“This isn’t going to be pleasant,” he said. For either of them, he thought, but most of all for him. “You know that.”
Mirghani nodded. He looked, if not quite as nervous as he had during the flight to Darfur less than a week ago, then close to it.
“I would place the call myself if it were possible,” he said, his frank gaze taking White a bit by surprise. Damned if he didn’t seem to mean it; the man deserved credit for his accountability. “Unfortunately, I do not believe it would be the wisest of proposals.”
White could have almost managed a grin. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “I appreciate the thought, Ishmael. I’m serious. Like I told you, though, his anger is something I can accept. I don’t know whether you can understand, but it’s his disappointment that will be most difficult. He entrusted me with an operation of enormous magnitude and the upshot…”
He let the sentence trail off. What exactly would the upshot be? He didn’t, couldn’t know, and supposed that uncertainty, translated as possibility, might yet be his saving grace. Yes, if he had it to do over again, he would have accompanied Hassan al-Saduq to Cameroon for his meet with the bloody pirate. Would have accompanied him aboard the yacht, overseen the entire money transfer. And whoever had boarded the boat and captured him would have had much more to handle than Saduq’s cheap, amateurish excuse for a security team. Yes, he thought, a great deal more.
But that was behind him, an error that could not be undone-but whose damage still might be limited. One of the most vital lessons he had learned in his day was that survival often hinged on untethering the past before its weight dragged you down into the muck of failure. The thing was just to stay on track.
He lifted the phone to his ear, thumbed in a number in America. He didn’t have long to wait; none to his surprise, it took only two rings before his party answered. Some version of the news, however, sketchy, would have reached him by now.
“Yes?” he asked over the phone’s encrypted channel.
“Condor, this is-”
“I know who it is. I also know the reason for your call. I’ve been expecting it.”
White could almost picture his baleful glare. “Sir, I don’t want to rehash whatever you already might have heard. It’s clear we have a problem…”
“We have a problem, all right. A fucking monster of a problem. Who were those people in Limbe? Can you tell me that?”
“No, sir. The question’s been with me every waking minute since it happened. They’re saying in the media it was an EU antipiracy team that was conducting a probe into our man’s activities-”
“And you believe it?”
White inhaled, exhaled. He was thinking he could lie here, make it easier. Except he couldn’t, not to the man at the other end of the line. “No. Or only partially. It makes for a good blind.”
“The cover story should be true in its own right. Like that search for the Titanic, the glory hound that dove on her wants to go waltzing through her grand ballroom and show movies on television. But first he’s got to find a submarine the Russians sunk in the Cold War. Office of Naval Intelligence pays his way, but he never tells the frog scientists aboard his research ship his real mission.”
“Yes, sir. Exactly.”
“So you believe somebody here at home was working with the EU task force?”
“I’m inclined to think so, yes. The timing doesn’t seem a coincidence-”
“And your shit antennae probably tell you there’s more than we’re sniffing on the surface.”
“Yessir,” White said. “A standoff on the street near the marina, the seizure of the yacht, and most of all our man being kept under tight wraps…does have a feel about it.”
“Have you spoken to the Exile?”
“Not yet, sir. He’s been out of phone and radio contact. But I expect to be in touch with him within the next few hours-”
“ Listen to me,” Condor interrupted. “You damn well better get in touch with him. You can send a carrier pigeon, or you can sprout wings. You can do whatever the hell it takes under the sun, moon, and stars. But we aren’t going to be passive. I want this operation’s timetable ramped up.”
“Yes, I don’t see that we have any alternative. But there are eventualities we can’t altogether control. The delivery, for example-”
“Those thugs took our money and we have to be concerned with delivery?”
“Sir-”
“No. I understand contingencies. But I’m not hanging on them. I refuse to accept that, and I refuse to be advised about them… Am I making myself clear?”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Then get this moving. It doesn’t matter who’s onto it. You stay two steps ahead of them. I know you’re capable. I’m counting on you, White. Get it moving now. ”
White nodded with the phone still against his ear, staring across at Mirghani, meeting his gaze with his own even as he realized the line had gone silent, leaving only the odd echoing silence particular to Satcom links.
He sat motionless for a while, immersed in his thoughts.
“Well?” Mirghani asked. “How did you fare?”
White gave a slow shrug, lowered the phone.
“As I’d expected,” he said finally.
CHAPTER 18
SUDAN
Navigating under cover of night’s darkness with their sophisticated GPS systems, the pirates had pulled their long, flat cargo barges to shore at Zula on the Bay of Arafali, some 50 kilometers south of the far busier port of Massawa, with its commercial dhow and tourist boat traffic, American naval base, police stations, and railway line. Thousands of years in the past this tiny Eritrean village had been an extension of Adulis, a major center of trade within the vast and influential Kingdom of Aksum, later to be known as Ethiopia. In the modern era, with the great empires fractured and degraded, their glory crumbled into sand, it was a sparsely populated belt of semiarid Sahel, with the thatch huts of its native tribesmen dotting the land near occasional springs and wadis, and stretches of featureless dun-colored terrain, over which archeologists would bump along in their 4x4s while heading toward the ancient ruins and excavations a stone’s throw to the north.
Standing very straight in his desert camouflage uniform, his hands planted on his hips above a nylon web belt-its pistol holster on the right, an ammunition pack on the left-the commander moved his gaze along the dockside, where half the total consignment of Zolfaqar MBTs and ANSAT/Sharaf combat helos had been discharged onto waiting heavy equipment transports. He would have preferred receiving the arms and equipment in a single delivery, and expedience was hardly his principal reason. It would be a sufficient challenge to get the trucks across the border without detection even once; twice invited complications and escalated the already considerable risks. But the pirates had wisely transferred the shipment from its original Ukrainian freighter onto a pair of smaller barges, and there had been restrictions on the size and weight of the loads those aging vessels could carry. That aside, the commander himself had corresponding practical and logistical limits. Seventy-five feet long from end to end, his giant tractor trailers could travel between 400 and 600 miles cross-country at a fair enough clip given the inhospitable desert landscape, their 500-horsepower diesel engines fueled by massive driver- and passenger-side gasoline tanks. Still, it would take two trips to move all the materiel to the staging ground, whatever quantity the pirates were able to bring with them tonight. The bottom line was that he had just so many available trucks.
Now he reached for the canteen strapped over his shoulder, removed its cap, and took a drink of tepid water, swishing it around his mouth before he gulped it down. It was now almost two o’clock in the morning, six hours since the Hangarihi had guided the barges ashore and deployed their off-load ramps. His men had since driven the Zolfaqars onto the trailers and put their backs into manually rolling the helicopters from the barges on metal tow carts, grunting and sweating as they hastened to complete their arduous work so the convoy could set out with many hours of darkness still ahead.