The Night Stalkers White House - Books 1-3

Chapter 12-2

“What we know,” Beat turned to face Ambassador Green. “Is that we need to remain calm and quiet.”

“But…”

She held up a hand to silence him.

Okay, she hadn’t killed the man, yet. Though she was certainly going to reserve that option. He still survived mostly because it was bad form to kill the man you were sworn to protect. And a little bit because he was such a fish out of water that she had to pity him. He’d been a political appointee by the prior administration rather than a career diplomat. And that he’d been assigned to the Senegalese embassy only said how low he was on the totem pole. He should have contributed more to the last President’s campaign, or to a different party and stayed in Kansas or wherever he hailed from.

Three years he’d been in Senegal and he had the common sense of a hamster. For one thing, after seeing what he’d signed up for, he’d stayed. Bad choice right out of the gate. This would be a hard posting even for a career Foreign Service diplomat. At least he appeared to be trying to do the right thing, but he really needed to learn to listen to direction.

Of course his chief attaché was currently lying in little pieces along with the remains of the embassy’s two SUVs and airport garage. Up until the explosion, those vehicles and a small liaison office downtown had been the sole assets of the U.S. government in Guinea-Bissau. Now only the office remained.

When the explosion occurred, she and the ambassador had been waiting halfway to the garage while his assistant trotted back to the plane on her mid-heel pumps for his forgotten briefcase. The chief attaché and the chargé d’affaires hadn’t been so fortunate. They’d gone ahead to the garage, a fancy word for a concrete block with two metal roll-up doors she could have unlocked in less than a minute without keys or explosives.

After much hiding, and three miles of sneaking through the suburbs of a city at war, the airport now lay thirty hours behind them. In their weaving track, they’d covered perhaps a quarter of that distance from the airport as the crow flies.

They huddled now in a hut of cracked, sun-baked brick walls and a rotting tin roof. The red dirt floor bore little in the way of debris or belongings, indicating that it was, perhaps, if their luck was changing even a little please, vacant. She’d erased their footprints for a hundred paces back, but they had to stay quiet and out of sight.

The ambassador and Charlotte his personal secretary, clearly with side benefits, huddled hip to hip against the back wall. Whatever they did on the side wasn’t her business, neither wore a ring anyway. They were swathed as she was, in clothing snagged from clotheslines.

Sam Green’s black pants with a simple white dashiki hanging to mid-calf over them worked well. She had him scuff up his black dress shoes. If anything had driven home the reality of their situation for him, even more than witnessing the explosion that had killed his two top-ranked staffers, it was when she’d grabbed the shoe from his hands as he gently patted it with red dirt. Beatrice had scrubbed it against some broken concrete until it was deeply scarred, then shoved it into the soil and handed it back to him.

Charlotte actually looked quite fetching in the traditional golden yellow-and-brown print buba and wrap-around sarong skirt. Beatrice had snagged a traditional head wrap for her, but Charlotte couldn’t keep it on her long, smooth hair. Even the head scarf kept slipping down around her shoulders.

Beatrice herself had found a bright blue pagne blouse and matching skirt. It would have been garish or at least stand-out in any environ other than West Africa, but here it blended in.

Charlotte’s feet weren’t up to running barefoot, so she’d retained the bright blue pumps that didn’t fit in at all. Of course, neither did her or Green’s blond hair, blue eyes, and New England-fair skin. They’d be a beautiful couple in a Boston townhouse, but they sure didn’t belong on the streets of an African country on the verge of collapse.

And neither of them knew how to move. She’d tried to show them the lazy, ambling walk of sub-Saharan equatorial Africa. That had been a fiasco. It was as if they’d traveled direct from prep school to an alien planet and learned nothing during their time in Africa. Charlotte was doing better than the ambassador, but not much. No matter how nice they might be as people or how good they might be at diplomacy, they were lost causes when it came to hiding out and blending in.

The three of them had been barely a dozen yards from the garage when it went up. She’d seen the fizzle of a failed explosive device and thrown the ambassador and Charlotte behind the next garage over just as the backup device blew the world to s**t.

She’d turned to sprint them back to the plane, hoping she could find some way to fly it out of there before someone shot it down. Then she’d spotted the army jeep roaring up beside it just in time to duck back out of sight. A ragtag trio climbed aboard the Beech King Air, their Soviet-era Kalashnikov machine guns leading the way. They hauled the Senegalese pilot out of the plane. Only Beat’s hand over Charlotte’s mouth had stopped the scream when they’d executed him on the tarmac beside the embassy plane.

Beatrice had dragged them to their feet and actually hit and slapped them until they started running.

Now, thirty hours later, they huddled in the midday heat. Her throat aching with the dry dust and blazing equatorial heat.

Their assets included her handgun, four spare magazines, one briefcase full of paperwork and a few pens that the ambassador had refused to abandon, but she’d gotten him to stuff it into a stolen burlap sack he’d then carried over his shoulder, and a pair of blue pumps. No cell phone signals, and the neighborhoods they’d passed through had no overhead lines, so no electricity or landline phones.

The shocking number of tacticals, white Toyota pickups with .50 caliber machine guns turreted in their beds, did not point to finding much help in the city.

Still, she’d listened initially to Ambassador Green’s insistence on reaching the American Liaison Office or the Presidential Palace in the heart of the city. But the black smoke now rising from that direction indicated that this time, if it was again a coup, it had not gone as smoothly as the prior executions of a few key leaders. Thirty hours of hard work and they’d covered less than two of the six kilometers to the city center. And the chances of survival decreased with every meter in that direction.

After dark, she’d see if the people around here had any food to steal.

And maybe someone had a pair of sandals for Charlotte.

* * * *

“Is the Guinea-Bissau ambassador to the U.N. here today? Ambassador Anselmo?”

Frank looked at the President in shock. Why the hell hadn’t he thought of that? And how had the President remembered the guy’s name? He was always doing that, as if his brain operated on a whole different level.

Frank hadn’t thought of it because they barely have a government was his answer. But anything was worth a shot.

One of the techs rattled her keyboard, “Yes.”

“Extension?” Hank called out and dialed it on the central table’s speaker phone even as she dictated it.

In minutes they had an appointment.

Frank could definitely appreciate traveling with the President. The man got things done.