called—how Westerners viewed the rest of the world. It introduced him to men and
women who grew up in households of power and privilege, where the main struggle
was over the remote control, and the greatest danger they faced was boredom. For
them, places such as Anura or Sri Lanka or Lebanon or Kashmir or Myanmar had
been flattened into metaphor, mere emblems of the pointless barbarity of
non-Western peoples. In each case, the West enjoyed the great gift of
obliviousness: obliviousness to its complicity, obliviousness to the fact that
its barbarity dwarfed any other.
Westerners! He knew they remained an abstraction, ghostly and even demonic, to
many of his followers. But they were no abstraction for the Caliph; he could see
them and feel them, for he had. He knew what they smelled like. There was, for
instance, the bored wife of an associate dean he had met during his school days.
At a get-together the administration held for foreign students, she drew out of
him his tales of hardship, and as he talked he had noticed how her eyes widened
and her cheeks flushed. She was in her late thirties, blond and bored; her
comfortable existence was a cage to her. What started as a conversation next to
a punch bowl was followed, at her insistence, by coffee the very next day, and
then by much more. She had been excited by his stories of persecution, by the
cigarette burns on his torso; no doubt she was also excited simply by what she
perceived as his exoticism, though she owned up only to an attraction to his
“intensity.” When he mentioned that electrodes had once been attached to his
genitals, she looked both horrified and fascinated. Were there any lasting
effects? she had asked solemnly. He had laughed at her ill-disguised interest
and said he would happily let her decide for herself. Her husband, with his
fecal breath and comical, pigeon-toed walk, would not be home for hours.
That afternoon, Ahmad performed a salat, the ritual prayer, with her juices
still on his fingers. A pillowcase served as his prayer mat.
The weeks that followed were a crash course in Western mores that proved as
valuable as anything else he learned at Maryland. He took, or was taken by, more
lovers, though none knew of the others. They spoke dismissively of their
pampered lives, but none of them would ever dream of actually leaving the gilded
cage. With half an eye on the bluish glow of the TV screen, the spoiled white
bitches would watch the events of the day as they waved their hands to hasten
the drying of their nail polish. Nothing ever happened that American television
could not reduce to a fifteen-second world-news update: slivers of mayhem
between segments on new diet fads and pets in peril and warnings about expensive
toys for toddlers that could be hazardous if swallowed. How rich in material
things the West was, how poor in spiritual! Was America a beacon unto the
nations? If so, it was a beacon leading other vessels into the shoals!
When the twenty-four-year-old graduate student returned to his native land, it
was with a sense of even greater urgency. Injustice prolonged was injustice
magnified. And—he could not say it enough—the only solution to violence was more
violence.
Janson spent the next hour going through the dossiers and listening to brief
presentations by Marta Lang’s four associates. Much of the material was
familiar; some of the analyses even reflected his own reports from Caligo,
submitted more than five years ago. Two nights earlier, the rebels had taken
over army bases, surged through checkpoints, and effectively seized control of
the province of Kenna. Obviously, it had all been carefully planned in advance,
down to the insistence on holding the summit in the province. In its latest
communication to its followers, the KLF had officially repudiated the Kagama
delegation at the summit, calling them traitors acting without authorization. It
was a lie, of course, one of many.
There were a few new details. Ahmad Tabari, the man they called the Caliph, had
gained in popular support during the past few years. Some of his food programs,
it emerged, had won him sympathizers even among Hindu peasants. They had
nicknamed him the Exterminator—not because of his propensity to murder civilians
but because of a pest-eradication campaign he had launched. In the areas
controlled by the KLF, aggressive measures were invariably taken against the
bandicoot rat, an indigenous species of vermin destructive to poultry and grain.
In fact, Tabari’s campaign was motivated by an ancient superstition. In Tabari’s
clan—the extended family to which his father belonged—the bandicoot rat
represented death. It did not matter how many Koran verses Ahmad Tabari had
committed to memory: that primal taboo was marked indelibly on his psyche.
But the physical realm, not the psychological one, was what commanded Janson’s
full attention. For the next two hours, Janson scrutinized detailed
topographical maps, grainy satellite imagery of the multiphase rebel incursion,
and old blueprints of what had once been a colonial governor general’s compound
and, before that, a fortress—the building on Adam’s Hill known by the Dutch as
the Steenpaleis, the Stone Palace.
Again and again he stared at the elevation mappings of Adam’s Hill and of the
Stone Palace, moving back and forth between overhead views and structural
blueprints. One conclusion was inescapable. If the U.S. government had declined
to send in the SEALs, political considerations were only part of the story. The
other part was that any exfiltration operation had an extremely remote
probability of success.
Lang’s associates knew it. He could see it in their faces: they were asking him
to conduct a mission that was essentially doomed from the start. But perhaps
nobody was willing to tell Marta Lang. Or she had been told and refused to
accede. It was clear that she regarded Peter Novak as somebody worth dying for.
She would give her life for him; and people like her were always willing to give
the lives of others as well. Yet could he say that she was wrong? American lives
had frequently been lost in pursuit of derisory gains—putting up a bridge over
the Dak Nghe, for the tenth time, that would be destroyed, for the tenth time,
before morning came. Peter Novak was a great man. Many owed their lives to him.
And, though he tried to put it out of his mind, Janson knew he was among them.
If people were unwilling to put themselves at risk to save such an apostle of
enlightenment, what did it say about the ideals of peace and democracy to which
Novak had devoted his own life? Extremists scoffed at Westerners and their
lightly held beliefs, yet was extremism in pursuit of moderation not itself a
moral contradiction? Wasn’t Janson’s recognition of that fact what had driven
him to retire?
Abruptly, Janson sat up straight. There was a way—perhaps.
“We’ll need aircraft, boats, and most of all, the right operatives,” he told
Lang. His voice had subtly shifted, from the mode of gathering information to
that of issuing orders. He stood and paced silently. The make-or-break factor
was going to be the men, not the machinery.
Marta Lang looked at the others expectantly; for the moment, anyway, the look of
grim resignation had lifted.
“I’m talking about a crack team of specialists,” he said. “Best of breed in
every case. There’s no time for training exercises—it’s going to have to be
people who have worked together before, people I’ve worked with and can trust.”
He pictured a succession effaces, flashing in his mind like so many file photos,
and mentally culled the list according to essential criteria until four
remained. Each was someone he had worked with in his past career. Each was
someone he felt he could trust with his life; indeed, each was someone who owed
him his life, and who, temperamentally, would respect a debt of honor. And none
of them, as it happened, were American nationals. The State Department could
breathe easy. He gave Lang the list. Four men from four different countries.
Suddenly Janson slapped the bolted table. “Christ!” he half shouted. “What was I
thinking? You’re going to have to scratch the last name, Sean Hennessy.”
“He’s dead?”
“Not dead. Behind bars. Her Majesty’s Prison Service. HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Got
embroiled on a weapons charge a few months ago. Suspected of being IRA.”
“Was he?”
“As it happens, no. Hadn’t been since he was sixteen, but the military police
kept his name in its Provo files all the same. In point of fact, he was doing a
job for Sandline Ltd.—keeping the Democratic Republic of Congo safe for coltan
extraction.”
“Is he the best person for the job you want him to do?”
“I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.”
Lang punched a series of numbers on what looked like a flat telephone console,
and brought the handset to her ear.
“This is Marta Lang,” she said, speaking with clipped precision. “Marta Lang.