Authors: David DeBatto
Hoolie had moved to the entrance. DeLuca joined him, a round shattering one of the bottles behind the bar, another splintering
the wood. Another grenade exploded in front of one of the cottages, then a third. The monkey cage had blown open as well,
George, Paul, John, and Ringo scrambling about and shrieking.
“Did you see if Dari was hit?” DeLuca asked.
“I didn’t see,” Vasquez said, ducking again as a tracer round passed overhead.
“Let’s go,” DeLuca said.
“Hold on a second,” Vasquez said, grabbing him by the arm. “We have a problem. The bridge is gone.”
DeLuca saw that the bridge extended for perhaps ten feet from the bar, and beyond that, a gap of about twenty feet, too far
to jump to shore.
“We swim then,” DeLuca said.
“What?” Vasquez said.
“You can’t swim thirty feet?” DeLuca asked him
“I can swim thirty feet,” Vasquez said, “but not as fast as a crocodile can swim thirty feet.”
“Jesus,” DeLuca said. Hoolie had a point. “It’s always something.”
He surveyed the scene quickly.
“Get the bread from all the tables,” he commanded.
He kept watch while Hoolie and Asabo filled a white tablecloth with rolls and bread scraps. Dari’s men were retreating, their
return fire abating. That meant whoever had fired on them was probably advancing. In the distance, DeLuca thought he heard
the sound of jet engines approaching.
“Wait for it,” he said. “On my signal, cast your bread upon the water, as far in that direction as you can.”
The Hellfire hit the hillside, throwing up a spray of fire and smoke, the flames barreling up into the night sky, lighting
up the trees.
“Now!” DeLuca commanded.
Hoolie and Asabo stepped out onto the remaining span of bridge and flung the bread in the direction opposite the shore.
“Wait a second,” DeLuca said. He heard the sound of tilapia feeding on the bread, and then the louder sound of crocodiles
feeding on the tilapia.
“Let’s go,” he said, diving into the water as the others joined him. He swam as fast as he could, pulling himself up onto
the shore but not pausing there, running with his head down for cover until he reached a stone wall by the motel office. Asabo
joined him there, and Vasquez a moment later, the three of them dripping wet.
“Boo-ya!” Vasquez said. “Man—I was walking across the top of the pond like a cartoon mouse.”
“Love attracts love,” DeLuca said. There was still considerable automatic weapons fire coming from the hill, and it was getting
closer. “Let’s go—that way!”
They sprinted for the cottages, taking cover behind one and pausing. Before them was the jungle, into which John Dari and
his men had disappeared. DeLuca lacked flashlights or NVGs and was effectively blind. He was equally disappointed to learn
his phone had gotten waterlogged during his brief swim and was not functioning.
“Use mine,” Vasquez said, handing DeLuca a phone still inside a waterproof Ziploc bag.
“Are you okay?” Scott said when DeLuca managed to connect.
“So far,” he said. “We got wolves at the door. Any suggestions?”
“There’s a trail,” Scottie said. “You’re behind cabin four from the right, facing the pond. The trail head is behind cabin
six, two to your left.”
They moved. DeLuca thought he saw an opening in the bush.
“Where does it lead?” he asked.
“No idea,” Scott said. “Away.”
“Away is good. Stay on the line and keep my signal,” DeLuca said, plunging headlong into the bush with the others close behind
him as a squad of gunmen appeared near where they’d parked the Cressida.
They ran. There was no light, but all the same, DeLuca thought he could make out the gist of the trail, leading downhill,
the going treacherous as they stumbled over roots and rocks. Now it was important only that they put some distance between
them and the motel. He ran until he was thoroughly winded, perhaps half a mile, maybe less, it was hard to say. The smell
was nothing like the “rain forest scented” shampoos his wife liked, floral and pleasant. It smelled like mushrooms, dank rotting
vegetation, putrefaction, and decay. He saw the moon briefly through the jungle canopy above. He got back on the phone.
“What’s happening?” he asked Scott. A jet streaked high overhead.
“Don’t stop now,” Scott said. “They’re looking for the trail. Somebody behind you is using GPS. I’ve got his signal.”
“Can you blind him?”
“Not easily,” Scottie said. “Wouldn’t you rather know where
they
are?”
“You have a point,” DeLuca said.
“There’s some sort of facility, three klicks down the trail,” Scott said. “I’m looking at a map but it’s not clear what it
is. More to come. Get moving.”
They stayed close together in the darkness, Asabo explaining that it was probably a trail made by forest elephants, judging
by the width of the path they were on, or so he’d read—he’d never actually been in the jungle before now. They paused when
a flare lit the sky, maybe a mile behind them. Whoever was chasing them had lights and would be able to make better speed.
They followed the directions Scott relayed to them, stopping when he told them to stop.
“What’s next?” DeLuca asked.
“You’re there,” Scott said.
“We’re where?”
“Check your Fee-bee-cee-bee—I sent you the same map I’m looking at.”
“My CIM took a swim—what are we looking for?”
“A research station of some kind.”
“Where?”
“Right there. Exact coordinates. Milsat’s accurate down to two meters.”
“There’s nothing here,” DeLuca said.
“There has to be. You’re right on top of it.”
“We’re on top of it? Negative. We see nothing.”
“It’s on top of us,” Vasquez said. “Look.”
He’d found a pair of climbing harnesses attached to ropes leading straight up into the air.
“The station’s in the canopy,” Asabo said.
“Can you climb?” DeLuca asked him. “You ever use one of these?”
“I’ve done some rock climbing,” Asabo said. “In Vermont.”
“Pretend this is Vermont,” DeLuca said, helping Asabo into the rig and turning to Vasquez. “We can’t outrun them. Once you’re
up top, drop a rig for me.”
“How long do you think these ropes have been exposed to the heat and humidity?” Vasquez said, giving one a tug to test it
as he snapped a carabiner onto the belt of his harness. “Somebody could take a whipper.”
“Why do you think I’m sending you first?” DeLuca said.
“It’s always something,” Vasquez muttered.
DeLuca waited below as the other two ascended. He heard a clattering overheard, and then he heard nothing but the night.
He waited.
He saw another flare, closer now, perhaps half a klick off.
“Any time, Hoolie, any time,” he said under his breath. He wondered what was keeping them. Had they run into trouble of some
kind? He heard voices far off but growing louder.
“Now would be a very good time, Hoolie,” he said. He considered his options. There was a layer of muck at his feet, damp decaying
leaves and vegetation. He could lie in it and cover himself if he had to. He waited, counting to ten. At ten, he would burrow
into the muck like a salamander in autumn. He heard voices again, closer now.
When the harness finally dropped, at the count of eight, he suited up and climbed as fast as he could. A platform had been
built in the canopy, about three hundred feet above the ground, he estimated. He pulled the ropes up behind him, and then
the three of them lay down on the platform, a wooden square about twelve feet across.
“Sit tight,” Scott said. “We’ve got you on UAV. They’re right below you. One of them has NVGs with infrared strobe.”
They waited.
Another flare fired from a flare pistol lit up the night sky, the bright light hanging in the air as it drifted from its parachute.
DeLuca doubted they were visible. The jungle canopy was too thick. Down below, they were guessing.
He heard a burst of machine-gun fire coming from directly beneath them, bullets ripping through the leaves all around them.
They heard shouts, men below them, calling out into the bush, and then the shouts faded.
He listened to his own breathing, his heart thumping in his chest.
A few minutes later, Scottie told DeLuca it appeared that the troops looking for them had moved on down the trail.
“We’ll stay here until the light comes up,” DeLuca said. He turned to Asabo. “Could you hear what they were saying?”
“They said, ‘Come out, John Dari—come out and get what’s coming to you.’ Things like that,” Asabo said.
“Ligerian army,” DeLuca concluded. “Probably Ngwema. How’d they find out about the meeting?”
“Dari’s men?” Vasquez said. “Somebody flipped on him?”
“I doubt it. It wasn’t from us,” DeLuca said, thinking. “We’re encrypted. LeDoux briefed CENTCOM if he briefed anybody. They
briefed the Pentagon. They briefed the White House. The White House calls Bo? Bragging about how they had somebody meeting
with Dari?”
“Maybe it’s not that complicated,” Vasquez said. “Maybe the clerk at the hotel opened the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. Who
compromised us isn’t exactly the problem, though, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” DeLuca said. For Paul Asabo’s sake, he stated the obvious. “The problem is that now John Dari believes we
set him up. He was the target, not us. And he knows it. He thinks we tried to kill him.”
WHEN SYKES CONTACTED HUBERT NKETIA IN Kumari, Nketia assured him that if they could get to a village called Amagosanda, he
would have troops meet them there to take them the rest of the way. When he told Nketia that Ms. Duquette was hoping to meet
with John Dari, Nketia said that he would try to arrange it, but that Mr. Dari was a very busy man these days. Sykes’s bullshit
detector went off immediately, but he decided to reset it—he was a stranger in a strange land, where the rules were different.
He wondered if Nketia was waiting for a bribe to be offered. In the hotel lobby, he told Major Fewalla, the officer heading
Gabrielle Duquette’s security force, that they needed to go to Amagosanda. Fewalla returned after talking to his men and said
that given how the situation had deteriorated in the last forty-eight hours, the dangers had increased proportionately, and
his men were going to need hazard pay, five hundred dollars a man.
“This is extortion,” Sykes said. The major nodded and smiled.
“Yes, that is right,” Fewalla said.
When Sykes reported the news to Gabrielle and told her they were shaking her down, he added, half in jest, “For that kind
of money, you could just rent a helicopter.” She responded by saying, “All right then, do it,” went into her bedroom, and
returned with twenty thousand dollars in new one-hundred-dollar bills.
At the airport, he found a pilot named Kwame MacArthur, a captain in the Ligerian air force, skinny as a pencil with aviator
sunglasses, a thin mustache, a gold tooth in the middle of his smile, and a walk that made him look slightly like a marionette.
After dickering over the price, MacArthur said he thought he’d be able to fly them, as long as they could be back that evening.
The helicopter, a Chinook with Ligerian air force numbers and insignia on the aft pylon, was more helicopter than they needed,
capable of carrying as many as forty passengers, but it would have to do. As they boarded the jolly, Sykes had further misgivings.
“There’s no copilot or flight engineer,” he told Gabrielle, as MacArthur settled into the right-hand seat. “We might want
to rethink this.”
“I don’t want to rethink this,” she said. “Can one man fly this thing?”
“I suppose,” Sykes said. “I doubt he’d try if it wasn’t possible. I’ve just never seen it.”
“You’ve flown in these before?” she asked.
“Hundreds of times,” he said.
“Ask him if we could hire a copilot and a flight engineer—tell him it’s not a matter of money,” Duquette told him. Yet when
he walked forward and spoke to the pilot, MacArthur only shook his head, then returned to his preflight checklist.
Gabrielle made a circling gesture above her head with her index finger to tell the pilot they were ready, then buckled herself
into a seat by the window. A minute later, they were airborne. Sykes had packed a pair of MAC-10s with as many ammo clips
as he could carry in a backpack. Duquette carried only her silver Zero case, not daring to leave it behind. A .60-caliber
minigun was mounted at the rear door of the jolly.
A greeting party was waiting for them in Kumari, including dancers in colorful costumes, drummers, singers, children with
hand-lettered signs that said
WE LOVE YOU GABRIELLE,
a television crew, and a coterie of officials and men in dark suits. Her smile lit up the terminal, Sykes thought. Hubert
Nketia was a well-dressed man of about sixty, with close-cropped white hair, a broad grin, and a hearty embrace for the famous
actress, who introduced Sykes as her traveling companion. Sykes instructed Captain MacArthur to have the helicopter refueled
and to wait for them in it with the engine running, adding that there would be a substantial bonus for him, pending their
safe return to Port Ivory. If MacArthur was for sale, Sykes wanted to make sure he understood that Gabrielle Duquette was
the highest bidder.
“Will Mr. Dari be meeting us?” he asked Nketia when he had a moment.
“Oh yes yes, I think so,” the man said, smiling brightly. Too brightly, Sykes thought. Maybe working in counterintelligence
had made him cynical (DeLuca had warned him it would), but he didn’t trust people who smiled too easily and told you what
you wanted to hear.
They boarded limousines and were brought to a place called the Safari Inn, where a banquet had been prepared. On the way,
Sykes checked his gear and made sure he had a round chambered in his automatic.
“What’s that for?” Gabrielle asked him.
“You’re usually most vulnerable during transport,” he told her. “Are you absolutely certain about this guy?”
“Hubert is my son’s godfather,” Gabrielle said. “I’d say you’re too suspicious, but I actually like that in a bodyguard. We’re
okay.”