“You know the one about the guy on his roof in a flood?” DeLuca asked his friend. “First a fire truck comes when the waters are up to his windows and extends the ladder, and the guy says, ‘Go away—the Lord will save me, I believe in the Lord.’ Water’s up to the eaves, so the Coast Guard sends a boat, the guy says, ‘Go away—the Lord will save me, I believe in the Lord.’ Finally the water’s up the chimney, so they send a helicopter that lowers a rope, but the guy says, ‘Go away—the Lord will save me, I believe in the Lord.’ So he dies, and he goes to heaven, and he gets up there and he says, ‘What happened, Lord—I thought you were going to save me?’ And the Lord says, ‘What do you want, moron? I sent you a fire truck, a boat, and a helicopter.’”
“Tell that one to the White House,” LeDoux said. “I’ve been a Republican since I was sixteen years old, and I voted for the president, because he’s a good man, but I swear, some of these evangelicals who’ve been whispering in the president’s ear ought to be seriously beaten with hoses. You know what they were debating today? One of the Democrats showed up with a bumper sticker that said, ‘Who Would Jesus Bomb?’ So one of the Republicans cited how Jesus was not entirely nonviolent and got physical when he had to drive the money-changers out of the temple, and how if he were around today, he’d use any means necessary, including smart bombs that only kill the bad guys. He said Jesus would love smart bombs. They spent the rest of the day, swear to God, arguing about what Jesus would or would not have bombed. It’s insane.”
“I think I prefer the line from Hannah and Her Sisters,” DeLuca said, “where Max von Sydow says, ‘If Jesus Christ were to come back today, he would not be able to keep himself from vomiting.’ Has the schedule changed?”
“So far, we’re still holding,” LeDoux replied. “That wasn’t what I wanted you to see. Lieutenant.”
The lights dimmed and on the plasma screen, an overhead view of a place that seemed vaguely familiar appeared.
“It’s a good thing MacKenzie spoke up last night,” LeDoux said. “I put through the request to expedite and your son and his friends stayed up all night to do it, so let him know we’re grateful. This is Sagoa. It’s also a good thing the artificial intelligence program that tells the computers what and what not to look for isn’t all that intelligent yet, because we wouldn’t have these pictures if it hadn’t screwed up. It programs the birds to watch our people and it locked in to Mack’s signal when she called in the morning to ask for directions to Camp Seven, but it didn’t figure out that probably meant she’d be leaving Sagoa and driving to Camp Seven, so the bird stayed on Sagoa.”
“Another argument for women in the military,” DeLuca said. “Men wouldn’t have asked for directions.”
“We’ll time lapse the sequence for you. This is 2000 hours. Everything looks good.”
The image on the screen moved forward, flipping from a natural-light image to infrared.
“At 2042 hours, as the darkness settles in, men in trucks arrive. You can’t tell, but the lead vehicle there is an H2, the civilian version of a Hummer. Blood red. We cross-checked and learned the vehicle was seized by Samuel Adu’s men two days ago in a village where WAOC had made a gift of it to a tribal chief who was sitting on land they wanted to develop. Anyway, unless somebody took it from Adu, we can reasonably expect this is Samuel Adu and his men.”
The image clicked forward again.
“Twenty-one ten, Adu’s men have begun to round everybody up into the village common. This bright orange spot here is a large fire, and the black spot in the middle is a cook pot. Just like in the old missionary jokes. This is the pattern the cannibal gangs in Sierra Leone established. They’d come into a place, round the people up, butcher a few in front of everybody else and put the pieces in the pot and eat them, for effect. I wish to God I was kidding. If we tried to talk about this in the media, we’d be lynched for stereotyping. Okay, now we’re going to shorten the sequence and zoom down a level or two. Lieutenant.”
The Marine lieutenant tapped his keypad.
“Here you see some sort of resistance. The people decide they’re not going to stand for it, I guess. This guy steps forward and gets shot. These two guys try to run away and they get shot, too. Now watch.”
The image clicked forward again, the numbers in the corner of the screen saying it was 2114 hours.
“These guys outside the circle are Adu’s men. They rounded the villagers up and put them in the middle. So boom, boom, boom, and over here, bang bang bang, all of a sudden, Adu’s men start to fall. Zoom out a level, Lieutenant.”
The Marine complied.
“Dot dot dot dot dot,” LeDoux said. “Somebody’s coming in, in large numbers, from the northeast, moving cross country at a pretty good clip. And… bang bang again, and now it’s armed forces against armed forces. Bang bang bang. There’s collateral damage as the villagers scatter. Forward again, the new force has driven Adu and his men out, there’s the H2 leaving . . . the trucks… a few scattered soldiers firing back, down they go… some clean-up action there and there… now it’s 2205 hours and Adu’s men are gone and these new guys are in their place. There’s only fifty of them, but they took ground from a significantly larger force and drove ’em out. If you ask me, these guys are heroes.”
“So who are they?” DeLuca asked.
“At first we thought it was the mercenaries from the El Amin facility, for a few reasons, but we were wrong about that,” LeDoux said. “The icon in the bottom of the screen indicates correlated SIGINT, so Scottie cross-checked and pulled it up. In an urban environment where more than one person had a cell or SATphone, we might have lost it in the snow. I don’t have the audio. Zoom down, Lieutenant, center on this man here. This is the guy making the call out. We don’t know who he called, but we can ID the caller with good confidence.”
“And?”
“It’s John Dari,” LeDoux said.
DeLuca was not surprised.
“I forwarded all this to the Pentagon, since getting intel on Dari was the original mission,” LeDoux said. “They think it’s a power play between rivals. They want to know what you think.”
“Do they really?” DeLuca said. “I’m the one who gave Dari the information we had on Adu. He asked me specifically where we thought he was, and I showed him on my CIM. Dari took on Adu because Dari knows, as well as you or I do, that Adu is as bad a piece a shit as any of us have ever seen. The Pentagon thinks they’re jostling for power?”
“The Pentagon is going on prior assumptions,” LeDoux said. “Strictly if then, go to. The guy I talked to told me they intend to rely on the operant paradigms until there’s a shift.”
“Operant paradigms?” DeLuca said. “That sounds like it comes directly from General Kissick. Remind me to shift his paradigms with my boot up his ass, next time I get a chance.”
“Can I tell them your thoughts?” LeDoux said.
“You can tell them,” DeLuca said. “You could buy ’em books, too, but they’d just chew on the covers.”
“Now I’ve got some bad news,” LeDoux said. “I told them you had a man who was left behind and you wanted to go get him. They’ve denied permission.”
“Denied?” DeLuca said. “Why?”
“They’re saying he’s not really your man,” LeDoux said. “He’s a civilian.”
“And he’s black,” DeLuca said.
“I’m not sure I’d play the race card here,” LeDoux said. “These guys are old school. They still have the old the-Army-was-integrated-long-before-the-rest-of-the-country-ever-was mentality.”
“So Scott O’Grady goes down in an F117 outside Belgrade, and Wesley Clark scrambles half the Army to get him, but we leave one black guy in Liger, and we say fuck it?” DeLuca said. “Is that really how they want to play it?”
“Asabo isn’t an Air Force pilot,” LeDoux said. “Scott O’Grady was. That’s the way they see it.”
“That’s not how I see it,” DeLuca said. “I had thirty-five informants working for
me in Iraq and last I checked, thirty-four of them were still breathing in and breathing out. And you know what happened to the last one.” DeLuca referred to an informant named Adnan who’d voluntarily stayed behind in a bunker that was about to be destroyed, to settle some personal business with a man named Mohammed Al-Tariq who’d been hiding there. “If I don’t take care of people, I don’t have people. If you think …”
“You’re preaching to the choir, David,” LeDoux said. “In this particular instance, my hands are tied.”
“This is crazy,” DeLuca began.
“However,” LeDoux said, interrupting again. “That said, what I can do is send in a team to observe the peace talks. Which may be a ways off, but we need to be prepared. You’ll probably want to get to know some of the people who’re going to be negotiating, once everything settles down. President Bo has moved his government to the Castle of St. James, for the time being. I suggest you take your team and Preacher Johnson and some of his men and arrange transportation with Lieutenant Riley and some of his SEALs. You might want to go at night, so as not to cause a disturbance on diplomatic fronts. And watch out for mission creep. You know how easy it is for one mission to turn into something else.”
“We’re going back strictly to observe?” DeLuca said.
“That’s right,” LeDoux said. “The ROEs are, of course, yours to determine. I would think Paul Asabo would be welcome at the peace talks, when they happen, representing the monarchy and all that. You might want to get in touch with him first.”
“That sounds like a plan,” DeLuca said. “I’ll see if I can track him down. For the peace talks.”
“Provisional. It’s not a plan,” LeDoux said, “unless you get some hard intel between now and midnight tonight on Asabo’s whereabouts. Use whatever you have, but I can’t authorize a fishing expedition, observers or otherwise. David, you can’t just go back and poke around a little bit. Not the way things are. If you can come up with something reasonable and concrete, I think we can work together on it. But you have to prove it to me, all right?”
“Fair enough,” DeLuca said.
He was talking to Scott when MacKenzie knocked on his door. Scott had had a team poring over the image intelligence available from the border crossing the night before, but it was too confusing. Dozens of trucks and vehicles had come and gone in the hours before or after Paul Asabo had been seized, and it wasn’t possible to pinpoint exactly when that had happened, so he could have been in any of them. SIGINT had nothing, no reports on the few radio stations that were still broadcasting, no intercepted e-mails, no Internet activity on the various Liger-watch Web sites, save one that reported that a very important person had been captured and would be tried for treason.
“Got a minute?” MacKenzie asked.
“Sure,” DeLuca said. She’d been trying to reach Evelyn Warner, who’d been there when Asabo was arrested, and, by the look on her face, having little luck. “Anything?”
She shook her head.
“It’s not going to happen,” she said. “I think the only way to reach her would be to go in person. There’s no land lines and the unhappy neighbors are jamming the wireless frequencies to stop the rebels from talking to each other across the border because they’re afraid spies have infiltrated the camps. I need to talk to you. I have a conflict.”
“What’s that?” DeLuca asked.
“I understand why you want to get Paul, and I’m right there with you if you need me, 100 percent,” she said.
“I know that,” he said. “But?”
“I want to find Stephen,” she said. “I read the e-mail you sent.”
“And?”
“And I don’t think he was CIA,” she said. “Or anything else.”
“He said he was a writer,” DeLuca said. “A journalist. We can’t find a record of anything he ever published.”
“I respectfully disagree with your conclusion,” Mack said. “I know you’re the team leader, but you didn’t know him. You tell us to trust our instincts, right? Well I trust mine. He was a member of my team, as much as Asabo was part of yours. Just because you can’t be Googled doesn’t mean you’re lying.”
She was digging her heels in. DeLuca could have overruled her but chose not to.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I thought I could fly in through Ghana and start from Camp Cobra and see if anybody there knows anything,” she said.
“And if nobody does?”
“Well, the least I could do is trace back to Camp Seven. It’s not that far.”
“Alone?” DeLuca asked.
“I could try to arrange for something,” she said.
“I don’t want you traveling in country alone,” DeLuca said. “That’s my one stipulation.”
“I hear you,” she said. He hoped that she did.
“Do you know who to talk to about transport?” he asked. She nodded. “Make the arrangements and then leave me a flight plan.”
Sykes and Vasquez were digging up information about Daniel Bo’s prison system, the gulag where Paul Asabo might be found, if he was still alive. For a man who portrayed himself as a devout Christian with close ties to the Catholic church, Bo’s prisons and jails were conspicuously lacking in Christian charity. Conditions, according to the antigovernment Web sites maintained by expatriates, ranged from horrible to hideous, “rehabilitation centers” where men were shackled to stakes in the sun for punishment, or confined with twelve or fifteen men in cells meant for one or two. The prison population was 62 percent Da, 33 percent Kum, and 5 percent Fasori, and 92 percent of the guards and administrators were Fasori. Prisoners were, it appeared, one of the main labor resources for government projects, and had built the soccer stadium, the Lions’ Park Casino, the presidential palace and many of the prisons. Officially, Liger was a country that did not have capital punishment. Unofficially, Liger was a place where people who were arrested frequently disappeared. Bo’s favorite method of execution was throwing people out of helicopters, dropping them into either the ocean or the desert, places where the bodies would never be found.
“A lot of the prisons have been liberated, it looks like,” Sykes said. “Not that Bo would have taken Paul to one, necessarily, but we can narrow down the ones he still has control over.”
DeLuca asked for a briefing with Robert Mohl, who’d managed to fly out of the country on a WAOC helicopter. Wes Chandler, his boss, had flown to Langley. Mohl was surprised to hear that Paul Asabo had come back.
“He was sitting in the bar with us when I talked to you,” DeLuca said, “at the Hotel Liger.”
“That was Paul Asabo?” Mohl said. “I must have missed it.”
“Why do you think he was arrested?” DeLuca asked.
“Why?” Mohl repeated. “Well, I suppose the fellow at the border made a phone call of some sort to somebody. I don’t expect there was a standing arrest warrant posted. They wouldn’t have been anticipating his return.”
“Called who?” DeLuca asked. “Best guess.”
Mohl thought.
“I suppose it could be a simple kidnapping for ransom,” Mohl said. “There’s an awful lot of that going around. That’s how the Lord’s Republican Army in Uganda has been funding itself for years. Maybe the guards saw an opportunity. Seize somebody important, and then either ransom him themselves or sell him over to somebody else who knows how to do that sort of thing.”
“Who would that be?”
“A local warlord,” Mohl suggested. “A tribal chief, maybe. Or else the government itself. They could have taken your man to a third party who’d sell him back to the government and split the take with the border guards. Or maybe it was straighter than that. Maybe the guards called their superiors, who called theirs, who called theirs, and the word came back from on high to arrest him.”
“And bring him where?”
“Who can say?” Mohl asked. “A jail? Somebody’s house? The presidential palace? There’s been a story for a long time that Bo had a pri
vate prison there in the basement. Do you remember the stories of Idi Amin having a freezer full of the heads of his enemies? I think Bo might have a similar mentality, without the freezer, keep his enemies close, where he can keep an eye on them.”
“Close and alive?”
“I don’t know,” Mohl said. “It was never more than a story.”
“Asabo is a threat to Bo?” DeLuca asked.
“Oh, yes, I should think so,” Mohl said. “People look back at the king as the last unifying benevolent leader of Liger. The man who got rid of the British, or made a deal with them to leave, but either way. He wasn’t just king of the Fasori. The Da loved him, many of the Kum did, too. Any heir to all of that would be a huge threat. What was the region?” Mohl asked. “The place where this happened?”
DeLuca showed him on the plasma screen.
“I could ask a few people,” Mohl said. “Call in some favors, I guess. I don’t even know that the phones will work.”
“Do what you can,” DeLuca told the CIA man.
Preacher Johnson said he had a few angles to work as well. Deluca had even e-mailed Walter Ford and asked him to track down any properties that Bo might have owned outside Liger, on the chance that he’d simply wanted to hustle Paul Asabo out of the country and stash him somewhere for later disposal. The breakthrough came when DeLuca’s cell phone rang, and on the other end, John Dari.
“I told you I would call you,” Dari said.
“So you did,” DeLuca said. “How can I help you?”
“Paul Asabo has been arrested,” Dari said. “I was hoping you could ask President Bo to spare his life.”
DeLuca covered the phone with one hand and asked Vasquez to contact SIGINT and see if they could get a lock on Dari’s signal.
“All our people are out of country,” DeLuca said. “Including Ambassador Ellis. We pulled them out days ago.”
“You have channels,” Dari said.
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