Skeleton Coast

“Thanks,” Juan said with relief as Julia and her team vanished into the ship.

Max sidled up next to him, his pipe emitting a fragrant blend of apple and cedar. “That was a hell of a premonition, getting me to contact Langston and tapping into Echelon.”

One of Juan’s first acts when he learned that Geoffrey Merrick’s rescue had fallen apart was to get Max to lean on Overholt in order to utilize the NSA’s Echelon program. At any given second there were hundreds of millions of electronic data transfers taking place over the globe: cell phones, regular phones, faxes, sat phones, radios, e-mails, and Web postings. There were acres of linked computers at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that trawled the bandwidths looking for specific phrases or words that might be of interest to American intelligence. Though not designed to be a real-time eavesdropping tool, with the right parameters programmed into the system—like a call originating at the Devil’s Oasis’

geographic location and containing such terms asMerrick ,Singer ,hostage ,rescue ,Donleavy —Echelon could find that needle in the cyber haystack. A transcript of Nina Visser’s conversation to Daniel Singer was e-mailed to Max aboard theOregon three minutes after the call had ended.

“I had a feeling that after our boys were caught whoever Singer had left in charge at the prison would want to let him know what was going on and get some new marching orders.” Juan ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to try to relieve some of the fatigue. “They’re a bunch of amateurs. They wouldn’t have contingency plans in place.”

“What did you do with the rest of the kidnappers?” Max asked. His pipe had gone out and there was too much of a breeze to relight it.

Juan started walking toward a hatchway, his mind already in his glass-enclosed shower with the heat cranked as high as he could stand it. Max kept pace. “Left them out there with enough water to last a week. I’ll have Lang contact Interpol. They can coordinate with Namibian authorities to pick them up and return them to Switzerland to face kidnap charges, with a charge of attempted murder for Susan Donleavy.”

“Why bring her back here? Why not let her rot with the rest of them?”

Cabrillo stopped walking and turned to his old friend. “Because the NSA couldn’t pinpoint Singer’s location and I know she has it and because this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. Kidnapping Merrick was only the opening gambit to whatever his former partner has pla

A moment later they reached Juan’s cabin and kept talking as Juan stripped out of his filthy uniform and tossed the clothes in a hamper. He threw his boots into the trash but first poured out a quarter cup of sand that had entered the shoe through the .44 caliber bullet hole. “Good thing I couldn’t feel that,” he remarked casually. He unhooked his combat leg and set it aside, pla

“Mark and Eric checked in about an hour ago,” Max said. He sat on the edge of the copper Jacuzzi tub while Juan climbed though the banks of steam erupting from the shower. “They’ve covered about a thousand square miles, but there’s still no sign of the guns or Samuel Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution.”

“What about the CIA?” Juan called over the sound of water beating against his skin. “Any of their assets in the Congo have a bead on Makambo?”

“Nothing. It’s like the guy vanishes into thin air whenever he wants to.”

“One guy can vanish. Not five or six hundred of his followers. How did Murph set up his search?”

“They started from the dock and have been flying wider and wider circles, overlapping the radio tag’s range by about twenty miles just to be safe.”

“The river is the border between the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Juan said. “Are they staying south of it?”

“Similarities to their names aside, relations between the two countries are a mess. They couldn’t get permission to cross into the R of C, so yeah, they’re staying south of the border.”

“What do you bet Makambo took the weapons north?”

“It’s possible,” Max agreed. “If Congo’s northern neighbors are shielding his army it could explain why he’s never been caught.”

“We’ve only got a few more hours until the tags run out of their batteries.” Juan shut off the water and opened the door. He was clean but scantly refreshed. Max handed him a thick Brazilian cotton towel.

“Call Mark and have him do whatever he has to in order to get across that border and take a listen.

Those guns aren’t more than a hundred and fifty miles from the river. I’m sure of it.”

“I’ll call him now,” Max said and levered himself from his perch.

Juan kept his hair short enough so he didn’t need to brush it. He put on deodorant and decided he looked more dangerous with thirty hours of beard so he left his straight razor on the bathroom counter.

The dark circles under his eyes and their red rims gave him a demonic cast. He dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt. He called down to the Magic Shop for a tech to get his combat leg and on the way to the ship’s hold he stopped in to grab a sandwich from the galley.

Linda Ross was waiting outside the hold. She was holding a BlackBerry that was receiving signals from the shipboard Wi-Fi network.

“How’s our guest?” Juan asked as he approached.

“Take a look yourself.” She tilted the small device so he could see the screen. “Oh, and I want to congratulate you on pulling off the rescue.”

“I had a lot of help.”

Susan Donleavy was strapped to a stainless-steel embalmer’s table in the center of the cavernous hold where Juan had packed his parachute the day before. The only light came from a single high-intensity halogen lamp that formed a focused cone around the table so she could see nothing beyond. The feed to the BlackBerry came from a camera placed just above the lamp.

Susan’s hair was lank from so long in the desert without enough water for personal hygiene, and the skin on her arms was blotchy from insect bites. Blood had drained from her face, leaving her washed out, and her lower lip quivered. She was covered in sweat.

“If she wasn’t tied down she would have bitten her fingernails to the quick,” Linda said.

“You ready?” Juan asked her.

“Just going over some notes. I haven’t done an interrogation in a while.”

“Like Max always says, it’s like falling off a bike. Do it once and you never forget.”

“I hope to God he didn’t put a sense of humor down on his job application.” Linda thumbed off the BlackBerry. “Let’s go.”

Juan opened the door into the hold. A wall of heat blasted him. They’d set the thermostat for a hundred degrees. Like the lighting, the temperature was part of the interrogation technique Linda had settled on to crack Susan Donleavy. They stepped silently into the room, but remained just beyond the circle of light.

He had to give Susan high marks because she didn’t call out for nearly a minute. “Who’s there?” she asked, a manic edge in her voice.

Cabrillo and Ross remained silent.

“Who’s there?” Susan repeated a bit more stridently. “You can’t hold me like this. I have rights.”

There was a fine line between panic and anger—the trick was to never cross it during an interrogation.

Never let your subject turn their fear into rage. Linda timed it perfectly. She could see the fury building in Susan’s face, the way the muscles in her neck tensed. She stepped into the light a moment before Donleavy started to scream. Her eyes went wide when she saw that it was another woman with her in the hold.

“Miss Donleavy, right from the outset I want you to understand you have no rights. You are aboard an Iranian-flagged ship in international waters. There is no one here to represent you in any way. You have two choices and two choices only. You can tell me what I want to know or I will turn you over to a professional interrogator.”