Free Heart of Danger by Lisa Marie Rice Page B

Botswana the year before, diamonds were the most valuable commodity on earth.
    Three vehicles including the armored truck carrying the diamonds. All heavily armed, each vehicle with a mini gun firing .50 caliber bullets at the rate of a thousand a minute. Flynn had said they were carrying more than fifty thousand rounds of ammunition.
    In Nanjing, fifty members of the elite “Flying Dragon” squadron were waiting, pending the outcome of today’s trial. If it was successful, SL-58 would be administered and in a month they would start accompanying trucks of iridium to the waiting ships.
    For now, it was Flynn’s men who were being tested. Some ex– U.S. military and several South Africans familiar with the African bush. Each soldier had received an injection of SL-58 the previous evening. Orion’s men had been told it was a benign, long-lasting amphetamine that would let them stay awake and alert for the twenty-hour journey.
    Lee was sending everything to Beijing via long burst encryption.
    It was an important trial. It was an important day. The first field test of the drug. So far, so good. The field doctor’s report had been mundane, even boring, which Lee approved of. Boring was predictable. Boring was good.
    Lee had watched the recording of the convoy starting out at 5 A.M. local time, the trucks heading out precisely, well-timed and well-organized.
    The speed and precision of the soldiers at departure were visible, almost tangible. Lee wasn’t a logistics expert but he had some idea of what it took to get a convoy of twenty-five men going. They did everything at top speed, quick and efficient. While the men were loading the trucks, Lee had to check the monitor dashboard to make sure the recording wasn’t somehow fast-forwarding. But it wasn’t on fast-forward. Everything was in real time. The men were walking as fast as most men could run, loading movements a blur.
    Flynn was watching in Virginia, observing the tactical situation. Lee watched with a scientist’s eye, delighted with what he was seeing.
    It was as if the soldiers’ movements were choreographed. Worked out beforehand and rehearsed a thousand times. It could have been on Broadway. However good Flynn’s men were, they couldn’t be that good. He was seeing the effects of SL-58.
    They moved fast and precisely and were bristling with weaponry. But trouble was brewing.
    Lee switched every five minutes to IR and noted human-sized bodies in the jungle, starting about a hundred meters from the staging area.
    Flynn had noted, too, and reported. The men were perfectly aware they were under observation.
    At first the red dots could have been any large mammals, but their stillness over time as the convoy was marshaled and then set off could mean only one thing—rebel soldiers, observing.
    Doubtless the rebels were in radio contact with other soldiers along the route—the only road to Freetown. It was a well-known technique—attack convoys away from home base.
    Well, if they attacked the enhanced convoy they were in for a nasty surprise.
    The orders were to barrel ahead. An ordinary convoy would take three or four days to get to Freetown, traveling between 15 and 20 miles an hour during the day over the badly rutted road, laagering at night. This was to be a straight run, with no rest stops, pissing in bottles, shitting in cans, eating MREs. These soldiers wouldn’t need rest stops. All they needed after the injection was a minimum of 8,000 calories a day and they could drive and fight nonstop for forty-eight hours. Twenty hours was nothing.
    A twenty-hour convoy run would guarantee an increase in profits of 300 percent for the diamond corporation and would represent a cash cow for Orion. But more important, it would be the first successful battlefield test run of SL-58. If it was successful, Flynn would be allowed to play with it for a year, during which time the Chinese would be producing it in industrial batches and injecting its soldiers. After a year