Unconventional Warfare

“Yes. Yes, it usually is.”

Kabila leaned back from the table and stretched out his arm.

The girl who had poured his drink slid into his lap. She regarded Bagdasarian from beneath hooded lids. Bagdasarian guessed she could have been no older than fourteen. She was beautiful, her eyes so darkly brown they were almost black, but still nearly luminescent. The effect was disquieting. In America she would be a freshman in high school. In Congo-Brazzaville she was the paramour of a corrupt warlord four times her age.

Bagdasarian forced himself to look away.

The sergeant on Kabila’s right shut the briefcase and placed it on the floor of the shack underneath the table and at his colonel’s feet. Bagdasarian looked around the room. An expensive-looking portable stereo played hip-hop music featuring a French rapper. A bar stood against one wall and a motley collection of bottles sat on it, devoid of import tax stamps. Cigar smoke was thick in the room, and Bagdasarian was surprised to see several of the gendarme officers chewing khat, a narcotic root he had always associated with the Horn of Africa, as well as the more common draggar.

The Armenian placed his hands palm down on the table and pushed himself up. He rose slowly and nodded to the colonel, who didn’t bother to return the favor. Bagdasarian looked over at the gendarme who had opened the door. The man’s eyes were slits of hate.

Rafik Bagdasarian crossed the room, keenly aware of how many guns were at his back. He placed his hand on the door handle and slowly turned the knob. Coolly he swung it open and stepped out into the falling rain.

Nigeria

THE QUONSET HUTS HAD BEEN dropped into the clearing by a Sikorsky helicopter. The cover story had to do with oil exploration for Chevron, which was a prolific presence in the Niger Delta region.

The electronic intelligence for the program hadn’t been so lucky.

The four-man team had traveled upriver through snake-, crocodile-and pirate-infested waterways first by motor launch and then for four miles of bush breaking overland.

The satellite relay station was jointly funded through the NSA and the DEA for counterterror and antinarcotics trafficking operations throughout western sub-Saharan Africa. For the most part the marriage between law enforcement and raw intelligence gathering had proved successful.

The most glaring hole in the plan was the lack of a security element. The NSA, unlike its intelligence-gathering counterparts in the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagon, preferred a “below the radar” profile to one more centered on firepower.

Calvin Sloke, a six-year electronic-intelligence specialist, swatted a mosquito.

The flying bug was particularly big and had got that way, Sloke suspected, by helping its vampric self to liberal portions of the American’s blood.

“Got you, you son of a bitch!” Sloke shouted in triumph.

The bug was smeared like fruit pulp along his forearm just above his Timex Ironman wristwatch.

“Congratulations,” Selene Hoffman replied from behind him.

Her voice was thick with sarcasm. She didn’t much like Sloke after six weeks in the cramped quarters and had pretty much given up pretending otherwise.

“Screw you,” Sloke replied, voice artificially pleasant.

“In your dreams, dork.”

“Quitting smoking sure has done a lot for your personality.”

“Sorry my not dying is inconveniencing you.”

“Boy, has it.”

“Stow the bullshit,” Mark Ensign said as he entered the tech center.

The ex-Marine was the only one of the crew who’d been to Africa before, having served time in both Liberia and Somalia as a counterintelligence officer. He still kept in shape with daily routines of calisthenics that made the other techs nauseous just watching him.

“We get our signal today?” he continued.

“Coming up now,” Sloke said.

Overhead, in geosynchronous near-earth orbit, a Dong Fang Hong satellite of the People’s Republic of China made its daily pass. Like clockwork the Nigeria station would begin signals intercepts, or SIGINT, operations.

This operation, along with digital wiretaps of the satellite and cellular communications networks used by the criminal pipeline that moved cocaine and heroin from Mexico and South America through Africa, up to Armenia and into the European Union, was the primary responsibility of the Nigeria station.

“Where’s Dex?” Hoffman asked.

“Getting some rack time,” Ensign replied.

Jason Dexter was the hardware and systems engineer assigned to keep all the various highly classified components at the site working and working with each other. After six years with the U.S. Navy and then two more doing the same job with the Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency, he’d been quietly recruited into the Puzzle Palace.

High-strung, type A and nearly anorexic, the specialist was a mission-first workaholic who’d run one marriage into the ground and didn’t speak to his children. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he had a reputation as the premier field-operations guy in the Agency.

At that moment the door to the communications station opened and a figure appeared in the doorway, submachine gun held in his hands.

Ensign reached for the metal filing cabinet where he’d placed his holdout, an H&K MP-5. His fingers curled around the smooth metal handle of the drawer.

The figure in the doorway stepped to one side and a second form appeared in the entrance. Hoffman had time to look toward Ensign as he yanked open the drawer and reached inside. Sloke covered his head with his arms.

Ensign lifted the submachine gun, tried to turn as his thumb snapped the fire-selector off safety and onto full auto.

The men in the doorway opened fire.

Bullets streamed through the claustrophobic space in a hailstorm of lead. Rounds chewed through computer screens and electronics equipment, shattering cases and housing like sledgehammers.

Sparks flew in wild rooster tails and miniature columns of smoke spewed upward as shards of plastic and stamped metal ricocheted around.

The cowering Sloke caught a long burst that slammed into him with relentless force, gouging out the flesh of his side and back, shattering his ribs and scrambling his internal organs like eggs in a skillet. He screamed and flopped under the impact until a triple burst of soft-nosed slugs shattered his jaw, cracked his temple and punched two holes through the temporal bone of his skull.

He slumped instantly, banging his head on the tabletop before flopping onto the diamond-plate flooring panels. His blood spilled out like flood waters.

Hoffman rose to her feet in a half crouch, a hapless, helpless, terrified look freezing her face into a mask of fear. Her hands came up as if she could ward off the bullets with such a feeble attempt.

Her left hand lost the pinkie and index finger as the rounds sliced through her. Her right palm blossomed with blood as a round slammed through the muscle under her thumb and lodged in the bones of her wrist.

She opened her mouth to scream and a single round slid into her torso, slicing apart her diaphragm and venting the air in her lungs. She gasped weakly and folded like a lawn chair in time to catch six more bullets across her chest and throat.

The intelligence agent fell backward, her blood splashing her computer screen, and tripped over her chair. She struck the ground like a kid falling out of a tree and gasped, fighting for breath through ruined lungs and larynx.

Her eyes filmed gray in an instant and she fell slack. The oxygen-starved muscles of her abdomen spasmed once and a cascade of dark blood bubbled out of her mouth and streaked her face.

Ensign leveled the H&K, his finger tight on the trigger.

He felt two bullets strike him like the impacts of a baseball bat, one in his thigh and a second low in his gut. He squeezed the MP-5’s trigger and the submachine gun roared to life in his hands.