Josh Duffy’s phone buzzed in the center console of the Tacoma just as they entered the hills on the N4 highway. While Isaac navigated and Nichole watched their six to make certain there were no rebels or mercenaries on their tail, Duff answered.
“Yeah?”
“Duff? It’s John.”
He hadn’t expected to hear from the CIA man again after last seeing him in the embassy garage.
“What’s up?”
“I’m three blocks away from the target. I’ve got a drone up, eyes on the front gate of One Ankama Close, and two technicals are approaching now.”
“Toyota pickups?”
“One is, the other’s a Ford. I can see in the front vic, they’ve got their windows down. Masked men, body armor.”
“Sentinel guys,” Duff said.
“That would be my guess. I wanted to let you know that they passed a vehicle about a block south of the property, slowed down, spoke to someone inside. My guess is the Chinese running this op have their own surveillance detection assets out in the neighborhood, and they were clearing them to go up.”
Duff said, “Gorski said Kang would do that. I’m hoping we’ll be able to fool that first layer of protection by making them think we’re Sentinel.”
John told Duff to stand by a minute, and then he said, “They just rolled up to the front gate, talked to a pair of Asian-looking guards there. Then they drove on through. Looking at the grounds, I see a third pickup plus three civilian cars, an SUV and two sedans, all parked in the circle at the front. Got a couple more guys in masks by the door.”
“Okay. Good information. What’s your mission?”
“Just observe and report. Nobody told me I couldn’t report to you, too.”
“Thank you.”
“Something else you need to be aware of. CIA has a field team up here, the group that found this location through electronic signal intercepts. It’s four locals and one of our techs.”
“What about them?”
“I just gave our guy a drone, told him to watch the area to the south and report anybody else coming up here who looks interesting.”
“Good. What does the wall around the property look like?”
“Probably three meters high. No razor or anything on top of it. Big lawn both front and back. I see a couple of patrolling sentries, plus the pair at the front. I can’t rule out sentries in the building looking out, but this isn’t a fortified military complex by any stretch.”
“Okay.”
“Stand by,” John said again, and then, “Okay. Six people dismounted from the technicals. They are all armed with long guns. A guard at the front isn’t impeding them, they’re walking right in.”
Duff said, “Okay. We’ll be there in—” He looked to Isaac.
Isaac said, “Fifteen minutes if we don’t run into any problems.”
Duff relayed Isaac’s words; John acknowledged, then said, “From looking at the property with the drone, there’s some good cover on the hillside on the south side, trees and big rocks. If you could get close enough to dismount and go through the trees, you could get right to the back fence. Inside the fence, there’s landscaping…palm trees mostly. You could get some cover there.”
“That’s what we’ll do, then.”
John said, “Let me know before you do anything, I’ll support you with overwatch as best I can.”
“Thanks,” Duff said, and then he hung up the phone and clipped it onto his chest rig.
To the other two in the truck, he said, “Let’s put the masks on. The hills have eyes.”
Mandy Duffy sipped her cocoa and looked at the closed bathroom door. She could hear the woman inside throwing up, and it sounded as if she were crying.
Huck looked at his sister. “Is she okay?”
Mandy nodded and took another sip.
Finally the toilet flushed, the water ran for nearly a minute, and then the door opened. The woman had clearly been crying; Mandy could see her puffy eyes now.
She sat back in her chair and didn’t look at the kids. She just stared off to the wall beyond them.
Mandy cleared her throat. “Your English is very good.”
The woman looked at her but said nothing.
“Did you learn in school?”
She gave a slight nod, and Mandy took that as an opening. “Are you Chinese?”
After a hesitation, she looked away. Said, “Yes.”
“We were studying Chinese at my last school. Ni hao.”
She saw surprise on the woman’s face as she looked back. “Ni hao ma,” she replied softly.
“Wo hen hao, xie xie,” Mandy said, and both she and the woman smiled a little.
When the woman did not immediately look away again, Mandy said, “Can I ask you a question?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t have any idea how long they are going to keep you here. I just work for them, they don’t tell me their plans.”
“I was going to ask you something else.”
“Oh…okay. What is it?”
“Are you going to have a baby?”
The lady just stared at her. Three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds. At fifteen seconds Mandy could see tears fill the woman’s eyes. She blinked, they dripped.
Self-consciously she wiped her eyes. Only then did she nod.
Mandy asked, “Are you going to have a boy or a girl?”
“I…I don’t know yet.”
Mandy smiled now. “It’s going to be a girl.”
Jia cocked her head. “Really?”
The young American nodded. “My mom said when she had me she was a lot sicker than when she had Huck.” She shrugged. Matter of factly, she said, “You seem pretty sick.”
“I am pretty sick,” she said now, and tears continued to flow.
After a long time, Mandy said, “Are you trying to keep it a secret from everyone? If you are, I won’t tell.” She turned to her brother. “Huck, don’t say anything.”
Huck nodded.
The woman said nothing.
Mandy changed the subject. “The men who brought us here. They shot somebody when they captured us.”
The Chinese woman looked away from them. After a moment she rose from the chair. “I will bring you lunch in a little while.”
As she headed towards the door, Mandy called out to her. “Ma’am. Can you do something to help us?”
Jia stopped, but she didn’t turn back around. After several seconds she said, “I can’t do anything. I’m sorry.”
She opened the door; the Russian guard turned around and took the opportunity to give the children the evil eye once again.
Jia walked past him without a word and headed for the stairs.
Kang Shikun sat in his dim office looking out the window at the bright Friday morning. He’d just taken a call from one of his agents in the city telling him Boatang’s forces had routed virtually all of the rebels in bloody street-to-street fighting along the coast.
Kang was pleased. Central Command would take over down here in an attempt to “restore order,” at least until the power came back online, and in that time Boatang’s profile would skyrocket at the expense of President Amanor.
Kang wondered if the president would even last for the rest of the month before he was forced out of power by a grateful congress and a grateful nation.
Just as he stood up to go out to his support staff and see what news they had, he was startled by a sudden bright light. He turned back towards the room, and he saw that the power was back on.
Lights that weren’t being run by the generator flipped on; the TV across the room glowed as it started up.
Kang sat back down. This was not ideal. He needed a couple more days of confusion and chaos around the capital city for General Boatang to become President Boatang.
Somehow the people at the hydraulic dam had managed to fix what Tremaine had described as “catastrophic damage” to the switchyard there.
Tremaine appeared at the door from the den. He’d put his body armor back on, and his rifle hung from his shoulder. “Hey. The power is—”
Kang said, “Not catastrophic enough, was it?”
The South African said, “This is Duff’s fault. He stopped us from doing the damage we wanted to do to the structure, and by killing my Sentinel operatives, he sowed the seeds for the dam to fall out of our control.”
Kang was not pleased, but he said no more about it. Instead he said, “My people are telling me the fighting at the square has died down to nothing. The professor and his nine unarmed men here are now apparently the last Western Togoland rebels still standing.”
Tremaine said, “They won’t be standing for long. I have the men here I need to do the job. We’ll take them down into the basement, sell it like some sort of after-action conference, and we’ll kill them all.” He put his hand on the knife attached to the body armor in the center of his chest. “We’ll be quiet about it.”
Kang’s desk phone rang now, and he snatched it up. At the same time, Tremaine’s satellite phone buzzed on his chest rig, and he stepped out of the office to answer it.
Kang said, “Yes?”
“It’s Boatang. We have a problem.”
“Tell me.”
“I just heard from an officer I used to know who is now with Southern Command. He tells me there is a platoon of special forces en route to raid a property up in the Aburi Hills. If that happens to be where you are, or where any of your people are, then you need to get out of there.”
Kang rose from his desk slowly. He said, “Listen very carefully, General. You need to stop that raid.”
“I can’t stop it! General Nkrumuh is in command down here, and he has been talking to BNI. Nkrumuh isn’t going to listen to me, and BNI isn’t going to listen to me. They’ve been investigating me, as I’m sure you remember.”
Kang called out for Tremaine; he only had a handful of armed Chinese here, but there were over a dozen of the Sentinel men throughout the house that he knew of.
But Tremaine didn’t answer.
Josh Duffy held the phone to his ear as he walked through the woods on the hillside a couple of hundred yards away from the target location.
He heard the phone answered on the other end, and then a voice. “Yeah?”
“Okay, Tremaine,” Duff said. “I’m in my car on the N4, and we just got into the hills. I have my wife with me. I also have the computer. Please, let’s just end this without any more violence.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a plan, my friend.”
The truth was Duff and his two cohorts had abandoned the truck just a minute earlier, three minutes after being stopped by a vehicle with two Chinese men in civilian attire. The men didn’t speak English very well, apparently, but they did manage to say the word “Sentinel,” in a questioning manner.
Isaac said they were, in fact, Sentinel, so the men waved them on up the hill, and Isaac drove on.
Tremaine didn’t say anything further, so Duff pressed. “Condor? What’s the plan?”
There was no response to his question, but he heard mumbled voices, as if someone had their hand over the phone while they talked.
Finally, the South African came back on the line. “I’m going to have to call you back.”
“What? No! Do you want this computer or not?”
There was another pause, and then, “One Ankama Close. Put that in your GPS and get here as quickly as you can. Trust me, Duff, you don’t want to dally.”
Tremaine hung up the phone.
Isaac looked at Duff now. “Why does he want you to go directly to their safe house?”
Nichole answered the question. “Because he’s not able to leave the property for some reason.”
Just then Duff’s phone rang again. Answering it, he heard Gorski’s voice. “Look, BNI isn’t telling me what they’re doing, but my tech Travis has a drone over the approach up into the hills, and he reports that a platoon-sized element of Ghanaian military are staging there.”
“Where?”
“To the north. They’re in marked army trucks, so they aren’t looking to do subtle. Travis thinks they’re going to just crash through the neighborhood and attack at the front gate, but they’re still preparing in a parking lot a kilometer away.”
Duff began running now, and Nichole and Isaac did the same. They were all aware that they had to have the kids out of that property before the army arrived.
Professor Addo stormed into Kang’s office now to find the Chinese intelligence officer standing by the window and conferring with Conrad Tremaine.
“It’s on the radio! My forces at the square are all destroyed, and there is no more fighting at the airport!” Addo shouted. “You should have let me stay with my men and fight to the end!”
“So happy to hear you say that, Professor,” Kang replied. He touched an intercom button on his desk. In English he said, “Bring the rebels their weapons immediately.”
Addo said, “What is going on?”
“Professor,” Kang said, “you and your men will get one more glorious taste of combat today.”
“What? What combat?”
“The army is coming here. You will fight them back.”
Tremaine walked over to Addo, took him by the arm, and pulled him out of the office. “Let’s get you kitted up for battle, Professor.”
Chen Jia watched while the rebel leader was manhandled through the den by the much larger mercenary leader. The other Dragons sitting around the room leapt to their feet, but more mercenaries hefted their rifles and pointed them at the unarmed men in camouflaged uniforms.
Tremaine shouted to the Dragons now. “Everyone out front! You’ll get your guns back and you’ll get a chance to fight for your cause.”
The group disappeared up the corridor to the front door of the massive home, and Jia looked at the other employees here. Everyone was trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
Kang stepped out of his office and marched into the center of the living room.
When he spoke, Jia could hear stress in the voice of the normally unflappable man.
In Mandarin, he said, “There is a platoon of soldiers preparing to attack this property. We have maybe fifteen, twenty minutes before they arrive. Our security forces along with the rebels will hold them back for the time we need to get out of here. Everyone break down your workstations, now, and go downstairs to the parking garage!”
The analysts, techs, and computer contractors began hurriedly closing and boxing laptops, unplugging phones and radios, and otherwise disassembling the war room.
But Jia only closed her machine, and then she looked at the stairs.
A minute later she walked as nonchalantly as she could towards the Russian protecting the door at the end of the hall. The man stepped out of her way, his hand on the grip of his rifle as he eyed her up and down. She opened the door and found the kids still sitting on the bed staring blankly at the television.
She could tell the little boy had been crying.
She shut the door behind her, then walked up to the kids, kneeling down in front of them.
Mandy said, “Hello.”
Jia looked at her a long moment, then said, “When I leave this room, I want you to wait one minute, and then I want you to climb out of the window.”
“We can’t,” Mandy said. “I already checked. It’s locked at the top.”
“I can unlock it.”
Jia rose, entered the bathroom, climbed up on the counter, and then reached out, as far and as high as she could. Her fingertips grasped the latch holding the window shut. She flipped it, then put her hand on the main latch and turned it.
The window swung open, but she shut it again immediately.
Mandy and Huck were already standing. “Where do we go?”
Jia climbed back down. “Outside is a terrace. If you climb down the trees next to it into the bushes, the guards won’t see you. Stay in the bushes until you get to the wall. At the wall you’ll have to find a way to climb over it. Maybe you can find a tree or something.” She said, “I’m sorry, it’s all I can do for you.”
Mandy said, “Thank you.”
“There will be fighting here soon, you need to run. Good luck.”
She rose and left the room, and the kids looked at each other.
Huck began counting down from sixty.
When he’d reached fifty-five, his sister said, “That’s enough. Let’s get out of here.”
They rose and rushed to the bathroom.