Mission Liberty (9 page)

“Don’t forget,” DeLuca reminded Asabo, “from here on, you don’t speak Fasori, or anything local.”

“Fa-shizzle,” Asabo said dryly.

It was the first time DeLuca had seen Asabo smile. If the younger man felt any emotion, returning to his home country after
so many years in exile, he didn’t show it. An official examined their passports, then stamped them without further ado. Asabo
smiled to see crowds of children surrounding them as they passed through customs, kids trying to sell them clear plastic bags
of potable water, bars of soap, loaves of bread, Pez dispensers, packs of chewing gum, brass napkin holders, polished gourds,
anything they could get their hands on that they thought wealthy foreigners might want to buy. Other children simply held
out their hands and begged, pleading with their eyes, some licking their lips or touching their lips with their fingers to
indicate they were hungry. Soon Asabo stopped smiling.

“Look at their teeth,” he said to DeLuca, who noted that most were missing teeth or were in need of orthodontia. “When I left,
there were no candy bars in Liger, and none of the children had cavities. Now they all do, apparently.”

Grown men held out thick stacks of Zudas, the local currency, offering to change their American dollars, though the exchange
rate was fluctuating wildly on virtually an hourly basis, depending on how the war was going. DeLuca held on to his cash.
Dispersed throughout the mob were soldiers carrying machine guns, unsmiling men in maroon berets and wraparound sunglasses,
their pants tucked into matching maroon gaiters.

“If we can get to the cab rank without getting shot,” DeLuca said sotto voce, “I think we’re in the clear.”

He asked the cab driver, a man named Jumee, to take them, first, on a tour of the city. The driver complied as best he could,
although the central part of the city along the coast, between the presidential palace and the Castle of St. James, was cordoned
off by soldiers manning roadblocks, black smoke still rising above the skyline, an acrid stench of burning rubber leaking
in through the taxi’s windows. When DeLuca asked the cab driver if he had any idea what the situation was at the soccer stadium,
he just shrugged as if he didn’t and hadn’t heard anything. DeLuca noticed a spot on the dashboard where Jumee kept his small
statuette of the Virgin Mary, which now rested on the seat beside him, out of view. The radio played nonstop music, innocuous
Afro-pop and smooth-grooved crap by Sting and Phil Collins, without commentary or commercial interruptions. He saw men carting
away rubble in wheelbarrows and hand-drawn carts from broken buildings, funeral processions of mourners clad in decorous local
textiles, children wandering alone, little short-haired dogs with skin conditions, a church where a line of young men in white
shirts and baggy dress pants but no shoes waited to enter, holding Bibles in their hands. He saw broken shop windows, dumped
garbage, looted stores, empty boxes in the streets, broken televisions and DVD players smashed against the pavement, walls
mottled with bullet pockings, bloodstains, raw sewage, people crouched around cook fires, and whenever they slowed, children
begging at the taxi’s windows with their hands out, adults, too, asking for anything, anything at all. He saw overturned and
burned cars, the shell of an armored troop carrier, a van on its side with the words “One Lord—Jah Love” painted on the side
that was showing, two of its wheels missing. He saw church steeples damaged by tank rounds, streets cratered by bombs and
artillery shells, houses with the roofs blown off, or the fronts, the sides, the backs, and in the exposed rooms, kids playing
or simply gazing out. He saw crowds of men gathered on street corners, taking security in numbers, men glancing nervously
through slits in doors and gates, lone men ducking into doorways or running away in advance of their approach, and government
soldiers in maroon berets stopping people to look at their travel documents or identification papers, government soldiers
loading men with their shirts pulled over their heads into trucks, government soldiers in a circle, down one alley, kicking
someone who’d fallen while a woman nearby screamed, “Please don’t take my son.” DeLuca didn’t see any bodies lying dead in
the streets. He wondered how many there’d been, and where they’d gone. He saw the Muslim neighborhood, now a wasteland of
rubble and debris, where two weeks earlier, President Bo had sent in a fleet of bulldozers to destroy all the Muslim homes
and shops in what he’d dubbed “Operation Trash Removal.”

“It was very bad,” the driver, Jumee, said. “Many people are now without homes.”

The driver took them, finally, to the headquarters for the African Union peacekeeping mission, a one-story tin-roofed pale
yellow building centered in a dusty courtyard filled with date and fan palms, a half dozen chickens, a pig chained to a stake.
There were two white Jeeps and a white Humvee parked in the dust, guarded by six soldiers in khaki uniforms with blue berets
and green kerchiefs around their necks to identify them as neutral observers and not combatants. The Humvee had been modified
by someone with a welding torch who’d added rough-cut iron plates to the doors and fender panels, until the vehicle resembled
something out of a Mad Max movie, pure Road Warrior. U.S. soldiers had done the same thing to their unarmored Humvees in Iraq.
The vehicles had the letters AU painted on the doors, and a white flag flew above the building featuring the same African
Union logo.

An aide asked them to wait a moment, then showed them into a dusty office.

General Osman was a large barrel-chested no-necked hulk of a man, hairless save for the bloom of white chest hairs sprouting
from his open shirt collar. When DeLuca told him, after introducing himself and his companions, that he had an appointment,
Osman looked suspicious, eyeing his lieutenant, who appeared to be doing his best to become invisible.

“What appointment did we have?” Osman asked. “This is the first that I have heard of this.”

“You didn’t get the call from my office?” DeLuca said. “We spoke with General Bukari. I’m not sure who my secretary spoke
with, exactly, but she informed me that you would be expecting me.” He was bluffing, but it was a reasonable assumption that
in the chaos of the civil war that surrounded them, Osman’s staff was likely to have lost track of an appointment or two.
Osman had no way of knowing that this wasn’t one of them, and DeLuca didn’t have time to wait for an actual appointment.

“My aide,” Osman said, “has not informed me. We’ve been without communications as well. Please forgive me—please be seated—how
is it that I can help you, Mr. Brown?”

“I appreciate your making time for me, General,” DeLuca said. “My colleagues and I do understand how busy you must be. I trust
that your men are all right. I know that yesterday was not a good day for Liger.”

“The days seem quite the same, from where I sit,” General Osman said.

“I won’t take up any more of your time than I have to,” DeLuca said. “We’re looking for John Dari. We have a business matter
we would like to discuss with him. I’m not free to disclose what that matter is, but we were hoping that you might be able
to tell us either where John Dari is or who might know where he is, if you don’t.”

Osman seemed taken aback.

“And how is it that you think I would know this?” he asked. “Dari is in the north. I am in Port Ivory. Do you think if he
were in Port Ivory, he would call me and we’d have tea?”

“No, I don’t,” DeLuca said, “but I know that you have men with eyes and ears in various parts of the country. Men who are
Christian and men who are Muslim. Men who might have heard something in their role as observers, either during the cease-fire
or during the recent conflict.”

Osman threw up his hands.

“I have three hundred men,” he said. “I don’t dare send them anywhere in numbers smaller than a platoon. And if we meet with
resistance, we must back down because we have nothing in the rules of engagement that allows us to fight. And, sir, we could
not fight if we wanted to, I will tell you that, because President Obasanjo and his friends in Addis Ababa have decided the
AU may not carry more than a single clip of ammunition for each soldier, or we would be seen as a threat. So tell me, how
can I learn what I need to know in Liger? How can I tell you what I need to know myself?”

“Perhaps you can’t help,” DeLuca said. “But you could help me, I think, spread the word that I would like to speak to Dari.
I’m not with the United States, General. I’m not with the UN, and I’m not with ECOMAS either. Despite what you may have heard,
the World Bank is an independent organization. We have an opportunity to bring considerable funds to bear on whatever needs
Liger might have toward rebuilding its infrastructure. The time to establish a no-fire zone, negotiated between all interested
parties, is now, not when it’s too late. And you see, General, I can’t travel, even with assurances from the government, because
there are large areas of Liger right now where the government itself can’t go. But your men, as neutral observers, can. I
understand that you’re understaffed, and I sympathize. I’m only asking that you do the best that you can. I might add that
the World Bank has also been studying ways to assist the African Union, as I’m sure you know.”

DeLuca waited. If Osman was going to ask for a bribe, now was his chance. DeLuca had been warned by a cynical friend in the
State Department’s Africa program that “African Union” was an oxymoron—“like ‘scented deodorant,’” the friend had said. DeLuca
was betting that Osman’s relationship with AU headquarters in Addis Ababa was less than satisfactory. It was also his own
personal experience that in third world countries with ethically challenged leadership, men in positions of power rarely sought
the high road and could be bribed, and nine out of ten times, the ones who wanted bribes came right out and asked for them.
Osman wasn’t part of the Ligerian government, but he was in Liger—perhaps he was playing by the house rules.

Osman didn’t take the bait, and in fact seemed oblivious to it.

“You would deal with this criminal, then?” Osman said. “This person who kills children? Who puts tires filled with gasoline
around the necks of his enemies and lights them on fire? This is the person you will do business with?”

“No,” DeLuca said. “I wouldn’t. But as a soldier, you understand that throughout history, whenever the end of a war is negotiated
rather than imposed, men who’ve killed have to learn how to talk to men who’ve killed, in order to stop the killing. It’s
not an easy thing to sit down across the table from your enemy, I know. What the World Bank wants to do is make such a thing
attractive and economically appealing to both sides.”

“Well,” Osman said. “I will be honest with you. I don’t know where Dari is, Mr. Brown. I have a report that he might be in
the hills west of Kumari, but I have another that he is moving on the oil fields three hundred kilometers to the east of that.
I don’t really believe either report. I think he could be anywhere.”

“Do you know in what numbers?” DeLuca asked.

“Five thousand men,” Osman said with a shrug. “I have also heard twice that.”

“I was told one thousand,” DeLuca said.

“Possibly two,” Vasquez added.

Osman shook his head.

“Maybe a month ago,” he said. “But not now.” He eyed them a moment longer. “So yes, Mr. Brown, I will pass along your message
to my men and ask them to make inquiries for you. But I don’t expect to have success, and I should tell you, I don’t believe
John Dari will meet with you even if he gets the message, only because you are white. He has said this himself. But perhaps
on behalf of the people he is leading, he will. In my opinion, whoever comes within ten feet of him should shoot him through
the eyes and ask questions later. But of course, we are not allowed to shoot. We can only observe. Do you know what we observe,
Mr. Brown? This morning, my men went to the village of Dsang, a small Da village, where the boys had formed a militia to protect
their mothers. With sticks. We found twenty-six bodies of boys with their penises cut off and shoved into their mouths. Because
John Dari is afraid of boys with sticks. So when you meet him at the peace table, please ask him about the boys of Dsang.
And ask him about their mothers, because we could not find them.”

After the meeting, they instructed Jumee to take them to Lions’ Park, a casino and golf resort that President Bo had built
on the northern end of the city. The driver told them Lions’ Park was closed. DeLuca said he knew, but that that was where
President Bo’s office had instructed them to meet the convoy that would take them north to Baku Da’al, unless, DeLuca said,
the cab driver was interested in making a longer trip, an offer Jumee immediately declined.

The casino, built by the government in an attempt to emulate South Africa’s Sun City, had squandered millions of dollars that
might have been better spent on food or schools or roads, Paul Asabo explained, but Bo needed a playground to entertain his
fellow despots and dictator friends. Bishop Duvallier had pulled the lever on the first slot machine at the opening ceremonies
and, to everyone’s surprise, he won nearly a million Zudas, which he remitted to the church, of course. In its opening year,
the casino had hosted concerts by Elton John and Sting, but as it began to decline, it was booking people like Gallagher and
Robert Goulet, and then Gallagher and Robert Goulet impersonators. The decline hastened when a report said 90 percent of the
prostitutes working the bars of Lions’ Park had AIDS.

“If you hired a team of the best architects,” Asabo said, shaking his head, “you couldn’t build a better monument to stupidity
and greed.”

Many of the windows in the thirty-story-high hotel had been shot out, as had the massive neon sign out front, the gray concrete
walls pocked with bullet holes and stained the color of dried blood where the oxidized iron rebars had rusted through. The
jungle had begun to reclaim the golf course, all but the eighteenth hole, where goats grazed on the fairway and the bunkers
had been converted into machine-gun nests.