Mission Liberty

by David DeBatto

  The hotel was riddled with bullet holes. DeLuca found the Toyota Cressida he’d rented tipped over on its side. He and Vasquez righted it, the car bouncing on its shock absorbers, but when he turned the key, again it started.

  “Sweet,” Vasquez said.

  DeLuca searched the hotel and found Robert Mohl seated at the bar, drinking the last remaining beer on the premises, the rest of the booze supply having been looted by the rebels. He’d passed the attack hiding in the basement, he said.

  “I think maybe it’s time I packed my things and headed out,” Mohl told DeLuca. “Time to call it a job.”

  “Why weren’t you on the bus?” DeLuca asked him.

  “If they stopped the bus and found a CIA agent on it, they’d have killed everybody, I think,” Mohl said. “Best not.”

  DeLuca noticed that the door to the parrot cage was open.

  “I let them out,” Mohl said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know where else they’re going to find work. Perhaps I’m not the only one in need of a career change.”

  “We have a car,” DeLuca told him.

  “That’s all right,” Mohl said. “I’ve made other arrangements. Maybe after this, they’ll start calling me an ‘old Africa hand.’ I always wanted to be an old hand somewhere.” He finished his beer with a swig and staggered to the door, straightening both his tie and his posture as he made his exit.

  Perhaps because of the Doctors Without Borders logo on the door, Evelyn Warner’s Land Rover had been left untouched, a small miracle, she said. She told DeLuca she had to get to Camp Seven. He took her aside and showed her the map displayed on the screen of his CIM. A large contingent of hostile troops had paused north of a line between Camp Seven and Sagoa. At the estimated rate of advance, barring an encounter with unexpected resistance, enemy troops were anticipated to arrive at one or both places by nightfall.

  “How many people in Sagoa?” DeLuca asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Warner said. “A few thousand. More than at Camp Seven. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what I can,” DeLuca said. “I need to find out what’s happening with my team. Once I know that, I’ll have a better sense of what’s going on and what I can do.”

  “If I see Ms. MacKenzie, I’ll tell her to call you,” Warner said. “Take care, David.”

  Chapter Ten

  DENNIS ZOULALIAN WOKE UP IN A HOSPITAL bed but had no idea where he was, or how he’d gotten there, or for that matter, that his name was Dennis Zoulalian. Words swam in his head, but not all of them in the same language. The television in his room was tuned to Al Jazeera, and he understood everything the announcers were saying, but he knew that Arabic was not his native tongue. His neck hurt, and his vision was blurred. His head throbbed. A doctor shone a small light in his eyes and spoke to him in French, which he also understood. He couldn’t respond.

  He was tired, so he went back to sleep.

  The next time he awoke, his vision was better but his neck still hurt. He recalled being in a car, but the details of the rest of it simply weren’t there.

  “Patient X. Je m’appelle Claude Chaline et je suis avec Docteurs Sans Frontières. Parlez-vous français?”

  “Oui,” Vasquez said.

  “Vous étiez dans un accident. Vous avez souffrit d’une commotion cérébrade. Savez-vous où vous êtes?

  The doctor said he’d been in an accident and was asking him if he knew where he was.

  “Je ne suis pas sûr. Je suis dans un hôpital. A Liger.”

  “Vous vous rappelez comment vous êtes arrivé ici?”

  “Do I remember how I got here?” Zoulalian said in English. The doctor seemed surprised, then concerned.

  “Parlez s’il vous plait en français.”

  The doctor told him his dental work was American—had he lived in America?

  “Oui.”

  “Qui êtes-vous?”

  Who was he?

  Excellent question. Something told him not to speak English again. The same voice told him he was in danger, and to be careful.

  “Je ne sais pas. Je voudrais savoir.”

  I don’t know—I wish I did.

  “They found these on you,” the doctor said in French. He was holding a satellite telephone and a small hand-held computer. “Unfortunately, both require some sort of password to access. I don’t suppose you remember what your passwords are? They might help us learn who you are.”

  “I don’t remember,” Zoulalian said.

  “You speak English without an accent. I also found a tattoo on your butt cheek when I examined you. A pair of green footprints. Do you know how they got there?”

  Zoulalian shook his head.

  “Let me tell you what I think, then. It might help you remember. A few years ago I taught a course in how to provide emergency medical treatment to undernourished and starving people. The course was at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. My students were all members of the U.S. Air Force’s para-rescue service. When they graduate, to show that they are members of the team, they get a pair of small green footprints tattooed on their asses. Your own physical fitness is probably what saved you from the car accident, as much as the airbag. I think you are a PJ. Or you were, at one time. I have also never met an Arab who has a tattoo.”

  Zoulalian tried to remember. He recalled the training, running for what felt like hours beneath the hot Texas sun. He’d quit. No, he’d finished the program, done the job, for a while, but then he’d transferred… changed jobs. To what?

  “Your memory will come back to you,” the doctor said. “The condition is temporary and quite common to head injuries. I think you will be sore, but I find nothing broken. Can you sit up?”

  Zoulalian sat up. His vision spun and his head banged like a drum, and the doctor was right, he was sore in his chest and neck, but beyond that, he felt relatively all right.

  “So here is what happened. I was in a car. With some other people. You were in the car chasing us when you had the accident. I came back to see if I could help. I sent my friends on ahead. Everyone in your vehicle was killed but you. They brought you here, and they brought me here to treat you. There’s a man outside the door with a gun, but he’s not guarding you—he’s guarding me. I’m a prisoner. They think you are one of them. I need to get back to my camp. There’s only one man outside the door. I’ve prepared a syringe with a fast-acting barbiturate, but I need you to distract the guard. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but my sense is that if you are an American, you need to escape as much as I do, so if you’ll help me, I’ll take you with me. How does that sound to you?”

  Zoulalian had to think? Was it a trick? No. He could tell from the doctor’s voice that he was someone he could trust.

  “Très bon,” Zoulalian said.

  Zoulalian called out to the guard in Arabic and asked him to enter the room. When the guard entered, he gestured with a crooked finger, inviting him to come close so that he could whisper something to him. When the guard leaned over, Zoulalian grabbed the barrel of his Uzi, to make sure it wasn’t pointing at the doctor, then whispered, in English, “Nighty-night.”

  The doctor stabbed the guard in the carotid artery with the syringe. The man dropped instantly.

  Zoulalian got to his feet, still a bit woozy, and helped the doctor lift the guard into the bed, where they covered him with a sheet. The doctor prepared an IV drip with enough sedative in it, he explained, to keep the guard unconscious until the following day. They removed the guard’s identification papers and left him there. With any luck, it would be some time before anyone realized a different man was now lying in the bed of patient X.

  Zoulalian held the guard’s weapon on his lap, hidden beneath a blanket, while Dr. Chaline pushed him in a wheelchair to the front door of the hospital. In the drive, they saw a black Mercedes belonging to some local tribal leader or warlord, the driver leaning against the front fender. Chaline opened the back door and helped Zoulalian in, then snapped his fingers
to command the driver to get behind the wheel.

  “Your employer said you are to take us,” Chaline said in English, getting in on the passenger side. “Quickly. There isn’t much time. This man is not well.”

  The driver sped away. Zoulalian looked out the rear window to make sure they weren’t followed. Once they were out of town, Zoulalian pointed the Uzi at the driver’s head and told him he could get out now, and thanks for the lift. They left him standing by the side of the road.

  MacKenzie and Ackroyd tried to talk Dr. Chaline out of going back, telling him he’d be taken hostage if he did, but he insisted, arguing that Docteurs Sans Frontières also meant doctors who didn’t take sides, and that if there were wounded people, he could not walk away. He would be safe, once it was understood which NGO he worked for, he told them.

  Mack and Stephen drove across an open, barren landscape, aware that the dust kicked up by the Land Rover made them visible for miles, crossing a rickety trestle bridge that spanned a nearly empty river bed where three elephants wallowed in a water hole. They’d left the main highway, certain that traveling on it wouldn’t be safe, and were quite lost, despite the map Stephen found in the glove compartment that he was hoping might help them navigate (she’d left her CIM at Camp Seven). They drove until they came to the Convent of St. Ann’s, a compound of red brick, squatting in the dust, where the abbess told them it wouldn’t be safe for them to stay, because men with guns had come every night, looking for somebody to kill. She’d sent her girls and her sisters in Christ to a convent in Ghana, across the River Liger, and she was the only one there, protected only by her advanced age and by her faith in God, which, she said, was enough. She gave them food and drink and suggested they drive another hour down the road to a village called Sagoa, where they might be safe. It would be dark soon, the abbess said, and it would not be safe at all for them to travel at night.

  The setting sun bled across the western sky and turned the clouds to tongues of flame, and then the cobalt dome turned black overhead, the Milky Way glittering with an incandescence brighter than fireworks. MacKenzie was certain the abbess had given them the wrong directions, because ahead of them they saw only blackness, thick and opaque, but then she saw a light flicker. Foolishly, she’d expected to see a glow in the sky, the way the lights of a city might illuminate the horizon, but there were no lights in Sagoa, no electricity, only people sitting around charcoal fires or kerosene lamps in front of their homes, round earthen huts with roofs of thatch, each hut surrounded by massive clay storage jars and tin jerry cans. She saw children hiding inside their houses, fearful of whoever was in the vehicle, peeking out through the portals. They were Da, Ackroyd told her, identifiable by the distinct scars on their cheeks and by their humble, almost meek manner.

  They stopped the car and parked beneath a large acacia tree at the center of the village, where they were met by a delegation led by a man who introduced himself as Father Ayala, a Spanish priest who’d been working in the village as a missionary. Stephen spoke some Spanish and conversed with the man for a few moments before telling MacKenzie what was going on.

  “These people,” Ackroyd said, “are LPF. Ligerian People’s Front. They’ve come from up north, where, if I understand Father Ayala correctly, they tried to stop the rebels by sitting on the road to block it, and the troops drove over them. They’re trying to get to Port Ivory. I told them it might not be safe there either.”

  Father Ayala spoke again for a few minutes. Ackroyd shook his head sadly.

  “He’s asking us if we have any food,” Stephen told MacKenzie. “The people here are very hungry, he says.”

  Ayala spoke further. Ackroyd listened.

  “He says there’s food in a storage building owned by the government,” Ackroyd told her, “but a powerful witch put a curse on the food so they can’t eat it.”

  “Where?” MacKenzie asked.

  Ackroyd asked the priest where, and the priest pointed to a tin warehouse, the size of a three- or four-car garage, at the edge of the common beneath a smaller tree, with a five-hundred-gallon fuel tank next to it, mounted on poles.

  “There’s food in that building, and nobody guarding it, but people are starving?” she asked. Stephen nodded.

  “Juju,” he said. “I know it sounds silly, but to them, it’s totally real. A witch’s curse is nothing to mess with. You do not want bad juju.”

  MacKenzie thought for a moment.

  “Would they eat the food if I removed the curse?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Stephen said. “Did you bring the curse- remover?”

  “Ask him,” she told Stephen, who relayed her question to the priest, who in turn asked the village elders standing behind him. The priest nodded to indicate that the people would indeed eat the food if the curse were lifted from it.

  “What do you have in mind?” Stephen asked MacKenzie as she walked back to the vehicle. “This isn’t something these people take lightly.”

  “I’m counting on it,” she told him. “Don’t forget—I’m a witch, too. I didn’t get this red hair out of a bottle.”

  She’d noticed, in the back of the Land Rover, a set of emergency supplies in case of car trouble, including a full tool kit and a four-pack of emergency chemlites in an aluminum sleeve to protect them from exposure to sunlight. Some chemlites the Army issued were designed to emit a variety of lumens for different lengths of time, and generally the longer a chemlite burned, the dimmer it was. The chemlites she took from the car were formulated to glow very brightly for about thirty minutes. They were orange, two feet long, and each about the thickness of her thumb. She took a machete from the back of the truck and walked to the storage building, where she saw that the door was locked with a simple padlock. It seemed like half the village had followed her to see what she was going to do.

  She bent the four-pack of chemlites across her knee, hearing each one snap, then shook the pack to make sure the chemicals mixed. A faint orange glow emanated through the foil wrapper. She held it up in the air in the darkness so that everyone could see the faint orange glow—Evelyn Warner had told her that people believed witchery took the form of light rising from the body—then she set the four-pack down on a wooden bench, raised the heavy machete blade high over her head, and brought it down with as much force as she could bring to bear, slicing the aluminum foil sack and the chemlites inside open, whereupon she quickly flung the liquid against the side of the building, daubing it on the door and on the padlock. Exposed to air, the chemophosphorescence would last only a few minutes more. The result achieved was better than anticipated, a kind of psychedelic Jackson Pollock/Peter Max effect.

  “Tell them that once the light’s gone, the curse will have been lifted,” she said.

  Ackroyd relayed the message to Father Ayala, who passed it on to the people of Sagoa. Ayala, MacKenzie surmised, understood the sham and saw right through it but didn’t care, as long as the hungry people were fed.

  A few minutes later, Stephen broke the padlock with a large maul. Inside, they found cardboard boxes and wooden crates with the letters IPAB stenciled on the side. The cardboard boxes contained U.S. Army issue MREs, enough to feed the village for perhaps a week. The wooden crates contained AK-47s and ammunition. When MacKenzie told Father Ayala, as Stephen translated, that she’d be willing to show his people how to load and fire the Kalashnikovs, he shook his head and refused, saying his organization was a pacifist organization—even in the face of death, they would not resort to violence. She showed them, instead, how to open and use the MREs, either beef stroganoff or chicken tetrazzini, how to crack the chempacks to heat the entrées, and she held up one of the cookies and took a bite to demonstrate that what appeared to be a thick piece of cardboard was in fact edible.

  She expected a rush, but the people of Sagoa waited patiently as the meals were distributed. She’d expected cheers, or some kind of animation, but the people simply took their food and consumed it in silence, the children crouched around thei
r MREs as if to protect them from raiding hyenas, fearful that someone was going to take them away.

  Mack was starving, devouring her meal without thinking too much about it. Ackroyd picked at his meal and eventually handed what he couldn’t eat to a child, who thanked him. They were sitting on the tailgate of the Rover.

  “They’re not very good,” Mack told him, “but you really should eat something. You’re too thin.”

  “You should have seen me in college,” he told her with a smile. “I was downright roly-poly. I’ve been trying to lose weight my whole life. This is great. They say you can’t be too rich or too thin—I’ll work on being too rich later.”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “we should head back to Camp Seven. How far do you think it is?”

  “As the crow flies,” he said, “probably not far. The question is, how to drive there. The road we were on leads back to Baku Da’al, Ayala said. There’s an oil facility at El Amin, but it might not be connected by road. The pipeline runs north and south but the oil workers patrol it with ultralight aircraft. There must have been a road when they built it.”

  “I’ll call for directions in the morning,” she said. “Unless my batteries give out.”

  “Call who?” Ackroyd asked. “Triple A?”

  She’d almost said she’d call CENTCOM. To Stephen, she was still Mary Dorsey, with the United Nations. She’d dialed DeLuca’s number earlier, but he wasn’t answering. She’d been impressed, all day, by the way Stephen had watched out for her. She had to admit she’d developed a bit of a crush, as Evelyn Warner might have said. Nothing serious, of course.

  “I’ll call the CIA,” she said. “Maybe they’re watching us right now with their satellites.”

  He looked up at the night sky.