Mission Liberty (16 page)

“You’re ordering us to evacuate?” DeLuca asked.

“Advising,” LeDoux said. “It’s up to you. The call from here is that the window is closing. Right now we can fly, but the
longer we wait, the more likely it is we get lit up.”

“How long do we have?”

“Depends on where you are,” LeDoux said. “If we wait till it’s hot, we’re going to need support.”

“Negative on extraction,” DeLuca said, making a decision. He wasn’t willing to risk the lives of flight crews on the chance
that something might happen, at some vague time in the future. If it happened then, they’d deal with it then. He was fine,
Hoolie was fine, Mack was okay, Dan was all right, and he hadn’t heard from Zoulalian, but he probably had his reasons for
going dark. The idea wasn’t to run away at the first sign that they were in harm’s way. “Somebody here delivered a letter
to the front desk today. Unsigned. It said Dari will be at the Park Motel tomorrow, outside Tsotho National Park, at noon.”

“From?” LeDoux asked.

“Don’t know who it’s from,” DeLuca said.

“Trap?” LeDoux said.

“Possibly,” DeLuca said. “Or he wants to meet. I think we need to go and find out.”

There was a long silence. LeDoux could order them out, if he wanted to.

“Keep me posted,” LeDoux said. “We’ll send whatever we have to send. You understand our position.”

“I do,” DeLuca said. “And you understand mine. We can still do the mission. I’ll give you a call if we need a limo.”

ZOULALIAN WAITED IN THE COURTYARD OUTSIDE the mosque at Kumari, told that he was in charge of the second vehicle, a two-year-old
white Mitsubishi Mighty-Max 4¥4 pickup with the spare tire mounted on the front grille. The mosque was modest, at least by
Middle Eastern standards, and felt more like a community center than a religious edifice. Rahjid Waid had gone inside to speak
with Imam Dadullahjid. Zoulalian had not yet been told what they were doing there, but he knew it had to be important because
Rahjid had come along in person rather than waiting back at the camp. Zoulalian had six men under him, including four seasoned
Algerians who looked like they’d cut your heart out with a butter knife, and two black African teenagers who were trying not
to show how scared they were. When Rahjid introduced “Khalil Penjwin” to the camp upon his arrival, he’d exaggerated Khalil’s
credentials a bit, saying he’d killed over a hundred Americans with roadside bombs and IEDs, and that he’d been the number-two
most wanted man on the Americans’ blacklist, just behind Ibrahim Al Durri, when he left Iraq to come help the cause in Africa.

A group of kids played soccer beyond the outer walls of the mosque. Zoulalian could tell that his black soldiers wanted to
put down their guns and join the soccer players.

“Some day, the World Cup will be played in Africa,”
he told the boys in Arabic. They smiled.

“African football is too beautiful,”
one said.
“We are too good. They don’t want to be embarrassed.”

Rahjid had told them to keep their weapons hidden beneath a tarp in the back of the truck, five AK-47s and a pair of shoulder-fired
grenade launchers. The Algerians were chewing on some sort of weed that made Zoulalian’s lips tingle when he tried it. They
were high. He couldn’t tell how high, but their eyes were glassy and wild.

Rahjid reappeared and crossed to where Zoulalian was standing. He was a short stumpy man, with a close-cropped black beard
and wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in desert camo except for the white
kaffiyeh
on his head. Khalil was dressed similarly.

“We will wait here,”
Rahjid said. He eyed the two younger soldiers.

“They are nervous,”
Zoulalian said, keeping his voice down.
“I think they want to know why we’re here.”

“They’ll find out soon enough,”
Rahjid said.

“I think it would be better if they had time to think about it,”
Zoulalian said.
“If they’re to become martyrs, I think they want to begin their prayers. It would help them fight the urge to panic.”

“They will not become martyrs today,”
Rahjid said. He paused, appearing to reconsider.
“Three people are coming. A Frenchman, an American reporter, and a woman from the UN. The imam wants to talk to them, and
when he’s done, we’ll take them to our camp. He wants to keep them to use to negotiate, when the American troops come. Not
here though—we will follow them a ways and then take them, away from the mosque.”

“Okay,”
Zoulalian said. He needed to get away from the others so that he could use his SATphone to warn MacKenzie.
“I need to use the bathroom. Could you tell me where it is?”

“I’ll do better than that—I’ll go with you. I have to go, too,”
Rahjid said.
“Come on.”

MacKenzie wore a scarf over her head but raised the veil only when they approached a roadblock, or when the dust was too great.
Dr. Claude Chaline drove, with Stephen Ackroyd in the backseat. The Doctors Without Borders logo on the side of the Land Rover
got them through the variety of checkpoints marking the seventy-kilometer distance between Camp Seven and the mosque outside
Kumari, the landscape changing from forested savannah to desert. Evelyn Warner had gone to Baku Da’al. Streams of displaced
refugees walked in the opposite direction, women with baskets on their heads and children in tow, old men pushing two-wheeled
hand carts, boys driving livestock, undernourished goats with their ribs showing, occasionally a truck or tro-tro so packed
with people they reminded MacKenzie of the little cars full of clowns she’d seen at the circus as a child. The sun beat down
relentlessly, the temperature well over a hundred degrees, and yet Chaline chose to save on fuel by driving with the air-conditioning
off and the windows open. Instead of refreshing, the wind made it almost harder to breathe.

Chaline grilled her most of the way, his French accent making him hard to understand at times above the noise. What was the
reason she’d come to Liger? What could the Women’s Health Initiative do for the women in IDP-7, or the women in camps elsewhere
across northern and central Liger? When he started listing the supplies and medicines they needed, she entered what he said
into her CIM, feeling both appalled at how much they lacked and horrible that she was lying to him, and that all her promises
were empty, and that she’d be unable to deliver on any of it. They needed surgical supplies, water purification equipment,
all kinds of medicines down to the most basic antibiotics and pain relievers, penicillin, aspirin, and the more sophisticated
AIDS medications—they needed everything. Chaline pointed to a collection of tin-roofed houses at the top of a hill when they
came to an intersection.

“What does that look like to you?” he asked, not slowing down.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What is it?”

“That’s a ‘boom-boom,’” Chaline said. “It’s a whorehouse. President Bo built new roads up here to move the oil equipment and
the tankers and service vehicles, so the boom-booms sprang up at the intersections so that the prostitutes could service the
truck drivers. The imams, including Dadullahjid, were morally outraged and blamed Bo, but a lot of the truckers themselves
were Muslims. In five years, AIDS in this country went from 2 percent to almost 25 percent, and it’s almost two-thirds among
the sex workers. We had people in the boom-booms handing out condoms but Bo stopped us. The church is against contraception,
so Bishop Duvallier told him what we were doing was against God.”

“So President Bo did him one better,” Ackroyd chimed in from the back, “and said all relief shipments had to be inspected
by the government first to make sure no contraband was getting through to assist the rebels. He made a big public show of
it when they found a supply of birth control pills and dumped it into the harbor.”

“How he thought the rebels could use birth control pills to their advantage, I don’t know,” Chaline said. “We’ve treated people
who’ve been tortured in his prisons. Cigarettes in their ears and eyeballs. I have a colleague who believes Bo introduced
Ebola into a village of Da that had been friendly to the LPLF. We can’t prove it. My colleague is afraid Bo is going to bring
Ebola to one of the camps. In ancient times, when a hemorrhagic fever came to a village, they’d block all the trails in or
out and put the sick people in a quarantine hut, where they would stay until they either recovered or died. Today, with roads
and cars, such viruses cannot be isolated or contained anymore. I’m going to speak to Dadullahjid because I have a plane in
Burkina Faso full of medicine with a pilot who’s willing to fly to Camp Seven, but I need Dadullahjid to tell his men not
to shoot it down.”

MacKenzie also saw troop convoys, armored transports and half-tracks, artillery and heavy equipment, moving south in long
columns, soldiers who looked suspiciously into the Land Rover as they passed. She kept the veil up and rolled her sleeves
down to cover her white skin. Chaline had told her to leave her sidearm behind because they were certain to be searched. She’d
considered hiding it somewhere in the vehicle, just in case, but in the end she complied with his request. She pasted the
list of medical supplies onto an e-mail that she sent to General LeDoux, just in case there was anything he could do about
it. She added a note to the e-mail:

Rebel forces moving south in large numbers. Appear well armed and organized. Singing.

Mack

When she was finished sending, she deleted the e-mail and the list in case her CIM was seized. They approached a checkpoint,
Dr. Chaline waiting in line behind a man on a motor scooter and an ancient Volkswagen microbus with a red cross painted on
the side.

“What are you going to say to Dadullahjid?” Stephen asked her.

“I want him to protect the safety of women,” Mack said. “And other noncombatants. I want a guarantee. I want him to give me
a letter with his signature and his seal on it, or whatever he has, so that if troops come, I can show them the letter. I
have a favor. Evelyn told me it would be better if you spoke to him. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.”

He hesitated.

“Okay,” he said. He seemed flustered, his eyes blinking nervously.

“But what? Be honest with me.”

“Well,” he said, “I was worried that if I got involved, as a journalist, that it could put the other journalists in Liger
in danger. But I’m already involved. And it’s not like they’d look out for me.”

The soldiers ahead of them pulled the man off his motor scooter roughly and dragged him away, while two other soldiers moved
his scooter to the side. Ackroyd’s hand reflexively reached out for Mack’s.

“Hopefully, all they want is his scooter,” Dr. Chaline said.

When it was their turn, the soldier took a long time reading the papers that Stephen Ackroyd handed him before handing them
back.

“
National Geographic
?” he asked. Stephen nodded. The soldier held up Ackroyd’s passport and looked at it, then at Stephen. He repeated the process,
then handed Stephen his passport. Mack caught a glimpse. The man in the passport photograph looked about thirty or forty pounds
heavier than the man sitting beside her in the Land Rover.

“You didn’t tell me you were working for
National Geographic,
” she said.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m freelance. I just needed a letterhead.”

Men’s Journal,
he’d in fact said. She recalled quite clearly. She made a mental note of the discrepancy, though it seemed of little import.

They drove another half hour, passing, along the way, another thousand refugees and a second convoy that appeared to be more
a support column than combat units (she counted trucks, to report later), before turning onto a main thoroughfare and finally
into the mosque compound. Two guards at the gate examined their papers, then directed them through. A group of armed men waiting
in the courtyard told them where to park, pointing with their guns. Stephen was directed to leave his camera in the vehicle,
and then they were taken to a room off the courtyard where they were searched, forced to lean with their hands against the
wall and their legs spread. When the man searching MacKenzie appeared to be spending too much time feeling her breasts, Ackroyd
said, “That’s enough!” A man raised his rifle butt, as if to strike Stephen, but paused. Stephen didn’t flinch. The man frisking
MacKenzie backed away with a scowl.

Dadullahjid sat behind a desk in the prayer hall. Three men stood behind him. One, MacKenzie didn’t know. The second was Rahjid
Waid, who she recognized from the briefing file she’d read. The third was Dennis. She tried not to give any sign that she
knew him or was surprised to see him. She was, for the first time, glad she had the veil to hide behind. Claude Chaline approached
the desk and spoke to the imam in French.

“Je m’appelle Dr. Claude Chaline. J’ai un avion chargé de medicaments pour le Burkina Faso. Je voudrais le piloter au Camp
Sept, mais j’ai besoin de votre aide,”
he said. He’d explained earlier that Dadullahjid had lived for three years in Paris, and hoped that that connection might
mean something. He had a plane full of medicine, he was saying. He needed assurances.

Dadullahjid listened without responding, his arms folded across his chest.

MacKenzie made eye contact with Zoulalian. His face was hidden half in shadow, but even so, MacKenzie read the message Zoulalian
was sending with his eyes, coming across in a way that couldn’t be clearer. “This is a trap,” they were saying. “You’re in
trouble. You are not safe.”

She touched her nose to ask for confirmation.

He sniffed. Sniffs meant yes. Touching the ear meant no.

Chaline spoke for a moment longer, gesturing softly with his hands. Mack took in the room, noting the windows and exits. An
instinct told her nothing was going to happen inside the mosque, a space that was sacred, or should have been, to those who
would harm her. If something happened here, Dennis would take out one of the men next to him and she would move on the other.
Was Dadullahjid armed? She doubted it.