African Dragon Read Free

After some informal greetings, Darren and Dex sat down with the team.
    The team had been invented last year—a mixture of navy SEALs, marine recondos, army rangers, and CIA operatives. They had used the cover story of a “US Navy All-Star Baseball Team” to get into Saudi Arabia the previous year for an operation intercepting fifty million dollars of insurgent money, and then traded their baseball uniforms in for church group t-shirts for an insertion into Paraguay to take out terrorists and drug smugglers in the tri-border region. After a couple of weeks off to debrief and decompress, they were recalled to their “ready room.”
    “Welcome back everyone,” said Darren as he took his seat. “Most of you were military so you know how this works: you train for desert warfare and you get sent to the mountains—you train for mountains and end up swimming up a beach at night. Evidently, we are learning from the army. You trained to be a baseball team last year and played what? Two real games on a job? Then you became a church group for the Paraguay job. So you come home, train hard again out on the baseball field, and guess what? It ’ s time to start learning about boats and SCUBA diving from your navy buddies. ”
    The team members all looked at each other and groaned, except for the SEALs, who were smiling.
    “Yeah, I knew you guys would be happy to hear it,” Darren said, looking at the SEALs. “I hope the rest of you don ’ t get seasick. Don ’ t laugh, but do any of you have any background with tropical fish? You know, like fish tanks when you were growing up.”
    Jon Cohen looked around and finally cleared his throat. “Um, I always had fish tanks growing up,” he said softly.
    “Anybody else?” asked Davis.
    No one responded until Theresa laughed and said, “Moose has a goldfish!”
    Davis looked at her and asked, “And you know this how ?”
    Her face turned red and she said, “He told me,” not wanting to admit she had been inside his apartment. Julia and Chris made sure they didn ’ t make any eye contact with each other for fear they ’ d start laughing or something.
    “Okay, so Moose has a goldfish, Jon has had some fish, and I have a half dozen SEALs that can dive and know boats. Jon, you ever hear of African cichlids?”
    Jon smiled broadly. “Yes, sir! That ’ s what I used to keep—from Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika.”
    Dex and Darren looked at each other and smiled. “Hallelujah,” said Dex.
    Davis said, “Congratulations, Jon. You just became the resident expert on fish collecting in the region. All of you will be heading to Africa on Canadian passports to collect fish from Lake Tanganyika. You are a new company out of Canada that will be exporting fish back to Canada, air freight, out of Luano Airport in Lubumbashi.”
    The African sounding names brought a few chuckles.
    “Don ’ t laugh—you are all going to have to do some homework on the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as tropical fish. The fish export business for the tropical fish hobby in the US and Canada is big money for the locals down there. Unfortunately, so is their newest export—uranium.”
    That got everyone ’ s attention.
    “As a point of historical reference, it was uranium from the Shinkolobwe Mine that was used in the Fat Man and Little Boy which we so graciously dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. There has been new uranium mining activity in the past couple of years in that region, which has been monitored on and off between wars, but more alarming is the discovery of a new uranium deposit in the eastern part of the country, near Lake Tanganyika. We had a few local resources keeping tabs for us, but they seem to have disappeared. The rumor mill says that China, North Korea, India, and Israel have all had folks down there looking to buy uranium. Nothing is confirmed other than Israel admitting it was “keeping tabs” just like we are.”
    The members of the team listened intently, trying to see