by Marc Cameron
Ryan leaned forward in his chair, mentally bracing himself for what was about to come next. “Casualties?”
“Unknown at this time, Mr. President. Contacts at the South Korean embassy report small-arms fire. They’re buttoned up tight for the moment, but they have dedicated an analyst to keep us up to date on what they’re seeing—which up to now is not very much.”
Ryan said, “Let’s open some back channels through neighboring countries. Get things rolling right away.”
“We have DEA personnel in Lagos and Homeland Security in Accra,” Forrestal said. “One of my Annapolis classmates is an NCIS special agent stationed in Douala, on the coast. I’ve reached out to him directly but have yet to make contact. And the two hundred seventy-eight men in Garoua to the north.”
“Good work, Robby,” Ryan said, stifling a groan. He was groaning far too much lately, and didn’t want to do it without thinking if the cameras happened to be rolling with hot mics. “So that’s the what. How about the why? This seems like a drastic overreaction to a grainy video.”
Forrestal looked at Scott Adler. His job was to brief and offer analysis when called upon to do so, but the embassy fell under Foggy Bottom’s purview—and the Commander was happy to let the secretary of state jump in.
“We’re still in the guessing stages,” Adler said. “But President Njaya has been hounding us to publicly take his side against the separatist movement in the English-speaking areas of the country.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “I realize we’re early in the process here, but I need eyes on the ground. Some kind of intelligence. What’s the size of the Marine guard force there?”
Forrestal glanced at his notes. He’d been briefing Ryan long enough to know he would ask about fellow Marines. “The NCOIC and five watch standers,” he said.
“Maybe they run a split shift,” Ryan observed. “Could be they’re not all on duty. Find out the number for the NCOIC and for the Marine House in Cameroon.” He turned to Burgess. “On second thought, you handle this, Bob. I want someone stratospheric in their chain of command to call and remind these Marines not to rush in and get themselves killed. We need intelligence, not martyrs. This is not the hill I want them to die on.”
Cell phones were customarily left in a basket outside the Oval, so Burgess opened a drawer in the base of his chair, retrieving one of the secure landlines to make his call. He cupped a hand over his mouth, speaking in hushed but forceful tones to convey the gravity and necessary speed of the situation. He hung up less than a minute later, giving the President a nod that it was done.
Forrestal said, “Two MQ-9s are in the air now from Garoua. They should be on scene in the next ten minutes.”
“Good to hear,” Ryan said. “Let’s get the feeds piped into the Situation Room.”
“Already being done, Mr. President,” Burgess said.
“Bob,” Ryan said. “Any of those sons of bitches who’ve attacked American soil so much as point an antiaircraft weapon above the tree line, and we dust them.”
“Understood.”
“The Task Force Darby CO”—Forrestal referred to his notes—“Major Workman, is discussing the situation with his host counterparts there in the northern part of the country.”
“Eighty-seventh Infantry out of Fort Drum is running the show along the Nigerian border,” Burgess said.
Ryan gave a nod of approval. “Tenth Mountain. Good.”
Burgess continued. “Major Workman feels confident at least some of the Cameroonian Rapid Intervention Battalion will give him a straight answer. They’ve spilled blood and shed blood together fighting Boko Haram. There’s some trust there going both ways.”
“If they even know,” Ryan said. “BIR forces working daily alongside the U.S. military are not likely to be in the loop on any attack. Are you telling me the Cameroonian military chased one of their own generals into our embassy and nothing hit any of our tripwires?”
Every U.S. mission overseas had emergency action plans that included highly classified benchmarks that would elicit specific responses. These benchmarks were known as tripwires. Molotov cocktails on a car parked across the street might cause an increased uniformed guard presence. Lob one over the fence and stronger measures would kick in. Certain tripwires—coups, nearby terrorist attacks—might call for anything from the evacuation of nonessential personnel all the way to the destruction of documents and closure of the embassy.
“None, Mr. President,” SecState Adler said. “This happened all at once. No warning. No tripwires.”
Forrestal said, “Initial reports indicate most locally hired security forces have walked away in the face of the military vehicles.”
“‘Most’?” Ryan said.
“Korean witnesses say there are two out front with the Marines.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I’m trying to imagine our Marines allowing people to run into the embassy, even a general.”
Forrestal paused for a moment, like he had uncomfortable news. “The Korean diplomat I spoke to indicated the Marines taught a big self-defense course to local women and girls. This is only a guess, but General Mbida’s daughter could have been part of that class. According to the South Koreans, the Marines recognized them, saw they were in danger, and let them in.”
Now Ryan let go with an honest-to-goodness groan.
“What about Diplomatic Security?” he asked. The regional security officer would be the senior law enforcement and security expert at the embassy.
“The RSO is a guy named Carr,” Adler said. “He was a SWAT officer with Albuquerque PD before he came on with State. I pulled his record before coming over here. He’s apparently kind of a badass. He’s been with DSS for fourteen years.”
“We could use a few badasses over there right now,” Ryan mused. “Cameroon . . . That’s Ambassador Burlingame. Right?”
“Correct, Mr. President,” Adler said. “Chance Burlingame. He came over from USAID a couple of months ago. He’s got a lengthy history with the foreign service in Africa.”
“What’s his status at this moment?”
“Outside the embassy,” Adler said, shifting on his feet as he did so. No one in the room liked to admit that they did not have a clear answer to one of the President’s questions. “We are still checking. But according to the staffer who made the original call to Ops, the badass RSO is with him.”
15
Adin Carr loved his job, but he didn’t care much for the title of regional security officer. His father was a cop, his brother was a cop, and he was a cop—not a security officer. The title of RSO was absent from his business cards and he introduced himself simply as Special Agent Carr. No one in Africa—or anywhere else other than the big-dog diplomats at Foggy Bottom—cared anyway.
“You, Mr. Ambassador,” Carr said, dodging a centipede the size of his hand as it undulated across the dirt trail, “are one heck of a runner.”
He adjusted the fanny pack on his waist to keep it from flopping as they headed down the wooded trail. The Glock 19 he carried inside the small nylon bag wasn’t a huge weapon, but he didn’t have a lot of extra padding and the ten-kilometer course up the hill behind the embassy and around behind the Hotel Mont Fébé gave it plenty of time to give him a hellacious bruise on the point of his hip if he wasn’t careful. He was tall, a little on the gaunt side, with the dark copper complexion of his Navajo mother. A desert rat at heart, he’d grown up on the reservation near Blanding, Utah, and would never get used to humidity like that of West Africa. Carr subscribed to the maxim that golf was a good walk spoiled, but the course behind the embassy offered a great place to run without getting run over by some crazy taxi driver. Better still, it was manicured and relatively well drained after the last week of constant rain. There was the off chance that some rascal would try and rob him during the run, which was the point of carrying the Glock.
He’d starte
d calling the bad guys “rascals” when he was RSO in Papua New Guinea, the assignment prior to this one. The word had a quaint connotation in the United States—mischievous. But in PNG, the masked bandits would hack you to pork chops with a bush knife if they didn’t shoot you in the face with a homemade shotgun.
Carr’s mother was from the Two Rocks Sit clan, daughter of a long line of Navajo holy men. She believed in skin walkers, curses, and all manner of witches and spirits, but those highland tribes Carr met in PNG took it to an entirely new level. Those rascals burned women to death for sorcery on a regular basis. As with most assignments, he and Linda had made many friends in PNG, but the three years in Port Moresby had been an eternity, with him worried about his wife every time she went to the store. Cameroon was poor, rife with political corruption, and pretty much looked as if the whole country had just been carpet-bombed. But it was a picnic compared to their time in PNG. It was sure as hell better than going back stateside. He’d already been told he would be tapped as a supervisory agent at WFO—the Washington Field Office—on his return and he wanted to stay away from D.C. as long as possible. Besides, he and Linda were in this for the adventure. Africa was a good place for that. Black mambas, bush cobras, rampaging elephants, Boko Haram—there was plenty to love. He’d heard the rascals were a little more civilized in Cameroon, but the ones he’d seen still carried big bush knives, and he didn’t intend to find out how eager they were to use them. Especially not with the ambassador in tow.
The last chief of mission had contracted malaria and returned to Iowa. Burlingame had been in Cameroon for only two months, but he wasn’t new to Africa, having worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in several other countries. The ambassador was an inch or two taller than Carr, well over six feet, with sandy blond hair that he kept just long enough to part. He carried himself well, and, as anyone who’d spent any length of time on the continent, understood that unpredictable things happened for one simple reason—TIA.
This Is Africa.
“Adin,” Burlingame said, hardly even breathing hard after five and a half of their six-mile run. “What do you say we add a couple of klicks to our run tomorrow.”
“I’m heading to Botswana tomorrow to teach a class at the regional police academy. I’m game for Friday.” Carr shot his boss a grin. “But you might keep in mind that I not only have to run, I have to be in good enough shape to fend off a deadly forest cobra while you escape if we get into trouble.”
Burlingame chuckled—something the previous guy rarely did, even before he got malaria. “Then who am I supposed to run with while you’re gone to Botswana?”
“You could stay inside, where—”
Emergency sirens that Carr had mounted on the embassy walls stopped him in his tracks. Painfully loud, the wailing sirens pulled double duty, warning everyone on the compound that something bad was going down, and, it was hoped, scaring some sense into any vandals who might be trying to pull a Tehran.
Carr ducked sideways, toward the shadow of some trees, grabbing Ambassador Burlingame by the shoulder of his T-shirt and dragging him along.
“A drill?” the ambassador asked.
Carr crept forward, keeping an eye peeled for the whiplike form of any Jameson’s mambas as he pulled aside the greenery for a better look at the embassy grounds.
“Nope,” he said. “Not a drill.”
“How can you know?”
“Because I’m the one who schedules the drills.”
The scene came into view for both men at the same moment, and their reactions were 180 degrees apart. Burlingame gasped, bolting forward, ready to run headlong to the fence. Carr yanked him back, keeping him in the safety of the trees.
Burlingame attempted to pull away. “I have to get down there.”
“Hang on,” Carr hissed, taking a better grip on the ambassador’s shirt. He was fully prepared to tackle the man if he had to. “We won’t do anyone any good if you’re caught up in whatever this is.”
Burlingame’s chest heaved. “Your people gave no indication?”
“None,” Carr said, still concentrating on the melee below. Three women he recognized as embassy spouses had been swimming with their kids in the pool not far from the back fence when the sirens went off. Embassy staff drilled with their families for all sorts of disasters and emergencies. Even the kids had scrambled out of the pool and were now running toward the chancery. Six heavy Camaroonian MRAP vehicles had taken up strategic positions outside the fence.
“A siege,” the ambassador whispered.
An embassy staffer Carr recognized as Karen from Human Resources leaned out an upper-floor window with what looked like a satellite phone, before ducking quickly back inside when she saw the MRAPs. Carr thought it odd that she’d risk leaning out for a call until he saw the demolished antenna array on the roof. They’d heard a couple of booms before they came around the mountain, but they’d been muffled by the thick foliage and Carr had chalked them up to aircraft or a distant military drill.
His hand dropped to the fanny pack, tapping his own Glock to make sure it was still there. He had one extra magazine with fifteen more rounds, giving him thirty-one in all. The pistol made him feel a little better, but it was hardly enough to mount a counterattack. In addition to the sidearm, he had a folding Benchmade knife, a small Streamlight flashlight, and a cell phone. He went for the phone first.
“Good idea,” Burlingame said. “Maybe someone in the chancery can tell us what’s going on.”
Carr tried the security office first, got nothing but a fast busy signal. The troops that had rushed the embassy had likely jammed the towers. They’d probably cut the landlines as well.
Carr lowered the phone.
“Cell phones are a no-go,” he said. “We need to get you to a secure location and find a landline or satellite phone to call this in.”
The ambassador took several deep breaths, trying to calm himself. “What the hell, Adin? Did Cameroon just declare war on the United States?”
“It looks that way, sir,” Carr said. “We need to go.”
“We can’t just leave.”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do, Mr. Ambassador.”
Burlingame gasped, pointing downhill.
“Damn it!” Carr hissed.
Sarah Porter, the wife of the deputy chief of mission, was dragged from one of the MRAPs and shoved into a waiting jeep. Her hands were cuffed behind her.
“Mrs. Porter . . .”
Burlingame grabbed Carr by the forearm. “We have to follow that jeep.”
“Sir,” Carr said. “Mrs. Porter is awesome. She’s like that really cool aunt that most of us had a crush on when we were kids. But my first priority is your safety.”
Burlingame gave him a side-eyed glare. “I can tell you want to go after her. I’m just giving you an excuse. An order, really.”
Carr weighed his options. There were several friendly embassies in the area, but there were also a lot of unfriendly-looking military vehicles patrolling around them. No, the Peace Corps offices were a better choice. They weren’t secure, but they were close, less than two kilometers away on the east side of the golf course. They’d do their best to see where the Army took Mrs. Porter, and then he’d stash Ambassador Burlingame at the Peace Corps offices until he got a handle on what was going down—or the cavalry arrived.
“You’re the boss,” he finally said.
“Maybe Boko Haram infiltrated the military, do you think?” Burlingame asked as they moved, peering through the foliage toward the compound.
“No,” Carr said. “It looks like a coup or something. If it was Boko we’d be hearing a heck of a lot more gunfire.”
“At least it’s political then, and not religious.”
Carr ducked to the right, hopping over a decaying log that looked like a good home for a snake. “Mr. Ambassador,”
he said grimly. “To some people, politics is a religion.”
16
Reza Kazem and his men—seven in all—pressed their chests into the muddy soup, shoulders hunched against a steady downpour, rifles out in front ready to deploy quickly if the need arose—which it would, and very soon. Countless silver waterfalls, born of the heavy spring rains, streaked the gunmetal mountains, turning gullies into streams and streams into rivers.
They carried long knives and assorted versions of the venerable Russian Kalashnikov, some with folding stocks, some with blond wooden furniture, others with a plastic that reflected distorted images of their nervous faces. Guns were not easy to come by, and target practice drew unwanted attention even out of town. Their kit, it seemed, had been cobbled together by someone who looked at a magazine photograph of the gear an insurgent should have. A few of the items, like the coil of para cord dangling from one’s belt, were generally superfluous. Others, like the three metal carabiners clipped to Raheem’s load-bearing vest, looked ridiculous and posed a real danger to the mission. Still, Kazem left the men to their own devices when it came to gear. The blood of a revolutionary coursed through the veins of every Iranian—even, or especially, those who had grown tired of life since the last one.
Kazem had wanted bad weather. Officials tended not to bother with too much of anything that required them to get out of their vehicles in this kind of rain. The storage facility outside Tehran was a plum assignment, absent the frequent skirmishes farther south in Baluchistan. The hiss of rain and skittering rockslides dampened any noise of approach, but even now, the sound of laughter spilled from the tin guard shack inside the gate.
“This makes no sense,” Raheem said from Kazem’s left. The mosquitolike whine in his voice made it difficult to be sure if his cheeks were wet with rain or tears. “I only count four guards.”
