AOZOU STRIP
The Cessna 421 braked to a halt on the hard-packed runway and shut down the left engine first. Before the three-bladed propeller had stopped spinning, the door opened and two men immediately debarked. Marcel Hurtubise and Paul Deladier carried overnight bags that contained few clothes. Anyone hefting the satchels would have commented upon the weight.
Cruising at 190 knots, the trip had taken over three hours. Deladier would have preferred to try to sleep during the trip but his superior had other priorities. In one way, however, Deladier welcomed the diversion. He did not want to dwell upon Gabrielle Tixier.
Etienne Stevin was waiting. Anticipating the question, he met Hurtubise and said, “We’re almost ready.”
The three mercenaries climbed into the Land Rover and talked en route to the mine. “Tell me,” Hurtubise commanded.
Stevin’s stubby fingers grasped the wheel, navigating the unpaved road from the landing strip. “After we got Paul’s message, we reinforced the guard and changed the schedule. We’re now at fifty percent alert during the night, thirty-three percent during the day. Moungar’s assistant is practically using a whip on the blacks; they’re pushing hard to get two full loads ready for loading.”
“How soon?”
“The first one—maybe day after tomorrow. No later than Tuesday. The second load maybe later that day.”
Hurtubise chewed his lip and rubbed his stubbled chin, measuring the time-distance equation. It was going to be tight. He could feel it. He looked at Stevin. “Who is the assistant?”
“Name’s Jean Djimasta. I thought you met him before.”
“I did. I just don’t remember the name. Medium-sized, really black, balding. Bit of an attitude for a nigger.”
“That’s him.”
Hurtubise glanced over his shoulder to Deladier in the rear seat. “Well, seeing that he’s getting the job done, we can tolerate some attitude. But not too much, eh?” He almost laughed.
Deladier leaned forward between the front seats. “What about Moungar? Will he be here?”
“No,” Hurtubise replied. “I’d like to have him here because he represents the government. But he’s making arrangements with our friends across the border.”
Downshifting to cross a narrow defile, Stevin said, “Boss, I’d like to hear more. What do we really know about the Americans? And how good is the information?”
Hurtubise dropped the impending grin. “The information is about as good as we can expect, but it’s the usual situation. You never have everything you want. I got suspicious when Gabrielle came back from her second meeting with the American woman.” He shook his head in self reproach. “That was my fault, really. I thought she could handle it. The little shrew was pretty good at getting people to talk but…”
Deladier felt a small, electric prickling between the shoulders at Tixier’s name. He sat back, grasping a door handle to steady himself as the Land Rover jounced over the graded road.
“Anyway, she spilled more than she learned,” Hurtubise continued. “When I realized what had happened, I sent her to deal with the American broad but she didn’t come back.”
Stevin did not know what to say. Deladier had already described the basics so the burly Belgian merely nodded.
“The rest I filled in with contacts at the embassy, and intuition. The American firm is training a counterinsurgency unit in N’Djamena but we have to assume they can get up here pretty fast if they want. That’s why I want to get at least two loads out as soon as possible. After that, we’ve met our contract. Anything else is a bonus.”
Stevin turned toward his boss and unzipped a tobacco-stained grin. “I like bonuses.”
Hurtubise scowled in reply. “You just blow it on gambling and booze and whores. In a couple of weeks or months you’re broke again.”
The Belgian nodded gravely, looking at the road again. Then he perked up. “But there’s always another job. Thanks to you.”
The Frenchman regarded his colleague with a sideways glance. “Not after this one, Etienne. Not after this one.”
BORKOU-ENNEDI-TIBESTI PREFECTURE
Terry Keegan had a good opinion of his dead-reckoning ability, but he was glad of the GPS set in the borrowed Alouette III. Flying with Charles the mechanic in the seat beside him, the former naval aviator led his two helicopters in a descent to Bardai airfield in the rugged terrain of northern Chad.
From studying aeronautical charts and Web sites, Keegan knew that only seven of the nation’s fifty-one airports had paved runways. Bardai, at thirty-five hundred feet elevation, was unpaved but its fifty-nine-hundred-foot runway would accommodate the C-130s inbound behind him.
Major Lowe, flying with Eddie Marsh, handled air-ground communications, such as they were. Though Bardai was a military field, it impressed the Americans as an extraordinarily low-key operation. They air-taxied to the area indicated by the controller, alit side by side, and shut down. The Turbomeca engines wheezed to a stop and the four men debarked. They were mildly surprised when no one met them.
“Not a bad thing,” Lowe observed. “As long as we can get refueled and arrange security, I’d just as soon be ignored until we’re finished here.”
While the Air Force officer arranged for fuel, Keegan, Marsh, and Haegelin conducted post-flight inspections on both choppers. “I’m using a little more oil than the manual lists, but I guess it’s okay,” Marsh said.
“What do you mean, you guess it’s okay?” Keegan never took anything for granted: it was part of the reason he had survived four western Pacific deployments as a sub hunter, operating in big waves off some small decks.
“Charles says it’s in limits,” Marsh replied. “And he sure knows more about these machines than I do.” The former Army flier quipped, “Hey, I’m an H-47 kinda guy.”
Keegan tried to suppress a smile, and failed. “Chinooks—they’re like women. You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.”
“No lie, GI. The ’47 was in the inventory twelve years before I was born!”
A low, insistent pulsing thrummed through the atmosphere, coming from the southwest. The helo pilots turned in that direction, shading their eyes against the slanting westerly rays of the sun. Several moments later Marsh exclaimed, “There! Just above the horizon.”
The tall-tailed silhouettes of two C-130Hs hove into view at 290 knots, slanting toward the field. They flew a straight-in approach, taking landing interval but not bothering with the traffic pattern. “They probably don’t want to draw any more attention than they need to,” Keegan surmised.
Charles Haegelin ventured a rare sentiment, as he had not been asked a question. “With that kind of noise, they cannot keep hidden so well.”
He had a point. Each Hercules’s four Allison turboprops conspired to produce a pulsing resonance that could not be ignored. The lead transport touched down in the first quarter of the hard-packed runway and the pilot reversed the propellers, visibly slowing the big Lockheed, which turned off before the end of the strip. The second plane loitered momentarily in its approach, allowing the dust to disperse. In a few minutes both planes were parked, their engines whining a descending dirge as propellers windmilled into stillness.
“Hey look,” Keegan exclaimed. “New paint job.”
Marsh squinted at the 130s. Finally he saw the Navy man’s meaning. Chad’s tricolor cockade was painted over the tactical black-on-gray American insignia on fuselage and wings. There was also a fin flash on the vertical stabilizer. “That’s not going to fool anybody,” Marsh ventured. “Besides, it’s probably not legal.”
Terry Keegan nudged him. “Like Teddy Roosevelt said, Why spoil the beauty of the thing with legality?”