The Marionette, page 19
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Monique said, as she rose to respond. “We would be pleased to have you and Amina back for a visit anytime. Thank you for coming. And now I invite everyone out onto the front driveway, where we’ll witness a made-in-Mali spectacle created by Pyrotechnic Arts, a company based right here in Kéniéba. Please join us around the great wooden lion that now sits in front of the building. Of course, it is symbolic of the Mali lion. See you out there.”
Amina had been sitting next to Coop. In fact, she’d been leaning heavily against her. She appeared to be very tired. But she roused herself now as we all moved towards the main door.
I was still back on the Mali lion. Mali lion? I’d never heard of such a thing. I was enlightened by a quick Google search on my phone. Yes, there is a Mali lion. Had I known, I might have been a bit more careful wandering around outside. Then I read a little more, only to learn that the Mali lion is found mainly in one region: yep, the Falémé River basin! I tried to put that out of my addled mind and focus on the job at hand.
When we stepped outside into the stifling heat of the early evening, I was happily surprised to see that a crowd of community members had shown up for the spectacle. Many of the volunteers and staff from the Tardif-funded community agencies were there, as well as dozens of the local mine workers and their families. The more people crowding the site, the better.
Adama and Amina waved to the assembled throng before turning and joining Coop and me for the long walk to the chopper, the four ever-present PPPF guards walking behind us. We had carefully mapped out the split-second timing of this part of the operation. The start of the chopper’s engines and the turning of the main rotor were the triggering events. The pilot was already ensconced in the cockpit, ready to go. Three of the guards climbed aboard the helicopter and took their seats in the forward compartment. We said goodbye to Adama and Amina. Then they boarded, while the fourth guard waited outside the president’s cabin. Coop slipped away and I stood back a dozen paces or so to watch.
While I was not on board the president’s helicopter at that moment, I knew exactly what was unfolding within. I could picture Adama tucking Amina into the small bed—really, it was more of a camp cot—inside the president’s private cabin. I counted off the timing as I stood there. In my mind’s eye, I could see him reaching down and unlatching the emergency exit hatch, before hugging Amina and whispering words to give her strength for what was to come. Then, I watched Adama step back out of the chopper, as the fourth guard closed the main door behind him. Adama and the guard joined the others in the forward compartment and secured the front door.
I knew what Adama would do next. He would bang twice on the cockpit wall behind him to signal they were ready for takeoff. I think I actually heard the wall-banging from where I stood. Or perhaps I just imagined it.
Right on cue, the engines started to turn over and rev up to speed. I looked over my shoulder to make sure that Monique, who was running the great wooden Mali lion distraction show, had heard the chopper starting up. She had. Immediately, she turned to two guys hovering near the lion and exchanged a few words. They both nodded and pulled something from their pockets.
Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
Finally, the main rotor started to turn slowly. Showtime.
When I looked back again, the lion was already smoking. A few seconds later it was fully engulfed in flames. The crowd gasped, their eyes glued to the lion. I turned back to the chopper just in time to catch a glimpse of Coop huddled underneath the bird and swinging open the emergency exit hatch. A second later, Amina had slipped through and was crouching on the ground while Coop closed the hatch. They both stayed low and scrambled towards the rear of the helicopter, before darting to the right behind the school bus conveniently parked there. It was hard enough for me to see them, and I’d been standing close and watching for them. So, again, given my vast experience in covert intelligence missions, I was confident we’d pulled it off. We’d know soon enough. And if you’re wondering whether opening the emergency escape hatch might have triggered a warning light on the chopper’s instrument panel, well, wonder no more. Coop and I had already downloaded and read the manual for the helicopter and there was no such sophisticated warning-light system. After all, the helicopter was thirty-one years old.
I smiled at the pilot and waved. He nodded. With my left hand I gave him a thumbs-up, though it really wasn’t for him; it was the all-safe sign for Adama, whose face I could see peering out a side window. The chopper lifted into the air. I watched it climb and turn towards Bamako, then walked back to watch the burning lion. As far as I could tell, not a soul was watching the chopper as soon as they torched the big cat.
CHAPTER 17
NOW THAT I was among the crowd near the incendiary sculpture, it really was quite the spectacle. The fire and the glowing wood gave the lion an eerie, swirling, orange outline. I didn’t know how they had done it, but the lion held its form. I figured out their secret when the flames eventually died away. I had thought it was the wood that formed the shape of the Mali lion, but in fact, the wood was attached to a sculpted metal-pipe frame. The illuminated shape of the lion was formed by the metal piping heating up and glowing orange. Anyway, it had been an extraordinarily effective distraction. Even I’d been distracted.
I felt Coop sidle up beside me as the festivities died down.
“All good?” I asked, looking straight ahead.
“All good.”
“Man, it is hot.”
“Yes, it is. Though I’m not sure standing so close to a giant flaming bonfire of a lion helps much.”
Within twenty minutes, most of the community guests had left for home. With the president no longer on-site, and the lion fully combusted, there was little to keep them there. The pipe frame of the lion had cooled and been reloaded onto the truck so it could be covered with wood and straw and ignited all over again at some future event.
Then the bus driver pulled his vehicle around and stopped as close to the building as he could without rumbling over the risers the choir had sung from earlier. It was time to go. I fetched the chilled bottled water from the fridge and loaded it onto the front seat of the bus, across the aisle from where the guard typically sat. At Monique’s urging, her team piled on board, ready for some downtime back at the compound. I counted fourteen expat Canadians as they filed past me and down the aisle like it was just another end-of-shift bus ride. And as far as they were concerned, that was exactly what it was. Then the armed guard boarded and took his regular seat just behind the driver.
“It’s stinking hot in here,” someone shouted from the back.
The bus driver yelled from the front as he fiddled with the AC controls.
“La climatisation est en panne!”
A collective groan rolled up to the front.
Monique stepped briefly onto the bus to tell the guard in French that she’d radio the compound and let them know we were on our way. The guard just nodded. One thing off his list.
Coop and I casually waved to Monique through the window as the driver closed the door and we started down the driveway. She waved back, Pierre at her side. Then she reached for the radio she’d brought from her office. I could see her talking into it to buy us some much-needed time.
I waited until we’d left the mine site and were driving on a relatively quiet two-lane road before I broke out the cold water. The guard across the aisle from me reached for a bottle.
“Allow me,” I said. I pulled out two bottles and opened them. I first handed one to the guard, who wasted no time in draining it completely. I waited another minute before handing the second bottle to the driver. He too guzzled the full bottle. The two plastic caps I still cradled in my hand each had a little black dot on them. Coop asked one of the guys on the Tardif team to distribute the rest of the water to the others on the bus. Then she grabbed one of the bottles and casually walked to the back of the bus, where, for some reason, she opened the last overhead luggage compartment, rooted around a little, and then closed it again. I noticed she was no longer carrying the water bottle when she returned to her seat across from the guard.
As planned, the guard exhibited the telltale signs first, right on schedule. His eyelids fell to half-mast. Then his head fell forward, before he snapped it back and opened his eyes with a look of alarm. He glanced around as he realized something was not right. The second time his eyes closed and his head fell forward, his body followed, as if he were performing a vaudeville pratfall. Coop caught him and gently reclined him on his seat before disarming him. He was out cold and would be for quite some time.
While Coop had been dealing with the guard, I’d been focused on the driver. I wondered if we’d overplayed our hand drugging the driver of a moving bus, or, more to the point, our moving bus. I stood up beside him, close. He was starting to drift across the road’s white centre line as his eyelids drooped.
“Hey, watch the road!” I shouted.
He woke up and brought the bus back into the right lane, but he was losing it fast. Two or three seconds later, he fell forward onto the steering wheel, unconscious. I was ready, but really, how ready can you ever be to take control of a moving bus when the driver has just passed out? I’d practised it in my mind and in my darkened room many, many times. But this was no rehearsal.
I grabbed the wheel with my right hand and kept the bus going semi-straight. With my left hand, I pulled on the driver’s pant leg to lift his foot from the accelerator, and, as you might expect, the bus slowed down. Then, as planned, Coop grabbed him around his torso and managed to drag him from behind the wheel. Somehow, she muscled him onto the two seats across the aisle from the guard, who, of course, was still out cold. By this time, I’d slid into the driver’s seat and accelerated back to the speed of traffic before the cars around us suspected anything was amiss. I assumed that was going to be the most hair-raising moment of our escape. Yeah, right.
While Coop was securing the ankles and wrists of both the guard and driver with heavy-duty zip-ties, the fourteen Tardif mining execs had fallen silent. Earlier that morning, before they’d driven to the mine site, Monique had told them in small groups that whatever happened that day, they were to do exactly what Coop and I told them to do, that we were there to help them. She refused to give them any more than that.
With everything secured up front, Coop rushed to the back of the bus, reached up, and opened the last overhead compartment. Amina stretched out her arms and Coop gently lifted her down to the seat below, as several freezer packs and empty water bottles tumbled down in her wake. But Amina wasn’t quite ready to let go of Coop. The hug carried on for another few seconds. I was still driving but had caught the scene in my rear-view mirror. As soon as Amina emerged from the overhead compartment, the Tardif team freaked out a bit. It caused a bit of a ruckus.
“Calm down, everyone!” I shouted. “All will be made clear shortly. Just give us a moment, please.”
Soon thereafter, Coop and Amina, still holding hands, moved up to a row of seats near the front of the bus. Amina sat down and finally let go of Coop’s hand, but I don’t think she wanted to. Coop handed her two more bottles of cold water and a towel to deal with the perspiration running down her cheeks. I can only imagine how hot it was up there in the overhead compartment.
“Okay, listen up, Team Tardif,” Coop started as she faced fourteen confused faces. “Just to get this out in the open right from the start, I’m Lauren Cooper, but I’m not really a research assistant to a famous thriller writer. As to my true occupation, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but let’s just say I’m employed by the Government of Canada.”
There were some rumblings from the expats, but I suppose that was to be expected.
“However,” Coop continued, “this really is James Norval, who is in fact a famous thriller writer. We came here to get you out of Mali and back to your families. We’ll soon be crossing the Falémé River on foot into Senegal, where a Canadian field team is expecting us. You’re going home.”
That’s when the spell was broken, and the Tardif Fourteen broke into applause.
“What about Monique?” someone asked. “Is she meeting us there?”
“We really wanted Monique to come with us and we tried hard to convince her, but she declined. She wants to continue her work at the mine and, just as importantly, her work with the community. She’s a very compassionate person, even if that’s not always obvious,” Coop said. “We think she’ll be safe because she’s the only one left who can effectively lead the mining operations.”
“If I’d known this was happening,” a young woman said, “I would have brought my guitar and my passport.”
“Yes, well, that’s exactly why we didn’t tell you,” Coop replied. “That may well have tipped our hand. It was safest to leave all your possessions back at the compound, as if it were just another normal day at the office.”
Just then, we came upon a section of the road with a wider shoulder. I took advantage to pull over and turn off the ignition. Then I slipped down onto the floor by the steering column. Other than a memorable moment in a particularly demanding game of Twister that I’ll say nothing more about, it may have been the most uncomfortably contorted position my body had ever assumed. Yet it only took me about ten seconds to reinstall the air conditioning fuse that Monique had slipped me. I replaced the black plastic cover on the fuse box and managed to return to my normal upright position, and we were back on the road inside of four minutes with the AC blasting. A few minutes later, another round of applause from the expats confirmed the cool air was moving again.
“I nearly forgot,” Coop said. “There’s something I need to do.”
I watched in the rear-view mirror as she grabbed the mobile phones of the guard and driver, removed their SIM cards, and threw all of it out the window into the bush along the road. I remembered that Kiran had told us that mobile phones could be tracked as a crude but effective way of monitoring the bus’s progress. Done.
“Okay, but there’s more,” Coop continued, addressing the Tardif Fourteen. “Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. We have the president’s daughter on board, and she’ll be getting out with all of us.”
“What, you’ve kidnapped her?” someone asked.
“No, of course not. We’re bringing her with us at the president’s request. I’m not at liberty to explain why, but rest assured, we are the good guys in this situation and are acting with the president’s support. That’s really all I can say, and all you need to know, right now. You’ll all be debriefed in Ottawa.”
I heard some low-level murmuring from the expats, but all in all, they took the news well. So Coop carried on.
“We’ll be at the Falémé River and the site of our crossing soon. We’re going to try to get this all done with some light left in the sky. So, try to relax and gather yourselves. I am in charge. You need to do what I say, when I say. That’s our best chance of getting everybody out and home safely.”
“But if we don’t arrive at the compound in about fifteen minutes,” a woman observed, “they’ll know something is wrong.”
“Not true,” Coop replied. “You can thank Monique again, because she radioed the security station at the compound just as we were leaving and told them that we’d been delayed because the president’s visit ran long. So, Monique gave us enough breathing room to get you all across the river before anyone knows we’re gone. You can thank Monique for a great deal. Without her and what she’s done, we would have had no chance of pulling this off.”
By then, we were on the RN2, just heading into Kofeba. As we had a few days earlier, I managed to find my way through the outskirts of the town, then turned right onto the dirt track that ran straight to the river. We were on schedule. As before, there seemed not to be a living soul around. Armed with recently acquired information, and the knowledge we were about to traverse the Falémé River, I was no longer concerned about encountering people, be they friend or foe. No, I was worried about the possibility of coming face to face with a Mali lion.
With only about twenty-five minutes to go before reaching the river, I suddenly realized that I felt different, more alive, buzzing. We’d been in Mali for a number of days by then, yet up until that moment, when I could almost see the river ahead, I hadn’t really felt like I was engaged in a potentially dangerous clandestine operation to exfiltrate fourteen Canadians and a presidential daughter from an unstable nation. I’d been staying at a palace, collaborating with the new president, touring a gold mine, inspecting raw diamonds, and getting my steps in walking an awful lot through the palace’s lush gardens. I had never once felt in danger or threatened, not even when Demba’s suspicions occasionally flared. So far, my time in Mali had not even approached the peril of my situation in that Tajik interrogation cell a week before. But now that we’d knocked out the driver and guard and were approaching our crossing from one country to another, from detention to freedom, I was finally feeling the pressure of the moment. That pressure manifested as excitement, and a curious lightheadedness.
It took me back more than thirty years, to when I’d had my heart and my head set on making intelligence work my career. Well, as you know, for reasons I still didn’t understand, it never happened. And you also know that it had haunted me ever since. I certainly could not complain about my Plan B. I had enjoyed writing novels and all the rewards that came with it. But deep down, that failure three decades previous had left a hole inside me that even my unexpected international success as a writer could never quite fill. Yet in that moment, just minutes away from the Falémé River, I sensed that liberating fourteen Canadians unjustly detained in a distant nation, might just be a start.
I felt Coop standing beside me.
“How much farther?” she asked.
