Chapter 6 #3
Bearclaw had had a lot of really bad publicity from that. It was only dying down because the police had zip. No leads, no gun, no shooter. The bodies had been autopsied—and yes, big surprise, cause of death was massive trauma from bullet wounds in all three cases—and handed back to Montez.
None of the men had families, so Montez had made a very big deal of giving them a hero’s funeral on company grounds, and given all his employees the day off to attend.
And all the while inside he’d been seething, furious that they’d botched a job that should have been easy, a fucking cakewalk, and had instead become a huge albatross around Bearclaw’s neck.
It might, in fact, cost him the company, if he wasn’t careful, because he needed that Pentagon contract, real bad, and right now.
Ellen Palmer was now in the hands of a very slick operator who could take three of his men out in minutes and get away laughing.
She was now ten times more dangerous than before.
Montez needed outside help. He hated to admit it, but it was true. He needed someone outside his company, someone who was better than the men in his company. Someone who would never be connected back to the company.
He knew one man who would fit the bill.
He dialled a number he’d committed to memory.
Piet van der Boeke. Originally South African, now a stateless person. The last sighting of Piet had been way up the Congo River tracking down a rebel warlord.
He’d done it, too. Piet was legendary. He didn’t have a company or a stable team of men. He recruited men for each job based on the job specs. He was plugged into the world and he found the best man or men for the job each time. But he worked best alone.
Montez didn’t want an army. He wanted one man, Piet. He’d done Piet a favour in 2020, a big enough one that Piet had given him his private number and told him to call if he needed help.
Piet was a fine soldier, one of the best. But there were fine soldiers everywhere. Montez employed over 300 of them himself. Men who knew how to handle themselves in a firefight, how to shoot, how to survive an op. They weren’t a dime a dozen, but there were plenty of good soldiers around.
What Piet did, better than anyone in the world, was track.
His mother had died giving him birth. Piet’s father ran a hardscrabble farm 300 miles from Johannesburg and, more important, at least 200 miles from another white woman.
Piet had been wet nursed by the wife of the chief of the local Nguni tribe, who had basically brought him up with his own son, who had been like a brother to Piet.
While year after year Piet’s father sat morosely over his unpaid bills, drinking bottle after bottle of whiskey, Piet was out in the wild, learning to follow sign.
He enrolled in the South African Army the day he turned 17 and proved to be a natural soldier.
But what was extraordinary was that Piet could track in all kinds of wilds. The savannah, the uplands of the Hindu Kush, Grozny, Peshawar, Belgrade…you name the place, country or city where a man had gone to ground and Piet would find him.
When he went private, he had clients coming out of his ears.
He’d been a natural at following sign for big game and he was a natural at modern technology.
The cell rang. He had strong encryption and knew Piet did, too.
“Yeah?” A bass tone in a strong Afrikaans accent, so strong even the voice distortion program couldn’t quite mask it.
The yeah sounded like yiah. But the voiceprint would be completely altered.
Even if NSA could pluck this conversation out of the air—and the odds of that were a billion to one—there would be no voiceprint match.
It occurred to Montez that since he had no idea where Piet was, he could be waking him up. If he was in West Africa, where he heard Piet had set up headquarters, it’d be midnight where he was. But the voice sounded strong and completely alert.
“No names. We met during Moondust. I headed the team. Do you remember me?”
Moondust had been a private black op just over the Pakistani border, technically illegal.
Piet and four of his men had been guarding and leading a New York Times journalist on the hunt for Al Qaeda’s bioweapons expert.
The journalist had gone on to win a Pulitzer.
What the article didn’t mention was that their GPS had died on them and they had gone four miles into no no land, over the border into Pakistan, and had been shot up by a cove of Taleban.
Piet had wasted every single tango but he was left with two dead and two wounded, including the journo.
If the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, had caught them, the journalist would have been thrown into jail till the end of time and Piet and his men would have been hanged, not without some pain first.
Montez had been following a lead that one of the comms guys had his headquarters in a mud hut. But the mud hut was just that—full of goatherders with their goats—and Montez was ready to pull back with his men when he got an SOS from van der Boeker.
Technically, it wasn’t Montez’s business at all. In fact, technically, helping mercenaries was illegal. But hell, it was only a couple of miles out of his way, he had manpower up the wazoo and it was a chance to get an IOU out of Piet van der Boeke. Better than money in the bank.
His team cut communication with their FOB for a couple of hours and went out to rescue Piet, his wounded and the journalist. The journalist was sworn to silence about the rescue, wrote an article that was turned into a book that became a bestseller and didn’t once mention Piet or Montez.
“Yiah. I remember you, mate. You need something?”
“Bad. I’ll send a company jet for you. Are you near Lungi?” The Freetown airport was the staging area for most of western and central Africa. Busy and corrupt, one more corporate jet wasn’t going to be noticed.
“Yiah.”
“Can you be there by 1400 hours local time tomorrow?”
“Yiah.”
“Good. The corporate jet will be in the name of—“
“I know the name.” And he hung up.
Montez stared at his screen for a moment, then powered down the laptop, knowing that he’d just done the only possible thing to correct a really bad situation.
Yiah.