DELUCA, VASQUEZ, AND ASABO, BEARING false papers identifying them as Don Brown, from the World Bank, Luis Avila, from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and James Hawkins, with Conservation International, were flown to Ghana, where they caught a commercial flight to Port Ivory. Sykes and MacKenzie were to enter in a similar fashion via Lagos, transferring first at an offshore oil rig. Asabo spoke English without an accent and could therefore pass as an American, though he’d never actually taken his American citizenship, but was allowed to stay in the United States indefinitely with the immigration status of a political refugee.
“Don’t forget,” DeLuca reminded Asabo, “from here on, you don’t speak Fasori, or anything local.”
“Fa-shizzle,” Asabo said dryly.
It was the first time DeLuca had seen Asabo smile. If the younger man felt any emotion, returning to his home country after so many years in exile, he didn’t show it. An official examined their passports, then stamped them without further ado. Asabo smiled to see crowds of children surrounding them as they passed through customs, kids trying to sell them clear plastic bags of potable water, bars of soap, loaves of bread, Pez dispensers, packs of chewing gum, brass napkin holders, polished gourds, anything they could get their hands on that they thought wealthy foreigners might want to buy. Other children simply held out their hands and begged, pleading with their eyes, some licking their lips or touching their lips with their fingers to indicate they were hungry. Soon Asabo stopped smiling.
“Look at their teeth,” he said to DeLuca, who noted that most were missing teeth or were in need of orthodontia. “When I left, there were no candy bars in Liger, and none of the children had cavities. Now they all do, apparently.”
Grown men held out thick stacks of Zudas, the local currency, offering to change their American dollars, though the exchange rate was fluctuating wildly on virtually an hourly basis, depending on how the war was going. DeLuca held on to his cash. Dispersed throughout the mob were soldiers carrying machine guns, unsmiling men in maroon berets and wraparound sunglasses, their pants tucked into matching maroon gaiters.
“If we can get to the cab rank without getting shot,” DeLuca said sotto voce, “I think we’re in the clear.”
He asked the cab driver, a man named Jumee, to take them, first, on a tour of the city. The driver complied as best he could, although the central part of the city along the coast, between the presidential palace and the Castle of St. James, was cordoned off by soldiers manning roadblocks, black smoke still rising above the skyline, an acrid stench of burning rubber leaking in through the taxi’s windows. When DeLuca asked the cab driver if he had any idea what the situation was at the soccer stadium, he just shrugged as if he didn’t and hadn’t heard anything. DeLuca noticed a spot on the dashboard where Jumee kept his small statuette of the Virgin Mary, which now rested on the seat beside him, out of view. The radio played nonstop music, innocuous Afro-pop and smooth-grooved crap by Sting and Phil Collins, without commentary or commercial interruptions. He saw men carting away rubble in wheelbarrows and hand-drawn carts from broken buildings, funeral processions of mourners clad in decorous local textiles, children wandering alone, little short-haired dogs with skin conditions, a church where a line of young men in white shirts and baggy dress pants but no shoes waited to enter, holding Bibles in their hands. He saw broken shop windows, dumped garbage, looted stores, empty boxes in the streets, broken televisions and DVD players smashed against the pavement, walls mottled with bullet pockings, bloodstains, raw sewage, people crouched around cook fires, and whenever they slowed, children begging at the taxi’s windows with their hands out, adults, too, asking for anything, anything at all. He saw overturned and burned cars, the shell of an armored troop carrier, a van on its side with the words “One Lord—Jah Love” painted on the side that was showing, two of its wheels missing. He saw church steeples damaged by tank rounds, streets cratered by bombs and artillery shells, houses with the roofs blown off, or the fronts, the sides, the backs, and in the exposed rooms, kids playing or simply gazing out. He saw crowds of men gathered on street corners, taking security in numbers, men glancing nervously through slits in doors and gates, lone men ducking into doorways or running away in advance of their approach, and government soldiers in maroon berets stopping people to look at their travel documents or identification papers, government soldiers loading men with their shirts pulled over their heads into trucks, government soldiers in a circle, down one alley, kicking someone who’d fallen while a woman nearby screamed, “Please don’t take my son.” DeLuca didn’t see any bodies lying dead in the streets. He wondered how many there’d been, and where they’d gone. He saw the Muslim neighborhood, now a wasteland of rubble and debris, where two weeks earlier, President Bo had sent in a fleet of bulldozers to destroy all the Muslim homes and shops in what he’d dubbed “Operation Trash Removal.”
“It was very bad,” the driver, Jumee, said. “Many people are now without homes.”
The driver took them, finally, to the headquarters for the African Union peacekeeping mission, a one-story tin-roofed pale yellow building centered in a dusty courtyard filled with date and fan palms, a half dozen chickens, a pig chained to a stake. There were two white Jeeps and a white Humvee parked in the dust, guarded by six soldiers in khaki uniforms with blue berets and green kerchiefs around their necks to identify them as neutral observers and not combatants. The Humvee had been modified by someone with a welding torch who’d added rough-cut iron plates to the doors and fender panels, until the vehicle resembled something out of a Mad Max movie, pure Road Warrior. U.S. soldiers had done the same thing to their unarmored Humvees in Iraq. The vehicles had the letters AU painted on the doors, and a white flag flew above the building featuring the same African Union logo.
An aide asked them to wait a moment, then showed them into a dusty office.
General Osman was a large barrel-chested no-necked hulk of a man, hairless save for the bloom of white chest hairs sprouting from his open shirt collar. When DeLuca told him, after introducing himself and his companions, that he had an appointment, Osman looked suspicious, eyeing his lieutenant, who appeared to be doing his best to become invisible.
“What appointment did we have?” Osman asked. “This is the first that I have heard of this.”
“You didn’t get the call from my office?” DeLuca said. “We spoke with General Bukari. I’m not sure who my secretary spoke with, exactly, but she informed me that you would be expecting me.” He was bluffing, but it was a reasonable assumption that in the chaos of the civil war that surrounded them, Osman’s staff was likely to have lost track of an appointment or two. Osman had no way of knowing that this wasn’t one of them, and DeLuca didn’t have time to wait for an actual appointment.
“My aide,” Osman said, “has not informed me. We’ve been without communications as well. Please forgive me—please be seated—how is it that I can help you, Mr. Brown?”
“I appreciate your making time for me, General,” DeLuca said. “My colleagues and I do understand how busy you must be. I trust that your men are all right. I know that yesterday was not a good day for Liger.”
“The days seem quite the same, from where I sit,” General Osman said.
“I won’t take up any more of your time than I have to,” DeLuca said. “We’re looking for John Dari. We have a business matter we would like to discuss with him. I’m not free to disclose what that matter is, but we were hoping that you might be able to tell us either where John Dari is or who might know where he is, if you don’t.”
Osman seemed taken aback.
“And how is it that you think I would know this?” he asked. “Dari is in the north. I am in Port Ivory. Do you think if he were in Port Ivory, he would call me and we’d have tea?”
“No, I don’t,” DeLuca said, “but I know that you have men with eyes and ears in various parts of the country. Men who are Christian and men who are Muslim. Men who might have heard something in their role as observers, either during the cease-fire or during the recent conflict.”
Osman threw up his hands.
“I have three hundred men,” he said. “I don’t dare send them anywhere in numbers smaller than a platoon. And if we meet with resistance, we must back down because we have nothing in the rules of engagement that allows us to fight. And, sir, we could not fight if we wanted to, I will tell you that, because President Obasanjo and his friends in Addis Ababa have decided the AU may not carry more than a single clip of ammunition for each soldier, or we would be seen as a threat. So tell me, how can I learn what I need to know in Liger? How can I tell you what I need to know myself?”
“Perhaps you can’t help,” DeLuca said. “But you could help me, I think, spread the word that I would like to speak to Dari. I’m not with the United States, General. I’m not with the UN, and I’m not with ECOMAS either. Despite what you may have heard, the World Bank is an independent organization. We have an opportunity to bring considerable funds to bear on whatever needs Liger might have toward rebuilding its infrastructure. The time to establish a no-fire zone, negotiated between all interested parties, is now, not when it’s too late. And you see, General, I can’t travel, even with assurances from the government, because there are large areas of Liger right now where the government itself can’t go. But your men, as neutral observers, can. I understand that you’re understaffed, and I sympathize. I’m only asking that you do the best that you can. I might add that the World Bank has also been studying ways to assist the African Union, as I’m sure you know.”
DeLuca waited. If Osman was going to ask for a bribe, now was his chance. DeLuca had been warned by a cynical friend in the State Department’s Africa program that “African Union” was an oxymoron—“like ‘scented deodorant,’” the friend had said. DeLuca was betting that Osman’s relationship with AU headquarters in Addis Ababa was less than satisfactory. It was also his own personal experience that in third world countries with ethically challenged leadership, men in positions of power rarely sought the high road and could be bribed, and nine out of ten times, the ones who wanted bribes came right out and asked for them. Osman wasn’t part of the Ligerian government, but he was in Liger—perhaps he was playing by the house rules.
Osman didn’t take the bait, and in fact seemed oblivious to it.
“You would deal with this criminal, then?” Osman said. “This person who kills children? Who puts tires filled with gasoline around the necks of his enemies and lights them on fire? This is the person you will do business with?”
“No,” DeLuca said. “I wouldn’t. But as a soldier, you understand that throughout history, whenever the end of a war is negotiated rather than imposed, men who’ve killed have to learn how to talk to men who’ve killed, in order to stop the killing. It’s not an easy thing to sit down across the table from your enemy, I know. What the World Bank wants to do is make such a thing attractive and economically appealing to both sides.”
“Well,” Osman said. “I will be honest with you. I don’t know where Dari is, Mr. Brown. I have a report that he might be in the hills west of Kumari, but I have another that he is moving on the oil fields three hundred kilometers to the east of that. I don’t really believe either report. I think he could be anywhere.”
“Do you know in what numbers?” DeLuca asked.
“Five thousand men,” Osman said with a shrug. “I have also heard twice that.”
“I was told one thousand,” DeLuca said.
“Possibly two,” Vasquez added.
Osman shook his head.
“Maybe a month ago,” he said. “But not now.” He eyed them a moment longer. “So yes, Mr. Brown, I will pass along your message to my men and ask them to make inquiries for you. But I don’t expect to have success, and I should tell you, I don’t believe John Dari will meet with you even if he gets the message, only because you are white. He has said this himself. But perhaps on behalf of the people he is leading, he will. In my opinion, whoever comes within ten feet of him should shoot him through the eyes and ask questions later. But of course, we are not allowed to shoot. We can only observe. Do you know what we observe, Mr. Brown? This morning, my men went to the village of Dsang, a small Da village, where the boys had formed a militia to protect their mothers. With sticks. We found twenty-six bodies of boys with their penises cut off and shoved into their mouths. Because John Dari is afraid of boys with sticks. So when you meet him at the peace table, please ask him about the boys of Dsang. And ask him about their mothers, because we could not find them.”
After the meeting, they instructed Jumee to take them to Lions’ Park, a casino and golf resort that President Bo had built on the northern end of the city. The driver told them Lions’ Park was closed. DeLuca said he knew, but that that was where President Bo’s office had instructed them to meet the convoy that would take them north to Baku Da’al, unless, DeLuca said, the cab driver was interested in making a longer trip, an offer Jumee immediately declined.
The casino, built by the government in an attempt to emulate South Africa’s Sun City, had squandered millions of dollars that might have been better spent on food or schools or roads, Paul Asabo explained, but Bo needed a playground to entertain his fellow despots and dictator friends. Bishop Duvallier had pulled the lever on the first slot machine at the opening ceremonies and, to everyone’s surprise, he won nearly a million Zudas, which he remitted to the church, of course. In its opening year, the casino had hosted concerts by Elton John and Sting, but as it began to decline, it was booking people like Gallagher and Robert Goulet, and then Gallagher and Robert Goulet impersonators. The decline hastened when a report said 90 percent of the prostitutes working the bars of Lions’ Park had AIDS.
“If you hired a team of the best architects,” Asabo said, shaking his head, “you couldn’t build a better monument to stupidity and greed.”
Many of the windows in the thirty-story-high hotel had been shot out, as had the massive neon sign out front, the gray concrete walls pocked with bullet holes and stained the color of dried blood where the oxidized iron rebars had rusted through. The jungle had begun to reclaim the golf course, all but the eighteenth hole, where goats grazed on the fairway and the bunkers had been converted into machine-gun nests.
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.”