The seafighters lay a bare two hundred yards offshore, closed up and fully stealthed with their weapons pedestals and secondary armament retracted inboard. A filtered strobe light pulsed at the head of each snub mast, flashing the identification number of the hovercraft. Visible only to the night-vision visors of the Raider coxswains, it guided each small boat home to its mother ship.
Tail ramps dropped and electric motors hummed, winching the raiders aboard, and the job was done.
“Carondelet and Manassas report raiders recovered, Captain,” Steamer Lane advised jubilantly from the cockpit. “Threat boards are clear, and Operations reports no reaction ashore.”
“We’re good down here as well, Steamer,” Amanda replied into the headset mike. “Close the tailgate and head us out. Maintain full stealth and swimmer mode until we clear the area.”
The landing party dismounted from the raider craft, dripping with mud, oil, and water, and redolent with the good-natured giddiness of men who have just doffed the burden of tension and danger. Stone Quillain loomed over Amanda, the white flash of a broad grin breaking past the oil stains and camouflage paint smeared on his face. Amanda grinned back and held up her right hand, palm out. Quillain’s own more massive paw lifted, slapped hers in a high five that cracked like a rifle shot.
“It went perfect!” the big Marine roared. “Totally, abso-goddamn-lutely perfect! Desperate Jesus! The first Special Forces operation in history to ever go down exactly as planned, and we can’t tell anybody about it!”
“I guess we’ll just have to save the story for our memoirs, Stone. Well done! Extremely well done!”
“Thank you kindly, Skipper. I’ll pass the word along to the boys.” Stone doffed his helmet and peeled off his MOLLE harness, stacking his gear against the central bay bulkhead in an oil-and-mud-sodden heap. “Lord, but a cup of coffee’s going to taste good.”
Amanda moved back a hasty step to avoid getting splattered. I’ll have some sent back for you. For Pete’s sake, don’t go forward until you clean up a little. You’re dripping gunk all over the decks.”
Quillain replied with a baleful glance. “Well, there you go! Never invite a woman to a poker game, a hunting camp, or a war. First thing you know, they start trying to tidy everything up.”
The depot was a petroleum swamp, its tanks rising up out of a stinking, sticky morass of mud, spilled fuel, and standing water that sheened with a rainbow layer of oil contamination, all barely contained by the surrounding safety berms.
Around the berm perimeters, salvage operations were already under way. A labor group drawn from among the women and older children of Freetown were hard at work, sopping up puddled diesel with bundles of rags, then wringing them out into open-topped oil drums. All electrical power to the tank farm had been cut and a cordon of militia sentries stood to around the complex, alert for anyone bearing a lit cigarette or any other open flame.
“How much did we lose?” Belewa asked flatly.
“All of the aviation fuel,” the moon-faced depot manager replied hesitantly. He was essentially a civilian administrator, and the ill-fitting militia uniform he had donned did little to give or inspire confidence. “Although there was little enough left of that. And perhaps seventy percent of the diesel and gasoline. The open valves weren’t discovered for a half hour or more, and it took time to call in the technical personnel to cap them off—”
“I did not ask for excuses! I asked only for how much fuel was lost!”
The manager’s words trailed off, fear catching him around the throat.
Belewa looked away, disgusted. Not with the depot manager, but with himself. Terrifying this fat and hapless little man accomplished nothing.
“I am certain you and your staff did all that was possible, Major Hawkins,” he said, keeping his voice controlled. “Now it is your job to save as much as you can. Every liter is precious.”
“We will do our best, General. But much of it has already soaked into the ground. And for the rest, the water, the dirt, even after it has been double-strained… ” Again the director’s voice trailed off.
“Every liter, Major,” Belewa said over his shoulder, striding back toward the tank farm gates.
His chief of staff and a group of military police officers clustered near the guard shack. Beyond them, spotted in an open lot well back from the miasma of the oil spill, sat the BO105 helicopter that had carried Belewa and Atiba to the raid site. Its presence was an indicator of the disaster’s scale. Fuel rationing had long since mandated that the Union’s few air assets be used only in response to extreme emergency.
“Brigadier,” Belewa snapped, not breaking stride as he passed the group, “do you have the security report?”
“Yes, sir,” Atiba replied, looking up.
“Good. Then we will go. There is nothing more we can accomplish here.”
Noting the approach of his two VIP passengers, the helicopter pilot started the spool-up of the 105’s power plant. Within minutes they were airborne, flying south along the coast en route back to Monrovia.
Belewa watched the beach slip past beneath them for a time before speaking into his intercom headset. “What did the security people have to say, Sako?” he inquired over the wind roar and turbine howl flooding in through the doorless side hatches.
“It appears that this may have been an act of civil insurrection,” the Chief of Staff replied. “There is no evidence of a U.N. involvement.”
“Pah!”
“The gate sentries and the men in the guard shack report they were attacked by locals, by blacks,” Atiba insisted.
“And there are a great many black men serving in the American Marine Corps.”
“If it were the American Marines, why didn’t they blow up the entire depot? Or why not simply drop one of their missiles on it?”
“Deniability, Sako! Deniability! This way, it can be said, just as you are saying, that this was an act of sabotage committed by our own people. Not only do they deprive us of our oil reserves, but it can be held up to the world as an example of how the Union is starting to collapse under the U.N. embargo. Of how our people are starting to turn against us.”
“I cannot see it, General! Our ambassador at the United Nations indicates that the Security Council is maintaining a wait-and-see attitude concerning Guinea and the Union. They seem content to let the embargo take its course. There has been no discussion of a U.N. escalation that would involve aggressive acts against our territory. No sign at all. We would have received ample warning.”
“This has nothing to do with the United Nations! The U.N. may be satisfied to maintain an embargo and to wait and see. She is not! She does not understand ‘wait and see.’ She is here to make war! On us!”
“The American commander again? Then what do we do? File a protest?”
“On what grounds? With what evidence? What kind of proof do we have?” Belewa brought his fists down on his knees in angry frustration. “And what would the Security Council do except to grin in our faces? With the Leopard fighting their battles for them, they are freed from having to make unpleasant decisions concerning us.”
Belewa lifted his fists again, then caught himself. Instead, he used one hand to tiredly rub his eyes. “Remember this, my friend, for your own future battlefields. You may think and plan and prepare for a campaign and believe that you have prepared for every conceivable eventuality. But there will always be at least one random factor that you will overlook. I overlooked the Leopard, Sako. I did not consider the Leopard.”