All heads swiveled to Duff as he leapt up. He was heading for the ambo, but he was glad to see Amanor’s agent in charge diving forward to cover the president, and Julian in motion going towards Aldenburg.
Jay Costa swung his body in front of Dunnigan, who was seated in her chair, and the EU AIC grabbed Aldenburg by the arm and heaved her to her feet as he covered her.
Amanor’s agent in charge tackled the president from behind at the lectern, and as soon as he did so, he lurched forward, just ten feet from Josh Duffy.
The crack of a rifle pounded the air, then echoed off the dam and boomed again.
Costa had Dunnigan spun around and they were already moving down from the back of the meter-high riser, but Josh shouted into his mic to the RSO from fifteen feet away.
“Into the power house!”
“Negative,” Costa answered back. “LZ!”
Josh was in the middle of the stage now, racing towards Dunnigan and Costa and the rest of the crowd. He saw Nichole stumbling away with the others when a second shot rang out from behind. A presidential security man next to him pitched forward, falling into the crowd of diplomats and other officials on the concrete.
Josh was too far away from the ambassador to cover her body, plus that was Jay’s job. His job, he knew, was to stand his ground and neutralize the threat. His gun appeared in his hand, he spun back to the river, and he raised his weapon.
Eliminating a sniper concealed several hundred yards away with a pistol was virtually impossible, and Duff knew this, so he planned on just squeezing off shots to suppress the threat as best he could.
But before he fired the first round at the jungled hillside across the water, he heard a bullet’s crack come from near the power house on his left. Before he could even react to the sound, Benjamin Manu shouted into his mic. “Contact, right!”
Instantaneously, a volley of gunshots boomed off to Duff’s right and he swiveled his pistol there, only to see that the RIVCOM police and dam VRA operations personnel who’d been standing there were now aiming weapons at the delegation.
He extended his Glock at a target, aimed at a shooter, and fired. The man lowered his rifle and ran behind a pickup, and Josh was reasonably certain he’d hit him, though obviously not bad enough to fully shut him down.
Costa yelled into his mic now. “Alamo! Alamo!” This was the code to get the principal into the hardpoint at the location. Here, the hardpoint had been established as the ground floor of a large stairwell inside the power house. The president and the EU contingents, Josh had also been briefed, would use the stairwell on the opposite side of the building’s lobby as a hardpoint.
But Josh wouldn’t be going, not immediately, anyway, and neither would Ben or the LBG men. Chad and Jay would rush Dunnigan to the Alamo, while Duff and the others would do their best to engage the threats that seemed to be growing exponentially. Duff and the others were tasked with making themselves targets so that their protectees could get away.
Behind him nearly forty people, including his wife, scrambled for cover. He, in contrast, was the only living person still standing on the big riser, in full view of an unknown number of enemy, including a sniper who could drop him at will.
A bullet’s overpressure bit into the air just inches from his head, coming from the switchyard, and he fired his pistol at the half dozen men standing or crouched there, thirty yards away.
Conrad Tremaine crawled backwards through the biting brush as fast as he could, dragging the rifle and the backpack on the mat as he went, desperate to get out of the area to flee the chaos he’d just initiated.
He knew what had happened as soon as it happened. The sky had been gray earlier, but the clouds had broken in the west, and sunlight had then reflected off the front lens of his rifle scope.
Someone saw the flash and recognized it for what it was. He’d fired, but not before the president’s AIC had dived in the way, taking a bullet in his back for his protectee.
Tremaine’s second shot had missed the president, as well, hitting another of his burly security men, and then the Dragons dressed as VRA employees and cops began shooting, either because the security forces fired on them first, or else they just opened up on the delegation’s security forces because they didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Feckin hell!” he shouted as he backed up farther into the jungle, the sounds of combat echoing all around him, and then he rose from his prone position, scooped up his weapon and his mat, and turned and began running for the truck.
Once in the Toyota, he looked at Krelis behind the wheel. “Get us off the hill!”
“What’s happening?” the Dutchman asked as he floored it, the tires spinning on the gravel before digging in and propelling the vehicle forward.
Tremaine wiped sweat from his brow and stowed his Dragunov between his knees, the still-hot barrel pointing up. “Well, I didn’t get Amanor, but there is good news. As far as anyone will ever know, the Dragons of Western Togoland just started this coup off with one hell of a bloody bang.”
RIVCOM sergeant Isaac Opoku had spent the past fifteen minutes racing up a gravel road on a Kawasaki motorcycle he’d appropriated from a passing teenager not far from the limestone quarry, and now he was just a minute or so away from the eastern side of the dam. He thought he heard a popping sound coming from the engine, so he took his hand off the throttle and shifted the bike into neutral, and doing so allowed him to immediately recognize the distant reports of gunfire.
He could tell that the shooting emanated from the dam, and his heart sank. He had been the one who stirred up the hornet’s nest, and now the hornets were stinging his friends and colleagues.
No! he thought. This was all his fault.
He opened the throttle, knowing full well that his one pistol wouldn’t make much difference in the midst of the battle he heard raging, but also knowing he had a job to do. He’d already lost three colleagues today, and whatever the consequences, he was determined to expend his last breath trying to save the others.
He thought briefly of his son, Kofi, of his wife, Abina, and of his promise to her that this job at RIVCOM he’d taken four years earlier would be safer than the work he’d done for the Army’s Northern Command.
He’d been in scrapes in the military up north, but he’d never heard any gunfight like the one just a kilometer or so to the south of him now.
He forced fear and family out of his mind. Isaac Opoku told himself he would fight off this threat to his friends or else he would die trying.
Duff felt rounds whipping past his head as a fully automatic weapon went cyclic. Another burst pocked the concrete lot in front of him between the riser and the building. The lectern on his right took a hit and crashed to its side, but Duff just kept firing at targets, men running in all directions and shooting at the same time. He dumped five rounds, eight rounds, twelve rounds.
As near as he could tell, everyone in a RIVCOM uniform was an enemy combatant.
He heard more shooting behind him, the loud report of more rifles. He finally dropped to his knees, bewildered that he hadn’t been hit, and he unloaded the rest of his fifteen-round magazine at the men at the switchyard, and then went flat on the riser to reload again.
More bullets zinged by; much of it was outgoing fire. It sounded to him like the LBG guys were behind the riser shooting in both directions, as well as possibly some of the president’s men and EU security personnel.
Duff wasn’t alone, but he was the most exposed, and he knew that no matter how many people he had out here fighting with him, they were all surrounded and outgunned by the men in the RIVCOM uniforms.
Josh Duffy had been surrounded and outgunned before, and he knew his only hope was to lay down an obscene amount of fire, to drop enough of the enemy into the dirt in the hopes that the rest of them would panic and break contact.
He rolled onto his side and aimed towards the river now, where he saw a pair of men in RIVCOM uniforms trying to flank to the east. He felt certain the sniper in the jungle had bugged out, otherwise there was no way Duff would still be alive here, alone on the big riser and in plain view of the hillside, so he dismissed the other side of the river and began dumping 9-millimeter hollow-points at the pair running along the edge of the parking lot on the near bank.
His earpiece came alive as he fired; he could tell it was the RSO, but he couldn’t make out what Costa was saying.
So Josh just kept shooting, hoping like hell to at least get these two guys in his view out of the fight, either by dropping them or by sending them down the riverbank to cover.
Ben Manu spoke through his earpiece now, then Chad Larsen, but again, Duff couldn’t make out the words through all his outgoing fire.
Soon both RIVCOM men by the river had disappeared, so he rolled to his right, over and over and over, crawled across the top of the dead agent in charge from the President’s Own Guard Regiment, and then fell off the back of the riser, dropping a meter down and landing on the concrete on his left side.
Both incoming and outgoing gunfire continued blasting the air. He was in decent cover here, but chunks of concrete still blew into his face, and a sharp edge sliced his forehead. He ignored the pain, the blood dripping into his eye, and he rolled up to his knees, ejected the empty magazine in his smoking-hot Glock 19, and reloaded with his last mag.
While he was doing this Costa’s voice came through again, and this time Duff was able to hear the transmission. “We’re in the Alamo, all fall back on us. Bounding fire!”
Duff saw enemy forty yards or so away on his left, crouched behind trucks and some parked storage containers there, and he saw more men in the direction of the river, moving laterally, not firing at the moment. He scanned to the switchyard and saw several dead enemy, but there was still movement behind one of the VRA trucks.
Ben Manu and two LBG men remained between the riser and the switchyard, and though they were shooting their pistols from the prone position, they were more exposed than Duff.
He shouted to them.
“Move!”
The three Ghanaian men rose and began racing back to the power house. Manu had a pronounced limp, which slowed him behind the others. Duff fired suppressing rounds, first at the switchyard, then back to the left, then over at the river. He wasn’t hitting anyone with this crazy fire, of this he was pretty certain, but screaming bullets might possibly keep heads down, and he figured that was the best he could do for now.
The problem was, Duff knew, that he was running out of ammo, and while suppressive fire might not require much in the way of accuracy, it was extremely demanding on one’s ammunition.
He aimed in on a plainclothed man with a yellow hard hat and badge on his shirt on the left; this joker held an AK-47, different from the M4s wielded by the RIVCOM guys. Duff fired his Glock three times, and the man slammed against the truck and fell to the ground.
Duff’s pistol locked open on an empty mag.
Just then, Manu’s voice came through Duff’s earpiece.
“Duff! Move!”
“Moving!” he shouted, then ran back for the power house, his empty gun in his right hand.
Manu and two LBG men were on their knees in the open doorway, shooting to Duff’s left and right. A man from the EU security detail was with them, standing and firing towards the switchyard over Manu’s head. Duff ran on, passing at least ten dead and wounded in the parking lot, some male, some female, and he held his breath as he looked them over, hoping with all his soul that Nichole wasn’t among them.
She was not, and he left the wounded where they lay because his job was to stay alive to protect the ambo.
Duff finally raced through the open door, came crashing into the darkened lobby of the facility, then fell onto the floor.
As soon as he did so, the man from the EU shut the door and locked it.
The room was lit only by emergency lights high in the corners, giving an eerie vibe, with long shadows drawn by the people inside and deep dark corners, impenetrably black.
“We’ve got wounded out there on the parking lot!” a British woman’s voice called from a doorway across the lobby. Josh thought it might have been one of the crew from Sky News.
To this, Julian Delisle shouted from a doorway on the other side of the open lobby. “We don’t have the firepower to go back for them yet. There’s two dozen enemy, at least, and they have rifles. We hunker down inside this building while we compose a plan. That door stays shut!”
Almost immediately, more gunshots cracked, and the windows at the front of the lobby shattered and the blinds covering them tore. Josh climbed to his feet, ran towards the Alamo, and made his way through the door. Here he found a large stairwell area, with Ambassador Dunnigan sitting on the stairs, a near-catatonic look on her blood-speckled face, and two other FSOs, a man named Scott Clarke and a woman named Arletta James, huddled around her. Chad Larsen stood behind the ambo, higher on the stairs and covering the second floor with his pistol, and Jay Costa remained at the doorway, his weapon aimed through the lobby and towards the front door.
Neither of the other DS men appeared to be injured.
Josh’s head spun frantically as he searched for Nichole, and then his heart stopped.
He saw a woman’s feet, wearing low heels, protruding from the recess under the stairs.
Duff had no idea what shoes his wife had been wearing; he rarely noticed such things, much to her displeasure. He ran there, turned into the dimly lit recess, and opened his eyes wide to take in what little light he could find.
Foreign Service Officer Karen Chamberlin lay on her back, her head in the lap of Nichole Duffy. Nichole held pressure on a wound over the woman’s right breast, and she looked up at her husband in horror.
Chamberlin was still alive, but Duff knew that the expression on his wife’s face meant the poor woman stood no chance.
Duff knelt down quickly and embraced his wife. “Are you hit?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t in shock, he could tell, but she was nonetheless overwhelmed by the events of the past ninety seconds or so. “You?” she asked, her eyes just slightly unfixed.
“I’m fine.”
She looked up at him suddenly. “Why would the dam police attack us?”
Josh rose and spoke loud enough for others to hear. “They aren’t dam police. Their tactics…they’re a mess. Just a bunch of assholes with guns. I don’t even think those guys expected the assassination attempt. The shot came from across the water, and the enemy around us responded to it even slower than we did.”
Manu sat on the ground, his back against the wall, obviously in pain. His face perspired; an LBG man named Malike tore open the Foreign Service National Investigator’s pants and used fabric to tie over a gunshot wound through his right quadricep.
But through wincing pain, Manu said, “Josh is right. The presidential detail were talking to each other in Twi, saying they didn’t recognize any of the cops and wondering, like me, where the superintendent was. When the sniper fired, the President’s Own Guard Regiment opened fire on the men in RIVCOM uniforms. I don’t think the enemy was looking to fight us until our side started shooting.”
Dunnigan spoke up now. “But…but they were bad guys. Right?”
Duff nodded. “They were bad guys. Rebels of some kind, here to take over the dam, would be my guess.”
The gunfire through the windows had stopped—for now, anyway—and Duff wondered if the enemy, whoever the fuck they were, were preparing to attack. He walked through the low light back over to Costa, who was on the radio with someone on another channel. He finished his conversation and turned to Duff. “We’ve got two LBG dead, Tano and Yooku. Amanor and Aldenburg, along with all their people still alive, are sheltered in the stairwell on the other side of the lobby.”
He added, “Julian sent the three helos away; they can come back and get us when the LZ cools off, whenever the fuck that might be, but he couldn’t leave the birds on the ground a hundred yards away from a firefight.”
Larsen continued covering up the stairs, his gun still pointing up to the landing. “Can the helos make contact with Accra?”
“So far no one is coming up on the net or sat phones. Somebody might have knocked down radio towers and jammed the sats.”
“Jammed the sats?” Larsen said. “Rebels don’t jam satellite transmissions. What the fuck is going on?”
Duff spoke up now. “Gunfire has stopped. I can check and see if the enemy bugged out, try to get any wounded back in here.”
Costa shook his head. “EU will do that. I need you for something else.”
Duff raised his weapon, its slide locked open. “I’m Winchester, boss.”
Costa pulled a G19 magazine from his belt and handed it over, still aiming at the closed front door to the parking lot. He said, “Down the hallway to the left of the reception desk is a control room, usually about a dozen or so operators working in there, including the guy who greeted us. If the enemy took this place by force, which I assume they did, they might be holding hostages in there.” Looking to Duff, he said, “I need you to take some guys and clear them out, and that means CQB against an unknown number of armed enemy, around noncombatants. You up for that?”
This sounded like a suicide run to Duff, but he understood the order. “Roger that.”
Costa radioed Julian across the lobby and told him what the plan was, and the EU security chief said, “I’ll send a man over to you to assist.”
Costa turned back to Duff. “Take Malike, too. Good luck.”
Malike was a fit thirty-five-year-old Local Body Guard who took his job incredibly seriously. Duff had only met the man in passing before today; he wasn’t friendly or chatty, but he was professional, and Duff had no doubt Malike would be a good man to have on his shoulder for whatever was about to happen.
Seconds later, a silver-haired bodyguard in a blood- and sweat-stained white polo shirt came across the lobby, stopping behind the reception desk where he scooped something up, and then continued forward at a run. He held a SIG Sauer pistol in his hands, and he nodded to Costa. In a Scandinavian accent he said, “I’m Anderson.”
“You hurt?” Duff asked.
The man looked down at his shirt. In a grave tone he said, “That’s not me. That’s Edina, a Hungarian development officer.” Softly now, he said, “She was twenty-seven.”
Duff knew they didn’t have the luxury of processing grief at the moment; they had to stay on mission.
He got into Anderson’s face. “Are you able?”
Now the middle-aged man nodded with complete resolution. “I’m waiting on you.”
“Let’s go,” Duff said, and he led the way out of the doorway with Malike and Anderson, heading down the darkened hallway.