by Todd Moss
“Okay, six hours later and we’re still in the dark. Everything is speculation right now. Press the intel community for anything concrete. Anyone else?”
“Legal has called about pulling the plug on our aid program.”
“Already?” asked Judd.
“Yes. We need to make a declaration about the coup. Once it’s declared, the congressional provision kicks in and all the accounts are frozen.”
“Well, things are still in flux, so we aren’t declaring anything yet. It’s not a coup until we say so,” replied Judd, perhaps a bit too firmly. “Any views?”
Silence.
“Anyone here from North Africa? Anything out of Libya?”
Silence.
“Anything else before we turn to Embassy Bamako?”
“This is public affairs. We still need the Secretary’s statement of condemnation cleared.”
“It’s not out yet?” asked Judd, holding up his palms in frustration.
“Not yet. We’ve got twenty-three clearances, but one holdout. One of the regional bureaus had a question on precedent and wants more time to review the language.”
“This should have been done hours ago,” said Judd, suppressing rising anger. “Who’ve I got to call to get this done?”
“We’ll follow up with your office.”
“Fine. Anything else?”
“Counterterrorism is confirming our contacts, and ensuring that lines are being kept open with Malian military.”
“Who is here from CT?” asked Judd. Two hands went up at the table, four more in the outer ring. Six people, for one little African task force?
“Is that all?” he asked no one in particular.
“CT wants to ensure that our policy doesn’t disrupt ongoing security operations in the Sahara Desert. We have concerns about potential negative spillover effects of premature overreaction.”
“Well, so does everyone sitting around this table. We need everyone to sit tight until we have a better handle on the situation. Every bureau, including CT, should stand down until further notice. Make sure your people in the field understand this. That’s direct from Landon Parker.”
Without waiting for a reaction, he turned to the video screen. “Embassy Bamako, we are ready for your update. Ambassador James?”
The whole table turned to look at the big screen. Larissa James was square in the center, joined only by Colonel Randy Houston, the defense attaché.
“Thank you, Dr. Ryker. During his national address, General Idrissa confirmed that he has deposed President Maiga and has declared himself head of state and chairman of the Council for the Restoration of Democracy. They are already using the acronym CRD. Most of the cabinet is in hiding, but we know that Idrissa is trying to reach out to key ministers with offers for them to stay, plus large envelopes of cash. The foreign minister is still in China and is unlikely to return. Would be helpful to have Embassy Beijing send someone to track him down.”
Judd turned to the group. “Can someone chase East Asia to make that happen?” And then back to the screen. “What else, Bamako?”
“Idrissa is already trying to dress this up as a seamless transition. I expect that he’ll convene the diplomatic corps in the morning to justify the coup, probably using the same script we heard on TV. Media is back on, but other than Idrissa’s address, the national television is just playing reruns of Dynasty dubbed into French. Colonel Houston is here to give you a security update.”
“Thank you, ma’am. The streets are currently quiet. Sundown was eighteen forty, about ninety minutes ago. The authorities have not, I repeat not, issued a curfew, although there remains a heavy security presence on the streets. The regional security officer and I were able to move through sectors of the city about one hour ago. Roadblocks are mostly down, with the exception of those up to the palace and airport. The black-hatted Gendarmerie have disappeared and we have troops in army regulars along the key avenues. Red Berets remain along the palace road.”
“Idrissa is clearly trying to show the city, and us, that things are normal,” added the ambassador.
“Yes, ma’am,” confirmed Houston. “At least in the capital. Kidal, Mopti, and Gao are also reporting ordinary traffic and market activity. Timbuktu is a different story. We have a very heavy military presence on all the major thoroughfares into the city. The governor’s office and the Great Mosque are each surrounded by a full Special Forces squad. Our embedded advisors have been asked to stay in barracks, but they are still reporting.”
“What about the Scorpions?”
“The Scorpion counterterrorism strike force based up in Timbuktu remains AWOL. We are trying to get a bead on their location and status, but we have conflicting reports. They may be heading north in an offensive column, or possibly they are moving southwest, toward the border with Burkina. It is unclear if the Scorpions have split into two units or if we have mistaken intel. A cost of having our guys pulled out.”
“Thank you, Bamako,” said Judd, noticing that Serena had slipped in the door and was beelining for him. “What about American citizens?”
“We still have no reports of any problems with AmCits, and no reason to believe they will be targeted,” said the ambassador.
“White House Situation Room, fifteen minutes,” whispered Serena into Judd’s ear. He gave her a look of query. She shrugged. “They didn’t say. Must be something big.”
“The embassy has formally issued a travel advisory, but we’re not recommending anything other than vigilance for American citizens already here,” continued the ambassador.
“You have to wrap this up and leave. Right now,” Serena said at full volume.
“All official personnel are accounted for. Peace Corps is activating its emergency tracking system and they have contact with almost all of their eighty-five volunteers. A few are off grid, but they’ll let us know if anyone is missing.”
Judd looked back to the assembled staff. “Okay. Thank you, Ambassador. I know that we have more questions for you from the different bureaus, but I’m going to ask them to hold off until our next meeting, tomorrow morning at oh six hundred, our time.” Judd stood up. “Thank you, everybody.”
Judd stared at Larissa through the screen, and gave her a little nod. She can see me, right?
14.
BAMAKO, MALI
MONDAY, 8:12 P.M. GMT
Papa Toure was heartily greeted at the door of the Farka Music Club with an elaborate handshake that ended with a loud snap. The bouncer was a plump African man wearing a tight black suit and, despite the late hour and low light inside the club, aviator sunglasses.
Papa was escorted to his usual table, where he rocked back to let the chair take his weight. The creaking seat reminded him that he was no longer the scrawny village boy of his youth. The extra pounds around his waist, along with the gray hairs in his scraggly beard, provided an aura of sage authority.
It had been a stressful day and he was relieved to escape the web of phone calls. So many calls: Mopti, Gao, Timbuktu, Paris, Lagos, Johannesburg, and Washington. It was exhausting to manage so many expectations.
He waved casually at the barman, a signal for a cool Castel beer.
—
Papa Toure was a man who loved the blues. Growing up in a village several days’ walk from Bamako, he would run home from school every day to finish his chores and schoolwork in time to listen to his grandfather play traditional music on the kora, a twenty-one-string harp made with cowhide pulled over half a calabash. The old man would sing about family history and their ancestors and, increasingly over time, about amazing changes going on in the country. Papa was still a young boy, but remembered the day his grandfather sang about independence, when it finally came in September 1960. It was his first hint of big-city politics.
Around that time, traveling musicians began to pass through his village with guitar
s instead of traditional instruments. It opened a whole new world: the sounds of Cuba, France, and Mississippi. Especially Mississippi. Papa was instantaneously drawn to the cadence and sensation of the American blues.
But neither Papa nor his grandfather was born into the jeliya, the caste of professional musicians. Jeliya were no mere buskers, but more like local historians, mediators, and preachers of morality all wrapped into one.
Papa’s ambitions for a life as a guitarist were not to be. His hopes were squashed in the end, not by social strictures, but by an early, and mature, realization that his talent did not match his passion.
Instead, he became a bookworm. His father saved his small profits from selling cassava to send his most promising son to school and to buy him dog-eared books for his studies. Papa, rising above his modest lot, secured a scholarship at a private school in Bamako and then another to attend the prestigious University of Ibadan in southern Nigeria. At the time, it seemed like the other side of the world.
What to study for a boy from the village on the edge of the world’s largest desert? Hydrology, of course. Papa became obsessed—and expert—in the study of water, how to find and manage it in a place where such a commodity was chronically, and too often fatally, scarce. It was ironic, but at once practical.
Papa soon learned that water in Africa was not really about the science. It can be found and stored even in the driest of places. Water was really about politics. So the studious village boy became a reluctant and accidental student of the men who ran Africa and their motivations. And what better place for the lessons of power than Nigeria?
In Africa’s version of Texas, everything is big, brash, and fueled by a noxious combination of easy oil money and human greed. During Papa’s ten years in Nigeria, he witnessed two coups, saw governors grabbing oil contracts for themselves, and watched top generals amass billions of dollars. Papa could see how Nigeria earned $400 billion from its oil yet had almost nothing to show for it. The average man on the street had actually become poorer since the black gold began pumping.
Papa secretly planned for the day his 3-D seismology studies might inadvertently hint at an oil reservoir rather than an aquifer. He decided he would do the only sensible thing: delete the data.
It was also easy for an African hydrologist to return home, triumphant with his Ph.D. in hand, ready to help develop his own country. But the time in Nigeria had given Papa a keen sense of suspicion for the motives of powerful men, and a belief that the human impulse for greed was infinite, even in a dirt-poor country.
The sad events of this morning only confirmed in his mind that this was true, even in his own nation. To survive, one had to make many friends like Luc Bosquet and Judd Ryker. Like Professor BJ van Hollen, the man who befriended him in Nigeria and introduced him to so many important people. Rest his soul, Allah yarhamu. And, of course, the beautiful Jessica Ryker. You had to maintain these friends in order to keep moving forward in this uncertain world. To keep your options open.
He would, of course, help Judd, his friend. But deep down he also knew he was going to point Judd in the right direction to help his country, too. And to help himself.
—
The lights came down and the crowd hollered. Everyone craned their necks, waiting for the musician to appear. Just then the barman silently arrived and set down a tray to clear away the empty beer bottles nudging each other for space on the small table. When the tray was lifted away and the barman departed, a brown envelope was left behind, the rectangular bulge of a stack of banknotes barely visible. Without averting his eyes from the stage, Papa slid the envelope off the table and into his jacket pocket.
Onto the stage ambled an African man, barely twenty years old, holding a guitar tightly by the neck. He sat on a lone stool and began to play. A bluesy rhythm, the lyrics extolled the glories of the thirteenth-century Mande Empire and the legend of its founder, the warrior Sundiata Keita, the king of kings.
Listening to the history of a lost empire beneath his feet, Papa felt Mali’s future weighing on his shoulders. He knew that tomorrow he was back on the road, back to work. But tonight he leaned back, shut his eyes, and drank in the sounds. Tonight was for the blues.
15.
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
MONDAY, 4:26 P.M. EST
Judd jumped out of the black sedan that drove him the five blocks from State headquarters to the side of the White House. Since the Secret Service had closed Pennsylvania Avenue between Seventeenth and Fifteenth streets for security and turned it into part of Lafayette Square, he had to walk the last block.
On the corner was a tourist T-shirt stand. TERRORIST HUNTING LICENSE and a drawing of a camel in crosshairs were on one shirt, flapping in the breeze. Judd weaved through a school group of loud teens in matching fluorescent green-and-pink T-shirts.
At the West gate, he flashed his badge through the bars and tinted plate glass. A loud buzz, the gate opened, and then slammed loudly behind him. He was now inside the White House grounds.
Straight ahead was the driveway up to the West Wing. Back to his left he could see crowds of tourists, their faces pressed to the security fence. To his right sat a field of television cameras and equipment covered in dark green tarps where the press corps reported. Today it lay abandoned and silent.
Rather than follow the path straight up to the West Wing main entrance, where two marines were standing at attention, Judd took a short flight of stairs down to the right and underneath to a canopied entrance. Here was where the National Security Council staff—the president’s personal foreign policy team—entered the West Wing from their offices next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Judd arrived at another security desk. On the walls were huge photos of the president walking his dog, speaking at a UN podium, looking stern and serious at his desk. There was one of the First Lady, standing on the bow of a sailboat, wind blowing her hair. Judd’s ID was silently checked and he was then cleared to enter a hallway that led down to the Situation Room.
Judd paused briefly at the deserted maître d’ desk at the White House dining room and smoothly pocketed two boxes of M&M’s with the White House seal. For the boys.
Judd descended another level and opened an unimposing walnut-paneled door that led into the Situation Room complex. He deposited his BlackBerry into a nook in the wall and double-checked his pockets.
To his left, he peered into a control room, with large mounted video screens and a small army of bright-eyed staffers wearing headsets. White House Operations. The Nerve Center. One of those punks woke me up this morning, he thought. Digital clocks read WASHINGTON, BAGHDAD, BEIJING, MANILA. Something must be going on in the Philippines today.
“Dr. Ryker, you are in Sit Room One. They are starting,” said a woman suddenly blocking his path.
“Er, thank you,” said Judd and turned to open the door for the room labeled ONE. He pulled on the door handle and felt the air valve seal release. He stepped inside.
The Situation Room was shockingly small. From the movies, Judd had expected something grand and imposing, but instead he found the ceiling uncomfortably low. Compounding the cramped feel, bulky leather chairs circled the main table, tightly hugged by another ring of seats around the outside. Along one wall was a bank of six flat-panel televisions, each with a large head on-screen, several in military uniform. The clock, reminding the participants why exactly they were here, read WASHINGTON and BAMAKO. Judd took the lone empty seat at the main table and sat quietly.
The Washington clock ticked from 4:29 to 4:30, and in from a side door entered a short, stocky man with thinning, slicked-back hair. He was wearing a shiny designer suit, but it looked like he had slept in it. He nodded to no one in particular and began without sitting down. “Okay, people. Everyone here?”
No answer.
Judd recognized no one. Asking who is here is admitting I don’t belong.
“We’re activating an emergency interagency group to deal with a special situation. Have we got FBI here? How about the counterterrorism center? You guys here, too?”
Several nods around the table.
“As most of you know, Africa is a new area of concern.” One of the screens sprang to life, displaying a high-resolution map of Africa.
“Al-Qaeda is on the run. We’ve killed bin Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri is feeling our pressure. The core al-Qaeda has turned to regional franchising by co-opting local grievances to advance their agenda. Al-Zawahiri’s radicals from the Middle East have been penetrating the Horn of Africa, using Somalia as an operations base, and working through the Somali al-Shabaab.” Somalia was highlighted in yellow on the map, with red explosion icons dotting the coast.
He continued, pointing to the map. “Our counterterrorism operations in the Horn have been highly successful against al-Shabaab. Maybe too successful. We’ve decapitated or disrupted nearly all cells operating across East Africa, so radicals are now seeking new entry points in the western part of Africa. The Sahara Desert region is their new target.” The map flashed a vast yellow blob covering most of West Africa. The speaker swept his arm across the screen with a flourish.
“Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM was born out of the conflict in Algeria. We have been working with local partners, especially the military and intelligence services in Mali, to inhibit further penetration. But extremists have continued to try to pierce our defenses by exploiting local conflicts for their own jihadist aims.” Thick black arrows appeared on the map, swooping down from Algeria, into northern Mali, and spreading across the whole region. “We’ve been keeping a close eye on developments. Over the past few days, the Sahara region has taken a major turn for the worse.”
More nodding around the table.
“We’ve got an emerging situation now in northern Mali. Ansar al-Sahra, a previously dormant group of jihadists based in southern Libya, have successfully recruited disaffected Tuaregs in Mali and are now active. This is an extremist splinter group, and let me be very clear: They present an imminent threat to U.S. interests. Everyone got that? The Sahara is now hot. We have chatter indicating a developing threat to our people in West Africa. An Ansar cell is moving from the northern border area in the direction of Timbuktu with hostile intentions. This came in today.”
