'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  He flashed a security pass encased in plastic.

  “Smarten up, if you don’t want the ditch,” he warned the soldier whose facial expression showed that he had heard about it, Boyko’s answer to those who got out of line. The point was too late for the victims. Friends and families, however, never missed the message. Pajak had seen one. Victims were staked out alive on the dirt floor of the trench, burial-grave deep. The ditch crawled with hordes of two-inch long, flesh-eating red army ants and blow flies. As many as 50,000 of the ants, wielding large, sharp mandibles, had marched in columns down from the surrounding fica trees into the ditch to devour the faces and naked bodies of the staked out victims one bite at a time. The flies joined the party, sucking up the ooze through their tube-like mouths and inserting maggot-producing eggs as soon as there was enough exposed dead flesh to attract them. The screaming of the victims ripped the surrounding area for as much as three days. When the feast was finished, nothing remained but a starkly-stripped skeleton for the nearby residents to witness.

  BOYKO AND PAJAK CONTINUED their drive across the Devanangan Bridge past a second checkpoint before arriving at Largro Pedro Benge, a main street in Cabinda proper. They pulled up to a new building, highlighted by a huge neon sign that flickered its come-on twenty-four-seven.

  GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!

  ALL SEX ALL TIME

  Boyko’s Grand Tropico Aphrodiziax night club stood out like a baroque Barcelona cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi in an apartheid-era South African tin shack township. Boyko operated a chain of similar bars in Luanda and Kinshasa. He relished the thought of Pajak’s prudish discomfort on learning that the teenaged pole-dancers were slaves to be sold to the highest bidder. The slave trade, started by the Portuguese in 1616, thrived from ports located along the Atlantic coast from Pointe Noire south through Cabinda and Luanda to Benguela. Born of collusion between European pillagers and local native tribal societies like the Imbangala and the Mbundu, the trafficking ensnared more than 100,000 prisoners before it was curtailed in 1880 by Cuba, the last country to recognize it as inherently inhuman.

  Half a century of civil war had revived the practice and left Angola and the DRC crippled; it now had the highest percentage of amputees in the world. One of those, a young man, stood at the bar balancing on one leg. Boyko ignored the plea in his face and the hand the young man held out for a donation as he led Pajak to a table at the foot of a small stage in the darkened cabaret. Outside, the town of Presqu’ile de Banana was quiet.

  “Ah, ha! You’re going to like the Grand Tropico Aphrodiziax, my friend.” Boyko’s laugh dripped with lust as he ran his hand over his stylishly short hair and turned to the bartender-hostess, a young woman with full, glossy lips. She sauntered over. It took Pajak a second to look away from her skimpy, scarlet belly shirt and the briefest satin shorts he’d ever seen.

  “I’m sure you’ve thought up somethin’ special,” he said.

  “The show starts in half an hour. My girls have prepared an act that would embarrass a Bangkok ping-pong showgirl on Patpong Road,” the hostess promised.

  Leering at naked kids on a stage wasn’t Pajak’s idea of entertainment. Sleaze had long since lost its appeal. However, his personal tastes took a back seat to his financial goals. His business required tolerance. Humoring clients, even perverted ones, was part of the game. As a young man, hustling the back streets and alleys of Augusta, Georgia, for the local mob, he had had his fill. The beatings he took in the few fights he lost paled in comparison to the STDs, which still haunted him every time he urinated. His escape from a life of lowbrow crime came when a judge gave him one alternative to avoid prison time and he took it. He enlisted in the Army and made it, with the Army’s backing, through college and officer’s candidate school before he started on his current career.

  In the background, a state-of-the-art jukebox boomed marimba, accented by bongos. Boyko called for drinks. A topless waitress whisked a bottle of Bell’s single malt Scotch whiskey to the table.

  “What’s your competition up to?” Pajak asked.

  “Dos Sampas. PFLEC? Hah,” Boyko guffawed. “Competition? No. Accommodation. Yes. Now he’s gone back to war. Can’t fuck with me. We have an open field. He’ll become a client, if anything, before long. Irony is rich isn’t it?”

  “Bombe?”

  “Bombe is getting rich beyond his limited imagination filling the private banks with his booty. Couldn’t be happier. And your special ops guys are still the best. New people you sent in are training four new platoons of Ninjas and their captains. Thanks to your Disposal Service Representative friend at DRAMS, we have no trouble getting all the Defense Department’s Form 1348s and other required certification documentation we need to claim the equipment as demilitarized and move it out of DOD’s Out-of-Country Distribution Depot in Bahrain, still as deadly-effective as the day it rolled out of the arsenal factory.”

  “You’ve got an amazing operation there. How do you do it?”

  “They’re so wrapped up in their underwear about getting money back on their used equipment, one hand never knows what the other is doing, and they keep transferring commanders,” Pajak explained.

  He was intimately familiar with the DLA Disposition Services at the Defense Logistics Agency, still referred to by seasoned soldiers as the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service or DRAMS, its old name. The agency is charged with selling off surplus arms and equipment, “to support the Warfighter and protect the public by providing worldwide disposal management solutions,” according to its mission statement. In the interest of efficiency, Disposal Service Representative sends its purchased surplus direct to its buyer.

  “We’re serving Bombe all the armament he needs to keep dos Sampas and PFLEC under control. We give Bombe guns; he lets us ship diamonds through Angola, no tariffs, no questions.”

  “And the Pentagon’s Long Bow protects Global Coast’s oil fields to keep the oil flowing so Bombe has cash for guns and for your charity, Hum-Assist International,” Pajak commented, “The billions left over go right into Bombe’s private overseas bank accounts.”

  “Ah, the world,” Pajak continued. “One hand washing the other. By the way, where did Slang get that nickname?”

  “The name came with the package. Total weirdo. The South African Defense Force gave it to him after he proved himself by prying Intel from prisoners. Used ‘African devil magic’ on them, ‘special techniques.’ They used him for their high-value prisoners.”

  “Wild.”

  Before joining the apartheid South African Defense Force’s black Buffalo Soldiers, the notorious 32 Battalion, Vangaler practiced Voodoo mind control techniques selling instant seduction seminars in Johannesburg: “How to pick up and bed down foxy ladies in three lay-easy lessons.” Like Boyko himself, he spoke Afrikaans. Vangaler’s combat record with the SADF’s Civil Cooperation Bureau had sold Boyko on him. He was perfect to instill the terror that Boyko needed to control the region. When Boyko hired him he just assumed Vangaler’s father had been one of those Afrikaners who traveled to Uganda to fight and cash in on the civil war there. That explained the man’s strange background, a seeming aberration but actually the norm on that anguished continent.

  “When I found Slang Vangaler, he was no more than a savage. With the CCB, he was famous for beating prisoners with a lead-filled glove into confessing to crimes they never committed. If that didn’t work, he castrated the men and genitally mutilated the women into giving in. Picked up the infibulations technique from his mother, who came from Sierra Leone with the Mende tribe.”

  “Wonderful! CCB! Civil Cooperation Bureau. Specialists in atrocities committed in the name of law and order. I have never seen a group of assassins so delicately named. I see what you find so valuable in him.”

  “We adapted his experience to our own psy-ops. Great control tool.”

  “Effective.”

  “Slang was exposed to cannibals when he was still a boy. The croc hoodies are his idea. He brews a mu
ti potion his Ninjas believe make them immune to bullets, anything. Set-ups for slaughter.”

  “How do you keep him under control?”

  “You can’t control a cannibal. Just feed him enough to keep him happy and stocked in fresh cunt. Besides, he thinks that if he plays ball and does his job, he’ll be cut into the main event.”

  “Ah, Plan A,” Pajak observed. “All goes well with our deal?”

  “The oil fields are pumping. The Reverend Ishmael Malik Johnson keeps the spigot on, shooting cash to his political ivory tower cronies in Washington.”

  “To us,” Boyko toasted.

  Pajak grinned. “Well, yah!” He emphasized.”

  “And to Cabinda,” Boyko grinned.

  “Well, yah!” Pajak said, grinning back.

  “We should have just killed all the hostages. The survivors should have died with the rest and we wouldn’t have had Maran on our backs. That idiot al-Amriki!”

  “Fuck al-Amriki. It’s time to take out Maran. Our boy at the New York Diamond Dealers Club is setting it up. Vangaler has to get to Boston, now.”

  “That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. He’s on the way. Back to business. The last batch is ready to be delivered to Antwerp. The customs agent at the Satellite d’Aviatione terminal for private jets works for us. Four full trunks of perfect one- to four-carat stones,” Boyko said.

  “Translate.”

  “Four hundred thirty-four pounds of diamonds. Twenty-three hundred carats to the pound. Do the math.”

  Pajak laughed. “Ten thousand carats. Congratulations.” His voice had passion for the first time.

  “That’s only half the story: just the cut stones.”

  He told Pajak about the total production of roughs that he was dumping on the market.

  “This time we have a babysitter, Alberta Chiang, our research chief. She’s amazing. Knows everything there is to know about diamonds and diamond production. There is too much at stake to leave it to Slang.”

  “Where’d you find her?”

  “Recruited her from a Chinese friend from my old days in Cabinda with the Russians. A rare find.”

  “OK, great. There’s more. A problem. Treasury is climbing all over this. They’ve linked the diamond market crash to the recession, stock, bond, commodities prices. We have to hustle if we’re going to cash out. Won’t be long, every banking spook in the world will be on the case.”

  “We’ll snap this batch out on the world market before they know what hit them. By the time they’re onto it, the war will be over.”

  “We can’t take chances,” Pajak warned.

  “I don’t know how Maran survived Cabinda. He won’t get a repeat,” Boyko assured Pajak.

  “We don’t know how far he’s gotten. We’re grabbing a lot of e-mail traffic from an office he set up to some places we don’t want him to be,” Pajak said.

  “What the fuck is he up to?” Boyko asked.

  “Don’t know, yet. No good. He’s running some kind of bogus private eye outfit up in Boston. Calls it BANG! We figure it’s just a cover for him to use to come at us. We have to stop him.”

  A Ninja officer walked over to their table looking like an advertisement for a black Rambo. Boyko drained the stemmed whiskey sour glass on the table in front of him and barked an order. “I want two men on the balcony and the rest in the corners. Cover the doors.”

  He turned back to Pajak.

  “You were saying?”

  “I don’t need the details. While we’re here we should encipher all your outgoing communications.”

  “We’re encoding our messages.”

  “A breakable cipher is no cipher,” Pajak answered. “Unless we take countermeasures, they’re bound to lock onto us. I brought you a little insurance. Take this flash drive. Use it. Echelon Max, beyond all known recipes for cryptanalysis. This is so powerful that if all 350 million computers in the world were put to work on a single Ech-Max message, it would take twenty-five million times the age of the sun to break it.”

  He put the pen-sized data storage device on the table.

  “Where’d you get it?” Boyko asked.

  “How’s the babysitter?”

  “Ah, the lovely Amber Chu!” Boyko answered. “Magnificent. She’ll move the merchandise through Antwerp. The market will never know what hit it.”

  “Do I get to meet her?” The news of her beauty had made the rounds.

  “Later. She’s busy right now,” Boyko said.

  Pajak’s head turned. The stage curtains flew open. Three young girls, early teenagers dressed like students in Catholic high school uniforms, flanked by two professional strippers dressed as nuns, their hands folded in front of their eyes as if in prayer. They stood on stage and began to chant a Portuguese church hymn.

  Suddenly, a rock or something hard came flying into the club. It came from the front door.

  “Grenade!” Pajak yelled.

  It was clear he was familiar with them.

  An explosion slammed the two men to the floor. Tables and chairs rocketed across the room. The girls and the two women shrieked. Dozens of patrons screamed, ripped by the ferocious blast, skin scorched by the wave of fire. White-hot shards of steel coil from the blast of the grenade shot through the room. Blood, flesh, and bone, splattered. Debris scattered everywhere. The drapes and tablecloths burst into flames. Smoke filled the room.

  Luck was with Boyko and Pajak. The grenade had bounced just in front of the bar, far from their table. Blood trickled from Pajak’s head. They scrambled under the table for protection.

  The back door flew open. Three soldiers crashed into the club, firing automatic weapons opened at full throttle. Bullets smashed bottles; the bar exploded into a fountain of alcohol, windows, bottles, and shattered into another shower of slivers.

  “PFLEC! Get them motherfuckers!” Boyko screamed from behind his barricade.

  His command ignited an instant reaction from his security guards, now joined by several other Ninjas. Reinforcements appeared. Their fire was wild, ineffective; they blasted in wide arcs on full automatic. Someone threw a magnesium grenade, briefly blinding the PFLEC attackers.

  “Get the code!” one of them screamed.

  Pajak grabbed an overturned, bloodstained chair and pulled himself to one knee. Still off balance, he tried to swivel to the attackers. The table pinned his leg just enough to interrupt his move. Boyko lay face down next to him. Neither saw the PFLEC who grabbed the flash pen still on the table and ran out the rear door.

  NINETEEN

  Mbuji-Mayi, DRC

  As Chief of R&D for Boyko’s diamond mining processes, Alberta Chiang had Vangaler under her thumb, after a fashion. At almost seven feet, she towered over his short, barrel-shaped body and was a match for not only his outsized ego but also for his animal libido. She wore a flowered white silk cheongsam. It clung to every crevice of her body. Her legs flashed under the slit that ran up the side. A white stripe slashed down the middle of her long, black hair. As an outside consultant to Boyko in the technology of diamond research, she was responsible for ensuring the mine’s production and quality control. Curiously, she played a dual role in the diamond business. Boyko wasn’t her sole employer. She also worked in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a hundred miles west of Boston, for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in partnership with General Diamond Corporation there.

  The day after he railed on the Arabs, Vangaler joined her back at Boyko’s jungle headquarters, a stately French Riviera-style palace he called Villa del Mar. It sat on the crest of a hill at the edge of his mining compound, MecaMines, surrounded by fenced-in security, just outside of Mbuji-Mayi. Located on the only hill, Boyko’s palace dominated the area. It was just one of many estates he owned, in addition to his place in Presqu’ile de Banana, in luxury resorts like Cap d’Antibes, Bellagio, and the Seychelles.

  Vangaler and Chiang were two of a kind. Neither was interested in formalities. So, he pulled back the cone-shaped net canopy, arranged the pi
llow on the ivory silk bedspread that covered the circular bed that floated from the ceiling a foot off the floor. He pulled a glass-topped coffee table over beside the bed and set out a half-dozen lines of 85% pure cocaine cut with caffeine.

  “Have some nose candy,” he ordered. They had a strange relationship. He needed her to keep Boyko at bay; she needed him for the same reason. Though she had no interest in drugs, she was highly adaptable to whatever it took to achieve her ends. She followed him and took three blasts. He smiled down on her, petting her head, as close as he ever came to human feeling.

  “Mmmmh,” she murmured, looking up at him from her job. “It won’t be long now.”

  TWENTY

  Boston

  Soft sheets of rain floated down from a dull sky that shadowed Tremont Street, adding to the grayness over the Revolutionary War era graves in the Granary Burial Ground by Boston Common, the site shared now by Paul Revere, John Hancock, and the five American victims of the Boston Massacre. There was an early chill in the summer air, foreshadowing the frost due in the early fall. Down Tremont Street from the burial ground, Maran climbed the old iron-clad cement steps leading up from the subway. He stepped across Tremont and walked several doors to the right of the McDonald’s on the corner just down Boylston Street from what was left of Boston’s strip clubs and peep shows.

  Mantville’s store was located on the third floor of the Jewelry Mart, an Empire-style stone edifice, sooty with age. As he entered Maran noted what must have been fashionable décor sixty years earlier. Faded fabric in rococo print draped windows too dirty to see through above an Art Nouveaux maple counter. The glass display case showed a scant supply of what looked, even to Maran’s unschooled eye, to be middle-of-the road watches and jewelry.

  Harold Mantville wore a trim black Salvadore Dali mustache. Razor-cut wavy black hair tipped in silver crowned the man’s head.

  It takes all kinds, Maran thought.

  “Mr. Mantville, Rodney Davis,” Maran said. Handing the jeweler one of the bogus business cards Levine had given him along with three $10,000 custom packs of Amex Single-Signer Travelers Checks, a passport, and a Platinum credit card.