“YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME,” DAN SYKES said. “I’ve been training hard for six months. My sensei says I’m as good as he’s ever seen me.”
“If you just really need to kick somebody’s ass, you could kick mine,” Vasquez offered. Sykes had been planning on entering the Intra-Services Full Contact Karate Championship, being held this year at Eglin AFB in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. First prize was an all-night lap-dance pass at the Gold Club in Panama City. Second prize was getting mooned by all the other competitors.
“Thanks, Hoolie,” Sykes said. “I appreciate that, but I could kick your ass any time I wanted to.”
“In your dreams, cabrón,” Hoolie said.
“Everybody read your packets,” DeLuca said as he distributed them. “I’ve skimmed each of them but I want everybody to study your own and then we’ll brief each other. I’m sure we can find Dan an ass to kick. Think of what questions you have or any special needs that might arise. The mission is to gather intel on Mujhid John Jusef-Dari, popularly known as ‘Brother John,’ northern warlord, leading an army with a strength estimated at between one and two thousand men, according to CIA estimates. For what it’s worth—I’m not big on what the CIA is telling us about Liger. We are to determine his whereabouts and his viability, prior to and as of one week from today, 2300 Zulu, at which point in time, unless certain conditions are met, Operation Liberty commences, as per the president’s announcement. My sense is that, as in Baghdad with various parties, were we to locate Mr. Dari early, in a way that locks in his GPS with confidence, he might be visited by a JSOW or some such ordnance in advance of Liberty. TF-21 is in country to paint targets, so that’s not our problem. Should you meet someone from either TF-21 or the CIA, he will identify himself with the phrase, ‘David Letterman went to my high school.’ The CIA report on Dari is at the back of your packet, but read it with a grain of salt. No, read it with a ten-pound bag of salt, because we find it flawed. When you’re done reading, Mr. Asabo here will answer your questions about Dari, or about Liger.”
They’d occupied a smaller conference room below the flight deck. There was a hot tray full of scrambled eggs, limp bacon, and pancakes that seemed to get larger and larger in DeLuca’s mouth, the longer he chewed them, but there was fresh fruit as well, and the coffee was good.
“My name is Mary Dorsey,” MacKenzie said at last, still reading. “I’m Irish. I sound like a washerwoman.”
“I wanted to be Irish,” Vasquez said, affecting an exaggerated brogue. “Saints be praised, sweet Mary mother of mercy, I’ll be havin’ another Guinness down at the local…”
“You sound like the leprechaun in Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” MacKenzie said.
“I know,” Vasquez said defensively. “That’s what I was trying to sound like.”
“I’m with the United Nations Women’s Health Initiative,” Mack continued. “Does the United Nations know that?”
“It’s against international law and the United Nations charter for military personnel to pose as UN troops,” DeLuca said, “but the charter doesn’t say anything about posing as a UN relief worker. They don’t like it and you’ll hear about it if your cover is blown, but technically, we’re okay. DIA set up a fake phone number in New York with an automated phone menu that’s so confusing that whoever tries to check up on you will give up.”
“I knew those things were DIA,” Zoulalian said.
“CENTCOM thinks Dari is using the refugee camps for cover,” DeLuca said. “The question has been, how do you hide two thousand men? That’s how. He’s also recruiting from the camps. You’re going to have to get over on UN personnel for transport and security.”
“I can travel alone if I want?”
“If you feel you have to.” DeLuca nodded, aware of how MacKenzie bristled, justifiably, whenever he created the appearance of making special considerations or allowances due to her sex. “Just remember how men treated you in Iraq. I’ll say this to everybody—this is a place where there is going to be strength in numbers. There is also some strength in media attention. I’m not saying bring reporters with you or pretend to be one, but if they’re around, be aware of the effect. There are some things these guys are going to want to draw world attention to, and some things they’re not. This is a tool we might want to apply.”
“Dari shuns attention, right?” Hoolie interjected.
“He does,” DeLuca said, “but the number-two guy who wants to succeed him might not. Whoever that may be.”
“Mary Dorsey,” MacKenzie read. “Ph.D. anthropology, University of Dublin. Nursing degree, Bardesley College, Liverpool. Hey, I get to use my EMT training. She worked for six years with the World Health Organization. Divorced. Damn, that’s sad. Two kids, Liam, six, and Molly, nine. I love the name Liam. My ex is a doctor. I’m guessing our work was so important to both of us that we drifted apart and never had time for each other. I felt neglected. He felt misunderstood.” She put on an Irish accent. “And of course, there was the drinkin’. He was a man just like me Da. Bastard used to take me lunch money and spend it at the pub. Me sainted mother kicked him out of the house when I was nine, but that was just the first time—she always took him back…” She dropped the accent. “Something like that? Without the clichés.”
“Maybe there was something about her health that made you dedicate your life to women’s health issues?” Vasquez suggested. “Breast cancer?”
“From living too close to a toxic waste site,” Mack finished. “I like it.”
“Dennis,” DeLuca said. “What do you get?”
“Surprise surprise,” he said, throwing his folder down on the table in front of him. “Khalil Penjwin, act two. I guess I won’t have to study too hard for that one.” It was the name of the identity he’d used when he’d gone undercover in Kurdish Iraq, almost two years before Iraqi Freedom began, posing as an entrepreneurial kid who’d grown up smuggling cigarettes and alcohol across the Iraq/Iran border for his uncle, a tribal leader and a U.S. ally during the time after Gulf One when U.S. planes were enforcing the northern no-fly zone. Zoulalian had cross-trained out of Air Force para-rescue and into counterintelligence largely because of his language skills, but the attraction to danger was what had drawn him to both. He’d allied himself, in Kurdistan, with a group called Ansar Al-Islam, a small band of extremists led by a man named Abu Waid that hoped to overthrow Saddam, and later the Great Satan- led coalition. Working as a double agent, “Khalil” had helped DeLuca and his team track down Mohammed Al-Tariq, the former head of Saddam’s Mukhaberat, his primary secret intelligence agency. Al-Tariq had been funding an operation to ship to the United States weaponized smallpox, until DeLuca and his team tracked Al-Tariq to his headquarters deep underground at a place called the Ar Rutbah Salt Works, in the desert near the border with Syria. A combination of carrier-launched cruise missiles and “bunker-buster” smart bombs had turned the salt works into a giant smoking crater in the earth.
“According to TF-21,” Zoulalian said, “Rahjid Waid, Abu Waid’s oldest son, is running an IPAB training camp in northern Liger. My story is, I survived the bombing at Ar Rutbah and I’ve been hiding out in Syria ever since, but now that things are getting dicey in Syria, I need a new place to go. Other than that, everything is the same as before. I know who we can ask in Iraq to tell Rahjid I’m coming. I’m going to need to get to Syria to catch a commercial flight so that Rahjid can send somebody to meet my plane.”
“I’m sure Captain McKinley can find one of his pilots willing to give you a lift,” DeLuca said. “There’s no in-flight movies, but on the other hand, you’ll be flying at Mach 2. Hoolie?”
“Luis Avila,” Hoolie said, holding up his new fake passport. “You know what they say—if you look anything like your passport photo, you’re probably not well enough to travel. From Arecibo, Puerto Rico. I work with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, manning a weather station at the top of El Yunque. Holy Jesus—I have to read all this? ‘A Multi-Study Overview on the Combined Effects of Sub-Saharan Desertification and the North Atlantic Vortex on Caribbean Particulate Deposits and Childhood Asthma.’”
“You’d better read it,” DeLuca said. “After all, you wrote it.”
“So I did,” Vasquez said, noting the authors of the paper. “‘By Dr. Luis Avila, and Dr. Helen Kossman.’ I have a Ph.D. from the University of Mayaguez. That’s an outrage—I did all the work and she gets half the credit? Who does she think she is?”
“She’s with NOAA and she actually wrote the paper,” DeLuca said. “She’ll back up your credentials if anybody asks or checks, but nobody will. I’m Donald Brown, with the World Bank. I’m here to determine how much money we’re going to need to loan Conservation International to help stop the deforestation of West Africa. Paul, you’ve been working on a grant proposal for exactly that for the last two years, am I correct?”
“You are,” Asabo said.
“Can you tell us, in a nutshell, what your work has been about?”
“A nutshell is not big enough,” Asabo said. “A thousand years ago, a band of rain forest extended from the Congo region of central Africa across the coastal regions all the way to Senegal and north for several hundred kilometers, and there it became savannah, before giving way to the desert. As populations increased, the pressure has grown to take sustenance from the rain forest, as people have done for thousands of years, by harvesting the bush meat but also by harvesting the trees for cook fires or for the timber industry, as well as to clear the land for agriculture, even though the soil for farming is poor. The reduction of the forests has decreased the land’s ability to hold water, so instead of recycling here, it blows away, and the desert creeps southward. We lose 20 million hectares, maybe 50 million acres, of rain forest each year, globally. In Africa, the Sahara grows by 60 million hectares a year, 150 million acres, since 1990. About 235,000 square miles, or an area the size of Montana and Wyoming combined. As Dr. Kossman’s report will tell you, the dust from the desert is blowing across the Atlantic and coming to earth in the Caribbean, and in North America. It is in part a result of the greenhouse effect on global warming, and it is in part the cause of it. So at Conservation International, we are working to keep the forests, but that means giving the people who live there a way to live that won’t deplete the forests. You can’t just kick people out without giving them something else to eat or to do. And of course, with the drought and the famine that comes with it, the pressure to eat bush meat is greater than ever. And because of political conditions, these things become ignored, at best. At worst, we have seen soldiers using elephants for target practice with their RPGs. This is what we’re trying to stop.”
“CI,” DeLuca said, “and by that I mean Conservation International and not counterintelligence, has had a standing invitation from President Bo to visit Liger for the last two years. So we’re taking him up on it.”
“In the middle of a war?”
“It’s always the middle of a war, in Liger,” Asabo said. “We discussed this at Conservation International in Washington. Our mission is peaceful, but if we only work where there is peace, then the cause is lost. I have had some training with guns.”
“If we do this right, you’re not going to need it,” DeLuca said, turning to the others. “We’ve all got brand-new SATphones, but spend some time memorizing each other’s numbers because these are programmed to not store call or contact lists, in case one falls into enemy hands. They do have internal caller ID.”
“What about suborals?” MacKenzie asked, referring to the nanotransmitters DARPA had developed, mouth-held radios small enough to swallow if you had to.
“Not this trip,” DeLuca said. “Get caught with one of those and you might as well be wearing a U.S. Army uniform.”
“What are you smiling about?” Mack asked Dan Sykes, who so far had remained silent, reading his portfolio.
“I’m a bodyguard, apparently,” Sykes said.
“See?” Hoolie said. “I told you you’d get a chance to kick some ass. Who for?”
“Gabrielle Duquette,” Sykes said.
“No seriously, man—who are you a bodyguard for?”
“Gabrielle Duquette,” Sykes said.
There was a long silence.
“The actress dude,” Hoolie said. “Gabrielle Duquette makes Halle Berry look like the mom on The Jeffersons. Are you shitting me?”
“She’s here on a fact-finding mission,” DeLuca said. “She’s a special good will ambassador for the UN. Whatever that means. Two years ago, she adopted a kid from Liger, and when she was here, she met with John Dari, so at the very least, she’ll be able to recognize him. She said in a press conference that she hopes to meet with him again—she might even be our best bet. Plus she’s going to have access to places we otherwise wouldn’t be able to go. I think both sides want to use her to get publicity.”
“My ID’s the same,” Sykes said, reading from his cover file, “but I’m retired from CI. Now I work for Blackwood Security, out of North Carolina.”
“Much as we all hate contractors,” DeLuca said, “the cover is good. With the exception of Dennis, we’ll operate out of the Hotel Liger in Baku Da’al. That’s where all the white people have stayed in central Liger since colonial days. Right now, I don’t think we’ll have much problem getting a room. We’ll arrive separately and meet in the bar, but don’t order the monkey brains. In Liger, that’s not the name of a drink they serve at frat parties. Paul, what do we need to know about John Dari, that’s not in the report?”
“Just that he is very smart,” Asabo said. “At school, I had to work very hard with my studies, but he didn’t. He got better grades than I did, and it came very easy for him. I don’t know why he changed so much, but I think maybe there is something he feels that the reports you have don’t mention.”
“What’s that?”
“Well,” Paul Asabo said. “I think he is lonely. I was his best friend, but I knew in school that that was not enough. He had a longing. He came from a big family and they were all killed. I know he always wondered why he was the one who was not. He thought there had to be a reason why he was spared. Something big that he was meant to do. So perhaps leading these forces, perhaps that’s the thing he believes he was meant to do. And perhaps his troops are his family. And his country. Like an LA street gang. Perhaps.”
“You make being a warlord sound like a domestic situation,” Hoolie said.
“I don’t believe he is a warlord,” Asabo said.
“Is that what your gut says?” DeLuca asked. “Don’t get me wrong—I make my living listening to people’s guts.”
“I knew him in high school,” Asabo said. “And junior high. Prep school. That is the time, and I think the place, where people are going to be cruel, if they have cruelty within them. John had plenty of reasons to have cruelty within him, given the things he saw as a young boy. But he was not cruel.”
“People change,” DeLuca said.
“Have you changed?” Asabo asked him. “How long have you been studying war?”
“A long time,” DeLuca admitted.
“And yet although you are wiser,” Asabo said, “have you lost your humanity? Have you changed, apart from simply growing older? People are who they are, I think. John Dari was my friend. I think he still is. But perhaps I will be disappointed.”
“As far as I can tell,” DeLuca said to end the briefing, “the White House doesn’t particularly care if we succeed, as long as they can say they tried, and the Pentagon only cares insofar as we can supply command and control with targeting data. The temptation would be to phone it in and play it safe. You will, at all times, take whatever precautions you can to remain safe, but if anybody here thinks they’re going to phone it in, tell me now and I’ll find you a mop you can use to swab the decks until we get back. The only thing more dangerous than a dangerous mission is a dangerous mission that you don’t take seriously. We deploy in two hours. Dennis, I’ll talk to the captain about your ride. You may want to leave sooner than that. Any questions?”
“How are we armed?” MacKenzie said.
“Everybody in Liger is armed,” DeLuca said. “You’ll probably attract more attention if you’re not. Just don’t be conspicuous. Dan, take a MAC-10 in addition to your sidearm. It’s what all the Blackwood guys are wearing these days. DARPA has also given us new handhelds to field test, called CIMs or Critical Information Minimodules—the army is also calling them FBCB2s or ‘Fee-bee-cee-bees,’ for Force Battle Command Brigade and Below systems. It’s a pocket PC that they hope will turn every soldier into an intelligence-gathering unit. Read the manuals. They look like civilian PDAs, or at least the version they gave us does, with built-in GPS for maps and data uplinks in real time to MILSATs and what have you, so spend some time getting to know how to use them. You can wi-fi to SIPERNET or the Internet, but if I catch anybody playing Grand Theft Auto on his, I’m taking it away. Paul, can I offer you anything?”
“Guns?” Asabo said. “I don’t think so. If they discover who I am, it would be best if I were unarmed. Plus I don’t like guns.”
“I don’t like cars,” DeLuca said, “but it beats walking.”
After the briefing, DeLuca used his new handheld PC to collect his e-mail. The first thing he’d done, upon awakening, was e-mail his friend Walter Ford back in Boston and ask him to get on the Web and look for any information that the briefing report might have omitted, sending the report as an attached file. He didn’t expect a reply so soon, but then he remembered that Ford, a retired cop and a professor in the Criminal Justice program at Northeastern, was one of the most diligent people he’d ever known. He’d stay up to finish a task, no matter how late it got.
Dear David,
Hope all remains well with you. Martha suggests I remind you to dress warmly. I told her you were in tropical Africa, but you know Martha. She would still be trying to get you to wear a sweater.
As to your questions, I’m supplying links to a number of Ligerian expatriate Web sites, but to give you the gist of it, the bottom line is, President Bo’s popularity ratings rank significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s. Ligerian expats hate him (Bo, not Clinton), as do many of his citizens, though he has the support of the Fasori elite, who he favors in return with tax breaks, import tariffs, bribes, etc. He had the full support of big oil and their hired mercenaries until he started talking about nationalizing the oil industry a few months ago, largely a populist gesture, but WAOC was not amused.
Bo has two rivals for power, both of whom he keeps on a short leash. One is General Kwesi Emil-Ngwema, vice president and head of the army. Ngwema was, for years, Bo’s go-to guy when he needed somebody thrown out of a helicopter. Lake Liger was his favorite drop zone, mostly because it’s full of cichlids that can make a corpse impossible to identify in about three seconds. I had some in my aquarium and they ate all my other fish, my bad, not theirs, but they’re worse than piranhas, IMHO. Lately Ngwema has stayed away from Bo. One Web site says he’s planning a coup, with WAOC funding. Another says he’s waiting for LPLF to do his dirty work for him. Either way, he’s playing his cards pretty tight right now.
The other rival is Bishop Duvallier. The majority of the nation’s Christians are Catholic, incl. lower-class Fasoris and most of the Da Christians, who mainly supply the workforce for the oil industry. Pentecostals making inroads, however. Question: Would Duvallier let Muslims kill Pentecostals? One Web site says yes. Both Bo and WAOC have been greasing Duvallier for years. One Web site says Duvallier is a cannibal who eats young boys. The Vatican loves him for his firm stand against birth control/abortion/same-sex marriage. Duvallier’s emissaries personally intercepted and destroyed a shipment of condoms sent by the WHO. FYI, AIDS in Liger is about 28 percent among women and 24 percent among men, second only to Uganda, but thanks to Duvallier, at least unmarried people aren’t having sex, because they’re all dying in hospitals.
And by the way, the ambassador you rescued was investigated for taking a seat on the Ligerian gravy train, accepting gifts, safaris, etc. from Bo, from whose Presidential Guard Ellis selected his household staff, whom he doesn’t pay. One site alleges that the U.S. ambassador keeps slaves. Lots of cocktail parties at the mansion, champagne, feasts with roast pigs, etc. The investigation said Ellis may have crossed the line at times but that his actions were in accordance with traditional diplomacy. Sumptuous feasts when up north, two thousand plus people a day die of starvation. I wonder why so many people hate America?
Let me know what else I can do.
Best, Walter