A low fence ringed the palace property. Beyond it was a lot of open ground. Although the palace was dark, a few tiny pinpoints of light marked the location of soldiers patrolling the expansive courtyard. A lone helicopter — a Russian-made Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter, painted in a military camouflage pattern — sat idle in front of the pillared exterior of the palace. When the nearest patrol started moving away, King whispered the ‘go’ order, and then slipped over the fence.
The palace grounds were partitioned with hedge walls laid out in a geometric pattern around a large reflecting pool. King darted to the nearest of these and then ducked down, waiting for the others to catch up.
As they huddled there, waiting, King checked his watch. The stainless-steel Omega chronograph — a gift from American astronaut Buzz Aldrin — had been on his wrist more or less constantly for nearly forty years. Winding the mechanism and verifying that it was still keeping accurate time had become something of a daily ritual for him, a habit that had taken root as he had ticked down the days and hours remaining in his long journey through the centuries.
“Two minutes, forty-five seconds to go time,” he whispered, then added, “If they’re on time.”
He did not hold out a lot of hope that Mabuki would be punctual. In Africa, and indeed in most areas of the developing world, people took a rather philosophical approach to scheduling. Things got done when they got done… or sometimes they didn’t.
Go time came and went, but King was pleasantly surprised when, not quite two minutes later, he heard the noise of distant explosions and gunfire. The bobbing lights of the foot patrols immediately swung around in the direction of the disturbance and several of the patrols moved off to investigate.
King slipped over the hedge and stole forward, moving from one place of concealment to the next. The noise of the distant battle continued to grow, but King knew that it would be some time before the large force of Republican Guard soldiers got anywhere near the Palais. Mabuki’s attack on the forces at the edge of the Gombe commune was a diversion, designed to draw attention away from the vulnerable river approach and mask the insertion of King’s team.
For several long minutes, King and his team moved in short spurts across the open area, ducking behind hedges, or sometimes simply lying prone in the open, trusting that their camouflage would blend in with the lawn. King’s objective was the smaller annex building, connected to the east wing of the palace, the place where he and Asya had been held captive, though he hadn’t been aware of it at the time. He only knew it now because Deep Blue had continued to monitor the q-phones, which were right where Favreau had left them.
The door to the small building was just twenty yards away, but two soldiers stood between that door and King. The men were in the open, easy targets, but without suppressed weapons, King didn’t dare shoot them. Doing so would give them away and bring the full might of the Congolese army down on them.
There was only one way to get past the men, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
King leaned back and whispered his plan to the leader of the Republican Guard team. Asya shot him an annoyed look, but he pretended not to notice. He didn’t doubt that she was capable of doing what he was about to do, but she was his sister, and if he could spare her a few sleepless nights by outsourcing the dirty work to the locals, then he would.
He gave the signal. Both he and the Congolese guardsman sprinted forward. The soldiers never noticed them. King buried the blade of his AKM Type II bayonet in the nearest man’s throat and clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle any cry of alarm. A second later, the guardsman did the same to the second soldier.
King held his hand in place until his target stopped struggling, then dragged the body around the side of the building where, hopefully, it would go unnoticed for a while. He did what he could to wipe away the hot sticky blood that covered his hands, and then moved toward the entrance door, where Asya had the rest of the team assembled.
They went in fast but silent. The dark anteroom was completely empty, along with the rest of the first floor. King soon found his way to the stairs leading down to the sub-basement, where he and Asya had been kept prisoner. He descended, the barrel of his carbine leading the way, and entered the room with the makeshift detention cell.
Their glasses, q-phones and the rucksacks containing weapons and other gear lay on a desktop, left there like car keys and junk mail on an entryway sideboard.
King donned one pair of glasses and handed the second to Asya. As soon as they were on his head, the night-vision feature activated and the room seemed to brighten around him.
“Blue, it’s King. Do you copy?”
The relief in Deep Blue’s voice came through loud and clear. “Good to have you back on the air.”
“Any news for me?”
“Nothing that can’t wait until you’re finished there.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” He dug into his rucksack and took out the Uzi he’d brought from Cairo. The weapon was still equipped with the integrated holographic virtual aiming sight, as well as a sound suppressor. “Give me a route to the assembly chamber.”
A faint blue arrow hovered in the air before him, pointing the way out, along with a top-down map of the entire building that showed King and Asya as tiny chess pieces, and showed the destination as a red dot. Although Deep Blue didn’t have access to the floor plan, he had been able to extrapolate a rough approximation of the layout from their earlier journey through the Palais. There were a lot of blank spaces, but every room and corridor that King and Asya had glimpsed while in custody was now flawlessly rendered as part of the digital model. With Deep Blue guiding him, King could have walked through the maze blindfolded.
In his eagerness, he almost forgot that the guardsman didn’t share his enhanced visual abilities. They stared blankly at him, their pupils fully dilated and visible as white dots in the night-vision display.
“Stay close,” he told them in French. “But don’t shoot anything unless I give the signal.”
He moved through the structure more quickly now, his confidence bolstered by the technology that he had earlier found so excessive and even a bit intrusive. The glasses were far superior to any night vision goggles he had ever used, not only providing a much sharper perspective on the unlit environment, but doing so without a disorienting change in depth perception. He knew Asya, similarly equipped, was right behind him. The guardsmen, fumbling along in the dark, were having trouble keeping up, but he didn’t slow down.
The glasses registered a change in the ambient light level and King slowed, easing forward to investigate. As he neared a turn in the corridor, he heard voices from just ahead, an odd mix of Swahili and French that, despite being fluent in both languages, taxed his linguistic abilities. He also caught a whiff of fragrant smoke. The glasses weren’t equipped with chemical sensors, but King had no trouble recognizing the aroma of nicotine, mixed with the much more distinctive smell of burning cannabis.
He moved closer, his glasses changing from full-dark to low-light mode as the light from the room beyond increased. He eased around the corner, barely long enough for his gaze to be drawn, moth-like, to the old-fashioned oil burning lamp on a tabletop in the center of the room. The glasses instantly registered what he did not have time to make out: the presence of at least six men, all wearing army uniforms. The soldiers were sprawled out around the table, smoking and joking, presumably off-duty, certainly not in a state of heightened defensive alertness.
Although he had drawn back into concealment, King could still see the men clearly in his display, ghostly figures, seemingly visible through the solid wall.