8
HORN OF AFRICA
THREE MINUTES AFTER THIS text from Salter, a video link comes in from A.D. I click it. Up pops a SkyNews clip of her doing a stand-up on Route 80 north of Kuwait City. Columns of merc transport stream past in the background, heading for Safwan and the border of southern Iraq. The clip is what they call in the news biz a “tail”—an outtake, recorded after the real broadcast piece. Tails are full of profanity and mockery. My estranged bride grins into camera: Eat your heart out, Gent.
She signs “Call me” and “love,” our traditional code.
A follow-up text comes in near midnight. A.D. is safe, rolling north with the troops. She has run into Dimitri and Dimitri, “the Brothers Karamazov”—Russian pilots we knew in East Africa. The pair is flying for Kiril Pachenko, the gunrunner, under contract to Force Insertion. No sign of Salter, says A.D., but she has an interview scheduled tomorrow with Juan-Esteban Echeverria, the former secretary of state whom I met in Scotland. Why is he here? Can I tell her anything? She slates a time for us to talk and signs off.
Dimitri and Dimitri.
I toss on my cot, remembering them—and the first time I met A.D. For some reason, the sight of her in-theater has upset me. This is her job; I understand that. She’s great at it. But war is no place for a woman; I don’t care what you say. I worry about her, and I’m furious at her for making me worry. I blame myself. She should be at home in our kitchen, fat and pregnant.
I take two Ambien.
Outside our hangar, a KC-130 taxis past with its big turbo-props droning. I close my eyes and I’m back in “the Horn” …
East Africa, 2022.
I was still in the Marine Corps then.
The thing about East Africa is there are no roads. You fly everywhere. Pilots are as common as cockroaches in Africa. Every white man, it seems, owns his own small plane or chopper. It’s like having a car in the States.
In Africa you see a lot of Eastern-bloc crews, Soviet-era pilots who left home and wound up working for Alex Martini, Kiril Pachenko, or Teddy Ostrofsky. No pilot in Africa wears a uniform. It’s shorts and shirts. The best you can hope for is the odd flight suit or bomber jacket that the flier wears to keep warm at altitude.
Above the African plains, the number one hazard is birds—pterodactyl-sized vultures that go zinging around like air-to-air missiles. Landing, the peril is wildebeest and zebra migrating across the airstrips. There’s no radio at half the sites, and the weather changes minute by minute.
Every big plane you see in Africa, if it’s not Lufthansa or BEA, belongs to an arms merchant. They’re all flying guns. Most of the planes are antiques from the Soviet days—Ilyushins, Andropovs, and Antonovs that were obsolete before I was born. I can’t begin to guess when the last spare parts for them were manufactured, but it certainly wasn’t in this century. That was when I met Conrad Hilliaresse. He was one of the few non-Russians flying, and the only nondrunk. He took me on a walkaround of his plane one time, explaining that even these ancient Ilyushins had redundant systems for everything, sometimes four and five contingencies deep. Yes, he acknowledged, those four or five were now defunct, if not absent entirely, but the basic flying platform remained functional. This particular aircraft, he told me, was using orange juice in place of hydraulic fluid.
“Conrad, if you’re not worried, I’m not.”
“Just to be on the safe side though, I shan’t retract the landing gear.”
The way you fly in Africa, as I said, is by hitching rides. Schedules don’t exist. The pilots, no matter how broke they are, won’t let you pay. There’s no pressurization on these aircraft and certainly no heat. And forget talking. The interiors are louder than Super Stallions and the fuselages are so riddled with bullet holes, patched and unpatched, that a gale howls fore to aft like a wind tunnel. On one flight with some Aussie Special Forces, I was watching a black African crewman shouting back and forth to the pilots, in KiSwahili, as he, the African, climbed up and down on cargo boxes tugging on wire cables that ran along the inboard flanks of the fuselage. One of the Aussies piped up. “What the fack ya doin’, mate?”
The African shouted back: “Working the rudder.”
I met Dimitri and Dimitri on a flight like that, from Princeville in Zamibia to Nairobi, on an errand for Salter. The Russians were flying a Tupolev Tu-114, which was the civilian cargo version of the Tu-95 bomber. I don’t know how old that thing was, but it had propellers. I remember in jump school at Fort Benning, guys who got airsick would puke inside their own shirts rather than soil the beautiful clean deck of the army’s C-130s. Nothing like that on this Tupolev; the underfoot was like the floor of a barn. I got so sick on this flight that they let me go up into the cockpit so I could see the horizon to settle my stomach. The pilots were both about fifty and both drunk as polecats. To navigate they had little tin boxes the size of iPods on the dashboard with a three-by-three window cut into them, like a TV screen, and a long strip of map paper scrolling on the inside. The paper was from a road map, like you’d buy in a gas station. I’m not making this up. The pilots scrolled the map by turning a little knob on the side of the box; they navigated by following the rivers and occasional dirt roads. I asked if they wanted to use my GPS. They said it would only confuse them.
I was feeling better now that I could see the horizon. I introduced myself and they did the same; when I couldn’t pronounce their names, they just said, “I’m Dimitri,” and “Me, too.” They were drinking Early Times straight from the bottle; they offered me some, which I took. I asked them what ranks they had held in the Russian air force. “I was a corporal,” said Dimitri who was flying the plane. He had to shout over the wind screaming through the cracks in the superstructure. Dimitri the copilot said he had been a private first class. My face must have gone white because they started howling.
“We’re jerking your chain, dude,” said Dimitri the pilot. “I was a major. He was a lieutenant colonel.” I asked why they were flying in Africa. “We couldn’t get visas to America,” said Dimitri the copilot. “Why else? We’re not crazy!”
I had thought of myself as a pretty good drinker till I met my first Russians. These characters are freaks of nature; the human liver must have evolved to some supernormal level north and east of the Ukraine. Black Africans are worse, except they don’t drink distilled spirits; their booze of choice is kishar, fermented cow’s or goat’s milk, and other poisonous brews made from melons and sugar cane. This stuff is living. It’s not antiseptic like vodka; you can’t sterilize a wound with it. It’s like compost; it’s organic. The Western gut can’t take this stuff. But these black Africans, even children, pour it down by the bucketful. They can live on it.
Africans don’t really get drunk. Instead they achieve a state of detachment, a species of walking oblivion, and they stay in it. Many can do it without alcohol. It’s a state of mind. The level of misery in some of these places is so intolerable that a sentient being can’t endure it without some means of leaving his body. In the West we have hope; that’s our drug of choice. The tribal African harbors no such illusions. The city African does, unfortunately for him. He’s got a little education; he’s seen movies and read books, studied the Bible or better yet the Koran. This is where suicide bombers come from: the hopeless who have been given hope. Some well-meaning Westerner gave it to them, probably a woman and probably as brave as she is clueless. When the bubble bursts, the city Africans can’t take it. Hope has softened their skins; they’re vulnerable now.
In place of hope arises hate.
We should leave them without hope. They’re happier that way. The little kids with smiles on their faces and flies crawling across their eyeballs. That’s their life. What’s wrong with it? Who told us we had the right to mess with it?
I used to see A.D. on those flights. I ran into her once at Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi and another time at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. We became friends before we were lovers. A.D. was back and forth to Sudan and Darfur all th
e time then, when both of those places were so hot not even the Chinese went in. She would catch rides on helicopters and small planes; I’d see her bundling across the tarmac packing sixty pounds of kit, then reaching up to be hauled aboard as the aircraft taxied down the runway.
A.D. at that time was not above donating her college-educated booty if she thought it would help her get a story. She slept with Pierre Mboku, the P.M. of Zaire. She was in Hans Klekker’s bed, the UN chief inspector, as well as Colonel Karl-Jurgen Pedersen of Southwestern Mobe. I picked her up for breakfast once as she was tucking her blouse in, leaving the presidential palace at Harare.
It was A.D. who first made me aware of ambition. When I was courting her, I asked why she risked her privileged white bacon traveling to these crazy-ass places.
“Blond ambition.”
A.D. had a philosophy about it.
“I come from a good family, Gent. My mum’s a college administrator, my dad’s a justice on the South African Supreme Court. I was raised never to strive for any object too conspicuously. Bad form. One was permitted to grind for grades, but only so she could marry well. I was raised to be a high-class brood mare.”
A.D. was telling me this on another of those vulture-dodging flights. At least once on those jaunts, the plane would drop four hundred feet in one sudden, unanticipated plunge. A.D. used to confess all kinds of shit to me in those moments.
“Then one morning I woke up and I realized, I’m ambitious! I want to succeed! I want to be famous, I want to make a name for myself. It was like some great weight had been lifted off me. I felt like myself for the first time. I walked around that whole day, going over in my mind all the times growing up when I had felt crazy and wrong and different, in a bad way, from everyone else. I realized that they were all moments of ambition—and that what had made me disown my true feelings was that I had internalized this upper-class inhibition against manifest aspiration, against wanting anything in too unseemly a manner, or making a spectacle of myself by striving and failing.” She smiled. “I packed my kit and got out the next day.”
Why did A.D. cover war zones? “Because it’s a fast way to get recognized and because there’re only a few other women doing it. And I’m curious. I love train wrecks. They’re horrible but one can’t look away. I want to know what the human heart is capable of, the evil and the good.”
What A.D. said made sense. I began to realize that I was ambitious too. I had an ego. I looked around at the guys in TacOps and it was clear they did too. It seemed that just about everyone in an elite, all-volunteer unit had some vaguely defined but nonetheless tangible aspiration, which was usually not fame or wealth so much as the desire to be present at the center of events.
We wanted to see what was going on.
We wanted to be part of it.
“You’re no different from me, Gent. You want to see your name in the paper.”
A.D. is a Jew. She doesn’t have the drinking gene. I made it a point to stick with her when she was partying, to make sure nobody took advantage of her. One night we were in a corrugated-tin dive called the Coconut Club in a UN compound outside Djembe, West Congo, and A.D. had to pee; I walked her outside (the loo was unusable) and stood discreetly by while she squatted on some palm fronds in the warm rain.
“What the hell am I doing here? I should be home writing my novel.”
When A.D. got down on herself, she hated everything, mostly herself.
“I gotta get out of here. I’m wasting my life.”
She declared that journalism for her was a distraction, an excuse to avoid her real work. “Thrill seeking,” she said. “I’m jerking myself off.”
A.D. was the one who blew the whistle on Salter in East Africa. It ended his career and made hers.
9
BROWN BOMBERS
ZAMIBIA WAS A BREAKAWAY republic on the east coast of Africa, on the Indian Ocean.
The nation doesn’t exist anymore; its territory has been reabsorbed as provinces into Somalia and Kenya. Its northeast border, when the state was sovereign, was marked by the tiny port of Sainte-Therese, which abutted the capital, Princeville. Refugees fleeing tribal wars in Somalia, and even Darfur, had been a problem there for thirty years; there were camps all along the border, with UN peacekeepers manning a supposedly demilitarized corridor called the Agarua, which means “Broomstick.”
The president of Zamibia was a former Olympic sprinter named Innocent Mbana. He and his soldiers had left the poor people in the villages alone as long as they had nothing. But in the summer of 2022, a major push by U.S., Swedish, and Dutch NGOs brought in tons of humanitarian and medical supplies, along with rice, corn and barley meal, flour, and oil. A convoy of forty trucks, manned by KBR and Advance Systems drivers, left the port protected by a few Force Insertion mercs and locally hired security contractors, traveling under a guarantee of safe passage from Mbana. He broke it. The president found out how much the drugs were worth. To make a long story short, a massacre ensued. Cell-phone video got out. The images showed drivers and contractors being dragged out of their vehicles and shot or burned alive while Mbana’s soldiers danced over them in glee.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps keep two Amphibious Ready Groups, ARGs, at sea at all times. One comes out of the East Coast, the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune; the other is from the West Coast, the First Marine Division at Pendleton. Each ARG carries a battalion-sized MEU(SOC), a Marine Expeditionary Unit, Special Operations Capable. There are other MEUs in reserve but in this case we had two together, the Eleventh MEU and the Twenty-Ninth, to form Task Force 68. Salter was its commander. He was a brand-new three-star. This was August 2022, right after AfPak II and the end of the second Iran-Iraq war.
In Zamibia at that time there were about two hundred American, Canadian, and European civilians, mostly pipeline engineers, doctors, missionaries, and humanitarian workers. The State Department, then under Secretary Echevarria serving President Jack Cole, had ordered them evacuated. Our job was to make sure they got out okay.
Salter called our teams together aboard the flagship, the USS Peleliu. Before Marines go ashore anywhere, Force Recon teams (or, at that time, TacOps) are sent in to seize and prepare HLZs—Helicopter Landing Zones—or ALGs, Amphibious Landing Grounds. That was us. Capt. Jack Stettenpohl ran the first team, Hellboy One; he was in overall command of the three-team section. My team was Hellboy Three. Two was Captain Robert Salter’s, the general’s son. We gathered around our commander on a platform overlooking the Peleliu’s well deck. This is a huge, cavernous space that can be flooded from the sea; the ship launches and recovers her landing craft from there. Time was about midnight; the place was deafening with engine noise and reeking of salt water and diesel fumes. Col. Mattoon and his S2, Maj. Cam Holland, gave the briefing.
Holland told us that a full-on revolution had broken out ashore. He showed us UAV video from two hours prior. Buildings were burning; mobs roamed the streets. Salter let Holland and Mattoon finish, then he stepped forward.
“I’m expecting a total goatfuck, gentlemen. You’ll see shit happening that you never saw on the worst days of AfPakI or II, Iraq, or Yemen. Keep a cool head. Do not react out of emotion. Your job is to locate and secure LZs for the main force, nothing more. Keep out of the way of Mbana’s soldiers. Do not light anyone up without clearing it with higher, and when I say higher, I mean me.”
Salter shook each of our hands. Our Super Stallions were cranking up on the flight deck. “You and your Marines represent the United States of America.” That was all Salter said. He looked into our eyes, rapped each of us on the shoulder, and we took off.
The advance teams went in fast and encountered no resistance. Streets were empty; the city was calm. Mbana’s troops had restored order. They welcomed us.
When I say troops, I use the word in its loosest possible meaning. Most were untrained, illiterate kalashes, nineteen to twenty-four years old, fresh in from the villages or off the streets of the shantytowns and squatters’
camps—commanded by thirty-year-old “captains” who couldn’t read or write and were, like their subordinates, whacked out on crystal meth, double-dope (dopamine-enhanced crack), “brown-brown” (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder), and khat, an African narcotic that you dip like snuff and that’s cheap as air. The soldiers were called Brown Bombers from the color of the berets they wore.
The status symbol for these thugs was a video camera. Squad leaders wore plastic Chinese SolarShooters on lanyards around their necks. The cameras were used to take pictures of any civilian that the soldiers intended to rape or murder later on. The locals were terrified of these cameras. The Brown Bombers’ weapons were AK-47s; their uniforms were surplus Albanian and Bulgarian cammies acquired from Teddy Ostrofsky or one of the other Eastern-bloc gunrunners, who also supplied the thirty-year-old Chinese 7.62 mm ammunition that was so moldy and rotten you could snap off the slug from the cartridge case with two fingers. The way you could tell an officer was he had boots. Everyone else wore flip-flops or went barefoot. The amazing thing was they all spoke English, pretty good English. They got it from TV.
Zamibia at the time, for all its troubles, had a lot of native charm. The architecture of the capital Princeville was colonial French, with Victor Hugo-esque manses built around courtyards and boulevards shaded by tall, leafy magnolias; cottages at the beach had palm-sheltered drives and big mahogany louvers built into the doors and windows for ventilation and shade. If a divorced woman or a widow wished to announce her availability, she left the shades open. Street vendors gave you oranges and coconut shavings for free, but shoppers voluntarily kicked in a few coins for the little paper umbrella, called a “flute,” that came with the treat. The custom of “lagniappe,” where merchants donate a little something extra for free, was practiced throughout the city. It lent a grace note to everything, as did certain endearing turns of phrase. When road crews shut down a street for repairs, the sign said
The Profession Page 10
