Hail Warning
Page 31
M ohammed Mboso had been in many life-threatening situations. Long before he had become the leader of the Boko Haram, Mohammed had taken an active role in many armed confrontations where bullets had been flying in all directions. He had been shot once in the shoulder and another time through his leg. The terrorist leader had still considered himself lucky. Most of the men who had joined the terrorist organization around the same time as Mboso were now dead. Their bullet entries and exit points had been much more sensitive than his own.
Mboso had been held, not once, but twice as a prisoner, once by the puppet government of Nigeria, and once by a rogue local militia. Both of those organizations had discovered it was not a great idea to incarcerate the head of a radicalized jihadi terrorist group. In both instances, a rescue party had been assembled. He had been freed to resume his command of the Boko Haram. Those who had imprisoned him paid for that mistake with their lives. In some instances, so did the lives of their families. Considering the horrid backlash, the leaders of the new Nigerian government had not been motivated to pursue Mboso’s incarceration.
Bullets hadn’t killed Mboso. Although he had been stabbed a few times, once by one of his own men who wanted to take charge, the steel that had pierced his skin, his lung and his abdomen had not taken his life.
On another occasion, he had been too close to a napalm explosion. The flame that licked out in all directions had fried his face, arms and the back of his neck. It had burnt his long beard into nothing but a fuzz which he had wiped away with a single stroke of his blistering hand. Badly scarred for life, lighter patches of pink derma covered his face and arms. But just like the napalm explosion, he had recovered from that as well.
Bullets hadn’t killed Mboso. Knives hadn’t killed Mboso. The great American Satan with their fire-breathing jets had not killed Mboso. Allah had chosen to keep Iniabasi on the earth to do his good work.
None of the methods of dying that were commonplace in his profession had taken him out. Instead, he found himself slowly dying from an incursion into his body that was not manmade or put there by hostile intent. No, the thing that was
eating him from the inside out was a parasite of some type. It had started a few weeks after he sent his soldier, Diambu from Nigeria, to shoot down the airplane in Venezuela. He had developed diarrhea which had never fully abated. His stomach continually felt nauseous. Initially, he thought he had food poisoning that was taking a long time to subside. Then he considered the possibility he was being poisoned by one of his men. For a time, he had become very careful about what he ate. The terrorist leader had created a ritual where he would have more than one of his men taste test his food. He made a habit of switching meals with one of his men at random. But this security measure had no effect on his health, and he had continued to deteriorate.
The day he was watching the video footage of United 1045’s wreckage on CNN was the best he had felt in months. He celebrated by opening a very old and rare bottle of wine, although his religion didn’t permit drinking. Soon after drinking most of the bottle, his God rewarded him with 24 hours of vomiting. So much for breaking Allah’s rules.
Not long after the downing of the commercial jet, the pain and aching in his muscles and joints began in earnest. They were minor annoyances at first. But the weeks that followed afforded him little sleep, and he had more difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. Fatigue, exhaustion, depression, and feelings of apathy enveloped the aging jihadi. He was distressed during a time when he should have been rejoicing having scored a blow against the evilest creatures, Satan-like, of the world.
The black pigmentation of his skin lightened, becoming opaquer, while at the same time his weight began to drop. The veins under the skin bulged, creating a tangle of thick strings that wrapped around the old man like a spider web. Ten pounds vanished, then twenty, followed by another quick ten pounds. No amount of food seemed to satisfy his aging body. It was seemingly under attack from within.
Not being a man who liked doctors or was accustomed to seeing any sort of physician on a regular basis, Mboso put off seeing a doctor. He believed Allah would reward him for his service and heal him. As he found himself unable to eat and was now obscenely malnourished, at the request of his men, the head of the Boko Haram finally decided to go to the local hospital in Lagos.
It is estimated there are more than six million species of parasitic specimens in the world. The tests at the hospital could only screen out a fraction of the internal invaders that were eating Mboso alive, but none of those parasites were discovered inside the man. Mboso’s condition was so alarming he was kept at the hospital. They took samples of his stool, blood, and skin. These samples were sent to labs around the world. An intravenous line was stuck into a plump vein on his right arm. To keep him alive, a feeding tube had been inserted down his throat and into his stomach.
As Afua and the Obanos were on their return voyage from the Caribbean, the leader of the Boko Haram died in the hospital from a massive heart attack. It was an overt reaction from the toll the parasite had taken on his body.
Weeks later, Mohammad Mboso, fondly known to his men simply as Iniabasi, was collected from the morgue by his faithful followers within the Boko Haram, and they buried him in his beloved African jungle.
As the Nigerian Princess crossed the Atlantic, the tests from the labs around the world began arriving back at the hospital. Tens of thousands of parasitic species had been ruled out, specifically parasitic species with the potential of killing a healthy man. But, in the end, the exact parasite that had killed a person the rest of the world considered a parasite was never found.
ABOVE SOUTHERN EGYPT
ABOARD THE AIR CRESS ANTONOV AN-26 CARGO PLANE
K ara Ramey pretended to have fallen asleep. Her chair on the plane was fully reclined, and her head sagged to one side. She breathed heavily as if she was in deep REM. She even considered eliciting a light snore, but she hated the sound of snoring. She hated listening to people who snored, although she didn’t know if she snored when she slept. Over the years, she had few lovers, but they had not mentioned if she did or didn’t snore. If they had provided such feedback, she would have been offended and ended the relationship. What woman wanted to be told that she snored? That was stuff you told your wife, not your girlfriend. By then it was too late, and either party would just have to live with it. When her parents were alive and she had lived at the mansion, she had a massive bedroom, and thus her parents had no idea if she snored. The cacophony of sound the old cargo plane was making would have covered up just about any nocturnal sound known to man.
Gratefully, Kornev had left her alone. He no longer attempted to make agonizingly obnoxious small talk, which she understood was difficult for him. Normally those bad at small talk were also very poor listeners. Kara found that type of person developed a distinct I don’t care what you’re saying look in their eyes, and may even resort to reading a text during a conversation. Kara figured that pretending to sleep was less stressful for them.
“What in the hell is that?!” she heard Kornev ask in Russian. Initially, Kara decided to pretend not to awaken. But there was a sound of fear and urgency in his voice she hadn’t heard before. Then he repeated the words, but this time louder and even more agitated.
“What the hell is that?” Kornev asked, maybe to his pilots or maybe to himself.
This time her curiosity got the best of her, and she blinked open her eyes and sat up in her chair.
She looked toward the cockpit and saw it.
Just outside the cockpit’s windshield, a drone about as long as a limousine and narrow like a fifty-gallon drum was flying just yards in front of their plane. Kornev’s pilot reactively began descending to dodge the drone. The drone mirrored the action and dropped as well, staying right in front of them.
Kornev got up from his chair, and he went to the front of the plane. He stood behind his pilots, hunched over to prevent hitting his head on the low ceiling of the cockpit. The copilot looke
d up from his controls, expectantly, awaiting Kornev’s instructions.
Kornev studied the aircraft, initially thinking it was a United States Predator drone. Even though he was looking at the back of the aircraft, he could tell it was not a Predator because it didn’t have the peculiar front that dropped down as if the aircraft had a bad nose job. This drone was much more streamlined—almost in the shape of an aerodynamic rocket. But this rocket had large, swept back wings. And under those large wings were two missiles, which Kornev had heard about but had never seen this close. He could tell, without reading the stenciled markings on the missiles, that it was the new Joint Air-to-Ground Missile called LOCO.
He had read about them. They were rumored to be horribly destructive. But what bothered him more than the damage caused by the LOCOs was the potential that someone with enough clout could get their hands on a pair. They could mount them to the aircraft flying just in front of him. But not just anyone could get their hands on them. He concluded it was obvious this person had the backing of a superpower nation that was majorly pissed off at him, enough to send this drone to intercept his plane.
Just as Kornev was about to tell his pilots to make some sort of evasive maneuver, his cellphone rang. Kornev reached for his phone in his pocket, which was not in a lead-lined bag as he had told Tonya. There was no lead-lined bag, but it was a stress-free lie to tell her to prevent her from pouting and begging for her cellphone. Kornev pressed the icon on his phone and answered the call.
No one was on the other end, but a phone continued ringing.
He then realized it was not his but Tonya’s phone that was ringing. He reached into his other pocket and took out Tonya’s phone. Both phones shared the same default ringtone.
He swiped his finger against the screen and said, “Hello?”
“I guess you didn’t take me seriously when I told you that you were no longer allowed to sell big arms to bad people.”
The voice on the other end was familiar to Kornev. The man on the other end of the call did not introduce himself. It was the arrogant cowboy that had humiliated him in the desert.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kornev said, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other. His neck hurt from hunching behind the pilots.
“Surface-to-air missiles is what I am talking about—two of them,” the voice said.
Kornev was stunned into silence. How in the hell did they know that he had two surface-to-air missiles on board?
The cowboy said, “Now, this is what you’re going to do. You are going to descend right now and land on an old airfield located at the coordinates that are being texted to this phone right now.”
“This phone—” the words bounced around in Kornev’s head, not initially making sense of the words. This phone—this phone—this phone that belonged to Tonya. Why would they be calling him on this phone? How could they be calling him on this phone, unless this phone belonged to an intelligence agency that—”
Kornev felt the bulge that had been pressing in the small of his back disappear. A coolness where the metal had once been taking its place.
The Russian turned around slowly and saw Tonya holding his gun that had been in his back waistband. The muzzle of the Glock was an inch from the bridge of his nose. The woman wasn’t smiling, but she seemed quite smug in some respect, as if she had checkmated him in a game that he hadn’t known they were playing.
She aimed the gun to Kornev’s heart.
“Put the plane on the ground,” she told him. “And I’ll take my phone back, thank you,” Kara added, holding out her free hand.
Kornev looked mad. And when he handed the phone over to her, Kara backed up a few steps to put distance between them. She raised the gun toward Kornev’s head and very carefully took her phone from his open hand.
“Now, sit back down in your chair and put on your seat belt,” she told him.
Walking backwards, Kara kept the gun trained on the Russian until they had returned to their seats. She motioned with the gun towards Victor’s chair. The Russian sat, and Kara kept the gun on him until she heard Kornev’s five-point seat belt snap into place.
She then put her phone to her ear and addressed Marshall Hail, “Why did you call him on my phone? Why did you give me up?” Kara’s voice was seasoned with rage. However, she was whispering instead of yelling, not wanting Kornev to hear the conversation.
“I didn’t have Kornev’s phone number,” Hail said defensively.
“You could have gotten it from Pepper,” Kara shot back.
There was a hesitation on Hail’s end. Then he said in a tone of contrition, “I didn’t want you to have to—” Hail let the sentence hang in the air. Hail struggled to find the right words before speaking again.
“Kornev would have found out sooner or later. And sooner seemed better than later.”
Kara wasn’t accepting any of Hail’s lame excuses. She spat back at Hail, “That wasn’t your decision to make. Do you realize that Kornev could have turned on me, right here, right now and I couldn’t have done anything to protect myself?”
“Where is Kornev now?” Hail asked.
“He’s sitting in his chair with his seat belt fastened.”
“And why is he there?” Hail asked, leading Kara along.
“Because I took his gun from him.”
“See,” Hail said, as if he was the world’s foremost fortune teller. “I knew you could take care of yourself.”
“That’s not why you did it. You did it so I wouldn’t have to sleep with him.”
“I did it because it was the only way I knew to contact Kornev without involving your boss in my business. I’m sure that you probably noticed that Kornev is in the process of delivering surface-to-air missiles to someone—somewhere. They are on your plane right now. We can’t let that happen, remember? That’s what this is all about.”
There was no response from Kara, which made Hail feel as if he had won this small battle and had made the correct decision.
A moment later, Hail said, “I texted some coordinates to this phone. The digits correspond with an abandoned airfield about sixty miles away. Give the coordinates to Kornev’s pilots, and I will see you on the ground in a few minutes.
“This is not over,” Kara seethed.
*-*-*
On the desert floor, Hail watched Kornev’s plane make a single flyby over the airstrip before circling to line up for the landing on the hardpan runway.
Hail was positioned at the end of the long runway, although very little of the abandoned airstrip could still be considered a runway. The natural desert air, blowing sand and endless drought had sustained this bleached piece of inert soil. It was relatively flat and a reasonably good place to touch down a fixed-wing aircraft. Behind Hail sat his shiny Gulfstream, its nose pointing toward him. Renner was sitting in the cockpit with his iPad. His iPad was connected to their drone, U2, which was resting on its tripod legs next to Hail.
Atop a hill of sand, about fifty yards away, was Foster Nolan. He was lying on his belly, prone, fiddling with his long sniper rifle, dialing in the distance on his scope. There was hardly a breath of wind, so adjusting for windage was not an issue. At this distance, Nolan could put a round through Kornev’s left eye while eating a sandwich.
Kornev’s big old heavy plane lumbered onto the runway, bouncing a few times on its fat and spongy tires before its tail touched down. The plane slowed and continued to roll forward, now only twenty yards in front of Hail. When the cargo plane finally came to a full stop, its dust cloud caught up with the plane and encompassed the group like a gray blanket.
Through the sand, Hail could see the two pilots, but he could not see Kornev. Hail suspected that Kara had not given the Russian permission to release himself from his seat belt. Hail smiled, as he imagined Kara on the plane’s intercom announcing, “All passengers should remain in their seats with their seat belts securely tightened until the plane has come to a full and complete stop.”
Hail looked on indifferently as the pair made their way over to him.
Kornev stopped in front of Hail and said nothing, which is what Hail would have done if he had been in Kornev’s shoes. There was really nothing for him to say. But there was something for Hail to say.
“I told you that if you tried to sell big arms to anyone without first notifying us that you would pay.”
Kornev responded indignantly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Hail shook his head, “If we open those black cases on your plane, are you telling me that we will not find what we think is in there?”
Kornev said nothing. He simply stared at the large man in front of him. He was not wearing a cowboy hat, but he was still wearing cowboy boots, adding dark sunglasses to his attire. Looking up towards the jet behind the cowboy, Kornev saw another man sitting in the cockpit of the sleek jet. Giving a slow turn of his
head, Kornev scanned the desert. He saw nothing but dry and lifeless sand. No one would be coming to his rescue. That was a given. And he was equally certain that his own pilots, who were still aboard his plane, would not fight on his behalf. They weren’t paid to take that type of risk. They were paid to smuggle contraband from point A to point B, and then fly to many other locations. There was a significant difference between a soldier and a smuggler.
Hail told Kornev, “It doesn’t seem fair to shoot you just standing there. So, I will make it a little more of a challenge. I will give you a head start,” Hail told him.
Kornev said nothing.