A cold fist of fear buried itself in Pearson’s gut. He looked over his shoulder and saw the escort car trailing behind them, but no other vehicles. Further on, he could see the police officer standing at the end of the street, waving other vehicles on.
What the hell?
He whipped his head back toward Jacob and Taylor and saw both men reaching under their jackets. A Diplomatic Security Service agent sitting in the front passenger’s seat was also hunting for his sidearm.
“Stop, it’s a trap!” Jacob yelled at the driver.
The driver stomped the brakes and Pearson felt his body being pulled forward, torso straining against the seat belt. Rubber squealed against the weathered pavement. The ambassador clenched his jaw and pushed his feet against the floorboards, bracing himself in case the escort car pounded into them. When the hit didn’t come, he exhaled deeply. Casting a look over his shoulder, he saw through the rear window that the third vehicle had come to rest just inches from his own Humvee.
Pearson saw that Jacob and Taylor had brought out weapons from under their coats. The ambassador, who’d spent the past decade surrounded by security details, recognized the weapons as micro Uzis.
“Back up! Back the hell up!” Jacob shouted.
The driver had his phone pressed to his ear and was speaking rapidly into it.
“Back up, back up,” he said, his voice taut. “Questions later! Just back up!”
Pearson’s mind began to race through the possibilities. Was this a kidnapping? An assassination attempt? Hell, were they just paranoid? Maybe the police had isolated them for their own protection. Maybe, though his gut told him otherwise.
Looking over his shoulder again, he saw the vehicle behind them jerk once before it began backtracking toward the location of their last turn. Peering past that vehicle, he saw a second officer join the one who’d sent the diplomatic caravan rolling down this street. Both were carrying assault rifles, not unusual for police in the DRC’s capital. One of the officers began to raise his rifle. Shit, Pearson thought, the bullets wouldn’t pierce the specially made SUV’s armored hide, but gunshots could turn an already tense situation into something deadly. It could cause the drivers, understandably, to run down the officers, all over a misunderstanding. Aside from two people dying needlessly, such an even would embarrass the United States and heighten tensions between the countries.
Knowing he couldn’t allow that to happen, he turned back to Jacob and Taylor.
“Let me talk to them,” the ambassador said. “They may have sent us down here for a reason.”
Jacob shook his head emphatically. “They have something to say, they can cable the Embassy. For now, they can get the hell out of our way!”
* * *
THE WHITE BACKUP lights on the Humvee closest to Nmosu flashed before it jerked into motion. The African tensed, but kept his assault rifle’s muzzle angled toward the ground. Those riding in the convoy obviously sensed something amiss. He didn’t want to fuel their suspicions by reacting aggressively.
His free hand slid into his pocket and his long fingers curled around a second mobile phone—a disposable model that had been supplied to him. He brought the phone into view and entered the first four numbers of a five-digit detonation code for an IED.
The middle car, the one that contained the ambassador, was halted near a red Renault parked at the curb.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the man beside him raise his assault rifle and draw a bead on the convoy.
“What are you doing?” he snapped. His hand lashed out and he knocked away the weapon’s muzzle. “I’ve got this.”
The man glared at him, but Nmosu ignored him. He’d deal with the moron later—and, judging by the mood Nmosu was in, the LRA—after he made sure the convoy couldn’t put any more distance between itself and the Renault. With his thumb, he pressed the final button in the detonation sequence.
An ear-shattering explosion rent the air, drowning out the normal sounds of the neighborhood. Thick columns of orange-yellow flame lashed out at the diplomatic vehicles, enveloped them, while the shaped charges and pieces of razor-sharp shrapnel battered and shredded the skin of the vehicles. The force shoved the ambassador’s Humvee hard to the left before thrusting it onto its side; the inside engulfed in flames. Fire tore through the vehicles for a few seconds before reaching the gas tank in the one furthest from Nmosu, igniting another explosion that yanked the Humvee from the earth, flipped it a quarter turn in midair before it crashed back to the ground, flaming wheels and other debris breaking loose and skittering across the ground.
The closest Humvee had most of its front end ripped free by the blast, leaving it crippled. The Renault’s engine had struck the State Department vehicle’s roof, crumpling it like paper. The panes of bulletproof glass, webbed with cracks, came loose from the frames and crashed to the ground.
Nmosu, with the other LRA gunner on his heels, jogged toward the carnage. As he neared the killzone Nmosu’s lips widened into a grin. A wave of heat slammed into him and brought him up short. He spotted one man, flesh rent by shrapnel, clothes smeared with blood, crawling from the vehicle’s interior. He didn’t recognize the man, but assumed he worked for the U.S. State Department or some other American agency.
The African raised his assault rifle and sprayed the man with a quick burst from the weapon. The man jerked under the onslaught, only falling still after Nmosu eased off the trigger. Nmosu circled the vehicle and found another man, his battered body caught in the seat belt. The injured American shuddered as pain coursed through his body, his face contorted with agony. The LRA gunner swung the rifle barrel around and put the man’s face in his sights. It’d be an easy shot, one that’d put the man out of his misery. Nmosu would have the satisfaction of making another up-close kill. Shaking his head, he lowered the weapon and walked away from the vehicle.
Nmosu wished he had time to stay, to watch the man die. Unfortunately he had no time for such indulgences. He could hear the wail of sirens growing louder in the distance. Once the authorities realized what had transpired here, the place would be crawling not only with local police and soldiers, but also FBI agents, helicopters and drones. The CIA likely would be involved and the NSA would start sweeping up every phone call on the continent.
The sound of footsteps from behind startled Nmosu and caused him to whip around, raising his weapon as he did. A man dressed in tan khaki pants, brown loafers and a sky-blue button-down shirt was approaching him.
In an instant Nmosu recognized the man. He relaxed slightly, though the man’s presence perplexed him.
“I didn’t expect you to come here,” Nmosu said.
“I wanted to admire your work,” the other man said.
Nmosu grinned. He turned and looked again at the flaming wreckage.
“It worked perfectly,” he said. “Better than I imagined.”
“Yes.”
“But we’d better go.”
“Please, stay,” the other man said. Nmosu felt something cold and hard press against the back of his head. What? Before he could turn around, blackness swallowed his world.
* * *
HOSSAN AHMADAH TURNED from the dead African sprawled in the street and briskly walked away from him. He stuffed the Makarov pistol in a holster beneath his jacket and moved to the nearest alley, used the narrow passage to get to the neighboring street. He did this a few more times and, within the span of a couple of minutes, had put several blocks between himself and the blast site.
He walked another block until he saw a weathered white van parked along the curb, its engine idling. As he neared it, the side door slid open and he climbed through it. Within a minute the driver eased the vehicle into traffic, driving for half an hour to a large warehouse.
The van rolled into one of the bays. The side door slid open again and Ahmadah slipped out, t
his time dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. He’d left his other clothes and the gun inside the van. The van’s remaining occupants would dispose of those things and destroy the vehicle.
He crossed the warehouse’s concrete floor to a second bay, where a faded red Renault stood waiting. He slid into the driver’s seat and pulled down the sun visor. A set of keys dropped into his palm. He slid a key into the ignition, brought the engine to life, and drove the car from the warehouse.
It took him two hours to arrive at to his safehouse, in part because he’d taken evasive measures to prevent being followed.
Entering the house through the back door, he found himself inside a cramped kitchen. Pocketing the keys, he turned the dead bolt and punched the alarm code into a keypad on the wall. Though the house was small, he had taken the time to memorize the floor plans and found the back bedroom easily. A single-size bed stood against one wall. Crossing the room, he knelt next to the bed, reached beneath and felt around until his fingers grazed the smooth plastic of a briefcase handle. Clutching the handle, he dragged out the case, set it on the bed, opened it and withdrew an encrypted satellite phone. He punched in a number and waited. After two rings, a man’s voice answered.
“Yes?” the man said.
“It’s done,” Ahmadah said.
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Many things are about to change.”
The line went dead.
CHAPTER ONE
“Grab a seat, gentlemen,” Hal Brognola said to the three Able Team warriors as they entered the War Room.
Brognola, the director of Stony Man Farm, America’s ultra-secret intelligence and counter-terrorism agency, was sitting at the oval-shaped table that filled most of the room. A cup of coffee and a glass ashtray sat on the table at his right elbow. The sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up to the middle of his forearms. His tie was pulled loose from his unbuttoned collar and dark half circles rimmed his eyes.
Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, the team’s electronics expert, lowered himself into a seat directly across from Brognola, who acknowledged him with a nod. Rosario “Politician” Blancanales moved to the coffeemaker and began pouring coffee into a white disposable cup.
Carl “Ironman” Lyons, decked out in faded jeans and a loud Hawaiian print shirt, leaned against the wall just inside the door, his arms crossed over his chest. The former Los Angeles Police detective’s mouth was creased into a scowl. His blond hair was mussed and his shirttails, the fabric webbed with wrinkles, had been pulled loose from his jeans.
Blancanales moved to the table, selected a seat next to Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and lowered himself into it. He punched Kurtzman, the leader of the Farm’s cyber team, in the bicep.
“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” Kurtzman said, grinning.
“Like this coffee you made?” Blancanales said.
“Words hurt, fella,” Kurtzman replied.
Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, moved around the table, handing out folders to the Able Team warriors. When Price handed a folder to Lyons, she paused, narrowed her eyes and gave him an appraising look.
“You too restless to sit?” she asked.
“Hell, yes,” Lyons said. “Been cooped up here for days. No mission. No leave. A guy can only spend so much time at the shooting range. Then he starts to get edgy.”
“Carl,” Price said, smirking, “you’ve been here less than forty-eight hours.”
“So? Forty-eight hours in an ultra-secret facility? Might as well be forty-eight days. You guys are killing me!”
Rolling her eyes, Price released the folder and moved toward her seat next to Brognola. Shaking her head, she muttered, “Drama queen.”
An unlit cigar jutted from between the big Fed’s lips. Leveling his gaze at Lyons, Brognola plucked the cigar from his mouth.
“You need some action?”
“Yeah,” Lyons said.
“You’re in luck,” Brognola said. “You’re about to get it in spades.”
A laptop sat on the table in front of Brognola. He tapped a couple of keys and a white projection screen lowered from the ceiling with an almost inaudible whir. While he waited, he put the cigar back into his mouth. A ceiling projector clicked on an instant later and filled the screen with a disturbing image.
Lyons turned his attention to the screen and saw the remains of three vehicles, their steel frames twisted, tires and upholstery vaporized by intense heat, wisps of oily black smoke wafting up from the charred metal. Water had pooled in several places on the pavement, a leftover from the efforts of firefighters to douse the blaze. Several people, mostly men, decked out in uniforms Lyons didn’t recognize, were moving around the scene.
“This is—or at least was—a diplomatic convoy in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. That is before it was blown all to hell by an improvised explosive device.”
“Was this the ambassador and his entourage?” Schwarz asked. “I read about this yesterday.”
Lyons muttered, “Apple polisher.”
Without turning around, Schwarz raised his hand and gestured at Lyons with his middle finger.
Brognola scowled.
“I’m about to give you two a time out. Right after I stick my foot up your asses,” Brognola growled. “Hermann, to answer your question, yeah, this is that blast. This particular photo came from the news wire services, in fact, so you may have seen it on the internet. But here’s one you may not have seen.”
Brognola punched a couple of buttons and another picture flashed on the screen. A black man, wearing the same uniform as others at the accident scene, lay sprawled on the ground. His head was turned, the right side of his profile visible. A crimson pool had spread over the pavement around his head. An assault rifle lay just out of reach of an outstretched hand.
“Meet Jules Nmosu,” Brognola said.
“I don’t recognize the uniform,” Lyons said. “He a cop or a soldier?”
“That’s a police uniform,” Brognola said. “But he’s no cop.”
“So he’s indulging in a little cos-play?” Schwarz asked.
“Cos-play? What the hell is that?”
“People make costumes and— Never mind, Hal. You need to leave the Farm once in a while. Seriously.”
“Tell me about it. Anyway, Nmosu’s a ranking officer with the Lord’s Resistance Army. As you can guess, his specialty is assassination and he’s wanted in several African countries, including the DRC. He also had his hand in several other atrocities, including village massacres and the trafficking of sex slaves.”
“All-around piece of shit,” Lyons said.
“On his best day,” the big Fed replied. “Slippery son of a bitch, too. Our intelligence services have been following him for years. Last we’d heard up until two days ago, he was in northern Uganda, making people’s lives miserable. But apparently he took his horror show on the road and went back to his homeland.”
Blancanales shifted in his chair. “So who killed Nmosu? Was it the cops on the scene?”
Brognola turned toward his old friend.
“That is an excellent question,” Brognola said. “One we don’t have an answer for at this point. We know it wasn’t the police, since he was dead before the cops or the soldiers showed up on the scene. Best they can determine, it was a single round to the head. The shooter covered his tracks. He picked up the spent shell casing and dug the slug out of the ground before leaving. There were no surveillance cameras around, so we have nothing in the way of footage to examine.”
“So we have zilch on this,” Lyons said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Simmer down, Carl. I’m saying we don’t have all the information we’d like to have. But we’re not empty-handed. The guy had no short
age of enemies. In theory, it could’ve been anyone, including someone with a beef against cops.”
“In theory it could’ve been a small child playing with an assault rifle,” Blancanales said.
Brognola nodded. “You get where I’m going. Since it wasn’t the authorities who shot him, the most logical guess is that another LRA puke did the deed.”
“Like they wanted him dead to tie up a loose end.”
“Something like that. Maybe it was a loose end. Maybe Nmosu did something freaky at the scene and they thought they needed to put him down.”
Lyons shook his head.
“Doesn’t play,” the Able Team leader said. “All they did was leave a calling card. So everyone knows the perpetrator.”
“Except you’re thinking like a cop,” Schwarz interjected. “These guys have no real agenda. But they consider themselves a relevant movement. They probably wanted the U.S. to know they killed our ambassador. They’d consider it a shot across the bow. From what I read, Pearson was pretty vocal against the LRA.”
“Fair enough,” Lyons grumbled.
“I think you’re on to something, Gadgets,” Brognola said. “Unless Nmosu had a confrontation with another LRA fighter that turned deadly, we can assume this was planned. As best we can tell, he was hit once from behind in the head. He fell to the ground and was shot execution style in the head. If it was a heat-of-the-moment thing, the other guy likely would have shot him multiple times.” Brognola slurped down some coffee, grimaced and set the cup back on the table. “There are a couple of other pieces, too. Neither is available to the public and each conflict with the other.”
Lyons uncrossed his arms. Squeezing his eyes shut, he rubbed his temples with his fingertips.“You’re killing me, Hal,” he said. “Is this a murder investigation or are we going to get some action?”
Blancanales smirked. “You’re making his head hurt with all this talking stuff.”
“Hey, I know how to investigate a murder. I’m just saying...”
“Like I said, Carl, simmer down. This stuff’s important to know before you start kicking in doors and busting heads. But you will get to kick in doors and bust heads.”
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