The Emperor's Revenge

ONE

Towering dunes and rocky crags stretched as far as the eye could see, baked by the harsh midday sun. The IL-76 cargo plane, now three hours out of Cairo, had been flying a zigzag pattern across the Sahara according to instructions.

Tiny Gunderson turned in his pilot’s seat and blinked in confusion when he saw Juan Cabrillo standing behind him.

Normally, Juan sported short blond hair, blue eyes, and a tan complexion like the native Californian he was, but today he was disguised as an Arab native, with dyed black hair, brown contact lenses, skin darkened even further by makeup, and a prosthetic nose to alter his appearance.

“For a moment, I thought you were one of our other passengers,” Tiny said.

“They’re busy down in the hold, checking their gear,” Juan replied. “They look a little nervous. A couple of them have never skydived before.”

“Well, they picked a doozy of a place to learn. I haven’t seen so much as a road for the last thirty minutes.”

“They want to make sure no one beats us to their target.”

“Fat chance of that happening. We’re nearing the latest checkpoint. I’m going to need the next set of coordinates.”

“Then my timing is impeccable,” Juan said. “Our client just gave me this. He said it’s the drop location.” He handed Tiny a piece of paper with a set of GPS coordinates. Tiny plugged the new numbers into the Russian jet’s autopilot computer, and the four-engine plane began banking in that direction.

“We should be on-site in ten minutes,” he said. “I’ll open the rear door two minutes before the drop.”

Juan nodded. “What’s our fuel status?”

“No problem. I’ve got eight more hours of flight time.”

“Remember,” Juan said, “they won’t leave the landing zone until you’re out of sight, so hightail it as soon as we’re away.”

“Like I’ve been bit in the butt, Chairman. Have a good fall.”

Juan smiled. “Keep in touch.” He left the cockpit and took the stairs down into the cavernous hold.

Four pallets occupied the center of the hold. Three dune buggies were packed nose to tail, their parachutes piled on top and their rip cords attached to the plane so they would be triggered automatically when dropped.

The dune buggies were Scorpion desert patrol vehicles sold as surplus by the Saudi Army, with their armaments removed, of course. It had taken a day to refit them with the .50 caliber M2 Browning machine gun and 40mm Mk 19 grenade launcher that were usually mounted on the chassis. Now they could take on anything, short of a tank, and, according to their clients, the weapons weren’t going to be just for show.

The fourth pallet, the same size as the dune buggies, was still under wraps at the front of the hold. It wouldn’t be joining them on this drop.

Juan strode toward the six men gathered near the rear door. All of them were elite soldiers of the Saharan Islamic Caliphate, a terrorist organization hoping to build a fundamentalist state that would span the entire width of North Africa.

The leader of this particular group, a brutal Egyptian named Mahmoud Nazari, who was suspected of several attacks on tourist groups, had made it known that he was trying to gain access to weapons of mass destruction that would aid in his goal to become the ruling caliph. The NSA had intercepted a conversation between him and his benefactors in Saudi Arabia that he needed funds to make an incursion into Algeria, where he could obtain such weapons.

Although the type of weapon was never specified in the call, the threat was taken seriously, and the Corporation had been tapped to take on the mission to discover what Nazari was looking for.

Juan stopped in front of the group. Nazari, a thin man with a heavy beard and dead eyes, showed no emotion whatsoever. He said in Arabic, “How long until our jump?”

“Less than ten minutes,” Juan replied with flawless Saudi Arabian inflection. He also spoke Russian and Spanish fluently in various accents, but he’d never been able to master Arabic in any other dialect, so his backstory sold him as a jihadist from Riyadh.

Given the atrocities Nazari was thought to have committed, Juan got a bad taste in his mouth every time he had to talk to the terrorist. When Nazari bragged about slicing off an infidel civilian’s hands during one of his attacks, Juan nearly threw him out of the plane’s door without a parachute, but the mission to find the WMDs was too important to indulge his urge.

“How far do we have to drive once we land?” Juan continued.

“You’ll know when I tell you. Now, complete your preparations.” Juan hadn’t been expecting an answer, but he would have seemed suspicious if he weren’t curious about the mission.

“Yes, sir,” Juan said, forcing himself to say the words with a convincing tone of feigned respect. He pointed at the warning light above their heads. “That will flash red when the rear door opens. Stay behind the yellow line on the floor if you don’t want to get sucked out. The light will change to amber a minute before the jump, then green to signal the jump. The pallets will go first, then us. Understand?”

“We went over this in the preflight briefing,” Nazari said with clear disdain. “We’re not simpletons.” His men, who busily rechecked their harnesses and static lines, didn’t seem bothered by the reminder.

“Of course,” Juan replied. “I didn’t mean to offend. I’ll see you on the ground.”

Juan left them and headed to the front of the cargo deck. The only reason he cared if they made it to the ground intact was so they could lead him to the target. It had been a challenge to get them to trust him to the degree they had, which was why this operation hadn’t been tasked to U.S. Special Forces. As good as they were, infiltration wasn’t their specialty, and the CIA had their own limitations.

Juan had created the Corporation to do work the U.S. government couldn’t engage in directly. Plausible deniability was the rule. His stint as an agent in the CIA had made it clear that there were plenty of those types of operations needing to be carried out through the Corporation. Juan had offered to take on the risks, for which he and those in his employ had been well compensated. Side jobs supplemented their income when work from the CIA was scarce, but Juan never took on a job that he didn’t feel was in the best interests of America.

This mission certainly fit the bill.

It had taken weeks of secret meetings to gain Nazari’s trust enough to be hired for the mission. He required a clandestine insertion into the southern Algerian desert, fifty miles of rough terrain from the nearest settlement or oasis. The dune buggies had only enough fuel to get them from the drop to the target and then back to civilization, which was one of the reasons for the aerial insertion. The other was because they weren’t supposed to be on Algerian soil. The Oregon was already positioned at the port of Algiers to smuggle them out of the country. Tiny Gunderson, the Corporation’s fixed-wing pilot, would return the chartered IL-76 to its owners at the end of the mission. Originally, the operation was to take place three days from now, but Nazari had suddenly shortened the time line for unknown reasons.

Juan found Eddie Seng verifying that the pallet tie-downs for the dune buggies were tight. As lean and sinewy as an Olympic gymnast, Eddie was another veteran of the CIA and the Corporation’s chief of shore operations. Though he was fluent in Mandarin, he didn’t know any Arabic, so he hadn’t mixed with Nazari and his crew. Juan told them that Eddie was a freedom fighter from Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world. Luckily, they hadn’t recognized that Eddie was actually of Chinese descent.

“How are our friends doing?” Eddie asked, and smiled when he saw one of them wrestling with the line that would pull his rip cord. “Some of them look a little green.”

“I just hope they hold it together until they jump,” Juan said, shrugging into his parachute rig. “Tiny will have a fit if they toss their cookies and he has to clean up the mess before he returns the plane. Are we set?”

“Everything checks out. We’re good to go.”

“Where’s Linc?”

“Just took one last trip to the head,” said a basso voice behind Juan. He turned to see Franklin Lincoln, carrying his chute in one hand and two AK-47 assault rifles in the other as if they were toys. The gargantuan African American, with a head as smooth as a cue ball, handed Juan an AK-47, one of his least favorite weapons. He took it reluctantly.

“Don’t blame me, Chairman,” Linc said. As a former Navy SEAL, he would have much rather been carrying a more state-of-the-art weapon, too. “Remember, we’re trying to fit in.” Linc’s cover was that he was a Nigerian who had joined the struggle to fight the Western infidels.

Intel said that it was unlikely that Nazari and his men spoke any English. Juan had told Nazari that he, Eddie, and Linc had only English as a common language, since they were supposed to be from Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Still, Juan kept his voice low when he could, just in case the intel was wrong.

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Juan said. He secured the rifle to his pack.

“Any word yet on what our target is?” Eddie asked.

“Nada. Nazari’s not the sharing type. I’m not even sure his men know.” Juan tapped his watch, and voices suddenly popped into his earpiece. He could hear Nazari as clearly as if he were standing next to the terrorist. So far, the minuscule microphone transmitter that Juan had installed in the liner of his harness hadn’t yielded any strong intel.

“But they have done everything we’ve required,” Juan could hear one of the soldiers telling Nazari.

“I don’t care,” Nazari said. “We can’t take that chance. Once they realize what we’ve dug up, they may change their minds about—”

At that moment, the rear door lowered, letting in a blast of air that garbled the sound so much that Juan could only catch a few snippets of the remaining conversation.

Juan, Eddie, and Linc didn’t waste any time finishing the drop prep. Everything was ready when the amber light flashed.

A minute to the drop.

“We’re going to have to keep on our toes once we reach the target and recover whatever it is they’re looking for,” Juan said, his eye on Nazari at the other end of the hold. “I’m pretty sure I just heard that that’s when our client plans to kill us.”

Linc smirked. “Lovely.”

Then the green light blazed, the dune buggy pallets neatly slid out the back one after the other, and Juan led the jump out over the desert waiting a mile below.