Z: The Final Countdown

by Bob Mayer

  “All right. We’ll break here,” Quinn called out. Daylight revealed him to be more than just a voice in the dark. He was a tall, thin man, his hair completely white, unusual for a man of thirty-six, but not for someone in his line of work.

  Trent placed outflank security on either side and the rest of the men slumped to the ground, exhausted. Trent was the opposite of Quinn in body type: short and stocky with heavily muscled arms and legs. He’d been the heavyweight boxing champion of the regiment before Quinn and he had been cashiered after the episode in Somalia. His nose and ears showed the results of those fights, squashed and battered up against his skull.

  “I suggest everyone take a bath and get cleaned up,” Quinn said in a voice that carried across the patrol.

  “Fuck, we’re just going to get dirty again,” one of the new Australians replied, pulling his bush hat down over his eyes. Those who had served with Quinn before were already beginning to strip down.

  Quinn had Australians, English, French, Germans, and quite a few East Europeans in his group, along with several black Africans—the latter a fact that didn’t bother him in the least, but had caused four South African merks to quit just before this latest foray into the bush. Good riddance was Quinn’s view. Bullets were not a discriminator and the blacks were good men. They kept their mouths shut, followed orders, and did their job well. That was all that Quinn was interested in. The white South Africans had bitched too much anyway about things that they no longer had any control over. Change with the times or become a statistic was one of Quinn’s mottos.

  “Yes, but cleanliness is very important,” Quinn replied, keeping his voice neutral.

  “I’ll clean when I get out of this pigsty of a country,” the Australian joked.

  Quinn pulled the bolt back on his Sterling, the sound very loud in the morning air. “You’ll clean now.”

  The Australian stared at him. “What the hell, mate? You fucking queer or something?”

  “I’m not your fucking mate. I’m your commander. Take your clothes off, put them on the riverbank, then get in line.”

  “You ripping us off?” the man stood, his weapon not quite at the ready.

  “No,” Quinn said with a smile. “I’m making sure you aren’t ripping your buddies off.” He centered the muzzle of the submachine gun on the man. “Now strip.”

  Soon there was a line of naked men standing waist deep in the water. The white ones had farmer’s tans, their torsos pale, their faces and forearms bronzed from the sun. Quinn and Trent went through the men’s clothes and gear, very slowly and methodically. A diamond was a very small thing to conceal, but they had experience. Trent had briefly worked security in South Africa at the diamond mines and knew the drill, and Quinn had followed his lead enough times to pick up the science of the search. It was just like customs officials. They knew the way people tended to think when they wanted to hide something, which usually led to the same common hiding places being used.

  Quinn held up a plastic canteen and shook it. He turned it upside down, draining the water out, then took his flashlight and peered in. “Ah, what do we have here?” Quinn asked. He drew a knife and jabbed it into the canteen, splitting the side open. A small, soaked piece of cloth fell into his hand. He unfolded it. Four rough diamonds fell into his palm.

  “Whose gear?”

  The men all turned and looked at one of the Australians who had just joined them for this mission. The one who had bitched about taking a bath. “Come here, mate,” Quinn called out with a smile.

  The man walked out of the water, his hands instinctively covering his groin. “Going into business for yourself, are you?” Quinn asked.

  “I didn’t—”

  The first round caught the man in the stomach and Quinn casually raised his aim, stitching a pattern up the chest. The man flew backward into the river, arms splayed, blood swirling in the brown water. Quinn turned to Trent, who had finished with his share of the gear. “Get to work, Doctor.”

  Trent reached into his backpack and pulled out a small cardboard box of surgical gloves. He pulled a pair on and gestured for the first man. “Come on, let’s get this over with.” The man walked up and Trent checked his mouth, nostrils and ears, then down the body to his groin. “Turn. Bend.” The man grunted as Trent checked his anus, fingers probing.

  “Next.”

  When Trent was done, the men redonned their clothes and gear. “Make sure you drink upstream from that shit-pile,” Trent advised the men, pointing at the body of the Australian, which was slowly floating away downstream. “We’ll rest here for a few hours.”

  Quinn retired to the shade of a tree. He took the four diamonds and added them to the group in a leather pouch tied around his neck along with his old ID tags. Trent joined him there and handed him a sheet of paper. The message Andrews received last night.”

  Quinn looked at a long list of letters that made no sense. “They encoded it. Must be getting worried about the Americans listening in.”

  Trent didn’t reply. He took his knife out and began sharpening the already gleaming edge.

  Quinn retrieved a Ziploc bag from his breast pocket. Inside it was a small notepad. He turned to the eleventh page—equaling the day of the month they received the message—and began matching the letters of the message with the letters on the page. Then, using a tri-graph, a standard page that had three letter groups on it, he began deciphering the message. It was slow work, made more difficult by the need to figure where one word ended and the next one began. After twenty minutes, he had it done:

  TO QUINN FROM SKELETON

  LINK UP WITH PARTY—VICINITY CHILUAGE ACROSS BORDER IN ZAIRE—AT COORDINATES SEVEN TWO THREE SIX FOUR EIGHT—DATE TIME SIXTEEN JUNE ZERO NINE ZERO ZERO GREENWICH MEAN—FOLLOW ATT ORDERS OF PARTY TO BE MET—BONUS ASSURED—CONFIRM ORDERS RECEIVED END

  Quinn pulled out his map and looked at the coordinates. About eighty kilometers upstream and then slightly to the east across the border into Zaire. He handed the message to Trent.

  “Why the fuck don’t they just drop this party off at one of these dirt runways in country?” Trent asked.

  Quinn pulled a small Walkman radio out of his backpack. “You haven’t been listening to the news. I pick up SNN radio broadcasts out of Kinshasa on this. The Americans have moved an aircraft carrier to just off the coast. They’re going to start enforcing the UN’s no-fly rule.”

  “But Skeleton could still—’“

  “He’s got to cover his ass,” Quinn cut in, looking around to make sure none of the others were in earshot.

  “Why through Zaire?” Trent asked. “Skeleton’s in Namibia.”

  Quinn had already considered that. “Northern Namibia is hot right now with the SADF and the other Pan-African forces. Easier to send someone around through Zaire. Besides, it’s closer to us.”

  Trent looked at the map. “It’s still a long fucking walk.”

  “We’ve got three full days to make it.” He rubbed the stubble of his beard. “I wonder what the hell Skeleton wants us to do after we link up with this guy?”

  Trent was anything but stupid, and he had been thinking about the upcoming changes. “Probably Skeleton wants us to eyeball the mines. Get ready for when Van Wyks gets them under his control. After all, Skeleton is his chief of security.”

  “That will put us out of business,” Quinn said. “But I think we’ve played this one as long as we can. And he does promise a bonus. Exactly how much, though, I think we can negotiate over the radio the next few days, seeing as they apparently need us.”

  “We need Skeleton, too, though,” Trent noted. “For the diamonds.”

  “No,” Quinn disagreed. “We don’t need him. Push comes to shove, we can take the rocks on the black market.”

  Trent nodded toward the merks. “Speaking of that, some of these boys just want to take their share of the diamonds and split.”

  Quinn laid a hand on the stubby barrel of his Sterling. “We move out in two hours.”
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br />   Atlantic Ocean, Vicinity 12 Degrees East Longitude, 12 Degrees South Latitude,

  12 June

  “Hawkeye Three, you are clear to launch. Over.”

  “This is Hawkeye Three. Roger. Out.”

  The catapult roared and the Grumman E-2 Hawkeye accelerated down the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln and was airborne in less than three seconds. It turned due east and within twenty minutes a dark line appeared on the horizon through the cockpit window.

  The twenty-four-foot-diameter radome piggybacked on top of the fuselage began rotating, and inside the craft the radar officer checked out his equipment. He picked up the CAC—combat air cover—over the Abraham Lincoln, then he began coding out all known civilian flights in the area, of which there were currently only four recorded.

  As the Hawkeye went farther east over Angola, the four-hundred-mile reach of the radar covered more and more of the sky above that embattled country. A pair of F-14 Tomcats roared by, waggling their wings: the power to enforce the no-fly rule in case the electronic eyes picked up a target. The pilot of the surveillance craft kept them in a figure-eight pattern over the center of Angola as they settled in to their duty.

  They had their first unknown contact exactly two hours and twenty-two minutes into their tour of duty. The combat information officer was very careful to note the time in his log. After the debacle in 1994 over Turkey where air force jets downed two army Black Hawk helicopters, killing all on board, already tight procedures had been given a few extra turns of the caution screw. The CI officer knew that there were Black Hawks from the Special Operations Command operating below. And this target was moving in a manner that told the radar operator it was a helicopter. The contact was over what was tentatively identified as rebel territory in the north central part of the country. It was moving to the north.

  The CI keyed his radio as his fingers flew over his keyboard. “Stallion One, this is Hawkeye Three. I’m feeding you an unidentified bogey. Looks like rotary wing. Over.”

  The pilot of the lead F-14 confirmed he had the target information in his computer. “I’ve got it. Over.”

  “Vector in. Over.”

  “Roger. Over.”

  The CI checked to make sure he had all listed army flights accounted for. Then he double-checked. Then he triple-checked. He interrogated it, looking for a transponder code. Nothing. He tried calling the rogue flight on the radio. Nothing. Regardless, he started broadcasting a warning, ordering the flight to immediately set down, giving flight instructions to the nearest government airfield.

  “Any change?” the CI asked the radar man.

  “Yeah, he’s going lower, trying to get into terrain masking. Must think he got picked up by ground radar.” That was the advantage of the E-2’s radome—it wasn’t blocked by intervening hills, since it was looking down.

  “Stallion One, this is Hawkeye Three. I have you intercepting in thirty seconds. Over.”

  “Roger. We’re slowing. Wait one. Over.”

  The CI watched the dot representing the two F-14s merge with the target.

  The pilot came back on. “We’ve got one MI-8. No markings. Over.” The CI knew that both the rebels and the Angolan government had MI-8s. He made communication through the Abraham Lincoln with the coordination cell of the Joint Task Force headquarters in Luanda to check whether it might be a government aircraft that had both failed to file a flight plan and was in the wrong place. The JTF headquarters confirmed that it was not a government flight.

  Satisfied that this was not a friendly and, just as importantly to the CI officer, satisfied that he had all these confirmations on tape, he contacted his commander aboard the Abraham Lincoln. Eight minutes had now passed since the first contact. “Six, this is Hawkeye Three. Over.”

  The reply was immediate. “This is Six. I’ve been monitoring. Break. Stallion One, this is Six. Over.”

  “This is Stallion One. Over.”

  “This is Six. You are clear to fire. Over.”

  “Roger. Out.”

  Eighty miles to the north of the Hawkeye, the lead Tomcat dived. The pilot of the MI-8 must have finally realized that something dangerous was happening, because the helicopter tried to evade. It was a futile effort.

  A Sidewinder air-to-air missile leapt off the wing of the F-14 and was in the engine outtake of the helicopter in four seconds. A blossom of flame appeared above the jungle canopy, then disappeared into the sea of green.

  The CI officer turned to the radar operator. “They seem to be taking this seriously,” he understated. He knew it was important that they keep the sky clear for the next forty-eight hours to allow the coming infiltration of surveillance and targeting teams to occur unobstructed.

  “About time,” the radar operator said. “Show these people we mean business right from the start.”

  Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, 12 June

  The C-141 Starlifter transport roared down the runway and took off. The interior was packed with pallets of equipment and people. Riley, Conner Young, and Mike Seeger were near the front of the aircraft, next to the pallet on which their camera and communication gear were packed.

  Conner had a modem from her cellular phone hooked into her computer. She leaned over and tapped Riley as something new came in on it from SNN headquarters. “Navy F-14s off the Abraham Lincoln just downed a UNITA helicopter that was violating the no-fly rule.”

  This wasn’t going to be like Haiti, Riley knew. Savimbi and the UNITA rebels weren’t going to just give up their guns. The die was cast and they were now airborne for a war zone.

  Oshakati, Namibia, 13 June

  The area around Oshakati was lined with washes, running from north to south where they fed into the Etosha Pan. That is, they ran when the rainy season was upon the land. Right now, the washes held not water, but men and their machines of war. Wheeled armored personnel carriers and gun carriers were spaced out, hull down, in the low ground, their crews resting in the shade created by ponchos stretched out.

  The overall commander of these troops—the Pan-African Force (PAF)—was South African, both because the South African Defense Force (SADF) formed the majority of the military might and also because the SADF had the most experienced officers in conventional warfare. General Nystroom had served for thirty years in the SADF and he had weathered the many political and military winds that had swept his homeland. He had steered clear of the right-wingers and thus had survived the change in government. He did this not because he was particularly politically astute but because he had always viewed himself as simply a soldier, not a politician. He was one of the very few white officers of high rank left in the SADF. He wasn’t sure why he had received this assignment and he didn’t really care. Orders were orders.

  Right now, Nystroom was standing in one of the top hatches in his South African-made Ratel armored command vehicle. He scanned the surrounding terrain through binoculars, noting the various types of vehicles that were scattered about the perimeter.

  Unlike the campaign in Desert Storm, these troops had very few tracked vehicles. The SADF had long ago made the decision to mostly go with wheeled armor, sacrificing protection and weaponry for speed and efficiency. The distances involved in the war that South Africa had waged—prior, of course, to Mandela coming to power—in the forbidding terrain of Namibia, had been the first factor in canceling out the effectiveness of tanks. Most nonmilitary types, Nystroom knew—and many military who have never served in armor—did not realize that tanks were rated in gallons per mile, rather than miles per gallon, necessitating a tremendous logistical tail to any armored beast. A tail that the long distances involved in the desert made almost impossible to maintain.

  The wind blew a veil of sand across the top of the vehicle and Nystroom felt it rub against his skin, reminding him of the most important prohibitor of tracked armor in this terrain. The sands of Namibia were soft and shifting. A sixty-ton main battle tank would bog down where an eight-ton wheeled personnel carrier would be supporte
d.

  All this knowledge and expertise Nystroom had learned and honed in the fierce guerrilla battles in the buffer states around South Africa while the whites tried to remain in power. It was an irony not lost on Nystroom or many of the soldiers now waiting in the northern Namibian desert that they now were to turn that expertise to the aid of their traditional black foe.

  While the Americans were beginning to move by air and sea, the Pan-African Forces, of which the South Africans represented the most potent and skilled part, were spreading out across the desert, just south of the border with Angola, prepared for their historic mission. A map in the cargo bay below Nystroom showed the deployment of the forces in a loose line from Quedas do Ruacan in the west to the Capriva Strip to the east—a thin stretch of Namibia that ran between Botswana in the south and Angola and Zambia in the north.

  Nystroom had been here before, and sometimes even he had to stop a moment and sort out in his mind the strange history of this area and the shifting alliances, of which this was just the latest.

  The Ovimbundu people who populate northern Namibia are also the predominant tribe in Angola. After the United Nations had declared South African rule of Namibia to be revoked in 1966—which the leaders in Pretoria simply ignored—and the International Court of Justice declared the continued occupation to be illegal, the South Africans responded by beefing up their forces in the country. Nystroom had been a young lieutenant then and had traveled north for the first time in Namibia. The Ovimbundu had responded by forming SWAPO—the South-West African People’s Organization.

  The guerrilla war waged by SWAPO was weak at best. Open desert is not friendly to either side, but it is very difficult terrain for guerrillas to hide in. No taking to the hills or jungle here, Nystroom knew.

  To further confuse the historical picture, when the Portuguese pulled out of Angola in 1975, the UNITA nationalist movement—also composed mostly of Ovimbundu—rose up. For a few years UNITA and SWAPO worked together and, with safe bases in Angola from which to strike and return, SWAPO started achieving some success. South Africa responded in Israeli fashion, taking the war into southern Angola and attacking the base camps. Thus Nystroom was not only not new to his upcoming mission, he was also familiar with the locale. He had been in the terrain in southern Angola that they were now preparing to invade.