Monster Island

PART ONE Chapter Four

Six months earlier, continued
A Chinese-built helicopter stirred up the dust in the courtyard with its lazily turning rotor. Whoever had just arrived must be important - I hadn't seen an aircraft of any kind in weeks. In the shade of the barracks building a group of huddled women in hijab dresses held their hands over the mortars where they'd been grinding grain.
The girl soldier lead me past a pair of "technicals" - commercial pickup trucks with heavy machine guns mounted in their beds. A particularly Somali brand of nastiness. Normally technicals were crewed by mercenaries but these had been hastily emblazoned with Mama Halima's colors: light blue and yellow like an Easter egg. The vehicles belonged to the Women's Republic now. Girl soldiers loitered around the trucks, their rifles slung loosely in their arms, chewing distractedly on qat and waiting for the order to shoot somebody.
Past the technicals we walked around a corpsefire. It was a lot bigger than it had been when Sarah and I were first brought to the compound. The soldiers had wrapped the bodies in white sheets and then packed them with camel dung as an accelerant. Gasoline was too valuable to waste. The smell was terrible and I could feel Sarah clench against my chest but our guide didn't even flinch.
I tried to summon up my identity, tried to draw some strength from my professional outrage. Jesus. Child soldiers. Kids as young as ten - babies - dragged out of school and given guns, given drugs to keep them happy and made to fight in wars they couldn't begin to understand. I'd worked so hard to outlaw that obscenity and now I depended on them for my daughter's safety. The worst horrors of the twenty-first century had turned into humanity's only hope.
We entered a low brick building that had taken a bad artillery hit and never been repaired. The dust billowed in the sunlight streaming through the collapsed roof. At the far end of a dark hallway we came to a kind of command post. Weapons lay in carefully sorted piles on the floor while a heap of cell phones and transistor radios littered a wooden table where a woman in military fatigues sat staring listlessly at a piece of paper. She was perhaps twenty-five, a little younger than me and she wore no covering on her head at all - a sign of real feminine power in the Islamic world. She didn't look up as she spoke to me. "You're Dekalb. With the United Nations," she said, reading off a list. "And daughter." She gestured and our guide went and sat down beside her.
I didn't bother assenting. "You have foreign nationals in that cell who are being treated in an inhumane fashion. I have a list of demands."
"I'm not interested," she began. I cut her off.
"We need food, first of all. Clean food. Better sanitation. There's more."
She fixed me with a glance at my midsection that I felt like a stabbing knife. This was not a woman to be trifled with.
"If it's still possible we need to be afforded communication with our various consulates. We need - "
"Your daughter is black." She hadn't been looking at me at all. She'd been looking at Sarah. My mouth filled with a bitter taste. "But you're white. Her mother?"
I breathed hard through my nose for a minute. "Kenyan. Dead." She looked me in the eyes then and it just came out. "We found her, I mean, I found her rooting in our garbage one night, she'd had a fever but we thought she would make it, I brought her inside but I didn't let her out of my sight, I couldn't - "
"You knew she was one of the dead."
"Yes."
"Did you dispose of her properly?"
My whole body twitched at the thought. "We - I locked her in the bathroom. We left, then. The servants had already gone, the block was half-deserted. The police - even the army couldn't hold out much longer."
"They didn't. Nairobi was overrun two days after you left, according to my intelligence." The woman sighed, a horribly human sound. I could understand this woman as a deadly bureaucrat. I could understand her as a soldier. I couldn't handle it if she expressed any sympathy. I begged her silently not to pity me.
Lucky me.
"We can't feed you and this installation isn't defensible so we can't let you stay here, either," she said. "And I don't have time to argue about your list of demands. The unit is decamping tonight as part of a tactical retreat. If you want to come with us you have five minutes to justify your keep. You're with the UN. A relief worker? We need food, more than anything."
"No. I was a weapons inspector. What about Sarah?"
"Your daughter? We'll take her. Mama Halima loves all the orphan girls of Africa." It sounded like a political slogan. The fact that Sarah wasn't an orphan didn't need to be clarified - if I failed now she would be.
It was at that moment I realized what being one of the living meant. It meant doing whatever it took not to be one of the dead.
"There's a cache of weapons - small arms, mostly, some light anti-tank weapons - just over the border - I can take you there, show you where to dig." We'd put the guns there in hopes of destroying them one day. Stupid us.
"Weapons," she said. She glanced at the pile of rifles on the floor by my feet. "Weapons we have. We are in no danger of running short on ammunition."
I clutched Sarah hard enough to wake her, then. She wiped her nose on my shirt and looked up at me but she kept quiet. Good kid.
"She'll be protected. Fed, educated."
"In a madrassa?" She nodded. As far as I knew that was the limit of the Somali educational system. Daily recitation of the Koran and endless prayers. At least she would learn to read. There was something impacted in my heart just then, something so tight I couldn't relax it ever. The knowledge that this was the best Sarah could hope for, that any protests I made, any suggestion that maybe this wasn't enough was unrealistic and counter-productive.
In five years when she was old enough to hold a gun my daughter was going to become a child soldier and that was the best I could give her.
"The prisoners," I said, done with that train of thought. I had to be hard now. "You have to leave us some weapons when you go. Give us a fighting chance."
"For them, yes. But I'm not done with you." She glanced at her sheet of paper again. "You have lived in America." Here it comes, I thought. The Somalis had no reason to help out an American, not after Operation Restore Hope turned to shit back in '94. I was a Gaal, a foreigner - a foreign devil. This is where they take me out in the yard and put a bullet in the back of my head. "I need a volunteer. An American volunteer for something quite dangerous. In exchange you could have full citizenship." She kept talking then but for a while I couldn't hear anything, I was too busy imagining my own death. When I realized she wasn't going to kill me I snapped back to attention. "It's Mama Halima, you see." She put down her paper and looked at me, really looked at me. Not like I was an unpleasant task she had to deal with but like I was a human being. "She has succumbed to a condition all too prevalent in Africa. She has become dependent on certain chemicals. Chemicals we are dangerously short of."
Drugs. The Warlady had a habit and she needed a mule to go pick up her supply of dope. Somebody desperate enough to go to America and get her fix for her. I would do it, of course. No question.
"What kind of 'chemicals' are we talking about? Heroin? Cocaine?"
She pursed her lips like she was wondering whether she'd made a mistake in picking me for this mission. "No. More like AZT."