Duff made it into his position on the far side of the bridge, finding a rock that jutted up enough for him to prop the magazine of his weapon on so that he could have a steady base to fire from while lying prone. Nichole knelt behind a tree just to his right, her weapon pointed out the right side.
He took aim on the headlights in front of him because he couldn’t see anything behind them, and he prepared to fire, but then he registered movement.
Shadows bouncing, men approaching at a run.
“Hold fire,” he said to his wife, but Isaac, Ben, and Malike were out of earshot, so he could only hope the men stuck to the plan and waited for him to fire before opening up themselves.
His intention was to draw this group of rebels into the middle of the L-shaped ambush he’d set up, but if anyone opened fire too early, they’d lose the opportunity to catch these men at their most vulnerable.
He aimed at a target, the lead shadow, just a silhouette of a man running forward, and then the man turned on a flashlight. Duff didn’t know if he was the squad leader, but he decided this man would be the first to die.
When they were only fifty feet or so from the bridge, Duff assumed they would be right in line with Malike and Ben over in the trees, so he flipped off his safety and put his finger on the trigger of his rifle.
Copper shouted into the radio. “Both squads on the hill, double-time it back down here. Enemy is trying to flank us with the stream.”
His two squad leaders in the jungle confirmed they’d received the order and were now on the way back, and then Copper began moving to the bed of his truck so he could grab an RPK light machine gun to provide extra support to the men closing on the bridge.
He’d just put his hand on the weapon when a crack of gunfire on the road made him look up.
Instantly several weapons began firing in semiautomatic mode. He could see the flashes, both at the bridge and in the trees to the right of the road, and he dove behind the truck, pulling the big weapon behind him.
He readied the machine gun, opening its bipod so he could rest it on the ground to fire more steadily, and he rolled out behind the left rear of his truck. To the east the gunfire was unrelenting, and he recognized the sounds of AK-47s, some fired haphazardly, and others fired with obvious skill.
Duff emptied the magazine of his Kalashnikov, seated another mag, then reached under and around the rifle to rack the bolt with his left hand. His wife fired at a cadence measured to conserve ammo, and when Duff again began shooting up the road, Nichole called for cover so she could herself reload.
Duff saw bodies down in the middle of the road just fifty feet or so away from him, but fresh muzzle flashes erupted farther away now, and at least some of the men in the road had dived into the trees on his right.
Duff took out a grenade, pulled the tape off the spoon, then pulled the pin. He let it cook off a couple of seconds in his hand, then side-armed it as hard as he could.
The frag grenade detonated shortly after disappearing into the trees.
Suddenly a fully automatic machine gun, fired from at least fifty yards away, began spraying short bursts in the direction of the bridge, so much so that Duff rolled to his right to seek shelter next to Nichole behind the tree. He saw Isaac still firing across the bridge; the RIVCOM officer had good cover, and even Chad Larsen, whose wounds looked devastating to Duff, had managed to crawl up the bank to the road with an AK, and he provided covering fire for Isaac.
The machine gun—Duff was certain it was a Russian-made RPK—barked, tearing up the trees all around him, but it seemed the man might have been firing from around the left side of a vehicle and therefore he didn’t have the right angle on Isaac and Chad.
Duff grabbed his wife by the shoulder and yanked her back behind the tree, then leaned into her ear to shout over the gunfire and the rain.
“Prep a grenade for me, but stay in cover.”
He knew the only way he could hit that machine gun with a frag grenade from this distance would be to just throw it as far as possible and hope for a skidding bounce that sent it the rest of the way before detonating.
He shouted across the bridge to Isaac. “Hey! Dump a magazine in that first vehicle!”
Isaac was almost invisible in the shadow behind the rock he used for cover, but Duff detected a nod of his head.
The Ghanaian’s AK began firing over and over. The headlights were quickly shot out, and shortly after that the RPK up the road fell silent.
Duff used the moment to step out from behind the tree, and he slung Nichole’s grenade as far as he possibly could, ducking back quickly. He heard a detonation, then looked back out, determining that the grenade had bounced off the road and into the trees thirty yards away.
Fresh rounds from the machine gun impacted the tree he knelt behind, but he didn’t move, he just began prepping another frag, but while doing so he saw Isaac stand up and heave his grenade, also towards the first vehicle.
Isaac had better luck than Duff. The detonation seemed to take place right in front of the headlights, and both of them immediately extinguished.
No more fire came from either the road or the trees.
Duff tucked back around the trunk, and he put a hand on Nichole’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “Josh…we’ve got to get back to Accra.”
She was thinking about Mandy and Huck and whatever it was that was going on in the city. He said, “I know, babe.”
All was quiet on the road save for the rain now, but Duff knew he didn’t have the luxury of taking his time to make sure the area was cleared of enemy.
The men on the hill could be back down here in minutes, and he needed to find vehicles that weren’t too shot up so that they could get out of here.
He rose and ran across the road just as Malike and Ben stepped out of the trees, their weapons still pointed to the west in case anyone remained there and was still in the mood to fight.
He shouted to Isaac, “Get everyone you can in your truck. I’m going up the road to score us another vehicle.” To Ben and Malike he said, “Can you guys cover me?”
“We’ll come with you,” Ben said, and he limped along with Duff as they headed up the pitch-black road in the rain.
Duff ran up the now completely darkened road, his rifle in the crook of his arm. If there were still combatants here, he and the other men with him were likely about to die, but he knew the clock was ticking to get out of here.
The first vehicle they came to was a powerful-looking Toyota pickup, but Duff didn’t even try to start it. The hood was up, the engine and front tires were riddled with holes, and the glass was shattered.
Behind it he saw a man on his back lying next to an RPK machine gun on its side. Duff shot him in lieu of checking him for a pulse, giving no thought to the action at all.
A Vektor rifle also lay there next to the truck and the dead man, and by looking over the body, Duff determined quickly that this was another Sentinel mercenary. The weapon, the man’s body armor, and even the radio on his shoulder were just like those of the Russian Sentinel operators Duff had killed at the dam.
He ran on, with Malike and Ben trailing, and quickly he found more bodies and two more pickups behind the first one. A man lay slumped behind the wheel of the second truck; Duff thought he was dead but fired two rounds into him anyway, then pulled his body out and let it fall into the mud.
This truck looked to Duff like it was still in good shape, but he knew it would be almost impossible to fit everyone into just this and Isaac’s Toyota.
Looking farther west, he saw that a small four-wheel-drive box truck sat parked in the rear of the convoy. He approached it cautiously but found no one there, alive or dead. Soon he climbed behind the wheel. The keys were in the ignition, so he fired it up, ground the gears, and began rolling forward to pick up Ben and Malike, then drive it through the heavy mud to the bridge.
Bob Gorski walked across his hotel suite, then flipped off the switch on the shortwave transmitter sitting on the desk. He then turned off the portable power station that had been giving the shortwave its electricity, and by doing so he also turned off the two lamps that had been plugged into the power station, blanketing the room in darkness.
A loud boom in the distance turned his head towards the window, and he looked out into the rainy, misty night. No other explosions followed; it seemed clear to him that the action in the streets was dying down. Two hours earlier he’d stood up here on his tenth-floor balcony and both watched and listened to gunfights around the city, heard the low booms of high-explosive mortar rounds exploding, and watched fires burn at the airport and somewhere far to the east.
But this detonation was the first he’d heard in several minutes, and it wasn’t immediately followed by other sounds of combat.
Gorski grabbed his wallet and left the room, heading for the stairs.
The CIA officer had spent many years in Africa, and he’d been in the middle of multiple coups d’état. Some of them had been violent, but Ghana was a bigger and ostensibly more stable country, and he feared that things were going to get worse before they got better.
He’d spent the evening on his shortwave and his sat phone, his only real ways to communicate with senior leaders in Ghana’s Bureau of National Intelligence, the nation’s spy shop. While CIA station Accra had been reluctant to give credence to any of Gorski’s concerns, BNI had been more receptive, and now that it appeared Gorski had been right about potential unrest, the local intelligence agency was actively helping Gorski, giving him access to their agents out in the city and in other parts of the nation.
Comms were difficult with the Internet down, the power down, and the cell network down, but a few BNI agents had shortwave transmitters, and Gorski had also been speaking with a BNI officer with a sat phone who’d been driving his motorcycle across the city to meet personally with his agents.
The man had stopped communicating an hour earlier, however, and Gorski didn’t know what to make of that.
With his sat phone in his pocket he descended the stairwell, lit with emergency lighting, and when he finally stepped out into the lobby, a pair of armed security men standing by the door turned to him in surprise.
A hotel guest services representative stepped from behind her desk. “Sir…may I help you?”
“Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “Just heading to the bar.”
The woman smiled back, but he could see the strain on her face that this day had put there. “You will not be alone, sir.”
Gorski entered the bar, saw that it was illuminated by candlelight, and sat on a barstool that was positioned in front of a candle on the marble top. A couple dozen people sat around the space, foreigners who’d come to Ghana for tourism or to do business but found themselves in the middle of chaos.
The bartender stepped up to him.
“The usual, Mr. Bob?”
Gorski said, “Evening, JoJo. You guys still have ice?”
“For a few hours more, sir.”
“Good. Yeah, the usual, thanks.”
“Vodka soda on the way, boss.”
Gorski’s phone rang in his pocket, and he hurriedly pulled it out. “Yeah?”
“Well, Bob, let me be the first to offer you an apology.” Gorski recognized the voice of Richard Mace, the CIA chief of station here in Accra.
He leaned forward and put an elbow on the bar. “What do you mean?”
“You come into town, feed us all this talk about trouble in the bush…we blew you off. You were right, we were wrong.”
“Something else has happened, hasn’t it?”
“Damn right. Reports we’re getting from Ghanaian intelligence is that two columns of rebels are moving on the city. Southern Command has had their hands full with the extremist cells they’ve been fighting all evening, and Central Command is forming up in Kumasi to come down and support.”
“What’s the ETA on the rebels hitting the city?”
“Within the hour. General Boatang and his troops are probably eight hours away, realistically. They won’t get here before dawn.”
“We have any idea of the number of rebels?”
“Professor Addo, the commander of the Dragons of Western Togoland, has claimed in the past that he has four thousand armed troops.”
Gorski waved that away as his drink was placed next to the candle in front of him. “In his dreams.”
“Agreed. We’re thinking the number will be under one K, but we are concerned about the idea that the rebels might have help from soldiers of fortune.”
“Yeah, that makes two of us.”
“Anyway, I also didn’t believe you when you told me Tremaine was here cooking something up, so…if you want to drop by the embassy and kick me in the ass, be my guest. I have it coming.”
Gorski laughed a little. “No worries, Mace. I don’t know if I’d have believed me, either. What about U.S. military assets?”
“Washington wants President Amanor to request them, and so far, that hasn’t happened. Understandable, it would be politically sketchy for him to do. It could make him look like a vassal of America.”
“Jesus Christ, Mace. The ambassador was attacked, and she’s out of the city and injured. That should bring out some sort of response from the military, right?”
“It’s up to the White House, as always.”
Mace then said, “Just got a call from the ARSO with the ambo.”
“Duffy?”
“The other one. Larsen. He says they’re on the N2 heading to the city.”
“He’s hurt, from what I heard.”
“Sounded like it. He says he’s passed off AIC duties to Duffy. We’re sending a team of local agents to meet them halfway and bring them back to the embassy. That’s all Washington wants to do for now.”
Gorski let it go, drank a sip of his vodka soda. “I’d like to debrief Duffy when he gets there.”
“Absolutely. But…don’t go out on the streets. I can have someone pick you up, bring you to the embassy. Get you out of your hotel so you can be closer to the action.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“What else do you need from me?”
Gorski had been waiting for this question. “I want to find Kang. To do that I need locals in a private vehicle, maybe SDA personnel or someone else we trust. We fit the vehicle with radio frequency scanners, thermal cameras, electromagnetic emissions detectors, whatever you have.”
“And then what?”
“Then they go out into the city looking for signals.”
“Bob…Accra is eighty-one square miles. It could take days to—”
“We don’t have days. We only have till the power comes back on.”
Dryly, Mace said, “That could be days.”
“Once the city has power, it will be exponentially harder to detect a strong electronic footprint.” Gorski sipped his drink, then said, “But your people won’t have to go all over the city. You send your crew to me here, and I bet we can narrow down the search zone considerably.”
“You really think this MSS guy you’re after is in Accra?”
“I know he’s in Accra.”
There was a pause, then Mace said, “Today is not the day for me to doubt you, Bob. I’ll get assets on the way to you, ASAP.”