In front of us lies a huge copper gate, probably seven foot high and a dimly lit perimeter wall. An orchard with cherries lines either side of a well-tanned road leading to the gate. We have specific orders to track down and extract a middle-aged woman. A journalist who has stumbled upon classified information on this place's activities and subsequently held hostage.
Security has been beefed up both in and outside this compound. Approximately twenty-five guards are manning this place, which seems to have a dozen activities going on spontaneously. Using A pair of binoculars with our four-wheel drive pickup disguised near the bush, Frank peeps inside as the gate is opened to allow a lorry inside.
On the edge of the perimeter wall, at least 150 feet from our position, the guards are offloading some huge bales of powder. The bales are white and seem to resemble 50 kg bags of cement. Frank swings the binoculars towards me, urging me to take a peek. I focus on the lorry that has just arrived and women are being helped out of it. This catches my attention as I scan through the girls to see whether our journalist lady is among them. We had been handed her picture and hence knew her stature, skin colour, hair type and the last outfit she was seen garbed in.
Almost thirty ladies are off the truck, and suddenly, a woman formally dressed in a black palazzo and white long-sleeve official shirt tries the unexpected. She breaks loose from the guard who was helping her alight the truck and quickly shoots forward towards the exit. All this happened so fast, and most of the guards were caught unawares with their focus on handling one package or another.
One guard realised and set off the alarm at which point we could hear rapid gunshots being fired in the air. Frank realised this was our chance, and intuition made us confident this was the journalist. I Set my G3 rifle just on top of the lowered window on the front door of the pickup as Frank started the engines... the lady had now made it outside, and as wild shots fired behind her, she saw the back of our vehicle as her only refuge and escape from death. She managed to jump into the back of the pickup as Frank speedily drove off. The guys rained heavy fire on us as I tried to cover ourselves by firing a bullet or two.
Once we are far off enough, I watch a couple of guards limbering down the tarmac through the mirror on my door side. I assume they must be pissed off, and we both don't rule out the possibility of our pursuers launching a fightback to get back their most treasured asset - Lara, the journalist lady.
Lara had been an investigative journalist working with a French media vanguard. She had risen to the zenith of her career after successfully researching and compiling a drug-related homicide in the Central African Republic and hence gained a tremendous reputation. She had swept as many awards as the renowned Tyra Banks at her peak. However, this story she wrote about these folks - an Australian mafia sex trafficking powerhouse; and was published at AFP, where she has worked for 18 years, almost sent her career tumbling like the proverbial house of cards. Lara had a bottomless depository of knowledge in crime reporting, conflict reporting, war reporting and political analysis in relation to graft cases and institutional scandals. She was a gem at media and a feared writer who now had in her possession a drive containing the operations of this place we have just fled - according to her, registered under the company name Raven Logistics.
Sex trafficking and drug trafficking, among other heinous crimes the mafias were involved in, were disguised under the company, primarily registered as a road construction logistics company in Australia.
So, as we sped by with Lara at the back, we noticed within 7 minutes that two SUVs were trailing us... I immediately loaded my gun, and as we negotiated a sharp corner, Frank engaged the handbrake, and we promptly switched spaces, with Lara sitting beside Frank at the front as I crouched on the back of the pickup with a semi-automatic and loads of magazines scattered on the cabin around me.
Frank shot off the car forward as soon as our assistants neared within touching distance of us. Boy, I rained bullets on them enough to hold them transfixed for a few seconds as we sped off again, leaving them with no option but to take cover.
My semi-automatic was a game changer; they were armed with mere pistols to teeth, but those weren't enough to turn the tables. So they had to let the dust settle before contemplating on their plan B. They lost us, and we got offroad and into a nearby forest where we abandoned the car and took our weapons and a laptop. We later set the the pickup ablaze and walked an entire 3 miles to a safe house my friend Frank had rented before extraction.
At the house, we began laying down the story and wanted to know how we could get the hard drive to publish the story by sending it to her editor in Chief at Agence France Presse via email. We knew we had yet another fight and hustle before we could get the drive but then her answer left us with a greater problem.
" I burned the hard drive. It was too risky; I had surgery to stuff a Universal Serial Bus inside my left arm," she said, stretching out her arm, which had a 43-millimetre-long cut scar.
We knew we had an uphill task; we were not surgeons apart from the basic training back in the army. And it was something we learnt years back. We were from rescue units and we only knew best how to handle guns... would we make it through with a scalpel on our hands?
Frank grabbed some vodka from a wine cabinet in the room; he went to the bedroom, where he came back with a study lamp and a first aid kit. I quickly popped open the vodka bottle and poured a glassful on Lara's arm. I offered her the bottle from which she sipped almost half of its content. We had no local anaesthetic and the alcohol, we hoped would help with pain. Frank pressed her arm against a table we were using as a working area. With the study lamp above her arm. I carefully slit her arm open and began controlling the blood flow with cotton wool and a suction pipe we were lucky to find at the place. Meanwhile, Frank ordered the house owner, who was a GP at a town hospital, to quickly get us two pints of B positive.
Twenty five minutes were enough for Tyrell to get to the place with the transfusion material. Lara was in immense pain and sweating a lot, we had managed to take out the USB drive, secured in polythene. Tyrell administered anesthesia and prepared her for infusion of the blood which I had to hold with my arm for some minutes. Lara was fixed in no time though asleep from the sedative effects.
As Tyrell left, Frank mounted the USB drive in the laptop and opened the only file in it. It had endless stories of a ring of networks operated by Raven Logistics and company "Penguin Ltd"
The writeups also detailed how Raven and Penguin were related companies and that the former was co-founded by a huge political figure in Australia who used the profits to fund his political ambitions. Penguin was a subsidiary company that had benefited from monies to the tune of $950,000 made away from government projects. The companies dealt in drug, weapon and sex trafficking into lucrative markets across Europe.
This grim news made sense as to why our pursuers stopped at nothing to recapture the lady who was now lying on the table recovering from a rather unprofessional surgery. As Lara woke up, she filled us in on crucial information and furnished us with her editor's email at which point we sent the whole file.
She was relieved because the people she was fighting had thrown dirt at her career, accusing her of potential career-ending crimes; including a framed murder of her ex-husband Aston. She truly had everything to fight for, and boy, was she on the verge of winning now.
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