Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  But, of course, he would do as he was ordered.

  His men had been training for Zaire for four months. There was big money in it and more weapons. He would have to find a way to deal with Lascelles’s infantile insults later.

  Z drove home. His wife knew at once that something was up—knew it from his face, knew it from the way he fondled his children, knew it from his voice.

  He sat on the bed and drew her to him, pressing his face into her belly. “I have to go,” he said.

  She started to weep, quietly, no sobs.

  “Africa,” he said.

  She knew it was too late to ask questions. He started to pack. She sat on the bed, and he told her what the arrangements would be for mail through Libya, people to call in Belgrade if there was an emergency. Finally, when he had got out his pistol and was checking it, she said, “Why now?”

  He shrugged. He worked the slide. “Some American. Some American CIA shit did something and the balloon is going up.” He let the slide slam shut and put the pistol into its holster and began to get into the shoulder harness. “I’ll be back in two weeks. It’s only a matter of pushing some blacks back across a border into a place called Rwanda. They won’t know what has hit them.”

  They kissed. His children cried.

  Next day. The Pentagon.

  Alan Craik didn’t know about Z. However, he did see a reliable-source report next day that two planeloads of Serbian mercenaries, with battle gear, had landed in Dehibat, reportedly in transit south. He inferred correctly that they were going to support Mobutu in Zaire, and so advised Admiral Pilchard.

  The balloon was about to go up along the Zairian border, he said.

  He continued to worry about O’Neill.

  14

  October

  The Uganda – Zaire border.

  O’Neill had crossed into Zaire twice a couple of months ago, both times by air, heading for Kisangani to do something that the resident in Kinshasa couldn’t get around to. Airplanes generally took you well above trouble, whatever their bad reputation for disasters. Flying at thirty thousand feet, he could look down and see the chain of lakes that used to separate French Africa from British Africa, pick out the length of Lake Tanganyika and, north of it, Lake Kivu, like the dot on an upside-down exclamation mark. On each side of Kivu were extreme danger and death—the camps at Bukavu and Goma, enough blood to have turned the lake red. Flying over, however, he had seen only brilliant blue water, fields, and the steep mountainsides and forests of Zaire. It was like a theorist’s view of war, very clean, very safe. A nice way to do spook work.

  This time, however, he was going in by road, and he didn’t like it. Elizabeth had at last asked to be taken out. He had suddenly had a message from her two days ago, plus a report that she had been seen as far south as Uvira, then up north near Goma. Then the “Get me out” message, the comm plan’s emergency cry for help.

  She was staying close to the leadership of the faction to which her half-brother belonged, he thought, but trying to keep herself clear of the fighting in the camps. Her one report, three weeks ago, had been crisp, fact-filled, unemotional. It had told him what other people had heard but she could verify: the Interahamwe were growing more violent, more desperate as more and more Hutus tried to return to Rwanda from Zaire. The Rwandan government broadcast pleas for them to come home and assured them that they would be safe; the Zairians were sick of them and wanted them gone; the only food was coming from the aid agencies, and there were too many people for the camps.

  He had to wonder how she had stayed alive and still been able to get such stuff, unless she had taken part in some of it. Maybe she had had to. Maybe that was how she had got close enough to know for sure.

  Anyway, it was over for her. She had sent him the message that she had to get out.

  He hadn’t seen her since they’d been at the Kenya game lodge. If anything, he loved her more, not less. He wanted her all the time; the nights without her were miserable, tormented. Now she was coming out, and the moment he had her safe in Arusha, he would send in his resignation and they’d be away. The air reservations were made.

  There was only this sticky part of driving into Zaire a few hundred meters to get her. That she had had to do it this way suggested that things were tight for her. O’Neill squeezed his left arm against the gun in his armpit for the twentieth time. He had never had to carry the weapon before; now, ending his brief career as a spook, he hoped he wouldn’t really need it.

  The road he was taking was a mess of rubble and potholes, some as wide as the road and deep enough to break an axle. The road had until 1990 been a mere track that ran down along the flanks of the Ruwenzori to Kasindi, the one-dog border town between Uganda and Zaire. Only the locals had used it, along with people sight-seeing in that part of the Queen Elizabeth Park, until Idi Amin had ruined the parks and even that use had stopped. Then the first wave of genocide had struck Rwanda, and all the heavy trucks that every day had pounded the main road from Kigali into Goma had had to find a new route. They went north into Uganda and nosed around and found the border crossing at Kasindi, so many of them that the road had had to be paved, meaning that a one-inch layer of asphalt had been laid down over dirt. It was broken to bits almost before it hardened, but the fact that it was paved brought still more trucks, and after two years it was the worst road in Uganda, which is saying a lot. Most of the trucks then stopped using it, it was so bad.

  Now O’Neill was headed down it, nursing the dust-white LandCruiser into the huge holes and out again. He was able to go around some; others spread so wide that their verges had become bottomless sand pits. He thought of Hammer, who had died trying to get his vehicle out of a mudhole. Maybe he should have brought somebody along, in case he got stuck. Three times, he was astonished, then terrified to see dust boiling toward him; after the first time he knew that the dust hid a sixteen-wheeler coming up from Zaire. They drove as fast and hard as they could on this road, as if they could mash the road into condition. If he hadn’t got out of the way, they’d have flattened him, too. He came across one truck stranded in a hole with an axle broken and the drive wheels deep in the sand. The driver waved. He had been there for two days, he said. No, he didn’t want a ride; somebody with a big tractor went up and down, making a living pulling trucks out. He’d be along.

  It wouldn’t matter, once he had her. He’d put up with this road coming back. He’d walk, coming back, if he had to. Getting her was everything.

  Things seemed normal. The trucks, the dust, the quiet. Prior had told him yesterday that there were reports of a lot of activity down around Kigoma, but up here everything was quiet. Anyway, this was Uganda.

  The town was nothing. On the map it appeared to be something; in reality, there was a border post, and a few houses scattered along a couple of hundred meters of the road. And a hoteli, where dispirited prostitutes were standing around looking at nothing, waiting for the truckers to come back. Two of them ran out when they saw his car. He didn’t stop. The border post was tougher than he had expected, even though he’d been warned. The Ugandan military had a lot of spunk because they’d won a good part of their war and were still doing pretty well in the north, and they hadn’t been back long enough for real corruption to set in. They had AKs and razor wire, and they weren’t taking any shit from anybody, not even an American businessman like the one O’Neill was supposed to be. They gave him a hard time, but they let him through. He laid the groundwork for his return with Elizabeth: he was only going to pick up his wife, he said, who had been spreading God’s word in Beni. The grunts were not impressed. He hoped they’d be more impressed by her false passport when he brought her back.

  The Super Ten Moteli and Monumental Strip Bar sat on the left side of the road a couple of hundred meters inside Zaire. It had no motel and, so far as he could see, no strippers. It was a truckers’ rest stop, with some beer cases and a low building with rooms like chicken coops, by the hour or the night, and five stringy women.
/>   He was to park his car there and walk in a hundred paces. He would come to the remains of a colonial house—the former Belgian customs officer’s residence, in fact. Next to it would be a soccer field. He was to walk down the soccer field where she could see him, and, when she knew it was he, she would come out. She would be wearing green. Then they would go home. He was aware that he was following her directions. He had been trained never, ever to follow an agent’s plan; always insist on your own. But this was Elizabeth.

  O’Neill pulled in next to the bar and set the parking brake and squeezed the gun with his upper arm. Either she was still very afraid, or it was a trap. He had had that thought all along—that it could be a trap—but he wanted her so much, he did not allow it to be a trap. Anyway, nobody trapped American CIA people. The retribution was too terrible. Anyway, it couldn’t be a trap, because the signals had been right. Everything checked out. It couldn’t be a trap.

  He got out of the car and locked it and told one of the resident women that he was sorry, but he couldn’t enjoy her services because he was a man of God, which amused her a good deal, probably the best thing that had happened to her all day. She gave him a sales pitch that used several words he hadn’t learned yet to describe things he probably had heard of in English. His heart was pumping so hard from getting ready to see Elizabeth that he could hardly hear her, and finally she gave up and shrugged. O’Neill unlocked his car, wiped the sweat away with his towel, and locked it again. It couldn’t be a trap, he told himself. It couldn’t be a trap.

  He shifted the gun a little, moving the butt farther out from his arm so he could get at it quicker. He would rather have had it in the front of his pants, cross-draw, but you don’t do that with a Beretta and hope to drive a car. He remembered that Craik had hated the Beretta, and now he had to agree. It was a really lousy concealed gun. He was wearing a half-belted khaki shirt that was sort of like a short-sleeved bush jacket; it was an idiotic garment, very touristy à la Hemingway, but it was the only thing he had that halfway concealed the Beretta.

  The customs officer’s house had fallen in and was growing bananas through its roof. It had been a fine house of that style, one-storied with a metal roof and verandahs, and windowless hovels out in back for servants. Now it was too far gone even for squatters. O’Neill walked past it, sweating buckets, and turned the wrong way and had to go back several steps before he came to what he figured out was the soccer field. It was untended, and nobody had played soccer there in years. Only the remains of something gray that had been used as a goal told him that he was there.

  O’Neill prayed. He prayed for her and he prayed for the two of them. He prayed that it would be okay, and in twenty minutes he would be laughing with her about the horrible road back up to Katunguru. Please, God. Just this once.

  He started down the field. Tall, dry grass whisked at his legs like broom straws. A cool breeze was blowing down from the Mountains of the Moon, drying his sweat, but he never noticed it. He was keeping his eyes moving to see everything, trying, as he had once heard a pilot say, to read the whole instrument panel at once. Then he saw her, down at the end, wearing a green pantsuit that he thought he remembered, and his heart turned over. She waved, and he waved, and he began to run.

  There were thornbushes down at the end of the soccer field, and when he got down there, panting, she had disappeared behind one of them. He knew that wasn’t right, and he put his hand on the gun and prayed and stepped around the bush where he thought she had gone, and there was nobody. He knew it was a trap, then.

  He stood still. There was loud insect sound, a buzzing like cicadas. The wind. A truck on the road—not that far away.

  “Elizabeth?”

  He pulled the gun out.

  Something moved at the edge of his vision. He turned, and he saw her.

  He wouldn’t have recognized her because of what they had done to her face, but he knew the size of her, and her body. She was staggering. She had lost her sense of balance and perhaps couldn’t see, because she put one hand a little ahead of her and one out at the side, but nothing worked in coordination with anything else and she half-fell and walked first one way and then another. She was naked. Dried blood covered the inside of her legs.

  O’Neill heard himself gasp. He heard himself squeal her name.

  “You like her?” a high-pitched voice cried. “You love her?”

  Men appeared behind her. O’Neill knew it must be her half-brother. He carried a machete. Then another man, this one white.

  O’Neill raised the pistol and managed one aimed shot before something struck him on the side of the head, and he was grabbed from behind and the right side, a hand over his face and then another coming over his forehead from the back, going into his eyes. He fired three shots but he couldn’t see, three shots at nothing. There were four men, he thought, holding him as he struggled, prying the gun out of his hand by breaking his fingers. He did what he had been taught. He caught somebody in the gut, and he kicked a chest hard enough to stop the heart, but one man is no match for four. They held him and beat him and then swung him around to look at her.

  “You like her?” the brother said again in that high voice. “You like her face? You like her hair? Lots of men like her! She had one hundred and twenty-three men since yesterday! Some twice! Okay—I give her to you!”

  She had wandered forward a little. He got behind her and put the machete at her throat, pulling her head back by the hair; O’Neill roared, and her half-brother cut her throat with a single long stroke, deep, deep, and arterial blood gushed out, down her body and forward on the dry ground. He twisted her as she fell, holding the hair, and swung the machete and cut deep again into her neck and then, letting go, he hacked at her until her head was off. He jabbed the point of the machete deep into the severed neck so he could lift the head and brandish it. Blood was running down from the neck over the machete, over his hand and his wrist.

  “I give her to you!” he screamed. He ran forward. When he was a dozen steps away, he stopped. “You piece of American shit!” he screamed. Down the field, the white man was looking at Elizabeth’s headless body. “You did it! You shit Americans, you pushed the Tutsis on us and now they’re killing us and you’re right behind them!”

  It was the first O’Neill knew about the invasion of Zaire. It must have started overnight, was what he was thinking, but he didn’t get very far with the thought. The man ran at O’Neill, swinging the machete with her head on it like a club. The head hit him on the left temple and the top of his own head with a great cracking noise. The head split, the machete coming out through the right cheek and jaw, and the half-brother lifted it again and brought it down on O’Neill, again and again until the machete cut through the bones and it fell off, and he hit O’Neill with the blade, but he was unconscious by then.

  15

  To Sea, October

  The day was fine and bright. Captain Cobb, of the Aegis cruiser Fort Klock, thought that it was an autumn day worthy of New England. The sea was the rich, deep blue that it saved for special days, and the sky overhead was deeper still, seeming to grow up and out from the bright horizon to the overhead depths of space. The sun was rising out past Hampton Roads, and the bright disk reflected off the wave tops in a shining path to the east. The Fort Klock’s bow wave showed a perfect, crisp white against the water as she cut a path toward the open ocean. Cobb leaned out over the portside bridge wing and looked back along the column.

  The solid bulk of the carrier was next in line. Aside from a battleship, no human invention gives a deadlier air of menace and danger than the ominous gray box of an aircraft carrier. The morning sun caught the wingtips of the dozens of aircraft parked at the deck edges and painted the haze-gray wings and fuselages a healthy orange.

  On board the carrier, LCDR Rafe Rafehausen stood near the bow, next to the plane that carried his name. He thought of traditional things—the woman who more and more filled his mind, the gas bill he had forgotten to pay, the fact that he
had left his short-wave radio behind. He also thought that these were the mornings that made a man proud to be a sailor, when the armed might of the fleet showed to best advantage and the world smiled on those who went down to the sea in ships, or planes. He tried to think of a way to say this to the men and women of his squadron around him, but all that came out was “Hell of a morning, folks.” To himself he said, half in prayer, half in promise, It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be fine.

  Several yards away, EM3 Sneesen kept sneaking a glance at the new crow ironed on his shoulder that meant that he had been promoted to petty officer third class. He longed to get back to work, to get 705 in really great shape for LCDR Rafehausen, to make the back end sing and fix the sluggish controls and earn more praise, more slaps on the back. He treasured the new knowledge of the world he had got from Borne’s books, caressed it in his mind, counted it over like money. It was like—power. Knowledge was power.

  LTjg Christy Nixon put aside her troubles and simply let the wind blow over her face. No more exercises. No more impossible decisions. The real thing. She felt like singing. It’ll be okay. She looked at Rafehausen. He’d been cruel about her fuckups in the Fleetex. Yet—It’ll be okay.

  On the flag bridge, high above the flight deck, Admiral Pilchard looked out at the sunrise between scribbling notes for his staff. His second deployment in eighteen months was not acceptable to his wife, nor could he blame her. He knew how to do so many things better, this time, and he knew how seldom any admiral got two shots at battle-group command. His pen stopped as he noted, for the tenth time, that he didn’t have a flag intel officer. Got to fix that. Ask Jack—move up the CAG AI? Kick the thing downstairs? So far, he was leaning on the ship’s N-2, and the N-2 was delighted to help, for now. In time, the workload of doing both jobs would kill him. Tackle that problem later.