The Devil's Horn (12 page)

Wophule and Promise sat on their haunches in the slanting sun, trying to decide what to do. All around them, the bush kept its uneasy silence. Wophule concluded they should do nothing. The drone was definitely military. Whoever lost it would know what had happened. Someone would come looking for it. The rocket appeared undamaged and was nothing to fool with. Best to leave it alone, walk away and let it disappear on its own, like a carcass.

Promise listened to Wophule’s logic, convinced that he was right. Someone would come. She could only guess at when . . . soon, after dusk. But she had different thoughts about walking away.

Promise got to her feet.

“Stay here.”

The boy straightened his legs to stand in her way.

“What are you doing?”

Promise answered only with a palm in his young face, telling him to stay, and stepped around him.

She moved closer to the drone on tiptoes without reason to believe this was a safer way to advance, only going by her habit with animals. The glass eye under the drone took no note of her. She moved near enough to enter the shadow of the broken wing. Promise ducked under it, sliding her fingers over the metal as if to pet it, soothe it as she approached. The hard skin felt warmed; it had lain in the sun for at least a few hours. The drone let her come, for everything about it seemed dead, except the missile.

Promise kept her hand on the drone instinctively; should it leap suddenly to life she would know. Inching forward, she ducked under the fuselage to the right side where the missile sat in its square nest.

She took a knee beside the battered box on the ground, inspected it, and found it empty. She moved to the launcher still attached to the wing, sliding a gentling hand along the fuselage as she moved. Everything about the drone was frightening. Both launchers were two meters long, narrow, and the most lethal things she had ever touched. Promise ran fluttering fingers over the smooth tip of the missile, touching its thick tinted-glass face.

She backed away, unsure what to do next. The pair of launchers and the drone lacked markings. Did they come from her own South Africa? The drone had crashed only ten kilometers from the Mozambican border, one hundred kilometers south of Zimbabwe, three hundred from Botswana. Whose was it? Where had it been? What hushed job did it do? Plainly, forces far beyond her and Wophule were in play here. The drone and rocket were missing, and somebody’s clock was ticking. How valuable were they? How dangerous? How much time until someone showed up?

Her gut roiled, and the boy, as if sensing this, spoke out.

“Leave it.”

Promise kept her back to him. She pulled out her cell phone.

“I’m going to call it in.”

Promise dialed. She walked away from the crash and young, trusting Wophule, so the boy would not hear her calling Juma.

Chapter 9

Kingsman 2
leveled out of its sharp bank, flying away from the sun.

Why were they headed east? Why hadn’t they jumped out behind the GAARV? What about the air show? Doc, Quincy, and Jamie were on the ground with both vehicles, watching LB and Wally zoom off without them. What the hell?

LB unbuckled his chute container and pack. Dropping the fifty-pound burden put a spring in his step. Wally still stood in his jump gear. One hand steadied him against the fuselage; the other pressed on his radio earpiece.

Arms spread, LB moved in front of Wally. He couldn’t read Wally’s face behind the opaque sunglasses. He reached up to snatch them away. Wally slapped down LB’s hand, then raised an index finger, the shut up finger, in the air between them.

The loadmaster had disappeared into the cockpit, probably for a briefing from the air crew. The GAARV was gone. The big, thundering cargo bay held only Wally and LB. LB’s patience boiled quickly, since he appeared to be the only one on the plane who didn’t know what was going on.

He sat close, where he could see Wally’s face to read his lips. Wally turned away, peeved; LB resat, if that was how Wally wanted to play it. This time Wally aimed the silent finger dead into LB’s face, very stern. Wally collapsed into a fabric seat, produced a pen and small pad, and started scribbling furious notes. He shot LB a mirrored glance over thinned lips. Something was going down, and Wally wasn’t liking it.

LB went back to the window seat to watch South Africa slide below, and with it the air show, applause, beers on a patio, and his team all faded. Sunset lay two hours off.
Kingsman 2
leaned back, gaining altitude.

Finally, Wally pulled his finger from his ear and stowed his pen. LB kept his seat. Wally shucked his own chute and pack, then plopped into the seat beside him. Wally doffed his helmet to run a hand through his cropped hair, as if trying to rattle his thoughts into an order that made sense. Wally took off his sunglasses. LB laughed, made a little nervous by this.

“Okay. Now you’re scaring me.”

“You won’t believe this.”

“Sadly, I will.”

Wally tapped the notepad to indicate he wasn’t making any of this up.

“That was Torres.”

“You stayed off your knees, so I figure this is business.”

“LB, not now.”

“Check.”

“About three hours ago, the CIA chief of station at our embassy in Pretoria got a call. He met with his senior defense officer. The SDO called AFRICOM—”

LB swirled a hand between them.

“Swear to God, I don’t care who called who. Where are we going?”

Wally waited LB out, letting him settle down like a curtain in a breeze. Insofar as every man has some genius, this was Wally’s. He did nothing before its time, never reacted in anger or frustration. Wally jumped out of planes this way, shot a rifle and led men this way, on target. That was why proposing to Torres in Djibouti, three thousand miles away, over the radio was so precious, out of character, and perfect for razzing.

“I’m telling you so you’ll know how far up this has gone.”

And it’s going to go up further
, LB considered, shifting his butt in his seat.

“Whatever.”

“The embassy asked AFRICOM what assets were available in South Africa.”

“Us? We’re on temporary duty, at a fucking air show.”

“We’re on a plane, we’re in chutes. We’re ninety minutes out. Nobody else close.”

“I’m not going to like this.”

“Nope.”

“Close to what?”

“The Kruger.”

The Kruger? The big game park on the Mozambican border. The place was huge, and full of animals. Big, wild animals.

“We’re jumping into the Kruger. Just you and me.”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

Wally opened his mouth to answer, but LB stopped him with a raised finger of his own.

“And let me add. Why are we jumping into the Kruger with no provisions, no med rucks, no weapons, and no team? Dying to hear.”

“The decision was made to go ahead with the show jump. It’ll hold down the attention at us turning around. The guys can handle it.”

PJs jumped into missions prepared as well as any Spec Ops teams in the world. They were experts at getting in and out of isolated, tough areas: any terrain and weather, any rescue or combat situation, covert or on the record, they had the best training and the right tools. LB patted his pockets for Wally in a show of poverty; for this mission, he had nothing.

“And the rest of it?”

Wally eased a palm down; the gesture said,
No worries, we got this
.

There lay the opposite of Wally’s genius. His unyielding optimism.

“A drone’s gone down in the Kruger. Torres says she needs eyes on it.”

“What? Why are we flying drones over South Africa? We don’t have clearance.”

For three decades, the United States had treated South Africa as a pariah because of apartheid. The South Africans were working hard to change their society. But they hadn’t dropped all their grudges against America. That was the purpose of hands-across-the-water displays like air shows, to rebuild some bridges—and the reason why the United States could not get caught flying a drone over South Africa without permission. That was no small thing.

Wally hedged, almost reluctant to give the answer.

“This is the hard-to-believe part.”

He clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together. Then Wally opened them like a magician who’d just made something really unlikely appear.

“It’s not our drone.”

“Whose is it?”

“South African. It’s a Denel.”

“Then why are we going after it?”

“Like I said. CIA.”

“Wally, just tell me.”

“It’s our missile.”

LB’s jaw slacked. Like a gulping fish, he formed the start of several words, all with a
W
: why, where, who, what, when. He finished none of them and collapsed back against the trembling wall of the climbing cargo plane.

Wally referred to his notes and told LB the story of the mission.

For the past few years, Al Shabaab, an Al Qaeda offshoot based in Somalia, had been looking to expand into southern Africa. The Somalian government, with plenty of international pressure and help, had finally begun to get its act together regarding not just piracy in its waters but Al Qaeda in its mountains. Al Shabaab needed new digs.

Tanzania, with a Muslim population of 50 percent and its own share of African poverty, was the next promising step along the continent’s east coast. Recently, Al Shabaab had gained a toehold in Tanzania, blowing up a few mosques, gunning down some priests and religious moderates. But an earmark of Al Qaeda was their ability to adapt, and being run out of Somalia wasn’t something they meant to repeat. So, while they were dropping roots in Tanzania, they’d also begun to probe the next domino to the south.

The ideal candidate was Mozambique, sparsely populated in its hilly, dry wastelands, plenty of room for clandestine training camps near the northern border with Tanzania, where the Muslim population was concentrated. The long Indian Ocean shoreline was impossible to secure. And the next potential domino, just three hundred miles off the coast, Madagascar.

After watching the debacle in Somalia and the rising violence inside Tanzania, the government in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, had no intention of letting Al Shabaab metastasize in its country.

So Maputo did what many poor, disorganized, and distraught nations did when they wanted somebody killed quietly. Once they got reliable word of a high-level Al Shabaab meeting on their turf, they passed it on to the CIA.

Wally paused while LB tamped all the puzzle pieces into place. LB ventured a few guesses, starting with the obvious.

“So we sent a drone to do the job.”

“Yep.”

“A South African drone.”

“Yep.”

“And I assume the bad guys got a knock on the roof.”

Wally made an explosion sound and spread his fingers to mimic the blast.

“Okay. Then we’re working with the South Africans on this.”

“Nope.”

“Wait. What?”

LB had hit a dead end faster than he’d expected. How had a US missile gotten on a South African Denel drone without their cooperation? LB slapped both his thighs, then held out one flat palm to Wally, like an usher, motioning for Wally to show him the way.

Wally, who knew the answer, began to give it, but after a few words burst into laughter instead. He tried to restrain himself to finish his report, but whatever he was about to tell LB was plainly so implausible, so wicked or Machiavellian, that it cracked him up. LB couldn’t share in the laughter, so he crossed his arms and waited.

Wally wiped a palm across his mouth to plug his mirth. He winced with the effort of keeping himself from guffawing again.

“Okay. The Kruger’s a wide-open place. A lot of illegals cross from Mozambique. Security risk. Once in a while the South African military flies drones over the park.”

“Alright.”

“Well.”

Wally bit his quivering lower lip. LB prodded.

“Yeah. Well?”

“Do the math. CIA hacked one.”

LB went rock still while this struck him.

“No, they didn’t.”

Wally had only to nod before LB doubled over, leaning almost out of the cloth chair. LB flicked his gaze around the empty cargo bay, as if looking for something to help him digest this plot, to fathom it. He had to gape down at the steel deck because he couldn’t bear to look at Wally, who was chuckling again and trying to wipe it off his face.

LB coughed, but this turned into a snicker. That reignited Wally; both of them gave in, letting the laughter shake itself out of their systems.

When they were done, LB spit on the floor as though to clear his palette and start over.

“You’re shitting me.”

Wally couldn’t do it. He said only, “No,” then motioned for LB to give him a second. He composed himself, cleared his throat, then repeated, “No.”

“We can actually do that? Hack someone else’s drone?”

“Looks like it.”

Wally filled in the rest of the operation’s odd details. The CIA had determined Al Shabaab’s mud-hut meeting in the Mozambican hills a sufficient threat to American interests and agreed to Maputo’s request to drop in. Once the target intel was confirmed, the challenge for the CIA came in finding assets for the operation. The US Air Force had no air bases in southern Africa and no drones with sufficient range to make the round-trip from the base in Djibouti to Mozambique.

So they hijacked a South African drone out of the sky, over the Kruger.

The CIA had sent false avionics to the South African controllers to make it look like the Denel had simply stopped transmitting, not an uncommon phenomenon; around 10 percent of all UAVs in every military went offline at some point during their missions. They usually flickered back to life at some point on their own; some crashed.

While the South African remote pilots were scrambling to figure out what was happening—had their Denel gone down, was it flying blindly somewhere over the park—the drone was winging east with new hands on the stick, soaring high over the Mozambique Channel to a waiting US Navy aircraft carrier.

The navy had been experimenting with drones taking off from carriers. Once flattops became mobile UAV bases, the reach of unmanned military flight would be, for all intents, global.

“Navy landed a drone,” LB said.

“They did.”

“Oh, man.”

LB was of mixed opinion about unmanned warfare. On the one hand, battle by remote control limited the casualties on the field. For a combat-rescue special operator, this was a good thing. But man’s abhorrence for bloodletting was usually what stopped the fighting in the end. LB and all professional warriors feared the day when war was taken away from the men and women on the battlefield and handed over to geeks in a bunker a thousand safe miles away. What would stop them? Not what they could see, hear, and smell up close. Certainly not their own peril.

Now drones were combining with sea power. That meant the planet had just become smaller and a little less safe. Taking lives was doing a booming business. Not for the first time, LB was glad to be among the ones saving them.

After the Denel was safely on the carrier’s deck, the navy’s armorers had gone to work. They’d bolted pylons beneath both wings. Secured to each pylon was a rocket launcher loaded with two Hellfire AGM 114 missiles apiece. All four air-to-ground missiles had been armed by the carrier’s munitions men with tritonol charges wired near the warheads. This self-destruct capability was typically reserved for training, not live-fire combat ops. But this was a covert, high-priority mission, and all fingerprints had to be wiped. No one on board the carrier knew the destination for the drone or the missiles.

With its new payload secured, the flight crew wheeled the Denel to the catapult and slingshot it back into the sky. The drone was flown at ten thousand feet for five hundred miles, taking it into Mozambique’s northern highlands.

A local tribesman—paid off by the CIA or Maputo—was there on the ground with a laser pointer, waiting to paint Al Shabaab’s remote meeting place with the lethal dot. The plan was to fire three Hellfires, make the kill, then turn the Denel back out over the ocean with one Hellfire still on board.

Once the drone reached deep water, the carrier was to beam a coded radio signal into the tritonol charge, detonating the Hellfire’s warhead, splashing the Denel. Evidence gone, case closed, mystery unsolved.

The strike went off exactly as drawn up. The Denel arrived high above the Al Shabaab meeting in Mozambique, right on time. The laser tag was confirmed, the fire order issued, and someone somewhere pushed a button.

One, two, three Hellfires streaked down out of the blue.

The mud hut disintegrated, all direct hits.

The remote pilots aimed the drone away, turning east for the Mozambique Channel.

LB had seen this part of the story coming.

“But she didn’t turn.”

“Nope.”

“Malfunction.”

“Yep.”

This was all part and parcel of unmanned combat. Ghosts in the machine. What caused them was anybody’s guess. More than likely in this case, the South African drone wasn’t designed to land on a carrier, then be slung back into the air by the ship’s huge catapult. A Denel wasn’t built to be a launching platform for Hellfire missiles, either. Or maybe this was just crap luck. Regardless, there’d been a short in the Denel’s guidance. One small flash from a loose wire caused another in a second wire, then a third; the controls burned out, then the comm; and next the CIA had a blind, dumb, and deaf South African drone with an American missile fixed to it flying by its stupid self. LB pictured a crew of remote pilots, somewhere in the States or Djibouti, seated at a computerized cockpit, hitting buttons and switches, flipping furiously through manuals, calling supervisors, saying, “shit, shit, shit,” many times.