The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [6]
Marten pushed himself to his feet and walked twenty or so yards back to the river’s edge. Judging the direction of the current, he moved off in the dark, hugging the riverbank and following it toward what he hoped would be the sea.
4
SIMCO HEADQUARTERS. MALABO. 12:23 A.M.
The always punctual Conor White sat in the small darkened office near the front of the large motor home that served as both his temporary company headquarters and, in the rear, his private living area. His computer screen aglow in front of him, he waited for twelve twenty-five, the time his party in Virginia would be ready to receive the secure e-mail he was about to send.
12:24 A.M.
White tapped his fingers in anticipation. They’d lost power earlier in the evening because of the storm that had twisted over the island, coming on land in the south and then retreating back to sea only to slam into the north several hours later. Immediately the SimCo compound’s backup generator had kicked in. Then the power had come back on and the generator had been shut down. None of this was new to Conor White, president and CEO of SimCo, the man in charge of the private security company’s four-hundred-man armed force in Equatorial Guinea and its seventy-man contingent in Iraq. At forty-five, the powerfully built, six-foot-four White, with his chiseled good looks and dark razor-cut hair, could still be a model for the modern professional mercenary soldier. A former col o nel in the British army’s SAS—the Special Air Service Regiment—he’d formed his first private military security firm, Argosy International, eight years earlier in the Netherlands, selling it as a “military security company” that provided what he referred to as “operational support to legitimate governments and companies around the world.” Since then he’d built Argosy into a thousand-employee firm with satellite bases in five different countries.
Then, a little more than a year earlier, at the urging of Josiah Wirth, chairman and chief executive of the Texas-based oil and energy company AG Striker, and Loyal Truex, former U.S. Army Ranger and founder and head of Hadrian Worldwide Protective Services Company, the world’s largest private military or ga ni za tion, he’d abruptly sold his interest in Argosy. Shortly afterward he formed the Bristol, England–based SimCo LLC, a smaller, far more agile military security company where the emphasis was narrowed to “providing protective security services to major companies doing business in underdeveloped regions of the globe.” Less than a month later, SimCo signed a long-term contract with Striker to provide those same services for the AG Striker Company in Equatorial Guinea. Ten days after that, White signed a separate contract for SimCo to provide operational support to Hadrian in Iraq, where it had long been Striker’s chief private defense contractor under an agreement between Striker and the U.S. Department of Defense.
It was to Hadrian’s Loyal Truex that Conor White waited to send his urgent and necessarily secure postmidnight e-mail. Another man might have been nervous about what he had to report; he wasn’t. As far as he was concerned he was in the middle of a war, and war was not only deadly but often troublesome and, these days especially, highly unpredictable. Moreover, he had been and still was a highly trained professional soldier. He acted accordingly.
12:25 A.M.
He pressed the pound sign on the keyboard. Immediately a message flashed on the screen in front of him: YOUR LXT DIGITAL IS ACTIVATED. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PERSONAL CODE.
White’s fingers reached out, and he entered the code. Instantly the words LOCK FUNCTION appeared on his screen. It meant the transmission line from Conor White, SimCo/Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, to LoyalTruex, Hadrian/Manassas, Virginia, was secure.
Immediately he typed