The Crisis (22 page)

The general's screen showed the disposition off the beaches. Ashaara had no navy, but
Shamal
and
Cyclone
were on station off the main port and
Firebolt
off the delta at R'as Zalurah, to intercept any speedboats or dhows that might interfere.
Oldendorf
was covering the amphibs—
Tarawa
south of the islands and shoals of the Ashaaran delta,
Duluth
and
Anchorage
to the north, all under way at bare steerageway—from air attack.

Three huge screens constituted the display area. The leftmost showed operations ashore; the middle, the amphibious operating area proper—the one Ahearn was toggled to at his chair—and the right, the air picture from the Nile deep into Saudi, a fused display from AWACs,
Oldendorf
, and Centcom. An unidentified air contact to the north showed 420 knots at twelve thousand feet on course 167. As he watched, the symbol blinked from unidentified to friendly. A B-52 with IFF turned off, headed for the secret but hard-to-disguise U.S. air base in Saudi.

He thought they were doing it right. For a moment he let himself hope this might work out as planned.

The general picked up a phone and a light colonel rose from his terminal. The J-2, the task force's intel officer. Ahearn sucked on his glasses' earpiece. “So, why are they not moving? Did we miss a dispersal? A redeployment, before we got eyes on them?”

The J-2 said, “We saw some movement of light units yesterday, General. Jeep size, trucks. Consistent with troops loading up what they can steal and deserting. No value in a tank to a looter.”

“The next decision's at Point Y,” Ahearn said. Y was the remote wadi where the LCACs would turn off their fans and drop ramps for the tanks to trundle into assault formation. “We've got better night fighting capability. But if those T-55s get hull down behind a ridgeline, with infrared spotlights, they can cream us. I don't like these ROEs.”

“They're definitely restrictive, sir,” said the J-2.

“How's it go again?”

“Return fire only in the event of armed resistence. Fire will not be initiated; no interdiction or prep fires authorized.”

“If we see movement to contact, we can do an air strike?”

“That'd stretch the ROEs, sir, but I don't see how anyone can reasonably object.”

“Lenson, you worked in the West Wing. Can they reasonably object?”

Dan rubbed his face. Coffee wasn't working anymore. “Sir, without meaning to be cynical, from the point of view of the president's people, all those ROEs are for is to absolve them of responsibility if you drop a laser-guided bomb on a school. Failing that, the op order clearly gives you own-force self-protection. If interdicting an armored column en route contact isn't force protection, I don't know what is.”

“But those could be dummies, or target hulks. Hal, you sure they haven't already redeployed? Waiting to kick the shit out of us when we drop ramps?”

The intel officer wiped his palms. “Based on the best recon available, it's our opinion the Twenty-first never left laager. But since we don't have before and after photos—”

“Then it's possible.”

“Yessir. Not probable, but . . . possible.”

“Which is one step above vomiting in a bucket.” Ahearn waved impatiently and they moved off as the general reached for his phone again.

“I remember where I saw you before,” the intel officer muttered. Dan lifted his eyebrows. “In Eritrea. With the briefcase, the nuclear codes, behind the president. Wasn't that you?”

“The emergency satchel. Yeah, that was me.”

“I saw you in that video of the shoving match with the troops. In the mess tent? The Secret Service using you for a battering ram. Didn't take, huh?”

“Sorry, I'm a little slow right now. What do you mean?”

“Well, you're back in the field, right?”

Dan shrugged, unwilling to explain how protecting the president had gotten him exiled. “Can we check if those tanks are still there? Send that UAV back at low altitude, take a look infrared? Or get some recon-type eyes out there? Right now all we're doing is guessing.”

The lieutenant colonel said he'd find out, and headed off. Dan stopped at the coffee mess in the back of the space and just stood, aching back pressed to the black-painted bulkhead. Ahearn was getting bent out of shape over nothing. Everything he'd heard about Ashaara portrayed poverty and social disintegration from decades of revolution, war, and mis-government. If the president had flown, why should the army fight?

But the Twenty-first was an elite formation. If the whole army crumbled, evaporated, that might be convenient for Collateral Gratitude. But what about the follow-on relief effort? How did you maintain security with no host nation army? A hell of a lot easier to use troops people were at least used to, one they shared a language with, than try to rivet down order with a foreign force. Especially in a largely Muslim country.

He valved another hit of bad coffee, and headed back to his terminal. Eighteen messages glowed on his screen, and Henrickson and two other staffers waited, looking impatient.

 

FORTY miles west of Ashaara City, in the dead dark of night, Dr. Gráinne O'Shea lay facedown in a ditch, digging her fingernails into dry earth as above her diesels roared and steel treads earthquaked down clods and dust as if to bury her alive. She'd forgotten her bloody toes inside her boots, her thirst, the fear that had hiked beside her since the afternoon before. Her mind felt like a bucket of dirty water.

The longest day and night of her life had begun the morning before, at the compound, when she'd answered her cell's chime to find her administrator from the Hydrological Programme on the line. “Tell me you're not still at Fenteni” were his first words.

“Ah—I am. Why?”

“Didn't you get my e-mail?”

“Down since yesterday, Derek.”

“You've not seen the news? Right . . . there's been a coup.”

“Oh God.”

“At least that's what it sounds like. You haven't heard?”

She bent to look out the dusty window at the ravine, where nothing had changed for several million years. “Hinterlands here, Derek. If we don't hear it from the villagers, we don't hear. But a coup—”

“New York pulled its people out three days ago. We thought you'd gone with them.”

“Never got that. Sorry.” She bent again, catching a figure outside, looking toward the road. Her assistant
had
acted strangely since Major Assad's visit. Outside for long periods, or when he was in, keeping a lookout at the window. Once he'd asked where she kept her passport.

So when she said thanks for the warning, she'd act on it right away, and went outside, she didn't like his evasive glance. “Abdiwali, I just had a disturbing call. The president's fled. There's rioting. You knew?”

A tight smile, averted eyes. “Yes, Doctor.”

“Were you going to tell me? Or just let me find out on my own?”

“You always know what to do, Dr. O'Shea.”

Sodding hell, it was like talking to some sly boyfriend. She pushed damp hair off her face—even newly risen, the sun was a torch—and tried for calm. An Irish temper didn't help with Ashaarans. “Stockholm says we should leave. The other agencies have already pulled out. Should we call the police compound? For an escort?”

“They have already gone.”

“The
police
?”

He only looked toward the horizon. She huffed. “All right, we're leaving. The truck's fueled?”

“We have three-quarters of a tank.”

“Is that enough?”

“To go where?”

“Well . . . the evac plan's always been the International Airport. If it's closed or occupied, then south toward Malakat. The Quarleses; we can stay with Howard and Michele.”

“Will they still be there?”

“I don't know. I tried to ring but no one answers. If they're gone we can carry on south to Eritrea.”

Her assistant grimaced. “Then you shall go. But what will happen to me?”

“What d'you mean? If I pull out, you go too.”

He looked more hopeful, and followed her inside to pack.

Every INGO in Africa planned against this very situation. She stuffed the latest tomograms into a briefcase, jimmied the hard drive out of her machine, and found the padlock for the trailer door. She looked at the water-versus-population graph on the wall. Take it? She decided to leave it.

They loaded the seismograph and her luggage, then hitched up the trailer with the sound source and geophones. With one Blunnie planted in the Rover, she stopped to gaze at the compound. Her office was locked, but she doubted it'd be intact when she returned.

If she ever did. Everyone knew researchers who'd been exiled from the lands they studied, some for decades, others forever. For a moment the dusty bare earth, the muddle of sheds and prefabs against the backdrop of mountains, seemed unimaginably dear. Then, squalid as a vacant lot in Derry. She got in and twisted the key.

. . .

THE hitch groaned as the trailer twisted on the uneven roads. They'd never been good, but over the past few years they'd really degenerated. Since the famine began, the government had become invisible, except for the police. Now they'd vanished too. She and Abdiwali rocked and grated over gravel and sand and broken stone, seldom at over twenty kilometers per hour; breaking an axle in Africa could be a death sentence. Here and there the tracks of previous vehicles left the road entirely to travel on flat desert. She always followed. The rebels were known to mine the roads. Staying on them when others didn't wasn't a smart move.

A dry dusty breeze made it hard to see, made progress even slower. They reached the first village around noon. At first she thought it deserted. Then people crept out of the shadows.

She caught her breath. Dusty skeletons, feebly lifting begging hands as the Rover ground past. She'd decided to take the back roads south of the river, rather than crossing to the highway. The river was dry now, of course, but she'd reasoned that if there was rioting when they reached the city, they might not be able to get through. The southern route would let her bypass it if she had to. The terrain was rougher, but it was the best chance of making it to the home of the Quarleses, who ran a school for AIDS-orphaned girls. But now she realized she'd immured herself too long. It'd been a fortnight since she'd left the compound, months since she'd come this way.

So when she saw the roadblock ahead she did the worst possible thing: simply drove up, halted, and lowered the window, smiling at ragged men who stared at her with disbelief, then at each other with glee.

It cost her two hundred pounds, all the cash she carried. They'd eyed Abdiwali as he sat rigid, but hadn't spoken to him, only her.

As soon as she was past the village she pulled off, bumped over a shallow ditch into a cracked-open field, and snapped, “Dump the bloody Bison. Pull the pin and leave it. I could have turned off and bypassed that village if I hadn't been pulling the fucking thing.”

They could replace computers and trailers, but without the sound source—the only one in Ashaara—her days as a hydrologist were over. She watched it shrink in the rearview with a sharper pang than she'd felt leaving the compound.

Lightened, the Rover rattled more but went faster. This part of the country looked featureless to an eye new to it, but gradually revealed folds and slants. What she didn't like was the bodies. Some lay along the road, beside burned-out cars; others were just bright cloth in the dead fields. Abdiwali sat as if mummified in the passenger seat, staring through the sand-dulled windscreen, gripping a worn gray bag he carried his kit in.

They killed him that afternoon. There wasn't any way around the second roadblock, in a broken region furrowed by pebble-strewn gullies that had been a side channel of the Durmani back in the middle Holocene. The gullies made the road, never paved or even graded since colonial times, twist and writhe so that spare parts and jerricans in back slid and banged from one side to the other. This time when she stopped two men stood by her door pointing guns while six others went to the passenger side. Abdiwali threw her one terrified glance before they pulled him out. They questioned him briefly—two, three sentences—then the machetes rose and fell.

“Why thee travel with that northerner?” a gaunt man said in broken French, leaning into her side and looking around.

Her tongue and jaw felt as if injected with novocaine. “He was my assistant.”

“And what are thee?”

“A water expert. With the UN.”

This brought bitter laughter and jokes in a dialect she couldn't follow. “Thee came to the wrong place for water,” the gaunt one said, leaning in again so his smell, like that of some carrion-eating bird, pushed into the vehicle. “But the right one for men.”

As they laughed again her toe felt for the accelerator, ready to stamp it and hurl through the overturned carts and iron bedsteads; but they stepped back and waved her on lazily, as if whatever energy they owned had been expended on the killing.

At the next roadblock they took her car. She raged at them but they simply pulled her out and got in. She stood shaking, cupping her elbows in her palms. The sun stacked white cubes of radiant heat between her and them. They drove off, abandoning the roadblock as if it had served its purpose.

Leaving her standing in vibrating heat, in the middle of a planate wasteland strewn with baking rocks, baking rocks, and yet more baking rocks. And here and there, down any fissure or furrow, a few dusty thorn plants so sere and juiceless the starving goats of desperate nomads had turned their beards aside. She felt like a robot, though what robot would shake with terror? And turned and stumbled away, knowing instinctively now she had to leave the road. Without a car, that colored shell of steel, technology, and culture, she was nothing more than a pale grub of tasty prey.