Mission Liberty (26 page)

“I thought one of the reasons I’m here was to verify Dari’s participation in the atrocities,” DeLuca said. “And, for the record,
I can’t.”

“They need names,” LeDoux said.

“How about Reverend Rowen?” DeLuca asked.

“Still debriefing that,” LeDoux said, which DeLuca understood to mean they were trying to figure out how to spin it.

“What’s the bottom line, as Kissick would say?” DeLuca said. “What can you do for me? I’m going to need fire support.”

“Bottom line,” LeDoux said, “no CAS. UAV only. I can give you what resources I have, but I can’t increase or jump the dates.”

“I figured. How many Predators can I have?” DeLuca said.

“We have six,” LeDoux said. “Rotating in eight-hour shifts.”

“Can you fly all six at once?” DeLuca asked.

“Not and give you coverage after they’re returned to base,” LeDoux said. “It’s your call. Where are you?”

“At a fork in the road,” DeLuca said. “About an hour out of Baku. You know what Yogi Berra said—‘When you come to a fork in
the road, take it.’ Camp Seven is that-a-way and a village called Sagoa is this-a-way. I wanted your thoughts.”

“Baku’s gone bad,” LeDoux said.

“
Gone
bad?”

“Gone worse,” LeDoux said. “Government troops blew up a mosque. Near your hotel. We’re in Iraq for two fucking years and we
avoid the mosques. Anyway, that’s behind you. Heavy fighting, door to door. LPLF, we think. According to SIGINT, we have rebels
an hour or so north of Sagoa and the same for Camp Seven. Neither looks good. You can’t just sit tight?”

“Negative,” DeLuca said. Mack was headed for Camp Seven, where Evelyn Warner was waiting for help. He couldn’t reach Sykes
or Zoulalian. He couldn’t divide his resources, nor did he really have resources to divide—even if his team was all together,
there were only five of them, six if he included Paul Asabo. Sending one or two people to either Sagoa on Camp Seven didn’t
make sense. He had to choose one, a village of men, women, and children, or a smaller encampment of women and children. There
were more people in Sagoa, but the refugees at Camp Seven were more vulnerable, protected only by a handful of African Union
troops whose value as a deterrent was very much in doubt.

“Can we move government troops?” he asked.

“We can make recommendations,” LeDoux said. “They don’t have to listen. Bo’s going to do what he wants. Ngwema will do whatever
suits him. It looks like they’re both concentrating their forces around the urban centers and abandoning the countryside to
the rebels. With all the predictable results.”

“Well,” DeLuca said, making a decision. “We’re going to Camp Seven. We should be there in about an hour. How long before the
shit hits the fan?”

“About that,” LeDoux said. “Maybe a little longer.”

“We’ll have to risk a speeding ticket then,” DeLuca said. “Give me four UAVs now and two on standby. How long is turnaround?
How far from base to Camp Seven?”

“Base is the
LBJ,
” LeDoux said. “We can turn ’em around pretty quick. From home to you is about forty-five minutes. The new ones are faster
than the old ones. What are you going to do?”

“Not sure,” DeLuca said. “Still improvising. But like they say at last call, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay
here.”

When he reached Camp Seven, he found matters in complete disarray, or rather, complete disarray would have been a significant
improvement. Evelyn Warner told him the United Nations troops had been recalled before she’d been able to return. The African
Union troops had been ordered to pull back and regroup with a larger contingent of AU forces positioned thirty kilometers
to the south. For now, Corporal Okempo was stalling, but he was getting pressure from above to move his men. He didn’t want
to defy his orders.

“I’m so grateful that you’ve come,” Warner said. “I wish I had better news. I think maybe a hundred of my girls have already
scattered or run off, thinking they’ll be safer in the bush than here. Maybe they’re right.”

They were interrupted when DeLuca saw a trail of dust rising in the distance on the road from Sagoa, a single vehicle, a white
Land Rover, making speed.

“That’s Dr. Chaline’s car,” Warner said. “I was almost hoping not to see him again.”

Hoolie tapped DeLuca on the shoulder and handed him his CIM. On the screen, DeLuca saw a map of the area, with Camp Seven
at the bottom of the screen. Above the camp, to the north, a field of red dots representing troops marching south, perhaps
five kilometers away, estimated strength, two thousand men, according to the attached dialogue box, led by Samuel Adu.

DeLuca looked at the sun, setting in the west. In another hour or so, it would be dark.

“We’ll have to work with what we have,” he said, surveying the surrounding landscape.

“Spoken like Davy Crocket at the Alamo. Remember the Alamo?” Hoolie said.

“Who could forget?” DeLuca said. “With one difference.”

“Which is?”

“They had a fort.”

Asabo looked puzzled.

“Famous American battle,” DeLuca told him. “Nothing to worry about.”

“WHERE ARE WE?” GABRIELLE DUQUETTE asked Dan Sykes. She’d walked to the flight deck and was leaning over his shoulder after
spending the first part of the trip staring disconsolately out the spotter’s window. He’d maintained a hover of about a thousand
feet. They were going to lose the light in another hour or so.

“What do you mean?” he shouted back, trying to sound positive. He didn’t dare use the radio, but he was getting to the point
where he needed to talk to someone who knew how to land a helicopter. He’d found a pair of helmets and plugged the com cords
in so that they could use the intercom to communicate above the roar of the engines. She seemed to be in better spirits.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” she said, pointing. “That way, toward the setting sun, is west, unless I’m mistaken. We’re
flying east. Port Ivory is south. I want to go to Port Ivory.”

“The closest border is east,” Sykes said. “I think we’d be safer if we left the country. Would you look in the cabinet where
the flight engineer sits and see if you can find a manual or something?”

“Why do you need a manual?” she asked.

“See if there’s a chapter that says how to land.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to need you to read it.”

“Why do you need me to read it?” she said. “Why can’t you just ask your friend how to land?”

“My phone went dead,” he told her. “About half an hour ago.”

“What?”
she said. “You’re telling me this
now
?”

“I didn’t want to worry you,” he said.

“You didn’t want to
worry
me?” she said. “Why did you take off if you didn’t know how to land? I should think that would have been a fundamental priority.”

“I didn’t really have much choice about taking off,” he said.

“We don’t have much choice about landing either, do we?” she said.

“I understand why you’re concerned—”

“Concerned?” she shouted into the headset. “CONCERNED?! I’m fucking more than concerned, Dan Sykes!”

He waited for her to calm down.

“I thought maybe I could figure out how to land, once we were in the air,” he said sheepishly. “Keep your eyes open for a
pipeline. It runs north to south, parallel to the eastern border.”

She had her eyes closed, thinking. Finally she opened them and glared at him.

“Why are men like this? I know you hate to ask for directions, but this is insane,” she said. “Stop the helicopter. I want
to get out.”

“Well, that’s pretty much what I was getting at…” he told her.

She fished inside her purse and handed him a satellite phone of her own.

“All you had to do was ask,” she said.

When he finally got through to the Pentagon, he explained the situation and said he needed to speak with Scott at Joint Intel,
who told him, when they were finally reconnected, that he was afraid he’d hung up on him. Sykes said he’d had a dead battery
and asked to speak to Captain Evans again.

“Got him right here,” Scott said. “We’ve been talking, while we waited to hear from you, about diverting you south to a place
called Camp Seven. We can vector you in if you’re willing. It’s not far. We have people on the ground who need evac. Let’s
go to 122.8 on the VHF. We won’t have any privacy, but I don’t think anybody is listening right now.”

Once they were on radio, Captain Evans directed him to turn south. Gabrielle looked at him, wondering what was going on, now
that she could hear the transmissions in her headset.

“Not a problem,” he told her. “We’re going to swing south a bit and pick up some friends of mine. They tell me landing should
be a piece of cake.”

His mother had always encouraged him to think positively. He wondered which was a stronger force, positive thinking or gravity?
Probably gravity, but he didn’t want to let on that he thought so. Captain Evans asked Sykes to read the gauges out loud to
him. They had enough fuel to fly for another hour or so.

As they approached Camp Seven, Scott came back on the line.

“We’re having a thought here—tell me,” he asked, “if you can see below you, what do you see?”

“Trees,” Sykes said. “Grass. I see Africa.”

“I’m going to ask you to bank left to get a look down,” Evans said. “Gently, with your right hand…”

Sykes saw men marching across open land, scattered in no particular formation. He told Scott.

“In what strength?” Scott asked.

“Can’t say,” Sykes said. “More than five hundred and less than a thousand.”

“Those are the bad guys,” Scott said. “Anything you can do to slow them down would be appreciated, but watch for triple A.
Are you taking fire?”

“Negative,” Sykes said. “Who are they? Dari?”

“Adu’s unit,” Scott said. “We think.”

“I got a mini in the tail,” Sykes said. “But nobody who can use it.” He looked Gabrielle in the eye. She shook her head. “Unless
I could set this thing on autopilot…”

“Negative, negative,” Evans said. “That’s not a Cessna.”

“What is this?” Duquette said, pointing at a hatch in the floor of the passenger cabin.

“That?” Sykes said, looking over his shoulder. “That’s the hell hole.”

“What is it?” she asked. “Is it a trapdoor?”

“More or less,” Sykes said. “It’s a rescue hatch. Winching men up, or down. Why?”

“Can you open it?”

“There’s a button next to the hatch that opens it. You have to pull the bar back manually. Why do you want to open it?”

He looked over his shoulder and saw that she’d opened her Zero case and was holding a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills in
her hand. She pointed with her other hand toward the hell hole at her feet.

“I think we might have figured out how to slow them down a bit,” Sykes told command. “How low can I fly before they shoot
me?”

He turned, banking back into the sun as Evans instructed, and brought the helicopter to five hundred feet. Gabrielle Duquette
propped her silver Zero case on the floor next to the hatch, opened the hatch, flipping it on its hinge until it lay flat,
and then, as fast as she could, tossed fistfuls of American currency out of the helicopter, ripping the rubber bands that
bound them and setting the binders aside, the cash dispersed by the rotor wash in a downward vortex, the money falling like
so much green snow on the advancing rebel troops. They saw soldiers looking up, and then they saw men running everywhere,
scrambling to recover the pieces of paper that fell from the sky, the rebel troops’ forward movement momentarily halted.

“Whaddaya know?” Sykes said. “You
can
throw money at a problem. I wish my father was here.”

“Why? Is he a pilot?”

“No,” Sykes said. “He’s a Republican.”

Camp Seven was a frenzy of activity. Everything seemed to be happening at once.

When DeLuca saw MacKenzie step out of the Land Rover, he couldn’t have been happier. She introduced him to her friend, Stephen
Ackroyd. It was none of his business, but somehow DeLuca sensed immediately that something had passed between them.

“The fifth estate was talking about you back at the Hotel Liger,” DeLuca said.

“Well, don’t believe everything you hear,” Ackroyd said.

“We have some surprises for you in the back,” Mack said, pointing to the arms cache. DeLuca gave them a brief inspection.

“Did you read the e-mail I sent you?” he asked her.

“Haven’t had a chance,” she said. “Why? What’d it say?”

Ackroyd was standing right next to them.

“Read it, when you get a chance,” DeLuca said. Mack crossed to where Evelyn Warner was standing, giving her a big hug and
receiving one in return.

“Bill Murray went to my high school,” DeLuca said to Stephen, asking him flat out. “Did anybody famous go to your high school?”

“Mine?” Ackroyd said. He looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The guy who draws the cartoon
Garfield
, but he’s not famous.”

“You’re a writer, right?”

“That’s right,” Ackroyd said. He seemed suddenly suspicious.

“What have you written that I might have read?” DeLuca asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Stephen said, his eyes blinking rapidly. “Probably not much. I haven’t really published too much.”

He moved to help Vasquez unload the Land Rover.

DeLuca let it go, for now.

“Are you all right?” Evelyn Warner asked MacKenzie.

“We’re good,” Mack said. “We had to leave in a hurry.”

“Where’s Claude?” Warner asked.

“There was an accident,” Mack said. “Dr. Chaline went back to help them. I’m sorry. We couldn’t stop him.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” Warner said, disconsolate that her friend was lost.

“Evelyn,” DeLuca interrupted, watching as an unidentified Chinook helicopter turned in the air perhaps one or two kilometers
north of them. He’d ordered Vasquez and MacKenzie to break out the AKs and load them. He’d sent for Corporal Okempo as well.
“Everybody has to leave, now. There’s no time for discussion. My CIM says there’s a road along the river, going south. Where
does it end?”