by Dick Couch
Janet’s voice crackled in Garrett’s earpiece. “This is Gopher Two Seven,” he replied, “Garrett here, Janet. Go ahead.”
“Garrett, AKR wants to move up the attack, as there are signs that the guard force may be preparing to pull out. I concur. Are you ready?”
Garrett cut the two men up front into the circuit. “You guys ready to rock and roll?” One of the pilots turned to look back at Garrett and gave him a thumbs-up, as did Rosenblatt. “We’re ready and standing by when needed. Tell AKR and Tomba to kick some ass.”
“Understand you are ready. Stand by, and I’ll keep you advised. Brisco out.”
Garrett looked at Rosenblatt and shrugged. It wouldn’t be long now, but they could still do nothing but sit and wait. Garrett and Rosenblatt did so impatiently and in silence. The two pilots up front debated the need for a realistic salary cap in major-league baseball and the merits of the designated-hitter rule. Experienced special operations pilots were practiced at waiting while events on the ground ran their course.
Janet Brisco looked over her shoulder to where Steven Fagan sat on a stool. Before him was a large screen that displayed the Makondo complex along with the five blips representing the men standing by for the order to attack. Like Garrett, Steven would have liked to be a little closer to the action. He had initially thought of going along on the helo, but he was not needed there. Steven Fagan’s job was to keep a careful watch as events unfolded. He was the mission commander. Janet would run the tactical picture, AKR would coordinate the ground assault, and Tomba would lead it. Garrett, when he arrived, would see that their medical expert took stock of the situation. If something went wrong or a strategic determination had to be made, it would be a critical decision, and Fagan alone would make it. He made eye contact with Janet and imperceptibly nodded his head.
“Akheem, this is Brisco, over.”
“AKR here, Janet, go ahead.”
“Green light, I say again, green light, over.”
“Understand green light. Tallyho. Dodds, you there?”
“Right here, AKR.”
“Okay, make your drop. As planned, give me a countdown to impact.”
In the next van from Janet and Steven, Dodds LeMaster made a few calculations on a slide rule. Some dated technologies, like vintage carpentry hand tools, were still useful and pleasurable. “I will make the drop in about ten minutes and give you a countdown from there, over.”
“Roger, Dodds, understand ten minutes to drop and count down.”
“Akheem, Brisco, over.”
“Right here, Janet.”
She hesitated a second, then keyed her transmit button. “Garrett says for you and Tomba to kick some ass.”
“Did he now. We’ll see what we can do. Thanks to all; AKR, out.”
10
The Pandemic
Judy Burks had returned from her meeting with Ambassador Donald Conrad feeling relieved and vindicated, and a little humbled. The ambassador was quite a man. That afternoon she had taken a long walk around Lusaka. She had found the city mildly disgusting and the people wonderful. Late that afternoon she was back out by the pool, reading a Patricia Cornwell novel. She was there to serve as an official go-between should something go wrong, but until it did, there was really nothing for her to do for the next two or three days but wait. There were any number of tours and side trips that might have been an option, but cell phone coverage—to the embassy or Washington, with the exception of Steven—was iffy outside Lusaka. She was reasonably sure that whatever was going to happen, it would happen the day after tomorrow, though that was nothing more than a guess on her part. After dinner at the hotel dining room, she went back to her room to read, finally putting her book aside and falling asleep a little before midnight. Garrett was with her in the dream, and the two of them were sitting on the patio of a coffee shop in Coronado when suddenly it started to rain. She was trying to get him to come inside, but he insisted it would stop; he just sat there drinking his coffee, soaked to the skin, as the rain fell harder and harder. The rain was so distracting that she never heard the two men slip the lock and move silently into her room. Suddenly, the rain began to choke her. She was awake for only a moment, struggling against the alcohol smell that filled her nose and mouth. The struggle lasted only a moment, and she was back asleep, only it was dark, she was alone, and it was no longer raining.
The two men were dressed like hotel employees, and both were black. They dumped the sleeping Ms. Burks into a linen-hamper cart, bending her double as if she were folded into a loosely strung hammock. They wheeled her to the service elevator, took her straight down to the loading dock, and loaded her, laundry bag and all, into the back seat of a Peugeot driven by an older white man. He handed the two men in hotel-employee uniforms a fist full of rand, and the Peugeot sped off.
Cheetah continued to roam over the Mavuradonha Mountains, reporting everything she saw. The UAV had flawlessly made the transition between daylight and nighttime, keeping her sensors locked onto the Makondo Hotel complex. Sometimes she flew out several miles away and dropped down a few thousand feet for a better angle on the objective, but basically she ran a racetrack pattern overhead. Then she received a command to take an easterly heading, pushed along by a mild tail wind. She complied, and when she was well away from the area, she was ordered back to the target on a westerly bearing. Without being told, Cheetah made minor course adjustments to keep the Makondo square on her nose. About a mile from the center of the complex, the two cylindrical packages under Cheetah’s wings came alive, electrically speaking. The sensors in the nose of each powered up, and in a few nanoseconds, both knew precisely where they were, not just over the Mavuradonha Mountains—exactly where they were on the face of the globe, and their exact altitude. A half mile out, the tail cones of each underwing package dropped away, and the cylinders sprouted fins. As if to flex stiff joints, servo-motors cycled the fins within a narrow range of motion and came back to a neutral position. The program that had sent Cheetah downwind from the target and back released the two packages exactly a half second apart, and they fell away from the UAV into the night. All this was a little disturbing to Cheetah, whose life centered around her sensor suite and an avionics package that demanded precise adherence to altitude and heading. The turbulence caused by the jettisoning of the tail cones and the unannounced, uneven dropping of the packages had forced her to make altitude and heading adjustments. She was much happier now that they were gone.
“Weapons released,” Dodds LeMaster reported.
“Understand weapons released,” AKR echoed.
“Damn, I hope I got those coordinates right,” he replied. It prompted a grim smile from AKR who looked up into the canopy of stars. Death was on its way.
Moments before, he had alerted the teams to stand by for an impact. On the intersquad tactical net he had tried to sound confident and routine, but this was all new to him. He had called in fire before, but not like this, and not so close. The team leaders all acknowledged, coolly and professionally.
LeMaster’s voice startled him. “Ten seconds.”
“Copy ten.” His eyes were locked on those of Tomba, who immediately keyed his intersquad radio. “Five seconds, brothers; five seconds. Tomba out.”
The fourteen men on the ground turned away from the target, put their hands over their ears, closed their eyes, and opened their mouths. Before AKR assumed this position, he made brief eye contact with Tomba. He couldn’t be certain, but in the dim moonlight, he thought he saw a look of amusement cross that man’s handsome features.
WHUMP—WHUMP!
It was almost a single explosion. For those arrayed in a semicircle just outside the perimeter, it was like two rapid, vicious jabs in the kidneys. For those inside, it was much worse. The packages were modified three-hundred-pound, precision-guided bombs. Like their big brothers, the 2,000 JDAMs that had ravaged the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Republican Guard in Iraq, these baby smart bombs, directed by their onboard GPS receivers,
struck within a few feet of their aim points. A half-microsecond delay allowed them to penetrate the roof and explode inside the buildings. One detonated just over one of the card tables in the bar-spa, the other in the center of the hallway on the second floor of the hotel barracks wing.
Eight of the Renaud Scouts died instantly in the spa, along with another twelve in the barracks. Seven more in the barracks, most of them in the first floor of the two-story wing, had their internal organs so mauled that they would never regain consciousness. Three crawled from the rubble of the destroyed wing bleeding from their nose and ears, unable to walk. Before the assault had begun, half the security force had been taken out of the fight. Those who were outside or away from the impact points had fared better, but none totally escaped the effects of the blasts. Many were knocked to the ground, and more than a few were temporarily blinded by the flash. Yet most of those left had experienced mortar bombardments and rocket attacks before. They recovered, some more quickly than others, and began to look for a place of safety, if not a place from which to fight.
Elsewhere in the complex, there was shock and confusion. With the exception of an all-night poker game, the clinical staff had been shaken from their beds, a few of them literally. Most thought it was an earthquake, followed by a quick realization that perhaps there was some kind of an explosion in the medical spaces, and that, more than anything else, prompted them to scramble to their feet and to look for a way out. Down in the basement medical facility, the effect was least felt, but nonetheless terrifying. Two technicians were in the process of disassembling the lab equipment, some of the more expensive and portable test equipment for transport, the rest for destruction. The two on duty paused to absorb the shock wave that passed through the medical spaces, exchanged a terrified look, and headed for the stairs. Throughout all this, the lights flickered but remained on. That was quickly taken care of when one of the Africans on the perimeter sorted himself out, shouldered his rocket launcher, and took out the two generators that had weathered the explosions. The two mini-JDAMs had, by design, started no fires. When the complex was plunged into darkness, the assault force pulled on their NVGs and began to move along preassigned routes into the complex. All but two. Joshua Konie and Pascoal Mumba remained in their perches, camped behind the IR sights on their SR-25 Stoner sniper rifles.
“Garrett?”
“Garrett here,”
It was Bill Owens; both Janet Brisco and Dodds LeMaster were glued to the tactical picture. “It appears that the initial strikes were dead on. AKR has initiated the ground assault. The generators are out, and the complex is dark. Time to rock and roll.”
Garrett grinned at that. Owens watched too many war movies. “Roger that, Bill. We’re on our way.”
Garrett caught the pilot’s eye and rotated his index finger in the air as a signal to start turning, but the pilots had heard the transmission and had already started to spool up the single engine of the Jet Ranger. A moment later, the blades began to turn.
“Don’t you think we should wait until the place is secured?” Rosenblatt yelled over the turbine whine.
“And miss all the fun?” Garrett retorted. “Are you nuts?”
As the Jet Ranger lifted from the veld, Garrett and Rosenblatt clung to the aircraft with one hand and held onto their helmets with the other. Once airborne, they got a radio check. Rosenblatt had a single earpiece and could hear only Garrett. By pressing a button on his wrist, Garrett could speak to Rosenblatt, AKR, or both. He noticed that his doctor was starting to look a little pale. He reached over and squeezed his knee.
“Tell you what, buddy. You don’t get me sick, and I won’t get you shot. Deal?”
Rosenblatt managed a grin. “Deal.”
A review of the video tapes later confirmed that the first individual kill during the assault belonged to Dodds LeMaster and Pascoal Mumba. LeMaster picked up an infrared image moving from the guard post on the road back toward the main building.
“Sniper One, this is Control. Can you hear me?”
“This is Mumba, Sniper One. Yes, I hear you very well.”
“There is a man moving up the road toward the large building. He should be in your view any moment.”
“Yes, Control. I see him now. May I shoot?”
“Mumba, Control. You may fire; you may fire, over.”
“Very well, I have him, out.”
Mumba had memorized the ranges from his shooting perch to various points in the compound. He judged it to be about 150 meters, which for the SR-25 was point-blank range. The man’s IR signature was clearly humanoid, but not clearly defined. He decided against a head shot and settled the cross hairs on the center of mass. The gun had been around for a while, but the ammunition had not. It was a new variant of armor-piercing, low-penetration 7.62 match-grade ammo. The round APLP bullet is designed to penetrate steel but not pass through a human torso. When the bullet entered into the flesh of the guard moving along the road, the heavy 192 grain round simply exploded. Mumba’s round caught the guard in the chest and blew off his head and left arm. LeMaster’s mouth fell open as he watched the expanding heat bloom from the scattered flesh. Then squirts of flame registered on his presentation screen as the .50-caliber near the guard shack opened up. They were firing at nothing, because they could see nothing. All they did was attract attention. Both snipers began to send rounds into the gun pit, and a moment later an LAAW rocket slammed into the emplacement, killing anyone still at the heavy machine gun.
Inside, the medical staff began to gather in the halls in various stages of partial dress. A few of them had flashlights. The stairwells and hallways were dimly lit by emergency battery lighting.
“What is it?”
“Are we under attack?”
“Where are the guards?”
Only one of them had any military experience—the Russian, a microbiologist who had worked with the Soviet and Russian bio-weapons effort. He waved the bottle of vodka he had been nursing most of the night, declaiming, “All can all kiss our sorry ass good-bye—All can all kiss our sorry ass good-bye.”
Then Helmut Klan appeared. “I believe we are under attack, but there is nothing we can do. Go back to your rooms. The security force will beat them back, or they will not. We’ll just have to await the outcome. Now go.” Some did as they were told; others didn’t, wanting only to escape the building.
Klan, dressed in his robe and slippers, went to his office and began setting out files for destruction. How he was going to accomplish this, he had no idea, but it seemed the logical thing to do. He was so intent on the task that he failed to notice François Meno enter the office. Meno was smoking a cigarette.
“So here we are in the führer’s bunker, and the Russians are pouring through the gates.” Meno held the cigarette backward in a theatrical Teutonic fashion, palm up, as he took a puff. “So, ve can say, ve vas yoost following orders? Eh? I don’t think so, mein Herr.” He peered carefully from the office window, which was cracked in several places. “I wonder who they are, anyway?”
Klan suddenly realized there was nothing to be done but wait for it to be over. He sat down at the desk and stared at the Frenchman. “If we’re lucky, they are a local African force, and perhaps Renaud and his men can deal with them,” he said to Meno, “but I rather think it is some kind of contract special operations force.” Suddenly remembering there was one thing he could do, he took his cell phone from the drawer and punched in the number for Maurice Baudo on his speed dialer. A single ring was followed immediately by a high-pitched squeal as Cheetah picked up the outgoing call and flooded the frequency with a jamming signal. Then a series of explosions sent them to the floor amid a shower of broken glass and dust.
Claude Renaud had packed his gear, had another belt of gin, and then tumbled into his cot, but had not been able to sleep. He finally gave up and, taking another pull from his flask, decided to return to the spa. After quickly downing another beer at the bar, he had started back to the barracks when the two
mini-JDAMs struck. He was immediately blinded by the flash, and the concussion brought him to his knees. Most of the explosive force was absorbed by the structures, leaving him unhurt but unable to see for a few moments. Instinctively, he knew he must get to cover if he were to stay alive. He crawled until he was able to stand up and stagger to a stake truck parked well away from the buildings. Renaud threw himself under it, and from this relatively safe spot watched rocket and small-arms fire pour in from the perimeter. He was enough of a soldier to know that the RPD emplacements and guard posts were well targeted by incoming fire. After just a brief burst from the .50-caliber machine gun, there was little or no return fire from his men. He knew with sudden clarity that this must be the Western special operations force that Klan had warned him about. He also quickly realized that they had not come up the single road to the hotel complex. For a brief moment, Renaud was angered that his force was being so systematically destroyed, but that anger was quickly replaced by his need for self-preservation. He was absolutely certain that his only chance for survival was to get away from the area, which was rapidly becoming a killing field. When there was a lull in the firing, he crabbed his way to the other side of the truck and scurried off into the brush.
When Judy Burks awoke, she was puzzled—at first because she was on top of the bedcovers, not under them, and then because the light was on. Or was it morning sun that seemed to scald her eyes? She distinctly remembered that she had closed the curtains before she undressed for bed. And was that cigarette smoke that she was smelling? This is all wrong, she told herself as she tried to sit up. It was then that she realized that she couldn’t move. Her hands and feet were tied down to the bed. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the light, she could now see that it wasn’t sunlight but a strong, shaded floodlight suspended at the foot of the bed. She took a moment to inventory her situation. Think back to what you last remember, she demanded of herself. As the sleepy fog started to clear, she had the icy realization that it hadn’t been a dream at all. She had been taken from her hotel room, removed from her bed. She didn’t know how or by whom, but she probably had a good idea why. Simultaneously, she was very angry and very scared.