Chapter 14

Frank: Now

No, we need answers right now, Ambassador Anselmo.” The President was not in one of his patient moods. “What is happening in your country, in Guinea-Bissau, right now?”

“Nothing is bad happening in my country. Can assure your nation of that, President Matthews.”

Frank wanted to pound his fist into the man’s dark face and then his ever so bright diplomat’s smile wouldn’t look so pretty. And by the time he was done, the man’s Brooks Brothers’ pinstripe would also be seriously mussed.

They sat in the Guinea-Bissau ambassador’s office in the U.N. Secretariat Tower. It had none of the grandeur of the U.N. Secretary-General’s. A lone receptionist, a pretty woman in a traditional red blouse, sarong, and sandaled feet, had greeted them kindly. Clearly one of the highlights of her day, not just meeting the American President, but meeting anyone in this quiet corner of the floor where the West African nations were clustered together. Her desk had been clearly devoid of any work, despite the ambassador’s presence.

Anselmo’s office bore little of the traditional African décor. Instead he had drawn deeply on the designs, colors, and motifs of his country’s heritage as a former Portuguese colony. Frank felt like he’d been trapped in an Iberian version of a Pottery Barn store. Nothing felt authentic.

“Then perhaps you can explain the attack on my embassy aircraft,” the President’s voice was calm. Matter of fact.

Hank Henson set down the photo of the massive bloodstain by the airplane’s exit stairs as the President spoke.

Frank had heard the President angry before, but this wasn’t angry. This was something new. He’d gone very quiet, so soft-spoken that Frank could barely hear him though he stood only two steps behind his chair. This was dangerous. In two years of serving with him, and six months on the campaign trail before that, he’d never heard that tone from Peter Matthews.

“After that would you care to explain the deaths of my embassy personnel?”

The photo of the exploded garage landed on the ambassador’s broad and empty desk, next to a gruesome close-up of the body parts, still there thirty-two hours later.

“The torching of my liaison office.”

A photo of the smoke still smoldering around the remains of the U.S. Liaison office building in downtown Bissau.

“These are acts of war, Mr. Ambassador. You have one hour to produce answers. After that, I will make any decisions I deem appropriate to determine the security of my remaining personnel on the ground.”

The President stood and moved from the room so quickly that Frank was hard pressed to stay in front of him. Hank brought up the rear.

As soon as they were in the elevator, the President began speaking quickly.

“You saw his face. He doesn’t know anything is wrong. Completely out of the loop, he’s playing the game with a tray full of vowels. I’ll wager he can’t even communicate with anyone in G-B at this time, though I’m sure he is only at this very instant discovering that.”

Frank blinked, it took him only that long to catch up with the President’s thoughts.

“Then why did you give him an hour?” Frank wouldn’t have given him thirty seconds.

The President didn’t answer, instead he turned to Hank as the elevator continued downward.

“Hank, what’s our closest asset? The Harry S. Truman where they launched the Raptor drone?”

“Good memory, yes sir. Operation Sure Seas off Nigeria. Nigeria’s trying to outdo Somalia on being the terror of ocean-shipping channels. The Truman’s leading a task group to fight them back.”

“Find out how fast they can have assets into Guinea-Bissau. Get the Joint Chiefs involved. We aren’t waiting an hour, we aren’t waiting a minute, I just wanted to give their ambassador some motivation. I do wish I hadn’t mentioned surviving U.S. citizens on the ground.”

In retrospect, Frank agreed. If the ambassador could get through to whatever was the government of the moment, he would tell them there was someone they needed to find. The question was whether it would be to find and save, or find and silence.

At the basement floor Hank got off the elevator, but the President remained, so Frank stayed with him. The President held the door as he finished passing instructions to Hank.

“I have a luncheon with Russia, a meeting with Pakistan that isn’t going to be any fun at all, and a dinner with Great Britain and France. After dinner there’s an informal but essential meeting with Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam about a combined trade agreement. I can’t delay any of those, but I’ll run things through Frank. Keep him posted. Call Daniel at the White House. Tell my Chief of Staff to get his wife on this and to get everyone in the Sit Room. I’ll deal with the attacks on U.S. property and personnel later. I want our people in Guinea-Bissau found and found now.”

He let the elevator door close without completing the statement to Hank, which Frank appreciated. He didn’t need to hear the President of the United States say about Beatrice Belfour, “if there is anyone still alive to be found.”

Once again, he was stuck with waiting.

# # #

“What we need at the moment is patience. You have to stay here.”

Ambassador Sam Green and Charlotte looked at Beatrice as if she’d gone mad. Well, that wouldn’t surprise her much at the moment. Trapped with the two of them in a narco-state undergoing a coup wasn’t exactly a rational experience. Guinea-Bissau didn’t have a large number of motor vehicles, and most of those were ancient motor scooters.

Yet, through the cracks in the wall of the hut they were hiding in, the roads were far from empty. They were hiding in a warren of ramshackle huts southeast of the airport, but one that afforded her a narrow view of the one main street in the whole city. In the last few hours squatting here, she’d seen a dozen tacticals, the white Toyota pickups just bristling with armed and angry militia, and two tanks that looked to be left over from when the place had gained independence in the ’70s. She knew they had about thirty tanks, but intelligence had been unsure how many actually worked and how many of those had shells for their main cannon. She could hear something pounding away in the city center, clearly someone had some ammunition. The place was really coming apart. Again. She even spotted one of their two known helicopters.

“You have to stay put here,” she pointed emphatically at the hut’s dirt floor.

“Not alone. We can’t.”

Beatrice was never prepared for this stage of working protection jobs. The moment when the protectee turned into, what the department carefully didn’t call, “the sniveling child” phase. Young children never dared circulate far from their parents. Protectees would latch onto their bodyguard’s metaphorical skirts and become a real pain.

Technically, it was called a stage-two trauma response.

Beatrice sighed. At least they were finally out of the stage-one denial. Now the ambassador had apparently opted for fear and confusion in stage two. She could do with the help from anger, but he hadn’t gone there. The Secret Service had trained her how to shift in mere seconds from precipitating event to stage three, new equilibrium. Only from equilibrium could the decision-making process accurately resume.

If she could do a Vulcan mind-meld and shift Sam Green forward through the stages, she would. Though she seriously doubted she’d like what else she learned about him during the meld.

Charlotte had moved on to anger. Apparently she and the now dead chargé d’affaires had been shopping buddies. That would be helpful, so she addressed Charlotte.

“Look, if you want to get out of this alive so you can work on fixing this place so this never happens again…” Fat chance of that. Guinea-Bissau would be cycling through hell for decades to come just as it had for the last half century. These kinds of places always did. “… Then I need you to stay here and stay quiet. I’m going to get food and water. I’m also going to try and scout our way out of here.”

Charlotte’s sharp nod of agreement confirmed that the woman’s brain had kicked back in. And that she was really looking forward to kicking some serious butt to revenge the chargé d’affaire’s death.

Beatrice momentarily considered handing over her gun, but decided against it. The last thing she needed was for Sam Green to suddenly take it from his more rational assistant and decide he was G.I. Joe. Or, more likely, to go out and think that he could talk sense to these people at gunpoint.

Instead, she told Charlotte. “Don’t let him leave. There’s half a million people here. If I lose you, you’re going to be dead.”

“And if we stay with you?” She saw in his eyes that Ambassador Green was at least part way back.

Beatrice shrugged. “Then I’ll see what I can do to improve our chances.”

# # #

For three hours Beatrice prowled the streets of Bissau. Starting her scouting in late evening, blending smoothly among what people there were along the street, darkness descended with that sudden slice-of-a-knife abruptness typical of tropical countries. The moonlight, and the warm glow of cooking fires lit her way. But between each calm cluster of families going about their dinner-time life, explosions racketed from the direction of the city center.

Bissau was turbulent. It was a city at war. Which was odd. As she understood the political structure, it was the military and the politicians who were constantly struggling for control of the drug trade. And no one else cared. For some reason, this time the entire city had erupted into violence.

It reminded her of the World Trade Organization riots she’d ridden out during the 1999 Battle of Seattle. America had managed to set a new low for international standards of supposedly peaceful protest. To quell the “peaceful” rioting and looting had required the activation of two units of the National Guard and the entire police force. Massive vandalism, tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets, and over five hundred arrests. Seattle had exported their new brand of peaceful-protest-gone-violent to every subsequent meeting of the WTO, the G-8, or anyone else trying to improve international relations. This had the same feel. The place had simply gone nuts.

Out here on the periphery, near the airport but not too near, the houses had mostly emptied. Everyone had either run to join the fray at either end of the main road, or run to the countryside to get out of it.

She slouched against a wall along the avenue between the airport and city center, the only four-lane road in the whole country. She heard it called the Fera di Bandim. She thought that Fera translated as “Beast” in Portuguese, but that didn’t make much sense. Bandim was the central market, the anchor for the center of the city. Beast in the Market. Nope. Probably meant “road” in the local Kriol language, “road to market” worked. Or maybe it meant “market.” Market in Bandim? She preferred her translation. A street-corner sign, rusted and tipped badly, declared it as, Avenida Combatentes de Liberdade da Pátria. Avenue of the Patriotic Combatants of the Liberation? Avenue of the fighters to liberate some guy named Pátria?

She was losing it. She knew from training and real-world experiences that her exhaustion was going to make her useless, beginning sometime within the next twenty-four hours. So, she set that as her timer and felt better for the focus. They had to get out within twenty-four hours or they were going to die here, and that wasn’t on her list of things to do in Guinea-Bissau.

Beat was tempted to try the walk into town to see what was happening, perhaps she could make an international call.

“Hello. Pentagon please. Could you please send a battalion to clean this place up?” Not likely. On an open line, sure to be monitored if it even worked, she’d be dead before she hung up the phone. Stupid idea. After just forty-two hours of being awake, she already wasn’t thinking straight.

Here on the “Beast” the traffic remained light. In an hour she counted seven more tacticals, though three may have been repeats roaring from town to airport and back. That she wasn’t sure was another bad clue to her state of mind. She’d been awake too long already, twenty-four more might be a bad stretch, but she couldn’t think of how to rescue them sooner. Actually, she couldn’t think of how to rescue them at all, that’s what she was really out here looking for, wasn’t it? Though she couldn’t tell the ambassador that, he wouldn’t make it if she told him that.

Three more tanks rolled through and one of the country’s six MiG-21MF fighter jets actually roared by close overhead in a display of… she had no idea what. No one had thought that any of the six were still flying.

The MiG hadn’t had any bombs tucked under its wings, but it did have a very effective built-in 23mm cannon, if it was working and they had rounds. What was certain was that someone still controlled the tiny Guinea-Bissau air force and was making a statement. A statement which told her that even if she managed to sneak back to the airport, steal the embassy plane and figure out how to fly it, they’d be gunned out of the sky.

That was it.

Right there.

Beat felt as if she’d been electro-shocked awake.

They knew that there were Americans still alive on their soil. No one in the outside world would know, but someone in Guinea-Bissau did. Someone who’d counted bodies at the garage compared with the number they had called in to the custom’s office before they landed.

And the Bissau-Guineans, at least whoever presently controlled their air force, didn’t want them leaving. She, Ambassador Green, and Charlotte were now being hunted.

No one else in the country had access to airplanes, the airport had been empty except for the daily passenger jet out of Dakar, and even it wouldn’t come in while a coup was in progress. Only the Americans, unable to fit their schedule to the one daily commercial flight, had brought their own craft. The MiG clearly said, “We will kill you if we find you.”

Time to get back to work.

Beatrice found that sandals were commonly available, so she let herself drift several blocks before stealing any. That way the theft wouldn’t localize their whereabouts for any militia or angry locals that came prowling. By some miracle, they’d gotten away from the airport clean, and she didn’t want to risk that little sliver of security.

Food and water didn’t prove hard either. Everyone was out and about with the city at war.

She went back to their hideaway by a long, circuitous route, dragging the tail of her skirt the last few hundred feet to erase her footprints.

The hut was so silent when she returned that she feared they’d actually been stupid enough to leave, or worse, been captured. She stood motionless. Staging a one-woman rescue across the landscape of Bissau wasn’t her idea of a movie that had any chance of a happy ending. Rambo she wasn’t.

She hadn’t seen any footprints outside, but in the soft moonlight, she might have missed them.

Then she heard it.

The ambassador and his assistant were trying to be quiet. They clearly hadn’t heard her return as they moaned softly together.

Beatrice moved back outside the hut and sat in the dirt, resting her back against the doorframe. It was in moonshadow, she would be close enough to invisible resting here. She could afford to wait a little while.

Sometimes people in fear for their lives needed a little privacy.