Mission Liberty

by David DeBatto

“We had channels,” DeLuca corrected him. “We haven’t been able to get through to the president lately, but there’s a chance we still could, yes. Why, may I ask, are you asking for intervention?”

  “Why?” Dari said. “Simple. Paul Asabo owes me a favor. I’m not going to be able to be repaid if he’s in prison.”

  “After this call, he owes you two,” DeLuca said. “I’m glad to hear you’re all right. I was afraid you’d think I gave information to Ngwema about our last meeting.”

  “I thought so at first,” Dari said. “But then I thought harder about it. It would not make any sense for you to have brought violence to me. Not without using the threat of it for leverage first to corrupt me.”

  “Wrong department,” DeLuca said. “My business is trading favors, not making threats. I’ll be honest with you, John. We don’t know where Paul is. We can’t do anything until we find that out. And even then, our options may be limited.”

  “He’s being held in the castle,” Dari said after a pause. “The Castle of St. James.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am certain,” Dari said. “I have a man in the castle. He has seen him. He might be able to help you, but we cannot contact him. He can only call us.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Henry,” Dari said. “Henry Mkembasasso.”

  “I have a favor I need from you in return,” DeLuca said. “I’m putting a woman into the shantytown across the border from Camp Seven. She’s going to be looking for a friend. I want her to be safe. Her name is Mary Dorsey.”

  “I can help you,” Dari said. Vasquez held up a sign to tell DeLuca Scott had the coordinates of Dari’s SATphone, a northern suburb of Port Ivory. DeLuca put his hand over the phone again.

  “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” he said to Vasquez. “I don’t want some asshole sending a Tomahawk into our business.”

  He returned to Dari.

  “We know what happened in Sagoa,” DeLuca said. “If there’s anything we can do to help you along similar lines, you let me know.”

  There was another pause.

  “I’ll give you my number,” Dari said. “Unless you’ve already traced it. You can tell me if you know anything. Like where he has gone.”

  “We’ll do that,” DeLuca said. “I’ll tell the birds to look for a red Hummer. There can’t be too many of those in Liger.”

  MacKenzie could find neither Evelyn Warner nor Dr. Claude Chaline when she reached Camp Cobra, around 1400 hours, arriving on a CH-47 from the USS Cowper carrying medical supplies as well as twenty U.S. Marines brought in at the request of the Ghanaian government to help keep order at the border and prevent armed marauders from robbing the refugees. The fighting in Liger had swelled the numbers of refugees in Camp Cobra beyond the breaking point, but international relief had begun to arrive, white SUVs and trucks from UNHCR, Oxfam, the World Food Program, the Red Cross, United Way, the Red Crescent, Catholic World Relief, and the Gates Foundation bringing in workers and supplies.

  MacKenzie found Cela in the crowd as she was helping a USAID official talk to the queen mother about setting up a school for the children in Camp Cobra. Sara Ochora was at her side, helping her. Cela threw her arms around MacKenzie and screamed and hugged her when she saw her.

  “I am so glad to see you,” Cela said. “How are you? Are you well?”

  “I’m all right,” MacKenzie said. “The others are, too.”

  “I was so worried,” Cela said, pulling at her hair and tucking it behind her ear. “Forgive my appearance. There’s not enough water here yet for adequate bathing for the adults. Not even enough for drinking, really.”

  “You look beautiful,” MacKenzie said. “Where’s Evelyn? Where’s Dr. Chaline?”

  “They went with Ms. Duquette to talk to the local governor about the water,” Cela said. “The local governor is a big fan of American movies.”

  “I was actually wondering,” Mack said. “I’m looking for my friend Stephen Ackroyd. Have you seen him? I was going to ask Ms. Warner if she knew where he was.”

  Cela looked puzzled.

  “I have not seen him,” she said. “But there are so many people.”

  “But not so many Obroni,” Mack said. “Thank you, Cela. Are you all right?”

  “I am fine,” the translator said. “A little hungry.”

  MacKenzie recognized one of the journalists DeLuca had said was at the Hotel Liger in Baku Da’al, filming a report and squinting into the sun in front of a cameraman, with the shantytown in the background and the American troops mingling in the crowd in full battle rattle, smiling and shaking the hands of the children who were beseeching them for food. She waited until the cameraman put down his camera, then approached the journalist.

  “I’m Mary Dorsey, from the United Nations Women’s Health Initiative,” she told the journalist. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure,” the man said, smiling. “Tom Kruger, Fox News.” He gestured to his cameraman to keep filming and pointed to MacKenzie, who ignored the intrusion.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she said. “A magazine writer named Stephen Ackroyd—do you know him?”

  “I met someone named Stephen Ackroyd,” Kruger said, “but he wasn’t a magazine writer. I suppose that must be who you mean.”

  “He was on assignment,” MacKenzie said. “Maybe his editor would know where he went. He said he was working for Men’s Journal.”

  Kruger shifted his gaze briefly, moving closer.

  “Men’s Journal? Well, he told me he was working for Esquire, but when I called an editor friend of mine who works there, he told me they’d never heard of him. I figured he was one of those blog people filing to their own Web sites and bragging about how many hits a day they were getting.”

  “If you see him,” Mack said, “tell him Mary Dorsey is looking for him.”

  “I will,” Kruger said, “but more to the point, where do you and I go from here?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Where are you staying?” he asked her. “A bunch of us white folk have taken over a motel down the road. There aren’t any rooms left, but you could stay with me, and just so you know, I’m huge. I’ll make you happier than any man ever has before.”

  MacKenzie stared at him for a moment.

  “If your estimation of your penis size is as accurate as all the other facts you people at Fox News disseminate,” MacKenzie said, “I think I’ll have to pass.”

  The cameraman guffawed. As MacKenzie left, she could hear Kruger insisting that the cameraman delete the previous segment.

  She moved to the large wall tent that served as the administrative offices for Camp Cobra, but no one there had seen or met anyone named Stephen Ackroyd. She toured the camp briefly, but she suspected she was wasting time. She couldn’t stop herself from thinking that Stephen was hurt somewhere and needed help, lying off the side of the road from Camp Seven, or on a trail somewhere. She didn’t like the idea of defying one of DeLuca’s direct orders, but she needed to go back to Camp Seven, alone if necessary, so she headed to the camp gate leading to the road to the border. At the gate, she saw a group of African Union soldiers posted there, and a familiar face. Corporal Okempo recognized her and asked her how she was.

  “I’m good,” she told him. “It’s good to see you, George.”

  “Where are you going?” he said. “You don’t want to go that way—that way is Liger.”

  “I know,” she said. “I have to go back to check on something.”

  “Alone?” he said. “You cannot go alone.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “Wait, wait,” he said. “You are on foot?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she told him. “I run marathons—I’m used to being on foot.”

  “Wait, wait, no no no,” Corporal Okempo said. “No no, you cannot. I will go with you. Please. You must let us.”

  “It’s dangerous,” she insisted.

  “No no
,” he said. “You cannot go alone. Please. It would be dark before you could return. Please, I have a Jeep—we can drive. It’s my job. We will go with you.”

  She considered his request.

  “All right,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Corporal Okempo picked three men to accompany them, and a minute later, they were off.

  At the border, after they showed their papers to the guards on the Ligerian side of the river, MacKenzie paid their entrance fees in U.S. currency. Every thousand yards or so on the way back to Camp Seven, they saw stragglers or lone refugees heading for safety, gaunt, hollow-eyed people with barely the strength to move, mothers with children in their arms, kids wearing handed-down charity T-shirts with Domino’s Pizza logos or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters on them, families walking silently, old women carrying plastic shopping bags containing all their remaining worldly possessions. “Have you seen an American?” MacKenzie asked them. “Have you seen an Obroni?” The sun was fierce. MacKenzie occasionally stood in the Jeep, hanging on to the roll bar, to survey the countryside. Each time they came to a grove of trees, her hopes rose, thinking she’d find Stephen resting beneath them with a broken ankle, perhaps, or maybe he’d stopped to assist someone in need and was staying with them until help arrived. She pictured him smiling and saying, “Thought you’d never get here,” or making some lame joke about how women were always late. At one point, her hopes rose again when she thought she saw a white man walking toward them, but she was mistaken. It was only a fair-skinned African man who seemed half-dazed.

  The scene at Camp Seven was one of desolation and destruction, as if the men who’d come to kill the people there had taken their frustrations out on the camp itself. Buildings and tents had been burned, solar cook stoves and water pumps destroyed. The infirmary had been slashed by machetes, beds and IV drips smashed and tossed to the ground, tables overturned, ration cards burned, as if to bring some further measure of hell to the people already visited by so much suffering, should they try to return. With Okempo and his men, they drove the lanes of the camp in silence, witnessing the devastation, and at one point MacKenzie called out Stephen’s name, several times, as loud as she could, not because she expected him to answer but because she had to.

  “Miss Dorsey,” Corporal Okempo finally said. “I think we should go. There is no one here. Please. It will be dark.”

  Then trouble.

  A troop convoy appeared in the distance, pausing on a far hill at a crest in the road and stopping.

  MacKenzie noted that her three escorts from the African Union were equipped with the AK-47s that DeLuca had given them. They held their weapons uncertainly, the way a new father might hold his first child. Okempo seemed to be about twenty, and the two men who’d volunteered to come along were younger than that. MacKenzie had a MAC-10 in her shoulder bag, as well as her service Beretta. She opened her bag but left the weapons inside it, where she could reach them quickly. The truck approached slowly, stopping again about fifty yards from where the AU jeep was parked. A man in a red beret got out of the truck and gestured for someone to come forward.

  “I will go,” Corporal Okempo said softly. “Perhaps there will be no problem.”

  She could sense, in the way he walked, that it was only with some effort that he was able to place one foot in front of the other and proceed, checking back over his shoulder and straightening his posture to make himself look as large and as important as possible. A second rebel jumped down from the truck and pointed his rifle at the corporal, who raised one hand in a gesture of peace.

  MacKenzie watched apprehensively as the two men, Okempo and the leader of the rebels, spoke for a few minutes, and then Okempo returned, a smile on his face.

  “You see?” he said. “I told you it would be all right. They are SJD. They say they will drive with us to the border to protect our rear. Okay then? Not a problem. But they say there are marauders in this place still who are not part of any army but who have been causing trouble anyway. We can go.”

  Mack took one last look around the camp, then got back into the Jeep.

  It was dark by the time they crossed first the West and then the East Liger rivers to re-enter Camp Cobra. She found Evelyn Warner in the administration tent. Dr. Chaline was in the infirmary. Warner wore a haggard look on her face, managing a brief sad smile to see MacKenzie again.

  “Wasn’t sure you were still with us,” Warner said. “I’m glad that you are. I heard you went back to Camp Seven.”

  “It got a little sketchy, for a while there,” Mack said. “Fortunately, we found some transportation when we needed it.”

  “I can’t tell you how grateful we are,” Evelyn said. “To you and to David and all the rest. Someone said some men parachuted in to lend a hand.”

  “It was a pleasant surprise,” MacKenzie said. “Have you heard anything about Paul Asabo? We know he was arrested, but we don’t know much more.”

  “I wish I had something to tell you, but I don’t,” Warner said. “He was telling the soldiers at the border to behave themselves. I was trying to intercede, but when they said to him, ‘Who do you think you are?’ he told them. Two minutes later, two men came and forced him into the backseat of a government SUV, and that’s the last we saw of him. Do you know where he is?”

  “We’re trying to find out,” MacKenzie said. “I actually came back to look for Stephen.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Warner said, a look on her face of sad surprise. She put her hand lightly on Mack’s arm. “Hasn’t anyone told you? Stephen didn’t make it.”

  MacKenzie felt her heart suddenly breaking, beat by beat.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “That he isn’t here? He didn’t come back with you?”

  “He’s here,” Warner said. “His body is. But he didn’t make it, Colleen. We’ve been trying to notify his next of kin.”

  “Show me,” MacKenzie said.

  Dr. Chaline stepped out of the infirmary just as they passed. When Evelyn Warner told him she was taking MacKenzie to see Stephen’s body, he nodded grimly and volunteered to go with them. He cautioned MacKenzie that it was the practice in refugee camps to bury people quickly, given what the lack of refrigeration and the hot African sun could do to a body after the life had gone out of it and circulation no longer cooled it. The morgue was a large tent, kept apart from the camp and downwind, because the smell could be quite strong. There was a cemetery beyond the morgue where the bodies were moved as soon as an identity could be determined, communal graves dug by a backhoe, with the attempt made to bury people with their own tribal members. Bodies that had been either identified or determined to be unidentifiable were taken from the morgue and stored on the ground, sprayed with chlorine, and then covered with lime to slow the decomposition until the burial crews could get to them. There were outbreaks of cholera and dysentery from soil and water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae and Shigella dysenteriae, Chaline said, an epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis, one latrine for every six hundred refugees because the camp was on volcanic rock where latrines were impossible to dig, and no mosquito control programs in place to prevent the spread of malaria or lymphatic filariasis. Things were barely in control, he told MacKenzie. He hoped she could understand.

  The smell was indeed overpowering. Stephen’s body lay on a table all by itself, covered in a white sheet. When Claude Chaline pulled the sheet back, Mack felt her knees buckle slightly. It was Stephen, but it wasn’t Stephen. She tried to harden herself and tell herself she was a soldier, and soldiers were tough and didn’t feel things, but her attempts were unsuccessful. She took a deep breath and turned to leave, walking away as fast as she could walk, until Evelyn Warner caught up to her and put her arms around her and held her. Soldiers weren’t supposed to cry, that’s what they said, but in her experience, soldiers cried all the time. For some, it was all that got them through. They did it privately, when they thought no one else was looking, but they all did it. Now it was her turn.

  Whe
n Dr. Chaline reached them, she asked him how it happened. Why? What was the cause of death? She said she wanted a complete explanation, and not to spare her. She’d had EMT training, she reminded him.

  “Starvation is one of the oldest things that people can die from,” Chaline said softly. “People have starved to death since the beginning of time, but we still can’t always pinpoint how it causes life to end. The causes are often multiple. Stephen would not eat. We all noticed how thin he was getting—did you know that this happens from time to time among relief workers, who feel so guilty eating in front of starving people that they can’t eat themselves, and give away all their food to those they think are more deserving? Sometimes we have to assign minders and eat on the buddy system, to watch each other to make sure it does not happen.”

  MacKenzie was aware of the phenomenon. She felt Evelyn’s arm around her shoulder.

  “When he first came to us,” Chaline continued, “he was quite overweight. I think he lost perhaps 30 percent of his body mass. He told us he felt better than he had in years. At a certain point, early in the process, sometimes a kind of contentment settles in. The psychological changes come later. I had spoken to Stephen about it. Starvation is a catch-all diagnostic. There is a final wasting away where the body depletes all its resources, but when you become extremely malnourished, long before that point, you become susceptible to a number of other things. He could have been hypoglycemic, or have had low blood sodium from dehydration. The body can’t fight infections. Your heart loses muscle mass, which makes exertion difficult. There are electrolyte imbalances. If I had to guess at cause of death, I would say his heart failed. We’ve had cases of critical orthostatic hypotension, myofibrillar damage, ventricular arrhythmias, low QRS voltage—all of this can lead to sudden cardiac death. It’s a combination. One thing occurs and then there is a sudden cascade to failure. I am sorry.”

  “If you knew he was starving himself, why didn’t you do something?” she asked him. “You’re a doctor. You could have force-fed him.”

  “A doctor cannot treat a patient against his will,” Chaline said. “That is assault, from a legal definition, unless the patient isn’t competent to make decisions for himself. With starvation, people are often completely lucid, right up to the end. It’s a problem. Tell me—did you see any signs of megalomania or persecution?”