Isaac Opoku opened his eyes and stared up at the slowly spinning fan above him, just visible in the low light. After a few seconds he pulled his pillow over his head and pressed it hard against both his ears.
And then, after realizing his efforts were futile, he gave up and tossed it onto the floor in frustration.
The baby’s cries were just too damn loud for him to drown them out.
He sat up slowly, rubbed his exhausted eyes, and glanced to the clock on the nightstand next to him.
Six twenty-four a.m.
He pressed his eyes shut again as he sat there, willing himself to wake up.
The baby had had him up during the night, he couldn’t remember what time that was, exactly, and he was absolutely wasted right now, but that wasn’t the worst part. No, the worst part was that he knew he wouldn’t have anyone he could complain to about his situation because his wife had been up then, as well, and from the sounds coming out of the family room of the little house here in the small town of Atimpoku, she was most definitely up now.
Their son had arrived four months ago, and neither Isaac nor his wife had had a good night of sleep since then.
He wondered how many cries he’d slept through. Had she and the baby been up other times without him?
Opoku was thirty-one years old, just under six feet tall, and fit. His hair was short and his boyish face clean-shaven, but with his sinewy muscles he carried the appearance of someone who was well accustomed to physical labor.
Not that he felt particularly strong right now. He staggered out of bed in his boxers and a T-shirt that said “Super Dad” in bold red lettering across the front, and then he continued shaking the cobwebs from his mind as he headed into the family room, where he found his wife of two years, just beginning to nurse his infant son on the couch in front of the TV.
“Maa chi.” Good morning, he said, speaking Twi, the language of the Akan people of southern and central Ghana.
Abina Opoku looked up and replied herself in Twi. “Sorry he woke you.”
Isaac wiped the sleep from his eyes. “It’s fine. I’ll just go in early; it will be a busy day at work, anyway.”
“I made some rice water; it’s in the pot on the stove.”
Opoku smiled a tired smile. “Let me get dressed first, and I’ll join Kofi for breakfast.”
A few minutes later he came back out of the bedroom wearing a dark green-and-brown camouflage uniform with a badge on the shoulder that read “VRA-RIVCOM.” A Browning Hi-Power 9-millimeter pistol hung in a leather holster from his hip, a pair of extra magazines jutted from pouches on his utility belt, and a maroon beret had been stuffed under the epaulet on his right shoulder.
Abina was still feeding their son, so Isaac went into the tiny kitchen, grabbed a bowl from a shelf, and used a ladle to scoop the hot rice water into it. It was a simple breakfast, just as its name implied. Rice with extra water, making for a souplike consistency, flavored with milk and loads of sugar, just the way Isaac liked it. He grabbed a cup of Milo, a chocolate malt powder his wife blended with boiling water and left on the counter for him while she held her son in her other arm.
Sergeant Isaac Opoku sat next to his young family while Abina finished breastfeeding Kofi; the TV was on and the local news reported the story of the EU chief diplomat in the capital, making a speech at the airport the afternoon before about the West increasing its investments all across Ghana. She announced how excited she was to be visiting points around the nation to mark the beginning of a new era of cooperation and assistance from the EU and the United States.
Both Isaac and his wife were well aware of the EU lady’s travel here in Ghana, even though the times and locations of her visits were not public knowledge.
“When does she arrive at the dam?” Abina asked.
“Tomorrow at two p.m.”
“Maybe you’ll be on TV. Your parents will love that.”
Isaac smiled a little. “Woman, if I’m on TV, I’ll be standing far in the background. You won’t even know it’s me.”
“Still…who of us has been on television? Try to get them to take your picture.”
“There will be thirty local police at the dam for the speech. Plus twenty-four of us from RIVCOM. Plus the fifty people from the helicopters.” He thought a moment. “Plus the VRA plant operators. No one would see me.”
Abina gave a tired smile as she stood from the sofa. She said, “Just start dancing or something. The photographers will have to take a picture of that!”
To this Opoku laughed a booming laugh, and as Abina put Kofi back in his crib, he finished his rice water and Milo, then took his dishes to the sink. “I am a good dancer.”
“You could be famous,” she said, continuing the joke. “Then you won’t have to be a cop anymore.”
Opoku said, “My dad was a cop. His dad was a cop. My sister is a cop. I’m always going to be a cop.”
Abina gave a tired laugh. “Well…Kofi’s not going to be a cop. He’s going to be a doctor.”
“Yes,” Opoku said. “As soon as he retires from football, he will go right away to medical school.”
It was a long-standing joke between the pair. Isaac had wanted to be a professional soccer player, but that dream died in his teenage years when he discovered he wasn’t particularly talented. He’d instead followed his father’s footsteps into the military, then followed them further into police work, but his special forces training in the army had helped him qualify for RIVCOM, an elite police unit that protected the hydroelectric dam and other critical infrastructure on the Volta River.
Isaac went back into the bedroom, and ten minutes later he came back out with a black canvas backpack and a motorcycle helmet on his head. He kissed his wife and now-sleeping baby, then went into the tiny carport of their tiny house and climbed onto his 250cc Honda dirt bike.
He fired up the twelve-year-old machine and rode out onto the road in front of his house, and soon he was out of the village, heading north towards his station at the dam.
Traffic was exceptionally bad this morning, but shift change wasn’t till nine, so this was early for him to be heading into work, right in the heart of the rush hour. And though the motorcycle gave him the luxury of slipping between gridlocked cars, eventually he found himself unable to advance any farther.
A traffic circle ahead was a daily obstacle for him; vehicles poured in from four streets, and there were no lanes marked, so sometimes the cars and trucks and motorbikes were five abreast, those on the left trying to nudge right to make a turn, those on the right giving no quarter to them as they themselves attempted to wind around to their own exit lane.
Still ten meters from the circle, he ran out of room, and he pulled up to a stop behind a green Hyundai Starex twelve-passenger van, putting his polished combat boots down on the ground and taking his hands off the clutch lever and the throttle to relax his arms.
He didn’t pay any attention to the van in front of him at first; these vehicles were ubiquitous outside the capital, usually ferrying villagers from town to town. But when he realized it was belching a constant plume of gray smog right up into his face, the green van did catch his attention.
The traffic circle ahead tightened up even more; they weren’t going anywhere for a moment, and not wanting to idle back here with the smog blowing in his eyes, Isaac pulled up on the left, walking his bike with his feet, squeezing between the green Starex and a white pickup waiting out the traffic next to it.
He looked into the green twelve-seater and saw ten men inside; he counted by subtracting the two open seats from the maximum number of occupants, and from the flash glance he gave the group he determined they were all young, in their teens or twenties. He looked into the pickup on his left and saw an older man talking animatedly on his cell phone, and then he turned his attention back to the traffic circle just ahead. It was gridlocked and tight; cars and trucks honked, and motorcycles tried to pick their way through to no avail.
Shit. He was going to be here a minute.
Lazily he glanced back into the passenger van next to him, his shoulder nearly touching it because he was wedged in between the two vehicles. The person on the other side of the second-row window just stared back at him, but not at his face. No, the young Black man was looking at the badge on his shoulder.
Glancing around at the others inside, he saw them all looking him up and down, taking notice of his uniform, his pistol, the helmet, the pack on his back.
Most Ghanaians that Opoku knew barely paid attention to the police. This group of men seemed exactly the opposite. As if they were more than curious about who he was, how he dressed and acted.
This piqued Isaac’s own curiosity. Eight years in special forces and four years in an elite police unit made him size up people and situations automatically and with a suspicious eye.
He leaned back a little, not trying to hide the fact that he was looking into the van, and this paid dividends. Sitting in the back seat on the right, mostly hidden by all the men around him, was another person. He was larger; he wore a baseball cap and sunglasses and a khaki-colored balaclava that covered virtually his entire face, including his nose and his forehead.
Isaac couldn’t see the man’s features, the man’s age, even the man’s race.
He saw sweat dripping from the faces of the young Black men in the vehicle; several of the windows were open, and this told him either the driver wasn’t running the van’s AC or else it didn’t work.
Why was this one man completely covered up?
Isaac could think of only one answer.
The man was white, or Asian, and he didn’t want anyone knowing it.
He would be tall and broad for an Asian, Isaac determined, so he thought the man was likely white.
Opoku looked at him more closely. The man stared straight ahead, unlike those around him who couldn’t help but look the way of the peering cop.
Just then the Hyundai lurched a little, fighting its way forward into the traffic circle.
The pickup began to move, as well, but Isaac hesitated, staying where he was so he could fall in behind the Starex.
Once he was behind it, he shifted to the right and moved forward with the van but at a slightly faster pace, so when both he and the Hyundai entered the circle and stopped in traffic again, he was halfway up on the right-hand side, perfectly level with the man wearing the face covering and sunglasses.
As before, the man didn’t turn his way at first, but when Opoku knocked on the window, after all the other men swung their heads in surprise, the covered figure slowly rotated to look at the officer.
Isaac motioned for the man to pull down his mask.
The man did not.
The window was cracked open several centimeters at the bottom. Isaac looked at the man and spoke to him in English. “Good morning. Let me see your face, brother. Just a security check.”
The man leaned forward towards the glass now.
Responding in English with an accent Isaac couldn’t identify, the man said, “You’re RIVCOM. We don’t have to stop for you here.”
“I can get an Akosombo police official and have you—”
A truck in front of the Hyundai found an opening in the circle and moved out of the way, and the man in the mask turned back in the direction of the driver at the front of the vehicle. “Go,” he said, an authority in his accented voice that made Isaac think he was either military or ex-military.
He stayed there motionless on his bike, but once the Hyundai moved ahead, he quickly reached into a breast pocket, took out a small notepad and a pen, and jotted down the tag number.
Behind him a few vehicles honked, but no one close enough to see his uniform did, because, unlike the masked foreigner, they wouldn’t dare defy a police officer, regardless of whether he had jurisdiction on this road.
Twenty minutes later Isaac Opoku parked his Honda outside a two-story white cinder-block building with a sign out front that read “Volta River Authority—River Command Police.” The building was right on top of the Akosombo Dam, with Lake Volta behind it and the Volta River in front of it, some thirty-four stories below. He fist-bumped a friend of his as the man left the building, and he stepped in, out of the morning sun and into the cool environs of a simple and drab office space.
It was just eight, but there was a lot of activity, mostly people cleaning around the building, though Isaac seriously doubted the joint delegation arriving tomorrow would have any interest in touring the drab police station.
No, everyone knew that the entire event here, to be held down at the power house at the bottom of the dam next to the switchyard, would last only twenty minutes or so, and then the dignitaries would leave.
And that was fine with Isaac.
He moved past his friends and coworkers without engaging anyone in conversation. He put his pack and his helmet in his locker and headed to the armory room door, where he punched a code in a lock. He opened the door and accessed his weapon, an M4 with an Aimpoint optic on the rail and a single thirty-round magazine in the mag well.
Checking it over quickly to make sure his coworker from the last shift had left the weapon in the same condition that Isaac himself had left it in after the shift before, he put it back in its locker and walked back through the halls, finally stopping at a door with a sign on it that said “Superintendent Baka.”
Isaac rapped gently with his knuckles, but he didn’t wait before going in.
Switching back and forth between English and Twi, he said, “Morning, boss. Etty sen?” How are you?
A portly officer in his fifties sat behind a desk covered in papers. He was hunched over a computer terminal, and he appeared annoyed by the intrusion.
The superintendent replied to him in Twi. “Can’t you see I’m busy? We’ve got a lot to do today to prepare for the delegation tomorrow.”
“Kafra.” Sorry, Isaac replied.
The older man waved Opoku to a wooden chair in front of his desk and said, “The football pitch on the western side of the dam above the power house will be the landing zone for the helicopters. We’ll need to rope that off today, rope off the trail through the trees down to the building. We’ll position one squad there with the dignitaries when they come, plus we’ll have three trucks, six men each, guarding the helicopters, the entrance to the switchyard, and the entrance to the dam itself.”
Opoku shrugged. “That sounds manageable.”
“Does it? Well, there will be armed security with the delegation, and Akosombo police haven’t even told me how many cops they’re sending, what vehicles they’ll have, anything. It’s going to be a congested mess, I can tell you that already. I’m about to head to town to walk in on the commander and make him give me his plan so our forces can be coordinated.”
Isaac nodded, but his mind was on something else.
The superintendent saw this. “What do you need?”
“I saw a group of men in a passenger van on the way to work. I can’t be sure, but I think they were up to something.”
“Something on the river? Something at the dam or the hydro plant?”
“No…I mean…I…I don’t know. This was on Tema-Jasikan Road, at the circle.”
“So…kilometers away from our jurisdiction.”
“I followed them a while, and they crossed at the bridge, disappeared.”
The superintendent didn’t look like he gave a damn. He reached for his cup of tea. “What about these guys?”
“Nine men, including the driver. All looked local but young. No one over twenty-three. And a tenth man, I think he was white.”
“You think?” The superintendent shrugged. “It’s not against the law to be a white man in Ghana, Opoku.”
“No, sir. But he didn’t fit in with the others. Not at all.”
The commander waved a hand. “A missionary. Came here to fix all the problems of our youth.” It was said dismissively.
“Definitely not a missionary,” Opoku countered. “Missionaries don’t cover their faces with masks and sunglasses and hats, they don’t hide their race. They don’t roll off into the bush with nine military-age males.”
“I don’t have time for this, Sergeant. What do you want me to do? Get in my car and drive around rounding up the whites?”
“Of course not, sir.”
Baka sighed. “You get their tag number?”
“I did.” Opoku held up his little notepad.
The older man rubbed sweat from his face and reached out for the number. “I’ll check it out after I go to Akosombo town.”
Isaac had suspicions his boss would do no such thing. He just said, “No worries, sir. You have to get everything sorted out for tomorrow. I’ll call Accra and find out who owns the vehicle, see if it’s registered to someone nearby. I’ll let you know if there’s anything to worry about.”
The superintendent stood. “We have a lot to worry about. A bunch of different groups, all armed and all thinking they are in charge, are going to be walking all over my dam tomorrow, and I don’t like it.”
“Yes, boss.” Isaac himself stood and headed for the door. He turned back around. “If I find out this van is registered to someone here in the area, you okay with me taking a couple of corporals and going for a quick look?”
Before the older man could reply, Isaac said, “Tomorrow is a big day. Those could have been protesters, bandits, whatever. If there is anything at all going on around here that could disrupt it, I think it’s better we know now.”
The superintendent waved Isaac out the door. “Only if it’s close to the dam. No more than fifteen minutes. I need you here getting ready for tomorrow. We have trucks to wash, boots to shine, guns to clean.”
“Yes, sir,” Isaac said, and then he left to go to his desk to call the central police HQ in the capital.