“We aren’t going to blow this little nation off the map. Tell everyone to relax. I’m in no danger. The SEALs are here. I’ve seen them work before. Now I’ll try to send a runner to contact them. I think we’re through here, Walter. You take care.”
The ambassador turned off the tape recorder. “So, now you know as much about this situation as I do. The Vice President must be taken by this young man. Sounds like he wants to be one of the leaders in this battle coming up.”
“What else do I need to know about this General Assaba?” Murdock asked.
“That’s about it. He’s a former night club owner who went broke. Later he helped the President get elected. When the top general in the Army refused some of the President’s orders, Kolda had him tried and shot for treason. Then he moved Assaba into his place.”
“Sounds cozy. We’ll talk. Outside of that, I don’t know what we’ll do. Our CIA control should be arriving here today or tomorrow. After that we’ll get to work.”
The dinner meeting that evening went about as Murdock figured it would. General Assaba was a small man, slender, looked good in his uniform, had a wolfish face and overly large eyes that seemed to bore into everyone he looked at. Murdock tried an eye-to-eye contest one time, and lost quickly.
“My English,” Assaba said. “Many years ago we were a part of another country — we don’t mention that it was a British colony. So the British taught everyone English along with our native Wolof. Now English is one of two official languages of our nation.”
The restaurant was the most expensive in town, and the general ordered the highest-priced dinner and a bottle of wine.
“We know you are with the U.S. Navy SEALs, a Special Forces group, and we know that you are remarkably talented. Perhaps you can chase down this rebel Mojombo Washington. We have tried. We sent two gunboats up the Amunbo River to try to find him. The boats were heavily armed with machine guns and rifles. The men on the ship never saw a rebel. However, they took such heavy fire from the jungle cover that we lost ten men dead and six wounded, and had to turn around and power away before the boats had made it halfway to the suspected target.”
“He owns the river. How close to Sierra City did the shooting start?”
“About fifteen miles upstream they took the first rounds.”
“I’d like to talk to your G-2 man, your head of intelligence. Maybe by working together we can figure out a plan to move up the river at night, say, then hit the jungle and move around him and hit him from the rear.”
General Assaba put down his fork, which had just dipped a bite of lobster into the melted butter, and smiled. “Oh, yes, I like the way you think, Commander. I’ll set up a meet with our Colonel Dara for ten o’clock tomorrow morning at our headquarters in the Government Building.”
A short time later the dinners and desserts were finished, and the men shook hands and left the restaurant.
Murdock took a taxi back to the embassy. He had a strange feeling about General Assaba. The man did not even sound like a military man, which he wasn’t. His uniform fit, but any tailor could manage that. There was something about the man that hit Murdock the wrong way. Was he as corrupt as the ambassador said? If so, there might not be much value in helping him. What confused Murdock more than anything was the radio talk he had heard between the Vice President and the White House. Mr. Adams sounded like he had adopted Mojombo Washington and swung completely behind him in his try to overthrow the elected government and establish a real democracy.
If that were true, Murdock pondered, why should the SEALs do anything to help the forces of the fraudulently elected government?
9
Back at the embassy, Murdock, Gardner, Senior Chief Sadler, and Jaybird traded faxes as they again read everything they had about the country and the situation.
“Looks like we just stepped into a large pail of shit,” Jaybird said. “No way we need to help these crooks steal more money.”
“We’re here to get the Vice President out of trouble,” Lieutenant (j.g.) Gardner said. “If we have to help them a little to get the job done, then we do it.”
“From what the Vice President himself said, he doesn’t consider himself a captive,” Murdock said. “He says he wants to help this rebel all he can. I wonder what he means by that.”
They were in Murdock and Gardner’s room, and they heard a commotion in the hall. Then a familiar voice came through the noise.
“Damnit, Murdock, come out of your hole. I’ve had enough trouble today without playing fucking hide-and-seek.”
Murdock stepped into the hall grinning. “Well, if it isn’t the wonder boy of the CIA, the next candidate for deputy director, your friend and mine, Mortimer J. Stroh.”
“That’s Snerd, Mortimer J. Snerd, and Edgar Bergen would sue you if he was still around. Murdock, you horse’s heinie, how the hell is it hanging?”
“Long and lean. Glad you finally made it. You have lots of direction for us in this snake pit of a country?” Murdock saw the exhaustion showing in the CIA man’s face. At forty-eight, he wasn’t slowing down any. His brown hair was thinning a little, but his blue eyes still had a snap to them. His round face made his ears look too big for his face. Don Stroh was definitely not the fade-into-the-background type.
“Not a lot of direction for you. Our job is to rescue the Vice President without throwing a few million dollars to each side.”
“Big-budget job, I’d say,” Jaybird cracked.
Stroh grinned. “They still putting up with you around here?”
“Till death do us part.”
“Might be sooner than you figure, Jaybird,” Sadler growled.
“So what the hell we gonna do about the Vice President?” Stroh asked.
Murdock chuckled. “Great. No directives, we get to figure it out ourselves. The way it usually goes. We’ve found out this country is about ready to go down, from ignorance and bad government if nothing else. A bunch of official crooks and killers run the place.”
“That’s the way I hear it, too,” Stroh said. “How do we get the second highest man in our government out of the jungle?”
“I’m talking to a colonel tomorrow and I should have some ideas after that. Off the top, it looks like a river cruise would be in order. A recon, done at night so we don’t draw a lot of rebel fire. The river is theirs.”
“What can we find out at night?” Gardner asked.
“Plenty,” Jaybird said. “First we slip up on a village and grab a couple of men and ask them some questions. We can find out if the peasants out there in the boonies really like this guy the way some people say. If so, maybe he’s not as bad as the government thinks. You hear Adams’s last talk with the White House?”
Stroh hadn’t. They let him read the transcript. He finished it and looked up. “Sounds like he’s signed on as a rebel.”
“Which means we can’t go shooting up the rebel camps,” Murdock said. “We have to contact them, but it has to be a soft contact, with no gunfire.”
“We’ve already got contact,” Gardner said. “He has a SATCOM, we have a SATCOM. Why don’t we just talk to him?”
“Because we don’t know when he might turn his set on,” Murdock said. “Most embassies don’t have SATCOMs. They have more sophisticated radio equipment. So we can’t just ring him up like he had a phone. We can try, but don’t expect much.”
Ten minutes later Bill Bradford had the SATCOM antenna lined up with the satellite and Murdock made a call.
“Sierra City calling Vice President Adams. Do you read me? Sierra City calling Vice President Adams.”
There was no response. The ambassador had been told of Stroh’s arrival, and came onto the balcony where they had set up the dish antenna.