Isaac Opoku had bandaged his waist as best he could, using a dressing he pulled from the tiny medical pouch he kept on his utility belt. His entire body was sore and getting sorer, but he was reasonably certain nothing was broken, nor had he suffered a concussion, which he found astonishing considering what he’d just been through.
But his focus did not remain on his poor physical condition for long, because soon he heard several trucks race by above him, as if leaving down the long gravel back drive.
He didn’t know if these were the trucks painted in the VRA livery, or if they were the passenger vans he’d seen, but in either case he couldn’t understand why they just left him behind, letting him go.
Did they think he was dead? It would be a reasonable assumption, he determined, considering the fact that he’d been shot and then fell down a steep slope into a rock mine.
Then it occurred to him. They left him behind because they had somewhere else to go.
By showing up here right now, he’d caused this unknown group to flee. He hoped like hell it would stop them from enacting whatever their plan was for tomorrow, because the only other alternative he could see would be for them to try to enact their plan right now.
Either way, Isaac knew he needed to alert the superintendent as to what was going on.
He rose on still-shaky legs, then headed for the wooden stairs and the long climb out of the quarry.
It took five minutes of arduous and painful work to get to the top of the stairs, and once there, he moved carefully, watching for any enemy left behind.
The vans were still there, but the trucks painted in the VRA and RIVCOM colors were gone.
The bodies of his three officers lay where they fell; he checked them all for a pulse but found none.
Five minutes later he’d made his way back down the rear drive to his truck. His tires had been slashed, but when he looked in the console he was glad to see that his cell phone was still there.
With a hand shaking from the stress his mind and body had incurred in these last twenty minutes, Isaac dialed a number, then waited.
Soon, a familiar voice answered.
“Superintendent Baka.”
“Sir! It’s Opoku! Officers down! We encountered unknown enemy, armed. Twelve, maybe fifteen, maybe more.”
“Calm down!” the superintendent screamed back over the phone, though suddenly he was no calmer than Isaac. “What are you talking about? Where…where are you?”
“The limestone mine outside of Akwamu-Ajena.”
“What happened?”
“Gyasi, Konadu, and Kwabena are all dead. The enemy has AKs! RPGs. Machine guns. Shit I haven’t seen since the army.”
“But…” The superintendent was poleaxed by this. “But,” he stammered again, “the Togoland rebels don’t have any of that.”
“Well, whoever these bastards are, they look like they’re planning something at the dam.”
“Why do you think they are planning—”
“Because they had trucks painted to look like VRA equipment!”
The superintendent did not reply.
“Boss?”
After waiting a few seconds for a response, Isaac said, “Sir? Do you read me?”
But he heard nothing on the other end of the line.
He hung up the call to dial another number at the station, but as he began punching it in, he saw that he had no cell signal.
Sergeant Opoku had no idea why he’d lost communication with the police station, but he put his phone in his pocket, looked down the road in the direction of the dam to the south, and then began jogging, doing his best to ignore the growing pain in his torso from the gunshot and the aching just about everywhere else on his body from the long tumbling fall.
The dam was ten kilometers away, so he kept his eyes open for traffic, planning to commandeer the next passing car or bike.
Superintendent Joseph Baka hung up his desk phone when he became disconnected with Opoku’s cell, then reached for his own cell phone. Immediately, he saw it had no service.
Just then, he heard a low rumbling to the east, towards Akosombo town. It was an explosion, that much was certain, but it seemed to be a fair distance away.
Quickly he reached for the walkie-talkie on his desk, but as he did so, a new, more immediate sound echoed throughout the building.
Gunfire, fully automatic, close. The power flickered and then went out, cutting the light in Superintendent Baka’s office by three fourths.
The big man rose behind his desk, shocked and confused about what his sergeant had reported and what he was hearing and seeing now.
More explosions emanated from outside the building, and distant gunfire grew; it sounded like it was coming from both the power house down by the river at the base of the dam and next door at the administration building, and only now did he understand the scale and scope of this.
The entire hydroelectric facility was under attack.
Another burst of gunfire came from inside the police station itself, then another, and the superintendent pulled the Browning Hi-Power off his hip and ran for the door to his office. He looked out into the hall to see a pair of men in camouflaged RIVCOM uniforms racing his way from the stairwell; he didn’t focus on them at first but rather spun to check the opposite direction. As he faced away from the approaching men, something occurred to him.
Both men wore maroon berets.
Indoors.
Something no RIVCOM officer would ever do.
And the guns? Were those AK-47s? His men carried M4s.
He spun back around, swinging the pistol, as well, but he’d only just raised the weapon towards the first impostor when he was shot in the stomach with a single round from one of the men’s AKs.
The superintendent lurched back into his office, and his weapon fell from his hands as he pressed down on his abdominal wound.
He lowered slowly to the ground, then rolled onto his back.
The two men in the hall each fired another round into his body as they passed, then headed down the hall, ready to either take prisoners or kill anyone who posed a threat.
Lev Belov looked down at the wound in his thigh, bandaged but only perfunctorily. As he watched, blood seeped through the white gauze and tape and down onto the passenger seat of the pickup painted to look like a VRA vehicle. He ignored the pain, opened the door of the vehicle the instant the driver put it in park, and then stepped out into the parking lot in front of the power house at the bottom of the dam.
All around him, at the administration building and police station on top of the dam, as well as down here at the power house and switchyard by the river, the fighters he’d trained for the past four months were finally getting their first real glimpse of combat. He knew that the men’s limited skill set would be adequate for today’s needs; the cops here wouldn’t have been expecting six truckloads of men, four from the eastern side and two from the western side, to attack, and the fact that all the vehicles the Dragons and Sentinel men had arrived in were painted to look like VRA equipment only made this task easier.
He heard the sounds around him and knew that the plan he and Tremaine had drawn up for the attack on the hydro facility was being executed effectively, albeit a day and a half early.
He heard the boom as rebels took down a massive radio tower with a single brick of explosives, and soon the automatic fire on the top of the dam at the police station by the admin building seemed to die down, and he felt certain they were moments away from having full control of the facility.
Belov had two other Russian Sentinel men with him today, and they pulled up in another truck and climbed out.
Vadik and Gresha walked around to the bed of their truck, hoisted out two heavy satchels each, and put them on their shoulders, carrying their rifles on their backs.
They headed for the power house, which was already under rebel control.
Belov reached back into his Toyota, pulled out his sat phone, and looked at the signal.
There was nothing showing, confirming that a half dozen satellite downlink jamming drones hovered in the sunny sky.
Reports began to come over his walkie-talkie now. The admin building had fallen, the police station had fallen, the front guardhouse on the road south of the power house had fallen.
The radio towers were down, and Internet and landline phone service had been shut off, almost certainly from the cyberattacks Tremaine had promised him the Chinese would carry out.
Casualties were significant on Belov’s side; the Dragons reported five dead, three at the station and two more at the front gate, and three more lay wounded, but with the use of the RIVCOM uniforms and mocked-up vehicles, Belov was proud to see that his Dragons of Western Togoland had managed to take complete control of the Akosombo hydroelectric facility in under eight minutes.
He headed for the door of the building, already guarded by one of his men in a RIVCOM uniform.
Vadik and Gresha caught up to him. “You okay, boss?” Gresha asked. These two men had not been at the limestone quarry where the vehicles were being painted and where Belov caught the bullet to the leg.
“Fine. Lucky cop put a bullet through me. I’ll live.”
He opened the door and the three Russians entered the lobby of the building. They’d watched YouTube videos showing the facility, so they knew their way to the main control room, here on the ground floor above the massive generator gallery.
In the control room they found a squad of eight Dragons holding a dozen power house operators at gunpoint, all standing at their workstations with their hands in the air. Other than a single dead RIVCOM cop in the lobby, there were no signs of fighting here, and Belov was happy to see that the people who were able to control the dam and the power it produced were still alive, because he didn’t have a clue how any of this shit worked.
He walked into the center of the room, ignoring the sting in his right leg where the RIVCOM cop had tagged him, and then he addressed the VRA employees. “Who is in charge?”
No one spoke.
He pulled his Beretta pistol from his hip and pointed it at a woman who stood to his right, just in front of her cubicle. She cried out when he pressed the gun to her temple, began sobbing as he spoke again.
“Who is—”
“I am in charge!” A voice came from the front of the room. A man stood there next to a computerized map of the Republic of Ghana, his hands in the air like everyone else here.
He had gray hair and thick glasses, and appeared, also like everyone else here, to be both stunned and terrified.
Belov lowered the pistol and began walking forward with a wince. Eventually he made his way up to the man. “What’s your name?”
“Martin Mensah. I am the deputy plant operator here.”
“Just the man I’m looking for, then. I want you to shut down the power grid. Now.”
Mensah still held his hands in the air. They shook as he spoke. “Which grid?”
“The entire country. All power transfer from this facility will stop. Now.”
“You mean shut…shut it down?”
Belov motioned to the lady in front of her cubicle. “Do I need to put my gun to that poor woman’s head again?”
The Ghanaian shook his head. “No…no. I’ll do it.”
Mensah turned around, facing a large table with several older-looking computer monitors as well as analog switches and dials. He looked back to the Russian and spoke meekly, but there was gravity in his words. “If we do this, in minutes all the power will cease in the entire nation. Only facilities that have generators will continue to function.”
“I know that.”
“Hospitals, airports. They will only have generator power for a few hours. The rest of the nation, other than some private homes, has no generators. If you do this…it will cause chaos.”
“Your country has power outages all the time. I’m sure you’ll manage.”
“Rolling blackouts are very different than a complete loss of—”
Belov lifted his pistol to Mensah’s face. “Do it!”
The deputy plant operator nodded slowly, faced the table, and flipped a series of switches, then conferred with a woman standing nearby. In seconds she sat and began tapping keys on her keyboard, crying as she did so.
On the map in front of them, glowing white lines showing the map of the nation’s power grid began to turn off, one after another.
As the flow of power ceased from the dam, the nation was effectively shut down.
Belov watched it all with interest. Finally, when all the lights were off, he said, “Well done.”
“What…what now?” Mensah asked.
Belov didn’t answer the Ghanaian; instead he turned to Vadik and Gresha, standing back at the entrance to the room. Mensah looked at the massive packs on their backs and in their arms.
Belov followed the deputy plant manager’s eyes. “We are going to mine your dam. We will only destroy it as a last resort. We need the power to stay off for a period of time, but if the government tries to take this facility back, we’ll shut the power off the hard way.”
Mensah looked around at his coworkers, then back to the white man in the combat gear with the pistol in his hand. “I…I don’t understand. You’re…you’re not here to kill the president?”
The Russian made a face of confusion. With a snorted laugh he said, “Kill the president? If we wanted to kill the president, we would come tomorrow when—”
Belov stopped speaking, because he registered something on the deputy plant operator’s face.
Belov turned to the young Dragons in the room with him. They looked as confused as he was.
To Mensah, he said, “What are you talking about?”
Mensah said nothing.
The Russian raised his weapon yet again. “What is going on?”
Almost apologetically, Mensah said, “The joint delegation, it’s on its way here. Now.”
Belov was gobsmacked. “You’re…you are lying.”
“When they see that you’ve taken over the dam, they won’t land, and they will return to Accra to alert the army. You might have defeated our police, but you won’t defeat—”
Belov cocked his head. He believed the man now. “When do they get here?”
The man looked at him with confusion but said nothing.
The Russian pushed the barrel of his pistol into the man’s forehead. “When, damn you!”
“In about…” He looked down to his wristwatch; his entire arm shook. “In about twenty minutes.”
Belov shouted back in surprise. “Why?”
The deputy plant operator just said, “They had to change their schedule due to a storm up north.”
“Shit,” Belov said, and then he ordered the Dragons in the room to watch over the technicians while he ran for the door, pulling his walkie-talkie from his belt. As he stepped back outside he pressed the talk button. “Condor, Bear. Condor, this is Bear. Do you read?”