The Devil's Handshake (38 page)

“
Like it’s supposed to!”
Navjot answered, with a wry smile still trying to put her at ease
before going on to describe both his and Ali’s suspicions that the
Russians were on to the operation due to the gunship being
impounded.

Their theory was a stretch, more Navjot’s as
Ali wasn’t that convinced, despite backing him with an
authorization to deploy, that for the sake of appearance with his
presence in Adawaland they would ensure the Russians, fearing a
regime change was about to take place, didn’t up the timetable by
landing troops before their Ambassador officially took up
residence,.

“
No self-respecting
billionaire is going to put himself in harm’s way due to the risk
of things going wrong,” Navjot stated, ignoring the fact that Ali
wasn’t fully behind the plan either.

Clara shook her head.

“
I still consider it a
fucking risk. What happens if they grab you?” she said, using
almost the same line Ali had yesterday over the secure
line.

“
Then I am a star on the
wall!” Navjot answered flippantly referring to the wall at Langley
where all the fallen agents were honored.

He didn’t need Clara or Ali to tell him that.
He knew it was a huge risk, but Navjot had rationalized that it was
one he had to take due to the pressures of time working against
them. That didn’t mean though he should not have a backup plan in
place, that he done by putting Rob Ashley on standby back in Dubai,
but again for operational security reasons, he chose to keep that
from Clara for the simple reason she had no knowledge of Rob’s
identity having never met him.

Finally, getting the message sensing she had
almost certainly pushed her friend and colleague far enough, Clara
reluctantly accepted his decision.

“
Now having heard bullshit
from everybody else can I have a proper update, please?” Navjot
asked again with his smile returned before offering her a drink
from the bar.

Forty-five minutes later, the attractive aid
worker left the room and made her way back out of the hotel and got
into her Land Cruiser.

As she did Navjot, still in his room, looked
at his watch. Seeing that he had about an hour before he had to
meet Wasir again, he undressed and went for a shower so he could
think through the effect of what he had just been told to him by
Clara.

“
So Litchfield has ten
Russian special forces members guarding him!” he told himself as
the jets of water hit his face. That meant with Litchfield’s own
team of four they had to deal with fourteen highly trained security
officers plus the team of twenty ex-Gurkhas that were in charge of
guarding the TLH assets in Adwalland, whom he had reasoned
Litchfield would certainly be able to draw upon.

In his mind he had discounted Jawari’s own
men due to their lack of skills and having assessed Wasir’s men on
his previous trips he figured they could be easily neutralized;
experienced fighters yes they were, but organized, no. “As long as
it stays that way, we should be okay!” he convinced himself as he
began to wash his hair.

To the sounds of the evening prayers echoing
around the city and needing privacy to make his call, Igor entered
his hotel room. He too checked for listening and monitoring devices
then pulled up the stocky aerial on his Codex phone and dialed the
number for Sergei Andreyevich.

Instantly his call was picked up.

“
Sergei Andreyevich,” Igor
started the call respectfully. “The President, within the next
thirty minutes, will be sending the Minister of Foreign Affairs a
formal request for assistance from Russian Armed Forces under the
terms of their cooperation agreement fearing an attempt by foreign
powers to overthrow his government,” said Igor.

“
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.

“
Excellent,” Wasir said
before going on to explain that when the personnel carriers would
arrive, and when the operation started he wanted him to take one of
the vehicles and some men then drive to Lughaya and carry out a
unique mission on his behalf.

At the end of the description of what was
needed, Buryak just nodded.

“
I require a one-off
payment,” he said.

What the warlord was asking him to do would
almost certainly grab the world’s attention, something he knew
Martin was almost rabid about to the point of distraction, so much
so the Englishman had ordered him to keep an eye on a couple of
freelance stringers at Rays Hotel and left him with instructions to
take them out when the action started.

“
How much?” Asked Wasir
popping his own date into his mouth while stroking the young
terrified child that brought them refreshments.

“
Thirty thousand U.S.
dollars,” replied the former Foreign Legion Sergeant Chef, ignoring
the whines of the young girl, figuring that it sounded
reasonable.

At least this way Buryak knew that he would
be able to head home to Camile, his wife, with at least eighty
thousand U.S. dollars in cash. Experience taught him that it was
unlikely that Martin would pay him the full hundred thousand,
having heard on the grapevine that he had been struggling to pay
his other men who were working for some of his other mining
companies.

“
That is a lot of money, Mr.
Leo!” replied the former pirate in an attempt to bargain despite
knowing it would be expensive as the targets were very high profile
and had been specially chosen to get a response from the
neighboring Americans in Djibouti. Yet he also knew he had little
choice but to agree to the man’s terms as time was against him. The
ex-pirate decided to trust his instincts as he reflected
that.