by Jeff Rovin
“Yes,” she said. “Quickly.”
Sisula had not considered that. He pulled on his headset and adjusted the radio to the civil band. He put the audio on “speaker.” The Chinese would most likely be monitoring those communications. He had to keep this humanitarian. And not give away the fact that the Chinese had been taken prisoner.
“This is Ensign Michael Sisula at Marion Outpost calling Civil Aviation Authority aircraft,” he said. “Come in, over.”
The wind was the only thing that moved in the room. It brought wisps of gray smoke and white ash, as well as the faint, noxious smell of melted plastic—all that remained of the exploded helicopter. It reminded Rivette of junkyard fires. He chuckled inside, thinking how much training and distance had gone into putting him right back where he started.
Sisula repeated the message.
“Chinese corvette is probably going a little crazy right now, not hearing their squad,” Rivette remarked. He smiled openly. “Gotta admit, I like that.”
The answer came through muffled, pushed through a mask, Sisula presumed.
“We heard an explosion!” said a woman’s voice.
“That was a medical helicopter, destroyed by an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Inexperienced pilot,” he said with an apologetic look at Bruwer. “Our commander and his pilot from Prince Edward. They are stranded, ailing after a long night. They may have been exposed to a toxic agent. We need to evacuate them.”
“We?”
“Members of the SAN,” he fudged. “Can you carry us over? We can come back with the helicopter.”
“We are civilians,” the woman replied.
“You’re the only help around,” Sisula said. “We only need a ride from our outpost a mile east of you to the west coast of the island. You don’t even have to wait. We have a helicopter there.”
“We saw it coming in,” the woman said. “This is highly unorthodox, sir.”
“Please.”
“Wait a moment.”
The radio operator heard muted conversation on the other end. The woman had not sounded unsympathetic. Of course, Sisula also had not mentioned that Mabuza was ill with the toxin and that he did not even know if they were alive. Or that the soldiers intended, somehow, to repel the Chinese invaders.
“The pilot says he can land you near your man’s position on Prince Edward,” the woman said. “You will hear us coming. It is not a quiet aircraft we have.”
“Thank you,” Sisula said, and terminated the call. He switched back to the military wavelength. Free of the Chinese, he wanted to ascertain the commander’s status.
Behind him, Rivette gravely fist-pumped. Grace remained thoughtful.
“They’re gonna suspect you’re not SAN,” Rivette mentioned to Grace.
“Masks go back on, so maybe they’ll hesitate,” she said.
Rivette nodded then looked down at the prisoners. “We just leave these guys?”
“For now,” Grace said. “The target has to be the Chinese who were at ground zero.”
“That may be easier than you think,” a voice said over the radio.
Sisula’s expression brightened. “Caller, we are receiving.”
“Ensign, this is van Tonder,” a voice said. “I shot the hell out of their screws. The patrol boat is still there and it isn’t going anywhere. Corvette personnel arrived on dinghies, working for two hours. And if you’re listening, you goddamned Beijing pirates—get the hell off my island!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Port Elizabeth, South Africa
November 12, 8:34 A.M.
National Sea Rescue Institute Station No. 6 in Port Elizabeth was not fancy, but it was his. Fifty-seven-year-old Station Commander David Hughes sat alone in the second-floor office of the teal blue wooden building. Around him were old, sun-faded prints of ancient sailing ships and shiny framed photographs of his own boats. Hughes had worked for the all-volunteer service most of his adult life. He was a boat designer professionally and wrote songs on the side, and he drew inspiration for both from the sea.
David, his wife, and their daughter, hydro-engineer son-in-law, and granddaughter lived close to the sea. Rarely a waking hour went by where the man’s sun-bronzed face was not turned toward it. He knew its moods, its moves, and the vessels that called it home.
He was on the job today, early, because the bridge that had fallen into the Nahoon River had created logistical ripples that rose the levels of traffic. Engineering and rescue boats were moving in—carefully, given the nature of the attack—and medical vessels were waiting to be admitted when the air was deemed safe.
Hughes was not surprised when the call came from General Tobias Krummeck. The intelligence officer often consulted him on matters pertaining to the movement of suspected smugglers and foreign vessels. The station commander was only too happy to help. His love for his homeland was the last star in the trinity that included family and sea.
“A photograph?” Hughes said in response to Krummeck’s question. “Yes, I’ll look at it.”
Hughes considered for a moment how to put the smartphone on speaker while he accessed a text. His son-in-law had showed him how; he wrote it down to remember the process, but he wrote it on his phone Notes app and was afraid he’d cut Krummeck off. After a few stabs, literally, he accessed his messages without losing the general.
“Let me just magnify a little,” he said, saving the image and expanding the boat. “That’s the Teri Wheel, General.”
“Who runs her?”
“MEASE,” Hughes replied. “Mineral Exploration and Acquisition Survey Enterprises out of East London.”
“When did you see the vessel last?”
“A week or so. They passed here on the way to Mossel Bay. Station there reported them asking for an update on the currents to the south.”
“Where south?”
“Prince Edward. General, has this anything to do with—”
“Thank you, Station Commander,” Krummeck said. “Very much.”
“Any time, General,” the man replied.
But the intelligence officer had already terminated the call. Hoping he had contributed something to the current investigation, and wondering what involvement MEASE might have, Hughes looked out at the sea.
“What do you know about all this?” he wondered aloud. “If only we could understand your language,” he added—then went to the closet where he kept his guitar and began playing so he could expand on the line.…
* * *
“Claude Foster,” Krummeck said as he set the phone on his desk. “Illegal gem prospector, dealer. The diamond conglomerates have pressured the government, and the government has pressured us. But we’ve never been able to pin him to anything, not directly.”
“How does he operate? Drills? Blasting? Something that could have opened your buried chest?”
“He would not have blasted where the outpost might have heard,” Krummeck said. “But … drills, yes. He uses drills and acid.”
Williams thought back to his conversation with Dr. Goodman. It was not a natural gas glowing in the light. It was an acid.
“General, was that Foster’s voice on the ship-to-shore radio call?”
“It might have been. He’s never been in open court. The call to the East London police has a lot of noise.” Krummeck reached for his landline. “I’ll ask my people to see if there are old wiretaps and have the SAN look for the Teri Wheel at the last known position. I’m going to—”
“If you’re thinking of having him brought in, remember—he might have the biological agent.”
“Which he would release suicidally?”
“He may have given it to someone else. Or there may be more than one.”
Krummeck picked up the receiver but stopped. “If this is his doing, and we leave him at liberty, he will be free to hold us hostage, and on his timetable. We cannot afford to give him more time.”
“I don’t disagree, but you
said yourself he’s slippery. He may know you, your people, your methods. He does not know me or Major Breen.”
The general hesitated then replaced the receiver.
“Do you have a file on Foster?” Williams asked.
“Names, dates, activities—no profile. We have not really needed that, you know. Everything is still so much about a man’s heritage.”
“Is any of that digital?”
Krummeck shook his head.
“All right. Anyone approaching him would not necessarily know those things anyway,” Williams reasoned.
“How will you approach him?”
“The major knows criminals, knows them well. He’ll have better ideas.”
“Legal ones?”
“General, he’ll have the kind we need right now, ones that can come together while we travel from here to there.”
Krummeck appreciated the tactic and respected the hubris but was still undecided. Williams leaned on the desk.
“General, a man like you described—he’s not a sociopath or a terrorist, he’s a savvy son of a bitch who does this for the profit but also for the fun. I’ll bet my life on that. He may not have gotten back in touch because he’s savoring this, maybe waiting to see what we do next so he can slap us again.”
“That’s a fair assessment,” Krummeck admitted.
“Okay, then. That means our side has to take charge of this or we’ll be playing catch-up until one of two things happen. Either we get lucky, or he wins. Let us go down there, make sure this is even the guy we want.”
Krummeck was not a man who liked to share his jurisdiction or his resources. He had given in to Raeburn’s request for transportation to Prince Edward because they had to know if their old operation had been compromised. Raeburn was MIA.
“This is beyond what it was,” the general said vaguely, more to himself than to Williams.
“Sorry?”
Krummeck’s tired eyes locked on Williams. “I’ve got a pair of men. I need to find. It will take ninety minutes to ferry you down. I will have a man meet you, an undercover driver. Whether we have any additional communication or not, you have this for at least a few hours after that. Is that acceptable?”
“Very, and thank you,” Williams said. “Do you have other men in East London?”
“Informants, watchers—noncombatants.”
Williams grinned, barely perceptively. He and Breen would be the only soldiers on the ground. Not South African. Someone to blame if things went wrong.
“My adjutant will get you a flight. Do you have money?”
“About two thousand rand,” Williams told him.
“More than enough for whatever you need. Hazmat?”
Williams nodded and turned.
“Good luck,” Krummeck said to his back as he left the office.
Williams knew the man was sincere. Krummeck wore the uniform of a nation under a toxic cloud. It was a small thought in the big picture, but Williams hoped that he had never been as plainly territorial when he was running the previous Op-Center organization.
When Williams emerged, the adjutant was already on the phone, listening.
“Yes, sir,” she said. Without acknowledging Williams standing before her, she called a number. “The airfield, section three,” she said, then hung up.
She finally looked at the American. It was the same look of bulletproof reserve that he had come to expect, and dislike, at the DNI.
“Deputy Chief Swane will take you to Pretoria Central Heliport,” she said. “She will also provide the name of your contact in East London.”
“Thank you,” Williams said as he hurried toward the staircase.
The adjutant did not wish him good luck.
CHAPTER THIRTY
East London, South Africa
November 12, 8:49 A.M.
The door to the office was closed. Seated behind his desk, rocking slightly in his office chair, Foster sipped coffee and turned to Katinka.
The young woman sat stiffly in the corner of a leather couch to his right. There were hazmat masks in a plastic bin that usually held mail. She wanted to be numb, feeling nothing, but she had gotten a good rest and could not stop thinking. And that made her alternately scared, sick, and depressed to the point of tears. She did not let Foster see her weep, artfully turning her face and finding some way to sweep them away.
Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he did not.
Employees were arriving for work. They chatted as they did, no doubt discussing the Terror at Batting Bridge, as the headlines called it. No one bothered the boss when his door was shut, though the eight office workers all looked at him now and then as if taking a cue from his expression as to what they should feel.
Apparently, nothing. His face was expressionless and still.
“I have been staring at the phone, thinking,” Foster said after a long silence. “I may not want to sell this to our government.”
“Sell protection, you mean,” she said. It was not an accusation but a clarification.
“That’s right. What would Pretoria do with a weaponized core sample? Force whites to give up the seventy percent of farmable land we own?”
Now Katinka looked at him accusingly. “Is that what’s behind this?”
“Is what behind this, Katinka?”
“You know damn well.”
“A reactionary attack on a system that has gone from being lopsided one way to aslant another way? You mistake me for my brother. Have I ever seemed political to you?”
“No, but that comment—”
“Is fact. It’s about the deep stupidity of our people, isn’t it? In the name of equality, they would be, are, eager to kill skilled farmers because of their color and replace them with unqualified farmers because of their color.” He set his mug down hard and swiveled to her. “But you are right as far as this goes. I would do a great deal to keep the idiots from interfering in my life and my work any further. They have forced me, you, us to work in secret with their idiotic regulations and payoffs from monopolies. Frankly, I don’t care if things fall apart, again, and have to be rebuilt. The man or woman or group that controls something to force true equality, not retribution—he or she or they would be great patriots!”
Foster turned back to his desk.
“What I wanted to do with my first call, I did. I let the world know that someone controls this extraordinary power. Now we must decide what to do with it. Do we justly enrich ourselves by terrorizing a venal system, or justly enrich ourselves by offering that power to someone else?” He shook his head. “I’m unable to decide that, Katinka. Do you still think we should sell it to an arms dealer or a foreign military?”
“When I realized what we had, I thought—that. Selling it. Negotiating. But nothing more.”
“Surely you realized that a buyer would have tried it.”
She shook her head.
“Really, Katinka. How did you expect this would go? Beijing or Tehran were just going to take your word that what you had brought down the plane? You don’t think they would have tried it on prisoners? Some remote village somewhere?”
“I realize now … I didn’t think,” she admitted.
“Of course. I have always been here to do that. And I’m not criticizing you. That was my function, just as digging and analyzing was yours. And so here we are.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “To hell with Pretoria. Let’s take it somewhere else. I will contact Nicus Dumisa. He has connections in every world capital. Then I’ll call Mila to get us out of here.”
The names alone made Katinka feel sicker than she already did—especially Mila Merch, who offered impoverished young women “positions” in the homes of well-to-do men. They compounded the self-rebuke going on in her brain, her idiotic idea that their relationship could be more than her being just an educated laborer.
God, how stupid you’ve been.
But a sudden self-epiphany did not change the fact that Foster was right. She was in this now. Even if Katinka had turned him in
she would not have gotten away free. She’d broken numerous laws, not the least of which was abetting mass murder, and she would have had to tell authorities where she had been digging. Others would go there.
They would get a sample, carry it off, repeat. Just as Foster had said.
There was only one way through this, and that was ahead. Like it or not, she was still attached to the man who was even now placing a call to Swaziland.
He did not get to finish that call as unexpected visitors came to the front door.
Nearly a dozen of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Pretoria, South Africa
November 12, 9:00 A.M.
The Robinson R66 Turbine helicopter was comfortable and quiet, a welcome break from the noise of Pretoria—and the first after the long journey that had preceded Black Wasp’s arrival in South Africa.
With their gear in the third and fourth passenger seats behind them, Williams and Breen had just taken off when they received a text from Matt Berry:
FBI says 99% certainty voice 2 recordings is same.
Major Breen was not surprised. He had not been idle while waiting for Williams. He had been reviewing data from the National Reconnaissance Office. The signal strength recorded in the report from the East London police and the radio intercept from the USS Carl Vinson had triangulated to roughly the same location.
“So how do we approach him?” Williams asked over their dedicated headsets. The men could communicate with the pilot and he could cut in with instructions but not eavesdrop.
“By understanding his endgame, which is twofold. First, to make as much money as possible and as fast as possible. Second, to get out of South Africa as quickly as possible. Pretoria is going to want to put him on trial for mass murder. He has to get to someplace safe.”
“Such as?”
“While I was waiting, I also looked up the countries that have no extradition agreements with South Africa. He can go to China, for one. Also Pakistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia—”
“He probably has a jet fueled and waiting.”
“No doubt, which is why I suggest we approach him with as little artifice as possible,” Breen said. “We should be what we are and, moreover, expect that we might not be the only ones quickly zeroing in on this guy. The Chinese may be running a two-prong operation: dig for the bug and offer him sanctuary. That way, they corner the market. The other consideration is that Foster will certainly have an accomplice, maybe additional stores off-site to sell to additional bidders—”