“Why?”
“Because your guards are dead.”
Lightning bolt number two hit, causing pain in his chest and left arm.
“Dead? My men are dead?”
Drake nodded gravely. “Quite.”
“And you’re sure of this?”
“Of course I’m sure! I wouldn’t be so panicked if I wasn’t sure!” Drake tried taking a breath, but his chest was tight as well.
“I’m sorry to doubt you, but it just seems so unlikely . . . What should we do?”
“That is why I’m calling. We need to figure out some kind of plan. I am on my plane, and I’ll be arriving there shortly. I was going to check the plant myself, but since you’re still alive, I shall tell my pilot to land in Lagos instead of Ibadan. It will be easier to talk if we’re face-to-face.”
“I’ll have my car and several guards meet you at the airport.”
“I appreciate the gesture,” Drake said, “but I doubt it will be necessary. Who in their right mind would plan a second attack so quickly after their first?”
***
JONES smirked as he continued to monitor Kotto’s conversation from a nearby car. “These guys don’t know us very well, do they?”
“No,” Payne growled. “We’ll have to make sure we introduce ourselves.”
CHAPTER 60
EDWIN
Drake opened the front door to Kotto’s home without knocking. He had no time to be polite at this hour of the evening. All of his hard work was crumbling, and he was determined to save it before irreparable damage had occurred.
“Hannibal,” he called, “where are you?”
The Nigerian rushed from the living room, where he’d been briefing Holmes and Greene on the slaves, and met Drake in the front parlor.
“Edwin,” he said as he shook the man’s hand. “I’m so sorry that this is necessary. I truly am. Obviously, I’m just as shocked about the incident as you are.”
“I somehow doubt that,” he replied coolly. “It seems that you have been keeping secrets.”
The comment caught Kotto off guard. “Secrets? I have no secrets from you.”
“No? I find that hard to believe, with the information I’ve just acquired. Who is Jonathon Payne, and why have you been keeping him from me?”
Octavian Holmes heard the name as he emerged from the other room and decided to answer for Kotto. “Payne’s our biggest problem. Now, before I respond to your other question, I’ve got an even better one for you. Who the fuck are you?”
Drake was ready to spout a nasty comeback until he saw Holmes’s size. When he saw an even larger figure behind Holmes, he decided it would be best to play nice. “I’m Edwin Drake, Hannibal’s financial partner. And you are?”
“Octavian Holmes, Hannibal’s main supplier of slaves.” He glanced over his shoulder and pointed to his large shadow. “This here is Levon Greene. He’s
my
financial partner.”
“Ah, the American footballer. I’ve heard about you.” Drake studied the two men and realized he wanted to stay on their good sides. “It’s certainly a pleasure to meet our U.S. connection. I’m glad to see that Hannibal wasn’t exaggerating when he told me that our snow was in some rather capable hands. Now that I see you two, I realize he was right.”
Kotto remained silent for a brief moment, waiting to see if Holmes responded to the obvious attempt at flattery. When he didn’t, Kotto decided to ease the tension. “Edwin has flown in from South Africa in order to discuss the Ibadan incident.”
“And to see how you’re doing,” Drake added. “I know that you’ve lost a lot of men. You must be in shock.”
Kotto was more stunned by Drake’s quick change in tone than by the incident itself. It had gone from accusatory to sympathetic in a matter of seconds. “I was shocked at first, but now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I’m fine. Saddened, but fine.”
“Good,” Drake stated. “I’m glad to—”
“Enough with the small talk,” Holmes ordered. “You said something about Hannibal keeping secrets from you. What did you mean by that?”
Drake’s complexion got whiter than normal. He wasn’t used to being bossed around. “As I was saying, I just received some information from the States, and it seems you failed to let me know everything about the Plantation. You told me that there was some trouble, but you never told me that it was blown up.”
All eyes shifted to Kotto, who squirmed under the sudden spotlight. “I wasn’t keeping it from you, Edwin. I was just waiting for the appropriate moment to tell you. I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. We’ve already discussed the danger of that. Besides, I wanted to design a backup plan and have it in place before I broke the news to you. I figured it would ease the shock of it all.”
“Actually, it did quite the opposite. Instead of having time to make preparations, I am now forced to deal with everything at once. The Plantation, the missing slaves, the murdered guards! That is a bloody lot to recover from.”
“I see that now. But obviously I couldn’t have foreseen the incident at Ibadan. There was no way of knowing that they would find us so quickly.”
Drake winced at the statement. “What do you mean by
they
? Who are
they
?”
“They,” Holmes answered, “would be Jonathon Payne and David Jones. They single-handedly wiped out the Plantation. Once I heard the details of Ibadan, I assumed that they were behind that as well.”
“I really doubt that,” Drake uttered. “Maybe they were behind things at the Plantation—you were there, so you would know—but I don’t see how they could’ve handled the Ibadan massacre. There was a variety of shell casings found, not just from one weapon but from several. And unless these are the type of men that would tote five weapons apiece, they couldn’t have done it alone. They needed plenty of help to pull that off.”
“Damn,” Holmes mumbled under his breath. “I hope . . .”
“What?” Kotto demanded. “What do you hope?”
Holmes glanced at Kotto, then at Greene, and both of them were surprised by the look in his eyes. The air of confidence that used to ooze from Holmes was gone. No longer did he carry himself like he was invincible. In fact, his face seemed to suggest fear.
“I hope I’m wrong about this, but this sounds like the MANIACs.”
THE semitropical landscape gave the soldiers many hiding places as they made their way across Kotto’s yard. They had already eliminated a few of his guards and several of his security cameras; now they were going for his power supply. Once the electricity was cut, they would storm the house under a cloak of darkness.
“What can you see?” Payne asked Sanchez through his headset.
The captain of the MANIACs was in the midst of an infrared scan of the house, trying to determine the current number of occupants. When he was through, he lowered the high-tech device and spoke into his radio.
“I can’t see anyone, sir. It’s like the place is empty.”
“No one?”
“That’s affirmative, sir.”
Payne and Jones winced, trying to figure out where everyone was. The house had been under surveillance for the last several hours, so they knew there should be people. A lot of people.
Jones whispered, “If you can’t see anyone upstairs, scan the basement. Maybe there’s someone down there.”
“I’ll try, but the moat around the house might interfere. It doesn’t see well through water.”
Payne crept closer to the house, trying to stay as low as possible. There was no sense risking his life before they knew if Ariane was inside. “Try closer to the drawbridge. The water might be shallower there.”
“You got it.”
Payne and Jones waited patiently while Sanchez attempted to get a better reading. After more than a minute of scanning, he gave them the bad news.
“He’s got something in the basement, but I can’t get a readout on this thing. It might be a vault or a bomb shelter of some kind, but whatever it is, it’s too thick for me to see through.”
“Keep us posted if anything changes.”
“I will.”
After switching channels on his radio, Payne tried to get an update from Shell, who was in charge of knocking out Kotto’s power lines with a small explosion. He remained silent until the device was set and he had repositioned himself in the nearby trees.
Once there, Shell turned his radio to an all-inclusive frequency and spoke to the entire squad, using the tone and mannerisms of a commercial airline pilot.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your lieutenant speaking. In exactly thirty seconds, we will be experiencing some violent turbulence, so I would advise you to prepare your night vision and put your firearms into their locked and loaded positions.” Shell smiled to himself before finishing. “And as always, thank you for choosing the MANIACs.”
Twenty ... fifteen . . . ten . . . five . . . BOOM!
The earth shook as the explosion ripped through the power station, tearing the generator to shreds in one blinding burst of heat and light. Payne and Jones were tempted to glance at the display of sparks but realized it would ruin their night vision for the next several minutes. So they waited patiently, until the shower of orange light subsided and Kotto’s entire estate fell under the blanket of darkness.
When the moment felt right, Payne pushed the button on his transmitter and growled into the microphone. “Gentlemen, don’t let me down.”
With phenomenal quickness and stealth, the soldiers converged on the stone mansion and crawled across the structure’s moat in groups of two and three, using wooden boards that they carried with them. Windows, doors, and skylights were points of entry, and the MANIACs breached them effortlessly in a series of textbook military maneuvers.
“So far, so good,” Payne muttered as he watched the assault from Kotto’s yard. “I’d like to be inside, though, where all the action is.”
Jones nodded his head in agreement. “Yeah, but there’s no way you could’ve climbed over the moat with that arm of yours. And you know it.”
“Actually, I
don’t
know it. I think if I was given the chance, I could’ve—”
Jones squeezed his friend’s injured biceps in order to prove his point.
“Jesus!” he grunted in agony. “You didn’t have to do that!”
But Payne was thankful that Jones had, because it reminded him that he’d made the correct decision by sitting this one out. If he hadn’t, he would’ve slowed down the team, and that was something he wasn’t willing to risk. At this point the only thing that mattered to Payne was Ariane, and everything else—his soldierly pride, his lust for action, and his desire for revenge—paled in comparison.
“I hope you realize there’s no reason to feel guilty. We’ve accomplished more in the last week than anyone, including myself, could’ve ever imagined.”
Payne didn’t respond, choosing to keep his attention on the mission instead.
“Plus, you set a good example for the squad by letting them take over. A man has to know his limits, and when he reaches them, he shouldn’t be ashamed to ask for help.”
“I know that. In fact, I might ask for some more help right now.”
“Really?” The comment surprised Jones. “Why’s that?”
Payne took a moment to adjust his night vision, then calmly pointed over Jones’s left shoulder. “If I’m not mistaken, I think our targets might’ve found a way out of the house.”
Jones turned in the direction of Payne’s finger and had a hard time believing what he saw. Levon Greene was standing outside Kotto’s iron fence, helping Octavian Holmes climb out of a well-concealed passageway—a tunnel that wasn’t mentioned on the blueprints Jones had downloaded from a local database.
“Get on the comm,” Payne said, “and tell Sanchez to send half the team out to secure the periphery. Have the others continue their sweep for the slaves, but warn them about the tunnel. I don’t want Greene doubling back inside if we can help it.”
Jones nodded as he reached for the radio. “And while I do this, what are you going to do?”
Payne smiled as he grabbed his Glock. “I’m going to play hero.”
CHAPTER 61
USING
the darkness as his ally, Payne moved quietly toward the mouth of the tunnel, hoping to eliminate Holmes and Greene before they even knew what hit them. But as he approached the tall iron fence that surrounded the estate, he soon realized that there was more going on than a simple escape. Instead of slipping away from the house unnoticed, Holmes and Greene were trying to smuggle several slaves out of Kotto’s house as well.
“D.J.,” Payne whispered into his headset. “What’s your position? I need your input up here.”
A few seconds later Jones slipped into the bushes next to him. “You rang?”
“Take a look at them. Does this make any sense to you?”
Jones watched closely as the duo pulled two cloaked slaves from the tunnel and shoved them forcibly to the ground. Then, when Greene was satisfied with their positioning, he went back to the tunnel while Holmes hovered over the first pair with a handgun.
“No sense at all,” Jones answered. “They must have something up their sleeves, otherwise they’d be heading for the hills by now.”
“That’s what I figured, but what?”
Jones shrugged. “I don’t know, but it has to be something creative. They aren’t going to hold us off all by themselves.”
“Something creative, huh? See, that’s what I can’t figure out. What the hell could these guys come up with on such short notice? I mean, it’s not like they have a lot of experience with . . .”
Experience
. The word sent shivers down Payne’s spine, for he suddenly remembered what Holmes and Greene were experienced with. Of course! It made perfect sense. The reason they weren’t leaving was because they
