Skeleton Coast

“Did you have to leave it to the last second?” Eddie asked when Juan approached. He was gri

Cabrillo shook his outstretched hand. “You know what a procrastinator I can be. You guys okay?”

“Couple more gray hairs, but none the worse. One of these days you’re going to have to tell me how you rustled up an army in the middle of nowhere.”

“Great magicians never divulge their secrets.”

The plane continued to pick up speed and was soon outpacing the guards’ truck. Through the open ramp Juan could see them fire off a few rounds in frustration before the driver braked hard and turned to give chase to the rest of Mafana’s men. A third and then fourth truck roared out of the prison gate after them.

Tiny hauled back on the yoke and the old Caribou lifted off the rough field. The vibrations that had built until Juan was sure he’d lose a filling finally evened out. Mindful that the ramp would have to remain open, the patients were moved to the front of the aircraft, leaving the area at the rear open. Linc stood on the ramp, a safety line stretching from a D ring on the floor to the rear of his combat vest. He wore a helmet with a microphone so he could talk with Tiny in the cockpit. There was a long crate at his feet.

Juan clipped himself in, too, and cautiously approached the big SEAL. Hot wind whipped through the cabin as Tiny banked the plane to come in behind the guards’ vehicles. With their newer trucks they had already eaten away half the lead Mafana’s troops had managed to gain on them.

The trucks were approaching a deep valley between towering dunes when the plane hurtled over the two sets of vehicles. There was less than a half mile separating them. Tiny kept them at a thousand feet as he flew along the length of the valley, but in an instant the valley came to a sudden end. Rather than opening up again onto open desert, the valley was only three miles long, a dead end. Its head was a sloping dune so steep that the trucks would have to slow to a walking pace to reach the summit.

“Bring us around again,” Linc shouted into his mike. “Come up behind them.”

He motioned for Mike and Eddie to join them. The two men quickly got themselves secured, leaning over to maintain their balance as the plane banked around. Linc opened the crate. Inside were four of Mafana’s RPGs. They were the reason Juan had sent one of Mafana’s men to hook up with Linc.

Linc handed one of the rocket-propelled grenade launchers to each of them.

“This is going to have to be some pretty fancy shooting,” Mike shouted dubiously. “Four trucks. Four RPGs. We’re doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour and they must be close to fifty.”

“Ye of little faith,” Linc yelled back.

The plane evened out again at the entrance to the valley. Tiny took them lower, fighting updrafts of hot air lofting off the desert floor. The dunes flashed by no more than a hundred feet from the wing tips. Linc was listening to the pilot as he counted down how long it would be before they shot over the guards’

convoy. When he lifted the RPG to his shoulder the other three did likewise.

He pointed at Juan and Ski. “Aim at the base of the dune to the left of the convoy. Mike and I will take the right. Drop the grenades about twenty yards in front of the lead vehicle.”

Tiny took them lower still, and then gained elevation quickly when the plane came under fire from below.

He steadied the Caribou just as they passed the last truck in line. For a fleeting second, Juan and the others were looking down at the convoy and it appeared that every gun the guards had was blazing away at them.

“Now!”

They triggered the RPGs simultaneously. The four rockets popped from their tubes and ignited, their white contrails corkscrewing through the clear air. The plane had overshot Mafana’s trucks by the time the warheads slammed into the base of the dunes. The shaped charges went off in blinding eruptions of sand. And while they seemed puny compared to the massive scale of the dunes, the explosions had their desired effect.

The equilibrium of angle and height that held the dunes in place was thrown off by the blasts. A trickle of sand began to slide down each face, accelerating and growing until it looked like both sides of the canyon were racing for each other. And caught in the middle was the guards’ convoy.

The twin landslides crashed onto the valley floor. The right-side avalanche had been going a bit faster than its partner so when it slammed into the convoy, the four vehicles were blown onto their sides. Men and weapons were tossed from the beds of the trucks only to be struck by the second wall of sand as it careened into them, burying everything under thirty or more feet of earth.

A cloud of dust was all that marked their grave.

Linc hit the button to close the ramp and all four men stepped back.

“What did I tell you?” Linc gri

“Lucky thing this valley was here,” Mike retorted.

“Lucky, my butt. I saw it when I hightailed it out last night. Juan had Mafana’s men drive here specifically so we could take out all the guards in one fell swoop.”

“Pretty slick, Chairman,” Trono conceded.

Juan didn’t try to hide his self-satisfied smile. “That it was. That it was.” He turned his attention back to Lincoln. “Does Max have everything set?”

“TheOregon ’s tied to the dock in Swakopmund. Max will meet us at the airport with a flatbed truck carrying an empty shipping container. We load the wounded in and hop aboard ourselves. Max will then drive down to the wharf, where a Customs inspector with a pocket bulging with baksheesh will sign off on the bill of lading and we get hoisted onto the ship.”

“And Mafana’s men are going to drive through to Windhoek,” Juan concluded, “where they can fly out to wherever we can find Ndebele a safe haven.” His tone soured. “All well and good, except we didn’t rescue Geoffrey Merrick and have lost any chance to find him again. I’m sure his kidnappers left the Devil’s Oasis five seconds after the guards.”

“Ye of so little faith,” Linc said for the second time with a sad shake of his head.

NINA Visser was sitting in the shade of a tarp anchored to the bed of their truck when she heard a buzzing sound. She had been writing in her journal, a habit she’d kept up since her early teens. She’d filled volumes of notebooks over the years, knowing someday it would be an important resource for her biographer. That she would be important enough to need a book written about her life was something she’d never doubted. She was going to be one of the great champions of the environmental movement, like Robert Hunter and Paul Watson, Greenpeace’s cofounders.

Of course the current operation wouldn’t be included. This was one blow she would strike from the shadows. She was only writing out of habit and knew she would have to destroy this journal and any others that mentioned her involvement with Dan Singer’s scheme.

She closed the notebook and slid her pen into the spiral binding. Crawling out from under the tarp was like opening the door of an oven. The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly. She stood, dusted off the seat of her pants, and shielded her eyes from the sun, searching the sky for the plane Da

A couple of her friends crawled out from the tarp to join her, including Susan. They were all tired from the drive, and thirsty because they hadn’t packed enough water.

Merrick was faring the worst since he was bound and gagged and left leaning against the side of the truck, where there was only a sliver of shadow. He hadn’t gained consciousness since being injected with the heroin and his sunburned face was rimmed with dried sweat. Flies buzzed around his wound.