Operator Down

by Brad Taylor

  She gave a brilliant smile, showing her teeth, the relief flooding through her. She said, “You’re just sweet on me.”

  23

  Aaron heard the men stir on the far side of the cell and knew the time was coming close. When they’d arrived last night—after twelve hours of riding under the carpet in the back of the SUV—their captors had separated Alex from Aaron and tossed him into a room with little light, the only illumination coming from a cracked window high on the wall. He was surrounded by prisoners who flitted about like roaches, all seeking to escape attention from the guards. He was the only Caucasian in the place. He hoped the fact that they’d separated Alex meant they at least understood what would happen to her if she were to be incarcerated with him.

  The prison was a decrepit cinder-block structure, without even bars or individual cells. All the men were thrown together, which made rest difficult. At least getting locked up alone would have meant enough security to sleep.

  He’d learned early that these prisoners were different from what would be expected. They weren’t here for petty street crimes. They were imprisoned for something else. Some wore the tattered remnants of military and police uniforms. Others clung to the remains of business suits. And they were tribal. The uniform crowd kept to themselves, and they seemed to want to curry favor with the guards by abusing other inmates, as if their actions had an impact on how long they would remain.

  The ones in civilian clothes were different. Special. As a class, they weren’t overtly abused, and the uniformed prisoners seemed to defer to them. From what Aaron could see, their punishment came at the hands of the guards, with restricted movement in the prison and less food.

  Aaron belonged to a third class—the one of victim. A minority of the prisoners belonged to neither tribe, and they were the ones whom the uniformed prisoners preyed upon, to the delight of the actual guards. Tonight it was Aaron’s turn.

  Aaron had taken the farthest pallet from the door, putting his back to the wall and stretching out his shackled legs, waiting for nightfall. Waiting on the darkness.

  Now he listened to the rustling and feigned sleep. There was enough light in the gloom to make out shapes, and he could see the guard outside the cell room, faintly illuminated by a single bulb. That would be the trigger.

  He mentally began rehearsing how many he could remove before he went down. Breathing long and slow, he prepared for the fight.

  He saw the guard get off his stool and wander down the hall. He felt the adrenaline surge.

  Showtime.

  No sooner had the guard disappeared than seven men stood up, walking slowly toward him, attempting to maintain silence. The leader was in the front, and that’s whom Aaron would take first.

  He waited until the first row of four was standing above him, then reached out and snatched the ankles of the leader. With a roar, he powered up, ripping the man off his feet and slamming his head into the concrete floor.

  The other men actually leapt back at his yell and the violence, momentarily confused. Aaron used the stitch, the small bit of precious time. Keeping the corner to his back, he shuffled forward, his arms cracking out with the speed of a whip, his fists connecting with the first three men, a startlingly rapid attack.

  They did whatever it took to get out of range, scrambling back and exposing the second row of three. The surprise gone, these were ready, circling to the left and right and bouncing on their feet, their shackle chains ringing on the concrete. They came in at the same time.

  Aaron tucked, placing his elbows against his head to absorb the blows, knowing the prisoner chains on their ankles would prevent knees and kicks. He was hammered above his ears repeatedly, the punches doing little damage. He waited for an opening, then shot an uppercut almost from the ground, lifting one of the men off his feet, teeth twinkling in the twilight as they spewed out of his shattered face.

  Aaron turned to the other two, only to find himself now facing all five. They closed in for the kill. Aaron raised his fists. The men circled, laughing at his predicament, sure in their numbers, not realizing what they faced.

  Aaron was a grinder. A pounder. He’d spent close to twenty years learning how to destroy men with his hands alone, and after all that time, he’d learned to play to his strengths. He was no Jackie Chan, doing fancy kung fu maneuvers. His power lay in his fists, in a stand-up slugfest. While the shackles were stifling the men’s ability to use kicks, they did nothing to Aaron’s fighting effort. He could take a punch. Take a great many punches. And he could return them with a force few could withstand.

  He kept the corner to his back and waded in, swinging his fists in jackhammer blows. His punches glanced off two of them, then connected solidly with one, dropping him like a puppet with the strings cut. He continued, tucked in and low, bobbing and weaving, blocking fists and snapping heads.

  In frustration, one of the men did what Aaron feared most: He screamed and jumped inside Aaron’s range, wrapping his arms around Aaron’s waist.

  Before Aaron could get free the remaining men jumped on him, causing them all to crash to the ground in a heap. Aaron brought his legs up and circled the chains from his shackles around a neck, launching his legs back out and jerking the man off him.

  He tucked his head as the remaining three began to beat him, knowing his time was running out. He wrapped one arm around his skull and snapped out with the other one, popping a man hard enough to split his lips. He whipped his feet out, spreading his legs wide, hearing the man in chains gargle. He grabbed the throat of the man above him. Holding him in a death grip, he leaned back until the man’s head was against the wall, then punched him in the forehead, causing his skull to ricochet. He focused on the final man, grabbing a thatch of hair like he was pulling weeds and drawing his arm back like a piston.

  Before he could swing, a dozen flashlights split the darkness, and shouted orders filled the air. The guards poured in, ostensibly to save him from getting beaten to death. They ran in with a choreographed charade, batons out, only to halt, the yelling fading away. He found himself facing Lurch, looking confused and astonished at the carnage.

  Lurch began screaming in Sesotho, and Aaron tossed the remaining conscious prisoner away, then untangled himself from the man still in his chains.

  One of the guards checked the prisoner Aaron had choked, then rattled off something, causing two guards to flee the room.

  Lurch’s face split into a smile. He squatted down until he was level with Aaron.

  “Bad, bad mistake, Jew. I don’t know why you were in here to begin with”—he turned and used his baton to poke the body of the man Aaron had choked with his chains—“but now it’s murder. And there is a specific punishment for that.”

  He raised his baton, and a voice from the back of the room floated out. “Leave him be.”

  A tall prisoner, gaunt, wearing the remnants of slacks and a suit jacket, came forward. His coffee-colored skin was stretched taut, with pronounced cheekbones and so little body fat one could trace the pulse in the veins of his neck, but he held himself as if he weren’t in prison.

  Lurch said, “This doesn’t concern you.”

  “I decide what concerns me. Leave him be.”

  Lurch began rapidly shouting in the Sesotho language, but the man remained unmoved. Lurch pointed his baton at the man, glared at Aaron, then flicked his head at the guards. They left the room, with Lurch giving one last stare, a beam of pure hatred.

  The man held out his hand, helping Aaron to his feet. He said, “My name is Thomas Naboni. You’re not the usual type we get in here.”

  He laughed at his joke.

  Unsure of what had just happened, Aaron said, “Thank you.”

  Thomas smiled, his teeth gleaming white and in perfect condition, a stark contrast to the rest of his appearance. He said, “When a man helps another out of free will, it says something of his character.”

/>   Still confused, Aaron thought he was referring to himself. “Yes, and I appreciate it.”

  Thomas said, “I’m talking about you. As hungry as you must be, you gave your food to another.”

  The guards had brought their meager rations earlier in the day, and one of the suit prisoners had been refused food. A stick of a man who was clearly starving. The others of that clan had shared their portions, and Aaron had kicked in, solely because the man looked on the verge of death.

  A half cup of soiled rice saved my life?

  Remembering the deference the guards had paid him, Aaron said, “I only did what I thought was right. Who are you?”

  Thomas waved the question off and said, “Doing what is right is why you are alive now. The better question is why you are in here at all. What is your crime?”

  Aaron said, “I’m a mistake. I’ve done nothing.”

  Thomas laughed and said, “Like us all. Like us all.”

  24

  Like everyone else on the aircraft, Johan van Rensburg stared intently out the window, waiting on the land to reveal itself below the weather they were in. The aircraft circled, one wing held low, lining up with the small national airfield of Lesotho, Africa. Unlike the rest of the passengers, either tourists anxious to see the exotic land for the first time, or natives to whom air travel was a luxury rarely experienced, Johan was looking for something specific.

  The aircraft broke through the low-hanging clouds, and the land burst forth below them, a rugged pictorial straight out of National Geographic, with high plateaus jutting out of the lush greenery like a setting from Jurassic Park.

  While the tourists and locals took in the splendor, Johan looked more clinically. He didn’t care about the beauty. He cared about a drop zone. A location where he could insert the team that would be close enough to the capital city of Maseru for his operation yet far enough away to not be noticed. A DZ that didn’t require a hard slog to a rendezvous with transport. Because he’d need the men fresh.

  Once they hit the ground, they’d be in motion for forty-eight hours straight, and every bit of energy he could conserve on the front end would pay dividends on the back. He knew, from experience.

  Johan had perpetrated violence in many, many different countries inside Africa, but this would be the first time he did so in his own homeland. Well, not really his homeland, but close enough.

  He had been born and raised in South Africa, a country that had fought between Dutch and British parentage for a century in various civil wars, until the country abandoned both, declaring outright independence. Then, as if it couldn’t stand to be without an enemy, the country began to fight itself, with the colonial masters now pitted against the native population. What had once been seen as a sidenote in the colonial era, as the Dutch Boers took on the British military, became the main event. The politics of apartheid eventually consumed the state.

  Johan came of age at the end of the white-rule era and the beginning of one man, one vote. A newly minted member of the famed South African Reconnaissance Commandos—the Recces—he served in 5 Recce on the small teams, doing external work in the border wars, a vicious, guttural fight that nobody else on the planet even knew existed. He learned there were no winners. Only survivors. After risking his life alongside black tribal members—men who were now his brothers—he came home from a final tour only to find his unit disbanded.

  There was a new South Africa, and it was all about majority rule and dismantling anything that smacked of the elite apartheid state.

  He’d left at that point, anxious about the fire consuming the country he called home. He had a unique skill, and a talent for using it that had been forged in combat. He’d plied that skill all over the continent, working with whomever would hire him, but as he did, his view of the world began to harden. He’d once been a member of an organization that held honor above all. Now honor was secondary to money.

  He’d signed on with Executive Outcomes, Sandline International, and a few other outfits, fighting from Angola to Sierra Leone on behalf of everyone from De Beers Diamonds to national governments, and he’d seen that his talent could do both good and bad. Initially, the work had been pure, with a chain of command that understood the continent and a body of men who grasped war at the visceral level—but the taint of the mercenary hung large over them, eventually forcing the various companies out of business even as the African countries that had hired them praised their contributions.

  After that, things had not been so clean, with him working solely for monetary gain with little in the way of moral restraint. He didn’t mind a coup here and there—hell, the entire continent was a mess of intrigue—but he began to have misgivings.

  When he looked in the mirror, he preferred to see someone who righted the wrongs of the world with the barrel of a gun, not someone who killed for money. In his heart, he knew that was nothing more than a myth. He’d seen enough evil to know he wasn’t pure.

  Once, long ago, he’d helped a warlord achieve success, and then he’d watched the man order the massacre of an entire village, solely because he believed—against all evidence—that the village had been against him. Johan had done nothing. He’d let the slaughter happen, and in so doing had become complicit in the deaths.

  To this day, he would lie awake at night hearing the screams, knowing he could have stopped it. To be sure, it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t in charge. But he did have a rifle in his hand. And had failed to use it to prevent the massacre.

  In time, he’d become somewhat of an anomaly in the cloistered world of mercenaries on the continent. Most of the hires would do whatever was asked, cloaking their activities inside the parameters of the job. He was different. Among the major players in Africa, he was known as the Lily Boy. A purist who didn’t understand the dirt required under the nails to accomplish the mission.

  Johan didn’t care. As he’d recently shown in his interrogation of the Jew, a little dirt never bothered him, if it was necessary. It was the mission alone that mattered to him. It didn’t have to be noble, but it couldn’t be outright evil.

  Their aircraft came into final approach, and off in the distance he saw a large escarpment with a single dirt road snaking to the top. The terrain was flat and isolated, without any structures that he could see. It was his drop zone. Johan mentally recorded the flight path, judging where the radar arrays would be aimed to track the approaches of civilian aircraft, wanting to avoid them when they came in on an aircraft that most certainly wasn’t going to land. He didn’t worry about military systems. He knew Lesotho had no air defense systems to speak of. Such a thing would be absurd, as their borders were protected by South Africa.

  Like the Italian microstates of the Holy See and the Republic of San Marino, Lesotho was an island in the middle of another country, completely surrounded. While Lesotho claimed sovereignty, it knew its hold on power was at the behest of the surrounding state—in this case, South Africa.

  Lesotho was a mountainous land, its entire history a fight for survival, with the country founded by a tribe seeking refuge from the more martial Zulu clans. Climbing high into the mountains, the Basotho tribe had built a kingdom in rugged terrain that was just too hard to attack. The first king, Moshoeshoe I, had proven adept at the skills of both fighting and diplomacy and had guaranteed the kingdom’s survival by engendering the protection of the British.

  When South Africa had declared independence from the United Kingdom, so had Lesotho. And it had lived ever since as a sovereign state, surrounded completely by the country of South Africa in a strangely symbiotic relationship.

  Its primary export was water, drawn from the dams in the highlands, and its primary customer was South Africa, making the country of Lesotho a strategic resource that irrevocably altered its ability to forge its own destiny. No matter what happened in the small kingdom, South Africa was inexorably tied to the outcome.

  The last bit of
unrest in Lesotho had caused a proactive response from the surrounding state. Ostensibly to stop the bloodshed, South Africa had deployed troops in a peacekeeping role, and it would have been seen as a true gesture of goodwill, except that the troops deployed to the dams that controlled the water into South Africa, letting the blood flow as long as the water did. The implication from that deployment was clear: Lesotho could pretend to be sovereign but only so long as it was peaceful.

  Besides water, Lesotho had one other blessing—or curse, depending on whom you asked: The mountains produced some of the largest gem-quality diamonds on earth. The kimberlite mines of Lesotho did little to help the poverty of the average Basotho tribe member, but they were why Johan’s skills had been brought in.

  Lesotho had had a number of coups in its history, some bloodier than others, but none that relied on the help of an outside element. Johan’s job would be to topple the government as rapidly as possible, using a martial skill that the troops in Lesotho could only dream of. His boss’s job would be to placate the South African high command.

  Johan wasn’t privy to the details—that wasn’t his job—but he believed Colonel Armstrong was using his contacts in South Africa to keep them at bay. He didn’t know for sure, and in fact didn’t want to know, but he understood that as long as the coup was relatively bloodless and swift, South Africa would stay away. If it turned into a street fight, South Africa was coming in just as they had before, and Colonel Armstrong’s plan would fail.

  The small aircraft hit the tarmac and rolled up to the lone gate of the Moshoeshoe I International Airport, a little bit of a misnomer because the only flights that came in were from Johannesburg. Looking more like an airfield at an island resort than the sole international airport for an entire country, the limited infrastructure made Johan smile.