by Tom Clancy
But if his heart’s utmost love were shared in equal measure by wife and child? Where then to deal the piercing blow?
The wife was a viable prospect, yes. Because she was often in the hardened security of Gordian estate, or with Gordian himself, she would be the lesser target of opportunity as a practical matter. But Kuhl’s surveillance also indicated she regularly ventured off alone—and on those instances there would be openings.
Practicality, however, could not be a determinant. Kuhl had studied Gordian for years now. Hard target or soft, he would go after whichever won him the ultimate objective. And for that reason he was leaning toward the daughter for maximum effect.
Gordian’s marriage stood on a commitment made by two. On assumptions of mutual responsibility; paired choices, hopes, and dreams. And paired risks. Take the wife, and some part of the foundation they had built together might survive, leave Gordian with the spirit to recover. But the child was meant to carry the future on her wings. The risks they had chosen for themselves were not hers to bear. And this child. This daughter. Strong, living freely, forward-moving and sure of herself . . .
With his daughter held hostage, Gordian would be paralyzed, unable to function. And when her wings were crushed, and the hopes and dreams she embodied died in Kuhl’s clenched fist, it would irreparably break Gordian, ruin him in every way.
Kuhl sat silently in the lamplight as the marine fog crawled up against his cabin windows and unsettled gusts of wind whipped across its roof. Eyes alert, ears pricked, the watchful black shepherd canted its head up toward the creaking beams and rafters.
After a time Kuhl tapped the keyboard of his laptop and once again accessed Harlan DeVane’s secure e-mail server. Then he typed:
A robin red-breast in a cage, Puts all heaven in a rage.
The message sent, Kuhl turned off his computer and sat still again.
Outwardly, he appeared to be relaxed in his chair.
At his center, he felt Destiny’s great spoked wheel rumble heavily through a momentous turn.
SEVEN
GABON, AFRICA / SAN JOSE
From the Wall Street Journal Online Edition:
UPLINK AND SEDCO CONNECT
IN CENTRAL-SOUTHERN WEST AFRICA
Lines of Convergence Drawn in Light between
Telco and Power Industry Titans
SAN JOSE—Less than two weeks after UpLink International finalized its White Knight takeover and development of the African fiberoptic network left abandoned by the sudden pullout of financially strapped European rival Planétaire Systems Corp., UpLink has injected the troubled marine fiberoptics market with yet another surge of stockholder attention, winning an estimated $30 million contract with Texas-based Sedco Petroleum to wire its regional subsea facilities into the carrier system. The new network segment will deliver high-speed phone and Internet/Intranet connections between Sedco’s growing string of platforms in the Gulf of Guinea and their coastal offices and is expected to increase the quality and reliability of communications for the oil company’s marine-drilling operations.
Financial analysts are in general agreement that the deal will benefit both parties. Sedco stands to increase production from its facilities and heighten its prestige in a region where competition is intense for the leasing of offshore fields. UpLink likewise will receive a considerable economic and public relations boost from the move, quieting speculative jitters that its African project would sap corporate revenues at a time when most telcos are scaling back the pace of expansion, and investor optimism in broadband remains low due to lingering after-shocks from the dotcom implosion and consumer reticence toward new media technologies, such as video-on-demand and live-event multicasting.
In a symbolic display of commitment for the fast-track prioritization of their plans, Sedco Chairman of the Board Hugh Bennett, and UpLink Founder and CEO Roger Gordian—the latter almost absent from the public eye since his near-fatal illness several years ago—have informed the Wall Street Journal that they will attend a formal contract-signing ceremony sometime next month aboard one of Sedco’s state-of-the-art drill platforms off Gabon, not coincidentally the hub of UpLink International’s African fiber network. Only the size of Colorado, with a population of under two million, the country nonetheless can boast of a relatively stable civil infrastructure and accelerated democratic reforms under President Adrian Cangele, offering foreign companies a lower-risk host environment than its notoriously chaotic regional neighbors—among them Cameroon, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), and Angola.
This is not to suggest that Gabon is anything close to a Western investor’s paradise. UpLink’s large and formidable private security force has acquired a worldwide reputation. But despite Cangele’s reform measures, a complex political landscape and employee safeguard issues have led many other corporations to remain wary of their practical ability to conduct business in the tiny nation. . . .
From L’Union Online
(limited content English version):
PRESIDENT CANGELE AND PARLIAMENT
SHARE IN JOYOUS RECEPTION FOR UPLINK
INTERNATIONAL
LIBREVILLE—In a gathering scheduled for later today, His Excellency El Hadj President Adrian Cangele and senior Parliamentary lawmakers will stand together beneath the graceful marble portico of the Presidential Palace to ratify a fifteen-year grant of the UpLink telecommunications licenses that had been early approved by the National Assembly. This frees the way for UpLink’s installation of a state-of-the-art fiberoptic network throughout the continent, and reaffirms the Republic of Gabon’s position as undisputed leader in Africa’s technological and economic rise to maturity on the global stage.
By confirming Uplink’s long-term franchise, President Cangele has given the company renewed confidence to proceed with its establishment of a headquarters complex in the Sette Cama region without concern that current network building operations could be interrupted by political sea changes. A further provision of the charter enables the Ministry of Transportation to deepen funding for construction of a modern paved highway from Port-Gentil to the Sette Cama, a difficult linkage that currently requires passage by air, river boat, or truck over dirt roads that are prone to flooding in the rainy season and plagued by scattered outbreaks of banditry, acts primarily committed by cross-border infiltrators (see feature article Cameroonian and Congolese Lawlessness). While UpLink will be a major beneficiary of upgraded travel to the region, it will also prove a splendid boon to agriculturists and lumbermen in far outlying areas, allowing easier distribution of their products to domestic and international markets. Increased tourism to the Sette Cama’s Iguéla and Loango National Wilderness Reserves, long attractive to photographic safari planners and sport fishermen, is viewed as an additional economic dividend for Gabon.
In a demonstration of its openhanded cooperative relationship with the Cangele administration, UpLink International has offered to defray a large portion of the highway’s construction cost with corporate funding. While no specific financial amount has been disclosed, its promised subsidy is rumored to be in excess of $10 million U.S., ensuring that no unfair tax burden will be imposed on residents of Port-Gentil and its surrounding districts.
Shortly before this story went to press, President Cangele was asked about media stories of political opposition to his aggressive backing of the UpLink licenses. “The stories were classic sensationalistic exaggerations,” he told our reporter, adding, “It is praiseworthy that none such accounts appeared in L’Union, our national beacon of journalistic integrity and accuracy.”
The president went on to explain that there has been no significant governmental dispute over the idea that UpLink International represents the nation’s telecommunications future.
“Any divisions that may have emerged concerned minor timing and procedural issues and were settled by brotherly, well-ordered debate,” he said. “My appearance with the foremost members of all our coalition parties will show
that, regardless of political or tribal affiliations, the Gabonese people are joined by common principle, and a wish to champion West Africa’s shift from continuous cycles of violence and revolution to progressive, harmonious evolution at the dawn of the twenty-first century.”
From L’Union Online
(limited content English version):
CAMEROONIAN AND CONGOLESE
LAWLESSNESS: WHO IS IN CHARGE NEXT
DOOR?
FRANCEVILLE—Before sunrise on September 25, Abasi Aseme, 64, left his home in the village of Garabinzam accompanied by his three adult sons and several carts packed with furs, ivory, and a modest quantity of panned gold bought from Minkébé camp diggers, their little mule train bound for a trader’s market thirty miles to the south at the northern edge of Djoua Valley. They had made the trip through the lower Minkébé Forest every week for decades and were welcome callers at supply outposts along their sparsely traveled path. One of these posts was owned by Abasi’s older brother, Youssou.
When the Aseme family did not make their regular stop around noon, Youssou became concerned: in the remote bushland, a dangerous stalking ground for animal and human predators, locals know to travel by daylight or not at all. By early evening Youssou’s concern had turned to unease, and then to worry. The Asemes still had not appeared. Nor would they after darkness fell. Abasi did not have a telephone, and there was no way of contacting his brother’s wife to see whether anything might have occurred to delay his usual market visit.
Early the next morning Youssou and a small party of friends went out in search of his relatives, striking out north toward Garabinzam. Two hours later, the missing traders were found murdered, their wagons and merchandise gone. The killings had been savage. All four victims had their throats cut, their bodies lined in a row on the trail, their legs hacked off below the knees and tossed into the nearby brush, where it must have been evident the body parts would be discovered immediately.
Among Cameroonian bandits, mutilation of the lower extremities is considered a message to those who might be inclined toward pursuit, a well-known signal that they would best keep their own legs from leading them to certain death.
The Asemes are but the latest casualties in repetitive waves of attacks on rural Gabonese by coupeurs de route, armed thieves who have fled from antigang crack-downs in Yaoundé and Ambam in Cameroon using graft to buy the cooperation of police and slipping easily through porous border checkpoints along the Minkébé wilderness’s mountain ridges. Once believed to pose a threat only at our country’s northernmost boundaries, these thugs have in recent months formed alliances of convenience with splinter guerrilla bands made fugitive by Congolese political conflict, and together staged raids on townships such as N’Dendé, deep in our country’s interior, with scattered incidents of road ambush reported as far south as the Iguéla, Loango, and Sette Cama Forests near the coast. The stepped up violence has led Gabonese law enforcement officials to ask their colleagues across the border when they intend to take responsibility for apprehending their vicious castoffs. . . .
From the Cameroon Tribune Online
—Editorial
(translated from the French):
GABON’S NATIONAL CREDO: IF YOU
CANNOT COMPETE, CONDEMN!
by Motmou Benote
Let us begin with the obvious: gang violence and brigandage are unacceptable wherever they may originate. But unless Gabon ceases it efforts to make others accountable for the outlaw problem in its northern districts, casting blame elsewhere rather than engaging in an aggressive pursuit of homegrown malefactors and tribal agitators, its police and military forces will soon be pointing their guns skyward to guard against menaces from distant galaxies. . . .
They toiled in the steamy midmorning heat, a dozen men in jungle fatigues swinging their machetes through the parched brown sedge and waxy clusters of euphorbia beside the dirt road. They kept their sleeves rolled down and wore heavy protective gloves, taking care to cover their skin; the succulents were filled with burning latex juice, and had thorny spurs all along the ribs of their fat, tangled branches.
The men thrashed at the dense vegetation. Their head wraps were drenched with sweat. The camouflage hoods they would put on were still stuffed in their pockets, unneeded as yet. There were no eyes about to see them, and they were not in any hurry to feel the heavyweight Nomex/Kevlar fabric slicken against their streaming wet cheeks and brows.
They worked in the heat, worked ceaselessly, creating clear fields of fire for their ambush. Their shoulder-slung Milkor 5.56-mm semiautomatic rifles were of South African origin, as were the lightweight 60-mm commando mortars and multishot barrel-loaded grenade launchers hidden farther back in their 4×4. Two Shmel RPO-A infantry rocket tubes rounded out their arsenal of heavy weapons, the “Bumblebee” variants designed to fire fuel-air explosive warheads.
A Russian military specialty used to devastating effect during their Chechen campaigns, man-portable thermobaric hardware cannot be purchased cheaply on the black market.
The job’s sponsors had been anything but close fisted.
Although some members of the band had equipped their mortar tubes with reticulated, microprocessor-controlled electronic sights, most felt the attachments were burdensome and off-balancing to their aim. Kirdi and Kulani bushmen from northern Cameroon, they had been raised with the bow and arrow as rural Americans might be with the hunting rifle. Where seasonal drought defeats cultivation of food crops, live game is a vital source of protein, and the need to kill or go hungry does more to perfect one’s weaponry skills than gun sport. For these men, the ability to acquire a target was basic to their survival, and they were masters at calculating range and determining projectile trajectories.
Five hundred feet ahead of them, the dirt track plunged eastward into a thick, shaded grove of mixed okoumé and bubinga, where a smaller group chopped at the tree trunks with axes, perspiration glistening on their muscled brown arms, their blades snarling in epiphytic vines that coiled up and up around the bark into the leafy green crowns.
The trees crashed down one by one and were rolled across the road. Then branches, brush, and pieces of slashed vines were strewn over the felled trunks to lay a screen of foliage over the ax cuts. Obscured from sight by broken patterns of shadow, the treefall blended into the overgrowth from a distance, and to the drivers of the line of approaching vehicles, would appear to be a natural phenomenon. Long before they might inspect it closely enough to learn otherwise, their convoy would be surrounded on all sides.
Another indispensable survival tool of the hunter is his knowledge of how to exploit the terrain for camouflage and concealment.
The group’s construction of their road block took a little under two hours. When they were satisfied the job was done, several of them went over to join their fellows in the copse of tall grass and succulents, while others spread out amid the trees. A single man scaled up a bubinga to saddle himself in a fork of its widespread limbs and find a comfortable position for his Steyr SG550 sniper gun, custom-railed with an AN/PIS thermal, day/ night sight.
The men in the copse had also finished their preparations of the area. Their gloves and uniforms tacked with spines and dripping the pasty, whitish secretions of the euphorbia stems, they had cut fire lanes that were as unobtrusive as the log barrier.
Now the band of hired jungle fighters would plant their mortars, and rest, and wait.
It would be a while yet before the UpLink convoy reached them.
A few minutes before the outset of the Sette Cama supply and inspection run, Pete Nimec stood talking with Steve DeMarco, Joel Ackerman, and Vince Scull at the airport parking area where their UpLink team had gathered. Nimec was leaning back against the driver’s side of a modified Sword Land Rover, elbows propped on the hood. The other three faced him in a close ring. Their tight little huddle around Nimec, and the 4×4’s bulking frame behind him, would make it tough for anyone watching from out of sight to monitor their speech.
/>
“The company execs ready over there?” Nimec said, and nodded toward a nearby line of Rovers and trucks.
“Tucked into their seats nice and comfy,” DeMarco said. “And actually glad to be headed into the jungle after finding out about the termites.”
Nimec couldn’t say he blamed them. “Freight loaded up?”
DeMarco gave an affirmative nod.
“Okay,” Nimec said. “It’s a broiler today, but let’s be sure we wear our vests. No exceptions. There should be extras stowed in the Rovers for the execs. We all know our jobs. Stay alert.”
“Knowing we’ve got the crawling eye on us,” Ackerman said, “it sort of comes easy, chief.”
Nimec looked at him. “I’m just being careful,” he said. “The bugging surprises me, but it doesn’t knock me out of my socks. After Antarctica, our base getting hit hard on a continent where there isn’t even supposed to be guns, I half expect anything. You need to remember where we are. This country’s surrounded by other countries where nobody’s in charge of the farm. Or everybody claims to be. I can imagine how some of the authorities here just might feel threatened by foreigners.”
“Even ones bearing gifts,” DeMarco said. “You think that could be the reason we’re being scoped? Some eager-beaver gendarme trying to impress his bosses?”
Nimec shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to downplay the seriousness of it. My gut tells me there’s a better than even chance we’re onto something else. But until we firm up our information, we should be careful about what we assume.” He paused, then shrugged again. “My point right now’s really that for the past week or so you’ve been protecting material assets. Ground freight. Everybody here knows it can put you into a certain mode. Today, with the VIPs going out, things are different. What we need to watch out for is different. There are human beings to protect. And I want to make sure we don’t let our guard down for a second. That we do what we always do when there’s more than the usual set of considerations about the safety of our personnel.”
