Peacemaker. Gordon Kent
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was part of the Hutu elite, always on the edges of discussions and meetings. She was trusted because she was a general’s daughter and Peter’s half-sister, and because all her life she had had privileges and luxuries beyond most of her countrymen’s wildest dreams.
“Put that camera away now!” he hissed. Zulu was shouting at his men. Somebody was running.
“Oh—poo!” she said. She snapped a picture of Peter looking furious, then swung the camera around and got one of the “Belgians” as he raised the launcher. Then she gave her half-brother a big grin and made a show of dropping the pink camera into her bag and zipping it closed. She laughed into his angry face, then minced across the soft earth, her beautifully coiffed hair bouncing, Zulu’s digital camera held like a jewel between her fingers.
Zulu was gesturing at the Rwandan soldiers, spreading them out. “All the way around us!” he shouted. “Both sides! When I tell you, you go! We get out very quick when this is over!” He looked for Peter, found him. “Get them out another fifty meters or so! A big perimeter—I don’t want any interference—” He looked around again. “Where’s my camera? Ah—” He ran to Elizabeth. “I’ll take it now. No, wait—get one shot of me and the guys—”
He crouched behind the two shooters, who had their backs to her with the launchers pointed into the sky to the north. “Okay—take the picture—Good. One more—” He changed his position, waved her around so she was getting him in profile again, cheating a little so his face, his nose showed as he seemed to be directing the two shooters. “Got it? Give me the camera. Many thanks.” He gave her the smile again, the smile that worked on the men and didn’t work on her. “Well done.” Then he was back with the shooters, speaking to them in the other language.
And then she could hear the aircraft. At first, it was an almost subliminal rumble, then a soft roar that diminished into a hiss and a sigh, with a thin screaming of air over wings beginning to descend above the other sounds. She stared into the north sky. The morning clouds had piled up but not delivered their rain; it would pass over them now and fall somewhere to the east. The clouds were bright enough to hurt her eyes; she squinted, trying to make the aircraft out above the trees. She prayed it wouldn’t be the civilian plane. Make it military, she prayed. Make it the UN. Even the French or the Belgians. It could be that it was them they meant to hit. That could be the strategy, to down a UN plane, stir things up. Not the other, she prayed. If it was the other, then they would all be in hell.
Zulu rapped out a word, and one of the shooters set his rear foot and hunched. Zulu had seen the aircraft, and she tried to find it in the brightness of cloud. Where? She was looking too far ahead, of course; she was deceived by the sound.
“There it is,” Peter said. The others had already seen it.
Then she saw it, too, surprisingly clear and close. It was a civilian 747. Please, no, God, she prayed.
The aircraft came on, dropping, on its final approach now for the Kigali airport. The thin scream of the wind cut into her ears. She covered them, screwed her face up, a frightened child.
One Stinger whooshed and roared and smoked from the tube. She followed its trajectory as it seemed to curve away from the aircraft. Miss, miss, dear God, she prayed. The trail curled and then swung more tightly up. It seemed to hang there for a long time. They missed, she thought. The airliner was screaming down the glide path to their left, dropping toward the trees, and the missile was invisible. Seeking, seeking the aircraft’s heat—
And then it hit. The aircraft erupted. A ball of light blew out of its roof, although the craft seemed for a moment to remain intact, to go on flying. Then flame and smoke spread from that white-hot center, and the tail section, independent now, began to fall. The front was almost entirely obscured by flash and fire; another explosion tore it apart; a wing and an engine seemed to slide sideways across the sky, and the fireball plunged.
She found that she was standing on her toes, one hand clasped over her mouth. She was weeping. Peter was shaking her and pulling her away. “Weakling!” he shouted at her. “Weakling! You stupid bitch!”
Everyone aboard the civilian flight, including the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, was killed. Both were Hutus. Tutsi rebels were blamed.
Then ten Belgian peacekeepers were killed by Rwandan presidential guards.
Then Hutus began to kill Tutsis. The killings were not random. On April fifteenth, more than a thousand Tutsis were murdered in a church by men throwing grenades. By April twenty-seventh, a hundred thousand on both sides were dead. Then the Hutu strategy backfired, and by August the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front was in power in Rwanda, and somewhere between half a million and a million Hutus had become refugees in other countries, mainly Zaire.
The man called Zulu was not there. He had flown out the same day as the downing of the presidents’ aircraft. After refueling at Abeche in Chad, an ancient Britannia 252 took him up to the edge of the Mediterranean at Tubruq, then to the military airport south of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. “Zulu” became somebody else who had his own training camp and weapons depot south of the city and whom the authorities in Belgrade feared and disliked, but without whom they could not achieve the ethnic victory in their own country on which their political lives depended.
Bosnia, February 1996
The sea was gray, the sky near the horizon pink, between them a line of silver. It looked as cold as dawn in Canada, but this was the Mediterranean in February. Cold.
He felt the bucking of the aircraft, under it the surge of the deck, under that the throb of the ship, felt these things without feeling them because he had been there so long these were normal, and when he got on shore the lack of vibration would feel wrong, something missing in the universe.
“Ready back there, Lieutenant?”
Fatigue perched on him like a big, obscene bird. Crow picking at roadkill. He roused himself, realized he had been half-asleep, the pilot’s voice in the comm waking him. Was he ready? Ready for one more of Suter’s punitive jobs, one more of his humiliations, one more of his demonstrations that he, Suter, was a lieutenant-commander and Alan Craik was only a lieutenant and it had been a big mistake for Alan to show that he thought Suter was an asshole?
“Yo,” he said.
“O-kay! And they’re off, as the monkey said—”
When he backed into the lawnmower, Alan finished for him. The puck dropped and the cat whacked him in the chest with Gs and the aircraft threw itself at the horizon. It was like the old days for a moment, and he felt the thrill of it, and then it was gone.
They flew into the rising sun, up toward thin strands of cloud like combed-out hair. Alan Craik looked back and saw the carrier, already small, a destroyer just visible in the haze a couple of miles away. Bitterly, he thought that he was off to do an ensign’s job, and behind him on the ship Ensign Baronik would be trying to do Alan’s job and screwing it up because he was only an ensign, and LCDR Suter would be on him like a weasel on a chicken, pleased that this nice piece of warm meat was there for him to savage. Ensign Baronik hadn’t been savvy enough to put space between himself and Alan, and so he was warm meat by association. And he was too young and too scared to tell Suter to back off, as Alan had done.
Alan sighed. God, he was tired. Four hours’ sleep in three days and now this. A lose-lose situation: if he didn’t work his ass off, Suter gave him every shit detail that came along; if he did work his ass off, Suter took the credit—and gave him every shit detail that came along. For Alan, who loved the job and for whom work was life, it was better to work himself to death and know that at least he’d done his best, but helping Suter’s career was bitter medicine. And