The Janson Command by Paul Garrison Page B

the cheering was Ferdinand Poe’s son Douglas Poe.
    The cheers grew louder and louder as President for Life Iboga swaggered up to the prisoner. The dictator slapped his face. The thin man staggered. Soldiers yanked him upright and Iboga slapped him again. Then the dictator beckoned, and a pair of tanks clanked from the semicircle formation at the edge of the shattered forest, crossed the clearing, skirting the one the FFM fighter had set afire. Guided by Iboga’s impatient gestures, they swiveled on their treads and faced off, gun to gun, leaving twenty feet between them.
    Soldiers tied ropes to Douglas Poe’s wrists, dragged him between the tanks, and yanked the ropes from either side, stretching his arms apart so that he stood as if crucified between the armored hulls. As the soldiers laughed, Iboga gestured for the tank drivers to move ahead, narrowing the space where the prisoner was held, creeping closer and closer until they pressed against his back and his chest. The laughter grew louder. Iboga whipped off his scarf and held it high over his head like a racetrack starter about to drop the flag.
    Suddenly he looked up.
    The taunting grin slid from his face.

NINE
    P aul Janson heard the same distant sound they had heard last night, the growl of the Reaper. Iboga froze, scarf in the air, face locked on the sky. The hunter-killer combat drone had come back.
    The soldiers and elite guard looked up, screaming, “Reaper! Reaper!”
    Iboga whirled and ran, shoving men out of his way, racing through the armored semicircle formed by his victorious tanks. To Janson’s amazement, the dictator’s soldiers frantically gestured for the tanks to back away from Douglas Poe. They lifted him in the air and held him like a shield as if to show the lenses in the sky that if the Reaper fired its missiles it would kill him, too. The attempt was futile.
    The ground shook. Thunder rippled. Iboga’s tanks began to explode, one after another, in balls of fire. His soldiers’ bodies and those of his guard who hadn’t run after him were flung in the air. The attack by the unseen, unmanned aerial gunships lasted less than thirty seconds. And when the smoke had cleared, every man left in the clearing, including Douglas Poe, was dead.
    Paul Janson was stunned. Who but the Pentagon or the U.S. State Department could have unleashed the Reapers? Theoretically, the motive for involvement would have been West African oil. But in reality, Isle de Foree’s corrupt government’s wells and pipelines and refineries were decrepit, and the nation’s oil reserves, like Nigeria’s, were dwindling. Any potential new oil reserves were already spoken for in deepwater blocks off Angola, a thousand miles to the south. America embroiling herself in chaotic West African tribal wars seemed like a risky venture for little return. Unless, of course, Doug Case had lied when he claimed that the assignment to rescue the doctor had nothing to do with oil reserves.
    If the Reapers weren’t American, had some private entity somehow gained access to UAV technology? That did not seem possible. The heavily armed surveillance drone was the sharp end of an immensely complex weapon system dependent upon remote guidance via orbiting satellites. That was light-years beyond the abilities of a Nigeria or an Angola. It was hard to believe that even China could pull that off, yet, much less a private outfit.
    Whatever it was, something—something else—was going down, some mission not apparent. Paul Janson vowed to find out what, because the Reaper gave whoever possessed it godlike power to observe and destroy.
    * * *
    BELOW IN THE clearing where the wreckage of Iboga’s army smouldered, FFM fighters began venturing in from the forest, awed at their sudden, astonishing turn of fortune. They wandered among the bodies of the soldiers who moments earlier had been intent on exterminating them and gazed in wonderment at the twisted steel that remained of the tanks. A man picked