by Gordon Kent
What was worse, Suter was good at his job. And smart.
“You wanna sleep back there, Lieutenant, go ahead. We got a couple hours, no scenery.”
“Would you ask the stewardess to turn down my bed?” Alan said.
“Jeez, I would, but she’s busy in first class just now.”
Alan smiled, the smile of habit, the sea-duty smile. He started to think about his wife, and home, and what it would be like when this rotten tour was over. He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he was aware of was the pilot telling him they were five minutes from going dry and he could wake up now.
“Must have dozed off.”
“Hey, I thought I had a corpse back there! Feet-dry in four minutes, man. We’re coming in over the islands now—” He started to give a guided tour but clicked off to deal with the comm. Alan consulted his own kneepad: Split was off somewhere in the haze to his left; to his right would be Dubrovnik, down along the coast that was now like a smudge from a dirty thumb. Directly underneath, the island of Brac, one of a series of former resorts that step-stoned down the coast to Dubrovnik. Not resorts now, he thought. He had no intel of fighting down there, but the war had been everywhere, the gruesome agony of a nation turned in on itself. Down there were perhaps only shuttered hotels and distrust; ahead on the mainland were horrors. He had already seen some of them. A so-called “peace accord” had been signed a few weeks before, but people who looked alike and had a common history and common problems were still killing each other, like a trapped animal chewing off its own leg.
The weather inland was lousy. Sarajevo was socked in, as usual. The UN food flights had just ended, and NATO had taken over the airfield. Alan watched the cloud tops, felt his eyes close, nodded forward—
“Cleared for landing. Check your straps, Lieutenant. You know how this goes—ejection position SOP. Make ready—” He felt the familiar turn and sink, deceleration, pressure as he came against the straps, but nothing like a carrier landing—no hook here, and a runway long enough to land a commercial jet. Alan saw the too-close bulk of Mount Igman, acres of dirty snow, low, dark cloud cover obscuring dark slopes, houses flashing underneath, a burned-out car—
A bang and a screech and they swiveled a degree and back and were down. A radar installation flashed past, two trucks angled to it in a plowed space, high snowbanks all around, a French logo. The plane was rolling now, no longer seeming to scream; they swung left into a taxiway, slowed some more and began the long taxi to the intake building. When Alan climbed down, a cold, wet wind slapped at him: welcome to Yugoslavia.
He blew out his breath. Six hours here. To do ten minutes of an ensign’s work. As he humped his pack toward the warehouse building that served IFOR as a local HQ, it started to snow.
The French officer signed for his package and gave him coffee (damned good—bitter, fresh) and asked him to stay to lunch (also damned good, probably, with wine), but a Canadian major with the worried look of an old monkey looked through a doorway and shouted, “That Craik?”
The Frenchman grimaced, winked at Alan. “Just arrived, Major.”
“In here, Craik.” The worry lines deepened and the major turned away, then looked back and said, “Welcome and—so on. Kind of a mess.”
Alan was supposed to sit for six hours and then get a lift to Aviano, sit for four hours, and then get something that might put him near the carrier. Suter’s idea. Nothing was supposed to happen here except turning over a lot of clapped-out aerial photos. “Uh—” he said stupidly at the retreating back, “—my orders have me going to—”
“Orders have been changed!” the voice floated back.
Suter again?
Alan shrugged himself deeper into his exhaustion and went through the door where the major had disappeared. There was a battered corridor, black slush on the floor, hand-lettered signs on pieces of notebook paper drooping from map pins like old flags—“G-3,” “S&R,” “Liaison.” He passed a makeshift bulletin board, most of the postings in both English and French. Well, they were Canadians, after all. At the top of the bulletin board, it said “UNPROFOR,” the acronym of the UN Protection Force that was in the process of pulling out.
“In here!” The major sat in a tiny office that had been a toilet before the sinks were ripped out. An unusable commode was almost hidden by a pile of pubs. “Francourt, Major, Canadian army. You know about all that.” He handed over some message traffic: his orders. Alan’s eyes flashed down it—“… temporary duty … CO UNPROFOR/CO IFOR Sarajevo… liaison and intelligence support and acquisition …” What was this shit?
The major was talking again. “You know UNPROFOR, what we do—?”
“I thought you were IFOR.”
The major shook his head. “UNPROFOR. We’re going, they’re coming.” He jerked his head toward the front of the building where the French officer was. “Unfortunately, some of us are still here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“French and Canadians down here, mostly us and the Italians up above.” He looked at Alan. “Tuzla.” That was “up above,” he meant. There had been a lot of fighting. “We were keeping the peace, ha-ha. You know all that. It says here you speak this African Kissy-willy, that right?” He rattled a piece of paper.
“Kiswahili? A little—”
“Good. And Italian, it says. Good, just the guy I want. We got a problem up there, I don’t follow it, but there’s a Kenyan medical unit making a hell of a noise, and I haven’t got time to deal with it. You’ve been asked for. Dick Murch—know him?”
His mind was slow because of no sleep, and it was all coming too fast—Yugoslavia, winter, snow, then all of a sudden Kenyans and Swahili. Murch. “Murch. Yeah—Canadian Army intel—”
“He asked for you by name.” The major rattled the paper again. “Your boss messaged us you’re just the man for the job.” The major, a man with decent feelings, glanced a little unbelievingly at Alan. It would be, after all, a shitty job, whatever it was—cold, uncomfortable, fruitless. Alan saw the major understand that Alan’s boss hated his guts. The major’s voice was almost apologetic: “Well—won’t last long. And it’s just being a good listener, eh? And you can take those photos you brought in right up to Murch and save us a step.”
Well, Alan thought, at least there would be wine with lunch before he left.
“There’s a plane going up in—well, it was supposed to leave a half-hour ago, but they never get out on time. One of yours.” He meant that the US had re-opened the airport at Tuzla and was moving there in a big way. Alan doubted the jab about being late; the Air Force, like the Navy, ran a tight operation. The major was just pissed because he was still here. “Dalembert’ll show you which one.” There went wine with lunch. And lunch, probably. A voice in his head said, This is another fine mess you’ve got us into! The voice would have been Harry O’Neill’s, doing one of his imitations. God, he wished O’Neill was with him! The bond of friendship would have got him through this crap. He and O’Neill had been two first-tour IOs together five years ago, winning the Gulf War on brilliance and brashness (with a little help from some pilots). O’Neill would have known how to deal with Suter. O’Neill would have known how to deal with Alan, for that matter. You’re good, Shweetheart—you’re really good—
“Got a weapon?” the major said.
Weapon. Weapon? Alan had to concentrate. “Got an armpit gun in my pack.”
“Wear it. They’re shooting at us up there. I mean, at us. Take off your rank, anything shiny.” He held up a finger. “Lesson: If you try to help some poor sonofabitch who’s being killed by his brother, they’ll both kill you, instead.” He made a gun with his hands and pretended to squint into a sight.
Alan gave another long, fatigued sigh. He unstrapped the pack and began to feel for the Browning nine-millimeter. This was a fine mess.
Fort MacArthur, North Carolina.
The Georgian brick buildings, the green lawns and the old trees looked like a university campus. The classroom looke
d like a university classroom. The students, in their thirties and forties, might have been university graduate students. But they weren’t. This was the toughest school in America, with the highest rate of flunkout, dropout, and just plain exhaustion. This was what people inside the intelligence community called the Ranch.
Harry O’Neill sat relaxed at one of the student desks. Unlike the rest, he was attentive to the briefing on Africa. The rest were in body positions that suggested that Africa didn’t exist for them. The teacher, himself a case officer no longer active, was pointing a laser pointer at a map with the outlines of countries but no names and asking questions with the resigned tone of a man who knew that he wouldn’t get answers.
“What’s this?” he snapped. When there was no answer, he said, “O’Neill?”
“Rwanda,” O’Neill murmured.
“This?” Silence. He nodded at Harry. O’Neill said, “Burundi.”
The bright dot moved. The teacher waited, flicked an eye at O’Neill. “Zaire.” Then, “Central African Republic. Chad—”
The teacher snapped the pointer off and leaned his butt back against a table, arms crossed, and said, “Okay, okay. You know what’s going on there? Want to do a little central African brief off the cuff, Mister O’Neill?”
Harry smiled. “Off the cuff, sir, let’s see—two years ago, there was a crash—some folks say a shootdown—of an aircraft with the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi aboard. All hell broke loose, with the two major ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, massacring each other. Tutsis came out on top, drove the Hutus into eastern Zaire, where they’re now living in big refugee camps that are being run by their own militias, who got out with their weapons and a big blood lust. When the other shoe drops, there’ll be hell all over again.”
“How come you know all this and the rest of these guys don’t, O’Neill?”
Before Harry could reply, a voice behind him said, low and with a snicker, “Cause dat’s his home, man!”
O’Neill was the only black man in the class.
The teacher snapped erect, face flushed. “All right—who said that—?”
But Harry O’Neill hadn’t stirred. He only smiled and said softly, “Oh, that’s okay, sir. I know who said it.”
When the class ended, most of them stirred and stretched, but a man named Richmond hurried out the door and started down the corridor. Harry O’Neill was just as fast, however; within a few strides, he had caught up and fallen in with the man, draping one arm around the other’s shoulders with what seemed perfect friendliness.
“Richmond, Richmond!” he said. He smiled. He squeezed Richmond’s shoulder. O’Neill had been both a Phi Beta Kappa and a starting defensive end at Harvard; the squeeze had authority. “Richmond, next week we have Close Combat Drill three times, did you know that? And, because I’m near the top of the class, I get to pick my partner, did you know that?” He gave another squeeze. “And Richmond—” His voice took on the same thick, fake-black tone that had been heard in the classroom. “Ah picks yew—man!”
Tuzla.
Alan tried to sleep on the short hop to Tuzla, but it was no good. They’d put him in a “crash-resistant” seat with enough straps to hold back Hulk Hogan, but they hadn’t given any thought to comfort. Most of the huge aircraft was loaded with cargo. The French coffee had lifted him for a little, but that was gone now. He had already had the second surge that comes with real fatigue, the time of being wired, with crash to follow. Except he hadn’t been able to crash. At Tuzla, they made one big turn and went in, with another aircraft on the runway ahead of them and another right behind. Like cyclic ops. Alan tried to find an office for UNPROFOR and finally learned that what was left of it wasn’t at the airfield; it was beyond the city, and he’d need transport. It was like a demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Somebody found him a truck.
The driver was Italian, one of those people who dedicate their lives to not being impressed, so he was not impressed that Alan spoke Italian with a Neapolitan accent. Still, he was willing to talk, so long as it was clear to Alan that he was not impressed by officer rank, either. When they had gone a few kilometers, he stopped.
“Good place to piss,” he said in Italian. “No snipers.” Alan didn’t recognize the Italian word for “snipers” but got it from a pantomime. The second time somebody had pretended to shoot him that day. He got out, and they stood side by side. Lots of other trucks had stopped here for relief; the place was an outdoor toilet, in fact. He climbed back up into the cab, higher than climbing into the old S-3 he had flown in for two years, and they coughed and clanked along. It was an incomparably gloomy scene, as so many land-war scenes are, all dirty snow and mud and artillery damage, and one woman with no teeth and a head scarf and a cow-like stare, watching them go past. Early in the war, a mortar round had landed in a square in Tuzla and killed seventy-one people, most of them children.
The trucker dropped Alan at what had been the UNPROFOR HQ. That was not where Murch was, of course; Murch was in the intel center, in a former school three rubble-strewn blocks away. When Alan had finally humped his pack to the right doorless office, Murch looked at him and said, “Is this the best the States can send us? You look like the meat course in an MRE.”
“I’m wiped.”
“You’ll fit right in.” Murch looked worn out himself. Alan had met Murch a couple of months before down on the coast; they had done a job together and had hit it off. They had found a shared interest in fishing. Murch was convinced there would be fishing nearby when spring came. His only evidence was that Tito had been a fisherman. “Eaten?”
“Somebody gave me a box lunch. I think I ate it. The French were going to give me real food. With wine.”
“You want to be walked through the chow line first or you want to crash?” There were cartons and fiber barrels everywhere. Murch was in the middle of moving.
“I’m running on empty, man.”
Murch handed him a tan plastic cup of acidic coffee and said, “Ten minutes. Got to brief you. Then—” He looked at his watch. “You can get eight hours and you’ll be off.”
“What the hell is ‘off’?”
Murch jerked his thumb toward the sky. “Up the hill. We’ll give you a Humvee and a driver and a gunner. You’re going up on a peacekeeping mission—between the Italians and the Kenyans.”
Thirteen minutes later, he was asleep.
Eastern Zaire.
The air was damp from rain that had come out of season, making haloes around the gas lamps in the cinder-block building. Insects flew in and out of the haloes. Out in the camp, somebody laughed; somebody screamed. Peter Ntarinada, sitting in the building in the scruffy room he called his office, pushed the gift bottle of Glenlivet across the rickety table. “I want more money and I want more arms,” he said.
The Frenchman poured himself some whiskey. He gave a kind of shrug with one eyebrow. “We don’t give something for nothing, Colonel. Lascelles himself said that times are tight.”
“Something for nothing! Look how I’m living! Is this nothing?” Peter snatched the bottle back, poured more into his own glass. “I’m living like a peasant! I live in this fucking camp that is paved with shit because we don’t have toilets—you call that nothing? Anyway, when we get back into Rwanda, you’ll be repaid. Lascelles knows he’ll be repaid. I have a scheme, you see? To move diamonds out of Angola—”
“Yes, yes.” The Frenchman nodded in the way that means, You told me that three times already. “We want you back in Rwanda, Colonel. We want you in the government there. But, we think—Lascelles thinks—in order for us to, mmm, underwrite you again, we need to have, mmm, insurance.”
“Insurance.” Ntarinada, a man at war, didn’t seem to understand the concept of insurance. In fact, he laughed.
“We want to put in a company of real soldiers, Colonel. Oh, I know, I know! Your men are soldiers, yes, yes, they are very good at beating up civilians and fragging people in churches, but frankly, the Tutsis are trained now, and
we have intelligence that the Ugandans and the Tanzanians are helping them. So—we need insurance, and you need real soldiers.”
Ntarinada’s face was drawn tight. He licked his lips. “White soldiers, you mean.”
“One company. The best. They’ll go through the Tutsis like a knife, then you come behind. Yes, white. Sorry—it’s the way the world is, Colonel. They have the guns, they have the training, and they have the recent experience. We’ll give you money and guns if you’ll accept one hundred of the best. To ease things a little, Lascelles will send a man you already know to run things. A friend of yours. Okay?”
Ntarinada was furious, but he contained his rage. “Who?”
“Zulu.”
Ntarinada stared. He was surprised. And impressed.
“Zulu,” the Frenchman said again. “The guy who was here two years ago and shot down the—”
Ntarinada held up a hand. “Not even here—don’t say it out loud.” He let his hand fall with a little slap on the table. He pushed his glass about, picked it up and drank off the rest of it and lifted the bottle to pour more. “A lot has happened since Zulu was here.”
“A lot has happened to him. Bosnia. He’s been fighting in Bosnia.”
