'A' for Argonaut (2 page)

The tattoo beat of
the downpour was all around Amber Chu. It rapped off the steel body of the industrial-sized open-topped waste compactor just outside the fortress, pinged off the coffee cans and empty beer bottles, drilled on the newspapers and candy wrappers. It seeped through the rotted refuse that blanketed her. She shuddered, gasped, her weakened breath pulsated against the heavy refuse that crushed against her smarting, inflamed lungs. The stink sickened her, forcing more vomit out of her mouth.

Waterfront rats rustled through the garbage. She could hear them as they ate leftover submarine sandwiches and pizza pieces that had been tossed by the dockworkers at lunch twelve hours earlier. Tied at her hands and feet, pinned like a mummy beneath the debris that had been heaped on her, Amber found it impossible to move. One of the rodents slithered up to lick a residue of wine that dripped from a bottle that stabbed the back of her neck as her head jammed against it. She struggled hopelessly against her restraints, against the crushing garbage. Outside, the killers had come down from the fort. She could hear them chanting Vangaler’s mock mantras. She also heard a soft clicking sound coming from the side of the compactor.

“Bye, bye, asswipe. Let this be a lesson to your friend.”

Outside the compactor, Vangaler worked the screwdriver on the end of his pocketknife into the plug of the wafer-tumbler cylinder lock on the compactor’s side-mounted control panel. He put just enough pressure on the pins inside the plug to free the lock as they fell into place.

He pushed the panel’s red power button activating the machine.

No! It can’t end like this. I’ve come too far, fought too hard to be taken for granted like a piece of trash. NO! Not here. I’m NOT going to die in here. I’m not trash. They are trash. GARBAGE! Mack. Help me! Mack. Mack Maran. Please. Tony‌—‌Tony, my precious, my son.

It was her last thought before the huge crusher began to grind. Its motor strained against the resistance‌—‌her body. The thick steel piston pressed on, breaking a gallon wine bottle that lay near her head. Broken shards of glass sliced her scalp. Blood seeped through the remnants of her once elegant gown, soaking her lacy bra.

“Skiet die teef!
Waste the bitch!” Vangaler said, smiling hideously at the men gathered around him.

Withdrawing the cell phone from its holster, clipped to one side of his cummerbund, he dialed Congo-Kinshasa.

One

Fort Bragg, home of the U.S. Special Action Warfighter Command‌—‌Months earlier

D
isgraced and now Ex-Army Lieutenant Colonel Mack Maran stepped out into the sunlight. He was tall with steeply sloped shoulders. His clean-shaven face was grim under a head of closely-cropped but still curly chestnut hair. The square jaw, hooked nose, and cocoa skin made people wonder if that face originated somewhere in the Mediterranean East or North Africa sometime in the distant past.

He pushed the sunglasses up on the bridge of his nose.

Behind him, the new, brick-faced Fort Bragg Courthouse with its tall, pediment-capped portico and four Roman pillars, loomed like a mammoth symbol built to reflect the standing and dignity of American military justice. Hands shaking, Maran stuffed the manila folder under one arm. It contained a dismissal from the United States Army for “Other Than Honorable Conditions.”

Questions still haunted him.

It was six weeks now. Had he really led his men to their deaths in the raid or had he been betrayed by the generals? If so, had he joined an institution that had become so corrupt that it would sacrifice one of its most loyal devotees for power and profit? His fear congealed to anger, then to hate, stoked by utter shame. His face felt like hot wax. If he could peel his skin off like a mask, he would don a new face. For the first time in his life, he wanted not to be himself.
Anyone! A librarian, a bookkeeper, a longshoreman‌—‌anyone but a disgraced soldier.
He had always been on the side of the good guys. Now the unimaginable had become plausible. Now the world,
his
world, which always had structure, may actually have had no order, no code, and now, no purpose. The facts belied all he believed in and had relied on for most of his life. He felt as if he were standing on the rim of a cliff‌—‌below him, a pit of madness.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a half-smoked Parodi stogie. He lit up, cupping the Zippo. His brow wrinkled. He wondered if it was a Chinese fake, another U.S. economy-crippling knock-off. He took a drag. Usually he just kept the lighter with the unofficial SAWC crossed-bayonet insignia on hand for lighting up friends. Now he looked around in the vain hope that he would spot one of them. On the outside, he looked like any soldier waiting for a ride. Inside, alone at the top of the granite steps, he shook with rage. In front of him stood “Bronze Bruce,” the 22-foot high statue of the Special Warfare Soldier, the symbolic heart of the Army Special Operations Command. Though he could not see the inscription on the base, he knew what it said: “He offers a gentle hand of friendship to the oppressed of the world…He is the perfect warrior…a healer, a teacher, and an opponent of evil.”

Now he wondered what those words
really
meant. The thought ignited a memory. A sickening memory.

Sean Callanan! Déjà vu.

It was another incident, almost precisely like his own humiliating court-martial, where an innocent American patriot was framed and then trashed by his superiors. Sean Callanan at the CIA had been a friend for years; he had served his country with honors until his superiors at the CIA, spurred on by an ass-covering FBI foray, made his life a living hell.

When a dozen Russian agents working for the U.S. disappeared in Moscow, the “Community” knew they had a mole in the house. They turned on Callanan, ignoring his distinguished career and dismissing him from his duties in disgrace. For twenty-one months they trailed his every step, bugged his phones, and threatened to prosecute him for a capital offense. He was cleared when a Russian defector gave up the real traitor in the FBI.

Maran knew Callanan would understand his situation if he were alive, but he had been felled by a fatal stroke.

He thought of the dress saber Ae Sook had bought for him. He wondered whether he was now honor-bound to take it down. He’d hung it over the mantle of his bachelor quarters home on the Bragg compound. He had kept it there in honor of his son’s memory. Dennis had always been proud of what it represented. The sense of his son’s presence triggered a pang of sadness. The memories made his eyes sting. He took off the Oakley SI Ballistic Frame sunglasses briefly and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Flipping the cigar stub onto the steps, he ground it out with the sole of one of his bloused paratrooper boots. He gripped his aluminum crutches tightly. He looked out across the parade field. No one was waiting for him. How could there be? Not one of his military pals even knew what had happened to him or where he was. Outside of them, no one else mattered. The Army had been his life. Now he was on his own for the first time in twenty years. His legs throbbed. His head felt like a bell tower at noon. His skull fractures were healing, but he feared the panic attacks the doctors had warned him about. He gripped the crutches so hard his fingers bruised. He shook his head clear, then used all the strength he had to straighten his back.

The Fort Bragg compound stretched in front of him, its barracks and four-story office buildings pieces in a vast board game. Now he realized that he was no more than a chip himself and the game’s players had a hidden agenda‌—‌one that had clearly eluded him.

His fingers probed his pocket for his AA chip, a constant reminder that Alcoholics Anonymous had ended the tornado that had taken over his life before he stopped drinking. He held it in a vice-like grip, grateful.

“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

I
t 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.