“They’ve got everything we don’t have—men, weapons, a secure base. They are professionals.”
“They’re contractors. They don’t expect to go to war.”
“They’re mercenaries,” Ikanbo corrected. “Under orders from their Chinese masters. If Li Hao is at the camp—that’s ChinaOne’s director of this project—then he could send them into combat.”
Ian didn’t like it. And not just because of the ugly way things had played out last time he was in the Ondjamba camp.
“You’d be putting yourself under control of a mercenary army,” Ian said. “Who’s to say they don’t help you defeat the rebels then decide to stick around and keep running things?”
“They couldn’t do that.”
“Of course they could. You think the Germans or the British or the South Africans ever needed more than a few thousand soldiers, plus some collaborators? And how do you think they got a toehold? They were invited by local leaders to solve some tribal conflict or other.”
“But this is the 21st Century. What about the international community?” Ikanbo asked. “Even the Americans would have something to say if these mercenaries occupied our country.”
“Didn’t you hear me? You invited them in. ‘Namibia is weak,’ people would say. Better to have Blackwing stabilize the situation—as no doubt some people in the Namibian government would demand. And then—”
“Enough. I’m convinced.”
“Better try our luck with the army.”
“No, I’ve got a better idea,” Ikanbo said. He gave Ian a sharp look, as if examining him for weaknesses. “You could take control of the Blackwing forces.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. I’ll convince Li to hire you as a consultant. He’ll like that, he won’t want Blackwing to take control of the country either. What he wants is stability and a way to pump all that oil back to China.”
“But I’m the guy who attacked his camp.”
“You’re South African by birth,” Ikanbo said. “That will make a difference. And he’ll forget about what happened earlier. These Chinese are nothing if not practical.”
“And what about the CIA connection?” Ian asked.
“You’re a rogue agent,” Ikanbo said. “You’re fighting off the coup. If you were to show up, demand control of the Blackwing forces, of course he would balk. But I’ll be leading you into Windhoek with my men. We’ll take control of the police, mount rescue operations and the like while you pin down the regular army. I will make it very clear to Li that my only goal is to restore the rightful government of Namibia. And the government will honor all contracts with the Chinese.”
Ian was quiet for a long moment, thinking. Ikanbo’s men put out the fire of the burning truck, transferred supplies, then pushed the truck off the road to get it out of the way. Julia sat with two men nearby, treating their injuries. Ikanbo stuck a cigar in his mouth and lit it. He offered one to Ian, who declined.
“Question is,” Ikanbo said between puffs, “can you do it?”
Ian had led troops into battle in Afghanistan. The Afghan forces arrayed in opposition to the Taliban were battle-hardened, ferocious fighters, but they lacked tactical training. Excellent at ambushes, terrible at mounting a sustained offensive. Men like Ian and Kendall had filled in the gap in leadership and sent the Taliban fleeing across the border into Pakistan.
“I can do it,” he said. “But I have one question of my own, first. Why do you trust me to lead these guys? How do you know I won’t do the same thing and try to take control of the country once I’ve defeated the rebels?”
“You came right past my men, I can’t believe how easily. So I know you’re good, and I know you’re not going to shoot me in the back, or you would have done it already.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m on your side though.”
“You were drugged,” Ikanbo said. “When my men captured you, you were battle shocked, with a concussion, but otherwise lucid. Someone, somehow, gave you something when you were in that cell. Even then, I thought you were a pawn. I don’t blame you for what happened.”
“I’m glad, but if I were you, I’d still be suspicious. Whatever you know, or think you know, the CIA could still be manipulating events.”
“No, I don’t think so. I think you came back to make things right. You’re an African, like me. You might also be an American, but you’re one of us, too. You know the kind of problems we face.”
“I do, but I’m not sure being an African is a good thing in this case,” Ian said. “Not from your perspective. There are plenty of white South Africans who think whites should still be running the continent.”
“I know that. Namibia has its own history of apartheid. But you’re not one of them. Your best friend, the one that was killed, he was a black man.”
“You know what I think?” Ian asked. “I think you’re trying to justify trusting me. I think you’re desperate and so you’re following a hunch.”
“Maybe I am.” His tone was defensive. “What choice do I have? I love this country and I’ll do whatever it takes to save it.”
Ian found himself inspired by Ikanbo. “Fine, I’ve tried everything to talk you out of it. Nothing else I can say, except that I’ll do it.”
“Good.” He dropped his cigar and stomped it out. “Now let’s get out of here. Yesterday, when we were closing in on your hiding place, one of my men spotted a plane circling overhead. One of your unmanned spy planes, I think.”
“A Predator drone,” Ian said. He looked immediately skyward, but of course he saw nothing but a vast, star-speckled expanse. Even in daytime, the Predator could loiter miles away, unseen and unheard.
If Ikanbo was right, it was a bad sign. Armed with a Hellfire missile, the Predator could attack their caravan from afar. More likely, it would fly at a distance, try to find out where they were going, what other forces they could marshal in defiance of the coup plotters.
“Your Chinese friend won’t be happy if we stumble into their camp already tracked and watched by American forces.”
“Then we’d better not tell him,” Ikanbo said.
Chapter Thirty-nine:
Anton Markov burned across the Atlantic Ocean as the sole passenger of an SR-91 Aurora, an aircraft that officially didn’t exist, but had replaced the SR-71 Blackbird, which no longer flew missions. The Aurora was capable of speeds up to Mach 5, but that speed would have required an additional refueling due to a higher burn rate, which he could not arrange.
Just under Mach 4 was the fastest he could manage, but that would be fast enough. It was the equivalent of a blitzkrieg behind enemy lines, to arrive before he could possibly be expected.
At such galloping speeds they outpaced the rotation of the earth itself and by the time he landed at Andrews Air Force Base, Markov could see the glow of the setting sun in the West.
He’d left his other agents to arrive by commercial flight tomorrow, under false passports. The other two men didn’t know what this was about, and didn’t ask. Nevertheless, when Anton called his friends at the NSA in Fort Meade, and at Langley, he put the two men on his surveillance list. He needed to be sure that they wouldn’t make ill-advised calls, emails, or text messages.
Markov had a company car waiting at the base, together with two more agents. They were older men who had served with him on missions in Beirut and Nairobi back in the old days. Both men had retired to desk jobs, as had Markov himself, but he knew he could trust them.
He made a phone call as soon as he reached the outskirts of Washington. His friend Dave Tilton at Langley picked up.
“Give me a location, Dave.”
“How about GPS coordinates?”
“That will do.”
Dave read the coordinates: “18S UJ 23480632.”
The number sounded familiar. “Is that Department of the Interior property?”
“Exactly. The subject is heading due east on foot, right by the Washington Monument. Travelling slowly, maybe talking to someone,
maybe on the phone.”
“Excellent,” Markov said. “Stay by the phone. I’ll be there in five minutes and I’ll need an update.”
He hung up and turned to the other two agents. One was driving, the other sat in the back seat.
“It’s time to brief you,” he said. “Let me start with a warning. This might be a lethal engagement.”
#
Sarah Redd thought she was being followed. The impression had been building for two days. More than once, while in a restaurant, or coming out of her offices on the Mall she would turn to see someone looking away, or ducking around the corner. Once, she had a pair of agents with her—younger men, faster than she was—and she sent them from the car first, but they returned shortly, not having seen anything. She wasn’t afraid, not of physical attack. If the stalker meant to kill her, he could have found a dozen opportunities while she was in public, exposed. What she wanted was to lure him into the open, figure out who was watching her, find out if she was part of an internal investigation.
And so, when she left the meeting with the president, she didn’t take a car, but walked across the Mall, alone. If she got to the Capitol Building without seeing anyone, she’d catch a taxi.
It was late afternoon, almost evening, and people tossed footballs or set up picnics. Hundreds of tourists strolled between the monuments or came out of the museums of the Smithsonian, as they closed.
The meeting at the White House had gone well, she thought. The President had given her authorization to call in SOCOM resources in support of CIA operations on the ground. What he had in mind, of course, was surveillance and search and rescue operations.
Sarah had other plans. She could justify the military action after the fact with carefully concocted evidence. Terrance Nolan could help. And Chang? He wouldn’t care, so long as she could give him some cool technological puzzle to solve or new toys to play with.
The Secretary of Defense was the problem. It had been an uneasy agreement, her needs for support slowly escalating until the entire Djibouti base was put on alert. But she had something on him. More than something. Everything.
She’d stopped the Secretary of Defense on the way out of the White House, explained what she needed, listened patiently to his best, angriest retort, then handed him a manila envelope with a photo of the portly Defense Secretary spread-eagled in leather with a half nude dominatrix kneeling between his handcuffed legs on a bed.
The Secretary shoved the photo back into the folder with shaking hands. He looked around the front lawn of the White House with a horrified expression, as if terrified of who else might be watching.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” Sarah said, “but I find myself wondering if your mistress is a transsexual. There’s something rather masculine about her jaw line…”
She laughed out loud at the memory, both of the ridiculous photo itself and of the Secretary of Defense’s reaction. As expected, that proved the end of negotiations. He capitulated on every one of Sarah’s demands.
Her phone started to ring. It was Chang. “Sarah Redd speaking.”
“I can’t get hold of Markov,” he said. “And I need your permission to try something.”
“What is it? Can it wait?”
“I found a pair of Predators at our base in the Caprivi Strip with sensor arrays that can broadcast implant commands. Those things have a long range, we can send them back and forth over likely routes in Namibia until we find the subject.”
Sarah groaned. “You are so far behind events; you’re just wasting my time. In the first place, the subject is dead.”
“He is?”
“Yes, Markov killed him and is bringing him back to the States even as we speak.”
“Hold on one second,” Chang said. The sound of typing on a keyboard came from the other end.
“I’m kind of busy.” A long pause. “Chang?”
“The thing is,” Chang said as he continued to type, “his implant made contact through an NSA computer yesterday. It was a passive active request packet.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“In this case, the implant was sending out an error message and as such didn’t require a full sequence initialization. If required software is present, the implant will initiate contact, send out the error code so we can debug. Nobody…”
She didn’t understand half of what he was talking about. “What kind of error message? That the subject was dead?”
“No, that doesn’t disable the implant. In this case, it gave a battery failure message. The implant itself can run on auxiliary power for a couple of weeks before we need to insert a new battery.”
“I thought the battery wasn’t supposed to fail.”
“It wasn’t, but if your man is dead, like you say, it could have been damaged or destroyed by whatever killed him. A bullet, or some other trauma.”
“Ah, I see.” Sarah felt relieved. For a moment she was growing worried that Markov had not given her the full account of events. She should have known better. Markov was a good soldier, did what he was told.
“The only question is why and how the implant established contact in the first place,” Chang said. “Someone must have been trying to read its data, but I didn’t think Markov had any reason to do that.”
“He didn’t.” The nervous feeling returned.
“Then it had to be Dr. Nolan.”
“I thought you locked her out of the system,” Sarah said.
“I did, but so what? This is the implant sending a message to us, not the other way around. Hold on just a second, I’m trying to hack NSA to find out more.”
“Can you do that?” she asked.
“I came from NSA, remember?”
“But why did the NSA have this contact?” she asked. “That’s something else that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I don’t know. I assumed that you or Markov were trying to hide something from me. I was going to dig into it when I had a few minutes.”
She waited a long, agonizing minute while Chang typed away on the other end of the line.
“Okay, I’ve got it. It was Markov. He sent a huge, compressed file to the NSA, received a data stream back. It’ll take a day or two to figure out what he saw unless I can find out which server it was routed through.”
“How could it have been Markov?” Sarah asked. “What on earth does he think he’s doing? He didn’t have the equipment or the technical know-how.”
Chang ignored the question. “Ooh, this is very interesting. Wow.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The data didn’t come from Ian Westhelle’s implant. It came from Kendall Rose.”
The news dropped her back on her heels. “How is that possible?”
“Which means,” Chang said, ignoring her question again, “that both Kendall’s implant and Ian’s implant were in the same room at the same time. Someone—had to be Dr. Nolan—accessed Kendall’s implant and meanwhile, Ian’s implant, in the room, sent out a distress call that found its way to me.”
“Again, I don’t understand. None of this is possible. You must have made a mistake somewhere along the line.”
“You remind me of this guy I used to work with,” Chang said. “Whenever his software was FUBAR, he would blame it on a bug in the compiler. You may not like the conclusion, but the data never lies.”
Sarah felt her blood pressure rising. “Have you ever heard of a software guru called the Almighty?”
“Heard of him?” There was awe in his voice. “Only worship the guy and crib from his code whenever I can. He disappeared a while ago. Maybe he retired?”
“He didn’t retire, Chang. We retired him, understand me? We had to put him somewhere where he wouldn’t be a danger to us or himself. He was one of the casualties of that unfortunate incident at the psychiatric ward in Utah. A bad death. Very ugly.”
Chang was silent on the other end.
“Now spell it out for me. Who is responsible for this?”
/>
When Chang spoke again, the arrogance had fallen away from his voice. He sounded meek, almost. “There’s only one way to put these things together. Dr. Nolan accessed Kendall’s implant, Markov gave her authorization to interpret the data. Ian is with them, or at least they’ve got his implant. I believe they’ve disabled Ian’s power supply, but I don’t believe he’s dead.”
Sarah found it hard to breathe. Markov. He’d doublecrossed her.
“So can I do it?” Chang asked. “Sarah, you there?”
“Do what?” she managed at last.
“Can I have those Predators? Try to find and take control of Ian Westhelle. I put in a few modifications while he was in the asylum, but it doesn’t seem to be working yet. If we want to try and use the implant, we’ve only a couple of weeks at most before the implant fails from lack of power.”
“In two weeks it will be over,” she said. “In two days it won’t matter. Yes, go ahead, stop him if you can. Call the Secretary of Defense, priority ‘urgent’ and give him the password, which is uhm…’leather codpiece’ and he’ll give you whatever you need.”
She hung up and stood in the Mall with the Capitol Building lit up in front of her. A group of young men, laughing, brushed past on her left. A woman with two dogs on leashes came from the other direction. All around swirled people, while the glow of lamplight gradually replaced the light of the failing sun.
“Sounds like a difficult conversation,” a voice said from behind her shoulder. “From what I overheard, you’re in serious trouble.”
She whirled to see Markov standing just feet away. He wore a look of smug satisfaction. There was another man, to her right.
“I knew someone was following me, I just never thought it was you.”
“No, I haven’t been following you. Just arrived from Africa. Found you just in time to hear the tail end of your conversation.”
“Well what do you want?” she asked. “Where is Ian Westhelle’s body?”
“Ian’s in Namibia. Alive, I hope you’ll forgive my white lie. Seems he wasn’t the traitor everyone made him out to be, so I thought the wisest course was to leave him alive.”
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