Mission Liberty (30 page)

“I know it’s not my place to ask, General,” MacKenzie said, “but is there any way we could expedite on Sagoa? I need to know.”

DeLuca was surprised to hear MacKenzie speak up.

“I’ll see what I can do, Agent MacKenzie,” the general said. She thanked him.

DeLuca asked Sykes what had happened to the refugees.

He’d set down, Sykes said, in a field marked by the crashed UAV. There was a large refugee camp, a shantytown thrown together
in the last few weeks that they were calling Camp Cobra, across the border from Liger, where Evelyn Warner and Dr. Chaline
managed to move all of the women and children evacuated from Camp Seven. Soldiers at the border were charging exit fees, which
had to be negotiated, given the large number of people who had to cross. There’d also been an outbreak of both septicaemic
and pneumonic plague in Camp Cobra,
Yersinia pestis
bacteria carried by the vermin infesting the camp, and not enough medicine or doctors to treat everyone, at which point Sykes
had handed the silver Zero case to Gabrielle Duquette, who handed it to Dr. Chaline, telling him what was inside. Once Dr.
Chaline had passed the appropriate amounts of United States currency to the appropriate officials, all went smoothly. The
sick and injured from the Chinook had been taken by bus or ambulance to a hospital facility near Accra. Warner and Duquette
decided to stay in Camp Cobra with the refugees.

“So no casualties then?” DeLuca said.

Sykes hesitated.

“Just two,” Sykes said. “Paul Asabo was arrested by government troops when he tried to get them to waive the exit fees. They
took him away when they recognized him. I couldn’t tell you where. We tried to bribe them to let him go, but they were too
afraid to take the money.”

“Who else?” DeLuca asked.

Sykes turned to MacKenzie.

“We couldn’t find your friend Stephen,” Sykes said. “We looked everywhere. He must have dropped out somewhere along the way.
That’s what Evelyn Warner thought. Or he got lost in all the confusion. We looked.”

“Well then,” DeLuca said after a very long pause, during which he was certain everyone was thinking the same thing he was.
“I guess that means we’ll just have to go back and get them.”

“YOU’RE UP EARLY,” LEDOUX SAID. “I THOUGHT you could use a good night’s sleep.”

Dawn had come cool and clear. In forty-eight hours, Operation Liberty was due to launch, and activity on the USS
Johnson
was ramping up accordingly. Aircraft were prepared. Ordnance was readied for loading. Flight plans for the first thousand
sorties were redrafted, reanalyzed, and filed. Pilots wrote letters home or sent digitized video clips over the Internet.

“You’re right, I could,” DeLuca said. He’d risen early and joined a group of sailors who were doing calisthenics on the flight
deck. It wasn’t so much that he felt in need of PT but rather that exercise helped him clear his mind. “Right now, I’m marginally
more useful when I’m awake.”

LeDoux handed him the second cup of coffee he’d brought with him.

“Come on inside, if you have a minute,” LeDoux said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

A young Marine lieutenant was reading the
New York Times
on the large plasma screen in the flight deck conference room when LeDoux and DeLuca entered. The man jumped to his feet
and saluted when the G-2 approached.

“As you were, Lieutenant,” LeDoux said. “Dim the lights, please, and run the sequence we were looking at for Agent DeLuca,
if you would.”

The headline read:
HEAVY FIGHTING IN LIGER, PORT IVORY. SIX AMERICANS KILLED.

“Who was killed?” DeLuca asked.

“A family of missionaries, from Indiana,” LeDoux said. “They’re spinning it like if we’d have only acted sooner, we could
have saved them. We had three different teams, including one two days ago, try to talk them into evacuating, but they thought
God would save them. They said this was a holy war and they knew their God was bigger than the enemy’s God.”

“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?”