by S. A. Beck
“Afraid of bees, eh? Not sure how that’s going to be useful.”
Ahmad shrugged. “You never know. All information is useful information.”
“True enough. What’s the second thing you know?”
Instead of answering, he turned to the doctor and switched to Arabic. “Is this man healthy enough to travel?”
The doctor, who was putting his instruments away in a black medical bag, clicked his tongue and said, “Certainly not. He might die if he moves in the next few days.”
“Ahmad, what’s going on?” Grunt asked in English to cut the doctor out of the conversation again.
The arms dealer looked grim. “You are not going to like it.”
“Tell me.”
Ahmad sighed. “The twins have left Marrakech. I do not know where they went, but I suspect they’re—”
“Heading for the rest of the team,” Grunt said, sitting up in bed. Pain lanced through his side, making him gasp.
The doctor put a gentle hand on his chest. “Lie down. You are not fit to go anywhere.”
“My team needs me.”
“In this state, you cannot help them,” Ahmad said.
“I’m going. Get me a computer so I can book the first flight south,” Grunt said, swinging his feet over the side of the bed and grabbing his clothes from the bedside table. The pain was intense, cutting through the drugs.
He ignored it. He had a duty to perform.
Chapter 12
AUGUST 15, 2016, THE DESERT OUTSIDE TIMBUKTU
7:30 A.M.
* * *
Hold your position and wait for reinforcements. Hold your position and wait for reinforcements.
That had always been her least favorite order in the Special Forces. She wasn’t the kind of person to sit around and do nothing when there was action going down.
Isadore Grant paced around the little camp she and Brett had set up in the desert twenty miles north of Timbuktu. Two small tents stood nestled in a sandy swale between a pair of low, rocky hills. The position was too open and exposed for her liking, but it was the best they could find in this featureless desert.
A few hundred yards to the north, a rented Land Rover stood parked in a cluster of bushes with a small tent next to it. The roof of the Land Rover poked above the tops of the bushes and gleamed in the sunlight, visible from a good distance away. That was the distraction. Hopefully if the Russians tracked her here, they’d attack that camp and give her some warning. Considering their level of training, that little trick probably wouldn’t work.
After getting attacked in her hotel the first night she had arrived, Isadore knew the Russians were in the thick of this mess. They obviously had a whole team here.
Did they know about Jaxon and the Atlantis Allegiance, or were they simply spying on the largest Atlantean community in North Africa?
Whatever they were up to, they were certainly on the ball. They’d heard of her arrival and assembled an assault team within hours. When she had reported in to General Corbin, he had told her to get out of town and wait until she got reinforcements. All he had said was “the twins are coming.” He didn’t need to say any more.
The McKay twins. She shuddered. No one creeped her out more than those two, not even the chemically created zombie teenager sharing her camp.
He lay on the hill to the north, as still as a stone, watching the surrounding countryside. He’d been up there for hours and would remain there for years if she didn’t tell him otherwise. The perfect sentry. Good in a fight too. He sure had helped when the Russians came bursting through the door. So far, field testing of the artificially created Atlanteans was going well. An army of these creatures would be unstoppable.
Isadore opened up her laptop and adjusted a small satellite dish linked to the computer. The dish was tuned to pick up the narrowband frequency of a CIA satellite. General Corbin had given her the access codes even though she wasn’t CIA, and that counted as treason. He was helpful that way. Once she logged in, she began to search all the intelligence about the region, especially regarding Russian involvement. Usually she did this before setting out on a mission, but General Corbin had sent her out at the last minute, and she had thought she only had to deal with the Atlantis Allegiance. Now it was obvious there were larger forces at work.
During the Cold War from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union had rivaled the United States for world domination. Part of that rivalry had involved collecting allies in the developing world. The Soviets had spent a lot of money in Africa on aid and sold large numbers of weapons to various dictators. The United States and other Western powers did the same. About half of Africa supported the old Soviet Union, while the other half supported the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russia had financial troubles and internal unrest to occupy its attention, and aid to Africa dried up. Many former “socialist” African countries aligned themselves with the West and became “capitalist democracies,” although really most were still the same dictatorships or corrupt pseudodemocracies. Only the names and the alliances had changed.
So Russian influence in Africa had waned in the 1990s and early 2000s. They still sold lots of weapons, but so did everybody else. American influence waned too. The Americans had mostly been in Africa as a proxy fight against the Soviets. When that stopped, the Americans focused more on the Middle East, where oil and an alliance with Israel had always made the region a priority.
Then the Chinese moved in, sending thousands of engineers to Africa to help with infrastructure projects while also getting mining concessions. Soon the Chinese were everywhere, investing and building and making themselves out to be valuable economic partners to every African leader. They had been the most practical of the three big powers. With the end of the Cold War, they had seen an opening and an opportunity. Now African raw materials supplied China’s industrial boom. Chinese development projects in Africa brought in money and influence. China was even buying agricultural land to feed its giant population. On a continent where food shortages and even famine were regular problems, corrupt African leaders were selling their best farmland to foreigners.
Isadore shrugged. It made no difference to her. What she was really interested in was how much the Russians and the Chinese were involved in Mali and the surrounding countries.
According to the CIA database, China didn’t have much investment in the Saharan countries. Not enough money or raw materials in it for them. They sold arms and had spies, of course, but according to the latest CIA intelligence, they weren’t a major factor in this region. There was also no evidence of their interest in the People of the Sea. The Chinese considered themselves the world’s oldest and greatest civilization, so it probably never occurred to them that the stories of Atlantis could be true. It would certainly hurt Chinese pride to know that another civilization had them beat by a few thousand years.
So the Chinese weren’t going to be a problem on this mission. The Russians were a different story. Besides the usual level of spies that they deployed in every country, they had a large number of archaeologists. That was interesting. Archaeologists in sensitive regions of the world often doubled as secret agents. Most of the time, they were real scientists doing real research, but the fact that they traveled extensively in the world’s hotspots and knew the locals made them very useful to their governments. America, Russia, the UK, France, Germany—all intelligence agencies of the major powers had archaeologists on the payroll. Some were only part-time spies who just happened to have a legitimate research interest in a sensitive region, while others were trained fighters given a bit of archaeological education and sent on specific missions.
Several Russian archaeological teams worked in Mauritania and Mali. Right here in Timbuktu, there was Dimitri Rublev, a linguist who the CIA database flagged as suspected KGB. Plus the database listed a couple of Russian archaeological teams excavating abandoned settlements in the desert just outside of town. Isadore suspected that her attackers had come f
rom those archaeological teams.
Another detail caught her interest. The Russians ran a large archaeological survey in Mauritania looking for rock art. This whole region had a long history of cave paintings dating back millennia. Interesting enough from a scientific standpoint, but why would the Russians care?
She checked on the survey and found that it was quite well funded by something called the Russian Academy for International History, which she knew the KGB used as a front for various projects around the world.
Isadore got up and paced around her little camp, now and then glancing at Brett, who still lay in the same position on watch atop the nearby hill.
The Russians had several teams scouring the Mauritanian desert. They’d found numerous cave paintings and had published several scientific articles on the subject, but that obviously was not what they were really after. So what were they looking for? Old Atlantean settlements, perhaps? But there was no evidence of any Russian interest in the modern Atlantean population. The ambush in her hotel room had been more of a reaction. She had shown up, and suddenly the Russians took notice. They probably didn’t know why she was here but decided to get rid of her anyway. If she hadn’t appeared, she suspected, they would have continued their quiet research into the Atlantean past.
That didn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t they be interested in the living Atlanteans? Those were the potential soldiers, not the dried-up bones of their ancestors. But the Russians were too practical to spend so much money unless they thought there would be some solid benefit. They obviously thought there was something in the Atlanteans’ past that was more useful than the people alive today.
What could that be?
Also, the Russians were too professional not to have noticed the arrival of Jaxon and her pals. They’d be spying on them by now.
Another detail had caught her eye in the Mauritania CIA report. It was a new and vague report, coming secondhand from some local sources. The Mauritanian government had rounded up all the People of the Sea and taken them to an unknown location. She sent Corbin a message asking him to dig for more information.
In the meantime, she would do her own digging. Perhaps she needed to strap this Dimitri fellow to a chair and question him. And maybe one of those archaeologists in Mauritania as well.
The Atlantis Allegiance had driven through Mauritania to get here. Had they met up with the Russians? Were they in league with them? Had Jaxon and her friends been searching in the desert for something too?
Maybe things would get clearer once the McKay twins made it here and they could go on the offensive.
In the meantime, there was nothing to do but wait. Isadore limbered up, going through her intense daily exercise routine of yoga for flexibility, pushups and sit-ups for strength, and lifting a few rocks to tone her muscles. She missed her home gym, and she missed being able to go to the shooting range. She didn’t dare squeeze off any rounds out here. She didn’t want to attract any attention.
A low whistle from the hill told her they had attracted attention anyway. Brett was signaling to her.
He made a series of quick hand signals using a system she had taught him from her old Special Forces days. He held up two fingers and pointed to the left and to the right, then pulled his hand back. Two enemies were converging on the Land Rover from opposite flanks. Good, the Russians had actually fallen for her little ruse. Brett held his two hands together, the forefinger of one hand touching the wrist of the other. The attackers carried assault rifles. Great. A firefight was just what she needed to relieve the tedium.
Isadore grabbed her own AK-47. It wasn’t her first choice of weapon, and it wasn’t in the greatest of condition, but it was the best she could get on such short notice. She didn’t know any arms dealers in Timbuktu, so she’d had to mug a prosperous storeowner and take his. That was one of the nice things about this part of the world. Everybody who was anybody carried a gun.
She was about to run up the hill and get into position to fire down on the Russians when she paused. Only two? There had been more than that in her hotel room, and surely they would send more than just two to fight a battle all the way out here.
Maybe they hadn’t fallen for her trick after all. Maybe the guys down at the Land Rover were a distraction to keep her eyes away from the real attack.
She crouched. Scanned the surrounding terrain. To her north stood the hill on which Brett lay in watch and beyond it the Land Rover and the two Russians. To the south rose another hill, a bit smaller. Both were stony and pretty much bare. Not much cover there. To the west and east, the land was sandy and more open. A few low dunes and the occasional bush provided some cover.
Which way would they come?
The glint of reflected sunlight to the east made her hit the dirt. To her surprise, no shot came. Had the sun caught the barrel of a gun or the glass of some binoculars? Had they seen Brett as well as her?
The reflection had come from the top of a low dune about four hundred yards away. It did not repeat, and she saw no one.
Then their plan became obvious, because it was what she herself would do if attacking a position like this. The guy hiding behind that dune was not a sniper, as she had initially feared, but a spotter equipped with a radio to contact two teams—the one hitting the fake campsite and the one moving in from the south behind the cover of that hill. A classic pincer movement.
She looked at Brett, who was studying the movements of the two approaching the Land Rover and fake campsite. After a moment, he turned in her direction. She signaled him to stay put, pointed in the direction of the threat, and ran a finger across her throat. Brett didn’t have any weapons, but with the serum he’d been given, he was his own weapon. He’d just have to figure out how to kill those guys himself.
She’d have her own hands full with the group coming from the south.
She crawled across the narrow valley and worked her way up the side of the southern hill, keeping behind rocks and worming her way through little depressions as much as she could. The spotter might notice her movement, but there was no helping it. If she didn’t get to the top of the hill before the enemy, she was done for.
She had studied this hill when they had first camped here. It was a steep-sided spine of rock with very little level space on top of it. She couldn’t see anything of the other side until she was at the very summit.
Isadore made it to the top without getting shot at. Before exposing herself, she glanced over her shoulder in Brett’s direction. He had disappeared. She heard no shots, no shouts, only the wind blowing through the desert, shifting the sands with a soft hiss.
She peeked over a rock at the other side of the hill and ducked back as a bullet cracked off the stone inches from her face.
Isadore shifted her position five yards to the right and popped up from cover. She had just enough time to see three men in a triangle formation ascending the back side of the hill. The one in front had been the one who shot at her. She snapped off an aimless shot that winged him in the shoulder, then dropped back down before the other two could fire.
Okay, this was a problem. She was outnumbered two to one, and the third guy might still have enough in him to put up a fight. Plus there was the Brett situation. She might have to bail him out. From the brief glimpse she’d gotten of the men, they looked trained and fit, probably the same professionals who had attacked her in her hotel room.
The odds of her getting out of this were slim. She grinned. God, she had missed this!
Shifting her position again, she dared another glimpse over the summit of the hill. Now she only saw two of them. The front man, who had spilled some blood on the stones around him, ducked out of sight as soon as she appeared. The one to his right and a little behind had moved farther to the right. The one to the left had disappeared.
Great, they were spreading out, trying to flank her and fire at her from both sides.
She took a shot at the guy to the right and missed. The man fired back, his AK-47 making a distinctive
bark, and the bullet buzzed over her head. They exchanged another couple of shots, but both were too well protected, and neither of them hit.
Then the wounded front man plucked up enough courage to add his fire to the fight. He moved too slowly, though, and Isadore took him out with a well-placed shot to the forehead.
“One down, five to go, assuming there aren’t any more lurking around here,” she muttered.
She kept exchanging fire with the man on the right, but he’d chosen a good spot and had enough training to fire quickly and get back down. Isadore bit her lip. They were too evenly matched, and this guy was wasting her time while his buddy moved around to her left. In another minute, he’d be in a good spot, and it would be all over.
Time to change the script.
She scrambled a few feet down the back slope of the hill and sprinted along it to her left for several yards then fell prone and listened.
Silence. No sound from Brett’s side of the battle. What was going on over there?
But then there came the scrabbling of someone crawling over the loose rock and sand. It was very faint, and someone who hadn’t trained their senses could have easily missed it. This guy moved like a pro.
Plus he was close, really close.
Isadore eased herself into a better position, making no sound. She leveled her assault rifle, sighting down the barrel, becoming one with the weapon as she had so many times before. He’d be quick, but he’d have the disadvantage of moving first. She lay in wait like a tiger, ready to pounce.
He popped up, lightning fast, a full five feet to the right of where Isadore had last heard him.
Damn, he was good.
Not good enough. A split second before he could fire, Isadore’s bullet punctured his neck. He fell back, choking and clutching at the fatal wound.
