Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  For his part, Alan briefed and analyzed and fretted. He was delighted to tell Rose what he could about MANPADs and ship-fired chaff pods and light explosives. He still had time to worry about O’Neill and Rwanda, which looked to him more and more menacing. Admiral Pilchard asked him twice to brief his staff, and Parsills came to see him for a long talk. The African situation had been thrown at him by the admiral, who had some interest of his own in the continent and so was for once ahead of the Gnomes of Langley in sensing what was about to happen. To Parsills, however, a crisis in Africa was something from left field. His questions to Alan were troubled, half-angry: Why should they care? What was the US interest? What might happen? What were the implications of an evacuation plan?

  “Maybe a marine division to be put ashore, for starters.”

  Parsills came back twice more. He had thoughtful questions that clearly disturbed him, and he wanted to discuss them with somebody other than the admiral: What happened to the battle group if they had to oversee an evacuation from Zaire? Where was the CV? The missile cruiser? Who was minding the store in the Med? What were the constraints on the use of air power? What were the implications of the notoriously short legs of the F/A-18 if they had to fight in two oceans?

  Alan felt close to BG 7 because of Parsills and Rose and his part in the old Fleetex. From his office in the Pentagon, he grieved that he was not a member of the wedding.

  Like the rest of them, Electronics Tech Third Class Sneesen worked overtime in those days after Fleetex, trying to play catch-up. Screaming Meemie was everywhere, bellowing and threatening; Rafehausen came behind him, trying to pick up the pieces, help morale, keep the squadron together.

  It was a tough time for everybody, but for Sneesen it was also a time of intense learning. Chief Borne had given him four pamphlets and a book about the threats to traditional American values to take home with him and study while he was off the boat. They had titles like Aliens from Earth—Immigration and the Final Battle, and The Children of Satan and Eve: How the Jews Push the Anti-Christ’s Agenda. Sneesen learned a whole new vocabulary from them—spawn of Satan, mud-people, blood in the face. God’s plan for America. The Jewish specter behind sex music and so-called black culture. Jungle music. Gorillathletes. He learned whole explanations of things that had always been mysteries to him—why God sent AIDS via Africa. Why most so-called athletes are black. Why the Jews own the movie industry. How American so-called education rots the minds of America’s white, Christian children.

  It was all so goddam logical. It all made so much sense. Things that had bothered him but seemed to have no cause now hung together. There were plans, both divine and satanic; there were agendas, mostly bad. He’d been waylaid by political correctness—that “sensitivity” crap. Bullshit about diversity. Now, here was the truth—why he instinctively flinched from Jews. Why fundamentally he knew blacks were dumber. Why he knew in his gut that God was male and white.

  It was the most intense and exciting intellectual experience of his life.

  Without even thinking about it, he began to isolate himself from the black guys. When they spoke, he only grunted.

  The world, which had always bewildered him, was becoming clear.

  Tanzania.

  Harry O’Neill hadn’t heard from her, and then he had a report from an agent on the Zaire side of Lake Kivu that he should look for a message, and he thought it would be from her. What he really hoped was that she would bring it herself, but he was almost certain she wouldn’t. If she did, he would try to make her stay.

  The drop was just outside Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika. He had been driving fake runs over there once a week or so, timing the distance between points, looking for places where he could check for surveillance, doing the boring stuff he had been trained to do. He would drive over, never varying his route, stopping at a technical college and visiting the library, then going on to the Kigoma Chamber of Commerce, and getting to the lakeside in time to eat the lunch he’d brought in his car. He always did it the same, and he knew the surveillance was getting sick of watching him.

  The lake had a lot of traffic, both licit and illicit, and, despite the heavy presence of intel people and military from several countries, it was wide open. Most of them were waiting for something to happen, but nobody was quite ready yet. Harry had heard too many truckers talking about some sort of build-up south of here—real logistics, going to soldiers who sounded pretty professional. Harry wanted to either check it out in person or pay a trucker to do it for him. His chief had told him, bluntly, to keep his hands off.

  Harry watched the other people near the checkpoint. He thought several looked remarkably like Rwandan People’s Army officers in drag. They weren’t interested in him. They were waiting. Everybody seemed to be waiting. He thought they weren’t going to wait much longer.

  He went about his business there quietly, not acknowledging the surveillance, which was not very clever and not very enthusiastic and today was only one man in one car, not enough to follow the Yellow Brick Road, much less a case officer. He thought that they’d about given up on Harry O’Neill.

  He found the spot on the lakeside where he could eat his lunch and watch the drop, a hoteli near a private dock where some of the lake’s fishermen kept their boats. He sat in his car. The young man from the Tanzanian police watched him from what O’Neill thought was too great a distance for him to see anything useful, but that was his business. When the boat O’Neill was looking for came in, he waited, his head aching from hoping too hard, but the person who got off was a man, not her at all, and, although he wore the red hat that O’Neill was looking for, he was a disappointment. The man went up to the hoteli. After five minutes he came out, looked around, and walked down to the water’s edge.

  O’Neill got out of the car, wiping his hands on a towel he always had in the front seat, tossed it back in and looked up at the sky. Seeming to judge that it was sunny, he reached back in and got a baseball hat, also red, and walked down to the hoteli. The toilet was in the back, nothing but a bombsite in the concrete with a water tap next to it, but there was a lock on the door. He pissed, ran the water over his hands, and came out.

  The young plain-clothes cop had followed him down, and he went into the toilet the moment O’Neill was out, leaving his car parked in front of the hoteli. The man in the red hat was gone. When O’Neill got back to his car, he found a roll of film in the glove box.

  Two days later, he was in Dar-Es-Salaam with the roll of undeveloped film and the Agent Report encrypted on a floppy. Both went into the diplomatic bag for secure shipment to Washington.

  In Republika Srpska.

  Z believed he had found Draganica Obren’s husband, but he hadn’t told her so. There was a patient in a “mental ward” (meaning a kind of human warehouse) near Banja Luka who was officially known by a number but who had had a letter to Obren in his pocket when he was picked up two years before. He had no memory, was sometimes violent and had to be restrained, according to Z’s informant.

  Z thought she would be better off if she never learned about him, never let her hopes rise. Whoever he was, her husband or just somebody who happened to have picked up a letter, he would die some day, and nobody would care.

  But that was not his decision to make, Z decided. Draganica Obren should make her own decision. She should have the right to get herself to Banja Luka and look at this madman and see for herself if he had once been her husband.

  So when he was near her village in RS, he went over, meaning to tell her. He saw the schoolmaster first, the one she reported to, and he told Z about all the good information she brought back from Sarajevo, most of all about the War Crimes Unit. Names of its officers, where they lived, what their security arrangements were. “We could kill some of them,” the schoolmaster said with a grin. “Make a statement.”

  “That’s not my department. Anyway, not yet. You think she’s worth keeping on?”

  “Yes, my God—! She’s the best.”

  So he d
idn’t tell her about the man who might be her husband. He spent the night with her and left her some money and said she was doing a good job for Serbia. He didn’t tell her he was leaving soon for Africa.

  Langley.

  George Shreed was scrolling down the weekly summaries, bored, unhappy with himself, changing his position every few seconds because his spine ached despite his medication. He was trying to avoid the thought that something more was going on back there than the usual smashed disks and ruined nerves. A grin flitted across his mouth, his response to the irony of his caring if there was something there like meningitis or cancer—he, who could hardly walk! He, the human ruin!

  But there is a logical inconsistency in anybody’s thinking he is better off dead.

  Now and then he saw something on a list that seemed promising and he would click on it, and it would appear on a screen in another office, and somebody would come to see him about it in a day or two. Like a spider in his web, Shreed thought. A metal-legged spider. He didn’t think of his legs as legs any more. The steel canes were his legs. My war trophies. He had been a pilot once, a very good pilot, and he had crashed.

  He was scrolling through Agent Reports Received and something caught his eye and he scrolled back, not knowing quite what it had been—Yes, that one. In the African section. “Eye-witness reports missile shootdown of civilian aircraft. Reliability One. (Photos).”

  Photos! That would be rather interesting. He knew exactly what shootdown was meant, from the date and the place. Rwanda. With photos? He wondered why it had taken three years to get the stuff here. Probably a fake, somebody trying to make some money. Still—

  He knew the unverified reports and the rumors, and the belief in part of the community that the French had been behind that shootdown. Agent reports like these were rigidly guarded, but his clearance was so high he was qualified to see them. It was not unusual that he would open one, as he was doing now, although normally he would have got the material in a digest, rewritten so that the agent’s identity was hidden. Now, however, he read the report, and he saw at once that it was probably genuine and that the agent could be easily identified by his or her (he thought her—why?) access to one of the Hutu Interahamwe generals. Very high-risk action. Dynamite.

  He clicked on the report and brought up another screen and blue-lighted four names and clicked again, and the report popped up on the encrypted mail of four of his analysts. He sent the usual terse message—read and report, prepare to discuss implications, all that.

  Interesting.

  He downloaded a fifth copy of the report to a disk. Later, from another computer, he mailed it to an internet address. No record of this transaction would exist.

  Shreed left at a little after six and drove himself home in his specially equipped car. He always looked forward to getting home—a good sign in a smashed-up man, he thought. Life can’t be too bad if you’re glad to get home. Home was a sprawling four-bedroom in Falls Church, where they’d lived for twelve years. Every year, the commuting got worse, the neighbors got younger, and the neighbors’ kids’ problems got more serious—drugs, AIDS. His own kids were grown now but would have survived what his neighbors’ kids could not; his kids had grown up in places like Macao and Jakarta and had the expat child’s blend of toughness and despair that made for survival, the result of being both feared and cosseted in alien places. His house was a kind of island for him in the oily sea of the Washington suburbs. It was supremely comfortable and, thanks to his wife of twenty-seven years, elegant in a slightly dated way he liked, vaguely colonialist, evoking the warren in Europe of some retired senior civil servant homesick for the places where he had spent his real life. Shreed entered it with relief—the Javanese shadow puppets in the foyer, the ranks of barrister’s bookshelves in his study, the real Kilims, the lingering odor of Straits Chinese curry—and kissed his wife, scratched the cat, massaged the dog, had two drinks and ate his dinner.

  “I am the most ordinary man in the world,” he said to her. And winked.

  “You’re going online?”

  “Only for a bit.”

  “You’ve become an addict.” She meant it as a joke, but it had edge. She was a tall, handsome woman with soft gray hair that fluffed out around her head and down her shoulders. From the back she still could have been taken for a girl. But menopause had been hard on her; intercourse was no longer possible, or not possible without pain that made it out of the question, and other kinds of sex were usually distasteful to her. She took their near-celibacy harder than he did and was always ready to think she was losing him and deserved to.

  He kissed her. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.” She shook her head. They had reached that age when nothing comes without a sliver of imperfection that may prove to be, with horrible speed, only the thin end of some terrible wedge. “I have some reading to do,” she said. She taught history at a community college, confused him by seeming to enjoy it.

  He had some quite special software that did not appear as itself when the hard disk’s contents were called up. It had other, quite innocent names—a defragger, a zip program. Now, he booted up one of these.

  Shreed stared at the screen for some time. His wife came in, kissed the back of his neck; he reached back and touched her. “Going up?” he murmured.

  “I’m going to read.”

  “I’ll be up.”

  When she was gone, he turned back to the computer. He called up the African report from the place where he had stored it and, using one of the masked programs, translated it to an encrypted form that was compressible to a single pixel. Then he called up from a file called “Books Read” a color photograph of a naked woman performing a fairly common sex act with another woman. He told the computer to embed the compressed data as a pixel in the photo, which it did through random selection, locating it in one of the women’s left big toenail.

  Shreed then consulted a list on another computer, sent the digitized photo from one computer to the other, and then sent it over the internet to the selected address. And, like that!, it was gone.

  Seconds later. Tehran.

  The digitized photo was intercepted by an Iranian monitoring its destination in Dubai. The operator found the pixel that contained too much data. He expanded the pixel that had resided near the toenail of the darker of the two naked women and transferred it to another computer, whose operator activated a decryption program that would run for nearly forty-eight hours before either decrypting the pixel’s data or admitting defeat.

  Within half an hour, a message about the interception of the pixel was on the desk of Yuri Efremov, the former Soviet KGB colonel who had sold his skills to Iran when the Soviet Union self-destructed. After studying the memo, he put it in a “To file” basket and turned to other matters: to date, they had not succeeded in decrypting anything that had come through this channel.

  But this time was different. Thirty-one hours later, he was given a copy of the single page that had been decrypted—a low-resolution photograph (JPG file, he thought to himself, nature of the transmission?) that showed several white men with a shoulder-fired missile, and black men standing in the background. If that had been all, it would have been merely tantalizing, but the picture had been taken by one of those little cameras that print a date and time on the image itself. And the date told him, without his even having to look it up, precisely where the picture had been taken and what the men with the missile were doing. Rwanda, April 6, 1994, he thought.

  “Remarkable,” he said to himself in Russian. “Remarkable.” He had the photograph scanned and sent to his home computer.

  Four seconds later. Beijing.

  After receiving the photo from the transfer site in Dubai, and unaware of its interception by Iran, the deputy head of signals had to wait two days to see the Chinese Under-Minister for Defense Munitions. He had outlined the subject of his visit in making the appointment. It was not, therefore, surprising that a Chinese he did not know, probably a diplomat or just possibly a la
wyer, was also present. Immediately interested in the report and its photographs of several whites shooting a Stinger missile, he murmured apart with the under-minister, and a few minutes later the two began to shoot questions at him—Where had it come from? How reliable was it? Could it have been faked? Who were the whites in the photographs? How had the photographs been taken? What nations had the greatest interest in such a report?

  Two hours later, they dismissed him. So far as he could tell, they thought a man named Lascelles would be the most productive buyer of the report.

  One day later. Cannes.

  Lascelles looked down at the papers and photographs spread on the library table before him. The photographs were not of the best quality, being computer-printed, but they were clear enough. His old man’s face was blotched with red. His breathing rasped.

  “Get me Zulu,” he growled. His head snapped around toward the two other men in the room, who looked blank. “Get me Zulu, you stupid filth!”

  One day later. Belgrade.

  Zulu had spent the morning organizing the movement of his two elite companies out of their barracks. A couple of TU-109s were on their way from Tirana; by the time they landed next day in Dehibat, his agents there would have housing and office space available. It was all tremendously hurry-up. The Libyans were cooperative, a good deal more so than usual, either because Lascelles had thrown money at them or because they wanted to get rid of Zulu and his men—officially, Libya was anti-Mobutu. He didn’t care about the reason. He was so angry at what Lascelles had said to him that he didn’t care about any of it: You get your Serbian ass down there and make it right! You let some fucking American agent take your photo, you shit, you filth, you pig’s cock, and you’d better make it right or I’ll have you killed! I’ll have your children killed! I’ll—!

  Z wouldn’t take that kind of abuse. He wasn’t a child, no matter how big a man Lascelles was in his own mad world of Napoleonic fantasy.