“That’s the sink hole,” Adebowale confirmed. “That spot there ate into the river bank.”
Sam looked at Tom and Adebowale. “Everyone ready?”
“Good to go,” they both confirmed.
Sam said, “All right. Set watches to 19:05 in five, four, three, two, one, mark. Good luck.”
Sam placed his regulator in his mouth, inflated his buoyancy control device so he would be mildly positively buoyant, and secured his dive mask. He checked that his Heckler & Koch MP5 was attached to his right arm, and his bag of C4 explosives was secure in its dry bag. He looked at Tom and Adebowale. “All right team. See you down there.”
He picked up the sea scooter, and stepped onto the helicopter skids. In one quick movement Sam pressed his mask against his face and stepped out. A split second later, he dipped into the dark, murky waters of the Tumba River and disappeared.
Chapter One Hundred and Five
Two thousand four hundred and eighty miles away, in Malta’s Grand Harbor, all was quiet inside the Maria Helena. Elise stared anxiously at four separate computer monitors. Each one feeding her different information about the mission. She had a number of background programs running. Each one aimed at providing information that might affect the mission, such as sudden changes in the movement of people, and social media changes.
And despite all that information being fed to her, there was nothing that would have any effect on the mission. It made her feel frustrated and redundant, where she was usually confident and used to providing valuable digital information, or solutions throughout an operation. The clock at the base of the computer screen displayed the current time in the DRC as — 7:20 p.m.
They’ll be in the helicopter by now.
The thought only confirmed her discomfort with her position. For all the information coming in, there was nothing new to help with the mission from her end. She shook her head. It was unlike her to feel redundant, and even less like her to even care. She’d built a life, a very good one, on being self-sufficient and looking after herself. Elise forced herself to smile. She didn’t care whether she was needed or not, the reason she was troubled was because she was worried about Sam — and Tom and Genevieve, too, for that matter. She didn’t care either way about Zara or Adebowale. Not that she wished them any harm, of course. They seemed like good people. They had chosen their own paths in life, and it didn’t coincide with hers.
But the other three were her friends. More than that. They were part of the only family she’d ever known. Sam in particular, was like a father to her. And Genevieve and Tom might as well have been her rough and ready siblings.
They will be fine. They’re all tough.
Elise needed a distraction. She knew she shouldn’t. Genevieve would kill her just for having a look, but she needed to know the truth. Her curiosity had gotten the better of her, and it was a welcome distraction. On a separate tab, she opened google, and typed a single word.
Solntsevo
The search engine spat out thousands of reference pages, but her eyes never glanced past the first one.
Solntsevskaya Bratva
She clicked on the first link. It was a Wikipedia page. But it provided her as much as she needed to know. More than she should have learned and enough to make her wish she hadn’t. She read the article once.
The Solntsevskaya Bratva was the biggest and most powerful crime syndicate of the Russian mafia. Founded in the late 1980s by Sergei Mikhailov, a former waiter who had served a prison term for fraud, the organization now has ties to global organized crime syndicates, ranging from drugs and weapon sales, through to internet fraud and money laundering.
The syndicate used a group of violent mercenaries and assassins to maintain its foothold in each area, while using the concept of a ten-fold response to any trespass against them as a deterrent. One such example was in 2007, when a member of a Mexican Drug Cartel killed a member of the Solntsevskaya Bratva, during a hostile takeover of the lucrative cocaine industry in Atlanta. They tracked the man down and systematically killed every person on his Facebook page. They started with the person’s immediate family, his relatives, his local connections. And when all that was done, they started in on his friends list. By the time the FBI opened a special investigation into the massacre, a hundred and eighteen persons had been killed.
Elise stopped reading, as the article turned to the methods the organization used to kill people, and instead, skimmed to the end of the page.
She read the final paragraph. Re-read it, and then closed the tab completely.
Sergei Mikhailov had a daughter, Anastasiya Mikhailov, who disappeared in 2014 at the age of twenty eight. It has been widely disputed that she was taken by one of the competing crime syndicates, in retaliation to something the Solntsevskaya Bratva had done. But no organization has come forward and claimed the kidnapping, and no one has ever seen her since.
A small beeping sound, coming from her computer, informed her that one of the background programs, searching for any changes in the frequency of news or comments on social media regarding General Ngige, had shown a sudden spike in information. She clicked on the program, and quickly scrolled through the notes.
This can’t be right.
Nearly fifteen thousand comments on social media confirmed the news. It was possible it could be fake, and artificially being proliferated by those who didn’t know the truth. But chances were, it was true.
Elise opened a new program. It was a DRC database for Births, Deaths, and Marriages. She quickly typed in the name, Adebowale. Followed by the string query, Known Siblings.
She looked at the results and swore. “What have we done?”
Next to her, the phone started to ring. It was a digitally encrypted satellite phone that used a combination of privately owned and proxy satellites to secure communications — and there was only one person who ever called it.
Elise picked up the phone. “Good evening, Madam Secretary.”
She listened carefully, without interrupting until the Secretary of Defense had finished. She jotted a few notes down.
Her face hardened. “Understood, Madam Secretary. I’ll do my best to let him know.”
She hung up the phone and ran up the stairs onto the bridge. Matthew, who had even less to do than she did, was sitting at his desk, tapping his fingers on the old teak.
Elise didn’t wait for him to greet her. “We need to abort the mission!”
Matthew’s face hardened. “We can’t abort the mission now. I just received confirmation from Genevieve that Sam, Tom and Adebowale have been dropped into the water, and have started their dive. There’s no way to get in contact with them until the mission’s complete. Why, what’s happened?”
She swore three times. It was loud, profane, and unusual for her. She placed the palm of her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes. There had to be a way to get a message through to them. She opened them again. “It’s Adebowale.”
“What about him?”
“He’s working for General Ngige.”
Matthew said, “But he had the secret passwords used by the United Sovereign of Kongo, and was able to get information through their coded communications? What’s happened?”
“I just spoke to the Secretary of Defense. Her people in Intelligence just informed her that General Ngige was an only child. His parents were killed in the early nineties, and as an orphan he spent time in what was then The Lake Tumba Gold Mine. You know who also spent time in that same mine, and was his best friend growing up?”