Out of Season E-Book

Tom Gilroy

• Herausgeber: Spines
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

In the early 1980s, Libyan forces crossed the border into Chad to help one side in the civil war raging in the country. France, the former colonial power in Chad, moved to thwart that alliance and the United States, alarmed to see Libya, a Soviet client, threatening to control more of the African continent, had its own interest in blocking the Libyans. 
“Out of Season” is a fictional account of the three-way interplay among the intelligence services but includes many real facts and events of that period. 
The novel also looks at the legacy of colonialism and its corrosive effects on the native populations; the relative power of beliefs; and how seemingly small choices made in anger can have life-altering consequences.

Leseprobe

Tom Gilroy

Out of Season

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Tom Gilroy

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by BooxAI

ISBN: 978-965-578-681-1

OUT OF SEASON

TOM GILROY

PARTI

N’DJAMENA

1980

CHAPTER1

Even at that distance, the automatic weapons fire woke him. Mark Reilly leaned up on one elbow, disoriented for an instant in the dark, while the sensation, as familiar now as it was damning, spread like a wave from his stomach downward and settled somewhere in his groin. It took only a second to remember he was in his usual room at the Relais du Logone. The war, or what was left of it, was safely contained in N’djamena, across the river.

Of course, he’d have to cross over in a few hours; it was, after all, why he’d come. But that was later. His heart, which had been pounding hard enough for him to feel it in his ears, slowed. Mark looked over toward where he knew the window was located. He’d shuttered it the night before when he arrived. Partly, that was to block out the noise—African towns, even dusty backwaters like Kousseri, never slept completely. Mostly, though, it was for the darkness. For some time, he’d had trouble sleeping in anything less than total blackness. The room was still dark, but he could see slashes of pale gray light bleeding into the room through the slats in the shutter.

The gunfire picked up slightly. It was coming from almost directly across the river, though on the far side of the Chadian capital, which made sense. Since the Libyans had shed all pretenses four months earlier and brought in tanks and troops to support the coalition led by Goukouni Oueddei, the “rebels” of Hissene Habre had been driven out of their last stronghold, a poorer quartier along the Chari river, at the southern end of N’djamena. Most of Habre’s troops had straggled across the desert toward Abeche, on the Sudan border, or slipped across the river into the refugee camps in Kousseri. But there were still a few of his loyalists hiding on the outskirts of the capital.

Either that or the factions that made up Goukouni’s coalition were already at each other’s throats. Well, that would come, too, though probably not yet.

Mark groped for his watch on the floor next to the bed. It was a cheap Timex he’d bought from some thief at the airport bar in Lagos, and the luminous dial was shot. Tilting it toward the shutters, he was just able to read the hands. It was 6:15. The Chadians were right on time. To get a jump on the heat, everything in Africa started early, and war-making was no exception. Even at its heaviest, the fighting almost always stopped around noon, when the combatants fell into a fly-swatting torpor.

They started killing one another again around four when the sun began its descent, and a light, steady breeze picked up, signaling that the worst of the heat was over, at least for another day. Sometimes, on the hottest days, the resumption of shelling was almost a relief.

There were, of course, periods of intensive, bloody fighting. Thousands of Chadians had died in the past year, and another hundred thousand had run for their lives and were now packed into refugee camps in Kousseri. Overall, though, the war had about it a laconic, almost lazy pace, as if the Africans, so often criticized for what Westerners considered a lack of sustained effort, weren’t quite up to it in the war-making department, either. There were even stories about the Chadians stopping pitched battles to let trucks carrying Gala, the excellent locally brewed beer, pass. Not that Mark blamed them for that: Gala was about the only thing Chad had going for it.

He had never found anyone who actually witnessed such a “beer truce,” but that was often a problem with African reporting. Anyway, it sounded right, and he’d used it once in a feature about the lighter side of the war.

Mark got out of bed and walked to the window. Christ, they were pimps, every last fucking one of them. At least most of the others made a decent living out of it. He threw open the louvered shutters so they bounced noisily off the relais’ masonry walls.

The sun wasn’t up yet, but it wouldn’t be long. The fighting sounded louder now, but it was still a long way off.

The room had once had a reasonably pleasant view across the confluence of the Logone and Chari Rivers to the sprawling, dust-streaked Chadian capital. That was gone now, another victim of the war. The Cameroonian Army had thrown up a two-meter earthen levee along the river bank to catch stray bullets and the occasional errant mortar round that had killed more than a few Kousseri residents since the start of the latest round of fighting.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself. He was starting to sound like one of his stories. The latest round of fighting. They all used terms like that just to make it sound a little newsier. The truth was that the Chadians had been killing one another for most of the 20 years since independence. The reasons were as numerous as the factions doing the fighting. They all had ridiculously arcane French acronyms, like FAN and FAP, and Mark’s favorite, FAT, and they all, at one time or another, had fought with or against most of the other factions.

The only thing approaching certainty in Chad was that today’s ally was tomorrow’s sworn enemy. This made covering the war correctly impossible since most U.S. editors insisted on clearly defined good and bad guys. That is when they were interested in Africa at all.

And now the Libyans had muddied things further. At least they’d generated some interest; Qadaffi was good copy, if nothing else.

Two African women, their wrap-around skirts tight across their hips, walked tranquilly along the crest of the levee, with wide, enamel bowls balanced on their heads. If they ever thought about it, the women no doubt appreciated the protection afforded by the levee, but the river bank was Kousseri’s main road. They wouldn’t give it up, not even for a war.

Behind him, away from the river, Mark picked up the muffled, rhythmic sound of women pounding millet. It had, no doubt, been going on for hours already, but it wasn’t something he “heard” anymore.

Since his earliest days as a Peace Corps volunteer, so many years before, it was a constant of village life: the dull, regular thumping of the giant pestle against the wooden bowl, over and over for hours, like a heartbeat that everyone heard but never really listened to anymore. It was backbreaking work, too, pounding the tiny kernels into powder. Mark had tried it just to make the village women laugh when he’d first arrived in Diarrere. After five minutes, his arms ached, and he was sucking for air. The women did it for hours every morning of their lives from the age of about seven or eight.

They started early, around four o’clock, to have the millet ready for breakfast. Early on, the pounding woke Mark, but he got used to it and even came to enjoy the sound since it meant he had two more hours to sleep. Mark had always loved to sleep late, but Africa changed that. The whole continent rose before dawn, and over the years, he had picked up the habit, albeit grudgingly.

It seemed to him that half his adult life had been spent in the back seat of a broken-down taxi, careening through some shantytown in the pre-dawn darkness on the way to an airport to fly somewhere he didn’t really want to be. The huts, with their mud-stained walls and rusting metal rooves blotchy and diseased-looking in the dark, always depressed him, and the sun, smoldering below the horizon, exhausted him before the day had even begun.

Mark looked at his watch again. It was almost 6:30. He hadn’t eaten much the day before on the trip up from Douala, and he was hungry. But he knew Emil wouldn’t open the relais’ restaurant for another half hour. The bastard had gotten pretty goddamn comfortable off the war.

With the shutters open, there was enough light in the room for Mark to find his leather carrying bag. It was by the door on one of the two wooden chairs which, along with the bed, made up the room’s furnishings.

The relais had electricity, but Mark left the light off. It was better than a lot of places he’d stayed over the years, and Emil did his best to keep the rooms reasonably clean. Still, it was the kind of place that looked better at night than it did in the day. He pulled out a change of clothes and threw them on the bed. Then he grabbed his shaving kit and went into the bathroom.

Like the rest of the relais, it was clean enough, though the toilet, a chain-flush type with the water tank above it, smelled strongly of shit and some harsh disinfectant. It had a cheap plastic seat with a crack in it that pinched like a son of a bitch if you weren’t careful. A quarter roll of harsh, brown toilet paper sat on the floor next to the toilet.

The shower was in the far corner, just a cold-water pipe with a spray head on the end of it. The tile floor sloped slightly toward a rusty drain in the center of the room. There was no shower curtain.

Mark pried a sliver of green Palmolive soap from where it was stuck on the sink and turned on the shower. He felt the water with his hand and exhaled heavily. It would be hot, damn hot, in another few hours, but at 6:30 in the morning, the desert has a chill that is difficult to describe to someone who’s never been.

Mark wet a forearm, then slowly inched the rest of his arm under the spray until the shoulder was wet. Breathing in sharply, he backed in all the way. The water felt like ice, but there was no telling when he’d have a chance to get clean again.

CHAPTER2

Mark climbed the levee and looked out across the Chari toward N’Djamena.

He counted six pirogues on the river, all downstream from the relais. The canoes’ occupants were fishing, casting the big nets in a circular arc, then pulling them slowly back toward the boats.Six wasn’t many compared to the dozens of idle pirogues that lined both banks of the river, but it was six more than the last time Mark had been to Kousseri.

The brave ones, probably, taking a chance that the worst was over, for now anyway. Or maybe just hungry. There had been little to eat in N’djamena the last time.What little food was still being grown in the countryside couldn’t be transported into the city because of the heavy fighting.

No one fished back then, either. Both sides were using the river to move supplies from Kousseri to their combatants, and that made anything that moved on the river, day or night, fair game for one side or the other.

Mark walked down the levee to the water’s edge. The river was down noticeably from his previous visit. But that had been in November, right after the rainy season; it was March now, the dead center of the dry period.

About 100 meters upstream from where Mark stood, an old man and a young boy, both naked, were standing in knee-deep water, washing themselves. There was a steady stream of human traffic on the levee now, women mostly headed to or from the market further up the Logone, but neither the man nor the boy appeared to notice them.

It was on the bank there, exactly where the boy and old man stood, that Mark had waited a year earlier for a pirogue to take him across to the Habre stronghold.

It was late, after midnight. Habre’s partisans were loading a dozen canoes with supplies: drums of cooking oil and gasoline, sacks of rice and dried fish, and boxes Mark could not identify.

He was to wait for them to cross over, and the lead piroguier would see if Habre agreed to the interview. If the answer was yes, Mark would cross in the second wave.

There was no other way to get to Habre; the larger and better-armed Goukouni forces had control of the rest of the city and of the ferry that linked Chad to Cameroon and the outside world.

The pirogues floated low and heavy in the water as they slid away from the bank. There were two men to a boat, but even so, loaded down like that, the pirogues were difficult to control in the strong current.

From that spot just upstream from the Relais du Logone, the Habre supply boats had to float downriver for about 300 meters until they reached a tapered spit of land called the Bec duCanard. It was there that the Logone emptied into the Chari River at a 45-degree angle.

The problem for the Habre people was that after the pirogues reached the Bec du Canard, they had to fight their way out of the Logone current in order to catch the Chari’s, which flowed south to the Habre camp.But even with experienced piroguiers paddling furiously, there was a short, deadly period when the Logone eddy brought the boats within firing range of the Goukouni positions.

The pirogues moved after midnight, but darkness didn’t help much that night. It was exceptionally clear, the way African nights near the desert can be, with so many stars that the sky seemed more milky-white than black.The full moon, though, was the real problem. It lit up the river like some oversized floodlight. From his place on the riverbank, Mark had no trouble following the pirogues, strung out on the water like the crooked links of some giant chain, as one by one, they neared the Bec du Canard.

The lead piroguiers, leaning forward, dug their paddles frantically into the Logone, pulling to get out of its current and over into the Chari’s.From where Mark sat, their progress seemed agonizingly slow, as if the currents conspired to hold the boats in place so that no matter how hard the boatmen worked, they were condemned to going nowhere.

And then Goukouni’s forces opened fire. Mark had never seen tracer bullets before and was surprised to be able to follow their trajectory. They seemed deceptively slow and benign like fireflies moving slightly faster than normal over the water.

By the time the middle pirogue in the flotilla reached the confluence, the night was filled with red-orange lights. Some disappeared into the black water, short of the pirogues, but many more streaked over or between them.

The first scream, short and guttural, with a hint of surprise, came from somewhere on the other side of the Bec du Canard, but it carried well across the water, and Mark heard it clearly.Two more screams came in quick succession; they echoed just a little, the way noise does over water so that the first had not quite disappeared before the second one sounded.

And then it was over. The last of the canoes surged into the Chari’s current and floated quickly south. The tracers continued for another few minutes, but the boats were clearly out of range now, and the bullets disappeared into the river, well short of their target.

The whole drama had taken no more than a few minutes, but watching from the bank, it seemed much longer, as if the intensity of the event had somehow altered its physical reference.The Chadians who had helped to load the boats started to leave; there was nothing more to see, really, and the empty pirogues would not return for an hour or more.

But Mark didn’t move, not even after the others had disappeared over the bank. It was cold by then, and he wore only a short-sleeved shirt, but it didn’t matter.He wasn’t sure when he’d started to pray, whether it was when the tracers began flying or afterward, but he didn’t stop. He hadn’t done it in years; he couldn’t even say for sure he believed in a God, at least that kind, but that didn’t matter either.

It was a simple prayer, like the first ones the nuns taught him. He mouthed the words to himself, over and over, asking, begging, really, that the answer might be no: that Habre didn’t have time for a journalist, or was ill, or wounded or busy torturing a prisoner, anything at all so long as he didn’t have to go.

At some point, Mark realized that he had only to get up and walk back to his room at the relais. No one would come looking for him. The interview was his idea, after all, and the piroguiers who would have to take him over couldn’t have been too crazy about making a second trip.

But options weren’t always what they seemed; they weren’t always real choices at all, but only mocking reminders of past weakness. Mark didn’t move.

When he spotted the lead pirogue cross in front of the Bec du Canard, it was after three a.m. The moon had slipped lower in the night sky and was nowhere near as bright; there were even a few clouds that blotted it out for minutes at a time.A dozen or so tracers arced out over the river from Goukouni’s forward positions, but the currents were kinder coming back, and none of the boats drifted into range. There wasn’t much point, anyway; the pirogues were empty now, and Goukouni’s men knew it.

One by one, the boats crunched up onto the bank near where Mark sat. A handful of Chadians appeared out of the darkness behind the bank and quickly unloaded three long, thin bundles, all wrapped in rough cloth, from three of the boats. The porters struggled to carry the clumsy forms back up the bank while the piroguiers, all glistening with sweat in the meager light, quickly hauled their boats all the way onto the bank.

The lead piroguier spotted Mark and hurried over to him. His name was Ahmat, Mark remembered. He was short for a Chadian, but extremely muscular, almost like a weightlifter, which was rare for a northerner.

He wore a wool ski cap, ripped cut-off shorts, and an oil-stained vest. He was barefoot. Though it was very cool by that time of night, Mark could see he was soaked with sweat.

“Ce n’est pas possible ce soir, monsieur,” Ahmat said, still trying to catch his breath. His French had the guttural, sing-song accent that French expatriates found so amusing to mimic.

“C’est dommage,” Mark lied, his heart pounding.

“Le President dit que peut-etre demain ou apres demain,” Ahmat added. Habre was barely hanging onto the poorest neighborhood of the city, but his people still referred to him as President.

Ahmat didn’t say why the interview wasn’t possible, and Mark didn’t ask.

“Tu passes demain soir, d’accord?” Ahmat asked, then hurried back to his boat without waiting for a reply.

Mark didn’t go by the next night or any other. The day after, he took the ferry across, which then was a kilometer upriver from its normal location, safely out of range of Habre’s mortars.

Goukouni’s headquarters were north of the city then, also well-removed from the fighting. But it gave Mark a N’djamena dateline, and that was what counted. He wrote an “on the frontlines” type piece, which was close to the truth, and said that repeated requests to visit the Habre headquarters had been turned down.

He did collar a Habre political official in Kousseri for balance and described in detail the nighttime supply convoy. All in all, it worked out well. The papers he wrote for loved it; some of them even paid him on time.

But the memory of those few hours on the river bank bothered him, even for a while after he’d returned to Douala.He tried to talk about it with Deborah once, but she either didn’t understand or didn’t care. Probably the latter. Hell, she almost certainly was involved with the French prick by then; she may already have decided to leave with him.

Mark glanced at his watch and then over at the relais. It was five after seven, and the restaurant’s back door, which opened onto a terrace facing the river, was still shut tight.

“Goddamn it, Emil,” he said out loud. He turned and walked back down the levee and around the building to the front door.

The Relais du Logone was a U-shaped complex, with the restaurant bar set back away from the road and closest to the river; the rooms ran from the restaurant to close to the road, on either side of a potholed, dirt parking area.

Mark zipped up his sweatshirt a little higher. The sun was just peaking over the levee in the east; it wouldn’t warm up for another two hours.And in another four hours, it would be so hot that it would seem impossible.

As Mark came around the side of the relais, a gust of wind caught him in the face. He instinctively closed his eyes, but it was too late. He took off his glasses and wiped a sleeve hard across both eyes, which were already watering from the swirling sand.

Heat and dust: They were the two constants there on the edge of the greatest stretch of sand in the world. There were villages in the area that dated back thousands of years, but somehow, man’s hold on the place seemed remarkably tenuous, like some fragile loophole in the laws of nature, that the heat and dust would get around to closing sooner or later.

The front door of the restaurant was open, and Mark could hear the clank of cheap dishes.

“Shit,” he muttered and walked inside.

The relais’ main building, like all the old masonry structures built by the French, was dark inside. The French had realized early into their African occupation that the sun was their most redoubtable foe. The architecture reflected that understanding.The walls were thick, and all the windows and doors had heavy, louvered shutters that were opened only at night or in the very early morning.

The dark, wooden floor of the building was warped in places and dull from years of harsh soap and no wax. Two overhead fans hung from the high ceiling, one over the bar area and the other toward the back, which Emil had partitioned off as a restaurant.

He hadn’t turned on either fan yet.

As Mark entered, Emil, dressed in white with an apron on, came toward him from behind the bar, carrying a tray filled with coffee, French bread, and jam.

“Bonjour, Mark,” he said, his wide grin already in place. “Tu as bien dormi?”

“Oui, merci, Emil,” Mark said. “But why the hell didn’t you open the terrace door? I’ve been standing out there for a half hour, starving to death.”

Emil’s grin widened to show surprisingly straight, white teeth. “Trop de poussiere,” he replied, laughing. It didn’t take much to make Emil laugh.

Mark laughed, too, though he was still annoyed.

“There’s always too much goddamn dust, Emil,” he argued, then followed Emil into the “restaurant.”

In fact, it was just the back half of the building, set off from the bar by several yards of a cheap, green cloth—the kind found in any African market on the continent—thrown over a rope that ran the full width of the room.

For whatever reason, all of the relais’ windows were in the bar area upfront. With the curtain cutting off the light from the open front door, the “restaurant” was quite dark.There were a couple of light bulbs that hung on wires from the ceiling, but Emil hadn’t turned them on either.

Only two of the dozen or so tables in the area were occupied: an enormously fat African sat alone at the one closest to the door; in the back, three whites, almost certainly French militaire, were eating breakfast.

Emil took the tray to the African’s table, and Mark sat down at one as far from both parties as he could get.

The African was well-dressed, in one of the locally made “complets,” a kind of African leisure suit. He was probably a functionaire, since they were about the only Africans that could afford Emil’s prices.

Mark didn’t know him, but that didn’t mean anything; since the refugee camp population had swelled to 100,000—some aid workers insisted it was higher—the Cameroonian government in Yaounde had dispatched a small army of officials to feed and house the Chadians, and more importantly, to keep them under control.

Emil headed back to the kitchen, which was in a small shack behind the bar.

“Cafe complet, mon ami?” He asked Mark.

“Oui, s’il te plait, Emil,” Mark answered.

Emil showed his teeth again. “Pas de Gala?” He asked.

“Peut-etre apres,” Mark said, smiling back.

It was their standard joke, and Emil chuckled on cue. It wasn’t even that funny; Mark probably would have a beer before he headed across the river. Up there, drinking before the sun was up didn’t raise too many eyebrows, and it sure as hell made looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov a little easier.

Emil disappeared through the curtain. He was a funny one, Emil. It was hard to imagine how he’d made a living before the war came along, but he’d cleaned up ever since.Mark liked him, though, and he knew the feeling was mutual. He had been one of the first Western reporters to the border when the latest round of fighting broke out, and Emil tended to view him as an old and honored client.

Even at the height of the war, when the hotshot correspondents from Paris and the American boys from Nairobi were sleeping four to a room, Emil saved a bed for him.And in all the times he’d stayed at the relais, Mark had seen Emil’s smile waver only once, when a Cameroonian gendarme, who’d had too much to drink, accused him of being a Chadian.

Once, when they were alone at the bar, Mark had asked him where he was from, but Emil just smiled and said, “D’ici.” So, Mark dropped it.

Emil came back through the curtain with a full tray. He unloaded the bread, jam, coffee, sugar, and condensed milk onto Mark’s table.

“Merci, Emil,” Mark said, reaching for the coffee pot. He was damn hungry; even the Nescafe, which Emil made so strong that milk barely changed its color, smelled good. He glanced up at Emil, who hadn’t moved.Mark put the coffee down and reached into his pocket. The other times, he’d just paid for everything when he checked out, but hell, maybe Emil had had some trouble with reporters not paying their bills.

“Non, non, Mark,” Emil said quickly. He glanced over at the African functionaire, who was busy with his breakfast, then slid into the chair opposite Mark’s.

His smile widened again, but this time from embarrassment. Mark was surprised. They kidded each other pretty regularly and had talked seriously once or twice; Emil had even once bought Mark a beer when there was no one else in the place. But this was a first.

“Mark, tu es americain, n’est-ce pas?” Emil asked.

“Oui.”

Emil glanced quickly over at the functionaire again, who was still working his way through the breadbasket, then leaned forward across the table and lowered his voice.

“Would you like to buy some dollars?” He asked in a whisper.

Mark noticed for the first time that there were several strands of gray in Emil’s short, spongy hair. He was older than he looked, probably, but that wasn’t that unusual in African men.

Mark exhaled, disgusted. One of his honorable colleagues had no doubt run short of CFA, the African franc used in most of the old French possessions, and had somehow convinced Emil to accept dollars instead.

And now the poor bastard couldn’t get rid of them. If he took them to a bank, they’d be confiscated since it was illegal in Cameroon to hold foreign currency.Emil could always smuggle them across the border to Nigeria; illegal black market operations flourished in most of the larger cities. But he’d lose plenty in the exchange and probably have to pay off border guards on both sides.

That was a lot of trouble for a few dollars.

“Combien, Emil?” Mark asked. He didn’t need dollars and was short of CFA as it was. But Emil had done him a few favors in the past.

“Cinq mille,” Emil said, leaning forward and lowering his voice even more.

Mark stared at Emil over the top of his coffee cup. Emil’s French was pretty basic, but he wouldn’t have made a simple mistake like that.

“Emil, where the hell did you get five thousand dollars?” He hissed.

Emil grinned. “Je les achete,” he said, conspiratorially.

“From who?” Mark demanded.

Emil shrugged. “The big merchants, mostly,” he replied.

“Where do they get them?” Mark asked, interested now.

“The Chadians pay for everything in dollars now,” Emil explained.

“The Chadians?” Mark exclaimed, trying to keep his voice under control. “Where are they getting dollars from?”

“C’est les Libyens qui les leur donnent,” Emil said.

“Since when?” Mark demanded. It’d been only four months since his last visit, and he sure as hell hadn’t seen any dollars in Chad.There had been little money of any denomination then, though there was some talk that the Libyans were trying to pay Chadian soldiers with dinars, the worthless Libyan currency.

Emil shrugged again. “Depuis deux, trois mois,” he said.

Mark thought a moment. It didn’t make sense. “Emil, are you sure they’re real dollars?” He asked.

That made it twice he’d seen Emil’s smile waver. Emil glanced over at the African again, then reached cautiously inside his apron. He slid his closed fist across the table to Mark, who took the bill.

Mark quickly held up the dollar close to his face, angling it toward what little light reached them from the door. It was a $50 note, not brand new, but not filthy and tattered, either, like so many of the CFA bills that circulated in a place like Kousseri.

He strained his eyes, looking for the red and blue threads that he’d read somewhere that proved a dollar was real. They were visible.

Mark passed the bill back to Emil along the side of the table farthest from the African functionaire. Emil, who was clearly very worried, stared at him.

Mark spread his hands and shrugged. “It looks real to me, Emil.” The smile returned.

“Alors, tu veut les acheter, mon ami?” Emil asked.

Mark emitted a short, humorless laugh. He didn’t have five thousand dollars to his name, anywhere, in any currency. Shit, he didn’t have five hundred.

“Desole, Emil,” he said, shaking his head.

“Ce n’est pas grave,” Emil said, smiling and getting up from the table. “I can sell them in Nigeria, but I thought it might interest you.”

Mark laughed, for real, this time. Emil was offering him a deal.

“Merci, Emil,” he said, meaning it. “It interests me plenty, but unfortunately, I’m just a poor journalist.”

Emil laughed and nodded. To Africans, there was no such thing as a poor American. Mark was just being polite. But Emil could appreciate that: in Africa, a tactful lie was always better manners than a flat rejection.

Two of the Frenchmen left while Mark was on his second cup of coffee. He didn’t know either of them, but both nodded curtly at him as they passed, and he did the same, just whites acknowledging their common predicament.

The African functionaire, who, Mark saw, had polished off the entire basket of bread, staggered up from the table shortly after that. He slipped on a pair of cheap, plastic sunglasses and lumbered toward the door.A moment later, the sound of a badly tuned car motor starting up floated in from the parking lot.

The third Frenchman waited until the functionaire’s car turned around and whined toward the relais’ exit, out by the main road, before he rose from his table and came over to Mark’s.He was young, like the other two, and short, even for a Frenchman, with reddish-blond hair cut very close to his round head.

He looked slightly overweight, soft, really, though that might have been an impression caused by his skin; it was extremely fair and heavily freckled, especially on his arms. It was hard to imagine he needed to shave more than once a week.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” he said, too friendly for a Frenchman.

“Bonjour,” Mark replied politely. He was used to the routine by now.

“Je peux?” The Frenchman asked, gesturing at the chair Emil had vacated.

“Je vous en prie,” Mark said.

The Frenchman sat down quickly. He was carrying a pipe that had apparently gone out; he poked it into the side of his mouth, pulled a Bic lighter from his shirt pocket, and expertly re-lit the tobacco.

“Ca vous gene?” He asked suddenly, withdrawing the pipe and clearly prepared to extinguish it if Mark so wished.

“Non, non,” Mark assured him.

The Frenchman slipped the pipe back in the corner of his mouth and smiled around it.

“I forgot that most Americans were anti-tobacco these days,” he said. “You are American, no?”

Mark shook his head. “Russian,” he said, straight-faced.

The Frenchman’s laugh was a bit late and a little too hard, but it was a nice try. He’d done this before, too.

“Are you crossing over today?” He asked, nodding sideways in the direction of the river.

“Oui,” Mark said. No sense dragging it out.

“Your first time?” The Frenchman wanted to know.

“Non.” The Frenchman waited to see if Mark would elaborate, then smiled when he didn’t.

“You know, we are all on the same side,” he said, still smiling.

Mark smiled, too, hoping it would keep him from laughing, but it didn’t. The Frenchman joined in, but again, his heart wasn’t in it.

“Look, I’m a journalist, that’s all,” Mark said earnestly. The Frenchman nodded emphatically. He wasn’t there to contradict an ally.

“Et votre consul la, monsieur Feraldi, vous le connaissez?” He asked.

Mark exhaled sharply, his hands spread wide. “I know he’s here, but I wouldn’t say I know him.”

“Il est un peu special, n’est-ce pas?” The Frenchman asked carefully, not sure that was the way to go.

Mark laughed. The French used the word to mean weird or eccentric, and that fit Martin Feraldi just fine. But then, he wasn’t really a consul, and Feraldi probably wasn’t his name.

“We paid him a visit, juste pour dire bonjour, quoi, mais. ...” the Frenchman explained, shaking his head to finish the thought. “Then we invited him over to our place for dinner or just a drink. He said he was too busy.”

The Frenchman gave his teeth a rest and pointed with the pipe stem in the general direction of Kousseri.

“No one is too busy in a place like this,” he said.

You ought to know, pal, if you’re sitting here with me, Mark thought.

“And his friend is worse,” the Frenchman complained. “I have never even seen him.”

Mark had, just for a second, the one and only time he’d bothered to go by the “American Consulate” in Kousseri. He’d talked to Feraldi, too, but the Frenchman was wasting his time if he thought Mark could help him.

“Whaddaya want?” Feraldi asked, stepping out onto the small veranda and holding the door closed behind him.

The “consulate,” which, for diplomatic purposes at least, was billed as a temporary replacement for the bombed-out embassy across the river, was housed in a run-down “villa” on the northern edge of Kousseri.

It was set back from the same laterite road that ran by the relais and had a kind of thorn-bush hedge that surrounded a vegetation-less “yard” and afforded some privacy from the passing traffic.Not that there was any secret about the place. Everyone in town referred to it as “the American house,” and any doubts were dispelled by the Jeep Ranger and the white Ford station wagon parked under an acacia tree on the shade side of the villa.

It had been some time since Mark had seen an American car. The two vehicles looked enormous and about as inconspicuous as a yacht on the Chari.

It was almost noon, and Mark was sweating freely from the walk over from the relais. Feraldi, if that was indeed his name, was still in his bathrobe, a heavy flannel job that hadn’t been cleaned in a while. He had a pair of Dr. Scholl clogs on his feet.He was about 45, medium-height, and not so much overweight as out of shape. Even if Feraldi wasn’t his name, he was probably Italian; he was dark, with lots of thick black hair on the part of his legs that showed below where the bathrobe stopped.

He hadn’t shaved that morning, maybe not even the day before, and it looked like he combed his oily hair with his fingers, straight back, as if to emphasize the receding hairline.There was a stale odor of cigarettes and whiskey that drifted out the door with him, though he wasn’t drunk.

Mark had seen him before, not Feraldi, but others just like him, so similar in style and attitude that any distinction was merely cosmetic.They all had the slight tremor in their hands and the aggressive insecurity, like aging punks who had suddenly discovered they weren’t very tough after all.

Africa had been crawling with them since Saigon fell.

“I just thought I’d drop by and say hello,” Mark said.

Feraldi scowled and shook his head. “I don’t talk to reporters,” he said.

“Who do you talk to?” Mark asked, smiling. But Feraldi wasn’t a kidder.

There was a muffled yell from inside the house, and Feraldi opened the door just enough to stick his head inside.

Mark caught a glimpse of another man, thin, bald, and surprisingly old, sitting in front of a sophisticated two-way radio. The man, who was dressed only in shorts and a droopy sleeveless T-shirt, did not turn toward the door when Feraldi opened it, so Mark saw only a fleeting profile.

Feraldi hissed something that Mark could not make out, then turned and closed the door behind him again.Mark couldn’t see the generator, but he heard its hum now; it had to be a big one to run the radio and the air conditioner sticking out of one of the side windows.

“Do me a favor, and don’t come back here,” Feraldi said, finished with the conversation.

“What if I lose my passport?” Mark asked, still smiling, but feeling the blood flowing to his cheeks. It didn’t matter now.

Feraldi stared hard at him, his eyes closed halfway, his mouth open just a little. It was a look that must have scared somebody sometime. After a moment, Feraldi turned and walked back into the house.

“Asshole!” Mark hissed, angrier and louder than he’d intended, as the “consulate” door clicked shut.

No, he couldn’t help the Frenchman.

“Et vous, vous rentrez ce soir?” The Frenchman wanted to know.

“That depends,” Mark said.

“On what?” The Frenchman pressed, not quite so friendly now, and his face a shade pinker.

Mark stared at him for a second. That skin and a short fuse: it was a bad combination in this heat, he thought.

“Whether I get the story I came for,” Mark said firmly. Emil walked by with the functionaire’s dishes. Mark caught his eye and put his thumb to his mouth. Emil laughed and nodded.

The Frenchman smiled indulgently at the interruption.

“You don’t want to stay the night in N’djamena,” he said confidently.

Mark smiled. Goukouni was so furious at what he viewed as French betrayal that any militaire who ventured across the river would have been shot on sight. This was why they were reduced to debriefing aid workers, doctors from Medcins sans Frontieres, and journalists in the relais.

“Still pretty bad?” Mark asked, smiling harder, trying not to laugh.

“Awful,” the Frenchman assured him.

Emil brought Mark his beer.

“Monsieur?” He asked the Frenchman.

“Rien pour moi,” the Frenchman said, in that unique way the French had of denying an African’s existence, or his humanity at least, even while addressing him.

“Perhaps you’d care to stop by our place and have a drink when you get back tonight,” he said to Mark as Emil disappeared back through the curtain.

“Perhaps,” Mark lied. “As I said, it depends.”

The Frenchman’s smile seemed to be frozen on his face. “You know the house?”

“Oui,” Mark replied, glad it was ending.

The Frenchman pushed back his chair and got up.

“Au revoir, monsieur,” he said, bowing slightly.

“Au revoir,” Mark said to the small, round back as the Frenchman brushed aside the curtain and disappeared out the door.

CHAPTER3

Mark paid Emil for the room and the meal, and slid his suddenly much thinner wad of CFA notes into a shirt pocket, and started for the ferry landing.

He was going to have to watch his money. Closely.

Most of his reporting trips were financed in advance by the newspapers or magazines he wrote for; they either asked him to go or he proposed a trip, and they accepted. Either way, they paid his expenses. But not this time.

“Thks yr offer but suggest wait till Qadaffi makes another move.” “Thks yr idea, but unless have major new Q development, ‘fraid must decline.” And so on.

Mark wired back testily that Qadaffi was not the only story in Chad; predictably, that got him nowhere.So, without too much thought or money, he’d flown to Maroua, Cameroon’s northernmost city, and the last stop on the Cameroon Airlines shuttle.In the past, he’d rented a car in Maroua and driven the last 250 kilometers to the border. But that was expensive and thus out of the question.So, he’d waited most of the afternoon at the Maroua taxi gare, then sat in the middle seat of a violently shimmying Peugeot station wagon, squeezed between an enormous market woman, whose robes smelled overpoweringly of dried fish and a hung-over Cameroon Army sergeant, for the three-hour ride to Kousseri.

And the truth was that Mark had no burning reason to make the trip then, not from a news standpoint, anyway.But since the night he’d spent on the riverbank, waiting for word from Habre, he’d felt a dreadful kind of urge to come back whenever he could, even sometimes, like now, when there was no news and he couldn’t afford it.It was so strong at times that he stopped doing the routine news items and commodity reports that paid the bulk of his pathetic salary and instead spent hours devising telexes that he hoped would convince one of his “strings” to finance a trip to the border.

But when they did, it changed nothing. He’d been back four times, and each trip simply confirmed what he already knew so well.And still, he came, like some helpless cripple making the same bogus pilgrimage, year after year, though he knew beforehand there would be no miracle.Mark didn’t know if he even wanted one, or if he did, exactly what he’d want it to change. The past, maybe, but even miracles had limits.

And now he’d need a damn good feature, maybe two, just to break even. Perhaps the dollar thing would do it. It would depend on how many they were talking about. The more, the better.

But he’d have to find out why dollars, instead of francs or CFA, and how the Libyans were working it.

That wouldn’t be easy. The Libyans weren’t big on interviews, certainly not on something like that. In fact, they did their best to maintain the pretense that Goukouni was running the show. Most of them stayed out of sight, on bases outside of N’djamena that were heavily guarded and off-limits, even to Chadians.

The few that Mark, or any of the other hacks, had been able to corner spouted the usual rubbish about friendship and solidarity between Third World brothers oppressed by the twin evils of Western imperialism and Zionism.

Mark shifted his leather carryall to the other shoulder. It wasn’t nine o’clock yet, and the air still had a coolness to it, but that wouldn’t last long. The sun had crept up over N’djamena and was rising fast. Mark’s shirt was wet across his back, and he could feel the sweat beads forming at his temple.

The Cameroon landing site was surrounded by an open, dusty expanse, devoid of any vegetation, that sloped gently from the road down to the riverbank.During the war, refugees loyal to the Goukouni side sometimes gathered there to talk or to stare across the river at the plumes of black smoke that curled up from their city.

The end of the fighting changed all that. A line of trucks waiting to cross over now stretched from the river’s edge back almost to the road.A constant flow of Africans, most of them carrying enamel basins or tightly roped bundles on their heads, moved toward the river, where dozens of pirogues lined the bank.A smaller, but still steady flow of Chadians passed Mark on the road, heading into Kousseri.

Mark was surprised at the number of trucks. There were several tankers, their Shell and BP logos barely visible beneath the grit and oil stains, and a dozen or more Berliet and Mercedes rigs overloaded with what looked like food and maybe cement.

All of them were filthy, covered with a thick coat of reddish-brown dust from the week-long trip up from Douala or one of the Nigerian ports.The ferry was a small, dual-pontoon model, straight out of French Army surplus, and could only carry one of the big trucks at a time. This meant that even running flat-out from dawn till dark (when a strictly enforced curfew on the river was still in effect), some of the trucks wouldn’t cross over until the following day.

Well, Africans could wait with the best of them, especially truck drivers. They were fair game for every idiot army private or bored gendarme drawing road check duty, and if they couldn’t afford it or didn’t feel like paying the requisite “dash,” they could sit a long time while the bastards “checked” their papers.

Compared to that, waiting for the ferry was a piece of cake.

Mark saluted the lone Cameroonian policeman at the loading area, then walked down the line of trucks toward the water.The waiting truck drivers stood near their rigs, alone or in small groups, talking. In another hour, most of them would be sitting on the shaded side of the trucks or lying on mats underneath them, arms thrown over their faces to keep the flies off.

Mark could see the ferry coming back from the N’djamena “port,” a smaller landing area almost directly across the river. Two figures clad in the camouflage gear and sky-blue berets of Goukouni’s presidential guard, each with a short-stock Kalachinikov cradled in front of him, stood on either pontoon.Another one would be riding in the rear.

The sensation, not at all unpleasant physically, started in Mark’s stomach and spread downward. He became aware of his heart because he could feel it, hear it almost, pounding in his chest. Pretty soon, his mouth would dry up, too.But that was all right; he was used to it, even welcomed it almost, since the anticipation was, in so many ways, worse than the fear itself.

Mark walked around the first truck in line, a BP gasoline tanker, to get a better view of the ferry as it approached.

On either side of the ferry landing, piroques lined the bank. Most of the canoe owners sat along the bank in groups, talking and watching the ferry return. A few were doing repairs on their boats, for the most part, “stitching” up cracks in the wood caused by the alternating wetness of the river and intensive dryness of the desert sun.They used what looked like crochet needles to bore holes on either side of the cracks, then laced cord, or if they could afford it, wire through the holes and pulled it tight, like a doctor stitching up a deep cut.

The stitching was never watertight, but it was only a short trip across the Chari, and the veteran piroguiers got used to baling water during the inevitable wait for passengers or supplies to carry the other way.It added years to a dugout’s life, and most of the pirogues on the Chari had at least one such “scar.”

Mark glanced up the riverbank. There were a half dozen pirogues loading what looked like sacks of millet or flour; two or three others were taking on passengers.

He shielded his eyes and looked out at the river. The sun was rising almost directly across from where he stood, and even wearing sunglasses, the glare of the water was intense.He counted another seven pirogues crossing over, five riding low in the water, obviously carrying supplies, and the other two loaded with refugees.

Some of them were headed home, anyway; not many compared to the number still in the camps, but given the durability of past “coalitions” in N’djamena, it was hard to blame the cautious ones.

The ferry neared the Cameroonian bank. It carried an aging Berliet ten-tonner, no doubt empty—there wasn’t anything to take out of Chad—and a handful of passengers, most of them older men dressed in the simple, long tunic worn by peasants throughout the Sahel.

The two combattants on the near side of the ferry stood with their legs slightly apart, scanning the landing area through ink-black aviator sunglasses. Their heads rotated slowly from one side to the other so that from a distance, they looked almost like battery-operated toys.

Mark backed up a step instinctively as the ferry slid up the bank and stopped. Several civilians on the shore hurried to lower the ramp.

One of the combattants hopped off the ferry. He ignored the workers entirely and stood, tense and alert, watching the crowd nearby.The other one stayed onboard and, from his perch on the pontoon, looked out over the whole landing area.

The Berliet coughed to life as soon as the ramp was in place and then rattled slowly down off the ferry and up the riverbank toward the road. The BP tanker started up and inched slowly up the ramp onto the ferry as several of the workers yelled and waved contradictory directions simultaneously to the driver.

Mark waited until the truck was on the ferry before he approached the combattant standing guard on the shore.He was a young one, no more than 16 or 17, but that probably made him a battle-weary veteran in Chad. Both sides had suffered such heavy losses that by the end, the only recruits left were young boys.

Mark smiled and nodded a greeting, but the Chadian only stared straight ahead, the black sunglasses revealing no hint of his mood.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” Mark said earnestly. “Uh, je suis journaliste americain. Est-ce que vous permetez que je mont a bord?” He asked, gesturing at the ferry.

The combattant took one hand off the Kalichinikov and flicked it at Mark dismissively.

There was better than a 50-50 chance that he spoke no French; the northerners had never liked their colonial masters and had resisted learning the language.

“Ecoutez,” Mark began, pointing across at N’djamena. “Je voudrais...”

But the Chadian cut him off brutally, jerking the Kalichinikov around in front of him and yelling something harshly in Arabic.

Mark instinctively took a step backward and held up both hands.

“It’s no use; he won’t let you on,” a voice in French said from behind Mark. Mark turned his head carefully. Alain Resnais, the current AFP correspondent, smiled at him.

“Salut mon general,” Alain said heartily, mocking a salute in the direction of the Chadian soldier. The combattant glanced at Alain then resumed his watch and ignored the two white men.

“C’mon,” Alain said to Mark, waving a hand toward the bank downriver. Mark followed him.

“None of them speak French, and anyway, they’ve got orders not to let anyone on the ferry,” Alain explained as they walked. “We can take a pirogue.”Alain obviously had a particular boat in mind as he ignored the entreaties from the idle piroguiers they passed. Near the end of the line of boats, he climbed into one where a short, wiry African sat, baling out the shallow puddle in the bottom with a rusted tin can.

“Alors chef, on est deux aujourd’hui,” Alain said cheerfully as he settled into the bow of the canoe.

The Chadian put down his can. “Deux cent francs,” he said firmly.

Alain feigned shock. “Mais t’es un voleur!” He shouted, loud enough that several of the piroquiers nearby stopped their conversations and glanced over.

“Deux cent francs,” the owner insisted.

“Si on est un ou deux, c’est le meme trajet,” Alain protested.

The Chadian made no move to push off. “Deux personnes, deux cent francs,” he said.

Mark stepped around the African and sat down. “Allons-y,” he said, motioning to the Chadian.

“Deux cent francs,” the piroguier repeated, still not moving.

“D’acord, mais allons-y,” Mark said, irritated. They were arguing over 50 cents.

The Chadian pushed off and hopped nimbly into the boat. He pulled a long stout pole from the bottom of the pirogue and, standing up, shoved it hard into the water until it bit into the sandy bottom. That late in the dry season, he’d be able to pole most of the way, except in the middle of the Chari, where he’d have to paddle.

“T’es un voleur,” Alain yelled. The Chadian’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing.

“Alors, ca va?” Alain asked Mark, smiling again.

“Ca va,” Mark shrugged. He was facing the piroguier and squatting to avoid sitting in the puddle that covered the bottom of the canoe. Carefully, he turned to face Alain.

“I had an interesting talk with one of your roommates this morning,” he said.

Alain grinned. “Which one?” He asked.

Mark shrugged. “Short, reddish-blond hair, skin like a baby’s ass,” he said.

Alain laughed. “Ah, Maitre le Paquet,” he said.

“That’s not his real name?” Mark asked, smiling.

Alain shook his head. “No, but every time France has a problem somewhere in the world, his solution is to ‘mettre le paquet,’” he explained.

Mark laughed hard, and Alain joined him.

“I don’t even know his real name,” Alain said. “But be careful Mark,” he added, serious again; “he’s a real bastard.”

Mark shook his head. “I doubt I’ll be talking to him again. I couldn’t help him, and I don’t think he liked me much,” he said.

Alain nodded but didn’t look like he agreed.

“Hey, I don’t have to live with him,” Mark said. He was trying for a laugh, but Alain barely managed a smile.

It was a sore point, not only for Alain but all the AFP correspondents shuttled in at regular intervals to cover what was, for the French, a pretty big story.They already had the onus of being owned by the French government, which didn’t help much with the Chadians, not then, anyway. Worse, they stayed in a room in the compound in Kousseri housing the dozen or so French militaires.

To be fair, the only other habitable place in Kousseri was the Relais du Logone, and the AFP, which ran a chronic deficit, couldn’t afford Emil’s prices. Certainly not when there was free lodging just down the road.Not that it was really free; it was common knowledge among the other reporters and, no doubt, the Chadians that the AFP correspondent was expected to keep his roommates abreast of what was going on across the river.

Neither Alain nor any of the others Mark had met liked it, but they all did it.

“How’s things with you?” Mark asked, changing the subject.

“Bof,” Alain exhaled disgustedly, the way only the French can. “Six months in paradise; I can’t complain.”

Mark smiled. It was more like four months, but he didn’t blame Alain for thinking it was longer. The rest of them came up for a few days, or a week or two outside, if something major was happening. Doing it every day for months, and AFP demanded at least a story a day, no matter what, must have been murder.

It had certainly taken its toll on Alain. He’d never be thin, but he’d lost a lot of weight since the last time Mark had seen him. The khaki shirt that had seemed a size too small the last time flapped loosely in the light wind on the river.Even the droopy, black mustache that made him look like some Corsican pirate seemed leaner now.

He’d calmed down some, too, adopted the kind of breezy confidence laced with cynicism that reporters in places like that had a patent on, more as a defense mechanism, really, than a true reflection of their feelings.

Mark was eating breakfast at the relais the day Alain arrived. It was his first crack at an overseas story, and he’d come by looking for someone to cross over with.

Chad, and especially the Libyans, were still big news back then, and the relais was jammed, mostly with French reporters from the major Paris papers and magazines.Reuters and AP had their Abidjan-based people there, and two of the three French television stations had even sent in crews.

Most of them had paired off by then, anyway; those that hadn’t made up excuses for why they couldn’t cross with Alain. It was nothing personal; just that right then, no one wanted too close an association with AFP.It was France, and vice versa, at least as far as Goukouni’s people were concerned, and that made life miserable for the agency’s correspondent assigned to cover the story—and anyone else that got too close.

For once in the post-colonial era, the French had sat one out. They got tired of seeing their carefully arranged coalitions and fragile truces disintegrate and decided to retire to the sidelines and simply re-establish ties to whichever side won.

They no doubt preferred Goukouni since his coalition included the malleable and historically pro-French southern troops of the corrupt Abdel Wadal Kamougue.

And Habre, a tough, shrewd leader who never liked the French, had the celebrated abduction of Madame Claustre—and some reports claimed, the personal, cold-blooded assassination of a French officer sent to rescue her—on his record.

But none of that was enough to induce Paris to heed Goukouni’s increasingly urgent pleas for help. Nor did the French really believe that Goukouni and his Christian allies from the south would ally themselves with the Libyans.

Qadaffi had already annexed the Aouzou strip in northern Chad to a general outcry from all the Chadian factions, and his radical Muslim pronouncements terrified the southerners.It was even widely reported that he had Goukouni detained against his will while on a visit to Tripoli.