The Republican Guard general had laughed at his demand. “It cannot be done. This is not New York City, my friend.”
Flying — on any aircraft other than Crescent II—wasn’t a viable option. General Velle had closed the airspace around Kisangani, and had the ability to shoot down any civilian aircraft that got too close to the remote city. The rebel leader also controlled the entire air armada of the DRC, which really consisted of a pair of Mil Mi-8 helicopters — one of which was currently carrying Favreau across the country.
That left only river travel. Fortunately, the navy had not defected to the side of the rebels. Unfortunately, the navy consisted of eight Chinese made Type 062 Shanghai II patrol craft, only one of which was presently operational.
“At maximum speed, the patrol boat could get you there in two days’ time,” Mabuki went on. “Maybe more. It is a long trip, and the boat is…” He let the sentence fall away, allowing King to reach his own conclusions.
“Two days?”
“Relax.” Mabuki clapped him on the arm. “We have a saying, ‘A bald headed man will not grow hair by getting excited.’”
“What the hell does that even mean?” King replied, exasperated. He knew what it meant. He needed to cross a distance that was just slightly less than that which separated Los Angeles and Dallas, in a country with virtually no infrastructure, where the average person earned about a dollar a day. He could shout and stamp his feet until he was blue in the face, but it wouldn’t change the fact that he was looking at a two day journey to his next objective… if he was lucky.
The journey had begun promptly, at least insofar as the Congolese sailors were capable of promptness. King was joined by a small contingent of guardsmen, which included the members of the strike team that had accompanied him during the raid on the Palais de la Nation. Miraculously, all of them had survived the battle, escaping with just a couple of minor injuries. “The regular Army soldiers,” explained their leader, “do not know how to fight.” King hoped that would be true of the forces under Velle’s direct command as well.
Viewed from a distance, the Shanghai had the profile of a battleship, bristling with gun barrels, and rising to a raked bow in the front. Up close, it was less imposing. 130 feet long, its guns were a pair of 37mm cannons, one fore, one aft, and a 25 mm twin barrel machine gun mounted behind the radar mast. There were no creature comforts. The low slung boat was intended for short patrol missions lasting only a few hours. King and the soldiers would be riding on the open deck, eating only what they could bring along, sheltered from weather and insects by whatever means they could contrive, with no privacy and no concessions to hygiene.
It was nearly dawn before the Shanghai pulled away from the dock in Kinshasa and started upriver. A low white fog covered the water, giving the appearance that the gunboat was motoring through the clouds. King watched their progress for a while, then found an unclaimed section of deck near the bow, draped a thin mosquito net over the rail and down to the deck, careful not to leave any opening, and as the sun rose over the emerald expanse of the rain forest, he drifted off to sleep.
At about the same time that King embarked on his journey to Kisangani, the Red Queen completed hers. The helicopter, which had less than a day earlier carried her from General Velle’s headquarters to the capital city, had brought her full circle. Her intended mission, to negotiate an end to the revolution — an end which would have installed General Velle as the military dictator of the country and pave the way for an exclusive resource partnership with Consolidated Energy — had been thwarted by the news of Joseph Mulamba’s escape. Her subsequent gambit to seize control of the country had ended disastrously. Yet she did not feel, what a famous sportscaster had once called ‘the agony of defeat.’
In fact, she felt energized.
During the long helicopter ride, she had analyzed her situation like the pieces on a chessboard. Although there seemed to be only a few moves left to her — defend, retreat, surrender — she knew that now was the time for a bold, dynamic strategy. The question that had occupied her thoughts for most of the trip was not actually what she would do, but why she would do it.
Her satellite phone had rung just once during the night, a single call from ESI headquarters. She had not answered, nor had she listened to the voice mail message that had been left. She knew that she had been disavowed, cut loose to face the consequences of failure on her own. Consolidated Energy would deny any involvement, and would bide their time for a while, before making another play for the riches hidden beneath the Congo at the bottom of Lake Kivu. The fact that the phone had been silent thereafter was proof enough that she was on her own. She could still win this game, though. She fully intended to, but what would she do with the spoils of her victory?
As she contemplated that question, the answer came to her like an epiphany.
What are you willing to sacrifice to win? Everything.
General Velle was waiting for her when the Mi-8 touched down at the army base. “This is a disaster,” he said by way of a greeting. “You have ruined everything.”
He was trembling with rage, and she knew that the only thing that kept him from lashing out her with anything other than words was his certain knowledge that her death would result in the detonation of the backpack nuke.
“It is a setback,” she countered, coolly. “Nothing more.”
“A setback? My loyal forces in Kinshasa have been defeated. We cannot take the capital without them.”
“Kinshasa is irrelevant.” She turned to the flight crew. “Do not disembark. We will be leaving again as soon as we have refueled.”
“Leaving?” Velle asked, still storming. “And where do you intend to go?”
She returned her gaze to him. “General, you should study your history. You do not rule Africa by capturing cities. You rule by possessing that which everybody else wants. I am going to Lake Kivu, and if you wish to win, then I suggest you begin moving your forces there.”
“Kivu? What is at Kivu?”
The Red Queen allowed herself a wry smile. “Everything.”
37
One of the raptors darted its head forward and snapped the chemlight up in its jaws. The thin plastic tube burst apart in a spray of glowing phosphorescence that splashed the creature’s plumage. The dispersed liquid gave little illumination, returning the cave to near total darkness but the splash revealed the raptor’s location. And its movements. The greenish glob began bobbing up and down as it shot through the inky blackness, straight toward the human intruders.
Bishop hesitated for a moment. The existence of these dinosaurs, while theorized by fringe science for years, was something of a miracle. Killing them would be a shame. But they were also predators, and given the path of the glowing specimen, hungry predators.
Seeing no alternative, Bishop swept his M240 in an arc, spraying lead in the path of the charging raptor. In the muzzle flash, he saw that it wasn’t alone. The glow-stained raptor went down in a flurry of scrabbling limbs and flying bits of lichen, but the rest continued, swarming. Bishop held the trigger down. The creatures moved faster than he could target, and for every one that went down, three more slipped under his barrage. Knight opened fire beside him, but with even less effectiveness. The heavy caliber rounds from his Intervention sniper rifle gouged up chunks of the lichen covered cave floor, but the rate of fire was so slow that he couldn’t track targets with his muzzle flashes. Worse still, the raptors seemed to have no sense of the relationship between the guns’ thunderous reports and the deadly consequences that might follow. If anything, the noise seemed to drive them into a killing frenzy.