“But now?”
“But now, I think you know what the ‘but now’ is. But now is chaos. My ex-husband’s family was involved in Liger for years, and my ex-father-in-law used to say, ‘If you want to understand Liger, Evy, don’t go to Liger—you’ll only become hopelessly confused.’ I thought he was just being patronizing, the way he was about everything else, but once I got here, I understood what he meant.”
“What about IPAB?” MacKenzie asked.
“IPAB,” Warner said, “right now, is mainly an arms dealer for the locals, with a few tech support people to show them how to plug things in and where to point them. That’s not a minor thing—Sammy Adu wreaked havoc in Sierra Leone for years without half the arms IPAB is pouring into the Sahel. In a piss-poor country, it doesn’t take much. IPAB is Janjaweed, it’s Al Qaeda, it’s Ansar Al-Islam, it’s whatever sort of displaced terrorist you want to name, but it’s not a significant force in Liger, apart from a handful of advisors. Maybe they’re waiting in the wings in greater numbers. I don’t know. If the United States wants to look for a unifying force in Africa, I’d suggest looking in the mirror. Nothing unites these people more than a common enemy, and that’s you, darling.”
“And the Ligerian People’s Liberation Front?”
“LPLF is Mfutho and the Muslim half of the Ligerian army. It’s also men, and boys, whom he’s recruited or coerced. He gives them guns and he pays them,” Warner said. “I don’t know where he’s getting the money to pay them, but as I understand it, he’s made it attractive to join him. I say he has the Muslim half, but he can’t do anything without Dadullahjid’s approval. Bo has the Christian half of the army, but if you ask me, General Ngwema is taking that away from him. There are commanders under Ngwema who back him, some who back Bo, and some who’re trying to carve out their own little piece of the pie. There’s so much misunderstanding—I’ve read that the Ligerian People’s Front, the LPF, not to be confused with the LPLF, is an armed force. God, the LPF is a group of entirely unarmed pacifist missionaries preaching nonviolence à la Mahatma Gandhi, but they’re listed as aggressors. Factor in Adu’s merry band of random psychopaths and twisted teenage murderers, and five or six independent mercenary militias contracted by WAOC or the diamond companies or the coffee growers or the cocoa growers, all acting occasionally in concert but invariably in their own self-interest, and the SJD starts to look pretty good. I don’t think the Sons of John Dari are your biggest problem. Though I’d love to know why somebody thinks so.”
“He’s an unknown,” Mack said. “Why do you think?”
“He has charisma,” Warner said. “That threatens people who don’t have charisma. I would include both your president and my prime minister in that category. Have you heard of the LRA?”
“Lord’s Republican Army,” MacKenzie said. “I thought they were in Uganda.”
“They were, and are,” Warner said. “Last week, two thousand people fled into southern Sudan because the LRA had stepped up their activities. You know you’re in deepest shite when you’re fleeing into southern bloody Sudan because it’s safer than where you’ve just come from. They’re led by Joseph Kony, who, I am not making this up, believes he’s possessed by the spirit of an Italian soldier named Lakwena. Lakwena apparently commanded the woman he first possessed, this was two possessions before Kony, to rid Uganda of witchcraft. The LRA supports the Ten Commandments and even added a few of their own, though apparently ‘Thou Shalt Not Make Parents Eat Their Own Children or Children Their Parents’ wasn’t one of them. What Kony does is kidnap boys as young as four and force them to be his soldiers—the initiation ceremony usually involves killing someone else. Once he’s indoctrinated them, he gives them weapons and tells them if they smear themselves with shea butter, enemy bullets will bounce off of them. Or pass through them harmlessly, I forget now exactly which it is. I could go on, but here’s my point. John Dari was with the LRA for a month, before he managed to escape. He doesn’t talk about what happened, but you can imagine. If people naturally follow John Dari, it’s because he’s one of the most self-invented self-possessed people I’ve ever met.”
“His followers believe he has magical powers,” MacKenzie said.
“Americans believe George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac and chopped down a cherry tree and couldn’t lie about it,” Warner said. “Maybe Africans tend to mythologize a bit more than we Westerners do. Africans do believe in juju. And witchcraft. I doubt John Dari can control what people believe about him. Why aren’t you looking for Samuel Adu? He kills people with his bare hands, on videotape, and then he makes copies and sends them to his friends. He used to be a heavyweight boxer so he likes to keep in shape by beating people to death and mutilating their bodies. The atrocities his men committed in Sierra Leone are beyond description. Why aren’t you looking for him?”
“We were assigned Dari,” Mack said. “Somebody else has Samuel Adu. We heard he’s north of Kumari.”
“I heard he’s on the other side of that river,” Warner said, pointing. “I also heard he’s in Port Ivory drinking Long Island iced teas on the beach. You can’t trust what you hear in Liger. Which I suppose is precisely why you’re here. I’m doing my best to limit my concerns to what’s going on right here at IDP-7. Sara Ochora’s hardly an isolated case. Do you know what the age of consent is in Liger? Thirteen. In many of the villages, older men of wealth shower young girls, or their families, with gifts and then have sex with them because they think it’s the only way to avoid AIDS, but of course, many of the sugar daddies already have it, so the girls become infected.”
“I’d read about that in my briefing material,” Mack said.
“That said,” Warner continued, “we have six women who have death sentences waiting for them in their home villages simply for having sex out of wedlock or before their anoka ceremonies. You might think having the queen mother promise that Sara won’t come back to her village is something Sara might actually want, but I assure you, she does not. Some of these women don’t know anything but their villages, and their extended families—the idea of going home is all that’s getting some of these poor girls through. I don’t know if you’ve noticed how this camp is segregated. We have one section for rape victims. One for Muslim girls. One for married women, one for single women, one for Da, one for Kum, one for AIDS victims, one for otherwise sick women, subdivided into those we can save and those we can’t. One section where women who are menstruating have to go, not because we say they have to go but because it’s their custom to ‘go behind the house.’ Last month we had a woman doing female circumcisions until we talked her out of it, but we didn’t force her to stop. The idea is to make this place feel as much like home as possible. Which isn’t possible. Sara Ochora owes you her life, but living it out in exile, away from her home village, is hardly a happy ending. By the way, if you see our friend in the green shirt again, be careful. He thinks you’re a witch. It’s the red hair. In this part of Africa, witches are identified by light emanating from the body.”
“I told the woman at the salon to go easy on the highlights,” Mack said.
“He’s told his friends the reason he was powerless to fight you was that you cast a spell on him,” Warner said. “Fear of getting his balls shot off played no part. Unfortunately, now, if he dies, he won’t be able to join his ancestors and he’ll have to live as a ghost. His only recourse is to kill the witch who cast the spell on him.”
“Terrific,” Mack said. “I’ll be careful.”
They were interrupted by a man of about fifty, handsome, wearing a soiled white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a stethoscope dangling from his neck. He seemed in a hurry. MacKenzie understood the man to be Dr. Claude Chaline, the head of the team from Docteurs Sans Frontières. Her fate was in Evelyn Warner’s hands—she could blow Mack’s cover or not. Chaline would send MacKenzie away simply because her presence in the camp increased the danger to everyone, despite how she’d handled the Sara Ochora situation
, merely because she was U.S. Army.
“Claude,” Warner said. “This is Mary Dorsey. United Nations Women’s Health Initiative. We’ve been showing her around a bit.”
“The one from earlier?” Dr. Chaline said.
Mack nodded.
“Why do you have a weapon?” he asked, suspicious. “Who taught you how to use it?”
“I was trained at the UN,” Mack said. “We’re authorized to arm ourselves. Since Rwanda.”
Chaline accepted her explanation at face value.
“Do you have medical training, Mary Dorsey?” he asked.
“I’m a certified EMT,” she said. “But it’s been a while since I’ve done any work as one.”
“Wash your hands and meet me in the OR in fifteen minutes,” he told her. “I have a C-section to perform. The fetus is underweight but I believe we can help the mother. Evelyn, I noticed Stephen didn’t eat his dinner again. Perhaps you could speak with him.”
Dr. Chaline left. Warner waited until he was out of earshot.
“Where is David?” she asked. “I’d love to see him again.”
“He’s working out of the Hotel Liger in Baku,” MacKenzie told her. “But I’m not sure where he’s going from there. Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Evelyn said.
“How’s my accent?”
“It’s good,” she said. “Though I knew you weren’t Irish before you interceded with our merry little wedding party today.”
“How?”
“Stephen told me you said you were from Coldwater Road and that Bono went to your high school. I knew Paul Hewson before he started calling himself Bono Vox. He went to a nondenominational arts high school. There weren’t any nuns or priests.”
“Are you going to tell Stephen?” Mack asked.
Warner shook her head.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” she said. “But you might want to tell him yourself at some point. He’s enormously trusting but a bit naive. I think somebody hurt him once by lying to him. He might take it personally.”
DeLuca was on the veranda when his SATphone chirped. He’d been talking to an ex-employee of Dutch Shell who’d been holed up at the hotel after they’d fired him for refusing to travel to a testing station that had briefly been overrun and occupied by LPLF forces near a village called Sagoa, fearful that the soldiers might return and find him there unprotected. He’d been drunk for the last two weeks, Mohl warned DeLuca, but he might have some useful information. “I’ll tell you what they don’t want you to know,” the man slurred to DeLuca. “There’s more goddamn oil in Liger than in Kuwait, Alaska, and Venezuela combined, but the IMF won’t loan them the money to get it out unless they make the oil itself collateral and repay from revenues. They did that in Lagos to stop government officials from pocketing the money. Bo is shitting in his pants. You know what I think? I think WAOC and Ngwema made a deal. WAOC is sick of dealing with Bo. Ngwema is so deep into WAOC’s pocket their balls are hitting him on the head.”
“Excuse me,” DeLuca said, holding up a finger to say he’d be a minute and flipping his phone open. “Don Brown, who’s this?”
“Herr Totenbrau,” General LeDoux said, referencing the brand of home-brewed beer they’d made while stationed together in Germany, several years, wars, and worlds ago. “Can you talk?”
“I can listen,” DeLuca said. He doubted the oil man was sober enough to remember anything he’d overhear, but why take chances?
“It’s all falling apart,” LeDoux said. “IMINT shows major troop movements in the north, IPAB or LPLF, trying to be in place and knock Bo out before we launch. So much for ultimatums. I’ll send you the details on your CIM. Three basic columns driving south hard, one to your west, one to your east through Camp Seven and Sagoa, and one’s coming right down the pike, your way, I’m afraid. You should be seeing retreating Ligerian forces any minute.”
“That’s interesting,” DeLuca said, glancing down the street in front of the hotel.
“We also have pictures of a village called Mbusi. About fifty klicks northeast of you. It’s not good.”
“How many?”
“Can’t say,” LeDoux said. “The bodies aren’t intact. We’re counting limbs and dividing by four. Plus we can’t tell how deep the piles are. Eight hundred people, give or take a few. Mostly Da Christians. TF-21’s going in to eyeball it.”
“Do we know who?”
“The government is saying it’s Dari,” LeDoux said. “For what it’s worth.”
“They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?” DeLuca said. “How does this change our timetable?”
“Not ours, but yours, maybe,” LeDoux said. “We’d prefer it if we could send one H-60 to one LZ to get the bunch of you. Any chance you could circle the wagons for us?”
“You’re ordering us to evacuate?” DeLuca asked.
“Advising,” LeDoux said. “It’s up to you. The call from here is that the window is closing. Right now we can fly, but the longer we wait, the more likely it is we get lit up.”
“How long do we have?”
“Depends on where you are,” LeDoux said. “If we wait till it’s hot, we’re going to need support.”
“Negative on extraction,” DeLuca said, making a decision. He wasn’t willing to risk the lives of flight crews on the chance that something might happen, at some vague time in the future. If it happened then, they’d deal with it then. He was fine, Hoolie was fine, Mack was okay, Dan was all right, and he hadn’t heard from Zoulalian, but he probably had his reasons for going dark. The idea wasn’t to run away at the first sign that they were in harm’s way. “Somebody here delivered a letter to the front desk today. Unsigned. It said Dari will be at the Park Motel tomorrow, outside Tsotho National Park, at noon.”
“From?” LeDoux asked.
“Don’t know who it’s from,” DeLuca said.
“Trap?” LeDoux said.
“Possibly,” DeLuca said. “Or he wants to meet. I think we need to go and find out.”
There was a long silence. LeDoux could order them out, if he wanted to.
“Keep me posted,” LeDoux said. “We’ll send whatever we have to send. You understand our position.”
“I do,” DeLuca said. “And you understand mine. We can still do the mission. I’ll give you a call if we need a limo.”
Chapter Eight
ZOULALIAN WAITED IN THE COURTYARD OUTSIDE the mosque at Kumari, told that he was in charge of the second vehicle, a two-year-old white Mitsubishi Mighty-Max 4¥4 pickup with the spare tire mounted on the front grille. The mosque was modest, at least by Middle Eastern standards, and felt more like a community center than a religious edifice. Rahjid Waid had gone inside to speak with Imam Dadullahjid. Zoulalian had not yet been told what they were doing there, but he knew it had to be important because Rahjid had come along in person rather than waiting back at the camp. Zoulalian had six men under him, including four seasoned Algerians who looked like they’d cut your heart out with a butter knife, and two black African teenagers who were trying not to show how scared they were. When Rahjid introduced “Khalil Penjwin” to the camp upon his arrival, he’d exaggerated Khalil’s credentials a bit, saying he’d killed over a hundred Americans with roadside bombs and IEDs, and that he’d been the number-two most wanted man on the Americans’ blacklist, just behind Ibrahim Al Durri, when he left Iraq to come help the cause in Africa.
A group of kids played soccer beyond the outer walls of the mosque. Zoulalian could tell that his black soldiers wanted to put down their guns and join the soccer players.
“Some day, the World Cup will be played in Africa,” he told the boys in Arabic. They smiled.
“African football is too beautiful,” one said. “We are too good. They don’t want to be embarrassed.”
Rahjid had told them to keep their weapons hidden beneath a tarp in the back of the truck, five AK-47s and a pair of shoulder-fired grenade launchers. The Algerians were chewing on some sort of weed that made Zoula
lian’s lips tingle when he tried it. They were high. He couldn’t tell how high, but their eyes were glassy and wild.
Rahjid reappeared and crossed to where Zoulalian was standing. He was a short stumpy man, with a close-cropped black beard and wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in desert camo except for the white kaffiyeh on his head. Khalil was dressed similarly.
“We will wait here,” Rahjid said. He eyed the two younger soldiers.
“They are nervous,” Zoulalian said, keeping his voice down. “I think they want to know why we’re here.”
“They’ll find out soon enough,” Rahjid said.
“I think it would be better if they had time to think about it,” Zoulalian said. “If they’re to become martyrs, I think they want to begin their prayers. It would help them fight the urge to panic.”
“They will not become martyrs today,” Rahjid said. He paused, appearing to reconsider. “Three people are coming. A Frenchman, an American reporter, and a woman from the UN. The imam wants to talk to them, and when he’s done, we’ll take them to our camp. He wants to keep them to use to negotiate, when the American troops come. Not here though—we will follow them a ways and then take them, away from the mosque.”
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