Corsican Honor Read online

  Corsican Honor

  A Novel

  William Heffernan

  This book is dedicated, with love, to my youngest children. To Taylor, who always reminds me what it was to be a boy. And to Max, who fills my heart each and every day. And for the little one we now await with love and expectation.

  PROLOGUE

  Wiesbaden, 1980

  She felt unbelievably happy. The past three weeks—that incredibly short period of time since she had first met Dieter Rolf—had been the most amazing of her young life. She smiled at herself, at the words she had used to describe her own feelings. Unbelievable. Incredible. Amazing. It made her sound like a giggling teenager, not a twenty-two-year-old staff sergeant in the U.S. Army.

  But it had been a long time coming. High school had not been the dream everyone had told her it would be. Not in Siesta Key, Florida, anyway. Not where a slightly plump girl didn’t exactly send the boys into a frenzy when she walked along a beach, wearing a bathing suit designed to hide baby fat that never managed to get itself hid anyway. No, not for Melissa Walden. She had always been the girl nobody asked to the dances, who nobody asked anyplace. Except, maybe, for a walk on the beach at night. Asked by some boy who’d been drinking beer and who thought a lonely fat girl would do what he wanted. And who’d walk away when he got it. And then tell his friends and laugh about it.

  So she had left all that and joined the army after high school. And the army had changed her. She’d lost weight, and her new friends even said she was pretty now. And Dieter thought she was beautiful, and said he was crazy about her.

  She smiled to herself, recalling how she had agonized over the decision to re-up for another four years. She had finally done it because the reenlistment had carried a promotion to sergeant and had made her somebody at last. And they had posted her to Germany, here to Wiesbaden, and now she had met Dieter. And, oh God, everything was finally going to be all right.

  Melissa stretched in her chair and tried to see beyond the sea of people who crowded the discotheque—mostly GI’s from the nearby base. It was a converted German beer hall that had telephones on every table, and each table had a light above it, with a number printed on the light, so people could call each other and try to make dates, or whatever. She had liked the idea when her friends had first brought her there. But now she didn’t need it. Now she had someone who was coming there just to see her, and, damn, that was so much better.

  “You’re drooling again, Melissa.”

  It was her friend, Tanya, a black girl from New York City, from that awful place called Harlem. Tanya, who liked to tease her about it all but who was really happy for her because she understood. She had run away to join the army too. Just to get away from all that shit, she had said.

  “Girl, you only met this man two weeks ago, an’ already you’re leavin’ drool marks on your shirt. Get hold a yourself.”

  “It’s been three weeks,” Melissa said, still not looking at her.

  “Well, shit, that’s all right, then. You go ahead an’ drool on yourself, if you want.”

  Tanya started to laugh. It was a coarse, raucous laugh, and it was infectious, and Melissa started to laugh too. She couldn’t help herself.

  They were all laughing now, even Tyrone, the spec 4 Tanya was dating. And Tyrone almost never laughed. He said it gave away his natural camouflage in dark places; made it too easy for these Germans to see where he was. He didn’t like Germans much. Didn’t like most people, Melissa thought. But especially Germans. And he was always introducing himself as Jesse Owens, said he liked to shake them Germans up. Let them know he wasn’t some dumb African who didn’t know what their boy Hitler had done all those years ago.

  But he had been nice to Dieter the one time he’d met him. Tanya had warned him he better had be or she’d have him cleaning latrines ’til he begged them to ship his ass to Alaska. Tanya was a sergeant too. And nobody messed with her.

  “You all look so happy. Now I am really angry with myself for being late.”

  Melissa’s head snapped around and she looked up into Dieter’s smiling, handsome face. Her own broke into a huge grin.

  Dieter slid into a chair next to her, and he took her hand and kissed it.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. He lifted a briefcase with his other hand, showing it to her. “Just as I was getting ready to leave, my chairman gave me all these papers to grade. I was working on them in my office, and I lost all track of time.”

  Dieter was an instructor at a university in Frankfurt, and had explained to Melissa he was the lowest man on the staff of his department, and therefore got all the work no one else wanted to do.

  Melissa squeezed his hand. It didn’t matter. Now that he was there. And it didn’t matter how low on the staff he was. She thought he was wonderful. And brilliant, and beautiful. She stared at him, pleased just to look at him. At his long blond hair and striking blue eyes. At the slender nose and finely chiseled features. She thought he looked like some kind of Teutonic god. And she wondered what he ever saw in her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We were just listening to the music.”

  Dieter glanced at the numbered light above the table. “And fighting off telephone calls from people who want to steal you away from me,” he said.

  He watched the woman blush. She had short dark hair and large brown eyes set in a plump, almost cherubic face. And, like her friends, she was only hours away from being a teenager, he thought. Naive and silly and slightly sophomoric. And feeling very worldly, but not even beginning to understand what worldliness involved. He smiled at her.

  “I am very lucky,” he said, “that you are so understanding.”

  Melissa beamed at the praise.

  “Man, you shouldn’t let them push you around like that. Make you some kinda house nigger.”

  It was Tyrone starting his rap, and Melissa saw Tanya shoot him a look that said: Keep your mouth shut, fool. Tyrone did as he was told. Dieter only shrugged.

  “You are probably right,” he said. “And, perhaps someday, I will do that.” He turned his attention back to Melissa and smiled, telling her he understood, that Tyrone didn’t bother him. “Let me get us all some beer,” he said.

  He turned and signaled to a passing waitress, who carried a large slotted metal carrier of the type milkmen had once used. It was filled with already drawn glasses of beer, and allowed her to move among the tables, dispensing drinks, picking up empty glasses, and collecting money all in one, efficient sweep. It was German ingenuity, and it also gave each waitress the biceps of budding weightlifters.

  Dieter slipped his arm around Melissa as he sipped his beer, feeling her slightly plump flesh give against his fingers, thinking of the way she sweated beneath him as they made love. Trying so hard to give all she could. Trying to please him. Trying to show what a good lover she could be. He smiled at the thought of it.

  “You look happy,” Melissa said, laying her head against his shoulder.

  “It is you. You always make me happy,” he said.

  She pressed her head harder against him.

  “Oh, girl. You’re makin’ me jealous,” Tanya said. She snapped around to Tyrone. “What’s the matter with you? You sittin’ there like some lump, while this man puts you to shame.”

  “I’m savin’ myself,” Tyrone said. “For later. Besides, Dieter’s too old to do nobody no good.”

  “You be savin’ yourself for nothin,” Tanya warned. She turned back to Dieter. “That true? You too old, Dieter?”

  Dieter smiled, flashing large white teeth. “I am afraid so. I’m thirty-three, and the end is surely near. You know what happened to Jesus at that age.”

  “See, woman. I told you,” Tyrone said, pleased Dieter was supporting
him. But still, he couldn’t make himself trust the man. There was something about him. And it wasn’t just that he was white, or German, or anything like that. Just something.

  “Well, don’t you worry, Dieter. Melissa here, she ain’t gonna nail you to no cross.” Tanya rolled her eyes. “She might nail you. But it ain’t gonna be to no cross. That’s for sure.”

  Melissa blushed, then began to laugh, joined by the others, and behind them, on the stage, the band struck up “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.” Melissa began to sing along, swaying back and forth against Dieter to the music.

  “Damn shitkicker music,” Tyrone mumbled. “Can’t play no real music here.”

  When the song ended, Dieter leaned into Melissa and said he had to get cigarettes, asking her to watch his briefcase until he got back. He thought she seemed pleased to be asked to do even that small thing for him.

  “Got some here,” Tyrone said, extending a pack of filtered menthols.

  “Ah, I must have my own,” Dieter said. He winked at the younger man. “We old people, we form habits that are hard to break,” he said.

  “Glad to see you admittin’ it,” Tyrone threw back.

  Dieter made his way through the crush of people, almost all of them as fresh-faced and naive as the three he had just left. The United States seemed to grow that wide-eyed variety of youth, he thought. Trusting innocents, who didn’t seem to receive an appropriate level of jadedness until they were well into their late twenties or early thirties. All of them so intent on having a good time, so eager to push away the need of a solitary serious thought.

  A young woman seated at the bar turned slightly and offered him a coy smile as he passed. She was beautiful, as so many American women were, but with a level of subtlety that was laughable. He leaned toward her. “You look very lovely,” he said. He watched her smile broaden, anticipating more. He continued past her.

  He stopped at the hatcheck booth and slipped off his coat, then smiled at the dour-looking young German woman standing behind the small counter.

  “Ah, it is so hot,” he said in German. “May I leave this with you?”

  The woman shrugged, expressionless. She was quite attractive but so sour. There was some benefit in American naivete, he told himself.

  The woman fitted his coat to a hanger, then turned and looked sharply at him. “There is an envelope in the pocket,” she said. “I cannot guarantee its safety.” She held up the jacket so the envelope in the inside pocket was visible to him.

  “Ah, it is just an old business letter,” he said. “It is of no consequence.”

  The woman shrugged, as if to say it was of no consequence to her either, then finished hanging the coat and handed him the claim check. Again he smiled at her, pleased he was doing something to help end her sour day. He turned and walked to the cigarette machine near the door, turned again, and looked back into the crowd. There was no one watching him. He walked past the cigarette machine, and pushed through the door and went out into the fresh, still warm evening air.

  He crossed the street quickly and walked to the nearby corner, then stopped and glanced at his watch. A little time, he told himself.

  He took a cigarette from a nearly full pack and lighted it, then turned back and watched a handful of people enter the discotheque. The close-cut hair styles of the men told him what they were. More lambs, he told himself, failing to keep back a smile.

  He glanced at his watch again, and the smile turned to a cruel smirk. He stepped quickly around the corner, out of the line of the building he had just left.

  The explosion was enormous, the concussion rocking him even in his sheltered position, and bits of glass and debris flew past the corner, slamming and cutting into cars passing along the perpendicular street. He stepped back around the corner, into a sea of billowing smoke and dirt, and waited for it to settle.

  When it did, he marveled—as he often had—at the effectiveness of Czechoslovakian-made plastique. It was the one thing—save tennis players—that they produced at a dependable level of competence. He smiled. The exterior of the discotheque was a twisted mass of broken rubble, and in the ruins, near what had been the front door, he saw what appeared to be the remains of a human limb.

  He thought fleetingly of sweet, innocent young Melissa, who had been so close to the epicenter of the blast—without doubt unwilling to leave her duty of safeguarding his briefcase. And the two schwarzers she had foisted upon him for the past week. He would miss Melissa slightly. Miss her foolishness and her eager, sweating young body. Perhaps he might even miss Tanya’s humor. Tyrone? The only thing he would miss about him would be the chance to have seen his face just as the bomb exploded beneath his feet. Ah, the Americans, he thought. The way they let their schwarzers abuse and intimidate them. It was their ultimate weakness.

  And then, of course, there was that lovely young woman at the bar, who undoubtedly would not smile with such stupid innocence again. And the dour German hatcheck girl. If you live, then you will truly have something to be sour about, he thought.

  But he hoped, if she had been killed, it had been from flying debris. He would like the letter in his coat to be found. Of course, it wouldn’t really matter. His group was already notifying the media that their leader, Ernst Ludwig, had again struck out at the American capitalist/military horde. But it would be so nice for them to have his handwritten message as well.

  He smiled again. Time to put his latest nom de guerre, Dieter Rolf, back into the closet. He would not use it again for years, if ever. He would undoubtedly use the name Dieter again. It had been his father’s name, and he took some satisfaction in that.

  In the distance he could hear the wailing, staccato blasts of approaching sirens, and he turned and began to walk away. There was a woman, old and withered, standing a few feet from him, her eyes and mouth opened in shock and disbelief. He shook his head as she looked up into his face.

  It is terrible,” he said. “These Americans, they make our fatherland safe for none of us.”

  The woman stared at him, confused, uncertain even of what he had said. He tossed his cigarette into the street and moved past her, repressing the smile that was again forming on his lips.

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER

  1

  Marseilles, 1980

  Alex Moran dropped his suit coat on his office sofa, seated himself in the high-backed leather desk chair, and turned to face windows that faced out across the rue de Rome at a wall of dull, lifeless buildings. The office was located only a few blocks from the Prefecture and several more from the opera and the innumerable Corsican-run whorehouses that surrounded it. An apt decision—he had often thought—to billet the Defense Intelligence Agency staff in close proximity to the political hacks and prostitutes it so often emulated.

  Until a year ago, DIA personnel had operated out of the U.S. Consulate, under a still continuing guise as a U.S. trade mission. Then the Revolutionary Guards had stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and initiated a now endless hostage crisis. And suddenly the security of the consulates worldwide had become questionable, just as his staff’s primary objective—monitoring East bloc shipping out of the Port of Marseilles—had fallen victim to its secondary mission, anti-terrorism. And so they had moved, and this new madness had begun.

  Marseilles held an Islamic population so diverse it was rivaled only by Amman. This, together with its strategically located port, combined to make it a seat of Middle East intrigue, and Morah’s staff of nine had been run ragged keeping watch on every Arab with known or suspected sympathies for their Persian brothers—which meant virtually every Arab in Marseilles.

  But now even that had changed. Ernst Ludwig was in the city, and the Iranians—as Moran’s Washington boss, Pat Cisco, had explained—were going to have to suck hind tit until he was caught.

  Alex turned his chair back to his desk and opened Ludwig’s file, which contained everything they knew about the man, sans photograph or physical description. But then, everyon
e who had ever seen him had been killed—by Ludwig himself—a running total that included five officers of various U.S. agencies.

  There was a light rap on Alex’s door before his secretary, Julie Ludlow, popped her head inside.

  “You ready to start the day?” she asked as the rest of her slightly plump body eased into the room.

  Julie was in her mid-thirties, favored a severe, out-of-date page boy for her dark hair, and dressed as though her job were merely a way station en route to a convent. Today she wore a flowered summer dress with a lace collar that left nothing but her arms exposed. Alex had inherited her two years before when he had been promoted to station chief, and had discovered she was deeply infatuated with him. Since that time he occasionally fantasized about how she might look with her armor stripped away. But, at best, it was a fleeting thought.

  “Yeah, I suppose I am. What’s first on the list?” He ran his fingers through his dark, wavy hair, then stared at the empty coffee cup on his desk.

  “I’ll get you some coffee,” Julie said, catching his gaze. She retrieved the cup and continued to prattle. “You’re supposed to see Jim Blount, the new boy in town. Give him a briefing on what you expect of him.”

  Alex groaned inwardly. “What’s he doing now?” he asked, hoping someone had Blount well occupied.

  “He’s holding court on how he’d retake the embassy in Tehran. It’s quite a daring plan, actually.” Julie fought back a grin that almost made Alex smile.

  “Good. Let’s have him reassigned there and get right to it.”

  “Sorry, I’m afraid he’s yours, for better or for worse. Shall I send him in?”

  Alex nodded and turned back toward the window. For better or for worse. He stared at the building across the street, wondering what his wife, Stephanie, was doing at the consulate. The place where she worked, where he himself had worked until the Iranians decided to play “parade the Americans before the TV cameras.” Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if he’d stayed at the consulate. He snorted at the immaturity of the thought.