Fulton left the dish for a moment, walking the couple of steps to the computer and checking reception.
'Where you learn do that?' the cook asked.
'Journalism school,' Buckwheat lied. At SWC at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, back when Bronze Bruce was still on the other side of the street.
'Wish I could learn,' the cook said, suggestively.
'Tell you what; when we finish my photo shoot I'll show you. Fair enough?'
'Better than fair,' the cook answered. 'For that you get extra portion of goat.'
D-78, Rako, Ophir
While the United States Army had never been a force in which idiotic personnel management boners were unknown-for example, at a time when it had been critical for Special Forces personnel to be able to blend in with the locals, it had on at least one occasion assigned a black captain to a Special Forces A team oriented to Norway, and this at a time when there were virtually no blacks in Norway-in Fulton's case it had made the far more sensible decision, deep in the throes of the Cold War, to assign him to a Special Forces Group, the Third, and team oriented towards the fringe where Islamic Africa met Christian, Animist, and Christian-Animist Africa. Thus the continent held few surprises for him. He'd seen it all. As Buckwheat said, more or less frequently, 'Thank God my multi-great grandpappy got dragged onto that boat.'
He'd said just that, once, after demonstrating the use of a condom to the men of a nominally Christian village. For that particular demonstration, he'd used a stick to simulate the male appendage. The next morning, after he'd arisen, he'd discovered that every married man had used his condom exactly as he'd shown them. Outside of each hut, planted in the ground, was an upright stick and on each stick a properly rolled out condom. He'd thought then, as he thought now, Thank God my multi-great grandpappy got dragged onto that boat. Tough shit for him, of course, but awful good for me and mine.
The reason for him thinking so, on this occasion, was the village into which he and Wahab and their guards had just driven. More precisely, it was the young girl, kicking, crying, begging, and pleading for all she was worth as she was dragged by her feet to where a collection of grim faced women stood, one of them holding a knife, another several rags, and a third a basket that Fulton already knew held acacia thorns. The thorns were a suture substitute.
Who do you blame for this? Fulton asked himself, as he had every time he'd been a near witness to a female circumcision. The Arabs? Islam? Nope, this predates them. The people doing it? 'Nothing is stronger than custom.' And how do you change their minds? Answer: you don't; I've tried. Poor little shit.
Neither Wahab nor the guards so much as blinked when the girl, now concealed inside a hut, began to scream in earnest, heartbreak incarnate. Again, Fulton thought, Poor little shit.
Though Wahab didn't blink, he likewise thought, Poor creature. Thanks to Allah my Alaso wasn't so treated when she was young. Of course, I can't say anything. Even if the mission we are on didn't require 'cover,' I am already so embarrassed in front of Buckwheat that I want to puke.
No more than had Wahab or the guards did the chief of the village seem to pay the slightest mind to the girl's voiced agony. The chief wore what amounted to a skirt, below, and in a sort of plaid, no less, with a bright blue shirt and a light, patterned shawl. On his head was perched the snug-fitting, rounded cap, called a 'qofe.' The chief looked to be truly ancient, from which appearance Buckwheat assumed they were about of an age.
The guards made the introductions while Wahab remained in the background.
'You are an American,' the village chief, Zakariye, observed. It was not a question.
'Indeed, yes,' Fulton agreed. 'Is this a problem?'
'Not at all,' said Zakariye. 'Indeed, we hope someday to have closer relations with the United States, so says my eldest boy, Gutaale. That, however, is for the future . . . and is in God's hands.'
'As are we all,' Fulton agreed. While the chief's wives and daughters, modestly wrapped in accordance with their faith but not in the stifling burkas of more fundamentalist regions, served lunch, Wahab busied himself with taking pictures. Eventually, the girl being clitorectomized not so far away ceased her wailing and shrieking.
D-77, Rako-Dhuudo highway, Ophir
Wahab said exactly what Fulton was thinking, 'We're so fucked!'
'Why fucked?' asked the guard manning the machine gun.
The reason for the exclamation was the column of dust-covered tanks-at this distance Fulton made them as being either Russian T-55s or the Chinese copy, the Type 59-passing across the road heading north to south. The tanks threw up a thick, linear cloud of dun-colored dust.
'He just worries whenever he sees soldiers he isn't one hundred percent sure are harmless,' Fulton lied. 'I thought you guys didn't have any tanks,'
'People you call ‘pirates' took them from ship,' the guard explained. 'Maybe . . . a month ago. Radio say we got . . . ummm . . . twenty-four. Me, I think the pirates didn't steal anything and there was a deal'-the guard winked- 'under the table between our people and the Russians. But, hey, I'm just hired guard. What I know?'
'I do know,' said another guard, 'that there are black men training the crews. I never heard of no black Russians.'
Fulton suppressed the chuckle that the line deserved, even if the speaker didn't know why it deserved it. Besides, having to face tanks, even T-55s, in armored cars is not a laughing matter. Shit.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The reasons for the current overestimation of
the importance of intelligence in warfare are twofold:
the first is the common confusion of espionage and
counter-espionage with operational intelligence proper;
the second is the intermingling of operational
intelligence with, and contamination by, subversion, the
attempt to win military advantage by covert means.
-John Keegan, Intelligence in War
