“How are we armed?” MacKenzie said.
“Everybody in Liger is armed,” DeLuca said. “You’ll probably attract more attention if you’re not. Just don’t be conspicuous. Dan, take a MAC-10 in addition to your sidearm. It’s what all the Blackwood guys are wearing these days. DARPA has also given us new handhelds to field test, called CIMs or Critical Information Minimodules—the army is also calling them FBCB2s or ‘Fee-bee-cee-bees,’ for Force Battle Command Brigade and Below systems. It’s a pocket PC that they hope will turn every soldier into an intelligence-gathering unit. Read the manuals. They look like civilian PDAs, or at least the version they gave us does, with built-in GPS for maps and data uplinks in real time to MILSATs and what have you, so spend some time getting to know how to use them. You can wi-fi to SIPERNET or the Internet, but if I catch anybody playing Grand Theft Auto on his, I’m taking it away. Paul, can I offer you anything?”
“Guns?” Asabo said. “I don’t think so. If they discover who I am, it would be best if I were unarmed. Plus I don’t like guns.”
“I don’t like cars,” DeLuca said, “but it beats walking.”
After the briefing, DeLuca used his new handheld PC to collect his e-mail. The first thing he’d done, upon awakening, was e-mail his friend Walter Ford back in Boston and ask him to get on the Web and look for any information that the briefing report might have omitted, sending the report as an attached file. He didn’t expect a reply so soon, but then he remembered that Ford, a retired cop and a professor in the Criminal Justice program at Northeastern, was one of the most diligent people he’d ever known. He’d stay up to finish a task, no matter how late it got.
Dear David,
Hope all remains well with you. Martha suggests I remind you to dress warmly. I told her you were in tropical Africa, but you know Martha. She would still be trying to get you to wear a sweater.
As to your questions, I’m supplying links to a number of Ligerian expatriate Web sites, but to give you the gist of it, the bottom line is, President Bo’s popularity ratings rank significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s. Ligerian expats hate him (Bo, not Clinton), as do many of his citizens, though he has the support of the Fasori elite, who he favors in return with tax breaks, import tariffs, bribes, etc. He had the full support of big oil and their hired mercenaries until he started talking about nationalizing the oil industry a few months ago, largely a populist gesture, but WAOC was not amused.
Bo has two rivals for power, both of whom he keeps on a short leash. One is General Kwesi Emil-Ngwema, vice president and head of the army. Ngwema was, for years, Bo’s go-to guy when he needed somebody thrown out of a helicopter. Lake Liger was his favorite drop zone, mostly because it’s full of cichlids that can make a corpse impossible to identify in about three seconds. I had some in my aquarium and they ate all my other fish, my bad, not theirs, but they’re worse than piranhas, IMHO. Lately Ngwema has stayed away from Bo. One Web site says he’s planning a coup, with WAOC funding. Another says he’s waiting for LPLF to do his dirty work for him. Either way, he’s playing his cards pretty tight right now.
The other rival is Bishop Duvallier. The majority of the nation’s Christians are Catholic, incl. lower-class Fasoris and most of the Da Christians, who mainly supply the workforce for the oil industry. Pentecostals making inroads, however. Question: Would Duvallier let Muslims kill Pentecostals? One Web site says yes. Both Bo and WAOC have been greasing Duvallier for years. One Web site says Duvallier is a cannibal who eats young boys. The Vatican loves him for his firm stand against birth control/abortion/same-sex marriage. Duvallier’s emissaries personally intercepted and destroyed a shipment of condoms sent by the WHO. FYI, AIDS in Liger is about 28 percent among women and 24 percent among men, second only to Uganda, but thanks to Duvallier, at least unmarried people aren’t having sex, because they’re all dying in hospitals.
And by the way, the ambassador you rescued was investigated for taking a seat on the Ligerian gravy train, accepting gifts, safaris, etc. from Bo, from whose Presidential Guard Ellis selected his household staff, whom he doesn’t pay. One site alleges that the U.S. ambassador keeps slaves. Lots of cocktail parties at the mansion, champagne, feasts with roast pigs, etc. The investigation said Ellis may have crossed the line at times but that his actions were in accordance with traditional diplomacy. Sumptuous feasts when up north, two thousand plus people a day die of starvation. I wonder why so many people hate America?
Let me know what else I can do.
Best, Walter
Chapter Five
DELUCA, VASQUEZ, AND ASABO, BEARING false papers identifying them as Don Brown, from the World Bank, Luis Avila, from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and James Hawkins, with Conservation International, were flown to Ghana, where they caught a commercial flight to Port Ivory. Sykes and MacKenzie were to enter in a similar fashion via Lagos, transferring first at an offshore oil rig. Asabo spoke English without an accent and could therefore pass as an American, though he’d never actually taken his American citizenship, but was allowed to stay in the United States indefinitely with the immigration status of a political refugee.
“Don’t forget,” DeLuca reminded Asabo, “from here on, you don’t speak Fasori, or anything local.”
“Fa-shizzle,” Asabo said dryly.
It was the first time DeLuca had seen Asabo smile. If the younger man felt any emotion, returning to his home country after so many years in exile, he didn’t show it. An official examined their passports, then stamped them without further ado. Asabo smiled to see crowds of children surrounding them as they passed through customs, kids trying to sell them clear plastic bags of potable water, bars of soap, loaves of bread, Pez dispensers, packs of chewing gum, brass napkin holders, polished gourds, anything they could get their hands on that they thought wealthy foreigners might want to buy. Other children simply held out their hands and begged, pleading with their eyes, some licking their lips or touching their lips with their fingers to indicate they were hungry. Soon Asabo stopped smiling.
“Look at their teeth,” he said to DeLuca, who noted that most were missing teeth or were in need of orthodontia. “When I left, there were no candy bars in Liger, and none of the children had cavities. Now they all do, apparently.”
Grown men held out thick stacks of Zudas, the local currency, offering to change their American dollars, though the exchange rate was fluctuating wildly on virtually an hourly basis, depending on how the war was going. DeLuca held on to his cash. Dispersed throughout the mob were soldiers carrying machine guns, unsmiling men in maroon berets and wraparound sunglasses, their pants tucked into matching maroon gaiters.
“If we can get to the cab rank without getting shot,” DeLuca said sotto voce, “I think we’re in the clear.”
He asked the cab driver, a man named Jumee, to take them, first, on a tour of the city. The driver complied as best he could, although the central part of the city along the coast, between the presidential palace and the Castle of St. James, was cordoned off by soldiers manning roadblocks, black smoke still rising above the skyline, an acrid stench of burning rubber leaking in through the taxi’s windows. When DeLuca asked the cab driver if he had any idea what the situation was at the soccer stadium, he just shrugged as if he didn’t and hadn’t heard anything. DeLuca noticed a spot on the dashboard where Jumee kept his small statuette of the Virgin Mary, which now rested on the seat beside him, out of view. The radio played nonstop music, innocuous Afro-pop and smooth-grooved crap by Sting and Phil Collins, without commentary or commercial interruptions. He saw men carting away rubble in wheelbarrows and hand-drawn carts from broken buildings, funeral processions of mourners clad in decorous local textiles, children wandering alone, little short-haired dogs with skin conditions, a church where a line of young men in white shirts and baggy dress pants but no shoes waited to enter, holding Bibles in their hands. He saw broken shop windows, dumped garbage, looted stores, empty boxes in the streets, broken televisions an
d DVD players smashed against the pavement, walls mottled with bullet pockings, bloodstains, raw sewage, people crouched around cook fires, and whenever they slowed, children begging at the taxi’s windows with their hands out, adults, too, asking for anything, anything at all. He saw overturned and burned cars, the shell of an armored troop carrier, a van on its side with the words “One Lord—Jah Love” painted on the side that was showing, two of its wheels missing. He saw church steeples damaged by tank rounds, streets cratered by bombs and artillery shells, houses with the roofs blown off, or the fronts, the sides, the backs, and in the exposed rooms, kids playing or simply gazing out. He saw crowds of men gathered on street corners, taking security in numbers, men glancing nervously through slits in doors and gates, lone men ducking into doorways or running away in advance of their approach, and government soldiers in maroon berets stopping people to look at their travel documents or identification papers, government soldiers loading men with their shirts pulled over their heads into trucks, government soldiers in a circle, down one alley, kicking someone who’d fallen while a woman nearby screamed, “Please don’t take my son.” DeLuca didn’t see any bodies lying dead in the streets. He wondered how many there’d been, and where they’d gone. He saw the Muslim neighborhood, now a wasteland of rubble and debris, where two weeks earlier, President Bo had sent in a fleet of bulldozers to destroy all the Muslim homes and shops in what he’d dubbed “Operation Trash Removal.”
“It was very bad,” the driver, Jumee, said. “Many people are now without homes.”
The driver took them, finally, to the headquarters for the African Union peacekeeping mission, a one-story tin-roofed pale yellow building centered in a dusty courtyard filled with date and fan palms, a half dozen chickens, a pig chained to a stake. There were two white Jeeps and a white Humvee parked in the dust, guarded by six soldiers in khaki uniforms with blue berets and green kerchiefs around their necks to identify them as neutral observers and not combatants. The Humvee had been modified by someone with a welding torch who’d added rough-cut iron plates to the doors and fender panels, until the vehicle resembled something out of a Mad Max movie, pure Road Warrior. U.S. soldiers had done the same thing to their unarmored Humvees in Iraq. The vehicles had the letters AU painted on the doors, and a white flag flew above the building featuring the same African Union logo.
An aide asked them to wait a moment, then showed them into a dusty office.
General Osman was a large barrel-chested no-necked hulk of a man, hairless save for the bloom of white chest hairs sprouting from his open shirt collar. When DeLuca told him, after introducing himself and his companions, that he had an appointment, Osman looked suspicious, eyeing his lieutenant, who appeared to be doing his best to become invisible.
“What appointment did we have?” Osman asked. “This is the first that I have heard of this.”
“You didn’t get the call from my office?” DeLuca said. “We spoke with General Bukari. I’m not sure who my secretary spoke with, exactly, but she informed me that you would be expecting me.” He was bluffing, but it was a reasonable assumption that in the chaos of the civil war that surrounded them, Osman’s staff was likely to have lost track of an appointment or two. Osman had no way of knowing that this wasn’t one of them, and DeLuca didn’t have time to wait for an actual appointment.
“My aide,” Osman said, “has not informed me. We’ve been without communications as well. Please forgive me—please be seated—how is it that I can help you, Mr. Brown?”
“I appreciate your making time for me, General,” DeLuca said. “My colleagues and I do understand how busy you must be. I trust that your men are all right. I know that yesterday was not a good day for Liger.”
“The days seem quite the same, from where I sit,” General Osman said.
“I won’t take up any more of your time than I have to,” DeLuca said. “We’re looking for John Dari. We have a business matter we would like to discuss with him. I’m not free to disclose what that matter is, but we were hoping that you might be able to tell us either where John Dari is or who might know where he is, if you don’t.”
Osman seemed taken aback.
“And how is it that you think I would know this?” he asked. “Dari is in the north. I am in Port Ivory. Do you think if he were in Port Ivory, he would call me and we’d have tea?”
“No, I don’t,” DeLuca said, “but I know that you have men with eyes and ears in various parts of the country. Men who are Christian and men who are Muslim. Men who might have heard something in their role as observers, either during the cease-fire or during the recent conflict.”
Osman threw up his hands.
“I have three hundred men,” he said. “I don’t dare send them anywhere in numbers smaller than a platoon. And if we meet with resistance, we must back down because we have nothing in the rules of engagement that allows us to fight. And, sir, we could not fight if we wanted to, I will tell you that, because President Obasanjo and his friends in Addis Ababa have decided the AU may not carry more than a single clip of ammunition for each soldier, or we would be seen as a threat. So tell me, how can I learn what I need to know in Liger? How can I tell you what I need to know myself?”
“Perhaps you can’t help,” DeLuca said. “But you could help me, I think, spread the word that I would like to speak to Dari. I’m not with the United States, General. I’m not with the UN, and I’m not with ECOMAS either. Despite what you may have heard, the World Bank is an independent organization. We have an opportunity to bring considerable funds to bear on whatever needs Liger might have toward rebuilding its infrastructure. The time to establish a no-fire zone, negotiated between all interested parties, is now, not when it’s too late. And you see, General, I can’t travel, even with assurances from the government, because there are large areas of Liger right now where the government itself can’t go. But your men, as neutral observers, can. I understand that you’re understaffed, and I sympathize. I’m only asking that you do the best that you can. I might add that the World Bank has also been studying ways to assist the African Union, as I’m sure you know.”
DeLuca waited. If Osman was going to ask for a bribe, now was his chance. DeLuca had been warned by a cynical friend in the State Department’s Africa program that “African Union” was an oxymoron—“like ‘scented deodorant,’” the friend had said. DeLuca was betting that Osman’s relationship with AU headquarters in Addis Ababa was less than satisfactory. It was also his own personal experience that in third world countries with ethically challenged leadership, men in positions of power rarely sought the high road and could be bribed, and nine out of ten times, the ones who wanted bribes came right out and asked for them. Osman wasn’t part of the Ligerian government, but he was in Liger—perhaps he was playing by the house rules.
Osman didn’t take the bait, and in fact seemed oblivious to it.
“You would deal with this criminal, then?” Osman said. “This person who kills children? Who puts tires filled with gasoline around the necks of his enemies and lights them on fire? This is the person you will do business with?”
“No,” DeLuca said. “I wouldn’t. But as a soldier, you understand that throughout history, whenever the end of a war is negotiated rather than imposed, men who’ve killed have to learn how to talk to men who’ve killed, in order to stop the killing. It’s not an easy thing to sit down across the table from your enemy, I know. What the World Bank wants to do is make such a thing attractive and economically appealing to both sides.”
“Well,” Osman said. “I will be honest with you. I don’t know where Dari is, Mr. Brown. I have a report that he might be in the hills west of Kumari, but I have another that he is moving on the oil fields three hundred kilometers to the east of that. I don’t really believe either report. I think he could be anywhere.”
“Do you know in what numbers?” DeLuca asked.
“Five thousand men,” Osman said with a shrug. “I have also heard twice that.”
&
nbsp; “I was told one thousand,” DeLuca said.
“Possibly two,” Vasquez added.
Osman shook his head.
“Maybe a month ago,” he said. “But not now.” He eyed them a moment longer. “So yes, Mr. Brown, I will pass along your message to my men and ask them to make inquiries for you. But I don’t expect to have success, and I should tell you, I don’t believe John Dari will meet with you even if he gets the message, only because you are white. He has said this himself. But perhaps on behalf of the people he is leading, he will. In my opinion, whoever comes within ten feet of him should shoot him through the eyes and ask questions later. But of course, we are not allowed to shoot. We can only observe. Do you know what we observe, Mr. Brown? This morning, my men went to the village of Dsang, a small Da village, where the boys had formed a militia to protect their mothers. With sticks. We found twenty-six bodies of boys with their penises cut off and shoved into their mouths. Because John Dari is afraid of boys with sticks. So when you meet him at the peace table, please ask him about the boys of Dsang. And ask him about their mothers, because we could not find them.”
After the meeting, they instructed Jumee to take them to Lions’ Park, a casino and golf resort that President Bo had built on the northern end of the city. The driver told them Lions’ Park was closed. DeLuca said he knew, but that that was where President Bo’s office had instructed them to meet the convoy that would take them north to Baku Da’al, unless, DeLuca said, the cab driver was interested in making a longer trip, an offer Jumee immediately declined.
The casino, built by the government in an attempt to emulate South Africa’s Sun City, had squandered millions of dollars that might have been better spent on food or schools or roads, Paul Asabo explained, but Bo needed a playground to entertain his fellow despots and dictator friends. Bishop Duvallier had pulled the lever on the first slot machine at the opening ceremonies and, to everyone’s surprise, he won nearly a million Zudas, which he remitted to the church, of course. In its opening year, the casino had hosted concerts by Elton John and Sting, but as it began to decline, it was booking people like Gallagher and Robert Goulet, and then Gallagher and Robert Goulet impersonators. The decline hastened when a report said 90 percent of the prostitutes working the bars of Lions’ Park had AIDS.
Mission Liberty Page 7
