A gangplank was thrown aboard and Limbani crossed into the ship with Peggy and Rafi on his heels. Ahead of them on the river the sun was setting quickly.
“It will be dark soon,” said Limbani. “We need to load the rest of the warriors and their supplies on board. Even with this wind Loki says it will take almost until dawn to get us downriver to Fourandao.”
“That should be just about right.” Holliday nodded. He paused and gave Peggy a short look. “Did you bring our weapons?”
She nodded. “Stripped from Jerimiah Salamango’s imps.”
Three men came across the gangplank carrying a sagging litter loaded down with AK-47s, ammunition belts, two RPGs with a half dozen rounds each and a pair of brutal-looking Saiga automatic shotguns with nine or ten eight-round magazines each.
“Bueno,”
said Eddie, “my favorite,
un acelerador de cabeza
.” He grinned, looping the sling crosswise over his shoulder and pushing a half dozen magazines into his belt. “In the army we called them
Fidelitos
—small but with a big mouth.”
Holliday turned and looked directly at Peggy. “Now, look—” he began.
“Don’t even start, Doc. I’m a big girl; I’ve taken photographs in a dozen war zones. I’m not your responsibility. We’re coming, and that, cousin o’ mine, is that.”
“You don’t have anything to say about this?” Holliday said, turning to Rafi.
“I’ve spent the last hour arguing with her. I lost. We’re coming, because if she goes then I’m damn well going with her.”
“You’re both crazy,” said Holliday.
“No,
mis amigos
,” said Eddie with a grin, “we’re
all
crazy.”
Konrad Lanz had been sitting in the navigator’s jump seat of the old Vickers Vanguard for three and a half hours and his legs were beginning to cramp. Looking between the pilot and copilot’s seats there was nothing to see but the velvet black of the night and the green and yellow glow of the instruments. For the past hour or so they had been flying at under five thousand feet, and so far they hadn’t heard a single query on the radio.
“How much longer?” he asked the pilot, another one of the old guard named Janni Doke, a South African in his late fifties who could fly anything from a Piper Cub to a jumbo jet.
“Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.”
“I’d better get the boys ready, then,” said Lanz.
“You do what you want, baas; just make sure you leave me a couple of roughies to top up the tanks. We’re on fumes as it is,” responded the gruff old Afrikaner.
“Will do,” said Lanz.
“You’re sure about the landing lights?”
“Positive. The approach lights are on all night. They get some late cargo going in and out.” He paused. “There’s only one runway, eight thousand feet, just like I told you in the briefing. The runway lines up with the tower. You can’t miss.”
“The helicopters? Even on the ground they could blow us all to Hades.”
“Three RPGs. One each for the Kamovs, one for the tower. There’s an old armored personnel carrier but there’s no one manning it at night. The wheels are flat. It’s just for show.”
“All right.” The Afrikaner half turned and looked at Lanz in the darkness. “Radio checks every ten minutes, okay, baas. No radio check and I’m gone with the wind. No screaming savages putting this old cheeky prawn in the pot for his dinner, understand?”
“Every ten minutes.” Lanz turned and went back through to the aircraft cabin. The original twenty-eight-row, triple-double seat configuration had been removed and replaced with twenty-five double rows of quad buckets from a few old C-47s they’d raided in Europe and North Africa.
Since the Vanguard’s folding air stairs fore and aft would be far too slow for egress, they’d been removed, and Janni Doke and a few others at Mopti had cobbled together emergency slides from several old parachutes that would let everyone off quickly, gear and all.
Most of the boys were sleeping or pretending to as Lanz made his way down the narrow aisle between the two cramped rows, shaking shoulders and giving out the five-minute warning. With that done he stood by the rear exit door with the three RPG teams and waited.
The PA system clicked on. “Three minutes. Approach lights in sight,” Janni Doke said crisply. The old aircraft seemed to sag in the air, yawing a little to the left and sending Lanz lurching against the bulkheads.
“Final approach two minutes. Interior lights off.” The airplane went dark.
Now was the time for the Kamovs to come off their hardstands and flank them all the way down the runway, tearing them up with cannon fire.
“Approach. Landing, one minute. Clear!” No Kamovs, at least for the moment. Thirty seconds from now and it might be a different story.
Lanz could feel everyone tense. This was the worst, the final few seconds of stillness.
“Contact!”
The wheels shrieked as they touched the runway and skewed a little as they hit. Janni straightened the plane out and kept both feet on the brakes. The big props howled as they ran down.... Lanz counted backward from ten. At zero he gave the order.
“Doors open!” He and one of the men from an RPG team worked the wheel until there was a quick hiss of air. Lanz pushed the heavy door outward and to the left against the fuselage. The first RPG team dropped the homemade inflatable slide out the doorway and Lanz pulled the lanyard that activated the big CO
2
cartridge. The ramp bellied out perfectly.
“Go, go go!” The three-man teams hit the ramp first and deployed twenty feet beyond the wingtip of the aircraft, giving them a clear shot. The Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades went off almost simultaneously, leaving a long, twisting trail of smoke that vanished into the darkness.
Three explosions lit up the night as the first projectiles hit. The teams had already reloaded and a second volley went screaming through the air. Only one of the Kamovs had been fueled and armed, and it detonated spectacularly, a black-and-yellow gobbet of greasy, fiery smoke bubbling up into the air. The first strike on the tower had hit just below it, smashing into the air traffic controllers’ chamber. The second volley hit the tower directly and the lights went out.
The Battle of Kukuanaland Airport had begun.
On the presumption that the coup attempt would be made on this night, Oliver Gash had seen to it that General Kolingba’s last three Bacardi and Cokes that evening were laced with two milligrams each of the drug known as Rohypnol, or roofies. The general got only halfway through the second drink before he passed out in front of his enormous wide-screen TV watching
Operation Petticoat
, his favorite Cary Grant movie.
Kolingba would ideally be out of it until somebody came along and put a bullet through his head, but Gash wasn’t taking any chances. As soon as the first snores started erupting from the immense body, Gash made his way down to Kolingba’s office, let himself in with a key he’d made for himself long ago and began cutting a picture window–sized hole in the floral wallpaper–covered drywall.
It took fifteen minutes to cut the hole, revealing several thousand tightly wrapped, pressure-sealed bricks of American hundred-dollar bills. As he recalled, each of the bricks was made up of one hundred bills, or ten thousand dollars. One million dollars, or one hundred of the bricks, filled up roughly half of an ordinary Samsonite hard-shell suitcase, and twice that load weighed roughly forty-four pounds. It took Gash four hours to fill twelve of the suitcases, for a total weight of 528 pounds.
Twenty-four million dollars was certainly nowhere near enough for the humiliation and idiocy he’d had to put up with over the years with Kolingba, but it gave him more than enough liquidity to get to the lion’s share of the money he’d hidden away in a variety of banks from Cyprus to San Remo and beyond to even more obscure bits of geography that specialized in hiding other people’s money.
When he was finished he lined up all the suitcases outside the door to Kolingba’s office, gave two guards a hundred-dollar bill apiece to carry them down to one of the bumblebee Rovers, explaining to them that he was running a late-night errand to the airport for the general. It was a common enough occurrence and neither one of the soldiers questioned the order.
Gash went back upstairs for one last look at the monster and then, whether out of spite or simply for fun, he slipped the diamond-encrusted Rolex off Kolingba’s pudgy wrist. On the television Cary Grant and Tony Curtis were discussing various methods of getting five navy nurses off their submarine, which had now been painted bright pink.
Gash watched for a moment, marveling at the Americans’ ability to make war funny. He briefly thought once more of killing the general with his own silver automatic, but instead simply took the automatic and slipped it into his waistband. He checked the Rolex. Four fifteen in the morning, time to go unless he wanted to get caught in the cross fire. He zipped up his Windbreaker to cover the silver-plated pistol, went out into the compound and climbed into the Rover and flashed his lights at the gate guards. They jumped to it, throwing open the gates, and Gash drove out onto the square.
He turned left toward the waterfront rather than right toward the airport, but nobody seemed to notice or care. He was halfway to the docks when every light in Fourandao went off and an explosive echo came rolling down from the airport. He’d made it in the nick of time. Or maybe not. He put on a little more speed, his mind working as he drove. He’d expected the coup to be centered on the airport and all the communications hubs located in and around it. What if it was a two-pronged attack, coming up from the water as well, catching anyone fleeing in a pincer movement?
“Shit!” He pulled out his cell phone and tried it. No signal. They’d already hit the microwave towers. “Shit!” he said again. He reached the docks and the turn onto the road to Banqui. The drive would take him four hours; if they were coming up the river road he’d be squeezed and caught. There was no use turning left, because the road ran out half a mile or so upriver, turning into nothing more than a native track. “Shit, shit, shit.”
There were more explosions coming from the direction of the airport. He rolled down the window and craned his neck, looking back the way he’d come. The sky was on fire.
With the window still open he paused and cocked an ear. He knew the sound. Outboard engines, lots of them.
“Goddamn!” he whispered. They were coming up the river! He stared out through the windshield. Directly in front of him was the entire Kukuanaland navy, the single rigid inflatable defended by an old Russian machine gun. He barely paused to think about what he was doing. He drove the last few yards down to the docks and began humping the suitcases out of the back of the Rover and into the patrol boat, keeping an ear out for the approaching outboards coming from the other direction.
By the eighth suitcase he was sweating and the engine noise was too close for comfort. He abandoned the rest of the cases, untied the boat from the old wooden bollard and hit the ignition button on the engine. It coughed, coughed again and died. The engines from downriver were getting closer.
“Go, you bitch!” he hissed. He hit the button again, there was another greasy cough and then the engine caught. Grinning through the sweat pouring from his brow, he gunned the engine, turned the wheel hard and hauled the boat upriver. There was nothing in that direction but bush and jungle. He’d hide there for a night or two, then slip down the river to freedom. He eased the throttle forward and turned the boat through a large curve in the night-black river.
And saw a nightmare. If front of him, no more than a hundred yards away, there was a monstrous dragonheaded ship coming right at him, oars like the huge legs of some unearthly water bug rising and falling in perfect cadence with a giant cross-scribed sail billowing over everything.
“No,” he said, wide-eyed. How could a Viking ship, of all things, be here, on this river, now? It was impossible. And in that instant he knew he wasn’t getting out of this one alive.
The white-feathered dart caught him at the base of the throat. The neurotoxin hit his brain within two seconds. He had just enough time to raise the Rolex to his face before he died.
Gash didn’t see the
Sea Dragon
as it swept around the bend in the river; nor did he see Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso standing at the bow with his
Fidelito
unlimbered in his arms, singing quietly to himself.
Beside him Holliday waited. They made the turn and kept on sweeping downriver, all sixty oars lifted from the water now, carried only by the current. With the first pink light of dawn at their backs they saw the oncoming Zodiacs, twenty of them, spread in an arrogant line across the river almost from bank to bank. In the stern of the
Sea Dragon
, Loki, standing at the steering oar, gave a single, loudly shouted order.
“Strybord!”
Thirty starboard oars hit the water as one and held there, the men on their benches straining at the current as the
Sea Dragon
turned her broadside to the looming inflatables, each filled with well-armed men.