The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  Without a clear idea of what she was going to accomplish, Marie aimed the heavy pistol at the only man not carrying a heavy can of gas on the assumption that he was the leader. She squeezed off three shots in rapid succession. All three shots missed. Shooting a man, she realized, was not the same thing as shooting paper targets.

  The genocidaires seemed uncertain which direction the shots had come from. The man she had shot at was carrying an assault rifle and he sprayed an entire magazine in a wide arc. Most of the rounds sailed harmlessly into the jungle, but one bullet slammed into the smelter wall near Marie’s head. She jerked her head back from the corner.

  The Rwandans were experienced. They spread out to make themselves a more difficult target and moved aggressively toward Marie’s side of the smelter. Marie fired two more rounds around the corner without even aiming and ran back to the door.

  Inside, the smelter was almost pitch-black. The pale moonlight that filtered through the door and the few small windows did little more than define several different shades of darkness. For a moment Marie was afraid that the genocidaires were not going to follow her; that they would simply burn the building down with her inside it. But they did come after her; maybe they were still uncertain about how many opponents they were facing and unwilling to turn their backs on a potential danger. Unlike Marie, the Rwandans had decent flashlights, and they swung their beams around the room looking for someone to shoot.

  “Split up,” she heard them say. “Find whoever it is and kill them. No prisoners today.”

  Marie huddled behind the furnace, her mind racing as she looked for a way out. She could hear her breath coming in rapid gasps and she struggled for calm.

  A shaft of light swept through the air over her head. She could tell from watching the beam that one of the Rwandans was moving from the back end of the furnace toward the door. In front of the door, Marie knew, a heavy steel cauldron used for smelting copper ore was hanging from a chain. It was almost directly above her. Maybe just a couple of feet to the right. She tucked the pistol into the waistband of her pants. When the genocidaire was almost exactly across from her, Marie rose and pushed the heavy cauldron forward with both hands. It slammed into the Rwandan’s face with a satisfying crunch of bone. The flashlight went skittering across the floor, and Marie heard both the soldier and his rifle fall to ground.

  Marie pushed herself deep into the shadow of the machinery and listened carefully. She could hear one genocidaire across the room, probably next to the rock crusher. The other seemed to be moving carefully toward the office, where she had been sleeping less than fifteen minutes earlier.

  “Juvenal. Forget this. Let’s just finish the job.”

  There was no response. Juvenal, Marie realized, must be the one sleeping the sleep of the cracked skull.

  “Juvenal. Can you hear me?” The voice came from the area near the tables where the village women sorted and washed the copper ore before it was smelted. Marie could see the flashlight beam of the third genocidaire panning across the far wall near the office. There was no one between her and the door. It might yet be possible to live through this. Live through this and save her smelter.

  Marie crawled carefully toward the door. She stayed low to the ground, using every shadow to her advantage. Once outside, she planned to empty the jerry cans of gasoline into the river and then go for help. It was the best she could do on short notice.

  The door frame was only about twenty meters away, but it seemed to take forever to cover the distance. Marie was close to the door, no more than five meters away, when she suddenly found herself impaled at the center of a bright circle of blue-white light. She froze. The light felt like an actual weight pressing on her spine. It was as though she could feel the individual photons holding her in place like a bug pinned to a mat.

  “Well, look at that. It’s just a girl.” The speaker was the one Marie had tentatively identified as the leader. She recognized his voice. He had been waiting for her, Marie realized. He knew that she would try for the door.

  “There must be others.” The voice of the remaining genocidaire—the arsonist—came from her left. He had covered the distance from the office quickly and quietly, closing the door of the trap that Marie now found herself in.

  “I don’t think so. I think the girl is all there is. I’ll take care of her.”

  With the flashlight beams shining into her face, Marie couldn’t see so much as an outline of the Rwandans. She had heard stories about what the Hutu had done to the Tutsi in Rwanda. Crimes so awful the perpetrators could never go home. She reached carefully for the pistol in the waistband of her pants.

  “Don’t do that, little girl.” It was the leader’s voice. “It’ll be easier for you that way.”

  The Rwandan raised his rifle and the shadow of the barrel fell across Marie’s face. Involuntarily, she closed her eyes.

  The staccato chatter of automatic-weapons fire was the last sound Marie expected to hear in her young life. It was followed almost immediately by a scream that she realized with some surprise was not her own. She opened her eyes.

  The arsonist still stood to her right, but his head was cocked at an unnatural angle and much of it seemed to be missing. The leader was lying on the floor. The flashlight lying next to him cast monstrous shadows of his profile onto the far wall of the smelter. The genocidaire’s screams grew weak and raspy. Marie saw a stream of blood flowing from his chest, following the dips and valleys in the uneven floor.

  She was still uncertain about what had happened. She reached down and touched the barrel of her pistol. It was tucked into her waistband. She hadn’t shot them. Marie carefully shifted first onto her hands and knees, and then into a kneeling position behind the rock crusher. She could see a flashlight beam searching back and forth through the smelter. Whoever had shot the two Rwandans was looking for more targets.

  “Marie, are you there? Are there any others?”

  “Jean-Baptiste?” she called hopefully.

  “Yes. Are there any others?” he repeated.

  “There’s one more over by the furnace, but I think I broke his skull.”

  Jean-Baptiste did not waste a moment. He moved quickly, holding his rifle with one hand and running the flashlight back and forth across the floor with the other. Suddenly he stopped. Marie heard two quick shots. Only then did Jean-Baptiste come to her, smelling of gunpowder and killing. Without another word, he took her in his arms. Marie clung to him and began sobbing violently into his chest.

  13

  JUNE 30, 2009

  BUSU-MOULI

  It’s a hell of a country, ain’t it? Primordial, even.” J. J. Sykes had to shout so Alex could hear him over the prop noise. Sykes nudged the controls of the de Havilland DHC-3 Otter to keep the aircraft on course as the Congo River below them began to curve north. Sykes had been in the Congo for the better part of three years, flying around central Africa for Ibis Air Cargo, a company that was almost, but not quite, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Intelligence Agency. In addition to being a pilot, Sykes was an aspiring poet, which was why he tried to slip words such as “primordial” into his conversation. “I mean, it’s like the country is a living thing,” Sykes continued when Alex failed to rise to the “primordial” bait. “It’s like a single organism, with the rivers serving as veins and arteries. The jungle is like the lungs. You know what I mean.”

  “I suppose I do, J.J.,” Alex replied resignedly. They had been flying for nearly two and a half hours now, and J. J. Sykes hadn’t stopped talking for more than five minutes of the flight.

  “I always thought of her as a woman. The Congo, I mean. Some of the other countries we fly in are male. Namibia, for example, is a strapping young lad, all rock and desert and heat. Namibia calls you out. Namibia has balls. Namibia will kill you like a man. The Congo, though, she’s a sneaky, seductive bitch. She’ll wait till you ain’t looking and then stick
a knife between your shoulder blades into your heart.”

  “That’s an interesting theory.” Part of Alex hoped that they would be landing soon so that he could escape the incessant yammering of J. J. Sykes. A larger part of him was so unhappy with what he had been tasked to do in Busu-Mouli that he might just as well circle the village in the single-engine Otter for the next week or so.

  “It’s a shame that there are so many things down there that want you dead. It looks beautiful and healthy enough from up here, but that is one wild-ass place at ground level.”

  Alex just nodded. He studied the terrain below. Sykes was operating just on the edge of sanity, but Alex had to admit that he had a point, at least about the Congo’s rivers. They were the country’s vital arteries. The late afternoon sun reflecting off the surface of the water set the extraordinary network of rivers and lakes into sharp relief against the dark background of the jungle canopy. Occasional towns and villages lined the banks of the Congo River, but the vast majority of the land they were flying over was wilderness.

  “We’re coming up on the confluence of the Mongala and Congo Rivers,” Sykes reported. “Busu-Mouli should be about five miles up the Mongala on the right bank. There should be a couple of smaller villages nearby, but Busu-Mouli will be the big one.”

  “Can we take a pass over the village before we land?” Alex asked. Might as well get a good look at it before we bury it.

  “I don’t see why not. Hey, this baby is equipped with external speakers. You want me to cue up ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ when we do the flyover?”

  “I’m pretty sure that Apocalypse Now hasn’t made it to the Busu-Mouli multiplex yet.”

  Alex pointed toward a large building, the largest they had seen since leaving Kinshasa, right on the edge of the Mongala River. A handful of fishing boats were tied up along one side of a dock next to the building.

  “What’s that down there?”

  “It looks like a warehouse of some kind,” Sykes answered. “But it isn’t on any of the charts and I didn’t see anything like it in the satellite photos our mutual friend Jonah shared with me.”

  “How old were the photos?”

  “Six months or so, I suppose.”

  “Is that Busu-Mouli?”

  “The cluster of buildings upriver from the big one should be Busu-Mouli, at least by the map. I’d say a thousand people . . . maybe two thousand maximum . . . in that village. Maybe another two or three thousand in the various villages scattered around.

  “Let’s go check it out.”

  For the first time in the flight, Sykes stopped talking. He lifted the nose of the Otter to bleed off airspeed and lose some altitude. For all of his quirks, Sykes was a smooth and accomplished pilot. He flew low and slow over Busu-Mouli, giving Alex a chance to survey the town and the landscape. The town had a clear main street, a wide avenue of red earth lined with a hodgepodge collection of buildings. A few side streets radiated off the main drag. There were quite a number of people in the streets. Most were looking up at the plane, shielding their eyes from the sun for a better look.

  “J.J., can you bring us in a loop around the hills to the north of town.” Alex wanted to check out the site that Consolidated had identified as the source of copper ore.

  “No problem. We’ve got plenty of gas for the round trip.”

  The countryside was stunningly beautiful. Carpets of thick jungle mixed with a patchwork of farm fields. The Congo was still the wildest country in Africa, maybe the wildest country in the world. But underneath the Congo’s fragile green shell there was a wealth of riches that greedy men would be unable to ignore for much longer. Civil war or no, Alex knew, the outside world was coming after the Congo’s mineral wealth.

  From his bird’s-eye vantage point, Alex saw a wide, well-tended track that led from the unexplained warehouse on the river’s edge up into the hills. As Sykes gently rolled the Otter around the first hill, Alex saw that the path disappeared under what looked like a broad swath of camouflage netting. Alex pointed it out to Sykes.

  “Can you get me any closer to that?”

  “I can try. But the winds will get tricky if we get too close to the cliff.”

  “Don’t do anything crazy. But see how close you can get us without one of those ‘unscheduled landings.’”

  “Man, you shoulda seen some of the shit we used to pull back in the ’Nam with Air America.”

  Sykes put the Otter into a sharp banking turn and flew parallel to the jungle track that led up from the warehouse. At the closest point, the wingtip was no more than ten feet from the camouflage net. Alex couldn’t make out what was underneath. Whatever it was, however, it seemed that it must be important to someone who was unhappy with the interest they were demonstrating in the site.

  “Holy shit, that’s ground fire.” Sykes immediately rolled the Otter away from the cliff and kept low to the ground as he slipped the plane back toward the river.

  “To be fair, they did just catch us sneaking a peek through the bedroom windows. Let’s go knock on the front door and see if that improves the mood. Can you set us down in the river and pull up to the dock by the warehouse?”

  “You sure you want to do it that way? This Otter is unarmed, but I got some other planes back at the field that pack a bit more of a punch.”

  “I’m sure. Let’s do it this way. You catch more flies with honey.”

  “You’ll catch even more with a corpse.”

  “Let’s try not to test that out.”

  Sykes brought the Otter down gently on the wide Mongala River and pulled alongside the dock opposite the fishing boats. He cut the power to the prop, but left the engine running as he hopped out to tether the aircraft. Sykes was leaving open the possibility that they were going to have to leave in a hurry. By the time Alex scrambled across the pilot’s seat and out onto the dock, there was a welcoming committee waiting for them. Five men wearing civilian clothes but carrying military-grade firearms stood between them and the shore. Alex stepped forward. He did not want to appear either weak or uncertain in approaching this conversation. He stopped quickly, however, when the men pointed the muzzles at his chest.

  “You are trespassing in Busu-Mouli,” a tall man at the front of the group said in French. “You are not welcome here. Get back in your plane and we will allow you to leave unharmed.”

  “Please let me explain why we’re here. My name is Alex Baines. I am with the American Embassy in Kinshasa. I have some information that I would like to talk over with the headman of Busu-Mouli. If that’s you, let’s talk. If not, I’d welcome an opportunity to meet with the Chief.”

  “You have thirty seconds to get back inside your airplane.” All five guns seemed to zero in on a spot in the middle of Alex’s chest.

  “Let’s come back with something with a chain gun attached,” said Sykes in an exaggerated stage whisper.

  Alex was stumped. He didn’t want to go back empty-handed, but he would be damned if he was going to get himself killed defending the interests of a publicly traded mining company. Before either party was forced to back down, a woman came sauntering down the path that led from the dock to the warehouse. Alex could tell even before she was close enough to see her face clearly that it was Marie Tsiolo. She was wearing green cotton pants with a trendy alligator belt and a yellow top. Back at Manamakimba’s camp, Marie had worn her braided hair pulled back into a ponytail. Now it hung loose down to her shoulders. She looked good. She was also in no hurry. She called something to the men with guns in a language that Alex could not understand but that he assumed was Luba. She took her time descending the hill and surveyed the scene carefully before speaking. Despite Alex’s role in helping to secure her release from captivity, she looked at him without even a hint of welcome.

  “What’s going on, Jean-Baptiste?” she said in French to the tall man who had been doing the speaking for the gro
up. “Is this what Busu-Mouli hospitality has come to in my time away? We should at least ask Mr. Baines what he’s doing here.”

  “You know him?” Jean-Baptiste looked away from Alex and focused on Marie. His gun didn’t move.

  “Yes. He helped negotiate the release of the mining party from Manamakimba.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I would prefer that you not shoot him without first finding out why he is here.”

  “You know why he is here and so do I. He’s after our copper.”

  “Maybe so. I suppose you could try to beat the truth out of him. On the other hand, we could just ask him.” Marie reached out one hand and pushed the barrel of Jean-Baptiste’s gun down toward the ground. He didn’t resist. As the weapon dropped, his men disengaged their muzzles from Alex’s midsection. There was a palpable easing of tension. Jean-Baptiste shot Alex a look that was at least as devastating as the bullet in the chamber.

  “So, how about it, Mr. Baines,” Marie said, turning from Jean-Baptiste and taking a hard look at Alex. “What brings you to our humble village?”

  “There are some things that are happening that you should know about, Ms. Tsiolo. Whether they’re good or bad, I’m not in a position to say. But they are important and there will be choices to make. There are some options . . . possibilities that I would like to discuss with your headman or the village council.”

  “You mean my father, Chief Tsiolo.”

  “I suppose I do.” Damn. Keeler hadn’t told him that part, and it certainly had not been in her file.

  “Well then. Let me take you to him.”

  Alex grabbed his briefcase out of the plane and followed Marie up a steep path that led toward the town he had surveyed from the air. It was a dirt track, but it was both well built and well maintained. Logs set into the ground at regular intervals formed a rough stairway. Marie said nothing as they hiked up the hill. She seemed more aloof than she had been during the long negotiation with Manamakimba.