Mission Liberty (8 page)

“According to TF-21,” Zoulalian said, “Rahjid Waid, Abu Waid’s oldest son, is running an IPAB training camp in northern Liger.
My story is, I survived the bombing at Ar Rutbah and I’ve been hiding out in Syria ever since, but now that things are getting
dicey in Syria, I need a new place to go. Other than that, everything is the same as before. I know who we can ask in Iraq
to tell Rahjid I’m coming. I’m going to need to get to Syria to catch a commercial flight so that Rahjid can send somebody
to meet my plane.”

“I’m sure Captain McKinley can find one of his pilots willing to give you a lift,” DeLuca said. “There’s no in-flight movies,
but on the other hand, you’ll be flying at Mach 2. Hoolie?”

“Luis Avila,” Hoolie said, holding up his new fake passport. “You know what they say—if you look anything like your passport
photo, you’re probably not well enough to travel. From Arecibo, Puerto Rico. I work with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration, manning a weather station at the top of El Yunque. Holy Jesus—I have to
read
all this? ‘A Multi-Study Overview on the Combined Effects of Sub-Saharan Desertification and the North Atlantic Vortex on
Caribbean Particulate Deposits and Childhood Asthma.’”

“You’d better read it,” DeLuca said. “After all, you wrote it.”

“So I did,” Vasquez said, noting the authors of the paper. “‘By Dr. Luis Avila, and Dr. Helen Kossman.’ I have a Ph.D. from
the University of Mayaguez. That’s an outrage—I did all the work and she gets half the credit? Who does she think she is?”

“She’s with NOAA and she actually wrote the paper,” DeLuca said. “She’ll back up your credentials if anybody asks or checks,
but nobody will. I’m Donald Brown, with the World Bank. I’m here to determine how much money we’re going to need to loan Conservation
International to help stop the deforestation of West Africa. Paul, you’ve been working on a grant proposal for exactly that
for the last two years, am I correct?”

“You are,” Asabo said.

“Can you tell us, in a nutshell, what your work has been about?”

“A nutshell is not big enough,” Asabo said. “A thousand years ago, a band of rain forest extended from the Congo region of
central Africa across the coastal regions all the way to Senegal and north for several hundred kilometers, and there it became
savannah, before giving way to the desert. As populations increased, the pressure has grown to take sustenance from the rain
forest, as people have done for thousands of years, by harvesting the bush meat but also by harvesting the trees for cook
fires or for the timber industry, as well as to clear the land for agriculture, even though the soil for farming is poor.
The reduction of the forests has decreased the land’s ability to hold water, so instead of recycling here, it blows away,
and the desert creeps southward. We lose 20 million hectares, maybe 50 million acres, of rain forest each year, globally.
In Africa, the Sahara grows by 60 million hectares a year, 150 million acres, since 1990. About 235,000 square miles, or an
area the size of Montana and Wyoming combined. As Dr. Kossman’s report will tell you, the dust from the desert is blowing
across the Atlantic and coming to earth in the Caribbean, and in North America. It is in part a result of the greenhouse effect
on global warming, and it is in part the cause of it. So at Conservation International, we are working to keep the forests,
but that means giving the people who live there a way to live that won’t deplete the forests. You can’t just kick people out
without giving them something else to eat or to do. And of course, with the drought and the famine that comes with it, the
pressure to eat bush meat is greater than ever. And because of political conditions, these things become ignored, at best.
At worst, we have seen soldiers using elephants for target practice with their RPGs. This is what we’re trying to stop.”

“CI,” DeLuca said, “and by that I mean Conservation International and not counterintelligence, has had a standing invitation
from President Bo to visit Liger for the last two years. So we’re taking him up on it.”

“In the middle of a war?”

“It’s always the middle of a war, in Liger,” Asabo said. “We discussed this at Conservation International in Washington. Our
mission is peaceful, but if we only work where there is peace, then the cause is lost. I have had some training with guns.”

“If we do this right, you’re not going to need it,” DeLuca said, turning to the others. “We’ve all got brand-new SATphones,
but spend some time memorizing each other’s numbers because these are programmed to not store call or contact lists, in case
one falls into enemy hands. They do have internal caller ID.”

“What about suborals?” MacKenzie asked, referring to the nanotransmitters DARPA had developed, mouth-held radios small enough
to swallow if you had to.

“Not this trip,” DeLuca said. “Get caught with one of those and you might as well be wearing a U.S. Army uniform.”

“What are you smiling about?” Mack asked Dan Sykes, who so far had remained silent, reading his portfolio.

“I’m a bodyguard, apparently,” Sykes said.

“See?” Hoolie said. “I told you you’d get a chance to kick some ass. Who for?”

“Gabrielle Duquette,” Sykes said.

“No seriously, man—who are you a bodyguard for?”

“Gabrielle Duquette,” Sykes said.

There was a long silence.

“The actress dude,” Hoolie said. “Gabrielle Duquette makes Halle Berry look like the mom on
The Jeffersons.
Are you shitting me?”

“She’s here on a fact-finding mission,” DeLuca said. “She’s a special good will ambassador for the UN. Whatever that means.
Two years ago, she adopted a kid from Liger, and when she was here, she met with John Dari, so at the very least, she’ll be
able to recognize him. She said in a press conference that she hopes to meet with him again—she might even be our best bet.
Plus she’s going to have access to places we otherwise wouldn’t be able to go. I think both sides want to use her to get publicity.”

“My ID’s the same,” Sykes said, reading from his cover file, “but I’m retired from CI. Now I work for Blackwood Security,
out of North Carolina.”

“Much as we all hate contractors,” DeLuca said, “the cover is good. With the exception of Dennis, we’ll operate out of the
Hotel Liger in Baku Da’al. That’s where all the white people have stayed in central Liger since colonial days. Right now,
I don’t think we’ll have much problem getting a room. We’ll arrive separately and meet in the bar, but don’t order the monkey
brains. In Liger, that’s not the name of a drink they serve at frat parties. Paul, what do we need to know about John Dari,
that’s not in the report?”

“Just that he is very smart,” Asabo said. “At school, I had to work very hard with my studies, but he didn’t. He got better
grades than I did, and it came very easy for him. I don’t know why he changed so much, but I think maybe there is something
he feels that the reports you have don’t mention.”

“What’s that?”

“Well,” Paul Asabo said. “I think he is lonely. I was his best friend, but I knew in school that that was not enough. He had
a longing. He came from a big family and they were all killed. I know he always wondered why he was the one who was not. He
thought there had to be a reason why he was spared. Something big that he was meant to do. So perhaps leading these forces,
perhaps that’s the thing he believes he was meant to do. And perhaps his troops are his family. And his country. Like an LA
street gang. Perhaps.”

“You make being a warlord sound like a domestic situation,” Hoolie said.

“I don’t believe he is a warlord,” Asabo said.

“Is that what your gut says?” DeLuca asked. “Don’t get me wrong—I make my living listening to people’s guts.”

“I knew him in high school,” Asabo said. “And junior high. Prep school. That is the time, and I think the place, where people
are going to be cruel, if they have cruelty within them. John had plenty of reasons to have cruelty within him, given the
things he saw as a young boy. But he was not cruel.”

“People change,” DeLuca said.

“Have you changed?” Asabo asked him. “How long have you been studying war?”

“A long time,” DeLuca admitted.

“And yet although you are wiser,” Asabo said, “have you lost your humanity? Have you changed, apart from simply growing older?
People are who they are, I think. John Dari was my friend. I think he still is. But perhaps I will be disappointed.”

“As far as I can tell,” DeLuca said to end the briefing, “the White House doesn’t particularly care if we succeed, as long
as they can say they tried, and the Pentagon only cares insofar as we can supply command and control with targeting data.
The temptation would be to phone it in and play it safe. You will, at all times, take whatever precautions you can to remain
safe, but if anybody here thinks they’re going to phone it in, tell me now and I’ll find you a mop you can use to swab the
decks until we get back. The only thing more dangerous than a dangerous mission is a dangerous mission that you don’t take
seriously. We deploy in two hours. Dennis, I’ll talk to the captain about your ride. You may want to leave sooner than that.
Any questions?”

“How are we armed?” MacKenzie said.

“Everybody in Liger is armed,” DeLuca said. “You’ll probably attract more attention if you’re not. Just don’t be conspicuous.
Dan, take a MAC-10 in addition to your sidearm. It’s what all the Blackwood guys are wearing these days. DARPA has also given
us new handhelds to field test, called CIMs or Critical Information Minimodules—the army is also calling them FBCB2s or ‘Fee-bee-cee-bees,’
for Force Battle Command Brigade and Below systems. It’s a pocket PC that they hope will turn every soldier into an intelligence-gathering
unit. Read the manuals. They look like civilian PDAs, or at least the version they gave us does, with built-in GPS for maps
and data uplinks in real time to MILSATs and what have you, so spend some time getting to know how to use them. You can wi-fi
to SIPERNET or the Internet, but if I catch anybody playing Grand Theft Auto on his, I’m taking it away. Paul, can I offer
you anything?”

“Guns?” Asabo said. “I don’t think so. If they discover who I am, it would be best if I were unarmed. Plus I don’t like guns.”

“I don’t like cars,” DeLuca said, “but it beats walking.”

After the briefing, DeLuca used his new handheld PC to collect his e-mail. The first thing he’d done, upon awakening, was
e-mail his friend Walter Ford back in Boston and ask him to get on the Web and look for any information that the briefing
report might have omitted, sending the report as an attached file. He didn’t expect a reply so soon, but then he remembered
that Ford, a retired cop and a professor in the Criminal Justice program at Northeastern, was one of the most diligent people
he’d ever known. He’d stay up to finish a task, no matter how late it got.

Dear David,

Hope all remains well with you. Martha suggests I remind you to dress warmly. I told her you were in tropical Africa, but
you know Martha. She would still be trying to get you to wear a sweater.

As to your questions, I’m supplying links to a number of Ligerian expatriate Web sites, but to give you the gist of it, the
bottom line is, President Bo’s popularity ratings rank significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s. Ligerian expats hate him (Bo,
not Clinton), as do many of his citizens, though he has the support of the Fasori elite, who he favors in return with tax
breaks, import tariffs, bribes, etc. He had the full support of big oil and their hired mercenaries until he started talking
about nationalizing the oil industry a few months ago, largely a populist gesture, but WAOC was not amused.

Bo has two rivals for power, both of whom he keeps on a short leash. One is General Kwesi Emil-Ngwema, vice president and
head of the army. Ngwema was, for years, Bo’s go-to guy when he needed somebody thrown out of a helicopter. Lake Liger was
his favorite drop zone, mostly because it’s full of cichlids that can make a corpse impossible to identify in about three
seconds. I had some in my aquarium and they ate all my other fish, my bad, not theirs, but they’re worse than piranhas, IMHO.
Lately Ngwema has stayed away from Bo. One Web site says he’s planning a coup, with WAOC funding. Another says he’s waiting
for LPLF to do his dirty work for him. Either way, he’s playing his cards pretty tight right now.

The other rival is Bishop Duvallier. The majority of the nation’s Christians are Catholic, incl. lower-class Fasoris and most
of the Da Christians, who mainly supply the workforce for the oil industry. Pentecostals making inroads, however. Question:
Would Duvallier let Muslims kill Pentecostals? One Web site says yes. Both Bo and WAOC have been greasing Duvallier for years.
One Web site says Duvallier is a cannibal who eats young boys. The Vatican loves him for his firm stand against birth control/abortion/same-sex
marriage. Duvallier’s emissaries personally intercepted and destroyed a shipment of condoms sent by the WHO. FYI, AIDS in
Liger is about 28 percent among women and 24 percent among men, second only to Uganda, but thanks to Duvallier, at least unmarried
people aren’t having sex, because they’re all dying in hospitals.

And by the way, the ambassador you rescued was investigated for taking a seat on the Ligerian gravy train, accepting gifts,
safaris, etc. from Bo, from whose Presidential Guard Ellis selected his household staff, whom he doesn’t pay. One site alleges
that the U.S. ambassador keeps slaves. Lots of cocktail parties at the mansion, champagne, feasts with roast pigs, etc. The
investigation said Ellis may have crossed the line at times but that his actions were in accordance with traditional diplomacy.
Sumptuous feasts when up north, two thousand plus people a day die of starvation. I wonder why so many people hate America?

Let me know what else I can do.

Best, Walter

DELUCA, VASQUEZ, AND ASABO, BEARING false papers identifying them as Don Brown, from the World Bank, Luis Avila, from the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and James Hawkins, with Conservation International, were flown to Ghana,
where they caught a commercial flight to Port Ivory. Sykes and MacKenzie were to enter in a similar fashion via Lagos, transferring
first at an offshore oil rig. Asabo spoke English without an accent and could therefore pass as an American, though he’d never
actually taken his American citizenship, but was allowed to stay in the United States indefinitely with the immigration status
of a political refugee.