Her fingers scratched over the raised welt, moved past, then returned.
Ian turned to face Dupont, as if he didn’t notice that the woman had located his surgery scar. “You don’t want us here, fine. We’ll leave. Plenty of others who would be happy to have our services. But you have no right to hold us over what? Because you’re suspicious about—”
“Here it is,” the woman interrupted.
“What? Are you sure?” Dupont stepped forward and peered down at his scalp. “I don’t see anything.”
“This raised welt, here. I might not have caught it, but it looks like he’s been scratching at it.”
“What are you talking about?” Ian demanded, his voice angry to disguise his growing fear. “I whacked my head on the edge of the door when I was changing a tire.”
“Yeah, I see it,” Dupont said. He sounded dubious.
“Here are some more scars, here and here. Smaller, but definitely there. And when I press on the skull I feel a hole. Someone cut through the bone.”
“But wouldn’t bone grow back in?” Dupont asked.
“Not in the skull. That’s one bone that doesn’t grow callus.” She stepped back, looked more certain now. “Definitely something inside his head, but whatever it is has a small footprint. That’s a very small incision.”
“Well, what’s in there?” Dupont said.
“We’ll have to cut it out to be sure. I don’t have the resources to do this safely. I’d need…”
“I don’t care about that. Just get it out and figure out what we’re dealing with. Unless,” he added, as if to himself, “it would make more sense to get what we can via interrogation, first, then cut it out.”
Ian opened his mouth to start a new round of futile, increasingly desperate protests, when an explosion rocked the building. Windows shattered inward and Ian reflexively ducked his chin to his lap before glass showered his face. It knocked both Dupont and the woman to the ground. Another explosion, this one farther away.
The two guards at the door picked themselves up and rushed into the night. A burst of heavy machine gun fire, followed by the thump of something that sounded like a tanker exploding.
Definitely a spooky, Ian thought. The C-130 was a deceptively simple looking four engine turboprop that had been in service for over fifty years. The third generation gunship model, the AC-130U, bristled with 30 mm MK-44 and 105 mm cannons. A sensor suite of radar, infrared, and television sensors sniffed out targets on the ground, either to direct airstrikes or to turn its cannons on the enemy themselves.
All that stuff was only as good as the guys flying it. Friendly fire in Afghanistan had taught him that lesson. A massive explosion tore off an entire wall of the compound. A block of concrete fell on the female doctor, who still crouched on her hands and knees. She lay screaming in a pile of rubble and dust. Dupont crouched and lifted his hands to his head.
And then the whole building seemed to lift into the air. When it settled back down, Ian was facedown, with the chair draped over his back and the straps still holding him into place. He rocked the chair until it flipped over and landed on something wet and warm. Incredibly, the lights flickered back on.
The warm, wet thing was Dupont. Half his face was gone, but he was still gurgling and alive, at least for the moment. The woman had stopped screaming. Ian moved his arms and legs, searching for pain. Nothing.
Someone struggled to his left. “Are you okay? Kendall, talk to me.”
“I’m alive. The chair is broken. I think I can get my right hand free.” Kendall grunted and twisted and a moment later stood and hefted Ian’s chair upright. “Get me out of this damn thing.”
“Those damn things kept us alive,” Kendall said.
One of the buckles had bent and Kendall couldn’t get Ian free. He rummaged over Dupont’s body until he came up with a knife and a handgun. He used the knife to cut off Ian’s straps.
Ian stood, rubbed his wrists, and checked himself for injuries. He felt a sharp pain at the base of his neck and pulled out a piece of glass. Kendall handed him the knife.
“So you’re keeping the gun and sending me out with a knife?” Ian asked. He turned it over in his hands. A standard KA-BAR, seven inch blade. It would do.
“I give you about thirty seconds until you get a gun of your own, hopefully better than this piss-ant Beretta.”
More explosions sounded outside. Fires were visible through the holes in the wall, and two trucks rumbled past with men in the back.
“I appreciate the cavalry riding to our rescue,” Kendall said, “but we stay here any longer and we’re going to become collateral damage.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
Kendall gave a sharp nod. Gone was the sluggish, bruised look. “Let’s kick some ass.”
There was still shooting outside, but the explosions came from farther away now. The two men ran outside. The road was a mess of burning trucks and workers running in random directions. A Blackwing contractor ran directly at them with his AK-47 lowered.
Ian ducked to the side, only to discover that the man hadn’t seen them and continued past, intent on some other objective. Kendall leaned out and knocked the man from his feet. Ian fell on him with the knife and a moment later came up with the AK-47.
“See, now you’ve got the big stick and I’ve got the pea shooter.”
“This isn’t a big stick,” Ian said. “What we need is some serious firepower.”
Bullets sprayed off the wall behind them and they crouched back into the threshold of the interrogation building. Someone must have seen them take out the contractor. Ian stepped out and scattered gunfire in the general direction and then the two men turned and ran the other way.
They were on a street of half-built concrete buildings, studded with exposed rebar. Here and there a truck burned or men lay dead in the street. They flattened against another building, looked around to try to figure out where they were in the camp. Kendall pointed out a crane, several stories high, that he thought was on the north end of the camp. The spooky pounded targets to the west and northwest of their position.
Ian listened, waited for instructions, for someone to tell him where to go.
“Nothing, nothing at all,” Ian said. “Those bastards were jerking me around like a puppet, almost got us tortured and killed and now they have nothing to say.”
A rocket lanced into the sky, followed by a second.
“Looks like they’ve got problems of their own,” Kendall said. “Those are Crotales.” Confirming Kendall’s opinion, the C-130 attack stopped almost at once.
“Who are they, anyway?” Ian asked. “Our friends, I mean.”
“That’s need to know, as Markov would tell you.”
“Which means that you don’t know.”
“No goddam clue.”
More bullets flew down the street. Shouts sounded to the north and east. They hadn’t been spotted yet, but the enemy knew their general location. And with the aerial attack over, at least for the moment, the enemy could concentrate on the two infiltrators.
“We’ve got to get to our weapons cache,” Ian said. “We don’t and we’re going to die. Come on, I found a culvert earlier. It might get us out of here.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Blackwing contractors were professionals, not some rag-tag Third World army that would flee into the night. After an initial round of chaos, their commanders took charge. No more shooting at the sky like villagers trying to scare the moon away. Humvees with mounted machine guns prowled the camp, directing dogs and searchlights.
But unlike the first chase, when Dupont’s men had captured Ian and Kendall, the two men had a better idea of the layout of the camp, they were armed, and they were assisted by the light of burning fires.
They crawled through the culvert, surprised to find that it was flooded with several inches of water. The C-130 had taken out the water tower.
They had an advantage once they reached the far side. The ground rose steepl
y, studded with boulders and brush. The enemy couldn’t follow, except on foot. Ian looked back and he could see and hear dozens of men and their equipment.
“They’ll find us out here,” Kendall said when they stopped some ten minutes later to catch their breath. “We left a muddy track on the other side of the culvert. In fact, I think they’ve already tagged us. Look, you can see them stretching along the road and there, cutting through to the south, see those Humvees? There’s no road there, is there?
“No, it must be hard pan.”
“So they’ll come up both sides and then box us in to cut off escape.”
“If the dogs don’t find us first,” Ian said.
“Right.”
Still, their situation was so much better than it had been a few minutes earlier, strapped into the chair with Dupont ready to cut open their heads, that Ian refused to give in to despair.
“If we can make it to the .50 cals we can make a go of it.”
“Make a go of it?” Kendall asked. “You mean take some of them out before they bring in mortars and RPGs and wire-guided missiles and annihilate us?”
“We’ll switch off on the .50 cal, lay some mines, shoot back some grenades of our own. For all they know, we might have a dozen guys waiting in ambush. There’s good cover. I’ll bet we can hold them a couple hours. That might be enough.”“Until we can get some special forces in here to pull us out, you mean,” Kendall nodded. “You’re right, that’s our best shot.”
The land bowled continually uphill and progress was agonizingly slow. Although there were trucks all along the road where they’d come in with the Land Rover, they arrived at last to find their tarps undisturbed. They peeled them back and quickly sorted through the weapons. Even in the dark, they shortly had the .50 caliber machine guns mounted and loaded and other weapons laid out for quick access.
Kendall grabbed for the satellite phone stashed with the munitions and fumbled to power it up.
A moment longer in the open and it would have been too late. A helicopter swung south from the camp with twin searchlights that tracked over the ground. Ian and Kendall crouched behind a rock to shield their infrared profile, then waited. Kendall kept looking down at the phone, then back at the horizon.
Ian saw Kendall take the phone to his ear, the green signal light blinking on the receiver. “Heavy enemy fire! Sending our position! We need an exit now!” Kendall paused as the helicopter turned and angled lower to the ground. “That’s not going to be enough. We need an exit now!” Kendall repeated, then listened again as the sound of the helicopter drew closer. He jammed the phone into his pocket, then looked at Ian. “At least two hours. There’s a Night Stalker in the Caprivi Strip, near Botswana.”
The helicopter swept back and forth from east to west, but gradually drifted southward. Ian did the mental calculations. The Caprivi Strip was a finger of land between Angola, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, one of the most contested pieces of land in Africa, and had been a critical front between West and East in the Cold War. More South Africans had died in that region than just about anywhere else.
Ian knew the U.S. had no official military base in Caprivi. It must have been a logistical feat to get a covered unit in place so far from Djibouti. The realization instantly registered. Whatever was going on in Namibia was a hell of a lot more important than he’d been led to believe, enough to begin a covert military buildup in the neighborhood. That was key information. Completely unacceptable that he didn’t know that at the outset of the mission.
The helicopter swept nearer.
“Take it down!” Kendall ordered.
They each hefted an RPG and fired. The pilot saw the shots coming and made a hard turn to bring the helicopter perpendicular and reduce his profile. Kendall’s shot streaked just past the cockpit. Ian’s clipped the tail. It was just a nick, but it was enough to send the helicopter into a spin. By the time it recovered it was only a few feet off the ground. It turned and fled toward camp.
But they’d given away their position. Trucks came up the hard pan to their right and the road to their left. Men fanned out, then came up the hillside toward them. Ian took the first .50 caliber and let off a blast toward the road. He swung quickly to the other side and laid down a trail of suppressing fire.
Return fire came at once from mounted positions on trucks and Humvees, and from men crouched on the hillside. Tracer bullets lit up the night, coming from the north, east, and west. Ian and Kendall dragged the guns behind the rocks and crouched for the next ten minutes while the air filled with bullets and exploding rock fragments. When it looked safe, they popped up for long enough to launch a pair of RPGs, then shielded themselves against another round of fire.
Kendall turned to Ian with a grim expression. “Two hours might be optimistic.”
“This is nuts. We’re going to die in the middle of Namibia. And what the hell for? We have no idea.”
“You mean you don’t know yet?”
“Do you?”
“Maybe. Let me tell you what I saw,” Kendall said.
Two explosions rocked the Ondjamba camp in succession. A jet roared overhead. Kendall let out a shout. “They just took out the missile batteries. Our guys haven’t given up on us yet. Come on, we’ve got to hold them off.”
The two men hauled out the .50 caliber machine guns and let fly. Kendall laid down a barrage of low fire, while Ian fired in semi-automatic mode to snipe at individual targets. The enemy returned fire, but from an inferior placement. They were apparently content to let the two operatives exhaust their ammunition. Shells clattered to the ground. The sound of explosions and gunfire was deafening.
The spooky returned an instant later. It was close enough overhead now to hear the propellers. Trucks exploded one after another on the road. A heat wave roiled up the hillside from the explosions and the burning fuel. Men fled their vehicles but the 30 mm cannons exploded into the crowd of soldiers. Ian and Kendall turned their guns to concentrate on the trucks, but then the C-130 turned its attention to the other side. An explosion lifted a truck into the air and flipped it onto its back.
“Damn right,” Kendall said. “Now where the hell is that chopper to get us out of here?”
“Doesn’t matter, so long as that Spooky keeps circling. No way they can touch us.”
Suddenly, the ground around them seemed to shudder. A heat wave washed over the hill and rocks exploded all around them.
“No, you idiots!” Kendall shouted. “Not us, goddamn you.”
It was only then that Ian realized that the C-130 had mistaken them for enemies and was in the process of reducing the hillside to powder. He scooted into the crevice at the base of the rock behind which he’d taken shelter from the gunfire. Kendall scrambled in the opposite direction on all fours, trying to reach an even bigger hollow about twenty feet away, behind an outcrop of rock. He had the phone to his ear already, signal still green.
Ian tried to look up but felt a wave of vertigo. He blinked his eyes, trying to make sense of what was going on. Where was he? The nausea passed and he looked up at Kendall as his clarity returned. He couldn’t hear what Kendall was saying on the receiver.
“Kendall, look out!”
Kendall got under the ledge just as 30 mm rounds tore up the ground where he’d been a second earlier.
Ian lay motionless while the fire rolled over the hilltop. A moment later, more firing on the road to his left and he crawled out on hands and knees across the top of the knoll, shouting Kendall’s name. When he got there, he could see nothing. The ledge had disintegrated and covered Kendall’s hiding place with tons of rock and rubble. He saw Kendall at the edge of the crevice hidden in a clump of brush. He was still moving, but his leg was unnaturally bent, his foot under a huge boulder.
Ian stared in horror and disbelief. Everything, all the battles they had fought together, and it had ended like this, killed by friendly fire in the middle of Namibia. It was not even a war zone, for God’s sake, the mission was supposed to be f
or recon only.
“Bastards!” Ian moaned. “Idiots. You told us to put our stuff here. You knew this was our position. What the hell kind of stupid mistake?”
And then Ian had an even more chilling thought. What if it hadn’t been a mistake? What if even now, the gunship was circling around, searching for a hot spot on the ground to incinerate? What if their goal was not to rescue Ian and Kendall—how could they do that, with so many enemies around?—but to eliminate evidence of the failed CIA mission?
He yelled to Kendall, “Get rid of the phone!” No response. The vertigo came again and he fell on his knees, his head spinning. Had to… Get Kendall… Out… Phone… Implant… Ian pulled the KA-BAR knife from his side and stumbled toward Kendall. The sound of exploding rock and dirt came again from behind him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Julia passed through customs alone and was overwhelmed by the crowd on the other side of the security gate.
Hotel representatives held signs that read, “Carlos Perez” and “Karl Klingman.” A Japanese woman with white gloves held a fan over her head around which gathered a group of Japanese tourists. Julia heard German spoken by a large cluster of people as she passed.. Men tried to get Julia’s attention as she stepped through. “Windhoek? Do you need a hotel? Taxi?”
She shook her head and looked around, dismayed to find herself alone. She scanned over the crowd as she took stock of her position. She had no Namibian dollars, no hotel room, no local connections.
Her previous international experience had been a conference in Toronto four years earlier. How quaint and foreign, with the pink and blue money, the coins with ducks and beavers, and the way everyone said, “aboot” when they meant “about.”
Namibia, it would seem, was another planet. She tightened her grip on her rolling suitcase and held up her garment bag to shield her face from the touts.
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