Two vehicles, a pickup and a four-wheel-drive box truck, pulled up on the narrow residential street in the town of Atimpoku, ten miles south of the Akosombo Dam. The streetlights were out, so when both vehicles stopped in front of a small house with a carport and turned off their headlights, the entire street was again shrouded in darkness.
Deputy plant operator Martin Mensah stepped down from the rear vehicle and began limping his way forward towards the pickup in front of him on the street.
The rain had moved on by eleven forty-five, but a thick mist covered the road, and Josh Duffy stepped out into it when he climbed out of the front passenger seat of the truck. Mensah was limping, Duff saw, and it was obvious the man approaching him was in considerable pain but equally obvious that he wanted to get back to his dam and begin the repairs needed to bring the power grid back up, because he hobbled forward quickly.
Mensah shook the American’s hand. “Thank you, sir, but I must return to the facility.”
“Of course. Take that truck. But be careful.”
“You be careful, as well. It might take us several hours to restore power.”
They shook hands again, and then the older man began limping back to the box truck.
Duff turned and met Isaac and Nichole in the driveway. The RIVCOM officer shined his flashlight on a small white four-door under the carport roof. He said, “Like I said, it will only carry four, maybe five people.”
“It only needs to carry Nichole and me. The ambo and the others will stay in the pickup. We’ll go ahead to scout the area so they don’t drive into anything unexpected. We’ll return it to you when this is over.”
Isaac nodded, somewhat distractedly, and then said, “Oh yes, the radios. Follow me.”
Duff, Nichole, and Isaac walked up to the carport door, and Isaac opened it with a key. Cracking the door to reveal the smell of candle wax and a dim view of his kitchen, he called out, speaking Twi. “Abina? It’s me.”
“Isaac!” his wife cried out from the darkness deeper in the little house.
He stepped into his home, shined his flashlight, and looked through the kitchen into the den, where he saw his wife cradling her son in her left hand and holding a kitchen knife in her right.
“What’s happening?” she asked as she moved closer, both relief and panic in her voice. “I heard explosions earlier, police sirens.”
“Rebels attacked the dam. Tried to kill the president.”
She gasped. “The helicopters, earlier. I heard them.”
“The delegation came today, not tomorrow, and the rebels were there to meet them.”
“Oh my God.” She took Isaac’s light and shined it on his T-shirt, seeing the blood. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s not bleeding anymore. Mrs. Duffy here treated my injury during the drive.”
Abina Opoku looked past her husband now, shined the light by the door, and saw the white couple standing behind her husband. They were drenched; the man had cuts to his forehead and arms, and the woman had a black eye.
Both carried rifles on slings hung over their shoulders.
“Hello,” she said, then looked back to her husband.
Isaac said, “Duff and Nichole, may I present my wife, Abina. My son, Kofi.”
Abina shook their hands, a wary look on her face, and then she went to the freezer, pulled out a bag of frozen mangoes, and handed it to Nichole. “This will help the swelling in your eye.”
Nichole took it and put it on her right eye, then let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Duff said, “Isaac said we could borrow your car. I promise the U.S. government will compensate for any damage or—”
Isaac spoke up, addressing his wife. “I can’t stay. I just came to get the car.”
“What?” Duff said, cocking his head. “No.”
But the Ghanaian nodded forcefully. “I am going to see this to the end with my friends.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Accra. The danger has passed here. You will be fine. I just have to get the ambassador back to her embassy, and then I will come straight back here. I promise.” He turned to Duff. “Let me change my shirt and I’ll be ready.”
“You don’t have to do this, man,” Duff said.
Nichole echoed the sentiment. “You’ve done so much already. We’ll be fine.”
But the Ghanaian remained steadfast. “You’ll be better with me.”
And with that, Duff and Nichole went back outside while Isaac took a moment to change and talk to his wife.
As they headed back down the little driveway, Duff said, “Isaac and I will go in the lead vehicle. We’ll stay in walkie-talkie range.”
Nichole said, “I want to go with you.”
Duff thought it over a moment. Said, “It’s going to be dangerous. We’re like the counterassault truck for this convoy, except we don’t have any armor to protect us.”
“That’s why you need me.” She held up the AK.
After a moment he nodded. “All right, you come with us. It will be fine. It’s not like we’re in D.C.”
Duff stepped up to the truck now. Ben was behind the wheel, with Malike riding shotgun. Ambassador Dunnigan lay in the back seat, and she seemed to be asleep, likely from the effects of the opiate, Duff reasoned.
In the bed, Chad Larsen and Arletta James lay flat, and Chad cradled an AK-47 in his arms.
To Ben, Duff said, “Isaac, Nik and I are going to be in the lead vehicle. We’ll try to stay half a kilometer in front of you; Isaac has radios we can use to communicate on the drive back.”
Chad called him to the back of the truck now. When Duff looked at him, even in the darkness, he could see that the man was in agony. He said, “Hey, man. Remember how I said I didn’t need anything for pain?”
“Stand by,” Duff said, and then he reached into the back seat of the truck and unzipped the trauma bag on the floorboard below Ambassador Dunnigan. From it he pulled a syringe of hydromorphone.
He walked around to the other side of the truck bed and said, “You’ve got five of us with rifles ready to protect the ambo. You just rest, man.”
Chad shook his head, “Just a half dose, and you’re not taking my AK.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Duff injected him with half a dose from the syringe, then squirted the rest into the street and broke off the needle.
He walked back up the drive as Isaac came out of the house dressed in a fresh RIVCOM tunic; it was untucked because of the thick bandage around his waist. He carried the AK rifle taken from one of the bodies in the jungle over his shoulder, a backpack slung over the other shoulder, and a pair of black walkie-talkies in his hands. He put one in his car and took the other to Malike in the truck.
Isaac then returned and climbed behind the wheel of his 2010 Toyota Yaris four-door; Duff took shotgun and Nichole sat in the back seat, her bag of frozen mangoes pressed to her face with one hand, while she held the AK in her lap with the other.
In minutes the Toyota had led the truck back onto the highway, passing signs of fighting every kilometer or two: burned buildings, bullet-ridden walls, wrecked-out cars.
The one thing not on the road tonight was traffic. People remained locked up in their homes to keep themselves and their property safe, staying away from the combat that had passed here hours earlier in addition to the evening of bad weather and the power outage.
As they drove, Nichole leaned up from the front seat, the frozen fruit still comforting her swollen eye. “Here’s something I don’t understand. Why does Tremaine want the detonation codes back? He knows you know where the bombs are, and his rebels don’t control the dam, so he can assume they’ve been defused or removed anyway.”
“No idea,” Duff admitted.
“Show me what it looks like.”
He reached down to the backpack between his boots and pulled it out.
She took it, looked it over with curiosity. “What is it?”
“It’s a tablet computer, but some military-grade shit. Getac. We used to use these in the PMCs to store our codes, frequencies, routes, op orders, stuff like that. This one looks pretty fancy.”
“It also looks like somebody shot it.”
He raised a hand. “Guilty.”
“Does Tremaine know it’s damaged?”
“I tried to tell him, but I don’t think he believed me.”
She took it in her hands. “But…why would you use this to detonate the bombs? Why do you need something this sophisticated?”
He shrugged now. “You don’t. I’ve seen a lot of triggering devices, and none of them are computers. Cell phones, little radio transmitters, stuff like that.”
“And,” Nichole said, “there’s no cell phone service. How was he supposed to use this once he left the area?”
Duff just shrugged in the front seat.
After a time, she looked back up to him, her eyes wide. “Don’t you get it? He doesn’t want the computer back to detonate the bombs that he has to assume have been disarmed; he wants it because there’s something else on here that he needs, or something that will implicate him or others involved with this.”
Duff took it back and looked at the two small round holes through the glass. “Whatever was on here, though, we can’t access it.”
“We can’t, but forensics can. It might have to go to CIA, it might have to go all the way back to the States, but I’d bet money somebody can get intel off that device. And whatever intel is on that device is what Tremaine is trying to keep out of our hands.”
Duff thought a moment. “We could give it back to him, and he could leave us alone.”
They looked at each other while Isaac drove in silence. Simultaneously, they expressed excitement, then doubt, then resignation.
Nichole said it first. “We can’t do that, Josh.”
“I know,” he said with a shrug. “He might not come after us, specifically, but if we give this back to him, it will leave him out here in play. We need to bring down whoever is doing all this.”
Nichole said, “When are you going to call him?”
“Once the ambo is safe, once we’re with the kids and we know they’re safe. Then I’ll meet up with Gorski, and we’ll call Tremaine and see what he has to say for himself.”
They passed the burned-out shells of police vehicles; the rain had extinguished any fires, but the smell of burnt rubber was pervasive in the air.
It became quickly clear from their travel south that the rebels weren’t interested in holding any territory. There were no roadblocks, no obvious continued fighting in the towns the two vehicles drove past, or any other hint that the rebels intended to do more than just blitzkrieg their way to the capital.
With the help of Sentinel.
Minutes before midnight, a team of nine Russian Sentinel operators stepped out of the chemical factory on Fertilizer Road, where they had been hiding out for the past several hours, and they made their way into the forecourt where their vehicles were parked. The group walked past the vehicles, through the darkness, confident in their movements.
They’d come to this place several hours ago, shortly after getting the emergency message from Belov that the operation was to begin immediately, knowing the place was abandoned, knowing also that the forecourt would suit their purposes for their task tonight.
These nine men were the only Sentinel operators inside the capital—all the others had been tasked to hit targets either on the roads to Akosombo ahead of the rebel columns or at the dam itself, and those men had all been engaged for hours already.
But these nine had been ordered to wait until midnight to act.
The men had been surprised by fighting in the city earlier in the afternoon and evening; they hadn’t been briefed on any other attacks, but they’d just hunkered down in their shuttered chemical factory, waiting for their time.
And their time was now.
The three 82-millimeter mortars had been erected in the forecourt near their three trucks, and the weapons were ranged for a target three kilometers to the west of their location.
The men used headlamps to see their way around, and in the dancing lights the three spotters went to three ladders propped up by the front wall; a man knelt next to a crate of shells positioned by each weapon, and a man stood with a shell over each mortar tube, ready to drop it in and duck.
The cell phone of one of the men chirped, telling him it was time to begin.
At exactly midnight, three men dropped three high-explosive fragmentation mortar bombs into the tubes; they crouched quickly, and with a single concussive thud the 6-pound explosives launched into the air.
The trio on the ladders had their binoculars out, aimed west, and thirty-five seconds after the first rounds were fired, all three hit Burma Camp, the headquarters of the Ghana Armed Forces Southern Command.
One shell slammed into the closed officers’ mess on the north side of the base, causing damage but no casualties. The other two rounds struck in and around the Block 6 barracks.
Most of the troops were out of the barracks, hastily assembling at Parade Square to go out to the north to meet a rebel force of undetermined size that Ghanaian intelligence had informed them of just a half hour earlier.
The Russian spotters registered the impact points of the mortars, then called for fire adjustments on all three weapons.
The second salvo of shells impacted a minute after the first. The motor pool was hit, a shell landed close enough behind the front gate to kill several sentries there, and the officers in Parade Square desperately trying to get their troops together in an organized fashion had to instead get everyone moving away as fast as possible.
The forward observers called to the mortarmen to fire for effect, and then shells began launching every five to ten seconds for the next three minutes.
This massive base had been hit by the extremists five hours earlier; a few were killed at the front gate by an RPG, and a half dozen mortars had impacted around the camp and set some equipment alight, but when over fifty shells detonated in a five-minute period across the length and width of the massive base, pandemonium ensued at Burma Camp. Entire companies of troops hunkered down in bomb shelters; other units rushed out the front gate with no orders, their chain of command disrupted.
The objective of the Sentinel operators was not to defeat Southern Command; it was to suppress any reaction the battalion of infantry there at Burma Camp could make to the rebels approaching the city.
And then, after five minutes of furious work, all nine men began to disassemble all three mortars, then they put them back in a covered-bed truck.
The Russians left the area a minute before a pair of police cars raced into view.
Their orders were to stop at one more location, a sprawling outdoor market two kilometers to the north, and here they would fire another thirty to fifty shells at Burma from another angle, and then the men would return to their safe house in the city to await extraction.