DENNIS ZOULALIAN WOKE UP IN A HOSPITAL bed but had no idea where he was, or how he’d gotten there, or for that matter, that his name was Dennis Zoulalian. Words swam in his head, but not all of them in the same language. The television in his room was tuned to Al Jazeera, and he understood everything the announcers were saying, but he knew that Arabic was not his native tongue. His neck hurt, and his vision was blurred. His head throbbed. A doctor shone a small light in his eyes and spoke to him in French, which he also understood. He couldn’t respond.
He was tired, so he went back to sleep.
The next time he awoke, his vision was better but his neck still hurt. He recalled being in a car, but the details of the rest of it simply weren’t there.
“Patient X. Je m’appelle Claude Chaline et je suis avec Docteurs Sans Frontières. Parlez-vous français?”
“Oui,” Vasquez said.
“Vous étiez dans un accident. Vous avez souffrit d’une commotion cérébrade. Savez-vous où vous êtes?
The doctor said he’d been in an accident and was asking him if he knew where he was.
“Je ne suis pas sûr. Je suis dans un hôpital. A Liger.”
“Vous vous rappelez comment vous êtes arrivé ici?”
“Do I remember how I got here?” Zoulalian said in English. The doctor seemed surprised, then concerned.
“Parlez s’il vous plait en français.”
The doctor told him his dental work was American—had he lived in America?
“Oui.”
“Qui êtes-vous?”
Who was he?
Excellent question. Something told him not to speak English again. The same voice told him he was in danger, and to be careful.
“Je ne sais pas. Je voudrais savoir.”
I don’t know—I wish I did.
“They found these on you,” the doctor said in French. He was holding a satellite telephone and a small hand-held computer. “Unfortunately, both require some sort of password to access. I don’t suppose you remember what your passwords are? They might help us learn who you are.”
“I don’t remember,” Zoulalian said.
“You speak English without an accent. I also found a tattoo on your butt cheek when I examined you. A pair of green footprints. Do you know how they got there?”
Zoulalian shook his head.
“Let me tell you what I think, then. It might help you remember. A few years ago I taught a course in how to provide emergency medical treatment to undernourished and starving people. The course was at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. My students were all members of the U.S. Air Force’s para-rescue service. When they graduate, to show that they are members of the team, they get a pair of small green footprints tattooed on their asses. Your own physical fitness is probably what saved you from the car accident, as much as the airbag. I think you are a PJ. Or you were, at one time. I have also never met an Arab who has a tattoo.”
Zoulalian tried to remember. He recalled the training, running for what felt like hours beneath the hot Texas sun. He’d quit. No, he’d finished the program, done the job, for a while, but then he’d transferred… changed jobs. To what?
“Your memory will come back to you,” the doctor said. “The condition is temporary and quite common to head injuries. I think you will be sore, but I find nothing broken. Can you sit up?”
Zoulalian sat up. His vision spun and his head banged like a drum, and the doctor was right, he was sore in his chest and neck, but beyond that, he felt relatively all right.
“So here is what happened. I was in a car. With some other people. You were in the car chasing us when you had the accident. I came back to see if I could help. I sent my friends on ahead. Everyone in your vehicle was killed but you. They brought you here, and they brought me here to treat you. There’s a man outside the door with a gun, but he’s not guarding you—he’s guarding me. I’m a prisoner. They think you are one of them. I need to get back to my camp. There’s only one man outside the door. I’ve prepared a syringe with a fast-acting barbiturate, but I need you to distract the guard. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but my sense is that if you are an American, you need to escape as much as I do, so if you’ll help me, I’ll take you with me. How does that sound to you?”
Zoulalian had to think? Was it a trick? No. He could tell from the doctor’s voice that he was someone he could trust.
“Très bon,” Zoulalian said.
Zoulalian called out to the guard in Arabic and asked him to enter the room. When the guard entered, he gestured with a crooked finger, inviting him to come close so that he could whisper something to him. When the guard leaned over, Zoulalian grabbed the barrel of his Uzi, to make sure it wasn’t pointing at the doctor, then whispered, in English, “Nighty-night.”
The doctor stabbed the guard in the carotid artery with the syringe. The man dropped instantly.
Zoulalian got to his feet, still a bit woozy, and helped the doctor lift the guard into the bed, where they covered him with a sheet. The doctor prepared an IV drip with enough sedative in it, he explained, to keep the guard unconscious until the following day. They removed the guard’s identification papers and left him there. With any luck, it would be some time before anyone realized a different man was now lying in the bed of patient X.
Zoulalian held the guard’s weapon on his lap, hidden beneath a blanket, while Dr. Chaline pushed him in a wheelchair to the front door of the hospital. In the drive, they saw a black Mercedes belonging to some local tribal leader or warlord, the driver leaning against the front fender. Chaline opened the back door and helped Zoulalian in, then snapped his fingers to command the driver to get behind the wheel.
“Your employer said you are to take us,” Chaline said in English, getting in on the passenger side. “Quickly. There isn’t much time. This man is not well.”
The driver sped away. Zoulalian looked out the rear window to make sure they weren’t followed. Once they were out of town, Zoulalian pointed the Uzi at the driver’s head and told him he could get out now, and thanks for the lift. They left him standing by the side of the road.
MacKenzie and Ackroyd tried to talk Dr. Chaline out of going back, telling him he’d be taken hostage if he did, but he insisted, arguing that Docteurs Sans Frontières also meant doctors who didn’t take sides, and that if there were wounded people, he could not walk away. He would be safe, once it was understood which NGO he worked for, he told them.
Mack and Stephen drove across an open, barren landscape, aware that the dust kicked up by the Land Rover made them visible for miles, crossing a rickety trestle bridge that spanned a nearly empty river bed where three elephants wallowed in a water hole. They’d left the main highway, certain that traveling on it wouldn’t be safe, and were quite lost, despite the map Stephen found in the glove compartment that he was hoping might help them navigate (she’d left her CIM at Camp Seven). They drove until they came to the Convent of St. Ann’s, a compound of red brick, squatting in the dust, where the abbess told them it wouldn’t be safe for them to stay, because men with guns had come every night, looking for somebody to kill. She’d sent her girls and her sisters in Christ to a convent in Ghana, across the River Liger, and she was the only one there, protected only by her advanced age and by her faith in God, which, she said, was enough. She gave them food and drink and suggested they drive another hour down the road to a village called Sagoa, where they might be safe. It would be dark soon, the abbess said, and it would not be safe at all for them to travel at night.
The setting sun bled across the western sky and turned the clouds to tongues of flame, and then the cobalt dome turned black overhead, the Milky Way glittering with an incandescence brighter than fireworks. MacKenzie was certain the abbess had given them the wrong directions, because ahead of them they saw only blackness, thick and opaque, but then she saw a light flicker. Foolishly, she’d expected to see a glow in the sky, the way the lights of a city might illuminate the horizon, but there were no lights in Sagoa, no electricity, only people sitting around charcoal fires or kerosene lamps in front of their homes, round earthen huts with roofs of thatch, each hut surrounded by massive clay storage jars and tin jerry cans. She saw children hiding inside their houses, fearful of whoever was in the vehicle, peeking out through the portals. They were Da, Ackroyd told her, identifiable by the distinct scars on their cheeks and by their humble, almost meek manner.
They stopped the car and parked beneath a large acacia tree at the center of the village, where they were met by a delegation led by a man who introduced himself as Father Ayala, a Spanish priest who’d been working in the village as a missionary. Stephen spoke some Spanish and conversed with the man for a few moments before telling MacKenzie what was going on.
“These people,” Ackroyd said, “are LPF. Ligerian People’s Front. They’ve come from up north, where, if I understand Father Ayala correctly, they tried to stop the rebels by sitting on the road to block it, and the troops drove over them. They’re trying to get to Port Ivory. I told them it might not be safe there either.”
Father Ayala spoke again for a few minutes. Ackroyd shook his head sadly.
“He’s asking us if we have any food,” Stephen told MacKenzie. “The people here are very hungry, he says.”
Ayala spoke further. Ackroyd listened.
“He says there’s food in a storage building owned by the government,” Ackroyd told her, “but a powerful witch put a curse on the food so they can’t eat it.”
“Where?” MacKenzie asked.
Ackroyd asked the priest where, and the priest pointed to a tin warehouse, the size of a three- or four-car garage, at the edge of the common beneath a smaller tree, with a five-hundred-gallon fuel tank next to it, mounted on poles.
“There’s food in that building, and nobody guarding it, but people are starving?” she asked. Stephen nodded.
“Juju,” he said. “I know it sounds silly, but to them, it’s totally real. A witch’s curse is nothing to mess with. You do not want bad juju.”
MacKenzie thought for a moment.
“Would they eat the food if I removed the curse?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “Did you bring the curse- remover?”
“Ask him,” she told Stephen, who relayed her question to the priest, who in turn asked the village elders standing behind him. The priest nodded to indicate that the people would indeed eat the food if the curse were lifted from it.
“What do you have in mind?” Stephen asked MacKenzie as she walked back to the vehicle. “This isn’t something these people take lightly.”
“I’m counting on it,” she told him. “Don’t forget—I’m a witch, too. I didn’t get this red hair out of a bottle.”
She’d noticed, in the back of the Land Rover, a set of emergency supplies in case of car trouble, including a full tool kit and a four-pack of emergency chemlites in an aluminum sleeve to protect them from exposure to sunlight. Some chemlites the Army issued were designed to emit a variety of lumens for different lengths of time, and generally the longer a chemlite burned, the dimmer it was. The chemlites she took from the car were formulated to glow very brightly for about thirty minutes. They were orange, two feet long, and each about the thickness of her thumb. She took a machete from the back of the truck and walked to the storage building, where she saw that the door was locked with a simple padlock. It seemed like half the village had followed her to see what she was going to do.
She bent the four-pack of chemlites across her knee, hearing each one snap, then shook the pack to make sure the chemicals mixed. A faint orange glow emanated through the foil wrapper. She held it up in the air in the darkness so that everyone could see the faint orange glow—Evelyn Warner had told her that people believed witchery took the form of light rising from the body—then she set the four-pack down on a wooden bench, raised the heavy machete blade high over her head, and brought it down with as much force as she could bring to bear, slicing the aluminum foil sack and the chemlites inside open, whereupon she quickly flung the liquid against the side of the building, daubing it on the door and on the padlock. Exposed to air, the chemophosphorescence would last only a few minutes more. The result achieved was better than anticipated, a kind of psychedelic Jackson Pollock/Peter Max effect.
“Tell them that once the light’s gone, the curse will have been lifted,” she said.
Ackroyd relayed the message to Father Ayala, who passed it on to the people of Sagoa. Ayala, MacKenzie surmised, understood the sham and saw right through it but didn’t care, as long as the hungry people were fed.
A few minutes later, Stephen broke the padlock with a large maul. Inside, they found cardboard boxes and wooden crates with the letters IPAB stenciled on the side. The cardboard boxes contained U.S. Army issue MREs, enough to feed the village for perhaps a week. The wooden crates contained AK-47s and ammunition. When MacKenzie told Father Ayala, as Stephen translated, that she’d be willing to show his people how to load and fire the Kalashnikovs, he shook his head and refused, saying his organization was a pacifist organization—even in the face of death, they would not resort to violence. She showed them, instead, how to open and use the MREs, either beef stroganoff or chicken tetrazzini, how to crack the chempacks to heat the entrées, and she held up one of the cookies and took a bite to demonstrate that what appeared to be a thick piece of cardboard was in fact edible.
She expected a rush, but the people of Sagoa waited patiently as the meals were distributed. She’d expected cheers, or some kind of animation, but the people simply took their food and consumed it in silence, the children crouched around their MREs as if to protect them from raiding hyenas, fearful that someone was going to take them away.
Mack was starving, devouring her meal without thinking too much about it. Ackroyd picked at his meal and eventually handed what he couldn’t eat to a child, who thanked him. They were sitting on the tailgate of the Rover.
“They’re not very good,” Mack told him, “but you really should eat something. You’re too thin.”
“You should have seen me in college,” he told her with a smile. “I was downright roly-poly. I’ve been trying to lose weight my whole life. This is great. They say you can’t be too rich or too thin—I’ll work on being too rich later.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, “we should head back to Camp Seven. How far do you think it is?”
“As the crow flies,” he said, “probably not far. The question is, how to drive there. The road we were on leads back to Baku Da’al, Ayala said. There’s an oil facility at El Amin, but it might not be connected by road. The pipeline runs north and south but the oil workers patrol it with ultralight aircraft. There must have been a road when they built it.”
“I’ll call for directions in the morning,” she said. “Unless my batteries give out.”
“Call who?” Ackroyd asked. “Triple A?”
She’d almost said she’d call CENTCOM. To Stephen, she was still Mary Dorsey, with the United Nations. She’d dialed DeLuca’s number earlier, but he wasn’t answering. She’d been impressed, all day, by the way Stephen had watched out for her. She had to admit she’d developed a bit of a crush, as Evelyn Warner might have said. Nothing serious, of course.
“I’ll call the CIA,” she said. “Maybe they’re watching us right now with their satellites.”
He looked up at the night sky.
“It’d be just like the military to fuck up the Milky Way,” he said.
“Are you antimilitary?” she asked him.
“Not at all,” he said. “My father was in the military. A colonel, in fact. I’m just feeling very pro Milky Way right now.”
“Me, too,” she said.
“We should get some sleep,” he told her. Most of the fires and lamps in the village had gone out now. They heard a woman singing softly somewhere. “There’s blankets here. If you put the seat down, you can sleep in the back of the Rover. It’s not bad, and you probably want to get up off the ground, where the no-see-ums won’t get you.”
He wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, then picked up a second one and wrapped it around his own before slipping down from the tailgate.
“So I guess I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.
“Where are you going?” she asked him. “Where are you going to sleep?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking around. “I’ll find a place somewhere.”
“Get in the car,” she told him. “I’m sure it’s big enough in the back for the both of us.”
The fact was, in the last three days, she’d grown enormously fond of the young writer, with his nimble intelligence and his quiet good looks, his gentle manner, his large heart. He was not, at all, the kind of man she was used to meeting in the military, and perhaps that was why she was so intrigued by him, or maybe it was just the old-fashioned stuff, the way he made sure she was taken care of before attending to himself, held doors open for her, listened to her closely when she spoke, and showed an interest in her. In the military, most guys (her team members the exceptions) still didn’t know quite what to do with a woman who was also a peer and fellow soldier, except treat her like one of the guys, make coarse jokes, unless they felt threatened, and then they were complete assholes. Stephen was a good person. He told amusing stories. He found her stories reciprocally amusing. There was something mysterious about him, something he was withholding from her, and she wanted to know what it was. She’d had a fantasy, as a younger girl, of living in Hollywood and being an actress and living with a man who loved her and wrote fabulous screenplays for her to act in, sort of like Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. The fantasy changed to living with a rock star who wrote songs about her, and then after a few years of dating actual boys, her fantasy was just that someday she’d meet a guy who wasn’t a total dickhead. Stephen cared about what was going on in Africa, but not in a bleeding heart distant way—he was actually here, putting himself on the line, literally, though he didn’t have to, trying to do something about it, to make things better, and she admired that.
When he lay down next to her in the back of the Land Rover, she felt her pulse quicken and wondered if she was falling in love with him. The idea struck her fairly suddenly, but just as suddenly, it made a kind of strange sense. It was an unlikely time and place to fall in love, but who could control the time and place when you fell in love? Maybe she wanted to fall in love, willed herself there, because of the hatred and horror all around them. Maybe the urge or need or wish to fall in love was some sort of survival mechanism, a thing the body knows it needs, the same way it knows it needs water or food. It wasn’t the simple emotional release of sex she wanted, the way men wanted that, but something deeper and purer, a sense of connection and intimacy, where the bond came from knowing the utter truth about each other. There were men she trusted with her life, men like DeLuca, or Dan, but this was a man she trusted with her soul. That was how it felt.
She bunched her sweatshirt up beneath her head for a pillow and lay down next to him. They’d put a blanket down to lie on and used the second to cover themselves. He’d propped his head up on his backpack.
“I can’t wait to read what you write about all this,” she told him. “I’m sure it’s going to be brilliant.”
“I know this will sound strange,” he told her, “but it is brilliant. I don’t have any doubts. It might even win a Pulitzer. Sometimes I think the only thing that could stop it would be if Kruger and the others get jealous and sabotage me.”
“How would they do that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “Accuse me of plagiarism, maybe. Hack into my computer, when I start writing it into my computer, and erase everything.”
“I’ve been tempted to peek into your journal…”
“Don’t ever do that,” he said, flashing anger for the first time. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t like people reading what I write before I finish it.”
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “I only said I’ve been tempted…”
“Well just, please, okay?” he said, calming down. “I’m sorry. I’d rather wait to show you when I’m finished. I don’t want to sound like a wuss, but that’s how I feel.”
“All right,” MacKenzie said. “You have to promise. It’s just that I see you writing in your journal and I get curious. I’ll wait. I just wanted you to know that I believe in you. And as someone with whom I was recently shot at, I can tell you that I’ve been shot at before with other men, and you’re not a wuss. Not remotely.”
“Call me old-fashioned,” Stephen said, smiling, “but I don’t think I like hearing that you’ve been shot at with other men. I want to think I’m the only one.”
“You’re the only one, Stephen,” she said. “I’ve never been shot at before with anyone like you. I mean that.”
“Mary Dorsey…” he whispered.
“What?”
“I really have to kiss you now.”
“I really want you to,” she told him.
They made love quietly, her body pressed against his, which was thin and gaunt, she thought, but which she welcomed to hers. He was a surprisingly aggressive lover. They slept. In the morning, rising before anyone else was awake, he told her he wanted to remember this place always.
Telling him her true identity was out of the question. She knew the rules. It put you in greater jeopardy, and it put the people you knew in greater jeopardy, including both your fellow team members and the people who knew what your cover was. Evelyn Warner knew. Stephen would probably be upset if she told him. Perhaps when this was all over, the right moment would present itself.
Regarding more practical matters, she was hesitant to leave the enemy weapons cache they’d found intact. She spoke to Father Ayala again, using Stephen to interpret for her, and told him if the village was attacked, and he chose a passive resistance, there was a chance the enemy would use the weapons against him. She appreciated his commitment to nonviolence and respected the philosophy behind it, but, she told him, there were people working in Liger to terrorize the population by killing and raping and mutilating the innocent and (she decided not to spare the man’s sensibilities, because it was too important that he understand the impact of his decision) by forcing people to watch or participate in acts of cannibalism—“Father,” she said, “these guns can stop that from happening. Perhaps prayer will tell you whether or not you want to use them.” There were six crates, each containing a dozen AK-47s, one of the simplest rifles to operate ever made, and one of the most reliable. She opened three crates and unpacked the weapons, loaded clips, and prepared the rifles for use. She and Stephen loaded the remaining three crates into the back of the Land Rover, along with extra ammunition, to bring to Camp Seven.
Before they left, she remembered to turn her phone back on. She’d turned it off, the night before, to shut the war out, if only for a night. She called CENTCOM Ops, out of Stephen’s earshot, and gave the duty officer the GPS coordinates of her current position. He gave her directions back to Camp Seven. Stephen had been right, there was no direct route between Sagoa and Camp Seven, sixty kilometers apart as the crow flew but nearly two hundred by road. She felt the need to hurry, but at the same time, if it meant spending more time with him, she didn’t mind the circuitous route, particularly because a small voice, one she tried to ignore, was telling her their time together was limited, a thing she did not want to be true.
He was a terrible driver, she discovered, turning left when she said right and not paying attention. At one point, he stopped, confused, certain they were driving in circles. He was, she thought, adorable.
DeLuca had stopped to check in, paused at an intersection in the proverbial middle of nowhere. His map told him one road led to Sagoa, the other to Camp Seven. He was relieved when Scottie told him Dennis’s signal was moving again, even though Scott said he couldn’t say why Zoulalian had turned his phone off and left it off. He was in a black Mercedes, Scott said, owned, according to the license-plate number picked up by the cameras in the sky overhead, by a local warlord named Ali Khan who was believed to be aligned with IPAB.
“Is that satellite or UAV?” DeLuca asked.
“Actually, we have a U-2 up,” Scott said.
“U-2?” DeLuca said. “From the sixties?”
“They started making them again in 1988,” Scott said. “They stay in the air as long as a UAV but they fly a helluva lot faster, so they cover more ground. Do you want to call Zoulalian?”
“No,” DeLuca said. “I’ll wait for him to check in. How about MacKenzie?”
“On her way to Camp Seven,” Scott said.
“Patch me through to LeDoux,” DeLuca asked. “You okay?”
“I’m good,” Scott said.
“Have you told your mother anything?”
“Just that we were keeping an eye on you,” Scott said.
“You can tell her I’ll be out in three days,” DeLuca said, “if not sooner.”
When LeDoux came on the line, DeLuca asked him for an update. LeDoux said the rules of engagement had not changed. The Marines were boo-ya and ready to fly. A G-2 with the 27th Infantry had complained that his men hadn’t been given a chance to acclimate before heading directly into combat, the way troops invading Iraq had trained first in Kuwait. The colonel who’d expressed his concern for his men had been reprimanded for voicing his dissent. He’d gone rogue with the media after that, saying he had misgivings about sending his men into a conflict the undertones of which were more religious than strategic, at the whim of a born-again American president who was too willing to risk the lives of his troops in the service of his own personal religious vision. Needless to say, he’d been removed after that and reassigned, and would possibly face charges as serious as treason for his comments, though right now they were just trying to get him away from the microphones.
To make matters worse, LeDoux said, the evangelicals in Congress had led a group sing on the Senate floor of the song “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the pictures on television showing the Republicans in full voice while Ted Kennedy sat tight-lipped with his arms folded across his chest. To rally political support, the White House was referencing evidence of new atrocities unfolding on an hourly basis, perpetrated by Samuel Adu and John Dari and various IPAB or LPLF forces.
“I thought one of the reasons I’m here was to verify Dari’s participation in the atrocities,” DeLuca said. “And, for the record, I can’t.”
“They need names,” LeDoux said.
“How about Reverend Rowen?” DeLuca asked.
“Still debriefing that,” LeDoux said, which DeLuca understood to mean they were trying to figure out how to spin it.
“What’s the bottom line, as Kissick would say?” DeLuca said. “What can you do for me? I’m going to need fire support.”
“Bottom line,” LeDoux said, “no CAS. UAV only. I can give you what resources I have, but I can’t increase or jump the dates.”
“I figured. How many Predators can I have?” DeLuca said.
“We have six,” LeDoux said. “Rotating in eight-hour shifts.”
“Can you fly all six at once?” DeLuca asked.
“Not and give you coverage after they’re returned to base,” LeDoux said. “It’s your call. Where are you?”
“At a fork in the road,” DeLuca said. “About an hour out of Baku. You know what Yogi Berra said—‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ Camp Seven is that-a-way and a village called Sagoa is this-a-way. I wanted your thoughts.”
“Baku’s gone bad,” LeDoux said.
“Gone bad?”
“Gone worse,” LeDoux said. “Government troops blew up a mosque. Near your hotel. We’re in Iraq for two fucking years and we avoid the mosques. Anyway, that’s behind you. Heavy fighting, door to door. LPLF, we think. According to SIGINT, we have rebels an hour or so north of Sagoa and the same for Camp Seven. Neither looks good. You can’t just sit tight?”
“Negative,” DeLuca said. Mack was headed for Camp Seven, where Evelyn Warner was waiting for help. He couldn’t reach Sykes or Zoulalian. He couldn’t divide his resources, nor did he really have resources to divide—even if his team was all together, there were only five of them, six if he included Paul Asabo. Sending one or two people to either Sagoa on Camp Seven didn’t make sense. He had to choose one, a village of men, women, and children, or a smaller encampment of women and children. There were more people in Sagoa, but the refugees at Camp Seven were more vulnerable, protected only by a handful of African Union troops whose value as a deterrent was very much in doubt.
“Can we move government troops?” he asked.
“We can make recommendations,” LeDoux said. “They don’t have to listen. Bo’s going to do what he wants. Ngwema will do whatever suits him. It looks like they’re both concentrating their forces around the urban centers and abandoning the countryside to the rebels. With all the predictable results.”
“Well,” DeLuca said, making a decision. “We’re going to Camp Seven. We should be there in about an hour. How long before the shit hits the fan?”
“About that,” LeDoux said. “Maybe a little longer.”
“We’ll have to risk a speeding ticket then,” DeLuca said. “Give me four UAVs now and two on standby. How long is turnaround? How far from base to Camp Seven?”
“Base is the LBJ,” LeDoux said. “We can turn ’em around pretty quick. From home to you is about forty-five minutes. The new ones are faster than the old ones. What are you going to do?”
“Not sure,” DeLuca said. “Still improvising. But like they say at last call, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
When he reached Camp Seven, he found matters in complete disarray, or rather, complete disarray would have been a significant improvement. Evelyn Warner told him the United Nations troops had been recalled before she’d been able to return. The African Union troops had been ordered to pull back and regroup with a larger contingent of AU forces positioned thirty kilometers to the south. For now, Corporal Okempo was stalling, but he was getting pressure from above to move his men. He didn’t want to defy his orders.
“I’m so grateful that you’ve come,” Warner said. “I wish I had better news. I think maybe a hundred of my girls have already scattered or run off, thinking they’ll be safer in the bush than here. Maybe they’re right.”
They were interrupted when DeLuca saw a trail of dust rising in the distance on the road from Sagoa, a single vehicle, a white Land Rover, making speed.
“That’s Dr. Chaline’s car,” Warner said. “I was almost hoping not to see him again.”
Hoolie tapped DeLuca on the shoulder and handed him his CIM. On the screen, DeLuca saw a map of the area, with Camp Seven at the bottom of the screen. Above the camp, to the north, a field of red dots representing troops marching south, perhaps five kilometers away, estimated strength, two thousand men, according to the attached dialogue box, led by Samuel Adu.
DeLuca looked at the sun, setting in the west. In another hour or so, it would be dark.
“We’ll have to work with what we have,” he said, surveying the surrounding landscape.
“Spoken like Davy Crocket at the Alamo. Remember the Alamo?” Hoolie said.
“Who could forget?” DeLuca said. “With one difference.”
“Which is?”
“They had a fort.”
Asabo looked puzzled.
“Famous American battle,” DeLuca told him. “Nothing to worry about.”