The Siberian made sure they all got a good look at his Uzi. The laborers held out empty hands to show they were unarmed, then began moving the bags forward, stacking them against the bulkhead. When the first truck was empty, the Siberian kicked the bags loaded aboard the plane, found them full and heavy, and stepped aside. The laborers removed five of the twenty heavy wooden crates stowed in the rear of the cargo area and loaded them in the truck.

Within three minutes, the first truck had been unloaded, reloaded, and was pulling out.

The Siberian watched while the first truck drove away and a second backed into position. The two armed guards in cammie shorts stayed in position beside the new load while the laborers repeated their tasks.

Smoking a cigarette, watching the surrounding land, the Siberian prowled back and forth in the cargo bay. The sun was well up over the horizon. The heat of equatorial Africa rose from the ground like an invisible shroud. White Eastern Europeans and black Africans alike sweated and exchanged cargoes without a hitch. No one was new to this game.

As the fourth truck unloaded, the Bulgarian stopped a laborer and used a sheath knife to rip a hole in the heavy burlap bag the man carried. He pried a black stone out of the slit and held it up for the Siberian to inspect.

“What you think? Is it coltan?” the Siberian asked in Bulgarian, one of his six languages.

The loadmaster shrugged. “You tell me.”

“It’s coltan.” He stubbed out his cigarette on the cargo floor and went to the doorway. “They know better than to shit on the Siberian.”

Or on his Russian backers.

Not to mention Joao Fouquette, who controlled much of South America’s arms trade.

Like the legal world, 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 large wooden 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 stepped back into the dark interior of the plane. It would be like the rebels to try and make off with the arms, the coltan, and the diamonds. Or perhaps the Camgerian government had discovered he was selling to both sides of its little war.

In the shadows of the aircraft’s cargo hold, the Siberian lifted his binoculars and studied the spot where he’d seen the flash of light.

Like everything else away from the tropical coast, the hill was covered by scrub and dust. He could make out what might be a sniper’s keep and thought he could see men inside. But he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t seeing his own paranoia in the moving wind shadows. The binoculars were inferior Moldavian goods.

Impatiently he turned toward the guard who had the sniper rifle. With both voice and gestures, the Siberian said, “Give it to me.”

The man hesitated until his officer barked a command. Reluctantly the guard handed over the rifle.

Still concealed by the shadows inside the plane, the Siberian rested the weapon on a crate and studied the hillside. The telescopic sight brought details into sharp focus.

There were two men. White. Both faces were hidden-one by a camera with a very long-range lens, the other by field glasses.

Then the man with the camera ducked down into the blind. Through the light grass screen across the front of the blind, the Siberian could see that he was reloading the camera. Film, not digital.

Russian curses echoed in the plane. The cameraman had at least one exposed roll of the Siberian overseeing the unloading, the rebel officer inspecting arms, the diamonds and coltan, the rebel brandishing weapons that were being delivered in contravention of African Union and United Nations arms embargoes, in the face of world opinion and all civilized standards. And those would be the headlines if the photographs were ever published.