Code of Conduct

CHAPTER 23

With his earbuds in, Jambo had pretended to be face-timing on his iPhone as he strolled the neighborhood and shot video. When they had reviewed it back at the hotel, Harvath and Ash were able to identify several places for static surveillance, plus launching pads if they needed to go dynamic. Harvath had no plans to attempt to breach the compound. However this went down, he wanted it to go down outside.

The next morning, they used Jambo and three of his relatives as cutouts to temporarily secure two second-storey apartments and access to a handful of rooftops ringing the target compound.

Even in a backwater like Congo, cell phone technology would allow Harvath and the team to feed images back to the Bunia Hotel. If Leonce and his son recognized any of the men, Decker would reply with a text.

With that said, there were limits to how clear a picture a camera phone would take. Harvath hadn’t come equipped for a surveillance assignment with long lenses and spotting scopes. They would have to make do with what they had.

Ash and the team had binoculars, but they didn’t have anti-flare lenses, so they were restricted to the apartments and forbidden from roof duty.

The team was operating under the assumption that they were dealing with active or former military personnel. From the little Jambo had been able to ascertain mingling in the market and throughout the neighborhood, the house they were surveilling was known by locals as the “white house.” It wasn’t a reference to the building in Washington, D.C., but rather to this structure’s occupants — all of whom were said to be white men. The team decided they would use the same name.

No one knew who the occupants of the “white house” were. Though sometimes seen on foot, they usually came and went in nondescript SUVs. They all wore sunglasses and had short haircuts. That was the extent of the description people in the neighborhood were able to provide. It was enough for Harvath.

They sat on the “white house” for thirty-two humid hours before the package Harvath had requested from Nicholas arrived. Ash sent Jambo to the airport with bribe money to pick it up and make sure nothing happened to it.

“What is it?” Mick asked as Harvath opened the box and lifted the item out.

“It’s a predator.”

“As in the drone?”

Harvath shook his head. “No. This technology preys on human weakness.”

“What?”

“Give me your cell phone.”

Mick handed it over.

“Now give me your Glock.”

“Why?”

Harvath motioned for him to hand it over, and Mick complied.

Turning the weapon in his hand, Harvath prepared to strike the face of the phone with the butt of the weapon when Mick intervened.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said.

Harvath smiled. “Exactly.” Handing them back, he stated, “That’s what I’m counting on.”

Included in the delivery from the Carlton Group was additional surveillance equipment, which they parceled out among their observation posts, along with tiny, wireless cameras for the rooftops.

Leonce had already identified two of the suspects, but as better imagery came rolling in, Harvath fed the pictures back to the hotel and Leonce grew more emphatic that they were on to the right group of men. Harvath agreed.

They were pros. The men did everything right when they entered or exited the compound. This was not some JV team. Their heads were on swivels and they took their time. Nothing was rushed. Everything was smooth and by the book.

In addition to sending the pictures back to the hotel, Harvath had also been funneling all of the camera phone imagery back to his office in Virginia. So far, there hadn’t been any hits via facial recognition.

That didn’t necessarily mean anything. The men wore sunglasses and baseball caps. With such poor resolution, it was tough to tag the appropriate markers. Now that the new cameras had arrived, Harvath was confident they’d know who the men were soon enough.

Back at the Carlton Group offices, Nicholas had been tracing the calls from their cell phones, the majority of which were going to South Africa. There was one phone inside the house, though, that Nicholas couldn’t crack or trace. It was heavily encrypted and not like anything he had ever seen before.

He warned Harvath about it and told him that if he did end up hitting the house, to make sure he bagged all of the phones. Nicholas couldn’t tell him what specifically to look for because he didn’t know himself.

“Just bring me all the phones, and I’ll sort it out,” is what he had said.

Harvath, though, hadn’t changed his mind. He still had no intention of taking the house down. There was no telling how many men were inside, how well armed they were, and what kind of resources they could muster if they got into a firefight. The last thing Harvath and his team needed were Armored Personnel Carriers full of UN troops rolling down the street and banging away at them.

The United Nations spent over $1.5 billion a year keeping twenty thousand troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was their largest and most expensive area of focus. The UN had divided the DRC into six sectors, and Bunia was the seat of Sector Six.

Other than their phones pinging off a cell tower near the MONUSCO HQ, there was nothing to connect the men inside the “white house” to the United Nations. What was interesting, though, was that of all the countries who had sent troops to be part of the MONUSCO stabilization force, only four others had sent as many or more than South Africa.

Harvath was willing to bet that a high prevalence of South African troops in the UN stabilization force and calls back-and-forth from the target house to South Africa weren’t a coincidence.

What they needed was to identify not only when the “black phone,” as Nicholas had dubbed it, was moving, but also who specifically was carrying it.

The phone had already left the compound once and returned, but had done so at night in a two-vehicle convoy carrying eight men. Harvath and his team had watched the needle and the haystack roll right past them, but hadn’t been able to learn much about either. It was one of the reasons Harvath hated surveillance work. It could not only be mind-numbingly boring, but incredibly frustrating. And, if you were working with the wrong people, tensions could quickly mount.

To their credit, Ash and his SAS crew were thorough professionals. Nobody in their right mind enjoyed surveillance, but the Brits approached it with a sense of humor. Making fun of different people and things they saw happening down on the street, as well as directing jibes at each other, helped pass the time.

Jambo was an excellent cook, and they supplemented his meals with Chinese and Indian takeout from the hotel. With two long lenses, as well as IR cameras that could capture much better nighttime imagery, they recorded as much as they could and beamed it all back to the United States for analysis.

As they did, Nicholas’s facial recognition and data mining programs began to return hits. The men were not South African military. They were former South African military. Recces — former Special Forces from the 5 Special Forces Regiment based in Phalaborwa in northern Limpopo Province.

Just because they were no longer active military didn’t mean they weren’t currently working for some other part of the South African government, like its intelligence division. But if that were the case, why would they have been involved in wiping out a charitable medical clinic and the adjacent village?

Harvath felt far more certain that the men were mercenaries of some sort, contractors. That of course, brought up all sorts of questions — most importantly who had hired them and what had they been hired to do? In order to get that answer, he was going to have to have a little talk with their head man. But before that could happen, they were going to have to ID him.

Twelve hours later, the gates opened and they got a clear view of one of the SUVs leaving. There were only two occupants — a driver in his forties and a passenger somewhere in his sixties. Nicholas confirmed that the black phone was in the vehicle and on the move. Harvath sent him the pictures they had taken.

An hour later, Nicholas called back. He had identified their target.

“The older man is your guy. His name is Jan Hendrik,” he said as he transmitted the man’s service record to Harvath’s computer. “All of the men we have ID’d so far served under him. Hendrik was their commanding officer.”

“What else do we know?”

“Nothing. I can’t find anything. No credit card bills, no parking tickets. They’re ghosts.”

Harvath scrolled through several of the photos on his laptop. These guys might be good at covering their tracks, but they were still men and men made mistakes, even the best of them. Especially when the right pressure was applied.

Pulling up satellite footage of the neighborhood, Harvath gestured Ash over and began to lay out his plan.