Blue Warrior (5 page)

“What game?” Johnny slipped his gun hand toward his back.

Guo tossed the transmitter at Johnny.

Instinctively, Johnny caught it, worried about crashing the drone overhead. A steel fist punched his chest, knocking the wind out of him. He dropped the transmitter into the grass. Looked down.

Saw the carbon blade wedged in his chest up to the hilt.

Johnny grabbed the blade as he crumbled to his knees, gasping for air. His darkening eyes saw the smiling Chinese still crouched in a throwing stance, throwing arm extended, fingers pointing at him like an accusation. A swarm of Africans burst out of the trees behind Guo, flashing long blades.

Sandra called his name, but her muffled screams seemed far away.

6

Lake Massingir
Mozambique

1 May

P
earce tossed the last empty bottle of Preta by the neck like a potato masher grenade. It whistled through the air until it finally splashed into the water. It joined a half-dozen other empty bottles bobbing around the lake like forlorn sailors lost on a dismal sea.

Pearce sighed. The wind wasn’t letting up, the fish still weren’t biting, and now he was out of beer.

A truly shitty day.

His ears perked up at the sound of distant thunder, mechanical and regular. Chopper blades hammered low on the eastern, treeless horizon.

Pearce watched the diving speck racing toward him, barely ten feet above the deck, about a mile out. Within moments the helicopter took shape; a Bell JetRanger, if memory served. Nose down, full throttle, the single rotor kicked up a pair of misty wingtip vortices off of the lake surface that melted away in the gusting wind.

Thirty seconds later, the helicopter flared, rotated ninety degrees, and hovered a hundred feet away from Pearce. The rotor’s downwash battered Pearce even from this distance, and he fought to hold on to his boonie hat. Bright yellow letters on the black and white zebra-striped fuselage shouted
Air Safari!
as the passenger door slid open. The pilot
was clearly fighting the crosswinds on the lake as the bird struggled to hold position.

The man in the passenger seat wore a light blue linen suit without a tie. He waved a cell phone in the air, then tapped on the screen. Seconds later, Pearce’s cell phone signaled a text message: “Pearce?”

Pearce glanced back at the helicopter and nodded heavily. His phone chimed again.

“DIGNAM, US EMBASSY.”

Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park
Mozambique

The
Air Safari!
copter cycled down as Pearce and Dignam hunched beneath the blades, racing toward the burned-up Land Rover. Dignam briefed Pearce on what little he knew on the flight over. The CIA station chief, Jack Hawkins, had remained on scene, afraid to leave before Pearce arrived. Six Mozambique park rangers in floppy hats and faded green fatigues stood in a loose perimeter scanning the horizon, clearly skittish, rifles high.

So much blood.

Hawkins worried that if he left the scene, the rangers might have bolted, too. Whoever had done this could still be around, and it was only an hour until sunset. But the rangers’ dignity, such as it was in their disheveled uniforms and battered assault rifles, wouldn’t allow them to leave if the American had the balls to stand fast. Especially an African-American like him.

Pearce marched up to Hawkins.

“Troy. I’m so sorry.” Hawkins shouted above the helicopter turbine still winding down. He extended his hand.

Pearce stared at Hawkins’s hand for a moment, trying to clear away his rage, then reluctantly took it. Hawkins wasn’t to blame, that was for damn certain. Pearce leaned in close so he didn’t have to shout. “Thanks for holding down the fort, Jack.” Hawkins nodded. Pearce and Hawkins
briefly met years before in D.C. When Pearce and Johnny had checked into the embassy a few days before, Hawkins was there to brief them over rum and Cokes.

“Dignam gave you all of the particulars. There’s not much more to add, but I wanted you to be able to get a look-see before this place got picked clean by the locals.” Hawkins defined “locals” by nodding at the park rangers nervously fingering their rifles.

“Show me what you’ve found,” Pearce said.

Dignam jogged back to the chopper while Hawkins walked Pearce to the back of the Land Rover. The windows were busted out from the intense heat that had melted away all of the plastics, tires, and paint. “Bodies?” Pearce asked.

“Not here.”

Pearce forced open the back door of the utility wagon, the spare tire melted off of the rim. The hinges creaked with stiff resistance as if rusted shut. Clearly, everything inside was destroyed.

“Gear’s missing,” Pearce said.

“Burned up?”

“No. The bays are empty.” Pearce pulled out his smartphone, pulled up a locator app. No GPS signal from the Silent Falcon. “Shit.”

“You lose any classified stuff?”

“Not exactly. But it’s not the kind of equipment you want to hand over to your worst enemies, either.”

Pearce glanced back over at the park rangers. “What do you think?” Park rangers all over Africa had a mixed reputation, especially the armed ones.

“No. Bishop and I were here first, before those boys showed up. He’s an ex-pat and a drinking buddy. He was flying the park when he saw the bodies and the busted-up Rover. Figured they might be Americans or Europeans, called it in to me, then flew me out here. I recognized Johnny from our meet and greet the other day. Thought I’d better find you.”

“Where is he?”

Hawkins knew Troy’s record. A real tough customer. Figured Pearce could handle seeing his friend.

Doubted he’d seen worse, though.

“Follow me.”

They trudged over to the stand of acacia trees. The park rangers spread out a little further to give Pearce and Hawkins privacy. With the helicopter rotor finally shut down, the air filled up again with the sickly stench of death.

Johnny was just inside the tree line, lying in the dirt in a crumpled heap, like a bag of bloody laundry that had fallen off the back of a speeding truck.

“Jesus.”

Pearce kneeled down. Johnny’s jaw had been sheered away by some kind of jagged blade. The rest of Johnny looked worse. He’d been hacked viciously by dozens of blows. Machetes, judging by the width of the cuts. A chunk of scalp was missing. So was the left cheek, now covered in clotted, black blood. They even cut off his nose all the way down to the bone, leaving a gaping hole. The cut was too neat, though. That was done with a sharper, smaller blade. A message? Heavy black flies buzzed around Johnny’s face, darting in and out of the gaping sinus cavity. Pearce batted them away.

“Fucking savages,” Hawkins said. He wasn’t thinking about race, obviously. But if the ambassador had heard him say that, she would’ve written him up on the spot.

The underside of Johnny’s broken forearms were shredded with blade cuts, too. “He tried to put up a fight,” Pearce said. “That must have freaked them out. Most people drop at the first hit.”

“So they frenzied.”

“Maybe.” Pearce knelt closer. Saw something. Unbuttoned Johnny’s shirt. “Look at that wound in his chest.”

“What about it?”

“Knife wound.”

“I don’t understand.”

“One knife wound, the rest machete strikes.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” Pearce stood. “Where’s the girl?”

“Not far. She have a name?”

“Gallez. Sandra. World Wildlife Alliance. A Belgian national.”

“I’ll have Dignam call that in to the their embassy. That’s the same Alliance project you told me about, right? It’s why you guys were here?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing else? I mean, off the books?”

“No. Straight up.”

“I’ve heard . . . rumors.” Hawkins was sympathetic, but he had a job to do, too.

Pearce glared at him. “I’m giving you the straight dope.”

“Why no security? This is Indian country out here.”

“Johnny was the security. He was a good gunfighter.”

So are you, Hawkins wanted to say but didn’t. “And you went fishing?”

“Johnny wanted to make his play on the girl. Didn’t need a third wheel to cramp his style. You know how it is.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just surprised anyone got the drop on him. This is all close in. No bullet casings? Nine mil?” Pearce was thinking about Johnny’s Glock.

“Not around here.”

“The girl?”

Hawkins pointed up ahead. “Over there.” He led Pearce twenty feet farther in and pointed to a female form splayed under a camouflaged rain poncho borrowed from one of the park rangers. Pearce pulled back the poncho. She was stripped naked except for the pink sock still on her left foot. She must’ve fought, too. Her fair skin was tattooed with welts, scratches, bite marks. Her broken jaw was purpled and swollen. The perineum was a red ruin, the blood turning to a sticky black in the heat.

“Extensive bruising around her neck. No bullet wounds. I’m no CSI, but I’d say they’d strangled her to death,” Hawkins said. “If she was lucky.”

Pearce knelt down beside her. Closed the lifeless green eyes still staring into the faces that had killed her.

“She was a smart girl. Johnny was sweet on her.”

Dignam approached cautiously with a couple of neatly folded body bags.

“You need to see anything else?” Hawkins asked Pearce.

Pearce shook his head.

Hawkins nodded at Dignam, who signaled a couple of park rangers for help.

“What’s that god-awful smell?” Pearce asked. But he knew.

“You haven’t seen the worst of it,” Hawkins said. “At least in terms of pure savagery.”

Hawkins led the way past the outer ring of trees and into a tree-canopied clearing. The air roared with thousands of buzzing flies.

Pearce stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh my God.”

A dozen adult rhinos lay on the ground, all dead. Two calves, too. All of them had had their horns hacked off, leaving gaping wounds of exposed bone and broken flesh. Each lay in a puddle of its own blood.

“Poachers aren’t exactly surgeons, are they?” Hawkins pointed at the massive spill of intestines in the grass around one of the big females. “Some of these weren’t even dead when they butchered them.”

Pearce spat in the grass. “All of this because some old Asian dirt bags can’t get a hard-on.”

“Your friends must have stumbled upon the slaughter in progress. The butchers didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind.”

A park ranger screamed. Pearce and Hawkins whipped around as a rhino crashed out of the tree line, eyes crazed, bellowing. Blood soaked its snout, a gaping hole where the horn used to be. It loped toward the ranger, three thousand pounds of deadweight lunging on three wobbly legs, the fourth leg shot to hell.

A yellow tag pinned to its ear.

The ranger tossed his battered rifle and bolted away, shouting for help in his tribal tongue as the other rangers open fire. Dozens of steel-jacketed 7.62mm slugs slapped into the thick gray hide. Hawkins hit the dirt at the first shot, but Pearce stood firm, mesmerized. The animal’s front legs gave out first and its heavy, ruined head hit the dirt with
a grunt, followed by the rest of the shredded torso. The rhino corpse kneeled there for a second before it crashed over on its side. The rangers finally stopped firing. The gunfire echoed into the distance, then finally faded away. The air still buzzed with flies.

Hawkins stood and dusted himself off.

“Congratulations,” Hawkins said. “You just witnessed the killing of the last rhino in Limpopo Park. Hell, in the whole damn country.”

Pearce turned around and watched Dignam and the other park rangers gently lift the body bags.

“I should’ve been here,” Pearce said. He glanced at Hawkins.

Hawkins’s pitying eyes agreed.

Pearce snatched off his hat and crushed it in his hand as he trudged behind the corpse of his friend back to the helicopter, its turbine slowly spinning up.

7

Zhao private residence
Bamako, Mali

3 May

T
o Zhao’s dismay, much of the new construction in the capital city was in the current pseudo-modernist style now in vogue throughout the Middle East. Zhao found the sharply angled cement and reflective glass structures to be distinctly childish and unsophisticated, if not pathetic. But this was the trend all over the developing world, including the new Sino-Sahara Oil Corporation building rising up on the bank of the Niger River.

Zhao witnessed the rise of such monstrosities in the pleasure capitals of Dubai and Doha. He’d even stood on the heli-deck of the soaring Burj Khalifa, soon to be the not-tallest building in the world thanks to the towering ambition of his own proud nation. Pounded by ninety-kilometer-per-hour winds and clutching his safety helmet, Zhao had struggled even more with the blustering of the emir’s nephew, who proclaimed with wild gesticulations the Burj as proof of a new Arab renaissance. Zhao bit his tongue to keep from laughing in the young fool’s face. Didn’t he realize the soaring Burj was designed by Americans and constructed by Koreans using cheap imported Indian labor? The only thing “Arab” about the building was its location. Even the money that paid for it was Western, technically, from oil discovered, exploited, refined, and shipped by the Western powers themselves.

So when Zhao was given the choice, he located his personal residence in Bamako in one of the city’s old
quartiers
, in a refurbished French colonial compound. The pink and white nineteenth-century Beaux Arts building and its furnishings were perfectly anachronistic and, like him, sophisticated, refined, and decadent. As the vice president of Sino-Sahara Oil Corporation, he was expected to entertain prominent officials, none more important than the minister of internal security, General Abdel Tolo, second only to the Chinese-installed president himself. Tonight’s debauch was in General Tolo’s honor.

The heads of the ministries of mines, natural resources, energy, and trade were also in attendance, along with a wide selection of the finest Thai and Ukrainian whores that Zhao kept under contract. For appearances’ sake, Zhao invited the Chinese ambassador to the evening’s event, but dismissed him immediately after dinner. The prudish and inefficient party bureaucrat frowned on Zhao’s famously lavish sex-and-drugs style of diplomacy and, no doubt, would have reported the abundant presence of prostitutes and cocaine in Zhao’s residence had he remained for the festivities. An even greater liability, as far as Zhao was concerned, was the fact that the ambassador possessed the complexion and deportment of a small toad wearing an ill-fitted suit.

Zhao and Tolo had retired to his private study and indulged in snifters of Martel X.O. cognac and Cuban cigars. The corpulent African was clearly enjoying the
cohiba
he was puffing with relish. Zhao lifted the distinctive arch-shaped bottle and refilled Tolo’s glass. Heavy techno beats thundered on the other side of the thick wooden doors.

“Thank you, Zhao,” the general said. “You are a gracious host.” He lifted the glass to his round face, admired the copper-colored liquor, then took another sip, followed by another long drag on his cigar. Zhao studied the general’s medal-clad dress uniform. He wondered if any other armchair general in history had ever acquired so many pieces of spangled baubles in just one lifetime. “I am a humble guest in your country, General, and your servant.”

The African roared with laughter. Blue smoke billowed out of his wide mouth. “Bullshit! Don’t pull that ‘Mandarin servile’ act with me.”
The general pointed the smoldering cigar at him. “I know you, Zhao. I’ve even seen you with your pants down around your ankles.”

“Indeed, you have.” Zhao first met Tolo at a military trade show in Paris the year before. Zhao not only threw an infamously raucous bacchanal that week but participated vigorously in the festivities. “So you also know why I’m here.”

“We have everything under control in the Kidal,” Tolo said, referring to the region of Mali where the REE deposits had been discovered earlier.

“I should hope so, now that your security forces have been amply resupplied by my government.”

“It’s not guns that matter. It’s guts,” the general harrumphed. He tapped his temple with a thick thumb, the smoldering cigar dangerously close to his bald scalp. “And brains.”

“Yes, of course,” Zhao said. He leaned forward and lifted his snifter toward Tolo. “To guts and brains.”

Tolo smiled and gulped down his cognac. Zhao sniffed his, savoring the aroma.

“My company is concerned about the safety of its workers,” Zhao said. “There are rumors of Tuaregs in rebellion all over the Sahara.”

“Rumors only. The ‘godforsaken’ are like dried grass. A small puff of wind and—” The general pursed his lips and blew. “They disappear.”

“We have a saying, too. When a little grass catches fire, the whole village is in danger.”

The African belly-laughed again. “You Chinese and your proverbs! Enough. The Tuaregs are easily dealt with.”

“The Tuaregs have traversed the Sahara for nearly three millennia. They are superlative desert fighters. No one has ever found them easily dealt with. I’ve read recent reports that they are rising up again in Niger.”

“Yes, around the uranium mines you Chinese are operating there. And do you know why? Your operations are draining away all of the scarce water in the region, robbing the Tuaregs of grasses to feed their precious camels, sheep, and goats. You’re polluting the land, and worse,
you import cheap labor, so you don’t even give those poor bastards jobs in those filthy mines while you’re starving and killing them.” Tolo set his snifter down.

Zhao nodded. It was true. His countrymen were often worse colonialists than the British and French they had displaced. But then again, Zhao reflected, these were only Africans they were talking about. If Africans weren’t meant to be skinned by the Chinese people, then history would not have made them rabbits.

“Mistakes have been made, and they are being corrected. I assure you no such abuses will occur among your people,” Zhao said.

Tolo shook his massive head. “We both know you are making promises you can’t keep. But what do I care for such things? Eggs must be broken in order to be eaten. Still, if you were to bring jobs to the Kidal, this would be a good thing for you.”

“But we can’t bring jobs until operations begin, and we can’t begin operations until the Tuareg problem is settled.” Zhao stabbed out the butt of his cigar in a crystal ashtray. “How do you plan on doing that?”

Tolo glanced at his empty glass. Zhao unstoppered the bottle and refilled it.

“The Tuareg problem now is simple. Always these ‘godforsaken’ have been restless and rebellious, but the desert grows hotter and they grow fewer. They are divided by clans and tribes, often fighting among themselves, at least until now.”

Zhao emptied the last of the Martel into the snifter. Tolo nodded his thanks. “
Merci
.”

“De rien,”
Zhao said. “What is different now?”

“The whole of the Tuareg nation now looks to one man. He is called ‘The Blue Warrior’ by his people. His name is Mossa Ag Alla.”

“‘The Blue Warrior’?” Zhao sat back and let the image of a blue-turbaned desert warrior roll around in his mind for a moment, admiring its mythical possibilities. “Yes, that makes perfect sense. The Kel Tamasheq men are famous for wearing the indigo blue headdress and veil.”

Zhao had done his homework. Unlike other Middle Eastern
cultures, it was the Tuareg men who wore veils, not the women. Often living as fugitives, the Tuareg
tagelmust
was the way the Tuareg fighters hid their identities as well as protected them from the violent sun and heat of the desert. The long garment that was used to wrap their heads and hide everything but their eyes was also considered a protection against the
djinn
of the desert, and when they sweated, the indigo dye bled onto their unbathed skin. The ultimate symbol of the Tuareg warrior was his blue
tagelmust.

Tolo shrugged his sloping shoulders. “He is but a man, and the Tuaregs a plague. We’ll kill him, and that will be the end of the affair.”

“But how will you find him?” Zhao asked. The Tuareg were virtual ghosts when hiding in the desert.

“We don’t have to,” Tolo said. “He will come to us, like a fish to the net.”

“Why would he do that?”

“We will smash the Tuareg villages, one by one. And he shall hear of it, and he will come out of his lair and strike, and then we will spear him!” Tolo laughed. His people had fished the Niger River for five hundred years.

Zhao began to say something but held his tongue. The Malian’s confidence was evident. Perhaps it was best to give him a chance to handle this problem. There was a gentle knock on the door.

Zhao smiled. “I believe my token of appreciation has arrived for you, General.”

Tolo chuckled, and set down his snifter and cigar. He turned heavily in his chair toward the door.

“Come,” Zhao said in a language Tolo didn’t recognize.

The heavy door swung open. Three Thai girls with tall drinks and short silk dresses entered, giggling.

Tolo turned back toward Zhao, white teeth grinning. “You are a good man, Zhao!”

“I knew you were a confident man, General.” He winked, and pointed at the three women. “Let’s see how far that confidence goes.”

“Trust me, Zhao. I won’t disappoint them—or you.” He laughed
again. So did Zhao. If the fat man failed, Zhao would be the one still laughing when he put a bullet between those bulging white eyes. But that would be little consolation. It would be his neck on the chopping block if this mission failed.

“If you’ll excuse me, General. I have some business to attend to.” Zhao excused himself with a wink and headed for his secure communications room to contact Dr. Weng. He’d give the general a chance to complete the mission, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t call in reinforcements, just in case.