The Prince of Risk

45

Team Two landed at Waterloo International Airport on the outskirts of the twin cities of Kitchener-Waterloo, 100 miles east of Toronto, at 8:05 a.m. local time. Kitchener-Waterloo, or KW, as it was more commonly called, was known as a beacon of the Canadian high-tech industry. The cities boasted two universities renowned for their electrical engineering and information technology programs and were home to several multinational corporations, including a world leader in the development and manufacture of smartphones and a smaller but highly respected developer of microchips.

The seven men and women who deplaned walked solemnly across the tarmac and into the customs and immigrations hall. No other planes were due in until noon, and a single officer of the Royal Canadian Immigration Services manned the arrivals booth. The officer smiled and welcomed the visiting Portuguese executives to his country. He assumed they had come to visit their Canadian colleagues at one software enterprise or another. None of the arrivals said anything more than “Good morning” or “Hello.” If they appeared too tan and too fit for men and women who made their living banging out software code for hours on end and subsisting on a diet of Red Bull and Skittles, the official did not mention a word. Nor did he remark upon the absence of baggage. It was hardly strange for professionals in the IT industry to make day trips to company headquarters. Besides, he was preoccupied with another matter: a glitch in the airport security surveillance systems.

Ten minutes before the plane landed, the airport’s entire video grid had gone dead. Sixteen cameras providing real-time views of every square foot of the 20-acre airport complex went black. Despite ongoing feverish efforts, the airport’s technicians could not find the cause. It was as if, one of them said, “someone had unplugged the entire system.” Nothing they tried made a whit of difference.

The team boarded a van parked at the curb. They drove twenty minutes through lush countryside, past cows grazing in the sun and farmers rolling hay. Inside the van, a stillness settled on the team. All present knew that the run in was as important as the operation itself. They were on foreign soil. At any moment something could go awry, and their every sense was attuned to the possibility. When the van slowed suddenly, all heads looked to the fore. But it was only an Amish man driving his horse and buggy down the center of the road.

They had numbered thirty when they had gathered in Namibia one month earlier. The continent of Africa was in as much a state of turmoil as ever in its tumultuous history. Machinations of every variety ran high from Morocco to Mozambique, from Togo to Tanzania, and everywhere in between. The source of tensions was not land but what lay under it. If the late eighteenth century had witnessed the last great land grab, the early twenty-first was seeing the great minerals derby. Countries around the globe were scrambling to lock up rights to oil fields, mineral deposits, and precious metals. First and foremost among them was China. Private contractors crowded flights to every major capital. Some were miners, others engineers, and others colonialism’s old favorite, mercenaries.

The training site was a 20,000-acre tract of land five hours north of Windhoek. Selection began upon arrival. All thirty men and women underwent an in-depth physical followed by a battery of psychological tests. The final stage was a grueling series of fitness tests culminating in a ten-hour overland march covering 40 miles while carrying an 80-pound pack.

Twenty-four people passed. All were assigned aliases and given accompanying documents. True identities were not to be revealed, on pain of dismissal. The rule went out the window after a week. The rigorous daily training quickly built camaraderie. As the course progressed from timed 10-mile runs, hour-long calisthenics routines, and evolutions on an obstacle course to more sophisticated team-building exercises, the recruits abandoned aliases for real names. There was a good possibility a few would die on the mission. Most preferred to hear their true Christian name before going to their Maker.

They were a diverse lot.

There was Sandy Beaufoy, the former South African commando nicknamed Skinner. There was Berndt from Stockholm, who’d done NATO duty in Afghanistan and had been asked to leave the service when he continued to request repeat tours. There was Peter from Kiev, who’d made a name for himself as a sniper in Grozny. His mates in the Red Army had christened him “the Widow-maker,” and at the shooting range he proved that his talents hadn’t diminished one iota. There was Rachel, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force who had grown a bit too angry with the Palestinians. And Brigitta, a former Berlin policewoman who enjoyed knocking heads too much for her pacifistic superiors. There was Miguel from Colombia, and Jacques from France, and Billy, Bobby, and Ian from England. All were of a type. Aggressive, disciplined, organized, sociopathic, and to a large degree fearless. And all possessed a chip on their shoulder the size of Ayers Rock, which made it impossible for them to lead a quiet, ordered, rule-abiding life.

For the job, each would earn a fee of $1 million, $200,000 having been paid upon completion of the selection course and the remaining $800,000 due upon completion of the operation.

And, of course, surviving.

Their destination that morning in Kitchener-Waterloo was the headquarters of Silicon Solutions. Silicon Solutions was not as large a company as Intel or National Semi or Advanced Micro Devices. The company occupied a specialized niche in the telecommunications industry. It was its chip that was used in three-quarters of the world’s cellular phones.

The van drove to an enclosed hangar at the rear of the factory grounds. Here the members alighted and strolled up and down the poured concrete floor. Those who so chose smoked cigarettes. Several performed calisthenics to relieve tension and to burn off the excess energy that builds before a hazardous operation. Most, however, simply paced back and forth and made small talk.

After an hour the hangar doors opened and a truck entered. It was not an eighteen-wheeler but a simple delivery truck painted with Silicon Solutions’ bright, hopeful logo. The driver lifted the rear door. The cargo compartment was filled floor to ceiling with boxes of finished microchips. One row, however, was not filled, leaving a path for the men and women to enter. One by one, they climbed into the truck and filed to the front of the cargo area, where a bench had been installed for their comfort. Once inside, they rearranged the boxes so that the compartment appeared full and their presence was suitably camouflaged.

At eleven o’clock the truck pulled out of the hangar and left company grounds. It required two hours’ driving to reach the border crossing in Buffalo, where the truck was waved through after a cursory check of its manifest. The driver had been making the run for fifteen years and knew the inspector personally. They traded comments about last night’s baseball game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Yankees. To the inspector’s chagrin, the Yankees had won on a ninth-inning home run blast by A-Rod. The inspector tore off his copy of the manifest without casting so much as a look and handed the remaining sheets back to the driver. The exchange was over, start to finish, in forty-five seconds.

Forty-five seconds after that, the Silicon Solutions truck crossed the border into the Empire State.

Team Two was on American soil.