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  The Alarmists

  Copyright © 2011

  Don Hoesel

  Cover design by John Hamilton Design

  E-book edition created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-1410-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  For my mother

  November 30, 2012, 2:17 P.M.

  From atop a rise—a mound of earth hardly a foot above the flat terrain that dominated the panorama—Colonel Richards looked in the direction of the sea that he knew lay off to the east, past the limits of his vision. From where he stood, it was difficult to imagine such a vast expanse of water in close proximity to this ravaged land—forsaken ground that filled the miles between the eastern sea and the mountains to the west. Stretches of solidified lava, fissures splitting the baked earth, and scraggly foliage designed to nurse the barest moisture seemed the only constants everywhere he cast his eyes.

  As his team circled out with their instruments, Richards took a few moments to catch his breath, steadying his legs on the rock and letting the particle-filled wind whipping over the near barren ground burnish his unprotected face. He was familiar enough with the geology of the area to know the nature of the forces at work beneath his feet, the lava coursing through the rock, the three tectonic plates in unsteady federation. He marveled that despite its silent power, he could feel none of it through his boots.

  He glanced at the Danakil gathered in a loose cluster some yards off. A few of the nomads squatted, sanafils skirting the mineral-rich ground. Others stood, the blistering sun at their backs, according the star a reverence conditioned by thousands of years of societal memory. Among the guides, there was not a single wasted motion.

  The colonel drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with warm air, and turned to look back at the path they’d taken to reach this spot, his eyes finding the mountains that unfolded along the Red Sea down from Eritrea before straightening and heading due south into Ethiopia. Set against these larger masses was Erta Ale, which, while smaller than the mammoth range beyond, warranted a good deal more attention from Richards for the fact that it shared a geological connection with the activity that had shaped the land over which the colonel now walked, and the massive rift less than a click to the west of Richards.

  That rift being the reason the colonel was there.

  Twenty yards away a lanky man with a shock of brown hair sticking out from beneath his hat slung a pack from his shoulder and went to one knee. Unlike the guides, Richards’s team paid the sun little mind. They were outfitted for the place, and for the short time they would be there, which meant they could carry out their assigned tasks with an efficiency that bypassed concern for things like sunburn or dehydration.

  The man who had dropped to a knee pulled what looked like a long tent stake from the pack. Holding it close to his face, he touched a spot just below the rim and a small green light blinked on. A second reach into the pack produced a mallet and, placing the business end of the stake to the ground, he gave it several hard taps, driving it downward. A few steps away another man, darker skinned and more solidly built, wearing sunglasses against the glare, hovered with a device the size and shape of a personal game console. Once the first man had finished the work of pounding the stake into the ground, he gave a thumbs-up, at which the second man turned his attention to the device. The colonel stayed silent throughout, as the other members of the team continued their own work, and as the Danakil stood silent watch.

  After a time, the man named Petros finished his analysis and looked back toward Colonel Richards. “Nothing abnormal, Colonel,” he said with a shrug. “Just the regular seismic activity.”

  Richards answered with a nod. He turned to the rest of the team, who were busy performing their duties with an efficiency that suggested they were back in the lab rather than in one of the harshest environments on the face of the earth. Bradford and Addison were engaged in a mirror of the activity Petros and Snyder had just completed. Beyond them, Madigan and Rawlings ran an electromagnetic sensor over a patch of darker earth. Richards saw Madigan pause over one spot, but after a moment she shook her head and moved on. Soon Rawlings broke from her side and started back toward the colonel.

  As the man’s path took him past the Danakil, Richards saw him lift his sunglasses and give them a wink, though he might as well have been interacting with statues for all the response he generated.

  “We’re not getting anything, boss,” Rawlings said. He closed the last few steps and took a spot on the rise next to Richards, turning so that he could see the activity from his superior’s vantage point. “You want me to set up Spike?”

  Richards rolled that thought around for as long as it took him to see Madigan complete another sweep and start back.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “It looks like this place is dead.”

  Rawlings nodded his agreement. “Maybe we’ll pick up something closer to the rift.”

  “Maybe,” Richards said, but his voice expressed doubt. More than a decade spent investigating spots like this had given him a sixth sense for knowing when they would come up with a goose egg. And he had that feeling now.

  “The data wasn’t wrong,” Madigan avowed, having intuited the colonel’s thoughts. She had the electromagnetic scanner resting on her shoulder, the smooth base coated with a blanket of salt, gypsum, and sulfur.

  “Of course not, Maddy,” Richards said with a half smile. “No one’s going to besmirch the data.”

  Maddy returned her boss’s smile with a chagrined one of her own.

  “Besides,” the colonel added, “our presence here accounts for quite a few taxpayer dollars, so we’d better be nothing if not thorough.”

  “Are we going to give Spike a go then?” Madigan asked, and while she directed the question to the colonel, her eyes went to Rawlings.

  Richards seemed to give the suggestion more thought than he had when Rawlings brought it up the first time, which brought a concerned look to Rawlings’s face, but Richards was still convinced it would be wasted effort. If there was anything to find, it would be closer to the rift.

  “Pack it up,” he called and then watched as they did so.

  As they finished up, Richards turned his attention to Rawlings.

  “We’ll need Spike once we reach the rift,” he said, with something between apology and amusement.

  Rawlings sighed. “Roger that, boss. Someone must be punishing me for something. This will be the third time we’ve rolled out Spike this week.” He then repositioned his pack and started back the way they’d come.

  After a last look around, the colonel was ready to follow suit until his eyes landed on Madigan. The only female member of Richards’s unit wore a puzzled look, her eyes pointed north of their position. Richards tried to follow her line of vision but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “What’s wrong, Maddy?” he asked as the rest of the team filed past, each covered to varying degrees with the ever-present dust of the place.

  The captain glanced over at the colonel, then back at whatever had drawn her attention, and it was just as she opened her mouth that Richards saw it too
.

  “They’re gone, sir,” said Madigan.

  Richards didn’t respond. Perhaps five minutes had passed since he’d last registered the presence of the Danakil. Not long enough for them to have vanished like vapor—not over terrain as flat as this. He sent his eyes over the desert, searching for movement. Their sanafils, white when new, were now the color of the land, making them hard to see.

  “There,” Madigan said, pointing. “Northwest—maybe a mile.”

  It still took the colonel a few seconds to find them. They’d stepped off a ridge, much like the one on which the colonel stood, and headed straight toward an area thick with dragon trees and shrubs. Their path took them in the general direction of the rift, but Richards could see that their guides were no longer acting in that capacity. Richards and his team were in the process of being abandoned.

  “What would have sent them running?” she asked.

  The colonel pondered that as he watched the retreating nomads. They didn’t really need the guides; the GPS systems and electronic maps they’d brought with them, backed by the technological might of the U.S. military, were enough to get them to within a foot of where they wanted to be. Still, there was something unsettling about seeing those in his employ fleeing across the desert. He turned to look in the direction of their SUVs.

  “Good question,” he said.

  This time, he saw it before Madigan. At first he thought it could be a dust storm, but one of the benefits of having lived through several of those experiences was that one learned when a cloud of dust on the horizon was something else.

  “Company,” he said, and Madigan was moving to the trucks before he finished.

  “Rawlings!” the colonel barked as he followed. Rawlings had just reached the first of the SUVs when he heard his name. He looked back at his commanding officer and then followed the line of the colonel’s finger. Even over the fifty yards that separated them, Richards heard Rawlings curse.

  Rawlings tossed off his pack and moved toward the back of the truck, and Richards could hear him directing the others, who, although not immediately clear on the nature of the danger, snapped into motion. Rawlings whipped open the door and began to pull out vests, tossing them to the others.

  By the time Richards and Madigan reached the trucks, the other vehicles had closed much of the distance and the colonel stopped and watched for a few seconds. The Americans had no claim to this place; they couldn’t control who crossed this land and who didn’t. For all Richards knew, these strangers were locals, with more right to be here than his team had. Or they could be a research team—a legitimate one. This area saw a great many of those, all sanctioned by the Ethiopian government. There was no reason to believe this was anything other than one of those probabilities. Except that they were coming in much too fast, and as the lessened distance provided a clearer outline of the approaching vehicles, the colonel saw what looked like a makeshift gun turret.

  “They’re hauling, Colonel,” Bradford observed. The soldier had donned a vest and held his AK-47 so that the barrel pointed at the ground.

  Richards gave his team a quick once-over. Each pair of eyes was trained on the incoming vehicles. Richards counted three jeeps, all painted the color of the desert floor. Definitely not researchers.

  “Bradford, Petros, back of Unit 2. Maddy, Rawlings, front side Unit 1. The rest of you with me.”

  Almost before the words had left his mouth they were moving, with two pairs heading in opposite directions. Richards took a few steps forward, and the remaining soldiers—and soldiers they were, despite their preference for science labs and high-tech gizmos—took flanking positions as the colonel waited for the visitors’ intentions to become clear.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  Richards saw the uniform line of spewed dirt and rock tracking toward the SUVs before he heard the shots, and he reflexively pulled back behind the cover of the Toyotas. Before he could bring up the HK-416, he heard his team answering the assault in kind. He exchanged a look with Snyder, then took a deep breath and poked his head out from behind the truck.

  The three enemy vehicles had stopped, forming a semicircle perhaps fifty yards away from the Americans. As he scanned the scene, Richards was relieved to find that the drivers had not elected to send their vehicles into the sides of the SUVs. Richards wouldn’t have called it a tactical error, but having positioned his team around the trucks made them susceptible to an attack that utilized the sheer mass of the vehicles against them. But such an assault would have required something akin to the mind-set of a suicide bomber, and nothing in Richards’s experience caused him to suspect such in Ethiopia.

  He saw Madigan pop out from behind her cover, take a fraction of a second to acquire her target, and send a spray of 5.56mm bullets toward the back of one of the jeeps—toward a trio of men in dark clothing, their faces covered with scarves. All three, having spilled from the jeep to put the body of the vehicle between them and the Americans, ducked from the assault. But Richards’s sharp eye caught the fact that while two pulled back on their own power, one slumped under the pull of gravity.

  “One down!” the colonel yelled before stepping out and following Maddy’s strafing with one of his own. He heard either Bradford’s or Petros’s rifle supplementing his rounds—saw large holes open up on the side of a jeep. During the barrage, one of his team lobbed a grenade across the distance between the opposing forces, dropping it behind their huddled forms. After the grenade detonated, leaving his ears ringing, he registered at least two casualties.

  Bradford had eased out past the colonel, laying down a line of fire that pinned down their assailants. When the officer, his clip expended, pulled back, Maddy took up the cause. As Bradford reloaded, his back against the Toyota, he glanced at the colonel.

  “They weren’t ready for us, Colonel,” he said. “They’re way outgunned.”

  Richards nodded. Whoever these men were, they were equipped enough to handle just about anyone they might encounter in the harsh land between the small towns that dotted the desert—but not a unit with the training of the colonel’s.

  During a lull in the firefight, one of the enemy scrambled into the jeep mounted with the gun turret, shinnying over the back seat to pop up through the sunroof. The man—wide, dark eyes the only feature visible through his coverings—managed the task with far greater speed than Richards would have suspected, and he had the NSV turned on the American team before anyone could react. Advanced training or not, a 12.7mm heavy machine gun was a formidable weapon. Richards heard the rounds puncturing the skins of the Toyotas; he heard tires exploding. The gun turret suddenly changed the game; it was the kind of ordnance that could quickly take the advantage away from his well-trained team.

  With the din of the machine gun filling the air, Petros pulled back from Unit 2, following the line of the SUV in a crouch. He stopped just after the cab, going to a knee below the curve of the windshield glass. After a beat, the sound of an HK erupted from the back of Unit 2, and as Richards poked his head around he saw the weapons fire draw the attention of the machine gunner.

  Petros raised up, brought the rifle over the vehicle, set and pulled off a single shot, sending his target toppling back through the sunroof. In the moments that followed, all guns fell silent, leaving Colonel Richards hearing nothing save his own breathing and the groan of the desert wind.

  Evidently, their attackers decided they’d had enough. A flurry of movement saw them launching themselves back into the jeeps, and in the brief period before they could send them speeding away from the Americans, Richards thought about having his team open up. Even if they didn’t get them all, it would be enough to prevent an attack later on. What kept him from doing so was that, when it became apparent that their foes had disengaged, not a single member of Richards’s unit fired a shot. And while a person in his position seldom took his cues from his subordinates, Richards had been with these men and women long enough to understand that the uniformity of their actions ident
ified it as the right choice.

  The colonel watched as the jeeps disappeared across the flatland, until the visual morphed into the dust clouds that had preceded their coming. As he did so, his team filtered back and Richards could see, without his eyes leaving their retreating assailants, that everyone was intact. Only when the dust clouds had vanished as well did he turn his full attention to those awaiting his orders.

  “Injuries?” he asked.

  There were none—a fact that freed Richards to pay more attention to the three bodies splayed out on the desert floor. The colonel brought his weapon around and crossed the section of land through which deadly projectiles had flown only minutes ago. When he was close enough to confirm the three kills, he lowered his weapon and glanced at Madigan, who had followed a step behind.

  “What do you think, Maddy?”

  The captain cast a critical eye over the trio.

  “Hard to tell,” she said. “Could be the ONLF, maybe even al-Shabaab. You’ve got some cross-border clothing here. Macawis on these two, pants and shirt on this guy.” She paused and gestured toward the third fallen man. “And this one looks like a local—an Afar.”

  Richards nodded. What he saw when he reviewed the deceased was a hodgepodge of, if not ideologies, at least ethnicities. If Maddy was right and this was the work of either the ONLF or al-Shabaab, he found himself leaning toward the latter: a terrorist group with a less stringent membership policy.

  “Both of them are known to work in this area,” Madigan added.

  “Except that we haven’t heard much from the ONLF since Ogaden in 2007,” said Rawlings, who’d wandered over to poke one of the bodies with his weapon. “For all we know, this is Ginbot 7, or someone else entirely.” He exchanged looks with both Maddy and Richards. “What I do know is that they didn’t know who we are, Colonel. Didn’t know how much firepower we have.”

  “Which means,” Richards said, “they weren’t coming after us so much as they were coming after any good-sized research team that might have a decent amount of valuable equipment.”