Cutting Edge

SEVEN

From the Wall Street Journal

Online Edition:

From L’Union Online

(limited content English version):

From L’Union Online

(limited content English version):

From the Cameroon Tribune Online

— Editorial

(translated from the French):

They toiled in the steamy midmorning heat, a dozen men in jungle fatigues swinging their machetes through the parched brown sedge and waxy clusters of euphorbia beside the dirt road. They kept their sleeves rolled down and wore heavy protective gloves, taking care to cover their skin; the succulents were filled with burning latex juice, and had thorny spurs all along the ribs of their fat, tangled branches.

The men thrashed at the dense vegetation. Their head wraps were drenched with sweat. The camouflage hoods they would put on were still stuffed in their pockets, unneeded as yet. There were no eyes about to see them, and they were not in any hurry to feel the heavyweight Nomex/Kevlar fabric slicken against their streaming wet cheeks and brows.

They worked in the heat, worked ceaselessly, creating clear fields of fire for their ambush. Their shoulder-slung Milkor 5.56-mm semiautomatic rifles were of South African origin, as were the lightweight 60-mm commando mortars and multishot barrel-loaded grenade launchers hidden farther back in their 4×4. Two Shmel RPO-A infantry rocket tubes rounded out their arsenal of heavy weapons, the “Bumblebee” variants designed to fire fuel-air explosive warheads.

A Russian military specialty used to devastating effect during their Chechen campaigns, man-portable thermobaric hardware cannot be purchased cheaply on the black market.

The job’s sponsors had been anything but close fisted.

Although some members of the band had equipped their mortar tubes with reticulated, microprocessor-controlled electronic sights, most felt the attachments were burdensome and off-balancing to their aim. Kirdi and Kulani bushmen from northern Cameroon, they had been raised with the bow and arrow as rural Americans might be with the hunting rifle. Where seasonal drought defeats cultivation of food crops, live game is a vital source of protein, and the need to kill or go hungry does more to perfect one’s weaponry skills than gun sport. For these men, the ability to acquire a target was basic to their survival, and they were masters at calculating range and determining projectile trajectories.

Five hundred feet ahead of them, the dirt track plunged eastward into a thick, shaded grove of mixed okoumé and bubinga, where a smaller group chopped at the tree trunks with axes, perspiration glistening on their muscled brown arms, their blades snarling in epiphytic vines that coiled up and up around the bark into the leafy green crowns.

The trees crashed down one by one and were rolled across the road. Then branches, brush, and pieces of slashed vines were strewn over the felled trunks to lay a screen of foliage over the ax cuts. Obscured from sight by broken patterns of shadow, the treefall blended into the overgrowth from a distance, and to the drivers of the line of approaching vehicles, would appear to be a natural phenomenon. Long before they might inspect it closely enough to learn otherwise, their convoy would be surrounded on all sides.

Another indispensable survival tool of the hunter is his knowledge of how to exploit the terrain for camouflage and concealment.

The group’s construction of their road block took a little under two hours. When they were satisfied the job was done, several of them went over to join their fellows in the copse of tall grass and succulents, while others spread out amid the trees. A single man scaled up a bubinga to saddle himself in a fork of its widespread limbs and find a comfortable position for his Steyr SG550 sniper gun, custom-railed with an AN/PIS thermal, day/ night sight.

The men in the copse had also finished their preparations of the area. Their gloves and uniforms tacked with spines and dripping the pasty, whitish secretions of the euphorbia stems, they had cut fire lanes that were as unobtrusive as the log barrier.

Now the band of hired jungle fighters would plant their mortars, and rest, and wait.

It would be a while yet before the UpLink convoy reached them.

A few minutes before the outset of the Sette Cama supply and inspection run, Pete Nimec stood talking with Steve DeMarco, Joel Ackerman, and Vince Scull at the airport parking area where their UpLink team had gathered. Nimec was leaning back against the driver’s side of a modified Sword Land Rover, elbows propped on the hood. The other three faced him in a close ring. Their tight little huddle around Nimec, and the 4×4’s bulking frame behind him, would make it tough for anyone watching from out of sight to monitor their speech.

“The company execs ready over there?” Nimec said, and nodded toward a nearby line of Rovers and trucks.

“Tucked into their seats nice and comfy,” DeMarco said. “And actually glad to be headed into the jungle after finding out about the termites.”

Nimec couldn’t say he blamed them. “Freight loaded up?”

DeMarco gave an affirmative nod.

“Okay,” Nimec said. “It’s a broiler today, but let’s be sure we wear our vests. No exceptions. There should be extras stowed in the Rovers for the execs. We all know our jobs. Stay alert.”

“Knowing we’ve got the crawling eye on us,” Ackerman said, “it sort of comes easy, chief.”

Nimec looked at him. “I’m just being careful,” he said. “The bugging surprises me, but it doesn’t knock me out of my socks. After Antarctica, our base getting hit hard on a continent where there isn’t even supposed to be guns, I half expect anything. You need to remember where we are. This country’s surrounded by other countries where nobody’s in charge of the farm. Or everybody claims to be. I can imagine how some of the authorities here just might feel threatened by foreigners.”

“Even ones bearing gifts,” DeMarco said. “You think that could be the reason we’re being scoped? Some eager-beaver gendarme trying to impress his bosses?”

Nimec shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to downplay the seriousness of it. My gut tells me there’s a better than even chance we’re onto something else. But until we firm up our information, we should be careful about what we assume.” He paused, then shrugged again. “My point right now’s really that for the past week or so you’ve been protecting material assets. Ground freight. Everybody here knows it can put you into a certain mode. Today, with the VIPs going out, things are different. What we need to watch out for is different. There are human beings to protect. And I want to make sure we don’t let our guard down for a second. That we do what we always do when there’s more than the usual set of considerations about the safety of our personnel.”

The men were quiet.

Nimec watched a jet make its takeoff from the runway, gain altitude, and bank in their direction, its airframe reflecting the high sun, a silvery flare of brightness rushing across the open sky. The shoom of its turbos grew loud as it flew overhead and then began to fade.

Nimec turned toward Scull.

“What’s on your docket while we’re gone, Vince?”

“I want to follow up on the business with those French divers,” Scull said, and motioned with his chin. “We know the Rover’s clean?”

Nimec glanced toward DeMarco for an answer.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t advise you to make any deep personal confessions in standard-issue vehicles like the one I’ve been driving around town, but these modified babies are checked for bugs at least once a day. Besides, they haven’t been anywhere except here at the airport, or over at the HQ site, where we’ve had men posted around the clock. Nobody besides our own’s gone near them.”

“What about guides and workmen?” Nimec said.

“They ride in the trucks or the standards. This vehicle’s okay, rest assured. If you don’t trust me, you can count on its intruder shock or bug detection systems. Take your pick.”

“Intruder shock?” Scull said.

“Anybody lays a hand on it who shouldn’t gets hit with fifty thousand volts, the same as with a stun gun. The zapper’s set every night.”

Scull nodded.

“Good enough, I just found myself a phone booth,” he said. Then he stepped past Nimec to the driver’s door and pulled it open. “You guys chill out a minute, I gotta make an important call.”

“Hello, Fred Sherman—”

“Sherm, it’s Vince,” Scull said into his secure cellular. It was much cooler inside the Rover than out on the blacktop, its mirrored windows blocking the sun’s powerful rays. “Since when do you personally answer your phone?”

“Since my receptionist left for the day along with everybody else who works sane hours,” said Sherman at the other end of the line. He was one of the top data hounds in Scull’s risk-assessment office at UpLink SanJo. “How’s it going?”

“Don’t fucking ask.”

“Nice to hear you sounding happy.”

“I try to be consistent,” Scull said. “Look, I need some info.”

“Sure. Tell me what it is, I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow.”

“I mean I need it right now.”

“Vince, it’s almost seven o’clock at night—”

“Not here in Africa, it isn’t.” Scull glanced at the dashboard clock. “Here in Africa, where I happen to be, it’s still before ten in the morning. The day’s young and the sun’s shining and it feels like a goddamn furnace.”

“Vince, come on. Another ten minutes, five minutes, I would have been out the door—”

“Good I caught you when I did, then,” Scull growled. “Is it a fluke or miracle of God, I wonder?”

“Ah crap, Vince, don’t do this to me—”

“You know the submarine cable maintenance outfit we contracted for our Gabon operation? Nautel?”

“Of course, I did most of the research on it—”

“Which is why I don’t have to explain how it’s the same fleet owner that was doing the job for Planétaire… and why I called you and not somebody else,” Scull said. “I want to see records from both companies about the African fiber outage back in May…”

“Oh. Well, that ought to be easy enough. I already have scads of them in my files…”

“And everything they’ve got on the accident that killed those two Nautel divers. Everything, Sherm. Internal review documents, too.”

“Different story there.” Sherman’s tone had lifted and sunk. “Nautel’s almost sure to cooperate, especially since we still haven’t inked our contracts. But it’s hard to get through to anybody who’s upper rung at Planétaire right now. With the company going bust, and those irregular accounting practices, quote unquote, being covered in the media, their top execs are all bolting down into hidey-holes. And taking their paper shredders with them.”

“More reason to pull the slimebags out by their necks,” Scull said.

“Just like that, huh?”

“Right. You figure out where we’ve got leverage. And use it.”

A prolonged sigh of resignation over the phone.

“Okay, I’ll try my best,” Sherman said. “Where do I fax the docs?”

“You don’t. Send them by ’crypted e-mail,” Scull said. “You need to talk to me about anything, dial up my cell. And from now on, don’t forward any messages to me at the hotel. Not even a hi-how-are-you from my kids. Or that brunette I’ve been seeing.”

“The racked stripper?”

“Amber’s a sultry erotic dancer,” Scull said. “But, yeah, she’s the one.”

“Christ, this does sound serious.”

“I said it was important shit. What the hell, you think I just got an urge to jerk your chain?”

“Christ,” Sherman repeated. “I’ll get back to you fast as I can.”

“Do that,” Scull said. “I’m gonna be waiting at my computer.”

“Look, rush job or not, this could take a while—”

“I’ve got a while. In fact, I’ve got all day. Send me what you can, and make it plenty. Meantime, I need to find an Internet café and plug in.”

“You sitting with a crowd of backpacking hipsters at a cyber café? Somehow I can’t picture it, Vince.”

Scull shrugged in the driver’s seat.

“Why not?” he said. “If a guy’s main goal is to be an anonymous nobody, there’s no better place for it in the whole stinking world.”

The UpLink convoy made good time for the first twenty miles of its trip out of Port-Gentil. But it was barely past noon when the populous townships beyond the city thinned out across the low, barren countryside and the string of vehicles left the paved coastal road to drudge over rutted sand and laterite.

At the head of the column, a group of local guides drove one of the unmodified Rovers. Rumbling along after it was a big, squarish 6×6 cargo truck with a loaded-down flatbed trailer. Pete Nimec occupied the front passenger seat of the tricked-out Land Rover in the third slot, DeMarco behind the right-hand steering wheel, a group of four engineers and company officers in back. Then came another armored Rover for the company honchos driven by Wade and Ackerman, followed by a plain vanilla filled with Sword ops and local hired hands. Next were two more 6×6 haulers. Hollinger, Conners, and an assortment of bigwigs and technicians rode seventh and last in the only remaining armored vehicle.

Soon they were rolling between the southern shore of N’dogo Lagoon and a belt of intermittent jungle and scrubland along the Atlantic Ocean. Sunlight poured down on the trail to throw a blinding white glare off the grainy material spread in uneven heaps beneath their wheels. Nimec could see heat-shimmers over his Rover’s wide steel hood as the feeble output from its air-conditioner vents blew lukewarm on his neck and face. Outside his window, slender smooth-barked cypresses rose straight as lamp poles from small island mounds in the lagoon. Storks and egrets stood in the straw-colored reeds at its fringes, some with their long necks bowed to drink. There was no hint of a breeze. Everything seemed still and torpid in the settled dry-season heat. The only motion Nimec observed was from animals along the lagoon bank darting off at the sound of the diesel engines, but it was always out of the corner of his eye, and always too late to catch more than a blurry glimpse of some startled creature — a sleek body, a whip of a tail — as it splashed beneath the surface.

Then lagoon and forest receded behind the convoy, and for a time there was just flat drab savanna spreading out and away from the margins of the narrow vehicle trail.

Sette Cama had been an active British camp in the middle of the nineteenth century. What remained of it now was a loose scattering of wooden huts and bungalows that rose from the sedge on either side of the road, and an overgrown graveyard with the names of long-dead colonists etched into its crumbling headstones. Beyond there would be nothing but more deserted stretches of jungle and savanna for dozens of miles.

In his Rover up front, the guide radioed back to call a rest stop before continuing on toward the headquarters site. Then he led the vehicles off the trail over a patch of clumped, flattened grass and treaded dirt toward a large A-framed structure Nimec instantly figured to be the village trading post. There was an old pickup parked in front, a stand with some fruits and vegetables under the roofed porch, and a galvanized water bucket and metal dipper next to a slatted bench by the entrance. Out back was a row of three crude outhouses. Except for a Coca-Cola poster whose red background had faded to a pale pink, the signs taped against the dusty windows were handwritten in French. They seemed to have been put up more in defiance of the tyrannical sunlight than for any other reason. A few well-established palms around the building offered it some weak, spotty shade.

The vehicles stopped, and the locals went to stretch their legs and make small talk with a group of men who came out of the place to meet them, looking glad for a break in their monotony. While they stood and chatted, the members of the UpLink party started to dribble from their vehicles in ones, twos, and threes, a few of them wandering off to investigate the trading post, others just to stand around and smoke, a small number heading with reluctant necessity toward the shabby outhouses. Wearing bush shirts with Sword patches on the shoulders, and baby VVRS guns in sling harnesses against their bodies, some of Nimec’s men got out of their vehicles in a loose deployment around the post. They did their best to stay low profile and at the same time ensure they had control of the area, keeping watch over the execs without getting in anybody’s way. A single Sword op remained in the cab of each of the three cargo haulers.

Nimec sat beside DeMarco for a minute or two after their backseat companions had wandered off toward the post.

“I’d better work out some kinks of my own,” DeMarco said, digging his knuckles into his lower back. “Feel like taking a walk?”

Nimec pulled his head off his back rest, glanced at his watch, and thought about how much he missed Annie. He didn’t feel much like doing anything besides getting his job done.

“No thanks,” he said.

“You sure?”

Nimec gave him a nod.

“Yeah, Steve, go on,” he said. “Think I’d rather wait in here.”

The convoy was under way again within half an hour, and soon swung heavily inland through the thickening wilds.

DeMarco glanced over at Nimec as they crawled ahead in their Rover.

“Okay if I ask you something?” he said.

“Why not?”

“Could be it’s none of my business.”

Nimec shrugged.

“Go ahead, shoot,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

DeMarco nodded.

“I noticed you’ve been checking your watch a lot,” he said, keeping his voice quiet so it couldn’t be heard by the passengers in back. “And I was sort of wondering about it.”

Nimec sat looking straight out the windshield.

“Maybe I’m compulsive about the time,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe I just want to keep track of our progress. This WristLink contraption has a global positioning system readout.”

“Maybe.” DeMarco hesitated, then pointed toward the dash console with his chin. “Except we’ve got a big, clear, easy-to-see GPS display right in front of us.”

Nimec raised his eyebrows but remained quiet a moment.

“ ‘My Girl,’ ” he said finally.

“Huh?”

“That old Temptations song,” Nimec said. “Remember it?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I’ve got the watch set to play it on the day I’m supposed to get back to the States.”

“And see your girl again?”

“Right.”

DeMarco smiled a little.

“Nice,” he said. “That’s nice.”

Nimec kept looking straight out the windshield.

“Think so?”

“Yeah.”

Nimec cleared his throat.

“Actually it was her son who programmed it,” he said. “Annie’s got a boy and girl. Chris and Linda.”

DeMarco nodded. He briefly took his left hand off the steering wheel and wriggled its third finger. He was wearing a simple gold wedding band.

“I miss my sweetie, too,” he said. “Been married going on twelve years, and it’s tough when the job keeps us apart. Separations are especially hard for the kids. We have three in our own brood… Jake, Alicia, and Kim.”

Nimec grunted. “Your wife’s with UpLink too, right?”

“A database administrator,” DeMarco said. “Her name’s Becky. Née Rebecca Lowenstein. My mother was hoping I’d wind up with a nice Italian Catholic girl, keep with the family tradition.” A grin filled his face. “Meanwhile, she’ll be attending my older daughter’s bat mitzvah come next July. Cosí é la vita… that’s life.”

Nimec chuckled, and leaned back against the seat. The vehicle rumbled slowly along behind the 6×6’s tailgate, forging through clumps of broad-leafed manioc plants that swarmed up on the trail and threatened to close it in.

“You and Annie have solid plans?” DeMarco said after a while.

“For right when I get back to the States, you mean…?”

DeMarco shook his head.

“I mean, are you two serious?”

Nimec looked puzzled a moment.

“We’re not engaged or anything,” he said. “Seems a little too early. But we’ve been steady for about a year, year and a half.”

DeMarco shrugged, holding the wheel.

“How long people have been seeing each other has nothing to do with serious,” he said.

Nimec raised his eyebrows.

“I’m not following you.”

DeMarco shrugged a second time. “I once dated a woman, exclusive, for almost three years,” he said. “Thought she was a great person, got on fine with her, but never considered making things permanent. Just seemed like something was missing between us. Then, bang, Becky comes along, and I know we’re a perfect match. Except I’m still involved with that other gal.”

“What’d you do?”

“Broke up with her. It’s one of those things that’s never easy, but had to be done. Then I asked Becky out, popped the question a few weeks later. Cut ahead three months, we’re walking down the aisle at that interdenominational UN chapel in New York City, beautiful place. A priest and rabbi co-officiating.”

“Never had any doubts you might’ve been rushing things?”

DeMarco gave Nimec a short glance.

“I’m only human,” he said. “You hear these stats about how over fifty percent of marriages hit the mat. And then there are all the timetables society lays on you. You’re supposed to date for this long, get engaged for that long, wait so many years to have a baby… sure, I had doubts. You don’t, it’s not normal. But worrying about them seemed like a waste. I knew what I knew. And figured it was enough for me to commit.”

Nimec became quiet in his seat as they rocked along over the deeply rutted trail. He turned his eyes to the display console’s GPS screen.

“Looks like we’re pretty near base,” he said, motioning at the readout graphics. “All we have to do now is get there without breaking an axle.”

DeMarco nosed their Rover forward, took a hard, jarring bump.

“Or our asses,” he said, his hand tight around the wheel.

The sound of engines was close.

They raised their eyes, their heads covered with the heat and flash retardant hoods now. Although the brush around them trembled slightly, it did not part.

Saddled high in the bubinga tree, the man with the Sig SG550 sniper rifle was motionless, camouflage netting wrapped around his face, his cheek against the weapon’s nonreflective black stock.

The sound was growing louder, yes. Closer. But its source had not yet entered their fire zone.

The ambushers remained hidden, ready for the moment.

“What the hell,” DeMarco said. His foot had slammed down hard on the brake pedal. “You ever ask yourself if the boss finds these green splats on the map just to test us? See what it’ll take to drive us crazy?”

Nimec produced a thin smile.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I could almost wonder.”

DeMarco shifted the tranny into PARK. He had a feeling they might be going nowhere for a while.

They sat looking out their windshield at the cargo hauler’s tailgate, their passengers muttering unhappily in the rear. A moment earlier the convoy’s lead Rover had come to a sudden halt, setting off a chain reaction down the line. This after their trail had taken them through a thicket of snarled, spiny-limbed euphorbia toward a jungle corridor that had promised some blessed shade from the relentless sun.

The forward driver had exited his vehicle, gone around to the truck behind him, and then paused to talk with some other locals who’d hopped from its cab — the entire team scanning the trail up ahead, shielding their eyes from the midday brightness with their hands. Now he separated from them, approached the Rover, and made a quick winding gesture with his finger.

DeMarco lowered the automatic window, catching a blast of hot air in his face.

“C’est un arbre qui tombe,” the driver said to him, looking dismayed. A man named Loren with angular features and a deep umber complexion, he was an excellent local guide who had already made the trek out to UpLink’s Sette Cama base a bunch of times.

“Ce mal?” DeMarco asked.

One of the execs riding in back leaned forward in his seat, trying to make out the guide’s response, unable to understand his French.

“What is it?” he said.

“We’ve got some downed trees across the trail,” DeMarco replied. “Our guide says these things happen sometimes. A tree rots, goes over, hits another, and that one crashes into another.”

The exec frowned, but sat back to relay the news to his companions.

“How big a holdup can we expect?” Nimec said to DeMarco.

DeMarco held up a finger, had another brief exchange with the guide in French, then shrugged.

“Depends,” he replied after a moment. “There can be two, three, or a dozen trees that need clearing. Loren, a couple guys from his Rover, and the truckers are going have a closer look at the fall, and he wants us to check it out with them so we know the score. He says it doesn’t seem too bad from here. If a few of us pitch in to help, we should be able to move soon.”

Nimec gazed out in front of him but was unable to see past the 6×6’s broad rear end. After a second he turned back to DeMarco.

“Tell Loren I’ll be right with him,” he said.

DeMarco nodded. “Guess I’d may as well tag along.”

“No,” Nimec said. “You sit tight.”

DeMarco looked at him.

“Any particular reason?”

“Like I told you before, nobody ever gets hurt by being careful.” Nimec pushed his molded radio earplug into place and adjusted the lavalier mike on his collar. He thought a moment and then resumed in a hushed tone, “Call back for some of our boys to get out of their Rovers and keep their eyes open to what’s around us. But I want them sticking close… nobody off the trail. At least one man should stay in every vehicle with the execs.”

DeMarco regarded him. The four company honchos aboard their Rovers were talking among themselves in back.

“You sure you don’t smell trouble?” he said, his voice also too low for them to overhear now.

Nimec shrugged.

“Not so far,” he said.

Then he shouldered open the door to exit the vehicle.

Weapons of war are by obvious definition intended to have ugly effects.

Thermobarics — a military nomenclature for devices producing intense heat-pressure bursts — are uglier than most.

Whether dropped by an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet or fired from a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, a thermobaric warhead will cause vastly more sustained and extensive destruction to its target than a conventional explosive munition. There are numerous designs floating about the open and black international markets, many battle tested, some under development, their payload formulas and delivery systems guarded with varying degrees of secrecy. In its basic configuration a fuel-air warhead has three separate compartments, two with high explosive charges, a third containing an incendiary fluid, gaseous, or particulate mixture. Though Russian arms builders will not confirm it, the RPO-Bumblebee warhead’s flammable mix is a volatile combination of petroleum-derived fuels such as ethylene or propylene oxide, and tetranitromethane-a liquid relative of PETN, the combustible ingredient used in many plastic explosives.

As the primary HE charge is air detonated, the incendiary compartment bursts open like a metal eggshell to scatter its contents over a wide area. A second explosive charge then ignites the dispersed aerosol cloud to produce a tremendous churning fireball that can reach a temperature of between forty-five and fifty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, burning away the oxygen at its center, a vacuum filled in a fraction of a second by a rush of pressurized air approaching 430 pounds per square inch — almost thirty times that which is normally exerted on an object or human body at sea level. Anyone exposed to its full force will be at once crushed to something less than a pulp, if not entirely vaporized. As the blast wave races outward, many at the nearest periphery of the detonation will die of suffocation, the breath sucked from their collapsing lungs. The casualties may also suffer extensive internal injuries such as venous and arterial embolisms, organ hemorrhages, and actual severing of bodily organs from the flesh and muscle tissues that hold them in place, including having their eyes torn from their sockets.

Pete Nimec had gotten only one leg out of the Rover when the RPO-A warhead erupted at the head of the convoy, and along with his fast reflexes, that was probably what saved his life.

There was a loud eruption from the mass of trees up ahead of him, then a roaring, rushing chute of heat and flame. The concussion struck the Rover’s partially open door, slamming it up against him and throwing him back into his seat with his fingers still clutching its handle. He had a chance to glimpse the vehicle Loren had exited just moments before bounce several feet off the ground, then drop back down on its left flank, crumpled and blazing, its windows blown out, completely disintegrated by the blast.

Nimec had seen enough action in his day to realize the six men still inside it would have been killed instantly. Almost without conscious thought about how to save himself, without time to think, he dove behind the Land Rover’s open passenger door, knelt behind its level VI armor as the blast wave swept over the 6×6, jolting it backward into the Rover’s ram bumpers. Debris flew in every direction. Some of it rained down heavily on Nimec. Some drifted in the air around him, burning around him. There were scraps of clothing, foliage, seat covers, lord knew what else. Nimec heard screams in the sucking, broiling wind — from the truckers who’d gotten out of the hauler’s cab, from the panicked executives inside the Rover, all their terrible cries intermingled. And DeMarco, shouting at him across the front seat, “Chief, chief, can you hear me, chief are you okay…?”

Breathless, dazed, Nimec couldn’t answer at first. His left eye stung, something dripping into it, blurring it. The warm wetness streamed down his face. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow and it came away slick and red.

Nimec blinked twice to clear his vision, then found himself almost wishing he could have remained blind to the scene before him. The truckers had been immolated. One of them lay still on the ground, his clothes burned away, his charred body consumed with fire. Near him the scattered remains of another man, or perhaps more than a single man, were also ablaze.

“Chief—”

Up, up, Nimec told himself. Sit up.

He managed it without knowing how, his glance briefly meeting DeMarco’s across the seat. And then, somehow, past DeMarco’s head, through his side window, he spotted Loren in the grass on the opposite side of the Rover, probably thrown there by the blast wave, rolling in a patch of shoulder-high grass to smother the last of the flames that had eaten away at his clothes, flailing his limbs in pain.

At the same moment, he heard a loud pop-pop-pop somewhere at the rear of the stalled convoy. Whooshing, whistling noises in the air. Nimec spun his head around and saw smoke tailing upward from the euphorbia grove, followed by three distinct orange-red bursts behind the last vehicle, the Rover shepherded by Conners and Hollinger. They were getting shelled back there, too. By what sounded to him like light mortars.

Then the unmistakable rattle of semiauto fire from the woods up ahead of him, and the thicket on either side, and the barrels of VVRS III’s that had been thrust from gunports on the doors and tailgates of the cherried Rovers amid the confusion, their exterior concealment panels having sprung down as the compact subs were fitted into them from within. The Sword ops who’d already gotten out of their Rovers on Nimec’s instruction had dived between bumpers and fenders and tailgates and were also opening up, exchanging volleys with their unseen attackers out in the brush.

Nimec gathered his wits and looked around into the Rover’s backseat. Some of its passengers were still screaming. Others had gone still, very still, not making a sound. All their faces wore confused, shocked expressions that probably weren’t dissimilar to his own.

DeMarco. Concentrate on giving DeMarco his orders.

“Loren’s alive,” he said. “I’m going to try and get him.”

“You’re bleeding—”

“It’s just a cut.”

“Chief, let me do it.”

Nimec shook his head. There were more popping mortar discharges. Then whistles, blasts.

“I’ll be okay, listen,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell kind of setup this is, but they’ve got us blocked, front and rear. Radio back down the line. Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers. Might not mean anything if they take direct hits, but the rest of the vehicles might as well be tin cans, including the trucks.” He thought furiously. “They’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best. Then lock all the Rovers’ doors and stay put. Try and keep the passengers cool.”

“You run out in the open alone—”

Nimec cut short his protest with a slice of his hand.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Contact the base… we’ve got scrambled voice communications, right?”

An acquiescent nod. “Right.”

“Tell them to send up the Skyhawk — I just wish we had more than one of those choppers on base. Make sure the crew’s warned to expect heavy incoming. Tell them about those mortars. And whatever caught us with that blast of flame… some kind of RPGs. I don’t know. Also, we’ve got to have a microwave vidlink with the bird. Can’t be of much use to its crew down here till we know the attackers’ positions.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“All right.” Nimec could still see Loren through the window. “That guide, Steve. I need to get over to him.”

DeMarco held up a finger, snapped open a compartment on his door, and fished hurriedly inside.

“You should take this,” he said, producing a small medkit. “There’s a morphine autoinjector inside. It’ll help. And watch out for those cactus plants, or whatever the hell they are. The shit that oozes from them’s poison.”

Nimec took the medkit and gave DeMarco a purposeful nod.

Then he shut the door with a hard push and dashed back around the rear of the vehicle.

In the expanse of sedge and euphorbia, the bandits had deployed into teams of two, each man laying his mortar about twenty yards apart from his teammate’s, and a hundred yards back from the girdled trail.

Crouched beside one member of the gang, their headman watched him feed a high-explosive fragmentation round into his tube, set for drop fire to allow faster discharge than manual triggering with the lever. The round slid down the barrel and hit the firing pin at its base cap. Its primer cartridge detonated at once, igniting propellent charges slotted into the fin blades.

An instant later the projectile launched from the muzzle in a gout of flame and smoke. It rocketed across the sky and thudded into the ground at the convoy’s rear, chewing a hole in the trail to hamper its retreat.

No sooner did it strike than the bandit was dropping another round into the tube.

The headman raised his binoculars to his eyes and looked toward the front of the column. Still out of his vehicle, the UpLink security chief had begun shuffling his way back along its side. He held his firearm in one hand, carried something else in the other, a box or case of some sort…

The headman produced a curious grunt. Then he noticed the man writhing in the grass beyond the 4×4. It wasn’t possible to get a clear view of him in the patchy thicket, but he believed it might be the guide.

His curiosity became satisfaction, a smile touching his lips. The UpLink security man was rushing toward the guide, exposing himself to try to aid him.

It was almost too good to be true, he thought. His entire reason for stalling the convoy farther up the road had been to bring the security man closer to the trees, into easy range of the sniper who waited with explicit orders to take him out. Indeed, all the orders he’d given his men were clear and explicit, following guidelines of similar specificity from the Congolese warlord Fela Geteye, with whom they were in league. Whom warlord Geteye dealt with on the next level up the chain was none of the men’s affair. Such linkages were intricate, preserved in secrecy, and shared only as necessary. What mattered most to the headman’s coupeurs de route was collecting their portion of the bounty.

It did not mean the headman himself was ignorant of likely connections. His choice of livelihood bore a great many perils, capture or betrayal high on the index, and experience had taught him one should always have a reserve of information worth dealing. He had no qualms accepting jobs on a need-to-know basis. But if those at the top were mindful of their safety, why not he? The trick was to strike a balance — too much knowledge could be dangerous, too little shortsighted and foolish.

The headman knew warlord Geteye had ties to a Cameroonian dealer of stolen arms and technology who had bought favor with many lawmen throughout the region, among them, a police commander in Port-Gentil. The headman knew this commander owed his appointment to an even more highly ranked member of the Police Gabonaise, no lesser than a division chief said to be the puppet of an influential government minister. And although he did not know the minister’s name, the headman had heard credible rumors that his strings were, in turn, pulled by a blanc of fearsome repute whose name and broad designs were more deeply mysterious than any of the rest… and better left that way.

However tempting it was to speculate about the parties’ identities, the headman thought it smarter to resist.

He neither knew, nor would have cared to know, that the Gabonese minister was Etienne Begela, that the divisional police boss Begela had called upon to arrange the Sette Cama ambush was an immediate superior of Commander Bertrand Kilana, and that Kilana had been the one to secure warlord Fela Geteye’s participation as middleman between the illicit trader and the headman’s own band.

Some information was a good thing, yes. But too much knowledge could weigh one down, tip the scale the wrong way. The headman would never wish to become a potential liability to those exceedingly powerful and dangerous individuals who might have concerns about what he could reveal about them under interrogation.

His main interests had been how his gang of killers and thieves played into the scheme, and what was to be gained from their involvement. In that respect, he did not stand above those he led.

Should all continue to go well, their earnings looked to be tremendous. The arrangement with Geteye was one of incentives, each stage of the operation they successfully pulled off boosting their profits. The convoy’s interception already guaranteed them a nice sum, with another agreed-upon bonus due if UpLink’s head of security was sniped out — a hit the headman believed was about to be accomplished. Were his men able to get away with hijacking the truckloads of multimillion-dollar cargo, they would stand to make a certain fortune, receiving a cut of the loot from warlord Geteye after its turnover by the Cameroonian black marketeer. No restraints had been placed on their taking of casualties… as far as that went, the headman had gotten the distinct sense that a high body count might be preferred. on the other hand, damage to the precious freight must be avoided, or at least kept to a minimum. And in that regard, things were about to get tough.

The headman held his glasses steady, watching the besieged line of vehicles through the double circles of their lenses. The Land Rover in front had been marked for destruction, and he’d factored in a significant loss to the cargo aboard the truck at its rear — the RPO-A shoulder launcher was a ravaging weapon. But he would take no chances damaging any more of his coveted bounty, and the nearness of the rest of the conveyances to one another — the last two trucks flanked front and back by what he now saw to be armored vehicles, something he hadn’t been warned to expect — meant a direct hit on any of the Rovers would have exactly that inescapable, unacceptable result.

The controlled barrage could be sustained only a bit longer, then. Keeping the convoy paralyzed, and further softening its defenses by taking out the handful of UpLink security men that had left their 4×4s.

The headman nodded to himself, thinking.

Soon, he would have to bring his men out onto the trail for the decisive strike.

Hunkered low between his Rover and the truck behind it, Nimec swiped more blood off his forehead, and then propelled himself across the trail.

He drew fire at once. A wild shower out of the trees that he figured for a subgun volley, then a single heavier-caliber round whapping the ground inches to his left, too close, throwing up divots of soil. That one had come from above. From a treetop. A shooter was perched up there, trying to take him out. The realization brought DeMarco’s question back to mind, what the hell kind of setup was this?

He snipped off the thought. No time to worry about it now. The guide was yards ahead of him, down in the sedge, moving, thrashing in agony.

Nimec plunged into the thicket, the folded blanket in his right hand, his unharnessed VVRS gripped in the other, its barrel tilted upward. He squeezed its trigger, sprayed the bubinga grove with fire, covering himself, or doing his best, impossible to take decent aim when you’re running full tilt.

Another shot whizzed from above, close again. Closer than it ought to have been. Nimec was a moving target in a tangle of foliage reaching a foot or two higher than his head, and the guy’d gotten off two near hits from several hundred yards. Nobody was that sharp, not unless he had X-ray vision, or was using more than an ordinary telescopic. And Nimec was betting it wasn’t Superman up there.

Behind him now, more mortar blasts and subgun volleys. But Loren’s screams, those piercing inchoate screams, were the loudest sounds of all, impossible to ignore. They tunneled his awareness, called to it like a maddening beacon. A human being might by dying there before his eyes and was suffering almost beyond comprehension. He had to get over to him, do something to stop those horrible cries of pain.

Nimec scrambled through a cluster of euphorbia, the spiny limbs reaching above his head, twisting up around him, scratching his arms despite his attempt to avoid them. Still, they offered momentary cover from the treetop sniper. He ran on, hit some more grass, reached his man, and snapped open the medkit DeMarco had given him. Loren was thrashing, rolling, hands slapping his own body. It was as though he were unaware he’d already doused the flames that had eaten at his flesh, and was still trying to beat them out.

“It’s okay, easy does it, try to stay still,” Nimec said, knowing the guide’s convulsive thrashing would only do more damage, thinking he might be in far too much pain to pay attention, possibly didn’t even speak enough English to know what he was saying. Sure, why not, there had to be a goddamn language problem for him to contend with, on top of everything else.

Nimec squatted down on his haunches, got the morphine autoinjector out of the kit, and pressed the end of the tube to his outer thigh, ejecting the spring-cocked needle that would dispense the painkiller directly through his ruined clothing. He was still urging Loren to hold still in the calmest voice he could manage, It’s okay, Loren, we can make it, I promise, we can, only you’ve got to work with me here, got to hold still. He could smell the man’s seared hair, his flesh, a sickening, terrible assault on his senses.

And then, suddenly, Loren settled down. He lay groaning — alive, at least — but almost motionless. Nimec couldn’t tell why. Maybe he’d understood him after all. Or maybe he was slipping into shock. Nimec simply couldn’t tell, guessed it might not be a good sign in the larger scheme of things. But staying here wouldn’t prolong his life. He wasn’t tossing around, flopping his arms and legs every which way, so it would be easier to bring him back to the Rover, where they’d at least have some protection. The Tom Ricci credo again… small steps.

Okay. Next stop, the Rover. He needed to get both of them into it. Throw Loren over his shoulder, drag him, whatev—

There was the crack of a gunshot, the sniper firing another round from the treetop.

Nimec spilled over into the tall grass.

Steve DeMarco knew how to follow orders without having them spelled out to the letter. Under most circumstances he wouldn’t have considered disobeying them.

These weren’t most circumstances, though. Which left him to rely on another of the strengths that had gotten him assigned to Nimec’s SanJo A-team: the ability to make tough judgments in a hurry.

Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers… they’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best.

They had been Pete Nimec’s words, not his. You decide what’s best. Okay, fine, ready and willing to oblige. And moments before DeMarco saw Nimec tumble into the thicket, he’d decided, radioing out to the Sword ops inside and outside the Rovers, preparing them for a synched up release of Type IV thermal obscurant from the tail pipes of the armored vehicles. A recent UpLink agent developed for military use, the micropulverized aluminum alloy particles would swirl upward in a buoyant white cloud that provided a thick visual/thermal — or bispectral — fog, shrouding their people from sight as they all transferred to the armoreds. At the same time, the fog would scatter the infrared emissions of whatever it enveloped, everything from the twelve- to fourteen-micron heat signatures of human beings to those radiated by the vehicles, which would be intense even with their engines off after they’d been running for hours in the hot sun. Use ordinary white or red phosphorus, you’d get even wider spectrum wavelength scatter, DeMarco knew. But the stuff burned at five thousand degrees, hot, and running through that smoke was liable to blister your flesh and airways on contact. With the Type IV, any thermal gun scopes or heat-seeking rockets the opposition might be using would be totally fouled, while the individuals it was shielding from detection could tolerate short-duration exposure without adverse effects.

DeMarco had decided on his crisp little plan and sent out word over the comlink. One, he would launch a thirty-second countdown. Two, the armoreds would release their bispectral obscurant. And three, the vulnerable UpLink personnel, road guides, and truckers would make their break, go hustling toward the safer vehicles.

DeMarco was at minus twelve seconds, counting aloud into his microphone, ready to push the Type IV fog-release button on the rapid-defense touch pad console beside his left armrest, when he heard the big-bore rifle up in the trees crack for a third time, and saw Nimec drop completely out of sight in the brush.

Stunned, DeMarco called an urgent hold command.

In the Rover behind him, Wade jerked his finger away from his control console.

At the tail end of the convoy, Hollinger did the same. “Chief, you all right out there?” DeMarco said tensely over the shared communications channel.

Silence from Nimec.

DeMarco felt his stomach knot.

“Chief!” He was almost shouting into the mike now. “Come on, Pete, goddamn it, are you—?”

“I’m okay,” Nimec answered. Flat on his stomach in the grass, his mouth full of dirt, he’d been hauling Loren up beside him as DeMarco’s tense radio call went out, too busy to respond at once. “Have to stay low. That son of a bitch in the tree almost took me out with that last shot. I think he’s using a thermal sight.”

There was momentary silence in his earpiece.

“Hang on, chief,” DeMarco said. “I’ll get you back in here—”

Nimec cut him short. “Forget me,” he said. “I told you to evac those sitting duck vehicles.”

“I was about make the call. Use the Type Four mist for cover—”

“So use it.”

“That sharpshooter’s got you pinned. You start moving again, trying to lug a wounded man with you, the fucker’ll nail you in a second.”

Nimec inhaled, wiped blood from his forehead. He’d gotten some juice from a broken euphorbia stem into the cut, and it burned as though on fire.

“If I’m being scoped through a thermal, Type Four’s what I need,” he said, lying through his teeth.

“That stuff won’t disperse fast enough to screen you—”

“I’ll keep hugging the ground, find the Rover once the smoke starts to lift.”

DeMarco waited several heartbeats before answering him.

“You’ll never make it that way,” he said at last. “I can use fog oil instead…”

Nimec inhaled. He wasn’t about to fool anybody here, leaving him to pull rank.

“No,” he said. “You’ve got any sudden ideas in your head, you damn well better shake them.”

DeMarco was silent again.

“Steve—”

“Your signal’s breaking up, chief. Couldn’t hear you.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t hear me?”

“Getting worse, I’m losing you—”

“Don’t pull this on me, Steve…”

“Lost you,” DeMarco said very clearly over their comlink. “Proceeding at my own discretion. Over.”

The headman had determined he’d waited long enough. An ambush must have surprise and speed; lose either, allow the situation to become static, and it would fail.

Lowering his glasses so they hung over his chest on their strap, he brought his palm-size tactical radio to his mouth and sent out his command to the men he’d divided up on both sides of the trail. His voice was level and controlled.

In the brush at the convoy’s rear, in the forest up ahead, the bandits left their stationary positions and started to converge on the vehicles according to plan.

Moments after breaking contact with Nimec — hanging up the phone on him, figuratively speaking — DeMarco resumed his countdown where he’d left off, twelve seconds minus. He’d moved his finger away from the Type-IV release button on his touch pad to another about an eighth of an inch over to its right.

The lighted button he was now ready to push was marked SGF2, for petroleum smoke-generator fog formulation two, which, in truth, was hardly different from the diesel-and-oil smoke pot formula that had been used on battlefields since World War II. And while it created a quick, dense visual screen and did a good job muddling near infrared signals, giving it a considerable degree of efficacy in certain evasive situations to the present day, it didn’t work nearly as well as Type IV in degrading the functionality of thermal imagers sensitive to far end IR wavelengths.

That limitation was precisely what DeMarco wanted — no, needed — to put him on more or less equal terms with his opposite number in the treetop.

“Eleven, ten, nine, I want everybody set to go…”

An eye on his digital dashboard clock, DeMarco was also getting set, practicing what he preached as he ticked off the seconds over his comlink — only he would be going very much his own way.

“… eight, seven, send up the smoke!”

DeMarco hit his console button and white SGF2 vapor began pouring from his Rover’s tail pipe, Wade and Hollinger releasing it from the exhausts of their respective vehicles at the same instant, the two of them acting on his direct order.

DeMarco looked down at the weapon he’d taken from a hidden underseat compartment, resting all sixteen pounds of it comfortably across his lap even as he’d been having his little clash of opinion with Nimec. UpLink arms designers called it a Big Daddy VVRS, their own version of what master planners with the Pentagon’s Future Land Warrior program were dubbing an “objective individual combat weapon,” or OICW, which was itself a variant of the modular French FAMAS rifles that terrorists had used with grievously damaging results against an UpLink facility in Brazil two years earlier.

Ninety percent of the time, Sword’s munitions designers were way ahead of the curve, but every so often they found themselves playing catch up. When that happened, they always compensated by pulling into first place.

The Big Daddy was a single-trigger, dual-barreled, integrated firing system, its lower barrel chambered for 5.56-mm VVRS lethal/nonlethal sabot rounds, and its upper barrel a 20-mm fused multipurpose munitions launcher; a microcomputer-assisted, thermal image/laser dot range-finder targeting scope on top. This was quite the whole package rolled into one.

Hoping it would do the trick for him, DeMarco continued to read the numbers on his dash clock aloud, getting there now, getting there, three, two, one…

“… Commence evac!” he yelled.

And gripped the Big Daddy in both hands as he pushed out his door into the churning smoke.

In the 4×4’s rear compartment, all four of its terrified passengers sat watching everything beyond their windows dissolve into a blank white void, as if the world were simply being erased before their eyes. Without exchanging a word, they had linked hands on the seat between them, bowed their heads, and begun moving their lips in spontaneous, silent prayer — each according to his or her individual belief, desire to believe, or willing abandonment to the possibility that a higher power might be stirred into turning an ear in their direction.

As one, they petitioned not for their own lives, but for those of DeMarco, Nimec, and the people from the evacuated vehicles somewhere out in the spreading whiteness—

Out there in the hell they could no longer see.

Out, out, and out.

They emptied from the death-trap trucks and 4×4s, a flood of over twenty executives, engineers, and local hands. Their Sword escort closed ranks around them even as they rushed onto the trail, guiding them through billows of turbine-blown oil fog in two groups of different sizes — the larger one running toward the pair of armored Rovers at the head of the convoy, a much smaller number turning the other way, dashing for the single armored vehicle at their rear.

The passengers were not the only ones in need of immediate evac. Three of the Sword ops who’d exited their vehicles for a look-see in the seconds before the raid commenced had taken serious hits — two of them sliced up from shrapnel discharged by exploding mortar rounds, the third bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to his leg. All had either found or been pulled into temporary cover between the vehicles, all had to be moved out, and in no case was it easy. But while the man who’d taken the slug and one of the shelling casualties were walking wounded, able to stay on their own feet with some assistance, the other was in far worse shape. Semiconscious, the left side of his head deeply gashed, a portion his left cheek torn away in a horrible flap, he had to be brought toward the armoreds in a fireman’s carry.

The ops ferried their charges through the mist as hastily as possible. They wore stereoscopic thermal goggles equipped with low-probability intercept, spread-spectrum digital video transmitters, their color-enhanced LPI images appearing on dashboard receiver displays in the trio of armored vehicles. These allowed the security personnel inside the suped Rovers to see everything their exposed teammates saw through the TI goggles, creating a kind of multidimensional collage perspective of their intensely hostile surroundings.

Inside and out, the Sword personnel were laying patterns of defensive fire. Careful not to fan the area where Nimec was bellied down in the grass, those on the trail were using the baby VVRS guns with which they’d left their vehicles. At the same time, the men aboard the Rovers were spraying the brush with rounds from their Big Daddies, waiting with their doors partially open for the evacuees, doing what they could to provide fire support as they made their way over from the cleared out vehicles.

For the ops involved in the evac, the SGF2 was proving a tremendous asset.

A matter of seconds after they started hustling the men and women in their care toward the armoreds, they had seen their attackers closing in, advancing on them like Indian warriors around an encircled Old West wagon train. They crept forward through the thicket, rushing with their bodies bent low, dropping, firing, then creeping forward again, their forms radiant in the TI lenses, the hot-spot discharges from their gun barrels appearing as winks of yellow-orange brightness against a gray field.

The rising blanket of fog vastly turned things around. As Pete Nimec had observed only minutes earlier, it was hard to be accurate with a rifle while you were scrambling and doubtful of your enemy’s position. But knowing right where your enemy was made it easier. A lot easer when you were fading before his very eyes.

Unable to see the convoy through the smokescreen, the attackers had stopped coming, their arrested movement suddenly turning them into blind and confused targets — and the Sword ops were quick to exploit the role reversal. Directing their fire at the IR images outside the blanket of mist, the gunners in the armored Rovers knocked one after another down into the thicket. As the evacuees continued their run toward shelter, their escorts managed to rattle off tight bursts of their own, breaking the ring of ambushers into a scatter of ducking, falling bodies.

Moments later the evacuees were hurrying into the armoreds. They got the wounded in first, the occupants of the vehicles coming out to help them through the open doors, clearing as much room as possible for them in the cargo sections, then assisting the rest, squeezing them inside, slamming and locking the doors behind them.

The transfer accomplished, they were, mercifully and at last, safer.

None of them was at all sure it meant they were saved.

Crouched on one knee outside the Rover, DeMarco was desperately scanning the treetops when he heard the flap of chopper rotors in the distance.

He felt a wash of relief, then took a breath to settle himself. No sense getting too overjoyed. The Skyhawk was coming, okay, but it wasn’t here yet. He needed to keep his mind on what he was doing, keep his finger on his trigger.

His gunsight shifted from normal daylight to TI mode at the flip of a switch, DeMarco could see clearly through the smoke gushing from the 4×4’s tailpipe. Knowing he’d be able to see in the whiteout was his entire reason for having chosen the oil fog. Type IV’s ability to screw up thermal imaging would have hidden the shooter from him, and him from the shooter, but left Nimec visible to the sniper out beyond the edges of the mist, a dead duck without assistance. Nimec had realized this as well as DeMarco, hence their tiff over the comlink. He had not wanted DeMarco to make a target of himself for his sake. And DeMarco supposed he might have felt the same in Nimec’s place. Too many heroes here, that was the problem.

DeMarco peered through his eyecup, his cheek to the gunstock, sweeping the rifle from side to side, trying to scope out the shooter.

A special agent with the Chicago FBI for over a decade before hooking up with Sword, he knew how to use a gun. He’d earned high qualifications for sidearm technique, better-than-average rifle certs, and a couple of commendations for situational and judgmental skills. But he was still no expert shot with a submachine gun and, for that matter, had never used deadly force on a human being or anything larger than a cockroach — shit, he even bought humane traps to catch the mice that wriggled into his basement every spring. Only twice in Chi had he been compelled to draw a weapon off the training course, both times getting a hands-in-the-air surrender. There were no dramatic takedowns or feats of marksmanship for him to tell war stories about over beers somewhere; if he was going to help the chief out of his jam, and maybe see another tomorrow himself, he would need to score his first right now.

Perspiration trickling down his face, DeMarco swept the rifle across the trees, a damn lot of them for that bastard to be hiding in, where the hell was he up there—?

He abruptly checked the weapon’s motion. Through the electronic reticle of its sight, he’d spotted the treetop shooter saddled in the crook of a foliage-swaddled limb, his IR phantom form absolutely still.

It took perhaps a millisecond to realize the sighting was mutual.

His eye to the scope, DeMarco had enough time to see the bore of the sonofabitch’s rifle swing toward him in the treetop, just enough, the sniper absolutely still and steady up in the treetop except for that one conspicuous movement.

DeMarco could hear his pulse somewhere between his ears as he squeezed back Big Daddy’s trigger and felt the recoil against his shoulder, a 20-mm smart round flying from the rifle’s titanium upper barrel, the micro-computerized sight processing range and position, automatically calculating the round’s best point of detonation for target acquisition, setting it for airburst rather than on-impact explosion. And then an earsplitting blast, the treetop igniting into an orange bouquet of flame, its trunk blowing apart, spewing everywhere, obliterated into countless fiery chunks, shaves, and splinters of wood.

DeMarco felt his heart stroking. Later he would recall his half-surprised glance down at himself as if to confirm it really was still beating inside him, that he really hadn’t gotten slugged in the chest — here, unbeknownst, was the crowd grabber of War Story Number One for the books.

He returned his eye to the rifle sight, looked through the smoke into the thicket. The gunfire around him had gotten more sporadic. He could hear the whap of copter blades closer overhead. Good signs. Very good signs.

“Chief!” Scanning the vegetation, scanning. His back pressed against the side of the Rover, his comlink channel to Nimec was open again. “Chief, come in, I’m trying to get a visual—”

“I hear you,” Nimec said. “Can’t see a damned thing, though. Smoke’s too thick. Best estimate, I’m ten yards back of the Rover, twenty yards or so deep in the brush.”

DeMarco swung his rifle barrel to the left, picked up a pair of low TIs — one man propped on his arms, the other flat on the ground.

“Think I’ve got a visual on you, chief, hold up a hand…”

It rose ghostly and shimmering in his scope’s eyecup.

DeMarco breathed.

“Okay, it’s you all right,” he said. “Hang tight, I’m on my way over.”

“Remind me to kick you down for insubordination when you get here.”

“Will do,” DeMarco said, and tore forward into the vegetation.

Watching the explosion rip through the treetops through his glasses, listening to the sound of a helicopter in the not-too-distant eastern sky, the headman knew it was time to call off his raid, knew irrevocably that it had come to almost total failure. The man marked for assassination was alive, the cargo he’d meant to hijack out of his grasp. Several of his band had been killed or wounded. Any financial compensation he stood to gain from having stopped the vehicles would not offset his losses.

He had become uneasy about his situation the minute he’d noticed there were armored vehicles in the convoy, a feeling that rapidly turned to anxiousness when their chemical fog was released to shroud the trail, and the security teams aboard the enhanced 4×4s had begun fighting off his men. It was not their impressive firepower alone that opened a fissure in his confidence — as a former Cameroonian military officer, he’d learned that no amount of planning could prepare one for every aspect of an engagement, that there were always gaps in what was known about an adversary. What mystified him was that the capabilities they’d demonstrated were in such total conflict with everything he’d been told about them. To have gotten incomplete information was something he could accept. But it made no sense that sources he had always found reliable could so wholly and startlingly misinform him, not unless…

The headman’s features stiffened, his fierce brown eyes riveted on the enkindled tree where he had placed his sniper. The helicopter would soon appear over its broken, blazing remnants, and when it did, his opposition would be able to scour the ground for him and his men.

There was no time left for further supposition, not now. He would find another opportunity to throw himself open to them.

Trembling with anger, he raised his handset to his lips and called a retreat.

As the copter came flying in overhead, Nimec pressed the TRANSMIT button of his Rover’s ground-to-air.

“Pilot, this is CSO, you read me?” he said.

“Roger, sir.”

“We’ve got a mess here. Fatalities. Several wounded, three seriously. They need immediate medevac. There’s a burn vic, don’t know how long he’ll last without treatment.”

“Goddamn. The pack of wolves that did this is on the move, I see them heading toward some off-road vehicles—”

“Let ’em go.” His eyes on the dash display, Nimec was watching his microwave video feed from the chopper’s aerial surveillance pods. “We can’t chase them and get these people out at the same time.”

“Yes, sir. Hang on, we’re coming down. Over.”

Nimec cut the radio, exhausted, holding a cotton pad from a first-aid kit to his forehead. It was soaked red.

“Man,” DeMarco said beside him. “I feel like I’ve been clubbed by a giant.”

Nimec snorted. He reclined against his backrest in silence.

They sat waiting for the helicopter to land. Stretched out behind them in some cargo space cleared by their Rover’s packed-together occupants, Loren released a long, low, wavering moan.

It made the fine hairs on Nimec’s neck and arms bristle.

“A few minutes ago”—DeMarco began, then paused to marvel at those very words out of his mouth. He found it hard to believe so little time had elapsed since the windstorm of flame had come raging over the convoy from the mass of trees in front—“When you were out in the thicket, something made me remember Brazil. I couldn’t even tell you what right now, my thoughts were racing along so fast. Still are. But the raid there, those terrorists hitting us by surprise, almost wrecking the Matto Grosso compound… it feels similar to this in a way.”

Nimec looked at him. “How do you mean?”

“Damn thing is, I’m not sure.” DeMarco made a groping-at-the-air gesture with his hands. “It’s been ages since I read the Shadow Watch case files. But even before we tied it to that maniac Rollie Thibodeau calls the Wildcat, what stuck out at me about the Brazil raid was that it was done by real pros. A HAHO jump insertion, prototype FAMAS assault guns that are just being put into mass production this year… those guys were seasoned fighters, must’ve had serious underwriting.” He shrugged. “Another thing I could never get was what they were trying to accomplish. Always seemed kind of fuzzy to me, like nothing was what it seemed on its face. And the shit that came down on us now makes me wonder on the same accounts. Motive, tactics, equipment.”

Nimec added a fresh first-aid pad.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The connection’s not there for me.”

“Maybe it’s because there isn’t one,” DeMarco said. “But who were these guys? Does it seem to you we were up against two-bit bushwhackers?”

Nimec considered that.

“I wouldn’t lump together every robber gang in the neighborhood as two-bit,” he said. “Some are made up of breakaway soldiers. Men who’ve had combat training from foreign advisers. Russians, Brits, Israelis, our own Green Berets to name a few. The bunch that hit us could fit into that category.”

DeMarco shook his head.

“It still doesn’t explain their ordnance,” he said, and jerked his chin toward the windshield. Up ahead of them, SGF2 mist and dark gray smoke from the burning lead Rover and trees had commingled to blur out the sky and forest, its acrid stench seeping into their ventilation system. “Whatever they used for a showstopper was heavy duty.”

Nimec bounced DeMarco’s main points against his logic. He really didn’t know what could or couldn’t be inferred from them. It was hard for him even to think straight. A man was moaning in pain, maybe dying, less than five feet in back of him. Hard to think. At first blush, though, he didn’t see that the incidents could be compared. The strike in Brazil had been massive, well organized, perpetrated by an enemy that had carefully assessed and exploited UpLink’s vulnerabilities. But their ambushers had gone after a small supply convoy and badly underestimated its defensive strengths. Given the hotel room buggings, and the extent of the surveillance on UpLink personnel in Port-Gentil, Nimec understood there was a very credible possibility that the men who’d struck at them here had backers with a wider agenda and substantial resources — which was a handful of needles and broken glass in itself. To go beyond that at this stage, though…

Nimec wasn’t ruling anything out, not until he’d had a chance to reflect with a clear head. But he’d been with Roger Gordian’s organization long enough to realize it had many disparate enemies, and wasn’t about to make any broad jumps drawing conspiracy theories.

He expelled a breath, looked out his window. The Skyhawk was finally wheels down in the grass.

“We’ll pick up on this later,” he said over the loud whack of its blades. “The guys on that chopper are going to need an assist getting our wounded aboard.”

His arms crossed over his chest, Vince Scull sat in front of his idling laptop computer at a cramped corner table in a cyber café called Zèbre Passage, which translated in English as Zebra Crossing, and seemed about as absurd a name to him as Scintillements. More ridiculous, actually. Maybe it was a sign he was getting old, but Scull often looked fondly back on the days when the name of a business would convey most of the information prospective customers needed to know about the services it offered, the products it sold, and whatnot. Macy’s Department Store. Woolworth’s Five and Dime. Ebinger’s Bakery. Howard Johnson Restaurant and Ice Cream Parlor. A customer walked off the street into any of those places, he not only had a very definite idea what he could expect to find, but knew the family name, and in some instances the first and middle initials, or even the full name, of its founder. Talk about a lack of consumer awareness, how were you supposed to draw people through your storefront door when the sign above it told nothing about what you were peddling?

Scull made a grumbling sound and shifted in his chair. What the name Zebra Crossing had to do with a joint that served rollups, scones, coffee, and bottled mineral water while providing Internet access to its customers, he didn’t know. He also couldn’t fathom how the twentyish men and women typing furiously at their keyboards — all of whom were white, and probably the dilettante kids of expat businessmen, and most of whom had come in wearing backpacks with padded sleeves designed for their computers — were able to concentrate on their work amid the flurry of other customers placing orders at the counter, carrying food trays past their tables, settling into chairs, or getting books, file folders, and other odds and ends out of their packs. They seemed so damned self-conscious about looking earnest and definite as they clacked away at their machines, some with headphones over their ears. What were they writing? Class papers? Travel articles? Online music reviews? Books, God forbid?

Scull didn’t understand how they could get anything accomplished. His job assignments took him everywhere on the planet and involved gathering information in every kind of physical environment, but when he actually sat down to prepare a coherent written evaluation, he needed a quiet office, or at the very least a room where he had four walls around him and some uninterrupted solitude… none of which was available in good ol’ Gabon courtesy of the droops, which was another reason for him to love the country, he guessed. Somebody could stick a gun to his head, tell him to put together a grocery list or else, and Scull doubted he’d be able to do it with all the fucking distractions in here.

But maybe his advanced age of fifty-three was why he didn’t compute, excuse the pun. Or maybe, just maybe, people thinking they could do honest, roll-up-your-sleeves, get-your-underpants-sweaty work in public places where they could also showcase their lightning-fast notebooks was one major reason so much of everything sucked rotten pigeon eggs nowadays.

Scull produced another low grunt of dissatisfaction and tapped a key on his laptop to wake it from its SLEEP mode, figuring he’d check his e-mail queue to see whether Sherm had come through with any dope on Nautel yet. After five hours of waiting impatiently in this crowded community nowhere, he’d about reached his limit…

He abruptly sat up straight. Miracle of miracles. Boldface on his inbox screen was a message from user name F. Sherman with the subject “Hope You Brought along Galoshes and Nose Plugs.” Cute, but what was it supposed to mean? Scull hardly cared. He was too busy noticing the little paper clip icon that indicated the message had arrived with a file attachment.

He highlighted the message and clicked it open. There were, in fact, several attached files. Large ones.

The e-mail’s body text read:

Scull opened the first file and browsed through it. Within minutes, he was ready to start holding his nose.