“We want to put in a company of real soldiers, Colonel. Oh, I know, I know! Your men are soldiers, yes, yes, they are very good at beating up civilians and fragging people in churches, but frankly, the Tutsis are trained now, and we have intelligence that the Ugandans and the Tanzanians are helping them. So—we need insurance, and you need real soldiers.”
Ntarinada’s face was drawn tight. He licked his lips. “White soldiers, you mean.”
“One company. The best. They’ll go through the Tutsis like a knife, then you come behind. Yes, white. Sorry—it’s the way the world is, Colonel. They have the guns, they have the training, and they have the recent experience. We’ll give you money and guns if you’ll accept one hundred of the best. To ease things a little, Lascelles will send a man you already know to run things. A friend of yours. Okay?”
Ntarinada was furious, but he contained his rage. “Who?”
“Zulu.”
Ntarinada stared. He was surprised. And impressed.
“Zulu,” the Frenchman said again. “The guy who was here two years ago and shot down the—”
Ntarinada held up a hand. “Not even here—don’t say it out loud.” He let his hand fall with a little slap on the table. He pushed his glass about, picked it up and drank off the rest of it and lifted the bottle to pour more. “A lot has happened since Zulu was here.”
“A lot has happened to him. Bosnia. He’s been fighting in Bosnia.”
Ntarinada nodded. He understood perfectly well how a man like Zulu could be fighting in his own country. “Zulu is a good man. Okay. Tell Lascelles I said okay. But get me money and some guns!” He drank. “I keep overall command,” he said.
The Frenchman shook his head. “Sorry. Zulu.”
“Never!”
“Insurance.” The Frenchman smiled. “How about—shared command? You’re both colonels now.”
Ntarinada looked away into the little room’s shadows. He was looking into a century of colonialism, the bitter darkness of working for the whites. “All right,” he said. “I’ll share command with Zulu.” He ran his hand over his thin face, sighed like a man dying of exhaustion. “You bastards.”
Above Tuzla.
The Canadian driver loved the Humvee and couldn’t stop demonstrating it. Alan got the hairiest ride he’d had on dry land since a drunken Italian had taken him on the Amalfi Drive. He found it oddly exhilarating, maybe from having had eight hours of sleep so deep he didn’t even dream. Still, it was nice to know it was a trip he’d have to make only once.
Except that he made it three times—three times up, three times down. And the last time wasn’t until the next afternoon.
The trouble up there wasn’t something that needed a linguist; it needed a good listener. And Alan was a pretty good listener, like anybody who wants to make it in intelligence. The fact that he knew both languages helped, sure; to the Kenyan doctor in charge of the medical unit, there was a plus in hearing a non-African say that it was baridi, baridi kabisa—bloody cold, man. And Alan had been in Kenya and could at least talk as much as a traveler can about the coast and Nairobi and problems up on the Sudanese border. So he learned that the real trouble between the Italian soldiers and the Kenyan medics was not that the Italians were racists or the Kenyans were bad nurses, but that they had all been there too long and none of them felt he had done shit to help the peace and now they were being pulled out and replaced by NATO. To make it worse, the unarmed Kenyan medics felt isolated by language and color and abandoned by the very people who were supposed to protect them, and they took it out in gallows-humor jokes, and some of the jokes were about how the Italians had got their asses whipped twice in Ethiopia—once by the Ethiopians and once by the Brits and the Kenyans.
For Sale: Like-new Italian rifle. Only dropped once.
The jokes had gone stale, then bad; there had been shouting—and, the doctor admitted, a bad fight, a punch that had emptied the benches and become a brawl. Bad.
So Alan got several of the officers from both units together and badgered them into eating their MREs in the same tent—it was lunch, and partway through one of the Italians produced some wine—and, when a shouting match broke out, he got the doctor to calm down enough to snarl that they, the Kenyans, were catching hell from the Serbs, who were just over the newly drawn border two miles away, and the Italians were doing nothing to stop it.
“We can’t do anything to stop it, you cretin!” the Italian screamed. Alan translated this as “We do everything we can, sir.” The Kenyan hollered, “You were afraid in 1942 and you’re afraid now!” which Alan didn’t translate at all. Another Kenyan, a senior surgeon named wa Danio, shook a finger at the Italians and told them that it was the civilians, the civilians over there, they were being tortured, maimed, massacred, and the Italians were doing nothing. The senior Italian, Captain Gagliano, threw up his hands and said, “Nothing, nothing—there is nothing we can do! Anyway, we are leaving.” After lunch, Doctor wa Danio insisted that Alan come with him to the ward, where he showed him an old man who had had his feet cut off with an axe and who had crawled the three miles to the Kenyan unit.
“You know, Lieutenant, we Africans are supposed to be uncivilized, but this is a horror. This is not stupid men swinging pangas; this is deliberate, organized hell. The Italians think we are savages, but we know those bastards over there are monsters!” He showed Alan a woman who had been gang-raped and beaten. A child with one hand, the other lost when he had tried to keep his already wounded father from being beheaded. Alan had a child. He felt sick, then thought what it would be like to sit here week after week, helpless to stop it …
So Alan went down the mountain. On the way down, he figured how it could be done. A warning bell rang in his head but he turned it off, paid no attention, and instead he listened to an inner voice that said, Okay, Suter, you want liaison and intelligence support and acquisition. I’ll give it to you, right up the nose.
He told Murch that the problem up there was not language or jokes or nationalities, it was frustration, fighting men and medical personnel who were frustrated and angry and unappreciated. They wanted to go in and make one hit on the Bosnian Serbs who were committing the atrocities before they were pulled out.
“We can’t go in there,” Murch said. “We’re protectors. Not aggressors.” Murch’s mouth seemed to lose some of its muscle: he was afraid.
“They say there was US armor up there a week ago and it got turned back.”
“Mm, yeah, all the women and kids in a Serb village blocked the road, lay down in front of a tank—they’re fanatical up there. Leave it.”
“Going in to get war criminals would be allowed.”
“I’m not at all sure of that, and we don’t know anything about war criminals over there.”
“The Kenyans say that they know for certain of a house ten miles in that serves as a command center for the butchery. They say it’s used for torture. Everybody knows it, they say.”
“Oh, Christ, Alan, ‘everybody—’” He was afraid of his place, his next evaluation, his career. Fuck him.
“Look, the Italians are good guys and they’re hot to trot. They’ve been sitting up there for two months and their hands have been tied and they’ve had to watch—to watch—while civilians get slaughtered, because of this phony ‘border.’ They want to do something.”
“We all want to do something. Alan, there’s nothing—”
“Yes, there is.” He was feeling pretty good, still. He thought he’d start to sink, but he hadn’t. It was two in the afternoon; he felt really good. Not wired, but charged. “Hit that two-bit torture