Mira stared at her friend for a moment.
“Well, go ahead.”
“Go ahead what?”
Lashay rolled her eyes as she looked back to her menu. She quickly folded it and then dropped it on the table with a sigh. “Go ahead,” she said again.
Mira tried formulating the words in her head. But they just weren’t there. She’d had the whole time she was waiting for Lashay to prepare, yet she still felt blocked up somehow. “Alright,” she said, trying a different approach. “Well, have you ever worked for someone who... um... where you start questioning their ethics and their conduct?”
“More than once. Why don't you just tell me?”
Mira sighed. “The Senator had me go on his computer this morning to look for some documents. And I came across some encrypted text that I, uh, accidentally decrypted.”
Lashay raised an eyebrow. “Uh-huh.”
“I don't even know how it happened. I just looked at it and my brain just started... I didn’t even know what the hell it was.”
“So what the hell was it?”
“It looked like some sort of contract.” Mira looked back to her notepad. “A lot of it seemed to be written in... Swahili.” And then she looked up, scanning the room to make sure they were alone. “Have you ever heard of the Mungiki?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, you're a librarian. You’re surrounded by knowledge all day long.”
“Not that knowledge.”
“It's a rebel faction in Kenya.”
“Okay...”
“And I think Senator Langhorne is somehow dealing weapons to them.”
Lashay's expression didn’t change.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Mira cut off suddenly with the arrival of their waiter. He took their orders, and even left Mira a cute parting smile. But she was no longer in the mood for it.
“Heyyy,” boomed a loud, deep voice from the front of the restaurant. “Mira, my girl. What's happenin'?” It was Kamari, the jovial, slightly rotund, middle-aged owner of Njema Cafe. He carried a bunch of grocery bags towards the back counter, giving the ladies a wink as he walked by their table.
“Well, well, well,” said Mira. “Someone who skips work as much as I do.”
“Hey, I'm re-stockin',” said Kamari. “Important part of the job. Just ask Tito.”
Tito, the waiter behind the counter, shrugged apathetically.
“So I heard you were lookin' for me?” Kamari, after placing the bags on his counter, walked back over to the girls. “What's up?”
Mira introduced Lashay and then asked Kamari about his travels to Kenya. When was the last time? And for how long?
“Last month... Not too long... Why, you wanna come wit' me next time?” He chuckled as if he'd said something hilarious.
“I was just wondering something...”
“What is it?”
“Can you speak Sheng?” asked Mira.
“Sheng?” He looked disgusted with the word.
“Yeah, the slang. Like, English and Swahili.”
Kamari had a sour look on his face.
“I hear it's what all the kids are doing,” she added.
“You mean slum kids?”
Mira remained quiet for a moment as she tried to consider Kamari's perspective. His context. What's this white girl doing asking about Sheng? “Well, it's gaining in popularity. And in legitimacy too, from what I hear.”
“Then that's a darn, darn shame.”
“Why?”
“Kids who speak that... The ghetto kids... You know why they do that?”
Mira had an idea. But she'd rather hear Kamari's insight.
“They do that 'cause they can't speak English or Swahili. Can't speak nothin', so they speak Sheng. ”
Mira nodded politely in agreement. “Okay, I see. But can you speak it?”
He grimaced. “Ah, well, I dunno.” Then he looked around, with one hand scratching his stomach absentmindedly. “Maybe some words.”
“Can you help me out?”
“Ah, I dunno...” He kept looking around.
“Please?” She tried on the prettiest, most innocent and deserving-of-help face she could muster.
Kamari stared at her and sighed. Then he looked at Tito. “Why are we so dead in here? Jesus Christ, Tito. Was it like this all day?”
Tito shrugged and mumbled something from behind the counter.
“Kamari,” said Mira. “Please?”
He looked annoyed now. “Whatcha need, girl?”
“Mburungo.”
He cocked his head to one side, looking like a puppy that just thought it heard something. “The hell you say?”
“Mburungo?”
“What? You're saying Mburungo? Like cargo?”
“I don't know,” said Mira. “Am I?”
“That means like cargo. Like, shipping. Like how someone would say, like, I dunno. Shipment.”
“Okay, good,” Mira said in a chipper voice while nodding. Shit, she was acting like a high school teacher. “Thank you.”
Kamari frowned.
“What about chapaa?”
His frown deepened.
“Does that sound right? Chapaa?” asked Mara.
“Money,” he said.
“Money, okay, thanks.”
“It's a like a dirty way to say money.”
“Oh, okay.” said Mira. “Now, one more.”
He was still frowning.
“Come on, Kamari, cheer up. One more.”
“Let's hear it,” he said with quiet resignation.
“In baridi dollar.”
Kamari was silent, his eyes closed briefly in concentration. Mira, meanwhile, stole a glance at Lashay who'd been sitting silently throughout the exchange. Her eyes were locked on Kamari, waiting for his next hyper-animated reaction.
“In baridi dollar,” she said again, treating the words with a mysterious tone. “What do you think?”
“Cold dollar,” he finally said, his head nodding as he thought it through. “Cold. Like, night job. Night work.”
“Alright,” she said with a smile. “Thank you. That's all I got.”
“That's all, then? You sure?” His tone had changed, and he almost sounded like he wanted more.
“Yep. Thanks, Kamari. I'll let you know if I have any more.”
He smiled back. “Yeah? So I can get back to work now? Geez.” Then he looked over to Lashay while pointing to Mira. “Crazy girl. Huh? She's crazy.”
“Totally,” was all Lashay could say.
“Yes,” he said. “She wants to go with me to Kenya. I know it.”
“If you're buying the tickets,” said Mira.
“She wants to go and learn Sheng.”
“That's the idea.”
Kamari's big laugh filled the restaurant. “She better be careful though. She'll get taught Sheng and then get stabbed.” He laughed again, this time looking over to Tito, looking to someone who knew and who could appreciate what he'd said. And then he just walked away shaking his head.
“What was all that about?” asked Lashay.
“I picked out some words from the text that didn't make sense to me.”
Lashay looked at her friend carefully. “If all this is true,” she said quietly. “This crazy arms dealing stuff...”
“I hope it's not true,” Mira said.
“I might have someone for you to talk to. An ex of mine.”
Mira almost chuckled. In a less serious situation a joke would have been made about the staggering amount of exes Lashay had curated over the years.
“His name's Matthias,” she continued. “We met back when I used to go to all those anarchist meetings. Remember all that?”
“Yep,” said Mira. “Part-time librarian, full-time shit disturber.”
“That's right. He was actually an undercover FBI agent trying to infiltrate the collective.”
Mira eyes widened. “You never told me that. Did you date him while he was, uh, actively investiga
ting?”
“Yeah.” Lashay smiled. “But I convinced him to be active in other ways.”
“Oh, I'm sure.”
Lashay looked off into space—or, to be exact, the cobwebbed upper corner of the restaurant where an old busted fan hung uselessly. “Anyway, that was a long time ago.”
“What's the deal?” asked Mira. “Why should I talk to him about this?”
“He works for a private company now. He's a contractor for a security firm that specializes in this kind of stuff.”
“This kind of stuff, like, illegal international arms dealing?” Now it was Mira’s turn to be skeptical.
“Yup. Geopolitics, black ops... All the stuff I still pretty much hate about our country. But anyway...”
“Wait, what side is he on? I might have evidence against a U.S. Senator. You really think I should go--”
“Don't worry,” Lashay interrupted. “You can trust him.”
Mira's face twisted into a frown. “Don't worry?”
Lashay just stared at her.
“Whose side is he on?” Mira asked again.
“Your side.”
The conversation died abruptly with Tito's near-silent delivery of a plate of fresh chapati bread. It looked delicious. And smelled even better. Her hunger having been worked up by serious conversation, Mira dove into the appetizer, mulling over the situation as she chewed. With a mouth still full of chapati, she asked, “You'll give Matthias a heads up first, right?”
3
Jackson
Luck was always the most important factor on the battlefield. Sheer dumb luck. It was something the drill instructors at Coronado didn’t like to talk about. And when they did, they'd always conclude by saying that hard work, especially hard training, was a means to position oneself for better luck in the field. But when better luck never came, a soldier best be tenacious like a motherfucker. Which was just fine for Jackson, who'd never been particularly lucky to begin with. Put his back up against the wall and out comes the tenacity of a cornered animal. He'd go full-on rabid dog at even the first hint of an impossible situation, the soft, touchy-feely parts of his brain turning off to give maximal attention to his pure will to survive. And then things would suddenly seem clearer and easier. An instinctual simplicity. No thinking. No asking. No doubting. Just survival on autopilot.
It was what got him through SEAL Hell Week back in California. Jackson was going to survive that week. There was never a question about it. When the sun had set on the first day and the students who’d finished the race ahead were allowed a few merciful moments of sleep, he was already thinking of days two and three, and more if it was necessary. He’d crawled beneath his crew’s inflatable boat, hunkered down as the wind howled around him—and even managed to close his eyes for a few blissful minutes—while everyone around him dropped like flies.
During Land Warfare training some eight weeks later, he’d opted to spend a second night in the miserable January cold on San Clemente Island, which came after swimming to the island in full gear from their drop-point six miles away, which came after a gagged and hooded mock-hostage helicopter ride, which came after a week of sleep deprivation and psychological stress tests that made even the most muscular and tattooed men sob like toddlers, which came after two months of other various agonies since Hell Week that had already thinned out over half the class.
The first day’s physical tests completed, it was time to prepare a survival shelter for the night. Jackson hadn’t spoken or made eye contact with anyone. He'd just piled up as many branches and palm fronds as he could before crawling underneath to escape the damp, cold wind off the Pacific. All through the night he’d held his position, tackling any surprises the instructors decided to throw at them in the dark.
That was Jackson.
It would be that same man—a SEAL graduation later—whose tenacity had him crawling around Afghanistan in a camouflaged ghillie suit. This time, instead of sleeping under a pile of foliage, he'd been wearing it. It was similar to a Chewbacca costume, except covered in straw, plus a sniper rifle somewhere in there, the whole ensemble slithering along the desert floor. That was Jackson after a botched mission, crawling through three days of scorpions, cacti and camel shit to finally reach safety.
His checklist of action movie style accomplishments was long and varied, as was the list of locations. Sucked out the poison from his own Fer-de-lance snakebite in Nicaragua? Check. Treading water with a broken leg for three hours after surviving a mid-Atlantic helicopter crash? Check.
He made meals of near-death experiences. But it was feast or famine, going hungry when the action dried up. When a situation looked insurmountable, when normal humans would curl up in the fetal position, Jackson was at his best. But outside of his military adventures, when he'd become buried in the minutiae of civilian normalcy and the pace of life slowed to a crawl, Jackson would be at his worst. Put an icy-veined Navy SEAL in some unremarkable non-combat role, like shopping for toilet paper or replacing a lawnmower blade, and you'd finally see the human emerge. A hesitant, disengaged human who'd feel himself wasting away while stuck in morning traffic, or when deliberating between the price-points of razor blades, a far cry from choosing which teammate to save from the burning wreckage of a Humvee.
Anyone could reasonably assume the benefits of a Navy SEAL volunteering his help in a home improvement project, even if it seemed like overkill. Rarely would anyone turn down that kind of assistance. Rarely would anyone fathom the scene of a Navy war hero on his hands and knees on the laminate floor of some utterly ordinary living room, the look of defeat obliterating his handsome face. Who could possibly imagine this shadow of a man, Jackson, tired and withered, defeated by the nuts and bolts and one-page instruction manuals of IKEA furniture?
He'd spend his off time like that, tied down to the debilitating domesticity of this or that holiday. It was more than a little adjustment, going from firefights and underwater explosives to rhubarb pies and passive aggressive store clerks. Usually, he'd only be able to go a week before the quiet, creeping urges arrived. Urges like sucking on the cold barrel of his 12-gauge Remington. It was just one week of civilian life. It frightened him to imagine an existence after his service. He'd just as well die in the field.
He definitely felt dead when he got word of his honorable discharge. It was what happened to SEALs who acquired rare ear infections that eroded their ability to hear and to balance themselves with knife-edge precision. It was what happened to Jackson, who, even on the flight home a week later, could scarcely hold back the tears. And it practically forced one flight attendant, thinking Jackson had lost a brother in combat, to compliment him with a copious amount of gin and tonic.
The drinks continued at home. They were even prepared by the same flight attendant. But as he soon discovered, no amount of gin or casual sex could ever break him out of the gigantic, foreboding lull that was to become his life. What the fuck would he do with himself?
Despite it being his worst fear, Jackson resigned himself to doing absolutely nothing, sometimes even spending whole days locked up in his room, in his bed, in a slow smoldering agony. On some days, the highlight could be walking out behind his house, half-naked, and just sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of the yard. He might be out there for an hour, doing nothing—not even sun tanning. And then, for no reason, he'd stand up and start back toward the house. Moving like a zombie, he'd retreat into the cool darkness of his McMansion home in one of Washington's wealthiest suburbs.
Inside that home were all the toys of affluence, the embarrassingly large TV screens and home theater speakers, a room full of professional-grade exercise equipment, the hardly used four thousand dollar juicer machine, the never used grand piano, and of course, a garage full of impractical cars. Everywhere Jackson looked, there would be some poor decision staring back at him, an albatross hanging in every room.
No, money never bought him happiness. It almost bought him a wife, until he realized that fact. Her increasingly co
ol detachment and her ever-escalating credit card limit moved in unison. Money, however, did provide Jackson with a second chance. He had enough on hand – some from the Navy and some from his highly decorated Vietnam vet father – to fund his own startup company, DARC Ops (Digital Assault and Response Command), a white-hat internet security firm, one of the good guys. His background and recognizable name made the firm an instant hit. And in a few short years, the slightly dulled and cynical Jackson would be leading one of Washington's most successful internet security companies. It was a long walk from that backyard lawn chair.
Although his current workload kept him busy and sometimes even satisfied, it somewhat lacked the entertainment of blowing up dams or jumping out of Black Hawks over Kurdistan at two in the morning. That was a very specific type of rush, one that could never be gained through virus removal and remote IT assistance. Put simply, the more Jackson's life was endangered, the better he performed, which perfectly explained his latest predicament: a fussy internet router.
“Why can't you work? Huh?... Please?... Please work, you sonofabitch!”
It was maybe a little ironic that the CEO of a specialized cybersecurity firm found himself inexplicably cut off from the internet. It made him feel like an amateur. Or worse, some average Joe who didn't know shit about hardware. He'd been vexed the whole afternoon, quietly cursing to himself in his home office, becoming increasingly late for a web conference call, and realizing that no amount of blowing things up or treading foreign water would make that fucking router work.
It was only a matter of time before he gave in and called his employee, Tansy, a former marine and hacker extraordinaire. Maybe the leader of DARC's hack team could fix his little router problem.
“I hate that I'm calling you.”
“Me too,” said Tansy.
“I'm desperate over here with this router.”
“Okay... So you need my help?” Tansy's voice took on a slight affectation, as if it were passing through a shit-eating grin. “I'm right in the middle of Regency.”
DARC Ops: The Complete Series Page 3