'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  There may have been nothing Maran could have done to prevent this additional death. It didn’t matter. It happened on his mission, and it was harder and harder to reconcile the failures with his pledge of honor that was deeply intertwined with his belief in leadership responsibility. If screaming could have helped, he would have shaken the surrounding jungle.

  He had no time to think about it.

  Atop the riverbank, he dove for cover behind a concrete wall, part of an earlier fortress. He lifted the weapon and fired a 20mm explosive round at the rebel patrol boat. The missile zigged to the left as it neared its target and veered directly into the boat’s engine. The boat disappeared in a ball of fire and smoke. When the smoke lifted, there was nothing left floating but oil slick on the surface of the river and some debris. No bodies evident. No one could have survived.

  One by one, Tracha and dos Sampas’ three soldiers climbed the bank to join Maran. It was then Maran noticed that his friend had a trailing line attached to his utility vest by D-hooks. Maran helped him drag the crates up the banks.

  “Inflatable cargo packs,” Tracha grunted as his pack cleared the top of the embankment. “Still got the gun.”

  The river and forest were quiet as a Sunday morning warehouse; the sound of the river hissed, white noise like steam from a radiator valve. Drenched, exhausted, the five men fell into the sun-seared grass, laid back, nursed their pains, watched the mist hang suspended over the rise and fall of the hissing river.

  “Time may be running out,” Maran warned, rising. “Now we’ve got to trek it until we can grab a four-wheel drive.” He pointed out the location of Boyko’s operation on his map, gathered Tracha and dos Sampas’ three remaining men around him to go over his operational plan. Dos Sampas’ men were in now more than ever, eager to even the score.

  “I know where we can go to get help,” their leader said.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Mbuji-Mayi

  Four hours later, after trekking through forested trails, Maran and Tracha had smashed through the driver’s window, popped the ignition and stolen a pickup truck at a car park on the fringe of Bakua Bowa, the diamond trading post outside of Mbuji-Mayi. With Maran at the wheel and dos Sampas’ men fully on board, they drove into Marché Inga, a muddy market square in the heart of the town.

  In spite of all the suffering he had witnessed in his Army career, Maran was still vulnerable when it came to kids. A group of children played Capture the Flag, running around a statue of Laurent Kabila, assassinated in 2001 after he led a coup to overthrow Mobuto. He almost broke down when he saw one kid, belly distended from hunger, burn scars on his arms and stomach from exorcism rites used by scamming revivalist pastors of crooked churches to fool gullible mothers that their children were bewitched sorcerers under an evil spell by the devil. He was stunned to learn that there were 2,000 children, mostly homeless and abandoned boys, who have been branded as possessed by Satan and in need of exorcism. It was hard for him to understand a society where mothers trying to make ends meet and live up to their responsibilities as parents are forced to pay up to $50 dollars of their $100 a year earnings to have their children put through cultish ceremonies that, not infrequently, end in death.

  “Touri! Touri!” the children yelled, running alongside the purloined truck. The Portuguese Angolan leader of dos Sampas’ team told Maran the word meant the children were frightened. They thought the white men had devil magic witchcraft powers and had been told that they ate black children. It was easy to see why they were so frightened. Several had the scars left from a life that few others in the world could imagine.

  “That’s it. Pull up,” the leader of the dos Sampas group said to Maran, pointing to a storefront shack. A sign joked, “House of Osama. Diamonds. Bought & Sold.”

  “Some joke,” Maran said.

  He got out of the truck. The windows of the store were barred with steel. He pushed past an officer in the Zimbabwean Defense Force who stood outside the entrance, one of the half-dozen blue-helmeted U.N. soldiers from a platoon assigned to that part of Marché Inga to defend the stores in return for fifty-percent of the gross sales. Maran opened the door. He walked in with Tracha. A man sat at a dingy desk in the back of the store. Three dirty lounge chairs ringed the desk. He was Lebanese, calling himself Manuel da Silva to pass as Portuguese, politically correct. Nothing in this country was as it seemed.

  Maran asked him why he shared his sales with the Zims.

  “Are you shitting me?” Manuel said in perfect English. “Anyway, there are more sales now with all the new foreign military traffic. I’m getting mine any way I can while the getting’s good. People here get poorer. Thieves, grifters, and killers get richer.”

  Maran threw a few stones on the table.

  “What’s that for?” Manuel asked.

  “Moise Ngoye said you would be a friend to work with. He said you could translate. That’s to convince you to close the store for the rest of the day.”

  He explained their mission and asked for his help. He needed to enlist an insider. And he needed not only a name but an introduction. He knew that his soft approach needed some muscle behind it.

  “Anything to stop that monster,” Manuel said.

  Maran didn’t know whether he was talking about Boyko or Vangaler. He didn’t care. He wanted both. He explained as Tracha listened.

  In order to mask Manuel’s participation, Maran needed bird dogs.

  “We can get them,” Manuel agreed.

  “Good. We also have to scare the village to death. Soften them up.”

  “Why?”

  “Insurance. We want to give them ample reason to join us. Their memories of history may not be enough.”

  “How?”

  “Bulletins.”

  “Panama.” Tracha smiled, recognizing the strategy that had worked so well there.

  They locked up the store. Manuel went into the back storeroom. He came back with a number of poster-sized sheets of light cardboard he used to promote sales. He handed Maran a black Magic Marker highlight stick. Maran wrote:

  TO THE PEOPLE OF BAKUA BOWA: We are beginning a campaign to liberate the people of Mbuji-Mayi and its province. I intend to kill all those who resist the Ninja Crocodile Devil Movement with the most powerful Devil magic at my disposal. Only darkness and Hell await the foes of our battle of liberation. Block our path and it’ll be stained with your blood.

  Anyone who tries to arrest or search the patriots of the liberation will be SHOT.

  The Ninjas

  Slang Vangaler

  The Supreme Leader

  “That should do it,” he said. Manuel took the poster into the back room. He translated it, made a dozen copies, and left to get his housekeeper to post them up and down the street.

  Maran and his team left in the truck to set up camp.

  THEY WAITED UNTIL AFTER dark, piled their weapons in the back of the pickup, covered them with a tarp, and drove back into town. The sky over the jungle was moonless. Noisy bars and merchandise stalls ringed the village square. Yellow mud swamped the streets of the floodlit market. The squalor, however, failed to dim the beauty of the fresh produce. The square was still busy. In stall after stall, booths were stacked with bananas, peanuts, beans, and a range of offerings exotic for the area: avocados, tomatoes, and multi-hued giant peppers. More impressive were the mounds of rough, yellowed diamonds that sat on burlap sacks next to the produce. Decades earlier, a simple rainfall would have exposed the stones under the surface dirt on the streets. Villagers picked them out of the dirt by the gross like pebbles and stuck them as decorations into the walls of their hovels. Portuguese opportunists used to buy the stones off the walls in exchange for new wine and cheap perfume. Now the walls were peppered with rusting bottle tops.

  “Drive straight through the square,” Manuel directed Maran as they got in their vehicle. They drove through Petit Marché, the town’s mud-pocked market. Manuel pointed out several brothels. He took them to what he promised to be th
e wildest bar in the village. A banner sign above the front door proclaimed its name: Café Tabernacle.

  The Tabernacle, with its odd sense of humor, was built from a small revamped Colonial-era French cathedral. A semi-circular bar mocked the original altar that stood in the center of the room. Three naked young women gyrated around brass poles on the stage running around a ring of men seated in front of them in a wide variety of dress: Moroccan djellabs, West African dashikis, jeans and ‘T’s, and military fatigues.

  Maran and his men took a table against the rear wall.

  Several pros worked the bar. One of them wore a Muslim robe. Maran questioned Tracha about it as she opened an uncustomary slit she had designed in the front and flashed two naked breasts, nipples bright with rouge. Averting his eyes, Maran dropped them to the hem at the bottom of the garment. She, like the others, was wearing high, spiked heels on three-inch platform shoes.

  “I heard some of the girls even dress in burkas to pass as legitimate to throw off the police. Or maybe to attract some weirdos, like guys who want to screw prossies dressed as nuns,” Tracha said.

  Maran thought to himself. Could they be our bird dogs?

  One of them approached. She wore a bright red, skimpy, skin-tight skirt that stretched across her hips. It accentuated the V between her legs. She addressed Manuel.

  “Hey, Big Boy. Wena Matimpi? Buy me a drink.”

  “Shing-a-Ling?” he answered, with familiarity, to her Kikongo greeting: “How are you?’”

  “Still like Dirty Bananas?” He was referring to a locally favored drink. She laughed. He ordered the drink, a banana-based cocktail blended with ice cream, sweet as a white chocolate martini. She slammed it down. Her friends joined the table, the one in the burka and another wearing severely short cutaway skin-tight jeans that hugged her crotch and a light half-halter that failed to conceal her painted nipples. Her hair was done up in a bleached-orange Afro piled up like a bright pumpkin.

  Minutes later, the women were sitting on the laps of the Portuguese soldiers. The women all had one thing in common: they’d all been raped, whipped, and beaten mercilessly by soldiers from one faction or another. They talked about it. Maran watched the clock. Their bodies may have been for sale and their spirits beaten down, but their souls were still strong and their dignity intact.

  “Soldiers. No matter who comes in they always rape, maim, and kill to get control. Everyone wants to run the mines. Vangaler‌—‌Ninjas. They’re the worst.”

  One woman lifted her dress. Maran’s eyes looked away from the sight of the mutilation between her legs.

  “Ninjas,” she said.

  Maran blanched.

  “It’s not unusual,” Manuel said.

  “Let’s go,” Maran said. He rose from the table. The rest of the men got up. The women followed. They walked out and around the corner to a fish restaurant. Maran ordered mabuke for them, peppered river fish boiled in banana leaves with maize. The other patrons looked on curiously. The women had seconds.

  Mounted in the corner, hanging from the ceiling, a television showed a reporter speaking to a man from Doctors Without Borders.

  “The U.N. promised to bring AIDS meds. We haven’t seen any help yet. The problem gets worse by the day,” Manuel said. “The U.N. has done nothing to stop the corruption.”

  “Vangaler,” the same girl scoffed. “Any meds get through, he sells them.”

  Tracha drew Maran away from the table. They walked to a men’s room in the back. It stank like ammonia.

  “Mack. We’re not sleeping with these women. They all, all these Angolans and Zims, got HIV.”

  “Of course not. We’ve got to treat them right,” Maran said. “It’s time someone did. They deserve a little respect and, besides, we need all the intel we can get. When we’re back in the States we can do more for them.”

  “Right on, brother,” Tracha said with a grin. They bumped fists.

  When they returned to the table, the storekeeper had brought the women to another table. He talked, listened, and brought out a sheet of paper. The women gave him the name and address of the village leader, Onekane, and a few of his colleagues. Manuel brought the sheet over to Maran and confirmed. The whole group piled into the SUV. Maran gave them each a U.S. twenty and drove them home to the outskirts of the village. He told them to expect a raid from the Ninjas.

  “They’ll be here tonight. Stay inside the house. We’ll be here to protect you,” Maran said.

  He left them with dos Sampas’ soldiers.

  MARAN AND TRACHA CREPT through the trees and shrubs behind the thatched huts. In the distance, laughter and music could be heard drifting out from the Tabernacle.

  Maran whispered, “No one gets hurt.”

  “In and out. Clean as a car wash.”

  “Right.” Maran’s face was grim.

  Over their heads, they wore the crocodile hoodies they had gotten from Ngoye. They were fitted with stretch fabric for stability and clamped to crocodile skin capes. The crocodile jaws hung out over their foreheads like bills on game caps‌—‌the telltale signature of the Ninjas. Camo grease paint covered their faces, masking Tracha’s white skin. They wore bandanas tied over their mouths and noses. Once he was directly behind the Tabernacle structure, Maran signalled to Tracha that he was ready.

  “Ready,” Tracha signalled back.

  “Now,” Maran yelled. They pulled the pins on two harmless MK141 flash-bang grenades, and threw them; Maran’s fell just in front of the open back door of the still-crowded bar, Tracha’s in front of the village chief’s hut. All around the square bright explosions lit up the village as dos Sampas’ team followed through and sailed incendiary grenades into the streets and light shrubbery. Instantly, a series of small fires shot sparks and smoke into the sky just behind the firehouse‌—‌diversionary‌—‌not an immediate threat. At the same time, they fired short bursts of automatic fire into the air.

  Tracha fired a rocket-propelled anti-tank grenade from his own HK AG36 grenade launcher at a point twenty yards from the sole police car parked outside the tiny, antiquated police station. The blast blew a harmless hole in the ground. It sprayed the station house with palm fronds and dirt; it echoed through the village off the walls of a nearby cliff in the surrounding hills. Black smoke rose fifty feet in the air. There would be no police opposition.

  Onekane lived in a small square at the end of Petit Marché. His home, like many of the others, was new, constructed from flimsy corrugated tin, a sop to community planning, painted government issue red. Maran crashed through the front door of the hut. Tracha followed, adjusting his mask. A man stood in the middle of his living room floor. He wore bright yellow pajamas with Casper the Ghost prints all over them. Two terrified young women stood behind him. Maran realized they must have been his wives. Three small screaming children stood next to them.

  He separated the family as gently as he could, nudging the man out the front door. The flash-bangs had disintegrated into smoke and small fires. Maran was pleased. Although everyone was out of bed by now, the group of soldiers and village leaders were alone on the street. The men herded the leaders up the street into the forest to the SUV. One of dos Sampas’ Angolan soldiers sat in the driver’s seat. He revved the engine. All were jammed into the seats. They waited for Maran and Tracha.

  Tracha ran down the street to the brick building that served as the village center. Maran ran from house to house around the square. Then they joined the team with their prisoners at the SUV.

  Tracha, wearing his Ninja face paint and speaking Lingala, posing in character, told the prisoners, “This is just the beginning. When we finish, the Ninjas will rule the Province.” He tied them loosely and left them with the hot chocolate and whiskey.

  When the “prisoners” were convinced that the raiders were gone, they had no trouble untying themselves. They passed around the whiskey and chocolate and then rousted Onekane. The ruse had worked magic. They were terrified. By the time they told Onekane what happened
to them, he was equally on edge. No one of them considered the fact that no one was hurt or that there was virtually no property damage. Fear overcame their judgment and opened them to any offered help.

  AFTER NO MORE THAN four hours of sleep in their camp, Maran and his men slipped back into town to check on the results. The prisoners had escaped. The posters were up. The scene was set.

  A crowd gathered in the square. People were pointing up at the MecaMines compound on the hill just beyond the village outskirts.

  Maran and Tracha went to Onekane’s house. It didn’t take long to turn him into an ally. Maran promised to put a very final end to Boyko and Vangaler and their hated Ninjas who had terrorized them and taken their diamonds for years.

  “When we’re finished, the mines will be yours,” Tracha told him. He handed Onekane a packet of cash to share with his friends; he drew a plan of the compound. Maran knew from Sergei’s blueprints that the information was on point. Onekane showed them where they would find Boyko. Maran came as close to praying as he ever had.

  Would I have become a soldier if I knew it would lead to this? Where does honor end and evil begin? Death is the final arbiter. He who decides survives.

  “Sometimes money is all the goodwill you need,” Tracha commented as they left.

  Maran nodded. “Particularly when the choice is that or a beating. I still wish there were another way.”

  War. Moral conflict. Outcomes. Focus. Amber. Tony. Shit!

  “Anyway. Good thing no one knows what we’re doing.”

  “One thing we don’t have to worry about,” Tracha said.

  “What’s that?”

  “No one’s leaking this one to the press.”

  They returned to their camp in the SUV.

  The morning came fast, but dawn hadn’t quite peeked yet above the trees. It was still dark. Tracha loaded his men and equipment aboard the Zodiak.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Vienna, Virginia

  This was only the second time Luster had visited the ultra-modern FINCEN building that housed equipment capable of monitoring every financial transaction in the world that goes through banks, casinos, brokerage firms, and non-bank financial institutions. Since its primary purpose was to fight money laundering, Congress had given it robust investigative and prosecutorial power.