The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  Beneath the photographs was a memorandum of agreement on the letterhead of Executive Solutions, a South African mercenary outfit famous for both professional competence and obsessive secrecy. The memo committed the company to provide two Denel AH-2 Rooivalk helicopter gunships to support a raid on the Congolese village of Busu-Mouli on July 23 in exchange for a cash payment of $150,000. That was only five days from today. No matter how brave they were, Jean-Baptiste’s village guard would be utterly helpless when faced with armored attack helicopters mounted with high-speed Gatling guns. If they fought, they would die. It was not hard to imagine who would be leading the raid: Innocent Ngoca and the genocidaires of the FDLR.

  Alex took the folder and closed the safe drawer. With luck, it might be a day or two before Spence realized that his safe had been rifled.

  There was a loud click and the room was bathed in a sudden but muted light. Alex turned with a deliberate slowness to find Jonah Keeler sitting in the Ambassador’s chair, his feet up on the desk. Keeler had pulled the chain switch on Spence’s desk lamp, casting a huge shadow of himself onto the blank wall behind him.

  “Pretty grim reading, huh, sport?” he said.

  “Hello, Jonah. Been there a while?”

  “Long enough. I know what’s in that folder, or most of it anyway. You’re looking at the Busu-Mouli file, aren’t you?”

  “Sure enough.” Alex set the file down on the desk in front of Keeler and sat down in one of Spence’s wingback guest chairs.

  “Jonah, they killed Antoine. He was trying to protect me and they shot him. Ngoca’s genocidaires murdered my friend. He was a good man. What the hell is going on?”

  “I’m sorry, Alex. I didn’t know.”

  “Why is this little village so all-fired important that it’s worth framing me for espionage . . . that it’s worth killing my friend?”

  “Do you know how many Westerners there are in the Congo, not counting the UN or the aid organizations? I’d be surprised if it’s more than a thousand. How can an organization like Consolidated Mining maintain control over the vast swaths of this country that it claims title to? Fear. The company is giving the Congo and its people a raw deal. As long as this is seen as inevitable, the natural order of things, Consolidated can get away with managing its considerable assets with no more than a pitiful handful of expats. Challenge that authority, however . . . call into question Consolidated’s right to rule . . . and you threaten the viability of the entire system.”

  “You mean it isn’t just about the value of the copper. Busu-Mouli was demonstrating that it could mine its own resources and keep the profits. Consolidated needed to make an example of it so that other villages were not tempted down the same path.”

  “Precisely. Busu-Mouli is an opportunity for Consolidated to make a buck, but there are lots of those to be had. More important, what the Tsiolo family is trying to do is a threat to the company’s carefully balanced system. That cannot be tolerated. This country has to be kept dependent on the company.”

  “But why is the Embassy—why is Spence—not only allowing this but actually facilitating it? Has Spence been bought?”

  “It’s not quite as simple as that. Have you ever heard of something called the Africa Working Group?”

  “In passing. It was some Cold War thing. A network of hard-core anti-Soviet types at State who wanted to step up support for the right-wing sociopaths in Africa in their wars against the left-wing sociopaths. People talked about it like it was a kind of old boys’ club.”

  “It was more than that, I assure you.” Jonah took his feet off the desk and leaned forward conspiratorially. It was the kind of body language that the CIA taught in its Psychological Manipulation 101 course at the Farm, the Agency training facility in rural Virginia. “It wasn’t just State Department types. The group wasn’t big, but it was broad. There were military officers, intelligence operatives, NSC people, and Hill staff from both parties. It was a regular interagency love fest. The Working Group didn’t stop with debates in the Georgetown policy salons either. They went operational in the mid-seventies.”

  “Operational?”

  “Yep. They started actively supporting right-wing insurgencies all across Africa. Jonas Savimbi in Angola. RENAMO in Mozambique. Tombalbaye in Chad. As long as you were anticommunist or at least anti-Soviet, the Working Group would back you with money, weapons, and political support. They got into bed with some of the continent’s real nut jobs.”

  “All of this outside official channels?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “So where did the money come from? Underwriting insurrection isn’t cheap and the black budgets aren’t big enough for something like that.”

  “Think about it for a minute.”

  Suddenly it was clear. “The mining companies provided the up-front capital in exchange for drilling and digging rights.”

  “Spot-on. The Working Group got the resources they needed to support the anticommunist right-wingers, and the mining companies got preferential access from friendly governments to all sorts of mineral goodies, with well-placed members of the Working Group doing most of the political heavy lifting for them.”

  “Spence was part of this?” Alex asked.

  “I think so. Secret cabals tend not to keep official membership rosters, but he’s the right generation and he’s got the right connections.”

  “But what about now? The Cold War’s been over for twenty years. Anticommunism is essentially a nostalgia act.”

  “Yes. But once something like this gets started, it tends to survive on sheer inertia. The Working Group found a way to adapt to the post–Cold War world. They persuaded themselves that America’s strategic interests lay in securing exclusive access to Africa’s mineral resources. They continued to bankroll insurgencies, but now with a twist. They were no longer concerned with the ideology of the groups they backed. They wanted effective insurgent movements and guerilla groups that would keep the states they operated in weak and divided. This made the local governments dependent on the Working Group and their mining company allies. It’s become increasingly hard to tell whether the mining companies are doing the bidding of the Working Group or the Working Group is doing the bidding of the companies. At this point, there may no longer be any meaningful distinction between the two.”

  Alex’s pulse picked up as he thought through the implications of what Keeler had just told him.

  “So Consolidated Mining is using Innocent Ngoca and the Rwandan genocidaires to keep the Congo weak so they can bleed it dry on the cheap and Spence is part of some Skull and Bones–style group of Cold Warriors that is helping them do it. Is that what’s going on here?”

  “In part. You’re still thinking too small.”

  “How so?”

  “Consolidated Mining and the Africa Working Group aren’t just using the genocidaires. They created the genocidaires for the express purpose of destabilizing the Congo, Africa’s richest mineral prize.”

  “How is that possible? The violence in Rwanda was a Hutu-Tutsi interethnic fight that had been building for years.”

  “Really? What actually triggered the violence?”

  “President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down trying to land at Kigali airport. The Hutu blamed it on Paul Kagame, who was a Tutsi . . . Jesus Christ. You think the Working Group was responsible, that they somehow shot down the President’s plane.”

  “They do have some of our people working with them,” Keeler replied, meaning CIA black operatives. “What was Spence doing at that time?”

  “He was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Central Africa in Washington.”

  “Did his brief include Rwanda?”

  Alex nodded. “Yes.” He desperately did not want to believe that this could be true. “What about Sudan?” he asked. “What about Darfur? Was that the Working Group’s doing as well?”

&nbs
p; “Perhaps. We’re not certain.”

  “We?”

  “Not everyone who works on Africa is irredeemably cynical. There are some of us who recognize the continent’s promise and its potential. This place can be so much more than a strip mine for U.S. industry. I am part of another informal group within the government that is pursuing this more positive vision of the future. We are a sort of counterweight to the Africa Working Group, except that we are generally younger, more junior, and not nearly as influential.”

  “So what makes me a threat to the Working Group? Is it the dissent channel message I wrote?”

  “Yep. Secretary Roberts has a track record as something of a goody-two-shoes. The Working Group couldn’t take the risk of a formal investigation into their activities. The moment you wrote that cable, you became an unacceptable risk. They needed to discredit you first and then remove you altogether. You’re lucky that you got away from Viggiano. You never would have made it back to Washington.”

  Alex was deep in thought. “That’s why Spence chose me for this job, isn’t it?” It was a rhetorical question. “Because I was crazy and had lost my clearances, it would be relatively easy to discredit me if it came to it. That’s why Spence called me up out of the blue and offered me Julian’s job. It wasn’t in spite of my troubles with DS, it was because of them.”

  Jonah shrugged, but it was clear that he agreed.

  “Did Viggiano kill Julian?”

  Keeler shrugged again.

  “Christ on a crutch.”

  He picked up the Busu-Mouli folder.

  “I don’t understand why Spence is holding on to this kind of information. It’s dangerous to him. Why keep this stuff around?”

  “Mutually assured destruction. None of the players in this little operation trust any of the others worth a damn. The paper trail is insurance against one of the partners trying to rat out the others.”

  Alex put the Busu-Mouli folder back on the desk.

  “I suppose I have you to thank for putting the bomb under the Land Cruiser.”

  “Yeah. Pretty cute, huh?”

  “And I suspect it wasn’t an accident that my old friends Chaudry and Sharif were manning that checkpoint.”

  “Nope. That one took some work too. But I figured that your friends wouldn’t shoot you in the back. If the checkpoint was manned by some schmoes, they might have killed you when you ran. That would have been unfortunate.”

  “No shit.” Alex slumped back in his seat, trying to come to terms with what Keeler had just told him and what he had found in Spence’s files.

  “So what do I do?” he asked.

  “We can help you, but we need your help as well.”

  “To do what?”

  “Flush out the game. The Africa Working Group has covered its tracks very carefully. Everything is deniable. Nothing is provable. We need them to make a mistake, expose their agenda, and give us an opportunity to destroy them.”

  “Destroy Spence?” Alex asked.

  “I’m not talking about whacking the guy. I’m not even talking about a trial and prison. We’re patriots. We don’t want to damage the United States. We just need to ensure that the Working Group is stripped of its influence.”

  “Can’t you just go to Secretary Roberts yourselves or even the New York Times?”

  “Not without real proof. Information and recommendations that make their way to the principals are the result of hard-fought battles, and they always have another agenda. Your cable was dangerous because it would have cut through the layers of bureaucratic defenses that the Working Group has built up over the decades. It would have gone right to the top without an opportunity for the Working Group membership to water it down with caveats and the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand language so beloved of Washington technocrats. If we move against the group without hard evidence, we will be destroyed ourselves. We would be leaving the Working Group a clear field to pursue their amoral strategy. We need the group to make a mistake, expose its flabby belly.”

  “How do I get my life back?” Alex asked simply.

  “You know Spence better than anyone else. Help us find what we need.”

  “Before I do anything else,” Alex replied, “I’m going to Busu-Mouli. I can’t let Executive Solutions and the genocidaires destroy that village.”

  “This wouldn’t be about a certain farmer’s daughter, would it? About five-eleven. Brunette. Foxy.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Thought so.”

  “I’ve only got a few days.”

  “Want to borrow my plane?”

  26

  JULY 20, 2009

  BUSU-MOULI

  It’s not nearly as scary as you might think,” J. J. Sykes said, as he banked his aircraft, a venerable Beechcraft Bonanza, to point the small single-engine plane into the wind. “Just don’t pull the chute until you’re clear of the tail.”

  Alex shifted uncomfortably in his seat and fiddled with the unfamiliar straps on the parachute. He had spent the four-hour flight hunched over in the passenger seat to accommodate the bulky pack. A smaller pack strapped to his belly held money and diamonds, a change of clothes, and some equipment, including the satellite phone he had pilfered from Spence’s safe.

  “You sure you can’t land somewhere around here? I don’t mind a walk.”

  “Sorry. No can do. This thing has wheels, not pontoons.”

  Jonah had put Alex up in a CIA safe house and had made the arrangements for Sykes to fly him to Busu-Mouli. Unfortunately, the amphibious Otter was undergoing a major overhaul and would not have been ready until after the planned assault on the village. Sykes agreed to fly Alex out in one of his other aircraft, but none were capable of landing on the river and there was no suitable runway within one hundred miles of Busu-Mouli. Alex was going to have to parachute into the town. To make matters worse, both Keeler and Sykes had been adamant that it had to be done at night. Too many people in too many villages would notice the parachute during the day and there was no telling whom they might report back to. That was how Alex found himself flying at five thousand feet in the dead of night over an inky black carpet of African rain forest, planning to make his very first parachute jump.

  “Have you ever done this before?” he asked Sykes.

  “What, jump out of a perfectly good airplane? No thank you. I hear tell there’s nothing to it. Just count to three and then pull that handle on your chest.”

  Alex reached over with his right hand and grabbed the handle. He’d been reaching for it obsessively every thirty seconds since they left the ground. It was reassuringly easy to find. When stationary . . . in the well-lit cockpit . . . and under no pressure.

  The Beechcraft was too old to have a factory-installed GPS navigation system. Sykes was using an off-the-shelf unit that was not so different from something that might have been mounted on the dashboard of any SUV in any American suburb. All the major landmarks were marked, however, including the vast expanse of the Congo River and the various villages that lined both of its banks.

  “Here we go,” Sykes said, breaking into Alex’s distracted reverie.

  “Busu-Mouli?”

  “Yep, right down there.” Sykes pointed to a spot off the port-side wing.

  Alex could not see anything. “How can you tell?”

  “I can’t, but I trust the GPS. Always trust your instruments. Your eyes will lie to you. Try to get you killed. Your instruments always tell the truth. You ready for this?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Great. Let’s do it.”

  The Beechcraft leveled out and Sykes punched a red button grafted onto the face of the instrument panel. The button sent a signal to the hard points on the belly of the plane, and a pair of clamps disengaged, releasing two GPS-guided projectiles that looked like oversize lawn darts. Weighted steel tips held the projectile
s point-down while fins on the side of the darts responded to signals from an onboard receiver that guided the payloads to a fixed landing point. These particular projectiles carried infrared strobe lights mounted on their tails. Had they been military issue, the projectiles would no doubt have had a macho moniker like “spearhead” or “thunderbolt.” These were CIA toys, however, and the Agency’s quirky technical branch had christened the projectiles “Sammies” after the engineer who had designed them. They were accurate to within three feet. Tonight their target was the central square of Busu-Mouli.

  Sykes put the Beechcraft into a slow banking turn. Reaching behind him into the aircraft’s open cargo space, he retrieved a black Kevlar shoulder bag. Inside were two fourth-generation Night Hawk night-vision systems. Alex slipped one on over his head. The straps held the scope, which was about the size and shape of a small video camera, firmly in place. Sykes strapped on the second Night Hawk and dimmed the interior lights. Alex hit the power button on his Night Hawk. Instantly the forest floor came alive, a shimmering green carpet with a flat darker region that Alex knew must be the confluence of the Mongala and the mighty Congo River.

  “There’s the signal,” Alex said, pointing slightly to the right of their line of travel. The twin infrared strobes were invisible to the naked eye, but showed up as bright pulsars through the Night Hawk scopes. There was a jump helmet on the floor by his feet. Alex put it on. It was designed to accommodate the night-vision gear and fit comfortably.

  “Get ready to jump.” Sykes gestured toward the back.

  Alex climbed clumsily between the seats into the rear cargo space.

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Okay. Remember. When I open the door, it’ll be too loud to talk. You’ll have to do it on your own. Just grab hold of the handles and wait for the green light.