Death of a Pharaoh (25 page)

“It
isn’t so much how they end but how they begin,” she asserted with as much of a
smile as the circumstances allowed.

Ryan
kissed her on the lips while everyone turned away discretely.

“I’ll
be back first thing in the morning,” Ethan assured him.

Ryan and Tony sat together on the beach trying to make sense of the tragic
turn of events. Neither had spoken for over an hour, words seemed superfluous
somehow. Zach was sound asleep in the house.

“I can understand
that they might want to take revenge on me,” Ryan commented, “I really screwed
up their plans.”

Tony knew that his
role right now was just to listen.

“What I can’t
accept is that they take out their anger on the innocent families of the people
closest to me,” he lamented.

“It just isn’t
fair.”

Tony put his arm
around Ryan’s shoulder.

They both heard it
at the same time. It sounded like distant thunder at first and Ryan wondered if
it was a message from the Gods. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. The noise
started to move closer.

“I think it’s a
plane,” Tony stated.

“Coming in real
low,” Ryan observed.

“Maybe we’re under
some sort of military approach.”

“And I was
thinking of making an offer for this place,” Ryan joked.

The metallic roar
grew so loud that Tony instinctively reached for his automatic rifle.

“Heads up,” he
barked into the microphone to his team of six guards scattered around the beach
house.

To their
amazement, the thick bank of fog a kilometer offshore suddenly belched a
massive transport plane heading straight for them and flying so low that the
wash from the huge propellers threw up a spray on the surface of the sea. It
looked so much like strafing that they both dove for cover.

“Dios Santo” Tony
yelled. “That was close and no running lights.”

Ryan didn’t
respond. He was still astonished by the image of pure evil that flashed through
his mind as the aircraft lumbered over their heads. It was the first time he
had ever picked up something from so far away.

“Ryan, are you
OK?”

The sound of
Tony’s voice dissolved the face of the man.

“I’m alright,”
Ryan assured him. “I received a vision from someone on the plane. He had a big
scar on the left side of his face and a heart so full of evil that all I could
see was death.”

Ryan shivered from
the all too recent memory, “Let’s go see how Zach is doing.”

Hill-top in Central Dakar, 06.24 GMT, October 22, 2016

Sergei ordered his driver to park beside the cluster of radio antennae
on a small hill in the northeastern sector of Dakar. It was still dark but at
first light he would have a clear view of the large compound to the southwest.
Five minutes later, one of his operatives flashed a laser from atop a utility
pole only thirty meters from the main entrance of the objective giving him the
exact location. Heat sensing devices the team carried detected thirty-seven
individuals in the sprawling compound as well as two dogs and what appeared to
be several birds.

The assault force
arrived in a transport plane two hours ago at an abandoned military airport
seventy kilometers from the city. Ten minutes earlier, the advance team
activated a portable air traffic control system long enough for the pilot to
guide the massive aircraft to the runway recently cleared of a herd of goats
and equipped with temporary landing lights that extinguished the instant the
wheels touched the tarmac.

They made the
final approach over the ocean at low altitude to avoid radar detection. Sergei
wondered if the wash from the massive turbo engines had managed to dislodge any
of the sea of tin roofs they roared over at less than a hundred meters. It
would be a rude awakening for the occupants.

He watched with
pride as the team unloaded four jeeps, several tons of ordinance and a large
camouflage tent in record time. The attack was scheduled to begin just before
dawn and with luck it would be over in ten minutes. His men would have another
quarter of an hour to mop up, scan the features of every victim to a computer
station with sophisticated face recognition software, photograph any bodies
that matched the profiles of the targets and abandon the scene before police
and first responders arrived. He calculated they would be airborne before 9 am
local time. He would trigger explosives planted near Léopold Sédar Senghor
International Airport, a military barracks and a popular market just as they
took off. He was certain local forces would be overwhelmed with four major
disasters at the same time.

At 6.29 am, he
marked t minus one minute and waited for the gates of hell to open. Sixty
seconds later, in perfect military coordination four Russian AGS-17 grenade
launchers, six portable RPO-A missile launchers armed with thermobaric warheads
and numerous machine guns vomited death and destruction in a classic case of
overkill. Sergei worried for a moment there would be nothing left for his men
to scan.

It was already dawn. Ryan and Tony decided to try to get some sleep.
The sound of distant gunfire changed their plans.

“That’s some heavy
shit,” Tony declared. “Full alert,” he barked into his radio.

When he turned
back Ryan was laying on the floor in convulsions. His first thought was that he
had been hit by a stray bullet but there was no sign of blood.

“Zach, wake up,”
he yelled.

A groggy Zach sat
up and rubbed his eyes, “What’s up?”

“Something’s wrong
with Ryan, I think he fainted.”

Sporadic shots
replaced the rapid automatic fire in the distance. Tony had a sickening feeling
that they were coming from the area of the compound.

Sergei watched the live feed on a monitor as his squad leaders breached
the exterior walls. Resistance was virtually non-existent. He soon spotted the
telltale muzzle flashes of well-aimed single shots that indicated his men were
eliminating any survivors. At 6.38 he received confirmation that the compound
was secure and with no casualties among his forces. He expected the results of
the first scans at any moment. Sergei smiled for the first time in weeks.
Killing civilians was like sex without a condom. You slipped in easy, finished
fast and pulled out without a mess.

The Georgian’s
initial ecstasy was short lived. Only one of the bodies matched any of the four
priority targets. He ordered his men to repeat the scans on all the male
victims. So far, they had only identified the owner of the property, a
Senegalese national named Chief Assane Mbaye. The Consortium would not be happy
if the three Americans on the list escaped the attack. Their intelligence was
obviously flawed. If the repeat scans confirmed the miss, he’d have no choice
but to abort the mission and return to the aircraft. The possible capture of
the multi-national assault team loaded down with Russian and Chinese
manufactured weaponry by Senegalese forces would create an international
incident with severe ramifications.

He almost
regretted that he no longer served in the Russian military. After such a
failure they would court martial him and banish him to a labor camp in Siberia.
The Consortium would not be so lenient. As his jeep sped toward the rendezvous
point at the airport, he was already making plans to offer his group as
mercenaries in any one of several conflicts active in North Africa. There was always
work for his kind.

Zach
shone a flashlight into Ryan’s eyes, “His pupils aren’t responding,” he
announced, “but he seems to be breathing alright.”

Tony detected the concern in
his voice and this from a man who had just lost his mother a few hours ago.

“What do you think it is?”

“It’s similar to what
happened when they killed his grandmother,” he explained. “Some terrible event
just took place and he’s absorbed all the pain. I think he’s in shock.”

“Will he be OK?”

Zach didn’t have an answer.

Tony’s radio squelched
followed by a voice that warned of a vehicle approaching fast. He drew a pistol
from his holster and gave it to Zach.

“We can’t lose him,” he
warned as he raced out of the room and scrambled up the ladder to the roof.

They
could see the headlights of the fast-approaching jeep but it was still too dark
to make out the occupants. Tony ordered his men to shoot to kill if they came
under attack. In the distance, he could see the flames from what he knew was
Chief Mbaye’s compound. All of his men had family who worked or lived there but
their faces betrayed no emotion as they tracked the vehicle speeding toward
them. His right index finger caressed the trigger of his automatic rifle. He
had killed nine boys with his fists but never anyone with a gun. He knew he
wouldn’t hesitate now. Static came over the radio. Someone was trying to raise
him.

“Tony, this is Ethan. Hold
your fire!”

“Stand down,” he shouted to
his men.

The jeep pulled up and
screeched to a halt. Tony leapt out and helped Mariam who seemed in distress.

Tony guided them into the
beach house where they stared at Ryan laying on the floor. Mariam ran to his
side and put his head on her lap. Zach got up and joined the others.

“Someone attacked the
compound,” Ethan reported. “I doubt there were any survivors.”

He glanced over at Mariam.
They understood. All her family were there.

“We thought you were in the
compound,” Tony said. “Gracias a Dios.”

“We had a flat tire and were
three blocks away when we heard the first mortar rounds. We headed straight
back here.”

Tony placed a hand on his
shoulder, “You made the right decision or you’d be dead as well.”

“What happened to the
Pharaoh?”

“Just like back at Sullivan,”
Zach commented. “I think he felt the pain of the victims and even worse he
probably thought you and Mariam were among them.”

“A military transport flew
overhead about two hours before dawn and Ryan told me he picked up a vision of
a man with a large scar.”

“From a plane?”

Tony nodded affirmatively.

“Did he say which side?”

“The left, I think.”

“
Sergei Grigorievich Chibirov,” Ethan put a name to the
face. “We’ve been tracking him for weeks. He’s a mercenary for the Consortium.
Georgian and ruthless. He’s wanted for war crimes in Afghanistan. Our last
intel had him in Sudan a few days ago.”

“Not anymore,”
Tony stated.

Several large
explosions made the ground shake under their feet.

Sergei detonated the bombs only moments before takeoff. While they
taxied, he sent a cryptic message to his employers informing them of the
botched mission.

The jet assist
kicked in with less than two hundred meters left of the runway. The landing
gear almost clipped a peeling water tower at the edge of a small farm. The
wings of the giant metallic albatross groaned in protest as the pilot made a
gut wrenching turn to head for the ocean on the same heading they had used to
land. On the left, they could easily detect the smoke and fire from the
destroyed compound and the three diversionary blasts. The fire caused by the
bomb at the market, usually packed at this hour, had already spread to a nearby
shantytown. Many civilians would die that morning for nothing.