'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  Vangaler’s stiffly pressed jungle-camo combat fatigues were decorated with five stars across each epaulet. That and the polished jump boots he wore accented his boast as Africa’s most feared warlord, a mass murderer. Boyko could scoff at the pointed metal teeth and grills inlaid with blue diamonds in his henchman’s mouth as they twinkled in the moonlight through his demonic grin, but he held a quiet respect for his inhuman brutality.

  Aware that he was being studied, Vangaler’s smug self-satisfaction glowed.

  He had his own plan.

  Boyko looked up. He flashed a red laser beam that cut through the heavy underbush. Instantly, two U.S. Army Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and a half-dozen two-and-a-half-ton Army trucks moved out of the jungle growth down to the edge above Maran’s ravine. A stampede of insurgents tore out of the forest, bare-chested, skin glistening with oil. Above their heads most, but not all, wielded axes or machetes.

  What the hell‌—‌Ninjas!

  Maran knew of them from his Pentagon briefings, named to appeal to young computer gamers, slaves already to Internet memes like Shinobi Ninja vs. Ninja Gaiden. These kids didn’t have toilets in their homes, but they played the latest multi-player war games on up-to-date PCs. In contrast, some wore wild wigs or shower caps on their heads; others wore dried crocodile head hoodies with ragged strips of crocodile skin capes draped over their shoulders. Their druggy shrieks wrenched the air. Maran shouted to his men, watching the enemy’s regular troops, dressed in tiger stripe camouflage combat uniforms. They were firing, at full automatic mode, the latest U.S. Army assault rifles and 40mm multi-shot grenade launchers.

  At the center of the ragtag mob, a tank loomed out of the jungle fog.

  An M1A2! The U.S. Army’s advanced Abrams main battle tank.

  Ambush! How did they know? Where did they get U.S. arms?

  He turned to his team’s flank and immediately grasped one fact. It didn’t matter whether he had “advanced to the rear” or attacked. The die was cast.

  Hellfire engulfed them; his team scattered, their resolve shredded.

  “Fire! Fire back. Get tight,” Maran yelled, trying in vain to get his men to group into wide-scope fire teams. He dropped to his knees and dumped his empty magazine. While he refitted a new clip into the firing chamber, his men lost their control.

  “Drop down! Set up! Three-round bursts! Pick your targets,” Maran screamed as the marauders overwhelmed them.

  “Fall back up the hill. Fire on the run! Keep firing!” His DNA programmed him as the aggressor. He knew what happened in combat to those who hesitated. So he ran: leading, setting the example, turning to fire back in short bursts with one arm as he propelled forward. He looked up.

  There.

  Ahead! A shrubby rock formation.

  Shelter.

  But it was too late. Around him, dirt and rocks flew through clouds of dust. Blood sprayed everywhere, splattering his face. He dodged, dove into the rocks, rolled, and came up firing from behind the shelter. Out in the clearing his men were being blown to pieces. The rebels hacked at the bodies with machetes. Displaying an amalgam of modern terrorism and historic animist African superstition, they danced around the corpses.

  An armored U.S. Army Humvee, draped with camouflage netting, roared out of the forest. A man stood tall behind an armored turret in the back. He barked orders in choppy Lingala, the region’s local dialect. He pointed to Maran, who fired through a new clip. But it was like spitting on a burning skyscraper with a plastic Super-Squirter. Through his dirt-caked combat night-vision goggles, Maran made him out from the photographs shown at his briefing.

  Grigol Rakhmonov Boyko. The Animal of Angola!

  The roar of the Abrams’ 1,500-horsepower turbine shattered his hearing. Its turret turned the 120mm smoothbore cannon on him. Instinct. Merged with iron discipline forged by years of repetitious training.

  When forward action fails, seek cover. Regroup. Recoup.

  He ran to the boulder. Leaped. Too late.

  The blast lifted him, hurled him over the boulder. Shards of shrapnel ripped his legs. The impact tore his helmet off. It blew the Heckler & Koch MP5K auto-fire out of his hands. His head and shoulders smashed into the rock and his body tumbled over, arched in pain. He whipped his hands up to his head. Everything blended. He felt the air rush through his tightly-curled hair, whistle past his ears, his body swirling like a kite twisted by paranormal forces. Colors kaleidoscoped, whirling through his brain. Then‌—‌nothing.

  Blackness.

  When he came to, he lay still. He waited, then felt his hands tremble. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious. The first sounds he heard were the lyrics from the headset on the Kevlar helmet lying next to him. The blast had switched his iPhone playlist to the music he had been listening to in the helicopter before they inserted into the area: Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” Slowly, carefully, he moved one hand to his face. Blood oozed through his fingers, but he had no pain, no feeling whatsoever. Hesitatingly, he felt for his mouth, his nose, and finally his fingers probed into the slippery chasm above his right ear. He looked down. His legs. Worse. As his vision cleared, he struggled to regain equilibrium. He crawled to the edge of the rock. All around him. Carnage. Every man. Butchered.

  The Animal. Before whatever was left of his God, he vowed to track the monster down. If he had to kill him with his bare hands, it would not be the first time. He only wished he would have the chance.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE THEM long to get there. A Search-and-Rescue team from the 535th landed one of their Pave Low- equipped helicopters. They secured the area. Alerted by gagging sounds behind Maran’s redoubt, two medics rushed to his side. They wrapped him in applied-pressure-bandages and tightened the bonds on critical points to stop the blood. It was apparent, however, that bleeding was far from the worst problem. He suffered from brain trauma that threatened a terrifying price. They tied him to a backboard and immobilized his neck with a collar brace. To stop him from choking on his own blood and keep his mouth open so he could breathe, they fitted his throat with a soft tube and strapped him into the split basket suspension stretcher that rode under the belly of the helicopter. They had no sooner hoisted him up and pulled out of the landing area when four more Pave Lows hovered in over the treetops, coming in to the hideous clearing to bring home the KIAs.

  FOUR

  Cabinda, Angola

  Several days later, Vangaler raged at his cadre over a fiasco in his own operation, the village assault that led up to Maran’s mission. “Ag man. You idiot!” he screamed. He stood at the head of a conference table at the Strategic Solutions’ regional business office in Cabinda.

  Vangaler’s odd spiritual development had started out when he became a Catholic altar boy at the Church of the Ten Commandments in his home town of El Segundo, Uganda. Impressed with the respect offered to the clergy within the Holy Spirit Movement there, a witchcraft cult devoted to ritual child sacrifice as a route to wealth and salvation, he turned to Voodoo and ordained himself a high priest. His success led to his recruitment as an officer in the infamous Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, a breakaway group of occultists from the Ugandan Acholi tribe on the DRC border who were also terrorizing the area. Maximizing lessons learned from the LRA and a corrupt parish pastor, he traveled south to join the mercenaries in South Africa willing to sell their souls to the devil or to the instigators of apartheid. It was a perfect fit. Already fluent in Afrikaans from his father, in English from his mother, and in several tribal dialects, his torture skills had been honed to a scalpel’s edge by the LRA. He was an ideal interrogator as well as an executioner for the Vlaakplaas dungeons. There they changed his nickname from Voodoo to “Slang,” Afrikaans for Snake. And it also was from there that he led a sabotage op to disrupt Namibia’s plan to free itself from South Africa’s grip by poisoning its drinking water with cholera bacteria. That added to his earlier fame gained when he rigged the headphones of a tape recorder that blew apart the he
ad of Attorney Thabiso Magabana, an anti-apartheid activist. Those operations built his reputation as an effective slaughterer of targeted individuals or mass groups. Boyko was drawn to him, knowing that he could use those fierce skills. Calling in some IOUs, he rescued him from the brutal Communist faction in Nelson Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation. Boyko’s intervention saved Vangaler from being “necklaced,” a ritual acted out on hundreds of suspected government collaborators.

  The practice involved soaking a tire in gasoline, draping it over a suspect’s shoulders and setting it on fire, the macabre “necklace.” He was a born lunatic. Boyko considered that one of his chief attractions.

  None of that, however, fazed Vangaler.

  THE GLASS CONFERENCE TABLE gleamed in the fluorescent light, sullied in its sterility by a cell phone, a laptop, and a pad of blank legal paper. Jungle décor adorned the office. Hung from the ceiling, a huge spider plant looked like it was about to devour several scraggy ferns. Overhead, three sword bromeliads and several crimson Birds of Paradise hogged the scant sunlight that streamed in from the lone window. A floor-to-ceiling aquarium filled one entire corner with a school of ragged piranha struggling for life under a slimy film. The remains of several dead rats lay rotting on the gravel at the bottom of the tank.

  Vangaler scowled.

  “How could your man have been so clumsy?” he asked his temporary aide.

  The man was dark and bearded. He wore a black and white checked keffiyeh scarf held in place on his head by a ropy black agal. Abu Mahmoud al-Ebrahyim, an Iranian militant Islamist and chief deputy to Osama bin Laden, had escaped death in Diyala, Iraq, in October 2008 when American and Iraqi forces took out twenty-four high-level al Qaeda terrorists and captured more than 4,600 others. Instrumental in Libya’s 1988 Lockerbie bombing, he was now, after Bin Laden’s death, the most-wanted man by the FBI. He was in Cabinda to provide his expertise to Vangaler in the development of ricin poison weapons and explosives in return for diamonds and access to Boyko’s U.S. Stinger missiles.

  Al-Ebrahyim turned to his assistant and screamed out the Islamist war cry, “‘Allahu akhbar!’ you scum-sucking, corpse-fucking eater of dog puke!”

  He was yelling at Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, born Omar Hammami in Daphne, Alabama, of a Syrian-born Muslim father and an American Southern Baptist mother, an American citizen. He emigrated, however, to Timbuktu, Mali, in 2008 to join the Intifada after being radicalized for the Islamist bombings. Now he was the chief recruiter for al Shabaab, the Mujahideen Youth Movement that had spread across North Africa, the Maghreb and the Levant. He joined Vangaler’s Ninjas to recruit aspiring young terrorists. He reported to al-Ebrahyim.

  Under al Amriki’s leadership, Vangaler’s young butchers had massacred every villager in the refuge camp of N’kisinbango. The NGO observers of the U.N. were also camped out in that same village. The Ninjas had insisted on taking the young American women, all idealistically beatific, as hostage slaves to their hidden outpost. It was those hostages in that rebel camp that General Luster had sent Maran’s team to rescue. In another masterful stroke of deception, al-Amriki and Vangaler’s Ninjas had left behind the PFLEC flag and packed the pockets of the corpses with false documents identifying them as members of PFLEC. Now, however, they had been close to losing everything. If Maran’s mission had succeeded, Vangaler would have been exposed and the Ninjas smashed by Angolan President Bombe’s Army. By deflecting the blame onto PFLEC, however, Bombe would continue to get the financial support from Washington, enough for him to mount a crushing assault on PFLEC. But Vangaler’s plan added another wrinkle to the deception. One more close to home. Once PFLEC was removed, he planned to simply kill Boyko. The entire empire would be his for the taking.

  Now?

  Al-Amriki stood, head bowed. He tugged at his ear, which looked like half of a large walnut shell. He waited for Vangaler’s tirade to end. They glared at one another.

  “We had it all set up. Look like PFLEC slaughtered the village. The trap would have triggered the end of dos Sampas and his PFLECs. Would have been perfect,” Vangaler snapped. “You fucked it up. Had to take hostages. Bring in the U.S. Army. You know what we got? A fuckin’ Special Forces assault team!”

  “We lost control,” al-Amriki said. “We didn’t count on just how crazy those Ninja kids would get. At first they wanted to take all the blondes, then they decided to take all the American women. They murdered the rest.”

  The room overlooked a garden that decorated a brick patio. Unlike the office, it was immaculate. Tuscan porcelain garden tables threw a profusion of Italianate colors into the mosaic of bougainvillea. Vangaler stepped to the window, cleared his throat, and hocked into the flowers.

  “The Brotherhood believes in this mission. Our pillars of faith will propel us to prevail. Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the name of Allah is our highest hope,” al-Ebrahyim said.

  The stumpy terrorist turned back from the window to al-Ebrahyim, nodded and said, “Allahu akhbar!” He could go along; he was pragmatic, focused.

  “But now they know too much. Dos Sampas gets off the hook and Boyko still gets his support from the Americans.”

  “CIA,” al-Ebrahyim frowned.

  “No. Boyko may be an asshole, but he’s not stupid. He gets it right from the source. Still needs ready cash to operate; diamonds are even better, compressed wealth. He moves them around with a bundle of series certificates of origin from his customs buddies in Libya. Gives him diplomatic immunity, a walking diplomatic pouch. He can pass that on to anyone he wants.”

  “Why should you take orders from a white man anyway?”

  “He has the power‌—‌for now,” Vangaler said. “The whites still control the money, and the power.”

  As a white man, Boyko had no chance to exert long-term control over the black cast-offs from Africa’s civil wars without black African help. Vangaler was the proxy he needed to run the Ninjas for Security Solutions. Inc.

  “Boyko’s cute. Speaks six languages, owns four different airlines. Got every corrupt dictator in West Africa in his pocket,” Vangaler said.

  “Boyko is Georgian,” al-Ebrahyim interjected.

  “So what? Came here years ago, Russian GRU then Mafia, Vory v Zakone, ‘Thieves in Law.’ They say, carry-over from the days when you’d never do it to a peasant‌—‌‘OK then steal from the czar.’ He’s got their starburst tattoo on his shoulder. Before that he was in East Germany, posted with STASI,” Vangaler snorted.

  “When he first came,” he continued. “Way back, the CIA was using deep cover, secretly backing dos Sampas and his fucking PFLECs against Moscow’s and Castro’s Communists. He came back again with VVZ when the Soviet spies turned Mafia. He worked against the Americans, Chinese, and Europeans for contracts to supply President Bombe with everything Russian, from fine wine to ultimate weapons. It was a fucking cluster fuck. It still is and it always will be.”

  “Bombe got rich,” al-Ebrahyim observed.

  “With my sacred diamonds. He lined his private bank accounts as soon as he took over. He went to Boyko for American weapons when Washington reneged on their promise for arms.

  “But Boyko’s running out of rope. Interpol ‘red noticed’ him with a warrant out for anyone who can arrest him. And if anyone wants anything from Interpol’s member countries they’d better honor it if they have the chance,” Vangaler added.

  FIVE

  U.S. European Command Hospital, Landstuhl, Germany

  Several days after his rescue, Maran awoke groggy in the hospital at the U.S. European Command, Landstuhl, Germany. In the meantime, the Army levied charges against him. The fact that he was in a coma made no difference to them.

  The hospital used the same methodical procedures with which the Army so callously charged him. This time, however, it was to his advantage; they provided him with top-shelf care. As his head cleared, his body shuddering with waves of anxiety, he began to realize where he was.

&
nbsp; What happened in Cabinda? They knew we were coming. How? When?

  The pain. He lifted the sheets, checking his legs. Both there. Sticky. Blood soaked through the casts. He shouted for a nurse.

  “You’re up! How can I help, Colonel?” the nurse asked, looking intently into the slits through the head bandages, his cobalt green eyes still bright with incandescence.

  Her words floated through the fog. He was awake, but he was nowhere near being up.

  “The blood. The pain. My legs. My head.” He reached up under the sheets to scratch under the chest dressing.

  “Don’t do that,” she warned. “I’ll get you something.” Just for a moment, the gloom lifted as he thought of all the gentle nurses he had met in his violent career.

  Again.

  My men! All lost.

  Pain shot through his head like a fireball.

  Cabinda!

  He had gone over it a hundred times in his coma, abstractly. Now it crashed to the fore. Different. Electric flashes, psychedelic blasts slammed through his bandaged head, careened off the aching brain cells like a pinball while anxiety wracked his body. He clawed at the irritation that gnawed at his skin like an army of red ants; gummy sweat soaked his bedclothes. His heightened senses picked up his body odor. Unable to prop himself on the pillows, he squirmed, inched from one side of the cot to the other to find just a shard of comfort. Chaos. A rattle of discordance. His head.

  Goosebumps rippled over his skin. He was struck by an onslaught of tremors. Recall battled with denial, unbending remorse shocked him with the truth.

  Cabinda!

  A cog in a vast wheel that churned out oil, diamonds, and weapons to the world’s terror networks. The clarity of Maran’s vision now clapped him like a back-hander from drunken hooligan. His knuckles went white, hands balled. He fought to regain his grip on reality.