Page 17 of Shadow Target

“He was the first guy to make me think about having a serious relationship, Dev.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe that love still exists between you, even after three years have passed?”

“I don’t know,” Willow admitted tiredly, shaking her head.

“One thing’s for sure,” Dev said, “you are going to find out. This assignment is going to be a year long. It will be a shakedown cruise of another kind for you two birds.”

Willow admitted she was right. “I’m sure I’ll be a lot clearer about him and myself by that time.” With a loud sigh, she added, frowning, “We got terrorists lurking around here and that has my FULL attention. Everything else is second or third.”

***

Tefere David sat with his lieutenants in a warehouse far outside Bahir Dar. The morning was cool and they all sat around smoking American cigarettes, the white plumes rising lazily into the vast air of the semi-darkened, packed warehouse. Although just at the age of forty, Tefere appeared much older, with horizontal lines across his broad forehead and deep slashes on either side of his full mouth that was now puckered. He sat with three of his most trusted men at a makeshift table, a map of the Northern Province of Ethiopia spread out before them on its rough plywood surface.

“Our spy at the airport, who is a baggage handler for one of the foreign airlines,” he told his men, all in their twenties and thirties, all dressed in the garb normal to Ethiopians, “tells me a Delos transport landed with forty employees on board earlier today.” He sucked on his cigarette, inhaling the smoke deep into his lean body. “This is part of some kind of build-up within this charity. Forty is a lot of people. They all looked like Americans.”

Zere, thirty-five years old, his second-in-command, said, “Some Latinos and Blacks were among them. Perhaps they aren’t all from the USA.”

Shrugging, Tefere said, “Doesn’t matter, although American women bring us more money on the market.”

Zere lifted his chin, staring over at his leader. “There are no children among this group, my lord.”

Tefere snapped back, “I have talked to Rasari and he’s shown interest in American women in their twenties. He is paying well for them.”

“Why that old?” Zere demanded, scowling. “Men want children for sex, not women in their twenties.”

“Look at it from Rasari’s trading instincts. American women are hated the world over by all terrorist factions. If they can buy one from him? It saves them the trouble of trying to find one in the Middle East to capture, put on video, and then behead them for all the world to see.”

“Hmmm,” Zere murmured, “that’s brilliant.”

“Yes, there’s no question he’s a genius,” and Tefere grinned. “He doesn’t really want them for sex trafficking as much as he does for building a market to get American women captives in who are wanted for other reasons. He already has one buyer in Pakistan who is willing to pay five million dollars for one.”

A murmur went through the lieutenants huddled crowded around the makeshift table. The air was filled with whitish dust from the bales of cotton stacked nearly up to the top of the two-story aluminum building. Tefere was always changing his meeting spots, staying one step ahead of the Ethiopian Army who hunted him and his crews. Even though they dressed like tribal Ethiopians, and appeared as such to the outside world, underneath they were the most dangerous of men. In order to not give the game away, they had their caches of AK-47s, and ammunition stored elsewhere. They were never safe, and for that reason, Tefere rarely came to Bahir Dar. But his one lieutenant, Assefa, who kept his ear to the ground in the Lake Tana region, of which the city sat at the southern end of, had heard gossip at the airport. And it had been enough to bring him in.

Tefere stubbed out his cigarette on the plyboard tabletop. “My spy says that there are two American women who pilot the Delos plane.” He pulled out two photos from within the dark-green vest he wore over his white shirt, placing both on the table. Everyone craned their necks, studying them in the low light. “The one with the red hair is the one I want. The other woman, the one with brown hair, would be my second choice.”

“What do you know of them?” Assefa asked.

“Not much. Not yet. My spy is going to try and find out their names over at Operations at the control tower. They must have flight plans and their names will be on them. He has to be careful. He knows an Ethiopian woman who works at the weather desk. He feels she is someone who can be bribed to give him more information.”

“Who cares what their names are?” Teka, the youngest of the group at age twenty-five, spoke up.

Tefere gave him an impatient look. “With a name, we can go on the Internet and find out a great deal more. Before I try to capture this red-haired woman, I want to know who she is. I then need to call Rasari and tell him the information. He has a buyer, but the buyer has demands. If this woman doesn’t fulfill those demands, I’m not going to waste my time trying to capture her.”

Teka nodded. “That makes sense.”

***

The next day, Willow and Dev had the entire group meet at the hotel’s largest banquet hall. They had spent a month putting together a Power-Point on the first village they were going to be upgrading for security. At nine a.m., the crowded room was quiet as Willow went into her presentation projected onto the huge screen at the front end of the room. The supervisors were taking notes while many of the workmen watched on as well. Everyone on the security team, she saw, were also making notes.

“Addis Zemen is the closest village flight-wise,” she told them, flashing a picture on the screen of the many homes with tin roofs and stucco block scattered across the valley, ringed behind by high mountains. “It sits east of Lake Tana, up in the hills where it’s cooler, at 6,480 feet in elevation. Addis Zemen has a population of twenty-four thousand people. They are of the Amhara tribe, as are the people of all the villages you’ll be working in. It’s an agricultural area and the people are farmers. They have herds of cattle and goats. Herds that can forage year-round, due to grass being available during every season. A lot of vegetables are raised there, and sold in other cities, notably the capital, Addis Ababa.”

She flashed a picture of a one-story brick building with rows of windows along it up on the screen. “Addis has a Delos Home School. It’s a big enough town to have teachers brought in to educate the children. There are many smaller villages surrounding Addis Zemen, and the children are brought in from them every day for nine months out of the year by pickup trucks. There are no school busses, just parents who are pitching in to help. Delos gives the men who drive the children to and from other villages a stipend for gas, as well as paying them for their time, so it works out well for all.”

Flashing up another picture, she said, “This is the Farm Foundation office. We have ten people there working with the farmers to improve agricultural methods; teaching breeding techniques and ways of better domesticating animals, mostly oxen, cows and goats. This group has created a network between grocers in the capital, as well as arranging truckloads of vegetables to it. They have four diesel trucks that make runs to Addis Ababa whenever the veggies are in season.”

She turned to Shep, sitting next to her, and asked him, “Do you want to show everyone the plans for the security upgrades on both these areas?”

Nodding, he took over the talk as Willow sat back down. He flashed a new photo up. It was of the heavy chain-link and poles they called cyclone fencing. He then clicked to a blueprint of the school showing where the ten-foot-high fence, with razor wire spooled out along its top, would be built. Citing some theft from the school, as well as from the Farm Foundation, Shep covered all the security that would need to be built into those areas. He talked at some length about the soil and the underlying lava rock of the region, and about the machines they’d need on hand to break through below to properly install the secure fence posts. Once he was done, he said, “Let’s break and go out into the hall where they’ll have coffee and tea ready for us.”

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