Michael Gruber - Valley of Bones

“The mission of SRPU is to keep the oil flowing. Oil is a big terrorist target, or it could be, so we have people in the oil-producing nations to make sure nothing happens. Sudan is a small oil producer but it’s also a terrorist center, or was at one time, so we had people there. Mainly it was to make sure that the government had enough resources to keep the rebels out of the oil fields and away from the pipelines. No biggie, really. It was a shitty little post, just me and the guy I worked for, Vernon McKay, and a bunch of locals. But I needed foreign duty to get my ticket punched, a six-month posting. Okay, I’m there a couple of weeks, we started to hear rumors that an Almax survey team had made a major find in the southeastern part of the country, east of the Pibor River…”

“Who’s Almax?”

“A survey outfit, working for a Chinese-French consortium. Anyway, we were monitoring their transmissions and we picked up the team leader, Terry Richardson, saying they’d found what looked like a major reservoir. It looked big, really big, maybe another Libya. A diagenetic trap.”

“A what?”

“It’s a rare formation and hard to find, which is why it’d been overlooked. Basically it’s a fossil coral reef capping an oil reservoir. The Sirte basin in Libya is a trap like that, and it’s around thirty billion barrels. Anyway, Richardson said that he’d send the data the next day. That was the last anyone heard from him or from anyone in the Almax team. They disappeared off the map. The government sent people into the area, troops, at first only a few and they disappeared, and then they sent planes, and stronger parties, and they disappeared too. The government was going nuts because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone on the other side of the Pibor except bunches of starving refugees and a few SPLA militia. And then we started to hear about Atiamabi.”

“Who’s he?”

“She. A white woman. That’s what the natives called her. She showed up in this little shithole east of the Pibor called Wibok, and all of a sudden these raggedy-ass locals are knocking off the Sudanese like clay pigeons. The whole area is closed off. We got onto our SPLA contacts and they say she’s not one of theirs. They’re pissed at her too, and when they sent people in there, they never came back either. Or they did, but with all kinds of insane stories. She was a nun, they said, she could do miracles, call lightning from the sky, all kinds of shit. So McKay told me to check it out, because he didn’t believe that a nun was playing fucking Erwin Rommel down there. It had to be some kind of pro and he had to be interested in the oil. I mean there’s nothing else there. We figured the nun was some kind of figurehead. So I hired people to go across the river, locals, and nothing, zilch. And then Hardy showed up. He knew who she was, an American named Emmylou Dideroff. A maniac like bin Laden, he said, but Catholic and she really was a nun. Hated Muslims, wanted to stake out a little oil kingdom of her own, use the resources to set up some kind of Christian theocracy. That’s all we needed, right? Every fucking raghead in the world is going to say, See, we told you so, the crusaders are back and they’re after our oil. It’d be worse than Israel. A catastrophe! But politically we couldn’t do anything out in the open. I mean can you imagine the fucking right-winger fundies in this government if they learned we were helping the Sudanese Muslims knock out someone like that? Not to mention the pope getting on the horn with the president. So it had to be completely covert. Could I have another drink?”

Paz provided it. The man drank, belched, resumed his story.

“This is where al-Muwalid comes in. He was our liaison with the GOS?”

“The…?”

“The GOS, the government of Sudan. He was doing what we were doing, keeping the oil flowing. He had a military unit, planes, a couple of tanks and armored personnel carriers…”

“To keep oil flowing? Tanks?”

“Yeah, he was chasing people out of Bahr al-Ghazal, where the fields are. Mainly he used Arab militias, but he had the heavy stuff too, if the SPLA gave him any trouble.”

“I thought they called that ethnic cleansing,” said Paz.

“It’s part of the price at the pump. Those people were in the way and he moved them. Anyway, we funded Hardy and he was able to upgrade their equipment, I mean al-Muwalid’s outfit, and he crossed the river and won this smashing victory, according to him. Well, fuck, we gave him pretty near an armored battalion, that’s no surprise. And he captured the bitch. Which was good, but he didn’t capture anyone else. No prisoners, no oil survey team, and no fucking data. I mean let’s face it, the characters you’re dealing with, in those places, you know…” Packer’s face flushed around the cheeks.

“Niggers, you mean,” said Paz helpfully. “Dumbass jungle bunnies. Go on, please.”

Packer cleared his throat heavily and did so. “Okay, so it was critical to find out whether they really had a big strike or not. McKay got Washington involved here. It was a big policy deal. I mean all the way up to the top.”

“Why?”

“Well,if it was all that big, like another Libya, say, then they had to decide what to do about Sudan. A country that’s got reserves of point six billion is a whole nother thing from a country that’s got sixty or more. Plus the country’s run by a bunch of Islamist crazies make the Saudis look like Methodists. So do we try for a coup, get the crazies out of there? Or throw support to the SPLA, let them take over the region, push them to declare independence? Maybe it’d be a good thing to have a nominally Christian nation with a shitload of petroleum down there. It’d piss off the Muslims, though, which is all we need right now. The point was, the big fish couldn’t come to a policy decision until weknew what the Almax team had discovered. We put the screws to al-Muwalid. He had the woman then. Could we see her? No. Did you find the data? No comment. You won this big victory, you got control of the region, let’s get another survey going. The situation is too delicate at present, he says. And bullshit like that. No one’ll give you a straight answer in the whole fucking country. Then we heard three things practically at the same time. One, the Almax team was dead, burned in their truck without a scrap of data, two, al-Muwalid had actually gotten his ass creamed by the n…by the locals across the Pibor, so there wasn’t a hope of getting another team in there, and three, this Dideroff character had escaped.”

“Who told you that?”

“Hardy. Some guys came in and snatched her out of the jail where al-Muwalid was holding her. A professional lift, not her people. We figured the Israelis, but our sources there said it wasn’t them. Washington is going nuts by this time. Meanwhile, she’s smoke for over a year. We looked for her hard, I can tell you that. The only Emmylou Dideroff on record skipped on a minor dope charge ten years ago and vanished. No record of employment, no criminal record, no credit, no passport….”

“Just like you,” said Paz. “And then…?”

“Hardy found her, I don’t know how. She was in some convent in Malta, but by the time we got our ducks in a row, she’d skipped. By this time she was important enough to have a federal presence on site, and they picked me. Hardy said she’d go to Miami, maybe he had people tracking her, I don’t know, but she showed on the manifest of a London-Miami flight, no attempt at an alias, on a passport under her own name, for crying out loud, and I met her at the airport. I got into a conversation with her, fed her some names of people she trusted, and the next part you know, the houseboat, the job with Wilson. We watched her like fucking hawks and she didn’t do shit. No long-distance calling, no contacts, no friends. She went to work and church and volunteered at a shelter, period. Then al-Muwalid showed up in town. Obviously, we were alerted. Hardy came up with the idea.”