Josh Duffy’s Oakley Holbrook shades protected his eyes from the tarmac’s glare in the bright morning. He gazed fifty meters away at the trio of Airbus H225M Caracals, their rotors already spinning, and then swiveled his head slowly to his left and right. Around him here at Kotoka International Airport were a collection of stationary Chevy Suburbans, Ford Escalades, Mercedes Sprinter vans, and other conveyances, as well as thirty or so armed security officers, plus a large accompaniment of airport police.
All the VIPs for the trip—Johanna Aldenburg, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy; Jennifer Dunnigan, the U.S. ambassador to Ghana; and Francis Amanor, the president of Ghana—remained in their vehicles, waiting for the all clear from DS Regional Security Officer Jay Costa, the Ghanaian president’s chief of security, and Julian Delisle, the agent in charge of Aldenburg’s security.
While the EU and American security men wore loose-fitting short-sleeve shirts and khakis or cargo pants, President Amanor’s security team wore military uniforms. These were men from the President’s Own Guard Regiment, which was, in actuality, a battalion of elite army troops entrusted with protecting the chief executive of the nation.
Most of the support staff of the three VIPs were busy loading bags into the rear of the helicopters while Duffy waited by the door to Dunnigan’s armored Suburban, and as he scanned, he saw his wife working with the other American Foreign Service Officers, filling the lead helo with luggage.
At exactly eight a.m., Costa, the head of the President’s Own Guard Regiment, and Julian Delisle gave the all clear, the doors to the armored SUVs opened, and the three principals stepped out into the morning heat. Josh; Benjamin Manu, the Ghanaian Foreign Service National Investigator for the embassy; Costa; and Larsen formed a diamond around Dunnigan. The other security moved with their protectees, as well, and soon everyone converged on the tarmac.
President Amanor was a bald-headed man in his late seventies, small in stature but surprisingly energetic considering his age. His eight-man security team from the President’s Own Guard Regiment of the Ghana Armed Forces, all armed with handguns, stayed close to him as he picked his way through the crowd. His voice boomed as he greeted the ambassador and the high representative, and he took time to say hello to all their attendees, as well.
All except the security officers, that is, but Josh wasn’t offended. He knew that blending into the surroundings was part of his job, so he didn’t need any attention from the president.
They began moving for the helos, and Josh took his place in the rear of the diamond around the ambo, carrying his Glock 19 on his hip, same as the other two DS agents, the police representative, and the four-member U.S. embassy Local Body Guard protection team, four ex-cops hired and vetted by the embassy for close-protection work. Eight pistols wasn’t a lot of firepower, but a pair of pickup trucks, each with five airport police armed with submachine guns standing around them, also watched over the foreigners on their short walk to the aircraft.
The airport police had been vetted by the State Department, but Josh still scanned their faces and their body language, checking them over for any cue that they were nervous or amped up.
They looked attentive but bored, and that was just how Josh wanted them to look.
He also watched the media entourage traveling with the group as they made their way forward. There was a reporter and a photographer from EuroMedia; another pair from GhanaSat, a national broadcaster; a two-person team from BBC; and a couple of freelancers.
All these people had been cleared by Costa and his staff over the past several weeks; Josh himself had been one of those who inspected their equipment and searched their bags back in the terminal, and all seemed in order.
Still, Josh kept a careful eye on them, as was his way, while they approached the helicopters.
Josh had learned from his briefings over the past several days that these French army helos had been involved in a training rotation in the Ivory Coast and then flown over here with military pilots for the diplomatic mission to Ghana.
None of the aircraft were armed, which Duffy did not love, but Costa had explained that the EU high rep’s people made the decision that they didn’t want to fly across Africa on a diplomatic mission with miniguns hanging off the side of their transport.
So the big weapons had been removed to improve the optics for the trip. Josh had known quite a few people who’d been killed in the furtherance of good optics, and though he didn’t think for a moment he was going to need belt-fed MGs on these Airbus H225Ms, he would have found a little comfort in having them in case the need arose.
Each aircraft had room for twenty-four passengers, and since there were only fifteen in the EU helo, fifteen in the president’s helo, and twenty in the American’s helo, not including the flight crews, there would be plenty of space.
Not that Josh and the other DS guys would have plenty of space. No, in his helicopter Josh knew that the ambassador, the four Foreign Service Officers, and the eight members of the press with them would have the bulk of the space at the front of the cabin, while the security men would be packed in bench seating at the rear.
Soon Dunnigan, Aldenburg, and Amanor each stepped up and into a different helicopter. Josh had seen Nichole board the first Caracal when he was still forty yards away, and when he climbed in, he saw that she and the three other FSOs were already buckled into seats near the front of the aircraft.
He gave his wife the same silly exaggerated wink she’d given him at the party the evening before, she laughed, then he strapped in at the rear starboard side window, just next to Larsen and Manu and facing the four members of the U.S. embassy’s Local Body Guard force.
The aircraft soon fought its way into the air, flying west towards Takoradi, just ahead of the other two Caracals.
The sprawling capital city slid by below them, a panorama of contrasts. The Gulf of Guinea to the south shone blue; the streets and buildings below the helicopters were almost uniformly redbrick, brown, and white; and green spaces pocked the urban landscape. The traffic ran thick on the dusty roads.
As the Caracals gained altitude, Josh put his headset on so he could communicate with others on the aircraft. As soon as he did so, Chad Larsen spoke to him. “Might as well get comfortable. Not a damn thing we can do for anybody till we land.”
Josh knew this to be true. He’d spent a lot of time in helicopters on security gigs in the Middle East and North Africa, and there wasn’t much security he could provide in a tin can a thousand feet in the air.
At twelve twenty p.m. the three helos circled over the airfield in Kumasi. Police on the ground were ready in trucks, with armored vehicles parked in a row for the protectees. Delisle came over the radio from Aldenburg’s helo and announced that he’d ordered the pilots to land.
They’d already pulled off the first event of the day, the port in Takoradi, and everything had gone smoothly. The president had made a quick speech, followed by the EU high representative, and then finally the U.S. ambassador. Everyone posed for pictures, and forty-four minutes after wheels down, they were wheels up again.
Kumasi, on the other hand, would be a bigger event. It was the second-largest city in the nation; they had to land at the airport some four miles from their destination and then move to the area in one large motorcade.
But Josh and the others were ready. He climbed out of the Airbus copter when it came to rest and took up his position before Dunnigan stepped out.
They escorted the ambassador to her vehicle, and he shut her, Nichole, and the three other American FSOs in before jogging to the lead vehicle, a Toyota 4Runner.
The fifty-person entourage moved out with a police escort, and three hours later they returned. Their visit to the opening of a medical clinic in Kumasi had also gone off without a hitch, even though only the administrators of the facility and the local police had been made aware of the stopover beforehand.
This element of surprise was a key component in protective movements. Complete surprise wasn’t an option, of course. Key people at each of the six stops of this two-day mission had to be aware in advance, plus local law enforcement was required to augment the security in each location, but Josh was glad that this big loud delegation had made it into and back out of the nation’s second-largest city without any complications.
Josh spent a few minutes in the rear of the helo expecting the rotor above him to begin spooling up at any moment, and to pass the time he watched his wife at the front of the aircraft. She was hard at work on her cell phone, no doubt communicating with the embassy in Accra about the next stop on the journey, scheduled to be all the way up in the north of the country in the town of Tamale. She was in her element, completely focused on her task, no doubt exactly how she’d been years ago when she served as an officer in the U.S. Army.
He beamed with pride watching her.
Eventually, however, he started to hear word on his radio from Costa saying he was talking to the EU security contingent, and the lead pilots had advised them that heavy weather was building up north that might impact their next stop.
He pulled up the weather on his phone and confirmed this. A massive thunderstorm, apparently unexpected by meteorologists, had formed just west and south of Tamale, and it appeared to be moving slowly to the east.
Costa spoke over the net a few minutes later. “Okay, we’re going to hold here a bit. Aldenburg’s people are looking at the other stops on the trip to see if we can knock something else off the list down here and go up to Tamale in the morning instead.”
An hour passed; the security officers let the media, the Foreign Service Officers, and other lower-ranking government officials get out of the helos and stretch their legs, but the three protectees were kept buttoned up in the aircraft and surrounded by their protective details.
Duff stood watch outside Caracal 1, his hands clasped in front of him and his Oakleys masking his constantly shifting eyes.
Nichole knew not to bother her husband while he was working, but she pulled out her cell phone, stood near him, and called Mandy and Huck back at Iris Gardens, the walled apartment complex where they lived.
She put the phone on speaker so that Josh could hear the conversation. Even though they’d only left the kids early this morning, this was the first time both of them had been away, so just these several hours felt like a lifetime to the parents.
The kids, however, seemed to be just fine. After they had come home from school Portia had taken them to get ice cream. A girl Mandy’s age named Shyla who lived in the complex and whose parents were in the CIA had come over and they were drawing pictures in the kitchen, while Huck sat nearby playing with a toy truck and watching cartoons.
Josh smiled listening to the kids recount their activities; the stability in his life still felt amazing to him, and he wondered if he’d ever get used to things going this well, because for several years of his life, so many things had gone so terribly wrong.
Finally, word came down through Costa that Julian Delisle had just told him that the helicopters would be taking off immediately, but instead of flying up north for their next scheduled stop, they’d fly an hour and a half to the southeast, to the Akosombo Dam.
Once they were done with the brief event there, they would then either fly up to Tamale if the weather had cleared, or else they’d come back to Kumasi, where a pre-vetted hotel had already been approved for such a situation.
The drop-in at the dam had originally been scheduled for two p.m. the next day; it was farther away than some of the other stops on the mission, but the weather was good along the route, and Akosombo had a couple of other things going for it that none of the other sites did.
First, the helicopters’ landing zone was right there at the dam where the ribbon cutting and speech by Aldenburg would take place, so there was no need to quickly arrange a motorcade from an airport or some other remote landing site.
Also, the dam had its own police force of twenty-four officers already on site, so they wouldn’t have to coordinate with local law enforcement about the rescheduling. All they had to do was contact officials at the Volta River Authority and let them know that tomorrow’s appearance by the dignitaries would instead take place in about ninety minutes.
No doubt the officials at the dam would be forced to scramble to get ready on the rushed timeline, Josh surmised, but he also knew they would suck it up and comply, considering the president of their nation would be among the dignitaries.
Costa explained that it would be six p.m. before they landed, and once on the ground they’d have to rush to catch the fading light to get the three speeches planned on video.
Personally, Josh didn’t love this change in plans. This wasn’t exactly an “in the blind” movement—they had advanced the location and planned for the stop—but if they had traveled to Akosombo at the originally arranged time, he knew there would have been a larger police presence there.
When the decision came down from the EU helo, Josh saw Nichole talking to the ambo about it at the front of the aircraft. At one point his wife looked to him in the back and gave a shrug that indicated both that she knew Josh wouldn’t be happy about deviating from the schedule and that there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
He just rolled his eyes, and they both smiled.
The rotors above them began to spin at four thirty p.m.
At five p.m., a black RIVCOM king-cab pickup truck pulled off a dirt road and onto a dusty gravel driveway. A padlocked gate kept the vehicle from going any farther, so it stopped and four men in camouflaged uniforms climbed out, then looked around.
Sergeant Isaac Opoku of the Volta River Authority’s River Command, along with three young RIVCOM corporals he’d “rescued” from mopping the floors of the police station, climbed up and over the low gate and back down onto the drive on the other side.
A sign over the gate said “Akwamu-Ajena Mining Co. Authorized Personnel Only.”
Isaac looked at the GPS on his phone and realized he’d stopped at the back gate of the property, not the front gate, but he decided to just enter here and not drive around to the front.
Isaac held the highest rank in this group of four, but it also appeared to him that he was the only one of the group who cared about what was going on inside this property. The others checked their phones for service, bit their nails, and Corporal Konadu, the youngest officer in all of RIVCOM, quickly stepped over to some brush to take a piss before they all began walking up the hill towards their destination.
All four of the men wore their Browning pistols on their hips, but none of them, Sergeant Opoku included, had brought their rifles, because none of them, Sergeant Opoku included, expected any real trouble. They were just here to have a look around and talk to the manager about the men Opoku had encountered on the road.
The Hyundai passenger van he’d seen earlier in the day had been registered to a company that owned one piece of property in the region, this limestone mine on the eastern side of the Volta River, some twenty minutes’ drive from the Akosombo Dam.
As soon as he saw that the vehicle was attached to a company that owned a mine in the area, he talked his boss into letting him take a few guys to go check it out at the end of his shift.
As Opoku walked, he thought about the young men and the stranger with them he’d seen earlier. He assumed they must work here at the mine in some capacity, but still, something didn’t sit well with him. Ghana was full of mines and miners—the extraction of natural resources was the main source of wealth in the nation—but for some reason he couldn’t put a finger on, those boys didn’t look to him like they worked in a limestone mine. Also, the mysterious guy they were with could have been some sort of foreign contractor or security man who worked for the mining company. But if so, why the mask, and why the reluctance to speak to the police?
Isaac didn’t have any jurisdiction here on the road just outside the village of Akwamu-Ajena, as this wasn’t a VRA facility, but he didn’t need jurisdiction for what he had planned. He wasn’t here to make an arrest; he was here to look around and ask around. He hoped he could allay his concerns, maybe return to his superintendent with a little intelligence about the situation that would make tomorrow afternoon’s event go off with less worry.
The walk to the limestone quarry was longer than he’d expected; the rocky driveway through the jungle rose and then turned, and then he saw he was probably another one hundred meters away from a big white building that must have been some sort of warehouse or storage facility. The jungle continued on his left along the drive, and up ahead and to the right on the winding road he saw other buildings in the distance, and he imagined that the chalky limestone pit would be somewhere beyond a row of vehicles parked there.
Young Corporal Konadu complained softly behind him about the mosquitoes, while Corporals Gyasi and Kwabena trailed a few meters behind, bored and annoyed about this excursion.
Isaac took his radio off his utility belt and called in to the RIVCOM communications room; he told the woman on duty there that they were on scene. He stayed close to the jungle on the left side of the drive as he advanced on the warehouse, the other men right behind him. They walked with quiet footfalls, scanned the area around them, and eventually made their way right up to the corrugated metal wall of the big structure.
Across the driveway on the right, past a row of vehicles not thirty meters away, was the edge of a massive quarry pit. Construction equipment sat parked there, as well, and it seemed like the mine was closed for some reason, as there were no noises other than the jungle sounds behind them.
He began to turn his attention back to the warehouse, but then he noticed the green Hyundai Starex van he’d encountered on the road earlier in the day. It was parked right next to two other passenger vans, all covered in dust.
The windows of the warehouse were completely covered in chalky white limestone dust as well, so Isaac began to walk around the right to the side of the building where he expected the entrance to be.
Just before he rounded the turn, however, he heard voices. Men speaking to one another in Ewe, a language common to the southeastern part of Ghana and some neighboring nations, though it wasn’t Isaac’s native tongue.
Isaac himself could speak Ewe, although he only did so at the market or in certain shops owned by native speakers, as everyone he worked with spoke Twi as well as English.
He leaned around the corner and saw that the large sliding warehouse bay doors were closed, and he and the others began walking past the first bay door towards a small pedestrian entrance, hoping to find someone working here today.
They were halfway to the small door when the large one on their left began sliding up; it sounded like it was being operated manually by a chain, and all four cops peered into the darkness as the metal door rose.
When it was finally up, Isaac Opoku couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Right there in front of them, four king-cab pickup trucks sat parked, their doors open and their tailgates down.
Two were painted white, and they had the emblem for the Volta River Authority on the doors.
The other two were painted black, and they had a very familiar symbol and an abbreviation painted on the front doors, as well.
“VRA-RIVCOM.”
The two black Toyota pickups were identical, or mostly identical, to the truck Isaac and his men had arrived in.
Around the vehicles, a dozen or more men stood, all wearing civilian clothing, though many were shirtless in the heat. Most appeared to be unpacking crates next to the trucks, but others held weapons in their hands.
One individual held several long rifles in his arms as if he were carrying firewood.
Most were young, they appeared local, and Isaac wondered if some of them had been in the Hyundai earlier when he’d tried to stop them. A few others were older, heavier, but they appeared to be local, as well.
None of the men pointed weapons his way; the rifles he saw didn’t even appear to be loaded, as there were no magazines protruding from them.
But all of the men stopped what they were doing and looked towards the four new arrivals.
Isaac didn’t know what to say at first, but after clearing his throat, he spoke in Ewe, trying to sound authoritative. “What is going on here?”
A man stepped around from behind one of the pickups. He was bare-chested, wearing khaki pants, and he was white with a bald head and a beard.
He held a pistol in his right hand, already raised out in front of him. He pointed it at Isaac, but he spoke angrily and in English to the Black men standing around him. “I told you bastards to maintain security at the entrance!”
Isaac recognized the voice. It was the man in the mask he’d encountered in the Hyundai earlier. Now that he’d said a few more words, the RIVCOM sergeant thought he detected a Russian accent.
To Isaac and his corporals, the white man said, “Raise your hands.”
Trying to draw his weapon while a pistol was pointed at his chest was insanity, Isaac knew, so his only option was surrender. Softly, he said, “Men…do as he says. Slowly.” He himself began raising his hands.
Corporals Kwabena and Gyasi did as instructed, but to Isaac’s horror, young Corporal Konadu reached down to his hip for his gun.