The more he thought about it, the more he dreaded that the threat was real. It was the sort of two-edged sword a smart and determined enemy might conceive to decapitate Forte and cut off the Republic of Texas from the water it needed to survive. Under the guise of enveloping the Alamo in a shroud of black so that it would melt away in the tropical sun–a sophomoric scheme Forte would be sure to laugh off–the saboteurs would infect the crew with anthrax, which would kill them all before the cause of their sickness was even suspected. The unmanned iceberg would run aground or drift away in the vagrant tropical currents to its quick destruction somewhere in the warm midocean waters, far from the anchors on the continental slope that kept it moving on course.
Worse, even if the crew were somehow spared, the damage would still be catastrophic: The hardy anthrax spores would infect, potentially, every drop of water the Alamo produced, and a terrible death would await anybody who drank it or used it to water his crops or livestock.
It was a diabolical plot, and it had KGB written all over it.
Or did it? The Russians were pathetically dependent on American grain imports to make up the shortfalls on their own state farms. If Triple Eye failed, the USSR faced famine, and famine meant revolution. So who had warned him of the plot?
Such questions were frustrating and, moreover, impossible to answer. Forte was sick of being a puppet on a string. Ned Raynes had pulled those strings once, and Joe Mansour, David D. Castle, and Jennifer Red Cloud had ham-handedly been trying to do so for the past three years. He had had enough. From now on people would dance to his tune.
The show would begin in just one hour. Forte had picked ten men, all like himself with combat experience, all sagging with the weight of the new Russian RFK-12
automatic rifles, combat knives, RPGs, smoke and stun grenades, plus several bags of needle-sharp caltrops that Forte’s armorer had laid in along with the other weaponry when he was setting up the Alamo’s defenses many months ago. But he had overlooked surface-to-air missiles, and now Forte and his men were on their way to make up that desperate deficiency.
Forte and Joe Mansour had first considered asking South Africa to dispatch fighter planes, but geography was against them. The Alamo was more than three thousand kilometers from the nearest base, beyond their range.
The only alternative was for Triple Eye to improvise its own defenses. Jane’s All the World’s Military Bases suggested three possibilities, of which Forte chose Swedru, Ghana, on the basis of the entry’s excellent map and satellite photos. It was garrisoned by 122 Ghanian soldiers, officered by three Russians: a major and two lieutenants. Among the ammunition stores were SP-9 “Skidder” SAMs. A shoulder-launched, wire-guided, short-range missile designed to shoot down ground-attack bombers, they had been obsolete for at least ten years, which was the reason Russia had given them to the Ghanian armed forces. But with a range of four thousand meters, against low-flying aircraft they were the best available within striking range of the Alamo, and Ripley Forte had no choice but to liberate them.
At 10:50 the Piper tiltprop took off with Forte and ten volunteers. All but Forte and two others were dressed in jungle camies, their faces streaked with green and black greasepaint. Forte was still wearing his rakish pirate costume. The other two were dressed in the costumes they had had on when Forte called for volunteers: one a Santa Claus suit complete with a bag of colorfully wrapped gifts, and the other his knee-length Campbell soup can.
Fifty kilometers south of the Ghanian coastline, flying at one thousand meters, the aircraft was challenged by Accra Control. The pilot identified the plane as the personal aircraft of the Cameroon minister of state transport, out of Youanda bound for Dakar, Senegal. After an interval, he was given permission to proceed, since he was only transiting Ghanian off-shore airspace.
The pilot opened the cockpit door and said over his shoulder to Ripley Forte: “Stand by.”
Forte opened the map he’d hard-copied from Jane’s along with the information they would need for the raid. For the third and last time he ticked off the phases of the operation, the number of minutes scheduled for each, and the mission of each member of the raiding party.
“Now remember, we don’t have time to work out a fallback plan, so we’ve got to do it right the first time,” he said as the plane lost altitude. “If a glitch occurs, you’ll just have to improvise. We’re slightly outnumbered, but on the other hand we know what we’re going to do, and they don’t.”
The pilot opened the door again. “Ready, Mr. Forte. Hold on, everybody.!”
The plane lost altitude rapidly. At two hundred meters the pilot could plainly make out the control tower at Winneba, which meant the Ghanese controllers could see him, too. He pulled the two cords that were jury-rigged to smoke flares under the port and starboard engines. They ignited, emitting sparks and an impressive trail of flame and smoke. He did a soft-shoe dance on the pedals, causing the plane to fishtail in the air, giving a convincing imitation of an aircraft in distress.
The Piper continued to lose altitude, passing out of visual range of Winneba, and the pilot flattened out, applied throttle, and made for the saddle fifteen kilometers farther on, separated from the Swedru ammunition dump by a tangled growth of trees and brush. Flying at treetop level over rolling range land, he pinpointed the landing site about a hundred yards from a dirt road snaking between the hills. When laser spot-sighted on the touchdown point, he flicked the autoland switch. The aircraft shuddered as it slowed. Its nose lifted slightly as the twin engines swiveled back until their blades were rotating horizontally and then settled on the sere savanna as smoothly as a falling leaf.
The door opened, and men poured out.
One of them ignited a large smoke bomb directly beneath the plane. Others ignited magnesium flares placed in a ring around the plane. In a moment, the plane was all but invisible in what seemed from a distance to be a roaring inferno. The men in camies jogged off to take up positions in the grove of trees fifty meters away. Forte and his two costumed companions, and the pilot, remained in their seats, waiting.
It wouldn’t be long, Forte decided. The ammo dump was very near, and the dirt road passed close to the main gate. A patrol should show up in about five minutes, guided by the tower of smoke and the noise of the exploding satchel charges his men had just set off in the bushes.
Minutes later, two jeeps raced around a curve in the road and made for the plane. Both were filled to overflowing with troops–no fewer than fifteen in all–festooned with rifles, pistols, machetes, and bandoliers of ammunition.
The jeeps braked to a stop, and the men piled out, jabbering excitedly in Twi and Fanti, waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. As they milled about, out of the fire and smoke walked three figures the like of which they had never seen.
They fell silent and looked at each other, stupefied. Their jaws went slack. Their arms fell to their sides. And while they stood like so many statues carved of stone, from both sides of the plane came eight men, automatic weapons at the ready. In their eyes was a message, and the Ghanian soldiers did not require an interpreter to discover it. Thirty hands reached for the sky.
Swiftly, efficiently, the soldiers were stripped of their outer garments and trussed with adhesive tape. Then they were thrown into the plane like so many bags of fourth-class mail.
While Forte and his ten men were exchanging their clothing for the soldiers’ uniforms, the Piper’s engines coughed to life and quickly rose from a throaty whisper to a banshee wail. The plane lifted vertically from the ground to an altitude of fifty meters, hovered there as the engines tilted forward 45 degrees, and went scudding forward at treetop level toward landing point number two some twenty kilometers to the north. In that deserted area the pilot would unload his human cargo and wait for the radio signal from Forte to proceed to the rendezvous.
Forte and company piled into the jeeps, lugging their RPGs, grenades, and other weapons. Two blacks drove while the others darkened their faces and hands with shoe polish. They wouldn’t pass close inspection, but then, close inspections weren’t part of Forte’s plan.
They drove at high speed through patches of thicket, and forlorn stands of trees, but mostly over rolling countryside denuded of vegetation by centuries of overplanting and soil erosion, until the guard tower next to the main gate came into view. Then they slowed, as if their errand had been of no importance. The gate, a single iron bar across the road, was down. For a moment he thought they’d have to crash through, but at the last moment the sentry in the guard tower, apparently reassured by the sight of familiar uniforms in the two jeeps that had just left the compound, raised the bar, and the jeeps roared through.