The Janson Command (9 page)

Moving quickly, they pulled the boats inside a cave-like space that the gunrunners had cut under mangrove knees that arched into the water. Janson sensed more than saw men waiting there and for an awful split second thought they’d been discovered. Instead, whispered greetings were exchanged and the men started unloading the gunrunners’ boat.

Janson tapped Kincaid’s shoulder. She stepped into his cupped hands, onto his shoulders, and pulled herself up between the mangrove knees. After a minute of silent watching, she toe-tapped his shoulder and he passed up her pack, then his, and hoisted himself after her. When Kiluanji and Heinz and their helpers finished loading backpacks they started inland on a path that led away from the river. Janson and Kincaid followed them. He checked the time. Three more hours of dark.

The path was at first a sort of narrow causeway across swamp with water on either side. But within a mile the land began to rise gently, and they left the water behind. They came to a dirt road, watched carefully, and crossed it quickly. Shortly they came to another, this one laid with a surface of oil, and crossed it, too, the land still rising. Dawn arrived abruptly, revealing geometric rows of green shrubs interrupted by wooden shacks. A familiar aroma indicated they had reached the cropland that supported Isle de Foree’s coffee plantations.

They forged inland, skirting shabby buildings, quickening their pace as the strengthening light shredded cover. At a raised concrete road, the gunrunners signaled a stop while they listened for vehicles. Heinz came back and said to Janson, “You should go ahead at this point. You’ll make better time climbing than we will with our lot.”

Janson gauged the land ahead. It appeared to rise more steeply and the belt of plantations came to an end. He nodded to Jessica, who quickly removed thirty thousand euros in banded one hundreds from his pack and passed them to the South African. It represented more than Heinz and Kiluanji would make carrying the pistols and drugs.

Janson offered his hand. “Thank you.”

“Strange.”

“What?”

“No patrols. No presidential guard. Not even the guys we bribe. Haven’t seen a soul.”

“What does it mean?”

“Busy somewhere else. Cranking up an offensive.”

“With the tanks?”

“All I know is I want to get in and out fast and you ought to do the same.”

“In other words, speed it up,” said Kincaid.

They bounded up the bank, crossed the concrete road, and broke into a run.

* * *

ABOVE THE CROPLAND
belt thick jungle thrived in the humid heat. Kincaid’s pack weighed seventy pounds, Janson’s ninety. Streaming perspiration, they alternated a mile of running with a mile of walking up the ever-steepening trail. They covered three and a half miles in the first hour, two in the second as running became climbing. The reward was a slight drop in temperature and humidity as the jungle began thinning into rain forest with a high canopy. Here among the tall trees they stopped. They were beyond the reach of the dictator’s troops that FFM had fought to a standstill at this level. This was a narrow no-man’s-land. Beyond it FMM ruled their closely guarded territory that rose to their camp on the mountain of Pico Clarence.

From this point on they should wait until dark, when their night-fighting gear would give them the advantage of seeing while not being seen. But if the dictator was launching an offensive, did they have time to wait? So far things had gone like clockwork. They had gotten every break. Now was thank-you time. They had to pay back their good luck by taking a chance.

In half a mile, Kincaid, who was on the point, suddenly froze. There was no need to signal Janson, no need even to
tsk
a warning from her wireless lip microphone to Janson’s earpiece. Her body language said it all—hidden sentries positioned to ambush—and Janson stopped moving instantly.

SEVEN

J
essica Kincaid stood in shadow and she did not move.

Janson could not see what she had seen. Nor could he see whether he was in the sentry’s field of vision she had stepped into. Without moving his head, he probed his surroundings through slitted eyes and decided that he was partly shielded by the three-foot-diameter trunk of a massive ironwood tree.

She stood still for so long that a shaft of sunlight that penetrated the canopy crept from the rough bark of the tree to the dull cloth of her pack and across her shoulder to the photon-absorbent camouflage paint on her face. Twenty minutes passed like two hours. Twenty more. Janson felt his limbs stiffen. His knees ached. His ankles locked. Gravity clutched the heavy pack on his back. Blood sank, drawn by gravity, pooling in his feet.

He imagined the outside of his body, his skin and clothing, as an unmoving shell and moved inside it, tensing and releasing muscle and sinew, clenching and unclenching, resisting the crush of inertia. He heard a faint rasping noise. What was it? He strained his ears. What was it? It rasped, again. Mechanical. Then a soft
click
. A weapon cocked? Not Jessica’s. She hadn’t budged. An old-fashioned revolver hammer clicking to full? His mind was forming pictures, telling stories. A rain-forest rebel cut off from the modern world. A rusty old gun. A grandfather’s gift. Drawing a bead on Jessica? Again the rasp and
click
. A cigarette lighter? A disposable butane cigarette lighter? Janson smelled tobacco smoke. A puff of it drifted through the sunlight on a downward trajectory.

What they did next was Jessica’s call. He could not see what she saw. Another drift of smoke. The sentry was not focusing, slipping out of his zone of attentiveness. They had to take advantage.

Tsk!
in Janson’s earpiece.

Kincaid signaling, but still not moving, which meant that she was telling Janson,
He might see me, but he can’t see you. I can’t move. You can. The smoke tells you where he is.

Janson saw his route, a step back, a step closer to the ironwood, another up to it, glide around, and come up behind. Then what? Because Jessica was signaling even more by not acting. The sentry was smoking a cigarette. One hand occupied, eyes following the smoke, eyes half-closing as he drew the cigarette for another pleasurable drag. Nicotine and methane gases were dulling the edges of his awareness. It was an opportunity to strike—swivel the short barrel of her sound-suppressed MP5K and fire in a split second—but she was not striking. More than one sentry? Or a man alone, whose death would be noticed when he didn’t report? Or the leading edge of a picket line bunched so close that others would hear the shot?

Janson stepped back, planting his foot carefully in case a numbed ankle or knee collapsed or locked up. Now close to the tree, now pressing the rough bark, now sliding around it, behind it, his field of vision opening up, broadening, his eyes sweeping carefully upward to the low branch or shooting platform from where the smoke was descending.

Something moved. A combat boot patched with duct tape arcing back and forth, the unconscious motion of tedium, a bored sentry swinging his foot like a pendulum. Janson continued edging around the ironwood until he could trace the line of the combat boot, to bunched camouflage cloth emerging from it, to the insurgent’s shin and calf, to his knee, to the heavy automatic pistol in an improvised tactical rig made of black poly tarp strapped to his thigh, to the long barrel of the World War Two–era Russian machine gun lying across his lap.

Janson drew a knife.

The sentry’s neck and face were obscured by leaves. His arms were bare, perspiration shining on his dark skin, but his chest was protected by a threadbare camouflage-patterned combat vest. If not bulletproof, it was still solid protection against a blade. Janson scanned the area around him. He was reasonably sure the man was alone. Anyone bored and stupid enough to be smoking would surely be talking if he had someone to talk to. The man took another deep drag and blew a smoke ring that descended toward Jessica.

Janson plotted a run straight at the man. Four steps, then up with the knife under his chin where the vest would do him no good at all. But to kill the sentry would be a last resort—or instant response if he suddenly spotted Jessica. Their best bet of getting into the camp and getting their hands on the doctor was to go in and out completely undetected. Killing a sentry would not serve, unless he left them no choice.

Suddenly the soldier jumped from the limb. He dropped the few feet to the forest floor, revealing the face of a bored teenager. Janson gripped his knife, waiting for Jessica to fire. But she did not move and an instant later Janson saw why. The kid had not seen them. He was slinging his machine gun over his shoulder and pawing at his fly. He urinated on the same tree he had jumped down from. When he was done he zipped up, turned on his heel, and headed up the path, moving in complete silence.

Janson found Jessica leaning against a tree and sucking on a water bottle, expressionless until he said, ���Nice.”

Her eyes lit. “I was never so glad to smell a cigarette in my life. Thought the son of a bitch would never move.”

They stopped there and slept in alternating hour increments through the afternoon, standing watch for each other.

* * *

AT NIGHT JANSON
and Kincaid were in their element, piercing the dark with panoramic digital sensor-fusion/enhanced night-vision goggles. A vast improvement over an early Air Force design, the $26,000 JF-Gen3 PSFENVG-Ds employed multiple image-intensifying tubes to give them command of the night with crisp vision ahead and nearly sixty degrees to either side.

Infrared enhancement made flesh-and-blood targets appear brighter than inanimate objects. The FFM sentry Janson spotted leaning on a tree looked shinier than the tree and the assault rifle cradled in his arms. Among the dark contours of boulders behind the sentry, the soldiers stationed as the sentry’s backup glowed like copper flames.

Their panoramics were linked by radio. Kincaid, who was in the lead, again, was looking down, concentrating on silent passage over rough ground. Janson shared the sharp, green image that he saw by toggling a switch that opened a horizontally split screen in her goggles, displaying the danger ahead as well as the ground at her feet.

They stopped at a safe distance from the sentries and picked their way through a route around them.

The temperature had dropped to a comfortable lower sixties and Kincaid and Janson climbed at a good pace. They stumbled onto the charred wreckage of a helicopter. It had been there for a while. Vines were creeping over the tail rotor, which was eerily intact, but the odor of burnt rubber still hung in the humid air. Janson signaled a stop and cautiously scanned the treetops.

Now his screen split as Jessica shared her image of a machine-gun platform a hundred feet off the ground, right under the canopy. No flesh-and-blood bright spots. The gun was unmanned but ready, a heavy old Soviet model easily capable of downing a slow-moving helicopter lacking high-tech sensors. They passed another downed aircraft and another. Above each heap of charred wreckage was another treetop gun emplacement. The FFM did not screw around.

Tsk!
sounded in Janson’s earpiece, followed by a whispered, “What the hell is that?”

Janson heard it, too. A faint droning noise high overhead that once heard was not forgotten. He exchanged baffled lime-green glances with Jessica. “Can’t be,” she whispered.

Except both had heard it and drawn the same impossible but indisputable conclusion from the familiar sound. High in the night sky an unmanned Reaper hunter-killer combat drone, armed with Hellfire anti-armor missiles and laser-guided five-hundred-pound bombs, was circling the insurgent camp on Pico Clarence. Had President for Life Iboga somehow gotten his hands on the deadliest weapon in America’s arsenal?

“Look!” Kincaid whispered.

Through their panoramics they saw a low ridge of volcanic stone, pocked with shallow caves. FFM sentries were running toward and diving into the caves.
They
believed it was a Reaper.

Janson tapped Jessica’s shoulder. It was baffling but not their fight—at least not now—and definitely not their priority, which was to get inside the rebel camp, unobserved. He gestured for them to take advantage of the opportunity to move on through the space vacated by the sentries. The sound grew faint. By the time Janson and Kincaid were around the sentries, it had stopped.

Ten minutes later they heard another strange noise, different from the first, though also mechanical. They stopped and listened carefully. More vibration than sound, it resonated very faintly, in the far distance to the south, like the rumble of a freight train or of heavy trucks on a highway. But the only trains on Isle de Foree were narrow-gauge crop cars on the coffee plantations, and the rails Janson and Kincaid had crossed were rusty, indicating that wheels rolled on them only during the harvest. The nation’s one highway, a short stretch twenty miles down island that connected the capital city of Porto Clarence to the President for Life Iboga International Airport, was way too far to hear.

A warm wind sprang up, rustling the forest canopy, and the rumble seemed to cease or was muffled. Janson and Kincaid forged onward and skirted some sentry posts and passed beneath numerous unmanned anti-helicopter machine-gun platforms. Then the panoramics began to register a strong glow ahead, which grew brighter, into a general flowering of light from hundreds of cook fires and lanterns. They were inside the picket lines, past the sentries, into the insurgent camp.

Any natural night vision possessed by the troops was blinded by their fires, while the panoramics’ enhancement software adjusted instantly to changes in light levels. Janson and Kincaid moved surely, scoping safe routes toward the muffled buzz of a portable gasoline-powered generator. Electricity was a rarity in the primitive encampment, which meant that the generator was near the headquarters and very likely whatever structure they were using for a hospital.

Tsk.

Janson stopped.

Kincaid had found it, the mouth of a large cave spilling steady white light into the dark. They had concluded earlier that the doctor would almost certainly sleep in the hospital to be near his patient and to make it easy for his captors to keep an eye on him. Janson and Kincaid worked their way toward it and sheltered in a clump of closely spaced trees. The night goggles showed little bright green dots running around the bark—ants feeding on something sticky.