Read The Janson Command for Free Online Page B

into him.
    Pounds tried to bluff it out. “What?”
    “I said, ‘Tell Doug Case to grow up.’ ”
    “Do I know you?”
    Now the woman was behind Pounds, calling in a friendly country drawl, “Hey, hon, how you doing?” and taking his elbow, and sending a jolt of unbelievable pain through a nerve he had not known existed in his arm. For half a second he couldn’t see straight. Then he was leaning on the wall and they were walking unhurriedly toward the Hilton.
    * * *
    THE JOB WOULD not be feasible without routes in and out of FFM’s Pico Clarence camp.
    In the cab to Hobby Airport, Paul Janson exchanged circumspect text messages with a weapons dealer he trusted more than most, Neal Kruger, and the deputy national commissioner of the South African Police Service, Trevor Suzman. Jessica Kincaid Googled maps and charts on her iPhone, routed them to her computer on the plane, and queried the Frenchman who handled their helicopter needs in Europe.
    They followed up with voice links as the Embraer soared off the runway. The plane’s secure Inmarsat satellite telephones employed IP Tor protocols in a virtual private network. Kincaid produced a slide show of maps and charts on their Aquos 1080 monitors.
    “Ready.”
    Janson had a pretty good idea how he would prefer to go in—quick and light on the backs of the gunrunners—but to stay alive he and Kincaid would consider every available alternative, from the least obvious to the unlikely. Sometimes something better came along. And when the ground shifted and you had to change tactics, you could keep moving ahead if you didn’t waste time dreaming up options.
    “Helicopters?”
    “The EC 135 with a long-range fuel tank will give us five hundred miles round-trip,” Kincaid answered. “It’s a powerful twin-engine machine, easy to get in Europe and findable in West Africa. Tough, but not impossible, to land in the jungle. I see three possible sites near the foot of Pico Clarence, but the topo maps suck and there’s no satellite shots that penetrate the canopy.”
    Janson studied the topographic maps of Pico Clarence she had put on the screen. What was known about the volcanic mountain’s terrain was based on Portuguese government surveys in the 1920s. Then he scrolled through her maps of the African coast. “The problem with the helicopter is where do we base from? Five hundred miles round-trip, two-fifty one-way, tops, limits our takeoff point to Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon are waiting to see who wins, so definitely won’t give permission to launch from their territory. Which means if we launch from them we have to return elsewhere. Nigeria seems to have sided with Dictator Iboga. But I would hate to have to trust the Nigerians to keep their word.”
    “Isn’t there a Nigerian lady you know sort of well?”
    “She’s in London these days. Besides, even with the extra tank, the EC 135 will not offer much leeway range-wise.”
    “The Super Puma doubles our range. So will a Sikorsky S-76. Plenty of them in the oil patch. Your pal Doug could get us one easy.”
    “The S-76 would put Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Congo within striking distance, but those governments also want to be hands-off until someone wins the revolution. The Puma is an eighteen-passenger machine. Too big.”
    “Another possibility is an EC 135 from a ship passing offshore.”
    “Much better. Except how do we persuade FFM not to shoot it down thinking it belongs to Iboga? They’ve done a thorough job of clearing the sky.”
    “Scratch the helicopter. What if we fly commercial or private into Porto Clarence? Drive inland to the end of the road. Walk into the jungle. Grab the doctor and walk back to Porto Clarence.”
    “What if President for Life Iboga wants to interrogate the doctor about the insurgent camp, or Ferdinand Poe’s state of health?”
    “We’d have the same problem with an airdrop. If we chute in we’ll still have to