African Dragon Read online

  Chris stopped walking and gently pulled her around to face him. “I was serious about the ‘you marrying me part.’ It’s going to get a little complicated, though, don’t you think?”

  She laughed. “Come on, we’ve known each other for what? Two months?”

  “Well it has been a busy two months,” he said with a smile. “How many of your other boyfriends have brought you out into the jungle for combat operations?”

  She laughed. “Unfortunately, all of them,” she said. Then quickly added, “Just kidding.”

  They looked at each other, neither one moving a muscle. Finally, Julia spoke. “You know, if the boss found out we were sleeping together, he’d take me off the team.”

  “You think so?” Chris asked.

  “I know so. I don’t know how it works in the navy, but in the company, there’s no overt fooling around between agents. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen—it just doesn’t get out in the open. If we actually were engaged or something—and I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but if it did, everyone would know. And I’d be pulled in two seconds.”

  Chris felt his heart sink.

  “It doesn’t change anything between us, it just means you can’t get down on one knee. Yet,” she added, and gave him a kiss. They had been standing there kissing for quite a while when both of their phones buzzed at the same time.

  They leaned back away from each other and laughed. “Speak of the devil!” said Chris. “But listen—seriously, Julia. It will be a little weird working together in the field now, don’t you think? I mean, the last time we ran around in the jungle together getting shot at, I wasn’t head over heels in love with you. It might be a little distracting now…”

  “Yes, you were so in love with me, Admiral. And yes, it will be distracting. But it also means we get to be together, so deal with it.”

  They smiled at each other. It was going to be interesting, to say the least.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try my best not to drool on you in front of anyone, but I can’t make any promises.” He made sure that no one was looking, then squeezed her butt.

  “And you can’t squeeze my butt in front of Director Holstrum. It would be a dead giveaway,” she said, smiling, and then squeezed his.

  “You can squeeze mine anytime you want,” he said.

  Their phones buzzed again, and they hustled off to their car to get back out to Langley.

  2.

  The team assembled in their usual muster room at CIA headquarters. Julia looked at Theresa, sitting next to Moose, and smirked. Theresa returned the little grin and looked away. They were best friends and knew each other’s love lives. The door opened and Desk Chief Darren Davis walked in, followed by his assistant, Dex Murphy. After some informal greetings, Darren and Dex sat down with the team.

  The team had been invented last year—a mixture of navy SEALs, marine recondos, army rangers, and CIA operatives. They had used the cover story of a “US Navy All-Star Baseball Team” to get into Saudi Arabia the previous year for an operation intercepting fifty million dollars of insurgent money, and then traded their baseball uniforms in for church group t-shirts for an insertion into Paraguay to take out terrorists and drug smugglers in the tri-border region. After a couple of weeks off to debrief and decompress, they were recalled to their “ready room.”

  “Welcome back everyone,” said Darren as he took his seat. “Most of you were military so you know how this works: you train for desert warfare and you get sent to the mountains—you train for mountains and end up swimming up a beach at night. Evidently, we are learning from the army. You trained to be a baseball team last year and played what? Two real games on a job? Then you became a church group for the Paraguay job. So you come home, train hard again out on the baseball field, and guess what? It’s time to start learning about boats and SCUBA diving from your navy buddies.”

  The team members all looked at each other and groaned, except for the SEALs, who were smiling.

  “Yeah, I knew you guys would be happy to hear it,” Darren said, looking at the SEALs. “I hope the rest of you don’t get seasick. Don’t laugh, but do any of you have any background with tropical fish? You know, like fish tanks when you were growing up.”

  Jon Cohen looked around and finally cleared his throat. “Um, I always had fish tanks growing up,” he said softly.

  “Anybody else?” asked Davis.

  No one responded until Theresa laughed and said, “Moose has a goldfish!”

  Davis looked at her and asked, “And you know this how?”

  Her face turned red and she said, “He told me,” not wanting to admit she had been inside his apartment. Julia and Chris made sure they didn’t make any eye contact with each other for fear they’d start laughing or something.

  “Okay, so Moose has a goldfish, Jon has had some fish, and I have a half dozen SEALs that can dive and know boats. Jon, you ever hear of African cichlids?”

  Jon smiled broadly. “Yes, sir! That’s what I used to keep—from Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika.”

  Dex and Darren looked at each other and smiled. “Hallelujah,” said Dex.

  Davis said, “Congratulations, Jon. You just became the resident expert on fish collecting in the region. All of you will be heading to Africa on Canadian passports to collect fish from Lake Tanganyika. You are a new company out of Canada that will be exporting fish back to Canada, air freight, out of Luano Airport in Lubumbashi.”

  The African sounding names brought a few chuckles.

  “Don’t laugh—you are all going to have to do some homework on the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as tropical fish. The fish export business for the tropical fish hobby in the US and Canada is big money for the locals down there. Unfortunately, so is their newest export—uranium.”

  That got everyone’s attention.

  “As a point of historical reference, it was uranium from the Shinkolobwe Mine that was used in the Fat Man and Little Boy which we so graciously dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. There has been new uranium mining activity in the past couple of years in that region, which has been monitored on and off between wars, but more alarming is the discovery of a new uranium deposit in the eastern part of the country, near Lake Tanganyika. We had a few local resources keeping tabs for us, but they seem to have disappeared. The rumor mill says that China, North Korea, India, and Israel have all had folks down there looking to buy uranium. Nothing is confirmed other than Israel admitting it was “keeping tabs” just like we are.”

  The members of the team listened intently, trying to see where they fit into this unusual briefing.

  Darren continued, “So…your new fish export company is going to get set up in a small village on the lake. Our Africa desk chief was kind enough to have one of his men purchase an existing fish farm down there. Everything you need is down there already, including a few workers who stayed on after the old owner sold out to us. He actually was Canadian, so it makes the sale look routine. The workers will keep things running until you get there, then split. You will live and work right there in the small compound. You will collect enough fish to look like a real business while you snoop around and see who the players are. I’d also like to know what happened to our assets down there. They either changed teams, took off scared, or they’re feeding the fish from the bottom of the lake.

  “Starting tomorrow, you’ll spend some time with the Assistant Africa Desk Chief, Deirdre Gourlie. She will catch you up on the DRC’s history, which is a bloody mess, and the local customs and languages. We have a fish guy lined up from the aquarium next week to give you a crash course on African cichlids and fish collecting in the wild, and our doc will start taking care of your shots tomorrow.”

  They all looked at Theresa, a navy corpsman, who had once made them all drop their pants for shots that she later admitted could have been administered in their arms. She smiled an
d feigned innocence at the looks from the men. “What?” she asked as naively as possible.

  Davis missed the joke and continued. “Shots for malaria, typhus, a few exotic fevers, and some other crap you never heard of will be started over the next few weeks to build up in your systems before you go. Trust me, you don’t want to get sick in the DRC. Their idea of hygiene is spitting on the knife before they hold you down and cut you open. Occasionally, their patients live.”

  “Nice,” said Theresa, thinking back to conditions she had experienced in Iraq out in the field.

  “Okay, that’s a start for now. There are some other details that we are still working out, but you need to head down to ‘the shop’ on the fifth floor and get your headshots done for your new Canadian passports and driver’s licenses. After your paperwork is done, go out and get drunk or do something entertaining, because starting tomorrow at noon, you are all going to be very busy.”

  Vinny “Ripper” Colgan, the team’s catcher when playing baseball, and Moose’s dive buddy when doing SEAL operations, smiled and asked, “Did you say noon?” When Darren gave him a yes, he high-fived Al “Moose” Carlogio, the team’s pitcher.

  “First round is on me,” said Ripper. “We get to stay up with the grownups tonight!” The team was used to hitting the rack early and being up working out by oh-five hundred. Showing up late was a special treat that would be utilized to the maximum of their livers.

  Julia pressed her leg against Chris’s under the table, with her own ideas of how she wanted to spend the extra few hours. Across the table, Moose was doing the same thing to Theresa, who was trying her best to look serious.

  3.

  The team reassembled in the conference room, showing up in dribs and drabs starting around quarter to twelve. A “noon start’ seemed like such a late hour at the time it was announced, but “boys will be boys,” and as usual, when they were together for a night off, they went way overboard. Even starting six or seven hours later than a usual day, they were all hung over and tired, except for Chris, Julia, Moose and Theresa, who were a little tired, but not hung over—just very content.

  They sat sipping strong coffee, quietly trying to wake up. At noon, exactly, Darren Davis walked in with Assistant African Desk Director Deirdre Gourlie. She was about as Irish looking as a woman could be, which made her assignment to the Africa department somewhat comical. Her skin was creamy white—she would definitely stand out in a room of African nationals. Her blondish-red hair was past the collar of her suit, and she had green eyes that smiled when she smiled. The men sat up straight when she entered.

  “Good morning, everyone,” she said, sounding wide-awake and confident. Evidently, she hadn’t been out getting hammered the night before. “Looks like this will be a series of ‘firsts’ for all of us. I have never worked with a team larger than three agents at once on a job, and you have never been fish farmers in Africa.”

  The group smiled, already liking her demeanor.

  “And which one of you is Jonathon Cohen?” she asked.

  Jon smiled and waved.

  “Mr. Davis tells me that you are familiar with fish to some extent and you are a navy diver. You will be picking three of your SEAL buddies that you want to do some diving with in Africa, and taking a crash course in African cichlids, the live fish exporting business, fish farming, fish diseases, and water conditions, etc.

  While the other members of the team work on other parts of the assignment, your job will be to have a small core of people that actually know the business. There are not a lot of folks in the area working the lake anymore because of the security issues in the DRC. Most of the fish are collected on the Tanzanian side of the lake these days.

  That means that a group this large is going to be very visible on the west side of Lake Tanganyika. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You will have lots of local fishermen swarming to you, offering to sell you fish. As you get to know some of the locals and they start to trust you, you may have opportunities to pick up local assets, and at the very least catch the local rumors. But—these fishermen have worked the lake for decades with foreigners in the tropical fish trade. If Jon and a few others can’t convince them you know what you are doing, they’ll see it right away. You’ll be happy to know that we have an expert on all of this coming to see you this afternoon. He will do a presentation to the entire group so you all have some exposure to the information, and then Jon and his group will spend a few days learning greater details of the fish farming industry out there. Any questions so far?”

  Everyone sat quietly, a few of the SEALs wondering if Jon was going to pick them to learn “Fish 101.” Pete McCoy figured he was a “given,” having been Jon’s dive buddy for most of the last three years.

  Deirdre continued with her briefing. “Okay, so Jon and company will get the detailed crash course on the fish industry and the rest of you will start learning local geography. Bringing in gear won’t be much of a problem. The last guy there had used fish finders, laptops, and sonar, so you won’t look funny bringing in equipment, although what the box looks like and what it does may be slightly different. Weapons will be slightly trickier. Even though Luano Airport in Lubumbashi is pretty lax about security, you still can’t walk into their country with rifles and machine guns. Our shop on three (the ‘gadget room’ on the third floor) is working on that for you. They are making SCUBA equipment crates that can hold your disassembled weapons. There won’t be much equipment on site that any of you would want to dive with anyway, so bringing your own SCUBA gear won’t raise suspicion.”

  Deirdre turned on a laptop that projected a map of the Democratic Republic of Congo on the wall. “You might want to take notes,” she smiled. “Most places in Africa have two or three names, depending on who is running the government that day. The DRC was formerly Zaire. City names have mostly been renamed since the formation of the new DRC government.”

  Jon Cohen, because of his background with African cichlids was confused, and raised his hand. “I thought the Democratic Republic of Congo used to be called the Belgian Congo?”

  Deirdre smiled. “I told you this would get confusing. The Belgian Congo, The Congo Free State, and Zaire are the same place. Same place as the DRC—but don’t get that confused with the Republic of Congo, which was formerly Republique du Congo under the French. Also known as Congo-Brazzaville. French Congo is now the Republic of Congo, and Belgian Congo is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they’re two totally different places. Have I lost all of you yet?”

  Everyone nodded, yes. What the Hell was she talking about?

  Deirdre laughed. “Look, don’t get all worked up over this, I’ll have maps for you to look at later and study present names. The only reason I brought it up now is because some of the cities have two and three names, and you may need to be familiar with all of the names for each place. Depending on who you are talking to down there, you may get different names for the same places. You will be in Katanga province. It used to be called Shaba province, and some of the older locals still call it that. Lubumbashi is the former Elisabethville or Elisabethstad. It’s one of the larger cities around the area, and you’ll be working in and out of there for resupply and hopefully making contacts.

  Lubumbashi is known for its copper smelting and the outlying areas are busy with mining. As you may know, world copper prices are way up, partly because the Chinese are buying it as fast as it is coming out of the ground. This led to expansion of copper mining activities in the region, and the accidental discovery of uranium. If you think the Chinese are excited about copper, you ought to see them around uranium. The Koreans and Indians have also been trying to get in on the action as well. US—DRC relations are still very good because of the amount of aid we pump into their government every year, and they are trying to cooperate with us regarding the control of uranium exports, but let’s face it—Africa is the Wild West. If somebody shows up with a trunk
full of money, the sale is going to get made.

  We need hard intelligence on who is down there, and from where. We also need to know how much uranium is in the ground. That may be impossible for you to find out, but we need you to try. You will have radiological testing equipment with you to make life easier. Keep in mind that there is no OSHA in the DRC. The uranium miners are probably glowing at night, so they’ll be easy to spot.” That brought a few chuckles.

  Deirdre pressed a button on the projector and showed a closer map of the area showing rail lines and roads, with cities, towns and villages marked out. There was a red dot on the shore of Lake Tanganyika that showed the location of their new fish export business.

  “Okay, this is a closer look around Lubumbashi. Rail lines from Ilebo, Kindu, and Kolwezi all converge here. The trains only run when whoever is in charge decides they are going to run, but it may be handy, nonetheless. It will give you greater appreciation for the local subway, trust me. Kolwezi is west of your position, on the Angolan border. There have been uranium mining activities there for many years as well, in between wars. Keep in mind that distances on the map generally can’t be equated to time it takes to travel. There are almost no paved roads outside the major cities, and if you venture too far, bands of bandits, rebels, and general thugs may try and charge you a ‘tax’ for passing through their area.”

  She took a deep breath and drank some water. “Everyone still with me?”

  Moose said, “You lost me right after the part about the name of the country.” After some muffled laughs, Deirdre continued.

  “Moose, right?” She asked. He smiled. “You just call it the Congo and we’ll try and make sure you don’t get lost. Okay…where was I? Right—the crooks in the outlying areas. Okay, so no one goes on safari out there unless you are with a large enough group and are well-armed.”

  Ripper couldn’t help himself. “Sheeeeit…Moose and me are a large enough group to change governments down there.”