The Golden Hour (9 page)

BAMAKO, MALI

MONDAY, 8:12 P.M. GMT

Papa Toure was heartily greeted at the door of the Farka Music Club with an elaborate handshake that ended with a loud snap. The bouncer was a plump African man wearing a tight black suit and, despite the late hour and low light inside the club, aviator sunglasses.

Papa was escorted to his usual table, where he rocked back to let the chair take his weight. The creaking seat reminded him that he was no longer the scrawny village boy of his youth. The extra pounds around his waist, along with the gray hairs in his scraggly beard, provided an aura of sage authority.

It had been a stressful day and he was relieved to escape the web of phone calls. So many calls: Mopti, Gao, Timbuktu, Paris, Lagos, Johannesburg, and Washington. It was exhausting to manage so many expectations.

He waved casually at the barman, a signal for a cool Castel beer.

—

Papa Toure was a man who loved the blues. Growing up in a village several days’ walk from Bamako, he would run home from school every day to finish his chores and schoolwork in time to listen to his grandfather play traditional music on the kora, a twenty-one-string harp made with cowhide pulled over half a calabash. The old man would sing about family history and their ancestors and, increasingly over time, about amazing changes going on in the country. Papa was still a young boy, but remembered the day his grandfather sang about independence, when it finally came in September 1960. It was his first hint of big-city politics.

Around that time, traveling musicians began to pass through his village with guitars instead of traditional instruments. It opened a whole new world: the sounds of Cuba, France, and Mississippi.
Especially Mississippi.
Papa was instantaneously drawn to the cadence and sensation of the American blues.

But neither Papa nor his grandfather was born into the
jeliya
, the caste of professional musicians.
Jeliya
were no mere buskers, but more like local historians, mediators, and preachers of morality all wrapped into one.

Papa’s ambitions for a life as a guitarist were not to be. His hopes were squashed in the end, not by social strictures, but by an early, and mature, realization that his talent did not match his passion.

Instead, he became a bookworm. His father saved his small profits from selling cassava to send his most promising son to
school and to buy him dog-eared books for his studies. Papa, rising above his modest lot, secured a scholarship at a private school in Bamako and then another to attend the prestigious University of Ibadan in southern Nigeria. At the time, it seemed like the other side of the world.

What to study for a boy from the village on the edge of the world’s largest desert?
Hydrology, of course.
Papa became obsessed—and expert—in the study of water, how to find and manage it in a place where such a commodity was chronically, and too often fatally, scarce. It was ironic, but at once practical.

Papa soon learned that water in Africa was not really about the science. It can be found and stored even in the driest of places. Water was really about politics. So the studious village boy became a reluctant and accidental student of the men who ran Africa and their motivations. And what better place for the lessons of power than Nigeria?

In Africa’s version of Texas, everything is big, brash, and fueled by a noxious combination of easy oil money and human greed. During Papa’s ten years in Nigeria, he witnessed two coups, saw governors grabbing oil contracts for themselves, and watched top generals amass billions of dollars. Papa could see how Nigeria earned $400 billion from its oil yet had almost nothing to show for it. The average man on the street had actually become poorer since the black gold began pumping.

Papa secretly planned for the day his 3-D seismology studies might inadvertently hint at an oil reservoir rather than an aquifer. He decided he would do the only sensible thing: delete the data.

It was also easy for an African hydrologist to return home,
triumphant with his Ph.D. in hand, ready to help develop his own country. But the time in Nigeria had given Papa a keen sense of suspicion for the motives of powerful men, and a belief that the human impulse for greed was infinite, even in a dirt-poor country.

The sad events of this morning only confirmed in his mind that this was true, even in his own nation. To survive, one had to make many friends like Luc Bosquet and Judd Ryker. Like Professor BJ van Hollen, the man who befriended him in Nigeria and introduced him to so many important people. Rest his soul,
Allah yarhamu
. And, of course, the beautiful Jessica Ryker. You had to maintain these friends in order to keep moving forward in this uncertain world. To keep your options open.

He would, of course, help Judd, his friend. But deep down he also knew he was going to point Judd in the right direction to help his country, too. And to help himself.

—

The lights came down and the crowd hollered. Everyone craned their necks, waiting for the musician to appear. Just then the barman silently arrived and set down a tray to clear away the empty beer bottles nudging each other for space on the small table. When the tray was lifted away and the barman departed, a brown envelope was left behind, the rectangular bulge of a stack of banknotes barely visible. Without averting his eyes from the stage, Papa slid the envelope off the table and into his jacket pocket.

Onto the stage ambled an African man, barely twenty years old, holding a guitar tightly by the neck. He sat on a lone stool and began to play. A bluesy rhythm, the lyrics extolled the glories
of the thirteenth-century Mande Empire and the legend of its founder, the warrior Sundiata Keita, the king of kings.

Listening to the history of a lost empire beneath his feet, Papa felt Mali’s future weighing on his shoulders. He knew that tomorrow he was back on the road, back to work. But tonight he leaned back, shut his eyes, and drank in the sounds. Tonight was for the blues.

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

MONDAY, 4:26 P.M. EST

Judd jumped out of the black sedan that drove him the five blocks from State headquarters to the side of the White House. Since the Secret Service had closed Pennsylvania Avenue between Seventeenth and Fifteenth streets for security and turned it into part of Lafayette Square, he had to walk the last block.

On the corner was a tourist T-shirt stand.
TERRORIST HUNTING LICENSE
and a drawing of a camel in crosshairs were on one shirt, flapping in the breeze. Judd weaved through a school group of loud teens in matching fluorescent green-and-pink T-shirts.

At the West gate, he flashed his badge through the bars and tinted plate glass. A loud buzz, the gate opened, and then slammed loudly behind him. He was now inside the White House grounds.

Straight ahead was the driveway up to the West Wing. Back to his left he could see crowds of tourists, their faces pressed to the security fence. To his right sat a field of television cameras and equipment covered in dark green tarps where the press corps reported. Today it lay abandoned and silent.

Rather than follow the path straight up to the West Wing main entrance, where two marines were standing at attention, Judd took a short flight of stairs down to the right and underneath to a canopied entrance. Here was where the National Security Council staff—the president’s personal foreign policy team—entered the West Wing from their offices next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Judd arrived at another security desk. On the walls were huge photos of the president walking his dog, speaking at a UN podium, looking stern and serious at his desk. There was one of the First Lady, standing on the bow of a sailboat, wind blowing her hair. Judd’s ID was silently checked and he was then cleared to enter a hallway that led down to the Situation Room.

Judd paused briefly at the deserted maître d’ desk at the White House dining room and smoothly pocketed two boxes of M&M’s with the White House seal.
For the boys.

Judd descended another level and opened an unimposing walnut-paneled door that led into the Situation Room complex. He deposited his BlackBerry into a nook in the wall and double-checked his pockets.

To his left, he peered into a control room, with large mounted video screens and a small army of bright-eyed staffers wearing headsets. White House Operations. The Nerve Center.
One of those punks woke me up this morning,
he thought. Digital clocks read
WASHINGTON
,
BAGHDAD
,
BEIJING
,
MANILA
.
Something must be going on in the Philippines today.

“Dr. Ryker, you are in Sit Room One. They are starting,” said a woman suddenly blocking his path.

“Er, thank you,” said Judd and turned to open the door for the room labeled
ONE
. He pulled on the door handle and felt the air valve seal release. He stepped inside.

The Situation Room was shockingly small. From the movies, Judd had expected something grand and imposing, but instead he found the ceiling uncomfortably low. Compounding the cramped feel, bulky leather chairs circled the main table, tightly hugged by another ring of seats around the outside. Along one wall was a bank of six flat-panel televisions, each with a large head on-screen, several in military uniform. The clock, reminding the participants why exactly they were here, read
WASHINGTON
and
BAMAKO
. Judd took the lone empty seat at the main table and sat quietly.

The Washington clock ticked from 4:29 to 4:30, and in from a side door entered a short, stocky man with thinning, slicked-back hair. He was wearing a shiny designer suit, but it looked like he had slept in it. He nodded to no one in particular and began without sitting down. “Okay, people. Everyone here?”

No answer.

Judd recognized no one.
Asking who is here is admitting I don’t belong.

“We’re activating an emergency interagency group to deal with a special situation. Have we got FBI here? How about the counterterrorism center? You guys here, too?”

Several nods around the table.

“As most of you know, Africa is a new area of concern.” One of the screens sprang to life, displaying a high-resolution map of Africa.

“Al-Qaeda is on the run. We’ve killed bin Laden, and Ayman
al-Zawahiri is feeling our pressure. The core al-Qaeda has turned to regional franchising by co-opting local grievances to advance their agenda. Al-Zawahiri’s radicals from the Middle East have been penetrating the Horn of Africa, using Somalia as an operations base, and working through the Somali al-Shabaab.” Somalia was highlighted in yellow on the map, with red explosion icons dotting the coast.

He continued, pointing to the map. “Our counterterrorism operations in the Horn have been highly successful against al-Shabaab. Maybe too successful. We’ve decapitated or disrupted nearly all cells operating across East Africa, so radicals are now seeking new entry points in the western part of Africa. The Sahara Desert region is their new target.” The map flashed a vast yellow blob covering most of West Africa. The speaker swept his arm across the screen with a flourish.

“Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM was born out of the conflict in Algeria. We have been working with local partners, especially the military and intelligence services in Mali, to inhibit further penetration. But extremists have continued to try to pierce our defenses by exploiting local conflicts for their own jihadist aims.” Thick black arrows appeared on the map, swooping down from Algeria, into northern Mali, and spreading across the whole region. “We’ve been keeping a close eye on developments. Over the past few days, the Sahara region has taken a major turn for the worse.”

More nodding around the table.

“We’ve got an emerging situation now in northern Mali. Ansar al-Sahra, a previously dormant group of jihadists based in
southern Libya, have successfully recruited disaffected Tuaregs in Mali and are now active. This is an extremist splinter group, and let me be very clear: They present an imminent threat to U.S. interests. Everyone got that? The Sahara is now hot. We have chatter indicating a developing threat to our people in West Africa. An Ansar cell is moving from the northern border area in the direction of Timbuktu with hostile intentions. This came in today.”

Projected on another screen were satellite photos. They were light brown, highlighted with bright red circles and arrows. Familiar satellite photos.
I saw these already.

“We have a series of camps and convoys along the border. We now have confirmed information from eyes on the ground that these are Ansar, and the pattern of movements suggests purposeful migration in a southwestern direction, toward the population center of Timbuktu.”

Several more nods around the table. Judd raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
What eyes on the ground?

“The local authorities have agreed to allow accelerated reconnaissance overflight, and they have several strike teams, trained by us and with embedded advisors, positioned in strategic garrisons. A complicating factor is a coup in the capital early this morning that deposed the president. The terrorists may be taking advantage of the political uncertainty to strike now. The coup does not, however, appear to be impacting our counterterrorism operations. We are being assured, through confidential channels, of continuity of cooperation across the board.”

Judd’s stomach twisted into a knot.
What channels?

The suit continued, “This includes Operation Sand Scorpion,
our search-and-destroy elite strike force teams based in Timbuktu. The embassy is confident that we can continue counterterrorism operations, even as State works the diplomatic angles on the coup. Is State here?”

Judd sat up straight. “State is here.”
Goddamn right.
“We’ve got State Task Force Mali activated. We are in constant contact with the embassy and still establishing the facts. But it is confirmed that President Maiga was arrested and detained this morning and that General Idrissa, who had recently been promoted to army Chief of Staff, is claiming power and in the process of installing a junta. As with all coups, things are still very much in flux and the information can change quickly. Once we have a better idea what exactly has happened and why, then we will be formulating a strategy. The Secretary’s instructions are to reverse the coup and reestablish President Maiga’s authority as soon as possible. Once we have a plan, we’ll come back to the interagency for execution.”

“Thank you for joining us,” the still-nameless chair responded, with no attempt to hide his condescension. “Our priority today is Ansar al-Sahra and to keep our people safe. There is a grand arc of terrorism growing that starts in Yemen and sweeps across Somalia, through the center of Africa, then up across the Sahara Desert. It’s a dagger pointing through Europe and into the United States. Smack in the middle of this arc of terror, the heart of this thing, is Mali. I will not allow Mali to become a new front in the global war on terror on my watch. We are going to kill this baby in the cradle.”

“State agrees. We have to stop the spread of al-Qaeda or
AQIM, if that’s what this is. As a close ally, Mali is the locus of our strategy to contain extremists across West Africa,” responded Judd, trying to stay cool. “Reinstating President Maiga as soon as possible is the best means to keeping our people safe. That’s how we keep this thing from spreading.”

Judd noticed eyes around the table averted. His stomach knotted again.

“And State has reports that elements of the Scorpions may be missing,” Judd added.

“Who is chairing the State Task Force? Bill Rogerson? Where the hell is Bill?”

“No, I am.”

“Okay, well not everyone shares State’s enthusiasm for Maiga. We’ve got credible reports that he is going soft. And possibly getting in bed with some very dangerous individuals.” The rumpled suit turned away from Judd, toward the group.

“We have another complication, people. Our CIA station chief in Tripoli received this via e-mail. Go ahead and run it.”

One of the screens lit up and a fuzzy still photo appeared showing a pale young woman, on her knees, blindfolded and hands bound behind her back. She was wearing a simple white T-shirt and her head was loosely covered with a scarf, but a crescent of fire-red hair was still visible.
American.

Standing over her were three tall men, all in black robes, their faces covered. Behind them was a black flag with white Arabic lettering. The two men on either side of the girl held AK-47s across their chests. The one in the middle, directly behind her, held a long sword.

Oh, shit.

The video began.

“Uh, hello?” said the young woman. She was sniffling. “My name is Katherine McCall. I am a Peace Corps volunteer in Bangoro. I am being held . . .” The sound crackled and the wind thumped. Her voice was trembling. She was terrified. The man with the sword reached down and grabbed her head. A collective gasp swept across the Situation Room.

The man removed the girl’s blindfold. She squinted and blinked, adjusting to the light. She continued, “Immoral American crusaders are not welcome in the Great Sahara. They must leave.” She spoke slowly and haltingly, obviously reading off something to the side of the camera. The three men stood motionless as she spoke. “I will not be released until all imperialist infidels leave Mali and Niger, and . . . and Pakistan. They will send further instructions.” More crackles and wind, then the screen went blank.

“Okay, people. That’s the whole clip. The National Security Agency confirms the voiceprint and the image are that of Kate McCall. For those of you not paying attention, she is not just anybody. The woman kidnapped by radical jihadists is the daughter of Senator Bryce McCall, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Diplomatic security is informing him now. We should all expect a mother lode of pressure to get her back.”

Judd instinctively grabbed for his BlackBerry, which was still sitting in a cubbyhole outside the Situation Room.

“I want CIA liaising with Special Operations Command in Stuttgart on possible rescue scenarios in the next fifteen minutes.
Make that ten minutes. I want a full intel team on this up and running by the end of today. And tell Langley I want their best crisis manager running this. I want the Purple Cell team leader. I won’t accept anyone else.”

“Sir, CIA has already activated the Purple Cell. She is aware and mobilized.”

“Good. Let’s get ahead of this, people. Let’s go.”