“I’ll handle it.”
“All right.” Nimec could still see Loren through the window. “That guide, Steve. I need to get over to him.”
DeMarco held up a finger, snapped open a compartment on his door, and fished hurriedly inside.
“You should take this,” he said, producing a small medkit. “There’s a morphine autoinjector inside. It’ll help. And watch out for those cactus plants, or whatever the hell they are. The shit that oozes from them’s poison.”
Nimec took the medkit and gave DeMarco a purposeful nod.
Then he shut the door with a hard push and dashed back around the rear of the vehicle.
In the expanse of sedge and euphorbia, the bandits had deployed into teams of two, each man laying his mortar about twenty yards apart from his teammate’s, and a hundred yards back from the girdled trail.
Crouched beside one member of the gang, their headman watched him feed a high-explosive fragmentation round into his tube, set for drop fire to allow faster discharge than manual triggering with the lever. The round slid down the barrel and hit the firing pin at its base cap. Its primer cartridge detonated at once, igniting propellent charges slotted into the fin blades.
An instant later the projectile launched from the muzzle in a gout of flame and smoke. It rocketed across the sky and thudded into the ground at the convoy’s rear, chewing a hole in the trail to hamper its retreat.
No sooner did it strike than the bandit was dropping another round into the tube.
The headman raised his binoculars to his eyes and looked toward the front of the column. Still out of his vehicle, the UpLink security chief had begun shuffling his way back along its side. He held his firearm in one hand, carried something else in the other, a box or case of some sort…
The headman produced a curious grunt. Then he noticed the man writhing in the grass beyond the 4×4. It wasn’t possible to get a clear view of him in the patchy thicket, but he believed it might be the guide.
His curiosity became satisfaction, a smile touching his lips. The UpLink security man was rushing toward the guide, exposing himself to try to aid him.
It was almost too good to be true, he thought. His entire reason for stalling the convoy farther up the road had been to bring the security man closer to the trees, into easy range of the sniper who waited with explicit orders to take him out. Indeed, all the orders he’d given his men were clear and explicit, following guidelines of similar specificity from the Congolese warlord Fela Geteye, with whom they were in league. Whom warlord Geteye dealt with on the next level up the chain was none of the men’s affair. Such linkages were intricate, preserved in secrecy, and shared only as necessary. What mattered most to the headman’s coupeurs de route was collecting their portion of the bounty.
It did not mean the headman himself was ignorant of likely connections. His choice of livelihood bore a great many perils, capture or betrayal high on the index, and experience had taught him one should always have a reserve of information worth dealing. He had no qualms accepting jobs on a need-to-know basis. But if those at the top were mindful of their safety, why not he? The trick was to strike a balance — too much knowledge could be dangerous, too little shortsighted and foolish.
The headman knew warlord Geteye had ties to a Cameroonian dealer of stolen arms and technology who had bought favor with many lawmen throughout the region, among them, a police commander in Port-Gentil. The headman knew this commander owed his appointment to an even more highly ranked member of the Police Gabonaise, no lesser than a division chief said to be the puppet of an influential government minister. And although he did not know the minister’s name, the headman had heard credible rumors that his strings were, in turn, pulled by a blanc of fearsome repute whose name and broad designs were more deeply mysterious than any of the rest… and better left that way.
However tempting it was to speculate about the parties’ identities, the headman thought it smarter to resist.
He neither knew, nor would have cared to know, that the Gabonese minister was Etienne Begela, that the divisional police boss Begela had called upon to arrange the Sette Cama ambush was an immediate superior of Commander Bertrand Kilana, and that Kilana had been the one to secure warlord Fela Geteye’s participation as middleman between the illicit trader and the headman’s own band.
Some information was a good thing, yes. But too much knowledge could weigh one down, tip the scale the wrong way. The headman would never wish to become a potential liability to those exceedingly powerful and dangerous individuals who might have concerns about what he could reveal about them under interrogation.
His main interests had been how his gang of killers and thieves played into the scheme, and what was to be gained from their involvement. In that respect, he did not stand above those he led.
Should all continue to go well, their earnings looked to be tremendous. The arrangement with Geteye was one of incentives, each stage of the operation they successfully pulled off boosting their profits. The convoy’s interception already guaranteed them a nice sum, with another agreed-upon bonus due if UpLink’s head of security was sniped out — a hit the headman believed was about to be accomplished. Were his men able to get away with hijacking the truckloads of multimillion-dollar cargo, they would stand to make a certain fortune, receiving a cut of the loot from warlord Geteye after its turnover by the Cameroonian black marketeer. No restraints had been placed on their taking of casualties… as far as that went, the headman had gotten the distinct sense that a high body count might be preferred. on the other hand, damage to the precious freight must be avoided, or at least kept to a minimum. And in that regard, things were about to get tough.
The headman held his glasses steady, watching the besieged line of vehicles through the double circles of their lenses. The Land Rover in front had been marked for destruction, and he’d factored in a significant loss to the cargo aboard the truck at its rear — the RPO-A shoulder launcher was a ravaging weapon. But he would take no chances damaging any more of his coveted bounty, and the nearness of the rest of the conveyances to one another — the last two trucks flanked front and back by what he now saw to be armored vehicles, something he hadn’t been warned to expect — meant a direct hit on any of the Rovers would have exactly that inescapable, unacceptable result.
The controlled barrage could be sustained only a bit longer, then. Keeping the convoy paralyzed, and further softening its defenses by taking out the handful of UpLink security men that had left their 4×4s.
The headman nodded to himself, thinking.
Soon, he would have to bring his men out onto the trail for the decisive strike.
Hunkered low between his Rover and the truck behind it, Nimec swiped more blood off his forehead, and then propelled himself across the trail.
He drew fire at once. A wild shower out of the trees that he figured for a subgun volley, then a single heavier-caliber round whapping the ground inches to his left, too close, throwing up divots of soil. That one had come from above. From a treetop. A shooter was perched up there, trying to take him out. The realization brought DeMarco’s question back to mind, what the hell kind of setup was this?
He snipped off the thought. No time to worry about it now. The guide was yards ahead of him, down in the sedge, moving, thrashing in agony.