“How the hell are you, Dave?” Comsky asked.
“I’m doing good, Ape Man. Nice show,” Riley commented. The nickname was one that Riley’s team in Korea had given Comsky. Both for his looks and his attitude. “I can’t believe they’ve got you as intelligence sergeant. Talk about a contradiction in terms there.”
“Keep it up, smart-ass. I can call you that, now that you’re a civilian puke.”
Riley pointed at the maps. “Sounds like you all are squared away.”
Comsky grimaced. “Shit, you don’t know the half of it. This is the biggest jug-fuck I’ve ever been associated with.” Comsky scratched his underarm idly. “Well, maybe not the biggest,” he amended, “but close to it. It sounds good but this place—”
“Comsky!” Lome was suddenly there, towering over the two men. The team sergeant looked at Riley. “We’ve got some things to go over,” he said, pointedly shifting his gaze to the door.
Comsky slapped the senior NCO on the arm. “Hey, Top, Dave here was my team sergeant in Korea. He’s all right.”
“He’s not wearing a uniform now, as far as I can tell,” Lome said. He stared at Riley and the other returned the look. They remained like that, visually locked together, until Captain Dorrick walked up and stepped between them. “You’ll have to leave now,” he told Riley. “We may have had to let you civilians into our briefback, but we don’t have to let you hang around.”
Riley broke his gaze away from Lome and looked at the captain. “All right.” He tapped Comsky on the shoulder. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Sure thing, Dave.”
Riley walked out of the isolation area deep in thought. The SNN van was waiting for him, Seeger at the wheel and Conner in the back. She was looking at the screen of her laptop. Sometimes Riley wondered if she wasn’t surgically attached to the computer.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well, what?”
“Come on, Dave.” Conner turned off her computer. You’ve attended a lot of those briefbacks. What was your feel?”
“I think the team is screwed up,” Riley said.
That wasn’t exactly what Conner had expected. “The team?”
“That Captain Dorrick has his head so far up Colonel Burrows’s butt that he can’t see the mission ahead. I don’t know about the team sergeant. The team seemed well organized. I just didn’t like what they were saying, but I think they were censored. Maybe by Dorrick, more likely during an earlier run-through by the Group S-3.”
“Censored?” Conner repeated. “About what?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Riley said. “I hope they were censored.”
“Why?”
“Because if they weren’t, they don’t know diddly-shit about where they’re going or exactly what they’re going to be doing when they get there.”
“Hell, Dave, we’ve been researching Angola for the past two weeks with all the resources SNN has available and we don’t know too much, either, about what’s going on in that country right now.”
“Yeah, but no one was shooting at you.”
“Besides the team,” Conner said, “what do you think of the mission?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you when we get on the ground. I’m going to pump Comsky for more information on the flight going over. At least we’ll hit the ground running with those laser targets from the AOB as soon as we arrive.”
Riley remembered the other parts of the censored operations plan he’d been allowed to read. Apparently the idea was to get the SF troops on the ground on day one of the air war. Take out all known targets before the rebels were ready or could hide in the countryside. After those initial targets, the teams would scour the countryside in conjunction with air surveillance, searching out new targets while the regular ground forces came in country.
It was this sequence of events that the military wanted to keep under wraps. They hoped to eliminate most of the MPLA armor and aviation on that first day, along with all fixed bases and lines of communication. That, hopefully, would prevent major, pitched battles as the 82d hit the ground. It actually wasn’t a bad concept, in Riley’s opinion. After Haiti and Somalia, everyone who watched SNN expected the military to move slowly and with great preparation. This fast knockout punch might just do the job. Then again, Riley knew, it might not.
Conner closed her eyes and leaned back. “Talk to Sammy lately?”
“Yeah, last night,” Riley said.
“How is she?”
“The same.”
Conner’s sister, Sammy Pintella, had been the one who had brought Riley in contact with Conner the previous year, when she’d discovered information about a secret military base in Antarctica and they’d gone south to investigate. The three of them had been the only survivors after a run-in with North Korean commandos on the ice pack.
Conner’s stock with SNN had risen greatly, based on the story that came out of the whole episode with Eternity Base, to the point where she now was able to pick and choose her own stories and investigate them with her own team. Sammy had stayed at her job at the National Records Center in St. Louis, where she had discovered the information. Riley saw her every once in a while and talked to her on the phone when the schedule permitted.
While Sammy was slow and steady, Conner was fast and brilliant. Technically, Riley knew he was being paid as a security consultant, but Conner had come to rely on his common sense more and more to balance out her driving instinct for the story that sometimes blinded her to other realities. This mission especially, because it was in Riley’s area of expertise, she was counting on him. He didn’t plan on letting her down.
Luia River, Angola, 12 June
The patrol looked like a party of ghouls as the sun revealed details. Most of the men were splattered with dried blood, and all were covered in mud. They’d made good time in the darkness, following the riverbed away from the site of the ambush. Steam was rising off the surface of the river, mingling with the trees that hung over it. The foliage almost touched in the middle overhead, making the band of water a dark tunnel with splotches of light playing along the surface.
“All right. We’ll break here,” Quinn called out. Daylight revealed him to be more than just a voice in the dark. He was a tall, thin man, his hair completely white, unusual for a man of thirty-six, but not for someone in his line of work.
Trent placed outflank security on either side and the rest of the men slumped to the ground, exhausted. Trent was the opposite of Quinn in body type: short and stocky with heavily muscled arms and legs. He’d been the heavyweight boxing champion of the regiment before Quinn and he had been cashiered after the episode in Somalia. His nose and ears showed the results of those fights, squashed and battered up against his skull.
“I suggest everyone take a bath and get cleaned up,” Quinn said in a voice that carried across the patrol.
“Fuck, we’re just going to get dirty again,” one of the new Australians replied, pulling his bush hat down over his eyes. Those who had served with Quinn before were already beginning to strip down.
Quinn had Australians, English, French, Germans, and quite a few East Europeans in his group, along with several black Africans—the latter a fact that didn’t bother him in the least, but had caused four South African merks to quit just before this latest foray into the bush. Good riddance was Quinn’s view. Bullets were not a discriminator and the blacks were good men. They kept their mouths shut, followed orders, and did their job well. That was all that Quinn was interested in. The white South Africans had bitched too much anyway about things that they no longer had any control over. Change with the times or become a statistic was one of Quinn’s mottos.
“Yes, but cleanliness is very important,” Quinn replied, keeping his voice neutral.
“I’ll clean when I get out of this pigsty of a country,” the Australian joked.
Quinn pulled the bolt back on his Sterling, the sound very loud in the morning air. “You’ll clean now.”
The Australian stared at him. “What the hell, mate? You fucking queer or something?”
“I’m not your fucking mate. I’m your commander. Take your clothes off, put them on the riverbank, then get in line.”
“You ripping us off?” the man stood, his weapon not quite at the ready.
“No,” Quinn said with a smile. “I’m making sure you aren’t ripping your buddies off.” He centered the muzzle of the submachine gun on the man. “Now strip.”
Soon there was a line of naked men standing waist deep in the water. The white ones had farmer’s tans, their torsos pale, their faces and forearms bronzed from the sun. Quinn and Trent went through the men’s clothes and gear, very slowly and methodically. A diamond was a very small thing to conceal, but they had experience. Trent had briefly worked security in South Africa at the diamond mines and knew the drill, and Quinn had followed his lead enough times to pick up the science of the search. It was just like customs officials. They knew the way people tended to think when they wanted to hide something, which usually led to the same common hiding places being used.
Quinn held up a plastic canteen and shook it. He turned it upside down, draining the water out, then took his flashlight and peered in. “Ah, what do we have here?” Quinn asked. He drew a knife and jabbed it into the canteen, splitting the side open. A small, soaked piece of cloth fell into his hand. He unfolded it. Four rough diamonds fell into his palm.
“Whose gear?”
The men all turned and looked at one of the Australians who had just joined them for this mission. The one who had bitched about taking a bath. “Come here, mate,” Quinn called out with a smile.
The man walked out of the water, his hands instinctively covering his groin. “Going into business for yourself, are you?” Quinn asked.
“I didn’t—”
The first round caught the man in the stomach and Quinn casually raised his aim, stitching a pattern up the chest. The man flew backward into the river, arms splayed, blood swirling in the brown water. Quinn turned to Trent, who had finished with his share of the gear. “Get to work, Doctor.”
Trent reached into his backpack and pulled out a small cardboard box of surgical gloves. He pulled a pair on and gestured for the first man. “Come on, let’s get this over with.” The man walked up and Trent checked his mouth, nostrils and ears, then down the body to his groin. “Turn. Bend.” The man grunted as Trent checked his anus, fingers probing.
“Next.”
When Trent was done, the men redonned their clothes and gear. “Make sure you drink upstream from that shit-pile,” Trent advised the men, pointing at the body of the Australian, which was slowly floating away downstream. “We’ll rest here for a few hours.”
Quinn retired to the shade of a tree. He took the four diamonds and added them to the group in a leather pouch tied around his neck along with his old ID tags. Trent joined him there and handed him a sheet of paper. The message Andrews received last night.”
Quinn looked at a long list of letters that made no sense. “They encoded it. Must be getting worried about the Americans listening in.”
Trent didn’t reply. He took his knife out and began sharpening the already gleaming edge.
Quinn retrieved a Ziploc bag from his breast pocket. Inside it was a small notepad. He turned to the eleventh page—equaling the day of the month they received the message—and began matching the letters of the message with the letters on the page. Then, using a tri-graph, a standard page that had three letter groups on it, he began deciphering the message. It was slow work, made more difficult by the need to figure where one word ended and the next one began. After twenty minutes, he had it done:
TO QUINN FROM SKELETON
LINK UP WITH PARTY—VICINITY CHILUAGE ACROSS BORDER IN ZAIRE—AT COORDINATES SEVEN TWO THREE SIX FOUR EIGHT—DATE TIME SIXTEEN JUNE ZERO NINE ZERO ZERO GREENWICH MEAN—FOLLOW ATT ORDERS OF PARTY TO BE MET—BONUS ASSURED—CONFIRM ORDERS RECEIVED END
Quinn pulled out his map and looked at the coordinates. About eighty kilometers upstream and then slightly to the east across the border into Zaire. He handed the message to Trent.
“Why the fuck don’t they just drop this party off at one of these dirt runways in country?” Trent asked.
Quinn pulled a small Walkman radio out of his backpack. “You haven’t been listening to the news. I pick up SNN radio broadcasts out of Kinshasa on this. The Americans have moved an aircraft carrier to just off the coast. They’re going to start enforcing the UN’s no-fly rule.”
“But Skeleton could still—’“
“He’s got to cover his ass,” Quinn cut in, looking around to make sure none of the others were in earshot.
“Why through Zaire?” Trent asked. “Skeleton’s in Namibia.”
Quinn had already considered that. “Northern Namibia is hot right now with the SADF and the other Pan-African forces. Easier to send someone around through Zaire. Besides, it’s closer to us.”
Trent looked at the map. “It’s still a long fucking walk.”
“We’ve got three full days to make it.” He rubbed the stubble of his beard. “I wonder what the hell Skeleton wants us to do after we link up with this guy?”
Trent was anything but stupid, and he had been thinking about the upcoming changes. “Probably Skeleton wants us to eyeball the mines. Get ready for when Van Wyks gets them under his control. After all, Skeleton is his chief of security.”
“That will put us out of business,” Quinn said. “But I think we’ve played this one as long as we can. And he does promise a bonus. Exactly how much, though, I think we can negotiate over the radio the next few days, seeing as they apparently need us.”
“We need Skeleton, too, though,” Trent noted. “For the diamonds.”
“No,” Quinn disagreed. “We don’t need him. Push comes to shove, we can take the rocks on the black market.”
Trent nodded toward the merks. “Speaking of that, some of these boys just want to take their share of the diamonds and split.”
Quinn laid a hand on the stubby barrel of his Sterling. “We move out in two hours.”
Atlantic Ocean, Vicinity 12 Degrees East Longitude, 12 Degrees South Latitude,
12 June
“Hawkeye Three, you are clear to launch. Over.”
“This is Hawkeye Three. Roger. Out.”
The catapult roared and the Grumman E-2 Hawkeye accelerated down the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln and was airborne in less than three seconds. It turned due east and within twenty minutes a dark line appeared on the horizon through the cockpit window.
The twenty-four-foot-diameter radome piggybacked on top of the fuselage began rotating, and inside the craft the radar officer checked out his equipment. He picked up the CAC—combat air cover—over the Abraham Lincoln, then he began coding out all known civilian flights in the area, of which there were currently only four recorded.
As the Hawkeye went farther east over Angola, the four-hundred-mile reach of the radar covered more and more of the sky above that embattled country. A pair of F-14 Tomcats roared by, waggling their wings: the power to enforce the no-fly rule in case the electronic eyes picked up a target. The pilot of the surveillance craft kept them in a figure-eight pattern over the center of Angola as they settled in to their duty.
They had their first unknown contact exactly two hours and twenty-two minutes into their tour of duty. The combat information officer was very careful to note the time in his log. After the debacle in 1994 over Turkey where air force jets downed two army Black Hawk helicopters, killing all on board, already tight procedures had been given a few extra turns of the caution screw. The CI officer knew that there were Black Hawks from the Special Operations Command operating below. And this target was moving in a manner that told the radar operator it was a helicopter. The contact was over what was tentatively identified as rebel territory in the north central part of the country. It was moving to the north.
The CI keyed his radio as his fingers flew over his keyboard. “Stallion One, this is Hawkeye Three. I’m feeding you an unidentified bogey. Looks like rotary wing. Over.”
The pilot of the lead F-14 confirmed he had the target information in his computer. “I’ve got it. Over.”
“Vector in. Over.”
“Roger. Over.”
The CI checked to make sure he had all listed army flights accounted for. Then he double-checked. Then he triple-checked. He interrogated it, looking for a transponder code. Nothing. He tried calling the rogue flight on the radio. Nothing. Regardless, he started broadcasting a warning, ordering the flight to immediately set down, giving flight instructions to the nearest government airfield.
“Any change?” the CI asked the radar man.
“Yeah, he’s going lower, trying to get into terrain masking. Must think he got picked up by ground radar.” That was the advantage of the E-2’s radome—it wasn’t blocked by intervening hills, since it was looking down.
“Stallion One, this is Hawkeye Three. I have you intercepting in thirty seconds. Over.”
“Roger. We’re slowing. Wait one. Over.”
The CI watched the dot representing the two F-14s merge with the target.
The pilot came back on. “We’ve got one MI-8. No markings. Over.” The CI knew that both the rebels and the Angolan government had MI-8s. He made communication through the Abraham Lincoln with the coordination cell of the Joint Task Force headquarters in Luanda to check whether it might be a government aircraft that had both failed to file a flight plan and was in the wrong place. The JTF headquarters confirmed that it was not a government flight.
Satisfied that this was not a friendly and, just as importantly to the CI officer, satisfied that he had all these confirmations on tape, he contacted his commander aboard the Abraham Lincoln. Eight minutes had now passed since the first contact. “Six, this is Hawkeye Three. Over.”
The reply was immediate. “This is Six. I’ve been monitoring. Break. Stallion One, this is Six. Over.”
“This is Stallion One. Over.”
“This is Six. You are clear to fire. Over.”
“Roger. Out.”
Eighty miles to the north of the Hawkeye, the lead Tomcat dived. The pilot of the MI-8 must have finally realized that something dangerous was happening, because the helicopter tried to evade. It was a futile effort.
A Sidewinder air-to-air missile leapt off the wing of the F-14 and was in the engine outtake of the helicopter in four seconds. A blossom of flame appeared above the jungle canopy, then disappeared into the sea of green.
The CI officer turned to the radar operator. “They seem to be taking this seriously,” he understated. He knew it was important that they keep the sky clear for the next forty-eight hours to allow the coming infiltration of surveillance and targeting teams to occur unobstructed.
“About time,” the radar operator said. “Show these people we mean business right from the start.”
Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, 12 June
The C-141 Starlifter transport roared down the runway and took off. The interior was packed with pallets of equipment and people. Riley, Conner Young, and Mike Seeger were near the front of the aircraft, next to the pallet on which their camera and communication gear were packed.
Conner had a modem from her cellular phone hooked into her computer. She leaned over and tapped Riley as something new came in on it from SNN headquarters. “Navy F-14s off the Abraham Lincoln just downed a UNITA helicopter that was violating the no-fly rule.”
This wasn’t going to be like Haiti, Riley knew. Savimbi and the UNITA rebels weren’t going to just give up their guns. The die was cast and they were now airborne for a war zone.