Loe raamatut: «Peacemaker»

Prologue

April 6, 1994

Zulu wore sunglasses and camo fatigues, and he had a star on each collar point that winked in the sunlight. These were not the first things you noticed, at least not as soon as you got close. What you noticed first was that somebody had tried to cut his nose off with a hard downward stroke from above, perhaps as if the blade had struck a helmet first and been deflected a little and gone into the hard bone of his nose almost at the bridge and taken out a chunk of it. Now he had a nose that looked in profile like a child’s idea of a witch’s nose, a nose that started too far down his face and came straight out before plunging downward. Some people winced when they first saw that nose.

His real name was not Zulu. Nor was it the name on his passport. The men with him simply called him Z.

He had four men with him, also in camo, men like him who were too pale to have been in the sun for long. He spoke to them in French, but, because one of the four had to translate for the others into another language, it seemed that the French was, like their Belgian uniforms, something false. All five men carried side arms and grenades, and they had things like NATO battle helmets and Kevlar vests and fanny packs that they had put on the ground nearby because it was so hot. They had the air of men who were in some place of transit—say, an airport—and who were used to not caring where they were because they would soon be somewhere else. They lit cigarettes and looked around and waited.

Elizabeth Momparu was too shrewd to hang back from the white men, even though she was the only woman. If she isolated herself, even from apparent shyness, she would be noticed that much more. Not that she could be easily ignored; she was a big woman, tall and robust, heavy-boned. People noticed her. Here, the African men noticed her with particular clarity because she was the daughter of a general, a Hutu, and half-sister to Peter Ntarinada, who was a big man in his own right. The European men noticed her because she was good-looking. A green dress that showed off her breasts and hips didn’t hurt.

“Peter!” she called. She put laughter into her voice. She made more of the difficulty she was having with high heels and the soft earth out here. Her half-brother turned his head but only made an impatient gesture with his hand. He had pushed himself into the group of Europeans, and he didn’t want some woman, even a half-sister, pulling him back out. Peter was aggressive—“proud,” Africans said—and very touchy, one of those people who can’t conceive of not using power if they have it. And he had some. And he would soon have more, if his plans worked.

Elizabeth Momparu laughed loud enough for the clusters of men to hear. There was a black cluster and a white cluster, with Peter the only one who had crossed from one cluster to the other. Still laughing, she tottered to join him. Peter turned again and scowled at her. She laughed.

They were gathered around the man named Zulu, who was speaking in a language Elizabeth didn’t understand to two white men in Belgian uniforms. Elizabeth didn’t believe for a moment that they were Belgian, and she didn’t believe Zulu was French, but she didn’t say so. She merely smiled into Zulu’s dark sunglasses and ignored his maimed nose.

The sunglasses stared back at her. Where were the eyes? Zulu looked down at the two “Belgians.” He said something, and the men began to unzip two long nylon bags. Elizabeth knew they were ski bags, because she’d been skiing in Switzerland, but she knew, too, that they didn’t hold skis. Not in Rwanda.

Another man in a Belgian uniform was murmuring into a radio. He had a short antenna strung, and equipment laid out on a plastic tarpaulin, and he listened and then called something to Zulu and held up a hand, the fingers spread, and opened and closed them once, twice. Ten.

“Ten minutes,” Zulu said to Peter. Peter squinted into the sky. He looked at Elizabeth, still squinting. “Keep out of the way,” he said in French.

But she moved in closer and watched one of the “Belgians” begin to take pieces of metal out of the ski bag. He began to assemble them. Elizabeth knew that he was putting together a missile launcher; she knew that much from having lived through a war, but she didn’t know that it was a shoulder-fired American Stinger.

“You want to help?” Zulu said to her. His voice was uncannily low, and he had an accent that she thought was either American or German. He had been pleasant to her at dinner last night and afterward in bed, and he was being merely pleasant now, perhaps letting his need for her brother’s help attach to her.

“Oh, yes!” she said. She didn’t feel that enthusiastic, but she thought that enthusiasm was called for.

Zulu took a camera from a bag at his feet. She saw at once that it was a very expensive camera but not of a kind she knew, very flat, square. She recognized the brand name, however. “Oh!” she said, “I have a Canon, too. A cute little one.” She began to burrow in her shoulder bag for it.

“This is, I think, the only camera of its kind in Africa.” He surprised her by sounding boastful. Odd, such a petty thing in a man who, according to her brother, was so important. Yet, he seemed childishly pleased at showing her his digital camera and how it worked.

“No film?” she said. She tried to make herself seem as stupid as possible—her “Marilyn Monroe act,” as she called it.

“No film. No laboratory. I print from my computer.”

“Your computer! Oh, wild! Oh!” But he was immune to the Monroe thing. It was the camera and the computer that turned him on. He showed her how to work it and then said, “Your part is to take pictures of me. You will be the official historian.” His lips smiled. He was used to dealing with men, she thought. This was how he got men to do things. Things like coming to Rwanda and wearing a Belgian uniform and firing a Stinger missile? Yes, almost assuredly so.

Zulu posed with her brother, his white arm around Peter’s black neck, his face turned up to the sky. She took the picture. Zulu posed, one foot up on a log, pointing toward a cloud. Zulu went and stood among the Africans and posed, seeming to be explaining something to them. The men were all her brother’s soldiers, Hutus, all armed with Heckler & Koch assault rifles, all in camo fatigues and bush hats; now Zulu posed them, one by one, as if he were directing a play, until they stood in a tight group, rifles at the ready, looking this way and that as if on guard. Elizabeth took the picture. It was an odd thing, such an ugly man being so vain, but she knew that he was.

Would she dare try it with her own camera? Better now than later, she thought. She took it out. It was bright pink, hardly something you would seem to be trying to hide. She raised it to her eye. She framed a couple of the soldiers.

“Wait!” Zulu shouted.

She froze, the viewfinder at her eye. She couldn’t see him in the viewfinder, so she turned her head to the left, seeing a small rectangle of the world swing by, and there he was. Was he angry? Was he going to do something to her?

“I’m not ready,” he said. He ran a hand over his hair and went to the black men, her viewfinder tracking him, and he took the assault rifle from one of them and pointed it into the bush. “Ready,” he said, turning his profile so his witch’s nose was silhouetted against the shadows. She snapped the picture.

“Okay?” she said brightly.

“Now with my camera, please.”

She took that one.

“Now like this.” He swung the weapon around and aimed it at her. Right at her face. Right at the camera. One of the Africans laughed, and then he got next to Zulu and pointed his rifle, and then a couple of the others came and then all of them, a dozen, and they stood there, some shaking with laughter, aiming their rifles at her until she took the picture with both cameras. The rifles were loaded, she knew.

Then the radioman shouted something, and Zulu busied himself with the two men who had the missile launchers. He slapped one on the shoulder and trotted over to Elizabeth. “Get pictures when I tell you.” He touched her little pink camera. “Put that one away.”

“Just one more?” she pleaded. Dipping her knees as children do, making herself smaller.

“Make it quick.”

He headed for the radioman, and she snapped one hurriedly, trying to get him and the two shooters; she cycled the film and stepped back, hoping one of them would raise the launcher to his shoulder, but they were busy on the ground.

“Put that thing away!” a voice said behind her. Her brother.

“He said I could take one more.” She bounced up and down on her toes.

“This is serious business, Elizabeth! Don’t you know what’s going on here?”

“It’s a déjeuner sur l’herbe, isn’t it? A peek-neek?” She gave him a foolish grin. “I’m not an idiot, Peter.”

“I don’t like you taking pictures.”

“He asked me to take them! And anyway, if you have your way, it won’t matter what pictures have been taken, will it? Besides which, they’re all supposed to be Belgians, so what does it signify?”

The Belgians were in Rwanda as peacekeepers. So were the French. Twenty-five hundred of them, keeping “peace” since last August in a country already up to its knees in blood. Now her brother was involved in something designed to start the horrors up again. She knew a lot about it; she 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.