The Threat

by David Poyer

  The state dinner that evening was at a palace on the river that had once been “Chinese” Gordon’s headquarters. Dan thought he’d seen the grand staircase before in some film. He vaguely remembered Gordon being speared to death on it by a howling mob of the Mahdi’s fanatics. Islamic uprisings, jihad, massacre, were old stories here. He stood by in an anteroom. The power went out during the performance, which was children doing traditional dances. Guards brought in torches, and the show went on. The effect was exotic and frightening; strange whining music, guttering torchlight, the fixed expressions of the dictator’s staffers-slash-henchmen.

  The De Baris retired early, but the State people stayed at the palace for a night session. Dan overheard enough to get the feeling this wasn’t the fact-finding jaunt the press people had made it out to be.

  The second day a huge, grizzle-bearded black man arrived, surrounded by bodyguards. Now three gangs of guards, all heavily armed, including the Secret Service’s SWAT people, glowered and elbowed each other outside the carved doors of the conference room. He wondered what would happen if one of the Sudanese decided the Mahdi had been right about Christians after all.

  The highlight was the photo op, when the session finally broke. No, the Moment. Garang and el-Bashir were both bald, fat, ugly thugs whose suits did not fit at all. A beaming De Bari shepherded them into a reception room with the pontifical bonhomie of a don brokering a gangland truce. He announced they’d just signed a cease-fire. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army would end twelve years of civil war, and Garang would join a coalition government as el-Bashir’s vice president.

  The two shook hands like tranquilized grizzlies as the press teemed and shouted questions, which they ignored. Dan noticed el-Bashir looking at him. His heavy-lidded eyes examined his uniform, then dropped to the satchel. As soon as the handshake was over Garang left, his security crowded so close he could not even be seen.

  It was probably a historic occasion, but he was busy trying to rejuggle the seating arrangements on Air Force One for the next leg, to Zaire. He’d have been more impressed if he hadn’t also seen the oil company executives with the State people the night before, and heard them discussing exploration blocks, probable reserves, and a pipeline to the Red Sea. He recognized these men now. They were De Bari’s golfing buddies, his intimates and presumably his donors. Not only that, one of the companies was the China National Petroleum Corporation. A reporter told him the deal was that the Nuer and Dinkas wouldn’t attack the oil fields, in exchange for a third of the revenue.

  The more he saw of politics, the better he liked the Navy. It had its share of assholes and incompetents. But being ready to step in front of a bullet, or face a hurricane, sheared away at least some of the greed and ego.

  But the next moment he answered himself. Who cared if the Dinkas got paid off? If this thug or that lobbyist got rich? Wasn’t ending a civil war a good thing?

  He stood with the satchel between his boots, pistol under his jacket, watching the smiling men congratulating each other. The president’s back was to him. He stood rigid, struggling again with the demon that whispered, Do it. You fucking coward.

  * * *

  The next day, in Zaire. He’d located a marginally navigable road out to the camp, so they took the motorcade. In the command van, enjoying air-conditioning while he had it, he rode in silence across from McKoy. Dan thought after a time: Maybe I should tell him. Or somebody.

  He envisioned it. “I’m having thoughts about killing the president.” Yeah right … or maybe, “I’m having doubts about my fitness for this job.” That might be better. But phrase it how he might, it’d still put the last nail in his coffin.

  If he could just finish, he might still get back to sea. It was possible, with the medal, with his record … not that it was such a great record … too many damaged ships, too many dead, too many internationally inconvenient episodes swept under the carpet. Still, he’d done his duty. There were those who disagreed. But you couldn’t please everybody.

  But could he go on? Being in this situation day after day … More pressure wasn’t what he needed. His neck hurt. He had flashbacks. He didn’t need this.

  But if he couldn’t handle it, he’d never get another ship …

  “You’re deep in thought,” the lead agent said.

  “Just going over the schedule.”

  “One more country, then we can head home.”

  “Well, I’ll be ready.”

  But to himself he wondered: Home? And where was that? An empty house? A wife who’d left? He looked out at the ash and patches of tortured volcanic rock that got larger and more frequent, the vegetation more sick and stunted-looking, the closer they got to the Goma Refugee Camp.

  * * *

  The tents started dotting the gravelly, wasted terrain half an hour before they turned off the road. The van lurched. Rocks screeched along the pan and whanged in the wheel wells. Some were cloth shelters, military surplus, but most were nothing more than sticks propping up blue plastic tarps with the letters UNHCR on them.

  He looked at the briefing sheet again. A million dead, hacked apart with machetes. A million and a half refugees, fleeing rape, militia rampages, looting, and tribal terror. Their hovels were crammed campfire to campfire all the way to distant green mountains streaked with mist, or smoke, or maybe even volcanic vapor. Supposedly the last mountain gorillas lived up there. Or had, until hungry humans had invaded their domain.

  When they got out the humid, cloying heat closed down like a sauna at full blast. A distant murmur surrounded them, and a stink like smoldering matches. The volcano had burned this whole valley out only a few years before. It still smoked on the horizon, chuffing out sulfurous gas and a fine gray fog. That fog was a choking-fine powder of ash, and the gas turned to sulfuric acid in the lungs and eyes. The briefing sheet said that the volcano could explode again any time. Fumes, clinkers, and a gritty black dust like hard, shiny little particles of fly shit permeated everything.

  The UN resident commissioner was waiting on a little drab hill of what looked like frozen mud. Dan, following the president’s party across it, realized it was a mixture of volcanic rubble and some sort of petrified or vulcanized dung, human or animal he couldn’t tell.

  Following the commissioner, handkerchiefs to their faces, they trailed the president and a slowly walking Letitia De Bari down into the valley. Under the equatorial sun, as if developed by the fumes, colors grew feverishly vibrant as they drew closer over the dead black ground. Traces of strangely too-green grass lay trampled and scorched. The refugees’ visages were inky holes under their scarves, clothes a fluorescent riot of cheap oranges, sick blues, hot pinks. They milled slowly, coughing, on the far side of a bright yellow webbed-plastic crowd barrier. He coughed too, feeling the acid bite into his lungs, as the administrator began, “They call this the Valley of Death.”

  The president and first lady looked uneasy as Ericssen gave them the rundown on the refugees. “As you can see, this is wasteland, avoided and dreaded before they arrived. There are no wells; this is lava mantle beneath us. No water and no drainage equals epidemics. Typhoid. Dysentery. Malaria. Blackwater fever. The mass graves are half a mile east of here. We lost twenty thousand this summer to cholera.”

  Empty eyes followed them as they picked their way downhill. A female staffer turned an ankle and went down. When she lifted her hands blood trickled from all-but-invisible lava cuts. The commissioner droned on in a digital voice, hands in his pockets and a gaze blank as those of his charges. He spoke of rations. Transport. The hostility of the indigenous population. The destruction of the gorillas. The denuding of the mountains to feed the greenwood cookfires that Dan realized were responsible for as much of the haze as the volcano. Each sentence he formed, each shack they passed, each group of huddled, vacant-looking human beings, was more hopeless. From inside one tent, as they drew near, a woman was screaming and crying.

  “This is just horrible,” Mrs. De Bari interrupted at last,
voice high and breaking-brittle. “All these people. Somebody should do something.”

  “We’re trying our best,” the commissioner said. “HIV infections have jumped elevenfold this year, due to rapes, prostitution, and lack of both condoms and an understanding of the disease…”

  Under the plastic sheeting the woman came into view, rocking and hugging a wrapped bundle. Dan looked at the president. De Bari’s face shone with sweat. Dark half-moons bearded the armpits of his golf shirt. He looked poleaxed, like one of the steers on his ranch.

  His wife asked to be taken back to the limo. De Bari looked longingly after her. Dan waited, clutching the football. He kept checking the barrier, noting the thousands of bodies on the other side. If they decided to swarm, was he really going to shoot to keep some starving refugee’s hands off the SIOP? He decided he wasn’t. Nobody here was going to call in an option on encrypted UHF.

  When he looked back toward the president he caught his breath and began hurriedly picking his way over the sharp ground after him. A thin wailing chorus came from the fog-smoke ahead. POTUS was not walking back, toward the motorcade, air-conditioning, and safety. He was headed up one of the lava-strewn hills that rose into the haze. Maybe to see better, but not pleasing McKoy. Dan heard the lead agent shouting, but didn’t catch De Bari’s reply.

  The keening grew louder as they climbed. He couldn’t imagine what it was. Then, as he crested the hill, he came to a stop where the president had already halted, looking down into a pit over which the choking haze hung low.

  It was filled with forms that took him a moment to identify. Wasted, small figures lying on blankets and on the omnipresent blue tarps. These people might lack everything else, a horrified corner of his mind wisecracked. But they had enough blue plastic sheeting.

  They’d been lying motionless, but when they noticed the group watching from above, they began to stir. They sat up. Left their games of tossing stones at bushes. Gradually a crowd gathered.

  “Who are these kids?” De Bari wanted to know.

  “Orphans,” the commissioner said. “Their families have been murdered. Or died of AIDS or cholera. When the children have no remaining family, we concentrate them. For their own protection.”

  Dan looked at the open sky, the sprawling horror all around. But for some reason this seemed more appalling. These small withered creatures, huddling into groups out of the simple child’s desire to be close to someone.

  A translator shouted something. The children hesitated. Then kept coming, stumbling up the hillock. Some were crawling. Individually they were just smudge-faced kids. His gaze went from one to the next. But there were hundreds, and more were getting to their feet and beginning to wander their way. The translator shouted again, but they didn’t stop. The air smelled of shit and smolder and something almost coppery, like blood.

  “Let’s move back now, Mr. President,” McKoy said. He hand-signaled to the detail. The agents pincered out, taking positions between De Bari and the advancing tide. “Time to get back to the motorcade.”

  The president didn’t move, so Dan moved up beside him. The kids were thirty yards away. Two spindly boys had the lead. One was wrapped in blue plastic. The other had found a man’s T-shirt somewhere. Stained and ragged, it flapped over bony knees swollen to the size of softballs. He led an even smaller girl by the hand. She looked up as they climbed, barefoot on the flinty hot ground. Her eyes were huge and very white against dusty skin.

  “There should be shelter,” Dan heard the president say. “Not just these fucking tarps.”

  “We’ve had to allocate all our transport space to fuel and food.”

  “Why do these people need fuel?”

  “They don’t, sir. We do. To transport the food to them.”

  “Let’s move back, Mr. President.” McKoy again, insistent, as the children flowed to right and left, boxing them in now on three sides. A throng whose only sound was the shuffling of bare feet in cinders, and weeping sniffles from the smallest.

  The smoke and dust parted to a hot breeze. When Dan lifted his gaze it went out over hundreds, no, thousands of children. It was like a battlefield, except that these still or slowly wandering forms were ridiculously small, absurdly thin, incredibly heartbreaking.

  Now all the agents and even the UN people were moving to place themselves in front of where De Bari stood, somehow looking alone for the first time. No trace of the glad-handing politician now. Nor of the gangland don. He stood coughing, shoulders slumped, staring at the oncoming tide.

  “Mr. President, we should go back,” the UN rep suggested.

  “Sir, he’s right,” Dan put in.

  He glanced back to make sure the way back over the lava and trash was still clear. Even the press people were backing away, though they were still recording, telecams intent. The press secretary looked apprehensive. The Moment, Dan thought. It might be here. But what kind of Moment would it turn out to be?

  He took De Bari’s arm. But the president reached down and brushed his hand off, gaze still on the advancing throng.

  The translator shouted again. But the children, fascinated by the strange beings they’d discovered, didn’t even slow. The smells of their bodies and clothes and diseases came up on the hot wind. A strange, dry, inhuman stink like a herd of dying animals. But close up they were not a herd. Just a boy in a ragged T-shirt. A girl with a dirty bandage around her head. Others carried sharpened sticks over their shoulders. Dan could not imagine what their lives were like, locked in this nightmare valley without food, or water, under the white relentless sky.

  McKoy said, “Sir, you have to go back. This is dangerous.”

  “They’re just kids.” De Bari’s first words since they’d started up the hill.

  “If you don’t leave we’ll have to drag you back.”

  “No,” De Bari said, so softly Dan almost couldn’t hear him. “Let ’em come.”

  The agents and Dan looked at one another. Now, having completed the ring, some of the children were approaching De Bari. “Stop that one, with the stick,” McKoy shouted. An agent lurched forward, shoes crunching into the ash. The children separated slowly, like sleepwalkers, as he plunged through them.

  Then they reached them. Surrounded them. De Bari looked down as they fingered his clothes and gazed at his boots. Some murmured pleas, holding out hands, begging. Others just stared up. A little girl spun in a circle, kicking up the ashy dust in some childish dance. Despite her wasted face, sticklike legs, she was laughing. De Bari seemed transfixed by what she was doing. “They’re just kids,” he said again.

  The technicals from the comm van, the Secret Service limo drivers, the camp staff, came straggling up, panting, spitting, slipping on the loose black scree. Yoshida carried his doctor’s bag. The techs hefted tools and lengths of conduit, as if they’d rallied in the last ditch to defend the president. “What the hell’s going on?” a potbellied older guy in a maroon windbreaker asked Dan.

  “I’m not sure.” De Bari had been staring at all the kids, yeah. But hadn’t his attention been riveted by the girl?

  Hadn’t De Bari lost his own daughter when she was five?

  “Jesus, look at this,” the tech said. “My God. Doesn’t this suck.”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  In a lower voice, glancing at the president: “What the hell’s he doing? Is he okay?”

  The president was kneeling. Speaking to the little girl. Fumbling in his pockets. Then turning angrily, cheeks mottled, hair hanging over his forehead, De Bari shouted in a choked voice to bring the lunches and drinks from the cars. He seemed to be crying. He was crying.

  Dan wiped his own cheeks. Like the president’s, like those of every man and woman on the hilltop, they were wet with angry tears.

  20

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Below-zero temperatures were a disorienting shock after the bitter heat of Africa. De Bari escaped them by flying to his ranch, then to Managua for a meeting with the heads of state in Central Am
erica. But it was another mil aide’s turn to accompany him, Major Francie Upshaw’s, and Dan stayed on in the East Wing.

  Jazak was doing the postgraduate course at the National Military Command College. He asked Dan if he wanted to sit in. The Greater Washington chapter of the Naval Academy Alumni Association called asking if he wanted to attend a talk by one of his classmates who’d just completed his second trip as captain of the space shuttle. Sandy Treherne called about a reception she was hosting.

  Instead he bought a VCR. In the evening he made dinner, then watched movie after movie. Snow blanketed the city, heaping dirty white outside the fence. Blair was in Taiwan. He saw Nan for dinner again, but they didn’t seem to connect. She sent him an e-mail afterward telling him he had to cheer up, she was worried about him.

  He drifted in a zone where he did nothing, wanted nothing, felt nothing. He wondered if he was getting depressed. He slept a lot. That was supposed to be one of the symptoms. Wasn’t it?

  But he really couldn’t say he cared.

  * * *

  The president came back the last day in January. When Dan went in the next day the Eighteen Acres was bustling again. De Bari had lost weight. He looked serious. He closeted himself in the Oval Office as senators and ambassadors, speechwriters and cronies went in and out. The first week in February loomed.

  Then it was here. The State of the Union address. Dan picked up his service dress blue at the dry cleaner’s. In the aides’ office, he toothbrushed the seams of his shoes, slid fresh ribbons onto his ribbon bar, snapped on a new white cap cover. He pinned on the gold “water wings” of a surface warfare officer, then, centered on his right breast pocket, the presidential service badge. The coat of arms of the president: the gold eagle against dark blue enamel, arrows in one claw, olive branch in the other. He looped and pinned the aiguillette. The routine was reassuring. Like inspection at the Academy. Be on time, in the right uniform, tell the truth … Annapolis and reality had never seemed so far apart.