The Night Stalkers White House - Books 1-3

Chapter 14-2

“What we need at the moment is patience. You have to stay here.”

Ambassador Sam Green and Charlotte looked at Beatrice as if she’d gone mad. Well, that wouldn’t surprise her much at the moment. Trapped with the two of them in a narco-state undergoing a coup wasn’t exactly a rational experience. Guinea-Bissau didn’t have a large number of motor vehicles, and most of those were ancient motor scooters.

Yet, through the cracks in the wall of the hut they were hiding in, the roads were far from empty. They were hiding in a warren of ramshackle huts southeast of the airport, but one that afforded her a narrow view of the one main street in the whole city. In the last few hours squatting here, she’d seen a dozen tacticals, the white Toyota pickups just bristling with armed and angry militia, and two tanks that looked to be left over from when the place had gained independence in the ’70s. She knew they had about thirty tanks, but intelligence had been unsure how many actually worked and how many of those had shells for their main cannon. She could hear something pounding away in the city center, clearly someone had some ammunition. The place was really coming apart. Again. She even spotted one of their two known helicopters.

“You have to stay put here,” she pointed emphatically at the hut’s dirt floor.

“Not alone. We can’t.”

Beatrice was never prepared for this stage of working protection jobs. The moment when the protectee turned into, what the department carefully didn’t call, “the sniveling child” phase. Young children never dared circulate far from their parents. Protectees would latch onto their bodyguard’s metaphorical skirts and become a real pain.

Technically, it was called a stage-two trauma response.

Beatrice sighed. At least they were finally out of the stage-one denial. Now the ambassador had apparently opted for fear and confusion in stage two. She could do with the help from anger, but he hadn’t gone there. The Secret Service had trained her how to shift in mere seconds from precipitating event to stage three, new equilibrium. Only from equilibrium could the decision-making process accurately resume.

If she could do a Vulcan mind-meld and shift Sam Green forward through the stages, she would. Though she seriously doubted she’d like what else she learned about him during the meld.

Charlotte had moved on to anger. Apparently she and the now dead chargé d’affaires had been shopping buddies. That would be helpful, so she addressed Charlotte.

“Look, if you want to get out of this alive so you can work on fixing this place so this never happens again…” Fat chance of that. Guinea-Bissau would be cycling through hell for decades to come just as it had for the last half century. These kinds of places always did. “… Then I need you to stay here and stay quiet. I’m going to get food and water. I’m also going to try and scout our way out of here.”

Charlotte’s sharp nod of agreement confirmed that the woman’s brain had kicked back in. And that she was really looking forward to kicking some serious butt to revenge the chargé d’affaire’s death.

Beatrice momentarily considered handing over her g*n, but decided against it. The last thing she needed was for Sam Green to suddenly take it from his more rational assistant and decide he was G.I. Joe. Or, more likely, to go out and think that he could talk sense to these people at gunpoint.

Instead, she told Charlotte. “Don’t let him leave. There’s half a million people here. If I lose you, you’re going to be dead.”

“And if we stay with you?” She saw in his eyes that Ambassador Green was at least part way back.

Beatrice shrugged. “Then I’ll see what I can do to improve our chances.”