by Peter Nealen
And he knew that that was what Van Zandt would say. They might have patched up some of the simmering animosity between them after Brannigan’s forced retirement, but he knew that deep down, Van Zandt was going to balk at throwing that accusation out on Brannigan’s say-so. It was going to be East Africa all over again.
Maybe he wasn’t being entirely fair. He considered that possibility. Van Zandt certainly hadn’t been shy about committing the Blackhearts where they technically weren’t supposed to be. But he had to admit that he didn’t trust the retired General to stick his neck out that far. When it was a matter of shadowy, deniable operations, that was one thing. But to invite that kind of political pressure? That was something else.
So, they needed more than just the oral reports of a reconnaissance patrol. They needed documentation. Which meant getting a lot closer to that camp. And he needed more assets than he had. Assets that Price did have.
“That’s why I kept us moving for as long as I did,” Price said, oblivious to Brannigan’s musings. “That high-flying drone had to be Chinese. We’ve only ever seen one at a time, and at intervals. They haven’t found this place yet, and the longer I can keep it that way, the better. Since last year, they haven’t been shy about trying to take me and my boys off the board.”
“But they’re not the primary target,” Brannigan observed.
“No, they’re not,” Price said with a sigh. “It certainly complicates things.”
“Nothing new,” Brannigan said. If you only knew, Price. “So, we’ve got to avoid the Chinese while getting closer to the Humanity Front, and, if possible, shutting down whatever it is they’re doing.”
“What they’re doing is testing biological weapons on refugees,” Price said grimly. “And yeah, I’m in agreement. We do need to shut that down.”
“We need more than that,” Brannigan replied. “If the Humanity Front really is a global terrorist organization, instead of the warm and fuzzy humanitarian aid organization that it claims to be, we need proof. More importantly, we need intel.”
“And I think we might have an opening,” Price said, glancing at the laptop. “Not enough to prove the bioweapons, maybe. But certainly enough to finger the Humanity Front as a dangerous terrorist group.”
“What opening is that?” Brannigan asked tiredly, when it became clear that Price wasn’t just going to come out and say it.
“The WHO is sending another team,” Price said, pointing to the screen. “More security this time—which I’m sure those bleeding hearts will just love—but it still probably won’t be enough. Regular austere environment executive protection types, rather than serious shooters with serious gear, like they’ll need. And you know as well as I do that they’re going to meet the same fate as the first team, especially since nobody wants to listen to anyone saying that it wasn’t just a random act of violence by local militias.”
“You’re thinking of trying to intercept them?” Brannigan asked.
“At least setting overwatch on them,” Price said. “When the Humanity Front moves in, so do we.”
“Timing and positioning could be difficult,” Brannigan pointed out.
“Leave that to me,” Price assured him. “I’ve got connections. I’ll know exactly where and when they’ll be.”
“How soon are they getting here?”
“Within the week,” Price said. “I’ll know exactly when by tonight.”
Brannigan nodded wearily. “Fine. We’re in. We came here to find out what happened to the first team, anyway.” He stifled a yawn. “Before we sack out, I need to call Stateside.”
Price pointed to an equipment case near the tent wall. “I’ve got a satellite hookup running 24/7. Help yourself.”
***
“Where the hell are you guys?” Brannigan asked, as soon as Hancock answered the phone.
“We’re in a safehouse in Northern Virginia at the moment,” Hancock said. He sounded desperately tired, and Brannigan suddenly felt his blood go cold.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Somebody jumped the Old Fogies and snatched Sam out of the hospital,” Hancock said. “Killed two cops on the way out. It was a bit of a race to get to them first.”
Brannigan didn’t need to ask what Roger had done. He knew his second-in-command well enough. Roger and the boys had done what they’d all done in New Mexico; he’d found the targets, and presumably killed everybody on site to get Childress back. The difference was, the cops were presumably on their side this time. “Status?”
“Sam’s hanging on by a thread,” Hancock admitted. “Herc’s doing everything he can, but they beat the shit out of him. He hasn’t regained consciousness yet. And we can’t take him to a hospital; these bastards found him too easily last time.”
“I take it that it’s too much to hope for that you took one alive?” Brannigan asked, rubbing his gritty eyes.
“Sorry, bossman,” Hancock said, though he didn’t sound especially contrite. “There were four of ‘em, they were all armed, and they all fought.” Brannigan suspected that Hancock hadn’t exactly offered the chance for any of them to surrender, but it was a moot point now.
“What about intel?” he asked.
“Jack and shit, and Jack left town,” Hancock replied. “We had to get out fast, but it looked like they were pretty sterile. Nothing to connect them to anybody. And get this; somebody in unmarked armored vehicles came screaming in to secure the place within ten minutes after we exfilled. Almost like they were already en route, and knew exactly where to go. And on top of that, whoever they are, they’ve shut the local cops out completely. From one of the guys I talked to, they won’t even give credentials; they’re holding the place by brute force and firepower.”
“Wait,” Brannigan said, starting to feel a bit of a headache forming. Maybe it was dehydration from the last thirty-six hours of constant operations. “You talked to one of the local cops, after running a hit in their jurisdiction?”
“Relax, John,” Hancock said. “Do they suspect we had something to do with the gunfire reported in the area just before it got locked down? Sure. But they can’t get in there to collect evidence, so they can’t prove shit. And none of us is going to say a word.”
Brannigan took a deep breath. “Do we need to head back?”
“There’s not much you could do here,” Hancock said. “What have you found out there?”
Brannigan filled him in quickly on the encounter with Price, his claims about the Humanity Front, and what they’d seen at the camp.
“No, you need to stay out there,” Hancock said. As tired as he sounded, he was thinking. “If Price is on the level, and these really are the same assholes, you’ve probably got a better chance of tracking down some solid intel, and stacking more of them. This is fucking personal now. If you can find and fix these bastards, maybe we can finally start hitting back.”
“If it really is the Humanity Front, you know we’re going up against some people with serious connections and very deep pockets,” Brannigan pointed out. Not that that would be an obstacle to him, nor to Roger Hancock. They’d both fight to the death to bury the people behind the attacks that led to the Tourmaline-Delta incident. But it had to be said.
“No shit,” Hancock said. “Just makes it more of a challenge. Good hunting, bossman. Bring back scalps.”
Chapter 17
Lung Kai squinted through the dusty windshield and winced a little as the Bastion Patsas Special Operations Vehicle hit another bump. Fortunately, the vehicle was open-topped, but he still almost peeled his scalp on the armor in front of the machinegun turret.
He wasn’t supposed to be there. Nor was Zhao Na, who was up in the turret, or the men in the other four vehicles. These were Chadian National Army vehicles, and Chadian crews. Lung Kai and his men were supposed to be playing contractor, keeping a relatively low profile and looking for their target. Furthermore, they had to be desperately careful about dealings with the Chadian National Army; the Americans had s
pecial operations soldiers embedded with the Chadians in several areas. However, their primary concern appeared to be Nigeria and Boko Haram, not the eastern border.
But Lung Kai had carefully built a rapport with General Goukouni upon his arrival in Chad. Of course, that rapport consisted largely of considerable influxes of cash and weapons, which had been authorized by the Central Committee for operational expenses in Africa, but it had bought him his own private General, nevertheless. Of course, Goukouni would much rather spend the money on luxury and avoid ever going out into the field, but Lung Kai had made it clear that exact figures, times, and dates would be provided to those with an interest in seeing him ousted if he didn’t cooperate. He’d waited until the third or fourth meeting, and the third payment, before he’d made that clear.
The truth of the matter was that he was supposed to have left that to Shao Xiao Chen Wei, the Second Department’s regional commander. Chen Wei was the one with the training, and the mission from Beijing, to handle intelligence and support in Chad. Lung Kai was supposed to be the blunt instrument, the weapon sent after the target.
But Chen Wei was the lazy, incompetent cousin of a Central Committee member, who had somehow managed to screw up badly enough to get banished to Africa, and he had demonstrated little enough enthusiasm for Lung Kai’s mission when they had met that Lung Kai had immediately written him off. While he could not be entirely certain, from his interactions with Goukouni, he was pretty sure that Chen had never actually spoken to the General, even in the two years he’d been out here.
Granted, the People’s Republic had had little interest in Chad before now. It was a dead-end post. If Lung Kai had been of a more forgiving mind, he might have understood Chen’s lethargy, if not his affinity for cannabis.
But while his superiors might not know it, Lung Kai was ambitious, and fully intended to attain Shang Jiang rank someday. To be the one to finally take down Mitchell Price, who had not only reneged on a deal in Hong Kong, but had embarrassed the People’s Republic over another low-profile operation in South America, would be the ticket to his rise. He had been waiting for an opportunity like this his entire career.
His superiors still thought of him as a blunt instrument; they liked their junior officers like that, particularly in the special operations teams. Beijing did not encourage independence in its tools, and any officer who proved to be too ambitious was likely to get slapped down. If he was lucky, he’d get assigned to poor postings and miserable, thankless assignments. If he was unlucky, he might find himself charged with some nebulous crime against the State, and disappeared. So, Lung Kai had perfected the impression of being just one more rigidly obedient, unthinking instrument of the State’s violence.
Until now. With his prey within his grasp, Lung Kai had thrown caution to the winds. He did not know just how far he had gone in the same direction as the man he held in contempt for losing the Yuan file that Mitchell Price had evidently retrieved from the Anambas—Feng Kung.
He was one of the few who had been read in on just what had happened in the South China Sea, and who the Jiaolong Commando leader had been. Feng’s family connections had ensured that his failure had not been made public. Kai didn’t know Feng. He’d never met him; the PLA Ground Forces and the PLAN rarely crossed paths. But he had become fixated on proving himself the better man.
It was not an attitude in keeping with a good Communist. It was not even necessarily a normal Chinese attitude. But it was driving Lung Kai, and now he was so close to his quarry that he could taste it.
He had taken the news that the drone had lost contact with the target’s convoy after the abortive air attack the night before with stolid impassivity, even as he had seethed inside. He had been at Goukouni’s door first thing in the morning, and now, thanks to a combination of threats and money, he and his men were embedded with several different Chadian National Army patrols, sweeping the Sahel north of Abeche, looking.
“Sir,” Wan Fang reported over the radio, “we have movement to the west, approximately twenty kilometers from your position. Seven vehicles, moving cross-country.” Wan was monitoring the drone that had been launched soon after the first had been retrieved. It was nearing the end of its loiter time, but the other should be ready to launch soon.
That has to be them. No one else out here has that kind of numbers, except for Group 75. If it was the Army, Goukouni should have known about it. The thought briefly crossed his mind that Goukouni might have secrets of his own, or, given his own corruption, that other Chadian officers were just as prone to rogue actions as he was. But the drone had lost the target while moving vaguely west, and something told him that they’d found their quarry.
He tapped the driver, a young Chadian soldier who didn’t speak a word of Mandarin. He pointed to the northwest. “We need to go that way,” he said. It took several tries and his pidgin French, picked up in bits and pieces since arriving in Africa a few months before, before he got the point across. The driver wrenched the wheel around, and Lung Kai grabbed the roll bar over his head instinctively. He barely thought about it; few drivers in his own country would have been much better.
***
Wade was driving with one hand on the wheel, one hand resting on the L1A1 thrust between his leg and the center console, his eyes scanning the landscape ahead and to either side even as he fought to keep the Toyota driving straight. The Sahel looked flat, but flat-looking terrain could be extremely deceiving, especially when trying to drive across it.
Brannigan was back in the right seat, his own rifle across his knees. The Old Man looked tired, but his eyes were bright and alert as he scanned the Sahel, keeping an eye on Price’s vehicles, trailing dust about two hundred meters ahead and to the right, as much as he was on the scrubby grassland around them.
Wade had been keeping an eye on several rising dust plumes on the horizon. There were definitely other vehicles out there; there might not have been a lot of cars and trucks in this part of Chad, but it seemed that just about everyone who owned one was out and about at that time of day. Which was why he’d much rather have been moving at night, but the WHO team seemed to be intent on making matters as difficult as possible.
Wade didn’t give a shit about the bleeding heart doctors. As far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of dumbasses who went charging in without even deigning to consider the risks, and they got what was coming to them. But since they were the mission, he’d do what needed to be done.
Some of those dust clouds were getting closer, but Price’s people didn’t seem too concerned, so he just kept driving.
Price’s trucks had dipped down into a wadi, and were starting up the other side. Wade followed carefully; so far, they hadn’t bogged down in any of the dry riverbeds, but he’d been around enough to know that it was only a matter of time.
He felt the wheels start to slow and shimmy in the soft sand at the bottom of the creek bed and gunned it, twisting the wheel to keep them from digging in, and breathed a bit of a sigh of relief as the truck surged up out of the softest point and started up the far bank. The back wheels slipped again a little bit, then they were over the rise.
To see four open-topped military vehicles with heavy machineguns mounted and manned, on-line less than two hundred meters away. Price’s vehicles had come to a dead stop, the dust still drifting away from their abrupt halt.
“Contact,” he snapped, his heart rate picking up just slightly. Wade had a bit of a reputation; he was generally known as an intense, mostly angry man, with little patience for what he saw as stupidity, and no qualms about flying off the handle about it. But when it came to combat, he was as ice cold as they came. Even his elevated heart rate was only what a normal person might experience climbing the stairs.
For a long moment, it was as if the two groups just stared at each other. It might be nothing but a chance meeting; they were supposed to be a non-governmental observer group, after all, and they might be able to pass it off as such. They might have to bribe the Chadi
an commander, but that was par for the course in this part of the world.
But then the center truck’s gunner opened fire, his DShK spitting puffs of muzzle flash, the heavy 12.7mm rounds ripping by overhead with loud cracks.
“Out!” Brannigan bellowed, suiting actions to words. There was no cover for the vehicles, and backing up into the wadi was out of the question.
Wade didn’t hesitate. He kicked his door open and bailed out, dragging his rifle with him and hitting the dirt as a stray round hit the roof of the truck with an earsplitting bang. At that range, the Chadians were going to get lucky, no matter how poor their shooting was.
He hit and rolled, trying to get his rifle up smoothly, but got tangled and went flat as more bullets snapped by overhead. The Chadians were out of their own vehicles, firing their AKs from kneeling positions, though it didn’t look like any of them were actually using the sights.
A rifle thundered off to his left, and one of the Chadians dropped. Wade got his own L1A1 to his shoulder and squeezed off a hasty shot. He missed, corrected, and dropped the man wearing the yellow shemagh and aviator sunglasses with the second shot. Then he had to flatten himself down in the grass as a storm of return fire hammered at the Toyota’s hood and kicked up dust around him while tracers that looked as big as flaming baseballs ripped by overhead. The Chadians weren’t good shots, but they were throwing a lot of lead, and they weren’t all that far away.
“Fall back to the wadi!” Brannigan roared, even as Wade fired again, sending a Chadian soldier tumbling as his buddies hit the dirt. The Blackhearts’ accuracy could hope to drive some of them to cover and reduce the volume of fire, but those machineguns were an equalizer that they couldn’t hope to match.
He heard Brannigan crank off five rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger, and took that as his cue. Scrambling to his feet, he started to turn, then dropped flat again as a bullet plucked at the strap of his chest rig, missing the back of his neck by millimeters.