Louis threw the Mia in gear and was pulling a U-turn to head west toward Paris when headlights went on a block in front of us. Another set went on half a block behind us.
I didn’t think much of it until the car in front of us, a black Renault, pulled out and stopped sideways across the street. He couldn’t block the entire avenue, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room to get past him either.
“Merde,” Louis said, locking up the brakes on the electric van and throwing us in reverse.
“What’s happening?” Kim cried.
“We’re not waiting to find out,” I said, twisting around in the seat to look out the rear window and see the other car, a blue Peugeot, coming fast in the other lane.
A bald, pale man in a studded, red leather jacket hung out the passenger-side window. He was aiming a rotary-magazine shotgun.
Chapter 6
SAUVAGE SWELLED WITH pride as he climbed to the second floor of France’s fabled War School, the history of the place flickering in his thoughts. In 1750, at the suggestion of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV founded a military academy for poor young men so they might have a vehicle for bettering their lives. The most prestigious course of study was and is War School.
Almost every major French military figure of the past 225 years has been through a variation of the program, including Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. Officers who’ve attended War School have effected radical change before, Sauvage thought, and we will again.
They moved toward a small amphitheater already filling for the day’s special lecture: “Psychological Warfare.”
Though not his specialty, the major looked forward to the talk.
Entering the amphitheater, Sauvage scanned the room and his fellow students-an old recon habit. He thought that even within this elite group of military minds, there was no one here, except him and Mfune, who had the vision, courage, and conviction to attempt something like AB-16.
The rest? They were sheep.
The lecturer that evening was Eliza Greene, a U.S. Army colonel assigned to NATO in Brussels and an expert in the fine art of fragmenting the will of the enemy and turning the hearts and minds of civilians caught up in war.
A few of the techniques and examples the American described fascinated Sauvage, but he ultimately found the lecture lacking and raised his hand to say so.
“Colonel Greene,” Sauvage said. “Those seem like excellent tactics, but with all due respect, wouldn’t psychological warriors such as yourself do well to adopt the techniques of modern marketing, especially the art of branding?”
A short, stocky woman in her forties, Colonel Greene crinkled her brow in response. “You are…?”
“Sauvage,” he replied. “Major Émile Sauvage.”
She nodded, watching him intently. “How would you do this, Major?”
“By standing for something, Colonel,” Sauvage said. “Maybe only one thing, but selling that position, that one thing, with a logo, perhaps, to the enemy and civilians long before combat ensued.”
Colonel Greene tilted her head, thought, and said, “That’s really the job of politicians, isn’t it? The selling of a war? It isn’t until you have troops on the ground and combat begins that psychological techniques really work. Defeating the enemy in battle repeatedly goes a long way toward winning civilian minds.”
Sauvage stood his ground. “Again, with all due respect, Colonel, have you been on duty in Afghanistan?”
She stiffened and said, “I have not.”
“I spent four years in Afghanistan with NATO,” Sauvage replied. “And I can tell you for a fact that the U.S. message there-the branding, if you will-was mixed, garbled, and the old country will just revert to its ingrained ways the second you leave.”
Colonel Greene smiled at him without enthusiasm and said, “Perhaps you can run a war your way, with branding, logos, and all, when you’re a commanding general, Major Sauvage.”
Sauvage found her smugness infuriating. He wanted to tell her off, inform her in no uncertain terms that he already was the commander of a growing army.
But then he felt Mfune’s slight elbow nudge, and understood. He couldn’t appear to be a fanatic in any way, shape, or form. That was the key to staying undetected as a scout, as a spy, and as a guerrilla warrior.
“I look forward to it,” the major said, sounding reasonable.
But as the colonel returned to her lecture, Sauvage was thinking that someday, after it was all over, he’d track down smug Colonel Greene and spray-paint “AB-16” all over her know-nothing face.
Chapter 7
THE SHOTGUN ROARED. The rear driver’s-side window exploded, throwing bits of glass and causing Kim to scream in terror, and me to dig for the Glock 19.
Louis reacted by showing us his mad skills behind the wheel.
At another time and another place, the head of Private Paris might have driven for a bank robbery crew or as a stuntman in the movies, because that shotgun blast caused him to unleash a series of maneuvers over the course of the next fifteen minutes that left me speechless and shaking.
The second after the side window exploded, Louis ducked down and threw the delivery van into a series of S turns, as if he were a skier in a slalom course, only going backward. Kim’s screams had died down to whimpers even as the Peugeot locked up its brakes and came after us in reverse. The Renault, however, was in third gear, in our lane, and coming at us at full throttle.
“Hold on to the handle above the door, Jack, and when I swing, shoot the tires of the closest vehicle!” Louis shouted.
Frantically cranking down the window, I grabbed the handle with my left hand and rested my right on the side-view mirror to steady the gun.
The bald, pale guy hanging out of the Peugeot was in our headlights now, aiming the shotgun left-handed. He touched one off, blowing out one of our headlights and cracking my side of the windshield into spiderwebs.
Louis didn’t flinch; instead, he spun the wheel and swung the rear end of the van around into that spur road we’d walked to get deeper into the project. As he did, the Renault floated into my pistol sights at twenty-five yards. I dropped my aim below the passenger-side front fender and squeezed.
The Glock bucked, and the bullet threw sparks off the lower fender. The second shot, however, was on target, and blew out the tire. The Renault swerved right toward the Peugeot, and I tapped the trigger a third time. The driver’s-side tire destructed. The front end of the car came down hard on the pavement, peeling strips of smoking rubber that spun crazily through the air.
The Peugeot’s rear end struck the Renault’s flank, and I was sure the pale shooter was going to sling off like a daredevil from a cannon. But the guy must have had uncanny reflexes and strength, because he managed to hang on.
Louis hit the brakes. We came to a bouncing, screeching halt in front of some of those gang members we’d passed earlier on foot. The whole lot of them were jumping up and down and cheering as if we were the best thing to happen in Les Bosquets in months, maybe years.
One of them yelled something in French that I didn’t catch, but Louis did, and he started laughing as he threw the little van into forward again, and pinned the accelerator to the floor. We passed other groups of immigrants who were now screaming those same words at us.
“What are they saying?” I yelled as we shot back out onto Avenue Clichy-sous-Bois, heading opposite the way we’d come in.
“Bad-Ass Plumbers!” Louis said, grinning, a little mania in his eyes.