The Russian shifted aim quickly, fired a single shot, and hit the corporal square in the chest.
Konadu’s pistol fell from his hand and he tumbled down to the gravel. Kwabena knelt to grab him by the shoulder, but then he spun down to the dusty earth as well after a second gunshot, also fired by the Russian.
Isaac ducked low and pulled his Browning, fired at the Russian without aiming, then began shooting wildly all around the scene in front of him as he grabbed Corporal Gyasi and pulled him along, back around the side of the warehouse near the three passenger vans.
More shots kicked off, still from the Russian, and Isaac saw the window of one of the Hyundais right in front of him shatter. He dove to the ground, pulling Gyasi back behind the first of the vans.
Bullets kicked up dust and bits of rock around them. Opoku and Gyasi had concealment behind the vehicle but no real cover here; the bullets just tore through the body of the vehicle and streaked past their heads.
Isaac shouted to the corporal over the incredible noise as glass shattered above them. “Get behind the rear axle!” Isaac rolled to his left, positioning himself behind the front axle, hopefully making it harder for bullets to punch through and hit him.
Looking under the vehicle and back at the warehouse, he saw his other two men lying on their backs. Konadu appeared dead, but Kwabena was still moving. The young man tried to raise his pistol, but a shot cracked from inside the warehouse and then he fell back.
Isaac couldn’t believe this was happening.
He rested the grip of his pistol under the vehicle, pointing it towards the darkened space twenty meters ahead of him. His heart pounded and sweat dripped into his eyes, making it hard to see the front sight of his gun, which, even though the weapon was supported on the ground, was still moving up and down rapidly with his near-frantic breathing.
He saw movement inside the warehouse and prepared to fire at it, but then he realized what he was looking at.
A young Black man in a green T-shirt and shorts held a machine gun. It looked like a Russian-built RPK, but Isaac didn’t focus on it long enough to make certain.
Before he could squeeze off a shot the man opened fire, and the Hyundai that Isaac lay behind began shredding to pieces right above him as dozens of bullets ripped through it.
Isaac knew that if pulling a gun on a man with a pistol was folly, facing a machine gun armed with only a pistol was nigh on insanity.
More men in the garage had armed themselves and loaded their weapons, and flashes of gunfire came from several points within the warehouse.
Gyasi had made it to the back wheel for cover, but he leaned down to shoot under the Hyundai and immediately took a machine gun round in the forehead, splattering blood back against the van behind him and killing him instantly.
Isaac knew he’d be dead himself in seconds if he didn’t find some cover.
He climbed to his feet and sprinted in a crouch, first behind the second van, and then behind the third. The gunfire continued, so he raced behind a front-end loader that was parked not far from the edge of the limestone quarry.
Instead of stopping there, he kept running, as fast as his feet would take him. He felt a tug and a sting on the right side of his waist, but he didn’t break stride, he just raced on to the edge of the quarry.
Leaping into the air, he felt the snaps of more bullets whizzing close by, and they continued until he fell below the edge of the quarry and hit the steeply angled side, then began tumbling down the embankment.
Rolling and rolling, kicking up dust and debris as he dropped down, he felt his radio come off his belt and his pistol fly from his hand.
He landed hard on a ledge and thought his fall was done, but the momentum of his body sent him over the side of this precipice, and he began sliding and falling again.
He came to rest a second time in a narrow chasm. He had no idea if he’d fallen twenty-five meters or one hundred twenty-five; all he knew was that his entire body hurt, a dozen men were trying to kill him, and he was unarmed.
He had just begun pushing up to his knees when an avalanche of small stones and sand-like rocks cascaded down on him, forcing him to cover his head.
He felt a hard thump on his back as something fell on him, and he immediately recognized it for what it was. Digging around in the newly settled debris, he pulled his Browning Hi-Power out of the bits of rock and limestone chalk, ejected the fifteen-round magazine, and pulled another from its pouch on his utility belt.
Reloading the pistol, he slid the mostly expended magazine into his back pocket, and then he looked up.
He’d slid and tumbled down to a ledge here in the massive quarry, but from where he was now he couldn’t see the edge of the pit above him or the vehicles he’d passed as he jumped, as there was a pronounced lip about twenty-five meters above him blocking his view. This was the ledge he’d landed on in the middle of his fall, so he assumed he’d slid down about fifty meters in all.
He heard noises high above; a few rocks rained down as if someone up near the ledge had disrupted the stones there and caused a small avalanche.
Looking around now to get his bearings, he realized quickly that the only way the enemy could get down here was to either foolishly leap down the embankment, risking breaking their necks, or else use a wooden staircase built along the rock wall thirty meters off Isaac’s left shoulder.
He leveled his pistol, which was caked with white limestone like the rest of him and his belongings, and then he ran low in that direction. As he moved he felt the sting in the right side of his waist, but he didn’t slow to look at the injury there, fearing what he might find.
When he was ten meters away from the stairs, an easy shot with his handgun, he found cover between a parked dump truck and the rock wall, and he went down to his knees.
Still aiming ahead, he waited, fully expecting that men with heavy weapons would be coming down here after him at any moment.
Only now did he look down to his injury. His wound was small, but the blood contrasted sharply with the white chalk all over him. Touching his torn tunic, he winced with pain, but he realized the bullet had merely grazed him, passing in and out just below the surface of the skin. It would hurt, and it would get infected if it wasn’t treated, but he wasn’t about to bleed to death.
As Isaac tried to catch his breath, concentrating the majority of his attention on the staircase and the ramp nearby, he realized his cell phone was in the truck and his radio was somewhere lost above him.
He had no way to communicate with RIVCOM, and no way to tell them that a group of killers had four phony VRA vehicles.
Isaac was no investigator, but he had no doubt that the men he’d just come upon were planning something for the delegation’s arrival tomorrow at two, and he was glad he had nearly a day to warn his people about the danger.
Kang Shikun sat at his desk in his rented eight-bedroom mansion on a street called Ankama Close high in the Aburi Hills, looking over the latest intelligence reports about the disposition of Northern Command forces up in Tamale.
Aburi Hills was a sanctuary for the wealthy here in Ghana: palatial estates, exclusive resorts, and restaurants with entrées that cost more than a week’s wages for those in the flatlands below who were lucky enough to even have a job.
His four bodyguards were positioned around the walled three-acre property, and another pair of Chinese security officers manned a simple security room, looking at the cameras at the gates and at the garden, as well as all entrances into the large home.
He finished what he was doing, then stood in front of his desk to clear his mind with tai chi meditation. As he moved slowly but expertly through the poses, he found himself unable to relax.
Not because he was worried.
No, because he was excited.
Kang Shikun understood the landscape well enough to know that he had already won.
He’d created an unsolvable equation for an opponent who was wholly unaware of what was about to happen.
Instead of the meditation, he began thinking about his strategy, and this comforted him more than his tai chi ever could.
Kang was pleased at where he found himself. Still thirty-six hours before the operation began, and all his chess pieces were positioned on the board in the most advantageous locations, with his opponent’s pieces still in their starting position, because Kang’s opponent didn’t even know he was about to play the game.
He had twenty Chinese intelligence technicians, twelve of them here at the home in Aburi Hills, and eight more at a remote staging area near the Volta Dam.
He had a force of four hundred forty-eight rebels to the northeast, seventy-one mercenaries in the east and south of the nation, and Iranian Quds Force colonel Hajj Zahedi’s group of terrorists, roughly one hundred strong, already hiding out in the capital city and waiting for Saturday morning.
Kang shifted into a new pose, shook the smile from his face, and told himself to concentrate on the tai chi and not the coming action, but just then his sat phone rang on the table in front of him.
He let his arms hang and he stood up fully, walked to the phone, and tapped the button to initiate the call on speaker.
“Yes?”
Conrad Tremaine’s voice came through the line, loud and agitated. “The fucking Dragons have been compromised!”
Kang picked up the phone and turned off the speaker function, then brought it to his ear. “What? Where?”
“Two squads painting trucks at the limestone quarry near the dam. My lead Russian there just called me, said a group of VRA police snuck up on them when they had weapons out in the open. There was an exchange of fire, three cops are dead, but a fourth made it into the quarry and they can’t get to him.”
Kang took a calming breath. “The equipment? Our men?”
“The Russian was nicked, but he’s fine. One of the Dragons was injured, as well. Don’t know how bad. The weapons and the trucks are still in our possession.”
Kang thought it through, but as he was doing so the South African spoke up. “Look, the delegation is in country, but they should be most of the way to Tamale in the north by now, hundreds of miles from Akosombo. If we attack the dam immediately, the delegation will just go back to the capital. The ambassador will squirrel away in her embassy, and the high representative will jump on her jet and get the feck out of here. They aren’t going to come to the dam at two p.m. tomorrow if the country is in the middle of a bloody coup d’état.”
Kang said nothing, so Tremaine finished his thought. “I’m saying…forget about Saturday morning. We need to start the operation! Now! Right now!”
Kang had the same thought, but he was more careful, more measured than the fiery mercenary. “How long until the Dragons are in position to attack the dam?”
“I’ve already told my Russian to get his people and weapons out of that location. They’ll be on the road in minutes. It’s twenty minutes to the dam. Two more squads, each with a Russian embedded with them, are at the safe house on the other side of the river, even closer to the dam. I’m saying I can have thirty-two Dragons and three Russian contractors hit the dam in under a half hour.”
“Is that enough?”
“There’s twenty-four RIVCOM officers per shift. With all the subterfuge we have planned, we have more than enough firepower to take over the dam and plant the explosives. Once that’s done, it won’t matter how many people we have there, because no one will try to take the dam back.”
“Where are you?”
“My plan was to be there at the dam for the attack, but I’m a half hour south of Akosombo with three of my men. I’m on the way up there. Say the word and we’ll attack now, but your people have to knock out the comms so we maintain the element of surprise.”
Kang’s technicians, all working here in the living room and in bedrooms repurposed as office space in the villa above Accra, would be tasked with conducting cyberattacks on the telecommunications and cable Internet infrastructure up around the Akosombo Dam. Everything was ready, Kang knew, but no one expected to be doing this for another day and a half, so he wasn’t sure how long it would take his team to act.
But he realized he had no other alternative. He had worked meticulously on a plan, and the timeline was now out the window. He knew he had to initiate, and he also knew that if Tremaine could get nearly forty gunmen to attack the dam in minutes, surely Kang could get his small force of computer warriors to do their job here in even less time.
The other issue he had to consider was the jamming of the satellite signal in and around the dam during the attack, because it was likely the Volta River Authority would have sat phones to use in emergencies.
Kang had a plan for this, as well.
A small team of Sentinel men protected a group of five Chinese technicians and their equipment in a farmhouse just southwest of the dam. In the back of a tractor-trailer there, techs had a dozen meter-wide drones, each with a satellite jammer on board.
The technology was called “jamming the downlink.” Once the drones flew into the sky above the dam, all satellite signals in the area would be lost.
With a half dozen units spread out on both sides of the river and several hundred meters in the air, an area over fifty kilometers square would be affected.
With resolve in his voice, the Chinese spy said, “We are only going to have the element of surprise for a few moments more. Tell your people to execute now. Communication will be disrupted as soon as possible.”
Kang added, “Good luck.”
“Don’t need luck, my friend.” The South African disconnected the call, and Kang immediately dialed the number of a Chinese technician near the dam, ordering him to begin satellite disruption operations.
He then rushed out of his office; looking out into the big living room with the sunken floor, he ignored the floor-to-ceiling windows with the hazy view of the flat city and the ocean beyond, and instead he called out to a woman sitting at a makeshift computer workstation at the kitchen island. “You!”
The woman launched to her feet, a startled look in her eyes. “Xiansheng?” Sir?
Chen Jia was twenty-eight years old, with long black hair, and she wore an oversized gray sweatshirt with the emblem for Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Kang didn’t know all the contracted employees here with him, but he knew that this woman was from Beijing and served as one of the lead intel techs here.
He said, “Tell everyone in the house. We execute now! Right now!”
“Yes, sir,” Jia said, and she swung back to the three laptops in front of her. Putting her fingers on one of the keyboards, she said, “All interruption operations will begin immediately, sir.”
Kang knew he’d have no way to communicate with anyone around the dam once the entire operation was in play, and once the dam was in the hands of the rebels, power would be cut to the majority of the nation.
But not to this building. He had a Skylink satellite Internet receiver here that allowed him to communicate with Beijing. He also had generators around the property, robust and fueled with diesel, with more drums waiting behind the property to give complete power to the house for ten days, if necessary.
But Kang didn’t think it would be necessary. Once the dam was taken and the power to the city shut down, once the Dragons made it into Accra, once Sentinel made the rebels appear to be an existential threat to the government, once the jihadis sowed chaos, then General Boatang in Kumasi would sweep down the N6 highway, eradicate the hapless rebels and extremists, and be on his way to taking power, and then Professor Addo and the other fools from Western Togoland would lose their lives for their culpability.
Kang smiled, unrattled by this change in schedule because he knew he was ready.