'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  He waved back, their signal to link up in front of Boyko’s manor in ten minutes. Leaving his team with instructions to watch for his signal to join them inside the villa, he adjusted his night-vision goggles and radio headset and ran across the landscaped area between the watchtower and the villa to join Maran.

  MARAN AND HIS THREE-MAN team from dos Sampas’ PFLEC slipped inside the command center.

  It was empty.

  Maran found the access control PIN codes for the entire complex in a three-digit combination safe lock that he cracked in five minutes with a Lockmaster’s autodialer he’d brought along. He punched in the sequence of PIN codes and hit the red control button to open the access control doors at Boyko’s palatial residence.

  Inside the safe they also found the command log.

  Afrikaner soldiers of fortune!

  Both commanding officers, Colonels Theuns Buke and Boeta Haggyar were named as leaders of Battalion 15, in charge of the dock facilities and a nearby holding pen. It had them scheduled to return with the full contingent in the morning.

  The notes also disclosed the names, addresses and ‘bush names’ of each of the Ninjas in the Battalion. It elaborated on evidence that could be used against Vangaler and Boyko if, contrary to Maran’s burning blood lust, it ever went that far. The names of everyone held at the prison were listed and it included incriminating details about how some prisoners, also named, had been tortured and executed.

  Maran had no time to detain the two Afrikaaners. He destroyed their communications equipment, confiscated the log and their identification papers and left them there. He also discovered and kept several documents that detailed the deception operation Vangaler had used to cast the blame of all his atrocities on his opposition, dos Sampas and PFLEC. One letter addressed to a PR agency in Washington outlined the strategy used by the agency to publicize the Ninja atrocities as having been committed by dos Sampas’ PFLECs. Into the soft folding bag he brought for the purpose, he stuffed a number of tear sheets from copies of the New York Times and Washington Post. Headlines in both papers noted evidence that pointed to PFLEC as the perpetrators of Ninja terror, including the murders of Maran’s American hostages.

  There was nothing about Maran’s Cabinda massacre.

  They’re keeping it secret.

  Outside the squarish cement block structure, Maran paused before entering a path into the greenery. He ran into the dense tropical shrubbery and deep groundcover that overwhelmed the area like jungle growth.

  Boyko’s MecaMines villa was a sumptuous manse. It reminded Maran of a five-star hotel in Marrakesh, formerly a Muslim palace, where he had stayed at on a splurge on leave from an assignment training paratroopers at a Morrocan Army base between Rabat and Fez before he joined SAWC. The villa was surrounded by terraced landscaping of thickly blossomed tropical flower gardens. At the far side, facing the ornate structure, a series of rotating spotlights cast beams on a chute of water that fell into a splash of ferns and hibiscus. To one side of the front landing of the staircase leading to the villa’s front door stood a stone pedestal supporting a blasphemous and outrageously bottle-green marble copy of the Statue of Liberty with one outsized breast exposed and a lustful leer on the lady’s face.

  Tracha joined Maran. He turned to see if there was a straight-line view between him and his men on the watchtower. He saw them, signalled. They returned the sign and he and Maran picked their way quietly through the bushes until they were just alongside the front door stair landing. A guard ran out from inside the building. He stood on the top of the landing, trying to see what the gunfire was about. Maran knew he would be wondering if it was just practice from the nearby firing range.

  He waited until the man’s back was in reach.

  Springing out of the frangipani and bougainvillea, Maran leaped on the unsuspecting man. He snapped the guard’s neck with one twist and charged, with Tracha by his side, through the front door and down the entryway towards Vangaler’s quarters in the back of the building. Tracha followed, cocking his Heckler as he ran. Another security guard appeared, lifting a rifle. Before he could shoot, Tracha fell to the marble floor. His weapon fell out of his hands. The guard focused on him, ignoring Maran and leaping at Tracha’s prostrate torso. He raised his rifle to stab Tracha’s exposed chest with the bayonet.

  Maran was just ahead, racing for the last corner in the hallway that led to Vangaler’s suite. A brown and black blur, snarling like a werewolf, flew down the hallway at Maran like a furry missile. Built like a small bull, the big South African Boerbul mastiff leaped. Maran dropped flat on the floor. The muscled package of fur and fang shot over him.

  A ghastly scream behind him tore into his head. He spun, leaped to his feet, crouched, rifle raised.

  Too late. The dog ripped into Tracha’s assailant’s neck. A roar exploded from within its thick body through teeth clamped like a vise on the assailant’s neck. It shook its boulder of a head wildly from side to side, ripping at the wide-opened wound that gushed blood, throwing the beast into a frenzy. The brute’s feet straddled the victim’s convulsing body, working with instinct born of a prehistoric monster. Maran fired a silent burst into the animal. The fusillade threw it against the wall in a bloody heap. He looked for the rooms beyond that he remembered from Sergei’s blueprints, then looked back at Tracha, who was covered in blood. He turned back and ran through the hallways to the anteroom that led to the Vangaler’s retreat. Following the design plans etched in his head, he charged through the chamber.

  Empty.

  On the far wall, a TV displayed a muted pornographic snuff movie, ugly as the souls of the men responsible for the atrociously obscene theater that was in the process of unfolding. Maran felt a sudden rush of his old confidence, perhaps for the first time since Cabinda. Calm spread through his body. He actually felt it as it rippled through him. His muscles tensed in a way that told him he was in complete control of his body.

  Murmurs wafted from the room beyond. Maran held the muffled weapon at his hip, cocked and ready to fire. He stepped into the hallway. The murmurs became voices.

  Amber! Vangaler!

  Vangaler, speaking his hocus-pocus: “Maduno, alagundu lupenda amasyo ga Mbuji-Mayi. Banga nbuilazuik, mondo bunduo nyaci, zindindu Argnaut ku sikula ntandu Vangaler.”

  “Exactly as the gods raise their winds and hurricanes to protect the diamonds of Mbuji-Mayi, so does Vangaler look after its Bantu people to avenge against the witches of darkness and their spell that threatens the diamonds of Mbuji Mayi,” a new voice chimed in.

  “Zlankiki kiila duno tzi benze, nuoanga tze ko pentszangu bitu ba-andu Bantu, Argnaut pnooma boosa,” Vangaler chanted.

  “God’s executioner cuts out the cancer that spoils the fruit of Bantu motherhood with Argnaut,” the acolyte repeated, completing the mantra.

  Maran opened the door a crack.

  A sacrificial ritual.

  Vangaler, naked to his socks, glistening with oil head to toe, stood in the center of the room at the foot of a long gurney. Apparently, back on Castle Island in South Boston, Vangaler and Boyko had had a change of heart. Boyko had taken Vangaler’s check-in phone call and decided that Amber was worth more alive than dead, but Vangaler must have changed his mind again. He was about to kill her, but he intended to satiate his lust for revenge first.

  Several men, worked into a frenzied sweat, stood, swaying, holding beeswax candles, foot-tall Madonnas, hands folded in prayer. Spread out on the gurney on her back with her arms and legs out in an obscene “X.” Amber! A sacrificial offering. Stark naked, vagina spread wide by a steel clamp. Her mouth, gagged with a white bandana, her clothing torn away, shredded like rags and thrown on the floor. Vangaler towered over her, his eyes maddened, his penis erect. One hand waved high in the air with a broken beer bottle, a handy scalpel, its razor blade edges glinting even in the dim light.

  “Good Jesus! He’s going to cut, infibulate her!”

  Maran kicked the door open and leaped into the room. As
much as he wanted to blast these scum to their just deserts, he knew they were more valuable to him if he could bring them back alive‌—‌with Boyko. Nothing would vindicate his name more than their testimony and conviction at a criminal trial. His weapon jumped in his hands as he sprayed the wall behind them with automatic fire as a warning. The disciples turned away from their master of malignance and dashed through the door at the rear of the room.

  Vangaler turned to Maran, advanced, the razor-sharp bottle fragment high in his hand. The aggression took the life-or-death decision away from Maran. He leveled his weapon, felt no mercy, pulled the trigger.

  The gun was empty.

  Drenched with sweat, drunk, high on coke and ganja, Vangaler was on top of him in a flash. Maran tried to reach his field knife. Too late. Vangaler smashed his neck with the blade of his hand.

  Maran gasped for breath, trying frantically to reach his knife, flailing out at Vangaler with an impotently off-balance slash of his hand. Catching his balance, he threw a kick to the assassin’s midriff. The glass knife in Vangaler’s hand flew in the air.

  Maran caught his breath. Blood streamed down his face, salty in his mouth. He slammed the savage to the floor, flipped his body over, leapt on him, straining for a chokehold.

  Vangaler swept his arm away, rolled Maran over, plunged his face into Maran’s neck and bit, using his sharpened teeth and metal grills to full advantage. Drunk with victory, Vangaler pulled away, lifted his face to fill the room with his cry, a primeval war whoop, triumphant clarion call.

  His victory, however, was short-lived.

  Another, higher yell punctuated the air.

  “Yi … Er … San!”

  Amber!

  In three rapid moves, she had freed herself and was on her feet; she had retrieved the glass blade that Maran knocked from Vangaler’s grip, cut the bonds holding her to the table, ripped off the gag, and released herself from the labial clips.

  She raised the glass far above her head and brought it down with all her strength across Vangaler’s exposed neck. The weapon broke in half, the long blade imbedded in her tormentor’s throat; a sharp stub remained, jutting from the beer bottleneck she still gripped. Blood spurted from the gash in the animal’s neck like a fountain. He raised his head.

  She slashed at his eyes. Vangaler struggled to rise. Maran delivered a decisive blow with his foot to Vangaler’s throat.

  Amber fell into Mack’s arms.

  The door on the other side of the room opened. A man stepped into the room, stopped, legs planted to the floor like concrete posts. He was white and in his mid-fifties, of average height, powerfully built. His hair was blond, cut high and tight, and he wore a cream shirt under a navy jacket and black trousers.

  In his hands, he held a machine pistol.

  “Baltimore!” Maran said.

  Amber stood to Maran’s side.

  “Pajak to you, asswipe. Alex Pajak.”

  Pajak! Baltimore! SAWC! The Pentagon! The White House! It’s all connected. How?

  The answer was right in front of him.

  “It all makes sense. You took advantage of the struggle. It wasn’t enough that the Dream-Teamers from State were giving up our secrets to all comers. You cut in on it to sell ordinance and rent mercenaries to Boyko.

  “The starry-eyed idealists let you sell out your country.”

  “Enough! You think that if the posturing freaks, the bankers, the stock manipulators, their cronies, can’t tell Adolph Hitler from Mother Teresa, I should bother? Think of it. Be a patriot, live like a peon, or sucker the ‘One-Worlders’ and get rich!”

  “You got it wrong,” Maran said.

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s not about money.”

  “Tell that to Hope Valentine,” the renegade snarled. “Spoils go to the winner.”

  “President Valentine,” Maran corrected, still clinging to a vestige of the respect for the civilian leadership that had been drilled into his head as a cadet.

  “Saint Valentine, you mean. All I wanted to do was stop you from bagging Boyko. She had to take care of her friend, Bombe. Her mission. Save the whole fucking, stinking world.”

  “Mack!” Amber screamed.

  He dove at her, taking her down to the floor with him.

  Vangaler had struggled into the room, gasping for breath, bleeding from the opening in his neck, one hand over a mutilated eye. In his other, he held a pistol.

  Maran rose. Vangaler lifted his gun. Maran leaped as the gunshot rang out. Behind him as Maran hit the floor, Baltimore dropped, a neat hole in his forehead.

  “You die!” Vangaler managed through his gurgling throat, re-aiming at Maran. Another gunshot. Vangaler’s body jumped as a fusillade of bullets hit him. Behind him, standing in the doorway, Tracha stood, standing lopsided, holding his chest with one hand, a smoking .40 caliber P229 Sig Sauer pistol in his other.

  He lifted the barrel to his face and blew the spiraling smoke away. His team was running past him, headed for the door to the rear rooms.

  “Tracha,” Maran sighed, exhausted, realizing that much of the blood covering his friend had come from his assailant and the canine. His own was seeping through his shirt from a chest wound and down his face from a slash on his head.

  “All in the timing, Bro. All in the timing,” he smiled through the pain. Vangaler’s dead body lay at their feet.

  “Tony!” Amber shouted.

  “My guys are on it, Amber,” Tracha assured her.

  OUTSIDE, MARAN AND TRACHA recognized the characteristic whup-whup-whup of the Blackhawk helicopters.

  “What?” Maran gasped.

  Amber, now wearing a bathrobe brought to her by one of Tracha’s men, grabbed Maran by the hand and squeezed. Followed by Tracha she led them out to a side veranda.

  Above them, three Blackhawks circled just above the trees. Three twelve-man teams of fully equipped SAWs fast-roped down.

  “What the hell?” Maran thundered. He looked at Tracha.

  “Luster’s boys. Just got the Intel on the radio,” Tracha said. “Says it is the least the United States could do for you.”

  Minutes later, one of the SAWC teams, accompanied by Tracha’s men, moved out onto the veranda from the back rooms. Held by two of the soldiers almost off his feet by his wrists tied behind with plasticuffs, Grigol Rakhmonov Boyko stumbled forward, his face haggard and bruised, his neck showing the raw wounds of a rope that had been tied by Vangaler around his neck and joined to his wrists, curling him in a fetal position like a croissant, a prisoner awaiting execution on the floor.

  Standing by his side, holding one of Boyko’s cuffed hands‌—‌Tony. He held a soccer ball under his other arm.

  SIXTY

  The Hague, the Netherlands

  The trial was held at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, the Netherlands. Maran sat in the courtroom while Boyko expressed contrition. Apparently, that didn’t merit the attention of the press other than a brief mention at the bottom of the stories they filed. What did capture their attention were the Interpol wiretap transcripts. They were intimate, detailed. But what most bothered the diplomats on the tribunal was that two of them were politically explosive.

  The first one, read aloud by Interpol’s chief investigator was a conversation between MAGIC’s Ishmael Malik Johnson and the White House’s Margaret-Anne Ryan-Colby. It took place six months before the presidential election:

  IMJ: So our guys…

  MRC: Boyko?

  IMJ: Right. Delivered up exactly one hundred fifty million dollars through our Multi-Ethnic Affiliated Green International Coalition, MAGIC.

  MRC: To the Islamic charities in the U.S.

  IMJ: The Islamic Foundation for Relief and Development‌—‌The Middle East Call for Help Council‌—‌Middle East Benevolent Democracy Foundation‌—‌others.

  MRC: All under the umbrella of the Society for Islam in America? Through Boyko? Because he originally got his support from the Islamic Russians in the Caucas
us: Georgia, Azerbaijan.

  IMJ: He started what has to be considered the progenitor of the modern private military company. Thing is, he has more than 30 companies now and they are involved in everything from terrorism and smuggling to computer software, adult education, and humanitarian causes. Started operations way back in the late ‘90s. He raises the funds. We channel that money to them as charitable donations. They disburse it to Hope Valentine’s war chest and the Democratic congressional candidates. Totally discreet. No one’s the wiser. And it’s legal. ‘A’ for Argonaut!

  MRC: For how long? Before they find out that a war criminal is behind it.

  IMJ: No one ever has to know. It’s the mission that counts.

  MRC: The mission. We can’t win this presidential election without you.

  IMJ: That close?

  MRC: Closest ever.

  The other transcript detailed a conversation between President Hope Valentine and Alexander Stassinopoulos dated shortly after Maran’s betrayal in Cabinda:

  AS: It was a shame what happened to Colonel Maran in Cabinda.

  HV: It was unforeseen. He was out of control and had to be stopped. There was too much at stake.

  AS: You’re right. National security. Had to be protected.

  HV: The best way to do that was and is through engagement, dialogue and negotiation. We may still get the Angolan government to sit down with PFLEC to resolve their dispute.

  AS: That would never happen if Colonel Maran had busted in on the PFLEC rebels and caused an international outrage.

  HV: It might well have turned out like Sabra and Shatilla for the Israelis. Accused of a massacre when they hadn’t pulled a trigger.

  The irony of Hope Valentine’s words never dawned on her. It didn’t escape Maran.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Crystal City, Virginia

  Spring came late to the Washington area on the heels of an unseasonal frost. The cherry blossoms hung persistently in the groves around Crystal City, Virginia, hard by the Pentagon. Daffodils and hyacinths, in full bloom, cast the area in brilliance. The profusion of bright pastels and sharp rococo colors fit the occasion.