Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (190 page)

“The intersection with Robert Mugabe. If it’s occupied, back off and wait for reinforcements. If not, take it. If you can, send a recon force forward until the intersection with—” He looked down again. “—Nelson Mandela. We’ll need to hold it, too.”

“You okay?” she asked once Ian switched off the radio.

He shook his head, pointed to his chest. “It keeps going off – and not in a good way.” But when she opened her mouth to intervene, he said, “Not now. I’ll manage.”

Ian’s Blackwing forces were only about two hundred strong so far, and they didn’t expect reinforcements until 1700 hours. They had to secure the northern edge of the city until then.

Meanwhile, Ikanbo, who knew Windhoek better than Ian or the mercenaries could ever hope to, would follow back streets and make his way toward the airport on the southern edge of the city, avoiding firefights if at all possible. Two of Ikanbo’s men in the capital had avoided arrest and called earlier to report that Charles’s brother was holed up in the Presidential Palace near the airport, coup headquarters. Ikanbo hoped to cut the head off the snake, kill the rebellion before it could take root.

Ian sent his fellow agent, Steve Billups, together with a pair of Blackwing officers—a Belgian and an American—to reinforce the bunkers they’d seized from the rebels. Men carried heavy machine guns and boxes of ammo. A truck mounted with rockets parked under hastily spread camouflage netting. Crotales surface to air missiles. They would be helpless against a serious American air strike, but more than enough to chase off Namibia’s own decrepit air force.

It was already midday. Traffic was heavy leaving the city, light on the approach, as word no doubt spread about the coup, but even so cars came down the B1, maybe trying to reach family, or protect homes and businesses in Windhoek. Some cut across the other side of the highway and fled as quickly as they’d come, but others came to an abrupt halt against the blockade. Very soon the pileup blocked both the road and its shoulders on both sides.

From the city came the sound of gunfire, and a heavier thump of mortars. Ian’s face turned grim. He turned to Julia. “It’s too early for a firefight. He’s nowhere near the palace.” Ian turned back to the jammed up road behind them. “We’ve got to keep it clear, or we’ll never get those reinforcements.” Sweat was pouring down his face now. He clutched at his stomach as though nauseous.

“I’ll clear the road,” Julia said. “Give me some men with guns. We can route traffic to the other side. I’m a civilian, they’ll trust me.”

He looked her over, as if assessing her fitness for duty, then nodded. He grabbed several men, gave them curt orders to follow her.

Julia made her way to the first car. Inside were two young men, dressed in blue overalls with hard hats and tools in the back seat. They must have gone to work as normal before someone told them about the coup. She tapped on the glass of the driver’s side window.

“Can you turn the car around, please? We need the road clear.”

“We not go nowhere until we get mother’s house,” the driver said.

“Where is your mother?” she asked.

“Wanaheda. I get off at Monte Christo, I be there in few minutes.”

She looked beyond the car with mounting dismay. Even while she was arguing with this man more cars were joining the queue. Behind her, the Blackwing soldiers looked disgusted with the weak way she was confronting this man.

“You can’t do that,” she said. Her exasperation was mounting. “If I let you past, everyone else will want to get into the city, too. The situation is too dangerous and—”

“Who the hell you are anyway?” the man asked. “Where police? Who these foreigners?”

“Get off the road!” she shouted, her patience suddenly broken. She snapped her fingers and waved for the Blackwing soldiers. They approached the car and lowered their weapons menacingly, as if waiting for Julia’s command to fire.

The driver shrank back. “Okay, okay. Where I go?”

She directed him to cut across the median, then turned to the next car. This time she started with the angry, demanding tone, and got better results. The third car needed only a gesture and it turned to follow the first two. Within minutes she had an orderly line of cars turning back from the city. Only a few holdouts required threats.

There was a roar and two jets streaked overhead. Julia instinctively flinched, stunned by the noise from the concussion of air. Blackwing forces shouted, ducked for cover. In the city the fighting had intensified. And then, without warning, one of Ian’s heavy machine guns fired a volley toward Windhoek.

Ian was on the ground, next to his Jeep. Had he been shot?

Julia turned to the soldiers. “Keep this road clear. Just keep sending the cars back.”

She turned and ran back to find Ian on the ground, completely still, his pupils pinpoint specks of black.
Was he breathing
? Slowly, she saw. His pulse was also slow, weak. Two men stood over him, helpless. One man shook his head, the other said, “I don’t know what happened, he wasn’t hit.”

“Stand back, move. I know what to do.”

They’d gone so long since the incident on the highway in Utah that she’d almost forgotten that the implant still could receive commands, and the CIA likely knew exactly where he was. Quickly, she took his left hand in hers and moved his fingers in sequence to restart the implant.

“Come on, Ian. Come on.”

There was no response. Panic rose inside her as Ian remained motionless. This was not post-ictal. No reason for his pupils to be so dilated. And why so much sweating? Something was going on in the implant. Ian had said as much, and she’d been stupid not to figure it out before now, when there was a crisis.

Julia looked to the sky but saw nothing but clouds and the contrail of a distant commercial jet, well past the city and moving east. The war planes had left no visible mark in the sky, though she could still hear them roaring in the distance.

A pair of armored trucks pulled in, part of the first wave of reinforcements. They immediately took fire from whatever force continued to gather against them. It was quickly turning into a major firefight. She had to get Ian up and back in service.

“Who is in charge of that missile battery?” she asked.

“The Crotales?” someone asked. “There’s a firing control specialist at the computers, but Westhelle said not to touch it unless those jets attacked.”

“Yeah, well there’s a plane up there we need to take out. Maybe more than one.”

“What is it? One of those F-16s?” the man asked.

“No, a spy plane. I don’t know, could just be an unmanned drone,” she said. “But you have to find it and shoot it down, or at least chase it off. It’s the plane that’s doing this to Ian.”

But she wasn’t as confident as she sounded. If it wasn’t a command from a plane, then what was going on? Had the implant fried his brain. No, or his pupils would be dilated. He’d be posturing. She forced herself to think systematically. Diaphoresis, constricted pupils, slow breathing and heart rate. It didn’t make sense.

If she didn’t know better she’d think he’d been oversedated. He looked exactly like a patient who was coming out of anesthesia with too much fentanyl on board.

Opiates.
Of course!
Ian had been talking about the feeling he was getting from the implant, a feeling he liked. The sweating, shallow breathing. She should have seen it earlier. The implant was triggering something that mimicked a response to opiates.
Chang.
Had to be. He’d switched out the energy stim program to one that stimulated brain regions loaded with endorphins. Frontal lobe, insula. They’d generated more than enough data during the weeks of training. And Ian’s brain had learned to autostimulate, essentially a reflex by now.

Like a monkey pushing a lever for drugs as fast as it could go, his brain had overdosed.

She was livid.
Chang.
How dare he… “Get me a medical kit. I need naloxone, now!”

Something landed nearby, exploded. She shielded his body from the rain of dirt and asphalt. The Blackwing soldiers were in full battle mode now. One man went down, screaming and clutching his leg. She had a hard time seeing the incoming fire, but she could hear it chew up the pavement and ping into vehicles. And every man or machine she could see was returning fire.

The radio in the Jeep started to squawk. “Blackwing One, come in.” It sounded like Charles Ikanbo. “Are you there? I need immediate assistance. Can you hear me? Blackwing One?”

Three missiles screamed skyward from the SAM battery. They raced off in different directions.

Two of them disappeared to the east, but the third veered toward the bush-coated hills on the west side of the city. The two F-16s broke apart, dropped something that flashed behind them, and then veered back toward the city.

She didn’t see it coming, didn’t hear it. Just one moment she was looking at the two American fighter jets, then the next moment they banked sharply away. And then the explosion.

It lifted the truck with the missile battery high into the sky. A clap like a lightning strike, inches from her head. She fell back on the pavement, stunned. Secondary explosions. Ian lay next to her, unmoving.

Ikanbo was shouting on the other end of the radio. “Dammit Blackwing One, where are you? Westhelle?”

________

Charles Ikanbo led his security forces almost to the edge of the airport before he found himself in trouble. Platoons of regular army troops patrolled the streets. The first two platoons fled when they saw his force approach, more than a hundred and fifty in number, equipped with RATEL and VAB armored personnel carriers. Whatever they’d signed up for, it hadn’t been to get slaughtered in a firefight with superior forces.

The road to the palace would be well defended. The palace sat near the airport and this gave Charles an idea. Rather than try to blast his way through the road he could cut across the airport tarmac and then slice through open country and knock holes in the fence to approach the palace from the rear.

At the airport they took fire from a .50 caliber machine gun and small arms from men in sandbag bunkers. By the time Charles took out the .50 cal, a T-55 tank rumbled into view from across the airport tarmac. The tank fired once, missed, but before Charles could bring his anti-tank guns to bear it had taken better aim and fired a second shell. This one hit one of the RATELs and punched through its armor like it was made of cardboard.

His men fled the burning wreckage. Others screamed as they burned alive. A pair of Namibian army APCs sped in to join the tank, together with trucks, further to the rear, loaded with Namibian regulars. Meanwhile, Charles’s men bunched up behind him, unable to spread out and bring all their firepower into the battle.

He didn’t need the airport and he couldn’t take it. He’d have to attack the palace directly.

“Pull back!” he shouted, then again into his radio, “Pull back to Mandume Ndemufayo.”

The enemy forces didn’t follow, perhaps worried that he was trying to lure them into a trap. The RATEL continued to burn behind them, sending a column of smoke into the air. Their first engagement and a clear loss.

He pulled back to the intersection then cut around the airport. As he’d expected, there were Namibian army forces on the road that led to the palace, but they were few in number. The RATELs and the HUMVs opened fire. The army forces returned fire. An RPG screamed past Charles’s Jeep. He pulled behind one of the RATELs, which pinged with small arms fire.

The road was wider here and he was able to bring more of his forces into the action. Soon the enemy was either dead, dying, or in full retreat.

They surged toward the palace and were forced to pull short again. Two T-55s flanked the entrance, additionally protected by concrete barriers, and his brother William had dug in with dozens of men in sandbagged positions. Charles ordered his men to take cover among the trees and attack the fortified positions.

Progress was agonizingly slow. He knocked out two of the bunkers and several mortar pieces but couldn’t dislodge or destroy the tanks. Meanwhile, he lost another APC and half a dozen men. He took a pair of outbuildings on the opposite side of the street and used them for cover. One was nothing more than a cinderblock foundation, and it was here that he made his headquarters.

Two jets streaked over, American F-16s. He watched them with dismay. He had to get in there and end this thing.

Charles got on the MILSATCOM satellite radio phone. “Blackwing One, come in.”

Westhelle had a couple of artillery pieces that should be arriving shortly from the Ondjamba camp. He could target those tanks. Charles would need a spotter, too.

He tried again. “Are you there? I need immediate assistance. Can you hear me? Blackwing One?”

Fresh waves of gunfire and exploding RPGs pummeled their position. Charles looked over the cinderblock wall. Regular army forces were approaching the palace from the road he’d just taken. There were two APCs and a couple of trucks. He was now wedged between the enemies in the palace and the ones that had seized his escape route.

An explosion rocked the city from the direction of Ian Westhelle’s forces. A column of smoke rose into the sky. One of the F-16s roared back over the city. A shell smashed the cinderblock wall. The air was alive with bullets and dust and screaming men.