The Hellfire hit the hillside, throwing up a spray of fire and smoke, the flames barreling up into the night sky, lighting up the trees.
“Now!” DeLuca commanded.
Hoolie and Asabo stepped out onto the remaining span of bridge and flung the bread in the direction opposite the shore.
“Wait a second,” DeLuca said. He heard the sound of tilapia feeding on the bread, and then the louder sound of crocodiles feeding on the tilapia.
“Let’s go,” he said, diving into the water as the others joined him. He swam as fast as he could, pulling himself up onto the shore but not pausing there, running with his head down for cover until he reached a stone wall by the motel office. Asabo joined him there, and Vasquez a moment later, the three of them dripping wet.
“Boo-ya!” Vasquez said. “Man—I was walking across the top of the pond like a cartoon mouse.”
“Love attracts love,” DeLuca said. There was still considerable automatic weapons fire coming from the hill, and it was getting closer. “Let’s go—that way!”
They sprinted for the cottages, taking cover behind one and pausing. Before them was the jungle, into which John Dari and his men had disappeared. DeLuca lacked flashlights or NVGs and was effectively blind. He was equally disappointed to learn his phone had gotten waterlogged during his brief swim and was not functioning.
“Use mine,” Vasquez said, handing DeLuca a phone still inside a waterproof Ziploc bag.
“Are you okay?” Scott said when DeLuca managed to connect.
“So far,” he said. “We got wolves at the door. Any suggestions?”
“There’s a trail,” Scottie said. “You’re behind cabin four from the right, facing the pond. The trail head is behind cabin six, two to your left.”
They moved. DeLuca thought he saw an opening in the bush.
“Where does it lead?” he asked.
“No idea,” Scott said. “Away.”
“Away is good. Stay on the line and keep my signal,” DeLuca said, plunging headlong into the bush with the others close behind him as a squad of gunmen appeared near where they’d parked the Cressida.
They ran. There was no light, but all the same, DeLuca thought he could make out the gist of the trail, leading downhill, the going treacherous as they stumbled over roots and rocks. Now it was important only that they put some distance between them and the motel. He ran until he was thoroughly winded, perhaps half a mile, maybe less, it was hard to say. The smell was nothing like the “rain forest scented” shampoos his wife liked, floral and pleasant. It smelled like mushrooms, dank rotting vegetation, putrefaction, and decay. He saw the moon briefly through the jungle canopy above. He got back on the phone.
“What’s happening?” he asked Scott. A jet streaked high overhead.
“Don’t stop now,” Scott said. “They’re looking for the trail. Somebody behind you is using GPS. I’ve got his signal.”
“Can you blind him?”
“Not easily,” Scottie said. “Wouldn’t you rather know where they are?”
“You have a point,” DeLuca said.
“There’s some sort of facility, three klicks down the trail,” Scott said. “I’m looking at a map but it’s not clear what it is. More to come. Get moving.”
They stayed close together in the darkness, Asabo explaining that it was probably a trail made by forest elephants, judging by the width of the path they were on, or so he’d read—he’d never actually been in the jungle before now. They paused when a flare lit the sky, maybe a mile behind them. Whoever was chasing them had lights and would be able to make better speed. They followed the directions Scott relayed to them, stopping when he told them to stop.
“What’s next?” DeLuca asked.
“You’re there,” Scott said.
“We’re where?”
“Check your Fee-bee-cee-bee—I sent you the same map I’m looking at.”
“My CIM took a swim—what are we looking for?”
“A research station of some kind.”
“Where?”
“Right there. Exact coordinates. Milsat’s accurate down to two meters.”
“There’s nothing here,” DeLuca said.
“There has to be. You’re right on top of it.”
“We’re on top of it? Negative. We see nothing.”
“It’s on top of us,” Vasquez said. “Look.”
He’d found a pair of climbing harnesses attached to ropes leading straight up into the air.
“The station’s in the canopy,” Asabo said.
“Can you climb?” DeLuca asked him. “You ever use one of these?”
“I’ve done some rock climbing,” Asabo said. “In Vermont.”
“Pretend this is Vermont,” DeLuca said, helping Asabo into the rig and turning to Vasquez. “We can’t outrun them. Once you’re up top, drop a rig for me.”
“How long do you think these ropes have been exposed to the heat and humidity?” Vasquez said, giving one a tug to test it as he snapped a carabiner onto the belt of his harness. “Somebody could take a whipper.”
“Why do you think I’m sending you first?” DeLuca said.
“It’s always something,” Vasquez muttered.
DeLuca waited below as the other two ascended. He heard a clattering overheard, and then he heard nothing but the night.
He waited.
He saw another flare, closer now, perhaps half a klick off.
“Any time, Hoolie, any time,” he said under his breath. He wondered what was keeping them. Had they run into trouble of some kind? He heard voices far off but growing louder.
“Now would be a very good time, Hoolie,” he said. He considered his options. There was a layer of muck at his feet, damp decaying leaves and vegetation. He could lie in it and cover himself if he had to. He waited, counting to ten. At ten, he would burrow into the muck like a salamander in autumn. He heard voices again, closer now.
When the harness finally dropped, at the count of eight, he suited up and climbed as fast as he could. A platform had been built in the canopy, about three hundred feet above the ground, he estimated. He pulled the ropes up behind him, and then the three of them lay down on the platform, a wooden square about twelve feet across.
“Sit tight,” Scott said. “We’ve got you on UAV. They’re right below you. One of them has NVGs with infrared strobe.”
They waited.
Another flare fired from a flare pistol lit up the night sky, the bright light hanging in the air as it drifted from its parachute. DeLuca doubted they were visible. The jungle canopy was too thick. Down below, they were guessing.
He heard a burst of machine-gun fire coming from directly beneath them, bullets ripping through the leaves all around them. They heard shouts, men below them, calling out into the bush, and then the shouts faded.
He listened to his own breathing, his heart thumping in his chest.
A few minutes later, Scottie told DeLuca it appeared that the troops looking for them had moved on down the trail.
“We’ll stay here until the light comes up,” DeLuca said. He turned to Asabo. “Could you hear what they were saying?”
“They said, ‘Come out, John Dari—come out and get what’s coming to you.’ Things like that,” Asabo said.
“Ligerian army,” DeLuca concluded. “Probably Ngwema. How’d they find out about the meeting?”
“Dari’s men?” Vasquez said. “Somebody flipped on him?”
“I doubt it. It wasn’t from us,” DeLuca said, thinking. “We’re encrypted. LeDoux briefed CENTCOM if he briefed anybody. They briefed the Pentagon. They briefed the White House. The White House calls Bo? Bragging about how they had somebody meeting with Dari?”
“Maybe it’s not that complicated,” Vasquez said. “Maybe the clerk at the hotel opened the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. Who compromised us isn’t exactly the problem, though, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” DeLuca said. For Paul Asabo’s sake, he stated the obvious. “The problem
is that now John Dari believes we set him up. He was the target, not us. And he knows it. He thinks we tried to kill him.”
Chapter Nine
WHEN SYKES CONTACTED HUBERT NKETIA IN Kumari, Nketia assured him that if they could get to a village called Amagosanda, he would have troops meet them there to take them the rest of the way. When he told Nketia that Ms. Duquette was hoping to meet with John Dari, Nketia said that he would try to arrange it, but that Mr. Dari was a very busy man these days. Sykes’s bullshit detector went off immediately, but he decided to reset it—he was a stranger in a strange land, where the rules were different. He wondered if Nketia was waiting for a bribe to be offered. In the hotel lobby, he told Major Fewalla, the officer heading Gabrielle Duquette’s security force, that they needed to go to Amagosanda. Fewalla returned after talking to his men and said that given how the situation had deteriorated in the last forty-eight hours, the dangers had increased proportionately, and his men were going to need hazard pay, five hundred dollars a man.
“This is extortion,” Sykes said. The major nodded and smiled.
“Yes, that is right,” Fewalla said.
When Sykes reported the news to Gabrielle and told her they were shaking her down, he added, half in jest, “For that kind of money, you could just rent a helicopter.” She responded by saying, “All right then, do it,” went into her bedroom, and returned with twenty thousand dollars in new one-hundred-dollar bills.
At the airport, he found a pilot named Kwame MacArthur, a captain in the Ligerian air force, skinny as a pencil with aviator sunglasses, a thin mustache, a gold tooth in the middle of his smile, and a walk that made him look slightly like a marionette. After dickering over the price, MacArthur said he thought he’d be able to fly them, as long as they could be back that evening. The helicopter, a Chinook with Ligerian air force numbers and insignia on the aft pylon, was more helicopter than they needed, capable of carrying as many as forty passengers, but it would have to do. As they boarded the jolly, Sykes had further misgivings.
“There’s no copilot or flight engineer,” he told Gabrielle, as MacArthur settled into the right-hand seat. “We might want to rethink this.”
“I don’t want to rethink this,” she said. “Can one man fly this thing?”
“I suppose,” Sykes said. “I doubt he’d try if it wasn’t possible. I’ve just never seen it.”
“You’ve flown in these before?” she asked.
“Hundreds of times,” he said.
“Ask him if we could hire a copilot and a flight engineer—tell him it’s not a matter of money,” Duquette told him. Yet when he walked forward and spoke to the pilot, MacArthur only shook his head, then returned to his preflight checklist.
Gabrielle made a circling gesture above her head with her index finger to tell the pilot they were ready, then buckled herself into a seat by the window. A minute later, they were airborne. Sykes had packed a pair of MAC-10s with as many ammo clips as he could carry in a backpack. Duquette carried only her silver Zero case, not daring to leave it behind. A .60-caliber minigun was mounted at the rear door of the jolly.
A greeting party was waiting for them in Kumari, including dancers in colorful costumes, drummers, singers, children with hand-lettered signs that said WE LOVE YOU GABRIELLE, a television crew, and a coterie of officials and men in dark suits. Her smile lit up the terminal, Sykes thought. Hubert Nketia was a well-dressed man of about sixty, with close-cropped white hair, a broad grin, and a hearty embrace for the famous actress, who introduced Sykes as her traveling companion. Sykes instructed Captain MacArthur to have the helicopter refueled and to wait for them in it with the engine running, adding that there would be a substantial bonus for him, pending their safe return to Port Ivory. If MacArthur was for sale, Sykes wanted to make sure he understood that Gabrielle Duquette was the highest bidder.
“Will Mr. Dari be meeting us?” he asked Nketia when he had a moment.
“Oh yes yes, I think so,” the man said, smiling brightly. Too brightly, Sykes thought. Maybe working in counterintelligence had made him cynical (DeLuca had warned him it would), but he didn’t trust people who smiled too easily and told you what you wanted to hear.
They boarded limousines and were brought to a place called the Safari Inn, where a banquet had been prepared. On the way, Sykes checked his gear and made sure he had a round chambered in his automatic.
“What’s that for?” Gabrielle asked him.
“You’re usually most vulnerable during transport,” he told her. “Are you absolutely certain about this guy?”
“Hubert is my son’s godfather,” Gabrielle said. “I’d say you’re too suspicious, but I actually like that in a bodyguard. We’re okay.”
He hoped she was right.
The resort catered to American and European hunters, but had been prepared to accommodate Gabrielle Duquette’s antifur, pro-PETA sensibilities. Sykes saw blank spots on the walls of the lobby and banquet hall where animal trophies had been removed—it was, after all, a hunting lodge. He saw one of the kitchen staff shoo a small child out the door, the child attracted by the aromas of stewing meat, curry, and lemon grass—there was nothing intrinsically wrong about that, but it seemed to him that the cook had acted a bit too roughly, too rudely. When the food was served, the children from the airport performed on a stage, singing songs and playing music with a “bamboo orchestra” that used truncated bamboo shoots of varying lengths and widths, which, when bounced on the stage, produced both a rhythmic pulse and musical notes. After the meal (a repast that struck Sykes as insensitive, given that they were in the middle of a famine), Nketia made a speech thanking the beautiful Gabrielle Duquette for coming and for calling the world’s attention to the plight of the Ligerian people.
Sykes had heard speeches before, so he decided to have a look around. Something was wrong. Off. Didn’t add up. Standing at the door at the back of the kitchen, he noticed the same children who’d been singing on the stage, a few moments before, being herded by a pair of armed men into a waiting passenger van. This was a job for armed men? When one child reached out a hand beseechingly, the soldier slapped it away and pushed the child forward with the barrel of his gun. They were still hungry? As far as Sykes could tell, the only children who were actually being fed were the two seated to either side of Gabrielle, each child with a nanny standing in attendance, but the nannies, Sykes noticed, had long, painted fingernails and looked more like prostitutes, frankly, than childcare providers.
People weren’t who they said they were. It was a setup. But for what? His biggest fear was an abduction, that John Dari had lured Gabrielle here, using people she knew, or thought she knew, and that he planned to use her to get the attention he needed, the way his abductors had used Daniel Pearl to get attention. If you could seize the world stage, killing a journalist, think what you could do if you abducted an actress who already had the world’s attention?
Sykes excused himself, saying he needed to use the bathroom, found a stall and locked the door. Using his CIM, he logged onto SIPERNET and plugged in the name Hubert Nketia. In the rush to arrange for transportation, he hadn’t had time, and he’d trusted Gabrielle’s judgment. Finally a file downloaded. What he read partially confirmed his suspicions, though it looked less like an abduction than a scam. They were still in danger.
According to his handheld, a man named Hubert Nketia had been arrested in Brooklyn in 1986 for running a long-distance telephone scam, selling stolen calling-card numbers to foreign nationals. In 1991, the same man, Hubert Nketia, had been arrested for credit theft, again heading a ring of criminals who this time pulled the unshredded carbon copies from credit card transactions out of wastebaskets to get the numbers and then cloned the plastic—his people had worked as housekeepers in various hotels in New York City. When the photograph finally downloaded, Sykes saw that it was the same man, albeit younger looking, not as gray. Nketia had been extradited, sent back to Liger to serve his time in prison. It probably wouldn’t be terribly
difficult for a man with money to buy his way out of a Ligerian prison.
He saved the files to memory. He was 99 percent certain he knew what sort of scam this was. When he returned to the banquet, Gabrielle told him she was going to discuss business with her friend in private, and that he could wait in the lobby if he wanted. He told her he thought it would be a good idea if he accompanied her—a very good idea. She reluctantly agreed.
They adjourned to what Nketia said was the presidential suite, where cocktails awaited. A barman with a suspicious bulge beneath his vest asked Sykes if he wanted anything. Sykes declined, carrying Gabrielle’s Zero case and staying close to his pack, unsnapping the snaps as inconspicuously as possible in case he had to reach his weapons in a hurry. Nketia poured champagne.
“This is a grand thing that you are doing, Gabby,” he said to her, raising his glass in a toast. “It is unfortunate that in Liger today, we can do more good in private than we can do in public, but that is how it is. The good you do today will have a lasting effect for years to come. The children whose lives you will save will be forever in your debt.”
In his pocket, Sykes pressed a button on his SATphone. He’d set it up, in the bathroom, to play a sample ring tone. His phone chirped in his pocket. He took it out quickly, apologizing, and “answered” it, pretending to listen for a few moments.
“Excuse me, Gabby…”
“Not right now,” she said.
“I think you’d better take this…”
“Tell whoever it is that I’ll call him back,” she commanded.
“It’s Wayne Gretzky,” Sykes said. “He’s out of backfat and he needs you to send him loonies.”
She looked at him like he had a monkey growing out of his forehead. She was Canadian. He’d read that in People magazine. He didn’t know much Canadian slang, but what he knew, he’d used, trusting that Nketia wouldn’t understand. Sykes looked Gabrielle Duquette in the eye, unblinking, to stress the gravity of what he was saying. When she took the phone from him, she heard a message for her that he’d recorded in the bathroom, dialing his own number and retrieving the message he’d left in his own voice mail before handing her the phone.
Mission Liberty Page 16
