The Crisis (26 page)

“Good morning,” said a light colonel in battle dress. “Let me welcome everyone to Camp Matevenado, home of the Sixty-second Engineer Battalion, Thirty-sixth Engineer Brigade, Sixty-fourth Corps Support Group, Thirteenth Expeditionary Sustainment Command. Before anyone asks, the matevenado's a big mean mother of a desert spider native to the American Southwest. I'll be chairing this logistics meeting for General Cornelius Ahearn, U.S. Marine Corps. A special welcome to Joint Task Force Red Sea, the J4 transportation folks from Centcom, and our guests from State and other federal agencies.

“Our biggest problem's going to be transport, which our first speaker will address. Specifically, the fuel problem. Getting it in-country, distributing it, and paying for it . . .”

Dan leaned back. He forced himself to listen as, across the room, he noticed several men staring at him.

. . .

AISHA sniffed, shaking her dress out to let the GMC's air-conditioning underneath. She'd picked up some kind of respiratory bug. Her chest hurt when she breathed. The embassy van rolled as soon as the door slammed. Out the gate, past the sandbagged post that blocked half the street.

Led by a camo-painted Humvee with a rear-mounted machine gun, the convoy weaved and braked between wrecked trucks, half-collapsed buildings. The damage worsened after they crossed the Victory Bridge, a rusting, creaking monstrosity built by the British in 1944 in a futile attempt to create a Red Sea highway. Or so said an old book her roommate had given her. The building that housed the local help was now so crowded, Aisha was sleeping in an overflow women's berthing set up in the GSA Building. Her translator was growing huge; Aisha couldn't imagine even walking in that condition, but the little woman kept working.

Tanklike vehicles on wheels guarded both ends of the bridge. The New Quarter was deserted. Block after block were as gutted as if bombed. Vultures reluctantly hopped aside from dead things in the street. Those buildings not burned were barricaded, lower windows boarded up. Armed men glared as the convoy rumbled past. Only a few civilians haunted the streets, faces averted, as if they didn't want to see what their city had become.

“The Ashaaran national flower,” Erculiano muttered.

“What?”

“Those plastic bags.”

Yes, they were still there, drifting and tumbling; filmy pink, dark red, teal blue, thinner than American grocery bags. She knew now they were for qat, tossed aside once the chewer had his wad tucked.

A stonefaced contract guard with his assault bag occupied the front passenger seat, with her and Erculiano and Terry Peyster, the young man who'd paid off the sergeant major the night of the attack on the compound, in the rear. Peyster was the RSO, the regional security officer, from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Department of State.

The security detail had arrived two days after the embassy attack. They wore black shooting gloves and short jackets embroidered with a snarling wolf's head. They spent their off-duty time at the motor pool lifting concrete blocks and engine parts they'd put together into weight sets, but their bulkiness was also due to soft armor. They were polite, but she caught their evaluating and, it seemed, hostile looks. They patrolled the walls, and acted as bodyguards when embassy personnel ventured outside.

Not that they'd gone out much recently. The compound was an island, supplied by helicopter. They ate airlifted food, drank and showered with airlifted water; the GMC ran on airlifted gasoline. She stared out as deserted streets went by. Every tree had been cut down.

“No manhole covers,” Erculiano murmured. She blinked at gaps in the buckled, potholed roadway. She met the gaze of a woman who'd stopped halfway across the road to let the convoy pass. Her reflection overlay the woman's in the tinted glass.

“Stand by to deploy,” the driver said to the other contractor. “Watch your six.”

“Nobody else is,” the man said, as if it were a challenge and response. The lead Humvee turned suddenly, rocking, and scooted down a side street. The other vehicles followed, threading battered, overturned cars she realized were set as approach barriers.

They abruptly braked. Armed Ashaarans leapt up from around a small fire, angrily waving them to a halt, jerking cartridges into their weapons. They looked strung out on qat. Before the van was fully stopped their own guard was out, slipping a short weapon from the assault bag. More emerged from the other SUVs, each beelining for his assigned station. The two biggest jogged to the front and bulled up, confronting the Ashaarans chest to chest.

Aisha located her pistol under the abaya, her pucker factor rocketing. She reached for the door handle, but Peyster covered her hand with his. “Give 'em a few minutes.” He had a boyish smile like some teen heartthrob. “They'll give us the all clear.”

 

THE last time she'd seen this man had been in a subbasement of the Palais de Sécurité, with dim flickering lighting and that strange smell from the cell blocks. Now, mysteriously promoted to general despite the flight of his government and dissolution of his ministry, Abdullahi Assad stood at a glass-topped table in a freshly pressed uniform and Sam Browne belt that made him look like the heavy in a 1940 Warner Brothers film. His uniform cap was set on the glass. The mirror behind him reflected his long neck and the dark skin at the crown of his head. The mansion had obviously belonged to someone wealthy, but there was no sign of him. Only the continual circulation of armed men from room to room, strolling from outside to inside. All were smoking or chewing qat, and some were doing both. She looked for the aged transcriptionist who'd bandied Italian with Erculiano but didn't see her. They were three on one with Assad, which might be difficult. The GrayWolf men stood in two corners, holding rifles. The other two were occupied by yellow-eyed Ashaarans with AKs. The bodyguards eyed each other like leashed Dobermans.

Assad bowed. Said in his deep, halting voice, but to her surprise in English: “American friends. Welcome to my new office.”

Okay, she was used to that. Most cops in the Mideast refused to speak the local language to Americans. Not because the Americans couldn't speak
their tongue, though that was usually true, but because everybody wanted to practice his English. Even those who professed hatred for the West.

But the first time they'd met, he'd pretended he couldn't speak English at all. Or Arabic, for that matter. Would anything else he told them hold up in court?

But that too was the Mideast. If she had a dollar for every time she'd talked to someone who'd told her one thing one day and the opposite the next, contradicting both himself and what she'd seen with her own eyes, she could've retired long ago.

She pondered this as a very tall, very dark woman with a heavy mustache brought in a tray of soft drinks. The familiar bottle, but the contents were too pale to be Coca-Cola or its Mideastern imitators, Zam Zam or Mecca. She set the glasses out with faint clicks on the tabletop, poured, then left without a word or a glance.

Of course they each had to take one. Aisha hesitated—the bottles here were recycled without sterilization, so you risked hepatitis C and who knew what else—but felt the amused regard of the Ashaarans. To Jahannam with them. She drank off the warm sweet fluid and poured more.

Assad seemed unsure whom to address. He looked at Peyster, then at Erculiano. They nodded to her. He shrugged. “Agent Ar-Rahim. The first time we met, I did not ask about your family. You have family?”

“A mother and father in New York, yes.”

“But you yourself, not married?”

“I'm not. You, General?”

“I am fortunate. Three sons.”

“All in good health?”

He lifted his hands. “All praise and thanks be to Allah.”

She let him play host. Sooner or later they'd get down to business. Perhaps she could steer it that way. “Congratulations.”

He lowered his glass. “Excuse?”

“Major to General—a big jump. Your superiors must have great faith in you.”

“Thank you,” Assad said, face a study. “They do.”

“Only—who
are
your superiors?”

She'd hoped the question would set him back, but it didn't seem to. “My superiors are the Governing Council.”

She glanced at Peyster—shouldn't he be stepping in?—but he simply sat smiling. So she went on. “I'm sorry, I haven't heard of them. Did they replace the former government?”

“There is no ‘former' government. It is the same, the legitimate government of the People's Republic.”

“Please enlighten me. I'd understood the government had fled. I know the president's resigned.”

“Mr. President has not fled. He is still president. Only in Switzerland for treatment.”

“I didn't know he was ill. And the minister of security?”

“The minister of justice is also there for treatment.”

“They're
both
in Switzerland for treatment?”

“This is correct. And I act for them.”

“Um, very good. Well, General, as you know, the United Nations has tasked us to carry out relief operations. I've been assigned the force-protection mission. That means I work with you, badge to badge, to reduce any friction. We help you, you help us.”

“I am very glad to hear this,” Assad said deadpan. “What is it I do to help?”

She looked at Peyster again but got no clues this time either. Her throat itched and she took out her handkerchief. Coughing felt like her esophagus was being sawed open with a dull knife. Assad waited. She drank more juice or whatever it was.

“We have to protect the various relief agencies that'll be arriving. As well as our own medical, construction, and transportation people. First, we'd like your ministry to resume guarding our embassy. Second, we need locals to work with our security teams at the airport. Third, we need three to five SDI agents to help Mr. Erculiano work the antidrug and anti-terror missions.”

Assad was nodding, but wasn't making any notes. She decided he wouldn't appreciate having a woman point this out. It was tricky, trying to motivate local officials to cooperate when you had no real leverage. She'd gotten interview training in basic school, but liaison took skills of a higher order. She coughed, wincing again. “Finally, we need to sit down with your customs people, and discuss importation of weapons. We intercepted a shipment coming in from Iran a few days before—I mean, before the president left. For treatment.”

“We also need to know how we can help him,” Peyster put in.

Assad turned to him at once. “We need transport. Fuel. Food, and arms. How soon can you provide?”

But Peyster sat back smiling, fingers tented, leaving her to answer. “We can provide some food. And trucks. Arms . . . how would we know those who receive them can be trusted? There's a rebel movement—”

“Whatever comes to us will not go to the southerners, who are the rebels and looters. We have ways of identifying those we trust.”

She frowned; she'd heard that before. Oh, yes. The little man who'd
welcomed them. A local proverb? “By the way, how is Mr. Bahdoon? I trust he's well?”

One of the guards stirred. Did Assad glance at him? “Bahdoon we have not seen since the troubles. I'm sorry.”

“Was Mr. Bahdoon a southerner?” She didn't use tribal names, since Assad hadn't, but Nuura had explained the “rebellion” more clearly than the CIA and State backgrounding.

Like most states in Africa, Ashaara's boundaries had been burned like a branding iron over a teem of mutually antagonistic tribes and ethnicities. Here that meant Cushitic-speaking Issas, Issaqs, Gadabursi, and Danakils. There were Bantus in the south and Ethiopian-dialect Tawahedo Christians in the west, and of course the Indians, into shopkeeping and import-export. Gilhirs from the high desert. The “northerners” were Diniyues, Jazirs, and the president's clan, the Xaashas, who'd dominated after the collapse of the Morgue.

She wondered how his world looked through Assad's dark, weary eyes. Did he really represent a rump government? Or even that? She said cautiously, “We'll have to discuss that in depth. Can you provide security to our embassy?”

“I will take that request to the Council.”

“All right, and one final question. We saw armed men in the streets on the way here. Were they yours?”

He gave her the same smile she'd noted each time he'd lied. “Yes. They are reporting to the Governing Council.”

“There are no other clan militias?”

“ ‘Other' militias?”

“I mean, besides your forces.”

“The legitimate security forces of this country.”

“That's what I meant.”

Assad called, and the server came out again. Aisha had left a little in the heel of the glass, the custom in the Gulf to show she couldn't possibly finish it. The woman held out the bottle; Aisha wobbled her glass between thumb and index. That seemed to get the message across.

“There are renegade elements,” the general admitted. “Responsible for the looting. They will be justified.”

“Brought to justice?”

“That is what I said.”

She decided to go in over the horns and see how the bull reacted. “General, we intend to put forward a policy of arms for food.”

“Arms for food?” The phrase amused him. “An old concept in Ashaara. We use our arms to get our food.”

“Not exactly. We'll supply food contingent on disarming the militias.”

“Contingent?”

Peyster spoke a word she didn't catch. Assad said, to her, “Rebels and criminals, no problem. But government forces will not disarm.”

“I see. Well. How would we contact these rebels? And the other—I mean, the clan militias? We'll need to talk to them.”

“We will set that up. You will go through us.” Assad put his hands on the table and rose. The three Americans rose too. Assad bowed and left.