'A' for Argonaut (40 page)

“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 where 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

T
hey 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.

As the man closed the passenger-side rear door for the woman, he looked up and down the street and up at the sky, his face clearly visible in the surveillance tape.

“Zoom that. Freeze it for a print. Match it on the watch list.”

“They’re back on the road,” snapped Dale Harper. “You’re certain it’s them?” Labrecque demanded. They were on the Kikwit road to Mbuji-Mayi.

“It’s them. Up-armored Humvee, camo, with a three-barreled Gatling gun on the roof turret,” Harper answered.

“Hell. That could be any one of dozens of Humvees the oil companies’ mercenaries are using to patrol Cabinda. Zoom in.”

The picture grew in size.

“That’s our boy. His license plate.”

“Roll it back. Replay.”

“Want to see them getting into the vehicle?”

“You got it. Rewind.”

Several minutes later, after Harper adjusted the focus, the two operators focused in.

“Stay right on top of them,” Labrecque commanded.

They hit two matches from the CIA terrorist watch list: Grigol Rakhmonov Boyko, wanted by the International Criminal Court for murder and human rights atrocities. He was accompanied by Erik Vangaler.

Within the next two minutes, Harper and Labrecque had forwarded the print to Cole Martin. The Intel was on Maran’s laptop minutes later. He opened the site as soon as the beeping signal went off, backed by the repeatedly blinking red dots on the screen. The camera had focused on the woman. He was thrilled by what he saw.

Amber! She’s alive.

Fifty-Three

Kinshasa

M
aran was in a hurry. He joined Tracha at the wheel in a rented Land Cruiser. They headed through the city to the muddy pocked road through Province du Bas Congo and Madimba, Tracha at the wheel. As they zoomed down the street through La Cite,” they passed decrepit, limping trucks, jitneys that rattled through broken traffic lights, crowds of emaciated hawkers selling cigarettes and
shikwanga
, manioc roots wrapped in fresh gum and tamarind leaves. They sped up Boulevard du 30 Juin.

As they continued out of the city they curved around trucks broken down in the middle of the road. Bonfires alongside of the road burned six to ten feet high.

A tall man in silver aviator sunglasses, dressed in a shiny, bright green blazer, a starched white shirt and knife-creased tan trousers, waved at them to pull over. He looked like he was on his way to a country club lunch, but he held out a laminated security service I.D. card as if it were a barricade. Behind him, a group of unsteady, red-bereted soldiers glared at Maran. They raised their Belgian FAL Automatic rifles high in the air. Tracha gunned the motor, they crashed through the makeshift checkpoint and, at eighty-odd miles an hour, blew past the decrepit schoolhouse that served as a barracks for the small contingent from the mission-shackled UN defense force. The impotent gunfire reverberated down the road behind them; the soldiers were too drunk to hit a barn with a shotgun.

As they neared the next checkpoint, Tracha stomped down on the gas pedal again. The Land Cruiser lurched forward like a giant lumbering goose spooked by a ball on a golf course. The two men bounced like rubber balls as the four-wheeler picked up speed.

Tracha gave the two sleepy sentries the bird as the Land Cruiser slammed through the flimsy wooden gate. Before the sentries fired their first shots, the two former U.S. Army special ops troopers were out of effective range. The shots kicked up dust in the ruts and embankment. Puffs of smoky yellow blended with the billows left behind the fleeing truck. Maran and Tracha looked at one another, laughing louder than they had in a long time.

They went through two
more checkpoints the same way before they reached Tshikapa, two hundred and fifty miles from Mbuji-Mayi, their final destination. They stopped and got out of the vehicle in front of a gate that held a sign that ordered visitors to check in. Another sign said this was territory owned by the Societe’ Miniere de Bakwanga, MIBA, the DRC’s state-controlled diamond mining company. The mines themselves were another fifty miles north of the headquarter offices.

The building was low, squat, painted beige, matching the dry, sandy earth, the stucco walls and clay roofs were splashed with jerry-built camo stripes.

“We parked in your front driveway, if that’s OK. Deborrah Anderssen from the U.S. Embassy said to expect her to be here for a meeting with her and your Director,” Maran told the security manager in his finest Boston accent.

Maran flashed the official I.D. and passport Anderssen had given him:

Walter Q.R. Jackson

Chief Investigator: competitive business intelligence

“This is Kurt Tracha, research director. He’s also a cameraman with me to illustrate key elements of our investigation.”

He and Tracha followed the manager across a dusty courtyard into the four-story mining office structure. They took an elevator to the top floor.

The MIBA Director was short and compact. Maran was surprised at the cleanliness and modernity of his office. Windows looked out on the mining complex. A tower that marked the mining shaft elevator to the original underground mine, now defunct, could be seen across a paved dusty lot. An IBM computer sat at a terminal hooked to an Internet cable. A Blackberry sat on the light mahogany desk.

Deborrah Anderssen sat in one of three small upholstered chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of the director’s glass desk. She rose as Maran stepped into the office with Tracha. She made the introductions. Maran assured the MIBA Director he would not be quoted. The squat man got right to business. He explained that though the take for MIBA’S Kasai fields was sixty million dollars, U.S., the official revenue for the country’s diamond fields the previous years was three hundred fifty million dollars. He also told Maran that the true revenues were double that because of smuggled diamonds.

“Something else is happening that’s abnormal,” Deborrah jumped in.

Maran surmised her response

“Big stones?”

“Trade in stones greater than two carats is flying. No one wants to pay the price for a smaller stone, not when they can get a chunk on their finger for a fraction of what they used to pay for a little starter. These are incredible discounts.”

“What’s happening?” Maran asked.

“Vangaler. His Ninjas came in about a year ago with no resistance. Terrified everyone. Runs the region now. He has to be smuggling out these huge stones for Boyko. It’s anyone’s guess where they come from. Boyko’s MecaMines only produce smaller stones. We can’t figure out where he gets these blockbusters.”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Maran said. Tracha shifted the camera case strap on his shoulder.

“I trust you will be more true to your word than the U.N.”

An ache began just above Maran’s neck, slowly cranked up until it enveloped his entire head in a merciless throb. By now, he had learned that he had to take action immediately. He reached in his pocket. His fingers found his medicine vial. He rose to stretch his legs, palmed one of the pills prescribed by his doctor at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital for his panic disorder. It wasn’t easy for someone used to drinking two quarts of coffee each day, but expediency had taught him. He had learned to quaff the pills down dry.

“What do you know about Boyko’s diamonds?” he asked.

“We know they go to Antwerp to be cut, a place where diamonds flow like water over Victoria Falls, where no one will ask a question,” she answered.

“Boyko keeps a low profile. He has offices in Cabinda and Kin. He’s seldom to be found at either place. Joseph Dos Sampas will know how to find him,” the Director promised.