“Have you spoken to the Exile?”
“Not yet, sir. He’s been out of phone and radio contact. But I expect to be in touch with him within the next few hours-”
“ Listen to me,” Condor interrupted. “You damn well better get in touch with him. You can send a carrier pigeon, or you can sprout wings. You can do whatever the hell it takes under the sun, moon, and stars. But we aren’t going to be passive. I want this operation’s timetable ramped up.”
“Yes, I don’t see that we have any alternative. But there are eventualities we can’t altogether control. The delivery, for example-”
“Those thugs took our money and we have to be concerned with delivery?”
“Sir-”
“No. I understand contingencies. But I’m not hanging on them. I refuse to accept that, and I refuse to be advised about them… Am I making myself clear?”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Then get this moving. It doesn’t matter who’s onto it. You stay two steps ahead of them. I know you’re capable. I’m counting on you, White. Get it moving now. ”
White nodded with the phone still against his ear, staring across at Mirghani, meeting his gaze with his own even as he realized the line had gone silent, leaving only the odd echoing silence particular to Satcom links.
He sat motionless for a while, immersed in his thoughts.
“Well?” Mirghani asked. “How did you fare?”
White gave a slow shrug, lowered the phone.
“As I’d expected,” he said finally.
CHAPTER 18
SUDAN
Navigating under cover of night’s darkness with their sophisticated GPS systems, the pirates had pulled their long, flat cargo barges to shore at Zula on the Bay of Arafali, some 50 kilometers south of the far busier port of Massawa, with its commercial dhow and tourist boat traffic, American naval base, police stations, and railway line. Thousands of years in the past this tiny Eritrean village had been an extension of Adulis, a major center of trade within the vast and influential Kingdom of Aksum, later to be known as Ethiopia. In the modern era, with the great empires fractured and degraded, their glory crumbled into sand, it was a sparsely populated belt of semiarid Sahel, with the thatch huts of its native tribesmen dotting the land near occasional springs and wadis, and stretches of featureless dun-colored terrain, over which archeologists would bump along in their 4x4s while heading toward the ancient ruins and excavations a stone’s throw to the north.
Standing very straight in his desert camouflage uniform, his hands planted on his hips above a nylon web belt-its pistol holster on the right, an ammunition pack on the left-the commander moved his gaze along the dockside, where half the total consignment of Zolfaqar MBTs and ANSAT/Sharaf combat helos had been discharged onto waiting heavy equipment transports. He would have preferred receiving the arms and equipment in a single delivery, and expedience was hardly his principal reason. It would be a sufficient challenge to get the trucks across the border without detection even once; twice invited complications and escalated the already considerable risks. But the pirates had wisely transferred the shipment from its original Ukrainian freighter onto a pair of smaller barges, and there had been restrictions on the size and weight of the loads those aging vessels could carry. That aside, the commander himself had corresponding practical and logistical limits. Seventy-five feet long from end to end, his giant tractor trailers could travel between 400 and 600 miles cross-country at a fair enough clip given the inhospitable desert landscape, their 500-horsepower diesel engines fueled by massive driver- and passenger-side gasoline tanks. Still, it would take two trips to move all the materiel to the staging ground, whatever quantity the pirates were able to bring with them tonight. The bottom line was that he had just so many available trucks.
Now he reached for the canteen strapped over his shoulder, removed its cap, and took a drink of tepid water, swishing it around his mouth before he gulped it down. It was now almost two o’clock in the morning, six hours since the Hangarihi had guided the barges ashore and deployed their off-load ramps. His men had since driven the Zolfaqars onto the trailers and put their backs into manually rolling the helicopters from the barges on metal tow carts, grunting and sweating as they hastened to complete their arduous work so the convoy could set out with many hours of darkness still ahead.
Lined along the gunwales of the barges, the Hangarihi had watched the laborious effort as if it were a relaxing diversion, smoking and drinking whiskey from tin flasks, the tips of their cigarettes glowing like orange fireflies in the night. They had offered no assistance after their cargo had been unlashed from its pallets, and the commander and his men had expected nothing else from them. In delivering his plunder without delay, their leader had stuck to his end of the bargain when he could have simply made off with the loot, using the raid on the yacht of Hassan al-Saduq as justification to go into hiding. That alone had earned him a large quantum of respect. With its easily defended coves and grottos, the Somali coast was a rabbit warren where he could have laid low indefinitely…not that it would have been his single best recourse. In the pirate boom-towns that were the underpinnings of the country’s new economy, Nicolas Barre would be treated as a king in his stronghold, and the people there would go to any lengths to shelter and protect them from legal authorities or any other threats.
The commander heard the growl of powerful engines coming to life, twisted the cap back onto his canteen with long, graceful fingers as he saw his chief lieutenant, Mabuir, striding toward him from the line of HETs. Although Mabuir had not shied from assisting in the off-load, it did not escape the commander’s notice that he looked crisp in his beret and field uniform. A great deal had changed about his fighters since the events at Camp Hadith-or the best of them, at any rate.
The reason was no mystery, and the commander credited himself for recognizing that the first step in preparing his force for what lay ahead would be to alter its composition. He had winnowed out the incorrigible brutes, the ones who were addicted to the adrenal highs of unbridled destruction and its spoils…who knew only the way of the gang and were incapable of restraint and strict obedience to his authority. Although the rest had lost none of their ferocity, it was as if their basest urges had been expunged, seared away in the cauldron of that blood-soaked raid. The commander himself had no qualms about what he had done in retrospect, and would have been surprised if any of his followers, to a man, recalled their actions that night with the faintest tinge of regret… not the killing, not the burning, not what they had done to the young American woman. But he managed to instill them with a discipline and purpose that went beyond the primal lust for combat, a sense of larger mission, which would be imperative for all that was to occur next. His goal, his driving motivation, was to reclaim for Africa what was African-its very lifeblood, a source of unsurpassed power that outsiders had drawn from its sand through conquest and subjugation and had used to further their own global dominance.
The Americans, the Russians, and recently the Chinese…their empires had risen as those on this continent had fallen into stagnation and decay. Risen to unthinkable heights on their broken souls and spines. But the reality they took for granted was about to be struck by the thunder and lightning of change, the geopolitical puzzle they had pieced together swept from the table at which they sat, its pieces scattered helter-skelter around them. With the commander leading a charge none of them could foresee, a new Pan-Africanism would be born.
Oil-it was the lifeblood of the earth, pulsing through the heart and veins of every contemporary superpower. Control its flow and you controlled them. Control them and you quite simply became supreme.
Some called him the Exile, and he did not object to that term in the least-in fact, its sublime irony amused him. When in times past had the visionary achieved recognition before the products of his imagination, his revolutionary dreams and ambitions, were actualized?
Simon Nusairi felt as if the entire arcing trajectory of his life-the fall from privilege to ignominy and disgrace for his refusal to accept complacency, his family’s rejection and ultimate denial of his rightful heritage, his embracing the role of pariah and outcast as a form of liberation, and finally his regenesis as a master gamesman and warrior-had been preparation for the great redemptive achievement that lay ahead of him.
He would soon shake the world in his fist. Grab it by the throat and shake it. And he would not release it from his choke hold until they acquiesced to his demands…
“Sir, we are ready to get under way on your orders,” Mabuir said, tearing him from his thoughts.
