There was no answer.
“Good enough for me,” he said, wheeling back toward the living room.
Chapter 19
Southeast Washington, D.C.
Amara woke in the middle of the night, his internal clock stuck somewhere between Africa and America.
He could smell Ken’s coffee. The burnt liquid permeated the air, its caffeine tickling his nose and throat.
Something about the man scared him. Physically, he was nothing, a weakling. But there was something in his gaze that made him very scary, as scary as any of the blank-eyed teenagers stoned out on khat and the other drugs the warlords sometimes used to encourage their men. Even spookier was the fact that he was smart, smarter even than the Asian, Li Han.
Lying in bed, Amara thought of his earlier time in America. The country was not the great enemy that the followers of al Qaeda claimed. It was a strange and bizarre place, a country of heathens and devils, certainly, but also one where a man might be free of his past.
Lying in bed, he recalled his days as a student. Most of the teachers he had were arrogant jerks, prejudiced against him because he was African and a Muslim. Yet a few had tried to encourage him. He thought about one, a black man who taught history, who invited him into his home around Christmas.
Christmas. The ultimate Christian holiday. It should have been abhorrent, and in fact Amara had only accepted out of loneliness. But the man and his wife—they had no children—were so low key about it, so matter of fact, and above all so kind, that he had begun asking questions. He was impressed by their answers.
“A day not to be selfish,” said the professor. “That’s the best way to sum it up for someone who’s not Christian.”
“And by not being selfish, to save yourself for eternity,” added his wife.
The idea was foreign to Amara. Not the element of religion—he certainly believed in an afterlife. But it seemed strange that one could guarantee a place there simply by helping others.
The other person who had been nice was a Jew. He didn’t know this at first. The man was his math professor. He’d found Amara sitting alone in the college café one lunchtime and asked to sit down. This became a habit through the semester. Only after a few weeks did it dawn on Amara that the man was Jewish. The man never talked about religion or asked about Amara’s, but comments he had made about one of the holidays made it clear enough.
At the end of the semester, grades faltering, Amara was in danger of flunking out. The professor helped him find free tutoring, aiding him with his English, his main barrier. He also loaned him money, and would have helped him find a job if Amara had stayed for the summer.
What if those men were killed by the weapon Ken was constructing? How would he feel?
Were they soldiers, too, as the Brothers’ allies claimed?
What of their relatives, their wives?
It was OK to kill an enemy tribe in revenge. But where was the revenge here? His people had not been harmed.
It was not murder when it was jihad. But was it jihad to kill a man who believed his greatest achievement was to help someone?
The apartment was cold. Amara shifted around under the thin blanket, trying to keep warm. He drifted in and out of sleep. He tried to push his memories away. At one point he saw Li Han in the house, laughing at him. He turned over, realized he’d been dreaming.
There was a shadow in the room, standing over him.
Ken.
He bent down and moved his arm swiftly.
“You have served your purpose,” said Ken.
Something flew across Amara’s throat. He started to protest, to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t respond. It was full of liquid, salty liquid—blood.
He gasped, then began to cough. The shadow disappeared, then the room, then thought.
All was warm; finally, all was warm.
Unexpected Consequences
Chapter 1
Southeastern Sudan
At precisely 1303 the cell phone towers that provided southeastern Sudan with its characteristically spotty reception had a power failure. This was not unprecedented; the system had crashed three times in the past two months alone. There were few calls on the network in the area to begin with; not only was the service considered extremely unreliable, but it was also commonly assumed—incorrectly, as it happened—that the government monitored all calls through the cell tower.
Somewhat less usual, there was a malfunction at the same time involving the satellite telephone network most convenient and popular in the area. Anyone on a call inside a hundred-square-mile circle—there were about two dozen—heard a bit of static, then had their conversation fade in and out before completely dying. A few seconds later full service was restored; it was somewhat unusual, but not entirely inexplicable—sunspots, bizarre electrical fluctuations, even strange weather patterns were randomly but plausibly blamed by the few people who happened to be inconvenienced.
The fact that both events occurred simultaneously was not, of course, an accident. The power disruption at the cell towers was accomplished by explosive charges, which wiped out the transformers at two key stations. Had it been detected, the evidence would have pointed to a rebel group, of which there were many operating in the Sudan: the explosive was manufactured in an Eastern European country known for its easy exportation policies. The men seen in the vicinity were driving a four-door white pickup common to many groups. The men, all three of whom were black, wore anonymous brown fatigues that had their origins in China—another common quality among the ragtag groups that vied for control in this corner of the country.
The men were actually two Marines selected personally by the third man, Sergeant Ben “Boston” Rockland, from the two Marine platoons assigned to the Whiplash operation and rushed to Ethiopia only two hours before.
Blowing up the transformer was a rather crude and old school approach to killing communications. While effective, it stood in sharp contrast to what happened to the satellite communications, also perpetrated by Whiplash. This was actually accomplished by a high-altitude balloon and a UAV only a bit larger than the average buzzard. Indeed, the UAV looked very much like a buzzard from the distance; one had to get relatively close to see the net antenna that trailed from the wings or the stubby protuberances from the bottom. These antennas allowed the unmanned aircraft to intercept and redirect satellite signals emanating from the ground to the Whiplash satellite system. This redirection brought the ground half of these transmissions to MY-PID, where they could be altered as well as modified; the system could allow normal communications to proceed through an antenna in the small balloon, or route them to human operators located at an NSA facility in Maryland to conduct the calls.
In effect, no one in this small corner of the world could call home without MY-PID’s permission, and even then it might not be home they talked to at all.
Thus was the Brothers camp isolated from the rest of the world.
Danny Freah, en route south in the repaired Osprey, worried that the disruption of telephone service would tip off the people inside the camp that they were about to be attacked. He wasn’t as much worried about them increasing their defenses as the possibility that they would begin leaving the camp. While he had the road under surveillance, dealing with a mass exodus would have been nearly impossible.