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  “Do you feel that you are in any danger, Ian?”

  “No, not really. Everything seems quite calm, quite orderly, much as it has been here in Monrovia for the past couple of months. A very polite officer from the ECOMOG forces came through and assured everyone that this lockdown is only temporary and that there will be a press briefing on recent developments sometime later today…. By the way, that sound you might be hearing is a Nigerian Army helicopter circling over the city. It has a loud-hailer system working, advising the populace to remain calm and stay off the streets. The same essential message is also being broadcast by KISS, the Monrovia radio station, interspersed with the usual African pop.”

  “What do you think is taking place, Ian? You’re our World Services man in Liberia.”

  “I honestly don’t know, Ann. We’ve had a couple of extremely quiet months here. It actually looked as if the long Liberian nightmare was over. The cease-fire between the Liberian Military and ECOMOG forces and the remaining rebel factions upcountry seemed to have been holding. There were ongoing negotiations to form a permanent representative government and to draft a new constitution …. Brigadier Belewa, the ECOMOG force commander and a most remarkable man, has been working tirelessly for a permanent end to this long-festering conflict. I hope this isn’t a setback for the very successful and enlightened policies he’s been putting into play here.”

  “Ian. We’ve been in touch with our man in Lagos. He reports that the Nigerian government has been out of communication with both the ECOMOG garrison and the ECOWAS headquarters in Monrovia since late last night. They are apparently also in the dark about what may be happening there in Liberia.”

  “Ann, there is one thing I can comment on. We have seen a number of military patrols in the downtown area … peace keeping patrols, I gather. They all seem to be conformed in the same way: six men, three teams of two. One of the patrols is below us in the street now. Two of the soldiers are obviously Nigerians from the ECOMOG forces, while two of the others appear to be Liberian army. The last pair are armed but in civilian clothing … a rather ragged-looking couple of individuals … I have no idea who they may belong to. One of the lads here suggests that they might be members of one of the rebel factions. I’m not sure how that could be.”

  “Ian? … Ian?”

  “Stand by, Ann. We have something here … Ah, we have a development … I have just been handed a flyer that was delivered to our rooms a few moments ago. It’s a notification of a press conference to be held at ECOMOG headquarters this afternoon. The purpose of the conference is to, and I quote, ‘clarify recent events taking place within Liberia for the world community’ … Bloody hell!”

  “What is it, Ian?”

  “This document. It’s signed ‘Brigadier Obe Belewa, Premier General of the Liberian Union.’”

  Freetown, Sierra Leone 0526 Hours, Zone Time;

  October 23, 2005

  Private Jeremy Makeni yawned mightily and tried to defy the overwhelming urge to sleep. Lance Corporal Rupert, the soldier who shared the night’s sentry duty at the Port Master’s dock, had surrendered to sleep an hour before. Stretched out and snoring with his head propped on a coil of rope, the corporal relied on luck or Private Makeni to wake him before their relief showed up at six o’clock.

  Granted that they showed up at all. The personnel of the Freetown garrison force were lax about such things, even as the fighting raged inland and on the eastern border.

  Angrily, Makeni straightened and again began to pace the sentry-go he had set for himself. Was he not a soldier, even if only guarding a rickety wooden pier miles from the battle line?

  When the notice had come calling him to national service, Jeremy had been overjoyed. At last, here was something better than working in his father’s chophouse. At last, an opportunity to do something more than sweeping floors and washing kettles. At seventeen, a chance to be a man instead of a boy.

  Pausing at the head of the pier, Jeremy looked out across the darkened waters of Kroo Bay and listened to the sluggish lap of the waves against the pilings. His father hadn’t understood, of course. He couldn’t see that it was time for his son to grow up. Jeremy caught him trying to pay dash to the government man to have Jeremy’s name taken from the list.

  He and his father had argued then. Not as father and son, but as one man with another, with men’s anger and pride for the first time. They had not spoken since.

  Jeremy still suspected that money had changed hands behind his back somewhere, however. Instead of being sent to the troubles up around the refugee camps or to defend against the Liberian threat, he had been assigned here after completing his month’s training. To the fat and sleepy Freetown garrison.

  Out in the bay, the lights of an anchored ship cast glimmering golden streaks across the oily water. It had not been there when Jeremy had come on duty. It was common for a vessel arriving in Freetown after dark to anchor in the road-stead. The pilot would go out in the morning to collect his fee and his dash, and the harbormaster, after doing the same, would clear the vessel to dock.

  Jeremy turned and began to pace back down the worn planking, stepping over Corporal Rupert’s sprawled legs. Damn! Why couldn’t his father have left well enough alone! The fighting had begun and here he was, stuck in the city, four blocks from where he had grown up!

  Jeremy’s steady footsteps faltered. The fighting had begun. And maybe soon enough it would come to him. The government boasted about the victories they were winning in the field, but the rumors didn’t match up. There was a battle going on out along the Kenema highway, and no one had heard anything from upcountry in days.

  In such times, maybe it was not such a good thing for him and his father to also be at odds. After all, his father did remember the bad days back during the civil war. And who could blame a parent for worrying about an only son?

  Jeremy Makeni grinned, his smile flashing in the darkness. After he was relieved on duty this morning, what would happen if he walked into his father’s cafe and called for his favorite breakfast of benchi and bread. After arguing as two men, perhaps now they could also sit and talk and laugh as two men. Still smiling, Jeremy turned.

  Abruptly, the smile left his face.

  A steely smear of dawn showed in the sky, revealing a long row of shadows slinking toward the harbormaster’s pier. Over the lap of the waves and Corporal Rupert’s snoring, Jeremy heard the mutter of a throttled-down engine. And beyond the swampy miasma of the shoreline, he smelled the metallic exhaust of an outboard motor.

  A launch of some kind, long and low and painted to match the darkness, was creeping in from the bay. Towed behind it were a string of smaller rubber boats, each loaded with a huddled mass of men. The first hint of daylight gleamed on a rifle barrel.

  Jeremy yelled out a startled, wordless cry of warning as he struggled to unsling his old bolt-action Enfield. Sleep-dazed Corporal Rupert sprang to his feet, his weapon lying forgotten on the pier decking. An instant later twin daggers of flame lanced out from the bow of the launch, the converging tracer streams shredding the noncom and flinging him aside.

  Exposed for the first time to the realities of war, Jeremy Makeni froze. He was never given the instant he needed to recover. The dual-mount machine guns raked the length of the pier and something smashed into the young soldier’s chest.

  He fell beside Corporal Rupert, a lingering fragment of warrior’s pride keeping his hand closed on the stock of his rifle. Jeremy’s eyes no longer responded to the growing glow of the sun, but faintly, he heard a man speaking. For a last moment, he thought it was his father’s voice.

  Yelling their deep-toned battle cries, the Liberian soldiers streamed up from the pier float, ignoring the two bloodstained bodies sprawled on the upper deck. Forming into assault teams, they stormed the streets of the city, en route to their assigned objectives. It was a scene being repeated a dozen time
s over along the waterfront as the seizure of Sierra Leone’s capital gained momentum. Over all, recorded words thundered repetitively from a bank of loudspeakers aboard the invasion transport.

  “PEOPLE OF FREETOWN! STAY IN YOUR HOMES! STAY OUT OF THE STREETS! LIBERATION HAS COME! SOLDIERS OF SIERRA LEONE! LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS! YOU ARE OUR BROTHERS! WE WISH YOU NO HARM!”

  Washington, DC 1021 Hours, Zone Time;

  November 20, 2005

  The indirect lighting in the White House briefing room dimmed. The two-meter-wide flatscreen set into the cherry paneling of the wall flicked on, displaying a computer graphics map of the African continent for the three people seated at the central conference table.

  Secretary of State Harrison Van Lynden turned in his chair to face the man at the head of the table. “To begin, sir,” the graying New Englander said, “I believe that a brief review of the situation in the crisis zone would help to put today’s developments in perspective. With your permission, Mr. Dubois, our Undersecretary for African Affairs, will walk us through the recent events in the region.”

  Benton Childress, the forty-fourth President of the United States, nodded. “Very well, Harry. Carry on, Mr. Dubois. Whatever you think we need to know.”

  “Thank you, sir.” A fit-looking black man in his late thirties, Richard Dubois scowled a scholar’s thoughtful scowl as he keyed a command into the wall screen control pad. The north-west quadrant of the map windowed up, filling with a view of the great West African peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic.

  “West Africa, gentlemen,” he began. “To say that this is an unstable and troubled region would be a cataclysmic under statement. Although potentially rich in natural resources, eight out of the world’s ten most impoverished nations are located here. Although hundreds of millions of foreign-aid dollars have been expended in the region, it still contains eight out of the world’s ten national populations with the shortest average life expectancy. Massive governmental corruption is rife. The military coup is the accepted method of changing administrations, and for the past two decades total anarchy has been commonplace.”

  Childress nodded thoughtfully. “According to my family’s genealogy, some of my people may have come from over there. Only from a little farther north, near Mali.”

  “Many of our ancestors did, sir,” Dubois agreed. “Mine came from farther east, we think from around Ghana. This region was the focus of the western Atlantic slave trade. The coastal chiefs grew rich raiding other tribes hundreds of miles inland, keeping the barracoons full for the European traders.”

  Van Lynden gave a brief snort of grim laughter. “If you want a touch of irony here, one of my ancestors has a connection with the area as well. He was a rather notorious Dutch sea captain who built himself something of a reputation as a blackbirder. A few centuries ago, our families might all have met under somewhat different circumstances.”

  Dubois touched the display control again, and once more the screen image zoomed in on the western underbelly of the peninsula. “Here is the heart of the current crisis, the neighboring coastal states of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Both nations share a unique heritage. Both were founded in the early nineteenth century by freed black African slaves from North America. Sierra Leone as a British Crown colony in the year 1808. Liberia in 1822 as an independent nation with support from abolitionist factions within the United States.

  “As a result, both use English as their official language and both have a distinctive Anglo-American flavoring to their national cultures. The governments of both nations were also established around the basic principles of Western-style democracy. That, however, didn’t take quite so well.”

  Van Lynden crossed his arms and sank deeper into the leather of his conference chair, a frown coming across his angular “down north” features. “At one time I recall that both countries were considered model states among the emerging Third World nations.”

  “Very true, Mr. Secretary,” Dubois agreed. “Sierra Leone gained full independence from Great Britain in 1961. Both it and Liberia had stable governments, growing economies, and reasonably good civil rights records for the region. Unfortunately, things began to go wrong. Large-scale pocket-lining on the part of governmental officials and a catastrophic brush with socialism bled the life out of the regional economy. This, combined with conflicts and favoritism among the tribal factions within both nations, soon led to large-scale unrest and disaffection.

  “Both countries fell into a descending spiral of coup and civil war, each new regime coming into power proving to be worse than the one it had replaced. The government of Sierra Leone managed to maintain some semblance of national order, mostly thanks to the South African mercenaries hired to put down their last wave of revolts. Liberia, however, sank into total chaos.”

  “That I remember,” President Childress commented. “Wasn’t the death of one of the Liberian presidents, Samuel Doe, I believe, videotaped and distributed by his executioners?”

  “Yes, sir, in September of 1990 by the forces of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the Charles Taylor faction. Only, it wasn’t an execution, Mr. President. President Doe was tortured to death. Mr. Taylor himself personally officiated.”

  “Lord, that was a bad one,” Van Lynden murmured. “I remember the U.S. took some flak for not intervening at the time. Frankly, though, we couldn’t find a single faction in the whole damn place that we felt we could support. In the end, we used the Marines to evacuate our embassy staff and the other foreign nationals who were in-country and then just let the chips fall where they may.”

  Dubois nodded. “The organization that eventually did intervene was ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States. In response to the crisis, ECOMOG, the ECOWAS Military Observation Group, was established. This was a body of peacekeeping troops deployed into Liberia by the ECOWAS membership with the intent of stabilizing the area and allowing the formation of a new Liberian government.

  “While involving contingents from the various ECOWAS states, ECOMOG was primarily made up of Nigerian forces. Putting it bluntly, its performance was lackluster. Or at least it was until Brigadier Belewa assumed command.”

  Dubois called up the next preprogrammed image in the briefing system, that of a tall, powerfully built black man in camouflage fatigues and field cap. Photographed against the backdrop of a shattered building, he stood with hands on hips, stern features set as if in thought.

  “Brigadier General Obe Belewa, late of the Nigerian Army,” Dubois continued. “Age forty-two. Born in the city of Oyo in western Nigeria. His tribal affiliation is Yoruba. Perhaps from them he inherited his talents as an empire builder. During the precolonial age, the Yoruba ruled one of the largest and most powerful of the West African kingdoms.

  “The General was educated at Sandhurst and at the University of Ibadan. A truly remarkable individual, he was considered one of the rising stars in the Nigerian military, right up until he disowned his country to take over another.”

  “I still wonder just how he pulled that one off,” the President commented.

  “By a combination of guts, will, and a feat of covert statesmanship that would have made Machiavelli proud,” Dubois replied. “Belewa attended a number of service schools here in the United States, including both the Army’s Special Forces course at Fort Bragg and the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. His instructors unanimously agree that the man is a brilliant strategist and tactician.

  “It must have taken him years to set up the coup. We know that he volunteered repeatedly for service with the ECOMOG garrison in Liberia. With each tour of duty he must have picked up more contacts and established more links within both the provisional Liberian government and military and the various rebel factions back in the bush. As he grew in rank, he also began to maneuver a carefully handpicked cadre of officers and NCOs into the garrison force, disaffected military personn
el who owed more allegiance to Belewa personally than they did to the Nigerian government.

  “Eventually, Belewa was named commander of the ECOMOG garrison. Using the power inherent in that position, he began to bring about real change within Liberia. He decisively suppressed corruption and random violence, he got food and medical aid out to the rural areas, and he restarted the national economy. In doing so, he drew the loyalty of the Liberian people, not to Nigeria or the provisional Liberian government, but to himself.”

  “Wasn’t his being a Nigerian, an outsider, a problem?” President Childress inquired.

  “No, sir,” Dubois replied with a shake of his head. “Belewa turned it into an advantage. He was a man outside of all the tribal conflicts and the interfactional hatreds. He became trusted and respected because he was scrupulously honest and even-handed at all times to all the involved parties. He also never made a promise that he couldn’t deliver.

  “As the talks between the provisional government and the leadership of the rebel groups wrangled on, Belewa conducted a second level of covert negotiations with the dissatisfied lower echelons of both factions. Then, roughly three years ago, when he had all of the pieces in place, he struck.

  “The leadership of both the provisional Liberian government and of the majority of the rebel groups were wiped out in a coordinated revolt, all factions then swearing allegiance to General Belewa. The Nigerian ECOMOG garrison also mutinied, declaring for Belewa as well. Overnight, he went from army officer to the leader of his own nation.”

  Dubois deactivated the screen and turned back to face the table. “To say the least, there was a convulsion within the ECOWAS community. Nigeria attempted a degree of saber rattling at the new Liberian regime and its leader, but nothing much came of it. They realized that if they attempted an invasion, they’d be looking down the gun barrels of both their own elite military units and a large and hostile guerrilla army. Belewa’s takeover became accepted as a fait accompli.”