Текст книги "Robert Ludlum's The Janson Command"

Автор книги: Robert Ludlum

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SIX

The Sikorsky S-76 had worked long and hard in the oil patch.

Fresh from the factory, the twin-turbine machine had flown ChevronTexaco executives out to the seismic vessels exploring Angola’s deepwater blocks. When the company started drilling, they replaced the fancy leather seats with aluminum ones and used the S-76 to ferry crew to the floating rigs. Long hours and salt water took their toll, as had dicey landings on sloped and slippery helipads. Eventually the company downgraded the helicopter to cargo runs before common sense dictated they sell it to an independent Italian company that traded it after several hard years to settle a debt to an equipment-leasing outfit. AngolLease ran it until a near-fatal hard landing bent its landing gear and shoved one of the struts through the cabin floor, which had led to jury-rigging the retraction mechanism. AngolLease passed it twelve hundred miles up the coast to Port-Gentil, Gabon, into the hands of LibreLift, a service operation owned by the pilots: an anorexic Frenchman with a sun-blasted face and a nicotine-yellowed walrus mustache, and a beefy Angolan wearing a patchwork of army uniforms, who also served as the helicopter’s mechanic.

Janson had no desire to take the panels off to confirm how worn its guts were. Judging only by loose rivets, oil streaks along its tail boom, and crazed Plexiglas, he figured he had flown in a lot worse. Jessica Kincaid had not and she mentioned as soon as they had their headsets on that she smelled a fuel leak.

“No problem,” said the pilot.

“You’re smelling the extra tanks in the cargo bay,” Janson explained. But the co-pilot/mechanic was quick to defend his brand-new composite tanks with crashworthy fuel cells that LibreLift would inherit after the job along with their mounting rafts. “Not auxiliary,” he assured Kincaid. “Main tank leak. No problem.”

She looked at Janson. “Am I supposed to be relieved?”

Janson pointed at the instrument panel. “You can relax unless you see one of these chip sensors light up.”

“Chips of what?”

“If they sense chips broken off the main bearings floating around the oil pan, the manual says: ‘Land while you still can.’ ”

“Glad to hear it.” Kincaid checked their rigid inflatable boat, the RPGs they’d separated from the lobsters, and her personal weapons, then strapped in and closed her eyes. The S-76 got clearance and lifted off with a racket of loose turbine bearings. Despite the ominous sound effects, Janson and Kincaid exchanged an approving glance. The pilot had a nice smooth touch. By the time his helicopter was whining and thudding west making 130 knots at four thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean both agents had fallen asleep. They awakened simultaneously in one hour.

“ Bateau délesteur,” said the Frenchman, pointing down at a little gray ship plodding through the murky sea. Janson glassed her. She was rust stained and heaped with cargo, a two-hundred-foot former OSV converted to freighting up and down the African coast. The main deck was crowded with used cars, pallets of bottled water, and lumpy shapes covered in blue poly tarps. With a three-deck wheelhouse sticking up in front and a fixed cargo crane in back, it offered no place to land a helicopter.

“Fast rope,” Janson said, and handed the glasses to Kincaid. The wheelhouse roof, the highest point on the ship, was the safe choice for the helicopter to hover while they went down the rope. But it was small, and in the middle spun a horizontal four-foot radar dish.

Janson radioed the ship’s captain on the short-range VHF channel the Angolan had specified to avoid transmitting on the general marine channel that anyone could monitor. The captain spoke only French. Janson passed the radio to Kincaid.

“Démonter la radar antenne, sil vous plait?”

The radar dish stopped spinning. While seamen climbed to the roof with tools and removed it, Janson and Kincaid attached the helicopter’s cargo hook to the inflatable’s harness. Then Janson and Kincaid put on their packs and rifles and rope gloves and snap-linked the bitter end of the fast rope to a cable donut ring anchored to the helicopter floor. Janson instructed the pilot to hover twenty meters above the wheelhouse.

The machine approached obliquely, angling in from the side. By now it was clear that the Frenchman was an exceptional pilot with light feet on his pedals, applying and reducing power smoothly. But unlike a ship captain, whose first responsibility was to his passengers, a helicopter pilot’s priorities were machine and crew first, customers second. The Frenchman would do anything he had to to keep from crashing, which would include a sudden departure while Janson or Kincaid was still on the rope.

Kincaid dropped the running end of the fast rope, which was coiled around a length of firewood, out the door. The thick, braided line uncoiled down to the roof of the wheelhouse and snaked around violently, whipped by the rotor wash. Janson took it in his rope gloves, clutched it to his body after running it between his thighs and around his right calf. Assault rifle hanging from a strap over his shoulder, barrel down, face turned aside, he swung away and slid down, controlling his descent on the rough surface by squeezing the line in his gloves. His weight straightened the rope. Sixty feet under the helicopter he landed on the roof.

Kincaid tipped the heavy RIB pack out the door and lowered it with the electric cable winch. Janson guided it to the deck beside him, signaled for her to crank the cable up, then steadied the fast rope for Jessica. She came down in three seconds and touched lightly beside him. He signaled the pilot to go up, and let the rope ease out of his hands.

They climbed down the ladder behind the house, stepped into the wheelhouse, and greeted their reluctant hosts.

* * *

THE CAPTAIN WAS so nervous that his small store of English deserted him. His first mate, a Congolese, spoke no English at all. Janson’s French was not up to the task. Kincaid took over and the captain quickly calmed down.

“Nicely done,” said Janson. “How’d you get him smiling?”

“He likes my French accent. He thinks I live in Paris. He wants to have dinner next time we’re both in the city. But we’ve got a problem. There’s a U.S. Coast Guard cutter patrolling between us and Isle de Foree.”

“I’ve been watching him on the radar,” Janson replied. The screen beside the silent helmsman showed a large ship twelve miles to the west. They had not seen her through the haze from the helicopter.

“What’s our Coast Guard doing six thousand miles from home?”

“Must be part of the Africa Partnership Station, maintaining a ‘persistent presence,’ as they call it. In other words, showing the flag in the oil patch.”

“Yeah, well, the captain’s concerned they’ll board us. Particularly if they spotted our helicopter on their radar. He wants to stash us in a hidey-hole down in the engine room.”

“Ask him where are the gunrunners?”

“Already hiding.”

Janson nodded to the captain and said to Jessica, “Assure the captain that we, too, have no desire to explain our presence to the United States Coast Guard. Tell him we’ll hide if the cutter decides we’re a Vessel of Interest. Let’s hump the boat undercover.”

The captain ordered seamen to help and they got the RIB pack onto the main deck under a blue tarp. The radar target drew nearer. At eight miles the cutter appeared as a light dot on the horizon. At five miles she raised a tall, knife-like narrow silhouette. At four miles a helicopter took off from her, circled out around them, and went back.

Then the cutter radioed a boarding hail identifying herself as the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Dallas, asserting their authority under the African Partnership Station. The captain answered requests for his ship’s name, cargo, port of departure, and destination.

Janson could hear chatter on the cutter’s bridge. It sounded like a lot of people were gathered around the radio. The captain muttered to Kincaid, who translated, “He says it’s probably just an exercise—they’ve got local sailors visiting.”

The Dallasannounced their intention to board and requested the captain to heave to.

“ Merde!” said the captain.

“ Merdefor sure,” said Janson “All right, let’s check out the hidey-hole.”

They put on their packs. The Congolese first mate led the way, down four deck levels of stairs, at the bottom of which he swung a heavy door on the deafening roar of two three-thousand-horsepower 16-cylinder Electro-Motive Diesel engines. He led them through the engine room and out the back into a quieter, dimly lit tween-decks space. Halfway to the stern, he rapped his knuckles on a gray-painted bulkhead, waited thirty seconds, and rapped again. The bulkhead, which appeared to be an immovable slab of steel welded to scantlings, slid aside with a grinding of metal on metal. Janson was relieved to see that the gunrunners knew their business.

Two men stepped into the light, a black Angolan and a mulatto South African.

“What is this?” asked the South African in nasal English. His eyes widened at the sight of Jessica Kincaid, who had stepped back and drawn a pistol to cover Janson.

“Room for two more?” asked Janson.

“Are you the bloody American mercs?”

“We are the bloody American mercs,” said Janson. “You are our bloody highly paid guides, Agostinho Kiluanji and Augustus Heinz. And the bloody Coast Guard is boarding. Why don’t we continue this conversation undercover?”

The Congolese mate who supposedly spoke no English nodded emphatically.

The South African asked, “Any chance of the crumpet putting away the artillery?”

“Soon as we are all inside.” Janson stepped past them into a gleaming stainless-steel chamber six feet in diameter and thirty feet long. He realized it was a tank originally installed to transport drilling mud.

“Clear!” he called to Kincaid. It was just the two men and a heap of gear, no one else holding a weapon. She and they stepped inside. The door slid shut with a clang that echoed. A single electric lantern provided light.

* * *

THE CONVERTED OSV stopped briefly ten miles offshore to hoist first the gunrunners’ heavily laden rigid inflatable and then Janson and Kincaid’s smaller RIB over the side. Then, as the ship hurried on toward Porto Clarence, Janson and Kincaid and Agostinho Kiluanji and Augustus Heinz paid out a long line between their boats so they would not get separated in the dark and motored toward the invisible coast. They navigated with handheld GPSs, but with no lights marking the channels, Janson and Kincaid would have to rely on the experienced gunrunners ahead to find their way in the swampy mouth of the shallow river.

The shore was dark, devoid of lights, apparently uninhabited, which was to be expected, as 90 percent of the population lived in Porto Clarence. The outboard motors were relatively quiet at moderate speed and their noise would be blown away from the shore by the land breeze descending from the mountainous interior, but not quiet enough to hear surf pounding the beach. Instead, the warning they were near came in the form of the seas steepening as the water grew shallow. Janson shortened up the line, while Kincaid drove, until the lead boat was only a few meters ahead and he could see the silhouettes of the men steering for the river.

Suddenly they could hear the surf. The water grew violent, tossing the rubber boat, and just as suddenly the sound moved to either side. They were inside the mouth. The gunrunners throttled back, quieting their motor. Kincaid followed suit, swearing quietly under her breath as she shoved the motor left and right, trying to follow the twisting route of the boat ahead. Then they were under trees, out of the wind, and the warm air grew warmer and gathered like soap on the skin. Mosquitos descended, buzzing angrily around the repellant they had slathered on their necks and faces.

Pale lights shone through the trees—oil lamps, Janson guessed by their yellowish glow. If their owners heard the mutter of the slow-turning outboards, they did not come closer to investigate. After what his carefully shielded GPS showed was a mile of movement inland, the boat ahead stopped and the engine went silent. Kincaid immediately choked their engine. In the quiet they heard insects sing and then the hollow grating sound of rubber on gravel as the boats drifted into a bank.

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 tska 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

Jessica 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. Theybelieved 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.

From this angle they saw a second cave spilling the same steady glow of electric light. Headquarters or hospital? In which cave was the doctor and which contained the FFM leaders, who would be heavily armed?

Janson and Kincaid had reached a critical point in their operation. They had no desire to get in a shoot-out with the doctor’s captors. Cross fires were indiscriminate and could get the man whose life they were attempting to save killed. Equally problematic was the effect killing the leadership would have on the revolution. While he was not interested in taking sides between the vicious Iboga and the insurgents who had slaughtered the crew of the Amber Dawn, it was clear to Janson that if there was a right side in the bloody civil war it was FFM, and he did not want to do anything to tilt the balance against them. Success would demand speed and stealth, in and out quickly and quietly.

The wind was growing stronger, which would help. Sleeping men would not hear them over the constant rustle of millions of leaves. They waited, spelling watches. An hour before dawn, the lights in one cave went out.

“Bosses turning in,” Janson whispered. “Give them a few minutes to fall asleep.”

Ten minutes passed.

“All right, let’s do it.”

* * *

IT WAS NOT the first time that Terry Flannigan had awakened in dreamy disarray as a woman covered his mouth with her hand, pressed her lips to his ear, and whispered, “Be quiet.” Husbands on business trips had a way of coming home early.

“We’re getting you out of here,” she whispered.

He’d heard that before, too. Into the bathroom and out the window. Or the guest room. Or, God help him, once in the closet, like in a New Yorkercartoon.

“Open your eyes,” she said, “if you understand me.”

Whatever groggy dream he’d been having came to a crashing halt when he saw the low rock ceiling of the FFM cave on Pico Clarence. A woman in commando gear was crouching over him, her face darkened with camo paint, her eyes intense.

“Who?” he whispered against her hand.

“Friends,” she whispered, and Flannigan knew fear. No “friends” knew he was here. With Janet murdered, only her murderers knew he had been captured when they killed her and sank Amber Dawn.

“What friends?”

“ASC,” she whispered, “your employer. We’re taking you home– You awake? Snap out of it!”

ASC? What the hell was going on? How the hell did American Synergy know he had been on the boat? He had doctored for oil companies long enough to respect and fear the enormous power they wielded in West Africa. He had seen what they were capable of. In remote places they were above whatever law existed. No way he could trust them.

Afraid she would see his confusion, Flannigan turned his face, only to see more death—a sentry sprawled on the stone floor. She raised her hand so he could speak again and he whispered, “Did you kill him? He was just a kid.”

“Animal trank dart,” she snapped. “Two cc’s carfentanil citrate. Get up!”

Terry Flannigan’s gaze shifted to the pool of light cast by a bulb over Ferdinand Poe’s cot. He shook his head. “I can’t leave him.”