Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05] Read online

  She listened to the reports coming over the radio of further advances being made by her generals. They were ahead of schedule. At this rate, Kabbah might well capitulate to her demands before dawn.

  But Latisse Matabu was not ready to celebrate just yet. She had dreamed of her grandmother last night. The dream held a warning, a portent of doom represented by an eagle and a hawk flying side-by-side through the sky.

  Two enemies were coming to Sierra Leone to kill her. . .

  Even in death, her grandmother had not abandoned her in this crucial time. Thanks to her, Matabu would be waiting when they arrived.

  The Dragon knew her safest bet was to be gone from the country before the eagle and the hawk could find her. Leave to join up with her remaining supply of the Black Death in the United States where her final actions would assure the ultimate freedom of her people.

  President Kabbah and Defense Minister Daniel Sukahamin remained in the heavily fortified State House on Siaka Stevens Street, as reports of the rebel attacks began to pour in.

  Everything was going true to form, exactly as Kabbah had expected.

  “How long do we wait?” Sukahamin asked nervously, sticking pins in a wall-mounted map to denote the RUF’s advancing positions. The building’s emergency generator was not strong enough to power the entire building, and even if it had been, they would have left the lights dim to make for a less inviting target.

  “Long enough, Minister,” Kabbah said from the window, where he stood, arms clasped behind his back, overlooking the utter darkness that covered Freetown.

  “They’ll ravage the city.”

  “And we must let them, if we are to save it.”

  “You must make the call, sir,” Sukahamin implored. “Before it is too late.”

  “We have already discussed this and settled on a strategy, Minister.” Kabbah moved his gaze from the window to a shadowy figure in the room’s darkened rear. “There is no going back now.”

  Ben and Danielle’s driver abandoned them and his cab on Wallace Johnson Street when the blackout occurred, barely a mile from the State House. They didn’t bother to call after him as he disappeared into the night, agreeing they would be better off proceeding from here on foot.

  “We must’ve walked straight into a rebel attack!” Danielle realized, pressed next to Ben against a boarded-up building to conceal themselves from the government patrols sweeping desperately through the streets.

  “Doesn’t bode well for our chances of getting in to see President Kabbah, does it?”

  Suddenly the sound of machine gun fire strafed the night. Bright tracer shells lit up the darkness on a major avenue up ahead just in front of the Sierra Leone National Museum. There was a screech of tires, followed by an explosion that sent smoke billowing into the air.

  Danielle recognized the sights and sounds all too well, but it was the smells that evoked the clearest memories. The stench of hot, spent shells drifting with gunpowder residue and the scent of scorched metal on the air. War always smelled the same no matter the country.

  “Ben,” she said softly.

  He was pinned back against the wall, trembling slightly. His first experience with a battle of this size and scope.

  “Ben,” Danielle prodded again, waiting for him to acknowledge her before continuing. “When I move, stay right behind me.”

  More blasts lit up the night, followed by the sound of glass breaking everywhere.

  “Where are we going?” Ben managed to ask.

  Danielle gestured toward a set of stairs. “If I’ve got my bearings right, those steps lead down to the King Jimmy Market just off the waterfront.”

  “Bad time to go shopping,” Ben tried to joke.

  “But the fact that it’s recessed from the street will keep out the gunfire. Follow it to the end and we’ll be just a few blocks from the State House.”

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  * * * *

  Chapter 90

  W

  hat do you mean?” Latisse Matabu demanded of General Lananga by radio.

  “You heard me, General. My first assault waves have entered Freetown without resistance.”

  “That wasn’t the plan! You were to wait until receiving word that the other sectors were secure and the government troops sufficiently engaged!”

  “It’s over, General. We’re winning. The government troops are running like shit through chickens.”

  “You have no backup,” Matabu warned.

  “I don’t need it,” General Lananga insisted. “The government forces here are looting what’s left from the stores. My troops will be at the State House within the hour. We’ll have President Kabbah in custody shortly after that.”

  “Desist, General,” Matabu ordered him. “I say again, break off your attack until ordered.”

  “Too late,” Lananga told her.

  “Listen to me! There’s something wrong. It’s too easy!”

  “No, no. It’s all happening just the way I expected it. Next time I call, President Kabbah will be standing at my side. Signing off.”

  Latisse Matabu held the radio to her ear long after Lananga’s voice had ceased. Last night in the dream her grandmother had warned her only of the hawk and the eagle, nothing else. So why did she feel worried? What was going wrong?

  Something. . . Something she had heard recently that should have stuck in her mind, but hadn’t. . . .

  The Dragon laid her radio down and sank heavily into a chair behind the rickety rattan table on which a crude map of the western sector of the country, including the coastline, had been drawn with the positions of her various troops highlighted. She tried to think but her head was pounding too much; the pain Dr. Sowahy had warned her about had set in, enveloping her brain. She felt the bottle of pills he had given her rattling around in her pocket. Powerful pills he promised would take away the pain, just as the injections had a few days before. At what price, though? Not only would they soften the pain, they would cloud her head and confuse her judgment.

  She wished she could be closer to the war she was directing from afar.

  Only then could Latisse Matabu know what it was she couldn’t see from the bunker.

  Daniel Sukahamin continued plotting the advancing positions of rebel forces on the wall-mounted maps.

  “Well?” President Kabbah asked.

  “The rebels have just taken Government Wharf. Our forces are in full-fledged retreat.”

  “As planned.”

  Sukahamin frowned. “Faster than we expected, but yes, as planned.”

  Beyond the well-fortified State House, the firing had intensified. The building shook now with each rocket blast, paint chips and plaster raining downward. Just minutes before, tracer fire had begun streaming past the windows, as government soldiers dug in behind their concrete barricades to meet the charge of the advancing rebel troops.

  “It’s time,” Sukahamin said, in what sounded more like a plea.

  “Almost,” President Kabbah said, focusing again on the dark figure seated in the room’s rear. “Agreed?”

  Ben and Danielle dashed along the cover provided by a dilapidated building called the City Hotel, surprised to find it was still operating, its lobby illuminated by lanterns. Flashes lit up the night, accompanied by the staccato bursts of automatic fire as they clung to the crumbling stone façade. Ben found himself already able to distinguish the heavier caliber fire from that of traditional assault weapons. The difference lay in the center of his ears, the way the sounds reverberated inside his head. He felt the loudest in the pit of his stomach in waves of nausea that made him think he was going to vomit each time.

  The M-16 assault rifle felt absurd in his grasp. Heavy and poorly balanced. He and Danielle had sneaked up on a pair of government soldiers cowering behind their patrol jeep as soon as they had emerged from the King Jimmy Market. The struggle had been very brief, ending with Ben and Danielle in possession of the M-16s and the soldiers fleeing toward the sea. The extra clips
clinked in Danielle’s pocket as she turned to signal Ben it was time for them to move on.

  “Where to now?” he asked her.

  “Two more blocks to Siaka Stevens Street where the State House is located,” Danielle told him. “Just move in my shadow and keep yourself against the buildings.”

  She felt as free and unencumbered as she had in her days in the Sayaret: so much on the line, but little to lose of herself. The strange thing was that today the only man she had ever felt truly close to, a virtual stranger for months, was now struggling to maintain her pace in a world of violence he didn’t understand. What did that say about her life? Had she rediscovered her true purpose, or did she simply lack any semblance of one?

  Danielle focused on the mission at hand. A substantially weakened and desperate United States could provide no more help for Israel. Absent the looming retaliatory threat posed by the U.S., Israel’s enemies would seize the opportunity to attack. All-out war could break out between Israelis and Palestinians, driving her and Ben apart forever.

  “Yes,” nodded Joseph Tupelo, foreign minister of Nigeria, as he rose to his feet. “I am in absolute agreement.”

  They had made it a good way down Siaka Stevens Street, when a familiar sound found Danielle’s ears.

  Out here? It couldn’t be!

  But her eyes told her that it was, as helicopter gunships followed by Blackhawk troop carriers soared over her head, coming from the sea.

  * * * *

  Chapter 91

  W

  e are coming under attack!”

  General Lananga’s words froze Latisse Matabu’s insides. The throb in her head became a pounding, as she struggled to make sense of what was happening, the sudden turn of events in the streets of Freetown.

  “Say again, we are under attack! Heavy fire from helicopter gunships! Taking casualties! Enemy troops sliding from the sky on ropes!”

  Matabu slammed her fist down on the table, splintering the rattan and just missing the radio. This was why she had ordered Lananga to wait for reinforcements before moving his troops on Freetown. He had rushed the assault and had walked into some sort of ambush as a result.

  Suddenly more reports blazed over her radio, barely discernible between the panicked shouts and screams. All her generals, it seemed, were being attacked in a perfectly staged offensive. But neither President Kabbah’s troops nor his commanders were capable of mounting such an attack, either in ability or number.

  So who was attacking? Where had they come from?

  The two Nigerian battalions ... It had to be them!

  But it couldn’t be. Her bribing of the Nigerian foreign minister Joseph Tupelo had assured that and, even if it hadn’t, the Nigerians had not entered Sierra Leone in the past twenty-four hours. Her spotters and spies assured her of that.

  Unless . . .

  Matabu squeezed her fingers to her temples, trying to massage out the pain that accompanied the realization that she had been fooled. President Kabbah had used her ambition, and the impetuousness of her generals, against her.

  The Nigerian troops must have been in Sierra Leone for days!

  Hiding in plain sight where no one would think to look. She had even ordered her men to steer clear of them, let them be.

  The refugees who had returned from Guinea, allegedly turned away at the border!

  It was right before her eyes, but Latisse Matabu had missed it. And now her people, as well her cause, would suffer drastically as a result.

  President Kabbah watched with unrestrained enthusiasm, as the counterattack proceeded beyond the windows of the State House. This troop, the best trained of the Nigerians, had come in from their staging point well off the beaches aboard commercial freighters leased specifically to provide their cover. On Kabbah’s command, the remaining American-trained Nigerian troops had emerged from the strategically placed, and realistically squalid, refugee camps. A sham to get them into Sierra Leone without attracting attention, concocted by President Kabbah and Nigerian Foreign Minister Joseph Tupelo.

  It had been Kabbah who suggested to Tupelo the idea of involving himself with the Revolutionary United Front. Let them think he was really working with them when he had covertly supported the standing government all along. Tupelo knew he was risking his life by agreeing to meet with Latisse Matabu. But he also knew that if the Revolutionary United Front triumphed in Sierra Leone, it would not be long before an offshoot would establish itself in Nigeria as well. No, the tide needed to be stemmed here.

  Kabbah had known that the refugee camps were the one thing the Revolutionary United Front would spare in its assault on Freetown and had placed them in a way meant to counter the Dragon’s expected plan of attack. Then, once the RUF forces were on the run, the Nigerian troops would sweep eastward, wiping out pockets of resistance and overrunning their strongholds. The Revolutionary United Front would be splintered and isolated. Matabu and her commanders would have no choice but to surrender on the government’s terms, or flee into the hills, even across the border.

  Kabbah remained by the window, watching first-hand the Dragon at the sunset of her time.

  The reports over the radio worsened. Latisse Matabu listened as the largest offensive ever staged by the RUF came to a crushing defeat. Her ragtag troops that fed off the smell of blood panicked when the blood spilled was theirs, returning to their roots as bullies and braggarts, reduced to what they were and had always been. There was nothing her generals could do, since their own roots were little different.

  The suddenness of this defeat only increased her resolve, though. Once again it was American guns and training that were responsible for victory. They had killed her parents, and now they sought to kill the dream Matabu had salvaged from the refuse of her parents’ lives and her own. The Revolutionary United Front would survive to fight another day, but it would lose again if still faced with the specter of American might and commitment.

  That would all change beginning tomorrow. Her escape to the United States through friendly Liberia had been prepared ever since her first purchase of the Black Death. She would leave before dawn along the prescribed route, while the government desperately sought the return of captured U.N. troops and foreign observers the RUF now had no further use for. That would stall Kabbah and his puppet ministers long enough to assure her success in the United States.

  Latisse Matabu maintained the presence of mind to order her generals to capture as many more hostages as possible during their retreats to give them the bargaining power the RUF would need to at least survive.

  Today’s hope was gone.

  Tomorrow’s remained.

  Ben an Danielle had covered two more blocks, half the remaining distance to the State House located up one final hill. Around them residents streamed into the streets from burning, blast-gutted buildings, scattering in all directions as gunfire reverberated around them.

  The firing intensified suddenly, forcing Ben and Danielle to duck into the narrow sliver between the two buildings forming the nation’s Law Courts. Barrages from the helicopter gunships strafed Siaka Stevens Street before them without pause, hoping to find rebels. Their barrages resounded with ear-pounding fire that cut through the night and blew chunks of the sidewalks and nearest buildings into the air.

  Ben and Danielle clung to their cover between the two buildings, hoping the battle would recede enough for them to mount a rush for the State House.

  “My God,” Danielle muttered, as a wave of fleeing rebels tried to chase down a horde of civilians.

  Instinctively, she spun out from between the Law Courts buildings and fired a burst from her M-16 in the rebels’ directions.

  “Danielle!” Ben screamed, but she kept firing until her clip was exhausted.

  “Help me!” she ordered, leaving no room for doubt.

  Ben whirled forward to take her place and opened fire.

  He quickly found an eerie rhythm to the shooting, despite his initial unfamiliarity with the M-16.

  The fir
st wave of rebels went down without resistance, taken totally by surprise. The civilians ran on, saved for the moment.

  But their gunfire had alerted other roaming rebels to Ben and Danielle’s position and a wave of dark-clad figures streamed toward the Law Courts. Ben followed Danielle’s lead in poking his frame out just enough to offer return fire. Danielle heard his assault rifle click empty and tossed him a fresh clip. It took him a few moments to remember how to eject the spent magazine and snap the new one home, valuable seconds in which rebels gained a foothold behind a building just twenty feet away.