The American Mission (5 page)

Sifa's face assumed a look of determination. “I have made up my mind,” she said with the absolute certainty of youth. “I am going to be a geologist like you and travel the world looking for valuable . . .
minerals.” She rolled the last unfamiliar word off her tongue with a deliberate slowness.

Marie smiled and was about to reply when a glint of black in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Just about any other geologist would likely have missed it. It was such a small thing. But for Marie, a number of data points that she had picked up almost subliminally clicked into place. This was why Karic had wanted her on the expedition. Geology was a hard science, but successful prospecting favored intuition. Without having to look, she somehow knew what was buried there under the sand. Coltan. With a small trowel from her backpack, Marie turned over the sandy soil and inspected the silicates. The black flecks in the sand could be coltan. She separated out enough of the material to run some simple chemical tests.

After fishing around in the bottom of the pack, she pulled out a small pan with a zinc plate on the bottom and two bottles labeled
POTASSIUM HYDROXIDE
and
CHLOROHYDRIC ACID
. She mixed the ore and chemicals in the zinc pan. The solution foamed up rapidly with an audible hiss. This field test was far from definitive. To confirm the presence of coltan in commercially exploitable quantities, the team would need to dig a series of slit trenches and use the diesel-powered water pump that the porters carried broken down in pieces to force the material down a sluice that would separate the heavier coltan particles from the sand and clay. Karic would insist on this step. The textbooks and company operating manuals demanded it. Marie knew in her bones that it was unnecessary. She was standing on a large deposit of one of the most valuable minerals on earth.

The sun was setting and the meadow was lit by the soft light of early evening. It was, as she had told Sifa, a truly beautiful place. Because of the techniques involved, coltan mining was exceptionally destructive. For an instant, Marie had a vision of the lush clearing turned into a moonscape of craters and trenches, the river thick with mud and
the soil poisoned with heavy metals. Sifa and her family would again be refugees.
Could she trade Sifa's village for her own? Could she live with herself if she did?

“What is it, Marie? Are you all right?”

“Yes, I'm fine.”

“Did you find something?”

Marie hesitated. Then she made up her mind.

“No, Sifa,” she said emphatically. “There's nothing of value here. We should get back to the village. They're probably waiting on us for dinner.”

She would not take the devil's bargain. If this deposit was not the answer, she would find coltan somewhere else, somewhere uninhabited.

J
UNE
13, 2009

C
ONAKRY

I
t was a familiar dream. It had been with him for the better part of three years, a part of his life that he would gladly leave behind but knew that he never could.

He stood alone in the desert. He was barefoot, and the hot sands of Western Sudan were painful to walk on. The bleak uniformity of the landscape was broken only by the occasional scrub bush or stunted acacia tree. His feet burned as he walked toward a mountain that he could see in the distance. He walked for hours under a desert sun that never moved from its midday high. Looking down at his feet, he saw a skeleton of a man wearing the rags of the rust-colored robe he had died in. The skull was bleached white, but shreds of desiccated flesh still clung to the arms and legs. The hands were stretched out in front with the fingers digging into the sand as though the man had been dragging himself across the desert when he had finally succumbed to the heat. More skeletons appeared, rising from the sand: men, women, small
children, and animals. He walked past them, intent on reaching the mountain that seemed to grow no closer.

He knew without turning around that there were people behind him. For some reason, he did not dare look back, but he knew they were there. They were following him or he was leading them. It wasn't clear which. Among them, he knew somehow, were friends, family, people he loved. Anah.

A sandstorm rose up from the desert floor, obscuring his view of the mountain. The storm took shape and form, Janjaweed riders on horseback made up of swirling sands with long lances and banners blotting out the sun. He stood still and opened his arms, awaiting the embrace of death. If he could sacrifice himself, perhaps the
Janjaweed
would spare those behind him. Instead, the apparitions simply flowed over and past him, filling his mouth and nostrils with choking sand and dust, and forcing him to squeeze his eyes closed. He felt the winds whipping over his body as they passed. And he knew that those behind him were dead. He could not look back. There was no point now in marching to the mountain, and there was nowhere else to go.

An insistent thumping sound filled his ears, starting low and building to an almost unbearable volume. He looked up and saw shadows sweeping through the sky like the blades of an enormous helicopter. The shadows grew larger and larger until they threatened to swallow the world.

Alex awoke with a start, the sheets soaked with the kind of sweat usually reserved for victims of malaria or dengue fever.

The air in his bedroom was thick and stale. The underpowered air conditioner had trouble keeping the temperature in the house below eighty. In the other rooms, ceiling fans helped to circulate the air, but Alex kept the one in his room turned off. The turning blades were evocative of helicopter rotors, and he knew from experience that they were potential triggers for panic attacks.

He unwrapped the sticky sheets from his body and lifted the mos
quito netting to get out of bed. He was always very careful to use nets at night. No sense adding malaria on top of the PTSD. The antimalarial drug Malarone that he took to ward off the endemic disease was bad enough. Nightmares and sleep disturbance were some of the side effects of the drug.

Alex was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes when he was tackled by a four-foot-eight dynamo who knocked him back on the bed and tangled him up in the mosquito netting.

“Good morning, sugar,” Alex said.

Anah's smile immediately banished the gloomy residue of the dream. She was standing at the foot of the bed in a bright pink pajama top with matching cotton shorts. There was a strawberry embroidered on the top with
SWEET THING
written underneath. Alex's housekeeper, Mrs. Mabinty, had fixed Anah's hair in braided spikes with colored beads at the tips. Anah liked the way the beads clinked together when she ran. Her grin was so big that it seemed to reach all the way down to her toes, and Alex, as he did every morning, marveled at just how completely he loved her. She had big, beautiful eyes, and there was something in the set of her jaw that reminded him of her grandfather.

“Good morning, Daddy. Are you ready for our workout?”

“Sure thing, baby. But there's something I've gotta do first.”

“What?”

Alex hooked his left foot behind Anah's leg and pulled her close enough to grab and tickle, which he did until she gasped for him to stop. Then she gave him a soft kiss on the cheek.

“Come on. Let's go.”

Alex threw on a pair of shorts and led Anah in their twenty-minute morning yoga routine, a combination of simple positions and basic breathing techniques that they enjoyed both as exercise and as an opportunity for a little father-daughter bonding. For Alex, it was also something more. It was a part of a holistic approach to treating his
PTSD, and he clung to it like a drowning man might cling to a piece of driftwood.

When they were done, Anah looked at her father thoughtfully.

“You had the dream again last night, didn't you, Daddy? I could hear you.”

“I'm sorry, baby. I didn't mean to wake you. Don't worry, okay? It was nothing. It's just a dream.”

Anah looked skeptical, but ultimately decided to give her father the benefit of the doubt.

“It's Saturday,” she observed. “Will you make French toast?”

“With strawberries?”

“Of course.”

Alex fixed breakfast while John Coltrane played on the stereo and Anah played on the carpet with her dolls. In doll land, the little girls always had both a mother and a father and a big extended family of stuffed animals and talking cars. Having lost his own father at a relatively young age, Alex well understood the feeling of absence that Anah wrestled with. Even before she had learned any English, he had taken her once a week to see a child psychiatrist in downtown Washington recommended by Dr. Branch. Their parallel therapies were another bond between them. Although his daughter had lost so much more than he had, her youth was a distinct advantage. It was Alex, not Anah, who still seemed trapped by the past.

They rarely discussed Darfur or Camp Riad, but Anah was old enough to remember. Just how old she was neither of them knew for certain. She looked to be about five or six years old when he had first accepted responsibility for her, but poor nutrition in the camps made it hard to judge age accurately. Alex had rounded up, and as far as he and Anah were both concerned, she was a healthy nine-year-old girl. Together they had picked April 21, the day the adoption was finalized, as her birthday.

They had breakfast sitting at a small wooden table in the kitchen.
The table was oak, a tree that was most decidedly not native to Africa. It was imported from the United States, along with every other piece of furniture in the comfortable three-bedroom house the Embassy had assigned to him from the housing pool. Every one of the thirty-five houses in the pool was supplied with Ethan Allen furniture in the same “classical American” style. In fact, homes owned or leased by State everywhere in the world had the same furniture and the same inoffensive beige carpets. It was oddly dislocating for an American diplomat to visit a friend living on another continent only to find his couch and coffee table waiting for him on the other end.

Alex left the dishes in the sink for Mrs. Mabinty and took a shower in tepid water that had a slightly brown tinge. The State Department said that the water in Conakry was not safe to drink but was “probably” okay to shower in. So far, no one in the Embassy had contracted any kind of parasite that could be definitively linked to the morning shower.

By the time he had finished his shower, Anah was dressed. Already something of a fashionista, she had picked out a bright yellow skirt and paired it with a green top that had a picture of a unicorn drawn in rhinestones and sequins. Hot pink sneakers completed the ensemble.

“So what do you think about today, Anah? Do you want to make a picnic lunch and go to the botanical gardens or hop the ferry to Îles de Los and go to the beach?”

“The beach,” she answered assuredly.

“The beach it is.” Alex looked at his daughter and tried to imagine how his joining Centrex might change her life. It would mean moving to London, where the company was headquartered. They could bring Mrs. Mabinty with them. The questions he had were really unanswerable, and he pushed them to the back of his mind. He was absolutely certain of only one thing.

“I love you, little girl,” he said.

Anah rolled her eyes. “I know that,” she replied.

•   •   •

T
hat night, after Anah had gone to bed exhausted from a day in the sun, Alex went to the den to work on his pet project. For nearly six months he had been trying to build a satellite system that would allow him to watch the Georgetown Hoyas play basketball. A local mechanic had cut a dish out of the hood of an ancient Mitsubishi pickup truck. Alex himself had cobbled together most of the electronics from Embassy castoffs and what he could find on the local market. The tools he used had once belonged to his father. Along with a passion for working with his hands, they were his sole inheritance.

Alex had borrowed a satellite finder from the Embassy communication section to point his Mitsu-dishy in the general direction of the Atlantic Hot Bird satellite that was hosting not only the TV broadcasts of Georgetown games but also—as he had discovered to his chagrin—a panoply of small-market channels ranging from Chinese pornography to Portuguese soap operas and Swahili game shows.

Alex almost certainly would have had better luck with the off-the-shelf components he could have shipped in from Europe or the States. It would have been faster as well. As it was, there was a real risk that Georgetown's star rookie, Greg Monroe, would make the jump to pro ball before Alex could get his contraption to work.

Without warning, the electronic snow on the TV screen was replaced by what was unmistakably an Indian Bollywood musical complete with dancing elephants. This, Alex reasoned, was a step up from the Arabic news broadcast he had found yesterday, but still a long way from the NCAA. A soccer match between Senegal and Cameroon suddenly replaced the Hindi musical.

Alex lay down on his back and stuck his head under the makeshift decoder that was supposed to translate the Hot Bird data into actual programming. For some reason, the receiver was sliding up and down the signal spectrum. He was so absorbed in the circuitry that he nearly
cracked his head open on the underside of the decoder box when the phone rang.

“Hello, this is Alex,” he said, picking up the receiver after nearly half a dozen rings.

“Mr. Baines.” The voice on the other end was female and more efficient than friendly. “This is the State Department Operations Center. Please hold for Ambassador Spencer.”

Alex was both surprised and pleased. Howard “Spence” Spencer was Alex's friend and his mentor in the Foreign Service, but they hadn't spoken in three or four months. Spence was Ambassador to the Congo now, where a complex and bloody civil war had already taken millions of lives without any sign of slowing down. This was the kind of thing that could keep an American ambassador pretty busy. Spence had been a big part of Alex's life since his freshman year in college. The Ambassador had been serving a stint as the diplomat-in-residence at Georgetown during Alex's freshman year. It was because of his course on America in Africa that Alex had graduated with a degree in African studies. It was because of Spence that Alex had gone into the Peace Corps after college and then into the Foreign Service.

Getting into the Foreign Service was a brutally Darwinian process. The year Alex joined, more than 18,000 aspirants took the entrance exam. After a grueling series of tests and interviews, and a background investigation that seemed to reach back to kindergarten, 250 candidates eventually got job offers. Spence helped Alex navigate the exam process. And when he was up for his first assignment overseas, Spence had arranged for Alex to join him at his post in Khartoum.

“Parties, you are connected. Ops will drop.”

“Hello, Alex. How's everything in the wild, wild West?” Spence had the kind of deep, resonant voice and vaguely upper-crust accent that was central casting's idea of what an American ambassador should sound like.

“Ambassador, it's good to hear from you. Hope life in the Congo is treating you well.”

“As well as could be hoped for. We've been tremendously busy, of course, but I'm reasonably optimistic about the way things are going here. The government has won a few tactical victories and is probably in a good position to regain control of the river.” Alex knew that reclaiming the Congo River, the enormous waterway that ran through the heart of the country, would give the legitimate army a real advantage in its battles with the bewildering array of rebel groups and paramilitaries running amok in the east.

“Good luck with that, Spence. The Congo is still my first love in Africa. What's going on there right now just breaks my heart. It's a huge job, and I'm happy as hell that you're the one doing it.”

“Thanks, Alex. I appreciate that. This assignment has been a really humbling experience.”

Alex could hear in Spence's voice the weight of the problems he faced. The Democratic Republic of the Congo was dying a slow and painful death, and there didn't seem to be anything anyone could do to stop it. “We'll talk more shop later. Tell me first, how's the family?”

Alex had grown close to the Spencer family over the years, and he had been a frequent guest at the Ambassador's Georgetown home. The Spencers' gracious Federal-style town house was a testament to old family money. By diplomatic title, ambassadors were both extraordinary and plenipotentiary, but they were still on the government pay scale.

Spence caught him up on developments in the family. They had stayed behind when he had left for Kinshasa so that his youngest daughter could finish high school in the States.