by By Jon Land
She surged out onto the front of the grounds, the Bugatti’s red metallic paint job singed by the flames’ touch, its rear end still smoking. She could smell the sickening stench of burned rubber and realized her back tires were on fire an instant before they blew out.
Danielle spun the car to a halt, leaped from the driver’s seat, and rolled onto the grass. Guards rushed at her from both sides of the house. Gunshots rang out and she tensed with anticipation of one of the bullets smacking her like a hefty kick. She twisted onto her side and sighted down on a pair of guards who had followed her plunge to the grass. Their bullets hissed through the blades before hers punched them backwards and dropped them on the compound’s circular drive.
But guards still surrounded Danielle on three sides, closing upon her even now, as she ejected the spent clip and felt in her pocket for a fresh one. She reloaded, the guards continuing to converge, when a truck roared up to the compound’s entrance and slammed through the gate.
The truck drew the fire from the guards intended for her and Danielle turned to see a pair of figures lean out the truck’s windows to train twin submachine guns on Sheik al-Akbar’s forces, bullets pouring from their barrels.
“Come on!” a voice shouted over the gunshots. “Hurry!”
She recognized Ben leaning out the passenger window, and Colonel Nabril al-Asi firing out the driver’s with one hand still wrapped around the truck’s steering wheel.
Al-Asi must have gotten the message she had left for him at the building supply store in Ramallah!
Trusting their fire would cover her, Danielle dashed straight for the truck. Ben thrust the passenger door open for her and she leaped inside. In the driver’s seat, al-Asi pulled his right hand from the wheel and jammed the truck into reverse. Still firing with his left hand, he used the other to jerk the wheel around upon hitting the street.
“They’ll have the road blocked off!” Danielle warned desperately. “The sheik will have summoned an army!”
“Not this time,” al-Asi said with a strange assurance, as he screeched off. “Relax, Pakad Barnea, everything is under control.”
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Chapter 85
D
espite the fact that al-Asi had bought off Hussein al-Akbar’s expected reinforcements, they remained wary as they continued down the road minutes out of Beirut. The front end of the truck rattled badly from the collision with the fence. Fluid bled from the engine and thin clouds of oily smoke drifted through the open windows.
“You’re sure you got all of the crates?” Ben asked, after Danielle had related what had transpired inside the fortress. “They were all burned?”
“Yes, I’m positive,” Danielle told him, still terrified by Ben’s explanation of their contents. “Bugs . . . You’re telling me they were bugs.”
“Created in a bio lab by Soviet scientists during the Cold War. The Black Death,” he finished. “Called that for a reason. . . .”
Danielle could do nothing but shake her head when his tale was finished. “Because they’re capable of nearly destroying a city,” she said, referring to Dubna.
“No, the Russians nearly destroyed the city to stop the Black Death from spreading. With good reason.”
“Tell her the rest, Inspector,” al-Asi prompted from behind the wheel as the truck’s gears ground noisily and the smoke rising from the hood grew more noxious.
“There were two other shipments of the Black Death, both sold to the leader of a rebel group in Sierra Leone.”
“Where the blood diamonds must have originated,” Danielle presumed. “But why would the rebels want to destroy their own country?”
“That’s the problem. They wouldn’t.”
Danielle remembered the pages she’d lifted from the portfolio and stuffed under her shirt back in the garage. She pulled the now crinkled pile out, as Ben continued.
“Even if the rebels do intend to use the Black Death, they would have only needed one shipment. They must have other plans. Sell it off or provide it to similar insurgent groups in other African nations.”
“No,” Danielle said quietly, having unfolded a color map she recognized instantly. “The rebels aren’t going to sell or give the Black Death away.” She looked up at Ben and al-Asi, her eyes wide with fear. “They’re going to use it.”
And with that she turned the map toward them.
“On the United States,” Danielle finished.
* * * *
Chapter 86
P
resident Kabbah coughed smoke and soot from his lungs, as he watched his country burn from a hillside overlooking the village of Katani. The fires had been started in keeping with Professor Deirdre Cotter’s instructions: a thirty-mile ring in the country’s center meant to encircle and, ultimately, envelop the black wave of bugs. Photographs taken by helicopters flying over the region revealed a wasteland spreading north out of Katani, and widening to the east and west as well. The fires would continue to burn inward until they met up with the advancing black tide.
My God, Kabbah thought, it looks like a war.
And war was exactly what he was preparing for over the course of the next twenty-four hours.
“We cannot fight the Dragon’s forces on their territory,” he had repeated to Minister of Defense Daniel Sukahamin at their strategy meeting a day earlier. “They control thirty percent of the country now, concentrated in the south and east, along with scattered towns and villages elsewhere. Even with the two Nigerian battalions, dedicating the forces required to launch a major offensive would leave our own strongholds bare. So if we failed against the rebels in the east and south,” Kabbah concluded grimly, “they could overrun our remaining forces and drive them straight to the Atlantic.”
The men gathered around the table in Kabbah’s conference room at the State House in Freetown had gazed emptily at each other.
“Furthermore,” Kabbah continued, “the Revolutionary United Front must be crushed here and now. Anything short of that would be a failure.”
The President had proceeded with the plan he had come up with himself. Latisse Matabu had left him an opening and he had to seize it. Use the egos and petulance of her commanders against the Dragon. Let them think the poorly disciplined and usually tentative government forces were powerless to stop their advance to the sea. With strongholds in the west, south, and east, the RUF would be able to effect a stranglehold on the government-dominated, densely populated north. The civil war would be over and the government’s forces would have lost.
Kabbah knew enough never to underestimate Latisse Matabu again. Her commanders, though, were something else again and Kabbah fully expected them to be unable to resist the bait he would set out.
He watched the swath of Sierra Leone burn from afar, because he dared not risk a helicopter flight himself for fear the rebels would shoot him down with one of the many rocket launchers their blood diamonds had bought them. In the next twenty-four hours, one way or another, the war that had raged for a decade would be decided.
“Mr. President.”
Kabbah turned to see Daniel Sukahamin standing just behind him, satellite phone clutched in his hand. “Some news for me, Minister?”
Sukahamin nodded. “We have managed to get all the refugees who were turned back at Guinea settled in the camps around Freetown, sir.”
The two men stared at each other for a long moment before Kabbah responded. “Good. Then we should get back to the capital, Minister. We have much work to do.”
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Chapter 87
A
natolyevich didn’t merely sell the Black Death to his buyers in Sierra Leone,” Danielle concluded, after a closer inspection of the maps contained inside the portfolio. “He also sold them the plans for how to use it on the U.S.”
“Not very surprising, Pakad Barnea,” Colonel al-Asi pointed out, “since the Soviets developed the Black Death specifically to be used against America.”
Ben scanned the maps one after anoth
er, as they drove across Lebanon toward the West Bank and, ultimately, Jordan. “These show the spread of the bugs depending on placement and volume of release. Mathematical formulas broken down by distance traveled and time sequences. Everything concentrated in crop-rich areas. The heartland, Florida, California.”
“Between two and three dozen separate release points for maximum effect,” Danielle elaborated. “My God, the Soviet scientists had this timed out to the precise minute and mile.”
“You’ve got to get word to the American government,” Ben said to al-Asi.
“And tell them what, Inspector? That African revolutionaries are going to destroy their country’s food supply? Cripple the richest country in the world economically for the next decade or so?” The colonel shook his head. “I’m a minister without portfolio now, a pariah. My contacts are gone and, with them, my credibility.”
“Then show them the proof,” Ben said, flapping the schematics Danielle had given him.
“Relics from the Cold War. And last time I checked,” al-Asi continued, his voice laced uncharacteristically with sarcasm, “the Americans maintained no embassy in Palestine. They do not take our intelligence gathering apparatus seriously. And I no longer have access to any of the private channels that matter.”
Danielle thought for a moment. “Can you get us there?”
“The United States?”
“No. Sierra Leone.”
Making spot repairs on their truck from time to time allowed them to reach Jordan and the village of Wadi Musa near Petra.
“I still have a few friends in Amman,” al-Asi said, by way of explanation, “who might be able to help us.”
They checked into the Movenpick Hotel and purchased fresh clothes from a boutique located in the lobby. Colonel al-Asi donned a fresh European suit, and disappeared without explanation, only to return hours later.
“I’ve done the best I can,” he reported to Ben and Danielle in the suite the three of them shared, looking much more like himself. “Jordan maintains reasonably strong diplomatic ties with Sierra Leone and officials from the intelligence service here have agreed to do everything they can to help you reach President Kabbah.”
Ben and Danielle looked at each other, grim resolve etched over their features.
“They are having an intelligence file on this Latisse Matabu, also known as the Dragon, delivered to the hotel in the next two hours,” al-Asi continued. “But my contact here in Jordan already shared something about her with me I think you will find most interesting. . . .”
* * * *
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Chapter 88
F
or Ben and Danielle, the trip to Lungi International Airport in Sierra Leone, twenty miles north of Freetown, had proved long and exhausting. Multiple legs that had begun nearly twenty-four hours earlier in Jordan’s capital of Amman, where they had boarded a South African Airlines flight bound for Johannesburg. They had arrived just after ten that morning and had had to wait an agonizing two hours before their connecting flight on Air Gambia left for Sierra Leone.
Neither of them had realized that the airport in Lungi was located on an island, necessitating a ferry ride from the Tagrin terminal to the Kissy terminal on the mainland just outside of Freetown. They emerged from the terminal to find just three taxis waiting, only one of which was willing to take them into Freetown after dark for five times the price posted on the rear seat.
Even the brief trip down Kissy Road toward Freetown Center, where the State House and governmental offices were situated, revealed the striking contrasts that defined the nation of Sierra Leone. The capital’s ancient flavor was no match for either the tension which filled the air or the occasional burned-out husk of a government vehicle left on the side of the road, or the rubble-strewn remains of collapsed buildings they passed regularly. They could see no evidence of any attempts at rebuilding, as if the city had given up, resigned to the inevitability of its own destruction.
Checkpoints manned by Kamajor tribesmen organized by the government into a kind of de facto militia dotted the road. The kamajors, wearing flowing tunics and fishnet shirts, sat in jeeps clutching assault rifles and grenade launchers and mostly ignored the taxi when it passed. Besides the kamajors, Ben and Danielle saw hardly any people. Since the Revolutionary United Front’s last failed attempt to seize the capital, movement on the part of Freetown residents had been severely curtailed. Curfews had become routine. And even when they weren’t, the inability of government troops and the kamajors to distinguish residents from rebels was more than enough to keep the city inside after dark.
The blackness of the night was broken only by garbage fires speckling the hillsides surrounding the capital until the cab approached central Freetown, passing an abandoned outdoor market by the Susan’s Bay beachfront on their right. Ben and Danielle could hear the peaceful sounds of the sea washing over the rocks and sand, providing the illusion of peace until campfires lit by the thousands of displaced residents who now called the beach their home flickered in the narrowing distance. Blazing torches held by the lost forever trying to find their way home.
The cab would drop Ben and Danielle just a few blocks from here at the State House building where the Kabbah government had presided over the country for the last four years and would continue to do so indefinitely, now that the promised elections had been cancelled for the third time. They had no idea what to expect at that point. Everything depended on how successful the Jordanian government was in persuading Kabbah to listen to what they had to say.
Only a few other private vehicles traveled the Freetown roads dominated by government trucks, jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and guns. Guns everywhere, held by troops under the mistaken assumption that bullets could solve everything. Ben and Danielle gazed at each other in silence, realizing how familiar it all looked. Different names, different uniforms, but similar problems. Violence in place of reason and common sense.
“Say again where to leave you,” their cab driver requested in the best English he could muster, obviously frightened by the world of Freetown after dark.
“The State House,” Ben told him.
“Closed to public and now barricaded,” he squealed at them. “No reach. No get close.”
“Close as you can, then,” Danielle ordered.
The driver had turned toward them to protest when the lights of Freetown flickered once and died.
* * * *
Chapter 89
L
atisse Matabu laid the receiver back on the table. The air in her underground bunker headquarters tasted stale and she suddenly found it hard to breathe.
So it begins at last. My destiny soon to be achieved. . . .
The assault on Freetown had started, as planned, with a small team of her best commandos overrunning the power station supplying electricity to the capital. Disciplined soldiers who had learned their trade under foreign flags before signing up with the Revolutionary United Front. Her orders were that the station should not be damaged irreparably; after all, in a few days’ time the power would need to be switched back on to reveal a new governing force in place.
Everything so far had gone exactly as planned. Her generals had deployed their squadrons in a ring around Freetown as far south as Kagboro Creek and north to Lungi where the airport would soon be in their hands. The plan was to splinter President Kabbah’s government forces in half, allowing General Lananga to drive straight over the range of hills, through the plush village of Gloucester where General Treest had made his home, to Freetown. From there Lananga would seize the harbor, giving the RUF control of the major source of the country’s trade.
The plan that had led to her parents’ deaths three years ago had been undermined by bickering and poor discipline on the part of RUF troops more interested in pillaging than politics. From the moment of her return to Sierra Leone, everything Latisse Matabu had done had built toward this moment where her father could be redeemed. Finishing his work. Completing her vengeance
on General Treest and those like him in the government for trying to destroy her.
Matabu knew her efforts would fail should the government have the opportunity to marshal the two battalions from Nigeria. The deal she had struck with that country’s foreign minister had thus cemented her plan. Not only had the Nigerian troops not arrived in time to launch an attack on the RUF, they would not be coming at all. Her father would have been proud.
