'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  “Whatever you put in front of your sobriety, you will lose.”

  The counsel had come from a tough-talking, big-hearted Irish firefighter just before he died. Big Bill, his AA sponsor, had helped him to absorb that principle as gospel. He hadn’t had a drink or a hangover ever since. He was determined that the present wreckage of his life wouldn’t lead him to pick up again.

  For the next two days he thought about his future. He was alone, crippled, an emotional wreck, but he wasn’t helpless. Slowly the pieces came together. He had to find the cancer in the Pentagon, to expose it and cut it out. In the process:

  I will eradicate the Animal.

  TWO

  Tropic Haven Corporate Retreat, Swakopmund, Namibia

  It began six weeks before the trial. Maran was in Swakopmund, preparing for Operation Taxi Home, his Cabinda hostage recovery mission. He had planned it out exhaustively. Figuring it could be his swan song after serving for twenty years, he wanted it to be perfect. He read the briefing documents prepared by the home office. The yellow border meant, as the title sheet stipulated, it was TOP SECRET//EYES ONLY. He hoped that meant for his eyes only.

  He flipped to the back. The two last sheets were bordered in blue signifying less sensitive information: CONFIDENTIAL//SENSITIVE//NOFORN meaning those sheets contained “intelligence” that wasn’t to be shared with non-U.S. citizens. It gave a thin film of protection from enemies who might find in them a clue as to why they were being used in a secret briefing conducted by a U.S. military Special Ops officer like Maran.

  More bureaucratic ass-covering, he had thought. He recalled the ridiculous “Top Secret” UFO-Alien-Invasion Threat reports from years earlier.

  He read on:

  RAMPAGING REBELS TERRORIZE CABINDA

  Electronic Clarion & Call

  Africa on the Web

  KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO ‌—‌ The outlaw rebels known as the Progressive Front for the Liberation of the Exclave of Cabinda, or PFLEC, have left a trail of death and destruction in their rampage against the Angolan government. Villagers and police believe the PFLECs hold occult powers and use them to turn themselves into man-eating animals. Police are searching the area around Cabinda for PFLEC members accused of kidnapping, dismembering, and eating the vitals of 33 people. The fighting in the provinces between Kinshasa and Cabinda has raged since Angola tightened its grip on the exclave in the wake of political turmoil.

  US MERCENARIES STOP CABINDAN REBELS AT OIL FIELDS

  Luanda Daily Cyber-Mail

  AFRICA ON THE WEB

  CABINDA, ANGOLA ‌—‌ A large, heavily armed force of mercenaries, most of them former U.S. Special Operations Force fighters, has engaged with rebel forces that have repeatedly attacked offshore oil platforms. Global Coast Oil Corporation, which is closely connected to U.S. President Hope Valentine, owns and operates the oil installations. The area produces ten percent of America’s oil and accounts for most of Angola’s export revenues. To maintain control of the region, Angolan President Dr. Carlos Eduardo Bombe’s Angolan Army has joined with forces from the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, in a counter-attack. The conflict has also interrupted another critical regional export: diamonds. As a result, world diamond sales have fallen in half to $20 billion annually.

  THE NEXT DAY, MARAN gave his team a final briefing at a private retreat outside Swakopmund, Namibia, or “Swak.” He stood in front of a white screen dressed in combat fatigues. Briefings like this never ceased to remind him of the countless training sessions in the Army’s clipped PowerPoint presentation style that had been drilled into his head as a cadet at West Point just after graduating from South Boston High School.

  This pep talk was the culmination of two months’ training Lt. Col. Maran had put his team through, ex-soldiers from a variety of warring sub-Saharan African armies and insurgencies. They had been organized off-book by Long Bow, a private military company run from his unit headquarters at Fort Bragg.

  Maran realized his profound responsibility. Even though they were mercenaries, they were his mercenaries. He was committed to bringing them back. “Victoriae!” dictated that.

  For the previous two years he had won the officer’s combat proficiency and physical fitness award as best of his unit. At six-foot-four, 230 pounds, lean as rope, he looked the part. He paused briefly and lifted his arms. His muscled right arm showed the bottom half of a blue-and-green tattoo. It stood out against his mocha skin, visible under the rolled up sleeves of his multicam combat shirt, part of the Army’s BDUs, battle dress uniforms, replacing the Vietnam-era fatigues. He recocked the maroon beret, tilting it over his right eyebrow according to regulation. A flash insignia centered on the crown peak of the beret displayed the silver oak leaf of his rank over a gold shield with a red-white-blue diagonal banner crossing left to right. It was the standard beret flash of the U.S. Special Operations Command, SOCOM. He wanted his men to know they were backed by the best. If his physical air didn’t convince them, they would know, from the SOCOM flash, the worth the U.S. Army ascribed to them. Not that they knew anything about the mission. All they did know was that they carried a lot of artillery and they kicked off at first light.

  Maran pointed with a hand-held laser stick at a laptop projection, a diagram of the target area. The dot danced over the screen, clearly visible even in the stark light cast by rows of overhead fluorescent lights.

  The resort’s private conference room was large enough to hold his entire team. It was ultra-modern with beige fabrics covering the walls. Bright blue ergonomic swivel chairs surrounded a slate conference table with a laptop at each place. Diffused fluorescent lighting fixtures evenly lit the room. The windows were covered by solar-blocking, sound-absorbing drapes, adding to the room’s privacy. No one in the room could see outside and vice versa. In one corner stood a white marble statue of a couple embracing lovingly. The design team had equipped it with allowance for him to choose between an audio conference or a video teleconference, an option he decidedly declined. There would be no video teleconferencing at this briefing.

  Outside, a gardener sprinkled rows of lilies, ferns, and hostas. Palms with spiky trunks towered above.

  Maran controlled the presentation with a touch panel specially programmed to meet his requirements. With one touch of the panel the “In-Room Presentation” option allowed him to dim the lights, close the shades, turn on the projector, lower the projection screen, and display the contents of his laptop screen onto the projection screen. The room had twin 72-inch wall-mounted flat plasma screens that projected high-resolution satellite images.

  “Gentlemen. From heah on in you ahh Tahsk Force 9909,” Maran said in his Boston dialect. “The code-name of our operation is Taxi Home. We ahh totally in the black. We have the full fire support of the Special Operations Command, but‌—‌officially‌—‌we do not exist,” he smiled. “That means: No option other than victory. Death to the enemy!”

  The men cheered. He raised his hand to stop them.

  The laser pointer tracked slowly over an area just east of Cabinda and well west of the border of the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of miles southwest of Kinshasa, “Kin” as the locals call it.

  “We are going in over the offshore oil fields here,” he pointed. “We’re setting down in an LZ, Landing Zone, five miles from the rebel camp northwest of Cabinda, far enough away to make a covert entry. Right here,” he pointed, “a rebel force has raped and dismembered an entire village and kidnapped the young women and boys to work in brothels. That group includes innocents here to investigate the charges that not only have U.N. officers stood by and watched, but they have taken profits from the human trafficking.”

  Maran took it personally. His mother had recounted stories to him as a child of the vast slums and human exploitation that his country and its allies not only tolerated but profited from. This Cabinda atrocity was a microcosm. He knew that a year earlier, U.N. peacekeepers sat on the sidelines while a million Hutus and Tut
sis had raped and dismembered one another in their war in Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC. Four million more were forced out of their homes into ramshackle refugee camps scattered between Angola and the two Congos.

  Now this.

  According to Maran’s background briefing, the hostage-takers were from the Progressive Front for the Liberation of the Exclave of Cabinda, a/k/a PFLEC. They had called the U.S. Embassy in Cabinda demanding the removal of U.N. forces from the region and an official apology from the President of the United States. They charged that the CIA was working with the diamond cartel and the international oil companies to cash in on Angola’s raw materials on the backs of destitute Cabindans.

  Maran knew PFLEC and its Angolan leader. They were not terrorists. The CIA had supported them as allies of South Africa in the war there against Soviet-sponsored Communism in the eighties. Maran didn’t believe the terrorists were from PFLEC. To him it sounded more like Joseph Kony of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, operating in the Congo. Satellite photography showed the exact location of the outpost where the terrorists had taken the surviving hostages. They had to be rescued quickly before it was too late.

  THREE

  Somewhere East of Cabinda, Angola

  The next day Colonel Maran’s 24-man private army lifted off the Atlantic coast by Swakopmund in their Chinook. He bit down hard on his unlit Parodi as they inserted on their LZ in the forest east of Cabinda, in rebel-held Angolan territory.

  As the light dawned in a faint glow over the forested horizon, Maran stood on a hill at the foot of an acacia tree. He tightened the chinstrap on his cushioned Kevlar combat helmet and adjusted the ballistic goggles on the bridge of his nose. He tightened the cuffs of the tactical gloves. He flexed his exposed trigger finger. His radioman handed him a long-range SATCOM Manpack tactical radio. He lifted his arm to signal the advance.

  The red dot was blinking.

  Bragg, he thought.

  “Back,” Maran challenged.

  “Door,” the voice affirmed.

  That voice wasn’t General Luster’s, his commander, the man behind the mission. He knew Luster. He even knew the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart he wore along with a trophy salad of other charms earned in hellholes from Columbia, Panama, Beirut, Baghdad, and Kabul, not to mention a dozen places never to be mentioned. Uncle Sam prosecuted its counter-terrorism war secretly anywhere against anyone perceived by the powers in control to pose a threat to America’s national security. Although Maran’s renegade genes often rankled at the way those decisions were made, he was hell-bent on protecting American lives, in spite of the political or personal career fallout.

  This was about to become one of those times.

  “Bah Fly Six. Can’t read you. Say again. Over,” Maran responded. “Bar fly” for his small guerilla unit, “Six” for its Commander, him.

  Alone on the boulder atop the ridge, he listened to the wind whip through the Angolan eucalyptus. Redheaded Lovebirds flew into the waning light. They screeched from lairs deep in termite nests high in the trees.

  Angola.

  Land of startling beauty surrounded by horror: unattended disease, intentionally inflicted poverty, monumental corruption. Another of the world’s disturbing riddles. Five hundred years earlier, attracted by its natural beauty and its rich source of converts to Christ’s word, the Portuguese colonized it. Now, it was torn by the struggle against the basest of humankind’s instinct’s: to plunder, rape, and exploit. Maran had been thrown into the boiling kettle.

  Victoriae!

  The weather had gone his way. The air was clear, warm, dry. Visibility was with them. He leaned forward to watch. As he did, he thought how it was second nature, a natural outgrowth of his intense training to prevail in combat.

  Forward!

  It was natural, like picking up after yourself in preparation for company in your home. The prime point of his training had taught him to advance.

  Forward!

  Exercise superior training, courage, firepower‌—‌Victoriae!‌—‌achieve victory. Because he assimilated that training so deeply it became a part of him and explained why he had become a killing machine, the best-of-the-best of America’s elite fighting forces.

  His heavily armed assault force fanned out, down the incline. The voice on the radio crackled again.

  “This is Colonel Greg Dreyfuss at Counterterrorism, Office of Plans and Operations. Orders from Major General Randy Baltimore. I repeat, your orders are to stand down,” the voice said with a slight southern drawl. “Stand down. Advance to the exit LZ,” the radio crackled.

  “Advance? The LZ is to our rear,” Maran grumbled. “Where is General Luster?”

  Colonel Dreyfuss ignored the question. If Maran hadn’t been briefed that Baltimore had replaced Luster at SAWC, it was no skin off Dreyfuss’ teeth. He had his own agenda‌—‌to follow orders, and he always followed orders.

  “Repeat. You are not to engage. Your extraction back to Swakopmund is now 0500 hours. You will respond….”

  Maran clicked the radio’s off knob. If communications were interrupted, his extraction, SOP, would proceed as planned. He would get himself and his team out.

  “General Baltimore? Plans and Operations? You can go and fuck yourself. We won’t need choppers till we rescue those hostages. We are not going back to Swakopmund without them.”

  Maran whispered the thought to himself. It surprised him. Under normal conditions, he never used the “F” bomb. He realized it as a sign of how disturbing the order was to him; disobey a direct order under fire or betray his core principals. In this case, he only needed a moment to reflect. He couldn’t follow the order. It didn’t make sense on the ground. Not when they were locked-and-loaded, ready to move. To maximize the element of surprise they came with only twenty-four men, but they had enough firepower to level the province. He recalled the words of Hank Luster, then only a Colonel, when Maran first advanced from the 1st Special Forces Regiment/ Delta to SAWC, the ultra-secret Special Action Warfighter Command under Luster’s wing:

  “The Special Action Warfighter is trained for three things: Overcome all odds, accomplish your objective, kill the enemy.”

  Retreat wasn’t in their vocabulary. If he abandoned those innocent American women, there was no way he could live with himself, no matter how much their naïveté had been to blame. He knew just how brutal these rebels could be. He had seen the videos. The bodies of young schoolgirls left on an altar in a Catholic church, blood seeping from their vaginas, split open from repeated rapes and bayonet probings. Never before had he questioned an order. But he wasn’t the kind of soldier who was going to abandon American hostages in the middle of a rescue mission.

  Maran didn’t know Baltimore. But he was sure that he didn’t nor would not like him. Of course, there were few authority figures Maran did like. He was a classic renegade, independent to a fault, a trait with certain value in a counter-terrorist operative. Cocky as a randy rooster, he was nothing if not decisive.

  Maran spit out the Parodi and flipped his night-scope up on its helmet mount. He signaled to his forward advance to pick up the pace. Under their field packs, his soldiers wore T-shirts and torn jeans, the uniform of the enemy. He had just hung up on Baltimore’s deputy. Now he had received a second report from his own recon patrol; the hostages were alive at the encampment outside of Cabinda on the DRC border. It was a former headquarters for CIA-supported anti-Communist guerillas during the Cold War, thought to be defunct. The report indicated that the outpost was undefended. There was a scant force left to guard the hostages, too thin to repel an assault.

  He spoke through his headset.

  “This is it. What we’ve trained for. You’re great. Let’s do it!” He hurried down the hill to join them.

  HIDDEN FROM THE ASSAULT force, standing on a crest along the peak of the next hill, a white man watched Maran through a set of U.S. Army night-vision binoculars as he and his team moved down through the dark into the hollow. The man was dre
ssed in a stylish lightweight windbreaker jacket with suede shoulder shooting patches. The jut of his chin looked like a ski jump divided by a cleft at the very bottom that accented a knife-like face. The nose had been broken and the knotty eyebrows were those of a street fighter. Pockmarks marred his face beneath the wrinkles on his brow and his bald head.

  He looked up at a cloud moving over the sliver of moon. It lent a Hollywood aura to the scene that he thought was fitting. Nothing suited him more than drama appropriate to his finer moments. And this was about to be one. The excitement of that knowledge tingled throughout his significant bulk. The thrill called for a big shot of Ramiroff Everclear Ukrainian one-hundred-and-ninety proof grain alcohol and a hard-biting Zolotoye Runo Russian cigarette; but there would be occasion for that coming up.

  Spread out over the hill around him, a large number of young men and boys were arranged, ready to attack. They stood around and in a number of U.S. combat vehicles commandeered by grim-faced regular soldiers. The youngsters wore a wide variety of patch-work uniforms. The scowls on their faces, however, were maniacally serious. In addition to the regular troops, many of these “soldiers” were no more than eight to thirteen years old, thugs nevertheless.

  He raised his wrist to check the time on his Rolex. It was 18-carat gold, once owned by Saddam Hussein.

  His name was Grigol Rakhmonov Boyko. Most knew him as “the Animal of Angola.”

  Another man stood in the tall stand of bougainvillea on the overhang alongside Boyko, watching the scene below through a night-vision pocket scope, General Erik Vangaler, chief of security for Boyko’s corporate interests at Strategic Solutions International, known in the region as SSI.

  Boyko watched the man with disdain; noted the blue coal face, offset by electric-blue eyes; half black, half Afrikaner. His head sat on a neck ringed with coils of muscle, a stack of tires. It was wrapped by a set-to-strike cobra tattoo. At five-eight, Vangaler weighed about three hundred pounds, solid, bulked up, face hard-boiled into a menacing grimace by years of field action, hand-to-hand combat training, and weight lifting.