The always punctual Conor White sat in the small darkened office near the front of the large motor home that served as both his temporary company headquarters and, in the rear, his private living area. His computer screen aglow in front of him, he waited for twelve twenty-five, the time his party in Virginia would be ready to receive the secure e-mail he was about to send.
12:24 A.M.
White tapped his fingers in anticipation. They’d lost power earlier in the evening because of the storm that had twisted over the island, coming on land in the south and then retreating back to sea only to slam into the north several hours later. Immediately the SimCo compound’s backup generator had kicked in. Then the power had come back on and the generator had been shut down. None of this was new to Conor White, president and CEO of SimCo, the man in charge of the private security company’s four-hundred-man armed force in Equatorial Guinea and its seventy-man contingent in Iraq. At forty-five, the powerfully built, six-foot-four White, with his chiseled good looks and dark razor-cut hair, could still be a model for the modern professional mercenary soldier. A former col o nel in the British army’s SAS-the Special Air Service Regiment-he’d formed his first private military security firm, Argosy International, eight years earlier in the Netherlands, selling it as a “military security company” that provided what he referred to as “operational support to legitimate governments and companies around the world.” Since then he’d built Argosy into a thousand-employee firm with satellite bases in five different countries.
Then, a little more than a year earlier, at the urging of Josiah Wirth, chairman and chief executive of the Texas-based oil and energy company AG Striker, and Loyal Truex, former U.S. Army Ranger and founder and head of Hadrian Worldwide Protective Services Company, the world’s largest private military or ga ni za tion, he’d abruptly sold his interest in Argosy. Shortly afterward he formed the Bristol, England-based SimCo LLC, a smaller, far more agile military security company where the emphasis was narrowed to “providing protective security services to major companies doing business in underdeveloped regions of the globe.” Less than a month later, SimCo signed a long-term contract with Striker to provide those same services for the AG Striker Company in Equatorial Guinea. Ten days after that, White signed a separate contract for SimCo to provide operational support to Hadrian in Iraq, where it had long been Striker’s chief private defense contractor under an agreement between Striker and the U.S. Department of Defense.
It was to Hadrian’s Loyal Truex that Conor White waited to send his urgent and necessarily secure postmidnight e-mail. Another man might have been nervous about what he had to report; he wasn’t. As far as he was concerned he was in the middle of a war, and war was not only deadly but often troublesome and, these days especially, highly unpredictable. Moreover, he had been and still was a highly trained professional soldier. He acted accordingly.
12:25 A.M.
He pressed the pound sign on the keyboard. Immediately a message flashed on the screen in front of him: YOUR LXT DIGITAL IS ACTIVATED. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PERSONAL CODE.
White’s fingers reached out, and he entered the code. Instantly the words LOCK FUNCTION appeared on his screen. It meant the transmission line from Conor White, SimCo/Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, to LoyalTruex, Hadrian/Manassas, Virginia, was secure.
Immediately he typed in the following: We’ve got a potential bad one. There are photographs of our guys unloading arms to the rebels.
Two seconds passed, then Truex replied.
CONOR WHITE: Yeah. Clear as day. No doubt about who our guys are if somebody wanted to examine it. I’m included with the other ops. I’ve seen several of the pics myself, computer- printed hard copies. They were taken last week. All have date codes.
LOYAL TRUEX:
CW: Not that we know. The copies I saw were brought to our guys in the field by a local native who wanted to sell them.
LT:
CW: Old German priest in Bioko. The army got him, he’s in a coma. His place was searched. His printer found and destroyed. Digital camera found, too. Only camera he had. No photographs, no extra prints discovered. The memory card was new. The old one with the photos is missing.
LT:
CW: There is no Internet connection in Bioko South, where he lived. To send them he would have had to use an E.G. government, Striker, or SimCo facility in Malabo, only places that have IT connections. He didn’t.
LT:
CW: His only cell phone was old. Had no camera technology. Cell transmission from Bioko South is unreliable anyway.
LT:
CW: Fax machine was found in his office, broken. Two more in the village. Both checked for recent communication. None in six months for one, three months for the other. Both destroyed. Owners now deceased. Ongoing check for more machines in surrounding villages. More-local telephone company records accessed. So far no fax or cell-photo transmissions to anywhere other than E.G. in last six weeks. Locals under us checking number by number now. Sense nothing sent, area still too primitive.
LT:
CW: Mail service from the south is erratic at best. Pickups would have gone to central post office in Malabo. Only possible tracking was if he sent them via registered mail. There is no record that he did. If he did send them via regular mail, they would be impossible to trace.
LT:
CW: Wilco. As stated, retrieval process already under way.
LT:
With that Loyal Truex signed off, leaving Conor White alone to breathe and reflect in the darkened cabin of his SimCo motor home.
“Right,” he said finally, his accent clearly upper-class British boarding school.
He’d known Loyal Truex since the First Gulf War when British SAS and U.S. Army Ranger advance teams went deep behind enemy lines to gather intelligence on Soviet Scud mobile missile launchers. They’d spent three nights and four days crammed into a tiny cave within a camel’s breath of a large contingent of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, where the slightest mistake or lack of discipline by either of them would have cost them their lives. Since Hadrian’s foray into Iraq just after the beginning of the Second Gulf War he’d worked both with Truex and for him, and more than once in the field. As a result he not only respected Truex’s leadership abilities and the logic behind his thinking, he wholly understood the orders he had just been given:
