Quillain glanced up, frowning suspiciously. “Excuse me, but just what are you thinking about, ma’am?”
Amanda leaned forward over the desk, intently meeting Quillain’s gaze. “Something I want you to think about too, Stone. What if we could take out Wellington Creek? Not only would Belewa’s operations against Guinea be derailed, but we could shorten this entire campaign by months at least.”
“Lord A’mighty! You are serious!”
“You bet I’m serious.” Amanda rose to her feet and paced off a few steps. “The target is there, it’s critical, and it’s vulnerable. Just by forcing the Union to shift their remaining fuel reserves around to cover its loss would take a huge bite out of whatever POL stocks they’ll have left. This is a natural, Stone. This is a body blow!”
“Hell, Skipper, I’m not arguing the point,” Quillain replied. “It sounds like just a hell of an idea to me. The problem will be with selling it to the Diplo-dinks. I don’t think the Security Council would authorize a direct boots-on-the-dirt raid on Union territory, at least not without arguing about it for six months. The idea makes too much sense.”
“I agree, Captain. That’s why I wasn’t going to ask for authorization.”
“Lord… A… mighty!”
Amanda’s golden hazel eyes glowed with an almost impish enthusiasm, and she arched an eyebrow at the Marine. “Like the man said, it’s only illegal if we get caught.”
Quillain slapped his utility cover against his knee. “Begging the Captain’s pardon, but how in thee hell does she figure on doing that? Taking out an oil depot is going to cause talk! We pull a stunt like that and those Union boys over there are going to run screaming to the General Assembly and the Third World media. You were able to justify that strike on Yelibuya by the skin of your teeth. You try this one and for certain-sure you’re going to end up getting yourself fried for exceeding your mandate!”
“The potential definitely exists,” Amanda replied, shrugging her slim shoulders. “And if it blows up in our faces, I’ll just have to take the fall for exceeding my authority. So be it. But if we can pull it off… aborting this whole damn war and maybe preventing thousands of casualties… I think the risk will be worth it.”
She started to pace again, slowly. “The keys to this operation are going to be no linkage and a low profile. We’ll have to make it look like some sort of local vandalism or sabotage launched against the Union government by its own citizens. That means no overt U.S. presence ashore, nothing left behind that could connect our forces to the act, and most importantly, no casualties. Theirs or ours… Oh, and also we’ve got to figure out some way to eliminate a couple of thousand tons of petroleum without blowing up or burning down half of Kizzy township.”
Quillain wiped a hand across his face and muttered something under his breath.
“What was that, Stone?”
“Nothing, Skipper. I was just thinking about this damn fool I knew once who went around talking about candy-assed female officers.”
Rain poured from the night skies, the heavy, misting, blood temperature rain of the African Gold Coast. The two middle-aged Union militiamen on sentry-go at the depot’s main gate were long used to such deluges. Nonetheless, familiarity didn’t make the sodden weight of their cheap cotton uniforms any easier to bear. Nor did it allow their vision to extend much beyond the feeble yellow circle of the gate arc light.
Nothing had happened during the first half of their watch except for the hourly pass of the Military Police motor patrol. Nothing ever happened around Freetown. That was why the security of the depot had been left in the hands of the local Home Defense battalion.
Propping their rifles behind them to protect them from the wet, the sentries leaned back against the corroded chain-link fencing of the gate. It was a futile gesture. The bluing had long ago been worn from their ancient Lee Enfield rifles, and rust already was setting in. Another chore to deal with before going home.
There was only one good thing about militia duty on such a night. It would be a full week before it would come around again. With half-closed eyes, the sentries stared into the darkness.
Then, gradually, the sentries became aware of voices and music growing louder over the hammering patter of the rain. Half a dozen men clad in ragged dungarees approached down Parsonage Road, one of them bearing a cheap tape player balanced on his shoulder. Afro-Pop blared from it into the night, blurring the jocular babble of their conversation, and bottles glinted in their hands.
Boatmen or oil workers, the sentries mutually decided without comment, coming from the bars and disco clubs up around Macauley Street and heading home to their shacks along the beach. A common enough thing. Common enough to be ignored.
According to the standing orders of the sentry post, anyone approaching the oil depot after dark was to be challenged and asked to present identification. However, after being told, profanely, what they could do with their identification for the hundredth time, the militiamen had abandoned the practice.
One of the raggedly clad men waved a beer bottle in the direction of the sentries, calling out the universal coast greeting of “Howdebody!”
The sentry nodded a reply, thirstily wondering if he could ask for a drink.
Then, just as the group of boatmen came opposite the sentry post, a silenced pistol whispered out a single bullet.
The arc light over the depot gate shattered and went out. The party of “boatmen” pivoted and lunged at the sentries, launching a silent, furious assault. The hard-swung tape player decked one of the militiamen, while a sand-filled sock took out the other. Neither Union soldier had the chance to cry out even a single word of warning.
Other forms materialized out of the darkness, uniformed, helmeted, armed, pushing open the gates and swarming through. Some raced toward the looming white cylinders of the oil storage tanks, while others rushed the lights of the guard shack a few yards away.
Within the guard shack, the sergeant of the security detail and his corporal sat at the shack’s desk, playing cards, while the members of the off-duty sentry team sprawled asleep in the room’s two bunks. When both the front and rear doors exploded open, surprise was again total. The “boatmen” stormed in and piled on, swinging callused fists and a variety of blunt instruments.
The sergeant and the two sentries went down, lunging for weapons they were not permitted to reach. The corporal tried for the telephone, another act of futility, as the phone lines had already been cut. Battered into unconsciousness, the occupants of the shack, along with the two gate sentries, were gagged and blindfolded with rags and bound with coarse locally made cord taken from a captured smuggler’s pirogue.
With that accomplished, the leader of the “boatmen” stepped back out into the night.
“All secure, Skipper.”
Stone Quillain nodded to Sergeant Tallman, rain dripping from his helmet brim. “Good enough. Now you and the rest of your guys rejoin the Marine Corps. We still got work to do.”
Touching the “Press-to-Talk” pad on his Leprechaun transceiver, Quillain spoke lowly into his whisper mike. “Royalty, this is Mudskipper. Phase one complete.”
Elsewhere in the darkness, hunters converged on prey. There were two other groups of Militia sentries to be dealt with, a pair of roving two-man security patrols within the confines of the tank farm itself. An Eagle Eye recon drone hovering just beneath the overcast tracked each patrol on its FLIR sensors, its systems operator coaching a Marine fire team in on each target.