The Ants of Gods by W. T. Tyler

Author:W. T. Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497696990
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

NINE

1

Penny sometimes drove with McDermott to Cohen’s villa on a steep hillside up the mountain behind the city. Usually she waited in the car or walked in the garden with Mrs. Cohen. The villa made her suspicious. It stood in a large compound shaded by silver trees and surrounded by a high stone wall with shards of broken glass razoring the concrete beadwork atop the wall. The iron gate was covered with sheet metal to conceal the courtyard from the foot and animal traffic along the rocky road outside. Inside its portals was a small gatehouse; a pair of brindled Alsatian dogs were staked to a post nearby, snarling and growling whenever the gates were opened for a vehicle, the hairs bristling along their spines like porcupine quills. Sometimes they roamed free when the gate was closed, as lean and feral as timber wolves. The two watchmen at the gate weren’t Ethiopians, like most of the local watchmen, even at the diplomatic compounds, but Europeans. Their presence made her suspicious too. “A guy with all this protection must have something to hide,” Penny insisted after her first visit. “Are you sure he’s on the up-and-up?”

McDermott had told her that Cohen was simply a temporarily transplanted Frenchman who was uncomfortable in Africa, a description that was half true. He’d described him as the operations manager for the French survey team exploring the interior, but this was false. Although Cohen traveled on a French passport and had been born in France, he was an Israeli intelligence officer with Mossad, controlling the gun-running operation into the Sudan. Rozewicz worked for him as commander of the Sudi strip; so did the other advisers, as well as a few Israeli military officers attached to the Israeli military assistance group that was training the Ethiopian army. The Ethiopian government cooperated with him, too, but only up to a point. Although Mossad also paid McDermott’s salary, Cohen had no direct authority over McDermott, who’d drawn up his own contract with Mossad in Tel Aviv. McDermott was carried as a consultant, free to fly under circumstances or conditions of his own choosing.

Cohen had once been a pilot but his experience was limited. He’d flown a small transport for the RAF during the war and hadn’t touched the controls since. McDermott and Rozewicz both thought Cohen knew far less about combat or all-weather flying and the systems they required than Cohen gave himself credit for. He was a small, bony man with sparse gray hair, closely trimmed, high cheekbones, and lips so thin and bloodless they looked like the mandibles of a tortoise. As a result of a racing-car accident in France years earlier he had only partial vision in his right eye. In recent years the optic nerve had begun to atrophy and he wore dark glasses to conceal the impairment. Strong-willed, often ruthless, he had little sense of humor, no talent for small talk, and little interest in ideas that weren’t of his own divination. He considered

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