The Watchers (36 page)

“That's what I thought,” echoed the Scythian.

“How many did your solo man go in with?”

“Three, I believe.”

“One, two, three . . .” began the Nigerian, poking his finger at the photographs before him.

“Can we get some helos down there to check out the area? Right now, I mean?”

“I can authorize it. But you have to say please.”

“Please.” But the word did not include the inflection of a question, and the Scythian's eyes went cold as he said it.

Dylan and Abby fell asleep, both exhausted from grief and the stress of battle, near the spot they had occupied since their sister's passing. Her body lay not far from them, lovingly wrapped in wool blankets.

Drifting up from a troubled sleep, Dylan felt his eyes flutter open. His muscles, still wired to their former training, snapped taut for a split second. A presence hovered just before him. Someone less than a foot away. He saw light, faint and trembling, and nudged his mind into awareness. Was this the first spark of dawn?

The next second showed him it wasn't. Undulating in the tiny flickers was a face, male, perfect and totally at peace.

He heard words. It would not matter in the days ahead whether they had been audible or merely spoken into his spirit. In either case, he could no more deny their reality and power than that of his own speech.

Dylan, be free of regret and go forth in power. Your enemy is not yet vanquished. Bury your sister and leave this place at dawn to rejoin the battle. I will send you rescue
.

Four Huey approaches had thundered overhead by the time Dylan and Abby—who stood huddled beside the fresh grave Dylan had prepared inside the chamber—saw a rainy dawn lighten pale and fresh against the earthen walls.

Ever thankful for the shelter of the hidden chamber, Dylan knew that their concealment was a godsend. At night, all the pilots would pick up was a cooling body on the ridge and maybe a couple of explosion signatures.

However, he also knew that come dawn there would be company. Lots of it, flown in and dropped from belay lines all around their current location. By midmorning they would be prisoners.

And yet, when he had told Abby of his ethereal visitor, she had readily agreed that they should wait for help. Dylan's residual instincts continued to resist this, eager to prod them into leaving their perch and putting as much distance as possible between them and the rampart before daybreak. But every time he remembered his otherworldly encounter, all resistance left him. He was too impressed with God's track record in their lives to risk fouling it up.

He has to fail us sometime,
Dylan thought at last in the morning's wee hours, half deluded with pain and fatigue.

Abby had no idea how God intended to save them this time. She only knew that according to her “word from Him,” they only had to wait and find out.

“Fine,” he'd relented. “We'll see.”

At first light came the sound of an approaching aircraft, and Dylan awakened at once, awash in disappointment that his darkest misgivings had actually prevailed. He glanced at the young woman, who leaned beside him fast asleep, her head resting on his shoulder. He would have liked nothing more than for this to continue, but being a man, he simply had to go and see for himself.

He carefully extricated himself from his companion, only partially waking her before tiptoeing warily toward the entrance. He began to frown even before reaching its aperture, for did modern armies still use propeller planes? He didn't think so. And yet the sound in his ears was now unmistakable. Not to mention baffling.

He stuck his head outside. The floatplane was a bright yellow, flying low just above the treetops and with astonishing skill. It was indeed a prop plane, which bore the bright red marking
His Wings Over Africa
.

“Abby!” he shouted. “Come here!”

The floatplane flew closer, then banked. Dylan saw an arm extend from an open window and wave. Then its wings dipped sharply, right then left. A greeting.

Friends!

Dylan looked at Abby and laughed. “You've got to be kidding!” he said.

After circling back, the floatplane began another approach toward them, this time even lower.

“No way!” Dylan said with a rush of astonishment, for he realized what the pilot was planning to do. “No way!”

Abby turned and gave him a smirk, whose meaning he translated right away.
So, are you through doubting yet?

The moat, nestled up against the Eredo Rampart, might have been swollen from the recent rains, but it still was barely wide enough for even the most compact aircraft to use as a landing strip. And yet it was certainly the only place for a fixed-wing aircraft to land in many, many miles.

There simply was zero room for error.

This time, both of their mouths moved in the utterance of frantic prayers as the floatplane dropped and then lined up with a rapid series of nimble course corrections, gracefully flared its descent, and set its floats on the water dead center in the channel. To make things more difficult, the moat did not follow a perfectly straight line, forcing the pilot to continue adjusting even as he feathered the engines and steered furiously to bring the craft to a safe stop.

Sure enough, as the craft began to slow, its near wing clipped one of the rampart's edges, sending a dirty colored rockslide into the water. The plane then overcorrected a bit, shearing off a generous palm frond and sending it into the moat as well.

Regaining its rightful path, the plane pulled to a stop just opposite their perch, only sixty or so feet from their position.

“They're friendlies, of course,” Abby said with a knowing glance at the resident skeptic.

“We're friends!” came a shout from down below. A white man was hanging from the window, waving a large bush hat their way. “Please, come with me! Hurry!”

The pair nearly skidded down the Eredo Rampart on the backs of their heels.

At the bottom, Dylan threw open the floatplane's side door, only to see its closest seat occupied.

“I thought my friends might need a ride this morning!” a strong, familiar voice said.

“Colonel Shawkey!” shouted Abby.

And if the man had not been restrained in a seat high above them, Abigail might have hugged her old protector to near asphyxiation.

CHAPTER
_
50

SKIES ABOVE COASTAL NIGERIA

“Pleased to meetcha!” the pilot had loudly exclaimed over the clamor of his plane's engine, while extending a large hand into each of their astonished faces in turn. “Valdo Bittner!”

Then, in the ensuing minutes, Valdo Bittner proved again what a gifted pilot he was. Even as he continued to converse in a loud voice and swift, exaggerated gestures of both hands—hands that Abby would have preferred were gripped around the plane's controls—he retraced his flight's impossible landing in reverse, racing along the moat with no additional wingtip scrapes and putting to use his plane's incredibly short takeoff distance.

Their departure was unlike any flight its passengers had ever taken, for the steep ascent lasted only a split second. Their cruising altitude would remain fixed at somewhere around seventy-five feet, a height so perilously close to the jungle canopy that at times Dylan was sure the plane's floats were trimming leaves while they buzzed along.

“Where did you learn to fly like this?” Dylan asked.

“A school in Texas called LeTourneau,” Valdo replied, grinning. “They have a whole program just for learning to land and take off in areas like this. It's called missionary aviation. These days, it's almost the last place left to have this much fun flying.”

“I've never seen a landing like that one,” Dylan said. “But if you hadn't nailed it, I think we'd be dead by now.”

“Praise Gawd!” the pilot exclaimed again and again as he explained how persistently Colonel Shawkey had urged him to fly into a region not served by missionary aviation—all in the vain hope that they might rescue three people whom all of Nigeria could not locate.

Fortunately, the floatplane was accustomed to flying just above treetop level, so it avoided all radar detection as it took off and headed east and out of sight.

And not a moment too soon. No more than eight minutes after it disappeared over the horizon, a V-shaped formation of five Nigerian military helicopters came barreling down from the west.

The army choppers hovered so long over the point of the previous night's firefight that by the time they had delivered a half dozen paratroopers along drop lines to the ridge of the Eredo Rampart, their blades had blown away most of the evidence of what had taken place. All except for the body of the American “military consultant,” a bizarre contraption beside a fresh grave, and a strangely bloodstained rock not far from his body.

Once again, the mystery of Abigail Sherman's disappearance had confounded local authorities.

By that evening, the President of the United States had graciously offered whatever assistance his nation's assets might offer the investigation.

Eager to remove the frustrating media magnet from over his country's life, the Nigerian Prime Minister wearily accepted the very next morning.

Thankfully, Pilot Valdo Bittner was also a man deeply in tune with God, so Colonel Shawkey had not felt forced into considering his last resort: veiled threats of bureaucratic reprisal. A small voice with whom Bittner was quite familiar had impressed on him that no matter how unorthodox the mission, this was a flight he would regret passing up.

And so, even while the combined electronic surveillance capability of Africa's largest nation registered zero airborne activity in the sector over Abigail Sherman's escape zone, the plane continued a harrowing and visually engrossing journey across the surface of its coastal rain forest.

This aircraft used for missionary aviation was among the most remarkably nimble and expertly designed in the world. Indeed, few other planes could have carried off such an unlikely entry and exit. Colonel Shawkey had been fortunate to find Reverend Bittner along the Cameroon border, as missions like his usually serve in nations with large and remote indigenous populations. But a certain group of sisters, serving him in a covert advisory capacity, had been keenly aware of Bittner's existence.

Beyond that, their predictions of where to find the threesome had, despite their lack of external documentation, proven eerily accurate.

MALIBU, CALIFORNIA, THE COLONY

The Head Elder tensed and turned slowly toward the disembodied heads of the old men surrounding him. Oversized and glowing with the vividness of a million pixels, the flat screens bearing their images were so large and numerous that they nearly eclipsed the room's vast Pacific view.

“Thank you for waiting, gentlemen. St. Petersburg has now joined us. Welcome, my Brother. My fellow Elders, I have troubling news. Shadow Leader has failed in his Nigeria mission. In the process, he contributed his soul to the cause. I will soon name a new Shadow Leader, but before we can spare the time for such a transition, we must address the situation at hand. The first thing we're doing is gathering a longtime nuisance back under our control. You'll see it when it happens: just watch your screens. It will provide the young woman a powerful incentive to give herself up.”

“And what if she doesn't?” growled New York.

“Our brother in Amsterdam and I,” he said while nodding to acknowledge the left-most screen, “issued an Annihilation order even before word reached me of his fate. Now the order will be enhanced. When we receive word of the girl's next destination, as we will quite soon, I'm certain, we make the order location-specific. Every one of our numbers, fully initiated or not, will be contacted immediately and ordered to converge as soon as possible on her location. Fifty warriors, on the scene with a maximum twelve-hour window. A fight to the death. As we've aptly named it—Annihilation.”

“How do the higher ones look upon this crisis?” asked New York.

“I won't lie to you; they're concerned,” the Head Elder replied. “I wouldn't take this extraordinary step if major stakes were not at play. But if we succeed here, we could still win a major victory against our enemies.”

“What can we do to help, Brother?” asked St. Petersburg in his thick Russian accent.

“Well, actually, I'm going to ask you to do something I've never asked of you before. When that word comes, I want you to come as well. This is our fate on the line, and your presence could help turn the tide. We will need not only power and muscle, but wisdom and cunning. When the call comes, I will be expecting that from every one of you.”

PORT HARCOURT, NIGERIA

It was almost midday when an unannounced and largely overlooked airplane executed a nonscheduled water landing on Bonny River just east of the busy harbor of Port Harcourt, Nigeria's fourth largest city.

In this industrial section of Port Harcourt, its polluted horizon dotted by the smoke of towering oil flares to the south, unscheduled aircraft landings usually signaled only one thing. Or perhaps two things—the arrival of another heroin shipment from South America on its way to Europe, or of heroin on its way to North America from the poppy fields of the Far East.

In fact, drug flights were a market second only to Nigeria's massive oil industry centered in Port Harcourt. Officially the world's fourth largest petroleum producer—and unofficially higher still if one chose to factor in the oil siphoned off by its staggering corruption—Nigeria exported all of its liquid gold from the oilfields of the nearby Niger Delta through the pipes of Port Harcourt.

The convergence of both bustling industries is why nearby dockworkers studiously looked away when the airplane pulled up alongside an empty quay and unloaded three passengers, a tall Nigerian man and two whites, and when the new arrivals just as quickly climbed into a large army van, which then sped off.