African Ice

by Jeff Buick

  Tomorrow would be important. They would tackle at least one of the two remaining possible locations, perhaps both if time permitted. The trace elements Kerrigan’s tests had produced were the key. She had tested each viable formation for them, but to date had come up completely dry. However that particular combination of minerals had come together, it had been one in a million, and very identifiable. If the readings on the spectrometer matched, she would know they had hit the formation. Providing she had time to run her tests, that was. Travis was concerned about Mugumba’s men moving into the jungle, and rightly so. His force was five times the size of McNeil’s, and equally well armed. She hoped Travis and his crew were worth what Kerrigan was paying them.

  Sam tilted her head forward then flipped it back quickly, her long wet hair arcing through the air and smacking against her back. She stood up and stretched; her arm felt much better after the swim. But as she walked back to the camp, she couldn’t shake the nagging doubt that no matter how good Travis was, he was up against insurmountable odds.

  Travis kept to Samantha’s left as he tailed her from the campsite, twenty yards off the path, twenty yards behind her. Hardly a twig moved as he glided through the damp ferns that covered the forest floor. He stopped as she branched off the main path and cut left into the underbrush on his side of the path. The angle at which she moved was still taking her away from him, so he resumed tailing her. He came to the edge of the jungle that surrounded the waterfall just as she set down her water and unbuttoned her shirt. It was obvious she was going in the water, and he knew he should avert his gaze as she undressed. He didn’t. She slipped out of her sports bra, and he took a long slow breath. Her pants fell to the ground and he felt his breath coming quicker, shallower. Samantha Carlson was one very hot lady.

  Her breasts were firm, round with perky nipples barely a tone darker than her skin. Her shoulders were broad and well toned, sloping gracefully down through her rib cage to her narrow waist. Her hips were slender, her buttocks tight and rounded. The kind of body Playboy paid top dollar to photograph. She slipped off her panties and waded slowly into the water. His breath was shallow as he watched. She dove into the clear waters of the tropical pool, and he felt his senses begin to return to normal. Jesus, what a woman. Her head broke the surface and he leaned back into the moss that covered the piece of jungle floor he rested on. If there is a God, he thought, let us both live through this and end up in bed together. He smiled and thanked his mom. She’d made him go to church when he was a kid. Maybe that counted for something here. Brownie points of sorts.

  Colonel Nathan Mugumba waved his driver ahead onto the bridge and the convoy followed. They had reached the bridge in good time, less than nine hours, but the hardest part of the journey lay ahead. He checked the map. For five miles, the road would be passable as it cut north through the jungle, but what followed then was seven more miles through some of the toughest country in the Congo. He folded the map and told his driver to stop at the next spot that would afford them water and a clearing to pitch their tents. When they found a suitable bivouac, he set up communications and used the satellite to place a call to Patrick Kerrigan in NewYork. The line was surprisingly clear.

  “We are two days from their latest known position,” he informed Kerrigan. “I’m sure it will be their final base camp. According to my inside man, they are down to only two possible locations.”

  “Excellent, Colonel Mugumba.” Kerrigan sounded pleased. “The GPS is still working?”

  “Yes, it’s relaying their position every sixty seconds, as programmed. It hasn’t missed a beat so far. We are in the perfect position. It will take Dr. Carlson at least two days to run her tests on the final locations, giving us ample time to move within striking distance. I’m sure that McNeil will set up a standard perimeter defense around his camp. We can breach it and cut his force to pieces inside an hour once the battle starts. I may lose one or two men, but that’s the worst case.”

  “You impress me, Mugumba. Your ruthlessness is second to none. Please make sure the bodies are hacked up and the bones thrown about. I don’t need some explorer finding them two years from now and people asking questions.”

  “I will take personal pleasure in cutting the bitch into very small pieces. You have my word on that, Mr. Kerrigan.”

  “And Mugumba.” Kerrigan’s voice was slightly threatening. “Find the fucking diamonds this time.” The line went dead before Mugumba could answer.

  “Oh yes, Mr. Kerrigan,” Mugumba’s soft voice was tinged with sarcasm as he dropped the satellite phone. “I’ll find the diamonds, and I’ll take many before I tell you where they are. But you’ll never know, now, will you?”

  Samantha strolled back into camp and scanned the personnel in the advancing twilight. Dan Nelson oiled a weapon, Alain Porter crouched over the communications console, and Troy Ramage rested in a hammock, his eyes closed. She smiled. Travis had followed her into the forest. She hoped he had enjoyed the show. She startled Alain Porter slightly as she came up behind him.

  “Hi,” she said, and he grinned as he returned the salutation. “What are you doing?”

  “Resetting the GPS coordinates in your field computer. I want to be sure you’re exactly where you think you are when you power this thing up tomorrow. The last thing we need right now is to waste time. Travis has got Hackett ready to fly in a minute if you need him.”

  “Is he always this uptight?”

  “Not usually. The only time he gets this anal is when we’re heading into a firefight. He’s pretty sure we’re going up against Mugumba in the next day or two.”

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  He eyed her for a moment before he answered, searching to see if she should be told the truth. “I think he’s right. And I think a lot of people are going to die. Let’s just hope it’s them.”

  They both jerked around as they heard Travis calling for them. He was standing close to where Troy lounged on the hammock, and waved them over when they looked. They arrived at almost the same time as Dan, still clutching the freshly oiled Vector. Travis had them sit in a tight circle and he spoke in a low voice.

  “Koko is Mugumba’s guy,” he said, opening with a zinger. “When I grabbed him in a bear hug on the bridge today, I felt something taped against his skin. I got a quick peek as you guys pulled him back up to safety. He has a tiny transmitter taped just under his armpit, left side. If the technology is recent enough, it might transmit voice in addition to location. They may have had ears in our camp the whole time.”

  “So they’ve got two sources for our location,” Troy said. “The secondary transmitter in the GPS system and the one taped to Koko.”

  Travis nodded. “Now that we know, we can manipulate this to our advantage. The GPS is easy—we’ll reverse the polarity. Koko is another story. We’ve got to get this guy to go where we want, when we want. And we don’t even know where that is yet. How we work Koko to our advantage is strictly on the fly.” The entire group nodded. “Timing is crucial on him. Anyone who sees the right opening is authorized to move him. Just keep in mind that wherever he goes, Mugumba will be close behind. There’s always the possibility of using Koko to lead Mugumba into a trap. Remember the strong points of our perimeter defense.”

  “We’re all set there, Travis,” Troy said. “Standard perimeter is in place.”

  “I’m feeling adventurous today, guys,” Travis countered. “Let’s make a few changes to that.” He leaned over and began detailing his ideas to his men.

  Liam O’Donnell knew of only one person who would call him on his private line at three in the morning: Patrick Kerrigan. He was correct.

  “Liam, Kerrigan. Things are moving. The first team will be in place within thirty-eight hours. We’ll know whether they are successful five fours later, tops. Be ready.”

  “We’ll be in the air inside one hour of your call if the first team misses,” O’Donnell confirmed. Kerrigan hung up. O’Donnell checked the clock again and did the m
ath. Team one would be ready to attack the target late afternoon the day after tomorrow. If they missed and his team had to react, they would be flying into Africa in the darkness. He frowned. Africa was inhospitable enough without adding darkness to the equation. He rose from bed and padded down to his modern kitchen. His estate home on the outskirts of Belfast was three hundred years old, but inside it was totally renovated. He put on some coffee and whipped up some scrambled eggs—he wouldn’t be sleeping any more tonight.

  He took his coffee back up to his en suite bath after finishing the eggs, and had a quick shower. The cool needles that drove out of the showerhead and into his hardened body felt good. He stepped from the shower and looked at himself in the mirror. Thirty-six years old and in peak physical condition. At six feet, he was tall for an Irishman. His thick shoulder-length hair had a reddish tinge and his eyes were a bitter blue. He spoke English with remnants of an accent when he was sober, but with a thick Irish brogue when the Guinness was flowing. Three other languages spilled from his tongue, all fluently and without accent. His knowledge of Russian had saved his skin on numerous occasions, while French and Spanish were convenient. But it was weapons training at which he excelled.

  Liam O’Donnell knew weapons. It didn’t matter if it had a trigger or a blade, he could inflict injury or death on his opponent with it. A simple length of chain became lethal, a sharpened object as simple as a pencil was all it took to snuff out a human life. He had been formally trained by the Special Air Services and had spent twelve years in the employ of the British government. The SAS molded and shaped him as a lethal weapon and for six years he was on the first team, Special Ops. He loved the fieldwork and excelled at covert operations. Then politics intervened and he began spending more time working with MI5 and MI6. He spent his days gathering information for his former teammates to act on. New Scotland Yard welcomed him because of his hate for the IRA. They felt safe that this Irishman, Catholic or not, would favor them over the militant arm of the Irish desire for independence. That his allegiance would be without resolve. How wrong they had been.

  Liam O’Donnell served Liam O’Donnell first and foremost—everything else fell a distant second. Money and power motivated him, not pride in or allegiance to his country. He couldn’t have cared less. His position inside MI6 had proven advantageous on numerous occasions, giving him the code names and locations of undercover British agents working abroad. Agents who had often been compromised and found dead under suspicious circumstances. Treason paid well.

  But the finger began to point in his direction after a few years, and O’Donnell felt it best to leave Her Majesty’s service before someone put a bullet in the back of his head. He resigned and lived the life of a country gentleman, wealthy but low-key. He liked the comforts, but missed the danger. When the opportunity to embark on a freelance career had arisen three years ago, he had welcomed the opportunity and had thrown himself into his newfound line of work with a vengeance. The correct people had died, and his employers had always been happy with his work. His reputation as a man who got results, at whatever the cost, coursed through the clandestine community, and he became in high demand. It was through this pipeline that Garret Shaw had found him and introduced him to Patrick Kerrigan.

  O’Donnell sipped on his lukewarm coffee and stared into his own eyes in the mirror. Somehow, he felt that this time was not going to be a trial run with Kerrigan. He didn’t just feel—he knew—that there would be confrontation; that there would be death. He continued to stare into his intense blue eyes, pitying the enemy that saw what he now saw. Because it would be the last thing they would ever see.

  Patrick Kerrigan called his travel agent and booked a midday flight to London. Rather than head back home to the suburbs, he picked up a few items at a nearby department store and headed for the airport. The shit was going to hit the fan, and he wanted to be a lot closer to the action than across the Atlantic. He was positive Mugumba’s troops would clean up McNeil’s tiny force of mercenaries, though he felt the colonel’s estimate of one or two dead was a bit low. But in all honesty, he didn’t give a shit. Let them completely wipe each other out.

  He thought about the teams he had sent to find the elusive Ruwenzori formation. They had been world class, each one of them. And each one, with the exception of the one that now stood on the threshold of discovery, had found the diamonds. And they had died. It was a pity he wouldn’t be on hand to see Samantha Carlson die in the steaming jungles of the Congo. He would have enjoyed that.

  He arrived at JFK and breezed through customs, smiling at the ticket agents as he boarded the flight. Just another polite American businessman on his way to the U.K.

  FOURTEEN

  Samantha glanced at the printouts for the third time, then looked up to Travis and shook her head. The laser ablation had come up empty again. The trace elements she needed to confirm that they were sitting on the vein were missing. She sighed and began packing up the gear. She had chosen the most promising of the final two locations and had drawn a blank. The likelihood of the final target being the one was considerably less than this one, and that bothered her. They were running out of time. They had left base camp at dawn and hiked for almost two hours to reach the spot. It had taken her the better part of three hours to secure suitable rocks and run the tests. All for nothing. And Mugumba’s men were moving inexorably toward them.

  She finished stowing her gear and consulted her topographical map. The direct route to the final location would take them over some extreme terrain, but the indirect route would add hours to the trek. She gave Travis an azimuth and they began to move through the jungle. He altered their course slightly to follow a ridge that ran parallel to their desired route. A small stream trickled along the bottom of the incline and he led the team through the shallow water rather than the thick underbrush. They made much better time not having to hack through the foliage, and just before two o’clock they were closing in on the final location. He signaled for the three porters hauling Sam’s geological gear to rest for a minute, and he sat on a felled tree and motioned for her to join him.

  “How close are we?”

  She studied the lay of the land intently before answering. To their immediate right was a towering ridge, covered with thick vines and totally impassable. It was incredible that anything could grow on such a steep incline, but somehow the thorny lianas and creeping vines managed a foothold. About a hundred feet along the crest of the six-hundred-foot-high-ridge was a substantial outcrop, reaching an additional two hundred feet into the air. She placed her finger on the map exactly where the outcrop occurred, then cross-referenced the data from Billy Hackett’s helicopter. She pointed upstream and right to the ridge.

  “Two hundred fifty to three hundred feet farther,” she said. “It’s going to form part of this ridge we’ve been following.”

  “Excellent,” he said, checking his watch. “We should have time for you to set up—”

  A scream from behind them, deep in the bush, stopped him in mid-sentence. With a reflexive motion, a gun appeared in his hand. He held his other hand up to silence the porters. The scream came again, this time the location more identifiable. McNeil counted the porters and silently indicated to Sam that one was missing. He held up his fist, a sign for them to stay put, and moved stealthily into the underbrush. All was quiet for a minute; then he reappeared with a shaking porter in tow. He motioned for Sam to follow him.

  “I don’t think you’re going to like this,” he said, walking back along the same route he had used moments before. They broke into a small clearing, less than twenty feet square, and Sam gasped, horrified. Before her lay a massacre. Skulls littered the clearing—at least fifteen, perhaps more. Bones, gnawed on by jungle carnivores and partially covered with lichens, were interspersed with the hollow skulls. McNeil knelt down and picked up a skull, then another, and another. He looked back at Sam and stuck his finger through a round hole in one of the skulls. A bullet hole.

  “They were execu
ted,” he said. “Each one shot once in the head.” He searched the carnage for a while longer as Sam tried to grasp what she was seeing. He gingerly held up a long bone with a loop of nylon rope hanging off it. “Their hands were tied. They didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” she said, sickened.

  “I think this would answer that question,” he replied, digging a piece of metal from a nearby tree. He held it out for her to inspect. It meant nothing to her. “It’s a bullet. From a Bofors Carl-Gustaf CGA5.”

  She shuddered and went wide-eyed. “That’s the make of gun Dan saw in the back of Mugumba’s tarped-over truck.” He kicked at something with the toe of his boot, then bent down and retrieved the object from the moss. He held it out to her. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s a geological hammer. Standard gear for a field geologist. We all carry them.” She stopped and stared at him. “It’s them, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “It’s the expedition that went in a couple of months ago. The bones are reasonably fresh.”

  “Mugumba killed them,” she said slowly, and he nodded slightly. “He must have thought they found the diamonds or he wouldn’t have killed them. In fact, they did find the diamonds.”

  “How do you figure that?” he asked, grasping her by the elbow and gently leading her from the clearing.

  “If they had rough, uncut diamonds with them when he intercepted them, he would have known they found the vein. But if they suspected Mugumba was going to kill them, they would have held back the location. Mugumba thought he could locate the vein, it was so close, so he slaughtered them. Then he looked but couldn’t find it. He reported his failure back to New York, and Kerrigan hired us to finish the job. Kerrigan and Mugumba knew all along the formation was close to here, and that’s why Mugumba’s men didn’t leave Butembo until we started moving our team into this area. He’s waiting for us to find it, and then . . .” She let the sentence trail off.