Jack crouched, leaned sideways, and peeked through the window. The interior was tidy, with no signs of occupancy. He looked at René and shook his head.
They retraced their steps to the sidewalk and moved on to the next bungalow. Here, too, Jack saw nothing to indicate it had been used recently. At the third and fourth bungalows, same result.
As they approached the fifth bungalow’s walkway, Jack caught a whiff of something in the air. It was the acrid stench of overseared meat. He glanced at René, who tapped his nose, pointed at the bungalow’s front door, and mouthed, Coming from in there.
Jack stopped at the door. His check through the window revealed the bungalow’s interior was in disarray. The beds were unmade and food trays were stacked on the dresser. Beer bottles overflowed the garbage can. In the center of the room was a hard-back chair. Dangling from its front legs was what looked like duct tape.
Jack signaled to René, Going in, and got a nod in return. Jack tried the knob. The door was unlocked. They went through and quickly cleared the bungalow. Jack and René clicked on their flashlights and looked around.
On the floor beside the chair was a bloodstained white towel, and balanced on the closest corner of the dresser was a curling iron. Its chrome surface was splotched with a dark, flaky material.
“It’s charred skin,” René whispered. “Fresh.”
Ah, Christ, Jack thought. “Let’s keep moving.”
At the sidewalk they turned left and headed to the next bungalow.
Jack froze. René followed suit.
Noise.
What was it? A muffled clang, a scraping sound. It was familiar. It took Jack a few more seconds to pigeonhole the noise: a shovel in dirt.
A male voice shouted, “Beeil dich!” Hurry up.
“It’s coming from behind the bungalows,” René whispered.
Jack started running. At the last bungalow, the sidewalk turned left. Jack followed it down a tree-lined path to an oval-shaped dirt parking lot fronted by a split-rail fence. When Jack reached its edge he stopped and dropped into a crouch. The lot’s far edge was made up of overgrown bushes. There was a vehicle in the lot: a black Hilux.
Through the bushes came a flicker of light.
Jack looked at René, who nodded his readiness. They stepped over the fence, crossed the parking lot, and split up, each taking one side of the Hilux. They met at the front bumper.
“I’m done!” a man called. It was ragged and weak, but Jack recognized the voice: Effrem. “If you’re going to do it, just do it! Assholes!”
In German-accented English a voice replied, “Suit yourself. Rolf, get the gas can.”
The bushes rustled. Rolf stepped into view. Dangling from his right hand was a semiauto pistol.
“René, take him,” Jack ordered.
René lifted his AK and put three rounds into the man’s chest. Even as the man fell, Jack sprinted past him and crashed into the bushes. He burst into a small clearing lit by an LED lantern sitting on the ground. The other German stood at the head of a pit. Effrem was in it, stripped to the waist and slick with blood and dirt and sweat.
Jack shot the German in the side, and he stumbled and dropped to his knees. Jack shot him in the side of the head. He toppled over.
Jack called to Effrem, “Anyone else?”
“No, just the two of them.” Effrem lifted the shovel above his head and hurled it at the German’s body. He turned to Jack. “Jack, will you please get me out of here?”
—
They put Effrem in the Hilux, then drove it around the fence and onto the lawn, stopping before the last bungalow. After shouldering the door open, René stood watch while Jack helped Effrem inside and sat him on a bed.
René called, “I’ll have a look around for other stragglers and then get the first-aid kit.” As he left, he shut the door behind him.
Jack closed the curtains and turned on the bungalow’s overhead lights.
Effrem’s appearance momentarily paralyzed Jack.
Scattered across Effrem’s torso were at least ten cylindrical burn marks from the curling iron. The tips of his pinkie and third finger on his left hand were pulp, probably the work of a hammer, Jack guessed. Effrem’s bottom lip was split and his right eye socket was so badly bruised and swollen it looked like a smashed plum.
“Fucking hell,” Jack muttered.
“Is it bad?” Effrem said.
“Pretty bad.”
“It’s starting to hurt, Jack, really bad. For a while I was numb, but now it’s—” Effrem winced, then exhaled heavily. He cradled his shattered hand in his lap. “He didn’t ask me anything. Not one question!”
“Möller?”
“He just did it. For no reason. For fun.” Effrem’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Möller told those two to get rid of me. I thought, Well, how much can a bullet to the head hurt? And then they told me to start digging. They were going to set me on fire . . . bury me in that hole. Why? Why that way?”
Because Möller’s a psychopath, Jack thought but didn’t say.
Effrem was crying now, his chest heaving with sobs. Jack sat down on the bed and pulled Effrem’s head onto his shoulder. “You’re alive, Effrem. Just keep repeating that in your head: I’m alive.”
—
René returned with the first-aid kit and went to work on Effrem, checking him for any obvious signs of brain damage or internal hemorrhaging, then having him down four ibuprofen followed by two miniature bottles of whiskey Jack found in the dresser.
Once the battered journalist had stopped shaking, René turned his attention to Effrem’s burns and wounds. He left Effrem’s hand for last.
“Hammer?” René asked him.
“Plumber’s wrench,” Effrem replied.
Jack asked, “What’s the diagnosis?”
“The burns are superficial. As long as they’re kept clean, they’ll heal. Same with his eye and lip.”
“What about my hand?” asked Effrem. “I’m going to lose those fingers, aren’t I?”
“Only if they get infected. The tips of the bones are broken, but the blood flow is still there. You will, unfortunately, never attain your dream of being a hand model.”
Effrem smiled faintly. “Guess I’ll have to stick with journalism. Jack, I’m sorry. You said ‘Jump’ and I didn’t jump. I was worried we were going to lose Möller. I had a gut feeling that Pilatus wasn’t going to move, but Möller was. I thought if I could at least follow them for a while we’d have a direction to follow.”
“You moved the GPS tracker?” Effrem nodded and Jack said, “You’re forgiven.”
—
They covered him in blankets and gave him another mini-bottle of whiskey. He was asleep within minutes.
“He’s fighting shock,” René said. “He needs at least four hours of sleep before we move him. We need to get him back to Windhoek.”
“Good luck with that. He’s stubborn.”
“And you’re okay with him coming with us?”
Jack said, “Not really, but he’s earned the right to decide for himself. Even if he just wants to go along for the ride, I’m going to let him.”
René shrugged. “You’re the leader. These are some terrible men we’re dealing with, Jack. What they did to him—what they were going to do to him . . .”
“I know.”
“And they belong to Rostock.”
This wasn’t a question, Jack realized, but rather a statement. The only emotion he heard in René’s voice was one of cold resignation. He’d cleared the chasm, Jack knew.
—
Seventy-five minutes after they arrived at the lodge, the GPS tracker’s signal faded with the convoy still heading north on the Western Bypass. Jack told René, “We lost them.”
“Maybe not,” Effrem said from his bed. He reached out and turned on t
he nightstand lamp. “I heard Möller say something about GPS and the Hilux. Maybe its nav system was programmed so they could catch up to the main group.”
René was already on his feet. “I’ll check.” He returned to the bungalow a few minutes later. “He’s right. There’s a destination programmed into the system.”
“Where?”
“Someplace called Kavango Dam.”
KHORUSEPA LODGE, NAMIBIA
René monitored Effrem’s condition through the night and shortly after dawn proclaimed him fit to travel. To assuage his conscience, Jack tried to convince Effrem to take the Hilux back to Windhoek for medical treatment, but Effrem dismissed the idea even before all the words had left Jack’s mouth.
After stripping the two dead Germans and their Hilux of anything of use, Jack and the others piled back into the Land Cruiser, left the lodge, and made their way back to the Western Bypass.
According to the coordinates in the Hilux’s navigation system, Kavango Dam lay 110 miles to the northeast, but neither Jack’s phone map nor René’s paper map showed any sign of the structure, or of any body of water. Worse still, though the dam lay just thirty miles west of the Western Bypass, the only access road snaked its way through 150 miles of Otjozondjupa Region’s most rugged terrain.
By mid-morning, having traveled as far north as possible on the Western Bypass, Jack turned off the blacktop and headed east on a dirt track that was little more than twin wheel ruts worn into the earth. After four hours they’d covered only eighty miles and the road was worsening as it zigzagged deeper into the hills. By nightfall they were still forty miles from their destination. The road narrowed until the view out Jack’s window was blocked by a sheer rock face.
From the backseat Effrem said, “The other side’s even worse, Jack. About three feet from our tires there’s a drop-off. I can’t even see the bottom.”
René asked Jack, “Push on or stop and set up camp for the night?”
“Push on,” Jack replied. “Möller has a good eight-hour head start on us. For all we know, they’re already at Kavango.”
“Yes, but doing what?” asked René.
“Effrem, check your phone,” Jack said. Since they’d left Khorusepa Lodge, their reception had been wildly sporadic. Any headway Effrem made into researching Kavango Dam was maddeningly short-lived. Despite the pain, he had been working hard to assemble these information snippets into something cohesive.
So far all they knew was that the Kavango Dam had been completed just two months earlier at a half-mile-wide section of the Omatako River. Since then a massive reservoir had been filling behind the dam. Downstream from the dam were nearly twenty villages and farms.
Effrem said, “I’ve got a bit of signal. Let me see what I can do with it.”
After another ninety minutes and ten miles the road widened and began descending. Jack was able to pick up some speed. By midnight they were within eight miles of the dam.
“It turns out Kavango’s a regulator dam,” Effrem said from the darkness of the backseat.
“Which is what?” asked Jack.
“Regulator dams are built upstream from hydroelectric dams. They’re designed to control the volume of water flowing into a hydro.”
“Is there a hydro around here?” asked René.
“Not yet. Evidently Kavango’s a sort of trial balloon for something called the Otjozondjupa Renewal Project. By 2028, the Namibian government wants to be exporting electricity to its neighbors. If Kavango works, they’re planning to build a hydro a mile downstream.”
René said, “What’s that mean, ‘works’? Either it holds back the water or not, yes?”
“No. Apparently, regulator dams require some pretty sophisticated hydraulic control systems. They’re due for a ‘proof of concept’ test in two days.”
Effrem’s words struck a chord in Jack’s brain. “Systems,” he repeated. “As in computer-controlled systems?”
Effrem was silent for a few seconds. “Shit, that’s it.”
“What?” René said. “I don’t understand.”
“Effrem, who installed the Kavango control systems?”
“Uh . . . a British company called Mondaryn Engineering.”
“Was it an open-bid process?”
“I don’t know for sure. Probably so.”
That was the connection, Jack realized. Rostock had been hired by one of Mondaryn’s competitors to sabotage Kavango’s flow-control systems. Jack explained it to René, who asked, “Effrem, how many people live downstream from Kavango?”
“Hundreds, maybe a thousand.”
—
Jack steered the Land Cruiser over a rise and stopped. He shut off the headlights.
Below them, running from east to west, was a curved line of pole-mounted sodium-vapor lights. Beneath these Jack could make out the dam’s faded ochre-colored concrete parapet. Rising from its midpoint was a bunkerlike structure that Jack assumed led to the dam’s interior.
Jack got out his binoculars and scanned the length of the parapet. At the far end, barely visible in the shadows, was a trio of black pickup trucks. Jack handed the binoculars to René, who looked and then nodded: “Möller’s Hilux.”
“Yes, that’s them. I don’t see anyone about.”
“You think they’re already inside?” asked Effrem.
“I’d put money on it. Klugmann has to work his voodoo from the control room or else he wouldn’t be in Namibia.”
Jack put the Toyota in neutral, took his foot off the brake, and let gravity carry them down the hillside to the dam’s access road. When they were fifty yards from the parapet he braked to a stop.
René said, “I wish we had more time to plan this, Jack.”
“If wishes were horses we’d have an Apache providing air cover for us. Effrem, get out and come around to my side. You’re driving.”
“What?”
“You’re going to find some high ground and start video recording.”
“What good will that do?”
“Maybe none, but you’re doing it. If René and I don’t come back out, you need to get to Windhoek and contact Mitch. He’s got an e-mail address you’re going to need. Tell the person on the other end the whole story and they’ll take it from there.”
Jack felt a vibration rising through the Land Cruiser’s floorboards.
“What is that?” asked René.
Down the length of the dam, red strobe lights began flashing.
A pair of men emerged from the parapet’s access bunker and began jogging toward the Hiluxes at the far end.
“Time’s up,” Jack said.
KAVANGO DAM, NAMIBIA
With Jack in the lead, they sprinted onto the parapet.
“Keep an eye out for Klugmann,” Jack called to René.
“How will I know it’s him?”
“Whoever hasn’t got a gun doesn’t get shot.”
“Right!”
Jack glanced over his shoulder. Effrem was standing beside the Land Cruiser’s open driver’s door. Jack stopped, turned back.
“Get moving, damn it!” he shouted.
He waited until Effrem climbed into the Toyota and started backing down the access road before he started running again. René was fifty yards ahead. Two more men emerged from the control bunker’s door. Neither one was Möller, but Jack had no way of knowing whether one of them was Gerhard Klugmann. Both were carrying FAMAS assault rifles.
René opened fire. One of the men went down. His partner ducked back through the bunker’s door and swung it shut behind him. René peppered the door with his AK. The rounds sparked on the steel.
Jack caught up with René and jogged the remaining distance to the door. It suddenly opened and a FAMAS barrel emerged. Jack dodged right and René dropped flat. Jack dropped to one knee and sprayed the door’s gap. The FAMAS disap
peared back through the door, which swung open to reveal a body lying across a steel catwalk landing. Jack sprinted toward the door. He called, “René, you good?”
He got no answer. He glanced over his shoulder. René was lying facedown on the concrete. He wasn’t moving. A pool of blood spread beneath his body.
I’m sorry, René, Jack thought, and kept running.
At the door he pressed himself against the bunker wall, took a breath, then peeked through the door in time to see two men rushing up the steps. Jack shot the first one twice in the chest, then dropped to one knee, and stitched the second man’s legs out from under him. The man tumbled back down the steps. Jack followed him. The man was stunned as much by the fall as by the damage to his legs. He had lost his rifle, but Jack frisked him anyway. Once he was sure the semiconscious man posed no further threat, Jack turned down the next set of steps to a concrete alcove. To his left and right were two royal-blue steel doors.
Jack flipped a mental coin and opened the door on the left, revealing a maintenance tunnel no wider than his shoulders and dimly lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs. Electrical conduits lined the concrete wall. The hum of machinery was thunderous and rhythmic; Jack could feel it in his belly.
He shut the door and tried the other one, which opened onto a catwalk lit by pendant lights. Jack stepped to the handrail and looked down. He saw nothing but blackness and billowing mist. He could hear the roar of gushing water. The air smelled of ozone.
To his right the catwalk ended, so Jack turned left and jogged fifty feet until he reached a set of steps that took him down to another catwalk. At its far end, a set of short steps led to a glass control booth. Through the windows Jack could see flashing red and orange lights.
He started down the catwalk.
In the control booth two figures rose up and began shattering the glass windows with the butts of their rifles. Moving at a sprint, Jack opened fire on the booth. The two men ducked out of sight. Jack reached the steps. He crouched so his head was below the door’s lower edge, then ejected the AK’s magazine and inserted another. He then reached forward, tapping the AK’s barrel against the door.