This morning Sanjay took over the cooking duties, which were minimaclass="underline" hot tea or instant coffee, with hard rolls and orange marmalade. For Sanjay and Jean-Paul and Miriam and Peter, this seemed to be a reasonable breakfast, though I wished for something more substantial, like eggs and bacon or pancakes and sausages or even a cruller or two. I’m not sure what Charlie or Karen normally had for breakfast—Charlie probably thought breakfast was a waste of time and Karen probably had granola or fruit mix or some damn thing—but whatever we had, we ate on the wet hoods of our Land Cruisers.
Sanjay sipped noisily from his metal mug of tea, the liquid wetting the ends of his mustache. ‘Look over there,’ he said, gesturing with a shrug of his shoulder to another Land Cruiser, where Jean-Paul had a satellite phone up and working. ‘I think Jean-Paul is getting his marching orders from Albany, don’t you?’
Jean-Paul was speaking rapidly in French, gesturing wildly with one hand. Peter was next to him, holding a map steady against the hood of the Land Cruiser. Charlie was at the end of the parking lot, looking up and down the road. Karen was next to Sanjay, and I noticed how she had gently bumped her hip against his twice when she didn’t think anybody was looking. I guess New Delhi was still quite far away.
Miriam took another hard roll, split it with one hand while spooning out some more marmalade. ‘Jean-Paul is under a lot of pressure, as are the other teams in this area. If there is no Site A, then there is no case in The Hague. And without a case in The Hague, you know what happens next. The criminals are released and, most likely, are released back to this poor country to start up where they left off if the UN leaves as agreed. Shooting refugees for sport. We have to do what we can.’
‘How many teams do you think are out here?’ I asked, finishing my meager breakfast and hoping against hope that tomorrow we would have something, anything, other than the chalky-tasting marmalade again.
Sanjay shrugged. ‘A half-dozen, maybe more. All driving around on the ground in this county, all poking around and asking questions and doing who knows what.’ He raised his head. ‘But up there… up there out in space are surveillance satellites, satellites that have the information we need. Archival footage to compare to real-time footage. Compare and contrast. See the trucks and the trains at work. All up there, ready to be used at a click of a mouse button. And we cannot touch it. Not even a single byte.’
Karen kept silent and Miriam added, ‘The Americans and the Russians have the best equipment. And neither are in a position to help us. You know how it is. The Americans are still humiliated over what has happened, and the Russians don’t want to piss off the Americans, in case they ever get back on the world stage like before.’
Sanjay looked at Karen, as if to suggest in a way that maybe it was her fault, I don’t know. Sanjay said bitterly, ‘I knew how it is, but I don’t have to like it.’
I looked over and saw Jean-Paul apparently still hard at work, with Peter next to him, equally intent. Then I had a start: Charlie was talking to two people, down where the road met the parking lot. To change the subject I said, ‘Look there. Seems like a couple of local men have come over to say hello.’
Sanjay and Karen and Miriam looked where I was pointing, and Karen said, ‘Look again, Samuel. The locals look like they haven’t reached puberty yet.’
I felt my face flush with embarrassment as I realized she was right. The two visitors were young boys and, looking again, I spotted the bicycles that they had been riding. Miriam said, ‘Young boys, out for a ride. How incredible. I wonder where their parents are. I don’t care what the map says about pacification; if they were my boys, they would still be in a basement or a shelter. Or in Canada or Mexico.’
‘Life muddles along,’ Sanjay said. ‘Seems like they’re telling Charlie something.’
Which was true. The boys were pointing up the road and Charlie was talking back to them, nodding his head, and when it seemed like he was satisfied with whatever it was they were saying he reached into his camouflaged coat and pulled out two chocolate bars. He passed them over and in a few seconds the boys were back on their bicycles, riding back to the town. Charlie watched them for a minute or so, and then ambled back and started talking to Jean-Paul. His face was impassive and I think I knew why. It had been quite normal in the previous century for good-hearted American military men to give out candy to local children in an occupied area. But these were not normal times, not when an American Marine had to do that in his home country. Our team leader pressed the satellite phone against his chest while Charlie talked to him, and then Peter caught my eye.
‘Better wrap up breakfast, folks,’ I said. ‘I think we’re going to be moving out quite shortly.’
Miriam smiled at me. ‘Samuel, you are so right.’
I helped with the dishes yet again, and then Jean-Paul strolled over. By now the stubble on his face almost matched in length the stubble on the top of his head. ‘We have to head out immediately,’ he said. ‘Those local boys told Charlie that something bad happened at a farmhouse a few kilometers away.’
‘What kind of bad?’ Karen asked, wiping her hands with a brown paper napkin.
‘Bad enough,’ Jean-Paul said.
Within ten minutes we were on the road and I looked back at the broken-down motel, feeling a bit of regret at leaving it behind. The bed and the room had been comfortable, and maybe we would be back tonight. Then again, maybe we’d be in a field once more, shivering from the early autumn cold. It all depended where we went and what we found.
Our three Land Cruisers made a small convoy as we drove along the narrow blacktop. The first Toyota was being driven by Charlie, with Jean-Paul at his side. I was in the second vehicle, with Peter driving and with Miriam in the rear seat, leaning in front so that she could talk to us, and Sanjay and Karen were in the last vehicle. I looked back a few times, saw them laughing a lot as we drove out. It looked like Karen had found the right room last night, and that the room’s occupant had helped erase memories of California after last spring’s attack.
Within a few minutes of leaving the motel we passed a refugee column heading in the opposite direction. It was smaller than others I had seen before in the weeks I had officially come ‘in-country’. This one consisted of two pickup trucks laboring under heavy loads of furniture and luggage, and two tractors pulling large flat wagons. About fifteen or twenty people, men and women, boys and girls, all ages, looked at us blankly as we sped past them. I watched them for only a moment. When I had first come here, I had wasted time examining the looks in the faces of the refugees, trying to determine on my own if these were aggressors or victims. And after a while I gave it up. I couldn’t tell, speeding by in a UN vehicle. The faces of the refugees all began to look the same: the same blank stare, the same resignation, the same exhaustion that prevented them from even glancing at us as we sped by, the official representatives of what was grandly called a peacekeeping organization, traipsing around in a nation that had usually hated the UN, even during that outfit’s good days. It was a hard thing to be a refugee here, especially when you had grown up thinking that refugees only lived on the other side of the world.
The road was well maintained and we stopped only once, at a crossroads where a fueling station had been set up. Three olive-green tanker trucks had pulled into a dirt parking area that looked like it had once held a farmstand that now consisted of burned wooden beams and shingles dumped in a ravine. Two armored personnel carriers guarded the approach from each direction. The familiar UNFORUS was stenciled in black on the side of each APC. The soldiers were Hungarian and were friendly enough, especially when they spotted Karen and Miriam. While only a couple of the soldiers seemed to speak any English, they managed to fuel up all three Land Cruisers within five minutes or so.