“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” said Avakian.

  “Joseph, sir.”

  Avakian blinked, and for one brief fleeting moment thought about asking if he was related to the general’s butler in Nigeria. Maybe there was some kind of rule for all African servants, so their employers would only have to remember a single name. “Lead the way, Joseph.”

  He followed the attendant around the curve of the hallway past a line of luxury box doors, finally stopping at one.

  At least it wasn’t decorated like an African game lodge, Avakian thought. No zebra skins, Zulu shields, or trophy heads.

  “Mr. Sternkamp will be with you shortly, sir,” the attendant said gravely. “May I offer you some refreshment?”

  Avakian settled himself into the leather couch facing the full length window onto the field. “Well, Joseph, since we’re watching a game I think a beer is in order. What do you recommend?”

  “What do you prefer, sir?”

  “I’m not much for sweet beers. Have you got a good lager or pilsner that isn’t mass-produced? If not, I’ll take the mass-produced as long as it’s cold.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  Avakian crossed his legs. He wasn’t immune to hoping that he hadn’t sounded like a complete jerk. A minute later Joseph returned and set a tall pilsner glass on the coffee table in front of him. Avakian took a sip of a very complex lager. “Wow, that’s good. It’s not pasteurized, is it?”

  “No, sir. It is called Forester’s Draught, made by a local brewpub.”

  “It’s outstanding.”

  Joseph set down a tray of cheeses and crackers, and some bowls of cashews, macadamias, and almonds. “Would you care for anything else, sir?”

  “No. Thank you very much, Joseph.”

  “If there is anything, sir, please ring.” Before he left he showed Avakian the recessed button mounted on the arm of the couch.

  Avakian glanced at his watch and left the beer sitting on the table. The rich and powerful worked according to their own clocks. They waited for no one, and everyone waited for them. Well, at least there was a game to watch.

  The stadium was almost full. Since blue and white stripes were the predominant color scheme, it wasn’t hard to pick out the home team. The crowd was predominately white. Everything in South Africa was racial, especially sport. Rugby was the white game, soccer black. There was a lot of singing—he could feel the vibration right through the windows—but no fights or thrown flares yet. There had been a misty rain earlier, but it was just overcast now. October was spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

  Hearing the door click open, Avakian swung an arm over the back of the couch and twisted around. A tall man in his early sixties strode in with the confidence of someone who owned the joint. Unusually without entourage. Dressed expensive casual in a cashmere cardigan sweater, oxford shirt, slacks, and loafers. Bald on top and steel gray hair cut close on the sides. He had the physique of a former athlete who now had both the means to employ a personal trainer and the means to eat in a different 4-star restaurant every night.

  Avakian stood up. Since it was work he was wearing a suit. Since it was a game he wasn’t wearing a tie. The man came to him and put out his hand. “Mr. Avakian. I’m Willem Sternkamp.”

  Afrikaners didn’t really tan under the African sun. They just turned varying hues of red. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Sternkamp. Thank you for the invitation.”

  “Sit, sit,” Sternkamp commanded, placing one hand on Avakian’s shoulder and nearly pushing him back onto the couch.

  Avakian didn’t like people putting their hands on him under any circumstances, but concealed it well.

  Sternkamp sat down beside him, just as Joseph soundlessly glided in and placed what looked to be a large gin and tonic on the table. As Avakian might have predicted, Sternkamp didn’t even acknowledge his servant’s existence.

  “Are you good?” Sternkamp asked, gesturing toward the beer.

  “Fine, thanks,” Avakian replied.

  Joseph left and Sternkamp raised his glass. “Cheers.”

  Avakian touched his against it. “Cheers.”

  “I wanted very much to meet you,” said Sternkamp. “But I wasn’t sure this would be your cup of tea.”

  His speech was Oxford layered over Afrikaans, so Avakian figured Rhodes Scholar. “Being a Yank?”

  Undaunted at being called out, Sternkamp laughed. “Exactly.”

  “I played rugby at university,” said Avakian, intentionally choosing the British term.

  “Ach,” Sternkamp exclaimed, lapsing back into the Afrikaner. “I thought you had the look of the front row.”

  “Props aren’t made,” Avakian said. “They’re born.” Meaning short and stocky.

  “What university?”

  “West Point.”

  “Ach,” Sternkamp said again, this time quietly and thoughtfully. “Did you play any afterward?”

  “In the U.S. Army,” said Avakian. “When I had the time.” He cocked his head toward the field. “Never thought I’d see cheerleaders at a rugby match, though.”

  A group of attractive young women were dancing on the midfield line, wearing cute little sailor caps and midriff-baring blue and white striped sailor tops. Tight spandex hot pants with, incongruously, Vodacom printed prominently across the buttocks. Taking sponsorship to the next level, Avakian thought.

  Sternkamp let out a disapproving growl. “The sport needed to professionalize and modernize, but the commercialism has gone too far. Now you can barely make out the team colors for all the sponsorship logos.”

  “I miss the jerseys with collars,” said Avakian. “These skintight performance t-shirts just don’t do it for me.”

  “Ja. They make ruggers look like the modern dancers my wife is always dragging me to see.”

  Avakian chuckled. No one would ever mistake a few of these gorillas for modern dancers. “I guess we’re old school. Who are we rooting for?”

  “Die Streeptruie, of course,” Sternkamp said indignantly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your pardon,” said Sternkamp, though without apology. “The striped jerseys.” He motioned toward the team dressed in blue and white hoops, like the cheerleaders. “Western Province.” A more dismissive wave in the direction of the opposition, in white with a red center band. “The Lions. Johannesburg. They’ve had our measure lately, but if we win this match we’re in the Currie Cup semifinals.” Then he abruptly shifted gears. “Do you know why I asked you here?”

  “You mean besides watching the match?” Avakian said mischievously.

  Sternkamp was totally serious when he said, “Yes.”

  Avakian shifted gears to meet his tone. There was always a test on the material. “You’re a prominent and busy man, Mr. Sternkamp. I’m used to being fit into people’s schedules when they want to talk business, so coming to the game doesn’t surprise me. But this is a large box, and I don’t see any friends, family, or business associates. Which leads me to assume you want to speak with me in some private place, where you’re not regularly seen. So what can I do for you, sir?”

  “Half my senior executives wouldn’t have come to that conclusion until I told them. Tell me, how was young Spencer in Nigeria? Truthfully.”

  “He was out of his element, as anyone in his position might be. It was my skill set. He wasn’t any trouble.”

  “That I doubt,” said Sternkamp. “Your tact, and my experience, tell me he was at least a millstone, if not a bloody coward. No, you don’t need to say anything.” He abruptly stood up and began pacing as he spoke. “You did a fine job. Only a few years ago no one would have dared to try and kidnap one of our executives. It shows you how far this country’s stock has fallen in the world.”

  Avakian guessed that Sternkamp was the type who liked to dictate on his feet. And there was also the psychological factor of looking down on his audience as he spoke.

  “Spencer told me your evaluation of events,” said Sternkamp. “And I agree. This was nothing less than an attempt to shoulder us out of Nigeria. And I tell you confidentially that it’s a sad state of affairs when you can’t even do a deal in Nigeria any more. But it’s part and parcel of what’s going on everywhere. We’re used to being pushed out of markets by the big American firms and Royal Dutch. But now it’s also the Russians and the Chinese. Even the bloody French. Do you know the only deal we’ve made lately? Papua New Guinea. Papua bloody New Guinea. And does our brilliant board of directors care? Of course not. The government has stocked it with blacks, Indians, coloreds, women, none of whom know a bloody thing about the oil business. It’s disastrous. They shake the trees for any black with a degree, then send them to run companies. Panda bears.”

  Avakian really didn’t want to further enable a rant like that, but the last part left him unable to help himself. “Excuse me. Did you say panda bears?”

  “Ja. They know to put their fist in the air for the ANC boys, they know to tell us how much it’s going to cost to put them in an executive office. Panda bears. Half black, half white—all they do is eat.”

  Well, every time you thought you’d heard it all from white corporate executives, they laid something new on you. The establishment of apartheid in 1948 only codified into law what had been practiced in South Africa since the first Dutch settlers landed in 1652. A system of racial segregation and discrimination so comprehensive and oppressive that it made the Jim Crow laws of the American south look like Sweden. That it lasted until black majority rule in 1994 made it unsurprising that there were only a limited number of blacks in the country with advanced degrees since the previous white governments had no interest whatsoever in spending any money on the health, welfare, or education of anyone who wasn’t white. Avakian had heard the same garbage all over the world, but Sternkamp’s little tirade was significant considering Safoil’s history.

  When the rest of the world gradually moved on from white supremacism South Africa found itself subject to embargoes and boycotts. A serious matter for a country with no crude oil of its own. So during the apartheid Safoil, as the national energy company, supplied the country’s needs by using the process developed by the Germans in World War II to produce gasoline and diesel from coal and natural gas. They ran South Africa’s gas stations and were also involved in mining and chemicals. Being so closely linked to white majority rule made them a prime target when the African National Congress came to power.

  And based on what Avakian was hearing, the old Afrikaner elite were definitely feeling on the run. What Sternkamp said about the new racial composition of the board was true. There was even a retired French CEO on it to keep an eye on affirmative action in executive hiring. This hadn’t come out of the blue, and the private meeting definitely wasn’t about keeping the kids off cocaine. They hadn’t even been interrupted by a cell phone call, which was unprecedented in Avakian’s experience. He had a very bad feeling that he was about to hear something he definitely didn’t want to. And for that reason he continued to keep his mouth shut and watch the game, though he could feel Sternkamp’s eyes on him.

  Once you got into rugby it was hard to go back to watching its younger brother, American football. The speed and action were so much superior. In rugby play didn’t stop when the runner was tackled, only when the ball went out of bounds or the official blew the whistle for an infraction.

  “What are your plans for the future?” said Sternkamp. True to character, it was more a demand than a question.

  “I’ll be heading back to the States shortly,” said Avakian. “I have some commitments there.”

  “Another job?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “I must say, I appreciate both your competence and your discretion,” said Sternkamp. “I daresay it would have cost us much more than he was worth to get young Spencer back. Would you be interested in another job?”

  “Let me put it this way,” said Avakian. “I’m always interested in hearing another proposal.”

  “Fair enough.” Sternkamp flipped his shirt cuff back to look at his watch. “I’m about to introduce you to two gentlemen who will make the proposal. They both have my confidence.”

  “Do they?” said Avakian, amused by the terminology. “Your confidence. Are these gentlemen affiliated with you, or is this strictly an introduction?”

  “I believe you may have met them before,” said Sternkamp, blithely ignoring the question. He leaned down to press the button on his arm of the couch, and then stuck out his hand. “Good to have met you, Avakian.”

  Avakian rose to take it. “Likewise.”

  Sternkamp was out the door, and all Avakian’s warning systems were blaring. Didn’t even want to be in the same room with the gentlemen he was making the introduction for, eh? They called that deniability. Come to think of it, it would be interesting to know just whose luxury box this was. Oh, Avakian, what are you getting yourself into now? If he had any sense at all he’d make his own exit this very minute.

  But those two evil twins curiosity and perversity kept him around. Two guys that he had met before. Well, he wasn’t going to be pacing the room when they rolled in. He settled back down on the couch.

  There was a single perfunctory knock before the door opened. Avakian came up off the couch and onto the balls of his feet. Initially he couldn’t place the first man who entered the room, but the second brought it all back because he looked the same lean and hard bastard he’d been more than fifteen years before. It had been a long damn time.

  He always liked to describe tropical forest as a wall of green. So green that even though you knew there had to be brown bark in there somewhere, your eyes still couldn’t pick it out. It loomed over the winding clay-brown dirt road, as if threatening at any moment to take it back.

  Two days earlier Lieutenant Colonel Peter Avakian had been knocking around the headquarters of European Command in Stuttgart, waiting to take command of the deployed 1st battalion of the 10th Special Forces Group in Panzer Kaserne. Now he was in Sierra Leone with orders to make an appreciation of the situation there. And the situation sucked.

  The notorious Charles Taylor, who’d taken over the government of Liberia and treated it like his own personal shopping center, had turned his wandering eye to the diamonds and minerals of next door Sierra Leone. In 1991 he sponsored a rebel leader named Foday Sankoh with some seed money and a hundred or so Liberian mercenaries to start a civil war. Now four years later the rebels were on the outskirts of the capital, Freetown. Gazing into the abyss, the group of singularly incompetent military officers who were the Sierra Leone government called a South African company called Corporate Solutions to get them out of the jam.

  And that was whose Land Rover Avakian was riding in. Former South African and British special forces, now mercenaries. An army for hire with a corporate logo.

  The Land Rovers were also green, and someone had hurriedly taken a paint brush and slapped some lighter green blotches on them for extra camouflage. They didn’t have catalytic converters, so if you were farther back in a column of vehicles, as Avakian was, you were driving through a fog of brown road dust mixed with leaded gasoline exhaust. Something most Americans hadn’t smelled since the 1970’s.

  The British colonials had called Sierra Leone the white man’s grave for a reason. The equatorial sun was brutal, and the humidity left a sheen of sweat on everyone that the road dust stuck to like glue. Avakian had discarded his hot wool green beret and was wearing a wide brim bush hat over his woodland camouflage battle dress uniform. His sleeves were rolled down. Every insect in the land carried some sort of disease vector, and there was no sense inviting them aboard.

  He was sitting behind a retired sergeant major of the Special Air Service Regiment, Britain’s elite special forces, who introduced himself as Fred. Originally from Fiji, he’d mentioned in passing that he’d fought everywhere from Borneo in 1964 to the Falkland Islands in 1982. The other three occupants of the Land Rover were former soldiers of the South African army’s 32 Battalion. A group of black Angolans who had been on the losing side in their country’s 1970’s civil war against the Marxist MPLA. They were recruited by South Africa to form an elite, initially secret Portuguese-speaking battalion to fight in Namibia and occasionally across the border in Angola. Black soldiers with white officers in a segregated army. With perfect irony their nickname, the buffalo soldiers, was the same as the black 9th and 10th cavalry regiments of the segregated U.S. Army during the Indian Wars of the 19th century. For obvious reasons this foreign legion was not favorably looked upon by the African National Congress when they took power, and 32 Battalion was immediately disbanded. All those well-trained but unemployed soldiers had been a ready source of mercenary talent ever since.

  The road was littered with the burned out skeletons of Sierra Leone army vehicles that had been caught in rebel ambushes. The front line was supposed to be another ten miles down the road. But the sum of Avakian’s military experience said that the only place the enemy was likely never to be found was where intelligence reports said they’d be.

  Bullets always arrive before the sound of firing. Avakian saw them patter like raindrops in the dry dust of the road up ahead a beat or two before the distinctive bap-bap-bap of AK-47 fire arrived at his ears.

  The ambush was aimed at the lead vehicle, a common mistake. And the first bursts missed. The typical teenaged African soldier usually pointed his weapon in the general vicinity of the target and fired full auto, eyes either open or shut, until the magazine was empty.

  An RPG boomed from uphill and the rocket sailed over the lead Rover to explode in the road.

  None of this would have mattered against the Sierra Leone army. The passengers of the vehicle would have huddled forlornly behind it until the ambushers had the chance to walk their fire onto the target. And the rest of the column would have turned around and run away.

  That didn’t happen this time. After the first burst the lead Rover was empty, everyone charging into the jungle with the vehicle left out in the road to attract the ambushers’ fire.

  Avakian’s experienced ear told him that they were being shot at by about 20 AK’s and a machinegun. The driver of his vehicle cut the wheel hard, driving it right into the trees and out of the kill zone.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26