Short Fuse: Elite Operators, Book 2 Read online

  She laughed, reminding him of the little birds that sang to each other every morning in the tree outside his kitchen in Cape Town. “It was just an observation, not a criticism of your technique.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, you’ll sleep better than they will tonight. No matter how basic the accommodation is out at Hambani, it’ll feel like the Ritz compared to the cells those two are in.”

  Her expression darkened. “Do you think they can bribe their way out?”

  “Out of the legal proceedings, yes, but not out of deportation and a ban. The Latadi border officials are working hard to be seen as legitimate, and if those traders’ company wants to get any other personnel into the country they’ll let these two be the sacrificial lambs. This time tomorrow they’ll be on a plane back to Johannesburg, I promise.”

  Her posture eased. “Good. Anyway, I got your briefcase from the luggage attendant, like you said, and picked up the rental car. It’s parked outside. Are you ready to hit the road?”

  He nodded, shifting back into professional mode. Having a beautiful journey companion was an unexpected bonus, but it didn’t make the task at hand any easier. On the contrary, when he was told he’d be meeting the American CSR emissary in August Town he had imagined a middle-aged woman in cargo pants and hiking boots, sufficiently travel-hardened to spare him the burden of small talk, waiting irritably in the arrivals area with a sign bearing his name.

  Now he faced a four-hour drive alongside a charming redhead. He supposed he’d have to be polite.

  “Let’s see what old bakkie your bosses decided to bestow upon us,” he muttered, following her to the door. The police station was near the center of August Town’s main street and the midafternoon heat and noise rolled over him like a wave as soon as he stepped outside.

  July was winter in South Africa, full of wet, windy days at his home on the Cape and crisp, cold Highveld mornings like the one he’d woken up to only hours ago in his sister’s house. But seasons were an unfamiliar concept this close to the equator, and one Latadi day looked very much like the next, week after week, month after month. High, unrelenting sun slicing through humid air, the heat only occasionally relieved by a dramatic afternoon thunderstorm. He pulled off his jacket as they circled the building toward the parking lot, suspecting he wouldn’t need it again until he was on the flight home.

  Whenever that might be.

  Nicola stopped beside a twenty-year-old white Toyota Land Cruiser with Zambian plates and tossed him the keys.

  “I’ve already stalled this thing three times. Stick shifts aren’t my forte—can I leave the driving up to you?”

  “No problem.” He opened the back door, unzipped his duffel bag and dug around until he found his sunglasses. Then he spun the combination lock on the metal case Nicola had retrieved for him until it popped open. Only when he picked up the Glock stored inside and relief eased the tension in his shoulders did he realize how intensely he’d disliked being separated from his weapon, which after all these years was as much a part of him as his ten fingers. He slid home the magazine, shoved the gun in its concealed-carry holster at the small of his back and walked around to the driver’s side.

  Nicola watched him warily, paused outside the open passenger-side door. “Is that loaded?”

  “No, I figured if we get carjacked I can throw it. Get in.”

  “Funny,” she muttered, climbing up beside him. He stashed the gun in the well in front of the gearbox and turned the key in the ignition, carefully listening to the transmission as he drove down the main street in the direction of the highway.

  “This car’s a piece of shit,” he diagnosed after a mile or two. “But the suspension feels pretty solid, so we’ll live.”

  Nicola was unfolding a map, evidently conscious that GPS software would be unreliable in this part of the world. “I thought the engine would’ve been the main concern.”

  As if on cue the Land Cruiser lurched to one side with a resounding clank, and she braced herself against the dashboard as the front-right end dipped dramatically. Warren downshifted, easing the car up and out, spinning the wheel to keep the back tire on the unbroken asphalt.

  “Pothole,” he explained once they were back on level ground. “An engine you can rig to run long enough to get help, but if you thud into one of those and break your axle in the middle of nowhere, you’re screwed.”

  “And we wouldn’t want to be screwed, now would we?”

  He took his eyes off the road just long enough to catch her smile, though he was sure he couldn’t have read it correctly. He could imagine her being scared of him—most women were—but not flirting with him. Maybe that was her nervous smile. No way had he seen what he thought he’d seen.

  He opted for a safe reply. “Have you been to Africa before?”

  “Of course.”

  And how often have you left the luxury hotel in Johannesburg where the Board holds its meetings? “Where, exactly?”

  She pivoted in her seat, chin lifted and arms folded. “So you’re aware, I’ve been working onsite for most of my career. I’ve been to more remote, less sophisticated mines than Hambani, and I’ve been in situations much more dangerous than the ones around here. I’m not some squeamish princess descending from my ivory tower for the first time. You don’t have to worry about protecting me.”

  He stared straight ahead as the road out of town joined the highway. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called out so succinctly—or enjoyed it so much.

  He already liked Nicola a lot. That could be a problem.

  “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise,” he replied carefully. “Just making conversation.”

  They continued in silence for several minutes. The noisy, cramped streets of August Town had so quickly given way to vast green expanses it was hard to imagine they were only a few miles outside the city. There were few other cars on the road, and the rolling, unspoiled hills were occasionally peppered with small herds of goats. The scene was so pastoral, so peaceful, it was hard to imagine gunfire thundering across the landscape or waves of people pouring down the road trying to escape the smoldering city.

  “It’s hard to believe this country was at war until a few months ago,” Nicola commented eerily, looking out the window.

  “The northern Kibangu party and the southern Matsulu party co-ruled without conflict for fifty years.” He shot her a sidelong glance. “Then Garraway discovered a gold vein in the middle of the country and suddenly the two halves were at war.”

  “Relations between the Kibangus and Matsulus had been growing increasingly volatile for a decade. They would’ve found something to fight about eventually.”

  “But gold is what they did fight about.”

  “And gold is what’s keeping the peace today. The vein in Hambani is keeping Latadi’s whole economy afloat. Neither side wants to risk all that foreign investment.”

  “The reigning Kibangu party doesn’t want to lose Garraway’s subsidies,” he corrected. “I wouldn’t be so sure the Matsulus are quite so committed to national stability.”

  “Are you about to lecture me on my employer’s practices? Because unless you’re working for free, from where I’m sitting you look pretty complicit.”

  He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He thought of the silent disappointment with which the major had watched him in the suspension hearing, the decisive way he’d closed the manila folder, the resignation in his expression as the meeting adjourned. The report is written and filed, he’d concluded wearily. You’re well aware of my thoughts on your inability to control your temper, and I’m not inclined to repeat them.

  “Sometimes personal financial necessity trumps macro ideology.”

  “I know.” Her tone was gentle and conciliatory. “That’s why I went to work for a mining company instead of an NGO when I graduated from college. And although the salary was t
he initial incentive, every year I become more convinced it was the right decision. I can’t stop the mining industry, but I can try to improve it from within. Where and how Garraway opens a mine isn’t my concern as long as it’s safe for the workers and the community around it is better off as a result.”

  “Fair enough,” he murmured, turning over her response in his mind. He didn’t completely agree, but he admired her conviction, her professionalism and her moral compass, as much as they were all apparent. “What will you do at Hambani? It’s a relatively new site so I would’ve thought the safety standards would already be up to code.”

  “It should be just implementation and consistency checks, and devising a strategy for community improvements. Garraway allots money for social impact projects, so I’ll make recommendations as to what might be most appropriate—building a new school, staffing an existing one, improving water infrastructure. But since they reported a minor explosion onsite last week, I’m a little concerned that safety violations may occupy more time than I’d like. I assume that’s why they’ve brought you in?”

  He nodded. “I guess it spooked the manager, who thinks it was a corporate sabotage attempt. They want me to evaluate the security procedures and tighten everything up.”

  Warren caught the sudden furrow of her brow, the sharpening of her gaze. He kept his eyes fixed on the asphalt stretching before them, passed an overloaded pickup more quickly than was necessary as he waited for her response. Had she put it together? Had she spotted his resemblance to the CEO of a world-famous diamond-mining company? Had she realized who his father was?

  “Why is the South African police force letting you take on a private contract?”

  He exhaled heavily, then shook his head at his own relief. Since when did he care what some corporate drone thought of him?

  Since the individual in question had perfect porcelain skin and clever blue eyes and filled the car’s musty interior with the scents of peaches and nectarines, apparently.

  “I’m not exactly on active duty right now. I guess you could say my status as an employee is under review.”

  “Let me guess. They don’t know you’re here?”

  “My commander is looking the other way.”

  “I suppose he forgot to ask you to hand in your badge, too,” she replied coolly.

  “He’s an old guy. Terrible memory.”

  “South African police aren’t exactly known for their good behavior. What does it take to get suspended?”

  “A lot.”

  Her grin was disarming and surprisingly infectious, considering the words that accompanied it. “Did you want to play the strong, silent type? Because I’m happy to sit here in intense silence, but as it’s a four-hour drive I think it might get a little boring.”

  “You Americans love the sound of your own voices,” he grumbled, flashing her a quick, joking smile. “Go on, then. Tell me your life story.”

  Three hours later he knew all about her New Hampshire childhood, her mother’s organic soap business, her father’s job teaching biology at a high-end private school she got to attend for free, the decision to translate her Harvard degree in geology into a globetrotting career as a mining safety expert.

  Compelled by an alien impulse to self-disclose, he told her more about himself in those few hours than he told most people in a year. He kept the level of detail to a minimum, but when she asked about the unusual cadence in his accent he confessed that his Johannesburg origins were muddled by ten years of boarding school and university in the UK.

  She leaned back in her seat. “Technically I’m based in London, but I haven’t spent more than forty-eight hours in my apartment there in months. What did you study?”

  “Electrical engineering. At Cambridge.”

  She arched a brow. “And you became a cop?”

  “I’m an explosives expert. Not many other jobs let you blow stuff up.”

  “So the Special Task Force is like the bomb squad?”

  He shook his head. “It’s the elite operations unit. More like the SAS.”

  He felt her gaze linger on him in the pause that followed, could practically hear the wheels turning in her mind. What was she reading in his profile, in the jaw he hadn’t bothered to shave before the early flight this morning, in the bump on the ridge of his nose from a misaimed riot baton, in the badly stitched scar on his forehead he’d given up being self-conscious about? Did she think he was a macho wannabe, inflating his power and skill to impress her? Did she think he was a violence-hungry bully who lived to hit and force and intimidate and only joined the police so he could do so with impunity?

  Or was there a remote possibility that she saw him for exactly who he was—a man who’d rejected the privilege that reared him, who’d built a life around his penchant for action and danger, who was more cautious than people assumed, more introverted than they expected and harder on himself that anyone knew?

  She smiled. He cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable.

  “We’re almost to Namaza, and then the mine is about half an hour beyond it. Do you want to stop in town or carry on through?”

  “Let’s stop.” She stretched her arms above her head, thrusting those glorious breasts ahead of her. “It’ll be good to take a look at the local area before we get out to Hambani.”

  The discovery of gold at Hambani had led three thousand people—almost all of them Matsulus from the south—to flood into the tiny village of Namaza looking for mining work. The impact on the former farming outpost’s infrastructure was obvious as they turned onto the main road, which was so badly riddled with deep, jagged potholes that Warren had to drive at less than half the speed limit.

  “This road wasn’t built to support heavy industrial trucks carrying tailings,” Nicola remarked. “That’s a project to think about.”

  But Warren was more concerned by the obvious poverty pervading the dilapidated village, the young men clumped in doorways drinking cheap cans of beer, the attention their car seemed to be attracting as he pulled into Namaza’s lone gas station. Theirs was the only car on the forecourt, but the cracked pavement was crowded with men in coveralls lounging on the ground, probably mine workers blowing twelve hours’ wages on booze and cigarettes and rigged card games.

  The custom in Latadi was for gas station attendants to pump the fuel, but no one approached the Land Cruiser. The one man wearing a gas-station uniform sat unmoving in a folding chair beside the door to the shop. He raised a hand-rolled cigarette to his lips and took a long pull, steadily regarding the vehicle.

  “Stay in the car,” Warren instructed, but it was needless. The concern in Nicola’s expression told him she was fully alert to the eerie atmosphere. He shoved the Glock into its holster and tugged his jacket down over it.

  Conversations died as he stepped out of the car. Men stared, and he stared right back. There was plenty of noise nearby—traffic barreling past, kids playing on the sidewalk across the street, a group of women loading sacks of maize into a wheelbarrow—but the gas station was so quiet the click as he lifted the fuel nozzle was practically deafening.

  He filled the tank with his back to the car, regarding each man in turn, letting them know he would remember their faces. No one smiled or scowled or looked away—just watched. Patiently. Unafraid. They’d remember him, too.

  When the nozzle clicked off and Warren withdrew it from the car, the man in the gas station uniform rose from his chair and slowly made his way over. Two other men stood up during his approach, as four more wandered out of the shop to join the crowd on the forecourt. Warren watched them over the man’s shoulder, ignoring the attendant’s wry smile as he quoted, in English, a price way above what appeared on the pump.

  He glanced down just long enough to pull the right combination of bills from his wallet. When he looked up, another five men were on their feet.

  Warren got back in the ca
r without waiting for his change, turned the key and put the Land Cruiser into gear. When he pulled back into the main road his attention was on the rearview mirror and the attentive gazes of the men watching them depart.

  “That was creepy.” Nicola frowned into the mirror. “What was up with those guys?”

  “I don’t know.” And I don’t like it.

  “Did they seem sort of hostile to you? Or am I reading too much into it?”

  “You’re not. Let’s carry on to the mine. Something’s not right around here.”

  She nodded, leaning back in her seat. Within minutes the town’s tiny commercial center gave way to once-upmarket colonial houses, then a series of hastily erected pre-fabricated homes, followed by a long stretch of crude tin shacks. Warren steered around a crater-sized pothole and they were in the countryside again, uninterrupted stretches of rich green grassland extending on either side of the road.

  They passed the next twenty minutes in silence, the atmosphere in Namaza having put an end to their amiable conversation. Warren was all too familiar with the social ills that tagged along behind industrial booms, and he speculated that the gas station was doubling as a center for loan sharks, or gambling, or drug dealing.

  But in South Africa, crime tended to be all-or-nothing. If you blundered into somewhere that was a front for illegal activity, you were either served with a smile to maintain the façade or assaulted outright. Just two weeks ago in Cape Town he’d unwittingly gone into a liquor store that was apparently a hub for students buying weed, as he discovered when the cashier asked how much dagga he wanted with his bottle of single-malt Scotch. He wasn’t in the business of messing with people’s livelihoods, so he’d kept the badge in his jacket, and the cashier wished him a nice evening as he left the store.

  On the other hand, there was that time he ran over a nail on the way back from a training exercise and pulled into what looked like a mechanic’s, only as soon as he opened the door, three guys—

  “There it is,” Nicola murmured beside him.

  The mine jutted up from the horizon, a hulking industrial interruption in the bucolic vista. A high, barbed-wire-topped fence encircled the complex, hugging the edges of heaped tailings. Groups of low-slung buildings stood out against the late-afternoon sky, punctuated by skeletal, slanting conveyor belts protruding from the ground. At the center was the shaft, a colossal rectangular cement tower that loomed over the site like a keen-eyed jailer, patient, alert, merciless.