ACTION: Attached find photographs General Kwesi Emil-Ngwema, taken yesterday 1640 hours at the Port Ivory airport. The man with him is Col. Jumar Inshal-Mukebo, former commander gov forces, Kum region with Ligerian Second Army. Caucasian number one is Simon Bell, head mercenary forces arrested/ confined two days ago, and number two is Hugh Lloyd, the money man. At 1730 hours, a British Hercules took off bearing 48 degrees northeast, destination Benghazi, Libya. Zero off-load, refueled, still there. Why fly an empty plane to Libya? The aircraft was briefly towed into the hangar at the PI airfield where mercenaries were being held under guard. One cellphone call from hangar to South Africa, nothing hard (Boer): “Things are changing rapidly, I’ll be in touch,” etc. The suspicion is that the C-130J picked up and airdropped mercs, somewhere on flight vector. Unfortunately, our bird went off-range at 1748 hours, so we have no IMINT past that time. No current sign of guards at hangar. Possible destination—WAOC has directed employees to relocate to El Amin oil facility for safety (40K NE you—see GPA attached).
ANALYSIS: Ngwema will act in WAOC’s best interests, allied with Mukebo/northern forces.
ACTION: SIGINT/IMINT indicates Ngwema adopting defensive positions only to direct/divert rebel forces against loyalist troops, similar to analysis his actions re Port Ivory—you were there, you know. Appears to be allowing deep incursions southward, where only Presidential Guard/Port Ivory area will/can mount significant resistance.
ANALYSIS: Ngwema wants rebels to defeat Bo, then his forces can encircle/defeat rebels (IMINT confirms— see map). Expect heavy casualties/collateral damage. Also expect no support—you are in the middle.
ACTION: LPLF/IPAB in three columns (see map/ falcon views). Leadership unclear at this time. Massacres in Mbusi, Angasa, Bok, Dasai, Pomogoso. Ligerian version of “shock and awe,” largely along eastern flank/west central. Will spare you the imagery unless requested. Enemy troop identification not possible at this time.
ANALYSIS: The shit has seriously hit the fan.
I will alert you to movements on your position, 20K radius. You may want to set your alarm to silent. Have advised others of same. Currently Mack has departed Kumari (high speed/ground). Sykes is flying into same, private helicopter. Zoulalian signal lost, cause unknown.
Went to 9/11 Memorial site with Mom and left flowers for Aunt Eileen. Mom is worried. She knows not to ask but she knows I can’t lie to her either. We chitchat. Carolyn is staying with her. FYI.
Scott.
DeLuca smiled.
“Good news?” Hoolie asked him as he drove. Paul Asabo was in the passenger seat, staring out the window, the foliage getting thicker and thicker as they traveled toward Tsotho National Park, a section of the Ligerian rain forest that had, so far, survived the pressures that had leveled so much of Liger’s southern jungle, isolated kakum and kapok and mahogany trees rising from the lesser growth to stand three and four hundred feet above the ground. They’d passed coffee and cocoa plantations with gates guarded by armed men. The Park Motel was down the road from the park’s northern entrance.
“Not entirely,” DeLuca said. “My son made captain.”
“Congratulations,” Hoolie said. “What’s it like to have a kid who outranks you?”
“It’s not that much different from having a teenager,” DeLuca said. “I can still kick his ass at eight-ball. That’s what matters.”
“My father and I played chess,” Asabo said. “I used to beat him, but it has occurred to me since then that I never would have beaten him if he hadn’t let me.”
“I let Scottie beat me at tennis once,” DeLuca said. “I learned my lesson. He was furious at me for letting him win.”
“My father beats me at accordion playing,” Hoolie said. “He used to study with Fred Zimmerle. When we play and he says, ‘Take it,’ I say, ‘Keep it.’”
“Bocce,” DeLuca said. “Long Island Bocce Ball Association. My old man played every Friday and Saturday. I couldn’t come close to beating him. When he died, we put a bocce ball in his coffin. I used to tell Scottie that when it thundered, it was his grandpa, playing bocce ball in heaven.”
“I would like to visit my father’s grave,” Asabo said, still staring out the window.
“Maybe if there’s time, we could arrange that,” DeLuca offered. Asabo turned around and looked at him in the backseat.
“First, we would have to find out where it is,” Asabo said. “Can you tell your satellites to search all of Liger for him?”
DeLuca couldn’t quite tell whether Asabo was being sarcastic or sincere. There was more sadness in his voice than bitterness. DeLuca had wondered what it was like for Asabo, coming home after all these years. He’d lingered at the stalls when they’d taken a short tour of the open-air market across from the hotel, running his fingers along the various fruits and vegetables, sparse though the selection was, smelling them, feeling the handwoven textiles and bragging that Ligerian weavers made the finest cloth in all of Africa. They’d gone to get a feel for how the public felt about the rebels in general and about John Dari in particular, but for Asabo, it was a full immersion in lost memories. He’d told DeLuca and Vasquez about a delicacy called jashi, which was barbecued bush meat in a spicy peanut sauce, and he was shocked to learn it was no longer available and hadn’t been for years. He was surprised to see booth after booth selling bootleg American movies on DVD. The market had once sold strictly African products, but now half of what was for sale was made in America or Japan, plastic dinosaurs and surplus McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, Las Vegas key chains, knockoff Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys. Occasionally he would see portraits of his father, old postcards for sale, commemorative plates marking his royal enstoolment, pictures of the king resplendent in the Royal Sun Robe of golden feathers, his staff in hand, smiling. “They haven’t forgotten,” Asabo had said in the marketplace. “I thought that maybe by now they would have.”
“I’m sorry,” DeLuca said in the car, a beat-up Toyota Cressida they’d rented at the hotel. “America should have done something.”
“That is the popular conception in Africa, you know,” Asabo said. “That during the civil war in Rwanda, the Americans were watching the whole thing on television from their satellites. And knew what the interahamwe was doing, from the beginning. I’ve heard some say it was shown every night on popular American television. I have told people that was not true, that only the government had access to the pictures. It was an intelligence failure.”
“I think ‘intelligence failure’ is my favorite new euphemism,” DeLuca said. “Half the things that go wrong aren’t ‘intelligence failures’—they’re stupidity successes. Often spectacular stupidity successes, like Rwanda.”
“How would you explain it?” Asabo said.
“I’m not sure I can,” DeLuca said. “I was a Boston police officer in 1994. But I will tell you one thing. The military has always placed too much value on satellite intelligence and not enough on human intel. Look at Gulf One, goddamn Norman Schwarzkopf with his goddamn slide shows every night, showing nose-cone footage from smart bomb cameras of cars scurrying across a bridge and laughing and saying, ‘There goes the luckiest man in Iraq.’ He was so proud of the technology that he made the war look like a big video game. Anyone with any brains knew the footage of bombs dropping on actual people got left on the editing room floor. The people without any brains, who number more than a few, unfortunately, got the idea that we’re omnipotent and we can see where we want to see and go where we want to go, any time we want, without consequences. I swear to God, 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if Al Qaeda didn’t think we were taunting them, saying, ‘We can hit you but you can’t hit us.’ As you may have noticed from Iraqi Freedom, we don’t do that anymore. We don’t run our intel in PowerPoint shows on national television.”
“Did you have pictures?” Asabo said. “Of Rwanda?”
“I’m not sure,” DeLuca said. “Some, I think. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say we were blind. Just confused. And mayb
e numb. I met Iraqis who thought America watches the whole world, 24/7. And that we know what’s going on.”
Hoolie laughed at the thought.
“Half of North Korea’s military establishment works deep underground,” DeLuca continued, “because they think we’re watching them. After Gulf One, if you lived near Canaveral or Vandenberg or Greely, you would have seen launch platform after launch platform throwing up milsats. You wouldn’t have known what it was, but you would have seen a lot of rocket plumes. Before Gulf Two, I think it was four or five launches a month, just getting ready to invade Iraq with all our birds up and running. We still couldn’t find anybody. That’s why I was there. And for that matter, that’s why I’m here—that’s what you’re part of. Team Red was formed to put a new emphasis on gathering human intelligence.”
“The whole WMD thing in Iraq was an intelligence failure,” Hoolie said. “Maybe I should say a stupidity success. We didn’t have enough human intelligence. We were too reliant on satellite imagery.”
“Satellites are fine,” DeLuca said, “if you know where to point them, and when, and what to look for, and how to follow up. If you don’t, all they do is make you overconfident.”
As he spoke, he downloaded and examined the falcon view of the Park Motel, which was now three kilometers ahead of them. He saw a large pond and a set of buildings, but zooming in and out, he saw no sign of military vehicles or unusual activities. He looked at his watch. They weren’t early. Was the letter he’d received a hoax? Or was he driving into a trap? If so, where was the trap?
A large sign marked the entrance, reading, WELCOME TO THE PARK MOTEL, LIGER’S FINEST RESORT SPA. EASY ACCESS TO TSOTHO NATIONAL PARK. AIR-CONDITIONING. IN ROOM TELEVISION. HBO.
“Good thing the TVs are in the rooms,” Hoolie said. “I hate it when you have to look out the window to watch TV.”
The proprietor greeted their arrival personally. The only other car in the circular drive beneath the palm trees was a blue Honda Civic with the motel’s name painted on the door. His name, he said, was Mohammed Ali, and he was smiling from ear to ear, shaking hands, searching with his eyes to see if there was any luggage to carry.
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said, “do come inside. I’m afraid I’m a bit short-staffed today because business has been slow, so I’ve sent some people home, but I can show you to your rooms myself…”
“Thank you,” DeLuca said, “but we don’t need rooms— we’re just here for a meeting. Is there somewhere we could wait?”
“Yes yes yes,” Mohammed said, “please follow me, you can wait in the bar.”
The hotel was one large central building and a line of smaller cottages following the shoreline of a five-acre pond, DeLuca estimated, the buildings all painted a bright pink with blue trim. The shore was lined with trees festooned with the nests of bowerbirds, woven grass globes about the size of small cantaloupes, dangling from the trees like Christmas ornaments. Bright yellow and orange birds flitted about, as did blue kingfishers and green hummingbirds, darting amidst the flowering bushes that Ali had used to landscape the property. The bar was a large open-air thatch-roofed structure built on pylons about thirty yards from shore, connected to land by a wooden bridge that reached out and then ran parallel to the shore before connecting to the bar. There was a large monkey cage in one corner of the bar, where four colobus monkeys cavorted, chattering loudly and grimacing and reaching through the bars for handouts.
“Don’t get too close,” Ali said. “They will settle down in a minute. My sons named them John, Paul, George, and Ringo. I will go start the generator. If you would like tea or limone or whatever you will have, please help yourself. There is beer, too, and I would bring it to you myself but as a Muslim, I do not touch alcohol, and my barman is not here, so help yourself and you will pay me later. Please.”
He crossed the bridge and disappeared into the main building. The late afternoon sun moved westward across an azure sky. DeLuca heard birds chirping and warbling, insects buzzing, the wind activating a set of gentle chimes that hung beside the monkeys’ cage, and from the kitchen, the faint pulse of a radio playing reggae music. With a little imagination, it was almost possible to pretend they weren’t in the middle of a civil war.
Hoolie read the note printed on the back of the menu.
“It says here this place started as a fish farm. The pond is stocked with tilapia. When the birds came and made nests, the guy figured it would make a nice place for a motel. The bread on the table is for us to feed the fish. Toss a piece in and see what happens.”
DeLuca picked up a dried roll that was probably a few days old and cast it onto the water. Within seconds, the roll was being pecked apart by a swarming school of small reddish gray fish, roiling the water and churning the surface white.
“Well that’s pretty cool,” he said. “Jesus Christ!”
He nearly jumped from his chair as a pair of massive jaws emerged from the water and snapped loudly down with a splash into the middle of the school of swarming fish. Hoolie laughed as the first crocodile was joined by a second, then a third, all feeding on the tilapia. DeLuca counted four more pairs of eyes gliding silently across the surface of the water toward the commotion. He’d drawn his weapon without thinking, alert to the possibility of an ambush.
DeLuca put his Beretta back in his concealed nylon holster and sat down.
“Excuse me while I go change my underwear,” he said.
Hoolie continued to read from the back of the menu.
“‘Why did I decide to stock the pond with crocodiles also?’ it says. ‘This is a question that is asked frequently. I tell those who ask, I did not decide to stock the pond—this is Africa. The crocodiles just come. You are advised to avoid swimming in the pond, but be certain otherwise that they will not hurt you. Remember, hate attracts hate. Love attracts love.’”
There were no fences or barriers of any kind at the edge of the pond.
“I wonder what keeps them from walking into the rooms?” DeLuca wondered.
“Fear of spiders,” Asabo said.
They waited for nearly three hours before DeLuca suggested perhaps they should head back to Baku Da’al. Asabo said Liger was a place where if you showed up on the same day as your appointment, you were considered punctual. DeLuca kept checking the falcon view on his CIM, but even at maximum zoom, they appeared to be alone. He’d asked for a Predator to be posted overhead, armed with a Hellfire missile, but he was beyond the reach of rescue teams and past bingo-fuel for Blackhawks—the Hellfire offered a one-shot option, and after that, they were down to the sidearms they had on them.
Then a figure appeared in the twilight between two of the guest cottages. The man stood, quite still, and DeLuca watched him. A second figure appeared, a third, and then he saw perhaps a hundred soldiers, armed mainly with Kalashnikovs, but here and there, men carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers. More soldiers appeared by the kitchen, the motel office, and on the road. DeLuca realized they were effectively surrounded, but then it didn’t matter, because they hadn’t come to put up a fight. The Sons of John Dari appeared to be disciplined and well-equipped, DeLuca noted, without the ragtag aspects of Africa’s other boy armies and militias.
“Everybody stay cool,” DeLuca said softly. “We knew we couldn’t beat the numbers anyway, so let’s all take it easy.”
Three men separated themselves from the others and approached the bridge to the bar. Asabo recognized John Dari at the center. He looked, of course, older than his high school photograph, but he retained a basic youthfulness, the main difference being the crescent-shaped scars carved into each cheek, bisected by a line extending down half an inch. The two men with him were enormous, each approaching six foot six and three hundred pounds by DeLuca’s estimation, presenting the image of a quarterback with a pair of NFL linemen forming a pocket on either side of him, though unlike NFL linemen, Dari’s protectors also carried M-10 machine pistols.
Dari and Asabo’s eyes met, tho
ugh neither man said anything. Then Dari spoke softly to his guards, in a language DeLuca couldn’t identify, and the two men withdrew to the bridge.
“Hello, John,” Asabo said at last.
“Hello, Paul,” Dari said softly, looking at DeLuca and Vasquez. “Why don’t you introduce me to your friends?”
“This is Don Brown, from the World Bank,” Asabo began.
“That’s all right, Paul,” DeLuca interrupted. He extended his hand to Dari. “Special Agent David DeLuca, United States Army counterintelligence. This is Agent Vasquez.” He held his hand out a moment longer, and when Dari didn’t take it, he pulled it back.
“Delta Force?” Dari asked. DeLuca shook his head.
“Different group,” he said.
Dari turned his attention to Asabo.
“Why have you come?” he asked.
“I’ve come with these men,” Asabo said. “To talk to you.”
“To talk to me,” Dari said. “And what will we talk about? I read that the Red Sox won the World Series. Shall we talk about that?”
“I think Paul and Hoolie and I have come to listen,” DeLuca said. “The people who sent me wanted me to learn everything I could about you.”
“You want to learn about me?” Dari said. “Why don’t you just go to my Web site?”
“We didn’t know you had one,” DeLuca said.
“I don’t,” Dari said. “I’m joking. Why would you want to know about me?”
“Because we feel like we have a responsibility to Liger,” DeLuca said. “We know that you’ve become an important person in Liger. But we don’t know what that means.”
“What were you told?” Dari said. “Just because I’m curious.”
“We were told you’re leading a rebel militia,” DeLuca said. “That you’re linked to Arab terrorists, and possibly supported by them or aligned with them. We don’t know what your allegiances are exactly, or your goals. To be honest, we’re afraid of you.”
Mission Liberty Page 14
