The Terms of Our Estate

by KP Dorsey

After highlighting the potential consequences of failure, which included a chain reaction of skyrocketing oil prices that would cascade across the Sahel, most importantly to the ports of Nigeria then to the Sudan, the senior officer on station, the SO, closed the briefing with the 'win one for the Gipper' line he used on all new transfers from Consular Cover:

"Since this is your first field trip I want you to remember two things, Judith. One. This is the Africa desk. Not the London ladies' cotillion. Second. We're clandestine action. Action. We do not pose at cocktail parties. We do not do paperwork."

By the time Judy had memorized the briefing, recited it to herself in her car, recited it over dinner, alone, recited it in the shower, and rehearsed it with her combat buddy, she could sing the action plan like brutal music:

Friday, 19 July, 2003: 10pm. Remove all watches and jewelry. Remove all personal identification. Place these in your locker. Dress in the MgF 2 -treated, zero-reflective office clothes provided. Visit the armory. Collect a Glock Model 22 sidearm, chambered for the .40" S&W caliber, modified to accept the seventeen-round clip. Collect two extra clips. Visually verify that all identifications on the frame, slide and barrel of the firearm have been laser etched and re-alloyed to prevent 'raising' of the serial numbers, should the firearm be lost. Collect ammunition. Visually verify all ammunition is friable to prevent ballistic identification, hollow-point type with unmarked, quick-rusting alloy casings and primers. Visit the requisition officer to collect the item: one customized Camel Bak brand backpack-style hydration system, black, no water. Contents should weigh approximately 6 (six) kilos. Do NOT inspect contents. Do NOT sign the property release form. Don shoulder straps and conceal backpack under clothes provided. Leave the embassy under cover of darkness and proceed by cut-out local taxicab north to the post office east of the high bridge on the Sura river. Expect a local contractor in a private car around 11pm. Visually verify a 1984 Chrysler "K" car, primer-black, no plates, no badges. Exchange your recognition phrases. Verbally verify he has not been followed. Visually verify you detect no tail. Get in the back seat and conceal your presence. Proceed for a manual count of approximately 1200 seconds, when you should expect to slow and stop at a road-side runaway-truck ramp. Exit the car with the Camel Bak and sidearm. Visually verify location. Ambient light will be waning gibbous moon. Reconnaissance gives verification indicator as a roadside sign, smooth cylindrical metal pole, three meters in height. Square metal sign reads "CAUTION: TRUCKS ONLY," in English, and bears three small-caliber bullet holes in lower-left quadrant. Do not exchange further words. Proceed north-northeast on your memorized terrain waypoint map. Convert your clothes to jungle mode. Use wilderness training for twelve hours. Expect contact prior to sunup Friday. Expect no resistance on the ingress. Expect light resistance, if any, on egress. Once you have left the car, your contact is the sole friendly for the duration of this op. You will receive egress details from your contact.

The last line was the best part, as far as she was concerned. It meant don't come home until you're done. It was the hint that this was big. Career-type big.

***

The Egyptian Counter-espionage Chief planned the drive from the Guinean capital of Conakry to the Ewiemu border at six hours. It had taken eight, over roads treacherous with mud and wash-outs. The night hike over the upcountry had been only as bad as expected. It would have been impossible without the medical team's "imported" Kevlar-Cordura-Lycra jungle suit.

The low mountain terrain of the Ewiemu upcountry was scattered brush clearings among trees and vines. In part, it was the remote, hummocky terrain itself, full of ridges, hollows, and knolls in which to conceal camps and people, that attracted the nationalists to muster here.

That and the snakes.

There had been briefings. His medical staff outfitted the travel pack with antivenoms for most of the worst, including both black and green mamba, puff adder, and the banded forest cobra which, he was edified to learn, is capable of atomizing its neurotoxic venom in an arc of spit that can hit rodents square in the eye at seven meters. The suit was good, but if he should reach his bare hand, or be spat upon, he would be OK. Absent these preparations, only the suicidal or fanatical would dare the terrain and the snakes.

And the mosquitoes.

In the vegetation-dense parts of the Sahel upcountry every leaf-full of residual rain water could breed over a hundred carriers of deadly yellow fever. And this was the rainy season. Each footstep raised an answering buzz. "But the mortality for healthy adults is under thirty-three percent so, odds are, you will survive," the medic had said.

"Tahwahk kahltoh ool allah, habibi." In God I trust, my friend .

All in all a perfect place to assemble several hundred heavily armed men-leaders and their several thousand more heavily armed boy-soldiers.

His PDA gave the distance to the rendezvous point as less than ten meters. He opened his camouflaged bag-for-protecting-one's-body, which the American girl-child had been so alarmed about in its English translation, body-bag. It concealed him in the broad, smooth, palmate leaves piled under a leeward dantoué tree, where he would be able to see any approach except from directly behind. This was not ideal, but the Americans tend to go armed. The tree would provide cover if the girl-child was nervous.

By the time he was settled in it was 4:39am local time. It would be light soon.

A long career had taught the Egyptian CE man that there is one truth in the secret war higher than all others: The limit of what can go wrong is much broader than the limit of your imagination.

The operation depended on the American girl-child, herself a ridiculous and unfortunate choice he did not control, surviving her way out here. On the money being good. On the nationalists keeping their word to wait for him. On the completion of the second transfer, after the girl-child's departure. On his successful egress from this forsaken country. On the sincerity of President Mubarak's promise to turn over the package to more of these "paperless" Americans. Over a long career he had come to detest the popular myths of his profession. Capeless superheroes leading public car chases, blasting everything with powerful handguns. Bikini girls. Speedboats. As if a single man could control the outcome of any activity involving more than two other human beings.

Ultimately, it was all in God's hands.

***

Judy was not happy. After leaving the car behind it had been easy enough for the first two way points, but the vegetation grew over so quickly from the recent rains that she took at least an hour too long to find her third.

Her 'office clothes' had not exactly panned out either. Even though these were supposed to be super-whiz-bang breathable Cordura-Kevlar imitations of a pantsuit, the seam at her right hip had split open on the edge of a dead tree branch and exposed her to mosquitoes there. She tried to cinch it up by unlooping her belt to hold it, but a three-inch gap kept slipping open.

And her sortie pack had enough food for about one decent meal. Might have been nice if they had mentioned to start off with a good dinner. It was fine and dandy to have three percent body fat when the point is to lure one-track men into stealing secrets, but without reserves her body had nothing to fall back on. She wouldn't starve to death in twelve hours, but it was damned uncomfortable to be that efficient when two thousand calories only gets you to night-fall.

For her camp meal she had to make-do with a puff adder, half-broiled over a fire of smoky dantoué wood which had avoided the downpour by falling with its large end propped off the ground against the parent tree's trunk, inside the drip-line of big, umbrella-like leaves. All snakes were edible they said, during training. For vipers, just start cleaning well behind the head. She had been forced to endure worse during her survival test. At least it had provided her a chance to test the weapon. The friable ammunition vaporized the thing's head clean off without even leaving bloody pieces.

But it did not taste like chicken.

On the bright side, the Camel Bak was much more comfortable than she hoped. Her brothers, five months into it in Iraq , were issued ones like it, but they were the cheap military version that chaffed and rose blisters.

Not that she had a water shortage. There were plenty of natural sources available, but she couldn't remember if yellow fever was transmitted by anything besides mosquitoes. Didn't they breed in water anyway? She would spill the milk under that bridge when she came to it.

By the map, if she remembered right, she was less than a kilometer away. She was going to make it. Before first light, she'd be outta here.

Her camp for the brief rest period before sunup was the zip-out cover from her breathable Cor-Kev jacket. Not terrible, but she envied the accessory she saw on her first meeting with Ammon. Though what he had called it was certainly not the thought on which to drift into a short catnap.

***

He heard her before he saw her.

The approach was from behind. He decided to ask her first whether that had been accidental or purposeful.

Until she was visible he had to remain still. From close behind the tree's trunk he saw first a high-quality all-terrain boot. Then a small leg, which was most likely her. Then his fate confirmed it by forcing him to observe a high swath of bare, white skin, dazzlingly close to her hip. Hell is veiled in delights, and Heaven in hardships and miseries.

"Yur hahmok allah, colleague. " Mercy on you from God ."

The boot froze in place. " Fee soobee leelah, Ammon." For the sake of God .

"Your pronunciation is getting better."

"Where are you?"

"At your feet, youngster."

Before he revealed himself he wanted to be quite certain that she was not going to blow a hole in his head with the distressing pistol she held, with both hands, in front of her. He recognized it as a Glock, and fortified.

When she lowered the gun, he rustled from the leaf bed. The CE man pulled back the camouflage hood, revealing a dark face whose etched features may have originated in any of a hundred countries on the latitudes between the tropics.

The girl-child hunched and rubbed her knees. "I haven't mountain hiked in a while."

The CE man averted his glance. Her physical grace and blonde hair, contrasted with her American immodesty touching her legs in such a posture, filled him with desire which he automatically converted into shame, disgust. He made this appear as nothing more than an adjustment of the head.

"I don't know if you remember, but I love those suits you guys get. Any idea if I might be able to snag one? On the cue-tee?" she said.

That his English was uncertain about this idiom was a very bad sign for his composure. 'Cutie' was some sort of term for loved ones. That could not be what she meant. Why did she not stow the pistol and cover herself?

"I'm afraid it is forbidden. Were you followed?"

"No, but I could use a drink."

He offered water, from his own Camel Bak. After she drank, he made something of a show of replacing the plastic mouthpiece with a spare.

"'Fraid of cooties, Ammon?"

Another irritating unknown idiom? Or the same one inflected?

He ignored her smile. "The money, then, is intact?"

She unstrapped the counterpart of his canteen system. It took three minutes to count the individual one-hundred-thousand dollar bearer bonds. Only one was missing, not bad considering how many hands it had touched. When she passed these minutes in silence, and even managed to keep low and survey the small depression in which they met, exposed side away from his view, he again thanked the One God for His mercy that he might get out of this without further torment.

"It is done."

"You have my instructions for the egress."

"Yes, here. I think you will find it more palatable than your version."

It was little more than regular rice paper, put through a process which toughened it slightly, for rigors in the field, and gave it a faintly cooked, but pleasant, lo mein flavor. The ink was the same used to create computer images on birthday cakes, dispensed through the stylus of his PDA. One of his techs got the idea during a child's birthday party she attended at an embassy in Cairo .

"You mean I actually get to eat the secret message?"

After his night of personal grousing, this was intolerable. Her expression could only be called lurid. It was far from a proper prayer, but he implored God that she not be allowed to misinterpret his cheeks' flush.

"As I said, it is not bad. From rice. Very simple, for what is needed. Our time is up."

"Did you have any contacts at all? On your way in?"

She again brandished the ugly weapon. Her one arched eyebrow mocked his concentration. She was unaware of herself as a caricature.

"No. Word has gone out that the time is near. Only the rebel watch scouts are in these hills. Stay to the west of the Sura and you will be safe."

"I'm glad it's you, Ammon. I hope we can work together again B "

He was busy strapping up his bag-for-the-body. He must give no personal acknowledgment. Contempt. Contempt is what she deserves. Contempt and dismissal.

"B soon."

There was something, though. Something she almost drove him to forget.

"You were unaware of my position, when you approached?"

"Totally. Why?"

"You should be more aware. What is kyoo tee?"

"What?"

"You said about my bag. On the kyoo tee."

"Oh B "

She had the most infuriating giggle of helpless adolescents!

"B it means quiet. Letter Q, letter T."

The blaze of white flesh once more caught his eye. He turned his head much too quickly.

"You should patch that hole. Mosquitoes."

She cocked her hip toward him in a display! Stupid! Who cares if she dies of fever! Her usefulness is served!

She turned her head down to inspect the gap, then glanced up at him from beneath her brows.

"I'll live, don't you think? Lowest bidder. Maybe you'll tell me who your supplier is, next time we meet."

He spun on his heel, to go, to avert his eyes from the sight, with such haste he dropped the money in the brush. Before he could reach down to retrieve it he heard--

"Ammon, your hands are shaking. Have you been bitten? Are you OK?"

She reached out. Touched his forearm. Gooseflesh erupted up to his shoulder with a numbing, violent tingle. Blood rushed to his groin. Shame cut his knees out from under him, to conceal this evidence of his lust.

"Ammon!"

His collapse only aggravated her concern!

She embraced him, to support his collapse, probably anticipating a need for first aid. His teeth clenched. He could smell her sweat. The smooth skin of her hands enraged his professional self-respect, even as he struggled to roll away from her sight. She was on her knees, now, too. Her face was almost pressed against his. She was saying "What is it? What is it?" with her face inches from his. His ears, forehead, cheeks ignited with flush so hot even his dark complexion mottled into a burnished cherry wood.

Speak, idiot! Away with her!

"Please. It is nothing." The growl he intended emerged from his seditious body meek and pinched. Imploring. The flush was immediately replaced with a chilling fear that drained the electricity from his arms and legs, leaving him partially paralyzed. The source of the fear was the immensely pleasurable sensation of Judy's skin against his.

She held his head in her hands and looked down at him, an intensity on her face that he could not resist recasting as the look of her face in extremity of--

Unspeakable!

As he struggled to free himself, to regain control, to gain precious inches from her physical presence, she gripped him more strongly.

She thinks I'm having some kind of seizure!

"Ammon. You're clammy. Shivering. Be still."

The voice that spoke his name had lowered its pitch into a presumption of control he recognized

from doctors and soldiers. His breath came in short, hot, puffs.

"Ammon, you're going into shock. Try to lay still."

She was pinning down his shoulders! Why could he not escape? Behind his clenched eyelids, he dissolved into a hot, tickling envelope of space, no bigger than the flesh of his body. Flesh that he could not will into vapor!

She held him down. She would never recognize his muscles' violence as the outward warning that a lifetime commitment of devoted faith, spent in humble submission to the merciful Lord, was about to fail in its struggle to contain the explosive force of a lifetime also of mortified desire. He tried to scream, but choked. His throat was constricted with terror. He felt her shove his body around on the hillside, legs uphill, head down, as first aid for shock prescribes. He felt the top of his jungle suit unzip. Heard her bare her own chest. Felt her lay the full weight of her bare body against his.

An animal, certainly an animal, shrieked somewhere in the surrounding hills. The phosphenes behind his eyelids sparkled, coalesced, then parted, as clouds, on fire in an apocalyptic sky.

Then, much more suddenly than they started, his spasms ceased.

***

Judy lay still, waiting for the blood to flow downhill and into Ammon's torso. She couldn't see any bleeding. It was possible he was reacting to a water-borne toxin, or to a bite she couldn't see. Any number of insect or invertebrate parasites might be involved. Contrary to her expectation, his skin was not as cold as it should have been if the shock were as advanced as it appeared. The top of his chest was even a bit red. There was no doubt about the other symptoms, though: dizziness; shivering; shallow, rapid breathing; weakness; rapid, shallow pulse. Definitely shock.

When he was warm and still, she propped herself up on her hands, at the top of a pushup, and looked at him. Other than a horrified facial expression with his eyes clenched shut, his color was back.

"Ammon? Can you breathe now? Are you dizzy?"

She decided that the nods of his head indicated he was responsive. She stood up, fetched the camel-bak that had the water in it, offered it to his hand.

When he curled around the water pouch, facing away from her on his side in a fetal position, she thought that he might be about to vomit--a bad sign that the shock was deepening, rather than abating. After he took several long sips off the pouch, she decided that he must be embarrassed to have received help from a woman, and a junior officer. The last thing she wanted was to taint their working relationship. The truth was, keeping his skin warm was not, in the recess of her mind that could replay the sense-experience later, at all unpleasant.

"Ammon? I can't leave until I can see that you can walk out of here on your own."

His movements were strange, but he stood. He seemed consciously to avoid facing her.

"I know you would have done the same for me. Are you sure you're OK? You should check for insect bites. You don't want to have another attack. We're just two officers out here. Ammon?"

He was walking with extreme care for each step, toward the leaf pile where his gear was concealed. "Go. Now. No more words. Walk."

This was very familiar in her experience. He was telling her that it would be better for him to die in bush than for them to be found together, should she exhibit weakness by giving in to the temptation to help him. A smooth wave of admiration swept across her skin, like from a cool breeze. If he were anything other than Muslim, she'd have kissed him goodbye, right then and there.

***

His solitary march to the shipping depot on the Sura's east bank was twelve kilometers long.

The Egyptian Chief of Counterespionage was neither delicate, nor naïve. He had once considered marriage. The flesh and its temptations were not unknown to him. Not all of his youth was spent in education. Though he was no longer young. How much sin may be extenuated by the body's frailty? Dehydration is an insinuating condition. His self-inflicted, and operationally required, sleep deprivation was not dissimilar to certain interrogation techniques. The long hike had used his leg muscles much. The flesh insinuates its weakness upon the will. Against this, there is scripture. The nearest to Me are the abstinent .

The girl-child knew nothing. Saw nothing. His suit contained his shame. No more effort of thought was to be wasted on it. Self-torment is, itself, a sin.

The two ruined wooden structures of the depot used to be the loading point for a coffee grower who shipped downstream to markets in the capital, but it had long been defunct, exploded in the civil war of the previous decade.

One-hundred-eighty seconds late, the longboat pulled up to the rickety edge of the abandoned dock without navigation lights. Overcast obscured the early sun. The light was not enough to register colors. The boat was piloted, if all had gone to plan, by an anonymous Nigerian dealer in small arms who had been selected for reliability and discretion.

The CE man remained concealed until he was certain.

The man who climbed off the boat was so black that his silhouette appeared to be a languid, human-shaped hole through the earth. He walked six paces forward, stopped, turned right and stepped off three paces to the first pile of ruined planks. There he dislodged a board, which did not lie in the same angle of collapse as the others, and removed the Camel Bak. This was thin, for a recognition confirmation, but Mubarak had been right to argue that the CE man's identity was more important than the small chance of the dealer being discovered, tortured for the path to the plank, and replaced by a provocateur cool enough to pull a masquerade. On such decisions may rest the fate of nations.

The gun dealer clicked a device strapped to his forehead, which turned out to be an LED lamp with a tight-focus beam. After two seconds of sweeping the beam over the mouth of the Camel Bak's water compartment, stuffed with the bearer bonds, he zipped it closed and returned to the boat.

There, he again became a black ghost who wrestled an oblong shape roughly twice his size over the transom. There was no splash, just a smooth whisper of ripples. The silhouette threw his new wealth over the rail, climbed into the inflatable dinghy, pulled once on the starter cord of its small outboard, and motored off, downstream.

The most dangerous moment in any field action is the moment when it looks like it will all work out, he whispered, barely audible even to himself, several times, before he went to the boat. He checked under the instrument panel for any wires that seemed not to belong. The bilges were free of petrol fumes. He started the motor, gave thanks to the Merciful Father for not exploding, and continued upstream.

***

In his heart he knew he was a good Muslim, but also that he was no theologian. The best current thinking on apostasy was that it was impossible to truly leave the faith, since the faith was permitted by God and therefore eternal. One could only make the act of renouncing it. The act of a murtadd , then, was the act of turning one's back on God, who could never be renounced out of existence. His education had included the distinction between the natural apostate, who is born to good parents, and the convert apostate, for which his work provided a concise, parallel term: double-agent. This is the man who converts to Islam and then later converts away. He knew from their time together in Washington that the man he came to meet was of this type. He wished he could remember if this affected the manner in which a murtadd should die.

He did not believe that any greater test of restraint would befall him than that of the decadent American girl-child, but it was a preoccupation of the slow trip upriver. He had to arrive early enough to inspect the shipment before the appointed time for the murtadd and two of his lieutenants, if they could restrain their fervor, were to meet him four kilometers further on.

The small shoreline clearing looked unoccupied, but the CE man was not satisfied. It cost precious seconds, but he landed, tied the boat to a stout azobé tree, and swept the surrounding brush and forest to a radius of one hundred meters.

Now he was alone.

The vessel was a ramshackle Portugese-style fishing boat, center-console, about fifteen meters long, converted for military use. It looked old enough to have been salvaged from the Angolan war in the mid-seventies. It made him think of the movie to the dark river heart, from the American boy-king's war in Indochina .

The hold was about the size of a sedan-type auto. The unmarked crates it contained were much too heavy for one man too lift. If they all contained the same assortment as the top-most, he had his deal. The top crate contained sixty assault rifles: twenty Avtomat Kalashnikova Modernizirovannys B the fully-automatic modification of the indefatigable AK-47 B twenty AK-74Ms, purchased almost brand new from soldiers of the Russian Army who believed they understood starvation, and twenty unfired AK-103s, for the officers, with folding butt-stocks in lighter-weight modern materials, but accepting the time-honored seven-point-six-two millimeter cartridge which so frustrated trigger-happy Americans caught without ammo in Indochina, because they could not fit the M-16. Though, as so many of them found from the wrong end, in a pinch, the M-16 round went through the AK serviceably enough.

Ten crates, fore and aft, sixteen-hundred rifles.

Stacked on the boat's deck and arranged to prevent imbalance of the hull, were more crates which a similar spot-inspection confirmed held roughly half of a million rounds of ammunition. About ten magazines for each of the sixteen-hundred nationalist assaulters. If they had counted correctly, but that would require a comprehensive inventory. Let the buyer beware, he decided.

The forward compartment, designed as the captain's chart salon and bunk compartment, was also stuffed with smaller crates of various sizes--grenades, a few optics for the 103s, one small, steel suitcase.

The order was complete. The CE man was glad for his decision, during the planning phase, to price the shipment at fifty for the Americans, but thirty for the dealer. Even at black-market prices he only had about twenty-five million dollars worth here, but since it wasn't his money, and since the service had been prompt and correct, a five million dollar tip didn't seem like too much to compensate for the dealer's nomadic life. Such as it was.

The extra twenty million he shaved from the Camel Bak was Mubarak's tithe for the favor. A steal at twice the price.

He came back up on deck and realized that the murtadd was late. Then a pebble hit him in the head.

"Are you still on the path to your great rewards, Ammon?" the voice of the murtadd said from behind him.

"And was the path you followed here straight or crooked, Soumaré?"

The rebel leader bounded aboard and took quick stock of the shipment.

"I release you from your debt, old friend. With these we will restore Ewiemu to the people. You should have given up on diplomacy with me. We could still use a man with your talents."

"I must return. I will be missed at the embassy."

"Where do they have you now?"

" Conakry , up the coast. Guinea ."

"A long way from Washington ."

There was nothing to say to that.

"Did they ever discover that it was me who helped you?"

In the early nineties, the CE man would not have been able to becalm the US Ambassador to Iraq if the murtadd had not backstopped him. Without her collateral report to go with Mubarak's, the Americans might have prevented the invasion of Kuwait .

"There is no way to know. Our fate is in God's hands, Soumaré."

"As you wish, Ammon."

Surely, God is with the patient. The CE man took the steel suitcase without comment. The second dinghy could be inflated only when deployed, to conserve space. Its motor was new and scooted along for such a small, quiet machine. It was only mid-morning but he was exhausted from the pace of the week's events. And there was still the return to Conakry , for another interminable twenty hours of waiting.

***

Judy was irrepressible. She had the front center seat in the situation center's row of surplus steel office chairs, the best from which to see the coverage.

"Liberated citizens of the west African nation of Ewiemu celebrated in the streets Thursday, after troops loyal to the Ewiemu government routed a massive rebel attack on the nation's capital.

As helicopters carrying U.S. troops landed at Subu International Airport to help stabilize the nation, a spokesman for the rebel group Democratic Ewiemu met briefly with international reporters on a contested bridge to announce the rebels' handover of the city's seaport to peacekeepers. Thousands of citizens poured over the bridge for the first time in two months, looking for loved ones."

All of her colleagues couldn't wait to congratulate her. She had been allowed to send the SITREP herself, edited a grand total of one time, explaining to the President's Chief of Staff that their plan to bait the rebels into the attack had gone like clockwork. Even the SO, whose face would have made her believe in reincarnation, had he been an eagle in a past life who had died flying face-first into a clean glass window, had almost smiled when he told her, "Nice work, kid." The word 'promotion' had been invoked several times. She knew she was beaming, in front of the flat-screen while the news came in, but she didn't care. Within the occluded community of her peers this was the only reward there was. No one she knew or loved, not the children she might one day have, nor the husband she might one day want, would ever know about it.

The SO put a hand on her right shoulder.

"We're going to get you right into the transition, Judy. Be at the briefing room in twenty minutes."

In eighteen months of grim recitations he had only ever called her Judith. The wonders would never cease.

"I'm on the clock today?"

"Hell yes. Gotta go see your Cabinet Minister so he knows we handed it to him. Everyone is running around with their heads cut off. Ground floor time."

Darren, her combat buddy and a classmate from training on the Farm, moved forward on her left.

"Careful, there SO. Don't let any FNs here you talking like that."

They had all taken the "culture-shock" course that taught them how not to offend foreign nationals employed at the Embassy with obscure English idioms. She was also pretty sure Darren would be trying to ride her coattails for the next few weeks.

But it failed to exercise her. The SO just told her she had a new network that included the president of sub-Saharan Africa 's most oil-rich nation. She was really on the inside, now.

***

The Egyptian CE man watched the obsolete television in the staff break room of the run-down annex his team occupied in the French Embassy to Guinea . Their occupancy of the three meager rooms, each little bigger than a water closet and collectively cut off from direct passage with the main building, were left over from the Horizons Partagés year of Franco-Egyptian cultural celebration and exchange. The extension of this celebration to Guinea had been little more than a dog bone, thrown to coax the Conté government from its policy of nonalignment into preferential consideration of France as a trading partner. As repository of half of the world's bauxite ore, without which there would be no aluminum, the French considered the ongoing presence of their Egyptian friends a matter of small risk, no cost and potential future benefit. Chirac was no friend of the United States at the moment, and the French tend to think ahead in such matters, as their history compels.

Even when the camera zoomed in, far too lovingly, on the smoking corpse of the murtadd , the news evoked from him no outward sign of emotion. It is as God wills.

After he had beached his boat and met his most trusted junior officer at the checkpoint above the capital, the bumpy, eight-hour drive back up the African coast had been so uneventful he almost drifted to sleep. Even the crooks on the Sierra Leonean border let them pass for a mere quarter-million leones .

He doubted the news coverage would last more than a couple of hours. The liberation of a small Sahelian republic just didn't rate among Western audiences compared with the days' developments in Iraq . And Mubarak would have his package B one lead-encased ball, about the size of a ripe gourd, perfectly spherical, weighing ten kilos. Never sullied by American hands, nor observed through American eyes, though purchased with untraceable US funds. Painstakingly rescued from the black market by long-time regional friends of the United States , acting with heroic selflessness, even under circumstances of inhuman humiliation. What the "paperless" Americans chose to do with it was, Lord be praised, none of his concern.