“No.”
“Then why the shit are you buggin’ me about it?” the Sleeper whisper-snarled.
“Because I figured you’d want to know!”
“When it’s my watch on the glasses, then I’ll want to know. Until then, I’m trying to get some sack time in here!”
“Ah, shove it. You prick!”
“Up yours, dork!”
The Sleeper returned to his favorite pastime, his head against his helmet pillow. The Bear returned to the night glasses.
“This all?” the transport sergeant asked.
“This all we got t’ru, and I think this be all anybody gets t’ru tonight,” the smuggler replied in the soft mixed English African patois of the coast. “The monsters be hungry.”
“Too right,” the second smuggler agreed. “Saw ’em takin’ a pinasse just off the bar at Harper. Think I got past just because I was a little fish not worth keeping.”
Two outboard-engined blockade runners lay drawn up on the sand, each assembled from a pair of pirogues lashed side by side to form a seagoing catamaran hull. Their combined cargoes, a dozen fifty-gallon drums of diesel oil, barely made a load for one of the three flatbed trucks that had been waiting at the rendezvous point.
Those oil drums had now been hogged up a plank onto the rear deck of the last truck in line and lashed upright in a double row. The enlisted men of the labor battalion were grateful for their abbreviated workload. The noncom commanding them, however, knew enough about current conditions within the Union to be concerned about what the two empty trucks meant.
“You got we dash?” the first smuggler demanded softly. “We got t’ be back over the line before light.”
The Union sergeant silently handed over the two sweat stained envelopes. Stepping closer to the guttering beacon fire, the two Ivory Coast boatmen hastily counted the thick pads of small-denomination currency.
After a few moments, the first smuggler looked back at the noncom. “Okay for now. But you tell ’em next time it’s more.”
“You got nuthin’ to bitch,” the sergeant replied sullenly, knowing how the contents of the envelopes compared with his own army pay.
“We get plenty to bitch if we go down to the Big Hotel for oil running. Lot of men Frenchside already gone down. Lot of ’em from our village, too. Be gettin’ too dangerous to dodge the monsters. You tell your big man, next time, more money! Else we go back to fishing.”
The noncom replied with another coast English phrase, a well-corrupted form of “shove it up your ass.” Kicking out the beacon fire, he turned back to his trucks. The smugglers responded obscenely in kind and started down the beach to their boats.
The transport sergeant paused to double-check the load lashings on the truck carrying the oil drums. Few as they were, he didn’t want to lose any of them. His captain wasn’t going to be pleased with this haul. But at least this time they were bringing in some fuel. There had been other nights recently when none had gotten through at all.
“Hey, Sleeper… Sleeper… Hey, buttfuck! Wake up, will ya!”
“Now what?”
“Something’s going on. They just kicked out the fire. I think they’re getting set to move out.”
“Lessee.”
The Bear moved the nite-brite binoculars to the point where he knew Sleeper’s hand would be waiting. The second Marine accepted the glasses, and a minute smear of faint green light leaked from around the eyepieces as Sleeper keyed the photomultiplier system.
“Yeah. The boat guys are taking off.”
Engines sounded over the hiss and rush of the nearby surf — the burble and buzz of two-cycle outboards and the deeper rumble of truck diesels turning over. Headlights snapped on, two twin-sets and a cyclopean single.
“Here come the trucks. They’re heading this way.”
“Check ’em out good, Sleeper. The Skipper and the Lady’ll want the word on any cargo.”
“I know, shit-for-brains. Gimme a second… Okay, we got oil drums on the last truck. Only the last one. The other two are empty.”
“They got a truckload through, huh? Trust the damn swabbies to screw up the job.” The Bear reached for his personal weapon, a 9mm Heckler and Koch MP-5. The bulky cylinder of a silencer had been screwed to the stubby barrel of the sub machine gun and a second cylindrical unit, a night-vision sniper scope, had been clipped to the grab-tight rail atop its receiver.
“Hey, Bear? What you doing?”
“Cleaning up, dude. Cleaning up,” the Bear replied, keying on the nite-brite optics and setting the fire selector to semi auto.
One after another, the Union army vehicles rumbled by. Their headlights brushed over the hide where the two Marines lay concealed, revealing nothing to the sleepy men slouched in the cabs. As the third truck rolled past, the Bear came up onto his knees, flinging back the flap of the ghilly net. Bringing the MP-5 to his shoulder, he settled the sights on target. Feather-light, his finger caressed the finely tuned trigger.
There were noises, more like a series of soft explosive sneezes than anything that could be construed as a gunshot. Holes magically appeared low on the oil drums strapped to the truck’s rear deck, each hole streaming a jet of oil, the Israeli Military Industries FMJ slugs punching cleanly through both rows of containers. The tinny thunk, thunk, thunk of sheet metal being pierced was lost in the roar of the gutted mufflers and the crash of the vehicle jouncing over the disintegrating pavement. Likewise, the smell of the spilling raw diesel merged with the exhaust fumes of the poorly tuned engine.
With the lifeblood of the Union dribbling out on the pavement behind it, the convoy went on its way. With their own mission completed to their satisfaction, the Bear and Sleeper did likewise.
Stone Quillain doffed his utility cover as he entered Amanda’s quarters. “You wanted to see me, Skipper?”
“Um-hmm,” Amanda replied absently from the far side of the desk, her attention still focused on the sheets of hard copy she held. “Sit down, Stone. I was just looking over the reports from the Observation Posts we had on the beach Unionside last night. I wanted to talk to you about one of them.”
Quillain lifted a hand. “No need to say another word, ma’am. I know exactly what you’re about to say. One of the OPs broke cover and shot up a load of smuggled oil drums. Their platoon leader and I have been tearing strips off the two men responsible all morning, and I can promise you it won’t happen again.”
Amanda chuckled softly “I hope you left a few shreds of meat on the bone. You see, those men of yours have given me an idea. I want to see what you might think of it.”
“What y’all got, Skipper?”
Amanda tossed the patrol reports onto her cluttered desk top and tilted her chair back, thoughtfully studying the ceiling of the quarters cubicle. “Maybe a way to crank up the pressure on Belewa a little.”
“That sounds like a worthy project. I’m listening.”
“So far, our campaign to bleed off the Union’s oil reserves has been essentially passive. We’re embargoing Belewa’s oil imports, but we haven’t been able to do anything about the reserves he already has in-country.”
“Yeah?” Quillain replied cautiously.
Amanda let her chair flip forward again. Reaching for a file folder, she passed it across the desk to the Marine. “Take a look at these.”
“What are they?”
“Photo printouts. Photographs of the Wellington Creek tank farm, located in Kizzy township, just east of Freetown and inside the Sierra Leone river estuary. Formerly it belonged to the Shell Oil Company. Currently, however, it’s being used by the West African Union as their primary petroleum storage and distribution center for both their western provinces and for their military campaign against Guinea.”