Thumping Afrobeats music played out of speakers hanging from trees, and locals drank and laughed and danced on the dirt-floored courtyard in front of a small thatched-roof structure that was nearly as dark as the jungle that encroached on it from three sides.
The gravel out in front of the roadside bar crunched under the weight of a dirty gray Land Cruiser as it pulled up and parked on the far side of the path, just off the riverbank and next to rows of scooters and motorcycles.
Five men climbed out of the vehicle and began walking through the crowd, and although the music kept pumping, the patrons of the bar immediately began to quiet down as heads turned.
The new arrivals weren’t regulars. And they weren’t locals, either.
All five of the white men wore beards, and one was bald; they ranged in age from late twenties to late forties, and the patrons of the bar didn’t spend any time pondering who they were. This establishment lay just off a rural road on the Ubangi River, outside the city of Bangui in the Central African Republic, and every single person in the bustling courtyard was instantly certain of three things about the new arrivals.
They were Russian, they were mercenaries, and they were trouble.
The men strolled into the darkened covered area, a bar on a low concrete slab with a thatched roof above it, and sat down at a plastic table. A wary waitress crept over, her boss watching her from behind the bar while she took their orders, and within minutes she returned with their drinks.
By the time the men were served, the entire place had all but cleared out of locals, save for a stalwart few who were not intimidated and a couple more who were either too drunk to notice or too drunk to care.
A single fan hanging from the thatched ceiling only served to stir the warm night air around the five as they drank, illuminated only by a couple of small neon signs across the space and the glow from a strand of Christmas lights hanging from a wooden support beam. Fat flies buzzed all around, ignoring the gently swirling night air, and the chanted lyrics of a thumping hit by Fireboy DML had been turned down by the staff in hopes the foreigners wouldn’t complain about the racket.
But the men did not complain, they just downed bottles of “33” Export beers and shots of Wa Na Wa vodka, and they kept to themselves.
Gruppa Vagnera, or the Wagner Group, was a private military corporation controlled by the Russian government that had fought in Syria and Ukraine, but its forces throughout Africa were simply known as Afrikanskiy Korpus, or Africa Corps. Here on the continent, the Russian organization operated like a mafia organization, but one of its many specialties was providing private security for weak leaders in exchange for lucrative natural resource rights.
The Russians had run timber, gold and diamond mines, and alcohol production and distribution all over Western and Central Africa, but when Wagner’s leader’s aircraft was blown out of the Moscow sky with him in it late one afternoon a year earlier, the organization immediately fractured, and the Kremlin began projecting its direct authority on the heretofore semiautonomous Russian contractors on the continent.
For that reason, the five in the bar here were no longer Wagner Africa Corps employees. They’d instead taken various security gigs on the continent, straight merc work, most recently here in the war-torn Central African Republic and across the border in the DRC.
And there were hundreds more Russians just like them around: here, in South Africa, in Nigeria, in Niger, in Ethiopia.
Some Wagner contractors had returned home, but most had not, because home meant the war in Ukraine, and the war meant stepping into a meat grinder. It also meant the previously well-paid soldiers of fortune would earn an enlisted soldier’s wage in exchange for their deaths, a small fraction of what they were paid for fighting other people’s battles down here in Africa.
These men felt abandoned by their company, by their country, by their people. They burned through their local money in bars and started fights, channeling the aggression that had been a key component of their jobs into their bleak civilian lives.
They were a powder keg waiting for a spark, and that spark arrived shortly before midnight.
A sudden gust of warm night air scattered the flies from the table a moment, and then the five Russians put their drinks down, because a lone white man approached through the nearly empty courtyard, stepping around the trees and tables on his way to the raised thatched-roof bar.
The stranger was athletically built, six feet tall, maybe fifty. He had wrinkles on his forehead and crow’s-feet around his eyes, and he possessed a lean face pockmarked with some childhood ailment that even his dark goatee could not completely hide.
He wore a sweat-stained light blue linen shirt with epaulets, khaki cargo pants, and Merrell boots. Central casting for a Western security man in Africa, the men all realized, and over his shoulder hung a well-used Arc’teryx backpack.
The man seated at the head of the table watched him approach. The Russian had a bald head and a bushy beard, and he spoke softly in his native tongue, just audible to the others around him under the music. “Anybody know this asshole?”
The chorus from the men was unanimous. “Nyet.”
A pistol hammer clicked under the far side of the table.
“Steady, Oleg,” the man at the head of the table said.
The stranger stopped directly in front of him now. “Lev Belov? I’m told you speak English.”
Belov’s eyes narrowed. After a moment he said, “Who told you that?”
“Can you and I go somewhere to talk in private?”
“Hand your pack to one of my associates and lift your shirt.”
The man in blue did as instructed; he wasn’t carrying a firearm, and nothing in the bag aroused suspicion.
Satisfied, Belov nodded, motioned to the bartender, and ordered a beer and another bottle of vodka, and then he waved to the one empty seat at the little wooden table.
“Buy us a round of drinks?”
“Of course, but my business is with you. We can go discuss—”
“Sit down. These men don’t speak five words of English between them.”
The bearded stranger didn’t seem pleased, but he did comply, taking an open plastic chair next to Belov.
Two bottles, a beer and a vodka, were placed in front of the new man by a waitress who immediately disappeared; rounds of the Wa Na Wa were poured for everyone and then downed without a corresponding toast.
Mistrustful eyes flitted around the table.
But the new man appeared relaxed, Lev Belov noticed. After he put his glass down, the stranger used his left hand to hold the beer while he reached out to the man at the head of the table with his right. “Conrad Tremaine.”
Belov shook the man’s hand. “You’re South African?”
“From Pretoria.”
One of the men at the table said something in Russian, asking Belov what the man was talking about, and Belov told him to shut up and to drink his beer. Finally, after pouring himself another shot, Belov said, “What do you want with me?”
“I want to hire you. Others, as well.”
Belov sniffed out a laugh. “To do what?”
“You and your men are fighters, but if you only wanted to fight you would be back home by now, dying in a ditch in Ukraine. You’re still here, which tells me you’re looking for what comes next.”
Belov didn’t disagree with any of this. He just sat silently until the South African continued.
“My friend…I’m what comes next.”
“Who says we need work?”
“You’re in exile. Wagner has been folded into Russia’s Ministry of Defense. Yeah, there are Africa Corps guys still out here, but they work for Moscow, they’re paid shit Moscow wages, and they wake each morning hoping Moscow doesn’t call them home to fight their neighbors.
“You and hundreds like you left the organization but stayed on the continent. You’re working shit security contracts while the gold and timber and diamond extraction moves right on by you on its way back to Russia.”
“You working alone?” Belov asked.
“No. I’m with Sentinel Security.”
Belov just shrugged. “Sentinel. Never heard of you.”
“You know us by our old name. Armored Saint.”
The Russian’s eyes narrowed now, a new tension in an already tense atmosphere. “Armored Saint was in Congo.”
“Yes.” Tremaine nodded. “I was there. Till the end.”
Belov nodded. “So was I.” After a moment he added, “On the other side.”
“Sorry that didn’t turn out so good for you guys,” Tremaine replied. Off a look from the other man, he added, “That was a year ago, mate.”
Belov’s eyes narrowed even more. “You killed my friends a year ago.”
“And you killed mine. But look around you. Surprise, surprise, Belov, the world keeps turning without them.”
The other Russians had remained silent only because they didn’t speak English, but Belov bristled at this. He was about to let this bastard know that he hadn’t forgotten his friends, but then the bastard said something that instantly changed things.
“This employment contract will be for a maximum of seven months, six in training. I need you and I need a lot more men, and you will be paid a finder’s fee for each quality shooter you bring me.” He added, “By Christmas you’ll be a very rich man.”
Belov turned away from Tremaine and spoke Russian once again, this time to the man on the opposite end of the table. “It’s okay, Oleg.”
The audible sound of a pistol’s hammer being decocked from under the table was not lost on Tremaine; Belov could tell it in the man’s face when he looked back to him, but the South African made no mention of the fact that there had been a gun pointed at his balls.
“How many men are you looking for?” Belov asked now.
Tremaine remained cool. “I have twenty. South Africans, Nigerians, Germans, Dutch, a Chilean…I’d like fifty more. Can you get me that many?”
Belov whistled. “That’s a massive crew. What’s the job?”
“Direct action,” the South African said without hesitation. “After the training, that is. Real spec ops work. Three- to five-man fire teams. Various weapons systems, various objectives. Blitzkrieg speed.”
“Where?”
“Here in Africa. We’ll be in Togo until the action, and for that we’ll go over the border.”
“Into Burkina Faso or into Benin?” Belov knew both of these border nations were exceedingly unstable.
“Into neither. Into Ghana.”
“Ghana? Why there?”
Tremaine did not respond.
Belov looked off into the black jungle rimming the bar. “You won’t tell me the reason, fine. Just tell me this: are we working for the government of the target nation or the opposition of the target nation?”
“That’s another question I can’t answer yet.”
Belov raised an eyebrow, then sipped his beer. “When?”
“The planning’s already begun. I need you and your boys now.”
“What’s the rate?”
“Five thousand euros a week per man…beginning once they’re hired. That will shift to fifteen thousand a week once the operation begins. A completion bonus at the end, seventy-five thousand more.”
“Benefits?”
“A death payout to the family of fifty thousand.”
When the Russian didn’t speak, Tremaine said, “A good wage for a half year’s work, mostly planning and training. An excellent wage for an operation that should only require a week or two at most. And then a bloody ransom for when it’s over. Don’t try and negotiate with me. I know this is a dream opportunity for you and your people.”
Belov sat in silence a moment. It was clear the man from Pretoria was annoyed by the delay, but the Russian just eyed him up and down as he drank his vodka.
“Well?” Tremaine finally prodded.
Finally the Russian said, “My people, my former employer, we have a reputation in Africa. We’re the new colonialists. We’re the invaders. The devils.
“But you white South Africans have done more killing on this continent than we ever will. Your mercenary outfits. You’ve got laws against them on the books, but you register your companies offshore so you can keep on doing your dirty work.”
Tremaine didn’t speak; he just sipped his beer, his eyes looking over the sweaty bottle at the Russian in front of him.
“Where is Sentinel registered?” Belov asked.
“Manila” came the reply, and Belov laughed.
“I told you.”
Tremaine put his bottle down. “You think I traveled all the way to this shit hole for a lecture from an ex-Wagnerite?”
“No. I think you came all the way to this shit hole to get a crew of Russians who can help you with something dark and dirty. I can see it in your dead eyes, Mr. Tremaine. You are here because you are preparing your next slaughter, and you would like my help.”
Tremaine did not blink at the accusation. “Have I wasted my time and yours?”
Putting his bottle back on the table, the Russian said, “You have not. We will take the work. I will find the men.” He looked to the others here with them. “Two of these guys. Not the other two. Their door-kicking days are behind them, they just haven’t accepted it yet.”
Tremaine reached into his backpack under the still-mistrustful eyes of the other men. He first pulled out a wad of bills and threw them on the table, payment for his round of booze, and then he retrieved a small folded paper and handed it over to Belov.
The Russian took it and looked it over. “Signal number?” Tremaine nodded and handed over a blank sheet and a pen, and Belov wrote his own encrypted Signal phone number on it.
Tremaine said, “Wire info, too.”
Belov jotted down the number of an account in Cyprus, folded the sheet, then handed it back. The men shook hands again while the others looked on.
The South African rose, and the Russian followed him up. Tremaine said, “I’ll wire you some travel money tonight. Once you get me the first five men, I’ll pay your wage, and theirs, for the first two months. It is in all of our interests to keep this a friendly relationship.”
With a nod to the others, Tremaine turned away and began walking back into the courtyard and towards the front of the building.
The Russian sat back down, looked to the four men at the table, and spoke in Russian. “That man came alone. Unarmed. Big balls.”
“What did he want?” Oleg said, and Belov just looked at him. After a moment he said, “Oleg, Vlad. Your drinks are on me.” After a pause, he added, “Now…fuck off.”
After an awkward silence, the two men stood and walked out into the night.
The two remaining Russians scooted closer to their leader. One of them said, “Who was that?”
“Tremaine. I’ve heard of him, but I didn’t let on. A year and a half ago he was our mortal enemy down in the Congo. Now…now he’s hiring us.” Lev Belov added, “We’re going to do some killing, boys.”
“For who? For him?” the other man asked.
Belov shook his head. “That South African…he’s one of us. A merc in the dirt. There will be someone else calling all the shots.” The Russian sighed. “There’s always someone else.”
“Where are we off to?”
“Training in Togo. Action over the border in Ghana.”
The man’s response was the same as Belov’s had been. “Ghana?”
Belov held his hands up, indicating he had no clue. But he said, “It’s in the middle of the coup belt of Africa, even if it’s not known as unstable. We’re either going to go support a coup, or we’re going to go defend against one by hunting rebels.” The men hefted shot glasses, downed one more vodka, and then rose. Looking around the darkened bar, Lev Belov sighed and said, “In the end…who really cares?”