“How was your trip?” he asked the Siberian in French.

“Uganda didn’t think much of your phony end-user certificates for the Kalashnikovs.”

The officer grinned. “That’s because the Ugandan defense minister supplied them to me without giving his superiors a cut.”

“I thought so. How much did he charge you?”

“Fifty thousand American.”

“He must have been feeling guilty. He only tacked on another twenty-five thousand. You’ll see it in the transport charges for the next load.”

The officer shrugged. “Where are the RPGs?”

The Siberian jerked his thumb toward the rear of the plane. “You’ll get them when I’ve seen the diamonds.”

The officer slid one hand into his pants pocket and produced a leather miner’s bag. He flipped the bag up to the Siberian, who hefted the bag on his palm, loosened the drawstrings, and spilled the contents into his hand. The morning sun caught on two dozen large rough stones. They were like ragged ice cubes in the heat, gleaming with promise.

“Feels light,” the Siberian said.

“They are perfect stones for Antwerp,” the officer said, climbing lithely aboard the plane, heading toward the five large wooden crates. “My South African says each will yield several two-and three-carat finished goods.”

The Siberian dug a jeweler’s loupe out of his trousers and studied the stones. “Perhaps, but documentation will cut into my profit. Even the damned Belgians are demanding paper proof that they are not conflict stones. Nobody wants diamonds with blood on them.”

“It washes off diamonds quite easily. I threw in an extra two hundred pounds of coltan to pay for your paperwork.”

The Siberian smiled slightly. “The transistor manufacturers of Prague will be pleased.”

“So the Czechs are providing you the rifles,” the officer said. “Good. Their work is better than that load of Moldavian shit you brought us last time.”

“AK-47s aren’t all created equal,” the Siberian said, smiling thinly. “The price reflects that.”

“Show me the grenade launchers.”

“Pick one.”

The officer pointed to a crate at random.

The Siberian nodded to the loadmaster, who undid the straps that secured the last large crates in place. He frog-walked the selected crate over to the door, laid it down, and pulled a pry bar out of its wall mount. Very quickly the crate gave up its secrets.

Six shoulder launchers rested in their recessed rack. The load-master dragged a smaller crate forward and opened it. Inside were twelve grenades, packed warheads up.

The black officer picked up one of the launchers and inspected it. Then he selected one of the grenades, walked to the open doorway, and held the weapons up for his men to see. He shouted something in a tribal dialect. All the Siberian could understand was Uhuru, which was a tribal name for part of Camgeria.

Fifty men cheered. The guard with the Kalashnikov pointed his weapon in the air and fired wildly.

The Siberian came and stood in the doorway beside the rebel officer. He looked out at the ragtag army and smiled. His own spies in their midst and in the camps of the Camgerian forces told him that the rebels were close to toppling one of the most stable of the countries among the oil-rich, tribally divided lands lying along Africa’s western coast. If the rebels won, there would be prolonged and brutal tribal warfare.

And oil concessions for the Siberian who brought guns to the winning side.

He turned a mental page in his account book and began formulating the final stage of his plan to move from trading illegal arms in the field to trading oil from the safety of America. Now that the rebels had received fresh stocks of Soviet-era arms, the Democratic Republic of Camgeria would need better weapons. The Siberian would supply them.

And make many, many millions of American dollars, plus connections with and favors from the present African regime. The latter would buy him what money alone couldn’t-a place at the international oil-trading table.

Blood didn’t stick to oil.

A glint of light caught his eye. The flash came from a rocky hill about three hundred yards off the runway.

Instantly he stepped back into the dark interior of the plane. It would be like the rebels to try and make off with the arms, the coltan, and the diamonds. Or perhaps the Camgerian government had discovered he was selling to both sides of its little war.

In the shadows of the aircraft’s cargo hold, the Siberian lifted his binoculars and studied the spot where he’d seen the flash of light.

Like everything else away from the tropical coast, the hill was covered by scrub and dust. He could make out what might be a sniper’s keep and thought he could see men inside. But he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t seeing his own paranoia in the moving wind shadows. The binoculars were inferior Moldavian goods.

Impatiently he turned toward the guard who had the sniper rifle. With both voice and gestures, the Siberian said, “Give it to me.”

The man hesitated until his officer barked a command. Reluctantly the guard handed over the rifle.

Still concealed by the shadows inside the plane, the Siberian rested the weapon on a crate and studied the hillside. The telescopic sight brought details into sharp focus.

There were two men. White. Both faces were hidden-one by a camera with a very long-range lens, the other by field glasses.

Then the man with the camera ducked down into the blind. Through the light grass screen across the front of the blind, the Siberian could see that he was reloading the camera. Film, not digital.

Russian curses echoed in the plane. The cameraman had at least one exposed roll of the Siberian overseeing the unloading, the rebel officer inspecting arms, the diamonds and coltan, the rebel brandishing weapons that were being delivered in contravention of African Union and United Nations arms embargoes, in the face of world opinion and all civilized standards. And those would be the headlines if the photographs were ever published.

It would ruin him. He’d live out his life in the stinking hell of Libya’s “freedom.”

He stared through the rifle’s telescopic sight. “Is the weapon accurate?” he asked.

The officer translated.

The guard grinned, nodded, and answered.

“He has it zeroed in at two hundred and fifty yards,” the officer translated.

“Excellent,” the Siberian said.

He changed his aiming point to compensate for the differences in range and for the fact that he was firing uphill. He would wound one. The other would try to save his comrade.

And both would be his.

Slowly the Siberian’s finger took up slack on the trigger.

The spotter moved slightly. For a timeless instant the Siberian and the spotter were frozen in each other’s sights.

As the last of the slack in the trigger vanished, the spotter threw himself on the cameraman and shoved him away. The shot echoed. Birds shrieked and leaped for the sky.

Dust leaped from the spotter’s cammie shirt, followed instantly by blood.

When the Siberian worked the bolt to reload, it was rough, gritty. The scope jerked. By the time he reacquired the grass blind, both men were gone. Cursing, he fired several times. Then he stepped into the doorway and stabbed toward the hill with his finger.

“Spies,” he shouted. “Kill them!”

The officer yelled at his army. As the rebels turned toward the hillside, two men broke cover and began scrambling over the crest of the hill. The rebels fired, but the men were too far away for accuracy.

The Siberian lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired two more shots without any real hope. A sniper’s rifle wasn’t much good on moving targets. Disgusted, he slammed the rifle onto the crate.

While the rebels watched, the wounded man fell.

Finally!

Before the Siberian could bring the sniper rifle to bear again, the cameraman bent over, picked up his wounded comrade, pulled him into a fireman’s carry, and vanished over the crest of the hill.

“Strong,” the Siberian said, surprised. “Very strong.”

And very unexpected.

He gestured at the staring rebels. “Go after them, shit-heads!”

The officer translated and the rebels ran toward the hill. Before they were halfway, an engine started on the other side of the hill. Moments later dust rose from the tires of a fleeing Land Rover.

The Siberian looked at the officer, who shrugged and said, “There is a track over there that leads to three roads. The Camgerian army controls two of them.”

Unease crawled through the Siberian’s belly. He had been very careful in his violent climb to the top of a violent profession. No one had ever captured his face on film.

“Prepare to take off,” he shouted into the cockpit.

The pitch of the engines increased.

“Get those men,” he told the rebel officer. “Bring me their film and I’ll give you two artillery pieces and a helicopter gunship. Do you understand?”

The officer grinned. If the Siberian would pay a million at first offer, he’d pay more on the second. “I’ll get the film. Then we’ll negotiate.”

The aircraft doors slammed shut as the plane accelerated down the dirt strip, scattering rebels like dust.

3

Five years later

Near Phoenix, Arizona

Late March

Thursday


8:30 A.M. MST

Kayla Shaw walked out of the little adobe house and put the last of her mementos into the Ford Explorer. It wasn’t much of a load, really. Some photos, her grandmother’s prize bridle, her mother’s barrel-racing trophies, her father’s favorite hunting rifle. Small things rich with memories. After work, she’d come back and pack up her clothes.