African Dragon (7 page)

12.

It had been a busy day, breaking once for fish roasted over the fire for lunch, and then again for a dinner of MREs. They all sat around the big campfire together to have dinner and relax. Everyone agreed they’d rather eat the same kind fish every day for a year rather than the MREs.

Mackey laughed when they complained about the MREs. “Oh, quit your bitching. When I was in Vietnam and you either weren’t born yet or were still poopin’ in your diapers, we had to eat C-rations. I swear to God, they were left over cans from the Korean War. If you think vacuum-packed steak is lousy, try eating twenty-year-old shit on a shingle. We ate the dead dogs we found rather than
that
shit.”

“Oh
nice
,” said Theresa.

“You think I’m kidding? We used to go down to the river and pick up the dead dogs after the river boats had gone by and wiped out the shoreline. Then we’d bring them over to Mama-san and she’d cook ‘em up with these little bottles of hooch she made. She’d bring us these little green coke bottles filled up with some kind of sake or something that would take the paint off the trucks, and we’d eat the dogs and drink until we passed out. The dog was better than the C-rats, trust me.”

“Oh man, that’s just
wrong
, dude,” said Earl Jones with a groan.

“No, man—I’ll tell you what was
wrong
. I was in a little shop near Saigon once buying some food that was actually edible. So I go in, and there’s a little old lady sitting with a puppy in her lap in the front of the store. I made the mistake of telling her I liked her dog on the way in. By the time I was walking out, the dog had been skinned, filleted, butchered and put into brown paper for me to take home.
That
was wrong, man.”

The entire group was silent. Finally Theresa said, “Please tell us you’re kidding.”

“I wish I was,” said Mackey.

“Well there goes
my
appetite,” said Theresa.

“Yeah, well you already ate about ten fish anyway,” said Moose with a laugh, which got him a shot in the ribs from Theresa.

The group continued to swap stories and enjoy a moment of relaxation together until Mackey put on his game face. He leaned closer and lowered his voice, and everyone immediately stopped speaking.

“Tonight, after dark, we’re doing a little recon. About four miles back towards Kalemie the Chinese have set up an ‘aid station’—more like a large military base. The place is guarded by a few thousand PAC guerrillas being trained by Chinese advisors. Of course, they’ll tell you that they are just security guards for the food being shipped in by the Chinese, but that’s a crock of shit. They have brand new uniforms and Chinese automatic weapons.”

“Don’t forget about the cute yellow berets,” added Cascaes.

“Right,” said Mack. “So at least you can spot them easily. There is a very minor possibility that Nigel may still be alive. If he is, and he’s still in Africa, that’s most likely where he’s being held. We’ll take a midnight stroll tonight and check it out. Everybody carries heavy, but we are recon only tonight. Get some sleep. We’re up at midnight and traveling on foot.

“It will take an hour to get there. I figure we snoop from one to three and get back by four. We’ll break up into smaller teams once we get there. Jon, you’ll stay with your dive buddies—McCoy, Jensen and O’Conner plus Woods and Koches. I’ll take Moose, Ripper, Hodges, Stewart, and Theresa. Chris, you take Jones, Jules, Smitty, and Ernie P. I don’t want any contact tonight, but if something goes wrong and you have to take somebody out, do it silently and bring the body out with you. Somebody goes missing, they’ll probably assume it was a deserter. They find a body and we’ll have a war started out here. Any questions?”

There were none, so everyone finished eating and headed back to their huts to grab some sleep. Mackey, Cascaes, and Cohen went back to the “command hut” (Mackey and Cascaes’ residence) and opened a laptop. Mackey had already marked the location on the GPS map, and they pulled up a satellite photo of the area. With the photo zoomed up tight, they could make out rows of long cabins with a fence around the rectangular camp that included towers in the corners.

Cascaes laughed at the picture. “Yeah, looks just like an aid station. And the government doesn’t do
anything
about this?”

“They can’t unless they are prepared to commit to a full scale war, which they can’t afford. They’ve been begging the UN, but the UN says there are no reports of hostilities, which is true. There never are—right up until the genocide begins. This government is pretty broke. Their entire army isn’t much bigger than the PAC, and their weapons aren’t new. I saw border guards carrying bolt action rifles that were older than me—probably from the
first
Congo War. They wouldn’t fare so well against the latest Chinese Type-81 assault rifles.”

Mackey explained their approach through a grassy area where they’d have to watch out not only for sentries, but for cheetahs and other animals that might want to eat them. They would get close enough to look at the camp from all sides, taking pictures and gathering whatever information they could, and then reassemble and leave the same way they had come.

When they were satisfied that they knew their way around the camp as well as their route from their home base to the target location, they called it quits. Jon returned to his hut, and Mac and Cascaes lay down on their sleeping bags and tried to sleep.

13.

Mac’s alarm went off on his watch a few minutes before midnight. They were up and dressed in camouflage fatigues within five minutes, then used black and dark green grease paint on their faces and hands. Weapons were checked and loaded, and they walked outside to gather with the rest of the team. Moose handed out coffee that he had been kind enough to make a few minutes before everyone else was awake.

Mac raised his tin cup and toasted his crew. “Okay—let’s gas up and go,” he said, then drank down the strong coffee. They walked out of the village in the dark of night, using night vision goggles. The moon provided some light, but it would have been almost impossible to travel without the night vision equipment. They were traveling fairly light, with only their weapons, some water, and the small computers for navigating through the grass and scrub land.

For the most part, the terrain from their camp to their target was hilly and open, with stands of trees and occasional small forests. They were traveling north by northwest, basically due west of Buwali, the closest village. They were about halfway through their hike when Ripper, on point, held up his hand and squatted down into the tall grass and shrubs. All of the team members were wearing throat mics and ear pieces, and could communicate quietly with each other.

They stayed silent and waited, watching the green world of their night vision goggles. Finally, they could see what Ripper had seen—people moving quietly up ahead of them in the stand of trees. They all went prone in the grass and froze. The group ahead of them was fairly close, and they could occasionally see a pair of eyes light up in their night vision.

Ripper spoke quietly into his mic. “Boss, I can’t see much, looks like quite a few of them. They don’t see us. Wait one.” Ripper belly crawled closer to the group ahead of them moving slowly and silently through the grass. When his voice finally came back over the headset, he sounded like he was fighting back laughter.

“Uh, Skipper, you might want to move up and see this,” said Ripper.

“What is it?” asked Mackey.

“Fucking
chimps
!” he said, finally laughing out loud. His laughter startled the group of chimpanzees, which had made large nests in the low trees. They started grunting and moving around faster.

Mackey told Ripper to move back. They’d go around the group of chimpanzees and give them a wide berth rather then get them riled up and noisy. While the chimps would most likely not get aggressive towards a large group of humans, now was not the time to find out. The team moved quickly and quietly around the chimps and continued northwest towards the PAC headquarters.

At almost oh-one hundred hours, they could make out the camp in the distance. There was no apparent activity, but that didn’t mean that no one was patrolling. They broke into the preassigned groups and fanned out as they moved closer to the camp. Generators had been set up to run lights along the perimeter fence, although they were fairly dim and spaced far enough apart that an elephant could probably walk through the fence without being seen.

Jon and his group moved silently to the right, while Mackey and his group went left. Cascaes took out his night vision binoculars and crawled closer to the fence until he was about a hundred yards out. He lay on his belly with his high-powered night vision binoculars on a very small tripod and zoomed in tight. There were a few sleepy looking Africans up in the towers half dozing, and the camp was completely dark.

They spent the next two hours comparing the buildings to their satellite photos, making notes on which buildings were most likely sleeping quarters, and which appeared to have electricity and could possibly be communication buildings. There was nothing that could link anything they were looking at to China, other than a large sign in French that read
China aid station
. Some buildings appeared to be warehouses where food or medicine might be stored, but they could just as easily house a few thousand rounds of ammunition.

By two am, Mackey recalled his group and they silently melted away from the compound. They regrouped a quarter mile away and began their walk back home. Occasionally, an animal would stir from sleep and run through the scrub, causing everyone to drop and grab weapons, but other than that, the trip home was uneventful. By three fifteen, they were back in their compound changing clothes and washing up. They would be getting about three hours of sleep before the sun came up. Just another day at the office.

14.

The singing from the lake sounded sweeter than a rooster crowing, but only barely. The men and women of the team groaned and bitched as they woke up to fisherman calling up the fish from Lake Tanganyika, their deep voices echoing throughout the camp. On a different morning, it would have been charming, but today, on three and a half hours sleep, it was plain old annoying.

As the team assembled at their usual spot around the fire, they were greeted by Jon Cohen, who looked pretty darn chipper all things considered.

Moose took a cup of coffee from him and asked, “What are you so happy about?”

“We’re going diving this morning. I’ll finally get to see what’s in the lake,” he answered, sounding genuinely happy.

“Alligators,” said Moose.

“Crocodiles, actually, but not around here. They’re further south. We should be pretty free from large things that want to eat us up here.”

“Well you have a good time, Jon. Personally, I’m planning a nap,” mumbled Moose.

Jon laughed and sat down with Pete McCoy, Ray Jensen and Ryan O’Conner. The four of them would be diving the Lake together. As soon as they had eaten powdered eggs and some plastic looking thing that was supposed to be bacon out of a foil pouch, they headed down to Fish Central. With Hodges and Jones helping, they loaded their wooden dive boat, purchased from the previous owners, and headed out.

Hodges and Jones waved goodbye from the shore, and as the boat chugged away with its single outboard motor, Jones shook his head. “Man, those SEALs are crazy muthafuckers. Would you go diving in that water? There’s fucking crocodiles and sharks and shit in there.”

Hodges laughed. “You weren’t paying attention in class, young man. There are no sharks in there—it’s freshwater. And Jon said the crocs are further south or something. The fish they’re catching are little. They’ll be fine.”

Jones rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, my ass is staying right here on the land. I’ll fight a thousand of those PAC mutherfuckers before I go swimming around in that shit. You remember Paraguay? Fucking piranhas, man! No way—uh-uh. This marine ain’t getting wet this trip.”

Hodges laughed. “Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”

***

General Shen Xun-jun was observing the firing line where twenty five PAC soldiers were target shooting at the far end of the compound. For the first two months, the soldiers had trained carrying spears and poles and whatever else they could use for “rifles.” When the Chinese weapons arrived inside a huge shipment of rice—enough to fill two rail cars—the soldiers finally were issued real guns.

While many of them had fired weapons before, and some of them had fought in the Second Congo War, none of them had ever seen a Chinese made assault rifle. The Chinese Type-81 Assault Rifle offered the reliability of the Russian AK-47, with accuracy closer to an American M-16. In the right hands, it was a formidable infantry weapon. Just not in
these
hands.

Shen Xun-jun cursed and screamed at his officers as he watched the Africans firing long bursts and wasting ammunition. Most of the rounds they fired were nowhere close to where they were aiming. The soldiers that
did
have combat experience had for the most part had fired either ancient rifles, or AK-47s at very close range. Usually while slaughtering enemy women and children. These new Chinese weapons required much more finesse, and they sprayed everywhere in nervous and excited hands.

Shen Xun-jun’s officers relayed the screaming back at the firing line in French, and the shooting stopped. The Chinese officers moved the men twenty-five yards closer to the targets, cutting the distance almost in half. One of the Chinese officers picked up a weapon, fired five short bursts, all of which were dead-on the target, and handed it back to the PAC soldier. He screamed in French for the men to slow down and fire single shots. The Type-81 had an effective range of four hundred meters. With the PAC forces, it was well under one hundred.

Shen Xun-jun watched for another ten minutes, and then ordered his men to unpack the bayonets. If they couldn’t shoot straight, they would at least learn to assault using the working end of a bayonet.