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 The teacher, himself a case officer no longer active, was pointing a laser pointer at a map with the outlines of countries but no names and asking questions with the resigned tone of a man who knew that he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