Unconventional Warfare

“That’s it,” Hawkins said. “That’s the last stream for a while and we’re on the veldt before the river crossing.”

According to their plan McCarter slowed and stopped the vehicle. Hawkins quickly got out, retrieved a grease gun from the cargo space and crawled under the vehicle to do his preventive maintenance.

As Hawkins worked, McCarter slipped out from behind the wheel to stretch. On a whim he crawled up onto the roof of the SUV and scanned his surroundings. The wild distance seemed vast as he scanned the terrain.

To the west he saw a small group of water buffalo wallowing in the mud beside the small stream they had just crossed. Beyond them a herd of giraffes moved easily across the grassland.

He felt at peace despite his exhaustion. The cares and worries of his singular occupation seemed far away. He felt the burden of his responsibilities lift off his shoulders like a bird taking flight.

He looked at his watch and noted how much time had passed. He was pleased. He calculated that their alternate route would put them in front of the Frenchmen in another hour.

“We might just win this thing, after all,” he called down to Hawkins.

Hawkins answered from beneath the rear axle but his reply was drowned out by the ringing of the satellite phone on McCarter’s belt. The Briton pulled it free and answered, figuring it was Manning with an update on Fischer’s condition.

He listened for a moment, then sighed.

“Hello, Barb. What can I do for you?”

Brazzaville; Capital, Republic of the Congo

THE NIGHT WAS HOT.

The heat was cloying, so humid it clung to the body in a blanket of damp. It made showering a superfluous activity. Despite this Rafik Bagdasarian had taken two in the past hour.

The first had been to wash the smell of the woman off him.

He’d been infatuated with her ebony skin and rich accent, but once he’d paid her, he’d come to the conclusion that whores were whores the world over. It didn’t matter if it was Moscow, New York, Paris or Brazzaville.

He took the second shower to calm his nerves. This one the Armenian mafioso lieutenant took with an iced tumbler full of Ouzo. In his years as arms merchant, contract killer, drug smuggler and human trafficker he’d come to love the anise-flavored liquor.

Walking through the suite of the Olympic Palace Hotel, he toweled off his pale, lanky body then poured himself a second drink. His body was covered with swirling green ink tattoos that announced his résumé and biography to those who knew how to read them.

Skulls, daggers, horned monsters, Catholic iconography all twisted across his lean, muscular frame. He was a problem solver, which was why his captain had sent him to the Congo.

Taking his drink, he stepped out onto his balcony and looked across the dirty water of the Congo River at Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The twin cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville were the only national capitals sharing a river border or situated so closely together.

The unique circumstance had done nothing to help the two countries, however, Bagdasarian thought.

He stepped off the balcony, tossed back his drink and began to think. The civil war of Congo-Brazzaville in 1997 and the larger war in Congo-Kinshasa in 1998 had left the poverty-stricken nations and their capitals in ruins with political systems decimated.

From the power vacuum strongmen with guns had emerged.

It was a situation and environment Bagdasarian understood well. His own criminal clique had risen to prominence during and after the chaos of his own country’s bitter, bloody and protracted war with neighboring Azerbaijan.

He lit a French cigarette and buttoned his shirt. His area of operations for the Armenian syndicate was Africa, but he wasn’t just here for them. This time it was bigger; this time the Chinese principal had set him into motion.

Failure was not an option.

In the valise on the bed in front of him was a large amount of francs and a Walther PPK.

The woman he’d bought had served for something else beside sexual gratification.

Prostitutes were the elements of the criminal underground most readily available to foreigners in any country. They haunted the hotels and nightclubs promising sweaty miracles in exchange for cash.

But they were also conduits to the black market.

Prostitution went hand in hand with drugs and where you found a drug dealer you found someone who could, if the wheels were greased, get you a gun or introduce you to all manner of nefarious operators.

Bagdasarian had the number of his own contact in Brazzaville but he wasn’t about to go anywhere in the dangerous African city unarmed. Unwilling to risk his mission by attempting to smuggle a weapon onto a French airline, he’d used the hooker to secure a pistol.

Dressed, armed, and carrying twenty-five thousand dollars in francs, Bagdasarian went out of his room to find the police.

He needed some Americans killed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Rafik Bagdasarian shoved a fistful of local currency over the battered seat to the cabdriver and got out. He leaned in the open window of the passenger door and instructed the driver to wait for him around the block.

The taxi sped away, leaving him standing on the edge of an unpaved street. There was an open sewer off to his right and the stench was ripe in his nose.

Bagdasarian looked around.

He was on the opposite side of Brazzaville from the international airport. The dirt street was lined with shanties and what light there was escaped from boarded-up windows or from beneath shut-up doors.

A pair of mongrels fought over some scraps in a refuse pile several dozen yards up the road. Other than those dogs fighting, the stretch of grimy road was strangely deserted.

Faintly, Bagdasarian could hear the sound of a lousy stereo playing and then voices raised in argument. A baby started crying somewhere and farther away more dogs began barking in response.

Bagdasarian looked up at the sky, noting the low cloud cover. The road was thick with muck from the seasonal rains and it clung heavy to the soles of his hiking boots.

He set the attaché case he was holding down and reached around behind his back and pulled his pistol clear. He jacked the slide and chambered a 9 mm round before sliding the pistol into his jeans behind his belt buckle, leaving it in plain sight. He leaned down and picked up the case. He shifted his grip on the attaché handle so that his gun hand remained free.

He took a quick look around before crossing the road and stepping up to the front door of one of the innumerable shacks lining the road. He lifted his big hand and pounded three times on the door. He heard a hushed conversation break out momentarily before the voices fell quiet.

“Kabila?” Bagdasarian asked, speaking French. “Rafik.”

Bagdasarian felt a sudden damp and realized it had started to rain while he was standing there. Despite the wet he was still uncomfortably warm in his short-sleeved, button-down khaki shirt and battered blue jeans.

The short-sleeved shirt left his elbows and forearms exposed, revealing their thick covering of tattoos, his calling card.

The door opened slowly and a bar of soft, nicotine-colored light spilled out and illuminated Bagdasarian.

A silhouette stood in the doorway and the Armenian narrowed his eyes to take in the figure’s features. It was a male, wearing an unbuttoned and disheveled gendarme uniform. His eyes and teeth were sharply yellow against the deep burnished purple-black of his skin.

He held a bottle of grain alcohol in one hand, and the other rested on the pistol grip of a French MAT-49 submachine gun hanging from a strap slung across his neck like a guitar. He leaned forward, crowding Bagdasarian’s space.

Bagdasarian made no move to back up.

“You, Rafik?” the man demanded, also speaking French.

His breath reeked with alcohol fumes, and the light around him reflected wildly off the glaze in his eyes. His words were softly slurred but his gaze was steady as he eyed Bagdasarian up and down.

The finger on the trigger of the MAT-49 submachine gun seemed firm enough.

“Yes,” Bagdasarian answered. “Is Kabila here?”

“Colonel Kabila,” the man corrected.

“Is Colonel Kabila here?”

“You have the money?”

Bagdasarian lifted the attaché case, though he knew the man had already seen it when he’d opened the door.

The gendarme ignored the displayed satchel, his eyes never leaving Bagdasarian’s face. His hair was tightly cropped and Bagdasarian could see bullets of sweat beading on the man’s forehead. The smell of body odor was acrid.

“Give me the pistol.”

“Go to hell.”

The drunken gendarme’s eyes lifted in shock and his face twisted in sudden, instant outrage. He snapped straight and twisted the MAT-49 around on its sling, trying to bring the muzzle up in the cramped quarters.

Bagdasarian’s free hand shot out and grabbed the submachine gun behind its front sight. The big man locked his arm and pushed down, preventing the gendarme from raising the weapon. The gendarme’s eyeballs bulged in anger and the cords of his neck stood out as he strained to bring the submachine gun to bear.

“Leave him!” a deep bass voice barked from somewhere behind the struggling gendarme.

The man cursed and tried to step back and swing his weapon up and away from Bagdasarian’s grip. The Armenian stepped forward as the man stepped back, preventing the smaller man from bringing any leverage to bear.

An ability to call up instant explosive anger and balls like brass fixtures was the way Bagdasarian had risen to the top in the hyperviolent world of Armenian organized crime. He didn’t take shit. Even if it cost him his life.

They moved into the room through the door and Bagdasarian heard chair legs scrape against floorboards as men jumped to their feet. He ignored them, making no move for the butt of the 9 mm PPK plainly sticking out of his jeans.

The man grunted his exertion and tried to step to the outside.

Rafik Bagdasarian danced with him, keeping the gendarme’s body between him and the others in the smoky room. His grip on the front sling swivel remained unbroken. Finally the gendarme dropped his bottle and grabbed the submachine gun with both hands. The bottle thumped loudly as it struck the floor but did not break.

Liquid began to gurgle out and stain the floorboards.

“I said enough!” the voice roared.

The gendarme was already using both his hands to snatch the submachine gun free as the order came.

The Armenian released the front sling swivel and stepped to the side. The gendarme found his center of balance around the struggle abruptly gone and overextended himself. Already drunk, he toppled over backward and struck the floor in the pool of reeking alcohol spilling from his dropped bottle.

Cursing and sputtering, the man tried to rise.

Bagdasarian surveyed the room. He saw four other men in the same soiled and rumpled police uniforms, each one armed either with a pistol or a submachine gun. All of them were gaunt and lanky with short hair except for the bear of a man bearing the gold braid epaulets of an officer.

The man rose from behind a table and hurled a heavy glass tumbler at the gendarme Bagdasarian had spilled onto the floor. The glass struck the man in the face and opened a gash under his eye, high on a prominent cheekbone where Bantu tribal scars had been etched at puberty and rubbed with charcoal.

“I said leave him!”

The shock of being struck snapped the embarrassed man out of his rage. He touched a hand to the cut under his eye and held up his bloody fingers. He looked away from his hand and nodded once toward the man looming up behind the table before rising.

The officer turned toward Bagdasarian. “My apologizes,” he said. “My men worry about my safety.”

“Understandable, Colonel Kabila.” Bagdasarian nodded. “I worry about my own safety.”

“Come now, you are in the company of police officers.”

“Yes, I am,” Bagdasarian agreed.

“Foreigners are not usually permitted to carry weapons in our land.”

Bagdasarian threw the attaché case down on the table. “That should more than cover any administrative fees.”

“Is it in euros?”

“Francs,” Bagdasarian corrected.

Kabila nodded and one of the gendarmes at the table reached over and picked up the attaché case. He had a sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve.

Bagdasarian saw there were two very young girls pressed up against the back wall of the shack. Their eyes were hard as diamonds and glittered as they took him in.

The gendarme sergeant pulled the case over and opened it. The sudden light of avarice flared in his eyes, impossible to disguise. Bagdasarian shrugged it off.

While the sergeant counted the stacks of French currency, Colonel Kabila reseated himself.

He snapped his fingers at one of the girls and she jumped to pick a fresh glass off a shelf beside her. She brought it over to the table and poured the colonel a fresh drink from an already open bottle. Bagdasarian could feel the intensity of her gaze.

Kabila regarded the Armenian through squinty, bloodshot eyes. He picked up a smoldering cigar off the table and dragged heavily from it. His men made no move to return to their seats. Kabila pulled his cigar out of his mouth and gestured with it.

“Sit down.”

Bagdasarian pulled out the chair from the end of the table opposite Kabila and eased himself into it. The two men regarded each other with coolly assessing gazes while the sergeant beside Kabila continued counting the money. Kabila lifted his new glass and splashed its contents back without changing expression.

“Shouldn’t a man like you be out selling drugs in the nightclubs?” Kabila asked.

“Shouldn’t you be out in the delta or back east, fighting?”

Kabila shrugged. “That’s what the army is for. I fight crime.”

“How’s it pay?”

“Not as well as you do, I hope.” Kabila smiled. He wasn’t smiling when he added, “For your sake.”

The gendarme sergeant looked up from counting the money secured inside the attaché case. Kabila’s eyes never left Bagdasarian. “Is it all there?” he asked.

“More.”

“More?” Kabila asked Bagdasarian.

“There’s a bonus in there. You’re going to have to travel outside the city.”

“Up river?” The colonel sounded incredulous.

“Yes.”

“I am a policeman.” Colonel Kabila smirked.

Bagdasarian followed the line of Kabila’s sight across the room to where the gendarme he had scuffled with stood glowering.

“Any way you want it, Colonel.”

“Yes. Yes, it usually is.”

Kabila leaned back from the table and stretched out his arm.

The girl who had poured his drink slid into his lap. She regarded Bagdasarian from beneath hooded lids. Bagdasarian guessed she could have been no older than fourteen. She was beautiful, her eyes so darkly brown they were almost black, but still nearly luminescent. The effect was disquieting. In America she would be a freshman in high school. In Congo-Brazzaville she was the paramour of a corrupt warlord four times her age.

Bagdasarian forced himself to look away.

The sergeant on Kabila’s right shut the briefcase and placed it on the floor of the shack underneath the table and at his colonel’s feet. Bagdasarian looked around the room. An expensive-looking portable stereo played hip-hop music featuring a French rapper. A bar stood against one wall and a motley collection of bottles sat on it, devoid of import tax stamps. Cigar smoke was thick in the room, and Bagdasarian was surprised to see several of the gendarme officers chewing khat, a narcotic root he had always associated with the Horn of Africa, as well as the more common draggar.

The Armenian placed his hands palm down on the table and pushed himself up. He rose slowly and nodded to the colonel, who didn’t bother to return the favor. Bagdasarian looked over at the gendarme who had opened the door. The man’s eyes were slits of hate.

Rafik Bagdasarian crossed the room, keenly aware of how many guns were at his back. He placed his hand on the door handle and slowly turned the knob. Coolly he swung it open and stepped out into the falling rain.

Nigeria

THE QUONSET HUTS HAD BEEN dropped into the clearing by a Sikorsky helicopter. The cover story had to do with oil exploration for Chevron, which was a prolific presence in the Niger Delta region.

The electronic intelligence for the program hadn’t been so lucky.

The four-man team had traveled upriver through snake-, crocodile-and pirate-infested waterways first by motor launch and then for four miles of bush breaking overland.

The satellite relay station was jointly funded through the NSA and the DEA for counterterror and antinarcotics trafficking operations throughout western sub-Saharan Africa. For the most part the marriage between law enforcement and raw intelligence gathering had proved successful.

The most glaring hole in the plan was the lack of a security element. The NSA, unlike its intelligence-gathering counterparts in the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagon, preferred a “below the radar” profile to one more centered on firepower.

Calvin Sloke, a six-year electronic-intelligence specialist, swatted a mosquito.

The flying bug was particularly big and had got that way, Sloke suspected, by helping its vampric self to liberal portions of the American’s blood.

“Got you, you son of a bitch!” Sloke shouted in triumph.

The bug was smeared like fruit pulp along his forearm just above his Timex Ironman wristwatch.

“Congratulations,” Selene Hoffman replied from behind him.

Her voice was thick with sarcasm. She didn’t much like Sloke after six weeks in the cramped quarters and had pretty much given up pretending otherwise.

“Screw you,” Sloke replied, voice artificially pleasant.

“In your dreams, dork.”

“Quitting smoking sure has done a lot for your personality.”

“Sorry my not dying is inconveniencing you.”

“Boy, has it.”

“Stow the bullshit,” Mark Ensign said as he entered the tech center.

The ex-Marine was the only one of the crew who’d been to Africa before, having served time in both Liberia and Somalia as a counterintelligence officer. He still kept in shape with daily routines of calisthenics that made the other techs nauseous just watching him.

“We get our signal today?” he continued.

“Coming up now,” Sloke said.

Overhead, in geosynchronous near-earth orbit, a Dong Fang Hong satellite of the People’s Republic of China made its daily pass. Like clockwork the Nigeria station would begin signals intercepts, or SIGINT, operations.

This operation, along with digital wiretaps of the satellite and cellular communications networks used by the criminal pipeline that moved cocaine and heroin from Mexico and South America through Africa, up to Armenia and into the European Union, was the primary responsibility of the Nigeria station.

“Where’s Dex?” Hoffman asked.

“Getting some rack time,” Ensign replied.

Jason Dexter was the hardware and systems engineer assigned to keep all the various highly classified components at the site working and working with each other. After six years with the U.S. Navy and then two more doing the same job with the Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency, he’d been quietly recruited into the Puzzle Palace.

High-strung, type A and nearly anorexic, the specialist was a mission-first workaholic who’d run one marriage into the ground and didn’t speak to his children. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he had a reputation as the premier field-operations guy in the Agency.

At that moment the door to the communications station opened and a figure appeared in the doorway, submachine gun held in his hands.

Ensign reached for the metal filing cabinet where he’d placed his holdout, an H&K MP-5. His fingers curled around the smooth metal handle of the drawer.

The figure in the doorway stepped to one side and a second form appeared in the entrance. Hoffman had time to look toward Ensign as he yanked open the drawer and reached inside. Sloke covered his head with his arms.

Ensign lifted the submachine gun, tried to turn as his thumb snapped the fire-selector off safety and onto full auto.

The men in the doorway opened fire.

Bullets streamed through the claustrophobic space in a hailstorm of lead. Rounds chewed through computer screens and electronics equipment, shattering cases and housing like sledgehammers.

Sparks flew in wild rooster tails and miniature columns of smoke spewed upward as shards of plastic and stamped metal ricocheted around.

The cowering Sloke caught a long burst that slammed into him with relentless force, gouging out the flesh of his side and back, shattering his ribs and scrambling his internal organs like eggs in a skillet. He screamed and flopped under the impact until a triple burst of soft-nosed slugs shattered his jaw, cracked his temple and punched two holes through the temporal bone of his skull.

He slumped instantly, banging his head on the tabletop before flopping onto the diamond-plate flooring panels. His blood spilled out like flood waters.

Hoffman rose to her feet in a half crouch, a hapless, helpless, terrified look freezing her face into a mask of fear. Her hands came up as if she could ward off the bullets with such a feeble attempt.

Her left hand lost the pinkie and index finger as the rounds sliced through her. Her right palm blossomed with blood as a round slammed through the muscle under her thumb and lodged in the bones of her wrist.

She opened her mouth to scream and a single round slid into her torso, slicing apart her diaphragm and venting the air in her lungs. She gasped weakly and folded like a lawn chair in time to catch six more bullets across her chest and throat.

The intelligence agent fell backward, her blood splashing her computer screen, and tripped over her chair. She struck the ground like a kid falling out of a tree and gasped, fighting for breath through ruined lungs and larynx.

Her eyes filmed gray in an instant and she fell slack. The oxygen-starved muscles of her abdomen spasmed once and a cascade of dark blood bubbled out of her mouth and streaked her face.

Ensign leveled the H&K, his finger tight on the trigger.

He felt two bullets strike him like the impacts of a baseball bat, one in his thigh and a second low in his gut. He squeezed the MP-5’s trigger and the submachine gun roared to life in his hands.

His rounds sprayed wildly in a loose pattern, most of them burning off harmlessly into the ceiling.

A second burst caught him in the chest and shoulder, smashing him back against the filing cabinet. The kinetic force jerked his arm, and the muzzle of the blazing SMG dropped.

Two rounds struck one of the attackers in his right arm, slicing through the biceps and cracking the humerus bone beneath, while the other sliced a gouge of meat an inch wide off the man’s rib cage. The Nigerian killer grunted with the impact and staggered.

The second gunman hosed the ex-Marine down, stitching a line of slugs in a diagonal pattern from hip to neck and unzipping the American’s stomach in the process.

Ensign rebounded off the filing cabinet and dropped to his knees, the H&K falling silent. A final burst from the unwounded killer sliced his face off his skull, leaving only a bloody cavity in its place.

The corpse fell forward and struck the ground with a wet slap.

Colonel Kabila stepped into the hut, a bloody panga knife in hand, cigar burning in his mouth.

He looked at his wounded police officer and jerked his head to the side, indicating the man should go.

“Dress your wounds,” he ordered, and the man hurried to obey.