Pierce’s mind flooded with distrust and doubt—of Jomo, of FREE, of Bara himself. But in the half-formed pattern growing in his mind, General Freedom might know why, and by whom, the workers had been killed. In this place where motives were impossible to guess and so
many ways existed to get rid of him, for Pierce to shun this invitation made no more sense than to accept it. With nine days until the tribunal convened, he still had no defense for Marissa’s husband. “I have to go,” he told her.
Abruptly, she stood and walked to the edge of the patio, her back to Pierce and Bara. Quietly, Bara said, “I’ll leave you two alone.”
For an instant, Pierce wondered what Bara might imagine. Still watching Marissa, he nodded.
She gazed out at the South Atlantic as the evening sun, falling, blurred the far horizon. Standing beside her, Pierce placed his hands on the railing. Softly, she said, “I never should have asked you here.”
“Too late,” he answered. “All that’s left to decide is how I live this out.”
She turned to him, the pain in her eyes so tangible he could feel it. “I’ve had enough of martyrdom. I don’t want that from you, Damon.”
Once again, it struck Pierce that Bobby, without her knowing it, had placed Marissa in great danger. Bobby had refused exile: the result, a lethal irony, was that Pierce would risk himself to save her. “The idea,” he told her, “is not two martyrs. It’s none.”
To Pierce, it seemed Marissa could no longer look at him. “Then please come back,” she said.
T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Bara dropped Pierce at the mouth of an alley in Port George.
Following instructions, Pierce turned down a second alley, then a third, finding a restaurant that resembled an abandoned shack. Though the sign in its dirty window read
CLOSED,
the door was not locked. Glancing over his shoulder, Pierce stepped inside.
Alone at a table was the man from the Rhino. He stood, motioning to Pierce, and led him out a rear exit. In still another alley waited a Land Rover with three Luandians inside. Pierce’s guide opened the front passenger door.
Pierce got in. The driver wore sunglasses and a black T-shirt that hugged his muscled body. Of the two men in the rear seat, the fleshy one held an English-language paperback of
Quotations from Chairman Mao;
the other smoked a joint, his eyes half-shut beneath the visor of a Boston Red Sox cap. Each wore a cartridge belt; two AK-47s lay between them. The sheer weirdness of this moment left Pierce caught between instinctive
dread and the reflex to laugh aloud. The driver stomped the accelerator, and the car, spitting mud, sped from the alley.
They took dirt roads out of town, passing homes and shops barely better than hovels. After a time Pierce kept his eyes on the road, accepting his destiny with as much fatalism as he could muster. Then they reached the landing where, accompanied by Marissa and Bara, Pierce had begun the haunting trip to Goro.
Everything else was different. A waiting sea truck was occupied by five armed men, all in black hoods. Around each man’s shoulders were draped two leather belts from which tipped bullets protruded like sharks’ teeth in a dull gold necklace. Stepping into the boat, the driver indicated a seat in the back for Pierce.
He sat between the reader of Mao and the marijuana smoker. Both covered their heads with black cloth hoods, the latter carefully placing his Red Sox cap beside him. Pierce tried to imagine them as his friends—in less than an hour, he had grasped the essence of Stockholm syndrome.
Wondering at the absence of uniformed military, Pierce took stock of the boat. White cloth banners flew from poles bolted to the deck, on which lay boxes holding weapons. The boat itself was new, powered by two gleaming outboard motors; when the pilot pulled the throttle, the boat accelerated so swiftly that it threw Pierce back. The hooded men, standing but bent at the knees, absorbed the jolting movement without much effort.
The boat skidded across the harbor, still gaining speed. Suddenly the Red Sox cap was captured by a gust of wind; it fluttered in the air like a wounded bird before dropping behind them into the churning wake. Standing, its owner shouted something guttural in a language unknown to Pierce. Spinning the wheel as he cut the motors, the pilot turned the boat in a slow trajectory aimed for the floating cap. As they passed it, the marijuana smoker leaned gracefully from the boat and grasped the visor. Then the pilot turned again, heading toward the creeklands as the man wrung filthy water from his cap.
W
ITHIN ANOTHER HOUR’S
time, Pierce experienced again the sense of being swallowed by a trackless netherworld. He could have been here before, or not. Banks thick with palms and mangrove closed around them; the pilot made unfathomable decisions, choosing one tributary in the
watery maze, then another. The occasional village seemed to have imbued its inhabitants with the same weary lassitude Pierce had observed before, their boats and fish nets lying unused on the muddy banks. The spray of water on his face was slick with the oil that moved sinuously across the surface like a formless black amoeba.
A third hour passed, the creeklands becoming narrower, the foliage thicker. Suddenly a helicopter appeared above the trees. For the first time, the heavyset reader of Mao spoke. “Perhaps the army,” he told Pierce. “If they drop a grenade, maybe our boat will sink, and they’ll shoot anyone swimming in the water.” But he said this with a curious unconcern. After a time, the helicopter vanished.
T
HE SUN WAS
straight above them now, radiating a muggy heat that dampened Pierce’s shirt. Still they took one creek, then another, seemingly without direction. Every so often the pilot, studying the terrain, spoke in an unknown dialect to a hooded man beside him. Then the pilot pointed to a landmark Pierce could not discern, and the man next to him replaced the white cloth flags with red ones. They took a hairpin turn into another creek, so sharp that their new course was hidden from view.
When they completed the turn, another boat was waiting there, its bow pointing directly at them.
The pilot shouted out. The other craft began speeding toward them, its armed occupants kneeling as bullets ripped the hull of Pierce’s boat.
Stunned, Pierce froze. As the men around him hit the deck, he followed, sprawling forward. Beside him the owner of the Red Sox cap crumpled and was still.
The militiamen grasped their weapons, all sense of randomness vanishing in the discipline with which they returned fire. Crouching, the pilot whipped the wheel; the boat swerved, barely missing their enemy as it sped past them in the narrow creek. Then he spun the boat again, and suddenly they were in pursuit.
The other boat was twenty yards away. Moving to the front, Pierce’s companions laid down a barrage of bullets. Ahead, two of their attackers fell, one pitching headfirst into the water. Then the man who read Mao stood, shouldering a grenade launcher. With a percussive whir, the launcher recoiled.
Reflexively, Pierce half-stood as the dark sphere arced toward its target.
The enemy boat shuddered, bursting into flames. As Pierce heard a scream of agony, a second grenade struck.
Tongues of blue-orange flames burst from the broken hull. A gas tank exploded. Pieces of fiberglass flew in all directions, and then the water was ablaze.
Standing, the pilot throttled back abruptly. As their boat slowed, gliding past the wreckage, a man screamed in anguish amid a burning oil slick. Next to Pierce, the reader of Mao stared down at his dead companion, pink-white brains seeping from the man’s shattered skull. With calm deliberation his friend raised his AK-47, turned, and launched a fusillade of bullets at the survivor, which caused him to twitch as though a metal clothesline was holding him above the surface. Then he sank amid a red-black skein of blood and oil, and the reader of Mao resumed his contemplation of the dead man.
At length he took out a cell phone and called someone. The softness of his tone required no translation.
M
OMENTS AFTER THE
pilot continued their journey, the reader of Mao returned to his vigil beside the corpse. Numb, Pierce sat alone.
Slowing, the boat glided into a shallow creek. In a clearing along the shore stood a group of hooded men, their chests bare except for ammunition belts. Red and white cloths were knotted on their arms. In front of them lay a white wooden casket.
Stepping from the boat, Pierce’s companions dipped their hands in the oily water. To Pierce, the reader of Mao said, “You also.”
Uncomprehending, Pierce complied. Two men stepped from the shore and bore the dead man to the casket.
Gently, they placed him inside. Then four men lifted the wooden box, taking a path through the palms and mangroves as the others followed in a single file, Pierce trailing behind. When the path opened again, he saw them in another clearing, gathering around a shallow grave dug from the red-orange clay.
The coffin lay beside it, the man inside gazing sightlessly at a patch of blue sky. The reader of Mao knelt again, shutting the man’s eyes with a forefinger. The militiamen crowded around the casket, chanting what to Pierce sounded like an anthem of battle. Then they removed their hoods.
They were startlingly young. Most could not be twenty; some struggled
to mask their grief. Tears in his eyes, the reader of Mao placed the Red Sox cap inside the casket, then closed its lid.
Standing apart, Pierce saw the men pick up wooden shovels. They each took turns covering the casket with dirt. When they were through, someone planted a makeshift wooden cross above the grave.
The reader of Mao approached Pierce, his eyes still red. “Come with me.”
Pierce glanced at the grave. Quietly, he asked, “Who killed him?”
For a moment, the man gave no sign of hearing. In a flat tone, he answered, “Who knows. Perhaps they came for you.”
O
NCE MORE THEY
climbed into the boat. As before, the militiamen donned hoods. No one spoke at all.
For another hour, they navigated the maze of creeks. Then they beached the boat again, this time on a patch of mud. A narrow path, not visible from the water, led into a sunless growth of palms and mangroves so dense that Pierce had no sense that it could end. Finally light appeared, and then an encampment of armed men.
Astonished, Pierce took in the concrete barracks, the shirts and pants hanging from clotheslines, the men loitering or smoking joints or clustered around iron cooking pots. The reader of Mao led him to a hooded man sitting apart from the others on a bench carved from the trunk of a palm tree. Lithe and well muscled, this man seemed taller than the rest, and the impassivity created by his hood was deepened by the intense stare he fixed on Pierce. In a commanding voice, preternaturally deep, he said, “I am General Freedom. I’m told you think I had three men hung.”
Pierce weighed his answer. This man could kill him in an instant; but then he could have ended Pierce’s life without extracting him from Port George. The instincts he possessed, those of a trial lawyer, were to be direct and nondeferential. “It’s occurred to me,” he said.
Freedom’s eyes became slits in a black mask. “Why would I do that?”
“To discredit Okari, and give Karama an excuse to execute him.”
To Pierce’s surprise, Freedom emitted a contemptuous laugh. “No great loss. Okari became so infatuated with his own celebrity that he mistook his people’s defenselessness for immunity from death. Okimbo shattered their illusions.”
“Leaving the field to you, Okari’s rival.”
“Okari’s rival,” Freedom repeated with disdain. “It is true that, by arousing fear, we make Okari more attractive to cowards. But his downfall was inevitable: only a fool imitates Martin Luther King when his opposition is Savior Karama.” Beneath his contempt, Freedom’s tone was imperative. “We did not scheme to give Karama a pretext, and he did not require one. I want you to understand that.”
Hearing this, Pierce relaxed a little; whatever else was at stake in this conversation, it was not Pierce’s life. “Why does it matter?” he asked.
“Because of the Western press. When you returned to America, you caused a considerable stir. If Okari becomes a martyr, I do not want FREE to share the blame that should be Karama’s alone. So listen well.” Leaning forward on the log, Freedom spoke intensely. “There’s the genuine FREE, and then there are groups that cloak their actions in our name. But we do
nothing
in the delta that I would be embarrassed to claim.
“We do not lynch defenseless oil workers; we kidnap their masters. Kidnapping is profitable. Murder is bad for our business in every sense.” Freedom’s voice became stern. “Nor are we the cat’s-paw of Islamists. I’ve converted to Islam—that much is true. I share Al Qaeda’s aspiration to fight those who would perpetuate our slavery by stealing our oil. But bin Laden’s struggle in the Middle East has refocused America’s avarice on us. Our sole concern is gaining control of the only asset that can end our misery and oppression.”
As Freedom spoke, some of his followers came closer, listening intently. Pierce took stock of his own impressions: this was a man of blunt charisma and, he guessed, considerable intelligence. But in the service of what or whom, he could not guess. “Control?” he asked. “How does kidnapping and extortion profit anyone but you?”
Or whoever gives your orders,
Pierce thought but did not say.
Freedom’s eyes lit with contempt. “As opposed to speeches, slogans, and marching unarmed Asaris to the slaughter? Okari’s day is done; I do not need him dead. With every act of ‘kidnapping and extortion’ we recruit more men and buy more arms. Soon we, not Karama, will effectively control the delta; soon he will understand that Okimbo cannot save him.”
“I thought Okimbo was your friend.”
Freedom stopped abruptly, his body tensing as he seemed to measure Pierce anew. “We have many friends,” he answered. “Friendship follows
fear. Someday Karama will give us what we want, or he will lose his country. If you ever meet our president, tell him that.”
“Tell him yourself,” Pierce answered. “You didn’t bring me here to say that, and I didn’t come to hear it.”