Covert Action

by Dick Couch

  For six weeks Renaud put his men through their paces. The blacks didn’t need the conditioning work, but most of the whites did, including himself. Renaud understood that for an integrated unit to function, there had to be some shared effort and pain. This was as true among the ranks of soldiers for hire as for national military units. Even pros need time in the field to bond. And at his core, Renaud was nothing if not a professional soldier. He knew what it was to get down to business; now for the first time he was the drover, not part of the herd. He was their paymaster, and that made him their leader. For all his leadership inexperience and bravado, he was determined not to squander this opportunity. So he positioned himself at the head of the column on the conditioning runs, and he stayed there. He led them in calisthenics, and took his turn on the ranges during shooting drills. When it came to tactics, he divided his force into ten six-man teams. In charge of each team was one of Renaud’s handpicked white mercs. They were all good men, experienced in tribal warfare. The blacks, while often more capable and more experienced, were content to follow their white team captains, up to a point.

  Renaud drove them hard, perhaps harder than necessary, but this was his long-awaited opportunity to lead a band of mercenaries. He wanted to make the best of it. In the calculus that now drove him, he truly believed that this could be the beginning of his own PMC, the Renaud Scouts. And word would get around the tight-knit mercenary community that there was something of the Selous Scouts still in Claude Renaud. At the end of their training period, he presented each man with a crimson beret with a silver pin that bore more than a token resemblance to the osprey emblem of the Selous Scouts. If some in the assembly on the makeshift parade ground thought this odd or frivolous, they kept it to themselves. Renaud was, after all, their paymaster.

  As Helmut Klan approached the makeshift bar in the improvised tavern, the men at the bar melted away to join the dozen or so soldiers playing cards or at the billiard table. Klan thought about asking Renaud to step outside to make his request, but he was anxious to be done with it and get back to his quarters.

  “Good evening, Herr Doktor. May I get you something to drink?”

  This meant a glass of that god-awful beer, as Renaud permitted nothing stronger in the garrison. “No, thank you, Claude. I have some late work to finish, and it will only make me sleepy.”

  “Perhaps another time,” Renaud replied amiably. He was in a good mood, as he usually was when he drank with his men, but as Klan had again observed with much relief, Renaud drank often but was never drunk. “I’ve just spoken with the head of my medical team, and things are going well. They anticipate that their research experiments will be concluded soon, perhaps within the next few weeks. But we will need more test subjects.”

  “How many more?” Renaud inquired.

  A few weeks after the clinical team had begun their work, there was a need for a steady stream of “volunteers” for test purposes. To ask for these volunteers in Kariba or the smaller outlying communities would announce their purpose. So Renaud and his men were instructed to make the disappearances appear random, trying not to take too many from one locale. They often traveled a hundred miles or more on one of these sweeps, hiding during the day and making their abductions at night. For these procurements, Renaud was paid 2,000 rand per head, half of which he shared with the team leader responsible for the body snatch. Jerking people from their huts at night was almost second nature to the veterans of the bush wars and, to some extent, to the civilian population, who had known little but war for the better part of three decades. At first they had released those who were sick or showed no symptoms of the testing. They were blindfolded coming and going, so they had no knowledge of where they had been, and they were too scared to talk. When the testing had moved into a phase where the subjects became contagious, the test subjects never left the complex alive.

  “We will need a dozen.”

  “A dozen,” Renaud replied. “And how soon do you need them?”

  Klan did not like to tell him how to do his work, but said, “As soon as you can deliver them, but we need them all by the end of the week. If it makes the task any easier, these should be the last.”

  Renaud considered this for a long moment. “What would make it easier would be a 3,000-rand bounty for each we bring in. This is merely a request, but for this number I will have to scatter three teams over a large area to take care of it that quickly. Word is getting out, and it is only a matter of time before we are met with clubs and spears on entering some remote village hut.”

  “I see,” Klan said. He knew he was being extorted, but then this was the last of the test hosts, and it was, after all, not his money. “Agreed. Bring them in and handle them in the same manner as you did the others.”

  “As you say, Herr Doktor. I will get two of the teams away this evening, and the third will leave after sundown tomorrow.”

  Klan excused himself and headed back to the hotel bar for another schnapps. Renaud sat pondering whether to split the additional bounty with his team leaders or keep it all for himself. After another glass of beer, he settled on the latter.

  Two nights later Matta Mimbosa had just got the last of her children to sleep and had set out the meager rations of corn and oatmeal for her husband’s and oldest son’s breakfasts. After they left for their work, she would prepare the morning meal for the other children. Matta and her family lived in a group of huts just east of the village of Karoi. There were five dwellings at the end of their road, but only three were occupied. One of their neighbors had gone to South Africa to look for better work, and the other had gone to Botswana for the same reason. There were few jobs in rural Zimbabwe. Unemployment in the nation was 50 percent, and higher in the countryside. Wages were low, and usually a worker’s first month’s pay had to be given over as a bribe to the foreman or overseer. With her oldest son now working with her husband in a cement factory, things had been better—not good, but considerably better, now that there were two wage earners in the family.

  They were Ndebele, and with the older son now working, her husband was now thinking of taking a second wife. A man’s status and measure of respect was greatly enhanced by a second wife. Matta was indifferent to the matter. A new wife meant someone younger than herself—someone who would occupy a more favored position regarding her husband’s affection. So be it. After bearing ten children, six of whom were still alive, let him rut with someone younger and stronger. It was his home, and he could do as he pleased. And another pair of hands to help with the house chores and the garden would not be unwelcome. Matta had born eight sons and only two daughters. Neither girl had lived past her first year, and two of the boys died in their second, which meant she had six sons. This delighted her husband, for having many sons reflected well on him, even more than having many cattle. But Ndebele men did no work at home, so Matta was both mother and servant, and as the boys grew older, she became less the former and more the latter. They quickly learned that all the work around the house was women’s work. Men sat, drank, swatted flies, and talked. It was the way it had always been.

  They had electricity—not all of the time, but this evening the power was on. Moving in the shadows cast by a single bare bulb, she tidied up the room and put away the dishes she had washed earlier from the evening meal. The men and boys had gone to bed, and there was a symphony of snoring from the sleeping rooms. Matta was accustomed to dragging her mat into the kitchen to sleep. She would be the last to go to bed and the first to rise. The house had plumbing and tap water when the electricity was on to run the pump, but the flush toilet had not worked for some time. She and the younger boys had dug a privy a short distance from the house, but they needed to fill the pit and dig a new one. Perhaps soon. Matta splashed water onto her face in the kitchen sink and blotted herself dry with a soiled dishtowel.

  Stepping from the house, she paused a moment to take in the night sky. There was the Southern Cross, the Dove, and many other constellations she once knew but had long si
nce forgotten. She walked past the outhouse, seeking the brush that edged the field that abutted their small plot of land. Often when it was late and quiet, she sought the bushes rather than the noxious smell and fly swarm of the privy. She had just hiked up her one-piece, ankle-length shift and squatted when an arm gripped her waist and a hand closed over her nose and mouth. She was jerked roughly to her feet, even as she lost her urine, wetting her thighs and dress.

  “Listen closely, mother,” a harsh voice said in her ear. The man who held her spoke in her native Sendebele. “Because what you say and what you do will determine how many of your family will live to see the sun rise.”

  Bound and gagged, Matta was marched back into her house, followed by four heavily armed men. They took her oldest son and blindfolded him, with his wrists bound and his elbows tied behind his back. It was between her husband and the son, and they elected to take the son. This was the decision of the black team sergeant; there were plenty of boys in this household.

  Matta stood dazed in the middle of her kitchen, surrounded by prone black bodies, their faces down with their hands bound behind them with nylon snap-ties.

  “Do not worry, mother,” the harsh voice said as he backed to the door, sweeping the room with the muzzle of his weapon, “you still have many sons.”

  The door closed gently, and in the silence that followed, Matta Mimbosa lowered her head. Tears ran down her ebony cheeks. Another child lost. She thought of the boy who had been taken away and the boys bound on the floor of her home. Unconsciously, she rubbed her belly to feel the life that stirred there. She knew, as she always had before, that it was a boy.

  6

  Deployment

  “All right, I’m going to need your undivided attention for the better part of the next two hours. This will constitute the jump-off briefing for this operation. Since there is a lot we don’t know and much that we yet need to know to accomplish this mission, this will be a phased deployment—one thing at a time. The first phase will entail getting what we think we might need into the region in a way that will provide us as much flexibility as possible. We still don’t know what kind of a nut we have to crack, let alone how to crack it. Once we are on the ground, we tackle the next phase; getting people and assets into position to move against the target objective. Right now, we are obviously short of specific target data. And finally, the takedown of this objective. It’s not going to be easy. We have to stage assets, move into position, and make our attack without alerting the locals or the opposition. We have a border crossing to make. And then we have to repatriate everyone and everything, leaving no footprint—or, as Steven would often have it, leave the footprint behind that we want read. In my opinion, it can be done, but as with any semi-denied-area operation, we will have to move carefully—one step at a time. Again, there’s a lot we don’t know, but hopefully, we can fill in many of the blanks along the way.”

  Janet Brisco stood behind a small elevated table that served as her briefing platform. They were assembled in the Kona operations building. The exterior was plywood prefab, with a corrugated metal roof; a post-and-pier construction with two feet of latticed crawl space under the single main flooring. There were thousands of similar buildings in Hawaii. Inside, it was part modern office space and part space-age military planning center. There were seven in her audience: Steven Fagan, Garrett Walker, Akheem Kelly-Rogers, Dodds LeMaster, Bill Owens, Tomba, and another of his Africans, a small ferret of a man with aquiline features, hooded eyelids, and a calm intensity. His name was Mohammed Senagal, the only Somali among the Africans. He was quite different in appearance and manner from Tomba, but both men seemed to radiate a quiet forcefulness. They had that measure of deadly serenity that only years of soldiering in extreme conditions could form in a man. In spite of their primitive appearance, both men spoke excellent English, and both were reasonably well versed in the application of modern technology to military applications. Brisco spoke a little slower in her briefing than normal, but she did not talk down to them. All eight of them had indexed briefing folders in front of them.

  “Okay, let’s start with what we do know.” She touched a keypad on the table in front of her, and a satellite image emerged on the two-by-three-foot plasma display behind her. There were no cords from her laptop; the system functioned on a wireless local area network. She stepped to one side so everyone had a clear view.

  “This is the area in northern Zimbabwe we have to penetrate. Mostly high veld cut by deep ravines and heavily wooded areas. There is worse country to cross, and there will be challenges if we have to move overland with any equipment. This is where we think we will have to go.” She tapped the keyboard several times. A series of increasing magnifications and lower-resolution images resulted in the grainy outlines of a hotel complex. “This is it, gentlemen, the Makondo Hotel.” She quickly outlined the Japanese-Saudi history of the structure, and what they knew of its most recent history. Then she flipped through several subtle variations of the same image. “You will note that there are very few vehicles about the complex, but those we do see are very inconsistent with a luxury hotel operation. About half of them are small pickup trucks, probably set up for off-road travel. Note that the gatehouse is positioned on the only improved road into the area. From all appearances, it’s a normal security gatehouse—all hotels have them, right? Well, take a look at the emplacement off to the right of the guard shack.” The image grew, larger and more grainy, then suddenly clarified. “With some computer enhancement by our friend Dodds, we have what appears to be a machine gun emplacement—a fifty-caliber machine gun emplacement. One of the problems in this part of Africa is that anything that is nice is very well guarded, sometimes even guarded with automatic weapons. But a fifty-caliber? If they have fifties, then it would follow they probably have RPGs, perhaps even mortars. That means they are probably prepared to deal with light armor and helicopter gunships. Something is going on there, and I’d wager it is more than elegant dining and Swedish saunas. Hotels in Africa do need security, especially those in remote areas, but a fifty-cal. is over the top.

  “We have a set of architectural plans coming, but the French firm who designed the place turned out to be a little stingy about sharing their work. Damn Frogs made it necessary to go through a consulting engineering firm in London, pay them a fee, and sign a licensing agreement if the plans are used for future construction. Of necessity, we have to go slow, as we don’t want to surface any unusual or urgent interest in the place. I should have them in forty-eight hours, so we will have them for final assault planning.

  “Now take a look at what we just got in from the NRO. Langley finally got them to bring one of their high-resolution satellites across Lake Kariba. Here we have two vehicles parked out in the middle of nowhere, covered by camouflage netting. Who in the hell cammies up their vehicles in the daytime? The safari concessions don’t do this, and there are no Zimbabwean military units in the area. Poachers, maybe, but I doubt it; they look too disciplined. We can’t make the kind of vehicles, but the dimensions match a Toyota 4x4. Now look at this.” A slightly oblique image showed two blurry, upright figures. Both had what appeared to be dark headgear. “Something look a little strange about these two?”

  “They’re both wearing berets,” AKR offered.

  “Exactly, and look at their arms. One is definitely black. The other is either a light-skinned black or a very tanned white guy. What do you make of this, Tomba?”

  Tomba studied the image for a long moment before answering. “It has all the appearances of a long-range scouting party, one that moves at night and laagers up during the day. And it’s a military unit. See the dark smudge well off to the right side of the lower vehicle?” Brisco marked it with a laser pointer. “Yes, there,” Tomba continued. “That seems to be where they built a fire for their rations. It is also near a stand of bush willows, which provide good low cover for men in a laager. Men in a scouting party will seek shade away from their vehicles. Perhaps from habit and training
, all men in scouting elements fear helicopters. If helicopters find their vehicles and attack, they will be able to engage the helicopters from a relatively safe location, or if the attack is overwhelming, fade into the bush. I agree they are not poachers. Poachers would have a single flatbed truck, and they would cover it with canvas and brush, not military netting. And no safari, photographic or shooting, would take these measures.” Tomba glanced at the Somali, who blinked slowly and slightly lowered his head in agreement.

  “Excellent. Thank you for that. So it seems we have located the center of activity, and it appears to be guarded by a professional, mobile military force, one that can, or has reason to, range well away from their base. Other than that, we know very little about the threat environment from a conventional perspective. Since we suspect biological activity, this brings on a whole other layer of consideration. If it comes to moving on this complex, resistance from what appears to be a security detachment with light infantry capability may be only a part of the problem. Needless to say, we need a lot more information. We will begin to deploy assets immediately. The planning process will be ongoing and will have to be flexible enough to account for new information. Under almost any other conditions, we would not even consider a regional deployment with this scant amount of knowledge, but the danger that this threat represents may be time-critical, so we move now. That said, let’s get into your briefing materials.”

  AKR opened his packet, turning it forty-five degrees to read the tabs: Topography, Country Profiles, Indigenous Peoples, Military Orders of Battle, Phase One Equipment Listings, Loading and Movement Schedules, Cover Documentation, and the list went on—some nineteen tabs in all. It was the size of a phone book for a small city. He leaned close to Garrett.