Authors: David DeBatto
Stephen’s belongings all fit into a large knapsack. She went through them, hoping it would tell her who he was. In addition
to a few changes of clothes, he carried with him a paperback volume of
The Catcher in the Rye,
a well- thumbed collection of poems by an Israeli poet named Yehuda Amichai, two paperback references on the flora and fauna
of West Africa, and a well-thumbed dictionary, with words in it underlined that he’d intended to learn and use.
Apodictically:
beyond contradiction, clearly proving.
Probity:
virtue, integrity.
Contretemps:
an inappropriate/ confusing/awkward moment.
He had a toilet kit containing a razor that lacked the blade cartridge, a bottle of aspirin, a toothbrush but no toothpaste,
a small flashlight with dead batteries, a fingernail clipper, and a comb. She found an empty prescription bottle for mefloquine,
an antimalarial medication, and another for sleep disturbances. In his wallet, an Illinois driver’s license, an Evanston,
Illinois, library card, an ATM card, and a card from his local grocery store that doubled your coupons, but no credit cards
and nothing that helped her understand who he was.
When she opened his journal to see what he’d written, feeling that it would be okay now, saving this for last, she was stunned.
She founds words only on the first page. She’d seen him sit down with his journal on multiple occasions and had always been
tempted to peek over his shoulder, but he’d always protected his writing from her, and she’d always respected his privacy.
She hesitated opening the journal now, but she did it, in the hope of finding some kind of explanation. She found the reason
why he’d chosen to starve himself, but she found also a greater mystery. He’d written:
I have come here to be a writer but so far, I am unable to produce anything. It’s all worthless shit. My first instinct is
to think this is ridiculous, one more ridiculous chapter in my pathetic and ridiculous life, but that’s just me, getting down
on myself, and nothing has become clearer, since my arrival, than that this is not about me. This country, this war, this
famine, these poor people—this is not about me. I am not equal to this challenge, but who is? The other professional journalists
at the hotel have laughed at me and called me a joke, and in a way they’re right, but in another way, I can prove them wrong.
They write about hunger and starvation, but they never get out of the fucking car, or they file their stories from the bar,
and they’re all overweight, and each night they go back to the hotel and have a big meal and drink and joke about how pathetic
the people in this country are. It’s they who are pathetic. They know nothing, and never will. The only way to understand
this experience is to live it, and then write about it, so that’s what I’ve decided to do. I will make myself as hungry as
the people in these camps, and then I will know what it’s like. And then I will write, once I’ve come through the other side.
That’s my plan, anyway. I am a great writer. This is the big one. This is the book that will be my legacy, I think. I can’t
wait to get started.
The other pages were either blank or contained doodles, chains of boxes or scribbled geometric designs. On one page, in the
middle, she found a picture, a rather crude drawing of herself, rendered in pencil, a portrait of her with her eyes closed.
He must have sketched it while she was sleeping. Above the face was the name, Mary Dorsey, and below it the words, “She will
be my muse.”
MacKenzie closed the notebook and put it in the backpack.
When the helicopter arrived, she showed the flight crew where they’d find the body and watched as they loaded it onto the
HH-60. She found Cela and gave her a hug good-bye, and then she found Corporal Okempo and gave him a hug as well, promising
him she’d never forget his bravery and his courage. Dr. Chaline had finally allowed himself to fall asleep, so she didn’t
dare disturb him to say good-bye. Evelyn Warner walked her to the helicopter.
“Tell David I intend to thank him in person when I see him,” Warner said. “For last night. I know he could have made other
choices and he chose to save us.”
“I’m not sure he could have made other choices,” MacKenzie said, “but I’ll tell him. Can I ask you a personal question, Evelyn?
When you and David were in Iraq, did you and he ever… become involved?”
Warner shook her head.
“I certainly gave it some serious thought, but I don’t think he ever did,” Warner said. “Inappropriate to bring it up, him
being happily married and all that. It’s a line I don’t cross.”
“Just wondering,” Mack said.
“I’m always astonished that love can exist in places like this,” Warner said. “You’d think we’d have higher priorities. But
what do I know anyway?”
“You know a lot,” Mack said. “Thank you.”
DeLuca, Sykes, Vasquez, Preacher Johnson, and three of his TF-21 men sat two thousand yards offshore in the darkness in the
second boat, awaiting Riley’s signal. DeLuca felt lucky in a number of ways. First, knowing Paul Asabo’s location eliminated
the search part of what was a search and rescue mission. Robert Mohl had heard from a contact a similar rumor, that Paul Asabo
was being held at the Castle of St. James. It was enough of a confirmation to persuade General LeDoux to green-light the operation.
Second, detailed plans for a covert insertion into the Castle of St. James had already been drawn up—it had been the original
plan to evacuate the ambassador, a night mission that was scrubbed only after DeLuca came up with a proposal to rescue the
ambassador in broad daylight and move the evacuation up twelve hours in the schedule. They were favored by an overcast sky
that made the night even darker, the city of Port Ivory without power, the fires to the west still burning. “We have flow,”
Preacher Johnson said. “We’re in the blessing zone.” High tide was at 2113 hours, an hour after last light. Lieutenant Riley
and his SEAL team had gone ahead.
The Castle of St. James had been fortified, when it was originally built, to protect the occupants from threats from land
and not from the sea, both because the likelihood of an attack from land was greater and because the sea side had its own
natural fortifications, the castle mounted on a rocky cliff thirty feet above the water at high tide, with a surf strong enough
to dash even the best swimmers to pieces against the rocks. When the castle had been part of the triangular trade operation
between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, there’d been a wooden pier connecting the “door of no return” with the sea. Slaves
were marched down a series of steps and onto the pier, where they were loaded onto ships for transportation to plantations
in the Caribbean originally and later in America. The pier and the wooden steps had long since fallen into the surf, leaving
only a lone door, high above the water, set into walls that were twenty-five feet thick at the base. There’d been talk, briefly,
of putting a BLU-136 laser-guided “bunker buster” ordnance into the door and taking the ambassador out through the hole.
Riley and three SEALs had entered the water from a thousand yards out and executed a compass dive, swimming underwater and
following illuminated compasses, emerging unseen in their matte black scuba suits on the rocks below the door. They’d survived
the surf and climbed the rocks, and then a pair of SEALs scaled the wall, setting bolts and rigging ropes as they went, until
they’d reached the portal. The actual “door of no return” itself was the original item, made of thick wooden planks and cast-iron
sheathing, but it had been designed to keep people in, not to keep people out. The additional work done over the years to
reinforce the door had done little to alter that function. It took the SEAL at the door no time to cut the bolts holding the
door closed with the portable oxyacetylene torch he’d brought with him.
“Ready when you are,” DeLuca heard Riley say over his radio.
The SEAL driving the Zodiac switched to electrical power, the boat moving silently forward in the darkness. The castle had
its own generator, with electric lights illuminating the walls and courtyards, but no lights shone on the sea far below. The
falcon view showed Presidential Guard troops manning the parapets on the land side, with only a handful assigned to watch
to the south. There’d been talk of creating some kind of diversion or distraction, but neither were necessary, given that
armed rebels were already providing the service, attacking the castle from town with sporadic RPG, mortar, and small-arms
fire. Ambassador Ellis had managed to telephone President Bo, who informed the ambassador that all was going exceedingly well,
and that he and his cabinet were preparing, with complete confidence, to reoccupy their offices in the morning. Both SIGINT
and IMINT confirmed that Bo and his cabinet were holed up in the castle keep. To DeLuca’s surprise, General Ngwema was in
the castle as well, rather than leading his troops from the field. Bo’s personal Chinook helicopter sat in the east courtyard,
ready to relocate the president and his administration if the castle were to fall.
DeLuca rechecked the falcon view on his CIM. He looked at the castle through his NVGs.
“I still say we oughtta get us a catapult and do this the old-fashioned way,” Preacher Johnson said in a soft voice.
The risk factors were twofold. One was that they’d be seen. The second was that they’d be dashed against the rocks by the
surf and drowned. At one point DeLuca nearly lost his balance, stepping out of the boat onto the rock, his arm caught in the
tight grip of a SEAL who pulled him quickly to safety. The SEAL driving the Zodiac tossed them their gear and motored offshore
to wait until he was called back.
A short, quick scramble up the wet rocks led to the climbing ropes the first pair of SEALs had rigged. At the top, the team
assembled out of view, where the portal had been hollowed into the wall. Thermal imaging revealed nothing on the other side
of the door. Imaging through the fifteen-foot-thick stone walls was, of course, impossible. Two SEALs held the door by the
hinge side while two of Johnson’s men, both of them African-Americans, DeLuca noted, grabbed the door by the opposite side.
On a count of three, they pulled the door off its hinges and set it aside.
“Permission to throw this motherfucker into the sea,” one of Johnson’s men asked.
“Denied,” Johnson said. “All political statements or gestures may be posted to the TF-21 Web site.”
On the other side of the door was what appeared, viewed through night vision goggles, to be a short tunnel, not quite tall
enough for any of them to stand upright in, perhaps twenty feet long. Johnson’s men took the lead, moving quietly to the end
of the tunnel, then gave the clear signal.
The tunnel opened onto a large room, the size of a barn, with a high ceiling, walls of cobbled stone and brick, and a dirt
floor that sloped uphill away from them, a four-inch-wide gutter running down the middle of the sloping floor.
“That gutter served as the only toilet for the slaves they kept in here,” Johnson whispered. “This room held maybe five or
six hundred men. The women’s quarters were up ahead. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of the women’s quarters where the governor
used to climb down and pick the girls he wanted to have sex with. It was the only other way out of the dungeon. Girls who
got pregnant were released because they figured a slave that was half white wouldn’t work as hard as one that was all black.
I believe the irony therein was lost on the colonial fathers.”
“How do you know this stuff?” Vasquez asked him.
“I took a tour,” Johnson said. “Back when I was still undercover.”
Small windows, perhaps eighteen inches square, were set into the walls about twenty feet above the floor. An aluminum stepladder
led to one, where there appeared to be a machine-gun mount, currently unoccupied. At the top of the slope, a large corridor
turned left, and at the end of the corridor, a single dim yellow light bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling. The corridor
was lined with boxes and crates containing, a quick inspection revealed, weapons, food, and cash, a block of U.S. hundred-dollar
bills similar to the stash of U.S. currency they’d found in Iraq. DeLuca had found, in Iraq, a stash that he later learned
came to $22 million American. This stash was, he estimated, even larger. The weapons were brand-new U.S. Army issue M-16Bs
and AR-10s. The food stores included caviar, pâtés, smoked fish, expensive cheeses, even a case of wine that Sykes, an amateur
oenophile, said would fetch perhaps as much as three hundred dollars a bottle in a typical New York restaurant.
“Let them eat motherfucking cake,” he said.
They found a set of stairs at the end of the corridor, uneven stone risers leading up to the lower levels of the keep, another
bare bulb at the top of the stairs lighting the way. They heard the drone of a two-stroke engine behind a closed metal door
and opened it to find the generator that was powering the castle, a large gas-powered nine-thousand-watt Honda on wheels,
jury-rigged to a junction box. They were about to ascend the stairs when DeLuca heard someone behind him. He turned to see
the door to a cell, iron bars, with only darkness within, and then, out of the darkness, he saw the face of Paul Asabo.
“See what I mean by flow?” Preacher Johnson said.
“I’d have to agree,” DeLuca said softly, turning to Paul. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” Asabo said. “How did you get here?”
“Same way we’re leaving,” DeLuca. “We’ve got a boat waiting. We’ll get you out of there in a second.” He gestured to the SEAL
who’d brought the torch to see what he could do about cutting through the lock on the door. “Can you walk?”
One of Johnson’s men shone a flashlight into the windowless cell where Asabo was being held. DeLuca saw an old man squint
at the light and cover his eyes with his hand. He was clean-shaven, with gray close-cropped hair, and he was dressed in pajamas.
“I can’t go anywhere,” Asabo said. “This is my father. He can’t walk.”