by Peter Nealen
NIGHT AMBUSH
He finally got up on a knee as the two trucks roared across the veldt toward them, and the machinegunner opened fire. The bad guys must have decided that the lights going out meant they had been spotted, so it was time to go loud.
The bright flower of the muzzle blast flashed and flickered in the night, and green tracers flew wildly overhead. The movement of the truck alone would have made it next to impossible for the gunner to hit anything, even if he could see what he was shooting at.
Brannigan shouldered his L1A1, only to discover that not only weren’t there optics, but there wasn’t a laser sight that he could use with his NVGs. Oh, well. The old-fashioned way it is, then. He knew that his accuracy wasn’t going to be that great; the NVGs could only focus on one distance, and he needed them focused a lot farther out than the front sight post of his rifle. But he put the sights, blurry as they were, in the green circle of his optic, flipped the selector to “Semi,” and fired.
The 7.62 rifle boomed in the night, and the machinegun fire suddenly went even wilder, before the truck swerved hard to one side. The mid-sized truck went the other way, even as the rest of the Blackhearts, taking his shot as the initiation signal, opened fire.
Muzzle flashes flickered along a ragged line, and the rolling thunder of gunfire echoed out across the Sahel.
BRANNIGAN’S BLACKHEARTS
DOCTORS OF DEATH
Peter Nealen
This is a work of fiction. Characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Some real locations are used fictitiously, others are entirely fictional. This book is not autobiographical. It is not a true story presented as fiction. It is more exciting than anything 99% of real gunfighters ever experience.
Copyright 2018 Peter Nealen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, to include, but not exclusive to, audio or visual recordings of any description without permission from the author.
Brannigan’s Blackhearts is a trademark of Peter Nealen. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
http://americanpraetorians.com
Chapter 1
The Cessna 208 dropped like a stone and hit the runway in Abeche with a hard jolt that almost threw Dr. Elisa King into the back of the seat in front of her, despite the seatbelt. For a moment, she thought that something must have broken. The pilot immediately slammed on the brakes and reversed the props, further throwing her, along with everyone and everything else in the cramped cabin, forward as the engines howled, trying to slow the plane down.
She hadn’t thought that the runway at Abeche was so short that a relatively small plane like the Cessna would need to decelerate that hard, but given what she’d seen of the pilot, maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised.
It wasn’t her first time in Africa, but it was her first time in Chad. The World Health Organization had often sent observers to document the almost routine cholera outbreaks, but this was the first time someone with her specialty had been called for in the Sahel.
The plane having finally slowed to a reasonable pace, the pilot taxied toward the low, one-story terminal. King looked out the window, taking in a part of Africa she hadn’t seen yet.
It looked an awful lot like many other parts. The landscape was barren and dusty, obscured by heat waves and dotted with scrub. The flatness of the country was broken only by low, peaked hills that looked like pyramids in the distance.
There were three military jets lined up against the retaining wall to the south of the airport. Two had mechanics swarming over them, and the third didn’t look like it was in any shape to fly. Half of one engine appeared to be in pieces, and there was a dusty tarp draped over the canopy. King only spared them a brief glance; she wasn’t particularly interested in the Chadian military, or any military, for that matter, as long as they kept out of her way.
The WHO cavalcade didn’t really stand out from the other vehicles gathered at the terminal, because they were all Hiluxes and Land Rovers, just like almost every other vehicle to be found in that part of Africa. But the tall, spare Frenchman standing next to one of the Land Rovers caught her eye, indicating where they were supposed to go. She’d recognize Flavien Paquet anywhere.
The plane stopped far short of the terminal, and the engines started to spool down. King was not amused; she had probably a hundred pounds of baggage, and wasn’t looking forward to lugging it the quarter mile to the rest of the vehicles. But the pilot, a local Chadian Sara, didn’t look remotely concerned, and showed no sign of starting the engines up to taxi any closer. He was comfortable where he was.
“Typical,” Gerhart Strasser muttered under his breath. The German epidemiologist usually spoke English, having spent most of the last ten years jetting between the US, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. This was his first trip to Africa in quite some time, and he was already displaying his utter contempt for the Africans and their “dirty little countries.”
King was finding that she didn’t like Strasser very much. But he was, reportedly, a genius when it came to sorting out surprise epidemics, so she was going to have to deal with his prejudices and nasty temperament for a while.
Doctor Alessia Caro murmured something to her companion, Dr. Eguzki Zambrano, and the bearded young man shook his head, smiling a little. King ignored them; she probably would have agreed with whatever Caro had said, but the unprofessional working relationship between the two lovers, she being almost twenty years Zambrano’s elder, and married at that, bothered her. She knew it shouldn’t; she considered herself quite cosmopolitan and enlightened about such things. But it did, nevertheless.
Paquet had climbed into the Land Rover and was trundling over to the tarmac with two Hiluxes in tow. King was glad of it; otherwise it would have taken several trips to get all of their gear over to the vehicles. She seriously doubted that the pilot or any of the crew would have lifted a finger to help.
The hatch stayed closed for far longer than she felt it should have, and she was starting to get impatient as the Sahel heat started to cook them inside the plane. The aircraft hadn’t exactly had good air conditioning in flight, and now that they were on the ground and the engines were off, there was nothing keeping the fuselage from becoming an oven.
When it finally swung open and the crew chief started to lower the short stairs, the breath of wind, as hot as it was, almost felt like a cool breeze. King cleared her sweat-damp hair away from her neck, trying to get a little bit of relief, as she got in front of Strasser, who seemed about as happy about that as he was about being in Africa at all, and started down as Paquet got out of the Land Rover.
“Eliza!” he said, holding out his arms. She embraced him and they kissed on both cheeks. “It’s so good to see you.”
“It’s been too long, Flavien,” she said. She sobered, looking at the desert around them. “It’s unfortunate that this is where and why we’re meeting again.”
Paquet sobered. “Yes,” he said quietly. “You’re just in time, as it were.”
“Another one?” she asked.
He nodded as he took one of the heavy duffel bags and heaved it toward the nearest Hilux. A young Chadian man reached forward to get it, struggling a little with the weight. “Yes,” he said. “The fourth this month. In the Kounoungo refugee camp, this time.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” King said, as she helped Paquet with the bags. His local helpers were less and less helpful as they discovered just how heavy the gear was. “The climate’s not right for hemorrhagic fever.”
“It gets weirder,” Paquet said. “It’s not Ebola. The tests we’ve run—well, the tests
that the Mèdicins Sans Fròntieres doctors have run—can’t definitively identify it, but it appears to be closest genetically to Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a little more probable,” King said, as she shoved the last bag into the pile in the bed of the Hilux, struggling to get the tailgate closed. “I’ve long suspected that the only reason it wasn’t reported in Chad is that there just haven’t been the medical eyes on this place, compared to Sudan, the CAR, and Nigeria.”
“Except that it’s not that simple,” Paquet said a moment later, as they both got into the Land Rover, with Caro and Zambrano in the back seat. “I said it’s closest to CCHR. But it’s not actually CCHR. It’s something else, something far more virulent.” He started the vehicle and began pulling away from the plane. “It’s killing about seventy percent of its victims, and the incubation period isn’t right.”
King looked out the window as they drove, pondering. It had been a while since a new strain of hemorrhagic fever had appeared, all of the public fears about mutant Ebola notwithstanding. That it was appearing among the refugees from the years-long slaughter in Darfur was another odd detail, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Let one vector in, and with people crammed together with minimal sanitation, diseases were sure to spread quickly.
As they left the airport, something caught her eye, a stylized emblem of a Greek statue against a winged globe. “The Humanity Front has people here, too?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Paquet replied dryly. “They’ve been busy, too, with doctors running around from refugee camp to refugee camp for the last three weeks. Typically for them, however, they haven’t been too keen on sharing information or effort. And their security men are the most overbearing apes I’ve ever seen.”
King stifled a smile. Paquet didn’t like soldiers, and he liked private soldiers even less. She couldn’t say she disagreed with him, but sometimes his prejudices got almost as overbearing as Strasser’s. They were just far more acceptable.
“Well, the Humanity Front isn’t exactly known for playing well with others,” she said. She’d run into the newest and richest NGO in the business in the Caribbean, working on disaster relief, and she’d discovered the same attitude. She liked their mission and their philosophy of improving humanity’s ways of thinking along with their material lot, but found that they tended to be extremely exclusive, as if the rest of the international NGO community wasn’t quite good enough to work with them.
They were soon past the airport perimeter and heading into Abeche itself. It looked like just about any other desert town anywhere in Africa or the Middle East. Blocky, flat-roofed houses crouched inside walled compounds, the bricks and cinder blocks all looking dusty and dingy. Various scrub trees grew inside the compounds and in the streets between them, but none of them looked particularly healthy, and their leaves were coated with a thin patina of dust.
Emaciated people watched them go by. Despite the number of Westerners who had descended on Abeche lately, given the crisis going on—that had been going on for years—in neighboring Darfur, the locals were still dirt poor and likely to stay that way. Chad was as dysfunctional as states got, without ever quite getting the “failed state” attention that some other nations did. Continual ethnic strife, revolutions, sectarian violence spilling over from Sudan and Nigeria; all of it conspired to keep these people from ever getting much of anywhere.
The Western enclaves were visible enough, if only from the clusters of people looking for work, or, if they could get them, handouts. Not all of those handouts were necessarily intentional, either. Trucks packed with slovenly-clad Chadian soldiers “guarded” most of those enclaves, but they seemed to be mostly there for the same reason the civilians were.
Finally, after having slowed down several times for Paquet to shoo away the clusters of dirty, barefoot children begging for food, water, candy, or money, they were out of the town and heading east along the one major road that cut through the Sahel toward the Sudanese border and the refugee camps. It was still stiflingly hot, even with the air conditioning running full blast. Dust billowed up from the wheels, despite the fact that the road was nominally paved.
King just watched the landscape roll past. She’d eventually continue her conversation with Paquet, but she didn’t want to encourage Caro and Zambrano to participate. So, she rode in silence, her cheek pillowed on her hand, her elbow against the window.
That was why she was the first one to spot the helicopter.
She didn’t pay it much mind at first. She was still thinking about the epidemic she was there to investigate. But as the dark-colored aircraft banked sharply toward the road and roared overhead, she looked up, startled. Only then did she see that the back doors of the ovoid craft were open, and that men were hanging half out, with stubby, streamlined rifles in their hands.
“What?” was about all she was able to get out before one of those rifles spat, and a hole sprouted in the Land Rover’s hood with a loud bang.
Paquet almost drove off the road, swearing fluently in French. “Those damned bloodthirsty cochons must have lost their minds, looking for ‘terrorists!’” he snapped. He stomped on the brake, bringing the Land Rover to a halt, half-slewing it around. As the helicopter came around, flared, and set down on the road, he threw himself out and started storming toward the figures coming out of the cloud of dust kicked up by the aircraft’s rotors, already waving his arms and yelling in French.
King felt that time seemed to stop when one of the burly men lifted his rifle and shot Paquet through the chest. She saw the puff of the muzzle blast, faint in the midday sun, and the sudden, violent blossom of red across Paquet’s back. Her heart stopped. Her mouth fell open, but for a brief moment, she had no breath to scream.
Then Paquet crumpled to the roadway, falling limply on his face. And the soldiers were suddenly surrounding the Land Rover, their rifles leveled.
Zambrano was jabbering in Basque, completely lost to terror. Caro was screaming incoherently. King could only stare as one of the advancing figures lowered the muzzle of his weapon and shot Paquet’s still form through the head.
King stared. The men weren’t Chadians. They weren’t Sudanese, either. The one standing by her door, his strangely rounded weapon pointed at her window, was wearing a skull balaclava, but his wrists were white between his green flight gloves and his half-rolled tan sleeves. The black man who was wrenching Zambrano’s door open and throwing the junior doctor into the dirt was simply too massive to be an actual African; he had to be a Westerner, as well.
King wasn’t any expert in military equipment, but she knew that these had to be Americans. Their equipment was simply not shabby enough for Africans. They were wearing modern camouflage uniforms and equipment, and their guns looked like something out of a science fiction movie.
“What do you think you are doing?” she said, momentarily astonished that she had the audacity to get outraged when a rifle was being pointed at her face. “We are an official investigatory team of the World Health Organization! You just murdered a WHO doctor! You’ll all be spending a very long time in prison, if you’re lucky! And don’t think that that ‘terrorist’ excuse is going to fly, either! I’m going to write a detailed report about this entire incident, and…”
She didn’t get any more out. The man with the skull balaclava, moving as if he really didn’t care about her outrage, stepped forward, ripped her door open—she had never really thought to lock it—and punched her in the face with his off hand.
Pain hammered through her skull as her head snapped back and bounced off the seat back. She was almost too dazed to notice when he reached in, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her out of the vehicle.
“Well, well,” one of them said. King was in too much pain, and down on her hands and knees on the dusty pavement to see who had spoken, even if their faces hadn’t been covered. “This one’s hot enough. Too bad we can’t take her with us, eh?”
“You’d ge
t all attached and get sloppy,” a harder voice said from above her. “Clean sweep. That’s the plan.”
She rolled over, getting one final look at the masked soldier standing over her. She could have sworn he was grinning, even though that might only have been the skull iconography on his balaclava; his eyes were hidden by sunglasses.
Then his rifle came up, and the last thing she saw was his finger tightening on the trigger.
Chapter 2
“You’ve been rather elusive lately, John.”
John Brannigan cupped his hands around his coffee mug and looked across the table levelly at Mark Van Zandt. General, USMC, Retired Mark Van Zandt.
“I live in the mountains, Mark,” he said. “It’s not like cell service is all that good up there.”
Van Zandt didn’t react, at least not by much. He’d gotten better at that, but Brannigan could still read him like a book. He was pissed. It was written in every faint line of his movie-poster Marine face, above his usual polo shirt and khakis.
Unlike Van Zandt, Brannigan had shed most of the Marine Corps’ appearance upon his forcible retirement several years before. A forcible retirement, he remembered all over again, that had been enforced by the very man sitting across from him at the table in the Rocking K diner.
Still big and powerfully built, Brannigan had let his hair get shaggy and grown a thick, graying handlebar mustache. He looked more like a mountain man than a retired Marine Colonel, while Van Zandt looked like he’d just taken his uniform off to come to the diner.
“We’ve heard some…faintly disturbing things lately, John,” Hector Chavez said carefully. Brannigan’s old friend had been medically retired for heart problems, and his body had gone soft in the years since, though his mind was still keen. He was dressed down from when he’d first showed up in the Rocking K in a suit for the Khadarkh assignment, but not by that much.