by Tom Clancy
The men were quiet.
Nimec watched a jet make its takeoff from the runway, gain altitude, and bank in their direction, its airframe reflecting the high sun, a silvery flare of brightness rushing across the open sky. The shoom of its turbos grew loud as it flew overhead and then began to fade.
Nimec turned toward Scull.
“What’s on your docket while we’re gone, Vince?”
“I want to follow up on the business with those French divers,” Scull said, and motioned with his chin. “We know the Rover’s clean?”
Nimec glanced toward DeMarco for an answer.
“Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t advise you to make any deep personal confessions in standard-issue vehicles like the one I’ve been driving around town, but these modified babies are checked for bugs at least once a day. Besides, they haven’t been anywhere except here at the airport, or over at the HQ site, where we’ve had men posted around the clock. Nobody besides our own’s gone near them.”
“What about guides and workmen?” Nimec said.
“They ride in the trucks or the standards. This vehicle’s okay, rest assured. If you don’t trust me, you can count on its intruder shock or bug detection systems. Take your pick.”
“Intruder shock?” Scull said.
“Anybody lays a hand on it who shouldn’t gets hit with fifty thousand volts, the same as with a stun gun. The zapper’s set every night.”
Scull nodded.
“Good enough, I just found myself a phone booth,” he said. Then he stepped past Nimec to the driver’s door and pulled it open. “You guys chill out a minute, I gotta make an important call.”
“Hello, Fred Sherman—”
“Sherm, it’s Vince,” Scull said into his secure cellular. It was much cooler inside the Rover than out on the blacktop, its mirrored windows blocking the sun’s powerful rays. “Since when do you personally answer your phone?”
“Since my receptionist left for the day along with everybody else who works sane hours,” said Sherman at the other end of the line. He was one of the top data hounds in Scull’s risk-assessment office at UpLink SanJo. “How’s it going?”
“Don’t fucking ask.”
“Nice to hear you sounding happy.”
“I try to be consistent,” Scull said. “Look, I need some info.”
“Sure. Tell me what it is, I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow.”
“I mean I need it right now.”
“Vince, it’s almost seven o’clock at night—”
“Not here in Africa, it isn’t.” Scull glanced at the dashboard clock. “Here in Africa, where I happen to be, it’s still before ten in the morning. The day’s young and the sun’s shining and it feels like a goddamn furnace.”
“Vince, come on. Another ten minutes, five minutes, I would have been out the door—”
“Good I caught you when I did, then,” Scull growled. “Is it a fluke or miracle of God, I wonder?”
“Ah crap, Vince, don’t do this to me—”
“You know the submarine cable maintenance outfit we contracted for our Gabon operation? Nautel?”
“Of course, I did most of the research on it—”
“Which is why I don’t have to explain how it’s the same fleet owner that was doing the job for Planétaire . . . and why I called you and not somebody else,” Scull said. “I want to see records from both companies about the African fiber outage back in May . . .”
“Oh. Well, that ought to be easy enough. I already have scads of them in my files . . .”
“And everything they’ve got on the accident that killed those two Nautel divers. Everything, Sherm. Internal review documents, too.”
“Different story there.” Sherman’s tone had lifted and sunk. “Nautel’s almost sure to cooperate, especially since we still haven’t inked our contracts. But it’s hard to get through to anybody who’s upper rung at Planétaire right now. With the company going bust, and those irregular accounting practices, quote unquote, being covered in the media, their top execs are all bolting down into hidey-holes. And taking their paper shredders with them.”
“More reason to pull the slimebags out by their necks,” Scull said.
“Just like that, huh?”
“Right. You figure out where we’ve got leverage. And use it.”
A prolonged sigh of resignation over the phone.
“Okay, I’ll try my best,” Sherman said. “Where do I fax the docs?”
“You don’t. Send them by ’crypted e-mail,” Scull said. “You need to talk to me about anything, dial up my cell. And from now on, don’t forward any messages to me at the hotel. Not even a hi-how-are-you from my kids. Or that brunette I’ve been seeing.”
“The racked stripper?”
“Amber’s a sultry erotic dancer,” Scull said. “But, yeah, she’s the one.”
“Christ, this does sound serious.”
“I said it was important shit. What the hell, you think I just got an urge to jerk your chain?”
“Christ,” Sherman repeated. “I’ll get back to you fast as I can.”
“Do that,” Scull said. “I’m gonna be waiting at my computer.”
“Look, rush job or not, this could take a while—”
“I’ve got a while. In fact, I’ve got all day. Send me what you can, and make it plenty. Meantime, I need to find an Internet café and plug in.”
“You sitting with a crowd of backpacking hipsters at a cyber café? Somehow I can’t picture it, Vince.”
Scull shrugged in the driver’s seat.
“Why not?” he said. “If a guy’s main goal is to be an anonymous nobody, there’s no better place for it in the whole stinking world.”
The UpLink convoy made good time for the first twenty miles of its trip out of Port-Gentil. But it was barely past noon when the populous townships beyond the city thinned out across the low, barren countryside and the string of vehicles left the paved coastal road to drudge over rutted sand and laterite.
At the head of the column, a group of local guides drove one of the unmodified Rovers. Rumbling along after it was a big, squarish 6×6 cargo truck with a loaded-down flatbed trailer. Pete Nimec occupied the front passenger seat of the tricked-out Land Rover in the third slot, DeMarco behind the right-hand steering wheel, a group of four engineers and company officers in back. Then came another armored Rover for the company honchos driven by Wade and Ackerman, followed by a plain vanilla filled with Sword ops and local hired hands. Next were two more 6×6 haulers. Hollinger, Conners, and an assortment of bigwigs and technicians rode seventh and last in the only remaining armored vehicle.
Soon they were rolling between the southern shore of N’dogo Lagoon and a belt of intermittent jungle and scrubland along the Atlantic Ocean. Sunlight poured down on the trail to throw a blinding white glare off the grainy material spread in uneven heaps beneath their wheels. Nimec could see heat-shimmers over his Rover’s wide steel hood as the feeble output from its air-conditioner vents blew lukewarm on his neck and face. Outside his window, slender smooth-barked cypresses rose straight as lamp poles from small island mounds in the lagoon. Storks and egrets stood in the straw-colored reeds at its fringes, some with their long necks bowed to drink. There was no hint of a breeze. Everything seemed still and torpid in the settled dry-season heat. The only motion Nimec observed was from animals along the lagoon bank darting off at the sound of the diesel engines, but it was always out of the corner of his eye, and always too late to catch more than a blurry glimpse of some startled creature—a sleek body, a whip of a tail—as it splashed beneath the surface.
Then lagoon and forest receded behind the convoy, and for a time there was just flat drab savanna spreading out and away from the margins of the narrow vehicle trail.
Sette Cama had been an active British camp in the middle of the nineteenth century. What remained of it now was a loose scattering of wooden huts and bungalows that rose from the sedge on either side of the road, and an overgrown grave
yard with the names of long-dead colonists etched into its crumbling headstones. Beyond there would be nothing but more deserted stretches of jungle and savanna for dozens of miles.
In his Rover up front, the guide radioed back to call a rest stop before continuing on toward the headquarters site. Then he led the vehicles off the trail over a patch of clumped, flattened grass and treaded dirt toward a large A-framed structure Nimec instantly figured to be the village trading post. There was an old pickup parked in front, a stand with some fruits and vegetables under the roofed porch, and a galvanized water bucket and metal dipper next to a slatted bench by the entrance. Out back was a row of three crude outhouses. Except for a Coca-Cola poster whose red background had faded to a pale pink, the signs taped against the dusty windows were handwritten in French. They seemed to have been put up more in defiance of the tyrannical sunlight than for any other reason. A few well-established palms around the building offered it some weak, spotty shade.
The vehicles stopped, and the locals went to stretch their legs and make small talk with a group of men who came out of the place to meet them, looking glad for a break in their monotony. While they stood and chatted, the members of the UpLink party started to dribble from their vehicles in ones, twos, and threes, a few of them wandering off to investigate the trading post, others just to stand around and smoke, a small number heading with reluctant necessity toward the shabby outhouses. Wearing bush shirts with Sword patches on the shoulders, and baby VVRS guns in sling harnesses against their bodies, some of Nimec’s men got out of their vehicles in a loose deployment around the post. They did their best to stay low profile and at the same time ensure they had control of the area, keeping watch over the execs without getting in anybody’s way. A single Sword op remained in the cab of each of the three cargo haulers.
Nimec sat beside DeMarco for a minute or two after their backseat companions had wandered off toward the post.
“I’d better work out some kinks of my own,” DeMarco said, digging his knuckles into his lower back. “Feel like taking a walk?”
Nimec pulled his head off his back rest, glanced at his watch, and thought about how much he missed Annie. He didn’t feel much like doing anything besides getting his job done.
“No thanks,” he said.
“You sure?”
Nimec gave him a nod.
“Yeah, Steve, go on,” he said. “Think I’d rather wait in here.”
The convoy was under way again within half an hour, and soon swung heavily inland through the thickening wilds.
DeMarco glanced over at Nimec as they crawled ahead in their Rover.
“Okay if I ask you something?” he said.
“Why not?”
“Could be it’s none of my business.”
Nimec shrugged.
“Go ahead, shoot,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
DeMarco nodded.
“I noticed you’ve been checking your watch a lot,” he said, keeping his voice quiet so it couldn’t be heard by the passengers in back. “And I was sort of wondering about it.”
Nimec sat looking straight out the windshield.
“Maybe I’m compulsive about the time,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe I just want to keep track of our progress. This WristLink contraption has a global positioning system readout.”
“Maybe.” DeMarco hesitated, then pointed toward the dash console with his chin. “Except we’ve got a big, clear, easy-to-see GPS display right in front of us.”
Nimec raised his eyebrows but remained quiet a moment.
“ ‘My Girl,’ ” he said finally.
“Huh?”
“That old Temptations song,” Nimec said. “Remember it?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I’ve got the watch set to play it on the day I’m supposed to get back to the States.”
“And see your girl again?”
“Right.”
DeMarco smiled a little.
“Nice,” he said. “That’s nice.”
Nimec kept looking straight out the windshield.
“Think so?”
“Yeah.”
Nimec cleared his throat.
“Actually it was her son who programmed it,” he said. “Annie’s got a boy and girl. Chris and Linda.”
DeMarco nodded. He briefly took his left hand off the steering wheel and wriggled its third finger. He was wearing a simple gold wedding band.
“I miss my sweetie, too,” he said. “Been married going on twelve years, and it’s tough when the job keeps us apart. Separations are especially hard for the kids. We have three in our own brood . . . Jake, Alicia, and Kim.”
Nimec grunted. “Your wife’s with UpLink too, right?”
“A database administrator,” DeMarco said. “Her name’s Becky. Née Rebecca Lowenstein. My mother was hoping I’d wind up with a nice Italian Catholic girl, keep with the family tradition.” A grin filled his face. “Meanwhile, she’ll be attending my older daughter’s bat mitzvah come next July. Cosí é la vita . . . that’s life.”
Nimec chuckled, and leaned back against the seat. The vehicle rumbled slowly along behind the 6×6’s tailgate, forging through clumps of broad-leafed manioc plants that swarmed up on the trail and threatened to close it in.
“You and Annie have solid plans?” DeMarco said after a while.
“For right when I get back to the States, you mean . . . ?”
DeMarco shook his head.
“I mean, are you two serious?”
Nimec looked puzzled a moment.
“We’re not engaged or anything,” he said. “Seems a little too early. But we’ve been steady for about a year, year and a half.”
DeMarco shrugged, holding the wheel.
“How long people have been seeing each other has nothing to do with serious,” he said.
Nimec raised his eyebrows.
“I’m not following you.”
DeMarco shrugged a second time. “I once dated a woman, exclusive, for almost three years,” he said. “Thought she was a great person, got on fine with her, but never considered making things permanent. Just seemed like something was missing between us. Then, bang, Becky comes along, and I know we’re a perfect match. Except I’m still involved with that other gal.”
“What’d you do?”
“Broke up with her. It’s one of those things that’s never easy, but had to be done. Then I asked Becky out, popped the question a few weeks later. Cut ahead three months, we’re walking down the aisle at that interdenominational UN chapel in New York City, beautiful place. A priest and rabbi co-officiating.”
“Never had any doubts you might’ve been rushing things?”
DeMarco gave Nimec a short glance.
“I’m only human,” he said. “You hear these stats about how over fifty percent of marriages hit the mat. And then there are all the timetables society lays on you. You’re supposed to date for this long, get engaged for that long, wait so many years to have a baby . . . sure, I had doubts. You don’t, it’s not normal. But worrying about them seemed like a waste. I knew what I knew. And figured it was enough for me to commit.”
Nimec became quiet in his seat as they rocked along over the deeply rutted trail. He turned his eyes to the display console’s GPS screen.
“Looks like we’re pretty near base,” he said, motioning at the readout graphics. “All we have to do now is get there without breaking an axle.”
DeMarco nosed their Rover forward, took a hard, jarring bump.
“Or our asses,” he said, his hand tight around the wheel.
The sound of engines was close.
They raised their eyes, their heads covered with the heat and flash retardant hoods now. Although the brush around them trembled slightly, it did not part.
Saddled high in the bubinga tree, the man with the Sig SG550 sniper rifle was motionless, camouflage netting wrapped around his face, his cheek against the weapon’s nonreflective black sto
ck.
The sound was growing louder, yes. Closer. But its source had not yet entered their fire zone.
The ambushers remained hidden, ready for the moment.
“What the hell,” DeMarco said. His foot had slammed down hard on the brake pedal. “You ever ask yourself if the boss finds these green splats on the map just to test us? See what it’ll take to drive us crazy?”
Nimec produced a thin smile.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I could almost wonder.”
DeMarco shifted the tranny into PARK. He had a feeling they might be going nowhere for a while.
They sat looking out their windshield at the cargo hauler’s tailgate, their passengers muttering unhappily in the rear. A moment earlier the convoy’s lead Rover had come to a sudden halt, setting off a chain reaction down the line. This after their trail had taken them through a thicket of snarled, spiny-limbed euphorbia toward a jungle corridor that had promised some blessed shade from the relentless sun.
The forward driver had exited his vehicle, gone around to the truck behind him, and then paused to talk with some other locals who’d hopped from its cab—the entire team scanning the trail up ahead, shielding their eyes from the midday brightness with their hands. Now he separated from them, approached the Rover, and made a quick winding gesture with his finger.
DeMarco lowered the automatic window, catching a blast of hot air in his face.
“C’est un arbre qui tombe,” the driver said to him, looking dismayed. A man named Loren with angular features and a deep umber complexion, he was an excellent local guide who had already made the trek out to UpLink’s Sette Cama base a bunch of times.
