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 me that three times already. “We want you back in Rwanda, Colonel. We want you in the government there. But, we think—Lascelles thinks—in order for us to, mmm, underwrite you again, we need to have, mmm, insurance.”
“Insurance.” Ntarinada, a man at war, didn’t seem to understand the concept of insurance. In fact, he laughed.
“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
