Mission Liberty (25 page)

“Tell them that once the light’s gone, the curse will have been lifted,” she said.

Ackroyd relayed the message to Father Ayala, who passed it on to the people of Sagoa. Ayala, MacKenzie surmised, understood
the sham and saw right through it but didn’t care, as long as the hungry people were fed.

A few minutes later, Stephen broke the padlock with a large maul. Inside, they found cardboard boxes and wooden crates with
the letters IPAB stenciled on the side. The cardboard boxes contained U.S. Army issue MREs, enough to feed the village for
perhaps a week. The wooden crates contained AK-47s and ammunition. When MacKenzie told Father Ayala, as Stephen translated,
that she’d be willing to show his people how to load and fire the Kalashnikovs, he shook his head and refused, saying his
organization was a pacifist organization—even in the face of death, they would not resort to violence. She showed them, instead,
how to open and use the MREs, either beef stroganoff or chicken tetrazzini, how to crack the chempacks to heat the entrées,
and she held up one of the cookies and took a bite to demonstrate that what appeared to be a thick piece of cardboard was
in fact edible.

She expected a rush, but the people of Sagoa waited patiently as the meals were distributed. She’d expected cheers, or some
kind of animation, but the people simply took their food and consumed it in silence, the children crouched around their MREs
as if to protect them from raiding hyenas, fearful that someone was going to take them away.

Mack was starving, devouring her meal without thinking too much about it. Ackroyd picked at his meal and eventually handed
what he couldn’t eat to a child, who thanked him. They were sitting on the tailgate of the Rover.

“They’re not very good,” Mack told him, “but you really should eat something. You’re too thin.”

“You should have seen me in college,” he told her with a smile. “I was downright roly-poly. I’ve been trying to lose weight
my whole life. This is great. They say you can’t be too rich or too thin—I’ll work on being too rich later.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we should head back to Camp Seven. How far do you think it is?”

“As the crow flies,” he said, “probably not far. The question is, how to drive there. The road we were on leads back to Baku
Da’al, Ayala said. There’s an oil facility at El Amin, but it might not be connected by road. The pipeline runs north and
south but the oil workers patrol it with ultralight aircraft. There must have been a road when they built it.”

“I’ll call for directions in the morning,” she said. “Unless my batteries give out.”

“Call who?” Ackroyd asked. “Triple A?”

She’d almost said she’d call CENTCOM. To Stephen, she was still Mary Dorsey, with the United Nations. She’d dialed DeLuca’s
number earlier, but he wasn’t answering. She’d been impressed, all day, by the way Stephen had watched out for her. She had
to admit she’d developed a bit of a crush, as Evelyn Warner might have said. Nothing serious, of course.

“I’ll call the CIA,” she said. “Maybe they’re watching us right now with their satellites.”

He looked up at the night sky.

“It’d be just like the military to fuck up the Milky Way,” he said.

“Are you antimilitary?” she asked him.

“Not at all,” he said. “My father was in the military. A colonel, in fact. I’m just feeling very pro Milky Way right now.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“We should get some sleep,” he told her. Most of the fires and lamps in the village had gone out now. They heard a woman singing
softly somewhere. “There’s blankets here. If you put the seat down, you can sleep in the back of the Rover. It’s not bad,
and you probably want to get up off the ground, where the no-see-ums won’t get you.”

He wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, then picked up a second one and wrapped it around his own before slipping down
from the tailgate.

“So I guess I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

“Where are you going?” she asked him. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking around. “I’ll find a place somewhere.”

“Get in the car,” she told him. “I’m sure it’s big enough in the back for the both of us.”

The fact was, in the last three days, she’d grown enormously fond of the young writer, with his nimble intelligence and his
quiet good looks, his gentle manner, his large heart. He was not, at all, the kind of man she was used to meeting in the military,
and perhaps that was why she was so intrigued by him, or maybe it was just the old-fashioned stuff, the way he made sure she
was taken care of before attending to himself, held doors open for her, listened to her closely when she spoke, and showed
an interest in her. In the military, most guys (her team members the exceptions) still didn’t know quite what to do with a
woman who was also a peer and fellow soldier, except treat her like one of the guys, make coarse jokes, unless they felt threatened,
and then they were complete assholes. Stephen was a good person. He told amusing stories. He found her stories reciprocally
amusing. There was something mysterious about him, something he was withholding from her, and she wanted to know what it was.
She’d had a fantasy, as a younger girl, of living in Hollywood and being an actress and living with a man who loved her and
wrote fabulous screenplays for her to act in, sort of like Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. The fantasy changed to living
with a rock star who wrote songs about her, and then after a few years of dating actual boys, her fantasy was just that someday
she’d meet a guy who wasn’t a total dickhead. Stephen cared about what was going on in Africa, but not in a bleeding heart
distant way—he was actually here, putting himself on the line, literally, though he didn’t have to, trying to do something
about it, to make things better, and she admired that.

When he lay down next to her in the back of the Land Rover, she felt her pulse quicken and wondered if she was falling in
love with him. The idea struck her fairly suddenly, but just as suddenly, it made a kind of strange sense. It was an unlikely
time and place to fall in love, but who could control the time and place when you fell in love? Maybe she wanted to fall in
love, willed herself there, because of the hatred and horror all around them. Maybe the urge or need or wish to fall in love
was some sort of survival mechanism, a thing the body knows it needs, the same way it knows it needs water or food. It wasn’t
the simple emotional release of sex she wanted, the way men wanted that, but something deeper and purer, a sense of connection
and intimacy, where the bond came from knowing the utter truth about each other. There were men she trusted with her life,
men like DeLuca, or Dan, but this was a man she trusted with her soul. That was how it felt.

She bunched her sweatshirt up beneath her head for a pillow and lay down next to him. They’d put a blanket down to lie on
and used the second to cover themselves. He’d propped his head up on his backpack.

“I can’t wait to read what you write about all this,” she told him. “I’m sure it’s going to be brilliant.”

“I know this will sound strange,” he told her, “but it is brilliant. I don’t have any doubts. It might even win a Pulitzer.
Sometimes I think the only thing that could stop it would be if Kruger and the others get jealous and sabotage me.”

“How would they do that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “Accuse me of plagiarism, maybe. Hack into my computer, when I start writing it into my computer,
and erase everything.”

“I’ve been tempted to peek into your journal…”

“Don’t ever do that,” he said, flashing anger for the first time. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t like people reading what
I write before I finish it.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said. “I only said I’ve been tempted…”

“Well just, please, okay?” he said, calming down. “I’m sorry. I’d rather wait to show you when I’m finished. I don’t want
to sound like a wuss, but that’s how I feel.”

“All right,” MacKenzie said. “You have to promise. It’s just that I see you writing in your journal and I get curious. I’ll
wait. I just wanted you to know that I believe in you. And as someone with whom I was recently shot at, I can tell you that
I’ve been shot at before with other men, and you’re not a wuss. Not remotely.”

“Call me old-fashioned,” Stephen said, smiling, “but I don’t think I like hearing that you’ve been shot at with other men.
I want to think I’m the only one.”

“You’re the only one, Stephen,” she said. “I’ve never been shot at before with anyone like you. I mean that.”

“Mary Dorsey…” he whispered.

“What?”

“I really have to kiss you now.”

“I really want you to,” she told him.

They made love quietly, her body pressed against his, which was thin and gaunt, she thought, but which she welcomed to hers.
He was a surprisingly aggressive lover. They slept. In the morning, rising before anyone else was awake, he told her he wanted
to remember this place always.

Telling him her true identity was out of the question. She knew the rules. It put you in greater jeopardy, and it put the
people you knew in greater jeopardy, including both your fellow team members and the people who knew what your cover was.
Evelyn Warner knew. Stephen would probably be upset if she told him. Perhaps when this was all over, the right moment would
present itself.

Regarding more practical matters, she was hesitant to leave the enemy weapons cache they’d found intact. She spoke to Father
Ayala again, using Stephen to interpret for her, and told him if the village was attacked, and he chose a passive resistance,
there was a chance the enemy would use the weapons against him. She appreciated his commitment to nonviolence and respected
the philosophy behind it, but, she told him, there were people working in Liger to terrorize the population by killing and
raping and mutilating the innocent and (she decided not to spare the man’s sensibilities, because it was too important that
he understand the impact of his decision) by forcing people to watch or participate in acts of cannibalism—“Father,” she said,
“these guns can stop that from happening. Perhaps prayer will tell you whether or not you want to use them.” There were six
crates, each containing a dozen AK-47s, one of the simplest rifles to operate ever made, and one of the most reliable. She
opened three crates and unpacked the weapons, loaded clips, and prepared the rifles for use. She and Stephen loaded the remaining
three crates into the back of the Land Rover, along with extra ammunition, to bring to Camp Seven.

Before they left, she remembered to turn her phone back on. She’d turned it off, the night before, to shut the war out, if
only for a night. She called CENTCOM Ops, out of Stephen’s earshot, and gave the duty officer the GPS coordinates of her current
position. He gave her directions back to Camp Seven. Stephen had been right, there was no direct route between Sagoa and Camp
Seven, sixty kilometers apart as the crow flew but nearly two hundred by road. She felt the need to hurry, but at the same
time, if it meant spending more time with him, she didn’t mind the circuitous route, particularly because a small voice, one
she tried to ignore, was telling her their time together was limited, a thing she did not want to be true.

He was a terrible driver, she discovered, turning left when she said right and not paying attention. At one point, he stopped,
confused, certain they were driving in circles. He was, she thought, adorable.

DeLuca had stopped to check in, paused at an intersection in the proverbial middle of nowhere. His map told him one road led
to Sagoa, the other to Camp Seven. He was relieved when Scottie told him Dennis’s signal was moving again, even though Scott
said he couldn’t say why Zoulalian had turned his phone off and left it off. He was in a black Mercedes, Scott said, owned,
according to the license-plate number picked up by the cameras in the sky overhead, by a local warlord named Ali Khan who
was believed to be aligned with IPAB.

“Is that satellite or UAV?” DeLuca asked.

“Actually, we have a U-2 up,” Scott said.

“U-2?” DeLuca said. “From the sixties?”

“They started making them again in 1988,” Scott said. “They stay in the air as long as a UAV but they fly a helluva lot faster,
so they cover more ground. Do you want to call Zoulalian?”

“No,” DeLuca said. “I’ll wait for him to check in. How about MacKenzie?”

“On her way to Camp Seven,” Scott said.

“Patch me through to LeDoux,” DeLuca asked. “You okay?”

“I’m good,” Scott said.

“Have you told your mother anything?”

“Just that we were keeping an eye on you,” Scott said.

“You can tell her I’ll be out in three days,” DeLuca said, “if not sooner.”

When LeDoux came on the line, DeLuca asked him for an update. LeDoux said the rules of engagement had not changed. The Marines
were boo-ya and ready to fly. A G-2 with the 27th Infantry had complained that his men hadn’t been given a chance to acclimate
before heading directly into combat, the way troops invading Iraq had trained first in Kuwait. The colonel who’d expressed
his concern for his men had been reprimanded for voicing his dissent. He’d gone rogue with the media after that, saying he
had misgivings about sending his men into a conflict the undertones of which were more religious than strategic, at the whim
of a born-again American president who was too willing to risk the lives of his troops in the service of his own personal
religious vision. Needless to say, he’d been removed after that and reassigned, and would possibly face charges as serious
as treason for his comments, though right now they were just trying to get him away from the microphones.

To make matters worse, LeDoux said, the evangelicals in Congress had led a group sing on the Senate floor of the song “Onward
Christian Soldiers,” the pictures on television showing the Republicans in full voice while Ted Kennedy sat tight-lipped with
his arms folded across his chest. To rally political support, the White House was referencing evidence of new atrocities unfolding
on an hourly basis, perpetrated by Samuel Adu and John Dari and various IPAB or LPLF forces.