The boundaries of the bar were poorly demarcated and customers fanned out along the margins and mixed with the street crowds. A swell of sidewalk pedestrians moved at a steady, tidal pace around the periphery, and occasionally an armed, stone-faced soldier from some tribal unit pushed past the beer drinkers. Motorcycles and fifteen-year-old Renaults and Fiats added to the general confusion as they clattered past the semi-paved street corner.
Maybe he saw it coming, but later he was only certain that he felt it coming—an older Liberian soldier with a hard-bitten look and an attitude. O’Brien caught him out of the corner of his eye.
The man had nothing. He was just a poorly trained thug in a dirty, camouflaged uniform deciding on a whim to teach a rich Westerner a lesson. Reason enough, O’Brien figured later, for the steel-shod rifle butt that came sailing in a straight, ugly line for his jaw. The mistake was going for the head. The man’s field instructors, if he’d ever had any, would have cautioned that a defender’s head feint is quick and easy. An opponent can’t dodge a blow to his mid-section as well.
O’Brien jinked backward with a grunt and punched an open-handed strike into the stock of the rifle butt. The deflected weapon whizzed past his head, but the soldier held onto the barrel and staggered back with an air of surprise on his face. Here was a man used to battering defenseless women and children.
The bar went quiet. Chairs scraped the floor and people fell back from the area in a jumble of crowd noises.
The Liberian glared at him with a face warped into furrows and tight lines. O’Brien dropped his beer reluctantly, tensed his muscles and took a few quick breaths. What in the hell was this all about?
The rifle butt came in again for a fast jab at his solar plexus. He parried sideways, let the man follow through and swept his feet out from under him with a circular block. The soldier caught part of two tables as he fell, spilling a collection of beer bottles to the floor. He scuttled to his feet and turned to face O’Brien. This time he reversed his weapon. The round hole at the end of a worn Heckler and Koch assault rifle was now pointed at O’Brien’s chest.
The soldier raised the corner of his upper lip. “You make big mistake, and now too bad for you.”
His hand moved to the cocking lever. O’Brien parried the rifle barrel with a left-handed block and simultaneously moved sideways into the soldier. He snapped a reverse punch into the man’s trachea with his right hand. The soldier gagged, recovered and centered his weight on the weapon. Once again he attempted to chamber a bullet. Another mistake.
O’Brien shot an elbow strike to his face and followed it with an open-handed thrust to his collarbone. The bone gave with a snap like a dry breadstick, and the Liberian turned a flat-footed pirouette into the overturned beer bottles.
O’Brien kicked the rifle away, hauled in a few more deep breaths, and fixed his eyes on the soldier. The man jerked in spasms as he tried to pull air into his lungs. An injury to the windpipe was a noisy affair, but he was not dying, though it may have seemed that way to the onlookers.
The crowd’s attention began to settle on O’Brien. Annoyed looks gave way to openly hostile stares. The routine never changed. In a bar fight the winner was often the loser. Sympathies naturally went to the guy on the floor, in this case a local guy pulverized by a stranger. There was never, in any course on self-defense he had received, information on the subject of leaving a bar after a fight. The priorities were clear, however: stay ahead of the police trying to arrest you and the owner yelling for damages. It also helped to make one’s exit before the people in the crowd knew who you were or where you stayed.
He turned into the bystanders and tried to make himself small. Pedestrians clogged the opposite side of the street, and he made his way in that direction through the knot of chairs and tables. He ignored a sharp tap on his arm. A second tap was accompanied by the graveled voice of the doctor. “O’Brien, this way!”
He glanced back at Gary Starr. The doctor’s bearded face had the look of a frontier settler surrounded by Apaches.
“Behind me, but not too close,” the doc said in a low voice. “Just keep me in sight. I’ll be moving fast.” He plunged through the agitated and rapidly growing mob and disappeared.
There were shouts. O’Brien was shoved. A beer bottle hit him on the shoulder. He raised his head and spotted the hulking figure of the doctor surrounded by the small knot of his colleagues. He pushed his way to the street and hustled toward the receding group in what he hoped was a smooth, inconspicuous manner.
Out of the bar and on the street the doctor was easy to follow. He was a tall, stocky white guy with a tangle of black hair on his head and face. He walked with the square-shouldered, energetic stride of a New Yorker late for a meeting. His khaki shorts and light field jacket stood out from the rest of the sidewalk traffic.
The shrill warble of police whistles and the siren of an approaching command car cut through the street noise behind him. People were beginning to converge on the bar from both sides of the intersection.
Starr disappeared. One moment O’Brien had him in sight, and the next moment he was gone. The only explanation was an alley and he slowed his pace and darted into the passage between the next buildings.
Starr was standing on the running board of an old, thoroughly beat-up Land Rover. With a jerk of his head he signaled O’Brien over. The vehicle was parked on a muddy, unpaved slice of dirt where it looked like it belonged. The car needed body work. The front fender was missing and there were holes in the side panels. He noted, however, that the tires were new, tough-looking, off road types with deep treads. That, and the engine idled way too smoothly for a beat-up piece of junk.
A rear door opened. He took a last look behind him and slid onto the back seat.
“Starr.” O’Brien pitched his voice to the front seat and pulled the door closed. “Thanks.”
“Yeah. No problem. Daniel O’Brien, right?” The doctor extended a hairy arm with a firm grip. “You put on quite a show.” He nodded to the driver. “Let’s get the fuck out of here, Kurt.”
O’Brien sat back as the Rover bounced out of the alleyway. After a quiet interval he said, “Okay. What the hell happened back there?” He glanced at his seatmates. “Anybody have a clue? Because I sure don’t.”
“We know you beat the hell out of someone,” the woman next to him said at once. She was petite and dark-haired with an olive, bronzed tone to her skin. She might have just arrived from a sunny beach in the Greek Isles for all he knew.
They were seated three across in the front, and his addition to the group made four squeezed into the rear bench seat. He ignored the woman’s comment. “So where are we going?” he asked Starr. “You guys could drop me off at my hotel...”
The driver shot a backward glance at O’Brien as he muscled around a corner crowded with pedestrians. He was a big, serious-looking fellow with a mass of unkempt red hair above a field of freckles. The kid might have come from a Nebraska wheat field.
“…or not,” O’Brien added to the oddly silent group of strangers.
Starr pulled an unlit pipe from his mouth. “Daniel, I think it’s best if you bunk at the medical compound for a day or two. The soldiers here...they’re not like our military back home. They’ve got tribal allegiances and sometimes they’re just part of a local warlord’s gang.” He eyed the street-side landscape and turned the pipe in his hand. “The guy you just decked will be looking for you, along with his buddies, and Westerners tend to stick out. You’d be easy to find.”
“So I’m being kidnapped?” He turned his head a small amount to include the woman in the conversation. Maybe she could be his keeper.
Starr chuckled. “No, no. We can run you by the hotel if you insist.” He frowned. “But it’s not really safe.”
“What about Lucy? She’s still in her room. She’s got the runs—some type of intestinal bug.”
“You talking about your co-pilot? I was just going to ask about her,” Starr said. “And what do you mean by
intestinal bug? Is she running a fever, vomiting? Diarrhea? We’ve always got to worry about cholera here.”
“She seemed okay, I guess, the last time we talked, but that was several hours ago. You guys gave us those vaccines on the airplane.”
“Yeah, but for a lot of reasons they’re not really effective, and cholera is as common as a cold. There’s an epidemic here and no one is immune.”
The man by the opposite window spoke. “She may need to be picked up, Gary. Get some fluids in her anyway.”
Starr shook his head. “We can’t get her now. The UN guys’ll have to help us. We’ll have to come back.”
“The UN?” O’Brien asked.
“Yes, the UN,” the woman beside him said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she asked, while staring straight ahead.
“I suppose I could have let the soldier bash my head in with the rifle butt,” O’Brien answered mildly.
“God knows...now because of your macho—”
“Gina, give him a break,” Starr cut in from the front seat. “He was just defending himself.”
“He nearly killed that man,” she snapped. “The guy’s trachea was almost crushed.” She threw an angry flash of lashes at O’Brien and let her gaze settle on Starr. “He went way beyond defending himself, Gary.”
“Maybe I was too gentle,” O’Brien allowed. He could almost feel a static discharge, a pulse of opposing magnetism where their flesh came together. Still, he couldn’t help noticing the shorts rolled up a turn or two over her attractive thighs. Again, he was put in mind of sunny beaches, possibly with her in the setting wearing a thong bikini.
“The point Gina’s trying to make...” Starr swung an arm over the backrest again, “...and by the way.” He tapped an introduction toward each of them in a line. “Daniel, Gina, Steve, Larry.” He raised his arm. “The driver is Kurt, and Theodore next to me.”
“So how do you know Rambo here?” Steve cut in with a sour tone. O’Brien was beginning to feel like a skunk at a picnic.
“He was the pilot who brought Paul and me over the day before yesterday, along with all of our medical supplies, I might add.” Starr took a breath and pulled on his beard. “Look,” he said. “The problem didn’t start with Daniel here. Do I have to remind everyone? We’re not in the middle of Kansas.”
Starr plowed into the relevant history of Liberia again. O’Brien gathered it was for the second or third time with this group.
The country, he emphasized, was basically an armed camp thick with roving, quasi-military factions, a wild west territory with little political stabilization or western-style legal rights. The problem was the gang mentality. There existed a Mafia-style structure outside of any military command authority. An assault on any of these soldiers constituted a slight that the other comrades would avenge. O’Brien was in their sights at the moment and that spelled trouble.
The existence of UN soldiers in the country kept a semblance of order. But even with their presence the various medical groups were all on the verge of backing out, at least until the new president established law and order.
“Right now cholera is the most acute medical problem,” Starr said. “Most of the medical supplies stacked onboard your airplane were antibiotics, tetracycline and the like.”
“What about Ebola?”
“Scary as shit,” Starr said. “And it gets all the press back home, but cholera kills more people, at least since I’ve been in charge.”
“Gary’s the permanent field officer here,” the guy named Larry pointed out. “He’s been here, what—”
“Three years,” Starr said, and coughed lightly.
“So who’s the slick mechanic?” O’Brien asked after a while. “I was fooled by this car’s junkyard look.”
“Kurt keeps it up,” Starr said. “He’s awesome when it comes to anything that runs on old-fashioned fossil fuels.”
“Fucking A,” the kid replied. “Most of these doctors don’t have a clue. I’m totally underappreciated.”
“We’re not exactly mechanically minded,” one said from the backseat.
Starr turned to O’Brien. “You made Kurt’s day.”
The street ran along a ribbon of ramshackle storefronts and shanties. O’Brien had seen the same wretched poverty the world over. Huts of plywood and cinder blocks squatted just off the roadway. The lucky inhabitants had roofs with sheets of corrugated metal. Open-air markets draped in red and yellow flower blossoms offered barbecued meats hanging from racks. Mysterious food items were for sale alongside jars of sweet teas. For most citizens in the civilized world, a taste of these roadside bombs would require an immediate trip to a hospital. He reflected on Lucy’s momentary lapse: a sip of water from a glass the first night in Liberia.
His companions were back to discussing their medical problems, the same conversations they’d probably had at the bar, only without the beer. The men had an indoors look about them, despite the Banana Republic attire. He wondered how accustomed they were to roughing it in a place like this. A month or two separated from their comfortable suburban homes could seem like a very long time. The woman sat stiffly against his shoulder sending her own personal message as they bounced along. Goodbye to the thong bikini, he concluded.
Passing the outskirts of the city the salad green of natural tropical foliage began to replace the man-made eyesores on the landscape. The terrain started to rise, and he could see small holdings of banana trees and ripe mangos.
O’Brien rubbed a hand over his face and fingered his smooth rose-petal scar. A few miles further on he leaned forward and tapped Starr on the shoulder. “I’m taking volunteers to pick up Lucy. UN help or no UN help. If they make some connection between us she’s going to be in trouble, whether she’s sick or not.”
“Are the phones working at your hotel?”
“On and off during the day. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the whole thing.”
“There isn’t here,” Starr said, “to anything. Look, our clinic is in Montserrado not much farther ahead. We’ll try her room when we get there.” He gave O’Brien a closer look. “A military background would help if you’re serious about this. I assume you’ve got one.”
“You assume correctly.”
8
The Montserrado medical compound had the appearance of a concentration camp. Barbed wire strung atop a stout Cyclone chain-link fence either kept people in or out of the place. From a first impression it wasn’t easy to determine which might be the case.
Starr cocked his head as Kurt drove past the guarded gate. “Daniel, don’t be put off by the appearance. If we weren’t protected by all of this security, I’m afraid the facilities would be ransacked overnight.”
“It’s looks okay. I’ve spent a lot of time on military bases.”
The complex was constructed in the foothills of the Waulo Mountains, a dark green backdrop that projected upward into a rainforest. According to Starr, the clinic was the largest of the Liberian medical facilities, and the central hub from which smaller clinics radiated.
A work force from various international relief agencies, including a contingent of UN personnel, staffed several large barracks-type structures within the perimeter. Two wings of what O’Brien took to be the main hospital branched out from an enclosed center section dotted with awnings and porches. White outbuildings grouped in a ‘U’ shape were situated inside an area the size of a football field. Kurt drove the Rover directly to the largest building and parked squarely in front.
“So you’re in charge of this entire compound?” O’Brien asked Starr.
“Just for the American contingent,” he said, opening the car door. He stepped out on the dirt driveway. “But that’s the largest part of the operation.”
A short time later O’Brien followed Starr from the communication shack to his office around the back side of the main building. They’d talked to Lucy. She sounded hallucinatory and that usually spelled fever.
“I’ve got to round
up some escorts, Daniel. It’ll take me a couple hours to get things ready. The UN guys’ll want their own vehicles, and this’ll have to be passed through the unit commander.”
“It’ll be dark by then. That going to be a problem?”
“Maybe. Like I said, this is the frontier.”
“Your satellite phone system sucks.”
“Nothing’s automated about it, ’cause it’s one of the older systems. But that’s not the reason our connection with Lucy was lost. Blame that on the local line,” Starr said as he entered his office. “We’ve got chairs here Daniel.” He indicated several folding chairs in a corner.
“Thanks, I’ll stand,” O’Brien said and stretched. He leaned back against a packing crate and looked around. Starr’s office was actually an industrial garage-sized storeroom crowded with shipping containers and boxes arranged in aisles fifteen feet deep. The space had a cramped but breezy quality with the open widows on opposite walls. A desk and a few small tables were gathered into a corner.
Starr sucked a match flame through the bowl of his pipe and pushed a cloud of smoke toward O’Brien. “Ah...sorry about that.” He fanned the blue haze with his hand and dropped the blackened match into an ivory ashtray.
O’Brien said, “Let me borrow your driver and the Rover and I’ll pick up Lucy. Screw the UN troops. Besides, I need to retrieve some of my own things. I’ve only got what I’m wearing.” He scraped his Nike trail shoes against a side of a box and indicated his cargo shorts and faded Jimmy Buffet T-shirt.
“You got your passport, your personal IDs with you, that sort of thing?”
“Always.” He patted his back pocket.
“Then let’s not worry about the rest,” Starr said, and stuck the pipe stem back in his mouth. He took a series of quick puffs. “Sorry, but you just can’t go back into the city by yourself. You don’t know these people like I do. They’re after you now, and they’ll find you and that’ll be the last we hear of you. The medical staff members here can do all of the runs into the city. It’s a normal routine, and if we’re stopped the police expect to see us.”
Errand of Mercy: How far do you run, and where do you hide? Page 6