Pierce’s mouth felt dry. “I’m no spy.”
Scowling, the policeman motioned Pierce outside. When Pierce complied, the man grasped his shoulder in a viselike grip. “To spy carries penalties for anyone who helps the spy. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. And I am a man with children whose boss pays him next to nothing.”
Pierce hesitated. “I understand.”
“The price for a spy is five hundred dollars American. A spy’s friends cost one hundred each.” The man glanced at his companion. “Passing into the military zone will cost two hundred more. How much will a spy pay for the privilege of risking death?”
Swiftly, Pierce tried to sift his thoughts. He needed to see Goro. Yet to turn back might be safer: this offer might be a trap, and to accept it might trigger their arrest. All he felt was astonishment at the instincts required for survival. In a tentative voice, he said, “I’d like to see more of Luandia.”
The ambiguous answer caused his questioner to remove his sunglasses, staring hard at Pierce. With stiff fingers, Pierce produced his wallet and counted out sixteen thousand in inflated Luandian currency, then four thousand more. The man kept staring until Pierce’s gaze broke. Then he took the money, nodding curtly.
Pierce got back in the car. As they drove past the barriers, no one spoke. He felt as though his nerve ends were rubbed raw.
T
HE SILENCE STRETCHED
for minutes. Sulfurous smoke from gas flaring drifted through the sweltering air; there were fewer birds; the palms and mangroves appeared scrofulous and stunted. At times Pierce could hear the distant roar of another flare. Now and then a Luandian man or woman trod along the road as though on a treadmill to eternity, their slow, repeated movements bespeaking weariness in the bone and brain, days endlessly the same. Near a nexus of aboveground pipelines was the shell of a two-story building identified by a faded sign as the Awala Hospital. The sight prompted Bara’s first words in a half hour. “A Potemkin project,” he told Pierce. “PGL builds things like this to pacify an angry community. But they’ve got no way to maintain them. You can’t run an MRI machine without electricity or training.”
Pierce kept gazing out the window. As they reached a red dirt path at the side of the road, Bara instructed their driver to stop. To Pierce he said, “There’s something I must show you.”
A
T THE END
of the path a pool of oil was spreading from a ruptured pipe that bisected what once had been a field of maize. “A pipeline leak,” Bara said, “maybe from corrosion, maybe because someone tapped it. The result is the same—fishing and farming erased, kids with distended bellies.” Pierce followed him to the edge of the pool, Marissa and the driver trailing behind. “A common sight,” Bara continued. “The oil spills; the government does nothing. So a local gang springs up to demand a ‘clean-up contract’ or to provide ‘security’ against more oil theft. Then PGL pays them off.
“But this one caught on fire—some idiot with a cigarette joined a group of people scooping up oil in buckets. Fifty or so died when he lit up.” He walked a few steps to a patch of crusted oil at the edge of the spill. Stuck like a fossil in the crust was a small flip-flop and what Pierce realized was the charred face of a child who, when alive, might have been its owner. Almost conversationally, Bara remarked, “King Tut looks somewhat better, don’t you think? A month ago, Bobby spoke at this very spot. After all he had seen, it was this child who moved him to tears.”
Behind them, the driver called to Bara.
Beside him a teenager in a T-shirt and shorts had materialized with a semiautomatic weapon. As the youth walked toward them, Bara murmured wearily, “Another parasite with a gun.”
The young man looked from Bara to Pierce. “This is our land,” he said harshly. “PGL pays us to clean it up.”
“Then perhaps you should remove the bodies,” Bara said.
The youth raised his weapon, pointing it at Pierce. “You from the oil company,
oyibo?”
“No.”
“Then go back where you came from. We don’t want strangers here.”
Twice in as many days, Pierce thought, a man had aimed a gun at his head, not even knowing who he was. “Let’s go,” he told Bara.
T
HEY DROVE A
few miles more, fearful of encountering soldiers. Abruptly, their driver turned down a dirt road barely wider than the van and stopped beside the grassy banks of a creek. Waiting there with an open speedboat was a young Asari man. “This route is safest,” Bara told Pierce. “They can block roads, but not these waters. You’ll see.”
Pierce and Marissa followed him to the boat. Their new pilot started the outboard motor, breaking the near silence to ease the craft forward into a maze of creeks bounded by thick groves of palms and mangroves. Within minutes Pierce had lost all sense of direction: they were specks in a vast alluvial plain barely above sea level, covered by so many creeks and swamps that it defied cartography. With each turn from one creek to another, the channel grew narrower, until the trees and vegetation seemed to close around them. Their pilot steered past the spectral branches of half-submerged trees, seemingly attuned to other perils below the water’s surface. He must have spent years, Pierce guessed, mastering this labyrinth; it was little wonder
that armed militias chose to conceal themselves in such a trackless maze. The thought struck him that an enemy could make them vanish without a trace.
Their pilot turned into another creek, and suddenly environmental ruin was all around them. The trees were bare and stunted, the water’s surface slick with oil. Pipelines appeared among the mangroves; the malodorous stink of flaring gas reentered Pierce’s nostrils. Save for a tree monkey, he saw no birds or animals. On the shore, some Asari had hacked a clearing for a village; half-naked children and sullen-looking adults sat idly on the muddy bank. Standing near the front, Marissa seemed not to notice them.
Ahead the creek forked. The pilot slowed further, taking the narrower course.
At once he stood straight, staring ahead at a rusty barge almost as wide as the creek itself. Armed men appeared at the front of the barge; Pierce saw what appeared to be a makeshift hose connecting an onshore pipeline to the barge’s hull.
He turned to Bara. “What’s this?”
“Militia,” Bara said tautly. “They siphon the oil from PGL’s pipelines to sell on the black market—bunkering, it’s called. Then they arm themselves with the proceeds.”
As they neared the barge, one of the armed men signaled for them to stop. Another man threw a rope to the pilot. When the pilot grabbed it, the same man towed the boat to the side of the barge as his comrades aimed their weapons.
The leader stared down at them. “What’s your business here?”
Bara gestured to Pierce and Marissa. “This man is a journalist. This is Marissa Okari.”
The leader’s face showed contempt. “Okari’s people died like fools. We are FREE, and ready to kill our enemies.”
A muted anger appeared in Marissa’s eyes. Calmly, Bara replied, “We came to see Goro, not to report you. Let us go.”
The leader weighed this. As Pierce stared up at him, he noticed the young man at his shoulder. With a jolt of recognition followed by uncertainty, he recalled the man at the Rhino Bar, talking to Bara, then saw him stepping across the murdered soldier in the doorway of the second bar. The man stared back, impassive. In a flat tone, the leader said to Bara, “Goro? I wish you the joy of it.”
Arms folded, Marissa turned away.
The man from FREE waved them forward. Carefully, the pilot slid their boat past the corroded hull of the barge. Above them, someone laughed.
W
ITHIN MINUTES, THEY
had slipped into another creek. “That encounter was lucky,” Bara said. “The odds are good now that there will be no military at Goro. When FREE is bunkering oil, often the commander in the area makes his soldiers disappear. It’s one thing to destroy an unarmed village. It’s quite another to take on a force better armed than yours, such as FREE, which pays you to leave it alone while it steals PGL’s oil.”
“Does FREE pay Okimbo?”
Bara shrugged. “PGL does. But no one knows who else may.”
Marissa did not seem to hear them. Pierce did not ask Bara about the man from the Rhino Bar.
A
NOTHER HALF HOUR
passed. The sun, now at its apogee, beat down on their heads. “We’re getting close,” Bara said.
As the creek widened, Pierce saw its mouth meet the white-capped ocean. Turning, he followed Marissa’s gaze.
Along the banks of the creek were the charred remnants of wooden huts. Their pilot nudged the boat against a muddy patch of earth on which, hauntingly preserved, rested three canoes whose owners had no need of them.
Marissa stood, stepped from the boat, and walked alone toward what used to be Goro. She stopped at the edge of the ruins.
Getting out, Pierce and Bara stayed at the canoes. They watched Marissa slowly approach an open area at the center of the village, its red earth now sprinkled with ash.
Pierce followed her, stopping a few feet back. Marissa did not look at him. “We had a well,” she said softly. “Somehow the Asari found fresh water below sea level. No one knew how this could be, only that we were blessed.”
Pierce moved beside her. In the rubble lay a tin cross, its shape distorted by heat. “That was the church?” he asked.
“It’s where they took Bobby’s father. Before, when a chief died, he would lie in state at the center of the village.”
When she began walking again, Pierce understood that he was meant to follow.
They stopped beside a charred cart with stone wheels. In the same distant tone, she said, “This was the marketplace. They sold what mangoes and pineapples and papayas still grew here. A few fish.” She pointed to a cantilevered tin roof that had settled on chunks of half-burned wood. “That was the school. The children’s books were so old the pages fell out.”
For a while she was still. Then she was drawn to a metal pot now blackened by fire. “This was Omo’s house. Her mother would sit in front, cooking. And that was her parents’ bed.”
Looking up, Pierce saw a melted bed frame sagging amid the charred ruins. Then Marissa turned toward the only home still standing. For an instant her eyes closed. Her body was still, her face rigid.
Pierce left her there. Crossing the rubble, he felt the whisper of death.
Every few feet he stopped, forcing himself to study the grounds with care. He found a woman’s pink plastic purse, intact amid the ashes; a headless chicken; charred bones that might once have been a human forearm. Spotting several bullet casings, he put them in his pocket.
The casings, he knew, would be from the kind of ammunition used by the Luandian military. Everything about the scene bespoke a massacre, not armed resistance. In the Balkans—in another life—his forensics team would have combed the rubble; searched for a mass grave; dug up skeletons with missing limbs and bullet holes in the backs of their heads; ferreted out survivors. His evidence, as it had before the tribunal at The Hague, might have included the testimony of civilian underlings Pierce had turned against the butcher who’d caused so many deaths. There would be none of that here. Aside from Marissa and Bobby, the only surviving witnesses might well be Okimbo’s soldiers. Though there was little doubt of what those men had done, actual proof would be harder to come by.
When he returned to Marissa, she remained frozen by the sight of the home she had shared with Bobby, the memory of what she had last seen there. A shadow crossed the space between them. Looking up, Pierce saw that the sky had turned a dense gray-yellow. Quietly, Marissa said, “It’s going to rain.”
“Tell me what happened here, Marissa. Everything.”
For a long while, she looked directly into his eyes. Then she gazed into the distance and, speaking slowly and succinctly, told him all she could. For
minutes, her face and voice were expressionless, as though she were subduing the pain of memory with all the resources she possessed. “When Okimbo and his men took me away,” she finished, “I could still hear gunshots.”
“They were killing the last witnesses.” Pierce paused for a moment. “Did you see who piloted PGL’s boats and helicopters?”
Marissa shook her head. “It was dark. Once the eclipse passed, all I saw was soldiers.”
“Were the sea trucks still on the beach?”
She stared at the ground. “I don’t think I looked there.”
A drop of rain stirred the ashes at their feet. When Pierce glanced up, another struck his face, and suddenly the skies unleashed a torrent of hard rain.
Bara and the pilot scrambled beneath a grove of palms. At the center of the village, Pierce and Marissa had no shelter.
As though by instinct, she took his hand and began pulling him toward the house. She stopped at its threshold, shrinking back, then stepped inside.
Pierce followed. The room was shadowy, the ruins of Bobby’s desk half visible. The ceiling fan was still. Arms folded tightly, Marissa paused to study it. Then, inexorably, her gaze moved to a dark stain on the carpet where, Pierce was certain, a girl had bled to death from a throat wound after Paul Okimbo raped her. Above them a fresh assault of rain struck the zinc roof like a fusillade of bullets.
Marissa began to shiver. Pierce pulled her close, feeling the ragged rhythm of her breaths until, at last, they slowed. Her arms stayed tight around him.
B
Y MIDMORNING OF THE FOLLOWING DAY
, L
UANDIAN SOLDIERS WERE
streaming into Port George.
Trapped at an intersection, Pierce and Bara gazed through the windshield at the jeeps and trucks filled with armed men. “A reprisal for the dead soldier we saw in the doorway of that bar,” Bara speculated. “Easier to root out FREE’s supporters in Port George, real or imagined, than to set off a firefight in the delta.”
“Especially if you’ve been bribed?”
“As I said, who knows about Okimbo. But at least he’ll be too busy to keep you from visiting Bobby.”
Pierce watched the soldiers. “You still think I’ll get in?”