'A' for Argonaut Read Free Page B

Home. We ahh totally in the black. We have the full fire support of the Special Operations Command, but‌—‌officially‌—‌we do not exist,” he smiled. “That means: No option other than victory. Death to the enemy!”
    The men cheered. He raised his hand to stop them.
    The laser pointer tracked slowly over an area just east of Cabinda and well west of the border of the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of miles southwest of Kinshasa, “Kin” as the locals call it.
    “We are going in over the offshore oil fields here,” he pointed. “We’re setting down in an LZ, Landing Zone, five miles from the rebel camp northwest of Cabinda, far enough away to make a covert entry. Right here,” he pointed, “a rebel force has raped and dismembered an entire village and kidnapped the young women and boys to work in brothels. That group includes innocents here to investigate the charges that not only have U.N. officers stood by and watched, but they have taken profits from the human trafficking.”
    Maran took it personally. His mother had recounted stories to him as a child of the vast slums and human exploitation that his country and its allies not only tolerated but profited from. This Cabinda atrocity was a microcosm. He knew that a year earlier, U.N. peacekeepers sat on the sidelines while a million Hutus and Tutsis had raped and dismembered one another in their war in Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC. Four million more were forced out of their homes into ramshackle refugee camps scattered between Angola and the two Congos.
    Now this.
    According to Maran’s background briefing, the hostage-takers were from the Progressive Front for the Liberation of the Exclave of Cabinda, a/k/a PFLEC. They had called the U.S. Embassy in Cabinda demanding the removal of U.N. forces from the region and an official apology from the President of the United States. They charged that the CIA was working with the diamond cartel and the international oil companies to cash in on Angola’s raw materials on the backs of destitute Cabindans.
    Maran knew PFLEC and its Angolan leader. They were not terrorists. The CIA had supported them as allies of South Africa in the war there against Soviet-sponsored Communism in the eighties. Maran didn’t believe the terrorists were from PFLEC. To him it sounded more like Joseph Kony of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, operating in the Congo. Satellite photography showed the exact location of the outpost where the terrorists had taken the surviving hostages. They had to be rescued quickly before it was too late.

Chapter 3

    Three
    Somewhere East of Cabinda, Angola
    T he next day Colonel Maran’s 24-man private army lifted off the Atlantic coast by Swakopmund in their Chinook. He bit down hard on his unlit Parodi as they inserted on their LZ in the forest east of Cabinda, in rebel-held Angolan territory.
    As the light dawned in a faint glow over the forested horizon, Maran stood on a hill at the foot of an acacia tree. He tightened the chinstrap on his cushioned Kevlar combat helmet and adjusted the ballistic goggles on the bridge of his nose. He tightened the cuffs of the tactical gloves. He flexed his exposed trigger finger. His radioman handed him a long-range SATCOM Manpack tactical radio. He lifted his arm to signal the advance.
    The red dot was blinking.
    Bragg, he thought .
    “Back,” Maran challenged.
    “Door,” the voice affirmed.
    That voice wasn’t General Luster’s, his commander, the man behind the mission. He knew Luster. He even knew the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart he wore along with a trophy salad of other charms earned in hellholes from Columbia, Panama, Beirut, Baghdad, and Kabul, not to mention a dozen places never to be mentioned. Uncle Sam prosecuted its counter-terrorism war secretly anywhere against anyone perceived by the powers in control to pose a threat to America’s national security. Although Maran’s renegade genes often rankled at the way