by David Poyer
“No manhole covers,” Erculiano murmured. She blinked at gaps in the buckled, potholed roadway. She met the gaze of a woman who’d stopped halfway across the road to let the convoy pass. Her reflection overlay the woman’s in the tinted glass.
“Stand by to deploy,” the driver said to the other contractor. “Watch your six.”
“Nobody else is,” the man said, as if it were a challenge and response. The lead Humvee turned suddenly, rocking, and scooted down a side street. The other vehicles followed, threading battered, overturned cars she realized were set as approach barriers.
They abruptly braked. Armed Ashaarans leapt up from around a small fire, angrily waving them to a halt, jerking cartridges into their weapons. They looked strung out on qat. Before the van was fully stopped their own guard was out, slipping a short weapon from the assault bag. More emerged from the other SUVs, each beelining for his assigned station. The two biggest jogged to the front and bulled up, confronting the Ashaarans chest to chest.
Aisha located her pistol under the abaya, her pucker factor rocketing. She reached for the door handle, but Peyster covered her hand with his. “Give ’em a few minutes.” He had a boyish smile like some teen heartthrob. “They’ll give us the all clear.”
THE last time she’d seen this man had been in a subbasement of the Palais de Sécurité, with dim flickering lighting and that strange smell from the cell blocks. Now, mysteriously promoted to general despite the flight of his government and dissolution of his ministry, Abdullahi Assad stood at a glass-topped table in a freshly pressed uniform and Sam Browne belt that made him look like the heavy in a 1940 Warner Brothers film. His uniform cap was set on the glass. The mirror behind him reflected his long neck and the dark skin at the crown of his head. The mansion had obviously belonged to someone wealthy, but there was no sign of him. Only the continual circulation of armed men from room to room, strolling from outside to inside. All were smoking or chewing qat, and some were doing both. She looked for the aged transcriptionist who’d bandied Italian with Erculiano but didn’t see her. They were three on one with Assad, which might be difficult. The GrayWolf men stood in two corners, holding rifles. The other two were occupied by yellow-eyed Ashaarans with AKs. The bodyguards eyed each other like leashed Dobermans.
Assad bowed. Said in his deep, halting voice, but to her surprise in English: “American friends. Welcome to my new office.”
Okay, she was used to that. Most cops in the Mideast refused to speak the local language to Americans. Not because the Americans couldn’t speak their tongue, though that was usually true, but because everybody wanted to practice his English. Even those who professed hatred for the West.
But the first time they’d met, he’d pretended he couldn’t speak English at all. Or Arabic, for that matter. Would anything else he told them hold up in court?
But that too was the Mideast. If she had a dollar for every time she’d talked to someone who’d told her one thing one day and the opposite the next, contradicting both himself and what she’d seen with her own eyes, she could’ve retired long ago.
She pondered this as a very tall, very dark woman with a heavy mustache brought in a tray of soft drinks. The familiar bottle, but the contents were too pale to be Coca-Cola or its Mideastern imitators, Zam Zam or Mecca. She set the glasses out with faint clicks on the tabletop, poured, then left without a word or a glance.
Of course they each had to take one. Aisha hesitated—the bottles here were recycled without sterilization, so you risked hepatitis C and who knew what else—but felt the amused regard of the Ashaarans. To Jahannam with them. She drank off the warm sweet fluid and poured more.
Assad seemed unsure whom to address. He looked at Peyster, then at Erculiano. They nodded to her. He shrugged. “Agent Ar-Rahim. The first time we met, I did not ask about your family. You have family?”
“A mother and father in New York, yes.”
“But you yourself, not married?”
“I’m not. You, General?”
“I am fortunate. Three sons.”
“All in good health?”
He lifted his hands. “All praise and thanks be to Allah.”
She let him play host. Sooner or later they’d get down to business. Perhaps she could steer it that way. “Congratulations.”
He lowered his glass. “Excuse?”
“Major to General—a big jump. Your superiors must have great faith in you.”
“Thank you,” Assad said, face a study. “They do.”
“Only—who are your superiors?”
She’d hoped the question would set him back, but it didn’t seem to. “My superiors are the Governing Council.”
She glanced at Peyster—shouldn’t he be stepping in?—but he simply sat smiling. So she went on. “I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of them. Did they replace the former government?”
“There is no ‘former’ government. It is the same, the legitimate government of the People’s Republic.”
“Please enlighten me. I’d understood the government had fled. I know the president’s resigned.”
“Mr. President has not fled. He is still president. Only in Switzerland for treatment.”
“I didn’t know he was ill. And the minister of security?”
“The minister of justice is also there for treatment.”
“They’re both in Switzerland for treatment?”
“This is correct. And I act for them.”
“Um, very good. Well, General, as you know, the United Nations has tasked us to carry out relief operations. I’ve been assigned the force-protection mission. That means I work with you, badge to badge, to reduce any friction. We help you, you help us.”
“I am very glad to hear this,” Assad said deadpan. “What is it I do to help?”
She looked at Peyster again but got no clues this time either. Her throat itched and she took out her handkerchief. Coughing felt like her esophagus was being sawed open with a dull knife. Assad waited. She drank more juice or whatever it was.
“We have to protect the various relief agencies that’ll be arriving. As well as our own medical, construction, and transportation people. First, we’d like your ministry to resume guarding our embassy. Second, we need locals to work with our security teams at the airport. Third, we need three to five SDI agents to help Mr. Erculiano work the antidrug and anti-terror missions.”
Assad was nodding, but wasn’t making any notes. She decided he wouldn’t appreciate having a woman point this out. It was tricky, trying to motivate local officials to cooperate when you had no real leverage. She’d gotten interview training in basic school, but liaison took skills of a higher order. She coughed, wincing again. “Finally, we need to sit down with your customs people, and discuss importation of weapons. We intercepted a shipment coming in from Iran a few days before—I mean, before the president left. For treatment.”
“We also need to know how we can help him,” Peyster put in.
Assad turned to him at once. “We need transport. Fuel. Food, and arms. How soon can you provide?”
But Peyster sat back smiling, fingers tented, leaving her to answer. “We can provide some food. And trucks. Arms . . . how would we know those who receive them can be trusted? There’s a rebel movement—”
“Whatever comes to us will not go to the southerners, who are the rebels and looters. We have ways of identifying those we trust.”
She frowned; she’d heard that before. Oh, yes. The little man who’d welcomed them. A local proverb? “By the way, how is Mr. Bahdoon? I trust he’s well?”
One of the guards stirred. Did Assad glance at him? “Bahdoon we have not seen since the troubles. I’m sorry.”
“Was Mr. Bahdoon a southerner?” She didn’t use tribal names, since Assad hadn’t, but Nuura had explained the “rebellion” more clearly than the CIA and State backgrounding.
Like most states in Africa, Ashaara’s boundaries had been burned like a branding iron over a teem of mutually antagonistic
tribes and ethnicities. Here that meant Cushitic-speaking Issas, Issaqs, Gadabursi, and Danakils. There were Bantus in the south and Ethiopian-dialect Tawahedo Christians in the west, and of course the Indians, into shopkeeping and import-export. Gilhirs from the high desert. The “northerners” were Diniyues, Jazirs, and the president’s clan, the Xaashas, who’d dominated after the collapse of the Morgue.
She wondered how his world looked through Assad’s dark, weary eyes. Did he really represent a rump government? Or even that? She said cautiously, “We’ll have to discuss that in depth. Can you provide security to our embassy?”
“I will take that request to the Council.”
“All right, and one final question. We saw armed men in the streets on the way here. Were they yours?”
He gave her the same smile she’d noted each time he’d lied. “Yes. They are reporting to the Governing Council.”
“There are no other clan militias?”
“ ‘Other’ militias?”
“I mean, besides your forces.”
“The legitimate security forces of this country.”
“That’s what I meant.”
Assad called, and the server came out again. Aisha had left a little in the heel of the glass, the custom in the Gulf to show she couldn’t possibly finish it. The woman held out the bottle; Aisha wobbled her glass between thumb and index. That seemed to get the message across.
“There are renegade elements,” the general admitted. “Responsible for the looting. They will be justified.”
“Brought to justice?”
“That is what I said.”
She decided to go in over the horns and see how the bull reacted. “General, we intend to put forward a policy of arms for food.”
“Arms for food?” The phrase amused him. “An old concept in Ashaara. We use our arms to get our food.”
“Not exactly. We’ll supply food contingent on disarming the militias.”
“Contingent?”
Peyster spoke a word she didn’t catch. Assad said, to her, “Rebels and criminals, no problem. But government forces will not disarm.”
“I see. Well. How would we contact these rebels? And the other—I mean, the clan militias? We’ll need to talk to them.”
“We will set that up. You will go through us.” Assad put his hands on the table and rose. The three Americans rose too. Assad bowed and left.
His qat-chewing bodyguards stayed. They watched the contractors and the contractors watched them as Aisha, musing on what had just passed, made her way down the steps toward the still-idling convoy. Anticipating, as she walked through the dense hot dusty morning, the air-conditioning there, once she was sealed inside.
AC would be nice, Dan thought. The dry stinking dust was reigniting his headache. He massaged his brow as the trucks ground toward the port area. Past its cranes rose the Old City, its hill still surrounded by remnants of the Portuguese-era wall.
He was riding in a five-ton dropside from the 100th Light-Medium Truck Company. Four more of the big 6x6s rumbled behind. One peeled off as they passed the exit for the park, loaded to twice the height of a man with palleted Meals, Ready to Eat. Some locals might find themselves eating pork with rice, but as he understood Islam, dietary restrictions could be set aside if you were starving. Others were stacked with lumber, welding equipment, prefab ramps, electric controllers, generators, coils of shining wire. They made a wrong turn, backed and maneuvered. Then came sandbagged revetments, alert faces under helmets. A glance at his ID, and he was through.
He picked up a sunshine yellow hard hat from a box inside the gate. The clatter and buzz of compressors and generators crowded the basin. A tug lay near the wreck by the jetty, hoses snaking over its side, as a landing craft warped beneath one of the cranes. Forklifts maneuvered between working parties. Cables and compressor hoses snaked across heatshimmering concrete.
A heavyset man with thinning reddish blond hair and sagging, sunburned cheeks stood with hands on hips, directing a truck-mounted boom at full extension. It lifted rusty sections off the crane as cutters carved it apart with crackling arcs. His cheek bulged but it wasn’t qat. He wore a cardinal scarlet hard hat and old-style green fatigues unbloused over Red Wing work boots. A portable radio, a Leatherman, and a canteen were clipped to his belt. His blue eyes photographed Dan as he came up.
“The harbormaster?”
“Parker Buntine.” He stripped off a work glove to shake hands. Something had been burned off his nose and cheeks, leaving pink raw skin. “Lenson, right? Any questions before I tell you everything we need?”
“Looks like everybody’s busy. When can you take the first ship?”
“Five days. Got to remove all this fucking debris, and I want to triple the staging area.” Buntine swung and shouted, “No, you fucking moron! In the truck! The truck!” He swung back. “Weld up these fences and put concertina on top. These cranes are shit, faster to replace than repair. Them monkeys stole every fucking piece of electrical gear, every switch box, every motor. What kind of baboons would do that?”
“I guess, people who didn’t think it made any difference to their lives.”
“Absolute bullshit, Commander. People who do this aren’t people, they’re fucking animals. And I’m not letting ’em back through those gates.”
Dan blinked. He didn’t know what Buntine was: army warrant, civilian, contractor. But whatever he was, he’d have to get along with the locals. “We’re going to need labor, Parker. And this is their country.”
“I done this before, Commander. Da Nang, Haiti, Mogadishu. Let ’em in the gate, right away, your losses go to forty percent.”
“Not forty—”
“You take in a hundred thousand tons, sixty thou gets on the road. You’ll lose another half there. Everybody’ll have his fucking hand out. Then they’ll start fighting over it. I already had some big son of a bitch looked like a white-faced possum here trying to shake me down.”
“Who?”
“Some asshole with a bunch of hired guns. Had the marines escort him out. Big black bastard, but his face white as mine. Give you the willies. . . . Keep the fucking skinnies out, that’s my two cents.”
“Parker, we’ve got a big job here. Nav aids, runways, power, water—the regime didn’t spend a cent on infrastructure for ten years.” Dan wondered what he was trying to say, then located it. “And there’s no jobs. If we put people to work, we start money circulating. If the economy starts up, they can afford to import food. And even if we have losses en route, the aid’s still getting to hungry people.”
“So what. Just be twice as many of ’em, ten years from now.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothin’, never mind. . . . Five days, that’s what you wanted to know.” Buntine scratched at a raw place on his nose, then jerked his hand away and spat and bawled at the men on the crane, “No, you fucking limpdicks! Who the fuck told you to splice? Everything out of the runs! Throw that shit in the scrap pile and pull me new wire, new wire!”
. . .
NEXT stop was the embassy, for Ahearn’s first coordination meeting with the ambassador. He hitched a ride with Buntine, who was invited too, on a Humvee on a twice-daily run, stopping at the logistics headquarters at the airfield, the marine terminal, and the embassy. The gunner stood casually in his seat, leaning on the hatch rim as they crossed the bridge. The Humvee was old, its suspension worn. He barely noticed, deep in the daily sitsum on his notebook. When the gunner tapped his shoulder they were at the bullet-pocked walls of the chancery. He looked at the hole in the guard tower, wondering why it hadn’t fallen. Apparently there’d been quite a battle here.
The enormous lobby felt empty. A modernistic chandelier, pale furniture set at wide intervals, an African-style tile floor. An elevator had an OUT OF ORDER sign, so they followed the other attendees up a staircase. One was a flaming redhead in tight jeans, Aussie boots, and a bush shirt, carrying a slung leather tote that looked as if it had traveled. He saw o
thers he knew. McCall, turning heads as she tapped along in black uniform heels. Marines. Contractors in sport shirts and ball caps. A heavyset black woman in an embroidered dashiki and gold headwrap. He wondered where the other Ashaarans were.
At the door to the conference room two burly men in black battle dress, combat boots, gray jackets, slung rifles, baseball caps, and Oakleys were checking IDs. The caps carried a logo that grabbed his attention. Two more stood down the hallway. He was almost there when the biggest stepped forward, blocking the black woman in front of Dan. “You, stop!” he shouted. “Go back.”
“I’m a presenter. I’m—”
She reached into her purse, and the guard shouted, “Gun!”
The team down the hall reacted immediately, one taking a knee and aiming, the other covering another door up the hall. Where the principals were meeting, Dan guessed. The others in line backed away. One stumbled, nearly falling down the steps but saving himself on the banister.
When Dan looked back they had the woman’s arm behind her back and her cheek pressed to the wall as they patted her down, feeling around her waist, up her chest. Her eyes met Dan’s. She didn’t struggle, but a deeper hue suffused her chocolate skin.
“She’s clean. Except for the gun.”
“Let me go. Check the purse. My badge is in there.”
Reluctantly, the guard searched the handbag. Came up with a black case. “What kind of badge is this?”
“NCIS. My photo ID’s in there too.”
“What’s the trouble?” said a young white man in suit jacket, white turtleneck, and a gold chain from disco days. “That’s my boss you got there. The NCIS agent in charge.”
“It’s all right, Paul,” the woman said.
The guards looked at each other, and unhanded her. “Sorry, ma’am,” one said. “Saw the pistol, had to check you out.”
“It started before that.” She sounded furious. “Just don’t think that every—never mind. Never mind,” and she smoothed her blouse, face still thunderous, and swept into the room beyond.
When it was his turn Dan said to the guard, “You were too rough with her.”
