if those dead Americans were indeed CIA operatives, and if Washington thought Laroque was personally responsible for their deaths, that he had killed them as some kind of warning to the superpower to stay out of “his” country, and away from “his” oil, then some major form of retaliation was certain.
Ubasi was set to blow.
Adrenaline hummed through Laroque’s blood as he turned to face the general, his dark mahogany skin gleaming in the equatorial heat. He touched Shaka’s fur as he spoke.
“Contact every single foreigner who obtained a visa from the immigration office within the past six months,” he commanded his general. “Order them all out. Shut the borders. I want as few innocent lives lost as possible.”
Innocent lives like his sister’s. Like her small children.
Bitterness filled his throat. It was always the innocent who suffered in this business of war. His business.
“There is also that science team sponsored by Geographic International—”
The image of the woman he’d seen in the street earlier that day once again took haunting shape in Laroque’s mind. She’d stood out like a siren among the crowds that had gathered to greet him. Something about her had unsettled Laroque deeply. It was the way her violet eyes had looked at him, right into him. Cool fingers of warning raked through him, indistinct like mist over a jungle swamp. He blew them off sharply.
Perhaps she was part of the science team, perhaps not. It didn’t matter. Either way she and every other foreigner would be out of his country by nightfall.
Laroque checked his watch. “The team should have landed in Ubasi nine hours ago. Turn them round, tell them they no longer have my sanction for their study.”
“If they refuse?”
“Anyone who has not left for the airport by curfew hour tonight is to be brought here to the castle. Tell them it’s for their own safety—Ubasi could turn into a war zone at any moment.”
Laroque watched the heavy doors swing shut behind his general, and he clenched his jaw.
Someone was trying to manipulate him into a violent confrontation with the United States. He needed to know who and why, and he needed to know ASAP. If anyone defied his orders to leave Ubasi, he wanted them in his palace and under his watch, because it might just give him a lead, some small clue as to what the hell was going down.
And God help anyone trying to undermine him. Laroque would sacrifice nothing for his dream of freedom now. Because he had nothing left to lose.
And that made him the most dangerous kind of man.
Chapter 1
Nine hours earlier. 06:02 Zulu. Friday, November 8. Ubasi airport. West Coast of Africa
Perspiration dampened Dr. Emily Carlin’s blouse as she neared one of two customs checkpoints.
There was no electricity in the cramped Ubasi arrivals room this morning. Fans hung motionless from the ceiling, the only light in the terminal coming from doors flung open to white-hot sunlight. Even at this early hour everyone was already dulled into slow motion by the rising temperatures and humidity.
The line of passengers shuffled slowly forward and Emily moved with it, people jostling her on all sides. She’d been informed Ubasi possessed no X-ray equipment and the additional lack of power made it even less likely they’d find the knife strapped to her ankle under her jeans.
It was small protection, but she didn’t expect much trouble. Her mission was simply to get into the beleaguered war-torn country wedged between Nigeria and Cameroon and assess the sociological situation. Most importantly, she was to compile a psychological profile of notorious mercenary Jean-Charles Laroque, known on this continent as Le Diable, a fierce and deadly guerrilla war expert, master military strategist, and now, a dictator.
She had exactly one week to do her job. Laroque’s life depended on her assessment.
Just over twelve months ago the Parisian-born Laroque had sailed into Ubasi on a Spanish boat with a scruffy black Alsatian at his side, a rough band of mercenaries under his command, and a cache of black market weapons in his hold. After putting up a weak fight, the beleaguered Ubasi army had surrendered to Laroque.
Xavier Souleyman—the despot who had overthrown Ubasi’s King Douala eight years previously and ruled the country with a bloody hand ever since—had escaped Laroque’s capture and fled the country with the aid of a small band of loyalists.
Laroque had wasted no time moving into the royal palace, installing himself as de facto leader, and after negotiating with the rebels who had seized control of the northern jungles of Ubasi during Souleyman’s reign, Laroque had assumed personal ownership of massive tracts of land where his geologists had proceeded to strike oil—enough to potentially rival production in both Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea combined.
That fact alone had catapulted the once-forgotten country and renegade warlord instantly onto the world stage.
In less than a year Laroque had managed to broker unheard-of treaties with disparate rebel factions over the border in Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea—radical militants who opposed their own corrupt governments’ financial ties with Western corporate interests in the Gulf of Guinea.
This placed Laroque in an exceedingly powerful anti-status-quo position. He now had the power to spark a major civil war in the region that could cut off oil supply to the rest of the world for decades to come—oil that had recently become critical to U.S. foreign policy, given the current tensions in the Gulf of Arabia.
On top of this, four deep cover CIA agents in Ubasi had just been slaughtered, their bodies displayed using the same gruesome signature technique once employed by Laroque’s mercenary father as he’d cut an increasingly bloody swath across the continent before meeting his own violent end two years ago.
Laroque seemed to be sending a message to the U.S.: Get out. Stay out. Or else.
And here Emily was going in.
She mopped her brow with a damp and tattered tissue as the queue inched forward again and heat pressed down.
Emily was a Manhattan-based expert in tyrannical pathology with a military background of her own. The minds of dictators, organized crime bosses, renegade warlords and murderous despots were both her passion and her professional specialty. Alpha Dogs, she called them.
She’d been contracted by the Force du Sable, a private military company based off the West Coast of Angola, to profile this particular Alpha Dog. The FDS in turn had been retained by a CIA-Pentagon task force in a clandestine bid to control the Laroque “situation.” His threat in the region was becoming too great for corporate and political comfort.
The U.S., however, could in no way be overtly involved in a bid to oust the new Ubasi tyrant. Nor could the CIA trust its own at the moment—the source of the intelligence leak that had resulted in the deaths of the four CIA agents represented a grave internal security breach, which was why the FDS had been brought in.
Emily’s assessment of Le Diable would be used by the FDS to formulate strategy. She needed to identify where the tyrant’s psychological weaknesses lay—and in her experience, they always lay somewhere—and she had to pinpoint what fired him. While much was known about Laroque’s military exploits in Africa, virtually nothing was known about the man himself.
No one knew what made him tick.
Emily’s job was to figure out what did.
She also needed to ascertain whether taking him captive would exacerbate an already volatile situation in the Gulf. To do this, she’d have to determine how his subjects viewed him—as evil despot, or charismatic leader. Tyrants wore both stripes, and the last thing the U.S. wanted was to make the man a martyr.
If taking Laroque