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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
