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The Company
Time: Wednesday, October 10, 2012 (wee hours).
Place: Construction camp not far from Gisenyi, Rwanda.
Last Event: Blasting the living hell out of the would-be ambushers' reserve element.
With the camp secured and hastily tidied up, Qoqa makes her rounds, checking her associates and the workers for injuries. Fortunately, nobody needs significant medical attention. Paul's minor fragmentation wound – a small cut from smashed window glass – is about it. Alert to the risk of infection, Qoqa treats this nonetheless.
Meanwhile, Anabel attempts to reassure the laborers. Taking the stance of a leader rather than a chummy friend or a bean-counting manager, she explains that her team is handling the admittedly serious security crisis, and asks everyone to stay put and get the school built. The foreman, Jean-Pierre, eventually agrees to keep his crew on-site, but with the understanding that problems involving armed attackers will be solved as soon as possible. Anabel reiterates that her group has made tackling that matter their top priority.
Shortly after Anabel and Qoqa complete their tasks, Vinnie pulls into camp with Lev and Wen in his jeep. As it's very late, and everybody is tired and damp, the Agents post watches and try to get some rest. Everybody sleeps with weapons nearby.
Come morning's light, the rain has died back to a light drizzle – by the standards of a wet season, it's a fine day. The Agents' top priority is learning who the previous night's attackers were and where they came from. Qoqa decides to examine the trucks captured near the camp, looking for crushed insects, bits of vegetation, mud splatters, small stones, or anything else that might narrow down where they've been. Vinnie helps Qoqa disassemble the vehicles for this purpose, while Jili searches for and downloads suitable ecological and geological databases.
Qoqa manages to collect quite a few samples, which she examines as closely as her medical equipment allows. Comparing her notes to the databases, she eventually finds evidence pointing to the fact that the trucks must have spent a fair amount of time driving around a particular ridge not far across the border in the DRC. From the maps Jili downloaded, Vinnie estimates that the nearer part of that region is perhaps an hour away, if one were driving at highway speeds on main roads. Of course, that doesn't take into account using side roads at either end of the trip, or crossing the border.
On a roll, Qoqa decides to use the remainder of the afternoon to interrogate the two prisoners captured the previous evening:
Q: "Who sent you?"
A: "Our captain."
Q: "Where did you come from?"
A: "Our camp in the DRC."
Q: "How many people are at the camp?"
A: "I never counted – a couple of hundred, maybe?"
Q: "How long did it take you to get here from your camp?"
A: "Perhaps an hour." (Qoqa accepts that, given that neither prisoner had a watch or a phone.)
Q: "What roads did you take to get here?"
A: "The highway, mostly."
Q: "What's your procedure for crossing the border?"
A: "We show up and a guy waves us across."
Q: "What's the name of your leader?"
A: "We just call him 'Colonel.' I can tell you he's a white man from France."
It's toward dusk when the Agents gather to analyze their findings. Everyone agrees that the origin of the attacks looks to be in the DRC. Klas gets the job of examining the maps and plotting a cross-country route into the area between the ridge Qoqa identified and the highway the prisoners mentioned – a course that will avoid both villages and the worst terrain. Vinnie starts preparing the jeeps for off-road driving.
Shortly after the meeting adjourns, everyone hears the sound of a truck horn from the direction of main road, near the turnoff to the site. Grabbing weapons and radios, Klas and Wen hasten into the brush, stuffing trauma plates into their armor as they run. Approaching stealthily, they see a covered jeep with a large truck behind it, both sporting Rwanda Defense Force colors. Wen radios it in as what looks like a legitimate RDF inspection.
Wen's call sends everybody scrambling to hide anything that inspectors might be unhappy to find, particularly heavy weapons and explosives. Jili, Qoqa, and Vinnie each dash over to a jeep and start covering it up, while Lev grabs any personal weapons sitting in plain sight and stashes them under the floor of the tool shed. Anabel buys time by racing up the lane toward the vehicles, hailing the soldiers frantically, as if she had just heard them honk. Klas and Wen, being armed to the teeth, stay hidden in the bushes to cover Anabel.
Upon seeing Anabel – attractive, unarmed, and doing her best to come across as a harried aid worker rather than a mercenary – an officer steps out of the jeep. Anabel takes a good look at his insignia, which appears to be that of a colonel. Knowing that there aren't many colonels in the RDF, and that they don't personally head up inspections of small foreign aid sites, Anabel plays things diplomatically. The colonel is polite, even charming, and claims to be seeking a private meeting with the site's security chief. However, the fact that his name tape is missing is grounds for caution. Anabel invites the man into the camp, relying on Wen or Klas to observe the proceedings and radio the others.
A few minutes later, Anabel orders Paarl and his men out of the engineers' hut, and then she and Paul sit down with the visiting colonel. The RDF officer wastes no time. He states that he knows that the site has faced guerrilla attacks, and that the camp's "security team" repelled these decisively. He claims to have forensic evidence and eyewitness reports to back up his assertions. In his opinion, Anabel and friends are well-trained private operators, posing as aid workers; he even floats some (incorrect) theories about where they were trained. Pointing to where his name tape should be, he smiles and adds, "Of course, you have no idea who I am, either – just call me Colonel G. I'm here to make a deal."
Over the course of the meeting, Anabel manages to get Col. G to make his intentions moderately clear; although he doesn't volunteer anything, he answers Anabel's leading questions. It's obvious that he's trying to maintain deniability. The long and the short of it is that he could have the group arrested or worse for being in Rwanda on false papers, armed with military weapons. However, he would prefer to have them strike at their mutual enemy. In his words, "You can do me a favor . . .".
It comes out that officially, Rwanda welcomes Chinese investment, as such deals are too lucrative to pass up. It's also an open secret that Rwanda backs guerrillas in the DRC; as evidence of this, Col. G explains that when his intelligence staff examined the tree downed to blockade the road yesterday, they found traces of Rwandan military explosives. What's less well known, Col. G claims, is that Rwandan officials are making the Chinese feel at home by helping them deal with international competition. On the surface, this assistance takes the form of administrative obstructionism – but Col. G happens to know that the government has arranged for guerrillas to terrorize and drive off anyone who would compete with the Chinese investors.
Col. G's interest is in battling this corruption – and not because he's an "honest man" or anything like that. He's completely upfront about two things: First, he wants Rwanda to be for Rwandans, not to become a de facto puppet state propped up by Chinese money and influenced by Chinese policy. Second, he has personal beefs with elements within the RDF, and represents a minority faction that would like to see the service's current bosses toppled.
Which brings Col. G to his point: he and the Agents have a common foe. He claims that the Rwandan government had the guerrillas pay this worksite a couple of visits because aggressive Chinese biotech concerns want Darmatech out of the region. However, Col. G can't do anything about this directly – the RDF is his employer. He would need an anonymous group of well-trained operators to do the job. Conveniently, Anabel's people fit the bill, and just happen to have a vested interest; it's a match made in heaven. Naturally, the team is free to turn down his offer . . . but then he would have to detain them, since he can't leave a camp full of mercenaries armed with heavy military ordnance sitting in a tense border region, can he?
Anabel words her counteroffer carefully, to avoid hinting that her team intended to hit the guerrillas soon anyway. Her hope is to get something better than "I won't arrest you" out of Col. G in return for doing what now appears to be his treasonous dirty work. As it turns out, the man isn't without influence. He could make all evidence of the Agents' actions in Rwanda simply disappear, and also ensure that their strike on the guerrillas in the DRC is covered up. Further, he could arrange limited material support; for instance, many vehicles were "misplaced" during the troubles in the 1990s, and he could reveal the location of a mortar carrier or even an attack helicopter.
At this stage, Anabel asks to bring in her experts on vehicles and tactics, and calls for Vinnie and Lev. Introductions are made all around, and then discussion of what Col. G can provide resumes. Lev and Vinnie are of the opinion that heavy vehicles, as nice as they might be, aren't well-suited to the terrain or the nature of the job. For nine fighters to go in stealthily and deal with an entire guerrilla base, the focus has to be on selectively destroying munitions, fuel, and command structure, not firing mortars and rockets at targets of opportunity. That means sabotage, which calls for explosives and preferably some sort of diversion.
Col. G smiles and says that these things are well within his reach. Fuss involving damage to the environment by mineral extraction in the region has left mining explosives stockpiled here and there, so arranging for a shipment to reach a construction site that has a permit for blasting would be trivial. As for the diversion, the RDF supports the guerrillas, so it would be a simple matter for him, a colonel, to contact them and pull them out of their camp to fetch a supply drop. Indeed, he could organize all this overnight. The only catch is that since the guerrillas have limited night-vision capability, they wouldn't want to deal with a drop after dark, so the distraction would have to come in daylight.
Seeing that Lev seems pleased with Col. G's proposal, Anabel agrees to it, with one further stipulation: Since the Agents will be away from the camp, conducting a raid in the DRC, the site will be without security. She asks the colonel to leave men here to protect the place. He snaps his fingers at his aide and says, "Make it so." Col. G adds that while the guerrillas might enjoy backing from Rwanda, the RDF still has a duty to provide people on Rwandan soil with protection against armed terrorism. Which is to say, nobody will blink an eye at his order.
With a deal struck, Col. G tells Lev to have his people ready to move out as soon as possible. The explosives should show up tomorrow afternoon (October 11), and if the group can get across the border and into position by the following afternoon (October 12), then he can pull enough guerrillas out of their base to make the sabotage mission go much more easily. With that, he doffs his cap, kisses Anabel's hand charmingly, and heads out. His jeep rumbles off into the night, while the truck remains behind with the RDF soldiers left to defend the camp.