'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  Is Amber Chu alive?

  Just down the street from the corner of Boulevard Du 30 Juin and Boyko’s offices, The Hotel Inter-Global Kinshasa was as safe as a hotel in a war zone could be. Maran looked in on one of the bars after he checked in. He was amazed to see it filled with Americans, Belgians, French, Arabs, Dutchmen; a motley band of racketeers there to leech off the illicit diamond trade. His room on the 18th floor overlooked the swimming pools where many of the guests were sprawled out under the sun or under umbrellas in lounge chairs. They sipped with sincere gentility on fruity, iced cocktails in the 100-degree heat. He could not wait to lie down on a real bed, fall into a deep sleep. First, he told the hospitality manager to hold any messages for him. He expected to hear from Tracha.

  The knock on his door a half-hour later jerked him to full alert.

  “Hi, did I wake you? Sorry,” the patrician woman in the doorway said. “I’m Deborrah Anderssen from the U.S. embassy. I used my official identification to get your room number.” She was tall, neatly dressed in a conservative light blue dress, face lightly touched with make-up.

  What? How? Washington here!

  He had heard her name, a friend of FINCEN’s Jack Connell. He must have sent her to deliver a message. He and Martin were the only ones who knew how to reach him.

  How can I trust her?

  He feared she was no more than an agent sent by lobbying groups from the financial sector, ones that heaped cash on the politicians from both parties. They could have him disappear in a heartbeat if they thought it would eliminate any threat to their bottom line.

  Anderssen was stationed with the embassy in Kinshasa, but she actually worked for the U.S. Information Agency, a center that promoted American culture, including political doctrine. Whether the work of the Information Agency was propaganda would be a polemic question, depending, as with so many other issues in the U.S. today, on one’s political bent. Nevertheless, the Agency was responsible for song-and-dance acts as well as for the distribution of information that outlined “the way things are and the way things should be.”

  Now the White House was at his door.

  Or what? Who?

  Logic told him he could rely on Martin and Connell, but he had thought that about Bull Luster and found out differently at his trial.

  How can I trust anyone?

  “Is there a problem?” Maran asked.

  She got right to the point. “You bet your life there is a problem. You should know you still have friends in Washington. But we believe there are others.”

  “Others?”

  “Right. Others who are tracking you. Who want you dead. We know about Antwerp, Knokke. It wasn’t us,” she said. “We want you to come in.”

  “Forget it. My business is just beginning here.”

  “Colonel Maran, why don’t you leave this to the Justice Department?”

  “Justice?” he shot. “What the…” He changed his mind about his choice of words. “What does Justice know about justice when it comes to war? And that’s what this is. War. And don’t give me that, ‘the-Constitution-says’ baloney.”

  Maran devoutly respected the distinction between the elected government and the military. Nevertheless, he harbored his own ideas, including silent allegiance to the Tea Party movement. His allegiance was to the Constitution, but his heart was elsewhere. So it was that he reminded Deborrah Anderssen, “This diamond scam in Angola and the Congo is economic terrorism, plain and simple. I don’t know yet how it all fits together, but I do know that it is just another example of anti-American, anti-western attacks that have been going on and getting worse since they hit our Beirut embassy in April ’83 and even before that when Fatah snatched the Israeli Olympic athletes. Tick it off: We responded to Beirut that October with a Marine contingent and the bastards used bomb-rigged trucks to annihilate two hundred and ninety-nine of us; the next March, they snapped our CIA station chief, tortured and killed him; then one thing after another‌—‌killing Americans and our allies‌—‌in the name of Allah. And finally…”

  “Lockerbie,” she completed his sentence for him.

  “Pan Am. So many people dead because our over-politicized civilian leadership has been operating with its thumb up its ass for decades,” Maran added. “How can we fulfill the American covenant to guarantee security to our citizens and let the scum-garbage fanatic Islamists bomb the daylights out of us? In the Cold War we weren’t fighting Russians, we were fighting an ideology: Communism. We won because we stood up with the all resolve it took. We have to do the same thing against this bastardization of Islam, Islamism, just another evil ‘-ism’ to be crushed before it crushes us.”

  She shrugged. “What has that got to do with Cabinda?”

  “It’s all connected,” he said. “We are history’s biggest fools. The strongest country in world history and we’re laying down and taking it while they chip away at us. If the White House had never tolerated terrorists like Yasser Arafat, the Animal would never have gained the power he has.”

  “We were afraid you’d feel that way. Here,” she said, opening a file case. “Take this. It will verify the legend Levine set up for you. You’ll need it even to get a taxi in Kin or anywhere else.”

  She handed him a VIP I.D. and matching passport issued by the current DRC government. They were made out to a Walter Q.R. Jackson: Chief Investigator: Competitive Business Intelligence.

  He was astonished; she knew about Levine, about his cover legend, yet he felt a degree of cautious relief with the honest smile in her eyes, a genuineness he sensed that could not be manufactured.

  God only knows how she got this far. Good enough, she’s for real.

  “Glad to see you’re still on top of your game,” he said looking at the credentials, acknowledging their fast work.

  “OK. Thanks. What else?” Maran asked.

  “KoeffieBloehm Diamond. As long as there are cartels, there’ll be cheats, whether it’s diamonds, arms or oil,” Anderssen told Maran. “Problem is the cartel thinks it’s you running the scam that’s killing them.”

  “How bad is it?” Maran asked.

  “They’re convinced. Your guys’ve left their electronic tracks all over the web world. KoeffieBloehm has a contract out with their outside security people to hit you.”

  “Apparently, they’re not the only ones. If the governments in Angola and the DRC would police their own, the cartel would have a lot less to worry about,” Maran said.

  “When meatballs get up to dance and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” she answered. She never told him her agency was working with FINCEN to track communications between the major New York diamond merchants and the Cabinda-Kinshasa region.

  He didn’t tell her about his commitment to rescue Amber Chu and her son.

  Later, Maran put on his iPod’s headphones, listening now to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Kinshasa

  Two hours later, Maran got out of the taxi at Kinshasa’s Le Beach Ngobila, the main port area. A long series of quays and jetties extended for four miles along the river there. Hundreds of boats and barges sat tethered to them. A large ferry, already packed with people, loaded passengers bound for Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo on the other side of the river.

  “Be careful, boss mandale,” the Congolese driver told him. “Que c’est dangereaux!”

  The scene sickened Maran. He’d seen plenty of squalor, but this reached into the deepest part of his psyche. It twisted his stomach. The street that ran along the river gave up the historical secrets of colonial exploitation in a mass of horrific images: bombed, burnt-out buildings, now no more than blackened shells, jerry-built shacks stacked like tin cans, one on top of the other. Putrid smoke enveloped the entire scene, half-sunken wrecks of barges and riverboats spread out, bleached and stripped like skeletons along the banks. Beggars ambled on the street, no more than torsos that rolled themselves along by hands shielded with makeshift snake-skin gloves. On th
e decrepit piers, squatters cooked plantains, palm grubs and green caterpillars on grills made from cans, pots, and metal lids. A hazy screen of smoke rose against the skyline of tall office towers and huge cranes that looked like a surrealist rendition of hell. Dockside straw bosses, in brightly colored silk shirts. They screamed orders through the heat to the shirtless longshoremen. A group of drunken soldiers staggered down the street towards Maran. He took a quick look for the address of the restaurant. Even before he spotted the small wooden sign for the Kinkole Bay Café, the soldiers stopped a businessman. They were demanding matabiches, the word for the bribe, which was needed to pass unimpeded.

  HIS MEETING WAS IN a restaurant in the Hotel Noire Riviere. Maran had changed from his sports jacket and casual slacks into a tan cotton safari jacket he bought on the Internet from Cabela’s and a pair of clean jeans. As he approached, he looked up at a ramshackle sign that swung from a chain. It identified the place on the hotel’s ground floor as the Café Frere Bemba, named after a local rebel gangster and former vice president of the country, one of the wealthiest men in the Congo and currently on trial at the International Criminal Court in the Hague for war crimes including the cannibalism of pygmies and mass rapes by his militia.

  The host wore a white shirt stained around the collar. He directed Maran past the bar to a private anteroom. Maran was relieved to find Tracha sitting alone in the back at a secluded table in a far corner. In front of him, steam rose from a dish of cossa cossa, fresh water prawns from the river and Angolan langoustines ringed with golf-sized balls of fufu, corn mash, and leaf-wrapped plantain lituma. The restaurant, in spite of its location, was safe. A giant plastic fish hung over his head, mouth agape, fins flared. Maran couldn’t tell what species it purported to represent.

  He had a different reaction to the plum-bordered satellite photos stacked on the table in front of Tracha.

  Maran took a seat. Tracha spread several photos on the table in front of him. “That’s one of the Abrams M-1A2s,” he said, pointing to a tank. It was rolling off a ship onto a cement loading dock.

  “You can make out the Army armored vehicle registration number on the turret in this picture, same tank,” Tracha continued. He passed Maran another eight-by-ten colored photograph. “That’s the Port Lobito Marine Terminal in Angola.”

  “If our surveillance is that good, how do you explain all the terrorist attacks still going on around the world?”

  “This is theater specific. About the rest of it, ask the Electronic Frontier and the other privacy perverts. They went ballistic on the leaks of the President’s Surveillance Program launched by ‘W’ after 9/11. I couldn’t believe it when Clinton’s CIA Director shut down the program.”

  “That was even after General Mike Hayden, Bush’s CIA chief, told the fools on the Hill that it was the electronic spy program that stopped any more al Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil,” Maran said.

  “Damn. We got access to their computers: data mining, telephones, social networks, aerial, biometric scrutiny, bugs, RFID tags. We should be using everything we got … Look, these guys at AUVSC can identify the address of a college co-ed sunbathing in her back yard on a clear day. They can probably tell her bra size and whether she’s wearing a tampon.”

  “Where’d you get these?” Maran asked.

  He recognized the border:

  For Official Use: Four Eyes Only.

  That meant the document could officially only be shared with government intelligence officials from four countries: U.S., U.K., Canada, or Australia, our closest allies. It was one step above Confidential and one below Secret. If Harper and Labreque, Tracha’s friends, were discovered sharing it with Maran, they would simply be reprimanded. No further action against them would be taken. The U.S. military was more interested in protecting resolution capability than intelligence on topography. Besides, Tracha’s friends must have figured that turning over evidence to Maran to stop massive criminal activity targeted against the U.S. would hold up as being justifiable.

  Tracha answered Maran’s question. “We got them from Dale Harper and Pete Labrecque, the Army’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Surveillance Center at Defense Support, clandestine Army Airborne electronic sentries trained by Lockheed Martin. They run drones and spy sats tied to various sensors on the ground to watch the seaports and terminals up and down the coast for the U.N. Blue Helmets there. That includes the Global Coast oil fields off the shores of Cabinda. Compliments of your buddy, Cole Martin,” Tracha answered.

  “When Martin promised us some help, he understated the case. We need more like him back home.”

  “How in hell did he manage that?” Maran wondered aloud.

  “Worked it through one of his old pals at Tactical Air Command at Cheyenne Mountain. Convinced them that advanced U.S. weapons were up for grabs throughout the region. Built the case that they could find their way up to the Revolutionary United Front in Freetown, Sierra Leone.”

  “Destabilizing the entire region,” Maran responded.

  “Like that. Anyway, Harper and Labreque both knew about you in Bosnia. I worked with them in Force Warrior, testing new equipment for Soldier Systems,” Tracha said.

  “Nice going. What else?”

  “The bad guys’re using M-113 personnel carriers, some Strykers, a pile of beat-up Humvees, up-armored, all off the same ship. All in these pix. Damaged goods. Obsolete. Transferred for disposal to DRAMS,” Tracha said, referring to the military’s used equipment fire sale headquarters, the DLA Disposition Services.

  “Destination?” Maran asked.

  “We used the registration numbers to locate the requisition forms. Going on the road to a loading dock above the Falls and driven overland to Mbuji-Mayi,” Tracha paused.

  “Boyko,” Maran said. “His MecaMines headquarters.”

  “Mack, you won’t believe where this equipment originated.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Maran answered. “Fort Bragg.”

  “Right. The Plantation.” It was code for the hush-hush camp within Fort Bragg used to train the Combat Applications Group’s Blue Team, otherwise known as Delta, Detachment F, the field operational arm, Maran’s former unit before joining SAWC.

  “What did they do with the equipment, the armaments?” Maran asked, dumbfounded.

  “Criminal Investigation uncovered a tainted Storekeeper there at DRAMS. CID has him and his deputy in custody at our Anacostia pre-trial confinement facility now. He’s talking. We haven’t yet found out everything about what he’s saying, but we know the bad guys gave him ten grand, a double-header from a couple of Russian hookers they picked up in Adams Morgan in the District. They signed off on a purchase order, shipped the goods to Spangdahlem Air Base in Bitburg for repairs, restoration,” Tracha elaborated.

  “Even the Abrams tanks?” Maran was incredulous.

  Alice in Wonderland, through the looking glass, and down the rabbit hole.

  “Everything. Defense Logistics is getting flack from the Joint Chiefs. If they can add new weapons to their disposal services, they can make more money. Stash knows the story. He cuts a deal. Puts Baltimore in with the Storekeeper at DRAMS in Bahrain. They’ve got so much surplus going in and out of inventory getting restored or scrapped every day there; it’s nothing to make stuff disappear. For all anyone back home knows, the missing stuff ended up in the scrap heap. Then they ship it out to the 94th Fighter Wing’s armaments depot, Al Asad, Iraq, on to Bahrain and finally to the deep-water port in Cabinda.”

  “SSI?”

  “Strategic Solutions International. Privately held, Georgian, Grigol Rakhmonov Boyko, big shot, airlines, mining, shipping.”

  “He’s our man. The pieces are falling together. How do we get to him?” Maran asked.

  “Lot of the local tribal leaders hate his guts. He holds all the power, gets them what they need for arms, drugs, currency exchange, name it. Joseph dos Sampas is his main rival for control. Our best bet. Dos Sampas has moved into the DRC to get Boyko.”

  “OK. So wh
ere are we right now?” Maran snapped in his strongest Boston neighborhood accent.

  “CID says the clerk from DRAMS has caved. He’s spilling his guts for a plea deal.”

  “Do we know his control, who moved him?”

  “Calls himself Alex Pajak. Name’s on P.O.s from a long list of clients from Angola’s leftist government to PFLEC as well as to Strategic Solutions International, a security firm that purports to support a lot of humanitarian work in the region. But we can’t find any Alex Pajak anywhere in the U.S. military,” Tracha explained.

  “A ghost?” Maran referred to that class of U.S. soldier who was listed under Pentagon legends, false credentials, fabricated backgrounds to protect them from future retaliation.

  “Just one thing. Where it gets really weird. Pajak is mobbed up, our canary says, with Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Alexander Stassinopoulos. Part of a plan they call ‘Plan A’” Tracha told Maran.

  “What does it mean?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  Somewhere in West Africa

  They were coming out of The Bundundu Inn in Kikwit, the DRC, 250 miles out of Kin as the crow flies on N1, a winding, rough, and dangerous road that was much longer than the crow’s route. Two men and a woman. A brief flash of reflected sunlight bounced off one of the men’s open smile.

  Jeweled grills!

  The woman looked up as she put one hand on the roof and entered the vehicle.

  “That’s a make. Definitely them,” Harper said, speaking to Labreque. He was looking from an oversized computer screen to the photos on the desk in front of him.

  The two cyber-warfighters were some thousand miles away from the scene they were witnessing from signals transmitted from one of their spy drones.

  Surrounded by monitoring screens and highly classified electronic surveillance equipment, they were working out of the Army’s UAV Surveillance Center, based in a secret location in West Africa, unknown by Congress, the President herself, or anyone else outside of DOD’s Cyberwarfare Center which was itself located in a section within the Pentagon closed to all but those cleared with dedicated smart cards.