African Dragon (14 page)

32.

Julia and Chris had gone for a long swim, found a secluded spot, and got reacquainted. When they were finished, they swam back to the fish farm and found Jon and his crew sitting down for lunch. They joined them for a meal of MRE’s, improved with some fresh barbequed fish.

“Bony little fuckers,” complained Jon, spitting tiny fish bones out of his mouth.

“Yeah, but tastier than the plastic hotdog looking thing I just ate. What the hell
was
that, man?” asked Ryan O’Conner.

“I think the package said ‘beef’ on it—it just didn’t say from what animal. Stick with the fish, man,” said Ray Jensen with a laugh.

“You guys seen Ernie P. or Smitty?” asked Cascaes.

“Down in Fish Central, playing with claymores. I think those two guys are fucking crazy man. They are getting this place rigged to repel a major assault.”

“That’s what they get paid to do,” said Cascaes.

“Yeah, Skipper, but these guys are
nuts
. They were taking stuff apart and making their own explosives and shit. They’ve got wires and sensors running all over camp. While you guys were out at the airstrip, Smitty and Ernie were
busy
. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I appreciate the help, since it’s our asses on the line if the PAC comes cruising in. But damn—I’ve never seen anybody do
this
kind of shit. Those guys engineers?”

Cascaes laughed. “I told you—Department of Defense.”

“Oh yeah—spooks like Mackey,” laughed Jon. “That explains it.”

Cascaes laughed. “They were imbedded with Rangers in Afghanistan for two years. Making ‘things that go boom’ is a specialty. You think only the Iranians know how to make IEDs?”

“Yeah—that’s a good word for it. Improvised Explosive Devices. That is definitely what this shit is—
improvised
. I just hope I’m not in camp if those two fuckers start setting shit off. This whole place is going to be one big black hole.”

“Okay, you have my curiosity piqued,” said Cascaes getting up, tossing his unfinished fish into the fire. “Come on Julia, let’s go get our other two volunteers.”

Julia and Cascaes walked down to Fish Central, the large fish packing building on the lake that would serve as a final defensive position if the shit hit the fan. When they walked in, sure enough, Smitty and Ernie had taken apart a dozen Claymore mines and had parts everywhere. They were laughing and joking as they worked.

“You two guys enjoy your work
way
too much,” said Julia.

“If you can’t have fun at work, why work?” asked Ernie, with a fuse and wires between his teeth. Ernie P. was a short Hispanic man with a bright smile and brown eyes that smiled when he did. For a good-natured guy, he was as deadly as they came.

“What the fuck are you doing with my explosives, sir?” asked Cascaes with a smile.

“Improving on them, Skipper,” said Smitty, holding up a large bucket of chain links.”

“Ah, I see,” said Cascaes.

“You see what?” asked Julia, confused.

“Watch and learn,” he answered. “What’s the container?” he asked Smitty.

Joe Smith held up a large metal box that had once housed something mechanical in the fish farm.

“Gotcha. How many?” asked Cascaes.

“A dozen,” said Smitty, then he flashed a smile. He really
did
love blowing things up.

“Damn. They really did pack a lot of shit into our SCUBA crates,” answered Cascaes.

“Chris, you want to fill me in?” asked Julia.

“You see, my dear,” he said dramatically, “Our ingenious friends over here take a Claymore mine, which is a shaped anti-personnel charge designed to throw hundreds of small ball-bearings…”

Smitty cut him off and walked over with steel balls in his hand. “Allow me, Skipper,” he said with a bow. “The M18A1 fires seven hundred spherical steel balls over a sixty degree fan-shaped pattern approximately two meters high and fifty meters wide at a range of fifty meters. It is effective up to a hundred meters, although the optimum range is about fifty meters.”

Ernie P. walked over with chain links in his hand. “Your very devious team mates have combined several claymores with chain links and assorted metal odds and ends with increased shaped charges to double the field of fire and effective kill zone. By the time we are finished with camp, we will
want
the PAC to attack us.”

“You may want to be in Tanzania when we set this puppy off though,” said Smitty.

“Wow,” was all Julia could muster.

“Yet again, I leave a beautiful woman speechless,” said Smitty with another dramatic bow. “Now if you will allow me to continue my work, I have lots to do.”

“Okay,” said Cascaes. “You have just gotten yourself out of a scavenger hunt for uranium. Keep up the good work and I’ll find another victim.”

Chris and Julia walked back out, up the small slope towards the campfire. “Holy crap, Chris. Those guys know their shit, huh?”

Cascaes smiled. “This team was picked from the best of the best Julia, including you. If they tell me this place will be covered, I will take that to the bank. They were pretty famous in Kost, back in Afghanistan. Set up an ambush and took out a few hundred Taliban soldiers in a series of controlled blasts. The Rangers they were with were damn good, and they all said that they’d never seen anything like those two. I’m glad they’re with us.”

She smiled and whispered, “I’m glad I’m with
you
.”

He winked and fought the urge to kiss her since they were near the campfire.

“Okay boys, I hate to break up the diving for the day, but I need two of you to come with us. Smitty and Ernie are busy, and Moose, Theresa, Hodges and Jones are at the airfield. Who wants to dry out for a bit?”

Jon nudged Pete McCoy. “C’mon Petey, we’ll give R and R some R & R.”

“R and R?” Pete asked.

“Ray and Ryan.”

Pete didn’t complain. “Aye, aye. I always wanted to go on safari anyway.”

Cascaes smiled. “Hopefully we won’t see lions—just uranium mining activities. Bring the cameras; we’ll be linking directly to Langley.”

“How far a hump?” asked Pete, planning gear in his head.

“Probably five to eight klicks. The mine is north of Lubumbashi, and a bit west. When we came up from the airport, it was on our left about two klicks. We’ll be humping in the hottest part of the day, so bring plenty of water. The walk back should be cooler.”

“We’re carrying, right Skipper?” asked Jon.

“I won’t walk out of my hut to take a piss without a sidearm around here,” said Cascaes. Then he looked at Julia. “Excuse the expression,” he added.

“No problem. When I take a crap in the woods, I bring a grenade,” said Julia. Jon and Pete cracked up.

“I’ll hang with you anytime, lady,” said McCoy.

She blew him a dramatic kiss. Cascaes smiled and switched back to serious mode. “We’ll carry assault rifles and silencers, night viz in case we run late, commo equipment, local currency, water and food for two days.”

Pete and Jon were making the mental list, and then hustled off to load packs for the four of them. They had served as SEALs with Cascaes as their commander for almost eight years, and would follow his orders to their deaths. They had extreme confidence not only in their own abilities, but in his command experience and expertise. As they hustled off, Julia spoke quietly to Chris.

“It’s going to start getting busy around here, huh? Between babysitting the PAC, defending this little fish farm, keeping track of Nigel and finding the story on the uranium mining, it’s really going to cut into our dating.”

“Yeah, and you left out the part where we take on the PAC army of ten thousand infantry with heavy weapons.”

“Right. And there’s that,” she said. She looked around and no one was nearby. She leaned over and kissed him. “I love you, by the way.”

Cascaes smiled and felt startled. While he had made the comment before their trip about marrying her one day, neither of them had ever actually used the “L word” before. She laughed at his startled face.

“I only said that because we’ll both probably be dead in a couple of days.”

“Whew, for a minute there I thought this was getting serious,” said Chris.

“Pretty serious,” she said, this time seriously. He leaned over and kissed her back. “I love you, too,” he said, “But that is classified.”

They walked back to their command hut where Mackey was on the horn with Moose over at the airfield. They packed gear quietly as Mackey spoke with the team at the PAC camp. They finished packing and were starting to head out when Mackey ended his conversation and turned to Cascaes and Julia.

“Moose said the camp is getting busier. Lots of shooting—live fire exercises with their new weapons. Maybe they are getting ready to go operational sooner than we think. They’ll stay out their watching all night. You guys be careful and get back tonight. Stay in radio contact every hour and make sure your GPS locators are working. I hate having my people scattered all over when there is a chance that World War Three is gonna start. Who are you taking?”

“Julia, Cohen, and McCoy are with me. Smitty and Ernie P are finishing the defensive preparations for the farm. They’ve got daisy-chains a mile long. Moose, Ripper, Jones, Hodges, Koches, Woods, and Theresa are still up at the PAC camp?” asked Cascaes, counting on his fingers.

“Check,” said Mackey.

Cascaes was doing roll call in his head. “Where’s Cory?” he asked. Cory Stewart was CIA, and was an old contact of Mackey’s. Cory was older than most of the others, and a quiet, loner type who was all business, all the time. While he enjoyed listening to the joking and funning amongst his team, he was usually just the observer. Like many CIA field agents, Cory tended to be “in the background” and easy to miss in a crowd. Prior to his recruitment to “the team,” Cory had always worked alone in the field.

“He should be halfway to Kinshasa by now,” said Mackey.

“What the fuck?” asked Cascaes, obviously pissed that he wasn’t informed ahead of time.

“Sorry, Skipper,” said Mackey. “Langley’s orders. He’s supposed to make contact with the DRC government contacts we have and update them on their options. The director sent the order a couple of hours ago.”

“You might have mentioned it,” said Cascaes. “Anybody else?”

“Nope. Just Cory. He hopped the train a few hours ago. It’s almost eight hundred miles—gonna take a while on that piece of junk. I’ll brief you later. For now, get what you can at the mine, and hustle back. By tomorrow, we should all be reassembled and prepared to take offensive action against PAC forces, if we get the order. The situation changes every time I call. Just go take some pictures, and get your ass back here in one piece.”

Cascaes wasn’t particularly happy being left out of the loop, but was somewhat used to it. Rarely did anyone ever have “all the pieces” of the puzzle. He grunted a “yes, sir” to Mackey and grabbed his combat pack. “Let’s go,” he said to Julia, and headed out to find Jon and Pete and start the journey to the uranium mine.

33.

Chris, Julia, Pete, and Jon met up at the campfire and hopped in the old pickup truck. They headed off towards the reported location of the illegal mining operations north of Lubumbashi. It would be three hours or so each way, bouncing along the dirt roads. At a little after two o’clock, and eighty-five degrees with relatively high humidity, it was not a great day for a drive in the country.

They drove through tall grasslands, remaining relatively quiet as they observed the raw beauty that was Africa. The countryside was wide open and there were no signs of human activity for the first two hours. As they grew closer to the mine, a makeshift village appeared. Thousands of Africans, mostly very young men or boys, had come to the area to work the mines. One of the biggest problems in fighting illiteracy was combating the dropout rate of boys who could easily be talked into working for low wages at the mines. The village was merely a shantytown of sorts, with garbage strewn everywhere. When they got closer, they stopped the truck and got out to walk. They spread out and approached the edge of the village cautiously.

Cascaes called in their location and the fact that they had made contact. Pete snapped a few pictures that were uplinked to Langley, and they walked closer. The first thing that got their attention was a small graveyard outside the village. There were easily a hundred recently dug graves with small stones as markers. Pete snapped a few pictures of that as well.

“Radiation sickness?” asked Julia to Cascaes. He shrugged.

They walked closer until they were at the edge of the village. The place reeked of latrines and garbage. “That’s what happens when a village has no women to oversee the men,” thought Julia. Chris motioned for Jon and Pete to stay put and cover them, while he and Julia dropped their packs and weapons. They walked slowly into the hellhole that was the village until they saw their first person, a young boy of maybe ten or so. Julia approached him with her warm smile and said “
hello
” in French.

“
Hello
,” he replied, but didn’t smile.

“
What’s wrong
?” she asked.

“
I can’t work today
,” he said. “
My little brother is sick
.”

“
Where is he
?” she asked.

He pointed to the small hut behind them. “
Sleeping inside
.”

Julia asked if she could see him, and maybe help. That got a smile. “
Are you a doctor
?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “but I have some medical experience.”

They followed the boy inside the hut. It was even hotter inside. A boy of maybe seven or eight was lying on his side on the dirt floor. He looked seriously ill. His skin color was pale for a dark-skinned boy, and his eyes were glazed-looking in hollowed out cheeks. He looked like he was freezing. He didn’t stir when they walked in.

The older brother sat next to him and whispered to him in Swahili, “
The white lady is going to make you better.”
Still no response.

“
How long has he been sick?”
she asked.

The older boy, who told them his was named Soffee, said that his little brother, Imika, started with diarrhea last week, and wouldn’t eat. Then he started getting cold, then hot and weak. He had drunk water from the creek by the mine, even though they had been told not to. Imika had boiled it first, which they had been taught would kill bad things in the water by the Peace Corps some years back, but they didn’t understand that uranium and heavy metals couldn’t be boiled out.

Cascaes asked Julia to translate his questions. “How many times did he drink that water?” Soffee shrugged. Most of the villagers had been drinking it for weeks. Cascaes asked where the water was, and Soffee said he threw it away. Cascaes asked where the creek was, and Soffee said he would show him if Julia would help his little brother. Cascaes quietly told Julia not to even think about bringing the boy back to camp. Julia narrowed her eyes with anger.

She stayed with Imika, holding his cold hand, watching his labored breathing, trying not to cry. He was too weak to even lift his head. Chris followed Soffee through the center of “town” towards the site of much activity. They walked on baked mud and dead, brown grass, past the huts that housed the laborers. Beyond the corrugated steel huts and makeshift cabins, thousands of Africans were digging by hand in an open pit with the aid of water cannons that ran off large generators near the town’s water source.

The open pit mine was the size of ten football fields, but there was very little in the way of heavy machinery. The land was simply being “overpowered” by sheer will. Water cannons tore open huge holes in the mud, and then workers with pick axes and shovels would dig through the dirt looking for the Uraninite ore, or “pitchblende,” that they had been trained to identify. They stood in ankle-deep, orange-tinted, foamy water and oozy mud that would kill a fish or frog in a matter of seconds. The ore in this location held the highest concentration of uranium yet discovered on the planet. “Oh great,” thought Cascaes, “Use the water to mine the ore, then drink the water.”

Cascaes stopped when they got close enough to see several Chinese men overseeing the workers. The Chinese wore lead lined waterproof boots and took iodine tablets daily. The Africans were barefoot in the poisoned mud.

He stepped behind a hut and called back to Jon on his throat mic. “Fishboy—you read me?” he asked.

“Loud and clear, boss,” said Jon.

“Come up the center road, quick and quiet with your camera and concealed side arms only. Chinese are on site. Jackpot. Out.”

He waited for almost five minutes, and sure enough, Jon and Pete came hustling up the same dirt road through the shantytown. Cascaes called to them when he saw them, and they ducked back behind a shed with him and the small boy.

“Smells
great
around here,” said Jon quietly with a grimace on his face.

“Like a shit sandwich without the bread,” said Cascaes. “The mine is up ahead. This little kid is Soffee. His brother is dying up the hill over there. They’ve been drinking the water. Same water the Chinese are using in the water cannons to strip mine.”

“Brilliant,” said Jon. Pete pulled his lens cap off and hustled up ahead to get a look. He started filming, taking particular care to show the Chinese men directing the workers. He also filmed the African workers carrying out another small body and laying it to the side for burial later. They couldn’t stop working yet.

“Unfuckingbelievable,” said Pete to himself as he filmed. When he had ten minutes of footage, panning over the huge area of ravaged earth where thousands of boys and men dug through poisoned mud, he hustled back to Cascaes. “Got it all, Skipper.”

“Okay, let’s get Julia and get the fuck out of here,” said Cascaes. He held up several small vials filled with water samples and showed them to Pete.

They ran back to the hut where Julia sat crying with the young boy. His eyes were rolled back, showing only the whites, and he was convulsing quietly.

“Oh shit,” said Pete when he saw the kid.

Julia shook her head at Chris. “He’s so sick, Chris. He’d never make the trip anyway.” She held up her hand to Soffee, who took it, looking scared. She explained in French that his little brother was dying, and that Soffee should go home as soon as Imika had passed on. He should go home and never come back to this place that was poisoned.

Soffee sat next to his brother and cried, and Cascaes gave him his thermos of fresh water and some MREs. “Tell him to eat and drink only this until he gets home.”

Jon looked at Cascaes. He pulled a few morphine syringes out of his fatigues. “Skipper, we can make it easier for him.”

Cascaes squatted next to the two young boys and asked Julia to translate. “Tell Soffee that this will help his brother sleep comfortably until he goes to the next world. He’ll have happy dreams.”

Julia translated and Soffee hugged his brother and cried and nodded his head.

“Who’s gonna do it?” asked Jon, his mouth suddenly so dry he could barely get the words out. They exchanged glances in complete silence.

Cascaes took the syringe from Jon, swallowed hard, and popped it into Imika’s skinny thigh. They watched the boy drift away. At least he wouldn’t be suffering. They sat with Imika while he sang a song they didn’t understand, but cried just the same. They shared a quick prayer, and left the boys, all four of them wiping tears, and jogged out of the village back into the grass, where Pete set up his satellite computer and sent the film to Langley.

Julia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Different country, same shit. Sweatshops in China, slave-wage farmers in Mexico, baby miners in Africa—no one gives a shit as long as what they want to buy is cheap.”

“That about sums it up,” said Cascaes.

Jon kept seeing Imika’s face and skinny body. “I’ve never been able to understand how it is that Africa and South America, two continents so rich in natural resources, are so fucked up.”

“Don’t get her started,” said Cascaes, stiffening. “You two can figure out the world’s political and economic picture when we get back to the Land of Wasteful Spending. For right now, keep your shit together and stay focused. We’ve got ten thousand armed thugs itching to start a revolution so they can make this little mine scene a national pastime. If you really want to help these people, stay alert.”

Pete whispered over to the three of them. “Uplink is finished, Skipper.”

“Okay, let’s boogie on back to the fish farm and see what’s going on. World War Three could have started already for all we know.”

They stood up and started walking. Julia looked at Cascaes. “You know, she was right.”

“Who was right?” he asked.

“Deirdre. Back in Langley. That slide show didn’t really paint the picture.”