“This office will not be looking over your shoulder,” President Debenport assured him. “What do you say? I need my own intelligence resource, my own confidant. I need Paul Hood.”
Damn him, Hood thought. Damn the president for making something expedient sound desirable. And damn him for leaving Hood unemployed if he declined the offer. He had alimony and child support. Hood would not let indignation over the process affect his responsibilities.
“I accept the post,” Hood told him.
“Thank you,” the president replied, rising.
Debenport sounded sincere, which was something. It made Hood feel marginally better about having been shanghaied. Besides, the president was right. This was Washington, and Hood would have been lucky to make a lateral move, let alone enjoy an upkick in a new administration.
It still had not really hit him that he would not be returning to Op-Center, that the responsibility of running it — and the privilege — had been taken from his shoulders. Unlike the ending of his marriage, there was no sense of relief to counterbalance the sudden, encroaching emptiness.
Hood forced himself not to dwell on that. He had just accepted a new job. That was where his attention must go.
Hood and the chief of staff rose. Sanders told the new special envoy that she would show him to his office and come back around three, after she had arranged for help to organize and equip the Winder Building space. He thanked her while the president was still within earshot. Hood may have come from Los Angeles, but he had good manners as well.
As they walked down the corridor, the sense of avoidance Hood had felt earlier was gone. It had been replaced by a sense of courteous attention. Maybe it was all in his imagination, or maybe it was something palpable in his walk or his carriage, a stalwart if unconscious evidence of his new access to power.
Whatever it was, Hood resolved to ignore it. Yesterday he was the director of Op-Center. Today he was a special envoy to the president.
Tomorrow he could be indicted over a cheese Danish.
As they neared the area where the vice president had his small office, Hood felt one of his two cell phones vibrate. It was the one on his right hip, the secure STU-III unit he carried for Op-Center business. He slipped it from the loop on his belt and checked the number.
Hood replaced the phone without taking the call. He felt guilty about that, but it was the right thing to do.
Whatever Bob Herbert had to say would probably be better spoken — and heard — when it had cooled.
SIX
The Gold Coast of Africa is no longer the gold coast of Africa.
The honor of being one of the richest, most profitable, and fastest-growing regions on the continent has passed from western Africa along the Gulf of Guinea to the eastern coast of South Africa, with the city of Durban as the anchor. Because of the subtropical climate, with high temperatures and significant amounts of rainfall, the area has always been a perfect environment for growing. Beginning in the middle 1850s, thirty years after the British first established a major port there, significant sections of arable land were earmarked for sugarcane. The crop was easy to cultivate and export, much in demand, and produced significant profits.
Over a century and a half later, sugar continues to play a prominent part in South Africa’s agriculture, with Durban as the biggest sugar port in the world. Tourism has grown as well, with miles of beachfront having been developed into one of the most popular and celebrated vacation spots in the world. Along the Golden Mile, where summer lasts all year, the beautiful beaches are protected by shark nets, there are swimming pools with water slides, and there is an array of markets and merry-go-rounds, shopping centers, and world-class restaurants, nightclubs, and five-star hotels, all a few steps from the ocean.
Ever since the late nineteenth century, when a railroad was built to give inland regions access to the port, workers from the rest of the continent and from as far as India have come to work in the fields. Investors from other nations have come as well, creating an international mix unparalleled in most of Africa. Some of those individuals used the port and its resources to smuggle goods and receive cash. Men like the infamous drug lord Yakuba Balwon moved heroin through Durban, then laundered the money through the London-based Windsor Global Securities Bank. Others sold Rophy tablets, which was short for Rohypnol, an addictive relaxant that was most popularly used as a date rape drug.
Because of Durban’s multinational nature, and because it has been an economic lifeline to blacks and whites alike, the city has been spared much of the violent racial tension that devastated other regions. None of the local workers, black or white, lived as comfortably as the plantation owners, investors, or tourists, but there is always money in everyone’s pocket, and the end of apartheid, when it came, was peaceable. The only noticeable difference is the number of British and Afrikaner businessmen who are selling their interests in the port and portside concerns to financiers from India, Germany, France, and China.
Something that has not changed over the years are the sugar silos. Stuffed with raw brown sugar, they stand side by side in clusters across the landscape. Once made of brick and stone, the fifty-meter-tall towers are now constructed of aluminum and steel with a ceramic veneer to help control the temperature. They are connected at the top by enclosed bridges, which allow workers to move from one to the other with stampers, jackhammer-like devices with round bottoms that are used to compress the contents. The silos are rated by tonnage, not volume. Even if they are full, there is usually room for more sugar.
The air smells sweet around the structures, like cotton candy. Despite the presence of inner and outer doors, large, rough granules spill from hatches and cover the ground and the raised walkways. Like ants, the sugar is nothing by itself. En masse, however, the power of these twenty-five-ton mountains is immense. The silos are akin to the revered seven pillars of wisdom of many local faiths. South Africans regard the towers as the sentries of prosperity. They ensure economic security for this area, its investors, and its workers.
The largest of the sugarcane repositories are located along the Maydon Wharf. The workers here, mostly from Kenya and Nigeria, have unusually strong legs, the result of having to forcibly lift their feet hard when they move along the sticky walkways. They work in ten-hour shifts, with a half hour for a brown-bag lunch and two other fifteen-minute breaks. Their job is to see that the raw sugar stems move from truck or train to processing plant to silo to freighter in a timely and efficient manner with as little spillage as possible.
Twenty-two-year-old native of Durban Moshood Azwe was not concerned about losing a little “sweet gold” here and there. The silos attracted flies, and the loose grains kept the insects low to the ground, away from his face. That made him a more efficient worker as he directed trucks to the elevators that carried the sugar to the tops of the silos. These dump trucks backed up to funnels, which had filters to catch cane or other debris the processing plant had missed.
There were few deliveries at this hour. Most were made in the morning, before the heat and dampness could affect the unsiloed sugar. Azwe was beginning to think about going to the João Tavern with his buddies when a dump truck arrived. It did not have a familiar logo from the de Gama Company or KwaZulu-Natal Shipping Associates, the firms that usually transported sugar to the silos. There was a loosely fitted tarpaulin stretched across the top of the truck to keep the sun off the cane. It would not be necessary to remove it. The flap in back would simply ride up on the sugar as it was dumped into the bin below.