by Vanessa Kier
“Here you go.” Lars pulled up a grid of seven different photos and turned the laptop so she could see the screen fully. Each photo was taken in a different location, with the man wearing different clothes and with a different name written underneath each photo.
JC whistled. “He’s been busy.”
Helen studied each photo. Some appeared to have been taken by security cameras in various public places. Two were close-ups that she suspected had been taken using a high powered camera lens.
But the face was recognizable even in the poorer quality images. “Yes, that’s the man I knew as Mr. Natchaba.”
“Excellent,” Lars said. “Now tell me if you’ve seen this man.” The next photo was of an older man with medium brown skin.
Lachlan swore in Gaelic under his breath. “That’s why Natchaba seemed familiar.”
“I’ve never seen him,” Helen said. “But he resembles Mr. Natchaba, doesn’t he?”
“Does the name Jonathan Morenga mean anything to you?” Dev asked.
“No. Sorry. Should it?”
Lachlan and Dev exchanged a glance. “He’s an arms dealer working for the rebels,” Dev began.
Lachlan put a hand on her shoulder. “Based on our intelligence, we suspected Morenga was the one running weapons through your airfield. If Morenga is Natchaba’s father, it means our intelligence wasn’t wrong, just incomplete.”
Helen checked the time. “Great. Glad to have cleared that up for you guys, but I’ve got to leave now or I’m going to be late.”
To her relief, her bodyguards wasted no time in separating themselves from the group. Helen allowed them to hustle her into the backseat of a bulky white SUV and they were on the road in minutes. From the level of alertness in all four men, she knew they feared an attack en route to the hospital. So she kept quiet and tried to shake the feeling that she had a huge target on her back.
When Helen stepped from the prep area into the operating room with Lance the medic by her side, her working calm settled over her. Only then did she lose the anxiety that had been looming over her all morning.
Because this was where she was meant to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LACHLAN WATCHED THE SUV drive away and fought the urge to insist on accompanying them. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his teammates. He did. He just didn’t like having Helen out of his sight.
“You’re a protector,” Father MacGuinessy said, patting Lachlan’s hand after he’d explained that he was joining the military. “It’s your nature to fight for those you care about and for strangers who are weaker than you.”
Lachlan would never call Helen weak, but he definitely felt protective of her. Unfortunately, she messed with his head. Around Helen, he became too prone to knee-jerk, violent reactions at the slightest threat to her. Became too close to the impulsive, violent man his father had been.
He needed distance from Helen so that he could refocus on his mission. Find the weapons and stop Natchaba before more innocents were harmed.
Not that he’d been much good in that regard so far. Violence kept finding Helen and the other survivors despite his best efforts.
And he knew exactly what Father MacGuinessy would say to that thought, too. “Stop trying to play God, son. You must accept that you cannot control the world. You can only control yourself.”
He’d heard those words often enough after the Father had taken him in. Every time Lachlan had railed about some injustice at school or drowned in guilt because he hadn’t been able to save some unfortunate student from a bully’s fists.
He turned away from the window. With half the men gone, the room finally had enough air to breathe.
“Azumah is going to be angry that you’re letting more team members be seen in public,” JC commented. “Hoss and I would have been happy to stand guard again.”
“No. You can spell the lads this afternoon if Helen continues working.” Guard duty required intense focus and was also boring as hell. Lachlan wouldn’t subject any of his men to prolonged shifts unless absolutely necessary. “There are still enough foreigners, including security workers, here in the capital to allow us to be anonymous. It’s not as if Lance and Levine are wearing uniforms that say WAR on them.”
“And if someone they’ve worked with in the past recognizes them?” JC asked, the twinkle in his eye indicating that he was enjoying playing devil’s advocate.
Lachlan raised his brows. “On the off chance that a former colleague wanders into the hospital, what are the odds that he’ll immediately assume our lads are working with WAR?” Azumah was very sensitive to the fact that while WAR had a vast network of local informants, politicians, and financiers, the military wing consisted primarily of foreign fighters. Most local soldiers were content to fight the rebels from within their home country’s military. And Lachlan couldn’t blame them. WAR’s limited resources made it difficult to compete with a government-backed military, no matter what level of corruption might be interfering with the military actually achieving its objectives.
Given the rebels’ anti-foreigner rhetoric, Azumah preferred to keep the nationality of WAR’s fighters a mystery. For the most part, WAR’s military teams completed their missions without being spotted, or wore masks to hide those with lighter skin color. The local population had started calling them ghosts because they would see the results of WAR’s actions—such as rebel forces being attacked and pushed away from villages they were targeting—without actually spotting WAR’s fighters.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Lars admitted. “If any of my old teammates saw me, they’d assume I was a mercenary looking to pick up some fast cash. Not a ghost.”
“Wait. You’re not?” Hoss asked with an exaggerated expression of dismay.
Lachlan reached out and lightly boxed Hoss’s ear. “Enough. Having Lance and Levine at the hospital is a risk we have to take, Azumah’s mandate on secrecy be damned. I won’t risk Helen being killed because we were too afraid to expose ourselves.”
JC gave him a nod of respect. “We’re with you, Commander. Had to check, though. You were no fan of Dr. Kirk when you started this mission.”
“Aye. Well, a man can admit when he’s wrong now, can’t he?”
“You won’t get any argument from me,” JC said. “She worked her butt off at that hospital yesterday. You’d never know that she’d survived an attack earlier in the day. I’ve got no problem bending the rules to keep her safe.”
“Yeah,” Hoss said. “She’s all right.”
Warmth and relief spread through Lachlan.
“In fact, based on what Dev saw in the kitchen yesterday morning, I’d say that the Commander is thinking she’s a lot more than all right,” Lars teased without looking up from his computer screen.
Both Hoss and JC started singing “Lachlan and Helen up in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”
As Lachlan scowled at them, it hit him. He’d been so worried about proving himself a calm, capable commander who always maintained control and would go the extra mile for his men that he hadn’t realized that the bonds he’d been searching for had already formed. Their casual acceptance of Helen, their willingness to follow his lead even knowing Azumah would be angry, and most of all their brotherly teasing indicated that they’d already accepted him.
He remembered Tony’s disappointment back at the clinic when Lachlan hadn’t opened up about his scars. As he looked around at the faces of these men, he knew that he had to confess his past to them before he told Helen. Not now, not with half the team missing. But soon. It was the one way he could show them how much their acceptance and support meant to him.
JC and Hoss had stopped singing and were looking at him with puzzled frowns.
“Ah, sorry lads. Lost in thought.” He turned to Lars. “Bring us up-to-date on what the government has learned from interrogating the various attackers they’ve arrested.” Several men from the follow-up attack against the regional governor, yesterday’s hospital attack, and the lone survivor from the
assault at Layla’s Foundation headquarters had been taken into police custody.
“Natchaba is smart,” Lars said. “He communicates only with the leader of each group. All phone numbers belong either to dummy corporations or are untraceable.”
“Figures,” Hoss muttered.
Lars nodded agreement. “What is particularly interesting is that of the three groups of attackers, none of them are related to one another. Each group claimed to be, shall we say, auditioning for Natchaba. He gave them each a mission. Whether or not they were successful would determine if he allowed them to join his new organization.”
“He’s setting his troops up to be an alternative to the current rebellion?” JC asked.
“Not quite. He professes to be part of the rebel alliance,” Lars continued, “yet according to the attackers, he’s promising a more focused strategy with a faster takeover of the entirety of West Africa. But only after he has finished building an army he deems suitable to the task.”
“He’s tempting them with the status of belonging to a new, elite fighting force,” Lachlan mused. “Testing groups with different strengths to see who has the skills and staying power to be of use to him.”
“That’s what it sounds like,” Lars agreed.
“Any groups that carry out future attacks on Dr. Kirk and the surviving villagers will also have no details on Natchaba’s organization,” Hoss said. “So, if intel is our goal, then there’s no benefit to using Dr. Kirk and the others as bait to draw the rebels out.”
“Agreed,” Lachlan bit out. He accepted that it might become necessary to use Helen and the others as bait in the future, but it made him uneasy.
“Based on the attacks so far,” Lachlan said, “Natchaba doesn’t have much skill in military tactics. He won’t be able to attract seasoned military fighters to his cause, or keep any that have been professionally trained, unless he puts someone in charge with the military experience to keep up morale and instill loyalty in his troops.” One of the weaknesses of the current rebel structure was that there was no skilled general directing and motivating the forces. A few experienced soldiers had controlled the initial forays, but they’d either been killed by government forces or overthrown by hotheaded, less experienced men. Without proper guidance, enthusiastic young men calling themselves rebels had formed roving gangs whose sole purpose appeared to be to commit violence whenever they felt like it. Most of those forces fell apart the first time they met organized, well-armed resistance.
The early gains the rebellion had made in taking over and holding towns this far east had recently been rolled back thanks to WAR and the local governments. Now the nearest rebel-controlled territory was a thin slice of land along the border between the Republic of Volta and the Ivory Republic. The rebels hadn’t given up, though. Every week they launched new attacks, trying to regain their foothold.
“Of course, we’re assuming that Natchaba intends to use his private army to carry out more strategic attacks,” Hoss said. “But after the festival attack he didn’t attempt to take over the regional capital or the nearby military base.”
“Right,” JC agreed. “Even if Natchaba wasn’t ready to use the town as a staging area for growing his power base, he could have worked with one of the rebel groups to give them control.”
“Ah, but I reckon he doesn’t want anyone having such control but himself,” Lachlan said. “He’ll use the rebel groups to achieve his own objectives, pay lip service to their goals, but never actually allow the rebels to become a cohesive, powerful entity on their own. That would allow them to threaten his own power. If he doesn’t have enough troops loyal only to him to hold the regional capital by himself, then he won’t have the military strength to force other rebel groups to bow to his command.”
“That’s gonna cost him later on,” JC commented. “Assuming that he agrees with the rebels that all of West Africa needs to be under new management, it’s going to take a lot more manpower later on to seize control of targets such as the regional capital once they’ve been put on alert.”
“Unless he waits long enough that the government relaxes their vigilance,” Lars said.
“That’s all in the future,” Lachlan pointed out. “We need to find out where he is now.” As he’d suspected, the solicitor’s office where Helen had signed the loan papers had been abandoned and yielded no clues.
“Research is trying to track down other aliases Natchaba has used. They’re also attempting to trace the financial records of the aliases we do know about,” Lars informed them. “Yet with so many cities and agencies in the region still not fully online, I doubt we’re going to find anything helpful.”
“Like a list of recently purchased properties,” JC muttered.
“Exactly. And with our budget constraints, recruiting people to perform in-person interviews and examinations of paper records is not going to happen.”
“What information do we have?” Lachlan asked.
“This is where HQ lost the signal on the tracker you planted.” Hoss circled an area on the map spread out on the coffee table. “It corresponds to a section of the main north-south road about a hundred kilometers away from Dr. Kirk’s clinic and half that distance from the border with Dahomey. When Marcus dropped us off yesterday morning, we didn’t find any evidence of a rebel base.” He shrugged. “There were no telltale tire tracks leading off into the jungle, just a mess of tracks and furrows where the unpaved side roads intersected. The truck you tagged could have headed off in any direction. Or kept going straight, since we don’t know if the signal died due to a malfunction or because the truck entered an enclosed area that the signal couldn’t penetrate.”
The problem with WAR having a limited budget was that some of their equipment was surplus. Meaning old. Their technology in particular tended not to work properly. Lachlan still hadn’t fully adjusted to being hamstrung in such a way.
“The man you interrogated at Helen’s clinic claimed that Natchaba feels a need to right some wrong committed against his mother’s family. This is her home village.” Hoss used a different color pencil to mark that location. “It’s at the farthest edge of David’s chiefdom, although it would have been under his father’s rule when Natchaba’s mother was kicked out. According to our sources, she’s now living in her own McMansion over the border in one of the larger towns in Dahomey.” Hoss made another mark on the map.
“I’ll ask Kris to assign one of our locals to watch the mother,” Lachlan said. “If Natchaba really did attack out of a need for revenge in her name, then he’s likely to visit her. In the meantime, the area around her home village is as probable a spot for Natchaba’s base as any.”
“As far as we know, except for the stolen government helicopter,” JC said, “all of the attackers reached their destinations via truck. So if Natchaba really does have a training or storage compound, it has to be in this general area.” He stabbed his finger at the map not far from where the tracking device disappeared.
Lachlan nodded. Helen’s clinic, the airfield, and the villages were the farthest points west. The home village of Natchaba’s mother, Morenga’s estranged wife, was the farthest north. The spot where they’d lost the tracking device was southeast of both. “He’ll need food. Water. Electricity. Paved roads so his men can get in and out no matter what the weather. Where’s the closest town?”
Lars pulled up a slightly more detailed map on his computer. “There isn’t much information on this area, because the jungle canopy is so dense and the government dismisses the area as unimportant. Even the main road skirts that part of the jungle because it’s so thick.”
“We would have needed machetes to hack our way into the heart of it,” Hoss agreed.
Lachlan nodded, having explored the western edges of that area the first night he and Tony had arrived at the most northern of the three villages closest to Helen’s clinic. “Aye, Natchaba could be hiding an entire army in there with none the wiser.”
“Not to mention that this ridge h
ere above the river could contain caves,” JC added. “During the first wave of rebellion and civil wars back in 2000, fighters blasted out tunnels all over the place. There could be an entire underground network we’re not aware of.”
“Now wouldn’t that be ironic,” Hoss said with a laugh. WAR’s HQ included an above ground abandoned army post, and an underground cave system that had been turned into conference rooms, storage rooms, and a recreation center for WAR’s off-duty members.
“Agreed.” Lars zoomed in on an area and pointed to several clusters of mud huts. “Would Natchaba house his troops in one of these villages?”
“We only had time to do reconnaissance on a few of them,” JC said. “But we didn’t see any indication that the villages were housing Natchaba’s troops.”
“Yeah,” Hoss said. “The villages barely have enough food for themselves, let alone hungry soldiers.”
“Natchaba wouldn’t trade with such small villages,” Lachlan said. “Their offerings would be too limited for the needs of his troops. They’d shop in the regional capital or over the border in the outdoor market. Kwesi’s luxury goods smuggling probably helped supply the camp, as well.”
Lachlan studied the map. “All of Natchaba’s aliases have been tied to businesses in the larger cities and regional capitals of Volta, the United African Republic, and Dahomey.” He stabbed his finger at the point on the map where the borders of the three countries met. “Based on the overindulgent luxury of his mansion, I don’t see him spending significant time at a training camp. He’ll have a home and office elsewhere. A place where he can remain anonymous and live in high style. He’ll need top-of-the-line equipment so that he can communicate with the leaders of his troops and his potential rebel partners.”
“You think he’s here in the capital?” Hoss asked.
“Not now,” Lachlan said. “He wouldn’t stage attacks if he was in residence. But the size of this place would appeal to him. Plus, it’s an important capital. He’d want the illusion of being one of the movers and shakers. My bet is that he might have had an office here, but has moved on to another cosmopolitan center such as the capital of the Greater Niger Republic.”
