Текст книги "Robert Ludlum's The Janson Command"

Автор книги: Robert Ludlum

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“What?”

“He’s a mess. I’m the only doctor.”

She rocked back on her heels and Flannigan got a better look at her. Skinnier than he usually went for, but a fine face and incredible lips. He had never seen eyes so focused, bright as ball bearings. She shot a glance across the cave, and a commando broad in the chest and light on his feet materialized at her side.

“He won’t go,” she whispered. “Won’t leave his patient.”

To Flannigan’s astonishment, a smile crossed the guy’s stern face. “I’ll be damned,” he said, and thrust out a powerful hand. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Doc.”

“Can we take him with us?” Flannigan asked.

“No way,” said the woman.

“They’ve got some lightweight stretchers, here,” Flannigan persisted. “How many men do you have?”

“You’re looking at it,” said the woman.

“ Twoof you?”

Suddenly both looked sharply toward the mouth of the cave, heads cocked like animals. A moment later he heard it, too, the hollow thudding sound of helicopters. In seconds they heard yells in the camp and pounding feet as the insurgents ran to their treetop machine-gun emplacements.

“Three machines, maybe four,” the man said.

Janson and Kincaid exchanged puzzled glances, hurried to the mouth of the cave, and peered out.

Paul Janson said, “Something’s up.”

“It’s suicide to attack.”

Already the machine guns farther out were chattering—quick, expert bursts—and Janson and Kincaid could picture the hail of heavy slugs shredding a helicopter’s thin skin. Rocket fire whooshedand the rotor thudding changed timbre as the slow-moving helicopters shot back and tried to maneuver for advantage.

“Suicide,” said Janson. “Unless—”

“It’s a feint! Iboga’s attacking on the ground.”

They heard a tremendous explosion. A ball of fire crashed through the leaf canopy. A helicopter had blown up. A pillar of white smoke shot from the forest floor. The thudding noise grew more urgent. The guns fired longer bursts. A second explosion sent a shock wave through the canopy. It was followed by a moment of eerie silence. Then the silence was broken by a concerted roar of powerful engines and the clanking of steel tracks.

“Tanks!” said Janson. “The T-72s.”

EIGHT

Heralded by the deafening roar of their 125mm main guns, tanks climbed the mountain firing four rounds a minute. High-explosive fragmentation projectiles cut broad swaths of blasted wood through the forest. Toppled trees ripped enormous gashes in the rain-forest canopy and crushed the encampment’s makeshift shelters.

Surprise was total; the noise of the forty-ton armored monsters creeping into position to attack had been muffled by the rotor thud of the daring helicopter attack and the guns of the defenders. Machine guns churned from the steel hulls, raking the panicked FFM troops who were fleeing for their lives.

Janson gauged the range of the muzzle flashes through the trees to be less than a quarter mile. “We promised not to start a shooting war. So a rumble in the jungle comes to us.”

“Run or fight,” said Kincaid. “We have about ten seconds to make up our minds.”

On their own, two operators trained in evasion and escape tactics could calculate the flow of battle and get away. The odds would shift against them if they took the doctor. If they took the doctor’s patient, too, they would all die.

Flannigan darted up behind them. “Give me a gun.”

“Do you know how to use one?”

“Hell no. It’s for Minister Poe. He cannot face being captured again. He wants to go down fighting and save the last bullet for himself.”

Janson and Kincaid shared a grim glance. Janson said, “The Russians export their crappiest tanks. ‘Monkey models’ with light armor, lousy sights, no infrared, no laser. And they carry their ammunition inside the crew compartment. Hit them right and the entire turret flies off like a jack-in-the box.”

“Otherwise they’re still tanks?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

Kincaid said, “Your call.”

Janson told Flannigan, “Tell your patient he will not be captured.”

They opened their packs without another word and unlimbered the disposable single-shot preloaded Russian rocket launchers. Five RPG-22s and one more-advanced RPG-26.

“Take the 26,” Janson told Kincaid. “You’re better with it.”

They headed down the hill toward the sound of the guns. Men were running past scrambling up the hill the other way, wide-eyed with shock. Acrid smoke swirled so thickly it blocked the early-morning sun. The ground was littered with rifles, helmets, even shoes thrown down by the stampeded troops.

An eighth of a mile from the firing, Jessica Kincaid spotted a tall tree to which wooden cross slats had been nailed as crude rungs that led up to one of the anti-helicopter machine-gun platforms. She climbed with three of the thirty-inch launcher tubes slung across her back, a load that added twenty-five pounds to the MP5 submachine gun, M1911 pistol, spare magazines, knife, Kevlar helmet, ceramic vest, GPS, spare batteries, medical kit, knife, and water she was already carrying.

As she caught her breath on the platform, cannon fire brought down another clump of trees, which opened up a half-mile view of the tanks and a mass of ground troops behind them. A flash of yellow caught her eye. She found it in her binoculars and cursed that there had been no room for a real sniper gun on this incursion. The yellow was a scarf as big as a blanket wrapped around the head and neck of President for Life Iboga. The man was enormous. If she had her Knight’s M110 the dictator would be dead and the tank attack would end.

Paul Janson sought a flanking position on the ground, slewing to one side, then racing ahead through the trees. Two hundred meters from the tanks he saw that the dark green armored behemoths had bogged down trying to cross a ravine, suggesting that the FFM camp was not as vulnerable in that direction as Iboga’s troops had supposed.

Emboldened, FFM troops who had not fled rallied to take advantage of the temporary setback. They fired assault rifles from behind boulders and hurled hand grenades. One tank stopped moving as a torrent of lead breached its commander’s vision slit. But the rest kept trying to climb the steep slope as the bullets bounced off armored hulls and the grenades fell short.

An insurgent stood up balancing an ancient RPG-7 on his shoulder. The heavy warhead protruded from a long, unwieldy launcher. As he tried to aim the weapon, a tank cut him in half with a sustained burst of machine-gun fire. Triggered by a dead hand, the rocket-propelled grenade flew over the tanks on a tail of white smoke and detonated in a tree. The backblast that roared behind the launcher tube threw an insurgent in the air and dropped him in a smouldering heap.

Jessica Kincaid laid two of her launchers, an RPG-22 and the RPG-26, on the shooting perch she had climbed to in the treetops and shouldered the second RPG-22. She reserved the superior 26 for her second shot. She would need the best she had after her first shot exposed her position. Eyes locked on the nearest tank, which was grinding over a rock ledge, she tugged the launcher’s extension, which simultaneously lengthened the weapon to its full thirty-three and one-half inches and opened its front and rear covers. Then she raised the rear sight to cock it, found the tank, aimed for the seal between its turret and turret cavity, and fired.

The rocket’s solid-fuel motor ignited and burned fully in a flash. The fin-stabilized rocket leaped from the smoothbore barrel and drove a two-and-a-half-pound high-explosive anti-tank warhead at Kincaid’s target.

“Bull’s-eye,” she murmured under her breath.

It was a double explosion, the first burst at the bottom edge of the turret, the second an instant later as the ammunition inside the tank blew up, hurling the armored turret off the hull and onto the ground. Smoke billowed as if Kincaid’s grenade had transformed the tank into a boiling pot.

She grabbed the RPG-26. The backblast had ignited the leaf canopy behind her, flagging her position. Every tank in the ravine tried to raise its main gun in her direction. But to elevate so high, they had to maneuver onto a slope. She cocked the 26—no time-wasting extension on the improved model, thank you, Russians—chose as her target a tank climbing a steep slope to draw a bead on her, and fired. She heard a flat cracking sound. Instead of screaming at the tank, the rocket misfired, jumped ten feet from the barrel, and tumbled to the forest floor.

“Fuck!”

The tank she had aimed at was traversing its main gun at her. She grabbed the remaining RPG-22 and jerked open the extension. Something exploded. The tank was suddenly spewing smoke. Its hatch opened and three men tumbled out, rolling on the ground to douse their burning clothes. Janson, she realized, had nailed it. But the fire in the trees behind her had drawn the attention of another tank.

“Get down from there,” she heard him in her earpiece. She raised her sight and prayed this one wasn’t another dud.

* * *

INSIDE THE T-72 three small men—none taller than five feet, four inches, could fit in the tiny space—teamed up to obliterate the RGP-armed insurgent in the tree who had already destroyed one of the tanks. The driver manipulated his tillers and gear sticks to force the machine up the side of the ravine. The commander guided the main gun and shouted the order to fire, twice. At the first command, the driver stomped his clutch to steady the beast. At the second, the gunner fired. The commander saw the flash of the insurgent’s launcher. A HEAT projectile penetrated the armor plate with a burning jet of gas. There was a blinding light. Hot shell fragments ricocheted in the confined space like flying razors.

* * *

IN THE TREETOPS, the tank’s 125mm shell screamed so close by Jessica Kincaid that a shock wave knocked her flat. Then the tank she had fired at exploded. She threw herself over the edge of the platform before another got the range, and climbed down the makeshift rungs as fast as she could.

As she hit the forest floor she heard Janson’s voice in her earpiece, cold and deadly: “I believe I ordered you out of that tree.”

“Yes, sir.” She felt like a buck private chewed out by a full colonel.

“Pull another stunt like that and you’ll be looking for a job.”

“I thought I was a partner.”

“Then you’ll be looking for a partner,” Janson shot back, and suddenly exploded in a degree of emotion she had never heard from him. “Jesus H! Jesse, you’ll get yourself killed cowboying like that.”

“Won’t happen again, sir.”

“Fall back to the cave; we’ve got to get out of here.”

They ran convergent paths that brought them together at the hospital cave. Janson looked more himself than his voice had sounded on the radio, Kincaid thought, his usual cool, clear, alert, and focused like a blowtorch. “Iboga hid his presidential guard behind the tanks. They’re coming up with all four feet.”

“I saw him. Scary dude in a yellow scarf.”

The FFM insurgents were falling back.

Inside the cave Kincaid and Janson found a dozen boys huddled around Ferdinand Poe’s cot.

Paul Janson spoke in a loud, clear voice to rally Flannigan, Ferdinand Poe, and any of the kids who understood English: “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to put Minister Poe on a stretcher and spell each other carrying him, four at a time, two on each pole. The doctor will carry his medicine. You two boys—you and you—will carry water. This lady will lead,” he said, indicating Jessica Kincaid with her MP5 cradled in her arms. “Follow her. I will cover our rear. Stick close together and we’ll make it out of here. Quickly now, everyone, move!”

Flannigan supervised the shifting of the injured man from his cot to the stretcher, which was held by four of the largest boys. Seconds after the ragtag caravan exited the cave and started climbing a narrow path farther up the mountain, one of the tanks clanked into the clearing and fired its main gun into first the hospital, then the headquarters. Behind it double-timing squads of the presidential guard raked the area with automatic weapons.

Janson, covering the rear and last out of the camp, looked back and saw two FFM fighters spring up, aiming their unwieldy RPG-7s at the tanks. Both fell in a hail of gunfire as they triggered the weapons, but one landed a lucky grenade in the tank’s vision slit. The big machine veered into a massive boulder, grinding its treads and spewing smoke.

But more tanks and hundreds more troops were pouring into the clearing as Iboga’s powerful force overran the rebel camp. Janson saw Iboga himself, a dark-skinned three-hundred-pound giant with a bright yellow scarf wrapped around his head like an Arab kaffiyeh. Surrounded by his elite personal guard, signified by yellow handkerchiefs knotted at their throats, he appeared to Paul Janson to be the personification of the evil “big men” chiefs who had destroyed African nation after African nation. A well-placed shot could turn the tide of the battle. But the range, 150 meters, was extreme for his MP5, the dictator was shielded by his tall guardsmen, and a missed shot would bring them streaming after Janson’s charges, who had thus far not been spotted. Too risky.

He ran up the trail after his people.

Jessica had them down on their bellies, crawling and dragging Poe’s stretcher along an exposed ridge that could be seen from below. Janson waited until they had made it across before he followed, slithering low. He had just crossed the open space when a loud cheer erupted from the chaos below. It was a roar of victory. Janson looked down at the clearing and saw that the presidential guard had captured a tall, thin man who he judged by the cheering was Ferdinand Poe’s son Douglas Poe.

The cheers grew louder and louder as President for Life Iboga swaggered up to the prisoner. The dictator slapped his face. The thin man staggered. Soldiers yanked him upright and Iboga slapped him again. Then the dictator beckoned, and a pair of tanks clanked from the semicircle formation at the edge of the shattered forest, crossed the clearing, skirting the one the FFM fighter had set afire. Guided by Iboga’s impatient gestures, they swiveled on their treads and faced off, gun to gun, leaving twenty feet between them.

Soldiers tied ropes to Douglas Poe’s wrists, dragged him between the tanks, and yanked the ropes from either side, stretching his arms apart so that he stood as if crucified between the armored hulls. As the soldiers laughed, Iboga gestured for the tank drivers to move ahead, narrowing the space where the prisoner was held, creeping closer and closer until they pressed against his back and his chest. The laughter grew louder. Iboga whipped off his scarf and held it high over his head like a racetrack starter about to drop the flag.

Suddenly he looked up.

The taunting grin slid from his face.

NINE

Paul Janson heard the same distant sound they had heard last night, the growl of the Reaper. Iboga froze, scarf in the air, face locked on the sky. The hunter-killer combat drone had come back.

The soldiers and elite guard looked up, screaming, “Reaper! Reaper!”

Iboga whirled and ran, shoving men out of his way, racing through the armored semicircle formed by his victorious tanks. To Janson’s amazement, the dictator’s soldiers frantically gestured for the tanks to back away from Douglas Poe. They lifted him in the air and held him like a shield as if to show the lenses in the sky that if the Reaper fired its missiles it would kill him, too. The attempt was futile.

The ground shook. Thunder rippled. Iboga’s tanks began to explode, one after another, in balls of fire. His soldiers’ bodies and those of his guard who hadn’t run after him were flung in the air. The attack by the unseen, unmanned aerial gunships lasted less than thirty seconds. And when the smoke had cleared, every man left in the clearing, including Douglas Poe, was dead.

Paul Janson was stunned. Who but the Pentagon or the U.S. State Department could have unleashed the Reapers? Theoretically, the motive for involvement would have been West African oil. But in reality, Isle de Foree’s corrupt government’s wells and pipelines and refineries were decrepit, and the nation’s oil reserves, like Nigeria’s, were dwindling. Any potential new oil reserves were already spoken for in deepwater blocks off Angola, a thousand miles to the south. America embroiling herself in chaotic West African tribal wars seemed like a risky venture for little return. Unless, of course, Doug Case had lied when he claimed that the assignment to rescue the doctor had nothing to do with oil reserves.

If the Reapers weren’t American, had some private entity somehow gained access to UAV technology? That did not seem possible. The heavily armed surveillance drone was the sharp end of an immensely complex weapon system dependent upon remote guidance via orbiting satellites. That was light-years beyond the abilities of a Nigeria or an Angola. It was hard to believe that even China could pull that off, yet, much less a private outfit.

Whatever it was, something—something else—was going down, some mission not apparent. Paul Janson vowed to find out what, because the Reaper gave whoever possessed it godlike power to observe and destroy.

* * *

BELOW IN THE clearing where the wreckage of Iboga’s army smouldered, FFM fighters began venturing in from the forest, awed at their sudden, astonishing turn of fortune. They wandered among the bodies of the soldiers who moments earlier had been intent on exterminating them and gazed in wonderment at the twisted steel that remained of the tanks. A man picked up an assault rifle only to drop it, crying out, burned by metal too hot to touch. A man laughed and then they began to cheer their unexpected victory.

From the forest above Janson heard a second wave of shouts and cheering—boyish cries of glee—and he looked up to see the youngsters racing toward him down the path carrying Ferdinand Poe’s stretcher. The rebel leader was conscious and propped up on one elbow, watching everything with burning eyes.

An anxious Terrence Flannigan ran alongside the stretcher, attempting without success to get his patient to lie back. They raced past Janson and down into the camp that they had fled moments earlier. Last to emerge from the trees above was Jessica Kincaid, MP5 at port arms.

“That looks even worse than it sounded,” she breathed, casting disbelieving eyes on the wreckage below. “Bad day for the bad guys.”

“Iboga got away.”

“Minister Poe just told his bunch to storm Porto Clarence.”

“That’s the right move. Take the capital before Iboga regroups and end it now.”

“What’s ourmove?” she asked.

“Stick close to our doctor,” said Janson. “Before a stray bullet saves ASC five million dollars.”

* * *

“YOU WILL DIE on the way to Porto Clarence, Minister Poe,” said Dr. Flannigan. “Please listen to reason.”

“No man enters the capital before me,” said Ferdinand Poe.

“You are leaking blood from every orifice. You have internal injuries. You cannot survive being carried twenty miles on a stretcher. Wait for your men to take the city and the airport so a helicopter can carry you to the hospital.”

“No man enters Porto Clarence before me!”Poe sat up on the stretcher and tried to push the doctor away. But despite a spirit reinvigorated by the hope of impending victory, Poe’s body was failing him. His round cheeks appeared to have collapsed from within. The deep hollows exaggerated the enormousness of his elephant ears and the length of his narrow nose, causing them to poke out of his head like cartoon appendages. His once-imposing crown of bristly dyed hair was matted to his perspiring skull.

Flannigan leaned closer to wipe blood from the corner of Poe’s mouth. “The glory will kill you, sir.”

“It is not for glory,” said Ferdinand Poe. “It is for order.”

Flannigan threw up his hands. “Talk sense to him!” he demanded of the commandos. By now he had named them in his mind. The woman was Annie Oakley for blasting Iboga’s tanks. Her expressionless, impenetrable partner was The Wall. Flannigan still had no idea why ASC was paying them to take him “home” and still feared the worst, but The Wall exuded the sort of common sense that might persuade his critically ill patient to see reason.

The Wall disappointed Flannigan. “You’re missing Minister Poe’s point, Dr. Flannigan. He knows that the victors of his long and brutal war could burn the city to the ground if he’s not there to restrain them personally.”

And Annie Oakley chimed in, “Doctor, his fighters have been living in the woods for three years. He can’t expect them to act like Boy Scouts unless he’s there to read the riot act.”

“Precisely,” said Ferdinand Poe. “Only I can restrain the impulse to vengeance. Only I, because they have all seen that.” He pointed a trembling hand across the clearing where ten men were struggling to lift a two-ton gun tank turret that had blown off by the Hellfires and crushed his son. “ Thatgives me the moral right—the example—to demand that they do not violate their fellow citizens, that they do not throw our poor nation into even more horrendous straits. This war must end today.”

He gazed for a long moment as they levered the turret off his son. Then he spoke softly. “Doctor, I appreciate your concern, and professionalism. But in this case professional soldiers”—he nodded at Janson and Kincaid—“even professionals who land on our island for reasons not entirely clear, are better qualified to diagnose a military situation.”

“I’m not diagnosing the situation, goddammit. I’m diagnosing you.”

“But I am not the patient, Doctor. Isle de Foree is the patient and Isle de Foree is in critical condition—Stand aside, sir. I must speak with my commanders.” He gestured for Janson and Kincaid to stay with him in the hospital cave.

Janson assessed the men who clustered around Poe’s stretcher. He had a dozen commanders who ranged from very young to very old. They were steady, tested soldiers, revered Poe, and had done a superb job of reforming their battered forces and rallying the men streaming in from the forest. But none displayed the charisma of their leader.

Poe addressed them in Portuguese. He spoke forcefully and fired them up with a fist pointed at his son’s body even as tears of grief streamed down his face. When the army started down the trail at a quick pace, with Poe’s stretcher in the lead, he beckoned Janson alongside.

“I’ve impressed upon my commanders the need to protect the city from unnecessary destruction while capturing the Presidential Palace. But it is not only for order that I rush into the capital. We must seize Iboga. He’s looted the treasury, sent millions abroad. Without it we will start our new nationhood bankrupt. We cannot permit him to escape. Now I gather from the doctor that you and your associate are mercenaries paid to rescue him after he was kidnapped by what appeared to be a renegade faction of my movement. Is that correct?”

“Essentially, Minister Poe,” Janson answered. This was no time to debate the fine line between mercenaries and security consultants.

“Judging by your ability to penetrate both the enemy lines and my lines, I assume that you and your associate are expert commandos.”

“We plansuch penetrations intensively and thoroughly,” Janson answered, putting strong emphasis on the word “plan,” for he saw that Poe was going to offer them the job of capturing Iboga and he did not want it. The cardinal rules of survival included no off-the-cuff operations, no decisions on horseback, no flying by the seat of the pants, no winging it. Besides, he and Jessica were on the edge of total exhaustion. Even were they fully rested, kick-the-door-in assault work was for younger, dumber types and he had already put that time in when he was younger and dumber. But mainly, he had taken a job and given his word to rescue the doctor, and abandoning the doctor in the middle of a shooting war was not his idea of rescue.

“We plan operations well ahead of time,” he explained. “Our planning—all of our planning—is designed to maintain the advantage of presenting a small, unexpected, moving target.”

“Small, unexpected, moving targets that destroy tanks?” Poe asked drily.

“We plan for a variety of events,” Janson replied, as drily. “Listen, sir, I know what you want, but I cannot do it for you. Your own men know their city, know the palace, and are fully capable of grabbing Iboga.”

“I fear this is easier said than done. Iboga is treacherous and deeply experienced in warfare. He fought in Angola. On both sides.”

“Yours is an island, sir. I presume you’ve instructed your forces to seize the airport and the harbor. If no plane or boat can get out of here he is not going anywhere.”

“Of course I’ve done that. Picked men are heading that way as we speak, and spies I’ve kept in the city will watch means of egress. But I know Iboga. He will have a plan and he will escape if he sees we are winning. I need your help. I am asking to hire you. I will pay you what you ask.”

Janson shook his head. “You’re a brave man, Minister Poe. I respect that. Here is what we can do for you: We can free up a dozen of your guard—who I imagine are your elite men. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“Make them the hunters. We will escort and protect you personally. Guaranteed.” He glanced at Jessica, who fired back, “Guaranteed!”

“I am not important,” Poe protested. “It is not for me.”

Janson said, “A war like yours in Isle de Foree is like chess. When the king is lost, the war is lost.”

“I have no desire to be king. I am a democrat.”

“In a war like yours,” Janson repeated patiently, “it is the same thing. When the ‘democrat’ is lost, the war is lost. This is no time for false modesty, Minister Poe. There is no one who can save Isle de Foree but you, sir. We can help—for no charge, not a penny—by protecting you until your men take the city and arrest Iboga.”

“Why would you do this?”

“I believe,” Paul Janson answered sincerely, “that you are on the side of the angels.”

“And you will incidentally protect the doctor,” Poe shot back.

“I’ve already made that clear. The doctor is our obligation and responsibility. We have given our word to return him safe and sound.”

* * *

AS THE FFM pursued Iboga’s forces it appeared, at first, that good fortune continued to smile on Ferdinand Poe. The FFM fighters who had been dispatched to the airport eight miles from Porto Clarence found it lightly defended by a demoralized unit that surrendered after a brief skirmish. No damage was done to the control tower and the hangars and little more than some bullet-pocked windows to the palatial President for Life Iboga International Passenger Terminal.

One of the nation’s last helicopters—commanded by the formidable Patrice da Costa, Poe’s spy inside the Iboga regime—swooped down to evacuate the injured patriot from the foot of Pico Clarence. Janson, Kincaid, and Flannigan accompanied Poe on the flight to the brand-new military wing of Porto Clarence’s otherwise-crumbling Iboga Hospital that had been equipped to serve the dictator and his friends.

The hospital occupied prime real estate, with a view across the hazy harbor of the Presidential Palace, a red-roofed two-story white stucco building festooned with balconies, pocked with recently added air conditioners, and crowned by a tall, square bell tower. Palm trees shaded its lawns. A long pier thrust into the water.

Poe informed his doctors that he would not submit to any operation or treatment that rendered him unconscious until the battle was won. The only weakness he showed was a plea to Terrence Flannigan to remain at his side.

“I’m not that qualified in internal medicine, sir.”

“But you were not given your job in his hospital by Iboga.”

“Good point,” said Jessica Kincaid. “He’s right, Doc; you’re the only one we can trust.”

Terry Flannigan saw that he was not going anywhere just yet, though one way or another he knew he was not going anywhere everwith the commandos hired by ASC. Although Annie and The Wall never let him out of their sight. He bided his time and stuck close to the crazy old patriot who insisted on his bed being cranked up into a sitting position so that he could watch events unfold at the palace across the water.

Poe’s presence seemed to have the effect the rebel leader had hoped for. Only thin, isolated pillars of smoke were rising from the city, and the scattered gunfire they heard sounded mostly like pistols. An hour from sunset, when there was still plenty of light in the sky, Iboga’s personal flag, a yellow banner adorned with a red snake, was lowered from the pole atop the palace’s tower.

Poe answered a cell phone. His face lit with pleasure. “Iboga is trapped,” he announced to the room. “Alone.

“Don’t kill him,” he ordered into the phone. “We must learn where he put our money. Take him alive.” Then he stared out the window at the pier and said to the American commandos, “You didn’t want to chase Iboga. You’re in the battle anyhow—box seats for the finale. Watch the pier. You’ll see him running onto it in a moment.”

Janson said quietly to Jessica, “War like Shakespeare wrote it. All the main players in the same room.”

As predicted, Iboga retreated onto the pier, his bulk unmistakable, but running like a man fully accustomed to his girth and strong enough to carry it. Nor was he alone, but flanked by two men with machine guns who alternated spraying the pursuit and reloading fresh magazines from a seemingly inexhaustible supply grabbed easily from each other’s rucksacks.

“Neat trick,” said Jessica.

Suddenly one went down, shot. Now it was only Iboga and one guard who kept coolly firing behind them as they retreated farther and farther out on the pier. Janson scanned the harbor with binoculars, looking for a boat speeding to the rescue, but saw none. The shooting had driven everyone from the water. The Porto Clarence harbor was nearly empty from the deteriorating oil storage facility to the fishing docks and freight piers. The only ship that had not fled the harbor was a rust-stained Bulgarian passenger vessel stranded at the cruise ship terminal, Janson guessed, by the absence of tugboats to escort her to sea.