Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  Two voices were shouting in French beyond the sheet-metal wall. Alan’s French was rusty, not great at best, but he could hear tone, and he thought that what he heard was anger. Was it O’Neill? Somebody shouting at O’Neill? Or somebody arguing about O’Neill? There were two voices, one high-pitched and enraged, the other deeper, colder, but equally angry.

  “What’s up?” Djalik said.

  “Something about the helicopters. One of them keeps shouting ‘Blancs, blancs’—whites. Maybe he means us.”

  “He doesn’t sound happy.”

  Alan listened. He thought he heard lâche—coward. Maybe plural, cowards. White cowards? Were he and Djalik white cowards? Then the high-pitched voice came through loud and clear, “Allez, allez, sauvez-vous! Foutez-vous, lâche blanc! Laissez-nous à notre afrique sanglante, traître!” And then a crash of metal—something thrown? Dropped?

  And then silence.

  “The one with the high voice told the other one to go fuck himself, go away, um—something about bleeding Africa—save yourselves, you white cowards—”

  The small man came in and took a stack of the folding chairs, a look of terror on his face. Alan got up and walked to the door. There was, in fact, a hangar beyond it.

  The hangar was made of sheet-iron over a rusty welded frame. It must have been an oven when the sun was overhead, he thought. There was a door, permanently open for so long that the dirt had piled an inch higher than its bottom edge, and inside it the remains of a concrete floor. Lots of oil had been spilled on it over the years, and lots of birds had been up in the rusted framework, adding their droppings to the mess below. All the way across the hangar from the small door where he stood, the big doors through which planes were meant to enter were almost closed, and through the opening between them he could see darkness.

  There were no aircraft in the hangar. There were parts of what might have been aircraft, or perhaps old cars, or just possibly agricultural machinery from the Bronze Age. All were the leavings of the wrecked, what was left after, first, abandonment, and, second, repeated looting. What was remarkable about the hangar was not anything about aviation, in fact, but about civil war: a table stood in the very middle, and the man with the chairs was arranging them like seats in a French court. There was one light, the kind of yellow work light that cops set up at an accident scene, and now the muffled pucket-a-pucket-a of a generator. A flag that Alan could not identify was hanging from a steel rafter above the table.

  In the far corner of the hangar, out of the light, a tall black man and a muscular white man in a dark uniform were scowling at each other. Half a dozen black soldiers by the opening in the big doors looked tense, maybe frightened, and two white soldiers behind the white man actually had their fingers on the triggers of their assault rifles.

  He stepped back into the little room. “I think we got a problem. There’re white mercs out there; that’s gotta be what the shouting’s about. I think they’re pulling out.”

  “So?”

  “So let’s hope they go before somebody starts shooting. Zairian Army started shelling one of the white barracks last week because those white guys are pulling down a couple thousand American dollars a month each, and the locals haven’t been paid their ten bucks a month for a year.” He chewed his lips. “Bad timing.”

  The shouting stopped. When he looked out again, neither the tall black man nor the white one was there, and Hutu militiamen were standing by the opening in the doors, trying to joke, smoking cigarettes that Alan guessed were from his helmet bag.

  Then the small man who spoke English appeared. “Come, please.”

  There was a man in one of the folding chairs, way over against the hangar wall, out of the light. His hands were secured in front of him, but he was slumped over so far that there didn’t seem to have been any point in restraining him. In fact, he looked asleep or dead. He was only a shape, but Alan guessed that if O’Neill was really there, he was this wretched figure in the chair.

  They were prodded into place, facing the table. They had two guards, each with an Ingram M-10 submachine gun. Djalik studied one of them with a professional’s interest, even flashed the guy a smile. No response.

  Black men in green fatigues began to fill in the chairs, five of them, and the tall, angry man who had argued with the white man walked slowly to the table, and the hangar fell silent. He sat and all of the other men sat. Alan’s and Djalik’s possessions had appeared on the table in front of him—helmet bag, first-aid kit, H & K P-9. There was also a rough stack of papers.

  The tall man began to speak in French. The English speaker, standing between Alan and the table, translated.

  “He tells you he is Colonel Peter Ntarinada of the Grande Armée Rwandaise. He has summoned this court-martial to try a man here, Mr Harold O’Neill, for espionage and treason against the Hutu people and the people of Rwanda.” He pointed at the unconscious figure. “Over there, that man.”

  So that was Harry. Alan tried to make out something, but the figure was in near-darkness.

  The tall one, Ntarinada, ruffled through the papers.

  “This man O’Neill, he, um, claims to be an American, we allow—are allowing you to watch these, ah, happenings.” The translator knew this word was wrong but didn’t have the right one. Alan silently supplied proceedings.

  Alan thought of Thorn and played his part, but in a flat voice, almost as if he was translating from another language, himself. “I must protest. I was not told of these proceedings, and I am not here as a representative of the American embassy. If your prisoner is an American, I request his instant release.”

  He braced and looked Ntarinada in the eye as his words were translated. Ntarinada smiled, spoke. “We have a, um, pas compris, um, miscomprehension. If you are not here for the embassy, you have no wish to see the prisoner?”

  Alan smiled and pretended a confidence he did not feel. “If the prisoner is an American, you have no right to detain him, sir. America is not a combatant here.”

  Ntarinada’s voice rose until he was shouting; his right hand banged on the table, found the H & K, rested on it. Alan got the drift before the translator did. “The prisoner is a traitor to the people of Rwanda. He seduced a woman into betrayal of her blood and people. He attempted to prevent the liberation of the Hutu people. He is an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency and the so-called Rwandan People’s Army. He has admitted guilty to all charges. We have his confession, many times. Do you understand, sir?”

  There was movement in the opening of the big doors. Alan began speaking, but his eyes flicked aside and saw the same white man come in, with two others behind him. The black soldiers got out of his way. Alan went on, but he watched the whites, because the atmosphere had changed as they appeared. Something flared outside and he saw the man’s profile. The witch’s nose.

  “Please address me by my correct military title, if you please. I am Lieutenant-Commander Alan Craik of the United States Navy.”

  Several of the officers murmured. He had intended that the rank legitimize him for them, move them toward the exchange, military to military. For a moment, it seemed to; even Ntarinada looked impressed, perhaps relieved. Then the white mercenary was coming forward into the light. There was a little rustle of movement, as if a wind had scattered dry leaves across the broken concrete. Alan felt Djalik push against his right side. What the hell? He didn’t get it. The pressure came again, harder, and he remembered, If I move you, go, but he was thinking He doesn’t have a gun, what does he want to clear the line of fire for? Even as he was swaying to the left, then taking a half-step, feeling the tension around him rise.

  Ntarinada had been haranguing them right through this; the translator started on what he’d said:

  “—an apology from your government to the Hutu People, you will write, you will, um, make your signing, your name—for the United States of America—if you do not make apology, I will kill him.”

  “Pardon, mon Colonel—n’est pas le projet—” It
was one of the others at the table. Now the white mercenary was listening, too; he had a stake in this, it seemed. But his eyes flicked back to Alan, and now their eyes met. For Alan, it was like watching a dangerous animal in the wild, not knowing why there should be enmity but feeling it. Alan flashed on the dark corridor in Bosnia. Crooked nose.

  Ntarinada shouted in Hutu. His tone was savage. The other man shook his head.

  The other officers wanted to release Harry. This is not the plan, the officer had said. To kill Harry, he meant.

  The white merc went closer to Ntarinada. “Dépêchez-vous; il faut partir.” Hurry up; we have to leave. As if he gave the orders there. Ntarinada’s head snapped around and he snarled something. They were isolating Ntarinada—dangerous.

  “I am prepared to offer an apology,” Alan said smoothly, “but I have not seen any evidence of a crime.” He didn’t know what the ramifications of apologizing might be, but if the other officers at the table wanted to get an apology and turn over O’Neill, he was going to throw them a bone; the hell with protocol. That white man was the war criminal, Zulu.

  The pop-pop sound of shooting was far away, but it made a steady background to the transaction. The soldiers in the opening were growing restive, staring out into the dark and fingering their weapons. One of them turned, called something into the hangar. Men started to get up from the table, and the one who had already spoken said something to Ntarinada, pointing at the slumped figure against the wall and then at Alan, making an insistent gesture, and Alan raised his voice over the noise and said, because he could feel it going out from under his feet like sand, feeling the pace accelerate and the tension rise, feeling it go to the brink and then start over, “Please—!”

  And the white mercenary whirled on him and started to draw his side arm from a flapped holster, and Alan had time to think only, It is him, and he saw Ntarinada move, too, startled by the white man’s move for his pistol, and he reached for the H & K on the table.

  Then Djalik’s hand was in his groin and then out and he shot the first guard in the head, the snout of a Colt Mustang pressed against the temple, and he stripped the man’s machine pistol over his head as he fell. Birds rose in the rafters, a great clatter of wings. Djalik shot the second guard before the first hit the ground and before the mercenary’s pistol had cleared his holster, another head shot at point-blank range, and he turned with the second man so that he had the sagging body between him and the table, and the mercenary fired into the guard’s body trying to hit Alan, and Djalik shot once and dropped to the floor, bringing up the M-10. Other shots roared and echoed in the metal hangar, and in the gloom beyond the circle of light the shots flashed in inches-long tongues of fire. Ntarinada rolled away from the table, into the confusion of officers panicking behind him, but Alan was diving at the table, at one man still trying to get to his feet. Alan’s weight threw the table over and he landed in a tangle with them, the table between him and the white man as he was thinking, Zulu. Djalik was moving again. One of the guards behind the table fired, and the other tried to get his muzzle up toward him, but Djalik stepped inside the arc of the barrel and shot him from inches away and then shot his partner under the third victim’s arm. Those were the five rounds from the tiny .380, and the first body was still thumping on the floor.

  Alan had no idea whom he was fighting. They had all landed in a heap, and he was fighting the way a marine gunny had taught him, with his elbows and knees and fingernails, trying to tie them down so they wouldn’t shoot Harry. There were three of them. Alan got his left hand on a face and thumped it savagely on the floor. A knee hit him in the groin and the world exploded and he was flung back against the tabletop. He held on to a pair of shoulders and heard two more quick shots. Nearly blind with pain, Alan had no idea that Ntarinada had just shot the English translator, trying to hit Zulu. Oh, God, Harry! he thought—that slumped figure, helpless in its chair—

  Djalik fell on his back, with the body of his third victim on top of him, and fired the M-10 into the clump at the hangar doors.

  Alan found a pistol under his thigh and pulled the slide, pointed it blindly and fired. His breath was coming in gasps and his vision was tinged with red. The kick to the groin hurt like fire. His victim’s last breath was hot and foul in his face. Alan thrust with his legs and pushed himself toward where Harry should be. Ntarinada was gone. Alan fired at a white man going out the hangar door, hit a second who had turned to fire.

  He looked around the side of the table, breathed, and shot at a black man who put his head in the opening in the hangar doors.

  Djalik was slamming a new clip into the M-10.

  Silence and cordite hung in the moist air. Then the moans started. Alan continued to watch the opening. The world hung suspended.

  “Nothing behind us, Djalik.”

  “Hangar secured, sir. Where’d that white motherfucker go?”

  Alan scuttled on hands and knees toward the figure who was supposed to be O’Neill, fearing he had been shot, seeing him on the floor, the chair tipped over. Christ no, he prayed. His groin hurt; he pushed through it and came to the quiet body and put his hand out.

  “Harry?” He felt for a pulse. The man stank, urine and shit and clothes that had been slept in for weeks. Alan raised his head, feeling the matted hair, holding it, gripping it as if the twisting of the hairs would wake the man.

  “Harry?”

  He thought then that it wasn’t Harry, that it was a joke, a trick. It certainly didn’t look like Harry. The face was swollen, the lips so enlarged they looked like grotesque balloons. The right eye was swollen mostly shut. Alan rolled the head to see the other eye and was nauseated by what he saw: a red, staring eyeball without lids. The socket had infected and the skin above it was swollen with pus, crusted with blood and scabs. He had seen it before, in the torture chamber of Pustarla. Zulu.

  “Oh, Jesus, Harry, what have they done to you!” he cried.

  He put his face against the bruised cheeks. He felt tears on his face, knew they were his own. “Harry—Harry—” And he reached down into his memory for the word that would wake this wreck, and said, “Creole? Hey, Creole—it’s Spy—!”

  The good eye cracked open. The eyeball rolled toward him.

  “Oh, Harry—! Goddamit—!”

  Djalik’s voice cut in. “We gotta move outa here! Some asshole’s gonna roll a grenade through that door—” The light went out. “Come on, let’s move—!”

  Alan tried to move back to the opening in the combat glide the gunny had taught him, but his knees were still shaky and his balls ached. Djalik had closed the door to the room where they had waited, then blocked it with two bodies. Somebody Djalik had shot moaned and gave a little burbling scream. He was gut shot, and the contents of his guts added to the hangar’s reek. Djalik, his eyes on the area outside the hangar, stooped by the wounded man, drew the man’s side arm, and shot him in the head. He had never even looked down.

  “That your friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He gonna be able to walk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He goddam well better be able to walk; they aren’t flying us outa here after this shit. Anyway, they’re all shooting each other out there now. There’s two white guys dead out on the concrete; I didn’t put ’em down.”

  Alan took out his magazine. He had somehow ended up with his own pistol. Where had he fired nine shots? He sat by the hangar entrance and pushed cartridges from one of the downed guards into the magazine.

  “Why did you shoot that wounded man?”

  “You can’t turn your back on them. Come on, sir, let’s get your guy and go.”

  Alan wanted to praise Djalik, to tell him how stunned he was that any one man could take on so many and win, but the words didn’t come. He found it hard to praise the killing. Finally he said, “Thanks. Nice job.”

  He felt his way to the upended table, flashed his light, found his helmet bag. Everything in it was intact: the little man who h
ad spoken English had kept his word. Not even the cigarettes. A small man of honor, who had wanted these white outsiders to see that his people were upright, too. Alan flicked the light around, found the man’s body. A decent, small man who had got between the killers. Alan thought then of the white man who had started the shooting and wondered what had gone on between them that had been so deadly—between him and Alan, him and Ntarinada, Ntarinada and Harry; Hutu and Tutsi; white and black—and a small man with the decency to keep his word had got a bullet in the temple. Alan moved the flashlight and saw Ntarinada, lying dead at the small man’s feet. He had been hit repeatedly. Perhaps his officers had had enough.

  He gathered a couple of the weapons clips. “We need water,” he said.

  “Belay that.” Djalik went to Harry, flashed a light on him for one second, then stooped and raised his torso. Alan took the legs; they propped Harry up, and Djalik bent his knees and lifted him in a fireman’s carry. “We’re outa here.” Alan got ahead of him—through the small room, out the back, into the darkness. They settled again into a metal outbuilding fifty yards along.

  Alan shone his own light on Harry’s face. His eye was open.

  “Harry?”

  The ruined mouth twisted. Tears were coming out of both eyes, the giant red one and the other. Alan knew that the monster eye was the result of the eyelids’ having been cut off.

  “Let me,” Djalik said. “Stay by that door and shoot anybody comes close. You shoot an AK?” He handed over an AK-47. There was more shooting outside now, and Alan could see movement on the airfield. There was little light and no moon.

  “Keep your eyes moving,” Djalik said. He had the medical kit over by Harry and was swabbing Harry’s arm. “I’m giving him a lot of morphine. I mean a lot.”

  “Can we wash him?”

  “Sure, and serve him ice cream when we’re done. His pants are full of shit because somebody beat him up, probably yesterday. He isn’t gonna die of shit. Neither are you. Sir.”

  “How bad is he?”

  “No idea. Tell you tomorrow. Tonight, I just got to get enough painkillers in him to get the fuck out of here. Enough morphine, you can walk on two broken legs if you have to.” He detached the needle and threw the squeeze-syringe away. “Here—wait two minutes, then give him another. Just stick it in and squeeze. I’m gonna look around.”