OUTCAST Ops: African Firestorm

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Kamal Hassan stared out into the dark beyond the lights of his estate, out to the Atlantic Ocean and whatever secrets it held. The darkness fit his current mood, black and complete.

He turned and walked back to his desk, lit by a single bulb, leaving most of his study in gloom and shadow. He sat in his chair, leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

The loss of Tamrez had hurt Hassan deeply. When he'd heard the news of the massacre at the hotel, he expected a call from Tamrez, telling him what had happened. But the call never came. Instead, one of the men Tamrez had left outside the hotel had called, telling Hassan that there had been an evacuation of the hotel, and that none of the men who had gone in were answering their phones. Hassan had ordered the man to stay put and watch what the police did.

More time had passed, afternoon giving way to evening, when a contact inside SAPS called his handler, who in turn called Hassan with the bad news; twelve bodies in the morgue, all Middle Eastern, and all shot. None of them had wallets or any identification, but it wouldn't take the police long to discover their identity.

And that would lead them back to Hassan.

The loss of a dozen men infuriated Hassan, but until the Americans came out of whatever hole they were hiding in, he had no way to strike back. He had sent word out through his organization, offering five million rand for the Americans' location. But he had little description — four men, two women, one of which was a beautiful African.

He'd sent the lookout to go into the hotel after the police had finished their investigation and get the names the Americans had used to register. Those names were sent to a contact in Customs, with orders to find the passports these people used.

There was a possibility that the Americans had gone to ground, or had fled the city. But Hassan wasn't taking any chances. He ordered his guard force doubled, pulling in men from other operations, and now he had forty men on the estate. Twenty patrolled the grounds right now, while the other twenty were off-duty, guns near at hand. He had given his servants several days off and had ordered the cargo in the storage shed to be moved before dawn. Tomorrow, he would take a "business trip" to Qatar for a few days, and hopefully get an idea of where the police investigation at the hotel was going.

Even so, Hassan couldn't shake the feeling something was wrong.

"Prime to all teams, check in."

Tanner knelt behind a low bush, thirty yards from the stone wall that surrounded Hassan's estate. Lit tiki torches spaced evenly atop the wall gave the place an exotic flair, but they also told Tanner that someone was definitely home. The half-moon was high in the sky, revealing a little of the ocean to his left. To his right, the rocky slope of Table Mountain rose into the darkness. Naomi knelt beside him, her eyes also sweeping the surroundings.

Each of the team members wore Dragonskin armor over black jumpsuits and balaclavas over their faces. Each carried a sound-suppressed HK MP5, their SOCOM pistols, night vision goggles, and two each of fragmentation, smoke, and tear gas grenades. In addition, Naomi and Dante carried a block of C-4, divided into quarters, while Liam had an H&K G3SG/1 sniper rifle.

"Sea Team ready," Liam announced. He and Danielle currently piloted a boat a couple of miles out to sea. In addition to securing the dock, the boat would be the team's getaway vehicle.

"Sky Team ready," Dante reported. He and Stephen were north of the estate, near the wall.

"Fire Team ready," the rich voice of Mandlenkosi intoned. He and a few of his friends lurked atop the cliffs overlooking the estate, ready to kick things off with a distraction.

“Copy.” Tanner glanced at his watch, waited for a few seconds to tick off, then gave the command.

"Fire Team: start the dragon."

Mandlenkosi looked out over the hundreds of rockets that had been stuck into the rocky dirt thirty feet from the cliff edge, out of direct sight of the estate, angled toward the ocean. Scattered among them were other types of fireworks, all designed to make as much bright light and noise as possible. Long fuses ran from each firework and twisted together with other fuses into bundles thick as a man's arm spaced six feet apart. A dirt path running north and south was a natural borderline, leaving all the fireworks on the path's west side, with everything else on the east.

He turned back to the dozen men standing around a lit fire barrel. Each man held a stick with a gas-soaked rag on the end as they looked at Mandlenkosi expectantly.

He grinned at them. They were all his old friends, several he had recruited for Ashcroft, while others had been with him for years, trying to make their country better.

"Light them up."

The torches were stuck into the fire barrel until they caught. Mandlenkosi picked up a spare one and lit it, then picked up a bucket sitting next to the barrel and poured the contents onto the fire. Smoke poured out from the barrel, lost in the darkness.

The men spread out and walked toward the fireworks, torches held low to keep them from being seen down at the Estate. Each man stood in front of a fuse bundle and looked at their leader and friend. "On three," Mandlenkosi said in a normal tone. "One… Two … Three!"

As one, the men dropped the torches onto the bundled fuses, turned on their flashlights, and ran from the fireworks along the path, half going north, the other half south. Despite their age, all of them were still fit, so they were thirty feet away when the first fireworks exploded. They continued running along the path as the cliff exploded with multi-colored flashes of light and loud cracks that sounded like gunshots and other weapons of war.