The Emperor's Revenge (Oregon Files 11)

“How far do we have to drive once we land?” Juan continued.

“You’ll know when I tell you. Now, complete your preparations.” Juan hadn’t been expecting an answer, but he would have seemed suspicious if he weren’t curious about the mission.

“Yes, sir,” Juan said, forcing himself to say the words with a convincing tone of feigned respect. He pointed at the warning light above their heads. “That will flash red when the rear door opens. Stay behind the yellow line on the floor if you don’t want to get sucked out. The light will change to amber a minute before the jump, then green to signal the jump. The pallets will go first, then us. Understand?”

“We went over this in the preflight briefing,” Nazari said with clear disdain. “We’re not simpletons.” His men, who busily rechecked their harnesses and static lines, didn’t seem bothered by the reminder.

“Of course,” Juan replied. “I didn’t mean to offend. I’ll see you on the ground.”

Juan left them and headed to the front of the cargo deck. The only reason he cared if they made it to the ground intact was so they could lead him to the target. It had been a challenge to get them to trust him to the degree they had, which was why this operation hadn’t been tasked to U.S. Special Forces. As good as they were, infiltration wasn’t their specialty, and the CIA had their own limitations.

Juan had created the Corporation to do work the U.S. government couldn’t engage in directly. Plausible deniability was the rule. His stint as an agent in the CIA had made it clear that there were plenty of those types of operations needing to be carried out through the Corporation. Juan had offered to take on the risks, for which he and those in his employ had been well compensated. Side jobs supplemented their income when work from the CIA was scarce, but Juan never took on a job that he didn’t feel was in the best interests of America.

This mission certainly fit the bill.

It had taken weeks of secret meetings to gain Nazari’s trust enough to be hired for the mission. He required a clandestine insertion into the southern Algerian desert, fifty miles of rough terrain from the nearest settlement or oasis. The dune buggies had only enough fuel to get them from the drop to the target and then back to civilization, which was one of the reasons for the aerial insertion. The other was because they weren’t supposed to be on Algerian soil. The Oregon was already positioned at the port of Algiers to smuggle them out of the country. Tiny Gunderson, the Corporation’s fixed-wing pilot, would return the chartered IL-76 to its owners at the end of the mission. Originally, the operation was to take place three days from now, but Nazari had suddenly shortened the time line for unknown reasons.

Juan found Eddie Seng verifying that the pallet tie-downs for the dune buggies were tight. As lean and sinewy as an Olympic gymnast, Eddie was another veteran of the CIA and the Corporation’s chief of shore operations. Though he was fluent in Mandarin, he didn’t know any Arabic, so he hadn’t mixed with Nazari and his crew. Juan told them that Eddie was a freedom fighter from Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world. Luckily, they hadn’t recognized that Eddie was actually of Chinese descent.

“How are our friends doing?” Eddie asked, and smiled when he saw one of them wrestling with the line that would pull his rip cord. “Some of them look a little green.”

“I just hope they hold it together until they jump,” Juan said, shrugging into his parachute rig. “Tiny will have a fit if they toss their cookies and he has to clean up the mess before he returns the plane. Are we set?”

“Everything checks out. We’re good to go.”

“Where’s Linc?”

“Just took one last trip to the head,” said a basso voice behind Juan. He turned to see Franklin Lincoln, carrying his chute in one hand and two AK-47 assault rifles in the other as if they were toys. The gargantuan African American, with a head as smooth as a cue ball, handed Juan an AK-47, one of his least favorite weapons. He took it reluctantly.

“Don’t blame me, Chairman,” Linc said. As a former Navy SEAL, he would have much rather been carrying a more state-of-the-art weapon, too. “Remember, we’re trying to fit in.” Linc’s cover was that he was a Nigerian who had joined the struggle to fight the Western infidels.

Intel said that it was unlikely that Nazari and his men spoke any English. Juan had told Nazari that he, Eddie, and Linc had only English as a common language, since they were supposed to be from Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Still, Juan kept his voice low when he could, just in case the intel was wrong.

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Juan said. He secured the rifle to his pack.

“Any word yet on what our target is?” Eddie asked.

“Nada. Nazari’s not the sharing type. I’m not even sure his men know.” Juan tapped his watch, and voices suddenly popped into his earpiece. He could hear Nazari as clearly as if he were standing next to the terrorist. So far, the minuscule microphone transmitter that Juan had installed in the liner of his harness hadn’t yielded any strong intel.

“But they have done everything we’ve required,” Juan could hear one of the soldiers telling Nazari.

“I don’t care,” Nazari said. “We can’t take that chance. Once they realize what we’ve dug up, they may change their minds about—”

At that moment, the rear door lowered, letting in a blast of air that garbled the sound so much that Juan could only catch a few snippets of the remaining conversation.

Juan, Eddie, and Linc didn’t waste any time finishing the drop prep. Everything was ready when the amber light flashed.

A minute to the drop.

“We’re going to have to keep on our toes once we reach the target and recover whatever it is they’re looking for,” Juan said, his eye on Nazari at the other end of the hold. “I’m pretty sure I just heard that that’s when our client plans to kill us.”

Linc smirked. “Lovely.”

Then the green light blazed, the dune buggy pallets neatly slid out the back one after the other, and Juan led the jump out over the desert waiting a mile below.

TWO

MONACO