“Understood, Igor! I will let the Director know. Your mission is now to protect the HARE at all costs.” Replied Sergei Petrov, using the call sign for the President of Adwalland. “Command Authority is granted. Unit C and D and the Brigade Commander that will be providing support for your team will be informed. What other resources do you have at your disposal until they arrive?” asked Sergei Petrov.
Having read Igor’s notes on the current disposition of the potential forces of Viper and then updated him on the carriers that were on their way from Addis despite the removal from the field of the Mil-17, Sergei was concerned they were outgunned. As he listened, he was even more concerned.
“This is going to be tight until the GRU Guards arrived in the theatre,” Sergei told himself.
“Within his security detail he has ten immediate bodyguards,” continued Igor. We are unsure of their loyalty, so we have not briefed them with the exception of Head of Security, but Blagorodnyy has placed his assets at our disposal, so this gives us extra twenty-five,” concluded Igor. His count included Thomas, who had insisted that he was staying in Borama despite him and Mikhail arguing about it and overriding Igor’s objections when they had stepped outside having received the President permission to make the call.
“Really?” answered Sergei surprised having assumed that Thomas was going depart the scene with his men knowing a putsch was imminent. It was what any sensible Oligarch would do.
“He has also placed his aircraft at our disposal if we need to do an emergency extraction,” Igor further added.
“Please pass on my thanks to Blagorodnyy,” offered Sergei gratefully.
This was going to be a close run thing, deciding there and then whatever happens he would ensure his wife cooked Thomas dinner next time he was in Moscow over this gesture. For he was sure the moment the Director reported to Vladimir Vladimirovich that one of Russia’s most important National Champions was staying, he would be ordered out of the theatre of operations for he was much too valuable to Russia to have him dying in the small country on the Horn of Africa.
“I will sir!” answered Igor, thinking the same thing despite Thomas overruling him.
After dropping off his Indian friend at the hotel, Wasir and his bodyguards drove back to his villa located on the outskirts of Borama, reaching it just as the midday sun reached its zenith.
The villa, built by a Sharjah based Pakistani three years ago, had cost him over two million U.S. dollars to construct in the foothills of the mountains that surrounded the small city.
The compound, enclosed by a two-meter high wall with machine gun posts at each corner was designed in a contemporary Arab style, set in a garden of date and palm trees much like the luxury Signature Villa the same contractor had built for him in the Emirates Hills, Dubai.
It had a spacious open plan living area, high ceilings, and a clerestory in the central living area, so to allow the ample natural light to filter through the property. The four bedrooms on the first floor were located off the double height gallery landing; two of the bedrooms and his master bedroom also contained a safe room. He maintained a separate similar villa on the compound for his wives and their children, as he preferred not to have the sound of them disturbing him. Only his eighteen- and sixteen-year-old sons, Mohammed and Samir, lived with him at the main house.
On entering with Ahmed, he found his oldest son Mohammed sitting in the lounge with a white man of about forty. After first greeting his son with a hug and a kiss on each cheek in the traditional method he then turned introduced himself to the man.
“You must be Mr. Leo,” he said offering his hand to the tall, bald, tanned, well-built muscular man with piercing blue eyes dressed in a black t-shirt with his holster looped over his shoulder and army trousers.
The UN convention defines a mercenary as “any person who is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and…. is neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a party to the conflict.” Leonid Yosipovich Buryak was such a man. A Jew starting his career as an eighteen-year-old in the Airborne Brigade of Ukraine, he had served three years with the unit before he left after the fall of Soviet Union because of the poor conditions and pay to make his way to Paris, France where his sister was making a living as a prostitute. He had been there six months scraping a living as a bouncer or enforcer for his sister’s pimp when he walked past a recruiting office for the French Foreign Legion. Thinking that it represented a better opportunity of allowing him to make a living and have a career he quickly joined up to serve ten years, eventually reaching the rank of Sergeant Chef. In the Foreign Legion, he served in the Central African Republic, Rwanda, as part of the KFOR mission in Kosovo and Iraq along the way before finally leaving to make a living as a security consultant back in Bagdad and in Afghanistan before finding his real calling as a mercenary in Sierra Leone and the many miserable holes of Africa.
When the business began to dry up he signed up with the Libyans at the start of the Arab Spring, working with the Turaegs for six months in the bitter civil war, only quitting when the U.S. dollars stopped coming. He didn’t really care about the rights and wrongs of a side. He had killed a lot of men and women, even child soldiers, over the years. Instead, he dealt with it by telling himself as they weren’t his friends or family, it didn’t matter. Life was cheap in a war zone.
Despite that rather cynically cold outlook on life he had never discussed any of it with his French wife or his sons and being smart neither did they; instead they just accepted his money gratefully.
When Xurella asked him if he could oversee the training and general operations for Adwalland, he had asked only one question.
“How much, Mr. Martin?”
When he got the answer of $100,000 U.S. dollars with $50,000 up-front, he packed his bags that night and recruited as requested, the nine other Ukrainians all in their fifties, eager for the money and had also previously worked with Gaffadi’s Islamic legion when they were in the Soviet Union’s GRU, and two hundred Turaegs who had all worked with him previously in Libya and were fresh from fighting his old Alma Mata—the Legion in Mali.
He hadn’t bothered to tell Martin or Wilson about this particular meeting because the Principal’s liaison had asked him not to when he took him to one side on his arrival at the airport from Mumbai. Assuming that he was the man paying him he replied that wasn’t a problem, “As long as he kept paying him he would do as he asked,” he said to the young man.
The Interior Minister started their discussion with an update on the armored personnel carriers to which Buryak had replied politely that he was very pleased. Privately he was actually thinking, “The sooner they could start the operation the sooner he could get out this shit hole!”
“I want to be sure that we both understand each other, that your men follow my orders, not Martin’s or Wilson’s,” stated Wasir as the young house girl who doubled as a concubine for him brought them dates and dark bitter coffee refreshments.
“Of course, Sir!” replied Leo. He knew where this was going and he had no “special” loyalty to Martin or Wilson. In any case, he was absolutely sure those two were certainly getting more than him.
If this African warlord wanted him to ignore their orders, so be it. Instead, he figured it was because Martin was being greedy or maybe the warlord was cutting him out. Either way he didn’t care.
“As long as you keep paying me, you’re the boss,” he replied picking up a date and popping it his mouth.