the pair of us two whole days to dig ourselves out of the rubble.'
'Man . . .' Mother said.
'Turned out Brandeis was working for some group inside the US military called the Intelligence Convergence Group, or ICG. Heard of them?'
'Yeah. Once or twice,' Mother said grimly.
'Don't hear about the ICG much anymore,' Rufus said. 'They say it was a bad-ass government agency that infiltrated military units, big companies and universities with its agents and then reported back to the government. But there was a purge a couple of years back that wiped it out. But some members like Brandeis survived. Turned out the ICG had been behind the attacks on the US embassies in Africa—they were liquidating some spies in those offices and had got Al-Qaeda to do their dirty work.
'To cover itself for the lighthouse bloodbath, though, the ICG blamed the whole thing on Knight. Said that he'd been taking millions from Al-Qaeda. Attributed all thirteen Delta deaths to Knight by saying that he pre-warned Al-Qaeda of their arrival. Knight was placed at the top of the Department of Defense's Most Wanted Persons List. His file was marked Classification Zebra: shoot on sight. And the US Government put a price on his head: two million dollars, dead or alive.'
'A bounty hunter with a price on his head. Nice,' Mother said.
Rufus said, 'But then the ICG did the worst thing of all. Remember I told you that Knight had a young wife. He also had a baby. ICG had them killed. Set it up as a home invasion gone wrong. Killed the woman and the baby.
'And now, now the ICG is dead and Knight's family is dead, but the price on Knight's head remains. The US Government occasionally sends a hit squad after him, like they did in Brazil a few years ago. And, of course, Wade Brandeis is still on active duty with Delta. I think he's a major now, still based in Yemen.'
'And so Knight became a bounty hunter,' Mother said.
'That's right. And I went with him. He saved my life, and he's always been good to me, always respected me. And he ain't never forgot Brandeis. Got a tattoo on his arm just to remind himself. Boy, is he waiting for the chance to meet that cat again.'
Mother took this all in.
She found herself reliving the mission she'd endured with Schofield and Gant at that remote ice station in Antarctica a few years back, an adventure which had involved their own battle with the ICG.
Fortunately for them, they had won. But at around the same time, Aloysius Knight had also been doing battle with the ICG— and he'd lost. Badly.
'He sounds like a Shane Schofield gone wrong,' she whispered.
'What?'
'Nothing.'
Mother gazed out at the horizon, a peculiar thought entering her mind. She found herself wondering: what would happen to Shane Schofield if he ever lost such a contest?