Z: The Final Countdown

by Bob Mayer

  Riley noticed that Conner had come up next to him and was looking at the remains of the bridge. “Did you get it, Mike? Did you get it?” she asked.

  “I got it!”

  “This is going to be great,” Conner said.

  “Let’s go,” Lome said, sliding down the bank with Tiller. He grabbed Sergeant Ku, who was still staring at where the bridge had been, his mouth agape. They retraced their way back along the streambed.

  On the outskirts of Saurimo, Captain Dorrick’s element watched as A-10s swooped out of the sky and destroyed eight rebel aircraft on the ground. With brisk efficiency, the runway was cratered and the control tower disappeared in a series of explosions. Job done, Dorrick and his men moved out toward their pickup zone.

  In the AWACS, Colonel Harris listened to the jubilant calls of the pilots as they hit their targets. Not a single rebel aircraft made it off the ground, and as the tally came in of aircraft confirmed destroyed, Harris felt reasonably secure that they had made an almost complete sweep of the UNITA air force. They might have missed a few helicopters hidden around the countryside, but as far as fixed-wing craft went, the rebels were done. All rebel armor that had been targeted had been plastered under a rain of five-hundred-pound bombs and precision-guided munitions.

  Colonel Harris sat back in his command chair and got a direct line to the command center on the Abraham Lincoln, which was hooked in to the Pentagon and the PAF headquarters in Silvermine outside Cape Town. Phase I had gone as planned and the road was paved. Now it was time for the main force to come in.

  Vicinity Huambo, Angola, 14 June

  The sound of secondary explosions died out as the sun rose. Smoke drifted up from the wreckage left behind at the main UNITA military post. At the edge of the jungle, two thousand meters from the building that CIA intelligence had pinpointed as Jonas Savimbi’s headquarters, three men waited in the shadows. They were almost invisible to the naked eye in their Ghillie camouflage suits. They’d been watching the building for the past three days, keeping track of every person who entered and exited.

  They knew Savimbi wasn’t in the building—or rather the wreckage of the building, since it was now nothing but a stack of crushed concrete and twisted steel. They’d seen him exit the previous afternoon, climb into an armored BMW, and drive off. To where, they didn’t know. He had not returned.

  “Break it down,” the leader ordered.

  The sniper took his rifle off its tripod and broke it into two parts, sliding them into his rucksack, then folding up the tripod itself.

  “We should have taken him last night,” the third man said.

  “That would have dropped off the bombing,” the leader said absently, still looking over the destruction through his binoculars. “We’ll get another shot.”

  The three turned and slipped away into the jungle.

  Chapter 7

  Vicinity Luia River, Angola, 14 June

  Quinn and Trent had listened to the distant roar and rumble and scanned the early-morning sky in an attempt to see the source. A flight of warplanes had gone by less than forty-five minutes ago, but it was too dark to tell what kind they were. All they could see was the flames from the planes’ jets race across the sky and the following thunderclap.

  The mercenary patrol continued on its way toward their scheduled rendezvous. Quinn pushed them until it was daylight, then considered it prudent to get under cover.

  “We stay here until dark,” he announced when they had reached a point where a side stream entered the Luia River and the overhead cover was thick.

  The merks faded under the cover of the foliage that surrounded the stream and Trent set out the perimeter, then rejoined his commander.

  “Two of the boys aren’t feeling too well. Running a fever.”

  “Give ’em some aspirin,” Quinn said. “We don’t have time for any slackers.”

  “Already did,” Trent said. He settled down in a rucksack flop. “What do you think?”

  “About what?” Quinn replied.

  “Sounds like somebody bombed the fuck out of Savimbi’s boys.”

  Quinn wiped the sweat off his forehead with an old rag tied around his throat. “Yeah, that it did.”

  Quinn squinted as they heard a roar come out of the south. A flight of F-14s flew by at a thousand feet up. In the sunlight there was no mistaking the plane’s double vertical tails, and also no doubt about the star and stripe on the wings.

  “Americans,” was Trent’s succinct comment.

  “Means we’re out of business here,” Quinn said. ‘They’ll get the diamond mines under control so we won’t get paid there, and the government won’t pay us bounty on rebels killed either. Not when they can get the bloody Yanks to do it for free.”

  “Well, it was fun while it lasted,” Trent said. “Do this last bit, then be on our way.”

  Quinn felt the diamonds resting against his chest in their leather pouch. “Maybe we should screw this mission, Trent.”

  Trent blinked. “Say again?”

  “Maybe we should just go, cross the border into Zaire, dump the stones on the black market, and move on.”

  “We won’t get as much on the black market,” Trent pointed out. “And we won’t get the MPLA bounty on the rebels we killed to get the stones if we dump them on the market. Five thousand American dollars for each of your photos is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “Money doesn’t do you any good if you aren’t around to spend it,” Quinn said.

  “It’s a million for just a little escort job,” Trent said. “And this thing should be easier with Savimbi’s boys running from the Americans. No one will bother us.”

  “I know,” Quinn said. He twisted his head and listened to the sounds of the jungle. “I don’t feel right. Something isn’t jibing about this mission.”

  “I’ve never heard you worry like this,” Trent said. “Besides, what if Skeleton does have a spy among the patrol? Skeleton’s got contacts in Zaire. Hell, all over the world. We don’t need him after us.” He reached over and slapped Quinn on the shoulder. “Hey, it’s an easy one. A cool million.”

  Quinn leaned back against his ruck. “Aye. A cool million.” But the thought of the money didn’t comfort him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Polaroid of the female rebel and looked at it for a while, then slowly put it back.

  Cacolo, Angola, 14 June

  Conner was looking at a different picture through the viewfinder on Seeger’s camera, replaying the bombing of the bridge. “Christ!” she said. “No one’s got footage like this. No one. This is great.”

  She turned to Seeger, who was setting out a small satellite dish. “Are you ready to transmit?”

  “I will be in a couple of minutes,” Seeger replied.

  “They’ll eat this up in Atlanta,” Conner said.

  Riley was watching her. He knew that the transmission would actually go through military satellites to a downlink at the Pentagon, where government censors would take a look and then forward to SNN at Atlanta whatever met the guidelines they had worked out with the news agency to get permission to be on the ground. There should be no problem with the recording from the bridge. After all, it showed the military was doing its job. It was all part of the agreement. The government’s justification had been that they couldn’t allow uncensored film to go directly on the air. What if it showed Mrs. Jones’s son getting blown up before the Pentagon had a chance to officially tell Mrs. Jones her son had been blown up?

  He could tell Conner was excited. Exhaustion from the long trip and the night-long mission would settle in soon, though. Riley stepped forward and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  Conner glanced at Seeger, who was still connecting cables. “Make it quick. I have to do a voice-over to go with the footage.”

  Riley led her out of earshot, then pointed back at the camera. “Do you know what you have on film there?”

  “Best da
mn footage America’s going to see when they wake up today,” Conner said. “The other networks are probably scrambling to get footage from the military. You know, gun camera shots of the smart bombs going in, but we got the—”

  “Conner,” Riley said quietly.

  “—real thing. We have it in color too! Mike had the perfect angle on the bridge when it blew. I think that if we continue—”

  “Conner,” Riley said sharply.

  She stopped and looked at him quizzically. “What?”

  Riley spoke slowly. “There was more than a bridge that got blown up, Conner. There was a man, a boy, on the bridge.”

  “I know there was someone on the bridge. I saw—” Conner began, but Riley stepped in close and cut her off again.

  “This isn’t a game, Conner. This isn’t a movie set where your chief worry is to get the best angle for your shots. There was some kid on that bridge. Maybe fifteen, sixteen years old with a gun about as big as him, probably thinking about what was for breakfast when those bombs hit and killed him. The OC doesn’t come over with a key and turn people back on alive again here. When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

  Riley pointed at the town around them. “These people are real. This is their home. They don’t get to climb on a plane and fly away from all this when it’s over and the story’s filed.” He nodded toward the tent where the members of ODA 314 were getting debriefed. “Those guys’ lives are on the line. This is real, Conner.”

  Conner was speechless. In all the time she’d known Riley, she’d never seen him so worked up.

  “You know what we just saw?” he continued. “We just saw a four-hundred-thousand-dollar bomb used to blow up a little old bridge and kill one enemy soldier. Did you know that if we had simply divided the amount of money we spent on bombs in Vietnam by the number of people in the country and given it out at the beginning, we probably could have bought their damn hearts and minds?”

  “What’s wrong, Dave?” Conner asked.

  Riley’s hands gestured at his clothes. “I wore a uniform for almost twenty years and did what I was told to do. I’m not one of them anymore. I’m a civilian now. You are too. Our job here is different. I know you have to get the explosions and all that for your bosses in Atlanta, but there’s more to this mission than that. There’d better be. There has to be a purpose to it all.”

  Conner stared at Riley for a few moments, then nodded. “All right. It’s real. And there’s a purpose.”

  Riley’s form relaxed slightly. “Then maybe, just maybe, we can resurrect some good out of all the death and destruction that’s happened and is going to happen here,” he said.

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  Riley nodded. “I thought you’d never ask. But first, you’d better do your voice-over.”

  Two hundred meters away, Sergeant Ku rubbed his crotch. His testicles ached. It was not the first time he’d had trouble in that part of his body. He knew the source. That damn whore from yesterday.

  As he reached into his pants and scratched, Ku reflected on the night’s events. The Americans knew what they were doing. From what he understood, there would be more Americans coming to his country to go into the field after the UNITA rebels.

  Ku had mixed feelings about that. On one hand it would be good for the war to end. But on the other, he was concerned about his future. Without the war, would he have a job? The military was all he knew, and in Angola soldiering and grave digging were two occupations that had always been secure for the past thirty-five years. Ku knew that across the border in Zaire, the only government agency that President Mobutu ensured was paid on time was the military. He’d failed once in 1991 to do that and the country had been torn apart by the military. In Africa, the man with the gun ruled supreme and Ku enjoyed being one of those with the gun.

  Ku cursed. The ache was under his skin and no amount of scratching was going to make it go away. He checked his watch. He was going to have to get the cure.

  Sergeant Ku walked away from the American compound to the Cacolo Mission Hospital. A rather ostentatious name for a few shacks sitting off to the side of the Catholic Church. It didn’t even have a doctor in attendance. The hospital was administrated by Danish nuns. The primary problems they saw were malnutrition and malaria, but they also dealt with every possible type of injury and illness in a country where there was an average of only one doctor per ten thousand people.

  Each day at eight in the morning the hurt and sick lined up outside the hospital. Some had walked many days out of the surrounding countryside to get there. Ku pushed his way to the front of the line. He was a soldier, after all, and, most importantly, he had a gun.

  The young nun working the reception table asked him a few questions. Her face didn’t register anything as Ku explained that he had a venereal disease. It was most common here, and Africa was one place where the sheer number of people dying outweighed anyone’s sense of moral or religious decorum.

  The nun gave him a piece of paper, and he walked over to another table where an older sister held court with a shiny hypodermic needle. She looked at the paper, dipped the syringe in a dish of warm water, then drew out the appropriate medicine from a vial on the shelf behind her. She jabbed the needle into Ku’s buttock and pulled it out. He was done.

  As he walked away, the nun dipped the syringe into the warm water, pulled up and down on the plunger to clear out the inside, then checked the piece of paper from the next client, a young boy shivering from malaria. She picked up the appropriate vial and gave him a shot, looking up with tired eyes at the line of people behind the young boy. It was going to be a long morning.

  Ku walked back to the American compound and decided to get some sleep. He did not feel well at all and surely the Americans had nothing planned for today. He curled up in the shadow of the headquarters building and pulled a poncho up over his head, slipping into a very uneasy slumber.

  Luanda, Angola, 14 June

  In the harbor district, hard-eyed men with automatic weapons guarded an old warehouse. Inside the building, other men looked at maps and studied satellite imagery being fed live to them from a Keyhole satellite currently in orbit overhead. With the return of the team from outside of Huambo, the intensity of the search had increased.

  “I’ve got Savimbi’s chopper!” one man called out, holding up a photo he’d just ripped out of a laser printer.

  “Give me a grid,” the commander ordered.

  The man read off the numbers and a pin was placed in a map. Northeast Angola, south and slightly to the east of Saurimo.

  “He must have flown there last night. I’ve got the Sentry’s records and they picked up a chopper out of the Huambo vicinity going in that direction.”

  “How come they didn’t intercept?” the commander wanted to know.

  “The CI officer on the Sentry only had two planes on call. Everyone else was getting ready for their missions this morning. It was bad timing.”

  Worrying about what was done was futile, the commander knew. At least they had the chopper and they knew Savimbi wasn’t in Huambo. That meant the odds were very good that he was with his helicopter.

  “What would he be doing up there? Checking on the diamond mines?” the commander asked.

  “There’s no mine right in that area. In fact, there’s nothing up there that we know about.”

  The commander wasn’t happy with that answer. “Yeah, well, what we know about this place is only exceeded by what we don’t know. It’s close to the border with Zaire. Maybe the bastard is going to make a run for it.”

  He looked at the photo of the MI-8 helicopter sitting in a small field. There was a village on the edge of the photo. There was no telling how long Savimbi, if he was there, would be staying. “Launch a strike force. Squadron-sized. Take that place out.”

  AOB, Cacolo, 14 June

  “Rise and shine,” Riley said, tapping Conner on the shoulder.

  “What?” she muttered. They were housed in an old service statio
n, sleeping on cots surrounded by mosquito netting.

  “We have a mission.”

  Conner sat up and looked at her watch. “I’ve only been asleep twenty minutes, Dave.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” Riley said. “These guys have less than forty-eight hours to take out everything they can before the eighty-deuce is in the field. I told you we were going to be on the go pretty much nonstop. Seeger’s waiting at the chopper. The air force has picked up some truck movement on the main road west of Saurimo. The team is going in to eyeball whether they should bomb the trucks. We got two minutes.”

  “All right, all right,” Conner said, swinging her feet down to the ground.

  Northeast Angola, 14 June

  “Savimbi’s helicopter is taking off!”

  The commander of the assault force checked the data relayed from the AWACS to him in the back of his UH-60 Black Hawk. A small blip had appeared in the target area. The MI-8 was airborne. He looked left on the display. The three red dots indicating his helicopter and the other two, one on either side carrying his men, were still forty miles out from the helicopter that they suspected was carrying the rebel leader, Savimbi.

  The MI-8 had slipped out of Huambo the previous evening and escaped interdiction for several reasons, but none of those were working this morning. The commander keyed his radio. “Dragon Leader, this is Key One. Put down the MI-8. Over.”

  “Key One, this is Dragon Leader. Roger. Out.”

  Forty miles away the MI-8 was flying just above the grass of the plateau, following the contour of the land. From above two A-10 Warthogs swooped down out of the sky. The pilot of the MI-8 saw them, but it was already over as the helicopter started to bob evasively. The 30mm Gatling guns in the nose of both planes spit out a solid line of bullets that intersected with the thin skin of the helicopter.

  The chopper disintegrated under the barrage. The main part of the airframe slammed into open ground and exploded. The two A-10 pilots banked and did a flyby.