ancestors.
He laughed delightedly.
“There were no women in the desert,” DeWitt said. “Colin was just talking. Anyway, we brought two Scuds back, sling-loaded under the Black Hawks, and the Russians. We took their identification and mug-shotted them, and then the agency sent a plane in and flew them to Vienna. Charley went along with them and saw them take off for home.”
“You know,” Delchamps said conversationally, “I’ve noticed that Vienna has a lot of women, many of them Hungarian, with red hair. Did you go right back to the desert,
“Carlos taught me how to do this, Mr. Edgar Delchamps,” Svetlana said, and gave him the finger. Then she turned to DeWitt. “Why do you call him ‘Hotshot Charley’?”
“There was a character in the comics, a fighter pilot, they called ‘Hotshot Charley,’ ” DeWitt said. “And it fit him like a glove. Here he was, a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant, and he already had the DFC, and now there was a DP TWX from the President—”
“A what?” Berezovsky asked.
“A message from the President. DP means Direction of the President. It has the highest priority. Former DCI Bush was the President then, and he was so excited that he forgot he wasn’t a sailor anymore. The message read: ‘Pass to all hands Operation SNATCH’—that’s what we called the op—‘Well done. George H. W. Bush, Commander in Chief.’ That’s pretty heady stuff, especially for a second lieutenant. And it went right to his head.”
“Untrue. I have always been the epitome of modesty and self-effacement,” Castillo said.
Leverette laughed out loud.
“I can see him now,” he said, “strutting around in his desert suit, a CAR-4 in one hand, a .45 in a shoulder holster, frag grenades in his shirt pockets, a KA-BAR knife stuck in his boot top, and peering through his aviator sunglasses as master of all he surveyed.”
DeWitt chuckled.
“The cold, honest-to-God truth, ma’am,” DeWitt said, “was that Hotshot Charley here thought he was God’s gift to the Army and that it was necessary for me to sit on him pretty hard from time to time. As a general rule of thumb, second lieutenants don’t like sergeants telling them what to do. And then making them do it.”
He looked at Castillo.
“But it worked, didn’t it? Here you are, two wars later—three if you count the one we’re in with the Muslims —a light colonel doing interesting things for the President himself.”
“Raining on your parade, DeWitt, what I am is a light colonel who is not only in the deep stuff up to my ears, but is getting booted out of the Army at the end of this month.”
DeWitt looked at him for a long moment, then at Leverette, who nodded.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” DeWitt asked. “Not to mention what the hell is going on around here?”
“It’s liable to cast a pall on our lunch,” Castillo said. “Let’s let fate decide. You ever been to Sub-Saharan Africa, DeWitt?”
“Yeah, and I didn’t like it much.”
“The Congo?”
“Both of ’em. There’s two, you know. And Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, places like that. I was bodyguarding a candy-ass from the agency who was ‘observing’ the UN. He didn’t speak any of the languages —”
“And you do?”
DeWitt nodded.
“Uncle Remus and I spent a wonderful year at the Language School in the Presidio. Just before we went to The Desert.”
“Why don’t we talk about this situation over lunch?” Lorimer said.
“Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said when he had finished what in effect was a briefing about the chemical factory, “we were hoping you could tell us something of the Congo. We’re really in the dark, and only you and DeWitt have ever been there.”
Ambassador Lorimer looked at him coldly.
“It’s been some time, of course, since I have been there,” Lorimer finally said. “But on the other hand, I spent a long time in that part of the world, and I have since—akin to someone not being able to stop looking at a run-over dog—kept myself as up to date on it as possible.”
“Please, whatever you could tell us, Philippe,” Castillo said.
“Better,” the ambassador said. “The best way to do what you ask, I think, is to begin at the beginning. But where is the beginning?”
He paused as he considered his own question.
“In 1885,” he began, “the Association Internationale Africaine, chairman and sole stockholder Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians, announced they now owned what today we call the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nobody challenged him. The Germans were doing the same thing—I can’t recall the name of their company—in what is now Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, and the French right next door in what later became known as Congo-Brazzaville.
“They were going to bring Christianity and culture to the savages, and also see about making a little profit from the copper, rubber, other minerals, and from whatever else they could exploit.
“They established the capital in a town they called Leopoldville, now called Kinshasa, and others at the interior navigational end of the Congo River. They called this one, now called Kisangani, the one in which you are interested, Stanleyville, after the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who went looking for a missionary who was bringing Christ to the savages in the bush and had gone missing.
“Stanley found him on the rapids of the river and with great elan said, ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume,’ as we all heard about in the eighth grade.”
There were the expected chuckles.
“This went on for about twenty years,” the ambassador continued. “Then, somewhere around 1906 or 1907, the King got some bad press, a lot of it American. An English diplomat named Roger Casement toured the Congo and learned that the Belgians had been unkind to the natives; Casement said they had starved to death or murdered large numbers—thousands upon thousands—of them.
“We Americans tend to be a little self-righteous, and there was a predictable hue and cry in the press.
“To which King Leopold replied that he had no idea that anything of the sort was going on and he would put an end to it. The Belgian Government, in the name of His Majesty, Leopold Two, annexed the Congo in 1908, with unspecified compensation to the Association Internationale Africaine.
“The bad press stopped, and now the Belgian parliament was in charge of improving the lot of the natives, who now found honest employment harvesting rubber, extracting copper, etcetera for Belgian firms, many of which had close ties to the Association Internationale Africaine.
“This situation lasted until 1960, and to be honest, what was termed ‘paternalistic colonialism’ wasn’t all bad. They brought schools, religion, and medicine to the Congo. Their hearts were in the right place, but very little of it stuck on the natives. It’s politically incorrect to say this, but the natives of Sub-Saharan Africa weren’t ready to govern themselves.
“I guess the best way to make that point is to quote Doctor Albert Schweitzer, organist, philosopher, and physician, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his lifelong humanitarian services to Africa. He built a hospital in French Equatorial Africa and did a great deal else for Africans, to whom he referred to his dying day as ‘Les Sauvages.’
“I was in Leopoldville as a junior consular officer in June 1960 when the Belgians gave in to UN pressure—a lot of that generated by the United States—and granted the Congo its independence. It became the Republic of the Congo. So did the former French colony Middle Congo, next door. So we had two new independent countries with
