“General Denby was unable to attend,” Kissick said.
An African man of about forty, in combat fatigues with three stars on his collar and with a face showing the markings of ritual scarification, introduced himself as General Adala Bukari, representing the African Union, another peacekeeping force, as DeLuca understood it, unable to keep the peace anywhere it went but probably still a good idea, an alliance of military personnel from across Africa tasked to observe elections and cease-fires but not interfere.
“I have been working, for some time,” he said, his voice barely rising above a whisper, “with Ambassador Ellis and with President Bo, to oversee the camps. And food shipments. General Ismael Osman is our contact in Liger.”
The last man at the table was a full bird colonel named Suarez, representing the 27th Infantry Division out of Ft. Drum, New York, where ten thousand reservists were getting ready for deployment. The division commander, General Gaines, had stayed behind to oversee the preparations.
“Liger,” General Kissick began, a map of the country appearing on the plasma screen. “Mr. Kensey has written a more complete history for you in your printouts, but let me thumbnail it for you so we’re all on the same page. You can bridge the oversimplifications yourselves. British colony since 1674. Dutch before that, Portuguese before the Dutch. Three main tribal regions, with the Fasori in the south, along the coast…” He pointed to a line on the map. “The Da in the middle and the Kum people in the sub-Saharan north. The Sahel. The European traders built a string of fortresses and castles along the coast but never ventured more than a few miles inland, which was considered ‘The White Man’s Graveyard.’ The whites traded with the Fasori. Most of the slaves who passed through the castles were Da, captured either by Fasori slave traders or by Kum warriors bringing their slave caravans south to market. Because of their contact with Europeans, most of the Fasori today are Christian, maybe half Catholic and half Protestant-Pentecostal. It used to be 85 percent Catholic, but the Pentecostals have been making inroads and doing heavy missionary work throughout the country. The Kum have traditionally been Muslim, moderately so until 1990 or thereabouts, when radical extremists began preaching a more Wahhabist point of view, U.S. as Great Satan supporting the evil Zionists and that whole tune. If you were to ask an average Da what his religious affiliation was, he’d probably tell you that he was an animist, a Christian, and a Muslim. They don’t seem to understand that you have to pick one, nor do the Christians or the Muslims understand that, actually, you don’t.”
He clicked on the laptop to add an overlay of red dots to the map, half of them concentrated in the south along the coast and the rest scattered along the country’s eastern and northeastern border.
“This might sound like ancient history to some of you, but none of this is irrelevant to the current conflict. I’ll say this, for the lay people among us. The struggle in Liger has always been between the Fasori and the Kum, and the Da have always been caught in the middle. Religious fundamentalism on both sides in recent years has only accelerated and amplified what was already there.
“Liger became independent in 1962. As revolutions go, this one was as soft as you get. The Fasori have traditionally been the ruling class in Liger, the most highly educated, controlling about 90 percent of the economy. Prior to 1962, the British governor worked with the monarchy, in the person of Fasori king Mufesi Asabo, who asked for and negotiated the British departure. Asabo, who was very popular, was overthrown in 1972 in a bloodless coup by General Sesi Mutombo and assigned a more symbolic role, something like the British monarchy. Mutombo was overthrown by President Daniel Bo, the father of the current president Bo, in 1980. The king was placed under house arrest. Mutombo was captured, tried, and beheaded, all in the same day, and then his body was literally hacked into a thousand pieces by the crowd that had gathered to witness the execution. Last year someone tried to sell one of the pieces on eBay, so they’re still around, kept as souvenirs.
“The red dots you see are oil deposits. Those along the coast and offshore were developed by British Petroleum and by Shell. The deposits in the east and north represent more recent discoveries, being developed by Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco and the Italian Agip group.”
Kissick clicked four more times, each click adding in overlay a shaded area that began in the north, labeled 1990, and extended south in multiyear intervals. By 2005, the shaded area covered the northern half of the country.
“These overlays represent drought, and with it, famine. Conditions of near-drought and near-famine extend south from these lines for about one hundred kilometers at each interval. Theories as to the reasons for the drought vary, including global warming, deforestation, and so on. We’re concerned more with the effect, which has been to cause tremendous social and political upheaval. For years, the Kum and the Fasori held to a kind of truce where it was possible for one group to keep to the north and the other to the south, with the Da region as a buffer zone. With the drought, famine, disease, cholera, starting in the north, the Kum reached the point where they depended on assistance from the government, which was and is, as I indicated, Fasori and Christian. President Bo, who I have to stress has long been an ally and staunch supporter of the United States, began to realize he could use that dependence for leverage when he needed concessions, mainly to develop northern oil assets. Liger is, today, the United States’ fourth-largest supplier of oil, ordinarily at about 1,200,000 barrels a day. Instability in the north has cut production to four hundred thousand barrels a day, and you all know what’s happened to gas prices back home as a result.”
Kissick clicked on a new map, showing the northern half of the African continent, strewn now with blue dots against a tan field.
“Enter IPAB,” Kissick said. “Islamic Pan-African Brotherhood. The blue dots are training facilities, all in the Sahel region, sub-Saharan, which, as far as we can tell, no country has ever figured out how to govern or police. It’s mostly training for military or terrorist activities, but some are more like schools for Islamic study. IPAB was initially an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in Egypt in the fifties. Bin Laden’s number two man, Abdullah al-Wahiri, was one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Beginning around 1995, various small, not terribly well-organized rebel elements in Liger began attacking oil facilities in the north, provoking various reactions by the government and by the oil companies, which found it necessary to hire and train their own security forces, with the blessing and cooperation of the government. Such attacks were sporadic and poorly planned, at first, but with the help of IPAB, rebel factions became better organized and better armed. Al Qaeda certainly had a hand in the training and in the funding, but we think it goes beyond Al Qaeda.”
Kissick clicked again to show the satellite image of an African village.
“So here’s what’s going on today,” he said, clicking again to zoom in one level of magnification. “After 9/11, rebel forces inspired and emboldened by the attack on the World Trade Center declared full-out civil war against President Bo’s government with the intention of overthrowing him and establishing an Islamic government. If you count the number of Muslims in Liger, and include the number of Da who add Islam to the list of religions they embrace, then Muslims represent the majority by about 65 percent or so. If you count Christian Fasoris and add in Christian Da, you get about 50 percent. Bo suspended planned elections after the declaration of civil war, but he’d promised and suspended them for several years prior to that, seeking to avoid the same fate as Sesi Mutombo, I gather. The war smoldered until six months ago, when civil unrest in the north escalated. That unrest flared up again a month ago when President Bo said he was going to nationalize the oil industry, in order to better defend it. The main body of the rebel forces is calling itself LPLF or Ligerian People’s Liberation Front, led by General Thomas Mfutho. Mfutho was at one time thought to be third in command in Liger, behind Bo and General Emil-Ngwema, Bo’s right-hand man, but apparently some years ago h
e decided he could do better on his own. We estimate he has between seventy-five hundred and eight thousand troops, poorly trained, most of them, moderately equipped. Minimal air support, a handful of helicopters and triple A. However, in the last month, a large amount of arms and equipment supplied by the U.S. to the Bo government has fallen into enemy hands. We also believe he’s been supplying himself from weapons cached in Iraq that we, unfortunately, failed to prevent from leaving the country.”
He clicked again to zoom to a lower level of magnification. DeLuca saw a collection of circular structures that he took to be the thatched roofs of a number of huts or houses in the village.
“Let me show you what’s going on in this country. There are currently about two million displaced people in northern Liger. That includes Da, Kum, Ashanti, Twi, Fur peoples driven out of Sudan by the Janjaweed, who still occasionally make raids on horseback into Liger. The joke going around the Pentagon is that we’re going to have to dust off some of our old cavalry uniforms from the 1800s and dig up John Wayne to lead the troops.”
The Republicans on the congressional fact-finding delegation laughed. The Democrats didn’t.
“Most of the time, however, the Pentagon is not in a joking mood.”
He clicked to a lower level, at the same time adding a pair of insets, photographs of two men, one of whom DeLuca recognized, the other not.
“On the right, this is Samuel Adu. You may have read about him in the paper. It looked like he was going to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone until the Sierra Leonese government brought in white South African mercenaries to kick him out. He took exile in the northern Ligerian capital of Kumari, not because Bo invited him in but because Bo lacks the power right now to kick him out. As dangerous as Adu was in Sierra Leone, he accomplished most of what he accomplished there with nothing more than machetes and a few hundred AK-47s. Now that he’s hooked up with IPAB, he’ll be much better armed, particularly after IPAB forces overran the government armory in Baku Da’al last week and seized a significant amount of equipment. We’re trying to get an inventory but right now that’s not possible. We suspect the rebels are still reading the manuals, but we’d like to hit ’em before they finish. And we know that some of the IPAB training camps teach recruits how to arm and fire captured U.S. weapons. Again, some of the weapons in country were also from looted armories in Iraq.
“The man on the left is Kum warlord Mujhid John Jusef-Dari, popularly known as ‘Brother John’ Dari. This is a high school picture, but it’s the most recent one we have, and we suspect he’s altered his appearance. Educated in Massachusetts at Mill River Academy, after he was brought over and sponsored by a Baptist church in Oklahoma whose missionaries discovered him when he was orphaned after his parents disappeared, possibly at the hands of the government. Originally a member of the Da tribe. Converted to Islam in prep school and returned to Africa after he was expelled for having sex with an underage girl. They call him ‘Brother John’ because he’s seen as something of a Robin Hood figure, robbing from the rich and yada yada yada. Some call him the Ace of Spades. A reference to the deck of card designations we used in Iraq. So let me show you what this so-called ‘Robin Hood’ and his people are up to.”
He clicked again. DeLuca saw the village in greater detail, an array of broad plank tables on one edge of the village where the locals dried their cocoa beans, and in the middle, a central common. Another click revealed a large crowd of people gathered in the common. A subsequent click showed that some of the people gathered were holding guns on the others, including a group that seemed to have been taken prisoner. In the center of the common was the communal cooking area, Kissick said, and then he clicked without saying anything. He zoomed in, until they saw, as clearly as if the picture were taken from atop a tall ladder, two large cast-iron cook pots, in one, human heads, and in the other, hands.
“These pictures were taken above a village called Yamagor, about halfway between Kumari and Baku Da’al. This is one of the cannibal gangs operating in the country. The come into a village, round up the leaders, and then they mutilate them while they’re still alive and eat the parts. I apologize, but there really isn’t a more delicate way to say this. They especially like the hands. They make everyone else in the village watch. Sometimes they force the onlookers to partake. This is terrorism at its most undiluted level.”
He clicked again, showing only a map of Liger. The sense of relief that swept over the room was palpable.
“Believe it or not,” Kissick said somberly, “I’ve spared you some of the worst pictures. Those involve women and girls. We believe this behavior is organized and intentional. There is also much behavior going on that is neither, but rather acts of random violence, instigated by radio exhortations or simply as the result of mob behavior, but equally horrible. Ambassador Ellis’s embassy issued a directive two weeks ago that all American citizens were to evacuate. As you know, the president has vowed that he will not sit idly by and allow another catastrophe to occur similar to what happened in Rwanda, 1994. And unfortunately, a number of Americans decided to ignore the directive to evacuate—Ambassador, about how many, do you think?”
“Too many,” Ellis said. “Maybe a thousand.”
“And Mr. Berger, how many of your oil workers would you say have remained in country?” Kissick asked.
“About five hundred,” Berger said. “We’ve hired protective services, but the danger is still great.”
“Officially, the main rebel faction is the LPLF. We’re actually much more concerned with Adu and Dari, and through them, IPAB. The White House has given General Mfutho until Saturday, seven days from now, to pull his troops back above the line you saw on the map dividing traditional Kum and Da territories, and to turn over to UN troops anyone suspected of being connected to IPAB or Al Qaeda. And to respect the cease-fire. We do not anticipate compliance. Failing that, we have twenty-five hundred Marines on the Cowper and another twenty-five hundred on the Glover who I’m told are so eager to deploy that they’ve started to chew holes in the bulkheads. And we have the 27th Infantry ready to fly in once the Rangers have secured the airfields. We don’t expect any significant resistance. People are going to say we’re trying to fight three wars at once. We’re not. It’s the same war, on three fronts. The president’s well of human compassion is anything but dry. Prompted in part by the capture of this man.”
He clicked again. DeLuca saw the picture of a white man, perhaps forty, standing in the white light of the sun with his wife and two children.
“This is Reverend Andrew Rowen. You may have read about him. Rowen disappeared ten days ago. The CIA believes he was taken in an effort to forestall the invasion, and as close as the president is to Andy Rowen, he’s made it clear that his concern for his personal friend will not have any effect on matters of national security. He would, if possible, like to at the very least know where Rowen is before we start the air campaign. Just to make it clear in everybody’s mind, this is a matter of national security. Letting our friends in Africa know they can count on us to protect their liberty is absolutely essential. Stopping the spread of IPAB is as important as stopping Al Qaeda. IPAB was Al Qaeda’s sister organization when they blew up the embassies in Kenya. Stopping IPAB here stops a pan-African jihad.”
“It’s also believed that if the oil supply of Liger falls into the hands of John Dari or IPAB, within a year, the price of oil in America will rise to over four dollars a gallon, at which point our global economic dominance, and therefore our security, will be severely compromised. I emphasize that we’d like to circle-slash the idea that we see this as a war of blacks against whites and Muslims against Christians, because that’s not going to pass anybody’s smell test, but that is effectively at least part of what it is, a race war and a holy crusade. We didn’t make it that way. We’re not even there yet. That’s the rule for IPAB in Liger. And for the LPLF. Kill the whites and kill the Christians. The report in front of you lists some of the atrocities perpetrated so f
ar against whites and Christians. For all these reasons, the delicacy of this matter cannot be overstressed. Mr. DeLuca, do you have any questions yet?”
“Pepperoni or sausage?” he replied, surprised to have been called upon. In fact, a great many questions were forming in his head, but this was not the place to speak before they were fully formed.
“What we want you to do,” Kissick said, “is find Dari. We’ve had a task force on Adu for a while now, but Dari is going to require your more specialized skill sets and core competencies, vis-à-vis leveraging linguistics, undercover work, and that sort of thing. Plus we don’t know where he is. I’m told this is the sort of thing you were doing in Iraq, and that you were better at it than anybody. I understand you like to prep your missions yourself, but with this following so close on the job you did today extracting Ambassador Ellis, we couldn’t overtask you by asking you to plan two missions at once, so we’ve done as much of the groundwork for you as we could to get you started. That said, on such short notice, it’s quite likely that you’re going to have to do a certain amount of ad-libbing, but again, General LeDoux has assured me that one of your finer qualities is going off script. CIA intel on Dari is in your report. Mr. Chandler, is there anything you have to update it?”
“I have a man in Baku Da’al who’ll be able to give you more than what I’ve put in the report, but we don’t have a com link with him at this time,” Chandler said. “My own data stream stopped when I left the embassy three days ago.”
“Did you leave anything behind that could find its way into rebel hands?” DeLuca asked. “I understand that the embassy fell rather suddenly.”
“Just my Callaways,” Chandler said. “But I promised them I’d come back for them.”
Mission Liberty Page 4
