St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

the illegal world had its shifting alliances, double crosses, armed truces, and brutal wars.
    A dusty Toyota pickup with a heavy machine gun mounted in its bed pulled up beside the cargo trucks. A handsome black man in a crisp tan officer’s uniform swung out of the cab and approached the loading bay.
    “How was your trip?” he asked the Siberian in French.
    “Uganda didn’t think much of your phony end-user certificates for the Kalashnikovs.”
    The officer grinned. “That’s because the Ugandan defense minister supplied them to me without giving his superiors a cut.”
    “I thought so. How much did he charge you?”
    “Fifty thousand American.”
    “He must have been feeling guilty. He only tacked on another twenty-five thousand. You’ll see it in the transport charges for the next load.”
    The officer shrugged. “Where are the RPGs?”
    The Siberian jerked his thumb toward the rear of the plane. “You’ll get them when I’ve seen the diamonds.”
    The officer slid one hand into his pants pocket and produced a leather miner’s bag. He flipped the bag up to the Siberian, who hefted the bag on his palm, loosened the drawstrings, and spilled the contents into his hand. The morning sun caught on two dozen large rough stones. They were like ragged ice cubes in the heat, gleaming with promise.
    “Feels light,” the Siberian said.
    “They are perfect stones for Antwerp,” the officer said, climbing lithely aboard the plane, heading toward the five largewooden crates. “My South African says each will yield several two-and three-carat finished goods.”
    The Siberian dug a jeweler’s loupe out of his trousers and studied the stones. “Perhaps, but documentation will cut into my profit. Even the damned Belgians are demanding paper proof that they are not conflict stones. Nobody wants diamonds with blood on them.”
    “It washes off diamonds quite easily. I threw in an extra two hundred pounds of coltan to pay for your paperwork.”
    The Siberian smiled slightly. “The transistor manufacturers of Prague will be pleased.”
    “So the Czechs are providing you the rifles,” the officer said. “Good. Their work is better than that load of Moldavian shit you brought us last time.”
    “AK-47s aren’t all created equal,” the Siberian said, smiling thinly. “The price reflects that.”
    “Show me the grenade launchers.”
    “Pick one.”
    The officer pointed to a crate at random.
    The Siberian nodded to the loadmaster, who undid the straps that secured the last large crates in place. He frog-walked the selected crate over to the door, laid it down, and pulled a pry bar out of its wall mount. Very quickly the crate gave up its secrets.
    Six shoulder launchers rested in their recessed rack. The load-master dragged a smaller crate forward and opened it. Inside were twelve grenades, packed warheads up.
    The black officer picked up one of the launchers and inspected it. Then he selected one of the grenades, walked to the open doorway, and held the weapons up for his men to see. He shouted something in a tribal dialect. All the Siberian could understand was Uhuru, which was a tribal name for part of Camgeria.
    Fifty men cheered. The guard with the Kalashnikov pointed his weapon in the air and fired wildly.
    The Siberian came and stood in the doorway beside the rebel officer. He looked out at the ragtag army and smiled. His own spies in their midst and in the camps of the Camgerian forces told him that the rebels were close to toppling one of the most stable of the countries among the oil-rich, tribally divided lands lying along Africa’s western coast. If the rebels won, there would be prolonged and brutal tribal warfare.
    And oil concessions for the Siberian who brought guns to the winning side.
    He turned a mental page in his account book and began formulating the final stage of his plan to move from trading illegal arms in the field to trading oil from the safety of America. Now that the rebels had received fresh stocks of Soviet-era arms, the Democratic Republic of Camgeria would need better weapons. The Siberian would supply them.
    And make many, many millions of American dollars, plus connections with and favors from the present African regime. The latter would buy him what money alone couldn’t—a place at the international oil-trading table.
    Blood didn’t stick to oil.
    A glint of light caught his eye. The flash came from a rocky hill about three hundred yards off the runway.
    Instantly he