by Sean McFate
“Full faith and credit, Glenn. Just like I promised. Full United States government backing, guaranteed.”
Hartley was agitated, like the very idea of Venezuela gave him hemorrhoids. “Where are we with that?”
“General Roberts is working State. Ray Brayburn, a former national security advisor, is working K Street.”
“I know Brayburn,” Hartley snapped.
“I’ve spent the last two days on the Hill. You saw the stories in the papers? Freedom gas. Friends of Ukraine. Elected officials are clamoring for action.”
Hartley waved that away with a swipe of his hand. “Did you talk to Addison?”
“He’s your senator, Glenn. We know he’s onboard. I’m working on the ones who care about what happens in Eastern Europe.”
“The idealistic bastards.”
The opportunistic bastards.
“Don’t worry, Glenn, we have the solution. We can push Putin back, promote democracy, and enrich America in one fell swoop. There’s no reason to oppose it.”
“My people tell me Addison might not go along. Too risky. Doesn’t want America sucked into another war.”
“Of course he wants America sucked into another war, Glenn. He’s a hawk. And he’s going to run for president.”
“He wants cover.”
“He wants to sound tough, Glenn, without having to take responsibility if the war goes wrong. That’s the best part of being on the outside looking in. Besides, we both know the senators come last. Right now, it’s a social call, keep them informed, so they don’t complain when we need them.”
Like you, Glenn.
It was almost eight thirty, the sun barely clinging to the horizon, but it was still hot. Winters could practically see the humidity hanging above the pool, and he could feel the dampness on the back of his collar. Houston was maybe the only place in America that made the stifling Washington summers seem pleasant. Two world capitals, both carved out of a swamp.
“Look, Glenn,” he said. “I’m sorry about Libya. Sometimes you have to cut something loose when a better opportunity comes along.”
“You cut fifty million dollars loose, Brad.”
“It was only twenty million, Glenn, and half of that was mine—”
Winters stopped. Wrong direction.
He leaned back in his lounge chair and looked out at the swimming pool and the manicured lawn, a lacrosse net hanging limp in the corner. Nobody ever had enough money, especially in River Oaks, but Glenn Hartley came close. This wasn’t about money. Hartley was a cowboy. He had loved the idea of Libya. But there were ideas he would love even more.
“Every time I come here, Glenn, I think of Prescott Bush, one of your famous oil men.”
“He wasn’t an oil man, Brad.”
“No, Glenn, he wasn’t. He was a dealmaker. He saw the opportunity to make a deal with the Saud family in the Middle East and supply oil to the United States for the next fifty years, when everyone else just saw Arabs in the desert. And you know what happened?”
“He made a pile.”
“His son became president of the United States. And his grandson, too.”
Winters paused to let it sink in. Opportunities to make money were everywhere. Opportunities to change the balance of power in the world for the next hundred years, and get filthy rich doing it, came once in a lifetime, if you were lucky.
“It’s not just Ukraine, Glenn. That’s a foot in the door. It’s Kirkuk, Irbil, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan. There’s a hundred years of oil out there, just waiting to be set free. I can get you in there, and guarantee your safety. But if you aren’t interested . . .”
“Brad . . .”
“We need a face, Glenn. Someone legitimate we can trust. If you don’t want to be that face, I can find someone else. I can find someone in this very neighborhood—”
“Easy Brad. Easy,” Hartley said with a languid smile, turning on the Texas charm. “I told you last year, and I’ll tell you again, I like you. I believe in you. And I’m committed, even after Libya. The team is together, and we’re ready to go. You give us the call, we’ll stick more holes in the ground than you can count.” That was life with Glenn Hartley. Like other wildcatters gone corporate, he believed the world was his pincushion, and he wasn’t truly happy unless he was driving in the needle. “Don’t worry, Brad,” Hartley said. “It’s going to happen. One way or another, we are going to nail Putin’s ass to the ground.”
“I’m glad to hear it Glenn, because I’ve got a favor to ask.”
Hartley laughed. “And here I am, licking your ass.”
Winters smiled, just to show he was a good sport. “It’s just a phone call, Glenn. I have a meeting with Karpenko’s London bankers, the day after tomorrow. The ones who backed you in Kirkuk. I need you to put in a good word.”
“What kind of word?”
“That you have my back 500 million percent.” Five hundred million was the most recent valuation of Hartley’s company, Valhalla Energy Group.
Hartley laughed. “Fine. So long as I don’t have to sign that statement. Anything else?”
It was Winters’s turn to laugh now. “I may have promised Addison you’d be a top backer of his presidential campaign.”
“Hell, I practically promised him that fourteen years ago, when I made him a congressman.”
Winters stared out across the pool, watching the evaporation burn off into the sky. Tomorrow morning, it would be back as dew. It made him wish for a tall glass of iced tea, one with a lemon wedge on the rim. What had happened to good old Southern hospitality?
“The boy’s got a scholarship offer,” Glenn said, looking at the lacrosse net in the gathering dusk, “and he’s only a junior, if you can believe that. The University of Virginia, up in your neck of the woods. It’s a powerhouse, I hear.”
Winters felt it, the rush of adrenaline, something almost like joy. If Glenn was thinking of legacies, he was all the way in. All Winters needed now was the general and the bankers. And Locke, of course. All of this depended on Locke.
“Well send him on up, Glenn,” he said. “You know we’ll take care of him. Washington is always looking for promising young men.”
CHAPTER 18
The Wolf wasn’t happy. The fallen tower, the mangled gate, dozens of destroyed vehicles. He walked through the gate and down the access road to the blind curve. The Chechens had chained the fallen trees and pulled them from the road, but it had taken time. So had moving the burned remains of the delivery truck. And the Range Rovers blocking the entrance to the main road.
This wasn’t Sirko. The Wolf was sure of that. This was too . . . modern. Too carefully planned. Too clever. Karpenko had brought in help. Someone connected. No amateur could fly a plane three hundred miles into Ukrainian airspace and out again. This was a top-flight operation, and the Wolf knew what that meant: the distant enemy. The West.
He wondered, briefly, about Karpenko’s story.
Then he put it behind him. The story here, in this wreckage, was more important. He had sent the Chechens out onto the roads, chasing luck, but he knew they wouldn’t stick with him for long, not if the bounty and his high-end extraction team had flown beyond his reach. They were in it for the money, nothing more, and there were many opportunities to make money in eastern Ukraine. Hell, Putin was basically paying mercenaries just to cause trouble.
But if the Wolf could find any proof of what had happened here, he could pay more.
He turned and looked back down the road toward the airbase, running through the operation in his head. Black Range Rovers, two Mercedes. Ambush with AK-47s fired by Ukrainians, not professionals. C-4. Padlock. Delivery truck. Delivery . . .
“Professionals,” Ivan said, walking up behind him.
The Wolf wheeled. Ivan was smiling, like this was nothing, even though half his men had been killed. Even though he’d been beaten, at the very thing he’d built his life around. Where was the pride? The professionalism?
“There’s no way Maltov did
this,” Ivan said. The Wolf felt the urge to shoot him, right in his big blockhead. But then . . .
“Who’s Maltov?” he said.
CHAPTER 19
Alie had gone to Bujumbura in 2004 for the same reason she had gone to the convent: to get away. Africa was as far from Anniston, Alabama, as you could get, after all, and even in Africa, Burundi was a backwater. It was small; it was poor (the fifth poorest country in the world, with a 65 percent Catholic population, Sister Mary Karam told her, a perfect place for mission work), and it was in the middle of the continent, away from lions, elephants, pharaohs, the Sahara desert, Nelson Mandela, and anything else anyone in America had ever heard of.
“Only the Nile River,” Sister Mary Karam had said. “It starts there. And genocide. Burundi is the sister country of Rwanda.”
Alie had stared at her blankly.
“The Rwandan genocide—where eight hundred thousand people were murdered. With machetes. In ninety days.” Alie shook her head no. She hadn’t heard of it. She had only been twelve. The sister threw up her hands. Literally leaned back and threw them up in despair. “You do Burundi some good,” she said, “and it will return the blessing.”
Burundi had done her good. She had thought her black grandmother’s crumbling farmhouse in Hale County, Alabama, had prepared her for the worst, but Bujumbura was a city of desolate one-story buildings, squalid huts, and anorexic chickens. People were sitting on the side of the dirt road, selling three or four pieces of fruit. A woman pushed a canister of propane in a ratty baby stroller. The huts were cinderblocks or scrap metal, and there were gaunt people in doorless entryways watching their charity’s Land Cruisers pass, just as people had watched when they drove their Lexuses down the backroads of Hale County to some shed where her black father had business, or knew somebody, or needed to chat in the backroom while kindly old men fed her pickled pigs’ feet long after that Southern delicacy disappeared from the more prosperous gas stations along Route 411.
And Bujumbura was the capital of this country.
Eventually, they pulled up at a checkpoint staffed by two Africans holding clubs. She thought of the genocide in Rwanda, which she’d researched on the Internet, and the extreme violence of death by machete or club.
Barbaric, she thought, and instantly regretted it. She was smart enough to know that was racist, but she couldn’t help it. Dear God, she prayed, as they pulled through the gate, have those men actually beaten someone to death?
The neighborhood on the other side of the concrete block wall was a different world. It was still dirt roads and chickens, but now there were electrical poles and oversized American-style houses on tiny lots. The driver stopped in front of a three-story cinderblock and plaster villa, centered on a trim green yard. In the doorway, another African lingered, this one dressed in formal attire, neat as a pin, with his hands clasped behind his back. When he reached for Alie’s bags, she saw that he was wearing gloves.
“Bienvenue à Bujumba,” he said.
The first floor was wide, but through the back doors, open for the breeze, she could see a cinderblock wall with broken glass embedded on top. There were desks, papers, the sounds of activity behind doors, but the man didn’t hesitate or inform. He carried her two small bags up the stairs—I should have carried one of those, she thought—and into a large room with a balcony and a queen bed. There was a ceiling fan, mosquito netting, African art, even a private bathroom. The air smelled like perfume and mosquito repellent.
“Votre chambre, mademoiselle,” the man said. Your room, miss.
“Tout pour moi?” she asked. All for me?
“Oui, mademoiselle,” he said, turning on his heels.
She opened the doors, walked onto the balcony, and leaned on the railing. She was looking out over the roofs, water tanks, and backup generators of maybe twenty similar houses, all within the compound walls. Beyond them was a startlingly large blue sky, bracketed by gorgeous green hills.
Africa, she thought, with a thrill.
“The Switzerland of the equator,” someone said, and she turned, startled, to find a lean man in a white suit standing in her doorway. “That’s what some call it, anyway. I’m not so sure. Maybe Alsace, I think. But the lake is beautiful.” He walked onto the balcony beside her and stared at the view. Alie followed his gaze and saw the thin line, right in the middle of the blue. The sky wasn’t bigger here; it was reflected in a lake.
“Lake Tanganyika. Over eighteen hundred kilometers long. The second deepest in the world. Over there,” he said, pointing toward a hill, “was where Stanley found Livingstone and said, ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’”
It was the first story expats told newcomers, something Alie found even stranger now that she knew it probably wasn’t true. She must have heard it three dozen times, or maybe three hundred. When she found herself saying it, she knew it was time to leave. But that was years away. On the first day, she was impressed.
“What’s over there?” she asked.
“Congo,” the man said. “You don’t want to go there. It’s dangerous.” He extended his hand. “I’m Gironoux. I’m the secretary here.”
She would see Gironoux almost every day of her stay in Bujumbura, or “Buj” as the expats called it, but never outside the compound walls. He was a sixty-year-old charity professional, tasked with handling the white part of the business: fundraising, tours, parties.
She was a twenty-four-year-old fallen nun, who spent her days in the community. She sat with the sick and dying in crumbling rooms, quietly terrified of the legendary African maladies: the fly that laid eggs in your eyes and made you go blind, the worms that fed on your organs, HIV. She shopped with a guide at the Central Market (it burned down in 2013, she remembered sadly), where the meat was covered in black flies, and served humble meals out of a community center. She watched babies and filled out forms and helped women set up small market stalls, until she realized she was so ignorant of the local culture that she might actually be setting them back and begged to teach children instead. After that, she spent four days a week in an open-air, mud-walled church that reminded her of the one made out of old tires and broken windshields back in Hale County, watching small girls weave hot pads and pan holders out of scavenged wire.
I’m helping. I’m making a difference. I’m risking myself, she thought, even though every night she was back in the compound, and every Saturday afternoon she was at the embassy beach. It wasn’t safe at night, they told her, and she believed it. There was electricity only in the wealthy pockets of town, and most of the city was dark by the time the rebels came out of the hills.
She heard the gunfire on the second night, while she was having dinner with Gironoux and three other natty Europeans at his villa down the road. They were eating goat stew (she was at that precise moment fishing out a few hairs, she recalled) and drinking Bordeaux when the popping started. She put down her spoon, but nobody else seemed to notice.
“Yes, it’s gunfire,” Gironoux said finally. “You’ll get used to it. Now what do you think of Sister Mary Agnes?”
At least guns are better than clubs, she thought, although now, after ten years in war zones, she wasn’t so sure. She met Locke two weeks later, right about the time she got bored with the place.
It was the Friday night party at the Marine House, a Buj tradition for young American expats. No, an African tradition. There was a Marine House near every American embassy, she understood now, and while the size and style varied depending on country, they were all the same: young men living in group rooms, in the kind of house none of them would ever be able to afford again. The United States embassy in Burundi was tiny and decrepit, but the twenty Marines sent to guard it lived in a mansion with a swimming pool, large-screen television, pool table, and barbeque. They had a butler for beer duty, a cook for meals, and maids for laundry. The frat boys at Auburn never had it so good.
Or partied so hard. These kids had gone straight into the Marines from high school, and now here they
were, in one of the most obscure postings in the armed forces, where they could afford anything, even on their salaries, since everything was cheap. So they created a nonstop beer commercial: BBQ, music, women, satellite television for their favorite sports, a projector to show movies over the pool. She was squeezing through the crowded living room, trying not to spill her margarita, when she saw him, on the other side of the room, in the glow of the neon Budweiser sign.
It wasn’t the first time. She had seen him around for at least a week, including that afternoon, at the embassy beach. It was a beautiful day. She was in her pink bikini, enjoying the tropical sun, even though her golden skin never needed a tan. He had been wearing pressed slacks and a linen suit coat; the man he was talking with wore fatigues. He glanced at her, but to her surprise, he didn’t seem interested. Her mother always told her she was twenty pounds overweight, her mom told her a lot of terrible things, but she knew men loved her curves.
It was that cursory glance, or maybe just curiosity, that drove her that night. He was handsome, and sure of himself, but more than that, he was mysterious. In a community where everyone had defined roles—military, charity worker, debauched and/or bored diplomat—he didn’t fit. He was older, but not old. Martial but not military. He seemed, somehow, to be all three at once, but also none at all.
When he glanced at her this time, she held his stare, and neither of them turned away. Ten seconds later, she was standing in the Budweiser glow.
“I’m Alie,” she said.
“Um . . . Locke. Doctor Thomas Locke.”
“Médecins sans Frontières?”
He laughed. “No, no. That was stupid. I’m sorry. I’m a doctor of international relations. From Harvard. The Carr Center for Human Rights.” He passed her a business card. Who had business cards in Burundi? “I’m studying genocide.”
