“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.