Regaining its rightful path, the plane pulled to a stop just opposite their perch, only sixty or so feet from their position.
“They’re friendlies, of course,” Abby said with a knowing glance at the resident skeptic.
“We’re friends!” came a shout from down below. A white man was hanging from the window, waving a large bush hat their way. “Please, come with me! Hurry!”
The pair nearly skidded down the Eredo Rampart on the backs of their heels.
At the bottom, Dylan threw open the floatplane’s side door, only to see its closest seat occupied.
“I thought my friends might need a ride this morning!” a strong, familiar voice said.
“Colonel Shawkey!” shouted Abby.
And if the man had not been restrained in a seat high above them, Abigail might have hugged her old protector to near asphyxiation.
CHAPTER
_ 50
SKIES ABOVE COASTAL NIGERIA
“Pleased to meetcha!” the pilot had loudly exclaimed over the clamor of his plane’s engine, while extending a large hand into each of their astonished faces in turn. “Valdo Bittner!”
Then, in the ensuing minutes, Valdo Bittner proved again what a gifted pilot he was. Even as he continued to converse in a loud voice and swift, exaggerated gestures of both hands—hands that Abby would have preferred were gripped around the plane’s controls—he retraced his flight’s impossible landing in reverse, racing along the moat with no additional wingtip scrapes and putting to use his plane’s incredibly short takeoff distance.
Their departure was unlike any flight its passengers had ever taken, for the steep ascent lasted only a split second. Their cruising altitude would remain fixed at somewhere around seventy-five feet, a height so perilously close to the jungle canopy that at times Dylan was sure the plane’s floats were trimming leaves while they buzzed along.
“Where did you learn to fly like this?” Dylan asked.
“A school in Texas called LeTourneau,” Valdo replied, grinning. “They have a whole program just for learning to land and take off in areas like this. It’s called missionary aviation. These days, it’s almost the last place left to have this much fun flying.”
“I’ve never seen a landing like that one,” Dylan said. “But if you hadn’t nailed it, I think we’d be dead by now.”
“Praise Gawd!” the pilot exclaimed again and again as he explained how persistently Colonel Shawkey had urged him to fly into a region not served by missionary aviation—all in the vain hope that they might rescue three people whom all of Nigeria could not locate.
Fortunately, the floatplane was accustomed to flying just above treetop level, so it avoided all radar detection as it took off and headed east and out of sight.
And not a moment too soon. No more than eight minutes after it disappeared over the horizon, a V-shaped formation of five Nigerian military helicopters came barreling down from the west.
The army choppers hovered so long over the point of the previous night’s firefight that by the time they had delivered a half dozen paratroopers along drop lines to the ridge of the Eredo Rampart, their blades had blown away most of the evidence of what had taken place. All except for the body of the American “military consultant,” a bizarre contraption beside a fresh grave, and a strangely bloodstained rock not far from his body.
Once again, the mystery of Abigail Sherman’s disappearance had confounded local authorities.
By that evening, the President of the United States had graciously offered whatever assistance his nation’s assets might offer the investigation.
Eager to remove the frustrating media magnet from over his country’s life, the Nigerian Prime Minister wearily accepted the very next morning.
Thankfully, Pilot Valdo Bittner was also a man deeply in tune with God, so Colonel Shawkey had not felt forced into considering his last resort: veiled threats of bureaucratic reprisal. A small voice with whom Bittner was quite familiar had impressed on him that no matter how unorthodox the mission, this was a flight he would regret passing up.
And so, even while the combined electronic surveillance capability of Africa’s largest nation registered zero airborne activity in the sector over Abigail Sherman’s escape zone, the plane continued a harrowing and visually engrossing journey across the surface of its coastal rain forest.
This aircraft used for missionary aviation was among the most remarkably nimble and expertly designed in the world. Indeed, few other planes could have carried off such an unlikely entry and exit. Colonel Shawkey had been fortunate to find Reverend Bittner along the Cameroon border, as missions like his usually serve in nations with large and remote indigenous populations. But a certain group of sisters, serving him in a covert advisory capacity, had been keenly aware of Bittner’s existence.
Beyond that, their predictions of where to find the threesome had, despite their lack of external documentation, proven eerily accurate.
MALIBU, CALIFORNIA, THE COLONY
The Head Elder tensed and turned slowly toward the disembodied heads of the old men surrounding him. Oversized and glowing with the vividness of a million pixels, the flat screens bearing their images were so large and numerous that they nearly eclipsed the room’s vast Pacific view.
“Thank you for waiting, gentlemen. St. Petersburg has now joined us. Welcome, my Brother. My fellow Elders, I have troubling news. Shadow Leader has failed in his Nigeria mission. In the process, he contributed his soul to the cause. I will soon name a new Shadow Leader, but before we can spare the time for such a transition, we must address the situation at hand. The first thing we’re doing is gathering a longtime nuisance back under our control. You’ll see it when it happens: just watch your screens. It will provide the young woman a powerful incentive to give herself up.”
“And what if she doesn’t?” growled New York.
“Our brother in Amsterdam and I,” he said while nodding to acknowledge the left-most screen, “issued an Annihilation order even before word reached me of his fate. Now the order will be enhanced. When we receive word of the girl’s next destination, as we will quite soon, I’m certain, we make the order location-specific. Every one of our numbers, fully initiated or not, will be contacted immediately and ordered to converge as soon as possible on her location. Fifty warriors, on the scene with a maximum twelve-hour window. A fight to the death. As we’ve aptly named it—Annihilation.”
“How do the higher ones look upon this crisis?” asked New York.
“I won’t lie to you; they’re concerned,” the Head Elder replied. “I wouldn’t take this extraordinary step if major stakes were not at play. But if we succeed here, we could still win a major victory against our enemies.”
“What can we do to help, Brother?” asked St. Petersburg in his thick Russian accent.
“Well, actually, I’m going to ask you to do something I’ve never asked of you before. When that word comes, I want you to come as well. This is our fate on the line, and your presence could help turn the tide. We will need not only power and muscle, but wisdom and cunning. When the call comes, I will be expecting that from every one of you.”
PORT HARCOURT, NIGERIA
It was almost midday when an unannounced and largely overlooked airplane executed a nonscheduled water landing on Bonny River just east of the busy harbor of Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s fourth largest city.
In this industrial section of Port Harcourt, its polluted horizon dotted by the smoke of towering oil flares to the south, unscheduled aircraft landings usually signaled only one thing. Or perhaps two things—the arrival of another heroin shipment from South America on its way to Europe, or of heroin on its way to North America from the poppy fields of the Far East.
In fact, drug flights were a market second only to Nigeria’s massive oil industry centered in Port Harcourt. Officially the world’s fourth largest petroleum producer—and unofficially higher still if one chose to factor in the oil siphoned off by its staggering corruption—Nigeri
a exported all of its liquid gold from the oilfields of the nearby Niger Delta through the pipes of Port Harcourt.
The convergence of both bustling industries is why nearby dockworkers studiously looked away when the airplane pulled up alongside an empty quay and unloaded three passengers, a tall Nigerian man and two whites, and when the new arrivals just as quickly climbed into a large army van, which then sped off.
The van swiftly merged onto busy Aba Expressway and several miles later turned swiftly on Tombia Road, adjacent to the city’s venerable Polo Club. Without even a touch of the brakes, the van swerved behind the white bulk of Le Meredien Hotel, admired by those in-the-know as the finest hotel in West Africa, and ducked into a basement-level entrance.
The doors were open before the van had stopped moving. No hotel personnel were in sight—the colonel and two Nigerian adjutants hopped out to help their slow-walking white passengers out of the vehicle and toward a nearly hidden service door.
For Abby, the sight of a polished marble hallway under elegantly recessed electric lights, after days of living in the jungle, proved overwhelming. She gasped and smiled, for she felt as if she had almost forgotten such places even existed. Her reaction was much the same when they reached a service elevator as its doors shut of their own accord and the motors whooshed them upward.
Colonel Shawkey had truly thought of everything. When the doors dinged and slid open, the two aides released her arm and quickly darted outside to make sure the hallway was unoccupied. Nodding the go-ahead, they resumed their places and escorted Abby to a door that opened into a luxury suite, which tore a sigh of relief from her bloodstained lips.
The rest of the day Abby spent in blissful recuperation. While Dylan conferred privately with the colonel in the sitting area, Abby stepped into the suite’s spacious, white-tiled bathroom and bathed for nearly an hour. By the time she had dried off and retired to a king-sized bed nearby, a privately hired female doctor had arrived, carrying an IV saline kit in an oversized shopping bag.
Soon after that came food—so much gourmet room-service fare that it took two porters to wheel in the trays. Abby had been so preoccupied with the preservation of life and limb that she’d forgotten how little and how infrequently she and her friends had eaten over the last several days. Wheeling in an IV-stand improvised from a coat hanger and a rolling lamp stand, she walked in and moaned at the mere sight of it all.
The doctor had helped her sit down and was preparing to make her exit when Dylan, who had yet to even change out of his tattered and spotted clothing, held up his hand.
“Doctor, I wonder if you could perhaps help me as well.”
“Of course,” said the doctor, eyeing his obviously injured side.
“Oh, it’s not that,” he said. “Well, at least for the moment. For right now, I wonder if you have a scalpel on you.”
Looking him over curiously, the doctor reached into her shopping bag and produced the same. When Dylan stood and peeled the remnant of his shirt from the dried blood on his wounded side, she shook her head. “You do not need a scalpel for that, sir. I will gladly disinfect and perhaps suture, if it is needed.”
“It’s not the wound,” Dylan said. “Please, come closer.”
She approached him for a better look.
“Do you see the small teardrop tattooed there, just beside the wound?”
She nodded yes.
“I need you to make an incision right over it, exactly one half inch deep.”
She stared at him as if he was crazy.
“Please. It’s very important. I will pay a bonus, if you like.”
“Could you tell me what we are doing?”
“Let’s just say we’re retrieving a buried artifact.”
CHAPTER
_ 51
The Nigerian doctor shrugged, sat down beside Dylan, and took out some alcohol swabs. After cleaning the area thoroughly, she brought her scalpel blade against the skin.
“Sir, you do know this is going to hurt quite badly?”
“I was here when the thing was inserted,” he replied. “Unfortunately, I remember it well.”
“Would you like some rum?” asked Colonel Shawkey from a corner of the hotel suite. Dylan declined. And so the doctor slowly sank the blade into the area where most men his age would have located their “love handles.” Dylan had none, although the blade did not penetrate muscle.
“Please, palpate the area,” he asked in a pained whisper when the incision was complete. With a grimace the doctor reached in and closed her fingers around first one, then two round objects. Each one she dropped carefully onto the room-service tablecloth. Then she swabbed the area again, sutured the incision, and tightly wrapped a bandage over everything.
No one spoke as Dylan carefully picked up the two round objects, which seemed smeared with some kind of wax or oil. He rinsed them in hot water from the waiting tea service, finally holding them up to the room’s light for all to get a better look. The objects glinted before their eyes, bright and dazzling. Abby gasped.
Diamonds! Big ones—easily twice the size of the huge rock her father had given Teresa.
“This is one of the oldest tricks in the game,” Dylan explained. “A last-resort cash infusion—for emergencies exactly like this, when a secret operative finds himself hard pressed to get cash from the usual sources.”
“Oh,” sighed Abby in mock disappointment. “And here I thought you were about to give me a whale of a belated birthday present.”
“Colonel Shawkey,” Dylan said, ignoring her, his eyes still fixed on the jewels, “I have trusted you with my life. Therefore, as I have no other currency with which to leave this country, let alone reimburse you for this room, I trust you to fetch the highest price for these beauties on the local market. I know we’re not in Sierra Leone, but I imagine there is still a good trade in stones of this value.”
“Indeed there is,” said the colonel, who seemed to avoid looking at the jewels himself.
“I know in New York or London, they would fetch around seventy-five thousand dollars apiece.”
“They will not command that around here, sadly,” said the colonel. “However, I can easily get you half as much in American dollars.”
“That will be wonderful, my friend, thank you.” Dylan seemed finally able to relax. He allowed a deep breath to escape him. “And now, Doctor, would you be so kind as to bandage up this other little scrape of mine?”
Dylan was fully clean, both his wounds and his body, when the colonel returned later—bearing not only a sizable brick of familiar green currency, but a Polaroid camera. One of the aides, who had hovered against a wall the whole time, photographed them both and disappeared with the documents.
“You are now as famous and sought after as Princess Diana once was,” said the colonel. “Your name and likeness are on every television. Look . . .” He walked over and switched on a set. Without even changing it, he pointed with a smile, for right there loomed the faces of Abby, Sister Okoye, and a poorly drawn sketch of Dylan.
“Despite rumors of a recent close call near the Nigerian coast,” droned a tired female voice, “the three remain at large and, much to the world’s dismay, unaccounted for.”
The next afternoon, two military vans pulled up alongside the terminal entrances to Virgin Airlines at the Port Harcourt Airport forty miles north of town. Soldiers emerging from both carried machine guns as they marched across the crowded sidewalk.
Twenty seconds later a gleaming white sedan pulled between the vans and stopped with a sudden chirp of brakes. The car disgorged three passengers: one tall African man in a military uniform, one slender and elegant man with hair whose gray color matched the pinstripes on his impeccable suit, and one woman in a full-length Muslim covering from head to toe.
The well-turned-out man and his cloaked companion turned and, quite surprisingly to the few bystanders who risked a look, embraced the Nigerian man with great fervor. The man, despite his air of panache, seemed to be teary-eyed
when he released them. The woman, who impulsively tore down her veil in the process, embraced him far longer, and was clearly in tears when they finally separated.
The couple checked in their obviously light luggage at the curb, then shook hands with the Nigerian officer, also with great emotion, and strode resolutely into the terminal.
At the Virgin counter, Dr. Frederick Eggleston and his striking wife, Suleima, showed Nigerian passports, recently renewed, and Nigerian drivers’ licenses indicating an address in a Port Harcourt executive compound. Their proffers aroused no suspicion, for sophisticated foreigners or employees of foreign companies, many escorting foreign-born wives, were the lifeblood of the Port Harcourt to London route.
They boarded the flight without incident.
One hour later, the jet landed at Lagos. Despite intense surveillance throughout the airport for the two Americans, Dr. and Mrs. Eggleston were effortlessly shuttled to the Virgin Nigeria international lounge.
Granted, a closely observant Muslim might have noticed with some dismay that Dr. Eggleston’s wife did not walk behind him, as a fundamentalist Islamic woman would. Had that person followed the pair to the privacy of their expansive first-class booth aboard the jet, he or she might have also been surprised to see her sit down and sip eagerly from the complimentary glass of champagne. Sighing in obvious relief, she seemed unashamed in the least to remove her headpiece, in the privacy of the bulkhead window seat, and reveal a closely shorn head of bright auburn hair. Her face bore not a trace of either Arabic or African ethnicity.
A very recent, and perhaps recalcitrant, convert to the faith.
CHAPTER
_ 52
LONDON, HEATHROW AIRPORT
Nine hours later, the Boeing 747 landed at Heathrow, marking the terminus of the pair’s return to the West. The oddly matched couple silently parted in the terminal’s main corridor and, carry-on satchels in hand, quickly made their way to the genders’ respective rest rooms.
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