Some seventy-five yards away from his position Josh Duffy saw his people, as well as Amanor’s people and Aldenburg’s people, and he was sure his wife was somewhere in the crowd ahead.
But Duff did not run to them. Instead he stopped his advance, turned, and retreated back to the ladder well, because he realized that running to Nichole, Costa, and the others just to be one more gun in a fight was much less important than stopping the bombs below them all from detonating.
He had to find the last Russian and get the tablet computer.
He told himself there was nothing he could do but ascend, knowing there was at least one more Russian here, and that man must be in possession of the device. The obvious assumption was that he would try to get away from the dam before blowing it, and Duff knew his best course of action was to hurry to the surface and try to find the man before he could do so.
He began climbing, unaware he was just four flights below the person he was after, because there was too much noise in the operational hydroelectric facility to hear his target’s footfalls above.
Sergeant Isaac Opoku of the Volta River Authority’s River Command police force gave the order for his men to fall back. They’d made it into the control room of the power house right as the electricity turned back on, and then, as they began descending the stairs, they heard the sounds of gunfire below them.
Opoku determined that the security forces were engaging the rebels, and as much as he wanted to help his president and the others, he was aware of a problem they might not have been aware of, and it was a problem that needed to be sorted out.
There was a mortar crew with an unknown number of bad actors somewhere on the eastern side of the dam. The mortars had killed or wounded four of his men before they made it into the power house, and Isaac knew that if the joint delegation’s helicopters returned, they could easily be targeted and destroyed as long as that position and those fighters remained in place.
His men were confused, but when he got all thirteen of his remaining police back in the lobby, he said, “We’re going behind the power house. The VRA maintenance vehicles are there, and we’re going to drive them back up to the top of the dam and try to knock out the enemy there so the president can be extracted safely, if he’s even still alive.”
The group began moving, even the walking wounded, and soon they were back outside, rifles swiveling left and right as they headed in the direction of the switchyard. Then they turned right, moving around the side of the power house to a small parking lot where two pickups and two vans sat.
One of the pickups and one of the vans had the keys in them, so Isaac took the front passenger seat of the truck; the rest of his men loaded up into both vehicles, and they raced off to the north up the winding road that led to the top of the dam and the reservoir beyond.