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“He asked me to take them! And anyway, if you have your way, it won’t matter what pictures have been taken, will it? Besides which, they’re all supposed to be Belgians, so what does it signify?”
The Belgians were in Rwanda as peacekeepers. So were the French. Twenty-five hundred of them, keeping “peace” since last August in a country already up to its knees in blood. Now her brother was involved in something designed to start the horrors up again. She knew a lot about it; she was part of the Hutu elite, always on the edges of discussions and meetings. She was trusted because she was a general’s daughter and Peter’s half-sister, and because all her life she had had privileges and luxuries beyond most of her countrymen’s wildest dreams.
“Put that camera away now!” he hissed. Zulu was shouting at his men. Somebody was running.
“Oh—poo!” she said. She snapped a picture of Peter looking furious, then swung the camera around and got one of the “Belgians” as he raised the launcher. Then she gave her half-brother a big grin and made a show of dropping the pink camera into her bag and zipping it closed. She laughed into his angry face, then minced across the soft earth, her beautifully coiffed hair bouncing, Zulu’s digital camera held like a jewel between her fingers.
Zulu was gesturing at the Rwandan soldiers, spreading them out. “All the way around us!” he shouted. “Both sides! When I tell you, you go! We get out very quick when this is over!” He looked for Peter, found him. “Get them out another fifty meters or so! A big perimeter—I don’t want any interference—” He looked around again. “Where’s my camera? Ah—” He ran to Elizabeth. “I’ll take it now. No, wait—get one shot of me and the guys—”
He crouched behind the two shooters, who had their backs to her with the launchers pointed into the sky to the north. “Okay—take the picture—Good. One more—” He changed his position, waved her around so she was getting him in profile again, cheating a little so his face, his nose showed as he seemed to be directing the two shooters. “Got it? Give me the camera. Many thanks.” He gave her the smile again, the smile that worked on the men and didn’t work on her. “Well done.” Then he was back with the shooters, speaking to them in the other language.
And then she could hear the aircraft. At first, it was an almost subliminal rumble, then a soft roar that diminished into a hiss and a sigh, with a thin screaming of air over wings beginning to descend above the other sounds. She stared into the north sky. The morning clouds had piled up but not delivered their rain; it would pass over them now and fall somewhere to the east. The clouds were bright enough to hurt her eyes; she squinted, trying to make the aircraft out above the trees. She prayed it wouldn’t be the civilian plane. Make it military, she prayed. Make it the UN. Even the French or the Belgians. It could be that it was them they meant to hit. That could be the strategy, to down a UN plane, stir things up. Not the other, she prayed. If it was the other, then they would all be in hell.
Zulu rapped out a word, and one of the shooters set his rear foot and hunched. Zulu had seen the aircraft, and she tried to find it in the brightness of cloud. Where? She was looking too far ahead, of course; she was deceived by the sound.
“There it is,” Peter said. The others had already seen it.
Then she saw it, too, surprisingly clear and close. It was a civilian 747. Please, no, God, she prayed.
The aircraft came on, dropping, on its final approach now for the Kigali airport. The thin scream of the wind cut into her ears. She covered them, screwed her face up, a frightened child.
One Stinger whooshed and roared and smoked from the tube. She followed its trajectory as it seemed to curve away from the aircraft. Miss, miss, dear God, she prayed. The trail curled and then swung more tightly up. It seemed to hang there for a long time. They missed, she thought. The airliner was screaming down the glide path to their left, dropping toward the trees, and the missile was invisible. Seeking, seeking the aircraft’s heat—
And then it hit. The aircraft erupted. A ball of light blew out of its roof, although the craft seemed for a moment to remain intact, to go on flying. Then flame and smoke spread from that white-hot center, and the tail section, independent now, began to fall. The front was almost entirely obscured by flash and fire; another explosion tore it apart; a wing and an engine seemed to slide sideways across the sky, and the fireball plunged.
She found that she was standing on her toes, one hand clasped over her mouth. She was weeping. Peter was shaking her and pulling her away. “Weakling!” he shouted at her. “Weakling! You stupid bitch!”
Everyone aboard the civilian flight, including the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, was killed. Both were Hutus. Tutsi rebels were blamed.
Then ten Belgian peacekeepers were killed by Rwandan presidential guards.
Then Hutus began to kill Tutsis. The killings were not random. On April fifteenth, more than a thousand Tutsis were murdered in a church by men throwing grenades. By April twenty-seventh, a hundred thousand on both sides were dead. Then the Hutu strategy backfired, and by August the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front was in power in Rwanda, and somewhere between half a million and a million Hutus had become refugees in other countries, mainly Zaire.
The man called Zulu was not there. He had flown out the same day as the downing of the presidents’ aircraft. After refueling at Abeche in Chad, an ancient Britannia 252 took him up to the edge of the Mediterranean at Tubruq, then to the military airport south of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. “Zulu” became somebody else who had his own training camp and weapons depot south of the city and whom the authorities in Belgrade feared and disliked, but without whom they could not achieve the ethnic victory in their own country on which their political lives depended.
Part One The Friends (#ulink_dcae754a-5810-5fda-bca8-5e3f76ed6442)
1 (#ulink_0216f889-b01b-5cda-9b43-e1e909842770)
Bosnia, February 1996
The sea was gray, the sky near the horizon pink, between them a line of silver. It looked as cold as dawn in Canada, but this was the Mediterranean in February. Cold.
He felt the bucking of the aircraft, under it the surge of the deck, under that the throb of the ship, felt these things without feeling them because he had been there so long these were normal, and when he got on shore the lack of vibration would feel wrong, something missing in the universe.
“Ready back there, Lieutenant?”
Fatigue perched on him like a big, obscene bird. Crow picking at roadkill. He roused himself, realized he had been half-asleep, the pilot’s voice in the comm waking him. Was he ready? Ready for one more of Suter’s punitive jobs, one more of his humiliations, one more of his demonstrations that he, Suter, was a lieutenant-commander and Alan Craik was only a lieutenant and it had been a big mistake for Alan to show that he thought Suter was an asshole?
“Yo,” he said.
“O-kay! And they’re off, as the monkey said—”
When he backed into the lawnmower, Alan finished for him. The puck dropped and the cat whacked him in the chest with Gs and the aircraft threw itself at the horizon. It was like the old days for a moment, and he felt the thrill of it, and then it was gone.
They flew into the rising sun, up toward thin strands of cloud like combed-out hair. Alan Craik looked back and saw the carrier, already small, a destroyer just visible in the haze a couple of miles away. Bitterly, he thought that he was off to do an ensign’s job, and behind him on the ship Ensign Baronik would be trying to do Alan’s job and screwing it up because he was only an ensign, and LCDR Suter would be on him like a weasel on a chicken, pleased that this nice piece of warm meat was there for him to savage. Ensign Baronik hadn’t been savvy enough to put space between himself and Alan, and so he was warm meat by association. And he was too young and too scared to tell Suter to back off, as Alan had done.
Alan sighed. God, he was tired. Four hours’ sleep in three days and now this. A lose-lose situation: if he didn’t work his ass off, Suter gave him every shit detail that came along; if he did work his ass off, Suter took the credit—and gave him every shit detail that came along. For Alan, who loved the job and for whom work was life, it was better to work himself to death and know that at least he’d done his best, but helping Suter’s career was bitter medicine. And it was made worse by Suter’s having control of his life—of his orders, of his job, of his fitness reports. And Suter hated him. “You’re supposed to be God’s wet dream,” Suter had hissed at him. “You’re supposed to be hot shit, Craik, and I know you’re not! I see through you! You’re just luck and bullshit wrapped with a ribbon, and I’m gonna untie it. People been hanging medals on you like Christmas ornaments—well, no more, mister. No more! You’re not even gonna get close to glory this trip—no way!”
What was worse, Suter was good at his job. And smart.
“You wanna sleep back there, Lieutenant, go ahead. We got a couple hours, no scenery.”
“Would you ask the stewardess to turn down my bed?” Alan said.
“Jeez, I would, but she’s busy in first class just now.”
Alan smiled, the smile of habit, the sea-duty smile. He started to think about his wife, and home, and what it would be like when this rotten tour was over. He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he was aware of was the pilot telling him they were five minutes from going dry and he could wake up now.
“Must have dozed off.”
“Hey, I thought I had a corpse back there! Feet-dry in four minutes, man. We’re coming in over the islands now—” He started to give a guided tour but clicked off to deal with the comm. Alan consulted his own kneepad: Split was off somewhere in the haze to his left; to his right would be Dubrovnik, down along the coast that was now like a smudge from a dirty thumb. Directly underneath, the island of Brac, one of a series of former resorts that step-stoned down the coast to Dubrovnik. Not resorts now, he thought. He had no intel of fighting down there, but the war had been everywhere, the gruesome agony of a nation turned in on itself. Down there were perhaps only shuttered hotels and distrust; ahead on the mainland were horrors. He had already seen some of them. A so-called “peace accord” had been signed a few weeks before, but people who looked alike and had a common history and common problems were still killing each other, like a trapped animal chewing off its own leg.
The weather inland was lousy. Sarajevo was socked in, as usual. The UN food flights had just ended, and NATO had taken over the airfield. Alan watched the cloud tops, felt his eyes close, nodded forward—
“Cleared for landing. Check your straps, Lieutenant. You know how this goes—ejection position SOP. Make ready—” He felt the familiar turn and sink, deceleration, pressure as he came against the straps, but nothing like a carrier landing—no hook here, and a runway long enough to land a commercial jet. Alan saw the too-close bulk of Mount Igman, acres of dirty snow, low, dark cloud cover obscuring dark slopes, houses flashing underneath, a burned-out car—
A bang and a screech and they swiveled a degree and back and were down. A radar installation flashed past, two trucks angled to it in a plowed space, high snowbanks all around, a French logo. The plane was rolling now, no longer seeming to scream; they swung left into a taxiway, slowed some more and began the long taxi to the intake building. When Alan climbed down, a cold, wet wind slapped at him: welcome to Yugoslavia.
He blew out his breath. Six hours here. To do ten minutes of an ensign’s work. As he humped his pack toward the warehouse building that served IFOR as a local HQ, it started to snow.
The French officer signed for his package and gave him coffee (damned good—bitter, fresh) and asked him to stay to lunch (also damned good, probably, with wine), but a Canadian major with the worried look of an old monkey looked through a doorway and shouted, “That Craik?”
The Frenchman grimaced, winked at Alan. “Just arrived, Major.”
“In here, Craik.” The worry lines deepened and the major turned away, then looked back and said, “Welcome and—so on. Kind of a mess.”
Alan was supposed to sit for six hours and then get a lift to Aviano, sit for four hours, and then get something that might put him near the carrier. Suter’s idea. Nothing was supposed to happen here except turning over a lot of clapped-out aerial photos. “Uh—” he said stupidly at the retreating back, “—my orders have me going to—”
“Orders have been changed!” the voice floated back.
Suter again?
Alan shrugged himself deeper into his exhaustion and went through the door where the major had disappeared. There was a battered corridor, black slush on the floor, hand-lettered signs on pieces of notebook paper drooping from map pins like old flags—“G-3,” “S&R,” “Liaison.” He passed a makeshift bulletin board, most of the postings in both English and French. Well, they were Canadians, after all. At the top of the bulletin board, it said “UNPROFOR,” the acronym of the UN Protection Force that was in the process of pulling out.
“In here!” The major sat in a tiny office that had been a toilet before the sinks were ripped out. An unusable commode was almost hidden by a pile of pubs. “Francourt, Major, Canadian army. You know about all that.” He handed over some message traffic: his orders. Alan’s eyes flashed down it—“… temporary duty … CO UNPROFOR/CO IFOR Sarajevo… liaison and intelligence support and acquisition …” What was this shit?
The major was talking again. “You know UNPROFOR, what we do—?”
“I thought you were IFOR.”
The major shook his head. “UNPROFOR. We’re going, they’re coming.” He jerked his head toward the front of the building where the French officer was. “Unfortunately, some of us are still here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“French and Canadians down here, mostly us and the Italians up above.” He looked at Alan. “Tuzla.” That was “up above,” he meant. There had been a lot of fighting. “We were keeping the peace, ha-ha. You know all that. It says here you speak this African Kissy-willy, that right?” He rattled a piece of paper.
“Kiswahili? A little—”
“Good. And Italian, it says. Good, just the guy I want. We got a problem up there, I don’t follow it, but there’s a Kenyan medical unit making a hell of a noise, and I haven’t got time to deal with it. You’ve been asked for. Dick Murch—know him?”
His mind was slow because of no sleep, and it was all coming too fast—Yugoslavia, winter, snow, then all of a sudden Kenyans and Swahili. Murch. “Murch. Yeah—Canadian Army intel—”
“He asked for you by name.” The major rattled the paper again. “Your boss messaged us you’re just the man for the job.” The major, a man with decent feelings, glanced a little unbelievingly at Alan. It would be, after all, a shitty job, whatever it was—cold, uncomfortable, fruitless. Alan saw the major understand that Alan’s boss hated his guts. The major’s voice was almost apologetic: “Well—won’t last long. And it’s just being a good listener, eh? And you can take those photos you brought in right up to Murch and save us a step.”
Well, Alan thought, at least there would be wine with lunch before he left.
“There’s a plane going up in—well, it was supposed to leave a half-hour ago, but they never get out on time. One of yours.” He meant that the US had re-opened the airport at Tuzla and was moving there in a big way. Alan doubted the jab about being late; the Air Force, like the Navy, ran a tight operation. The major was just pissed because he was still here. “Dalembert’ll show you which one.” There went wine with lunch. And lunch, probably. A voice in his head said, This is another fine mess you’ve got us into! The voice would have been Harry O’Neill’s, doing one of his imitations. God, he wished O’Neill was with him! The bond of friendship would have got him through this crap. He and O’Neill had been two first-tour IOs together five years ago, winning the Gulf War on brilliance and brashness (with a little help from some pilots). O’Neill would have known how to deal with Suter. O’Neill would have known how to deal with Alan, for that matter. You’re good, Shweetheart—you’re really good—
“Got a weapon?” the major said.
Weapon. Weapon? Alan had to concentrate. “Got an armpit gun in my pack.”
“Wear it. They’re shooting at us up there. I mean, at us. Take off your rank, anything shiny.” He held up a finger. “Lesson: If you try to help some poor sonofabitch who’s being killed by his brother, they’ll both kill you, instead.” He made a gun with his hands and pretended to squint into a sight.
Alan gave another long, fatigued sigh. He unstrapped the pack and began to feel for the Browning nine-millimeter. This was a fine mess.
Fort MacArthur, North Carolina.
The Georgian brick buildings, the green lawns and the old trees looked like a university campus. The classroom looked like a university classroom. The students, in their thirties and forties, might have been university graduate students. But they weren’t. This was the toughest school in America, with the highest rate of flunkout, dropout, and just plain exhaustion. This was what people inside the intelligence community called the Ranch.
Harry O’Neill sat relaxed at one of the student desks. Unlike the rest, he was attentive to the briefing on Africa. The rest were in body positions that suggested that Africa didn’t exist for them. The teacher, himself a case officer no longer active, was pointing a laser pointer at a map with the outlines of countries but no names and asking questions with the resigned tone of a man who knew that he wouldn’t get answers.
“What’s this?” he snapped. When there was no answer, he said, “O’Neill?”
“Rwanda,” O’Neill murmured.
“This?” Silence. He nodded at Harry. O’Neill said, “Burundi.”
The bright dot moved. The teacher waited, flicked an eye at O’Neill. “Zaire.” Then, “Central African Republic. Chad—”
The teacher snapped the pointer off and leaned his butt back against a table, arms crossed, and said, “Okay, okay. You know what’s going on there? Want to do a little central African brief off the cuff, Mister O’Neill?”
Harry smiled. “Off the cuff, sir, let’s see—two years ago, there was a crash—some folks say a shootdown—of an aircraft with the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi aboard. All hell broke loose, with the two major ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, massacring each other. Tutsis came out on top, drove the Hutus into eastern Zaire, where they’re now living in big refugee camps that are being run by their own militias, who got out with their weapons and a big blood lust. When the other shoe drops, there’ll be hell all over again.”
“How come you know all this and the rest of these guys don’t, O’Neill?”
Before Harry could reply, a voice behind him said, low and with a snicker, “Cause dat’s his home, man!”
O’Neill was the only black man in the class.
The teacher snapped erect, face flushed. “All right—who said that—?”
But Harry O’Neill hadn’t stirred. He only smiled and said softly, “Oh, that’s okay, sir. I know who said it.”
When the class ended, most of them stirred and stretched, but a man named Richmond hurried out the door and started down the corridor. Harry O’Neill was just as fast, however; within a few strides, he had caught up and fallen in with the man, draping one arm around the other’s shoulders with what seemed perfect friendliness.
“Richmond, Richmond!” he said. He smiled. He squeezed Richmond’s shoulder. O’Neill had been both a Phi Beta Kappa and a starting defensive end at Harvard; the squeeze had authority. “Richmond, next week we have Close Combat Drill three times, did you know that? And, because I’m near the top of the class, I get to pick my partner, did you know that?” He gave another squeeze. “And Richmond—” His voice took on the same thick, fake-black tone that had been heard in the classroom. “Ah picks yew—man!”
Tuzla.
Alan tried to sleep on the short hop to Tuzla, but it was no good. They’d put him in a “crash-resistant” seat with enough straps to hold back Hulk Hogan, but they hadn’t given any thought to comfort. Most of the huge aircraft was loaded with cargo. The French coffee had lifted him for a little, but that was gone now. He had already had the second surge that comes with real fatigue, the time of being wired, with crash to follow. Except he hadn’t been able to crash. At Tuzla, they made one big turn and went in, with another aircraft on the runway ahead of them and another right behind. Like cyclic ops. Alan tried to find an office for UNPROFOR and finally learned that what was left of it wasn’t at the airfield; it was beyond the city, and he’d need transport. It was like a demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Somebody found him a truck.
The driver was Italian, one of those people who dedicate their lives to not being impressed, so he was not impressed that Alan spoke Italian with a Neapolitan accent. Still, he was willing to talk, so long as it was clear to Alan that he was not impressed by officer rank, either. When they had gone a few kilometers, he stopped.
“Good place to piss,” he said in Italian. “No snipers.” Alan didn’t recognize the Italian word for “snipers” but got it from a pantomime. The second time somebody had pretended to shoot him that day. He got out, and they stood side by side. Lots of other trucks had stopped here for relief; the place was an outdoor toilet, in fact. He climbed back up into the cab, higher than climbing into the old S-3 he had flown in for two years, and they coughed and clanked along. It was an incomparably gloomy scene, as so many land-war scenes are, all dirty snow and mud and artillery damage, and one woman with no teeth and a head scarf and a cow-like stare, watching them go past. Early in the war, a mortar round had landed in a square in Tuzla and killed seventy-one people, most of them children.
The trucker dropped Alan at what had been the UNPROFOR HQ. That was not where Murch was, of course; Murch was in the intel center, in a former school three rubble-strewn blocks away. When Alan had finally humped his pack to the right doorless office, Murch looked at him and said, “Is this the best the States can send us? You look like the meat course in an MRE.”
“I’m wiped.”
“You’ll fit right in.” Murch looked worn out himself. Alan had met Murch a couple of months before down on the coast; they had done a job together and had hit it off. They had found a shared interest in fishing. Murch was convinced there would be fishing nearby when spring came. His only evidence was that Tito had been a fisherman. “Eaten?”
“Somebody gave me a box lunch. I think I ate it. The French were going to give me real food. With wine.”
“You want to be walked through the chow line first or you want to crash?” There were cartons and fiber barrels everywhere. Murch was in the middle of moving.
“I’m running on empty, man.”
Murch handed him a tan plastic cup of acidic coffee and said, “Ten minutes. Got to brief you. Then—” He looked at his watch. “You can get eight hours and you’ll be off.”
“What the hell is ‘off’?”
Murch jerked his thumb toward the sky. “Up the hill. We’ll give you a Humvee and a driver and a gunner. You’re going up on a peacekeeping mission—between the Italians and the Kenyans.”
Thirteen minutes later, he was asleep.
Eastern Zaire.
The air was damp from rain that had come out of season, making haloes around the gas lamps in the cinder-block building. Insects flew in and out of the haloes. Out in the camp, somebody laughed; somebody screamed. Peter Ntarinada, sitting in the building in the scruffy room he called his office, pushed the gift bottle of Glenlivet across the rickety table. “I want more money and I want more arms,” he said.
The Frenchman poured himself some whiskey. He gave a kind of shrug with one eyebrow. “We don’t give something for nothing, Colonel. Lascelles himself said that times are tight.”
“Something for nothing! Look how I’m living! Is this nothing?” Peter snatched the bottle back, poured more into his own glass. “I’m living like a peasant! I live in this fucking camp that is paved with shit because we don’t have toilets—you call that nothing? Anyway, when we get back into Rwanda, you’ll be repaid. Lascelles knows he’ll be repaid. I have a scheme, you see? To move diamonds out of Angola—”
“Yes, yes.” The Frenchman nodded in the way that means, You told me that three times already. “We want you back in Rwanda, Colonel. We want you in the government there. But, we think—Lascelles thinks—in order for us to, mmm, underwrite you again, we need to have, mmm, insurance.”
“Insurance.” Ntarinada, a man at war, didn’t seem to understand the concept of insurance. In fact, he laughed.
