The American Mission (27 page)

Alex took the folder and closed the safe drawer. With luck, it might be a day or two before Spence realized that his safe had been rifled.

There was a loud click and the room was bathed in a sudden but muted light. Alex turned with a deliberate slowness to find Jonah Keeler sitting in the Ambassador's chair, his feet up on the desk. Keeler had pulled the chain switch on Spence's desk lamp, casting a huge shadow of himself onto the blank wall behind him.

“Pretty grim reading, huh, sport?” he said.

“Hello, Jonah. Been there a while?”

“Long enough. I know what's in that folder, or most of it anyway. You're looking at the Busu-Mouli file, aren't you?”

“Sure enough.” Alex set the file down on the desk in front of Keeler and sat down in one of Spence's wingback guest chairs.

“Jonah, they killed Antoine. He was trying to protect me and they shot him. Ngoca's
genocidaires
murdered my friend. He was a good man. What the hell is going on?”

“I'm sorry, Alex. I didn't know.”

“Why is this little village so all-fired important that it's worth framing me for espionage . . . that it's worth killing my friend?”

“Do you know how many Westerners there are in the Congo, not counting the UN or the aid organizations? I'd be surprised if it's more than a thousand. How can an organization like Consolidated Mining maintain control over the vast swaths of this country that it claims title to? Fear. The company is giving the Congo and its people a raw deal. As long as this is seen as inevitable, the natural order of things, Consolidated can get away with managing its considerable assets with no more than a pitiful handful of expats. Challenge that authority, however . . . call into question Consolidated's right to rule . . . and you threaten the viability of the entire system.”

“You mean it isn't just about the value of the copper. Busu-Mouli was demonstrating that it could mine its own resources and keep the
profits. Consolidated needed to make an example of it so that other villages were not tempted down the same path.”

“Precisely. Busu-Mouli is an opportunity for Consolidated to make a buck, but there are lots of those to be had. More important, what the Tsiolo family is trying to do is a threat to the company's carefully balanced system. That cannot be tolerated. This country has to be kept dependent on the company.”

“But why is the Embassy—why is Spence—not only allowing this but actually facilitating it? Has Spence been bought?”

“It's not quite as simple as that. Have you ever heard of something called the Africa Working Group?”

“In passing. It was some Cold War thing. A network of hard-core anti-Soviet types at State who wanted to step up support for the right-wing sociopaths in Africa in their wars against the left-wing sociopaths. People talked about it like it was a kind of old boys' club.”

“It was more than that, I assure you.” Jonah took his feet off the desk and leaned forward conspiratorially. It was the kind of body language that the CIA taught in its Psychological Manipulation 101 course at the Farm, the Agency training facility in rural Virginia. “It wasn't just State Department types. The group wasn't big, but it was broad. There were military officers, intelligence operatives, NSC people, and Hill staff from both parties. It was a regular interagency love fest. The Working Group didn't stop with debates in the Georgetown policy salons either. They went operational in the mid-seventies.”

“Operational?”

“Yep. They started actively supporting right-wing insurgencies all across Africa. Jonas Savimbi in Angola. RENAMO in Mozambique. Tombalbaye in Chad. As long as you were anticommunist or at least anti-Soviet, the Working Group would back you with money, weapons, and political support. They got into bed with some of the continent's real nut jobs.”

“All of this outside official channels?”

“Most definitely.”

“So where did the money come from? Underwriting insurrection isn't cheap and the black budgets aren't big enough for something like that.”

“Think about it for a minute.”

Suddenly it was clear. “The mining companies provided the up-front capital in exchange for drilling and digging rights.”

“Spot-on. The Working Group got the resources they needed to support the anticommunist right-wingers, and the mining companies got preferential access from friendly governments to all sorts of mineral goodies, with well-placed members of the Working Group doing most of the political heavy lifting for them.”

“Spence was part of this?” Alex asked.

“I think so. Secret cabals tend not to keep official membership rosters, but he's the right generation and he's got the right connections.”

“But what about now? The Cold War's been over for twenty years. Anticommunism is essentially a nostalgia act.”

“Yes. But once something like this gets started, it tends to survive on sheer inertia. The Working Group found a way to adapt to the post–Cold War world. They persuaded themselves that America's strategic interests lay in securing exclusive access to Africa's mineral resources. They continued to bankroll insurgencies, but now with a twist. They were no longer concerned with the ideology of the groups they backed. They wanted effective insurgent movements and guerilla groups that would keep the states they operated in weak and divided. This made the local governments dependent on the Working Group and their mining company allies. It's become increasingly hard to tell whether the mining companies are doing the bidding of the Working Group or the Working Group is doing the bidding of the companies. At this point, there may no longer be any meaningful distinction between the two.”

Alex's pulse picked up as he thought through the implications of what Keeler had just told him.

“So Consolidated Mining is using Innocent Ngoca and the Rwandan
genocidaires
to keep the Congo weak so they can bleed it dry on the cheap and Spence is part of some Skull and Bones–style group of Cold Warriors that is helping them do it. Is that what's going on here?”

“In part. You're still thinking too small.”

“How so?”

“Consolidated Mining and the Africa Working Group aren't just using the
genocidaires
. They created the
genocidaires
for the express purpose of destabilizing the Congo, Africa's richest mineral prize.”

“How is that possible? The violence in Rwanda was a Hutu-Tutsi interethnic fight that had been building for years.”

“Really? What actually triggered the violence?”

“President Habyarimana's plane was shot down trying to land at Kigali airport. The Hutu blamed it on Paul Kagame, who was a Tutsi . . . Jesus Christ. You think the Working Group was responsible, that they somehow shot down the President's plane.”

“They do have some of our people working with them,” Keeler replied, meaning CIA black operatives. “What was Spence doing at that time?”

“He was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Central Africa in Washington.”

“Did his brief include Rwanda?”

Alex nodded. “Yes.” He desperately did not want to believe that this could be true. “What about Sudan?” he asked. “What about Darfur? Was that the Working Group's doing as well?”

“Perhaps. We're not certain.”

“We?”

“Not everyone who works on Africa is irredeemably cynical. There are some of us who recognize the continent's promise and its potential. This place can be so much more than a strip mine for U.S. industry.
I am part of another informal group within the government that is pursuing this more positive vision of the future. We are a sort of counterweight to the Africa Working Group, except that we are generally younger, more junior, and not nearly as influential.”

“So what makes me a threat to the Working Group? Is it the dissent channel message I wrote?”

“Yep. Secretary Roberts has a track record as something of a goody-two-shoes. The Working Group couldn't take the risk of a formal investigation into their activities. The moment you wrote that cable, you became an unacceptable risk. They needed to discredit you first and then remove you altogether. You're lucky that you got away from Viggiano. You never would have made it back to Washington.”

Alex was deep in thought. “That's why Spence chose me for this job, isn't it?” It was a rhetorical question. “Because I was crazy and had lost my clearances, it would be relatively easy to discredit me if it came to it. That's why Spence called me up out of the blue and offered me Julian's job. It wasn't in spite of my troubles with DS, it was because of them.”

Jonah shrugged, but it was clear that he agreed.

“Did Viggiano kill Julian?”

Keeler shrugged again.

“Christ on a crutch.”

He picked up the Busu-Mouli folder.

“I don't understand why Spence is holding on to this kind of information. It's dangerous to him. Why keep this stuff around?”

“Mutually assured destruction. None of the players in this little operation trust any of the others worth a damn. The paper trail is insurance against one of the partners trying to rat out the others.”

Alex put the Busu-Mouli folder back on the desk.

“I suppose I have you to thank for putting the bomb under the Land Cruiser.”

“Yeah. Pretty cute, huh?”

“And I suspect it wasn't an accident that my old friends Chaudry and Sharif were manning that checkpoint.”

“Nope. That one took some work too. But I figured that your friends wouldn't shoot you in the back. If the checkpoint was manned by some schmoes, they might have killed you when you ran. That would have been unfortunate.”

“No shit.” Alex slumped back in his seat, trying to come to terms with what Keeler had just told him and what he had found in Spence's files.

“So what do I do?” he asked.

“We can help you, but we need your help as well.”

“To do what?”

“Flush out the game. The Africa Working Group has covered its tracks very carefully. Everything is deniable. Nothing is provable. We need them to make a mistake, expose their agenda, and give us an opportunity to destroy them.”

“Destroy Spence?” Alex asked.

“I'm not talking about whacking the guy. I'm not even talking about a trial and prison. We're patriots. We don't want to damage the United States. We just need to ensure that the Working Group is stripped of its influence.”

“Can't you just go to Secretary Roberts yourselves or even the
New York Times
?”

“Not without real proof. Information and recommendations that make their way to the principals are the result of hard-fought battles, and they always have another agenda. Your cable was dangerous because it would have cut through the layers of bureaucratic defenses that the Working Group has built up over the decades. It would have gone right to the top without an opportunity for the Working Group membership to water it down with caveats and the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand language so beloved of Washington technocrats. If we move
against the group without hard evidence, we will be destroyed ourselves. We would be leaving the Working Group a clear field to pursue their amoral strategy. We need the group to make a mistake, expose its flabby belly.”

“How do I get my life back?” Alex asked simply.

“You know Spence better than anyone else. Help us find what we need.”

“Before I do anything else,” Alex replied, “I'm going to Busu-Mouli. I can't let Executive Solutions and the
genocidaires
destroy that village.”

“This wouldn't be about a certain farmer's daughter, would it? About five-eleven. Brunette. Foxy.”

“Not entirely.”

“Thought so.”

“I've only got a few days.”

“Want to borrow my plane?”

J
ULY
20, 2009

B
USU
-M
OULI

I
t's not nearly as scary as you might think,” J. J. Sykes said, as he banked his aircraft, a venerable Beechcraft Bonanza, to point the small single-engine plane into the wind. “Just don't pull the chute until you're clear of the tail.”

Alex shifted uncomfortably in his seat and fiddled with the unfamiliar straps on the parachute. He had spent the four-hour flight hunched over in the passenger seat to accommodate the bulky pack. A smaller pack strapped to his belly held money and diamonds, a change of clothes, and some equipment, including the satellite phone he had pilfered from Spence's safe.

“You sure you can't land somewhere around here? I don't mind a walk.”

“Sorry. No can do. This thing has wheels, not pontoons.”

Jonah had put Alex up in a CIA safe house and had made the arrangements for Sykes to fly him to Busu-Mouli. Unfortunately, the amphibious Otter was undergoing a major overhaul and would not have
been ready until after the planned assault on the village. Sykes agreed to fly Alex out in one of his other aircraft, but none were capable of landing on the river and there was no suitable runway within one hundred miles of Busu-Mouli. Alex was going to have to parachute into the town. To make matters worse, both Keeler and Sykes had been adamant that it had to be done at night. Too many people in too many villages would notice the parachute during the day and there was no telling whom they might report back to. That was how Alex found himself flying at five thousand feet in the dead of night over an inky black carpet of African rain forest, planning to make his very first parachute jump.

“Have you ever done this before?” he asked Sykes.

“What, jump out of a perfectly good airplane? No thank you. I hear tell there's nothing to it. Just count to three and then pull that handle on your chest.”

Alex reached over with his right hand and grabbed the handle. He'd been reaching for it obsessively every thirty seconds since they left the ground. It was reassuringly easy to find. When stationary . . . in the well-lit cockpit . . . and under no pressure.

The Beechcraft was too old to have a factory-installed GPS navigation system. Sykes was using an off-the-shelf unit that was not so different from something that might have been mounted on the dashboard of any SUV in any American suburb. All the major landmarks were marked, however, including the vast expanse of the Congo River and the various villages that lined both of its banks.

“Here we go,” Sykes said, breaking into Alex's distracted reverie.

“Busu-Mouli?”

“Yep, right down there.” Sykes pointed to a spot off the port-side wing.

Alex could not see anything. “How can you tell?”

“I can't, but I trust the GPS. Always trust your instruments. Your eyes will lie to you. Try to get you killed. Your instruments always tell the truth. You ready for this?”

“Uh, no.”

“Great. Let's do it.”

The Beechcraft leveled out and Sykes punched a red button grafted onto the face of the instrument panel. The button sent a signal to the hard points on the belly of the plane, and a pair of clamps disengaged, releasing two GPS-guided projectiles that looked like oversize lawn darts. Weighted steel tips held the projectiles point-down while fins on the side of the darts responded to signals from an onboard receiver that guided the payloads to a fixed landing point. These particular projectiles carried infrared strobe lights mounted on their tails. Had they been military issue, the projectiles would no doubt have had a macho moniker like “spearhead” or “thunderbolt.” These were CIA toys, however, and the Agency's quirky technical branch had christened the projectiles “Sammies” after the engineer who had designed them. They were accurate to within three feet. Tonight their target was the central square of Busu-Mouli.

Sykes put the Beechcraft into a slow banking turn. Reaching behind him into the aircraft's open cargo space, he retrieved a black Kevlar shoulder bag. Inside were two fourth-generation Night Hawk night-vision systems. Alex slipped one on over his head. The straps held the scope, which was about the size and shape of a small video camera, firmly in place. Sykes strapped on the second Night Hawk and dimmed the interior lights. Alex hit the power button on his Night Hawk. Instantly the forest floor came alive, a shimmering green carpet with a flat darker region that Alex knew must be the confluence of the Mongala and the mighty Congo River.

“There's the signal,” Alex said, pointing slightly to the right of their line of travel. The twin infrared strobes were invisible to the naked eye, but showed up as bright pulsars through the Night Hawk scopes. There was a jump helmet on the floor by his feet. Alex put it on. It was designed to accommodate the night-vision gear and fit comfortably.

“Get ready to jump.” Sykes gestured toward the back.

Alex climbed clumsily between the seats into the rear cargo space.

“Let's get this over with.”

“Okay. Remember. When I open the door, it'll be too loud to talk. You'll have to do it on your own. Just grab hold of the handles and wait for the green light.

“All of the lights are fucking green in this scope.”

“Well, wait for any old light then. You'll know it when you see it. Remember to really jump out that door. If you pussyfoot around, the tail is likely to slice you in half. We're not all that high, so make sure that you're clear of the aircraft and then pull that goddamn ripcord. Got it?”

“Yeah. I'm ready. Mostly.”

In between the two front seats was another makeshift control panel with several buttons, dials, and switches that Sykes called the Jumpmaster. He flipped two of the switches and the side cargo door of the aircraft opened up. There was a loud rush of air. Alex took a deep breath and looked out. He tried not to look at the jungle canopy a mile or so below. Grabbing the smooth steel bars welded to the sides of the door frame with either hand, he crouched down like a sprinter on the starting blocks. He had practiced this on the ground in Kinshasa. It had seemed easy. Over the door was a series of three lights. Alex knew that they were red, yellow, and green, but they all looked about the same color through his scope. The middle light was lit. Yellow. They were approaching the drop zone. Alex felt himself tense.

The middle light went dark. The third light went green. He launched himself into the void.

He sensed more than saw the tail of the aircraft whip by overhead, and then he was falling toward the forest floor, his body twisting violently in the air. Sykes, who had spoken with remarkable authority for a man who now claimed never to have jumped himself, had told Alex to focus on a single spot on the ground. Free-falling in the dark, however, he was having trouble even telling the ground from the sky. Without waiting to count to three, he reached across his chest and pulled the rip
cord. Almost instantly, he was jerked roughly upright and the scene before him stabilized as the horizon seemed to reemerge from the jumble of images that had threatened to overwhelm him.

The bright beacons of the Sammies' infrared signals stood out in sharp contrast to the surrounding jungle. They looked to be less than half a mile away. Sykes had dropped him right on target. The parachute he was using was military grade and intended for jumpers with vastly more experience than Alex. Sykes had taught him the basics of steering and warned him that the controls for the rectangular airfoil were extremely sensitive. One thing they had not had time to practice was landings. Alex grabbed on to the two toggles that controlled the pitch of the canopy. It took a moment or two to get a feel for it, but the steering was surprisingly intuitive. There was no wind to speak of, and Alex was able to guide the parachute until he was almost directly over the signals from the twin Sammies. Then he pulled on the left steering line and started a corkscrew descent that he hoped would bring him down right in the center of Busu-Mouli.

According to what Sykes had told him, it would take about four minutes to reach the ground from five thousand feet. It seemed to happen much faster than that. From about one thousand feet, Alex was able to make out the outlines of the buildings in Busu-Mouli and the layout of the central square.

It was difficult to judge distance through the single lens of the Night Hawk. Alex concentrated on keeping the Sammies directly underneath him, making delicate adjustments with the unfamiliar steering controls. The Sammies were embedded in the ground just a few feet apart in an area about forty feet on a side that looked to be mostly clear of debris. That was where Alex hoped to land. For the last two hundred or so feet, the ground seemed to rise up at him with dizzying speed. At what he guessed was about fifty feet, he pulled down hard on the toggles to flare the chute and slow his descent before impact. He must have applied the pressure unevenly, however, because the chute slipped
suddenly to the right, and instead of coming down in the clear area, he landed on the sloped corrugated tin roof of a house. The crash of his body against the metal made a terrible noise, but the tin roof was flexible and helped cushion his fall. He did everything he could to protect the equipment in his belly bag. Then the chute dragged him off the roof and he fell in an awkward heap, landing hard on his left side and smashing his head against a fence post. Even with the helmet, the blow left him dizzy and he struggled to strip off the chute before a gust of wind could pick it up and drag him across the courtyard.

The noisy landing had alerted the village to the intrusion, and by the time he was free of the chute, Alex found himself staring through his eyepiece at the glowing green barrel of a Kalashnikov. Someone pointed a flashlight in his face, overloading the night-vision system, which flared white and then went black. It would reset itself eventually, but Alex simply flipped the goggles up onto his forehead. His left side and his left arm hurt like hell.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light. The man training the rifle on him was Jean-Baptiste. Three of his guardsmen stood behind him. Alex undid his chin strap and dropped the helmet and the Night Hawk to the ground.

“Didn't we do this the last time, Jean-Baptiste? You point a gun at me. Someone tells you that there's no percentage in shooting me and we kiss and make up. Let's skip ahead. Can you take me to the Chief? There's something he needs to know. If you can't tell by my entrance, it's urgent.”

Jean-Baptiste lowered the rifle grudgingly.

Only now did Alex begin to realize just how terrifying—and exhilarating—the drop had been. Part of him wanted to scream into the night sky for the sheer joy of being alive, or at least not being dead. Sykes had clearly soft-pedaled the number of ways he could have killed himself on this jump.

“I didn't expect to see you back here,” Jean-Baptiste said.

“I didn't expect to be back, at least not so soon. I thought I might even show up on a boat or a plane, maybe even in the middle of the day. But I'm here now and I need to see Chief Tsiolo. Can you take me to him?” The rush from the jump had him keyed up and he was ready to pick a fight with Jean-Baptiste, even though the man was armed with a Kalashnikov.

“The Chief is dead.”

Alex felt like he had been kicked in the stomach.

“What about Marie?”

“Chief Tsiolo now.” It was Marie's voice and Alex experienced a moment of pure relief as she stepped out from the shadows into the now torch-lit courtyard. She was dressed in khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt. A long knife protruded from a sheath on her dusty work boots. A wide leather belt with an oversize gold buckle was the only truly feminine touch.

To Alex's surprise and pleasure, Marie hugged him, and he winced from the pain in his side as he tried to return her embrace.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Not seriously. This was my first and, if I have anything to say about it, last parachute jump. I'd say that I need to work on my landings, but if I never do this again then that's really not true.”

“You couldn't have flown to Goma and taken the ferry downriver? That's what most people do.”

“I was in kind of a hurry, and it'll likely be a while before I can take any commercial flights. It's complicated.”

They stood face-to-face for a moment, letting the silence speak for them.

“I'm sorry about your father, Marie. He was a great man.”

“Yes, he was. His death is a loss to us all, not least of all to me.”

Suddenly Alex felt dizzy and he put out a hand to steady himself on the wall of the house. Marie took his arm and gestured for Jean-Baptiste to help on the other side.

“Come on,” she said. “Let's get him up to the house.

“I'll give you one thing,” she added, with a hint of mischief.

“What's that?”

“You do know how to make an entrance.”

“Just wait until you see me leave.”

After a few stumbling steps, Alex shrugged off the assistance. “I'm okay,” he said. “I can walk.”

He smelled it before he saw it. The acrid odor of smoke seemed to permeate the village. When they arrived at the place where the Tsiolo house had been, there was only a burned-out shell. A few charred beams were all that remained of the Chief's home . . . of Marie's home. Even without the night-vision scope, Alex could now see a number of buildings in the village that had fire damage. Some were still standing, others had burned to their foundations. A few were being rebuilt or repaired.

“What happened?” Alex asked. But he knew the answer.

“Genocidaires
,”
Marie replied. “They attacked us twice since you left. The first time they took my father from me. The next time they took my home. We beat them back both times . . . but the cost was terrible. With time, we can rebuild what was burned. The lives lost can never be replaced.”