'A' for Argonaut (39 page)

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

T
wo 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 the 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.