Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (180 page)

“Well?” one of them asked.

“It’s them, I’m sure of it.”

“Then we’ll move in?”

“Yes.”

They’d cut an entrance in the barbed wire fence on the south side of the ranch. In the near dark, with no headlights, it took a few minutes to find. Meanwhile, Charles called the rest of his men on the radio. They met him on the road within half an hour.

It was a well-trained, sober group. Most of them were older and had once served in the army before joining his security forces.

Samuel Ubo voiced the question all of them must have been thinking. “And what if we approach the house and find out we’re outgunned?”

Ubo was a tall, intense man and one of the brighter, more loyal men under Charles’s command. It wasn’t a question backed by cowardice, but caution. Charles would rather have a dozen cautious men than the kind of guy so common in the army, full of false bravado but likely to turn tail and run when faced with organized resistance.

“If I’m right, they only have five men, maybe six,” Charles said. “We’ve got thirty two.”

“What about what happened in Kaokoland?” Ubo asked.

Charles had arrived on the scene with his men only to find himself outgunned by the Blackwing mercenaries—who could have annihilated him in minutes, had they not cooperated. And a single CIA agent, holed up under a burned-out APC, had killed two of his men, only given up when he exhausted his ammo.

The problem was that his intelligence forces were limited in what they could carry. The thinking was that the intelligence services, secretive by nature, posed a threat that could only be neutralized by imposing limits. One of those limits meant that his men were only armed with semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, or handguns like the Glock that Charles currently wore at his side.

He needed some RPGs and heavy machine guns.

“We’ve got more than enough firepower,” Charles said. “And it will be easy enough to exaggerate what we’ve got, anyway. We’ll circle the trucks around the ranch house, turn on the lights. We’ll come in from every direction.”

“There’s no cover out there. What if they start shooting?” someone else asked.

“There’s cover. There’s the dry wash, and that outbuilding. And the berm on the north side, we’ll set up some men behind there.”

They were right, Charles knew. A couple of guys with fifty caliber machine guns could keep them pinned down almost indefinitely. He couldn’t afford a siege, or to have to call in the army. Not when the army itself was suspect.

In the end, he decided to call in more men. Fifty should do it, he thought, which meant he needed twenty more. He had that many watching outlets from this spot, most within fifty kilometers of here. Bringing them in would leave him blind outside the confines of the ranch.

But better to be sure here, take the risk. Fifty men would give him enough to approach the building in overwhelming numbers while still holding back enough in reserve to open fire on the building should things turn ugly.

Meanwhile, night fell and his men grew anxious to move. After he made the calls, Charles waited, impatient, for the others to arrive.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Julia put the footage from Kendall’s implant on the largest monitor. Markov and Ian leaned in for a closer look.

Markov’s friend from the NSA had decompressed the data stream, then returned it as video footage with audio spliced in. There was a strange, dreamlike quality to the footage, as if that dream had been filmed through an ancient video camera. The focus jumped around, and looked as if someone had set the zoom on maximum and forgotten about it.

That camera was Kendall Rose’s eyes. She couldn’t see him, just his arms, shoulders, hands, depending on where he was looking. Kendall turned his gaze to Ian, then looked out the windshield. Armed men flanked the car, dressed in dark uniforms with berets. The truck was moving.

A mechanical voice came through from off screen. It was stripped of normal inflection and tone, as though played from an old phonograph at the wrong speed. The audio cut out frequently with a hiss of high-frequency static. “Drive until … the water tanker. Park ...”

“Who is that?” Julia asked.

“Dupont,” Ian muttered. “He was sitting in the truck behind us.”

“Henri Dupont,” Markov said. “He supposedly died in the attack.”

“He did,” Ian said. “I saw his face come off. Killed by that C-130. You’ll see. You’ll see it all.”

They led Kendall in for a strip search while Ian waited outside. Julia found it hard to watch, but Kendall bore the abuse calmly, seemingly unconcerned as the woman passed over his body with latex gloves while Dupont made rude comments, many of which were unintelligible. Kendall and Ian passed each other, then Kendall went on to get something to eat from the mess while Ian went to his inspection.

“Let’s skim this part,” Markov said. “I’ve seen it all from Ian’s implant. Go forward to the part where Kendall and Ian get their orders.”

“Right,” Ian said, “the part where you make us twitch and dance. Like a puppet on a string.”

“Not my choice. I voted against the optional functionality and I wasn’t the one who sent you those orders.”

“Convenient.”

“Shh,” Julia said, hunched over the computer. “I need to pay attention.”

Julia tried to concentrate, but she was watching Ian out of the corner of her eye. The footage had apparently brought back all the memories, the feelings of betrayal. She wondered how deep those feelings went, how long the scars would take to heal. He looked distracted, in his own world.

The two men shut up while she worked. It wasn’t quite like fast forwarding a DVD, and not all of the footage was in the same file.

Quieting them down proved to be a mistake. Ian’s anger reminded her of Terrance. Why would he do it? They had so many years together, so many shared memories. She could find the good ones without much trouble, buried like nuggets in all the drudgery and strained moments of their daily life.

He’d all but signed off on her death. No, he’d as good as pulled the trigger himself by sending her that Trojan Horse.

She scanned through the footage until she got to the point where Ian and Kendall were in their tents, lying on their cots. Kendall lay down, closed his eyes and the image of the tent slipped in and out of focus, then was replaced by darkness. Ill-defined swirls of light played along the contours of the afterimage of the tent.

“That guy could sleep anywhere,” Ian said. “Rocks, sand, scorpions, bombs, didn’t matter. He wouldn’t even so much as ask for a pillow.”

Suddenly, Kendall’s eyes flicked open, or that’s how Julia saw it as the monitor went from black to gray with dim outlines.

“Get dressed, leave tent, go left and walk until you reach the cistern.” The words sounded mumbled, like they’d gone through a voice distorter.

“Is that it?” Markov asked. “Is that the command?”

“Yes, that’s similar to what I heard,” Ian said. “Haven’t you seen this part already, just from my perspective?”

“Not this part, no. I’ve got the transcripts of what you heard from the engineers when you were crouched on the other side of the wall.”

The command came a second time and Kendall walked out while the Ian on the screen sputtered something incomprehensible.

Ian was intent now. He leaned over Julia’s shoulder to see what his friend had seen in those last minutes before the air strikes.

Kendall passed a bunker, then crept near a truck with a box mounted on a column. There were tubes with what looked like missile tips poking out.

“Is that a mistral?” Markov asked.

“Looks like it,” Ian said. He turned to Julia. “French surface to air missiles. Portable. Wait, freeze it there.” He pointed to something on the edge of the frame. “Is that a tank? No, wait.”

“Giat 155 mm mobile artillery,” Markov said.

“Ah, yes.” He let out a low whistle. “Wow, and this is a private army. They answer to a corporation?”

“Welcome to my world. Some days I feel like the whole CIA is obsolete,” Markov said. ‘”It used to be that the United States spoke and the world at least listened. Now wars are fought by private companies. They have their own spies, their own economies as big as some nation-states. They send men to die, and it’s not about freedom or even power. It’s as simple as protecting the bottom line to stockholders. Guys like us have been outsourced.”

“Go ahead,’ Ian said. “Start it up again.”

Kendall’s choppy gaze shifted among bunkers, artillery pieces, with audible instructions telling him exactly where to turn. All this information could be blown up, analyzed in military laboratories, in a way that any one man could not have possibly done on his own. Thanks to the implant and Julia’s surgical expertise. She was struck with a sense of pride in what she had made possible, more real than any exercise or white paper after looking through Kendall’s eyes.

Kendall evaded detection throughout this reconnaissance, but just as he was almost back to his tent, an alarm went up throughout the camp. Someone had detected the incoming transmissions to the implants, Julia knew. The chase was on.

Markov told her to pause the footage. “That’s it, then. That’s all we have.”

“Did you see something?” Julia asked, “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” Ian said, sounding puzzled. “I mean, I understand some of the pieces. I was sent to spy out the engineers, gather technical knowledge. They sent Kendall to gather intel about the Blackwing contractors, their numbers, their forces. Am I right?”

“Sure looks that way,” Markov said. “They needed visual confirmation of what they were seeing from satellites and predator drones. What was in the tents? How much was camouflaged to look like something else?”

“But why?” Julia asked. “Just a recon mission, like you told us?”

“There’s no such thing as a dry run when you’ve got resources of this magnitude.”

“So why did they care about this particular camp?” Julia asked.

“Hold up a sec,” Ian said. “We’ll get there, but I want Markov to back up for a minute.”

“Go ahead,” Markov said.

“First, I can’t figure out why Blackwing is so heavily armed. Those resources go way beyond maintaining a robust defensive posture. And from our side, you say the CIA needed to know Blackwing’s military capabilities. Why? I can’t see how that would be useful unless someone were planning to…”

“Exactly.” Markov said. “That’s it. That explains everything. I can’t think of any other explanation.”

Ian shook his head. “There’s no way we could pull that off, not with what we just saw. It’s one thing to call in a gunship, but SOCOM can’t send in ground forces. It would take a battalion, maybe two,
with
air support, to take that camp.”

“Wouldn’t that basically start a war?” Julia asked.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Ian said. “It would amount to an invasion. Both the Chinese and the Namibians would go nuts.”

“They went nuts anyway,” Markov said. “Even with the cover story of a rogue agent. You, I mean.”

“A full-scale attack would go way beyond that.”

“Unless,” Markov said, “it wasn’t the Americans planning the attack.”

This quieted Julia and Ian for a moment. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it.

“You mean the Namibians,” Ian said at last. “The regular army.”

“Right. American intelligence, American air power. Namibian ground forces.”

“They’d attack a camp in their own country?” Julia said. “But why? Aren’t the Chinese and their mercenaries here by permission of the government?”

“And this is the why of the matter,” Markov said. “Let’s go back to what you saw, Ian.”

Ian shrugged. “Just a couple of guys chatting about mining operations.”

“About an oil field,” Markov corrected. “A really, really big oil field. What the industry calls an elephant.”

“I don’t know much about oil,” Ian said, “but I know there’s a lot of that stuff in Africa.”

Julia had read about the scramble for oil across Africa. It was one of the few major places still left to discover and exploit large resources and all the big players were involved.

“Why this field?” she asked. “There’s oil all over Africa.”