Shadow War (2 page)

The leader signaled, and the Tuareg in the baseball cap came forward, flashing his brown teeth. He bent down on one knee and popped the top of the nearest case. He lifted out a plastic-wrapped brick of crisp, new hundred-euro notes. The poorer the people, the more they appreciated freshly minted money. He counted the bricks. The leader nodded, and the young man pulled a long, curved knife from his belt.

“Tangos on the east perimeter.”

The shout exploded in my earpiece, just as the knife sliced into the plastic. A second later, I heard the
bip-bip-bip
of an Israeli Tavor assault rifle. Our medic Boon's gun.

“Two Tangos”—meaning targets—“at seven o'clock.”

“Eight o'clock.”

“Taking fire.”

I heard Miles's assault rifle firing in controlled bursts, and the flat repeat of a semiautomatic pistol somewhere behind me.

I leapt forward and knocked the young man unconscious with one swing of the collapsible metal baton I kept on my web belt. In an instant, I had his knife. I looked up, locked eyes with the Tuareg leader, and knew he hadn't double-crossed me. This was third party.

I thought about grabbing the closed Pelican case anyway, but
turned instead and sprinted for the cab of the first deuce, my earpiece echoing with commands.

“Shooters in the east building.”

“Suppressive fire.”

“Cover down on Charlie 1.”

“Roger.”

I grabbed the door handle and swung into the driver's seat, knowing the key was in the ignition. I turned it, and the engine sputtered.

I pumped the gas, the engine revving and then dying. The desert was full of the light popping of automatic fire, never as loud or chaotic as the movies made it seem. I could make out the audio signature of each of my team's weapons, with limited returning shots, mostly AK-47s by the sound of it. We had caught the assailants out of position, probably maneuvering for an ambush, so my men weren't targeting them. They were too well trained for that. This withering barrage was designed to keep enemy heads down, so they couldn't fire back. Only assholes counted kills.

I turned the key again. This time, the engine turned over. I pumped the gas, and the deuce belched smoke. I double-clutched and shifted. The gears ground, but the truck didn't move.

“Where are those shots coming from?”

“Tangos on the southeast dune. No vehicles spotted.”

So how did they get here?

“The Tuareg are heading out. I repeat, the Tuareg are on the move.”

I looked in my side mirror; both Pelican cases were gone.

“They're taking fire.”

I heard the gears grinding on the other deuce, but I didn't look to see which one of my men was behind the wheel. I had one job now, and that was to drive my truck onto the egress route.

I slammed down on the gearshift and heard it crunch, then muscled it into first and felt the deuce lurch, then start to roll. I shifted to second, cranking the wheel to straighten it on the road. I heard bullets ripping into the wooden crates and cursed my stupidity in trusting the perimeter to the Tuareg. My cargo of SA-18 missiles wouldn't explode in a firefight, but they could be punctured and ruined.

“Fire in the hole,” Miles's voice barked in my earpiece, as I shifted into third. I felt the explosion, then heard it, and a moment later, the dust cloud enveloped the truck. That was the end of a hundred-year-old Italian outpost.

“Pop smoke,” Miles yelled. That was what I wanted to hear. Behind me, the Alphas were throwing smoke grenades and laying down fire to cover our escape while someone, probably Frank “Wildman” Wild, British ex-SAS, howled over the headset with delight.

At three hundred meters, outside the dust and the effective range of an AK-47, I looked back. The second deuce was straggling behind, two tires shot out, our Thai ex-paratrooper Boon at the wheel. I could still hear the popping of automatic fire.

Then I saw the Toyota pickup angling over the hardscape at the back of the incline. There were four—no five—men in the back, firing AK-47s as they came. Maybe local bandits tipped off to the sale, but more likely Libya Dawn or Dignity, the local jihadist groups.

Nothing dignified or dawning here. Nothing Western but their weapons.

A man stood up and lifted an RPG to his shoulder. It bounced as the truck caromed over the rocks, but the man needed only a second to line it up in my direction. The distance was a hundred meters and closing; there was nothing I could do. Hitting anything with the notoriously imprecise RPG was little more than
chance anyway, and this man had probably never fired anything like it in his life.

I pounded the gas pedal and held my breath.

Misfire.

I couldn't hear the click, but I saw the man lower the barrel.
Now,
I thought, jerking the steering wheel toward the hardscape and careening back toward the Toyota. Bullets ripped through the canvas and steel, but I focused on a spot just behind the truck's rear wheel, hit the accelerator, and heard a tremendous crunch as the deuce crushed the rear flank of the Toyota. It spun sideways and flipped, launching the men into the dirt. The deuce sputtered, but I ripped the gear down to second and threw the wheel hard to the right.

A moment later, I was back on the dirt road, the Toyota a worthless hunk behind me. My rear tires were dragging, and blue smoke was spewing from under the hood, but the exit route was clear. Only another truck could catch me now.

“Charlie One clear,” I said into my headset.

“Alpha One clear,” came the response.

“Alpha Two clear.”

“Alpha Three clear.”

“What about the Libyans?”

“All clear, Charlie One.” It was Miles, confirming the count.

“Even the interpreter?”

There was a pause, then I heard Wildman's Welsh accent in my ear. “I nabbed 'im, boss. But God, he smells.”

Miles laughed. I knew that laugh anywhere, even though I couldn't see his face. I didn't even know where he was for sure. Behind me somewhere, covering my ass. “Number one or number two?” he said.

“Both.”

More laughter over the headset, as the tension eased. Everyone shits their pants the first time the bullets start ripping.

“Any more trucks?” I asked.

“One,” Miles said, “but it's after the Tuareg. Probably an inside job.”

I thought of the Atlanta baseball cap. Maybe.

I eased back on the accelerator. With only one truck, the Islamists, or dissident Tuareg, or whoever they were, wouldn't give chase. It may not have been clean, but we had the weapons we'd come for.

Another victory for the good guys,
I thought as I pushed the deuce into third, then fourth. I could barely see the road through the diesel smoke, but there wasn't much to see. It was all dirt and rocks anyway.

Eighty kilometers later the deuce died. Boon's truck, which had been blowing smoke for the last forty kilometers, limped up beside me. It was time to ditch the deuces. The men stripped our three Land Cruisers of excess weight—spare tires, pioneering kit, survival gear—and started to load them with the weapons, while Boon attended to the interpreter, who was in a state of shock. Thai paratroopers as a rule weren't shit, but I'd hired Boonchu “Boon” Tipnant four years ago because he was a combat medic. Turned out, he was an expert at stealth extraction and hand-to-hand combat, and a hell of a good guy, too.

“Lose the crates,” I yelled, as the Land Cruisers filled up. “And the 14.5 millimeter ammunition.” I could easily source the ammo in Romania.

While the team jammed the weapons into the Land Cruisers—they would enjoy driving the last hundred kilometers with heavy weapons drooping off the tailgate—Miles and I stepped into the desert. I lit a cigar from my portable humidor and activated my sat phone, then lit Miles's cigar, too. It was a ritual we'd picked up in Airborne in the 1990s, half a lifetime
ago, and we'd smoked a thousand cigars together since, from Sicily to the drop zone at Fort Bragg to the jungles of Liberia.

“Lucky,” I said, walking through my mistakes in my head. Unknown broker. Late arrival. No lookouts. I was getting sloppy.

“It's not lucky if you're good,” Miles replied.

“That doesn't make it right.”

“That doesn't make it wrong, either,” he said. Miles was grinning. He was past fifty, and he looked like a dentist, but if I was in a death cage match with a crocodile and fighting for my life, he was the first man I'd chose to be with me.

The sat phone beeped. I looked down. I was surprised to see I'd missed several calls. I walked away a few paces for privacy, puffed on my cigar, and dialed the familiar number. A familiar voice answered.

“Monday, 0800.”

“I'm in the middle of something.”

“It's off. Come home.”

I straightened my red Hermès tie in the bathroom mirror, then brushed lint from the right shoulder of my dark blue Harvie and Hudson suit, the battle armor of the corporate world. I checked my shave, realized I'd missed a spot on my neck, and dry-shaved the stubble.

Then I went to my closet. On the right were ten suits, blue or gray, and stylishly cut. On the left were a dozen colorful robes and kaftans, gifts from grateful people I'd worked with in Africa. Crammed between them on shelves and utility hooks was my gear. Three sets of boots—black, tan, and olive green. Action slacks in the same three colors. My web belt, my six-inch folding knife, and my collapsible baton, the extendable steel club I'd used to knock the Tuareg unconscious less than thirty hours ago.

I checked my seventy-two-hour “go bag.” I always kept two packed—one for the developed world, one for the rest. My third world bag had been depleted in Libya, so I restocked it with sterile syringes, malaria tablets, batteries, codeine, and other items prized in a war zone. Then I packed my personal essentials: the ivory chopsticks I'd picked up as a teenager backpacking around the world, my portable ten-cigar humidor, and an iPod crammed with classical music.

I had arrived home seven hours earlier after a twenty-eight-hour journey that involved driving the weapons to the desert
camp, choppering to Tripoli, and buying a ticket to Rome with cash. I'd showered in the first-class lounge, waiting two hours, then bought a ticket to Washington, DC, and slept on the plane. I figured I'd have a day in DC, at most, and then it was back to the grind.

That didn't bother me. It was standard procedure. I was accustomed to flying twelve hours for a two-hour meal with a client or source, and then turning around and flying home. The information shared on such assignments couldn't be written down. It had to be delivered in person, or not at all.

What bothered me, as I locked my apartment and drove my thirty-year-old diesel Mercedes through Adams Morgan, my Washington neighborhood, was the Libyan operation.

I wasn't worried about the firefight. That was a known business risk. And besides, I'd acquired the weapons at the agreed-upon price, losing only two deuce-and-a-halfs in the process, and cargo trucks were essentially worthless. Yet, by the time I got back to base, my desert training camp was already being dismantled by one of the “cleaning” teams my employer, Apollo Outcomes, used to scrub evidence of an operation.

It wouldn't show, and I'd never let the bosses know, but I was pissed. I had spent six months planning the Libyan job. I had been back and forth between Washington and a fashionable conference room in Houston, Texas, a dozen times. Could this job be done?
Should
it be done? How long would it take? How much would it cost?

I had been the Apollo man in Africa for more than a decade: raising small armies for U.S. interests; preventing a genocide in Burundi with twelve competent soldiers; defeating a warlord in Liberia without firing a shot; “shaping the environment” in Sudan to make way for American foreign policy. Standard stuff.

The Libyan operation was different. In Libya, my goal was to
seize, protect, and operate major oil fields, on foreign soil, for an American oil company, in the middle of a civil war.

It was un-fucking-precedented.

That was what traditional soldiers never understood, even my old paratrooper mates, the ones who called me merc like it was a dirty word. Working for Apollo wasn't about the money, which was less than most people thought, or the power, which was incidental and fleeting. It was about doing the shit I couldn't do in a uniform. No red tape. No political constraints, like I'd have in the public military. This job wasn't about licking boots in Washington. It was about being assigned mission impossible and getting it done. It was being dropped into the middle of a war zone with my rucksack and my wits and nobody to look over my shoulder . . . and changing the shape of the world.

I understood the geopolitical implications of the Libyan operation. I had sat through endless meetings in top floor conference rooms overlooking Houston, discussing the big question: what if the world found out?

But the circumstances, as I'd arranged them, were airtight. The drilling station had been abandoned for more than two years. The location was remote. The pipeline ran through uninhabited desert or controllable towns. AO, as Apollo was known in the field, even had a long-standing contact inside the port at Zawiyah, where we would load the oil onto tankers, and Zawiyah was truly a city where no questions were asked.

The light turned green, and I turned past the massive brick hotel onto Rock Creek Parkway, slipping out of the urban environment and into the leafy gully of Washington's hidden highway.

The operation was a shit pile, I thought as I passed under arched road bridges reminiscent of Roman aqueducts. It was a box of mismatched puzzle pieces. It should never have fit to
gether. The job had been, by any reasonable estimate, too much to ask.

But I'd done it.

Three weeks in-country, and I'd already seized the drilling station, recruited a few hundred local fighters, and set up a desert camp to train them. We had more than enough light arms and “liberated” black market UN Land Cruisers. Thanks to the Tuareg, we had acquired the firepower to equip helicopters and technical. Already, we could defend a hundred miles of pipeline, and it was still two days before the Houston wildcatters arrived—the craziest bastards on planet earth, even worse than the Navy SEALs—and slammed the station into working order. If anything, I was ahead of schedule.

So where had it gone wrong?

Not the ground game, I thought, as Rock Creek Parkway bottomed out along the Potomac River. I had gone over every move during my layovers and flights, and my end was clean.

Was the operation compromised? Did someone in Tripoli or Houston leak to the press? Was a major shareholder concerned?

But even if a reporter started sniffing around—and I was sure no reporters had, yet—there was nothing to latch on to. I'd drawn my team from the elite forces of a dozen different nations. My indigenous recruits were loyal to tribal strongmen, who knew nothing of the overall operation. My management group, mere figureheads, were the cousins and other assorted confidantes of connected Libyan businessmen, the type of shady characters paid good money to do nothing more than take the fall, if it ever came to that. All financial transactions were layered through them, then routed through the British Virgin Islands, whose banks were more secretive than Switzerland's. It would be next to impossible to trace anything back to Houston, especially given the cutouts and shell companies I'd created. That was why the Fortune 500 hired Apollo.

What about the U.S. government? I doubted USG was involved, but I knew one phone call from State or Defense could shut down a company operation anywhere in the world. That's the power of handing out thirty billion a year in military contracts.

I downshifted as I passed the Kennedy Center, the giant Kleenex box where I got my opera fix whenever I had the misfortune of being in town, and eased into the bridge traffic. The Washington Monument was behind me, and the Jefferson Memorial off to my left, but the skyscrapers of Arlington, Virginia, rose in front, looming over the low treeline of Roosevelt Island. God, I hated going to Virginia, with its consulting firms and tract mansions and glistening office parks for the military-industrial complex. I distrusted it even now, on a clear morning, at the ass end of rush hour, on a reverse commute, and sure enough, the traffic snarled at the first big bend in U.S. 66. There was only one industry in Washington, and these office jockeys, like everyone here, were policy dependent: consultants, attorneys, think tankers, and advisors, a living army of opinions and analysis.

And yet few of them would understand the Libyan operation. They would insist that we don't seize foreign assets for profit . . . not in the sixty years since the United Fruit Company conquered Central America using the CIA, anyway . . . or since Prescott Bush brokered an oil deal with the Saud family.

But that was merely ignorance. This was the way the world worked. A place like Libya—or Syria or Afghanistan—wasn't a sovereign country in any modern sense. Even before Gaddafi was overthrown, the desert regions had governed themselves. In the end, the self-proclaimed “king of kings of Africa” was little more than the mayor of Tripoli. Now Libya was shattered, and everything from oil fields to “tax stations” along desert camel
tracks were run by whatever local racketeer had the muscle and imagination to control them. The Sahara was the American West of 150 years ago: a lawless land where unemployed soldiers, smugglers, natives, and criminals took what they could, sometimes by cunning, usually by force.

Half the world was like that now. West Africa. Congo. Yemen. In South Sudan, I spent four months helping a local strongman with ties to a U.S. congressman destroy a rebellious rival. The strongman's reward was an appointment to the Ministry of Natural Resources. The reward for our client, a large energy firm, was the exclusive right to drill oil in Block 5A—at a hefty price, of course.

I had believed in that operation. The rebels were butchers. I had seen it myself. Then, three months later, I heard the strongman had slaughtered a thousand “Islamic terrorists,” most of them women and children.

My Libyan operation cut out the local middleman. A middleman who was most likely a murderer, rapist, and thug. In my opinion, Libya was a step toward a more civilized world, not away from one. It was naïve to think otherwise.

So where had it gone wrong?

Somewhere along this damn interstate, I thought, as someone laid on a horn behind me, and somewhere up ahead another car answered. The traffic was completely stopped, and even the Virginians, who lived with this every day, were getting antsy.

Just get me back to Africa,
I thought, as I heard the pounding opening to Verdi's opera
The Force of Destiny
on the classical station, WETA. It was one of my favorites: two men who fought as mercenary brothers-in-arms, now pitted against each other by fate in a fight to the death. A nice reminder that my occupation was as old as civilization and, like Verdi's opera, often didn't end well.

It wasn't my job to question Apollo or its clients, I reminded myself, as the traffic started moving. I was a high-end fixer. I was paid to solve problems in war zones, using whatever means I could get away with. And for the creative mind there were so many means.

Whatever happened after . . . well, it was only rumors, anyway.