Sergeant Isaac Opoku ran across the top of the dam as fast as his legs would take him, his Browning pistol swinging with his frantic movements. The heavy shooting had stopped down below, for now, anyway, but he didn’t know if the shooters there would be coming up here, or if there were already more enemy up here with him.
He’d dumped the bike in the jungle at the eastern edge of the dam so he could arrive more quietly, but this meant a quarter-mile run over open ground, and considering the fact that every joint, every bone, every muscle in his body ached from his fall into the limestone quarry and his high-speed journey on the bumpy road, the run was pure torture.
The only place he didn’t really feel pain at the moment was where he’d been shot above his right hip, and he didn’t know if that was good news or bad.
He saw no one, friend or foe, as he raced all the way across the top of the dam to the administration building, where he stopped and leaned his shoulder against the western wall, keeping out of view of the windows here. He decided to bypass this building and head next door to the police station, in the hopes that some of his compatriots would still be in there.
He broke into a reluctant run again, then went around the back of the admin building, and as he passed the doorway here, he looked inside a window.
There, standing alone at the end of a corridor, was a RIVCOM man, his rifle slung over his shoulder. He seemed to be guarding a door, but the man was too far away for Isaac to identify.
He breathed a sigh of relief and reached to open the door, but as he put his hand on the latch, he stopped himself and looked in.
The officer down the hall was wearing his maroon beret on his head.
There was only one cop here at RIVCOM who would ever possibly do anything that stupid, and that was Corporal Kwabena.
And Opoku knew that Kwabena was ten kilometers away, lying dead in the limestone dust.
Isaac quickly backed away from the door, turned, and began running again towards the police station.
So the enemy didn’t just mock up vehicles to look like VRA personnel. No, they had uniforms, and the fact that the rifle around the man’s neck appeared to be one of the RIVCOM standard-issue M4s told Isaac that they’d managed to get into the armory and take their actual weapons.
A minute later he was moving slowly and methodically through the police station, his Browning pistol out in front of him. Blood on his hands from his many cuts and scrapes slicked the grip of his weapon, and sweat poured into his eyes, but he kept working, “slicing the pie” to each room, moving laterally a few inches at a time when he got to a door so that he would only expose himself to the parts of the space he could cover with his weapon.
He went up a staircase to the second floor, made it to the door to the kitchen, and then opened the door, keeping the majority of his body behind the wall as he did so.
Two men in RIVCOM uniforms stood there; neither had their berets on but both had their hands on their rifles, while over a dozen more sat lined up on the floor, their heads down.
One of the guards looked Isaac’s way, focused on him a moment, and then said something in Ewe.
“What’s going on?” the man asked. Isaac didn’t recognize him; he knew all twenty-four men on his shift, as well as all the men on the other shift, so he fired his pistol, hitting the man square in the torso just above the magazine rack on his chest. He fired again for good measure, then switched aim to the other target, who was in the process of raising his AK up in his direction.
Isaac fired three more times, hitting the man in the pelvis, the stomach, and the head as he fell.
He now focused on the hostages on the ground. They looked up; they were cops from his shift, he recognized each and every one of them, and he ran towards them. Seeing that their hands were zip-tied behind their backs, he pulled his small folding knife from his pocket.
Cutting the zip off the first man, he handed the knife to the newly free RIVCOM officer, grabbed one of the M4s lying there by a dead enemy, and swung it towards the door in case anyone came in, responding to his gunfire.
The other RIVCOM man began cutting his mates free. The third man grabbed the other rifle off the floor and shouldered up to Sergeant Opoku.
“Where is Baka?” Isaac asked.
“The superintendent is dead. I saw him fall.”
“Damn.”
“And they’ve got our guns.”
“Where are their guns?” Isaac asked.
“Don’t know. They had AKs when they hit us. One I saw had an RPK. Any idea who they are?”
Opoku said, “They speak Ewe.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “They’re West Togoland rebels? They actually exist?”
“Maybe,” Isaac said. “I saw about fifteen or twenty.”
The officer shook his head. “I saw the trucks approaching from both sides. There were thirty or forty men, had to be. And they’ve got white men helping them.”
Isaac knew this already, of course. He just said, “Russians.”
Now the officer looked to him. “Did they kill the president?”
“The president? The president of what?”
“Of Ghana.” The young officer explained the early arrival of the joint delegation to Isaac’s astonishment and horror. He seethed inside, still thinking this was somehow all his fault by stirring up the hornet’s nest. He said, “Is Amanor dead?”
Another man in the room said, “We don’t know. I heard the helicopters land and then leave about twenty minutes later. We lost five of our guys in the initial fight, but they looked like us; they came in so fast, we didn’t know what was happening.”
Isaac thought for a moment. “Well, we do now. Before we do anything, I want everyone to take off your tunics. I don’t care if you have an undershirt on or not, I don’t want you wearing a full uniform out there. The enemy has our camo, our weapons. We have to stand apart from them or we’re going to start shooting each other.” The men began doing this, and when the first two were down to their white tank tops, they took the rifles from Opoku and the other officer so Isaac and the other man could do the same.
While the rest of them were still getting their tunics off, Isaac said, “Let’s get to the armory first. They must have left their rifles there when they pulled ours, so maybe we can use them. Once we have enough guns, Sergeant Ofori, take three men and clear the admin building. Expect hostages. Get them downstairs and out the exit at the motor pool, then link back with us. All the shooting has been going on at the power house, so we’re heading there.”
Ofori was a tall man about Opoku’s age, and he nodded readily.
Isaac saw that he had fifteen men with him now, minus Ofori and the three he chose to take with him after they found more weapons.
Isaac took the M4 back from the corporal who held it, then led the way out into the hall towards the armory.
Josh Duffy knelt to push the door latch that would get him into the control room, staying below the window in the door so that any enemy inside wouldn’t see him.
Behind him, Anderson from the EU and Malike from the U.S. embassy’s Local Body Guard team waited with their weapons up.
Duff had organized this hasty room-clearing operation with whispers and gestures. He’d open the door and cover anything in the ten o’clock to two o’clock position while prone, Anderson would burst in to the left side of the room and Malike would go right, covering nine o’clock and three o’clock respectively.
If the enemy knew what they were doing, which though not evident so far could also not be ruled out, then they would put men in the far corners on either side so that they would both have an angle on anyone breaching from the hall, while remaining out of each other’s crossfire.
Duff had more territory to cover, of course, but he’d also be safer. As dangerous as opening the door was, falling flat on the floor to engage threats made him a smaller target.
After a quick look back to the others to make sure they were ready to go, he tried the latch and found it locked.
Fuck, he thought.
He began to rise up; he knew very little about picking locks, and he wasn’t a criminal or a spy, so he planned on retreating so he could call Jay to see if he had any ideas.
But Anderson put a hand on his shoulder. Softly in his ear he said, “Switch with me. I got a set of keys from behind the reception desk. Might take a minute, but I’ll get us in.”
Duff did so; he took the left wall and rose as Anderson knelt down. The man pulled a ring of at least a dozen keys and a dozen more key cards, then began looking them over while examining the lock on the door latch, trying to find which one might fit.
His first try didn’t work, but his second slipped right into the lock. He glanced back over to Duff and nodded, and then he placed his pistol on the floor in front of him, turned the key with one hand, and opened the latch with the other. Once it was cracked open, he hefted his SIG pistol and shoved the door open with force, dropping down into the room on his chest.
Duff and Malike raced in on either side of him, and Duff heard a gunshot from his side before he even cleared the doorway.
He swung in and saw a man in a uniform with an AK-47 at his shoulder, and the weapon was pointed directly at him. Duff fired, then dove to his right, into the room, firing twice before crashing into the ground on his right arm.
The shooter in his corner got off one more round before he caught one of Duff’s hollow-points in the side of his neck. Blood shot across the white wall behind him, and he fell to the ground, clutching his throat.
Duff shot him again while gunfire behind him barked.
He scanned his entire sector of the room while on his side and saw several civilians crouched on the ground or folded under their desks, but no more opposition, so he rolled in the opposite direction.
In the far right corner another man in a RIVCOM uniform had slumped down in a seated position, a crimson stain behind his head. There were no more targets here, either, only terrified dam employees, so Duff sat up and checked on his two partners.
Anderson lay facedown in the doorway, clearly dead. He’d been shot through the left side of his head by the man Duff had then dispatched.
The EU security officer had taken Duff’s position and, through no fault of his own, paid the ultimate price.
Duff knew it could just as easily have been him, and he felt panic welling up inside him. He stifled it down when he looked at Malike, and saw that the Ghanaian had blood pouring from his left hand and onto the floor. The LBG man shook his arm, and more blood splattered down.
Duff climbed to his feet, balanced himself awkwardly on his prosthesis as he did so, then rushed to him, all but forgetting about his panic, though his gun remained up and aimed at the civilians. “You good?”
“Hit my forearm. I’ll live.”
Duff turned to face the room. “Any more enemy here?”
One man rose, his hands in the air. Duff immediately recognized him as the assistant plant operator who had greeted them outside. “None here, sir, but there are more in the building.”
Duff spoke into his mic. “Jay, we’re clear in here. Bring the principals in quickly, we might have more problems.”
Costa burst into the room, the ambassador just behind him and both Larsen and Manu just behind her. Nichole, Scott Clarke, and Arletta James followed, and Josh saw that Karen Chamberlin, the wounded Foreign Service Officer, was not with them.
He knew his wife would not have left Karen if she were still alive.
The group from the EU entered moments later, and the president, the surviving government employees, and the surviving men of the President’s Own Guard Regiment just after that. Julian saw his dead coworker on the floor, and Costa realized that Malike had been injured. He pointed to a control room worker, a woman in a dress, still squatting in the corner. “You have a first-aid kit?”
“Yes. Yes, we do.”
“We need it. Is there a washroom?”
A man next to her pointed to a door. He turned to his three agents still standing. “Get the high representative in that room.”
Johanna Aldenburg was escorted past the control room personnel and put in the bathroom, and seconds later, the seven surviving members of President Amanor’s detail brought him in, as well.
Five members of the press were here, and Duff assumed that meant they’d lost three in the initial gunfight.
The control room technician produced a first-aid kit from a box on the wall, and the lone non-injured LBG man, a burly fifty-one-year-old named Kaku, took it and brought it over to Malike, who was now seated on the floor, holding his bloody arm.
Costa rushed up to Mensah now. “Any other ways into this room other than the one we came from?”
“Stairwell down. There, next to the bathroom door.”
“That it?”
“If you go back into the hall there’s an elevator, and on the other side of the lobby are more stairs and a freight elevator, but from here, you can only get into the main part of the dam by taking the stairs down to the generator gallery.”
“How many entrances to the building in all?”
Mensah thought, but just a moment. “Ten, twelve maybe, including the subterranean levels.”
“Son of a bitch,” Larsen muttered. “We’ve got to lock this room down. We can’t cover the entire building.”
Julian ordered two of his men to stay at the hallway door and two more to go to the stairwell.
Now Costa looked back to Mensah. “Tell me everything, as fast as possible.”
“There’s only time to tell you one thing, man. Three Russians are here, and they are planting bombs.”
“Russians? They came with the others?”
“Yeah.”
Costa looked to Duff and said one word. “Wagner.”
Duff nodded.
“Where are they planting the bombs?”
Mensah looked like he might have a heart attack. Sweat poured from him, and his movements and words were rushed. “Downstairs. They are doing it right now.”
“Okay, calm down. Where are they?”
Mensah thought a moment. “Below us is the generator gallery, and below that the turbine gallery. There are elevators up to the top of the dam, other levels with equipment and piping and electrical relay systems.” He shook his head. “They were speaking to each other in Russian, looking at a tablet computer, and the one in charge said something about the turbines and needing to program detonators.”
“You speak Russian?” Costa asked.
“No, but they said ‘turbina,’ ‘programa,’ and ‘deetonators.’ Not exactly a secret code.”
Duff muttered softly now. “Oh shit.” He looked to Nichole for support but saw her hurriedly bandaging the upper thigh of a wounded male government official from the EU diplomatic group.
Costa needed more information. “What happens if they blow up bombs down there?”
“The amount of explosives they have? They had four satchels, but I don’t know if they all carried bombs; one looked different than the others. Each of the other three looked like they could have been twenty kilos or so. Sixty kilos, it’s not enough to blow the dam, I don’t think, but I’m not a structural engineer.”
He thought a moment. “I guess, depending on if they know what they are doing, if someone told them exactly where to put them at the base of the turbines, they could damage the flow from the penstock, filling the chambers with water. If that happens, then the dam wall could burst, killing tens of thousands downriver.”
With a distant stare he said, “And it could remove power from our nation’s circuits for a year or more, killing tens of thousands more.”
The president could hear all of this from the open bathroom door. He began conferring with some of his aides.
“What kind of bombs?” Julian asked now.
“What kind of bombs? I have no idea. They have three of the rebels with them; they told them they needed to come guard them while they prepare and plant the explosives, that’s all I know.”
“How long ago?”
“Right before I heard the helicopters.”
Costa looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes. Fuck. How long does it take to plant—”
He stopped talking, clearly, Duff reasoned, because he knew Mensah would have no answer to his question.
Now the RSO turned to Duff. “Those bombs are a danger for the ambo, so that makes them a priority. We’ve got to clear those guys out.”
Duff hefted the AK-47 rifle from the floor. “I don’t know how to dismantle a bomb.”
“If you can’t stop them before they plant them, you better damn well get your hands on whatever they’re using to detonate them.”
Ben Manu sat in a chair, stanching the blood coming from his thigh with his own hand while the U.S. embassy’s LBG man Kaku pulled more dressings from the first-aid kit. Manu said, “You know how to use that AK, Josh?”
In his career as a contractor, Josh Duffy had probably fired the AK-47 and other variants of this rifle more than all the other guns he’d ever fired in his life put together, including the M4, which he’d carried in the army. He just nodded. “I know my way around one, yeah.”
Duff raised the Kalashnikov, examined the sights, pulled the bolt back a bit and looked inside, then dropped the magazine. Reseating it, he went over to the dead rebel and took two more mags from his chest.
Julian said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got all my team covering this room, and I’ve got to stay with the high rep. I can’t spare you anyone.”
Kaku drew a fresh Browning pistol from the hip of one of the dead guards. “I’ll go.”
Manu and Malike both rose, but Costa ordered them to sit back down. “You two aren’t fully bandaged yet, and you’re still losing blood. Get yourselves patched up, then you can get back in this fight.”
Duff had the feeling he was about to go with only Kaku, and so did his wife. Nichole heard what was going on, and she rushed over. Squaring off to Jay Costa, she said, “You can’t possibly expect—”
A booming voice interrupted her. President Francis Amanor stepped out of the bathroom, despite his security men’s attempts to hold him back. He moved over to Costa, but he needn’t have bothered. Two steps from the bathroom he was audible throughout the room.
“I have six men left. How many do you need?”
Duff answered before Jay did. “Two.”
The president nodded, peeled two of his men off him, and sent them forward. Amanor said, “Bismark and Gideon have been with me for years.” He looked to his men, both in their forties. “Good luck.”
Duff said, “Who’s in charge?” He knew a power struggle down there would be the last thing anyone needed, and it would likely get everyone killed.
Amanor said, “You were the last man in this building, the first to be sent in to clear out this room. You are in charge. You’ve earned it.”
Mensah gave Duff and the others some quick directions; Larsen pulled a small plastic map of the facility off the wall and handed it over to him.
Then Nichole stepped up, reached out, and put her hand on her husband’s face.
She lowered it, and spoke to him.
Though she looked both tender and terrified, the words that came out of her mouth were hardly gentle.
“Kick ass, soldier.”
Duff and the three Ghanaians went to the stairs; Bismark led the way down, Duff right behind him, the Kalashnikov rifle at his shoulder.
As soon as they were gone, Nichole Duffy walked over to the dead man in the RIVCOM uniform who still wore a pistol on his belt. She knelt down to pull it, but behind her, Julian said, “What are you doing?”
“We need all the firepower in this fight we can get.”
“You know how to use a gun?”
Nichole pulled the weapon, rose up, and turned to him. “I was an officer in the U.S. Army.”
Julian just looked at her, then repeated himself. “You know how to use a gun?”
Nichole sighed, checked the weapon and the magazine, and pulled another magazine from the dead man’s utility belt. She said, “My dad had one of these when I was a kid. I prefer Berettas and SIGs, but I’ve sent enough lead downrange with one of these to know which end the pointy things come out of.”
Regional Security Officer Jay Costa called to Julian now. “I know this woman’s history. She’s proven herself in the past. She can help.”
Julian nodded, then looked to the American female Foreign Service Officer. “Just don’t point it at me or my people.”
Nichole fought an eye roll and jammed the pistol into her waistband.
She knew the man wasn’t being sexist, he was being anti-officer. Must have been an enlisted man, she told herself, and then she didn’t think of it again.