African Dragon

by David M. Salkin

  Deirdre laughed. “Yes, you probably aren’t that far off. Which will be a good segue to my next topic and the major reason for your mission in the DRC. And unfortunately, this can’t be taken lightly. By African government standards, the DRC’s presidential democratic republic is considered stable, however, in Africa the scene changes with the seasons. There have been rumors of a new rebel faction forming and being pumped up with Chinese money and arms. Obviously, a Chinese puppet government would give them unlimited access to uranium, copper, gold, and tantalum.”

  Everyone exchanged glances, and finally Cascaes had to ask. “Okay—you stumped me. What’s Tantalum?”

  “Tantalum is used for a variety of things, including alloys used in the electronics industry, super-alloys for jet engine components, nuclear reactors, and missile parts. It is highly sought after and is worth a lot of money to the DRC. It is also responsible for a lot of environmental problems down there and local wars over mining rights. Over a third of the children in the area have left school to work the mines. While it may help their families in the short run, the cycle of ignorance and poverty continues. Don’t get me started on my soapbox.”

  Cascaes was now paying closer attention, having heard the word “China.”.

  “How hard is the intel on Chinese involvement in the area?”

  Deirdre crinkled her face in a pained expression. “That is the big question, senior chief (she was letting him know she had read his file). We had assets that were reliable down there, and they went missing. No trace. This includes one of our own agents. I was going to get to this later, but since you asked, we’ll jump ahead.” She pressed the computer keys a few times, jumping ahead of the geographical information and showed a slide of two pictures of the same man. He was a black man of about fifty, with salt and pepper short hair and a beard. The first picture was a headshot off of his passport in a suit and tie. The second was a picture taken in knee high grass out in the DRC with a bush hat on and sunglasses, a large camera around his neck, obviously enjoying a day out photographing animals.

  “This is Nigel Ufume. He was born in the Belgian Congo and came here with his parents as a child. A smart kid, he was educated at Georgetown, and ended up working for us. Besides English, he speaks French, Swahili and Tshiluba—the prominent languages of his native country. He had been working as our primary operative in the DRC for four years. Nigel had developed almost a dozen reliable assets over that time period, from government employees to an army colonel. He and every one of his contacts simply disappeared almost three weeks ago.”

  She paused and took a drink. She wasn’t used to standing up and lecturing for so long, and felt like a professor. “It wasn’t uncommon for a week or so to go by without contact with Nigel, but after the maximum span passed, we tried reaching out to his people out there and came up with nothing. So—you can add search and rescue to your list of things to do while in the DRC.”

  The mood changed in the room drastically. The team had been in Paraguay working only a couple of months earlier, and had lost one man and rescued Smitty after he had been captured. In the couple of hours of Smitty’s capture, he had been roughed up pretty good. Hearing about a CIA operative possibly captured and missing for weeks made everyone’s hair stand up, especially Smitty’s, who had permanent scars all over his body from his experience.

  Cascaes asked Deirdre, “Any guesses on who has him? Think it’s the Chinese?”

  “Well, we’re still trying to follow some leads, but we had to bring in another agent and he didn’t have any contacts there. He tells us that the People’s Army of Congo, or ‘PAC’ for short, seems to be getting very organized in the shadows out there. Apparently, they are the recipients of the Chinese weapons and money, and have been actively recruiting in the countryside. If the PAC grabbed him, they may have turned him over to the Chinese that are in the DRC, or even worse, smuggled him out on that proverbial ‘slow boat to China.’ God help him if they did. Our guess is, they broke him and got the names of his assets, hence the disappearance of his entire organization. All speculation at this point, of course. Maybe we get lucky and they’re all in hiding somewhere.” She didn’t sound convincing in her last sentence.

  “Okay,” she said sitting down and turning off the projector, “That’s the overview. Use the next few days to learn as much as you can. Your date with Mr. Fish starts in twenty minutes. Jon, pick your dive buddies. We’ll break into smaller groups after the fish lecture and start getting into more details of the assignment. Who’s it gonna be there, Mr. Cohen?”

  Jon looked at Pete McCoy and said, “Pete’s my other half. And unless somebody else is dying to come with me, I’ll take Jensen and O’Conner.”

  Ray Jensen and Ryan O’Conner were also typically paired up during SEAL operations. Moose quietly breathed a sigh of relief. Not only had he no interest in learning about tropical fish, but he hoped he might get more time with Theresa in a different assignment. She was thinking the same thing.

  “Okay, congratulations. Cohen, McCoy, Jensen and O’Conner are now the brains behind ‘Tanganyika Imports.’”

  4.

  The team took a quick break to grab new coffees and get rid of old ones. Dr. Hans Rutter arrived a little while later, after clearing security and being escorted all the way to the briefing room. He handed his laptop to Dex Murphy, who plugged him into their computer and projector. Dr. Rutter introduced himself and began a formal lecture about African cichlids in the fish hobby. He began with a brief history of the geography surrounding Lake Tanganyika. Lake Tanganyika and Lake Malawi were the two primary sources for African cichlid exports, although Lake Victoria to the northeast was also a valued source of cichlids.

  Unfortunately for the cichlid population of Lake Victoria, the Nile perch had been introduced into the lake as a food source. And while it did help feed the indigenous peoples, the perch also wiped out many of the species and varieties of prized fish in the hobby. In fact, many fish existed only in hobbyist fish tanks around the world now, having become extinct in the wild.

  Lake Tanganyika was bordered along its long western shore by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi to the north-northeast, Tanzania on the long eastern shore, and Zambia to the south. The fish export business for the pet hobby was limited mostly to Tanzania where things were slightly safer. The DRC did have a few small operations, however. Foreigners mostly stayed out of Burundi, one of the world’s poorest countries, and very unstable. Zambia, ravaged with AIDS and poverty, didn’t make many tourist guides, either.

  Dr. Rutter explained the high alkalinity and hardness of the lake’s water, and then started showing slides of the fish, the names of which had most of the team grimacing. “Lepidiolamprologus, Julidochromis, Cyphotilapia”…it was a different language. Only Jon had ever heard of any the species. When he explained the reproductive cycle of the fish, the room got very quiet.

  “Cichlids are, for the most part, mouth breeders. The female lays the eggs as the male does his little courtship dance. He has an egg spot on his anal fin, which he wiggles near where she is laying the eggs. As the female picks up the eggs to keep them in her mouth, she goes for the egg spot on the male’s anal fin, at which time, he fertilizes the eggs in her mouth.”

  At first, no one spoke as they did the instant replay of what he just said over again in their heads. Earl Jones, a young marine that had grown up on the streets of Harlem, just about fell off his chair.

  “Oh damn, man!” he screamed, laughing out loud. “You mean he fires off a round right in her face? Holy shit, man! I wanna be a fish!”

  That opened the door for another solid two minutes of chaos in the room. Dr. Rutter, used to speaking to scholars, was not prepared for the response and was mortified. It took Cascaes pulling rank to restore order, although even he was laughing at the comments of his crude men. Theresa shot Moose “the look,” and he never said a word. Julia gave Cascaes an “eyebrow,”
and he felt it in his trousers.

  Dr. Rutter quickly moved on to capturing fish in the wild, explaining how they were kept and sorted at the “farm,” treated with chemicals to reduce stress during transportation, and then the packing part of the business. Jon and his three men would be going into much greater detail later, but at least everyone had some idea of what life would be like as a fish farmer in Africa. The more pictures they looked at, the less intriguing it sounded and the more it just looked like hard work.

  Once a week, they would bag fish—a half full bag of lake water mixed with pure oxygen and stress reducers, temporary home to a dozen or so fish depending on size, which went into Styrofoam crates, and was then trucked over to Luano Airport in Lubumbashi for a very long flight to Canada. Well trained, experienced fish farmers might lose ten or fifteen percent along the way, which was only one of the reasons the fish were so expensive at the pet shops. Dr. Rutter, still slightly exasperated from his lecture on the reproductive cycle, was hoping ten percent might live with these clowns.

  The team took notes and tried their best to remain focused on the information being given to them, but their hangovers were not helping them. Their success would depend on Jon and his team paying better attention to detail in the days that followed.

  The rest of the team joined Deirdre Gourlie and two of her assistants for further briefings on the geo-political happenings of the DRC. No matter how bad things looked in the US on the news, they paled in comparison to what was happening almost anywhere on the African continent. When they broke for lunch, Julia had an opportunity to speak to Chris privately. She looked sad.

  “It’s like seeing Paraguay all over again,” she lamented. “South America and Africa are two continents bursting with natural resources and people willing to work hard, but their governments and leaders are all so corrupt that the people suffer and die by the millions. It’s unconscionable to me. And no one gives a shit.”

  Chris could see her getting wound up. “That’s not true. Lots of people try to help. The problem is getting the help to the right people. How many shipments of US aid ever get to where it’s needed? That’s the problem. It ain’t for lack of trying.”

  “Then we need to try harder. And not just the US. Everyone should be helping.”

  “Yeah, well, I bet the Chinese are going to start helping quite a bit now,” he said somewhat sarcastically.

  “And that’s just it, Chris. China will help because they want something in return. Just like when we give aid to countries that have oil, or something we want. But poor countries in Africa and South America, Hell—everywhere, if that don’t have anything we need, they get shit.”

  “That sounds about right. You think the American taxpayers are going to work a few extra hours every week to send more money to someplace they never heard of to make some warlord richer? It’s a shitty world, Julia. Just be glad you live here.”

  Deirdre happened to catch the last part of their conversation as she walked past. She stopped and smiled at Julia. “He’s right, Julia. And I heard about all the work you did in Paraguay with the Guaranis down there. It’s nice that you care and you try to help. But I’ve been covering Africa for ten years, and honestly, it is a depressing mess. You don’t need to get heartbroken in the DRC. Do your job, get home safe, and forget you were there. Trust me. Africa will break your heart.” She turned and walked away to begin the next briefing.

  5.

  Deirdre was standing at the front of the briefing room facing the team. Jon Cohen, Pete McCoy, Ray Jensen and Ryan O’Conner were in another room with Dr. Rutter, learning how to run a fish farm. Deirdre was looking at Julia when she began speaking.

  “The DRC, like most African nations, has seen more than its share of violence and war. The First and Second Congo Wars were brutal by any standards. The Second Congo War took place between 1998 and 2003. Best estimates are approximately four million dead. Four million. The short version is the Hutus of the DRC, backed by Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Chad fought the Tutsis of the DRC. The rebel factions called the ‘Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo’ were backed by Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. To say they were brutal to each other doesn’t really paint the picture. As bad as things were in the DRC, in neighboring Rwanda, it is estimated that three-quarters of the entire Tutsi population was slaughtered in ’94. The irony of the Tutsi-Hutu war is that the two cultures are almost identical. It brings to mind Jonathan Swift’s satire about a war over which was the proper way to open a soft boiled egg.”

  Deirdre flashed through almost twenty slides in thirty seconds, showing piles of corpses and destroyed villages to make her point.

  “This is beyond the scope of your mission. You are not the UN, and most of this is behind us now. The reason I’m showing you this nightmare is to remind you of where you are going. I know most of you have served in Afghanistan or Iraq or both. As bad as things are there, they’re worse in Africa. In Iraq, a death squad shows up and kidnaps a few men, maybe decapitates them after a night of torture. In Africa, a rebel force arrives at a village and kills everything that moves. That’s after raping the women from eight to eighty years old. I can’t begin to impress upon you the conditions these people have been living in for their entire lives. It is important to understand, because most of these rebels are not fighting for a cause, they are fighting for a meal. Literally. A meal. Keep that in mind down there when you’re trying to acquire assets. You can trust no one, but you can also buy real information from almost anyone.”

  Deirdre walked around the desk in the front of the room and sat on it facing the room. She crossed her athletic legs, every pair of male eyes on them as she did so. Again, she looked at Julia.

  “You all served together in Paraguay and I’m familiar with the operation in great detail even though it was in South America. I want you all to understand that you are not in the Congo to build a school or feed the hungry.”

  Julia felt her face flush, and fought off the urge to respond.

  “While I appreciate your good intentions and your humanity, I am trying to mentally prepare you for what you will see when you are there. You will want to give away all of your food and medicine the first minute you arrive. You are human, and you are good people. Forget it. Resupplying you is not easily done, and once you go down the road of being the Peace Corps, you will never be able to operate. You are operating a fish farm, not an aid station, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll have a thousand refugees loitering around your camp.”

  Cascaes, starting to get annoyed at the lecture on Julia’s behalf interjected. “I think we get the point, ma’am.”

  “I hope you do, because you’d be the first.” She let that sink in. “Every agent that we have sent into remote parts of Africa has called in for immediate aid to the local population. There are legitimate reasons to aid the locals, I understand that. It builds good will and maybe wins you some friends, but it also escalates faster than you can imagine down there. Many of these people have nothing. There will be hundreds, maybe thousands, of people that will be dying or damn near close to it. You will be driving by children dying of malnutrition while you eat your lunch and want to cry, but eat your lunch and look straight ahead. I am telling you all this because I have been all over Africa. Everywhere you look you will see disaster and you’ll want to help. You all need to be mentally prepared for this, and I don’t think I can stress that enough. Maybe this will help. I apologize in advance.”

  Deirdre walked back around and turned on a slide show from her computer. For the next six minutes, the group sat in silence as they looked at hundreds of slides of dead and dying men, women and children—victims of war, famine, disease, and total hopelessness. By the time the slide show ended and Deirdre turned the lights back on, every face in the room had fallen. Deirdre looked around the room and folded her arms across her chest.

  “I know,” she said quietly. “And the DRC is not as bad as it ge
ts. Burundi, Rwanda and Zimbabwe are worse. The life expectancy in Zimbabwe was sixty in 1990. Today it’s 34 for women and 37 for men. And it isn’t getting any better. If the HIV/AIDs epidemic gets much worse, there won’t be anyone living there in fifty years. Almost half of the population is currently infected. So—Julia and the rest of you, if you think I have been hard on you or belabored this information, maybe you understand now.

  “Africa is a very difficult place to work. You will see some of the most amazing natural beauty in the world, in countries full of natural resources and people who want a chance at a better life, and you will also see the most heart breaking and depressing living conditions on earth. If you think the slides went overboard in any way, think again. There is nothing I can do to fully mentally prepare you for this operation. But at least now you’ve been warned. Just remember to stay on task and harden your heart. Get in, do your job and get home safe. That’s it. That’s all you can do. Everyone go take a walk outside and meet here again in twenty minutes.”

  ***

  Deirdre went back to her private office and closed her door, then put her head on her desk and cried. She had been through those slides many times to try and prepare agents for their time in some of the most depressing places on Earth. What she hadn’t told anyone was that she had taken those photos herself some years back. Almost every face in those pictures was burned into her brain. She knew what those people had sounded like when they were crying for help, for food, for anything. And all she could do was take pictures.

  Outside, the members sat in the fresh air in total silence. After twenty minutes, Cascaes looked at his watch and told everyone to get back to work. The team walked back inside, still not speaking, except for Cory Stewart, who stood leaning against the brick building. Cascaes spotted him.