“Understood.”
“The Task Force Darby CO”—Forrestal referred to his notes—“Major Workman, is discussing the situation with his host counterparts there in the northern part of the country.”
“Eighty-seventh Infantry out of Fort Drum is running the show along the Nigerian border,” Burgess said.
Ryan gave a nod of approval. “Tenth Mountain. Good.”
Burgess continued. “Major Workman feels confident at least some of the Cameroonian Rapid Intervention Battalion will give him a straight answer. They’ve spilled blood and shed blood together fighting Boko Haram. There’s some trust there going both ways.”
“If they even know,” Ryan said. “BIR forces working daily alongside the U.S. military are not likely to be in the loop on any attack. Are you telling me the Cameroonian military chased one of their own generals into our embassy and nothing hit any of our tripwires?”
Every U.S. mission overseas had emergency action plans that included highly classified benchmarks that would elicit specific responses. These benchmarks were known as tripwires. Molotov cocktails on a car parked across the street might cause an increased uniformed guard presence. Lob one over the fence and stronger measures would kick in. Certain tripwires — coups, nearby terrorist attacks — might call for anything from the evacuation of nonessential personnel all the way to the destruction of documents and closure of the embassy.
“None, Mr. President,” SecState Adler said. “This happened all at once. No warning. No tripwires.”
Forrestal said, “Initial reports indicate most locally hired security forces have walked away in the face of the military vehicles.”
“‘Most’?” Ryan said.
“Korean witnesses say there are two out front with the Marines.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I’m trying to imagine our Marines allowing people to run into the embassy, even a general.”
Forrestal paused for a moment, like he had uncomfortable news. “The Korean diplomat I spoke to indicated the Marines taught a big self-defense course to local women and girls. This is only a guess, but General Mbida’s daughter could have been part of that class. According to the South Koreans, the Marines recognized them, saw they were in danger, and let them in.”
Now Ryan let go with an honest-to-goodness groan.
“What about Diplomatic Security?” he asked. The regional security officer would be the senior law enforcement and security expert at the embassy.
“The RSO is a guy named Carr,” Adler said. “He was a SWAT officer with Albuquerque PD before he came on with State. I pulled his record before coming over here. He’s apparently kind of a badass. He’s been with DSS for fourteen years.”
“We could use a few badasses over there right now,” Ryan mused. “Cameroon… That’s Ambassador Burlingame. Right?”
“Correct, Mr. President,” Adler said. “Chance Burlingame. He came over from USAID a couple of months ago. He’s got a lengthy history with the foreign service in Africa.”
“What’s his status at this moment?”
“Outside the embassy,” Adler said, shifting on his feet as he did so. No one in the room liked to admit that they did not have a clear answer to one of the President’s questions. “We are still checking. But according to the staffer who made the original call to Ops, the badass RSO is with him.”
15
Adin Carr loved his job, but he didn’t care much for the title of regional security officer. His father was a cop, his brother was a cop, and he was a cop — not a security officer. The title of RSO was absent from his business cards and he introduced himself simply as Special Agent Carr. No one in Africa — or anywhere else other than the big-dog diplomats at Foggy Bottom — cared anyway.
“You, Mr. Ambassador,” Carr said, dodging a centipede the size of his hand as it undulated across the dirt trail, “are one heck of a runner.”
He adjusted the fanny pack on his waist to keep it from flopping as they headed down the wooded trail. The Glock 19 he carried inside the small nylon bag wasn’t a huge weapon, but he didn’t have a lot of extra padding and the ten-kilometer course up the hill behind the embassy and around behind the Hotel Mont Fébé gave it plenty of time to give him a hellacious bruise on the point of his hip if he wasn’t careful. He was tall, a little on the gaunt side, with the dark copper complexion of his Navajo mother. A desert rat at heart, he’d grown up on the reservation near Blanding, Utah, and would never get used to humidity like that of West Africa. Carr subscribed to the maxim that golf was a good walk spoiled, but the course behind the embassy offered a great place to run without getting run over by some crazy taxi driver. Better still, it was manicured and relatively well drained after the last week of constant rain. There was the off chance that some rascal would try and rob him during the run, which was the point of carrying the Glock.
He’d started calling the bad guys “rascals” when he was RSO in Papua New Guinea, the assignment prior to this one. The word had a quaint connotation in the United States — mischievous. But in PNG, the masked bandits would hack you to pork chops with a bush knife if they didn’t shoot you in the face with a homemade shotgun.
Carr’s mother was from the Two Rocks Sit clan, daughter of a long line of Navajo holy men. She believed in skin walkers, curses, and all manner of witches and spirits, but those highland tribes Carr met in PNG took it to an entirely new level. Those rascals burned women to death for sorcery on a regular basis. As with most assignments, he and Linda had made many friends in PNG, but the three years in Port Moresby had been an eternity, with him worried about his wife every time she went to the store. Cameroon was poor, rife with political corruption, and pretty much looked as if the whole country had just been carpet-bombed. But it was a picnic compared to their time in PNG. It was sure as hell better than going back stateside. He’d already been told he would be tapped as a supervisory agent at WFO — the Washington Field Office — on his return and he wanted to stay away from D.C. as long as possible. Besides, he and Linda were in this for the adventure. Africa was a good place for that. Black mambas, bush cobras, rampaging elephants, Boko Haram — there was plenty to love. He’d heard the rascals were a little more civilized in Cameroon, but the ones he’d seen still carried big bush knives, and he didn’t intend to find out how eager they were to use them. Especially not with the ambassador in tow.
The last chief of mission had contracted malaria and returned to Iowa. Burlingame had been in Cameroon for only two months, but he wasn’t new to Africa, having worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in several other countries. The ambassador was an inch or two taller than Carr, well over six feet, with sandy blond hair that he kept just long enough to part. He carried himself well, and, as anyone who’d spent any length of time on the continent, understood that unpredictable things happened for one simple reason—TIA.
This Is Africa.
“Adin,” Burlingame said, hardly even breathing hard after five and a half of their six-mile run. “What do you say we add a couple of klicks to our run tomorrow.”
“I’m heading to Botswana tomorrow to teach a class at the regional police academy. I’m game for Friday.” Carr shot his boss a grin. “But you might keep in mind that I not only have to run, I have to be in good enough shape to fend off a deadly forest cobra while you escape if we get into trouble.”
Burlingame chuckled — something the previous guy rarely did, even before he got malaria. “Then who am I supposed to run with while you’re gone to Botswana?”