Alex Berenson: The Night Ranger

Shafer had worried that Awaale might set an ambush near Wizard’s camp, trapping the White Men before the meeting. Instead, the Ditas hadn’t even bothered with scouts. Shafer could see why. No doubt Awaale saw the meeting itself as all the trap he needed. The technicals gave the Ditas an overwhelming advantage. Once Wizard brought his men within firing distance of those machine guns, Awaale would decide whether they left.

Whether the White Men survived this battle or not was irrelevant to Shafer. The alliance between Wells and Wizard didn’t even deserve to be called a marriage of convenience. It was more like a one-night stand. But if the White Men were overrun straightaway, Wells and the hostages would be captured. Wells might be killed on the spot. For them to have any chance at all of getting away clean, Tomaso would have to land the Reaper’s five-hundred-pounder perfectly and Wizard would have to move instantly in the chaos that followed.

—

Duto tapped Shafer’s shoulder. “Come.” Duto had been furious since Wells asked for help, confirming what they all knew anyway, that the White Men were badly outgunned.

“This is not the time.”

“Now, Ellis.” Duto kept his voice even, walked out loose and easy, like he was inviting Shafer for lunch. But once they were outside the operations center he grabbed Shafer’s arm and pulled him back to the ice-cold conference room.

“You should have found a way to slow this down, given us time to bring in more drones.”

Like Duto hadn’t signed off, too, making his own selfish calculations.

“You keep forgetting, Vinny. That guy on the ground, Awaale, gets a vote, too. And he wasn’t waiting on us.”

“If Wells hadn’t been so in love with doing this himself, we could have put guys in the air hours ago.”

“Funny. I didn’t see John in your office with a gun to your head to stop you from telling the Pentagon about this. Anyway, what are you worried about? You made the call your eleven-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer told you to make. You’re protected.”

“Not the point.”

They were standing close now, and Shafer took some small pleasure in seeing the row of tiny pimples high on Duto’s forehead. Duto was appearing regularly on CNN and Fox News and Sunday-morning talk shows, raising his profile for his Senate campaign, and he had the bad skin that came with television makeup. Duto could have his teeth brightened until they were supernova white and wear two-thousand-dollar suits, but he’d never be handsome. Shafer knew he shouldn’t care, he was hardly the best-looking guy in the room himself, but he took some small pleasure in Duto’s ugliness. “That’s always the point with you,” Shafer said.

“You let him gamble with these hostages.”

“You’re so upset, I almost forgot it’s his ass on the line out there and not yours, Vinny.”

“We put ourselves in this corner for no reason. Because you couldn’t talk him down last night. He ran all over you. Like he always does.”

“We both know he’s earned the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you should save the blame game until we see whether he pulls it out.”

“This crush you have on him—”

Shafer felt his cheeks sting like Duto had slapped him. “Loyalty. A word I know you can’t imagine.” He brushed past Duto. “If it’s all the same to you, we should get back, see what’s going on over there before you write John’s obituary.”

—

Back at Tomaso’s workstation, they watched in silence as the convoy edged closer. On screen, the technical turned off the track, rolled through a pool of rainwater. The rest of the convoy followed. Fifteen hundred meters from Awaale, the lead three pickups spread out and rode side by side by side, the Rovers single file behind them.

Shafer couldn’t tell if Wizard had a tactical reason for the change or if he simply hoped the T shape might make his force seem larger than it was. Either way, if the White Men tried to charge the Ditas in open pickups, the technicals would tear them apart before they got close, as Wizard surely knew.

Tomaso’s hands never stopped moving, adjusting the cameras, making sure the Reaper was flying smoothly despite the weight imbalance that came from having a five-hundred-pound bomb on one wing and not on the other. He looked up at Shafer.

“The air looks good. Unless you object, I’m going to go brain, fly autopilot on a two-click hold around the Red Six. That way I can focus on the payload. But we’ll only have partial visuals on the friendlies.”

“In English,” Duto said.

Tomaso’s eyes slid to Duto, like he’d just remembered who his real boss was. “We have smooth air right now, nothing the software can’t handle. I want to set the Reaper on autopilot to circle at a two-kilometer radius around those four technicals in the middle. We’re assuming that’s where the enemy commander is—”

“Awaale—” Shafer said.

“Awaale is. That way I don’t have to worry about keeping the Reaper in the air, I can focus on putting the GBU and the Hellfires on target. Only downside is that we may lose visual contact with the friendlies.”

“Sounds fine,” Shafer said.

“Great,” Tomaso said. But his eyes stayed on Duto until the DCI nodded approval.

29

LOWER JUBA REGION

The convoy emerged from the last of the scrub and the White Men fell silent.

Even from five hundred meters away, the technicals loomed over the empty plain. They were Toyota Hilux pickups, crew cabs with wide tires and roll bars, built to be indestructible on the world’s worst roads. The White Men drove them, too. But each of the Dita Hiluxes carried a machine gun, its long steel barrel poking over the top of the cab. Three men stood in each pickup, one to aim and shoot, one to handle the ammunition, and one in reserve.

If Wizard had commanded the Ditas he would have turned around half the Hiluxes so that the guns could shoot out the open bed of the pickups for maximum visibility and flexibility. But the Ditas didn’t seem worried. Wizard couldn’t hear them, but their hands told the tale, loose and relaxed. Awaale stood in the center, a head taller than most of his men.

Wizard wasn’t surprised. In truth, this meeting would have been suicide for the White Men if not for the drone. Even with it he would need every bit of magic in the world. He slipped the Range Rover behind his pickups to give it a few extra seconds of cover if the Ditas opened up. When the Ditas opened up.

The hostages had been silent during the drive. Now Gwen leaned forward.

“Be careful,” she said.

Just then Wizard knew he would never see her again, whatever happened in the next few minutes. He’d be gone, or she would. He missed her already, her and her magic, the magic of her blond hair and blue eyes, the magic she’d won just by being born in America. In his pocket he found a plastic bag that held a sheaf of miraa. The bag was mostly empty, the miraa growing stale. He had nothing else to give her. Nothing else she could possibly want. He handed it to her. She seemed to understand as well as he did.

“You tell everyone at home about Wizard.”

“You know it.”

He popped his sunglasses back on, stepped out of the Rover. His men leaned against their pickups, their sad naked Hiluxes. Their feet sank into the mud as they snuck glimpses at the technicals.

Wizard faced his soldiers one final time. “What I told you before, it’s still true. You acting like these Ditas got tanks. Look over there.”

One by one, the White Men lifted their heads.

“You see tanks? I don’t see no tanks. I see technicals. And I see a bunch of boys never could be White Men. Stupid boys. Weak boys. We the ones with the secret. This all gonna look different soon. So different.” He turned to the Donkeys. “You know what you supposed to do, when you supposed to do it.”