Mission Liberty by David DeBatto Page B

children
     begging at the taxi’s windows with their hands out, adults, too, asking for anything, anything at all. He saw overturned and
     burned cars, the shell of an armored troop carrier, a van on its side with the words “One Lord—Jah Love” painted on the side
     that was showing, two of its wheels missing. He saw church steeples damaged by tank rounds, streets cratered by bombs and
     artillery shells, houses with the roofs blown off, or the fronts, the sides, the backs, and in the exposed rooms, kids playing
     or simply gazing out. He saw crowds of men gathered on street corners, taking security in numbers, men glancing nervously
     through slits in doors and gates, lone men ducking into doorways or running away in advance of their approach, and government
     soldiers in maroon berets stopping people to look at their travel documents or identification papers, government soldiers
     loading men with their shirts pulled over their heads into trucks, government soldiers in a circle, down one alley, kicking
     someone who’d fallen while a woman nearby screamed, “Please don’t take my son.” DeLuca didn’t see any bodies lying dead in
     the streets. He wondered how many there’d been, and where they’d gone. He saw the Muslim neighborhood, now a wasteland of
     rubble and debris, where two weeks earlier, President Bo had sent in a fleet of bulldozers to destroy all the Muslim homes
     and shops in what he’d dubbed “Operation Trash Removal.”
    “It was very bad,” the driver, Jumee, said. “Many people are now without homes.”
    The driver took them, finally, to the headquarters for the African Union peacekeeping mission, a one-story tin-roofed pale
     yellow building centered in a dusty courtyard filled with date and fan palms, a half dozen chickens, a pig chained to a stake.
     There were two white Jeeps and a white Humvee parked in the dust, guarded by six soldiers in khaki uniforms with blue berets
     and green kerchiefs around their necks to identify them as neutral observers and not combatants. The Humvee had been modified
     by someone with a welding torch who’d added rough-cut iron plates to the doors and fender panels, until the vehicle resembled
     something out of a Mad Max movie, pure Road Warrior. U.S. soldiers had done the same thing to their unarmored Humvees in Iraq.
     The vehicles had the letters AU painted on the doors, and a white flag flew above the building featuring the same African
     Union logo.
    An aide asked them to wait a moment, then showed them into a dusty office.
    General Osman was a large barrel-chested no-necked hulk of a man, hairless save for the bloom of white chest hairs sprouting
     from his open shirt collar. When DeLuca told him, after introducing himself and his companions, that he had an appointment,
     Osman looked suspicious, eyeing his lieutenant, who appeared to be doing his best to become invisible.
    “What appointment did we have?” Osman asked. “This is the first that I have heard of this.”
    “You didn’t get the call from my office?” DeLuca said. “We spoke with General Bukari. I’m not sure who my secretary spoke
     with, exactly, but she informed me that you would be expecting me.” He was bluffing, but it was a reasonable assumption that
     in the chaos of the civil war that surrounded them, Osman’s staff was likely to have lost track of an appointment or two.
     Osman had no way of knowing that this wasn’t one of them, and DeLuca didn’t have time to wait for an actual appointment.
    “My aide,” Osman said, “has not informed me. We’ve been without communications as well. Please forgive me—please be seated—how
     is it that I can help you, Mr. Brown?”
    “I appreciate your making time for me, General,” DeLuca said. “My colleagues and I do understand how busy you must be. I trust
     that your men are all right. I know that yesterday was not a good day for Liger.”
    “The days seem quite the same, from where I sit,” General Osman