Skeleton Coast

  A ramp at the rear of the aircraft slowly lowered, reminding Nina of a medieval drawbridge. A man she didn’t recognize emerged and approached the group. “Nina?” he asked, yelling over the engines noise.

  Nina stepped toward him. “I’m Nina Visser.”

  “Hi,” he said in a friendly tone. “Dan Singer wanted me to tell you that the United States’ government has a program called Echelon. With it they can listen to just about any electronic conversation in the world.”

  “So?”

  “You should be more careful what you say over a satellite phone, ’cause someone was listening last night.” Even as his words were sinking in, Cabrillo dropped his easy demeanor and whipped a pistol from behind his back, aiming it at Nina Visser’s tall forehead. Three more men charged down the Caribou’s ramp, led by Linc. Each was armed with an MP-5 machine pistol and they swept their guns from person to person. “Hope you guys like it out here,” Juan continued. “We’re on a rather tight schedule and don’t have time to haul you in to the police.”

  One of the environmentalist fanatics shifted his weight to lean closer to their truck. Juan fired a bullet close enough to his foot to gouge the edge of his rubber-soled boot. “Think again.”

  Linc kept the environmentalists covered, clearing the way for Juan to cut Geoff Merrick free while the other two Corporation men bound each of the kidnappers with plastic flex cuffs. Merrick was unconscious and his shirt was caked with dried blood. Julia was aboard the Oregon tending to the wounded freedom fighters from Zimbabwe, but one of her orderlies had made the flight. Juan turned Merrick over to the medico and stepped back out into the sunlight carrying two jerry cans of water.

  “If you ration this it should last a week or so.” He tossed the cans into the back of the truck.

  He searched the vehicle and found Nina’s satellite phone in the glove compartment. He also came away with a couple of assault rifles and a pistol.

  “Kids shouldn’t play with guns,” he said over his shoulder as he returned to the plane. Then he paused and came back to the group. “I almost forgot something.”

  He scanned their faces and spotted the person he wanted trying to hide behind a large bearded kid. Juan walked over and yanked Susan Donleavy’s arm. The guy protecting her made to swing at Cabrillo’s head. The effort was clumsy, and Juan easily ducked the blow, coming up with his nine millimeter pressed firmly between the collegian’s startled eyes. “Care to try that again?”

  The kid stepped back. Juan cinched Susan Donleavy’s cuffs tight enough to let her know there was going to be worse to come, and frog-marched her to the plane. At the ramp he paused and addressed the two team members who were going to remain behind. They had manhandled a rubber bladder of fuel for the truck off the plane. “You know the drill?”

  “We’ll drive about thirty miles deeper into the desert and dump them.”

  “That way the plane Singer sent will never find them,” Juan said. “Just don’t forget to get the GPS coordinates so we can get them later.”

  “Then we drive back to Windhoek, stash the truck someplace, and get a hotel room.”

  “Check in with the ship as soon as you arrive,” Juan said and shook their hands. “Maybe we can get you out before we go after the guns up north in the Congo.”

  Just as Cabrillo was about to disappear inside the Caribou with his prisoner, he shouted at the environmentalists, “See you in a week.”

  Linc trotted after him, and as soon as he was aboard Tiny gunned the engines. Ninety seconds after touching down they were aloft again, leaving behind eight slack-jawed, would-be ecoterrorists who never knew what hit them.

  23

  “WELCOME back, Chairman,” Max Hanley said when Juan reached the top of the Oregon’s boarding ladder.

  The two shook hands. “Good to be back,” Cabrillo said, fighting to keep his eyes open. “The past twelve hours have been about the worst of my life.” He turned to wave down at Justus Ulenga, the Namibian captain of the Pinguin, the boat Sloane Macintyre and Tony Reardon had been aboard when they had been chased. Juan had contracted the fisherman at Terrace Bay, where he’d been lying low following the attack on his boat.

  The affable captain tipped his baseball cap back at Cabrillo, grinning broadly because of the thick sheaf of money he’d been paid for the simple job of ferrying Juan’s party to where the freighter loitered just outside Namibia’s twelve-mile limit. As soon as his boat had motored a good distance from the Oregon, the massive freighter began accelerating northward, ersatz smoke pouring from her single funnel.

  Geoffrey Merrick had been hoisted onto the deck in a medical basket. Julia Huxley was already hunched over him, her lab coat dragging in a hardened pool of oil. Under it she wore blood-smeared scrubs. She’d been patching together wounded men since the first moment the container Max had used to transfer the soldiers to the ship had been opened. With her were two orderlies standing by to bring Merrick down to surgery, but she wanted to do an assessment as quickly as possible.

  A blindfolded Susan Donleavy had been escorted to the ship’s brig by Mike, Ski, and Eddie as soon as she’d set foot on the Oregon. It was plain to see that the fact that no one had said a word to her since Juan had nabbed her in the desert was wearing on her mind. Though not yet defeated, her façade was cracking.

  “What do you think, Doc?” Juan asked when Julia pulled her stethoscope from Merrick’s bare chest.

  “Lungs are clear but his heartbeat’s weak.” She glanced at the saline drip bag one of her people was holding above Merrick’s prone form. “That’s the third unit of saline he’s taken. I want to get some blood in him to get his pressure up before I go after the bullet that’s still in the wound. I don’t like that he’s unconscious.”

  “Could it be the heroin they gave him back at the Devil’s Oasis?”

  “It should be out of his system by now. It’s something else. He’s also spiking a fever and the wound looks infected. I need to get him on antibiotics.”

  “What about the others? Moses Ndebele?”

  Her eyes clouded over. “I lost two of them. I’ve got one more that’s touch-and-go. The others were mainly flesh wounds. So long as no one shows an infection they should be fine. Moses is a bloody mess. The human foot has twenty-six bones. I counted fifty-eight separate pieces of bone on his X-ray before I gave up. If he’s going to keep it we need to get him to an orthopedic specialist within a couple of days.”

  Cabrillo nodded, but said nothing.

  “How are you doing?” Hux asked him.

  “I feel worse than I look,” Juan said with a tired smile.

  “Then you must feel like crap, because you look like hell.”

  “Is that your official medical diagnosis?”

  Julia pressed her palm to his forehead like a mother checking a child for a fever. “Yup.” She motioned for her people to lift Merrick’s stretcher and started for the nearest hatch. “I’ll be below if you need me.”

  Cabrillo suddenly called out to her, having remembered something he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. “Julia, how’s Sloane doing?”

  “She’s great. I kicked her out of medical, and then out of the guest cabin because I needed it as a recovery room. I even put her to work as a candy striper. She’s bunking with Linda. She wanted to be up here to meet you but I ordered her to bed. We’ve had a busy few hours and she’s still weak.”

  “Thanks,” Juan said with relief as Julia and her team vanished into the ship.

  Max sidled up next to him, his pipe emitting a fragrant blend of apple and cedar. “That was a hell of a premonition, getting me to contact Langston and tapping into Echelon.”

  One of Juan’s first acts when he learned that Geoffrey Merrick’s rescue had fallen apart was to get Max to lean on Overholt in order to utilize the NSA’s Echelon program. At any given second there were hundreds of millions of electronic data transfers taking place over the globe: cell phones, regular phones, faxes, sat phones, radios, e-mails, and Web postings.
There were acres of linked computers at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that trawled the bandwidths looking for specific phrases or words that might be of interest to American intelligence. Though not designed to be a real-time eavesdropping tool, with the right parameters programmed into the system—like a call originating at the Devil’s Oasis’ geographic location and containing such terms as Merrick, Singer, hostage, rescue, Donleavy—Echelon could find that needle in the cyber haystack. A transcript of Nina Visser’s conversation to Daniel Singer was e-mailed to Max aboard the Oregon three minutes after the call had ended.

  “I had a feeling that after our boys were caught whoever Singer had left in charge at the prison would want to let him know what was going on and get some new marching orders.” Juan ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to try to relieve some of the fatigue. “They’re a bunch of amateurs. They wouldn’t have contingency plans in place.”

  “What did you do with the rest of the kidnappers?” Max asked. His pipe had gone out and there was too much of a breeze to relight it.

  Juan started walking toward a hatchway, his mind already in his glass-enclosed shower with the heat cranked as high as he could stand it. Max kept pace. “Left them out there with enough water to last a week. I’ll have Lang contact Interpol. They can coordinate with Namibian authorities to pick them up and return them to Switzerland to face kidnap charges, with a charge of attempted murder for Susan Donleavy.”

  “Why bring her back here? Why not let her rot with the rest of them?”

  Cabrillo stopped walking and turned to his old friend. “Because the NSA couldn’t pinpoint Singer’s location and I know she has it and because this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. Kidnapping Merrick was only the opening gambit to whatever his former partner has planned. She and I are going to have a nice long talk.”

  A moment later they reached Juan’s cabin and kept talking as Juan stripped out of his filthy uniform and tossed the clothes in a hamper. He threw his boots into the trash but first poured out a quarter cup of sand that had entered the shoe through the .44 caliber bullet hole. “Good thing I couldn’t feel that,” he remarked casually. He unhooked his combat leg and set it aside, planning on giving it to the Magic Shop staff so they could reload the gun and clean the grit out of the mechanicals.

  “Mark and Eric checked in about an hour ago,” Max said. He sat on the edge of the copper Jacuzzi tub while Juan climbed though the banks of steam erupting from the shower. “They’ve covered about a thousand square miles, but there’s still no sign of the guns or Samuel Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution.”

  “What about the CIA?” Juan called over the sound of water beating against his skin. “Any of their assets in the Congo have a bead on Makambo?”

  “Nothing. It’s like the guy vanishes into thin air whenever he wants to.”

  “One guy can vanish. Not five or six hundred of his followers. How did Murph set up his search?”

  “They started from the dock and have been flying wider and wider circles, overlapping the radio tag’s range by about twenty miles just to be safe.”

  “The river is the border between the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Juan said. “Are they staying south of it?”

  “Similarities to their names aside, relations between the two countries are a mess. They couldn’t get permission to cross into the R of C, so yeah, they’re staying south of the border.”

  “What do you bet Makambo took the weapons north?”

  “It’s possible,” Max agreed. “If Congo’s northern neighbors are shielding his army it could explain why he’s never been caught.”

  “We’ve only got a few more hours until the tags run out of their batteries.” Juan shut off the water and opened the door. He was clean but scantly refreshed. Max handed him a thick Brazilian cotton towel. “Call Mark and have him do whatever he has to in order to get across that border and take a listen. Those guns aren’t more than a hundred and fifty miles from the river. I’m sure of it.”

  “I’ll call him now,” Max said and levered himself from his perch.

  Juan kept his hair short enough so he didn’t need to brush it. He put on deodorant and decided he looked more dangerous with thirty hours of beard so he left his straight razor on the bathroom counter. The dark circles under his eyes and their red rims gave him a demonic cast. He dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt. He called down to the Magic Shop for a tech to get his combat leg and on the way to the ship’s hold he stopped in to grab a sandwich from the galley.

  Linda Ross was waiting outside the hold. She was holding a BlackBerry that was receiving signals from the shipboard Wi-Fi network.

  “How’s our guest?” Juan asked as he approached.

  “Take a look yourself.” She tilted the small device so he could see the screen. “Oh, and I want to congratulate you on pulling off the rescue.”

  “I had a lot of help.”

  Susan Donleavy was strapped to a stainless-steel embalmer’s table in the center of the cavernous hold where Juan had packed his parachute the day before. The only light came from a single high-intensity halogen lamp that formed a focused cone around the table so she could see nothing beyond. The feed to the BlackBerry came from a camera placed just above the lamp.

  Susan’s hair was lank from so long in the desert without enough water for personal hygiene, and the skin on her arms was blotchy from insect bites. Blood had drained from her face, leaving her washed out, and her lower lip quivered. She was covered in sweat.

  “If she wasn’t tied down she would have bitten her fingernails to the quick,” Linda said.

  “You ready?” Juan asked her.

  “Just going over some notes. I haven’t done an interrogation in a while.”

  “Like Max always says, it’s like falling off a bike. Do it once and you never forget.”

  “I hope to God he didn’t put a sense of humor down on his job application.” Linda thumbed off the BlackBerry. “Let’s go.”

  Juan opened the door into the hold. A wall of heat blasted him. They’d set the thermostat for a hundred degrees. Like the lighting, the temperature was part of the interrogation technique Linda had settled on to crack Susan Donleavy. They stepped silently into the room, but remained just beyond the circle of light.

  He had to give Susan high marks because she didn’t call out for nearly a minute. “Who’s there?” she asked, a manic edge in her voice.

  Cabrillo and Ross remained silent.

  “Who’s there?” Susan repeated a bit more stridently. “You can’t hold me like this. I have rights.”

  There was a fine line between panic and anger—the trick was to never cross it during an interrogation. Never let your subject turn their fear into rage. Linda timed it perfectly. She could see the fury building in Susan’s face, the way the muscles in her neck tensed. She stepped into the light a moment before Donleavy started to scream. Her eyes went wide when she saw that it was another woman with her in the hold.

  “Miss Donleavy, right from the outset I want you to understand you have no rights. You are aboard an Iranian-flagged ship in international waters. There is no one here to represent you in any way. You have two choices and two choices only. You can tell me what I want to know or I will turn you over to a professional interrogator.”

  “Who are you people? You were hired to rescue Geoffrey Merrick, right? Well, you’ve got him so turn me over to the police or whatever.”

  “We are taking the ‘whatever’ route,” Linda said. “That includes you telling me where Daniel Singer is at this moment and what his plans are.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Susan said quickly.

  Too quickly, Linda noticed. She shook her head as though she were disappointed. “I had hoped you would be more cooperative. Mr. Smith, would you please join us?” Juan came forward. “This is Mr. Smith. Up until recently he was employed by the United States government to extract information from terrorists. You might have
heard rumors about how the U.S. moved prisoners to countries with, how shall I say it, more lenient laws concerning torture. He was the man they used to get intelligence through any means necessary.”

  Susan Donleavy’s lip started trembling again as she stared at Juan.

  “He got anything he wanted from some of the most hardened men in the world, men who fought the Russians in Afghanistan for a decade and then our forces for years, men who swore an oath to die rather than submit to an infidel.”

  Juan lightly traced the outside of Susan’s arm. It was an intimate gesture, the caress of a lover rather than a torturer, and it made her stiffen and try to shy away, but the ties holding her down prevented her from moving more than a couple inches. The threat of pain was far more effective than inflicting it. Already Susan’s mind was conjuring images that were far worse than Linda or Cabrillo could conceive. They were letting her torture herself.

  Again Linda’s timing was spot on. Susan was struggling to rein in her imagination, to banish whatever she’d envisioned. She was finding within herself the courage to face whatever would come. It was Linda’s job to keep her offguard.

  “What he will do to a woman I have no idea,” Linda said softly, “but I know I won’t be around to watch it.” She leaned down so her face was inches from Susan’s, making sure that Juan was still in her field of view. “Tell me what I want to know and nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

  Juan had to fight not to smile because suddenly Susan Donleavy looked at Linda with such trust that he knew they’d get everything they wanted and more.

  “Where is Daniel Singer, Susan?” Linda whispered. “Tell me where he is.”

  Susan’s mouth worked as she fought the sense of betrayal she must be feeling toward divulging what she knew. Then she spit a glob of saliva into Linda’s face. “Screw you, bitch. I’ll never tell you.”