Anagkazo waved a hand above his head yet another time. Clayton stepped toward the cabin, his pistol thrust out before him, the uptilt of its snout now barely perceptible even to Kuhl.
Two shots crashed from it.
“Attack!” Anagkazo commanded.
The dogs hurtled forward, racing straight at Clayton, making no sound, midnight wind. The pistol was fired again, a series of rapid bursts, but they did not stop, kept on charging in his direction.
He lowered his gun as the dogs reached him, aimed it at them.
They lunged. One of them drove high, rose onto its hind legs, and Kuhl saw the flash of bared white fangs as its massive black jaws clamped over Clayton’s gun arm below the elbow. Another shepherd went for his right thigh. The third, his left ankle. Clayton twisted his body, shouting loud threats at the dogs, pulling them around with him, dragging them around with him, but they hung on, silent, silent, throwing their combined weight against him, finally making him lose his balance, forcing him off his feet. As he dropped hard onto his side, the pistol flew out of Clayton’s grasp, landed several feet away in a patch of grass.
From Anagkazo now: “Hold!”
The three German shepherds released his helper, backed off, and got onto their haunches without turning away from him, staying within a yard of the spot where Clayton had fallen, forming up in a close ring around him. They were still silent, their thick wooly tails whipping back and forth over the ground.
Anagkazo turned to Kuhl.
“Fearless, as promised,” he said. “They won’t budge until I call them down.”
“And if the intruder were to run into the woods?” Kuhl was watching the dogs. “Try to escape rather than press ahead toward a confrontation?”
“As long as you give the command, they’d track and find him no matter where he hides,” Anagkazo said. “Bear in mind you don’t have to be in danger or any extraordinary circumstances to get the same level of obedience from them. It extends to their routine behavior. Whether it’s walking beside you on the street, retrieving a Frisbee at a picnic, whatever. With these dogs there’s no negotiation.”
Appreciating that last phrase, savoring it, Kuhl waited a long moment before he offered the breeder his reply.
“Excellent, Mr. Anagkazo,” he said, then. “Truly excellent. That is just what I’d wanted to hear.”
Steve DeMarco was one of nine members of Sword’s advance team to have met the plane out at the landing field.
A Boeing 737 freighter, it had flown in with about twenty thousand tons of cargo for the satcom ground station and fiber network head-end center going up near the Sette Cama Forest thirty miles south of Port-Gentil. The bulk of its load consisted of parts ordered by the horde of engineers, plumbers, and other specialized utility systems experts at work in the compound’s buildings. There were pallets of everyday office fixtures, including desks, chairs, computers, LAN modems, phones, fax machines, copiers, paper, toner cartridges, and so on. And there was an initial shipment of expensive upgrade and replacement components for the Planétaire optical communications infrastructure, such as long-haul light amplifiers, wavelength division multiplexers, demultiplexers, and routing devices. The telecom equipment alone was worth upward of a couple million dollars, which would have been reason enough for fully three-quarters of Nimec’s security contingent to be on hand for the Boeing’s reception.
And they had another.
A comparatively smaller portion of the valuable cargo transshipped to Gabon via UpLink Europe had been requisitioned by the Sword boys. This ranged from electrified perimeter fencing, ballistic glass panels, and concrete Jersey barricades for vehicle entry points to fancier hardware like fixed intruder-alert systems, countersurveillance sweep units, mobile robotic guards (dubbed “hedgehogs” by Rollie Thibodeau), and many of the same weapons and chembio threat detectors Thibodeau had described to Tom Ricci during their brief, strained catch-up session at UpLink San Jose. Also arriving with the Sword req were the first three of what would eventually grow into an entire fleet of armored-and-modified-to-order Land Rovers, and a delivery of weapons and gear Nimec’s team had been licensed to use for personal and facility defense under special agreement with Gabonese authorities. Among these were several crates of conventional firearms, third-generation “Big Daddy” variable-velocity rifle-system submachine guns, and other lethal and less-than-lethal munitions.
Once the goods had been unloaded they were expedited to temporary warehouses, checked in, sorted, and prepped for final transport — and that was where Steve DeMarco and his teammates entered the picture. Everything was eventually headed out to the Sette Cama for on-site storage and distribution, begging careful supervision as the first loads were transferred onto off-road trucks and heavy lift choppers by airport personnel. Four of the Sword ops had ridden with the wheeled convoy along remote jungle roads, which might present tempting ambush points to thieves and hijackers. Each of the two birds making the initial air run had swept off with a guard of its own. As agent in charge, DeMarco had also assigned three men to the warehouse beat until the rest of the freight was cleared out of them, a process expected to take seventy-two hours at the very least.
With things well under control at the airport, DeMarco had gotten into his company vehicle and driven back to the Rio de Gabao. His plan was to freshen up in his room, then grab a bite to eat at the hotel restaurant before giving Pete Nimec the lowdown on the successful transit operation.
He would wind up with a whole lot more to tell him.
As he got out of the elevator, DeMarco’s curiosity had nudged him to give one of the new pieces of equipment that had arrived with the 737 a quick test. Though far from the most expensive or important item in the shipment, it was nonetheless a nifty little gadget… assuming it worked as touted. At a glance it appeared to be a long, thin silver cigarette lighter. Another version of the same device, designed to look like a key chain fob, had been chosen by some of the ops. To each his own.
Whichever outer configuration was preferred, the miniature guts of the thing remained the same. Its true function was neither to fire up a smoke nor to help a person locate keys buried in a trouser pocket — although the latter was something the fob did quite handily because of its shape, perhaps accounting for its favored status in contrast to the fuel-less, wickless, single-purpose mock-cigarette lighter version. The device’s true function, at any rate, was to snoop out hidden surveillance cameras. Inside the case was a very low frequency directional receiver sensitive to electromagnetic emissions in the fifteen- to twenty-kilohertz range, corresponding to VLF levels radiated by the horizontal oscillators that typically allowed remote-operated cameras their side-to-side movement. The detector had two switchable modes of alert. At the touch of a button, it could signal the presence of a hidden camera with a discreet pulse similar to that given off by a cell phone set to silently vibrate, or sound a series of beeps through an attached headset. The closer it got to the source of the low-band radio emission, the faster a tiny red LED on the case would blink, allowing pinpoint location of the camera… in theory, insofar as DeMarco was concerned for the present. His trust in any gadget or weapon had to meet the same standard he applied to women: He would reserve judgment until he saw how well it treated him.
Thus, DeMarco’s test. On his first day at the hotel, he had noticed a couple of minidome cameras in the hallway outside his room. The first to snag his careful eye was mounted flush with the ceiling near the elevator bank and might easily have been taken for one of the domed light fixtures with which it was aligned in a long row. The second minidome was more visibly mounted about two feet to the right of his door — and four or five feet above his head — in a corner formed by the juncture of the wall and ceiling. Neither bothered him by its presence. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Rio was a five-star hotel catering to upper-echelon international travelers. And any decent lodging nowadays was obliged to provide security for its guests. At its most basic, this would consist of an in-house security staff and twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week video monitoring of common areas.