Free Frank's Independence Day (The Night Stalkers) by M. L. Buchman

know anything is wrong. Completely out of the loop, he’s playing the game with a tray full of vowels. I’ll wager he can’t even communicate with anyone in G-B at this time, though I’m sure he is only at this very instant discovering that.”
    Frank blinked, it took him only that long to catch up with the President’s thoughts.
    “Then why did you give him an hour?” Frank wouldn’t have given him thirty seconds.
    The President didn’t answer, instead he turned to Hank as the elevator continued downward.
    “Hank, what’s our closest asset? The Harry S. Truman where they launched the Raptor drone?”
    “Good memory, yes sir. Operation Sure Seas off Nigeria. Nigeria’s trying to outdo Somalia on being the terror of ocean-shipping channels. The Truman ’s leading a task group to fight them back.”
    “Find out how fast they can have assets into Guinea-Bissau. Get the Joint Chiefs involved. We aren’t waiting an hour, we aren’t waiting a minute, I just wanted to give their ambassador some motivation. I do wish I hadn’t mentioned surviving U.S. citizens on the ground.”
    In retrospect, Frank agreed. If the ambassador could get through to whatever was the government of the moment, he would tell them there was someone they needed to find. The question was whether it would be to find and save, or find and silence.
    At the basement floor Hank got off the elevator, but the President remained, so Frank stayed with him. The President held the door as he finished passing instructions to Hank.
    “I have a luncheon with Russia, a meeting with Pakistan that isn’t going to be any fun at all, and a dinner with Great Britain and France. After dinner there’s an informal but essential meeting with Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam about a combined trade agreement. I can’t delay any of those, but I’ll run things through Frank. Keep him posted. Call Daniel at the White House. Tell my Chief of Staff to get his wife on this and to get everyone in the Sit Room. I’ll deal with the attacks on U.S. property and personnel later. I want our people in Guinea-Bissau found and found now.”
    He let the elevator door close without completing the statement to Hank, which Frank appreciated. He didn’t need to hear the President of the United States say about Beatrice Belfour, “if there is anyone still alive to be found.”
    Once again, he was stuck with waiting.
    # # #
    “What we need at the moment is patience. You have to stay here.”
    Ambassador Sam Green and Charlotte looked at Beatrice as if she’d gone mad. Well, that wouldn’t surprise her much at the moment. Trapped with the two of them in a narco-state undergoing a coup wasn’t exactly a rational experience. Guinea-Bissau didn’t have a large number of motor vehicles, and most of those were ancient motor scooters.
    Yet, through the cracks in the wall of the hut they were hiding in, the roads were far from empty. They were hiding in a warren of ramshackle huts southeast of the airport, but one that afforded her a narrow view of the one main street in the whole city. In the last few hours squatting here, she’d seen a dozen tacticals, the white Toyota pickups just bristling with armed and angry militia, and two tanks that looked to be left over from when the place had gained independence in the ’70s. She knew they had about thirty tanks, but intelligence had been unsure how many actually worked and how many of those had shells for their main cannon. She could hear something pounding away in the city center, clearly someone had some ammunition. The place was really coming apart. Again. She even spotted one of their two known helicopters.
    “You have to stay put here,” she pointed emphatically at the hut’s dirt floor.
    “Not alone. We can’t.”
    Beatrice was never prepared for this stage of working protection jobs. The moment when the protectee turned into, what the department carefully didn’t call, “the sniveling child” phase. Young children never dared