Innocent as Sin
( St. Kilda - 3 )
Elizabeth Lowell
Elizabeth Lowell
Innocent as Sin
For Margaret and Roy
Yeah, sure, you betcha!
1
Africa
Late March
Wearing dirty camouflage gear, boots, and insect repellent, Rand McCree crouched behind the tattered grass blind. His camera’s extreme-long-distance lens filled the hole cut in the loosely woven grass. Even though the sun was barely above the eastern horizon, Rand was sweating. He didn’t notice it. In the Democratic Republic of Camgeria, whether it was tropical coastland or scrubby interior, men sweated. It was how they knew they were alive.
Through the camera lens Rand watched the rebels-or freedom fighters, depending on your politics-wait next to heavy trucks parked just off the south end of the miserable, barely scraped dirt strip that passed for a runway in this part of Africa.
Next to him, his twin jerked, kicking the AK-47 lying between the two men.
“Settle down,” Rand said softly. “The plane will be along eventually.”
“Something bit me,” Reed muttered.
“Are your shots current?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what are you bitching about?”
“I feel like a bush blood bank.”
Rand smiled. “You are.”
“How did I let you talk me into this?”
“Me? You were the one going on about a lifetime opportunity to get a picture of the most dangerous, mysterious arms trader since-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Reed interrupted. “Don’t remind me.”
“Not more than twice a day.”
“More than that. At least twice since-”
“Quiet.”
Reed shut up and heard the whining growl of turboprops. He raised his powerful binoculars and began searching the dusty sky in the direction of the sound.
“Got him,” he said to his twin. “Coming in at three o’clock, flying low. And I mean low.” He whistled softly through his teeth. “That’s a ballsy pilot. Or a drunk. His gear is raking leaves.”
“Just one of the problems of flying without filing a flight plan.” Rand concentrated on getting the unmarked, unlighted Ilyushin Il-4 in focus as it approached the dirt strip. “Keep an eye on the countryside. We don’t want to explain what we’re doing here.”
“Nobody would ask,” Reed said. “They’d just shoot us.”
“Like I said-”
“He’s going straight in,” Reed interrupted, excitement in his voice. “You got him?”
“Yeah. Watch that you don’t flash sunlight off your binocular lenses.”
“Kiss mine. We’re going to nail the Siberian’s baby-killing ass.”
Rand grinned. The thing about having an identical twin was that he was…identical. You talked to each other because you could. But it wasn’t necessary. He’d do what you’d do in his place.
No thought required.
The plane leaped into focus. No insignia. No numbers. No identifying marks at all.
Surprise, surprise.
Silently Rand went to work.
2
Camgeria
Early morning
The man known only as the Siberian sat behind the copilot and watched the scrubland flash by at eye level on both sides of the plane. At the last possible instant, the Ukrainian pilot lifted the Ilyushin’s nose and slammed the metal bird onto the rough dirt runway with the sound of someone whacking a tin coffin with a baseball bat.
The turboprops reversed hard and spooled up, screaming like the undead. The plane bucked and humped on the rough dirt surface. Red dust swirled up from the wheels and the prop wash, sticking to the smears of hydraulic fluid that covered both wings of the aircraft. The first direct rays of the sun turned the smears into blood.
Cargo trucks waited. So did heavily armed men. They hadn’t flinched when the plane passed barely five feet above their heads.
Sweating, cursing in two languages, the pilot and copilot wrestled with the controls. Between them, they kept the plane rubber side down in the middle of the narrow strip. Sweat darkened the men’s blue coveralls. The aircraft was overloaded and undermaintained, a flying death sentence waiting to be executed.
Any sweat on the Siberian came from the heat slamming into the cockpit from the outside. Compared to what waited behind them on the runway, the shuddering, straining landing of the plane was caviar and toast points.
Halfway down the dirt runway, brakes and reversed props finally won out over momentum. A hundred yards short of the runway’s end, the plane sat down heavily on its gear and settled into a more predictable shake, rattle, shimmy, and roll. The pilot cranked the nose wheel and reversed course, beginning the long taxi back to where the men waited.
“Nyet,” the Siberian said.
The pilot didn’t argue. He might be the number one flyboy, but he knew who owned the plane.
“Keep your engines running but hold this position,” the Siberian continued in Russian. He unsnapped the harness that was barely big enough to contain his massive chest. “Make the bastards come to us.”
He stood up and leaned forward, watching the trucks and men nearly half a mile away.
“You think it’s a trap?” the copilot asked him nervously.
“Life is a trap.”
With that he crouched down and looked through the windscreen with binoculars, studying the trucks. After some indecision, their drivers had started up and were heading for the aircraft, trailing streamers of dust. Most of the vehicles were grinding along the edge of the runway, but one of the drivers used the runway itself.
It could be an innocent mistake.
It could be intentional. Lethal.
The Siberian yanked a hand radio from the hip pocket of his white jungle suit. He keyed the microphone and snarled in English, “Tell that idiot to clear the runway, or we’ll take off right now.”
“Oh, yaasss, b’wana,” a voice replied over the radio in singsong English.
“No insolence, Da’ana, or I’ll cut your heart out and feed it to those pagans.”
The radio popped softly as the man at the other end of the transmission keyed his microphone, acknowledging the command from his boss.
“Stay in the cockpit,” the Siberian ordered the pilot in Russian. “Keep the brake set and power on the props.”
“What if one of the rebels backs into them?” the pilot asked.
“Haven’t you heard? Stupidity is a capital crime.”
He turned and growled orders into the cargo area, using serviceable Bulgarian. The Bulgarian loadmaster began undogging the wide double doors just in back of the cockpit.
The Siberian grabbed an Israeli-made submachine gun from beneath the jump seat and headed back into the cargo area. He stood in the open doorway while the first truck arrived and backed into position, its tailgate lined up level with the floor of the plane’s cargo area.
Two lean, bare-chested black Africans in tattered camouflage shorts sat in the back of the truck. Beneath their thin butts were burlap bags crammed full of cargo. One of the guards held a Kalashnikov casually in one hand. The other had a Russian-made sniper’s rifle slung over his shoulder.
The Siberian switched frequencies, lifted the hand radio to his mouth, and spoke to the rebel commander in French. “I take off in twenty minutes. If you want your merchandise, work fast.”
A second truck pulled up beside the first. A gang of sweating black laborers jumped down and mounted the first vehicle. Quickly they boosted heavy burlap bags into the cargo bay and started to scramble aboard the aircraft.
The Siberian made sure they all got a good look at his Uzi. The labor
ers held out empty hands to show they were unarmed, then began moving the bags forward, stacking them against the bulkhead. When the first truck was empty, the Siberian kicked the bags loaded aboard the plane, found them full and heavy, and stepped aside. The laborers removed five of the twenty heavy wooden crates stowed in the rear of the cargo area and loaded them in the truck.
Within three minutes, the first truck had been unloaded, reloaded, and was pulling out.
The Siberian watched while the first truck drove away and a second backed into position. The two armed guards in cammie shorts stayed in position beside the new load while the laborers repeated their tasks.
Smoking a cigarette, watching the surrounding land, the Siberian prowled back and forth in the cargo bay. The sun was well up over the horizon. The heat of equatorial Africa rose from the ground like an invisible shroud. White Eastern Europeans and black Africans alike sweated and exchanged cargoes without a hitch. No one was new to this game.
As the fourth truck unloaded, the Bulgarian stopped a laborer and used a sheath knife to rip a hole in the heavy burlap bag the man carried. He pried a black stone out of the slit and held it up for the Siberian to inspect.
“What you think? Is it coltan?” the Siberian asked in Bulgarian, one of his six languages.
The loadmaster shrugged. “You tell me.”
“It’s coltan.” He stubbed out his cigarette on the cargo floor and went to the doorway. “They know better than to shit on the Siberian.”
Or on his Russian backers.
Not to mention Joao Fouquette, who controlled much of South America’s arms trade.
Like the legal world, the illegal world had its shifting alliances, double crosses, armed truces, and brutal wars.
A dusty Toyota pickup with a heavy machine gun mounted in its bed pulled up beside the cargo trucks. A handsome black man in a crisp tan officer’s uniform swung out of the cab and approached the loading bay.
“How was your trip?” he asked the Siberian in French.
“Uganda didn’t think much of your phony end-user certificates for the Kalashnikovs.”
The officer grinned. “That’s because the Ugandan defense minister supplied them to me without giving his superiors a cut.”
“I thought so. How much did he charge you?”
“Fifty thousand American.”
“He must have been feeling guilty. He only tacked on another twenty-five thousand. You’ll see it in the transport charges for the next load.”
The officer shrugged. “Where are the RPGs?”
The Siberian jerked his thumb toward the rear of the plane. “You’ll get them when I’ve seen the diamonds.”
The officer slid one hand into his pants pocket and produced a leather miner’s bag. He flipped the bag up to the Siberian, who hefted the bag on his palm, loosened the drawstrings, and spilled the contents into his hand. The morning sun caught on two dozen large rough stones. They were like ragged ice cubes in the heat, gleaming with promise.
“Feels light,” the Siberian said.
“They are perfect stones for Antwerp,” the officer said, climbing lithely aboard the plane, heading toward the five large wooden crates. “My South African says each will yield several two-and three-carat finished goods.”
The Siberian dug a jeweler’s loupe out of his trousers and studied the stones. “Perhaps, but documentation will cut into my profit. Even the damned Belgians are demanding paper proof that they are not conflict stones. Nobody wants diamonds with blood on them.”
“It washes off diamonds quite easily. I threw in an extra two hundred pounds of coltan to pay for your paperwork.”
The Siberian smiled slightly. “The transistor manufacturers of Prague will be pleased.”
“So the Czechs are providing you the rifles,” the officer said. “Good. Their work is better than that load of Moldavian shit you brought us last time.”
“AK-47s aren’t all created equal,” the Siberian said, smiling thinly. “The price reflects that.”
“Show me the grenade launchers.”
“Pick one.”
The officer pointed to a crate at random.
The Siberian nodded to the loadmaster, who undid the straps that secured the last large crates in place. He frog-walked the selected crate over to the door, laid it down, and pulled a pry bar out of its wall mount. Very quickly the crate gave up its secrets.
Six shoulder launchers rested in their recessed rack. The loadmaster dragged a smaller crate forward and opened it. Inside were twelve grenades, packed warheads up.
The black officer picked up one of the launchers and inspected it. Then he selected one of the grenades, walked to the open doorway, and held the weapons up for his men to see. He shouted something in a tribal dialect. All the Siberian could understand was Uhuru, which was a tribal name for part of Camgeria.
Fifty men cheered. The guard with the Kalashnikov pointed his weapon in the air and fired wildly.
The Siberian came and stood in the doorway beside the rebel officer. He looked out at the ragtag army and smiled. His own spies in their midst and in the camps of the Camgerian forces told him that the rebels were close to toppling one of the most stable of the countries among the oil-rich, tribally divided lands lying along Africa’s western coast. If the rebels won, there would be prolonged and brutal tribal warfare.
And oil concessions for the Siberian who brought guns to the winning side.
He turned a mental page in his account book and began formulating the final stage of his plan to move from trading illegal arms in the field to trading oil from the safety of America. Now that the rebels had received fresh stocks of Soviet-era arms, the Democratic Republic of Camgeria would need better weapons. The Siberian would supply them.
And make many, many millions of American dollars, plus connections with and favors from the present African regime. The latter would buy him what money alone couldn’t-a place at the international oil-trading table.
Blood didn’t stick to oil.
A glint of light caught his eye. The flash came from a rocky hill about three hundred yards off the runway.
Instantly he stepped back into the dark interior of the plane. It would be like the rebels to try and make off with the arms, the coltan, and the diamonds. Or perhaps the Camgerian government had discovered he was selling to both sides of its little war.
In the shadows of the aircraft’s cargo hold, the Siberian lifted his binoculars and studied the spot where he’d seen the flash of light.
Like everything else away from the tropical coast, the hill was covered by scrub and dust. He could make out what might be a sniper’s keep and thought he could see men inside. But he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t seeing his own paranoia in the moving wind shadows. The binoculars were inferior Moldavian goods.
Impatiently he turned toward the guard who had the sniper rifle. With both voice and gestures, the Siberian said, “Give it to me.”
The man hesitated until his officer barked a command. Reluctantly the guard handed over the rifle.
Still concealed by the shadows inside the plane, the Siberian rested the weapon on a crate and studied the hillside. The telescopic sight brought details into sharp focus.
There were two men. White. Both faces were hidden-one by a camera with a very long-range lens, the other by field glasses.
Then the man with the camera ducked down into the blind. Through the light grass screen across the front of the blind, the Siberian could see that he was reloading the camera. Film, not digital.
Russian curses echoed in the plane. The cameraman had at least one exposed roll of the Siberian overseeing the unloading, the rebel officer inspecting arms, the diamonds and coltan, the rebel brandishing weapons that were being delivered in contravention of African Union and United Nations arms embargoes, in the face of world opinion and all civilized standards. And those would be the headlines if the photographs were ever published.
It would ruin him. He’d live out his life in the stink
ing hell of Libya’s “freedom.”
He stared through the rifle’s telescopic sight. “Is the weapon accurate?” he asked.
The officer translated.
The guard grinned, nodded, and answered.
“He has it zeroed in at two hundred and fifty yards,” the officer translated.
“Excellent,” the Siberian said.
He changed his aiming point to compensate for the differences in range and for the fact that he was firing uphill. He would wound one. The other would try to save his comrade.
And both would be his.
Slowly the Siberian’s finger took up slack on the trigger.
The spotter moved slightly. For a timeless instant the Siberian and the spotter were frozen in each other’s sights.
As the last of the slack in the trigger vanished, the spotter threw himself on the cameraman and shoved him away. The shot echoed. Birds shrieked and leaped for the sky.
Dust leaped from the spotter’s cammie shirt, followed instantly by blood.
When the Siberian worked the bolt to reload, it was rough, gritty. The scope jerked. By the time he reacquired the grass blind, both men were gone. Cursing, he fired several times. Then he stepped into the doorway and stabbed toward the hill with his finger.
“Spies,” he shouted. “Kill them!”
The officer yelled at his army. As the rebels turned toward the hillside, two men broke cover and began scrambling over the crest of the hill. The rebels fired, but the men were too far away for accuracy.
The Siberian lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired two more shots without any real hope. A sniper’s rifle wasn’t much good on moving targets. Disgusted, he slammed the rifle onto the crate.
While the rebels watched, the wounded man fell.
Finally!
Before the Siberian could bring the sniper rifle to bear again, the cameraman bent over, picked up his wounded comrade, pulled him into a fireman’s carry, and vanished over the crest of the hill.
“Strong,” the Siberian said, surprised. “Very strong.”
And very unexpected.
He gestured at the staring rebels. “Go after them, shit-heads!”
The officer translated and the rebels ran toward the hill. Before they were halfway, an engine started on the other side of the hill. Moments later dust rose from the tires of a fleeing Land Rover.
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