After a minute of near-constant shooting, reloading, and shooting again, Sergeant Opoku ordered his men to hold fire here at the top of the dam, though there were at least a half dozen and likely more rebels still down in front of the power house. Accurate fire from this distance with the iron sights of their just-acquired AKs was exceedingly difficult, and Opoku wanted to save as much ammo as possible.
He knew he had to close on the enemy to be more effective, and he also knew taking the stairs down the massive embankment would expose him and his force to enemy guns, but he didn’t see much alternative. Yes, they could have gone down the elevator or the ladder shaft in the building next to them and eventually ended up in the power house, but Opoku knew that route would require several minutes without any visibility on the enemy, minutes where the now-hunkered-down rebels could collect themselves and hit the building, perhaps kill the president and anyone else who might be inside.
No, he couldn’t afford to take the safe route to engage the enemy; he had to do it the hard way. He called out to the men on the railing around him. “Everyone, put a fresh magazine in if you have one. We’re going down the stairs; I will lead. Keep three meters separation, and keep your sights on the switchyard and the riverbank and watch for any—”
He stopped talking and turned his head to the east, in the direction of the police station and the admin building. He thought he’d heard a shot or some other noise.
The young corporal he’d ordered to provide security to the east was still aiming in that direction.
“Muntari. You see anything?”
“No, sir. But I heard something.”
Opoku pulled his cell phone out, opened the camera, zoomed in as much as possible, and then raised the phone towards the admin building and the road in front of it. He’d just focused in on a single black civilian truck parked there when an explosion rocked the center of the dam, only forty meters away from Corporal Muntari on the eastern side of the RIVCOM men.
Shrapnel, concrete, and asphalt came raining down on them.
Opoku knew what he’d heard, which meant he knew what had just happened, which meant he knew the danger he and his men were in.
“Mortars!” he shouted. “Get down!”
The second explosion came thirty seconds after the first, and twenty-five meters closer, which told Opoku, a former Ghanaian Army special forces captain, that the mortar crew was ranging their weapon, “walking in” the shells. He had his team hidden behind the elevator building, but clearly the enemy knew exactly where they were, so he yelled for the officers around him to follow him.
He rushed down the stairs, keeping his AK up on his shoulder and his eyes on the parking lot below. He was ready to stop and drop to a knee to fire on any enemy who revealed themselves from behind cover, but he was hoping he didn’t have to, because his men were still on the dam, trying to get onto the stairs.
The third mortar impact smacked the top of the elevator shaft building only ten meters from the last of Opoku’s men, but the shrapnel went up and out, firing over the heads of the cops there. Still, eardrums were pounded and the shock wave and terror of being under accurate indirect fire meant the men began scrambling down the stairs even faster.
Isaac recognized the loss of order above and behind him, so he focused even more intently on the scene below and in front, thinking that his team wouldn’t be watching for threats the way they should.
Almost immediately a pair of rebels behind a smoldering pickup in front of the switchyard stepped out and raised their rifles, and Isaac began firing on them.
To his relief he heard shooting from just behind as two of his men clearly saw the same threat that he’d seen. They all kept descending as they fired; the stairs took some hits from more enemy below, but Isaac kept the charge going, knowing what they were fleeing above.
Two mortars slammed down on the top of the stairs, just three seconds apart, killing the last two of the RIVCOM men in line instantly and injuring the man in front of them.
Isaac didn’t know this—he was occupied battling the rebels in the switchyard from two hundred meters away and ten stories below him—but the increased cadence of the mortar fire told him the crew knew they had dialed in their target’s location, and it also likely meant they would now rain down hell on the area.
Martin Mensah and his team of technicians had spent the last five minutes restoring power to the rest of the nation from the hydroelectric dam. It was still coming back up; in a few minutes more, he explained to the members of the joint delegation around him, the dam itself would have juice, and soon after that the lights all the way down in Accra would turn back on.
Benjamin Manu stood on his now-bandaged leg. The wound in his thigh was killing him, but his immediate focus was not on the pain but rather on the noise outside. Close in there was the sound of undisciplined gunfire but no sound of bullet impacts here in the building. From farther away there was more shooting, and the guns sounded to the well-trained Manu like they were probably AK-47s, with a louder boom and a lower report than the M4s most of the rebels carried.
But it was a third sound that caused him the most concern: the unmistakable thuds of mortar shells impacting somewhere a few hundred meters distant.
Julian Delisle shouldered up to him in the middle of the control room. “Are those RPGs?” he asked.
Before Manu could answer, Chad Larsen spoke up from across the room. “No. Not frag grenades, either. Those sound like mortars. Sixty mil.” When Delisle just looked at him, Larsen said, “I was in a Marine infantry battalion for six years. I know a mortar when I hear it.”
Delisle looked to Manu. “Who has mortars?”
“The army has mortars, but there’s no army around here. That must be the other side.”
“But they’re not firing at us?”
Jay Costa called out from the doorway to the bathroom. “There’s a battle going on out there. Maybe the police showed up.”
The man from the EU nodded at this, then turned to Mensah. “We aren’t going to wait around to see who wins. Can you get us out of here through those subterranean passages you mentioned?”
Mensah considered this. “If we don’t encounter any Russians or rebels on the way, yes.”
“Where will that put us on the outside?”
Mensah replied quickly, “We could either take the elevator or ladder to the top of the dam, or we could go all the way to the reservoir side. There’s some maintenance and warehouse buildings and the motor pool.”
Costa looked to Delisle. “If we can get out of here far enough away from the fighting, we can get those helos to come pick us up.”
Nichole Duffy had no authority in the conversation, but she spoke up anyway. “What about Josh and the other three men?”
Costa looked to her. “We’ll try to find them on the way. Hopefully they’ve stopped those bombs from being planted.”
“And if we don’t find them?”
“Look,” Costa said, “that fight outside could come in here at any time. And those mortars out there could start dropping on this building. We can’t just sit here.”
Nichole clearly saw the logic. She helped one of the wounded stand, and then the entire group, both the delegation and the dozen power house employees, began moving towards the stairs that Duff and his hastily formed team had taken less than ten minutes earlier.
Mensah said, “I must stay here to make sure the rebels don’t turn off the electrical transfer again.”
Delisle shook his head. “If the dam blows, you won’t stand a chance. You all are coming with us, and as soon as the army comes and routs these rebels, you can come back and go back to work.”
“But—”
“Non-negotiable,” Delisle said, and Mensah nodded reluctantly.
Forty-six people began descending the stairs, with Chad Larsen and three of the President’s Own Guard Regiment leading the way, pistols out in front of them.
Far below them, Duff, Gideon, and Kaku had made it about a quarter of the way down the right-hand wall of the huge turbine gallery when Gideon reached out and put his hand on Duff’s shoulder. Duff looked back and saw him pointing to something above. There, on the left of their position, the turbine shaft rose to the ceiling. A catwalk halfway up went around the circular structure, apparently for maintenance workers to use to access the internal components of the gargantuan machine.
Duff quickly saw what Gideon was pointing at. A meter-wide and meter-tall hatch, just above the catwalk, sat open, the metal covering propped below it on the catwalk railing.
Gideon leaned into Duff’s ear; he had to shout to be heard over the sounds of water coming through the walls and the floor. “There’s going to be a bomb right inside there.”
Duff knew he was right. He’d seen no other hatches open.
Fuck, he thought. He knew there was a computer that could trigger the weapon remotely, but he had no idea if the bomb fifty feet from him was also on a timer that was ticking down to nothing, or if the Russian with the detonation code was somewhere safe with his thumb on the bang switch.
“You want to check it out?”
Gideon nodded, then ran to the circular stairs leading around the turbine shaft. He was exposed on the catwalk, so Duff kept his weapon forward, hunting in the dim light for any movement ahead.
A minute later the Ghanaian returned. “There’s a big military-looking satchel down at the bottom of the shaft. They must have lowered someone down with a rope to place it. It’s attached somehow to a joint in the turbine housing. No way to get close to it to remove it.”
Duff wanted to run for his life, to go back up and grab Nichole and get the hell away from this disaster waiting to happen, but the only way out of this was to move forward and get the trigger from whoever had planted the device.
They did not see an open hatch on the next turbine shaft, so they moved forward to the third in the long room, and here, again, the metal cover was detached and propped open, and the darkened hatch looked ominous to the three men.
They moved forward a little more, found the fourth turbine undisturbed, then headed for the fifth and last turbine shaft to check it for the third satchel.
Lev Belov watched while Gresha climbed down the stairs of the fifth turbine, then ran forward, rejoining Belov, Vadik, and the two Western Togoland Dragons with them. He handed Belov the tablet computer.
“All detonator codes are entered. This is now the firing system; its radio range is about three kilometers.”
Vadik handed Gresha his rifle and rucksack back while Belov zipped the tablet back in the administrative pouch on his body armor, right in the center of his chest. Then the five of them stepped into the stairwell at the far end of the turbine gallery, intending to take it up one level so they could walk half the length of the generator gallery to access the ladder shaft to the top of the dam.
The power remained out, of course, so Belov assumed the elevators would be out of commission. The climb up thirty-five flights of a sharply angled ladder with their body armor, packs, weapons, and ammunition was going to be arduous, but they’d known all along that the twenty-minute climb from the depths of the dam was going to be a bitch.
On the generator gallery floor the men broke into a jog, keeping their rifles up at their shoulders, flashing the weapon lights occasionally to check the shadows in case there were dam employees or some other potential threats down here.
They encountered no one, however, and soon arrived at the ladder shaft, right next to the large elevator. Belov led the way into the shaft, but as he did so, he heard a squawk in his walkie-talkie, hooked to the left shoulder strap of his body armor vest.
He ordered the rest of them to stop with a closed fist, and then he pushed the button on the radio. “This is Bear, repeat last.”
“Delta squad for Bear.”
Delta squad should have been somewhere above him and out of radio range.
“Go for Bear.”
“We have entered the power house. We went to the control room; two men are dead, their weapons are gone, and the hostages are missing.”
If they were missing, Belov reasoned, then the security forces of the delegation must have been somewhere down here, trying to escape through another exit in the massive hydroelectric facility. Neither of his men spoke English, so he relayed the message quickly to them in Russian, speaking over the sound of rushing water coming from all around.
Then Belov returned his attention to the walkie-talkie. “Do you have comms with Condor?”
“I did a few minutes ago, then someone started shooting at us from the top of the dam, and we raided this building to get out of the line of fire. I can’t reach Condor from here, but mortars are exploding out there.”
Lev Belov rubbed sweat from his face. “Condor and his team have a sixty. Those mortar shells mean he’s here and in the fight. How many of you are left?”
“There are eight of us on our feet, including me, but that’s from three squads.”
“Okay, I want you and your men to head down the stairs off the control room, follow the signs to the turbine gallery, and protect that room until we come for you.”
“Yes, sir,” the man replied, and Belov wondered if he’d be detonating the bombs he’d placed down there in just a matter of minutes, killing the man he was now talking to. He wouldn’t detonate until Condor gave the order, and Condor would only give that order if the facility was completely retaken by the army and there was no other choice to keep the power off in the nation while the coup was under way.
But Belov’s main concern was not the fact that he was about to kill the rebels. The rebels were utterly expendable. No, his main concern was that the assistant plant manager in the control room had known he was going to plant the bombs, so it was possible the delegation was down there looking for them right now.
Quickly he turned to his small team.
“Gresha. Me and Vadik will stay here with one Dragon, guard the ladder, and watch for anyone on this level. You take the other Dragon, go back down to the turbine level, and protect those bombs.”
Gresha looked at him like he was an idiot. “Two of us?”
“You just have to hold any enemy off until the other eight Dragons arrive down there. When they do, come back up here. We’ll all go together up to the surface.”
Just then, lights came on in the big gallery, and the hum of spinning turbines below grew, even over the sound of the water.
“Shit,” Belov said. He realized the dam technicians had managed to restart the electricity, and now he was certain he’d be ordered to blow the bombs as soon as he got to the surface.
Gresha stepped over to the freight elevator next to him and pressed the down button, glad for the chance to use an elevator and avoid the ladder well.
Duff, Kaku, and Gideon all dropped to their knees in the turbine gallery, startled as bright lights took away the shadows they’d been moving through, and loud mechanical noises filled the air.
To their left the turbines began spinning, the whine growing by the second.
They’d checked the fifth turbine at the end of the room and found the third device but no Russians, so they’d backtracked towards a stairwell door they’d passed on the south wall of the room, halfway down. Their objective had been to go back upstairs to the control room, then escort the entire force out of here via the warren of tunnels, ladders, or, if the electricity returned, the elevators.
They’d just arrived at the stairwell and the big elevator next to it when the power suddenly came back on, and instantly Kaku rose and hit the call button.
From the multilevel map he’d been given in the control room, Duff thought this elevator might lead to the same level of the power house he’d left the rest of the delegation on, as would the ladder, but this gallery was several stories high, as was the generator gallery above, so the ladder would take much longer.
Over the sound of the turbines and the rushing water, Duff heard the elevator car lowering, and he stood with his shoulder next to the door as he covered to the west, and Gideon covered to the east, his own shoulder against the elevator door, while Kaku stood in the middle, watching over the rest of the gallery, waiting for the door to open.
Duff felt the door begin to slide up; he heard a shout of alarm from Kaku behind him and then a furious exchange of gunfire just yards away. Swiveling into the car, whipping his rifle up, he saw he was not alone.
Two men, one white and in combat gear, and the other Black and in a RIVCOM uniform, stood there just at the door and within striking distance.
Both men held rifles; the Ghanaian’s gun was down but the Russian’s was up and had just fired, hitting Kaku in the chest and knocking him down to the turbine gallery floor, but both Duff and Gideon had shifted into the car so close to the pair that no one could get their muzzles on another target.
Duff charged closer as he swung around, hoping to get a hand on the Russian’s gun. Gideon did the same to the rebel, but a step slower than Duff, and as a rifle shot cracked close, Duff heard the president’s bodyguard cry out in pain.
Both men threw their bodies into the two combatants in the elevator, and then they all four fell to the floor, desperately trying to get their rifles in position and keep their opponents from wielding theirs.