Authors: David DeBatto
“I’m here on a fact-finding mission,” she told him, keeping to the story that had been prepared for her. “I’ll be making a
report to the UN when I’m done on the status of women and how they’re being treated in the conflict. How about you—what brings
you here?”
“I’m a writer,” he told her. “I’m doing a story for
Men’s Journal,
but I think it’s going to be a book too. My agent thinks she can sell it. Where are you from?”
“Dublin,” Mack said. “How about you?”
“I’m from the States,” he told her, as if she hadn’t surmised that. “Near Chicago. Evanston. Near where Al Capone was from.”
“I know where Chicago is,” she told him. “I come from Coldwater Road. Bono, from U2, went to my high school. The nuns and
the priests didn’t know what to make of him.”
“Oh,” Ackroyd said. Now was his chance to mention David Letterman. He didn’t. “Do you know Evelyn Warner? Do you get the BBC
in Ireland?”
If she’d had the time to prepare her own identity, or study the one that had been prepared for her, she might have known the
answer to that question.
“I’ve seen her reports,” MacKenzie replied evasively. “We do have cable TV in Ireland, Stephen. I know who Larry King is,
too, though some of the more remote villages in Ireland don’t get HBO. Why do you ask?”
“Sorry,” he said. He seemed embarrassed, flustered. She’d only meant a gentle tease. “I was just asking because she’s working
here, on a story. She’s at the health center. I’ll introduce you.”
MacKenzie knew her Irish accent was good enough to fool an American, or an African, but whether she could get across on a
Brit remained in doubt. She had other concerns—Warner had worked with DeLuca in Iraq, the Englishwoman one of those globe-trotting
journalists who seemed to find the hot spots before they got hot, always squinting into the sun in her khaki safari vest or
trying not to flinch in front of the camera as the bombs burst in the background and missiles lit the sky, casting fiery orange
highlights onto her wind-tossed yet somehow ever-perfect hair. Mack doubted Warner had any way of connecting her with Team
Red or DeLuca (they’d never met in Iraq, though they’d passed each other in the hallway of a combat area support hospital),
but if she somehow slipped up, her cover could be blown.
The path dipped down by a river, filled recently by heavy rains to the north, where a hand-drawn sign indicated in pictures
that defecating or urinating at that place was forbidden. Across the river, the landscape was dark. The path rose from the
river up a sandy bank and wound through another population of refugees, the candles and kerosene lamps glittering beneath
the African sky giving the feel of a kind of vigil. Ackroyd explained that they were moving from an area where people were
generally healthy, hungry or starving but otherwise without major infections or illnesses, to an area where the sick were
located. They’d had an outbreak of cholera due to sanitation problems and
V. cholerae
bacteria in the river.
“We can give you Mutacol or Dukerol if you want,” Ackroyd said. “Neither are available in the States, yet, anyway. We have
about seven hundred people here, all women and children, and maybe half are ill. It’s one of the smallest IDPs in Liger, but
that doesn’t necessarily make things any easier. We’re a little worried because we don’t have water purification equipment,
and the last convoy of water trucks was hit by the rebels. Only one made it through with potable water. Two were captured
and two were destroyed. The water just poured out onto the ground. We’re boiling what we can, but we’re running out of kerosene
to boil, too, and gas to power the generators. You could save almost everybody if you could just rehydrate them, but that’s
proving to be more difficult than we thought it would be. I’m sure you know this already, but don’t drink any water unless
it’s bottled or boiled, don’t eat anything that hasn’t been well cooked and isn’t still warm, don’t eat any fruit you didn’t
peel yourself, and don’t, it goes without saying, go in the river. I mean, don’t go swimming.”
“Why is this camp all women and children?” Mack asked. “Where are the men?”
“There are camps with men, too,” Ackroyd said. “The feeling was that the Muslims didn’t want men and women housed in the same
camp. Evelyn Warner thinks they just want to put the women where they know they can find them. It’s not safe here and all
we’ve got is about thirty AU troops, led by a young corporal named Okempo who’s never actually fired a weapon in his life.
We took a mortar round last night that killed a dozen people. It came in from across the river. For no reason, just to kill
people and make them afraid.”
“From who?” Mack said. “IPAB or LPLF or someone else?”
“What difference does it make?” Ackroyd said. “That’s the infirmary. The staff compound is behind it—that’s where you’ll be
staying.”
She saw lights ahead, a GP-large tent illuminated from inside with electricity, glowing orange beneath the African stars,
oversized human figures projected in silhouettes against the canvas. She heard generators starting and cutting out. She felt,
as she followed her guide, utterly conspicuous, the eyes of the sufferers who surrounded her watching her, mothers and children,
but unlike the crowds she’d seen on the streets of Port Ivory, where kids begged for handouts and adults clamored for assistance,
here everyone was for the most part silent, save for the occasional low voice of someone singing a lullaby to help her baby
sleep.
At the tent, Ackroyd left her alone while he made inquiries. He returned to say that Dr. Chaline was out having a walkabout
in the camp, and that his assistant, Dr. Leger, was attending a birth, even though the mother was so underweight and malnourished
that the survival of either mother or newborn seemed doubtful.
A white woman, mid-thirties, Mack guessed, sat at a folding table outside the staff tent, smoking a cigarette beneath a broad
acacia tree, a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table in front of her. A young black woman was seated across from her. The white
woman was wearing a pair of short-sleeved loose-fitting navy blue coveralls, the zipper drawn down to reveal a white tank
top beneath it. The black woman wore green fatigues and a white short-sleeved shirt.
“This is Evelyn Warner, who I was telling you about,” Ackroyd said, “and this is Cela, our translator and a relief worker.
Evelyn, Cela, this is Mary Dorsey from the United Nations Women’s Health Initiative.”
“Have you eaten, Stephen?” Warner said, nodding to MacKenzie.
“I will,” Ackroyd said. “I wanted to go check on section ten to see if Udal brought them the lime they needed.”
“Why don’t you eat now and check on that later?” Warner said.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Stephen said, making his exit. “Mary, it was nice meeting you. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
“Mary Dorsey, welcome to Camp Seven,” Warner said. “We heard a rumor that a new
Obroni
was on her way—you wouldn’t happen to have come with a load of diapers and infant formula, would you?”
“I did,” MacKenzie said. “They were unloading the helicopter when I left.” Warner closed her eyes and sighed with relief,
then opened them, smiling.
“I didn’t mean, ‘Did you have any on you?’” Warner said. She turned to Cela. “That must be where Claude went. Now if we just
had something to mix the formula with, we’d be all set, wouldn’t we?”
She turned her attention again to the visitor.
“So do tell, Mary Dorsey, what exactly is the United Nations Women’s Health Initiative? And forgive me for being blunt, because
I was going to say, ‘What can we do for you?’ but frankly, I’m much more interested in what you can do for us.”
“I’m here to learn,” MacKenzie said. “Just to see for myself, I suppose. I can’t make any promises, but what I
can
do, when I get back, is make recommendations.”
Warner didn’t say anything. Mack wondered if her accent had given her away somehow. There had been times, during her career
with counterintelligence, when MacKenzie had taken a certain amount of pleasure, even pride, in the role-playing her job required
her to do, and in fooling people. This was not such a time. This was one of those times when she hated—hated—having to lie
to people.
“I suppose that must sound terribly inadequate to you,” she continued, “and for that, I apologize. The bottom line is that
we can’t commit relief funds without verification. That’s why I’m here. That probably seems hard to believe, for you, when
the proof is all around you, but in New York, they can’t rely on word of mouth or satellite photographs, so they sent me.
I was hoping to take with me a list of what your needs are.”
“What our
needs
are?” Warner said. She exchanged glances with Cela, and then the two women laughed, a prolonged chuckle despite the Englishwoman’s
best efforts to suppress her mirth. “Oh dear, that’s rich,” she said. “I’m so sorry,” she said at last, “we’re not laughing
at you, really we aren’t, but I think the first thing we’d need would be a very long roll of paper upon which to write you
a list of the things we need. Maybe it would save time if we told you what we don’t need. We don’t need dirt. Or fresh air.
Everything other than that, we need.”
“We’re also worried about security,” MacKenzie said, sticking to her agenda. “My superiors are worried about relief supplies
falling into the wrong hands.”
“And whose hands would those be, exactly?” Warner said.
“Maybe you could tell me,” Mack said. “The Council on Relief is concerned that anything we bring in will be seized by IPAB
forces led by John Dari—that sort of thing.”
Again, Warner exchanged glances with Cela.
“Well, first of all,” she said, “you should tell your bosses to get it straight, because John Dari doesn’t lead IPAB forces.
The people he leads don’t call themselves anything, though I’ve heard them referred to as the SJD or the ‘Sons of John Dari.’
And second of all, this oh-so-delicious corn-soy porridge that Cela and I have just supped on, of which you will also surely
partake if you stay with us, may have been originally shipped by Oxfam or President Bo or the U.S. or whoever wants to take
credit for it, but it was delivered into our hands by John Dari’s men after it sat in a warehouse on a government air force
base in Baku for God only knows how long, so you should tell your ‘superiors,’ if I may use that word, that John Dari is not
your problem.”
Mack felt like she was being scolded by a kindergarten teacher.
“Forgive me, Mary, I don’t mean to snap at you,” Warner said, “because I know it’s not your fault, but you should know that
while people elsewhere spend time arguing about who to give aid to or how to get it here or who should transport it or who
gets credit for where it comes from and all that sod-off crap, the people here who are waiting for it are dying, in great
numbers, every day, in this camp and in others. So when we see people on ‘fact-finding’ missions, we tend to think, my God,
if they could just send one shipment of food for every observer and famine-tourist they think they need to send, real people
would be alive.”
MacKenzie stood still while Cela gave Evelyn Warner a look.
“Now I must ask you, with all the humility I can summon, Mary Dorsey, to forgive me,” Warner said. “That was completely out
of line. You’ve just arrived, you mean good entirely, and I’ve gone and made you feel like you’re to blame. You know, the
thing is, we’ve actually noticed this—Stephen and I were talking about it. You live here and you get very angry, and it builds
and builds inside you, but we all feel the same thing, so what’s the point in talking about it? And then someone new comes
along, and we dump on them, just because we have somebody new to dump on. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course I can,” MacKenzie said. “Of course. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel that way.”
“Human? Speak for yourself, but I won’t be 100 percent human again until I can get a nice dry martini and a big red steak,”
Warner said, getting to her feet. “If you’ll forgive me, I really need to find Dr. Chaline, but maybe Cela could show you
the nursery. Cela? Would you mind? Take Corporal Okempo with you. I think that would be a good place to start. We can show
you the rest in the morning. Give you more
facts
than I imagine you really want to find, but it is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Mack followed the black woman, who said she was Kenyan by birth but had lived in Liger since she was a teenager. Corporal
George Okempo looked younger than advertised, a lanky man with a broad smile and big ears that stuck out from the edge of
his blue beret. He carried his weapon awkwardly, as if he were trying to not carry it, or to hide it. The nursery was another
GP-large, about fifty feet from the staff area, lit inside by a single kerosene lantern in the middle, propped up on a wooden
crate. In the tent, Mack saw the faces of perhaps thirty or forty children, ranging in age from newborns to five-year-olds,
some held by older girls but many who were alone. A large woman in the middle of the room sat on a short stool, surrounded
by children gathered at her feet.
“These children,” Cela said softly, so as not to disturb the proceedings, her accent thick, “have no mothers or fathers. This
is the orphanage, yes? Some came here with them and their parents died, but some were alone when we found them. A few have
AIDS, but mostly no. The queen mother, the woman there, is telling them a story.”
The large woman in the center of the circle took a small stick, stuck the tip of it into the flame of the kerosene lamp, and
then used it to light two dozen candles on a large unfrosted birthday cake. The children’s faces lit up as the woman lit the
candles.
“The government said they were sending us a million candles,” Cela explained. “And we were glad until we learned that they
were only birthday candles. So we have parties, whenever a new child enters, we say it is his or her birthday.”
The old woman asked the children a question, and the children responded with a loud cheer.