The Exile

by Andrew Britton

  Now he reached for the canteen strapped over his shoulder, removed its cap, and took a drink of tepid water, swishing it around his mouth before he gulped it down. It was now almost two o’clock in the morning, six hours since the Hangarihi had guided the barges ashore and deployed their off-load ramps. His men had since driven the Zolfaqars onto the trailers and put their backs into manually rolling the helicopters from the barges on metal tow carts, grunting and sweating as they hastened to complete their arduous work so the convoy could set out with many hours of darkness still ahead.

  Lined along the gunwales of the barges, the Hangarihi had watched the laborious effort as if it were a relaxing diversion, smoking and drinking whiskey from tin flasks, the tips of their cigarettes glowing like orange fireflies in the night. They had offered no assistance after their cargo had been unlashed from its pallets, and the commander and his men had expected nothing else from them. In delivering his plunder without delay, their leader had stuck to his end of the bargain when he could have simply made off with the loot, using the raid on the yacht of Hassan al-Saduq as justification to go into hiding. That alone had earned him a large quantum of respect. With its easily defended coves and grottos, the Somali coast was a rabbit warren where he could have laid low indefinitely…not that it would have been his single best recourse. In the pirate boom-towns that were the underpinnings of the country’s new economy, Nicolas Barre would be treated as a king in his stronghold, and the people there would go to any lengths to shelter and protect them from legal authorities or any other threats.

  The commander heard the growl of powerful engines coming to life, twisted the cap back onto his canteen with long, graceful fingers as he saw his chief lieutenant, Mabuir, striding toward him from the line of HETs. Although Mabuir had not shied from assisting in the off-load, it did not escape the commander’s notice that he looked crisp in his beret and field uniform. A great deal had changed about his fighters since the events at Camp Hadith—or the best of them, at any rate.

  The reason was no mystery, and the commander credited himself for recognizing that the first step in preparing his force for what lay ahead would be to alter its composition. He had winnowed out the incorrigible brutes, the ones who were addicted to the adrenal highs of unbridled destruction and its spoils…who knew only the way of the gang and were incapable of restraint and strict obedience to his authority. Although the rest had lost none of their ferocity, it was as if their basest urges had been expunged, seared away in the cauldron of that blood-soaked raid. The commander himself had no qualms about what he had done in retrospect, and would have been surprised if any of his followers, to a man, recalled their actions that night with the faintest tinge of regret…not the killing, not the burning, not what they had done to the young American woman. But he managed to instill them with a discipline and purpose that went beyond the primal lust for combat, a sense of larger mission, which would be imperative for all that was to occur next. His goal, his driving motivation, was to reclaim for Africa what was African—its very lifeblood, a source of unsurpassed power that outsiders had drawn from its sand through conquest and subjugation and had used to further their own global dominance.

  The Americans, the Russians, and recently the Chinese…their empires had risen as those on this continent had fallen into stagnation and decay. Risen to unthinkable heights on their broken souls and spines. But the reality they took for granted was about to be struck by the thunder and lightning of change, the geopolitical puzzle they had pieced together swept from the table at which they sat, its pieces scattered helter-skelter around them. With the commander leading a charge none of them could foresee, a new Pan-Africanism would be born.

  Oil—it was the lifeblood of the earth, pulsing through the heart and veins of every contemporary superpower. Control its flow and you controlled them. Control them and you quite simply became supreme.

  Some called him the Exile, and he did not object to that term in the least—in fact, its sublime irony amused him. When in times past had the visionary achieved recognition before the products of his imagination, his revolutionary dreams and ambitions, were actualized?

  Simon Nusairi felt as if the entire arcing trajectory of his life—the fall from privilege to ignominy and disgrace for his refusal to accept complacency, his family’s rejection and ultimate denial of his rightful heritage, his embracing the role of pariah and outcast as a form of liberation, and finally his regenesis as a master gamesman and warrior—had been preparation for the great redemptive achievement that lay ahead of him.

  He would soon shake the world in his fist. Grab it by the throat and shake it. And he would not release it from his choke hold until they acquiesced to his demands….

  “Sir, we are ready to get under way on your orders,” Mabuir said, tearing him from his thoughts.

  The commander nodded, glanced at the tarpaulin-covered equipment. “Give everything a last inspection…. I want to be doubly certain the tanks and helicopters are well secured for the trip. The tarps as well. Everything. It’s best we take precautions now to avoid delays than have to proceed in fits and starts.”

  Mabuir gave a brisk military salute. Nusairi gave no outward display of satisfaction, but for him it was yet another affirmative sign that the ragtag band of fighters he’d pieced together had been tightened into a legitimate armed force. He returned his lieutenant’s gesture and then reached into his field jacket for his satellite phone.

  “Hello?” On the first ring.

  Nusairi gave a thin smile. The leader of the so-called Darfur People’s Army was another of those in for a surprise. There would soon be no more room for his breed of minor insurgents; they would fall into step or else. But that was still something for the future.

  “Ishmael,” he said. “I take it you have been waiting for my call.”

  “Yes,” Mirghani said. “How could it be otherwise?”

  “And the American?”

  “He has retired to my guest room. Whether he sleeps or not is another story. But I confess to envying how he manages to be calm under most circumstances…or act as if he is, at any rate.”

  “Well, he has substantial cause to relax,” Nusairi said.

  “The shipment came as arranged?”

  “Precisely.” Nusairi was gazing at the assembly of transport vehicles. “It is already aboard our trucks and set to move west over the border.”

  “This is the most encouraging word I could have gotten tonight, my friend,” Mirghani said, breathing an audible sigh of relief. “After the news from Cameroon several days ago…”

  “Put it out of your mind,” Nusairi said. “It was of trifling consequence in the broader scheme of things.” He paused in thought. “I would recommend that you knock on the American’s door and pass on your recovered optimism. It’s my expectation that he will in turn want to convey it to his puppeteer in the United States.”

  Mirghani’s chuckle was slightly uncomfortable. “I don’t believe he would appreciate your characterization of him…or the one to whom he answers.”

  “It makes no difference,” Nusairi said. “For all his bluster, he is a hand puppet to be waggled on his master’s fingers. A pawn who does as he is told. Let him reassure the one who makes him twitch and jerk that we are on course.”

  “I will update him immediately,” Mirghani said. “Allah ma’ak, may God be with you on your journey.”

  Nusairi pocketed the phone without a word of farewell. Mirghani was a fool. Another narrow-minded separatist warlord, one of dozens used to firing potshots at Omar Bashir and one another while crouched out of sight behind rocks or inside burrows. If the opportunity arose, he would resort to licking the soles of Western boots in exchange for a fiefdom through which he could parade at will, lording over his flatterers and subjects, strutting about like a peacock with his tail feathers outspread for their admiration.

  Grunting to himself, Nusairi walked toward the convoy, gave it a quick once-over, then climbed into the passenger seat of
the second truck and radioed the order to move.

  A minute later its oversized wheels began to roll.

  Playing with her sat phone to kill time aboard the cramped, grimy train from the railway junction at Atbara to Port Sudan, Abby Liu had found a Google search result that read, “The Road from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum.” When she’d clicked on the link, she’d come upon a color photograph of a young man standing thigh-deep in an infinite vista of powdery gray sand, a set of barely distinguishable tire treads running between him and the camera lens. Besides the blue screen of sky overhead, and those old, faded tracks, nothing disturbed the barrenness of the near or far horizons.

  She’d smiled thinly at the online snapshot, then nudged Kealey in the seat next to her, holding the phone out to show him the image, thinking whoever had posted it had a caustic sense of humor…and that it might help break the silence in which he’d sat staring out the window for hours.

  He had glanced down at it expressionlessly, shrugged her off, then turned back toward the dust-filmed window.

  “My apologies, Ryan,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”

  He looked at her. “What?”

  “Interrupt the grinding monotony of this ride,” she said. “I mistakenly thought you might appreciate it.”

  Kealey said nothing for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “We need to get to where we’re going,” he said. “This is like, I don’t know….”

  “Being stuck in sand?”

  He studied her face. And this time a smile ghosted at his lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose that’s as good a way of putting it as any.”

  She nodded, a gleam in her slanted brown eyes.

  “Something else you find amusing?” Kealey asked.

  It was her turn to shrug. “We can only do what we can do,” Abby said quietly. “That doesn’t include shrinking the desert or laying highways across it—so where’s the use in brooding over our situation?” She took her voice down another notch so the local travelers packing the aisles couldn’t hear it. “I count us damned fortunate to have gotten this far without any snags.”

  He grunted. In fact, she was right. Ferran’s arrangements had gone beyond holding the ferry’s departure for them; Gamal, his fixer at the Aswân pier, had gotten them past the Egyptian customs and immigration officers and onto the boat without a single one of them so much as glancing at their documents. Gamal had assured Kealey there likewise would be no hitch at all when they reached Wadi Halfa the next day, and true to his word, things had gone smoothly, the blue-uniformed Sudanese customs men moving them from the ferry onto the waiting train with alacrity. In that sense, the two thousand dollars Kealey had used to grease Ferran’s palm had seemed an absolute bargain.

  The problem was that he had not considered that the railway trip to Khartoum aboard the antiquated, slow-moving Sudanese train would take over two days. It had been an oversight that had little bearing on things, since there had been no faster means of transport available to them. The only remedy, using the word loosely, had been to alter their planned route and switch to the Port Sudan line at the Atbara junction. In the port city, they would have the option of hopping a plane to Khartoum or motoring down a paved road—and after a phone call to Seth Holland, the Agency man at the embassy, it had been determined that he would dispatch one of his staff there to meet and drive them down into the capital, once again staying away from the unwanted scrutiny of air security personnel. Which was all well and good. But still…

  “I have to remind you about Cullen White,” Kealey said, looking at Abby. “The man is calculating, and quick on his feet. Once he hears about Saduq being in custody, he’s going to put two and two together.”

  “He can’t possibly know you’re involved.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” Kealey said. “All he does have to do is get a whiff that something about the raid on Saduq’s yacht—or his being held out of sight—deviated from what’s SOP with Interpol or the EU task force. I think that’s already happened, and I’m pretty sure the same thought must have crossed John Harper’s mind more than once. I guarantee White won’t be waiting around for the sky to fall on his head. Whatever he’s been working on, we can expect he’ll very quickly start looking at contingencies. And that means ways to shift into high gear.” He shook his head. “This holdup is about the last thing we needed. Doesn’t matter if we were stuck with it from the get-go…I wish I’d at least seen it coming.”

  Her features serious, Abby sat beside Kealey in private thought as the train clanked along over obsolete wooden railroad ties, the blackness outside its windows no more uniform than the sandy landscape visible by day. Around her, passengers rustled in their sleep amid heaps of shabby-looking baggage and loosely packed cartons.

  “We’re in far from an ideal spot. I won’t quibble with you there,” she said at length. And then hesitated, still looking contemplative. “Ryan, this probably doesn’t need stating, but we’re very different. I don’t work like you. I’m used to careful planning, gathering of evidence, adherence to rules and process….”

  “And you’re wondering what happens when we do reach Khartoum,” Kealey said.

  She simply looked at him, and he all at once recognized something in her expression that he had not seen there before, a kind of vulnerability that caught him off guard.

  “I wish I could tell you,” he said, whispering now. “But I won’t lie, Abby. I have no idea beyond what I said in Limbe. We’re going after Ishmael Mirghani. We came into the game late…and I get the feeling that we’re close to being out of time. All I know is we’re at the stage where we’ll have to wing it again, and it means we’ll have to hit the ground running—”

  “And do whatever’s necessary,” she said, finishing the sentence.

  Kealey gave her a long glance, studying her face, and was surprised to find himself wishing he could say something to relieve the unsettled look that continued lingering over it.

  But he could not give that much of himself. Try as he might, he could not. And instead he turned away from her, his eyes returning to the window and the black emptiness into which it seemed he’d been staring for an unendurable eternity.

  Jacoby Phillips had spent almost an hour tailing Ishmael Mirghani through Khartoum in his ten-year-old blue Saab SPG, having picked him up when he’d exited his suburban home in the northern section of Bahri, leaving a short while after the man who had once introduced himself to the American chargé d’affaires as James Landis slipped out a back entrance and then turned onto a side street from the rear garden.

  Phillips had watched Landis hasten down the street from Mirghani’s yard, then climb into a waiting Ford Escort, which had promptly driven off toward the highway, heading in the general direction of the Kober Bridge, or Armed Forces Bridge—which, he’d realized, was the most direct route to the airport. Although Landis was not Phillips’s assignment, the CIA agent had taken a video capture of him entering the black sedan with his DVR cell phone, making sure to get a close-up shot of its plates. He’d then relayed the encrypted file to his colleague Bruce Mackenzie, whose job was to stay on Landis, using the Agency’s secure Intelink-SCI wireless intranet, and continued cooping about a half block from Mirghani’s house.

  After about ten minutes Mirghani emerged from his front door, carrying a hard-shell briefcase, strode a few blocks to the bus station, and got on the express shuttle to the downtown area. Staying close to him, Phillips slowed down as he boarded, and then eased along three car lengths behind the bus, following it past the Kober Bridge, which Landis’s vehicle had taken, and then over the old Blue Nile suspension bridge for the short ride across the river.

  Mackenzie had spotted the black Escort within minutes of receiving Phillips’s e-mail and video attachment, having waited just a few blocks away from Mirghani’s home, outside an area of landscaped trees and lawn along the riverside. The CIA agents had known it was just a matter of time before one, the other, or both of their birds flew the coop, and their assumpt
ion had been that they would do so separately. It would have been a source of intensely curious attention had the Muslim radical and his unlikely Western visitor left there together at the peak of U.S.-Sudanese relations; for them to do so now in plain sight was incomprehensible.

  In fact, Mackenzie had thought, the same could be said about their relationship, period. Whatever link had formed between those two could mean nothing but trouble.

  As he’d borne west from Mirghani’s neighborhood, the Escort had gotten on the highway belting the Nile and then swung onto the Kober Bridge’s wide concrete span. Mackenzie, driving a Honda, had followed it past Al Salaam Park and then the Burrii Cemetery to the traffic circle, where it had turned right onto Buri Road toward the turnoff to the airport.

  Moments after the Escort made the turn, however, its driver unexpectedly hit his left signal, slowed, and then pulled onto the shoulder of the two-lane access road and came to a complete halt with his flashers on. Caught by surprise two cars behind it, Mackenzie saw no recourse but to continue straight ahead toward the airport. What else was he supposed to do? Stop behind the Escort? Of course, that was out of the question and just underscored the realization that anything besides driving on past the car would have been an outrageous giveaway. But what the hell had happened? There’d been no sign that the Escort was having car trouble. No sign it had gotten a flat tire. And he had been careful to stay far enough behind so that Landis and his driver would not suspect they had anybody on them.