If the entire operation was sanctioned by the President… Markov played the implications in his mind. Then he was a traitor. He was undermining the foreign policy of his own country, meddling in war plans, putting the lives of U.S. soldiers and airmen at risk.
He tried to clear his head. No, that was impossible. America had done some despicable things in the world, but had never staged a coup in a friendly, democratic country for profit. This was over the line. And if the President was involved, then Markov was already screwed. May as well finish the job. Do what’s right.
He ended the call with Colonel Garcia, turned his attentions to securing the safe house, now partially, but not completely compromised.
#
Sarah Redd took her cell phone out of the White House Situation Room to speak to Markov. When she came back, the President of the United States gave her a hard look. Around the rectangular mahogany table, nine other faces mirrored the President’s.
The National Security Council, the President’s primary forum for discussing foreign affairs related to U.S. national security, was not the sort of meeting one just skipped out of after saying one would “be right back.” Around the table were the Vice-President, Secretaries of Defense, Treasury, and State, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor, and the President’s Chief of Staff, Counsel, and Assistant for Economic Affairs.
“Word from the field agents,” she explained. Her mouth was dry, as it had been for the last hour, since she’d briefed the president. “It sounds like events are moving beyond our control.”
“The question is,” the President said, “why do the rebels expect our assistance? Surely they don’t think we’d be involved in overthrowing a democratically elected, friendly regime.”
He’d been briefed only hours before and had not at first grasped the enormity of the economic and political repercussions vis a vis the mammoth oil field recently discovered but unannounced by ChinaOne. Only when shown a diagram comparing future Namibian exports graphed against declines or modest increases from other oil powers, together with dollar figures, did it all become clear.
“I have no idea,” Sarah lied. A trickle of sweat started to grow uncomfortable along her bra-line. Was it always this warm in here? She glanced quickly at the Secretary Defense, but avoided eye contact. “But it might be wise to consider deploying SOCOM resources. If not in actual support, then to prevent a civil war. If the rebels take charge, they will no doubt revisit their agreement with the Chinese, and that could be to our favor.”
“While setting back Chinese relations by years,” the Secretary of State said. “You know how prickly they are, and desperate for resources to fuel their expansion. We don’t want to be the ones seen blocking their prosperity and influence. It doesn’t help us in the long run.”
“I’m not going to worry about that now,” the President said, to Sarah’s relief. “The key thing is to contain the damage. It’s not in our interest or the Chinese to have the country slip into civil war. If this rebellion is broad-based, as you say,” he said with a nod to Sarah, “then we can’t simply declare our support for the Namibian president and parliament and wait for it to die down.”
And it was too late for that now. Sarah knew a lot more of William Ikanbo’s plans—had helped formulate them—than she would ever admit. She regretted it now, of course, although maybe not as much as Terrance Nolan. She still had an acid taste in her mouth from William’s clumsy attempts to blackmail her. He would pay for that.
Blackmail might work in the short term. But the thing William was forgetting was that the best place to stage a coup was in a country that had just suffered one. Give him a week, maybe a month, tangle himself in the mess of forming a new government and then Sarah could find some military officer or government official to stab him in the back. Perhaps literally. Problem solved.
The Secretary of the Treasury cleared his throat. “Um, Mr. President, there is another, more serious problem.”
He was a quiet man, nervous, rarely contributing to National Security Council Meetings. Sarah looked to him in surprise. What could he possibly have to add to the discussion?
“You mean the financial bubble,” the President said.
“Financial bubble?” Sarah asked.
“Word of the new oil field has leaked somehow, yesterday evening. Oil futures plummeted, and have been all over the place since then. But the real problem is in Tokyo and Hong Kong. There has never been such a high volume day in the history of either exchange. There are big stocks, up more than a thousand percent. It’s completely unprecedented,” said the Treasury Secretary.
Terrance. That fool, it had to be him. He had friends on Wall Street and was drowning in debt. Maybe Sarah should have tossed him something to keep his head above water when she’d eliminated his financial incentive with the Namibians. Or better yet, never brought him into the plan in the first place.
“Who leaked it?” she demanded. “The Namibians? The Chinese?”
“Maybe the Namibians,” the Secretary said in a skeptical tone. “Not the Chinese. Why would they? They’ve been silent on this for months. Stroke of luck we found out when we did.” He looked appreciatively at Sarah. “Plus, China isn’t benefitting from the fallout. Most of the activity is off mainland China, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and London. Most of the profits seem to be funneling into a few large hedge funds, but speculation is extraordinary. JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs—all the big players—it’s an all-out bidding war with no end in sight. No one wants to be the one caught with their pants down.”
“Insider trading,” the President said.
“Not necessarily,” Sarah said. A second bead of sweat was right at her hairline now and she willed it not to trickle down. “Leaks happen, word gets out. There are a lot of engineers, contractors, etc., who might have talked.”
“The point is, it’s a bubble, and a big one. If it collapses—”
“Which it will,” the President said, “as soon the Namibian conflict hits the news.”
“Right,” the Secretary continued. “All those stocks could collapse, possibly overshoot their pre-bubble price, and the price of oil will skyrocket. Any conceivable position is going to be inadequate to cover those kind of margins.”
“Why would oil shoot up?” Sarah asked. “The Namibian stuff hasn’t even hit the market yet.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the Secretary said. “The point is that expectations will cause the price run up.”
Sarah thought through the implications. “I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but can’t the Fed intervene? I don’t know, buy dollars, lower interest rates, pump in some extra liquidity, whatever.”
The Secretary of the Treasury just looked at her like she’d told him to manufacture a few thousand tons of gold in order to solve the crisis. Or mint a ten trillion dollar coin to pay off the national debt.
At last he deigned to answer. “Where do you think we’ll get that kind of money? Another huge bailout? Borrow another trillion dollars? Print a big barge-worth of money and tow it up the East River? The Fed is out of bullets, and everyone knows it. We’re still on the hook for the last big mess. The FDIC can’t handle a modest-sized bank run, let alone a repeat of 2008. Once this thing starts to explode, that’s it. Picture Bank of America gone, JP Morgan Chase, Citi. It will spread to London, take down HSBC, maybe even bump off the big Japanese boys. The Chinese will dump their T-bills faster than used toilet paper. You do that and…no, I don’t want to go there. It’ll make the Great Depression look like a holiday.”
Sarah felt lightheaded. She hadn’t thought about any of this. “Wait a minute. We’re talking about one day. How can a market implode in a single day – nothing is fundamentally different from yesterday. Can’t we just freeze the markets or something?”
Treasury shook his head. “You don’t understand how fast the market moves now. Response is all but instantaneous. We might conceivably put a lid on New York, but what about all the other exchanges? What
about futures markets? America doesn’t own the world. Markets are balanced on a razor’s edge, and the more complex they become, the more unstable they are. The world is totally different than it was two years ago, let alone twenty.”
“It sounds to me,” the President said to Secretary Defense “that our only choice is to get involved as soon as possible and support whichever side looks to be coming out on top. I want this thing stabilized by the time the conflict is over in Namibia.” He turned to the Secretary of the Treasury. “Set up a meeting with the Fed. Now.”
Sarah did not allow the smile to come to her lips and bypass the grim expression she wore on her face. But she felt it.
“I agree, Mr. President. I’ll get right on it.”
Not only did she have resources at her disposal to help one side or the other come out on top, but she was the one who controlled the information flow from Namibia. And that meant she could pick the winner.
William Ikanbo and his Namibian rebels would be very happy. At least in the short term.
Chapter Thirty-eight:
Markov and three of his men drove one of the Land Rovers east from the farm house while Ian, Julia, and the final CIA agent followed Charles Ikanbo in a caravan to the southwest, toward Windhoek.
The agent Markov sent with Ian and Julia was a quiet man named Steve Billups, and he was given to staring out the window into the darkness for long stretches without comment. He wore headphones and listened to his ipod from the back seat, which gave Ian and Julia some privacy in front.
“Do you think it’s too late?” Julia asked.
“To prevent a coup? Probably. To prevent a civil war, maybe not.”
He squirted wiper fluid to clear the windshield of the dust kicked up by the trucks in front of them. He could smell the dust even through the filter of the air conditioning.
He’d never asked the obvious question when he and Markov made the decision to split, with Markov returning to the States to deal with Sarah Redd and Julia staying with Ian to help Charles Ikanbo restore the rightful government of Namibia.
Why is it our responsibility?
He hadn’t needed to ask. Because we broke it. Because the two of them—Julia as chief investigator for the DARPA implant project and Ian as a CIA operative tasked to infiltrate and ultimately destroy an oil camp on Namibian soil—had set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of a democratic regime.
“You know what I keep thinking?” Julia asked.
“Don’t worry, everything will turn out okay. I’ll do my best to keep you out of the fighting, and it should be over very quickly.”
“No, I’m not thinking about that. Well, sure, I’ve wondered if I’m going to die here, that’s only natural. But after that horrible thing in Utah, those dead guards, the look on the Almighty’s face when he went down. And Gandhi too, dead. And I was pretty scared when Ikanbo was interrogating us. I thought they were going to...well, I’m not embarrassed to say that I was scared out of my mind.”
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed.”
“So no matter what happens, it can’t get any worse, can it?”
Ian thought about the interrogation with Henri Dupont at the Blackwing headquarters, and about the firefight on the hill during that horrible moment when he realized that he and Kendall were the targets of the American air strike. He thought it definitely could get worse.
“Is that what you’re thinking?” he asked. “That you’ve gone through the worst?”
“No, I’m wondering what happens to me when we go back to the States.”
“You’ll be safe. Markov will straighten it out.”
“Will he straighten out my marriage?”
He felt a twinge of discomfort. Of course she would be thinking about that, even if Ian had had begun to move beyond her marriage in his mind. He started to respond.
“No, don’t answer,” she said. “That was rhetorical.” Ian saw her glance in the rear view mirror to check on Steve Billups, who still looked out the window with his headphones on. “It’s over,” she said, more definitively this time. “And even if it wasn’t, even if I could somehow forgive Terrance for trying to get me killed, I’m guessing that he’ll be going away for a long time.”
“You’ll still have your job, if you want it,” Ian said. “Markov will go to bat for you, I’m sure. I will too. You’re a good doctor, the best I could have hoped for.” He hesitated. “And you’ve been great since that moment you came for me at the psych ward. Great in every way.”
“Thank you.” Ian felt her tense next to him.
They lapsed into silence and Ian thought about that moment at the guest house in South Africa, where he’d awakened to find Julia touching his lips with her fingers. And then he’d pulled her in and they’d kissed. He could still feel the weight of her body, her breath on his face, feel her rapid pulse. She’d pulled away, but the moment had lingered between them ever since.
And that was before she found out that her husband had betrayed her. What had started as a weak moment, aroused by shared danger and natural chemistry had only stoked Ian’s interest.
No, it was earlier than that. It was in the Namibian jail cell. Half conscious. drugged and beaten down in every way possible. And then she was there. Caring, helping. He remembered her eyes, choked with tears. He could never forget how it had felt to see her right then.
The truck in front of Ian stopped so suddenly that he had to slam on the brakes. Through the dust and in the darkness, he almost hadn’t seen the red brake lights of the other vehicle.
Julia slammed tight against her seatbelt. “What?”
In the backseat, Steve threw off his headphones and grabbed his M16. He was out of the Land Rover and crouched behind the truck in front of him before Ian even realized they were being shot at.
Ian reached back to grab his own weapon, then shouted for Julia to get down and out of the way while he joined Steve. As he jumped out of the car he almost lost his footing as a wave of vertigo passed over him. Then a sense of energy swelled up in him as the adrenaline kicked in.
The night sky lit up with small arms fire. The burr of a heavy machine gun answered. Tracer bullets tracked into the front of the caravan. The firing came from a berm to the north, set back from the road about a hundred yards and about two hundred yards further along the road, near as Ian could tell in the darkness. If the gun had only waited a few more seconds, the entire caravan would have come into its view. As it was, the front-most truck in Ikanbo’s caravan burned while the machine gun continued to riddle it with ordinance.
Three of Ikanbo’s Namibians joined Steve behind the truck and the CIA agent shouted instructions to move around the gun in a flanking maneuver. They crawled away on their bellies, with Steve at the lead.
Ian glanced back to see Julia flat on the ground behind the Land Rover. He gave her a stay down gesture, then ran to the next truck in the caravan. There were half a dozen men here and they ducked around and fired with their AK-47s whenever the machine gun fell silent.
He waited until they were shooting, then ran forward to the next truck. Here he found Charles Ikanbo with several more men. He was shouting orders, helping them unload ammunition from the back of the truck when he spotted Ian.
“Just one gun,” he said, “but I can’t match that firepower.”
“Some of the men, including my guy, went around to attack it from the rear.”
“Good,” Ikanbo said. “Do you know what kind of gun that is?”
“12.7 mm, I’d guess, either a Kord, or more likely, an older NSV, by the sounds of it. Hard to tell the difference without getting closer, which I’d prefer not to do, brother.”
There had been a lot of the older model Soviet NSV machine guns in Afghanistan and no doubt would be for generations, as tribal chiefs treated their prize weapons with the same love and care they would shower on a favorite son. It was a basic, but dependable gun.
“NSV, then,” Ikanbo said. “Namibian regular army. Damn it.
”
The firefight continued for several more minutes, then there came the rattle of the AK-47s and the slightly higher pitched sound of Steve’s smaller caliber M16. The machine gun went silent. A moment of shouting back and forth between the men who’d stormed the machine gun and the main forces, then it was clear the battle was over.
Ian followed Ikanbo to the machine gun entrenchment. Steve and the Namibians stood with flashlights over the body of the dead soldier, who slumped over his gun, now pointed skyward.
“We were saved by incompetence,” Ikanbo said. “Only lost one truck and nobody died.”
“Except this guy,” Ian said.
“That’s right. Except this unfortunate man.”
“Problem is, you can’t count on incompetence next time.”
“No, and what if there had been ten men, or twenty, instead of just one? Bet he radioed in already. They’ll know where we are.” Ikanbo turned to his men. “Get this gun and its ammo back to the truck. And find out who this man is. Cover him up.” He gave a shake of the head as if disgusted by the waste of it all. Ian could empathize.
“This is the problem,” Ikanbo added. “We’re undermanned and poorly armed. Man for man, any of my men is more than a match for Namibian regulars. But half my forces are scattered throughout the country and most of the rest will be pinned down in Windhoek or under arrest by now.”
“Surely not everybody in the army is in on the coup,” Ian said. “We could find a base, organize a resistance.”
“There’s an army base about a hundred kilometers from here,” Ikanbo said. “Of course, this fellow might have come from there. Probably did, in fact. I know another base, up near the border, with Angola—” He stopped and a thoughtful expression passed over his face.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about your old enemies.”
It took Ian a moment to realize what he was getting at, since his first thought had been the CIA, and specifically Sarah Redd. And then it came to him. “You mean Blackwing?”
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