Mission Liberty

by David DeBatto

  He was still standing in the hallway. The actress was dressed in khaki shorts and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a tan bandana around her neck, white socks, and hiking boots.

  She remained suspicious.

  “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “What do you think of me?”

  “As an actress?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “What do you think of me being here?”

  “You’re a special UN ambassador,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “I want you to tell me what you really think,” she said. “I read a story before I left comparing me to Jane Fonda, visiting North Vietnam.”

  “You came anyway,” Sykes said. “That means you believe in what you’re doing.”

  “Do you think I should be here?” she asked.

  “I think this country is a very dark place,” Sykes said. “Dark places need light. And bright lights follow you wherever you go.”

  “Good answer,” she said. “Come in, please. I’m almost ready.” She began sorting through stacks of documents spread out on her bedspread. “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Sykes—for reasons that still sometimes baffle me, I do understand that I have a hugely disproportionate amount of attention on me. I don’t claim to deserve it, but since I have it anyway, I goddamn well intend to use it properly. I’m here to make sure that for as many nights as possible, the nightly news and the New York Post and Inside Edition and whoever else runs pictures of what’s going on here, even though I’m sure to get hammered in the press by writers who’ll say I’m just some idiot actress, in over her head, talking about things she doesn’t understand.”

  “You know that President Bo isn’t going to let you see anything he doesn’t want you to see, don’t you?” Sykes said. He saw a framed photograph of a smiling black child on the bedstand. “It that your son?”

  “Jonathan,” she nodded. “So you’re ex-military—is that correct, Mr. Sykes?”

  “Call me Dan,” Sykes said. “And yes, I am. Counterintelligence.”

  “Call me Gabby. And what is that?” she asked, taking an orange juice from the minibar and offering him one. He declined. She shook her drink. “That sounds like the opposite of intelligence, which would be stupidity.”

  “That’s only true of the leadership positions,” Sykes said. “Counterintelligence is to the military police what the FBI or the CIA is to your local police. That’s the best way to describe it.”

  “Have you ever killed anybody, Dan?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he told her. “In combat, I have. That’s what soldiers do.”

  She looked at him again, hesitating.

  “I suppose it means you understand something that I don’t. Okay, you can stay,” she said.

  “What would you like me to do?”

  She glanced about the room, her eyes falling on a metal suitcase with formidable-looking clasps on it, the case the size of a large overhead bag, and then on her purse, which she picked up and opened.

  “You can do two things,” she told him. “The silver Zero case is your responsibility. If I said, ‘Guard it with your life,’ would you take that literally?”

  “I guard people with my life,” Sykes said. “Suitcases, I need a little more information. What’s in it?”

  She hesitated.

  “I suppose I have to trust you, don’t I?” she said, biting her lip. “The case contains the scripts for Star Wars VII, VIII, and IX. The cover pages are bogus, but the scripts are real.”

  “I thought there weren’t going to be any more,” Sykes said.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to think,” Gabby said. “I play Han Solo and Princess Leia’s daughter. If those scripts get stolen and/or leaked onto the Internet, the whole thing falls apart. I also want you to make arrangements for me to meet this man.”

  She handed him a piece of paper with the name Hubert Nketia written on it, along with an address.

  “This is in Kumari,” Sykes said. “The last I heard, you’re going to need more than thirty troops to get to Kumari. LPLF roadblocks start just north of Baku.”

  “Hubert helped me when I adopted Jonathan,” she said. “He knows everybody in Kumari. He’s told me he’ll arrange for rebel troops to meet us halfway and escort us. You just get us there. Have you heard of a man named John Dari?”

  “I have,” Sykes said.

  “I’m going to be meeting with him after I meet Hubert,” Duquette said.

  “Why are you meeting with Nketia?” Sykes asked.

  “That would be my business, wouldn’t it?” the woman said.

  MacKenzie awoke to the sound of men shouting. When she stuck her head out of her tent, she saw three girls running in the opposite direction, their bare feet pounding the dust. At the same time, a girl in a green jumper, resembling something like a Girl Scout, approached her out of breath and said something in a language Mack didn’t understand.

  “I speak English,” MacKenzie said.

  “Dr. Chaline,” the girl said. “I have to find Dr. Chaline.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” MacKenzie said. “I just woke up.”

  The girl ran off.

  Mack quickly dressed and ran to the scene of the shouting. Nine men carrying machetes had entered the camp and were having a violent discussion with Evelyn Warner and an older African male who was trying to translate for her. Corporal Okempo, holding his rifle at an angle across his chest, stood at her side. Mack thought he looked frightened out of his mind. The leader of the men with machetes was wearing a bright green shirt. He was bald, about forty, and spoke with his machete raised in the air to accent his speech. He shouted, pointing toward the refugees, and at his compatriots, who seemed equally angry and equally dangerous.

  Mack found Cela hanging back from the center of the dispute.

  “What’s going on?” she asked Cela. “What do they want?”

  “I’m trying to understand,” Cela said. “They are looking for a girl named Sara Ochora. They think she is here.”

  “Is she?” Mack asked.

  Cela nodded.

  “What do they want with her?”

  “The man in the green shirt is explaining,” Cela says. “Sara Ochora was promised to his brother, but now he is dead. The brother is dead, who she was betrothed to. So the man in the green shirt is claiming her as his right.”

  “What did Sara have to say about the betrothal?”

  “This happened before she was born,” Cela said. “The man in the green shirt is saying she has shed blood in an unclean way and now his ancestors have taken high offense, and the gods have, too. This is why these calamities have been happening to him and to his family and his village.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mack said.

  “Shh,” Cela said, listening a moment longer. “He says she had sex with four men before her nubility rites. She was not purified and so she has committed kyiribra. This is a moral depravity. Her cousin reported her to these men and told them where they could find her. The cousin was obligated to do this. And so misery will come and befall them until she has been taken back and removed from her abominable state.”

  Evelyn Warner spoke with an equal vehemence, the man at her side doing his best to keep up with the translations.

  “Tell him she was raped,” Warner said. “Tell him it’s the men who did this to her who have upset his ancestors and not Sara.”

  The man in the green shirt screamed again.

  “He says that it was voluntary,” Cela said.

  “No!” Warner shouted. “No, not with four men! They told her if she didn’t go with them, that they would kill her family.”

  “They kill them anyway!” the man in the green shirt shouted in English before returning to his native tongue. His grip on his machete appeared to tighten.

  “He says she should have let them kill her rather than submit to them,” Cela translated. “He says they will take her with them—oh, my God!”

  The man in the green shirt knocked the old ma
n down, then pushed Evelyn Warner aside as she tried to stand her ground. A second man grabbed Warner, holding her by the arm. When Corporal Okempo tried to intercede, three men knocked him down. Mack stepped forward.

  “Stop!” MacKenzie ordered, standing in front of him and holding her hand up. “Let her go. United Nations—if you have a complaint, you can bring it to me.”

  The would-be husband regarded her for a split second, scowled, knocked her hand aside, and brushed past her.

  Mack drew her service Beretta and pointed it at the man, ordering him to stop.

  Green Shirt froze.

  She moved in front of them, holding the sidearm with both hands, then pointed it at the man who was restraining Evelyn Warner.

  “Let her go!” Mack commanded. “Everyone lay down your weapons. Now!” The raiding party paused but kept their weapons. She raised the pistol, aiming it squarely between Green Shirt’s eyes. He tipped his head back, smirking, defiant, so she stepped closer, lowering the weapon until it was pointed at his balls.

  He dropped the weapon. His clan members dropped theirs as well.

  “Everyone lie down,” she commanded. “On your stomachs. Corporal, bring those two over here. Everybody down, now! Cela—help me out here. Tell them what I want.”

  Corporal Okempo regained his authority and came to her assistance, covering the men with a fierce expression on his face, shouting at them in a tongue Mack couldn’t identify. She’d grabbed a handful of flex cuffs from her bag and used them, quickly moving from prisoner to prisoner until she’d bound each man’s hands behind his back, looping the cuff through their belts whenever possible. She looped a heavy orange extension cord through their arms and around a mango tree before tying it off with a reef knot to deter them from fleeing, and when she was done, she told Okempo to come back with enough men to control the situation. She finally commanded Cela to take some girls with strong arms and throw the machetes into the river, as far out as they could throw them.

  Evelyn Warner had been tending to the old man, picking him up and dusting him off. He seemed to be all right. She sent him away, then approached MacKenzie.

  “Are you all right?” Mack asked her.

  “Thank you, Mary, I’m all right,” Warner said. “You?”

  “I’m well,” MacKenzie said. “What’ll we do with these fellows, though?”

  “I’ve sent for the queen mother,” Evelyn said. “The matriarch of their clan. She happens to be here, too.” Warner leaned in and whispered. “I don’t know who you are, or what your real name is, but you’re not with the United Nations Women’s Health Initiative—that much is certain.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” MacKenzie said. “I grew up with six brothers, that’s all. A girl learns quickly how to handle herself under such circumstances.”

  Warner held her arms out in front if her, her forearms touching hand to elbow, made horns with her top hand and waggled the fingers on her bottom hand, which MacKenzie recognized as American Sign Language slang for “bullshit.”

  When the queen mother arrived, an older woman who walked with a cane, accompanied by two attendants, Warner and Cela explained to her what had happened. The old woman listened, then went to the man in the green shirt. She spoke scoldingly at first, then listened to him for fifteen minutes as he pled his case to her. When he was done, the old woman stood and walked around in contemplation for a few minutes before returning to him to explain her decision to him. Cela translated for Warner and MacKenzie.

  “She says to him she will perform anoka to reverse the kyiribra,” Cela explained. “And pour libations to Onyankopen, Aasse Yaa, nananom abosompem and nananom nsamamfoe. To God, the earth, the thousand gods of the ancestors, and to the spirits of the dead. She will cover Sara Ochora’s genitals with the blood of a sheep and break an egg over her head. Then Sara must agree to never return to her village. This will lift the curse and bring peace to his tribe.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” MacKenzie said.

  Mack was in her tent, going over what had happened in her head and wondering if there might have been a better way to handle the situation, when Warner entered and sat on the cot opposite hers. Mack smiled weakly. Warner took a tape recorder out of her pocket, took the microcassette out of the recorder, and laid the two pieces on the cot.

  “This is off the record,” Warner said. “I’m going to need to know who you are. I can’t force you to tell me, but what I can do is tell Dr. Chaline my suspicions, and he’ll have you removed. I suspect you have good reasons to be here, but I’m not going to let you stay here and jeopardize the lives of all these women—don’t interrupt me.”

  Mack opened her mouth, then closed it.

  “It’s just too fragile here to have to factor in an unknown element,” Warner said. “You may not have noticed it, but we’re having our little tea party here on the top of the proverbial powder keg. We’re about three minutes away from utter chaos at all times, so if you don’t talk to me, I’m going to have to take you out of the equation. I like you and I’m grateful to you for what you did, and I dare say a little impressed, but enough.”

  Warner waited.

  Mack considered her options. She had none.

  “Agent Colleen MacKenzie,” she said at last. “United States Army counterintelligence. I’d show you my badge and credentials but we were advised to leave them behind. My boss, David DeLuca, told me not to blow my cover, but if I did, to give you his regards.”

  “David’s here?” Warner said, a smile spreading slowly across her face, warm and forgiving. MacKenzie nodded. “How is he? Last I saw him, he was in hospital with a rather ghastly-looking halo of metal around his head with screws holding it in place.”

  “Screwy as ever, but all right,” Mack said. “He told me I could trust you. I guess I don’t have any choice.”

  “You don’t,” Warner said, “but you can. Why are you here?”

  MacKenzie explained that their assignment was to gather intelligence on John Dari and his followers. She told Warner that Stephen Ackroyd was currently arranging for her to meet with Imam Isfahan Dadullahjid, to see if he might be willing to help. She said her government was concerned with curtailing the influence of the Islamic Pan-African Brotherhood in West Africa.

  “And what are you going to do, exactly, with the intelligence you gather on John Dari?” Warner asked.

  “We want to gather the facts,” Mack said softly. “The truth. What happens to the truth after it leaves our hands is out of our control. I don’t personally think we know enough about him to make the call, right now, but I know people are worried that he’s either a warlord like the ones we’ve been dealing with in Afghanistan, or he’s the African Osama bin Laden. We just don’t know. We have satellite photographs of cannibal gangs doing things, committing atrocities—I’ve seen them with my own eyes. He calls himself the ‘Ace of Spades’ like he can’t wait for us to make up our Ligerian deck of the fifty-two most wanted. The satellite photographs I saw showed ace of spades playing cards. It’s our government’s position that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is not going to happen in Liger.”

  Warner rolled her eyes.

  “What?” Mack said.

  “I’m sorry,” Warner said. “It just starts to sound a bit disingenuous after a while. I can say that—I’m English. We were the world’s moral policemen for a hundred years, and look where it got us.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And just between us girls, I’m going to take a wild stab and say it has something to do with oil, too.”

  She winked conspiratorially.

  “I think if there’d been a drop of oil in Rwanda, Bill Clinton would have zipped up his pants and been on the job before anybody could say, ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ And unless you have pictures of John Dari himself stirring the pot, don’t assume Dari’s involved, just because somebody leaves a few aces of spades playing cards around a campsite. I’d be willing to bet the cards are a reference to Apocalypse Now and not to Iraq. This place is ste
eped in American pop culture. That’s part of why the Muslims hate you, by the way. Your pop culture is much stronger than theirs.”

  “Maybe,” Mack said. “As our president might say, those who don’t repeat history are doomed to study it. I’m trying to stay focused on John Dari.”

  “Well, you can’t really separate him from African history,” Warner said. “He’s a product of it. I don’t think Dadullahjid is going to help you. I have some rather hideous advice, but if you go, let Stephen do the talking. Dadullahjid hates women. Veil and head scarf at the very least. You could ask me about Dari, if you don’t think I’m part of the elite liberal media that can’t be trusted.”

  “I’ll ask anybody,” Mack said. “We know people who knew Dari, but that trail goes cold when he returned to Africa.”

  “Maybe I can pick it up for you,” Warner said. “He worked here. I’m not sure when he started. Hmm. Father Boateng would be able to tell you when exactly.”

  “Worked here doing what?”

  “In the IDPs,” Warner said. “When you work in an internally displaced persons camp, you do just about everything from driving a truck to performing surgery. Dr. L’Heureux, who worked at Camp Five and then here briefly before Dr. Chaline, was trying to convince John to go to medical school because he was so good at helping out in the infirmary. I did a story on the famine, long before the war started, in 1999. John Dari was my interpreter. The interpreter the Ligerian Press Office assigned me wasn’t telling me what people were actually saying. I found that out when I interviewed Dari. When we were done, John looked at me and said, in perfect English, ‘Miss Warner, I think you’re being taken advantage of.’”

  “You didn’t know he spoke English?”

  “He didn’t want anybody to know,” Warner said. “He told me about the famine relief work he’d been doing with the Red Crescent, and how Bo was withholding food from the Kum to starve them intentionally, to get them to move into the IDPs or to other countries. There was an outbreak of plague in one of the camps. The medicine was sitting in a warehouse in Baku Da’al, but the government wouldn’t release it, because they claimed the LPLF wouldn’t guarantee safe passage for the troops he needed to deliver it. So John Dari got a hundred men and went to the warehouse and took it. He did the same thing when he heard the government was hoarding food supplies. He took his men all the way to Port Ivory to seize a shipment of relief supplies right off the ship. I don’t know how much food they finally managed to bring north, but it was the Ligerian equivalent of your Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Japan during World War II—little actual damage done, perhaps, but an enormous psychological effect. After that, people started to seek him out, to join him. I’m not sure at first that he had anything for them to join—he was just trying to keep people from starving to death and using force to do it. I think when General Mfutho declared war against the government in Port Ivory, John Dari probably wanted nothing to do with it.”