Belewa’s fist slammed down onto the desktop with an oil canning boom. “Then consider this an emergency! I will speak with Colonel Eba now!”
The duty officer hastily summoned a runner to guide Belewa to the Colonel’s quarters. The lieutenant knew that in doing so, he would draw the eventual ire of his battalion commander down upon himself. However, at the time, that seemed the lesser of the two evils.
Belewa followed his guide up the curve of the grand stair-way to another patch of generator light on the second floor of the vast old structure. Like most of Monrovia’s major buildings, the Masonic Temple had long before been pillaged of everything that could be stolen, down to the doors themselves, and the illumination leaked from around a cloth curtain drawn across an empty entryway.
The sound of music and women’s laughter also issued from behind the curtain.
Responding to the summons of the runner, Colonel Eba stepped out into the shadows of the hall. Belewa caught a glimpse inside the Colonel’s quarters as the curtain was drawn aside. Several of the other Battalion officers lounged there, along with a couple of young Liberian women. Attractive women, clad in bright, cheap dresses, who swayed in time to the rhythmic Nigerian Afro-Pop issuing from a tape player.
Eba was a heavyset man, thickening toward a stoutness that pulled his camouflage fatigues taut. In one hand he carried a coffee mug half-filled with whiskey. “What’s this about, Captain?” he demanded, scowling.
Belewa held at a rigid parade rest, his eyes focused over the head of the squat Eba. “Sir, I have received word from one of my scouting teams that the village of Simonsville, fifteen kilometers northeast of the city, is under attack by an unidentified armed force. I have sent two reports concerning this event to this headquarters.”
“We thank you for your efficiency in bringing this matter to our attention, Captain,” Eba replied archly. “I am sure I will be most interested in reading your reconnaissance reports in the morning.”
“Sir,” Belewa continued lowly, “I also dispatched two requests for the release of the Mobile Reaction Force to respond to this event. I’ve received no answer to either request.”
“Perhaps that is because none was required.” Eba took a sip of whiskey from his mug. “Simonsville is on your morning patrol route. You can check the situation out then. There’s no sense in our people tearing about in the darkness chasing rumors.”
“Sir, this is not a rumor! I have a scout team on a hill over looking Simonsville now. The village is being torn to pieces! I can have my men there in twenty minutes!”
“No, Captain, no.” Eba chuckled patronizingly. “You young bull officers are all the same. Always prone to charge at every little sound in the bush. That’s not proper military thinking. We must not waste our strength by becoming involved in every little squabble the locals have.”
The Colonel chuckled again and took another sip from his cup. “Remember, Belewa. We are here as a peacekeeping force. How would it look if we go about getting into fights all of the time.”
“I thought we were here to help these people.” Belewa made no effort to control the contempt in his voice.
Eba’s face hardened. “You are here to obey my orders, Captain. You may investigate these events in Simonsville on your morning patrol and not one moment sooner. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir. I understand very well.”
The sky was barely touched with pink in the east when the column of Land Rovers and Steyr 4K-7 armored personnel carriers roared into Simonsville. But by then it was far, far too late.
There had never been much to the little village, just a small cluster of huts and shanties along a dirt track, surrounded by upland rice fields and the low scrub left behind by logging and slash-and-burn agriculture. Now only ashes remained. Ashes and a few guttering remnants of flame curling around blackened frames of buildings.
There had been people here, though. Their remnants had been left behind as well. Charred forms lay in the wreckage, twisted grotesquely, frozen in midwrithe. The nude body of a young woman stood nailed in place against the last intact wall of the village. Given the extent of the bloodstains, she had been alive as the nails had been driven home. However, some one eventually had granted the girl as much mercy as could be found out in that scarlet night. Her head had been stricken from her shoulders with a blow from a machete.
Possibly the attackers had been part of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia. Or possibly it had been one of the splinters of the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy. Or an element of “Prince” Yormie Johnson’s Independent Patriotic Front, or remnants of the dead President Samuel Doe’s Armed Forces. Following the Taylor-Doe civil war and the collapse of the Liberian government, a dozen different factions had sprung up to gnaw at the corpse of the fallen nation. Each was little more than a loosely organized armed rabble, hiding its inhumanity behind a high sounding name.
Somewhere, a child cried, not with the cry of a child but with the agonized shrieks of a small, trapped animal in agony. Possibly the men who had created this carnage had a valid reason for annihilating Simonsville. More than likely, however, they didn’t.
Seated in the front seat of the command Land Rover, Captain Belewa snarled his orders into his radio handset. “All elements deploy by the action plan! First Platoon — establish a security perimeter! Second Platoon — search the village for survivors! Weapons platoon, set your pickets around the vehicles and get the aid station established! Third Platoon — start a sweep beyond the village area! Look for any of the wounded or injured who may have crawled off into the bush! Move!”
Carrying their long-barreled FALN assault rifles at port arms, the Nigerian mobile troopers dismounted and streamed away on their assigned tasks. Commanding the company’s headquarters section, Lieutenant Sako Atiba was kept busy for several minutes inside the Steyr communications track, notifying ECOMOG headquarters of their arrival and establishing the tactical radio net with the platoon leaders.
With those tasks accomplished, the compact and panther lean young officer stepped down the tail ramp of the big Austrian-built APC. Walking forward along the line of parked vehicles, he went to report personally to his commanding officer, military mentor, and friend.
A faint morning breeze stirred the humid air, but it served only to stir the miasma of corruption, burnt flesh, and charred wood. This was something Atiba had long ago learned about serving in Liberia. You could never get away from the evil, sweet scent of the dead. Perhaps that was the cause of some of the savagery that had infected this land. You inhaled death with every breath. A Housa tribesman, native to Nigeria’s Sahel uplands, Atiba sometimes dreamed at night of the dry, clean winds blowing in from the Sahara.
Approaching the command Land Rover, Atiba was surprised to find Captain Belewa sitting in the vehicle, looking out across the burned-out funeral pyre that was Simonsville. The tall warrior still had the radio microphone gripped in his left hand. The right, though, was clinched tightly into a pale knuckled fist, a fist that beat slowly and deliberately against the heavy metal of the Land Rover’s dashboard. Atiba was even more surprised to see the tears streaming from his company commander’s eyes.
“We have got to stop doing this to ourselves, Sako,” Obe Belewa murmured tightly. “We have got to stop doing this!”
“Ann, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Ian. Quite well.”
“Very good. We have our satellite phone set up here on the roof of the Ambassador Hotel. We’re still attempting to establish our video link. Not much luck yet, I’m afraid. Until then, we’ll try to describe what’s been going on here in Monrovia since this morning’s… incident.”