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  Paulina had no intention of letting the Russians interfere with her plans to get Tytus to notice her during the next couple of weeks.

  * * *

  • • •

  At three p.m. the civilian militia buses arrived at their first destination, a lumber mill on a flat piece of frozen ground just west of Radom.

  As soon as the buses were parked, everyone climbed out to find several TDF trucks in a row. The trucks were full of ammunition, food, water, tents, and the crew-served weapons issued to those whose specialty required them.

  Everyone in Paulina’s company had a specialty. She served on a two-person RPG-7 crew. The rocket-propelled grenade launcher fired a finned grenade up to five hundred meters. The launchers assigned to Paulina’s company had been manufactured some ten years before her birth, but it was still a good and effective weapon.

  Paulina and her teammate on the crew, an acne-scarred nineteen-year-old boy named Bruno who worked at his uncle’s tire shop just west of Warsaw, had been assigned one RPG-7 and one crate with four rockets in it. Paulina and Bruno had each fired exactly six actual rounds from an RPG-7 in their lives, all at the Land Forces training grounds the previous summer. Bruno had been slightly more accurate with the weapon, so he’d been charged with fielding and firing it, while Paulina’s job was to help him reload and to clear his backblast area. She was also tasked with carrying the ammunition in a big bandolier, protecting Bruno with her old rifle, and being ready to take over if Bruno was unable to continue fighting.

  Paulina and Bruno hefted their crate of rockets out of the back of a truck, and Paulina loaded them into her bandolier. Bruno took the launcher itself from a wooden box of six, while the five other RPG gunners of the company grabbed theirs.

  As they were organizing their gear at the back of one of the trucks, Tytus walked by with his Dragunov sniper rifle in a drag bag over his shoulder.

  “Hey,” Paulina said with feigned nonchalance.

  “Tobiasz,” Tytus replied with a nod as he passed.

  Now she wondered if he even knew her first name.

  Tytus was the section’s sharpshooter. Calling him a sniper would have been overselling his skills, but for a boy from Warsaw he could shoot well. He’d told Paulina once that his uncle had a farm an hour north of the capital and he’d gone there on weekends as a boy. Together they would hunt rabbit, and Tytus had been a natural shot.

  With their packs and weapons and other gear, the militia company climbed onto the old civilian trucks driven by locals, and soon they bumped off the paved road and began heading along a winding muddy forest track that led through a farm.

  As Paulina bounced around in the truck and wondered if she’d have to eat military rations for dinner, Nowicki came over the radios. “All units. We’re stopping at a rail yard to pick up some wood for fortifications, and then we’re going to set up camp in a bean field off Highway Twelve.”

  Urszula turned to Paulina. “Now we need wood? We just left a lumberyard.”

  Paulina replied, “They weren’t going to let us use that stuff. We get the cheap shit, girl. We have to scrounge for scraps.”

  Urszula said, “Seriously, could this possibly get any worse?”

  CHAPTER 17

  DJIBOUTI CITY, DJIBOUTI

  EAST AFRICA

  22 DECEMBER

  It took four days of diligent work to find out where the Russians were staying in Djibouti City, but sixty-four-year-old French spy Pascal Arc-Blanchette was nothing if not a persistent man. The first afternoon of the tail he lost them when they climbed aboard a bus heading to the Balbala neighborhood. There weren’t many tourist hotels that he knew of in that area, so he wondered if they might be staying with locals. He quietly asked his contacts around the area about boardinghouses, hostels, people with enough property to take in a large group, and the like.

  With no true leads, he began driving around the neighborhood at different times throughout the day. This was slow, arduous, and boring work, especially because the air-conditioning wasn’t working in his filthy, beat-up old four-door Renault. This December was typical for Djibouti, weather-wise, with highs in the eighties and nighttime lows barely dipping below seventy. But Pascal was used to sweating—he’d been doing it profusely his entire life—and he much preferred the heat to that sudden rush of bone-chilling cold he felt whenever he found himself somewhere outside of Africa in winter.

  To the extent there were any centers of tourism in the city, the area around the Balbala bus station wasn’t one of them. It was on the outskirts of town: row after row of ramshackle warehouses, shanties made from corrugated metal and even rusty old conex boxes, and the wind-whipped dust and sand that encroached from the south and permeated all life here on the edge of the Third World capital.

  There were no hotels, but there were a few warehouses converted into housing for laborers. Pascal drove by these with a local friend and fixer who went in to have a look while the Frenchman sat outside in his Renault.

  After two days of scouting around for the mysterious strangers, he’d decided the Russians had likely moved on. A dozen or more white faces in this neighborhood would be hard to conceal, after all. But late in the day he fell in behind a brand-new Toyota Hilux pickup truck that rolled north of the bus station and into town. He wasn’t even following it intentionally at first. Its tags were local, it didn’t stand out with any features, and he couldn’t see the driver or the passenger, because they were hidden by the headrests.

  But when the truck pulled into a gas station and both the driver and passenger climbed out, Pascal saw they were two large, bearded Caucasian men. He couldn’t be certain they were from the group he’d seen a week earlier at Restaurant L’Historil, but he decided to back off a couple of blocks and follow the truck when it left.

  The Hilux soon drove five minutes further to a dilapidated warehouse surrounded by a stalwart-looking chain-link fence. Pascal didn’t have his fixer with him this day, so he couldn’t send someone in to find out what was going on. Instead, he drove to an overlook nearly six blocks away and parked but remained in the car lest anyone take too much interest in a white man wandering around in this neighborhood.

  Pascal Arc-Blanchette didn’t spend money on nice clothes, nice cars, or nice anything, for that matter. But he did have a few nice toys, courtesy of French intelligence. He pulled a pair of Vortex Kaibab high-definition binoculars from his shoulder bag on the passenger’s seat next to him and brought the fifteen-power optics to his eyes, focusing on the warehouse in the dusty distance.

  Instantly he saw a white man on the roof, himself with a pair of binoculars. A moment of dread swept over Pascal as he worried he might have been compromised, but quickly he realized the man was scanning the roads closer to the warehouse and wasn’t looking this high up on the hill.

  Next to the man was a cheap plastic lawn chair, and propped on the chair were a rifle and a high-quality backpack.

  Pascal’s unkempt gray eyebrows twitched a little. Providing security for one’s property was a good idea here in Djibouti—there was nothing off in in that—but the fact it clearly wasn’t a local security service doing the work was a bit unusual.

  Pascal wasn’t sure who these Russians were, but he was now certain they weren’t the international vagabonds they were portraying themselves as.

  No, this was definitely some sort of organized affair. Corporate spies? No: based on their appearance and, noticeable to Pascal’s trained eyes, their attempts to hide their military precision, they were more likely a clandestine military unit.

  He could think of no reason a dozen or so Russian soldiers would be skulking around a Djibouti warehouse district unless the soldiers were here to protect whatever the Russian government was doing inside.

  He saw no other activity on the grounds of the property for nearly an hour, but eventually a metal garage door slid open and two Toyota Hilux pickups rolled
out of the main building. They passed through the front gate and turned south, and six blocks away Pascal rushed to get his Renault started.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the late afternoon’s fading light, a beige sedan drove down the RN5, two hundred meters behind a pair of gray Toyota pickups. Behind the wheel of the sedan, Pascal squinted through the dust and grime on his windshield, doing his best to keep his aging eyes on his targets.

  The RN5 was the main highway out of town that led to the south and then into Ethiopia. It first left the sprawling shantytowns of the southern outskirts of Djibouti City and then rolled through the southwestern portion of Arta, one of six regions in the nation. Here the terrain switched to rolling hills almost completely devoid of vegetation and intersected with streambeds, most dry this time of year, but some flowing with brown water.

  It was at a bridge over such a streambed where the pair of pickups pulled off the highway. Pascal himself slowed and veered off to the side, stopping once his car was below the crest of a long, gentle hill. He was still two hundred meters back, but he pulled his binos, stepped out of the car, and went around to the front to lift the hood.

  Faking car trouble wasn’t exactly the newest trick in the book, but Pascal Arc-Blanchette had been pulling this stunt around the world for some four decades, and it had worked for him almost every time.

  With his hood up, he retreated back behind his open driver’s-side door and lifted his binoculars to his eyes.

  Half a dozen white men climbed out of one of the Hiluxes; they all appeared to be military-aged males, and they walked along the bridge, leaned over the side and looked down, and even took pictures with their phones. The men seemed relaxed about all this, nonchalant, but they were most assuredly there for a reason.

  One of their number went to the near edge of the bridge, climbed over the side, and walked down the dirt embankment.

  To Pascal, this seemed to be part of some sort of engineering survey. He thought they might be interested in the strength of the bridge, which meant they had plans to move something heavy over it at some point in the future.

  But it was clear to Pascal they were operating covertly, which meant they were not here with the full blessing of the local government.

  That’s a new one: Russian special forces units working in advance of geological survey missions.

  Geological survey teams from around the world had come here to hunt for minerals: gold and rare-earth metals. He knew all about the Russians losing their hold on the REM mine down in Kenya, and he assumed they were here doing more sight surveys, obviously in a clandestine fashion.

  He didn’t think they’d find what they were looking for. France itself had scoured the land around Djibouti looking for potentially profitable minerals and petroleum under the sand, and hadn’t found much of value.

  He’d return to the embassy to write a secure cable back to Paris. This was something they could hand off to the locals if they wanted, but Pascal hoped they’d ask him to keep looking into the matter and find out who, exactly, these men from Russia were and what sort of secret mining operation they were thinking about conducting to the south of the city.

  It was just a hope, not born out of any real expectation of acclaim from Paris for his work, but rather simply because Pascal Arc-Blanchette so very much wanted something interesting to do with his days.

  * * *

  • • •

  The cable was written and sent, and the next morning the response from Paris was in his hands as he sat down at his desk.

  It was official-speak, as usual, but Pascal could read between the lines.

  It was clear they simply didn’t give a damn.

  There was an acknowledgment of receipt but no request for more information, no offer of resources.

  Pascal sighed, but then his mobile phone rang. Instantly he brightened, because he realized it was time for his weekly call from his son. “Allo?”

  “Hi, Papa. Happy early Christmas.”

  “Same to you, my boy. How was your week?”

  “Same old thing. How about you?”

  “You won’t believe it. Something damn interesting is going on down here.”

  “Oui, you are right. I don’t believe it.”

  “I’ve bumped into some new visitors to town. Foreign chaps. All wearing adventure wear and carrying the best rucksacks and boots. A group of a dozen.”

  “What about them?”

  “My guess is they are in the same line of work as you.”

  This piqued Apollo’s interest, but only a little. “You say foreigners?”

  “From the land of Kalashnikovs and caviar.”

  Apollo understood his father was telling him he thought plainclothed Russian Spetsnaz were operating in Djibouti, and now he was genuinely curious. “You’re joking.”

  “Not about this, no.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Looking over bridges and highways, securing warehousing. They’ve been here for days, and from the looks of where they are staying, they plan on hanging around for a while.”

  “They aren’t some privately contracted force? There to protect Russian civil engineers or something?”

  “Doesn’t look or feel like a private firm, and I haven’t seen many civil engineers that are built like judo champs.”

  “Would be odd. You’ve told Paris, I assume.”

  “And they could not care less.”

  Apollo said, “Have you heard of this happening before?”

  “Never. Not in the years I’ve been in country. I’m going to look into this riddle a little more. I’ll tell you what I learn.”

  “Be careful, Papa.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m sure you’re doing something more dangerous than me today.”

  At this the younger man laughed. “Papa, half the battalion is on leave, and I’m getting caught up on paperwork.”

  “Good, then I can sleep easy tonight for once.”

  CHAPTER 18

  BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

  23 DECEMBER

  Thirty-two-year-old Captain Apollo Arc-Blanchette of the 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment hung up his cell phone, then rolled his chair back and put his boots up on his desk. His tiny office here at his barracks was spartan, but he had certainly made do with worse setups in worse locations, so he didn’t complain.

  His battalion was winding down its six-month rotation as the duty unit at NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force. He and his men would return to France, and Germany’s Kommando Spezialkräfte unit would take over.

  He’d been deployed in combat in Afghanistan multiple times, and he’d seen significant action during all his tours. He and his men had the battle scars to prove they were among Europe’s most elite unit of special forces, and even though they’d done nothing more than train here in Brussels over the past six months, he was proud to have served NATO.

  A rotation with NATO’s VJTF was not the coveted Afghanistan deployment his men had wanted; they were hoping for a chance to fire real lead at a thinking enemy who fought back. But it was better than sitting at home at Camp de Souge, where the ammo was scarce, the live-fire training was hampered by constant fire danger ratings, and Apollo spent the majority of his time writing reports and filling out requisition forms.

  But Apollo wasn’t thinking about any of this right now. No, he was thinking about his dad.

  He didn’t know what to make of his father’s assertion that something weird was going on down in Africa. It was not that he doubted his father’s conviction that something was up; it was just that he worried his dad had been out in the field so long, he might have started to see ghosts.

  Apollo and his sister, Claudette, had dealt with Pascal’s erratic and often spontaneous world traveling for their entire lives. The kids had thought their dad to be a commercial trade re
presentative for the French Foreign Ministry, and it wasn’t until Apollo had received très secret défense clearance, the French version of “top secret,” that he discovered his father had spent the past forty years working for the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure.

  The younger Arc-Blanchette tried not to worry about his dad too much. Pascal had been taking care of himself for quite some time on his own in many foreign lands. He spoke eight languages with near perfect fluency, although he could be flighty, forgetful, and as unconventional a father as ever existed.

  Pascal’s defense to his son’s accusations that he was “an absentminded old fool” was always to quote the French author Voltaire: “How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.”

  His dad was too smart for his own good, Apollo always thought. And in his own way, by joining the French special forces, Apollo was following in his father’s footsteps, since they were both servants of the French government, although Apollo employed guns and helicopters, while his father used dead drops and encrypted phones.

  Apollo’s mother was a society woman from Paris who had left Pascal for another man when Apollo was too young to remember her. As a boy, Apollo had strayed away from his sister’s and father’s inclination to read and write, and had instead gravitated toward organized sports and physical activity. He was the total opposite of his father, who had never engaged in a minute of nonmandatory fitness in his life.

  The elder Arc-Blanchette always wanted his son to become a writer or a teacher, but Apollo instead joined the military and then the special forces. He loved the action, gravitated to the danger, and had flourished in the physical challenges and demands of the 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment well enough that he had gained high regard from his French Army superiors.