Havoc

Central African Republic

“So what do you think, Book?” Sergeant Paul Rivers asked out of the corner of his mouth.

Booker Sykes didn’t take the low-light binoculars from his eyes as he surveyed the ruined town of Kivu. “That I’m pretty lucky one of my ancestors wasn’t the fastest runner in his village. I’d hate to have been born in a shit hole like this.”

The two of them had come ahead, leaving Sergeant Bernie Cieplicki to guard their truck a few miles shy of Kivu. Although Caribe Dayce had been the greatest threat to the region, his death had done little to quell the unrest. Small bands of armed teens roamed Kivu and the surrounding villages, drunk off their asses or so stoned they could barely see. And that had made it easy for Sykes and his small team to arm themselves.

On the road up from Rafai they had been stopped at an impromptu checkpoint by four kids looking to shake down anyone foolish enough to be traveling in the strife-ridden area. The checkpoint was at a spot where the trees crowded close to the road, so vehicles couldn’t turn around. They’d forced the Americans out of the truck, and while one of them covered them with his AK-47 the others began to rifle the four-wheel drive Sykes had bought in the capital, Bangui, with cash Mercer had given them for the mission.

Sykes had prepared for this; actually he’d hoped for it, because he wanted weapons for when they got deep into the bush.

The kid watching the Delta Force commandos was probably sixteen or seventeen, with deep-set bloodshot eyes and an insolent mouth. He held his assault rifle with casual indifference. While the three men he was covering were big, it was his experience that bullets trumped size every time. He was more interested in the cartons of cigarettes and other items Sykes had loaded into the truck for just such an ambush. Everything he’d brought was chosen deliberately to make the gunmen want to probe deep into the back of the battered Cherokee.

“Hey, hey,” one of the kids rummaging in the cargo compartment called excitedly. He emerged with a brand-new soccer ball and as Sykes had predicted he bounced it on his knee for a second and gently kicked it toward the kid guarding them.

Sykes watched the teen’s eyes, and the instant they flickered from the captives to the approaching ball, he and his men went into motion. Sykes lunged forward, grabbing the AK by the barrel and thrusting the weapon skyward. Bernie Cieplicki had been folding a tightly rolled magazine. Inside it was a six-inch-long nail that had been ground down so one end was as sharp as a needle. He whipped the magazine forward, sending the nail through the air like a dart. It hit the gunman who’d found the soccer ball in the shoulder, embedding half its length in his flesh. Had Cieplicki felt the situation warranted it, he could have sent the nail through the kid’s eye and into his brain. As it was, the teen cried out, startled by the sudden agony.

Paul Rivers, who at six four was the biggest of the commandos, shot past the wounded African and used all his weight to slam the Jeep’s rear door. The two teens inside hadn’t even begun to react to the attack. The impact of the heavy door, plus Rivers’s weight, broke three of the four legs dangling over the bumper.

With the gun pointed harmlessly in the air, Sykes struck the teen in the jaw with his elbow. His eyes fluttered and he dropped unconscious. Bernie leveled the gunman with the dart in his arm with a roundhouse kick to the side of his head.

The counterattack had taken four seconds.

Before continuing on, Cieplicki, who was the team’s medic, pulled the nail from the African’s shoulder, swabbed the wound with antibacterial ointment, and bandaged the puncture. There wasn’t much he could do for the broken legs except fashion some splints and give the two kids morphine injections to knock them out for a couple of hours. The teen Book had decked wouldn’t need drugs to remain unconscious.

Booker Sykes checked over the weapons with ill-disguised contempt. The assault rifles were serviceable, if dirty. What he hated was the gun itself. Liberal groups back in the States loved to point out how the United States was the biggest arms exporter in the world. And in absolute dollars that was true, but what they failed to mention was that the billions of dollars’ worth of arms were generally aircraft like AWACs and F-16s or warships past their prime, weapon systems that invariably were never used beyond training and coastal interdiction missions.

Meanwhile here was the ubiquitous AK-47. There were more than a hundred million of them scattered around the globe, and nowadays you could buy one in bazaars and souks in most third world countries for as little as fifty bucks. They had considered buying arms in Bangui but knew it would take too long to establish contacts with dealers.

Booker had faced the AK on four continents and believed it had caused more death and more misery than just about any single weapon since cavemen started bashing one another with clubs. Nuclear bombs had killed a hundred and sixty thousand people at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Men with AKs had caused the deaths of ten times that number in Africa alone.

So where were the protesters decrying how Russia and her old satellite states had flooded the world market with AKs with no regard as to who used them? But let the American government try to sell a couple of KC-135 aerial refueling planes to Taiwan and everyone screams warmonger.

It pissed him off.

They left the inept highwaymen loosely bound, and with a couple of cartons of cigarettes and enough food to see them through a few days, and continued on toward Kivu. Dusk was settling as they approached and rather than risk driving into an unknown situation, Booker ordered Cieplicki to stay with the truck while he and Rivers reconnoitered the town.

“About the town, smart-ass,” Rivers said to his captain. In Delta, rank had little meaning.

“Looks quiet enough,” Book rumbled.

The hotel where Cali had stayed was deserted, its Lebanese owner having fled with his family. A couple of youths lounged on the veranda. All the liquor from the bar and the food from the restaurant had long since been stolen, so they simply sat at a table and watched the sluggish river roll by, showing interest only when part of the bank fell into the waters from the constant erosion. A pair of men were working on Cali’s abandoned Land Rover. From what she’d told Book back at Mercer’s house, all it had needed were tires and he was surprised it was still here. He dialed up the binoculars’ resolution and noted the dark patch under the truck’s high chassis. Someone had either drained the oil or more likely put a few rounds into the engine block. He spotted a few families trying to put their lives back together, and an old woman sat at the entrance of her mud hut with a squealing infant in her arms. Book imagined the child’s mother had probably been raped to death.

God, he hated Africa, because the cycle would never be broken.

“So how do you want to play it, Capt’n? Drive right on through now or wait?”

“Mercer said the village we’re looking for is another two hours up the road. I don’t see any cars or trucks down there that look like they can follow us, but I’d rather pass through when it’s oh-dark-thirty so they don’t even know we’re in the area.”

“Roger that.”

Booker had wanted to bypass Kivu altogether but the only road cut right through the town center. He did a comm check of their tactical radios and sent Rivers back to the truck with orders to approach the town at three A. M. He’d make sure nothing changed in the desolate village, then meet them before they entered.

Booker Sykes couldn’t remember how many nights he’d spent watching over villages such as Kivu. Places in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, and a dozen other countries he’d just as soon forget. But somehow knowing that this mission was connected to Philip Mercer made it all the more important.

He didn’t know what to make of Mercer. Without a doubt he was the smartest, shrewdest man Book had ever met. He handled himself well in any kind of fight despite the fact he’d never been in the military. At heart he was a loner but people seemed to gravitate toward him, finding in him a calm strength that few knew existed. And Booker was well aware of the way Cali Stowe looked at him even if Mercer himself was blithely ignorant. He knew Mercer was still grieving over Tisa Nguyen, but the boy was going to miss out on someone pretty special if he wasn’t careful.

Mercer was a close friend of the deputy national security advisor yet hung around blue collar guys like Harry White. He had a ton of money but didn’t possess an ounce of ego or pretension. Booker hadn’t figured out what made Mercer tick, what drove him to get involved when other people ran. He suspected Mercer himself didn’t really know, and that was just as well. Sykes didn’t delve too deeply into why he joined the military and then volunteered for its most dangerous missions, because if he found the truth he probably couldn’t do his job anymore.

Without electricity Kivu shut down as the sun sank lower to the west. The rebels on the hotel veranda grabbed up their weapons and climbed to the room they’d commandeered. The woman with the baby entered her little hut. She lit a lantern but only let it burn long enough to feed the child and tuck it into a makeshift crib. The single street through town and the small square were deserted by nine o’clock.

Yet Booker stayed with his plan, and as insects fought their way past his barrier of DEET repellent and feasted on his blood he sat motionless on a small bluff along the road and watched Kivu sleep.

He called Rivers at a quarter to three to tell him everything was set, and retreated a hundred yards up the road. The instant he heard the Jeep’s engine over the din of insects and nocturnal animals, he radioed Rivers to kill the engine. He loped another hundred yards away from Kivu to where the Jeep Cherokee sat silently.

Wordlessly Booker and Paul Rivers moved to the back of the four-wheeler while Bernie Cieplicki stood at the open driver’s door. Together they began to push the two-ton truck along the dirt road. True to his role as the team prankster, Bernie Cieplicki made Sykes and Rivers provide the bulk of the horsepower while he merely steered.

They passed though Kivu as silently as wraiths and continued down the road for another two hundred yards. Sykes and Rivers were lathered in sweat and blowing like draft horses.

“You guys look a little spent,” Cieplicki quipped. “I guess I shouldn’t have left my foot on the brake.”

“You’re an asshole, Bern,” Paul wheezed.

“That’s what people keep telling me,” Cieplicki replied with a grin cocky enough to make Rivers want to swipe it off his face.

“Let’s mount up,” Sykes ordered.

With the lights off and using night vision goggles, Cieplicki drove them away from Kivu, at a crawl at first, to keep the engine noise down, but within a mile he had them up to forty. The wind whipping through the open windows was hot and stank of the nearby river but they needed the windows down because Book and Paul watched the surrounding jungle with their weapons ready to engage.

It took them two and a half hours to reach the Scilla River where it flowed into the Chinko. Someone had destroyed the makeshift ferryboat Mercer had mentioned, the barrels lay scattered along the riverbank, and there was no sign of its corrugated metal deck.

“From here it’s all on foot,” Sykes said, unlimbering his big frame from the Jeep. “Let’s hide the truck and wait until dawn. I don’t want to go stumbling around the jungle without knowing who’s out there.”

“You mean what,” Bernie said.

“That too.”

In the predawn hour, they made their approach to the village where Mercer had seen the stele. The nocturnal animals had already found their dens for the day and the diurnals had yet to emerge. There was no evidence that anyone was in the area, but they took no chances. They crossed the ancient mine, noting the breach in the levee where Mercer said he and Cali had been sluiced down to the river. Farther on they came to the village. Covered by Cieplicki and Rivers, who stayed at the tree line, Sykes entered the clearing. Nothing remained of the village but the burned husks of the huts, blackened piles of grass and mud that had once been home to the innocent. The air reeked of putrid flesh.

The utter futility and waste of it all sickened him.

He cast around for the stele. Mercer said it was about seven feet tall and impossible to miss, but Sykes didn’t see it. Unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched, and not only by his own men, he methodically crisscrossed the jungle clearing. The grass was littered with hundreds of spent cartridges. He picked up one to sniff it. It still smelled of gunpowder. He passed a pile of loose rocks and was about to ignore it when he stopped and went back. In the tricky dawn light he had to squint to make out the odd writing that remained on the larger pieces.

“Oh, Mercer ain’t gonna be happy ’bout this.”

He jogged back to the tree line where Rivers and Cieplicki waited.

“What’s the word, Boss Man?”

“The stele thing’s all smashed up. Can’t be more than a few pieces the size of a brick.”

“Explosives?” Cieplicki asked.

“No. I’d say they broke it with hammers or rifle butts. Also I’ve got the feeling we aren’t the only people in the area.”

“Could be villagers returning.”

“Not at five o’clock in the morning.” Sykes went quiet, thinking through his options. He had gotten a few hours of sleep on the flight to Africa but that had been thirty-six hours earlier. He was exhausted. His eyelids felt like they had an inner liner of sandpaper. But he’d been trained to ignore such distractions. He came up with his plan and issued his orders. Cieplicki and Rivers took off at a run while he remained in the jungle watching over the clearing. He heard no movement, no coughs or the scrape of cloth over vegetation, but he was certain he wasn’t alone.

Moving as carefully as a stalking leopard he made a wide half circle around the village, careful not to step out on the exposed bluff overlooking the river. He found nothing.

Rivers and Cieplicki were back in eleven minutes, and had Sykes not been so uneasy he would have reproached them for how long it had taken to run the mile to the truck and back. They brought back three military-issue backpacks, heavy nylon bags that could support more than a hundred and fifty pounds. Leaving Cieplicki to cover the woods, Sykes and Rivers took the bags to the ruined stele and carefully started filling them with pieces of the ancient marker. They were careful about weight distribution, for while Bernie could more than handle a load, Sykes and Rivers were much bigger and stronger men.

When they had one filled, Rivers heaved it off the ground.

“What do you think?” Book asked.

“Hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy.”

“Thank God it’s only a mile,” Sykes said and looked up sharply when a bird suddenly launched itself from a tree. He waited a beat but nothing more happened.

They had secured all the larger pieces and were down to fragments the size of acorns half-buried in the ground when Cieplicki opened fire. His single shot was answered by at least eight guns ripping on automatic. Sykes and Rivers dove flat, shoving the bags into a row for cover, their guns resting on the priceless relic.

Cieplicki came out of the woods a moment later, laying down a wall of fire to keep the rebels in the woods. He reached his teammates, leaping over the bags and rolling around so his AK was pointed back at the woods.

The jungle fell silent again.

“This isn’t good.”

The Delta operators only had two spare magazines each; that’s all the kids they’d taken the guns from had carried. It wasn’t nearly enough for a protracted fight with more than a half dozen rebels.

“Discretion and all that,” Sykes said. He fired a quick spray into the woods and slid his pack’s straps over his shoulders, using the power of his legs to deadlift the heavy burden. Cieplicki and Rivers did likewise. As a team, they started running back toward the Jeep at the confluence of the Chinko and Scilla rivers.

The packs were too heavy to slap against their backs as they jogged along the embankment, and before he’d gone a hundred yards Sykes felt the tendons and ligaments in his lower back popping. Then the muscle pulled. It was a merciless knife-edged pain that exploded against the top of his skull, and every step served to deepen the agony. Yet he did not slow. He gritted his teeth against the torment, the thought of dropping the pack never entering his mind.

The gunmen kept to the woods as they pursued the team, taking poorly aimed potshots that forced the team to zigzag as they ran, adding tremendous pressures to knees and spines as they returned fire to keep the rebels at bay.

Grimacing with each footfall, Sykes kept telling himself to ignore the pain, but the agony was beyond belief. Searing waves of pain radiated from his lower back, and when he jinked, the added strain sent a bolt of fire to his brain. He could barely twist to return fire, so he held the AK one-handed and popped off covering shots.

He’d carried an injured man in Afghanistan, a local fighter who’d taken shrapnel to the gut, but it was nothing like this. The deadweight in his pack ground him down, made him question everything he’d ever done in his life to bring him to this torture. He glanced at his men. They knew the pain too. It was etched in their faces and in the sweat that poured from their skins. Even Paul Rivers, a towering ox of a man, was feeling it.

And still they ran on.

They reached the mine, plunged down into the section of blown-away levee without pause, and gutted their way up the other side, legs moving like pistons. Sykes faltered near the top and felt Bernie ram his shoulder into the pack to see him up those last couple of feet.

Unbelievably they were outpacing the rebels thrashing their way through the thick jungle. One of the rebels realized their quarry was getting away and dashed out from the bush. As rear guard it was Rivers’s job to cover their backs. Every few moments he’d look over his shoulder. He saw the skinny African leap out of the jungle and start sprinting. Without breaking his pace, Rivers fired a quick burst. The rebel went down as if he’d been jerked by a string.

“Last one…,” Cieplicki panted, pausing to swallow the pre-vomit saliva that flooded his mouth. “Last one to the Jeep is a rotten egg.”

He retched and a trickle of bile dribbled down his chin onto his khaki bush shirt.

More of the rebels emerged from the jungle behind them, a phalanx of them coming on hard.

“Cap’t,” Rivers called out.

Unable to stop running because they knew they’d never start again, the three men slowed enough so they could lay down a blistering wall of autofire. The range was pretty extreme for firing from the hip, but one rebel spun to the ground when his shoulder was shattered by one of the 7.62-millimeter bullets and the others dove for cover.

The last part of the run was down a slight grade and the men let gravity work for them, their boots slapping the hard African ground with each rubbery step. Sykes had tears coursing down his cheeks as he ran those last couple hundred yards. It was the first time he’d cried since his grandmother died when he was twelve.

The Jeep was well hidden off the main road. Rivers didn’t bother pulling away the branches they’d used to camouflage the vehicle. He popped the rear door and turned to lower the backpack into the cargo hold. The shoulders of his T-shirt were sodden with blood from where the straps had chafed his skin.

Despite the agony, or maybe because of it, Sykes let Cieplicki unload his pack next. Rivers was already moving to the driver’s door. Cieplicki dumped his pack and just shoved Booker into the back of the four-wheel drive. He climbed in after his team leader and slammed the door.

As soon as everyone was in, Rivers gunned the Jeep’s engine, reversing out of the jungle just as three of the rebels reached the mud flats around the convergence of the swift Scilla and sluggish Chinko. They opened fire as soon as they saw the Cherokee emerge from the jungle. The rear window exploded, raining gem-sized chips of glass on Cieplicki and Sykes. Cieplicki was working on a large bundle in the cargo area, opening it flat and maneuvering the three packs onto its rubbery surface, while Sykes returned fire though the shattered window.

A bullet found a rear tire, blowing it flat. Rivers fought the steering wheel, not daring to slow but knowing that the tire would slough off the rim if he didn’t. “Talk to me back there.”

“I need a minute,” Bernie replied without pausing from his work.

“Shit!” Three more gunmen raced out of the jungle in front of the Jeep just as they started back down the road to Kivu. “You don’t have a minute.”

More automatic gunfire ravaged the Jeep, punching holes through the windshield, blowing off the passenger-side mirror, and puncturing the radiator, so steam billowed up from under the hood.

“We gotta do it now,” Rivers shouted. The steering wheel shook so hard he felt like he was holding an electric fence.

“Don’t wait for me!” Bernie cried.

“I’m not. Hold on!”

He cranked the wheel to the left, aiming for the broad river cutting though the jungle. The banks were about five feet above the level of the water, so he pressed the accelerator to the floor. The tired engine responded as if knowing it was going out in a blaze of glory.

The Jeep hit the bank, reared up, and shot over the water. It hit like a charging hippopotamus, a frothing swell of water surging over the windshield and a bow wave curving out to crash against the far bank. The SUV was caught in the slow current almost immediately, pirouetting in unseen eddies so it soon faced backward. It also started sinking.

“How’s it coming back there?” Paul asked as the water quickly filled the foot well.

“You could help by bailing,” Bernie said as he struggled to readjust the packs that had lurched forward when the Jeep slapped the water. Sykes helped him as best he could, but his back had so stiffened, now that he’d stopped running, that he could barely move.

Paul Rivers climbed over his seat and knelt on the rear bench, helping Cieplicki with the packs. The water was only an inch or so below the blown-out rear window. Once it found that inlet, the Jeep would sink like a stone.

“Any piranhas in these waters?” Bernie asked without looking up.

“That’s South America, dipshit. But they got crocodiles here the size of speedboats.”

A wave washed over the rear sill and in seconds the cargo space was flooded. The men braced themselves as Bernie lunged to open the rear door. Then the Jeep slid below the surface, leaving just a small ripple on the water.

The rebels on shore watched it vanish, and after a minute they began to cheer when none of the men surfaced. They’d been denied any spoils but were just as satisfied with the kill.

Thirty yards from where the Jeep disappeared, the water heaved upward unexpectedly and a huge set of jaws emerged from the river, a gaping red maw surrounded by daggerlike white teeth. The rebels pointed and shrank back as the rest of the flat, oval monster erupted from the depths. Then it seemed to spit out bodies. Three heads emerged next to the creature. First one, then another jumped onto the animal’s back. One of the men helped the third one mount the beast while the first man did something near its broad rump.

“Hurry,” Bernie said as he helped drag Sykes out of the water.

The three-man inflatable boat had been Mercer’s idea. He’d reasoned that since they were going to be along a river it might not be a bad idea if the roads were impassable. Sykes had bought it at an outfitters in Virginia, liking the model with the shark’s mouth painted on the bow, and paid extra to have it flown to Africa with them. They’d shoved it out the rear of the Jeep moments after it began to plummet to the bottom of the river. Cieplicki had waited as long as he dared to pull the lanyard that filled the rubber raft’s hull with compressed air, something they’d neglected to tell the airline about.

As Sykes rolled over the soft rail Paul Rivers wrestled with the five-horse outboard motor. He didn’t bother mounting it to the transom. As soon as he pulled the starter, he greased the throttle and held the whirling prop underwater. The overloaded inflatable didn’t exactly roar down the river but they picked up speed quick enough. The rebels on shore merely watched them vanish from view, not sure exactly what they saw.

“All together now,” Bernie called out merrily. “Row, row, row your boat…”

Despite the pain, Booker couldn’t help but laugh at Cieplicki’s antics.