Authors: David DeBatto
DeLuca showed his transit papers to the captain in charge, who examined their passports and a letter from President Bo himself
(forged), and then pointed to a white bus, tapping his wristwatch with his finger to indicate they’d be leaving shortly. A
dozen young soldiers in maroon berets rode on top of the bus, their weapons slung casually over their shoulders, the convoy
comprising perhaps forty vehicles, including Jeeps, Humvees, M-113 troop transports, and some sort of armored carrier DeLuca
didn’t recognize, two at the head and two at the tail, German, he thought, though he’d need a closer look to be certain. He
thought briefly of the book
Heart of Darkness,
the journey into the savage interior that Joseph Conrad described so well. DeLuca had read it first in college, and again
before deploying to Liger, hoping it would yield new insights. It had: Don’t go.
On the bus, he let Hoolie and Asabo take the first open seat and moved toward the middle, where he saw a familiar face, one
of only a few white faces in a crowd of Africans. The man in the black shirt and priest’s collar moved to the window as DeLuca
sat down beside him.
“Of all the gin joints,” DeLuca began. “Don’t tell me—David Letterman went to your high school?”
“Used to beat his ass and take his lunch money every day,” the priest said with a thick southern accent. “Never thought he’d
amount to much.”
“Don Brown,” DeLuca said, offering his hand to the man he knew from the time they’d worked together in Iraq as Preacher Johnson
with Task Force 21. “World Bank.”
“They told me you’d be on this bus. Father O’Connell,” Johnson said, shaking DeLuca’s hand. “Or O’Connor. O’Connor?” He checked
his passport. “O’Connell. Father O’Connell.”
“You might want to memorize that,” DeLuca said. “Just in case it comes up again.” It didn’t appear that anyone seated near
them could speak English, and once the bus began to move, the engine noise drowned his words anyway, but it was still wise
to be cautious. “I didn’t know you were working in Liger.”
“Oh, yeah,” Johnson said. “Special emissary from the pope. Who’s a close personal friend.”
“You met the new pope?” DeLuca said. “What’d you think?”
“Him, I liked. Her, I didn’t,” Johnson said as the bus rocked after hitting a massive pothole. “Damn. I think I just lost
a filling.”
He explained that there were only two paved highways in Liger, one running along the coast and the other connecting Port Ivory
with Baku Da’al and extending north to Kumari. The rebels had held this road until today, retreating only when planes from
the Ligerian air force were able to take command of the skies.
“The government had a sat-cam looking for ambushes, but then the kite string broke and it crashed,” Johnson said. “I spoke
in prayer with some of our angels this morning and they thought the way was clear, but I’m still thinking it’s a good idea
to sit in the middle of the bus. That way if they shoot us from in front or behind, there’s plenty of bodies to take the rounds.”
“You want me to take the window seat?” DeLuca offered.
“That’s all right,” Johnson said. “It’s fifty-fifty they shoot from your side anyways, and if they do, I’m bailing. How was
your flight? I hope this time you took an airplane.”
Johnson was referring to the last time he and DeLuca had met, during a raid into the Sinjar Jebel mountains, 160 kilometers
west of Mosul, Iraq, near the border with Syria. Preacher Johnson was somewhere in his late fifties, tough as depleted uranium,
the leader of Task Force 21, an elite squad of special ops troops culled from among the best of the Rangers, SEALs, Delta,
and other special forces, the cream of the crop, working deep undercover in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq before, during,
and after Iraqi Freedom, disguised behind long beards and native
abayas.
They’d been the brawn to the CI brains. The raid had been on an Ansar Al-Islam hideout in a monastery where Saladin had once
turned back the crusaders in the twelfth century. DeLuca and Sykes, along with TF-21, had executed a High Altitude Low Opening
or HALO jump from thirty-nine thousand feet in the dead of night, in head-to-toe puffy suits to protect them against the minus-one-hundred-degree
wind chill, to reach the LZ in a field above the monastery, a mission that had by and large, but not entirely, cured DeLuca
of his fear of flying. The mission had ended with DeLuca being thrown through the bulletproof windshield of a Humvee during
a high-speed chase down a winding mountain road and hurting his neck, but other than that, traveling with Preacher Johnson
had been a pleasure.
“How about you?” he asked. “You flying Delta?”
“Attached to,” Johnson said. “Working with most of the same people as before. We lost one man. Not here. But otherwise we’re
mostly intact.”
“I’m sorry,” DeLuca said.
The countryside rolled by, empty country marked by an occasional cocoa or rubber plantation, bare clay fields, scrub brush
with tall trees rising singly and well spaced, villages of wattle and daub with thatched roofs or cinder-block houses with
tin roofs and glassless window openings, shade-tree mechanics working on cars flipped on their sides in lieu of hydraulic
hoists, boys tending goat herds or sheep flocks, women walking down the side of the road with large tin pans or straw baskets
loaded with food or dry goods or laundry balanced on their heads.
“You’re looking for John Dari?” Johnson asked. “Let me know how I can help, but it’s been damn hard. These guys have people
so scared they’re not giving up much. Though I’m not so sure about Dari. Most of his people are Da. I put him more toward
the center than some people think.”
“Samuel Adu?”
“Real piece of work,” Johnson said. “As a man of the cloth, of course, I must pray for his redemption, but as a purely practical
matter, I’ve given orders that if anybody working for me sees him, he’s free to send Adu on to meet his maker and let him
deal with matters of the mortal soul, though I’m not sure Adu ever had one.”
“You hear about Dsang?” DeLuca asked.
Johnson nodded.
“Confirmed?”
Johnson nodded again.
“We’re mostly far north, in the Vacant Zone, they call it. Sahel, accent on the ‘Hell.’ You think Iraq was all dust and camel
shit, try the VZ. Delta’s been there for months training what they’re calling the ‘Sub-Saharan Peacekeeping Battalion.’ Men
from Niger, Mali, Chad, Mauritania, pretty soon Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal. Two hundred men and a bunch of Toyotas
to patrol a chunk of desert four times the size of Alaska, looking for IPAB hadjis and LPLF lowlifes who outnumber, outgun,
outsmart, and outrun us on a daily basis. SIGINT is useless because nobody has coms and infrared only works at night because
of the heat during the day. We call it the BS Battalion, but be that as it fucking may, somebody in a very oddly shaped building
which shall remain nameless thinks they’re going to hold the northern frontier for us when the shit hits the fan. Hold their
dicks is more like it.”
“What brings you south?” DeLuca asked.
“Little of this, little of that,” Preacher Johnson said. “Mostly just sitting on a wall, eating shit and drinking piss. Isaiah
thirty-six, verse twelve, my son. We cached some material to prep an LZ for CC on a farm outside the next village, actually,
which is where I’ll be getting off to have a look-see. Some indications that it’s been disturbed, but I’ll believe it when
I see it. I think maybe the gnus have been digging around some with their hooves.”
DeLuca waited.
“Go ahead,” he said at last. “You know you want to.”
“So no gnus is good gnus,” Johnson said.
DeLuca nodded.
“Gnus travels fast,” Johnson added.
“One’s enough,” DeLuca said.
“Where y’all stayin’?” Johnson asked.
“Hotel Liger,” DeLuca said. “Baku Da’al.”
“Aha,” Johnson said. “Otherwise known as the Worst Western. Ask for a nonsmoking room. Those would be the ones that aren’t
currently on fire.”
“I’ll try to remember,” DeLuca promised.
“Actually, when you’re there, talk to a man named Robert Mohl. M-o-h-l. He’ll be on the stool at the end of the bar closest
to the lobby. He’s the CIA field agent, but he never leaves his stool. He’s like Norm in
Cheers.
Actually, that’s not fair. Sometimes he ventures as far as the table by the door. Ask him about Imam Isfahan Dadullahjid.
He’s the Non-Commissioned Ayatollah in Charge for the Kum. He might know where Dari is, and Mohl might know where Dadullahjid
is. After the last few days, you’ll recognize Mohl by the pee stains running down his pants.”
Johnson leaned his head toward the window. Ahead, DeLuca saw smoke rising into the sky from something burning.
“This is my stop,” Johnson said, stooping to grab his bag from beneath the seat. “You’re the one who got the ambassador out,
right?”
DeLuca nodded.
“Just as well,” Johnson said. “We were plan B. Blow the shit out of everything, with our customary panache. You hear the rumors
about Ambassador Ellis?”
“Which ones?” DeLuca said. “That he’s a shit?”
“No,” Johnson said. “That he owned slaves.”
“I heard that one,” DeLuca said. “Does President Lincoln know about this?”
“It’s not all that uncommon in Liger, actually,” Johnson said. “Especially in the rural villages. Some family pisses off the
tribal chief, so to make amends, they give him their daughter for ten years. Bo has them in his palace. People think he gave
some to Ellis as a gift. A party gift, if you catch my drift. I heard Ellis liked to videotape himself. It’s probably not
true, but that’s what people say.”
“People say the darndest things,” DeLuca said. He moved aside as Johnson crossed to the aisle, stepping over a goat that someone
had brought on board.
“You take care of yourself, Don Brown,” Johnson said. “Ethnic tension-wise, this place makes Iraq look like a board meeting
at the American Library Association.”
“You have a number I can reach you at?” DeLuca asked. “Just in case I get lonely?”
“Already told you,” Johnson said. “Isaiah thirty-six, v. twelve. Twenty-third book, thirty-six, ‘v’ Roman numeral for five,
and then twelve. Two-three-three-six-five-one-two, same prelims and country codes as yours, which I have. But don’t worry,
you won’t get lonely. And if you ever get in trouble, remember, just say,
‘Kwa maana jinsi hii Mungu aliupenda ulimwnegu, hata akamtoa Mwanawe pekee, ili kila mtu amwaminiye asipotee; bali awe na
uzima wa milele.’
That’s John three-sixteen in Swahili. Nobody here speaks Swahili, but it sounds good, don’t it? Take care. Don’t let the
bedbugs bite. That’s not just a figure of speech in Liger. They vo-racious sons-of-bitches in this neighborhood.”
MACKENZIE’S PALE BLUE UNITED NATIONS helicopter set her down outside a place known only as Camp Seven. She’d been the lone
passenger, the remaining available space in the Russian-made chopper filled floor to ceiling with cases of baby formula and
diapers. As the helicopter landed, it was possible, even in the dimming light, to gauge the misery below, centered in a sea
of makeshift shelters, plastic tarps, and blankets held up by sticks, the landing zone a circle in the dirt formed by a cordon
of African Union soldiers in blue berets and green kerchiefs keeping back a throng of displaced people surging to meet the
aircraft and obtain a portion of its cargo.
As she ducked her head into the backwash from the rotors, she was met by a young man who took her by the elbow and led her
to a lean-to made from a large piece of corrugated tin roofing, a transport parked next to it that had to be forty years old.
“My name is Stephen Ackroyd,” the young man said above the din. “What’s yours? We didn’t know anybody was coming.”
“Mary Dorsey,” MacKenzie said. “United Nations Women’s Health Initiative. I hitched a ride. I would have called ahead, but
…”
“Welcome, Mary Dorsey,” Ackroyd said, still shouting above the sound of the rotors, which had slowed but apparently weren’t
stopping. She watched as soldiers off-loaded the helicopter, moving the crates and boxes onto hand-drawn carts. To one side,
she saw a group of people, waiting on stretchers, she guessed to be medevaced.
“Would you like me to take you to Dr. Chaline?” the young man asked her. “I think he’s in the infirmary. It’s a bit hard to
find unless you know where to go, particularly after dark. Can I carry your bag?”
“I’ve got it. Thank you,” MacKenzie said, following him.
“Watch your step,” he said. “I left my flashlight in my tent because we’re low on batteries. We’ll get there sooner if we
take the path instead of the road.”
She’d seen the sun set a deep blood red as she flew. The sky was now dark, the Milky Way streaming like a vivid river of light
across the heavens. There were few lights in the camp, a candle here and there but no electricity save for a floodlight up
ahead where, she assumed, they were going. The smell was overwhelming, a stench of human waste and vomit, and yet as she walked
she heard children laughing and mothers singing lullabies to their babies. She saw huts made of sticks with corrugated tin
or fiberglass roofs, shelters made of plastic sheeting, huts made of woven grass mats, World War I-era canvas wall tents and
nylon tents and Mongolian yurt-style tents, solar-powered cookers, a windmill, and women carrying water cans and cook pots,
blankets, hoes, children in flip-flop sandals several sizes too big for their feet, young boys in hand-me-down T-shirts with
the logos of American sports teams on them, men examining ration cards to make sure people had eaten, or that nobody had eaten
twice, people living in doorless, engineless cars, and monkeys picking through trash heaps.
“Believe it or not, this is one of the nicer camps—in Gula, Zaire, in 1994 after the massacre in Rwanda, we had 1.2 million
people cross the border into Zaire in forty-eight hours. What exactly does the Women’s Health Initiative do?” Ackroyd asked,
once they were away from the helicopter and no longer had to shout and could speak in normal voices. He was a good-looking
man, Mack thought, a bit on the thin side and more soft-spoken than most of the men she met, but that wasn’t a bad thing,
gentle-featured, with thin lips and long sandy brown hair that hadn’t been washed in weeks, judging from how it shone, and
it kept falling in front of his eyes even though he kept pushing it back under his Red Sox cap. He had a patchy stubble of
beard on his face that made him look even more boyish for its lack of thickness. He was wearing jeans, hiking boots, and a
plaid long-sleeved shirt, untucked and unbuttoned, the end of his belt hanging down below his shirt.