Pierce kept gazing out the window. As they reached a red dirt path at the side of the road, Bara instructed their driver to stop. To Pierce he said, “There’s something I must show you.”
AT THE END of the path a pool of oil was spreading from a ruptured pipe that bisected what once had been a field of maize. “A pipeline leak,” Bara said, “maybe from corrosion, maybe because someone tapped it. The result is the same—fishing and farming erased, kids with distended bellies.” Pierce followed him to the edge of the pool, Marissa and the driver trailing behind. “A common sight,” Bara continued. “The oil spills; the government does nothing. So a local gang springs up to demand a ‘clean-up contract’ or to provide ‘security’ against more oil theft. Then PGL pays them off.
“But this one caught on fire—some idiot with a cigarette joined a group of people scooping up oil in buckets. Fifty or so died when he lit up.” He walked a few steps to a patch of crusted oil at the edge of the spill. Stuck like a fossil in the crust was a small flip-flop and what Pierce realized was the charred face of a child who, when alive, might have been its owner. Almost conversationally, Bara remarked, “King Tut looks somewhat better, don’t you think? A month ago, Bobby spoke at this very spot. After all he had seen, it was this child who moved him to tears.”
Behind them, the driver called to Bara.
Beside him a teenager in a T-shirt and shorts had materialized with a semiautomatic weapon. As the youth walked toward them, Bara murmured wearily, “Another parasite with a gun.”
The young man looked from Bara to Pierce. “This is our land,” he said harshly. “PGL pays us to clean it up.”
“Then perhaps you should remove the bodies,” Bara said.
The youth raised his weapon, pointing it at Pierce. “You from the oil company, oyibo?”
“No.”
“Then go back where you came from. We don’t want strangers here.”
Twice in as many days, Pierce thought, a man had aimed a gun at his head, not even knowing who he was. “Let’s go,” he told Bara.
THEY DROVE A few miles more, fearful of encountering soldiers. Abruptly, their driver turned down a dirt road barely wider than the van and stopped beside the grassy banks of a creek. Waiting there with an open speedboat was a young Asari man. “This route is safest,” Bara told Pierce. “They can block roads, but not these waters. You’ll see.”
Pierce and Marissa followed him to the boat. Their new pilot started the outboard motor, breaking the near silence to ease the craft forward into a maze of creeks bounded by thick groves of palms and mangroves. Within minutes Pierce had lost all sense of direction: they were specks in a vast alluvial plain barely above sea level, covered by so many creeks and swamps that it defied cartography. With each turn from one creek to another, the channel grew narrower, until the trees and vegetation seemed to close around them. Their pilot steered past the spectral branches of half-submerged trees, seemingly attuned to other perils below the water’s surface. He must have spent years, Pierce guessed, mastering this labyrinth; it was little wonder that armed militias chose to conceal themselves in such a trackless maze. The thought struck him that an enemy could make them vanish without a trace.
Their pilot turned into another creek, and suddenly environmental ruin was all around them. The trees were bare and stunted, the water’s surface slick with oil. Pipelines appeared among the mangroves; the malodorous stink of flaring gas reentered Pierce’s nostrils. Save for a tree monkey, he saw no birds or animals. On the shore, some Asari had hacked a clearing for a village; half-naked children and sullen-looking adults sat idly on the muddy bank. Standing near the front, Marissa seemed not to notice them.
Ahead the creek forked. The pilot slowed further, taking the narrower course.
At once he stood straight, staring ahead at a rusty barge almost as wide as the creek itself. Armed men appeared at the front of the barge; Pierce saw what appeared to be a makeshift hose connecting an onshore pipeline to the barge’s hull.
He turned to Bara. “What’s this?”
“Militia,” Bara said tautly. “They siphon the oil from PGL’s pipelines to sell on the black market—bunkering, it’s called. Then they arm themselves with the proceeds.”
As they neared the barge, one of the armed men signaled for them to stop. Another man threw a rope to the pilot. When the pilot grabbed it, the same man towed the boat to the side of the barge as his comrades aimed their weapons.
The leader stared down at them. “What’s your business here?”
Bara gestured to Pierce and Marissa. “This man is a journalist. This is Marissa Okari.”
The leader’s face showed contempt. “Okari’s people died like fools. We are FREE, and ready to kill our enemies.”
A muted anger appeared in Marissa’s eyes. Calmly, Bara replied, “We came to see Goro, not to report you. Let us go.”
The leader weighed this. As Pierce stared up at him, he noticed the young man at his shoulder. With a jolt of recognition followed by uncertainty, he recalled the man at the Rhino Bar, talking to Bara, then saw him stepping across the murdered soldier in the doorway of the second bar. The man stared back, impassive. In a flat tone, the leader said to Bara, “Goro? I wish you the joy of it.”
Arms folded, Marissa turned away.
The man from FREE waved them forward. Carefully, the pilot slid their boat past the corroded hull of the barge. Above them, someone laughed.
WITHIN MINUTES, THEY had slipped into another creek. “That encounter was lucky,” Bara said. “The odds are good now that there will be no military at Goro. When FREE is bunkering oil, often the commander in the area makes his soldiers disappear. It’s one thing to destroy an unarmed village. It’s quite another to take on a force better armed than yours, such as FREE, which pays you to leave it alone while it steals PGL’s oil.”
“Does FREE pay Okimbo?”
Bara shrugged. “PGL does. But no one knows who else may.”
Marissa did not seem to hear them. Pierce did not ask Bara about the man from the Rhino Bar.
ANOTHER HALF HOUR passed. The sun, now at its apogee, beat down on their heads. “We’re getting close,” Bara said.
As the creek widened, Pierce saw its mouth meet the white-capped ocean. Turning, he followed Marissa’s gaze.
Along the banks of the creek were the charred remnants of wooden huts. Their pilot nudged the boat against a muddy patch of earth on which, hauntingly preserved, rested three canoes whose owners had no need of them.
Marissa stood, stepped from the boat, and walked alone toward what used to be Goro. She stopped at the edge of the ruins.
Getting out, Pierce and Bara stayed at the canoes. They watched Marissa slowly approach an open area at the center of the village, its red earth now sprinkled with ash.
Pierce followed her, stopping a few feet back. Marissa did not look at him. “We had a well,” she said softly. “Somehow the Asari found fresh water below sea level. No one knew how this could be, only that we were blessed.”
Pierce moved beside her. In the rubble lay a tin cross, its shape distorted by heat. “That was the church?” he asked.
“It’s where they took Bobby’s father. Before, when a chief died, he would lie in state at the center of the village.”
When she began walking again, Pierce understood that he was meant to follow.
They stopped beside a charred cart with stone wheels. In the same distant tone, she said, “This was the marketplace. They sold what mangoes and pineapples and papayas still grew here. A few fish.” She pointed to a cantilevered tin roof that had settled on chunks of half-burned wood. “That was the school. The children’s books were so old the pages fell out.”
For a while she was still. Then she was drawn to a metal pot now blackened by fire. “This was Omo’s house. Her mother would sit in front, cooking. And that was her parents’ bed.”
Looking up, Pierce saw a melted bed frame sagging amid the charred ruins. Then Marissa turned toward the on
ly home still standing. For an instant her eyes closed. Her body was still, her face rigid.
Pierce left her there. Crossing the rubble, he felt the whisper of death.
Every few feet he stopped, forcing himself to study the grounds with care. He found a woman’s pink plastic purse, intact amid the ashes; a headless chicken; charred bones that might once have been a human forearm. Spotting several bullet casings, he put them in his pocket.
The casings, he knew, would be from the kind of ammunition used by the Luandian military. Everything about the scene bespoke a massacre, not armed resistance. In the Balkans—in another life—his forensics team would have combed the rubble; searched for a mass grave; dug up skeletons with missing limbs and bullet holes in the backs of their heads; ferreted out survivors. His evidence, as it had before the tribunal at The Hague, might have included the testimony of civilian underlings Pierce had turned against the butcher who’d caused so many deaths. There would be none of that here. Aside from Marissa and Bobby, the only surviving witnesses might well be Okimbo’s soldiers. Though there was little doubt of what those men had done, actual proof would be harder to come by.
When he returned to Marissa, she remained frozen by the sight of the home she had shared with Bobby, the memory of what she had last seen there. A shadow crossed the space between them. Looking up, Pierce saw that the sky had turned a dense gray-yellow. Quietly, Marissa said, “It’s going to rain.”
“Tell me what happened here, Marissa. Everything.”
For a long while, she looked directly into his eyes. Then she gazed into the distance and, speaking slowly and succinctly, told him all she could. For minutes, her face and voice were expressionless, as though she were subduing the pain of memory with all the resources she possessed. “When Okimbo and his men took me away,” she finished, “I could still hear gunshots.”
“They were killing the last witnesses.” Pierce paused for a moment. “Did you see who piloted PGL’s boats and helicopters?”
Marissa shook her head. “It was dark. Once the eclipse passed, all I saw was soldiers.”
“Were the sea trucks still on the beach?”
She stared at the ground. “I don’t think I looked there.”
A drop of rain stirred the ashes at their feet. When Pierce glanced up, another struck his face, and suddenly the skies unleashed a torrent of hard rain.
Bara and the pilot scrambled beneath a grove of palms. At the center of the village, Pierce and Marissa had no shelter.
As though by instinct, she took his hand and began pulling him toward the house. She stopped at its threshold, shrinking back, then stepped inside.
Pierce followed. The room was shadowy, the ruins of Bobby’s desk half visible. The ceiling fan was still. Arms folded tightly, Marissa paused to study it. Then, inexorably, her gaze moved to a dark stain on the carpet where, Pierce was certain, a girl had bled to death from a throat wound after Paul Okimbo raped her. Above them a fresh assault of rain struck the zinc roof like a fusillade of bullets.
Marissa began to shiver. Pierce pulled her close, feeling the ragged rhythm of her breaths until, at last, they slowed. Her arms stayed tight around him.
6
BY MIDMORNING OF THE FOLLOWING DAY, LUANDIAN SOLDIERS WERE streaming into Port George.
Trapped at an intersection, Pierce and Bara gazed through the windshield at the jeeps and trucks filled with armed men. “A reprisal for the dead soldier we saw in the doorway of that bar,” Bara speculated. “Easier to root out FREE’s supporters in Port George, real or imagined, than to set off a firefight in the delta.”
“Especially if you’ve been bribed?”
“As I said, who knows about Okimbo. But at least he’ll be too busy to keep you from visiting Bobby.”
Pierce watched the soldiers. “You still think I’ll get in?”
“You should. I gave the authorities a letter telling them you’re an American lawyer who may help represent Bobby Okari. For the moment, they’re trying to tamp things down by honoring the form, if hardly the substance, of our so-called human rights. Still, you’re lucky that Okimbo isn’t at the prison today.”
Once again, Pierce pondered the fluidity with which Bara navigated between ostensibly opposing forces. At last the army passed and Pierce and Bara drove to the barracks at Port George.
SURROUNDED BY A high stone wall, the barracks had but one entrance, a steel gate guarded by two soldiers. After Pierce showed his passport, a mustached young officer appeared. Stone-faced, he introduced himself as Major Bangida, and permitted Pierce to enter.
They crossed a courtyard surrounded by soldiers’ quarters. To one side, a two-story stone prison with barred windows looked down upon a platform that appeared to be a gallows. Bangida led Pierce to a metal door to the prison and told the soldier guarding it to direct him to Okari’s cell. But for the gallows, Pierce could have been visiting a prisoner in America, until he climbed the stone steps to the second floor, dark and dank and fetid with the odor of human waste.
At the end of the corridor was a cell without windows, illuminated only by a bare bulb in the ceiling. As Pierce came closer, a form rose from the shadows with the painful slowness of an old man, gripping the bars for balance. Then Pierce saw Bobby Okari peering through the bars.
Bobby’s bloodshot eyes betrayed hope and apprehension. His chin was flecked with gray stubble, and the lines graven in his gaunt face seemed more than the years could account for. “Bobby,” Pierce said. “It’s Damon Pierce.”
Bobby studied Pierce’s face as though examining every feature. “Damon,” he replied softly. “This I never expected.”
“Marissa e-mailed me,” Pierce answered. “How are you?”
“As you see me. A bottle to piss in; a bucket to shit in; rats and roaches for company. They don’t let her come—a kindness perhaps. Since we last met, I have learned much about how men can subvert the essence of what it is to be human.”
Pierce nodded. “I want to help you,” he said quickly. “I’m trying to figure out how to develop some legal leverage—I’ve got the background for it. But we may not have much time, and there’s a lot I need to understand. Starting with your relationship to Karama. Everything, from the beginning until now.”
Bobby’s teeth showed in a brief smile, a ghost of his former animation. “You’ve made inquiries, I see.”
“A necessity. Your fate’s in Karama’s hands.”
Bobby’s gaze turned inward. “I first met him fifteen years ago,” he said at length, “when I was a novelist and sometime journalist in Port George. He was Captain Karama then—like many young officers, he saw the army as a path to power. I saw him as an interesting person, most of all for how he listened to others: attentive, watching their eyes and weighing their words, asking questions to deepen his understanding. Without quite saying so, he implied that he wished for the army to secure the democracy we’d never truly had.” A weary irony crept into Bobby’s voice. “I had my own ambitions for Luandia and needed friends who might someday have the power to help. During that time, Karama and I spent several long evenings together. Only later did I discover his gifts for deception.”
“How so?”
Bobby seemed to wince. “One night, after many drinks, we discovered that we shared a woman. Ela was also a journalist, beautiful and ambitious—that she’d be using us both was unsurprising. But as drunk as I was, I saw the change in Karama’s eyes.
“When I next saw Ela, she was a shell. It seemed that she’d learned things about Karama’s tastes she would not speak aloud. Soon after, she vanished. No one knows where.” Bobby looked directly at Pierce. “Marissa knows nothing about this. When I brought her here, Karama was not in power. The best thing you can do is remove her from this place.”
“Karama has taken her passport, Bobby.” Pierce paused, waiting for Bobby to absorb this. “You haven’t finished the story.”
Bobby touched his eyes. “While I was in America, to my further surprise, Karama immersed hi
mself in army politics. Fairly soon after I returned, a general close to him decided to depose the corrupt civilian president, who, nevertheless, was preferable to a military ruler.
“The general’s plan was to assault the presidential palace at night. To his surprise, Karama ordered his soldiers to slaughter the troops who were to carry out the coup, and personally dispatched his former patron with a bullet to his head. When dawn broke, the president had survived and General Savior Karama, now the army’s chief of staff, was the most powerful man in Luandia.” Bobby’s tone remained soft. “Two years later he went to the palace, put a gun to the president’s head, and reminded him how easily he could pull the trigger. The president chose to resign. The quiet officer of my acquaintance had become Luandia’s nightmare.”
“Not forever,” Pierce said. “Presidents don’t last here.”
“So I hoped. But Karama became a prodigy of paranoia. He built a new capital city meant to be so impregnable that no usurper would dare a coup. He began sleeping by day and governing at night, so that enemies could not use the dark against him. Even those closest to him learned to fear for their families. Distrust your foreign minister? Take his thirteen-year-old daughter as your mistress and dare him to complain. The man wished that Karama had killed her . . .”
His voice trailed off. “Are you all right?” Pierce asked.
Bobby closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the bars. “Karama likes group sex. His partners were screened, of course. One night the procurer in chief flew in three prostitutes from Paris. After Karama had the first two, the third claimed that she wanted him at once, and offered him what she said was Viagra.
“Karama asked her to take it first. When she began to cry, he explained the alternatives to her in detail. After that she took the pill. Karama gave her two companions to his men; the girl who died foaming at the mouth was lucky.” Bobby stared at the chains around his ankles. “Their deaths are the first movie of a double feature Karama shows to those who servility he questions. The second film records the death of the general who recruited them. During the viewing, it is said, Karama serves champagne . . .”
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