“So we’re screwed,” Linda said, her anger putting a hard edge in her girlish voice. “Those guns could be anywhere and we have no way of finding them.”

“Ye of little faith,” Murph said with a broad grin.

She turned to him. “What have you got?”

“Will you guys ever stop underestimating the chairman’s cunning? Before we sold the guns he asked me and the chief armorer to replace a couple of tags the CIA gave us with some of my own design. Their range is nearly a hundred miles.”

“Range isn’t the issue,” Hali said. “Isaka knew where we hid the tags on the weapons. He’s bound to have told the rebels, and they could disable ours just as easily as the ones we got from the CIA.”

Mark’s smile never faltered. “The CIA tags were hidden in the butt stocks of the AKs and forward grip assembly of the RPGs. I put our tags in the grips of the AKs and modified the sling swivels to hide them on the grenade launchers.”

“Oh, bloody brilliant,” Linda said with true admiration. “Once they find the CIA tags they wouldn’t look for any more. Ours are still in place.”

“And transmitting on a different frequency, I might add.” Mark crossed his arms over his chest and leaned far back into his seat.

“Why didn’t Juan tell us about this?” Max asked.

“He sort of thought he was straying from prudence into paranoia with his idea,” Murph replied. “So he didn’t want to mention it because more than likely our tags would never be needed.”

“How close did you say we need to be to pick up the signals?” Linda asked.

“About a hundred miles.”

“That still leaves us searching for a needle in a haystack without some idea where the rebels were headed.”

Mark wiped the smug look from his face. “Actually, there’s another problem, too. To give the tags that kind of range I had to sacrifice battery life. They’ll start failing in another forty-eight to seventy-two hours. After that there really is no way to find them again.”

Linda looked to Max Hanley. “The decision to find those weapons has to come from Juan.”

“I agree,” Max said. “But you and I both know he’ll want us to track them down and alert the Congolese army so they can get ’em back.”

“As I see it we have two options,” Linda said.

“Hold on a sec,” Max interrupted. “Hali, call the Chairman on his satellite phone. Okay, two options?”

“One is we turn back and send a team from Cape Town up to the Congo with whatever detection gear they need. Mark, this stuff is man portable, right?”

“The receiver’s not much bigger than a boom box,” the technical wizard told her.