Mission Liberty (32 page)

The cameraman guffawed. As MacKenzie left, she could hear Kruger insisting that the cameraman delete the previous segment.

She moved to the large wall tent that served as the administrative offices for Camp Cobra, but no one there had seen or met
anyone named Stephen Ackroyd. She toured the camp briefly, but she suspected she was wasting time. She couldn’t stop herself
from thinking that Stephen was hurt somewhere and needed help, lying off the side of the road from Camp Seven, or on a trail
somewhere. She didn’t like the idea of defying one of DeLuca’s direct orders, but she needed to go back to Camp Seven, alone
if necessary, so she headed to the camp gate leading to the road to the border. At the gate, she saw a group of African Union
soldiers posted there, and a familiar face. Corporal Okempo recognized her and asked her how she was.

“I’m good,” she told him. “It’s good to see you, George.”

“Where are you going?” he said. “You don’t want to go that way—that way is Liger.”

“I know,” she said. “I have to go back to check on something.”

“Alone?” he said. “You cannot go alone.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I have to go.”

“Wait, wait,” he said. “You are on foot?”

“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “I run marathons—I’m used to being on foot.”

“Wait, wait, no no no,” Corporal Okempo said. “No no, you cannot. I will go with you. Please. You must let us.”

“It’s dangerous,” she insisted.

“No no,” he said. “You cannot go alone. Please. It would be dark before you could return. Please, I have a Jeep—we can drive.
It’s my job. We will go with you.”

She considered his request.

“All right,” she said. “Thank you.”

Corporal Okempo picked three men to accompany them, and a minute later, they were off.

At the border, after they showed their papers to the guards on the Ligerian side of the river, MacKenzie paid their entrance
fees in U.S. currency. Every thousand yards or so on the way back to Camp Seven, they saw stragglers or lone refugees heading
for safety, gaunt, hollow-eyed people with barely the strength to move, mothers with children in their arms, kids wearing
handed-down charity T-shirts with Domino’s Pizza logos or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters on them, families walking
silently, old women carrying plastic shopping bags containing all their remaining worldly possessions. “Have you seen an American?”
MacKenzie asked them. “Have you seen an
Obroni
?” The sun was fierce. MacKenzie occasionally stood in the Jeep, hanging on to the roll bar, to survey the countryside. Each
time they came to a grove of trees, her hopes rose, thinking she’d find Stephen resting beneath them with a broken ankle,
perhaps, or maybe he’d stopped to assist someone in need and was staying with them until help arrived. She pictured him smiling
and saying, “Thought you’d never get here,” or making some lame joke about how women were always late. At one point, her hopes
rose again when she thought she saw a white man walking toward them, but she was mistaken. It was only a fair-skinned African
man who seemed half-dazed.

The scene at Camp Seven was one of desolation and destruction, as if the men who’d come to kill the people there had taken
their frustrations out on the camp itself. Buildings and tents had been burned, solar cook stoves and water pumps destroyed.
The infirmary had been slashed by machetes, beds and IV drips smashed and tossed to the ground, tables overturned, ration
cards burned, as if to bring some further measure of hell to the people already visited by so much suffering, should they
try to return. With Okempo and his men, they drove the lanes of the camp in silence, witnessing the devastation, and at one
point MacKenzie called out Stephen’s name, several times, as loud as she could, not because she expected him to answer but
because she had to.

“Miss Dorsey,” Corporal Okempo finally said. “I think we should go. There is no one here. Please. It will be dark.”

Then trouble.

A troop convoy appeared in the distance, pausing on a far hill at a crest in the road and stopping.

MacKenzie noted that her three escorts from the African Union were equipped with the AK-47s that DeLuca had given them. They
held their weapons uncertainly, the way a new father might hold his first child. Okempo seemed to be about twenty, and the
two men who’d volunteered to come along were younger than that. MacKenzie had a MAC-10 in her shoulder bag, as well as her
service Beretta. She opened her bag but left the weapons inside it, where she could reach them quickly. The truck approached
slowly, stopping again about fifty yards from where the AU jeep was parked. A man in a red beret got out of the truck and
gestured for someone to come forward.

“I will go,” Corporal Okempo said softly. “Perhaps there will be no problem.”

She could sense, in the way he walked, that it was only with some effort that he was able to place one foot in front of the
other and proceed, checking back over his shoulder and straightening his posture to make himself look as large and as important
as possible. A second rebel jumped down from the truck and pointed his rifle at the corporal, who raised one hand in a gesture
of peace.

MacKenzie watched apprehensively as the two men, Okempo and the leader of the rebels, spoke for a few minutes, and then Okempo
returned, a smile on his face.

“You see?” he said. “I told you it would be all right. They are SJD. They say they will drive with us to the border to protect
our rear. Okay then? Not a problem. But they say there are marauders in this place still who are not part of any army but
who have been causing trouble anyway. We can go.”

Mack took one last look around the camp, then got back into the Jeep.

It was dark by the time they crossed first the West and then the East Liger rivers to re-enter Camp Cobra. She found Evelyn
Warner in the administration tent. Dr. Chaline was in the infirmary. Warner wore a haggard look on her face, managing a brief
sad smile to see MacKenzie again.

“Wasn’t sure you were still with us,” Warner said. “I’m glad that you are. I heard you went back to Camp Seven.”

“It got a little sketchy, for a while there,” Mack said. “Fortunately, we found some transportation when we needed it.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful we are,” Evelyn said. “To you and to David and all the rest. Someone said some men parachuted
in to lend a hand.”

“It was a pleasant surprise,” MacKenzie said. “Have you heard anything about Paul Asabo? We know he was arrested, but we don’t
know much more.”

“I wish I had something to tell you, but I don’t,” Warner said. “He was telling the soldiers at the border to behave themselves.
I was trying to intercede, but when they said to him, ‘Who do you think you are?’ he told them. Two minutes later, two men
came and forced him into the backseat of a government SUV, and that’s the last we saw of him. Do you know where he is?”

“We’re trying to find out,” MacKenzie said. “I actually came back to look for Stephen.”

“Oh, dear God,” Warner said, a look on her face of sad surprise. She put her hand lightly on Mack’s arm. “Hasn’t anyone told
you? Stephen didn’t make it.”

MacKenzie felt her heart suddenly breaking, beat by beat.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “That he isn’t here? He didn’t come back with you?”

“He’s here,” Warner said. “His body is. But he didn’t make it, Colleen. We’ve been trying to notify his next of kin.”

“Show me,” MacKenzie said.

Dr. Chaline stepped out of the infirmary just as they passed. When Evelyn Warner told him she was taking MacKenzie to see
Stephen’s body, he nodded grimly and volunteered to go with them. He cautioned MacKenzie that it was the practice in refugee
camps to bury people quickly, given what the lack of refrigeration and the hot African sun could do to a body after the life
had gone out of it and circulation no longer cooled it. The morgue was a large tent, kept apart from the camp and downwind,
because the smell could be quite strong. There was a cemetery beyond the morgue where the bodies were moved as soon as an
identity could be determined, communal graves dug by a backhoe, with the attempt made to bury people with their own tribal
members. Bodies that had been either identified or determined to be unidentifiable were taken from the morgue and stored on
the ground, sprayed with chlorine, and then covered with lime to slow the decomposition until the burial crews could get to
them. There were outbreaks of cholera and dysentery from soil and water contaminated with
Vibrio cholerae
and
Shigella dysenteriae,
Chaline said, an epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis, one latrine for every six hundred refugees because the camp was on
volcanic rock where latrines were impossible to dig, and no mosquito control programs in place to prevent the spread of malaria
or lymphatic filariasis. Things were barely in control, he told MacKenzie. He hoped she could understand.

The smell was indeed overpowering. Stephen’s body lay on a table all by itself, covered in a white sheet. When Claude Chaline
pulled the sheet back, Mack felt her knees buckle slightly. It was Stephen, but it wasn’t Stephen. She tried to harden herself
and tell herself she was a soldier, and soldiers were tough and didn’t feel things, but her attempts were unsuccessful. She
took a deep breath and turned to leave, walking away as fast as she could walk, until Evelyn Warner caught up to her and put
her arms around her and held her. Soldiers weren’t supposed to cry, that’s what they said, but in her experience, soldiers
cried all the time. For some, it was all that got them through. They did it privately, when they thought no one else was looking,
but they all did it. Now it was her turn.

When Dr. Chaline reached them, she asked him how it happened. Why? What was the cause of death? She said she wanted a complete
explanation, and not to spare her. She’d had EMT training, she reminded him.

“Starvation is one of the oldest things that people can die from,” Chaline said softly. “People have starved to death since
the beginning of time, but we still can’t always pinpoint how it causes life to end. The causes are often multiple. Stephen
would not eat. We all noticed how thin he was getting—did you know that this happens from time to time among relief workers,
who feel so guilty eating in front of starving people that they can’t eat themselves, and give away all their food to those
they think are more deserving? Sometimes we have to assign minders and eat on the buddy system, to watch each other to make
sure it does not happen.”

MacKenzie was aware of the phenomenon. She felt Evelyn’s arm around her shoulder.

“When he first came to us,” Chaline continued, “he was quite overweight. I think he lost perhaps 30 percent of his body mass.
He told us he felt better than he had in years. At a certain point, early in the process, sometimes a kind of contentment
settles in. The psychological changes come later. I had spoken to Stephen about it. Starvation is a catch-all diagnostic.
There is a final wasting away where the body depletes all its resources, but when you become extremely malnourished, long
before that point, you become susceptible to a number of other things. He could have been hypoglycemic, or have had low blood
sodium from dehydration. The body can’t fight infections. Your heart loses muscle mass, which makes exertion difficult. There
are electrolyte imbalances. If I had to guess at cause of death, I would say his heart failed. We’ve had cases of critical
orthostatic hypotension, myofibrillar damage, ventricular arrhythmias, low QRS voltage—all of this can lead to sudden cardiac
death. It’s a combination. One thing occurs and then there is a sudden cascade to failure. I am sorry.”

“If you knew he was starving himself, why didn’t you do something?” she asked him. “You’re a doctor. You could have force-fed
him.”

“A doctor cannot treat a patient against his will,” Chaline said. “That is assault, from a legal definition, unless the patient
isn’t competent to make decisions for himself. With starvation, people are often completely lucid, right up to the end. It’s
a problem. Tell me—did you see any signs of megalomania or persecution?”

She thought, then nodded, remembering when Stephen told her he thought he was going to win the Pulitzer, unless the other
journalists in Liger sabotaged his work.

“Anger or aggressiveness? Impulsiveness, perhaps?”

“Just once,” she said, recalling how he bristled when she said she wanted to peek at his journal.

“Did he ever seem confused or disassociated?” Chaline asked. “As if he didn’t quite know where he was? Or indifferent to the
future?”

She remembered what a bad driver he was, and how, in the chaos of exiting Camp Seven, he’d seemed a bit lost, or distracted,
but war was nothing if not disorder—feeling lost was normal, she’d concluded at the time. She remembered him not getting her
joke, and saying, “It just never occurred to me that this would be over,” and his last word to her, “Whatever.” She’d missed
all the signs. MacKenzie understood that to the doctor, Stephen’s was just one of a thousand deaths he saw every week. It
was different, but it was the same.

“I wish you’d told me,” she said.

“He made us swear to say nothing,” Chaline said. “I’m sorry.”

“We’re having some trouble contacting his next of kin,” Evelyn Warner said. “We’ve tried the emergency contact listed on his
passport, but there’s no answer—the information appears to be out of date. This is horrible, but there simply aren’t the facilities
to handle this properly. Under these conditions, prolonging burial endangers everyone else…”

“I’ll take care of it,” MacKenzie said. “He can come with me. I’ll contact his next of kin.”

“We have his things,” Warner said. “I’ll get them for you.”

MacKenzie contacted the USS
Johnson
and asked for a helicopter to come get her. She added that they would need to bring along a body bag for a team member whose
remains needed to be stored and shipped to Evansville, Illinois—she’d furnish the details later.