“You sound very chipper, Douglas. How are you?”
The caller’s voice was disguised. The sound emitted by his telephone was digitally morphed by a voice transformation system originally developed for psychological warfare and to fool voiceprint ID systems. Case recalled it from his early days at Cons Ops. Digitization, miniaturization, new understanding of articulatory position, and software advances from VTS1 to VTS14.8 had improved it mightily. It enabled the caller to change timbre, transpose pitch, add confusing vibrato and tremolo—even capture and synthesize signals to generate impersonations. The Voice could sound like a robot. He could sound like a little girl. He could sound like Jon Stewart or Hillary Clinton. Tonight he sounded like a cross between Stewart and WALL•E.
The Voice’s phone line was secure. It revealed nothing to Case about his identity or where he was calling from. Nor, Case presumed, did the caller necessarily know where he was, such was the anonymity of cells and sat phones. The difference was that if The Voice asked for Case’s location he would reveal it immediately. While Case would not dream of asking where the caller was.
Case presumed the caller was from within the American Synergy Corporation, high in management—one of the vipers, most likely—or on the board of directors, or the mysterious Buddha himself. Though he could be from outside the corporation, he had a very clear concept of what was going on inside it. Case had received his first call two years ago. “You were the most talented covert officer ever to serve your country,” The Voice had flattered him. “Serve me and be rewarded.”
Their relationship had already made Case the wealthiest man he knew and, he suspected, a man with a golden future if he stayed loyal, obedient, useful, and discreet.
“I
am
chipper, thank you, sir. What can I do for you?”
“I want a member of Ferdinand Poe’s circle replaced.”
“By whom?”
“First create the vacancy.”
“When?”
“Soon. Be prepared.”
“Who?”
The Voice named Ferdinand Poe’s chief of staff, Mario Margarido.
The steady Margarido was the glue that held Ferdinand Poe’s ramshackle new government together while it struggled to repair infrastructure and right the economy of the war-torn island. With Margarido suddenly gone, the acting president’s only strength left would be his spy turned security chief, Patrice da Costa, and his own formidable will. Case wondered if The Voice was planning a coup. To ask would be presumptuous. Better to remain loyal, useful, obedient, and discreet.
“Do you have any preference how Margarido is removed?”
“It would be best not to have him machine-gunned in public.”
Case recognized the studied sort of dry sense of humor calculated to flatter the knowledgeable listener on his sophistication and to pass on additional information without saying it aloud.
“Beyond that limitation, use your best judgement. The least suspicion the better, but a soupçon of doubt will keep others guessing.”
It sounded very much like a coup. “I’ll take care of it. As soon as you want it done.”
“I will give you word when the time comes. Will you farm it out to SR?”
Case hesitated. “I’m not sure. Events have sped up. Surprisingly.”
“Do you sense a problem with SR?”
This time Case did not hesitate. There was a fine line between obedience and partnership. Trust spawned partnership, and whoever The Voice was, Case’s long-term hope was to become his partner. Money was one thing—a fine thing—but power was another on a whole higher scale. Case answered honestly, admitting his worst fear about contracting Securité Referral to perform black work.
“My original impression of SR was that of a criminal cartel of top-notch ex-operatives who accept the value of submitting to an independent, stand-alone operation that answers only to itself.”
In the interest of stoking an atmosphere of partnership, Doug Case paused to let The Voice lead their conversation. The Voice jumped right in with a second dose of dry humor.
“Qualities that only the best corporations demand. They sound wonderful. What’s the problem?”
“My one worry was that they might see Isle de Foree as a transit base for South American drugs smuggled to Europe. Would they seize the opportunity to create a narco-state?”
“A natural concern. Nonstate actors are certainly the future. Launch a fleet of retired 727s to fly the Atlantic between Latin America and Isle de Foree, transit cocaine and weapons to West Africa, then across the Sahara into Europe. It’s only a matter of time until organized crime claims a nation.”
“But I expected that once ASC took control of Isle de Foree we’d have no trouble stopping SR from acting.”
“Eliminating competition is a perk, shall we say, of dominating a sovereign nation. He who dominates first wins. What has changed?”
“SR has changed. They’re more ambitious.”
“Or did you underestimate them?” The Voice, Case knew from their conversations, could wield language like a knife between the ribs.
“Frankly, I did underestimate SR. I failed to ask how SR happened to be on the scene, already. I thought they were just supplying mercenary trainers.”
“When,” demanded The Voice, “did you realize that you had underestimated them?”
“When they rescued Iboga.”
“I was under the impression that we—that you—had hired SR to rescue Iboga. I thought that was rather slick on your part.”
“I wish I could take credit for the rescue. But I cannot. It’s clear now that SR convinced Iboga ahead of time that he might need rescuing. And it is clear, too, that SR has all along seen Iboga as their best bet to own Isle de Foree. They rescued him to reinstall him in a future coup.”
“I am beginning to understand,” the Voice said, “why you sense a problem with Securité Referral.”
“I’m afraid they smell the potential of Isle de Foree’s petroleum reserve.”
“Goddamned right they do! Did it ever occur to you that SR took the
Amber Dawn
job to keep the reserve discovery quiet for them, too?”
“Belatedly, sir.”
“Oil is a hell of a lot more valuable than drugs. Oil is the foundation of a legitimate state. Narcocracies are pariah nations, shunned, sanctioned, preached against. But no sovereign nation that exports oil will ever be treated like a pariah. No matter how much so-called legitimate states bitch and complain to the United Nations.”
Doug Case did not reply. He could only hope at this juncture that silence would work his will.
The Voice said, “If you engage SR to take out Poe’s chief of staff, SR will know ahead of time the precise moment they’d have the best shot of taking over.”
“From under our noses,” Case agreed, seizing the opportunity to inject the word “our.”
“The last thing we want is a goddamned coup we didn’t organize. You better engage someone else to remove the chief of staff.”
“You’re absolutely right, sir,” said Case.
By playing it straight, by admitting his mistakes, by allowing, encouraging, goading The Voice to parade a superior intellect, Case had won a “we.”
“I presume that a former covert officer with your background who has maintained his contacts has another crew in mind.”
“Standing by.”
A
hundred feet above the Tyrrhenian Sea on a moonless night Paul Janson could not see the cable that tethered his parachute to the RIB churning toward the Vallicone peninsula, nor could he see the rubber boat itself, though he could see the frothy white propeller wash spewed by its muffled engine.
Daniel, the former SEAL, was driving. The Corsican helping Daniel steer around the rocks, Adolfo, was a fisherman who was wearing patched blue jeans, ragged sneakers, and the first expensive, brand-new garment he had owned in his life, a light-absorbent Gore-Tex windbreaker black as midnight, a gift from CatsPaw Associates. Adolfo knew where the rocks lay just below the waves, making him currently the most valuable of the twenty men Janson had recruited to snatch Iboga from Securité Referral.
Janson no longer doubted that Iboga was holed up on the peninsula. Nationalist separatists already plotting an attack in the mistaken belief that the new residents were building a gated resort had reported at yesterday’s midnight meeting that they had seen Isle de Foree’s deposed president for life angrily pacing the grounds of the main house.
Sanglier gigantesque
, they had described him. A giant wild boar.
Janson kept his attack plan simple: a classic razzle-dazzle to give the SR operators guarding Iboga a strong motive to retreat, first by destroying their outer defenses—the machine-gun positions blocking the road—next by taking away their ability to escape with Iboga, their helicopter, and finally, before they hunkered down to fight like cornered rats, by puting terror in their hearts so they would scatter, deserting Iboga in a chaotic every-man-for-himself rout.
The passenger harness dangling beside Janson held a deep wicker basket that carried his weapons: a pump shotgun; a beautiful old matte-black Bushmaster rented from the Porto-Vecchio family of Union Corse; and two rocket propelled grenade launchers supplied by Neal Kruger’s man on the island.
A soft
tsk
in Janson’s headset told him Kincaid was in position with the outer blockhouse in her sights, waiting for the first explosion.
* * *
AT THE POINT
where the Vallicone peninsula began its mile-long perpendicular thrust from the shore into the sea, two strong Corsicans dragged a large black duffel bag through the dense brush, stirring aromas of lavender, rosemary, and thyme from snapping twigs. They navigated in the dark by keeping the rumble of breaking waves to their left and the stiff offshore wind in their faces and prayed that the noise of wind and sea would prevent the guards with their .50-caliber machine guns from hearing them.
These two Corsicans were familiar with every hectare of the quarter-mile-wide peninsula, from these fields to the higher ground at the seaward end where the main house, outbuildings, and broad lawns perched on the cliffs. Born and raised nearby, they had poached game on the peninsula since they were boys with the same shotguns they had strapped to their backs. When, at a distance of three hundred meters, they saw the faint silhouette of the first stone hut that guarded the single-track road, they unzipped their duffel bag and spread out the contents: a high-capacity gasoline-powered air pump and a large sheet of plastic fabric that looked like the makings of a tent but was in fact an inflatable decoy.
* * *
“GO!” JANSON SAID
into his lip mike.
Daniel opened the throttle and the RIB increased speed. Janson felt the parachute rise higher, whisking him above the loom of the land. He tugged the elevator lines attached to the lifting slots in back of the canopy and it shot up another hundred feet.
He pulled his panoramic digital sensor-fusion/enhanced night-vision goggles over his eyes. The surface of the peninsula appeared green, the radar dome a dull circle, the house and the helicopter darker. He saw a flicker of tiny bright figures—the infrared enhancement of flesh and blood.
SR fighters were running from the house to the helicopter.
Janson found it hard to believe that Securité Referral’s radar was sensitive enough to detect the almost nonexistent targets presented by the parasail and his body. More likely, a guard had stepped outside the house and heard the RIB’s motor. But whatever it was had raised the alarm.
Janson drew a grenade launcher from the basket beside him. Choppier seas near the cliffs were rocking the boat and jerking the towline. The parachute shook. He targeted the helicopter and fired. The flash from the fiery rocket motor ignition reflected on the thirty-foot canopy of parachute cloth above his head. The high-explosive fragmentation warhead dropped short of the helicopter and exploded on the ground.
He had missed a direct hit and could only hope that the flying fragments of shrapnel that scattered the fighters had put some serious holes in the helicopter. Janson dropped the empty launcher into the sea and grabbed the second. The SR fighters stopped running, scanned the sky, having been alerted by the flash, and started firing pistols and bullpup rifles in his direction.
* * *
THE CORSICANS IN
charge of inflating the decoy did not hesitate when they heard Janson’s first grenade, though now came the dangerous part, starting the noisy gas-powered air pump. They positioned the exhaust pipe facing away from the blockhouse, stood in front of it to further muffle the racket, crossed themselves, loosened their shotguns, and jerked the start cord.
The motor started on the first pull. It didn’t sound as loud as they had feared and the plastic began to inflate. In seconds, it ballooned into the massive shape of a full-size T-90 battle tank. Invented by the Russian Army to confuse enemy reconnaissance satellites and intelligence operators on the ground, the decoy’s plastic fabric was impregnated with chemicals that reflected targets to both radar and thermal-imaging devices.
They felt in the dark for the tie-downs and knotted them around shrubs before the wind could pick the thing up and blow it away. When the Corsicans were sure they had it securely tied down, they slithered away through the brush, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the balloon.
* * *
THE SERB MERCENARIES
guarding Securité Referral’s first blockhouse had no radar repeater in their position, but they had thermal imaging and night glasses and a night scope for their Dushka.
What they saw three hundred meters out in the dark was the chilling silhouette of a Russian T-90 battle tank complete with a 135mm smoothbore cannon jutting from its turret. Lesser men would have run for their lives. These were Serbs with long years of bloody history behind them, and while they knew it would ultimately prove futile, if not lethal, they opened fire with the forlorn hope of a lucky shot penetrating a view slit.
A blizzard of armor-piercing half-inch bullets crossed the maquis and tore through the balloon. To the Serbs’ astonishment, the “tank” jumped in the air, sagged weirdly, and then collapsed flat on the ground. For a second they couldn’t believe their eyes. Then, through their night glasses, they saw plastic flapping in the wind.