Root and Branch

by Preston Fleming

  Guerin must have heard it, too, because he cast a troubled look at his boss.

  "Drone?" he asked in a low voice, as if someone might overhear.

  "Yes, possibly an American Reaper," Zorn answered. "The French Air Force operates drones from Niamey, but this one is likely from one of America’s remote desert bases."

  "Even so, the sound sets my teeth on edge," the security chief grumbled. "I've heard some American pilots are more than a little trigger-happy. It seems the U.S. has given Niger’s government so much military aid that the American pilots feel they have carte blanche to fire on anything that moves."

  At Zorn's request, Guerin stole another look at the base through his ten by fifty military binoculars before handing them to Zorn, who adjusted them to his eyes. From a couple of miles away, the camp resembled one of the American firebases that Zorn had visited in the mountains of Afghanistan, except this one was ringed by barbed wire fences rather than earthworks and fortifications. On one side, Zorn could make out a series of open-air camouflage tents suspended from steel cables, while opposite them were two rows of prefabricated metal buildings and trailers.

  They set off toward the camp with the car windows open, the better to see and hear anything that might pose a threat. At last they reached a checkpoint astride the road to the camp. A team of four grim-faced American guards in wraparound sunglasses and desert camouflage fatigues pulled the visitors aside for inspection. As Zorn expected, the guards required them to turn over all cameras, cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices before entering. After taking identification documents from each of the six visitors, they withdrew to their guard shack to verify Zorn's American passport. The convoy waited in silence until the guards at last waved it through.

  At the top of the hill, a mechanized gate rolled aside for the three SUVs to enter. No signage was displayed on the gate or on any of the adjacent buildings, except for a large blue-and-gold Tetra logo. Smaller signs inside, with instructions in English and Arabic, directed them to a parking lot the size of a basketball court, where a half-dozen desert-camouflage Humvees baked in the sun. At one side of the lot stood a steel building that Zorn guessed to be a supply depot. That would explain the signs in Arabic and French. After all, somebody had to drive the supply trucks from Arlit, and one couldn't count on all of the lorry drivers being literate in English.

  As the six visitors stepped out of their parked SUVs, a deeply tanned duty officer with a blond buzz-cut, dressed in the same desert fatigues as the sentries, greeted them with handshakes. There was no name tag on his tunic, its only marking being an embroidered Tetra logo.

  "Welcome to Repat Base Assodé," the duty officer began. "My name is Loomis. I'll be your escort."

  At the nearest gate into the command compound, Loomis pressed a series of buttons in a keypad cipher lock to gain entry. Once inside the mess hall, which was emptying out after the lunch hour, Guerin flashed Zorn the thumbs-up sign. The mess consisted of three mobile units joined together to form a single room furnished with picnic-style tables, a cafeteria-style chow line, and a row of self-serve dispensers for breakfast cereals, soft drinks, and hot beverages. Bowls of fresh fruit stood next to the eating utensils stand. The few employees who lingered over dessert or coffee appeared to be in their thirties or forties, and nearly all of them looked like former U.S. military.

  "It looks as if your men don't have it so bad out here," Zorn mentioned to the duty officer as the two of them made for the door. "But I'm also curious to see how the detainees are holding up."

  Loomis raised a sun-bleached eyebrow as he let Zorn through the door.

  "You'll have to take that up with the chief, sir."

  They walked across a courtyard of packed earth past a row of compact modular buildings to a second row of structures. The largest of them belonged to the base chief. Loomis opened the door and let Zorn in. Without waiting for either to speak, Max Steiner rose from behind his primitive trestle-style desk to greet his guest.

  In his desert-camouflage fatigues, Max Steiner's erect bearing and brush-cut hairdo made him appear every inch the infantry officer he had been before joining the CIA. But now that he was older, his deep-set eyes, hawk nose and trimmed mustache gave off a guarded look, as befitting his decades-long career as a spy. To Zorn, Steiner’s eyes seemed those of a driven man who found himself at last squarely in his element. Zorn detected a confidence, even an arrogance, behind the steely gaze that made him wonder whether he might have underestimated his host. Was Roger Zorn still persona grata, or at least half grata, with Tetra Corp, or was Steiner pretending he was? What had he got himself into?

  "Congratulations on finding us," the base chief began with a smile so oddly charming that it gave Zorn chills. "I actually like receiving visitors out here. I wish more senior people in the program would come out to see what we do. It's so hard to explain this place to anyone who hasn't been here.”

  Steiner gestured for Zorn to sit in one of the two folding wood-and-canvas director's chairs opposite his desk. The chief's bonhomie emboldened Zorn to press on.

  "So I’m cleared for a full-on briefing? Nothing held back?"

  Steiner raised a shaggy eyebrow and met Zorn with a steady gaze.

  "You’re a respected member of the ESM team, Roger. DHS and Tetra want to keep you fully on board. After all, your Triage technology is what’s made all this possible."

  Zorn breathed an inward sigh of relief. Perhaps Steiner didn’t know yet about his conversations with Pike or Craven before he left D.C. Or maybe he did, but also knew of Larry Lawless’s eagerness to purchase Zorn Security.

  "Listen," the chief went on, "You had a long ride out here and must be starving. Why don't we head over to the mess hall for some lunch?"

  Zorn hadn’t eaten anything at all during the rough ride from Arlit. Now he felt his appetite returning.

  "That would be terrific."

  By the time the two men arrived at the mess hall, the other Frenchmen had gone and only a few Americans remained. The cook took their orders for cheeseburgers and fries before retreating to the kitchen. The chief found seats toward the back of the dining area.

  "All right, then," Steiner began in a matter-of-fact tone. "You must have a good idea of what we do here or you wouldn’t have come. So what else do you want to know?"

  Zorn's eyes widened and he swallowed hard. Steiner seemed completely unaware that Zorn might not fully approve of what was being done with detainees.

  "Wow, I hardly know where to begin," Zorn replied while gathering his thoughts. "Why don't we start with repatriation? I always thought repatriation meant to send someone home. Yet I doubt that many of the detainees sent here hail from Niger. So why bring them to Assodé instead of the places where they were born?"

  "It’s simple, Roger. Their home countries don’t want them back. Washington has long-standing repatriation agreements with quite a few Muslim-majority countries. But very few will take back their violent Islamists. And even those who do cooperate with us insist on doing it in secret. So, wherever we can, we use third countries as middlemen."

  "I see," Zorn acknowledged.

  At that moment, the cook brought lunch. To Zorn, the cheeseburgers, fries, and freshly made cole slaw tasted remarkably good. Asked how he managed to prepare such delicious food out in the Sahara desert, the cook explained that all his ingredients were flown in twice weekly from U.S. bases in Europe. The moment the cook left them alone, Steiner continued.

  "This spring, one of our repatriation partner countries refused landing clearance for a planeload of deported Islamists. It seems they worried about public exposure, though we were paying them handsomely to take the jihadis off our hands. A few weeks later, that government stopped accepting deportees other than its own citizens."

  Zorn offered his host a look of concern.

  "Yes, I can understand how that might lead to backups."

  "It was more than a backup. For quite a while, Corvus Base was awash with jihadis and the whol
e deportation system nearly ground to halt," Steiner noted. "We had to find new ways to dispose of high-risk detainees or else stop hauling them in. We needed methods that were scalable, long-lasting, and didn’t leave a paper trail."

  "Like dumping them at sea?"

  Zorn did his best not to sound judgmental, and apparently he succeeded, because Steiner went on.

  "In extreme cases, yes. Though in the beginning, we didn’t do it just to free up more space. No, what we wanted was to ship the worst offenders to places where they couldn’t do any more harm. So we seized on a trick cooked up by a canny security chief when a healthy detainee died at his base by mistake. To avoid blowback, the chief buried the corpse at sea and jiggered the man’s record to make it seem he’d been transferred. Before long, whenever the chief had a inconvenient death on his hands, that became his solution."

  "Excuse me, Max," Zorn interrupted, putting down his fork. "But why go to such lengths? Why not just bury them on site?"

  "Because the water table is too high for burial on most Caribbean islands. And cremation uses too much fuel."

  "Okay, but how did disposing of a few dead bodies turn into pushing hundreds of live detainees out the back of C-130s?"

  In asking the question, Zorn did his best not to let his face reveal his distaste. But Steiner seemed too focused on wolfing down his cheeseburger to notice.

  "Not long after the burials at sea started, a riot broke out at one of the transit centers. So the same security chief who’d deep-sixed the first corpse flew off the handle and ordered the organizers pushed out of an airplane—alive—to be rid of them. And faked their records to show they’d been repatriated."

  "What happened then?" Zorn asked, expecting some kind of sanctions against the security chief.

  "Well, the jihadis who incited the riot were all total incorrigibles. So, under the circumstances, the chief wasn’t punished. In fact, he was promoted. That’s when others started doing the same thing. Then they got promoted, too!"

  Steiner laughed, apparently at the absurdity of it all. Suddenly Zorn found that his burger had lost its flavor.

  "But how did they get away with it? Didn’t somebody up the chain of command find out and order it stopped?”

  "Not with the records being faked," Steiner replied before washing down his last French fry with cola.

  Zorn pushed his plate away.

  "So the disappearances and cover-ups went from the exception to the rule?"

  "More or less. Except now we resort to dumpings only in the most extreme cases,” Steiner answered, an amused look creeping across his rugged face. “For the others, we came up with a better idea."

  "How so?"

  "After the rioting, we worked out a new arrangement with officials in Niger and another African country. The goal was to bypass formal detainee transfers and have the host government look aside while we flew new arrivals directly into their hinterlands."

  "I don't understand," Zorn confessed. "What would be the point? Wouldn't you risk losing control of them out there?"

  "Ah, but what better place than the Sahara for a devout Salafist to practice his version of Islam without interference? Except, of course, for having to devote all his energies to staying alive. And getting whacked by a drone if he throws in with Al-Qaeda."

  "Oh, that, too? How does that happen?"

  Steiner flashed an enigmatic smile and rose from the picnic-style bench.

  "How, you ask?" the base chief repeated with an arched eyebrow. "Let's grab some coffee and head back to my office. When we’re there, I'll reveal our secret weapon."

  Once in Steiner's office, the two men perched again on directors’ chairs and set their cups of take-out coffee on a table between them.

  "You wanted to know how the drones track the detainees after we release them into the wild?"

  Steiner paused to fix Zorn with an intense gaze.

  "Are you familiar with TTL technology?"

  "Not by that name," Zorn replied, unwilling to admit his ignorance. "What is it?"

  "TTL stands for tagging, tracking and locating. The technique bombards a target with radio waves or laser light from a distance. Then it uses materials like radar-responsive ID tags and laser reflectives to locate the target. So, say you were wearing a piece of clothing that carried embedded tags. You’d have absolutely no idea that one of our drones might be watching you from miles overhead, night and day, rain or shine."

  Zorn let out a low whistle. It was a chilling thought.

  "So you’ve been tagging the detainees' gear?"

  "Uniforms, boots, hats, belts, canteens. You name it."

  "But what happens if the detainees discard the outfits you've given them? Or their boots wear out?”

  A Cheshire Cat smile appeared on Steiner’s face and all at once a thought struck Zorn that gave him the shivers.

  “Wait a second. Can you inject one of those tags into a person’s body?"

  Steiner wagged a finger at his guest and chuckled.

  "Sorry, Roger. You’re not cleared for that."

  Now the picture was coming into focus.

  "Correct me if I've got this wrong, Max, but it seems to me that what you've created out here is a gigantic free-fire zone."

  Steiner inhaled deeply, thrust out his chest, and released a self-satisfied sigh.

  "You said it, not me. Under our system, former detainees who lead quiet lives in their new homeland are left in peace. Those who take up jihad are struck down. It's efficient and, in my opinion, exceedingly fair."

  The enormity of what Steiner had just said left Zorn dumbstruck. Had the base chief gone mad? How could the emergency measures program have evolved so quickly under Tetra and Steiner that, in less than a year, a relatively benign method of identifying violent foreign jihadis and removing them from the U.S. had become a high-tech holocaust?

  What possible response could Zorn make to what Steiner had revealed? How could he reason with a mass murderer who enjoyed the full support of the U.S. national security establishment? Especially now that he and his men were completely at Steiner’s mercy?

  Until now, Zorn had been careful not to take issue with anything the base chief had said so as not to antagonize him. But how long must he play along? He had come to Niger to gather evidence of detainee abuse. Now that he had it, was it time to end their session and go home? Or should he humor the base chief just a while longer to learn even more?

  ""A few moments ago, you said that you resort to dropping detainees over the ocean only in extreme cases now. Does that mean you intend to end the practice?"

  "Not yet. I expect a few will still get tipped out from time to time. But that’s only for jihadi ringleaders. The ones too bloodthirsty to be left alive."

  Steiner eyes took on a faraway look as he reached for his coffee.

  As for Zorn, it took all of his self-control not to call the base chief a bloodthirsty murderer himself. Instead he pasted on a bland smile and changed the subject once more.

  "If you don't mind, Max, let's circle back to the detainees you bring to Assodé. Can you walk me through what happens once they arrive here?"

  All at once, Steiner’s eyes took on a dark cast and, for a moment, Zorn feared the retired spy might have seen through his dissembling. But when Steiner spoke again, his voice took on an almost defensive tone.

  "Let me make one thing clear, Roger. No country wants these people. Not even their home countries. The only ones who’ll take them in are Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the warlords."

  "And you’d prefer that it be the warlords?"

  "Absolutely," Steiner snapped, his eyes flashing as he put down his coffee. "For me, the warlords are the lesser evil because they lack overseas reach. They're also constantly at war with Al-Qaeda. Here, when a detainee is released in the desert, he has two choices. Throw in with jihad or work for the warlords. Those who opt for jihad realize their error when the drones come after them. Though I suppose getting blasted by a Hellfire missile might be better than slaving
away in a warlord’s gold mine."

  But Steiner's smugness so provoked Zorn that he couldn’t resist raising a challenge.

  "Just out of curiosity, have you cleared your repatriation system with the White House?"

  Steiner's face darkened once again.

  "Trust me. The people you’re talking about don’t want to know."

  "But how can you keep this sort of thing going without high-level cover? What's your exit strategy? Will you wind down the program once the intifada is over? Or do some sort of limited disclosure as part of a national reconciliation movement?"

  "You mean like what they did in South Africa, with their so-called ‘truth and reconciliation’ commissions2?" Stein inquired, his voice dripping with disdain.

  "Yeah. It seemed to work out pretty well over there."

  The base chief shrugged and reached for his coffee.

  "It was a mixed bag. They also tried it in Argentina, but it’s never been attempted in a place with as large or as litigious a population as the U.S."

  "Might it be worth a try?"

  "Way too early, in my opinion. Maybe once we’re totally rid of the jihadis, we could afford to try it. But that’s still a long way off."

  "Then how will America ever return to some sense of normalcy?"

  The moment the question left Zorn’s mouth, he worried he might have gone too far. But Steiner just sat back in his chair and gazed at him with an enigmatic smile.

  "I think you might see things differently if you knew how we handle the turnover process here at Assodé," he told his guest. "Would you like to see how we do it?"

  "What exactly do you mean by ‘turnover?’"

  "It’s quite simple. A few days ago we took in a planeload of Islamists from Corvus Base. Later today we’ll be turning them loose so they can rejoin their Muslim brothers and sisters and fulfill their dream of living under sharia law. Why don't you come along and see how it's done?"

  "You wouldn't mind?"

  "Not at all."

  "Then let’s do it. But first, would you mind if we took a walk in the yard for a quick look at the detainees?"

  "Certainly," Steiner replied. "Why not? You're part of the family, Roger."