"Okay. Scares me, though, just one . . . "
The door to Stauer's apartment flew open, showing darkness lit by streetlights beyond. In walked Phillie. She was dirty. Her face had several abrasions. Both knees of her pants were ripped, and the left one hung down several inches. Reilly, standing near the door made a waving motion under his nose, so apparently she stank, too.
"Fuck you all," she said, loud enough to be heard over the entire place. Without another word, she began walking straight to the master bedroom. The sound of running water began and didn't stop for a long time.
"How'd she do, Terry?" Stauer asked as Welch followed her in by about a minute behind.
Welch smiled broadly. "Not bad for the time we had. Give us a few months and she could find a place on a B Team. She's a good girl."
"Thanks, Terry. You're boys ready to move out to Myanmar?"
"Yeah, all set. I was concerned about evacuation, but Cruz is going to get the best Hips, piloted by him and his Russian pal, sitting on the Thai side of the border until we call. If Inning's lawyer will play along-and I am betting that Victor picked his lawyer based on his utter lack of principle-then it should be okay."
Ralph Boxer took Terry's hand and placed in it a card. "Memorize this and destroy it. It is a valuable contact within Burma."
Stauer was waiting when Phillie finally came out of the shower. She seemed like a sleepwalker. He stood, being a gentleman and all, and said, "I'm told you did pretty well. To the extent it was a test, and it mostly was, you passed."
She shambled over to him, put her arms around his neck, laid her head against his chest, and began to cry. "Oh, Wes, it was awful."
CHAPTER TEN
There is another huge structural problem for UNHCR,
for every agency, and that's the relief budgets.
The emergency budgets are always easier to get than
development. So you can get the emergency money
with hardly any trouble. Development funds are much
more difficult to get. So, the temptation is to keep
everyone in a perpetual emergency situation rather
than to work towards their integration.
-Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond, OBE
D-147, Abéché, Chad
Abéché wasn't the middle of nowhere, but you could see the middle of nowhere from there. That is, you could if the dust had settled enough to see much of anything. That only happened, though, in July and August when the town got most of its annual nineteen inches of rain. The rest of the time? Forget it.
It was the kind of place that in a travel guide discussing nightlife, things to do, places to see, places to stay, etc., there would be zero entries. Even the airport only operated in the day.
For all that, to Labaan the most disappointing part of the town was that somehow-inexplicably, impossibly-Lance was waiting for the party near the airport parking area when they arrived. They found him by the plane they'd last seen in N'Djamena, reclining on a folding lawn chair, with a reflector held under his chin to help get that perfect tan.
"Dude," Lance said, "the day after I saw you I tried to crank it and it just started to work. Maybe a vapor lock in the engine. Dunno. But good to see ya, dude. You ready to head on out?"
Labaan resisted the urge to shoot the idiot American. But only because we need him for now.
"Vapor lock? In a turboprop?"
"Dude, I dunno; I just fly 'em. You want me to take you to Kosti or not?"
With all the humanitarian aid and human rights workers flooding eastern Chad, nobody much cared about a single Pilatus PC-12 leaving with a human cargo. Lance told the control tower he was leaving. Nobody answered. With a shrug, he gave a little power to the plane's sole, nose-mounted, engine and taxied to the runway. There he turned left, heading west. At the western end he did a one eighty, waiting for a flight from Care to clear off.
"Dude," he called to Labaan, "open the hatch and look behind us to see if anyone's trying to land." When Labaan didn't move, Lance added, "Dude, I'm serious."
Sighing wearily, Labaan did just that. Having looked from directly behind to directly overhead, he closed and dogged the hatch and shouted over the engine's roar, "You're cl-"
He couldn't finish before Lance had given the engine full throttle and was racing down the runway, shouting, "Kawabungaaaa!" The plane's deck moved out from under Labaan's feet, tossing him off the bulkhead rearward of the hatch and then to the floor.
I will kill this man, Labaan thought to himself, as he crawled along the deck to his seat. Not all the lives saved by America around the world are enough to justify his continued existence.
"Hey, dudes," Lance called out over his shoulder, "Look down below. Refugee camp." He twisted the control yoke and tilted the Pilatus over on its port side to give his passengers a view.
"There are twelve of these," Labaan told Adam, "all spread more or less in an arc east of Abéché. At least, there were twelve. There may be more now. And they keep growing. Someday, I suspect, the entire population of Africa will be in refugee camps where well-meaning Europeans and Americans can feel good about themselves for all the wonderful things they do on our behalf."
"You don't much like the whites, do you?" Adam said.
Labaan shrugged. "Whites in themselves? I've no strong feelings one way or the other. But the ones who come to help us? The twenty-year old diletantes who come to teach our people how to farm land they've been farming for five thousand years? The ones who then give out so much food that it doesn't pay to farm anymore? The ones who ensure that both sides to our innumerable and interminable civil wars are fed, thus ensuring that the wars will go on forever? I despise those whites.
"Worse, though, are the ones who brought us Marxism, or brought some of our people to their lands to teach them Marxism. Imperialism never did us the harm that that one miserable European pseudo-philosophy has.
"Worst of all, though, are the ones who bring money, lots and lots of money, that feed our kleptocrats and give them both the means and the motivation to retain power. Always for good purposes does that money come," finished Labaan. "Always for evil purposes is it used."
"Imperialism did us plenty of harm," Adam objected, heatedly.
"Did it?" asked Labaan. "Ask anyone in a position to know, anyone old enough, if they'd rather things stay as they are or if they would, if they could, go back to the old days. Not one in a hundred wouldn't rather have the Euros back in charge. Unless we could talk the Americans into taking the job."
Adam went silent, turning his head and eyes to the front of the plane.
Labaan wasn't letting go, though. "Of course there are some people who like things as they are, especially the kleptocrats like your father who could never steal as much while the imperialists were in charge. Like my own chief, for that matter. And the people in the former French Empire couldn't go back, since there's nothing to go back to; the French kept their empire in everything but appearances."
***
The sun was well behind the Pilatus now, shining in thin streaks through the port side windows and painting those in bright lines on the seats and walls. Adam asked, "So what is our problem, then?"
Labaan shook his head. "Countries. Countries that mix tribes and clans."
"How so?"
"Because when you're a minority-or even something less than an absolute majority-in countries such as we have, and you're in a position to steal, then you're only stealing from other tribes on behalf of your own. Why, it's immoral not to steal then, before someone else beats you to it and disadvantages your own tribe."