Andrew Britton - The Exile

At least, that was how it had been prior to the disastrous events of April 4. Since the barbaric attack on Camp Hadith, everything had changed, and Reynolds no longer felt the urge-or the need-to mask how he truly felt. Over the last two months diplomatic relations between the United States and Sudan had essentially ceased to exist, and up until the previous afternoon Reynolds had been expecting the inevitable call from the State Department that would bring him, his wife, and the rest of the embassy staff home. Privately, he’d been wondering why the evacuation was so long in coming. Now he was starting to suspect it might not happen at all.

Walter Reynolds was one of the few people who had known about Lily Durant’s presence in West Darfur-as well as her closely guarded relationship to the president-right from the start. He had met her just once, on the day she had first arrived. That had been several months earlier. They had kept the meeting short for the sake of discretion, but despite the brevity of that encounter, he’d found her to be an exceptionally charming, if somewhat naive young woman. The fact that she had volunteered for such thankless work was more than enough to earn his genuine admiration, as he had visited the camps of West Darfur, and he knew just how terrible the conditions actually were. Not just for the refugees, but for the aid workers themselves.

The knowledge that someone would actually choose to live in such squalor in order to help others had done much to restore his faith in humanity, which had been sorely lacking since he had arrived in Khartoum. The only thing that worried him was Durant’s blatant lack of concern regarding her personal security. She had politely but firmly brushed off his warnings, despite what had happened to John Granville, a senior USAID official who had been killed in Khartoum some years back, along with his driver, a Sudanese national. Reynolds had painted a colorful picture with that story, trying to impress upon her the danger of working in such an unstable environment. But she would not be dissuaded, and he could not help but admire her tenacity even as he privately feared for her personal safety.

He deeply regretted that he had been right all along, and although he had tried, he couldn’t seem to erase that terrible day from his memory. He could still remember every word of the frantic call he’d taken from Gregory Beckett, the doctor stationed at the camp in West Darfur. Beckett was the primary eyewitness to the entire event, as well as the first person to report what had happened. As he’d listened to the doctor describe what he’d seen, Reynolds had tried to tell himself that it wasn’t true-that Beckett had either made a terrible mistake or was playing some kind of sick joke. But the lingering fear and shock in the younger man’s voice had made it impossible for Reynolds to doubt what he was saying, and he didn’t have to wait long to discover that his first instincts had been correct. The doctor might have been a coward who had fled at the first sign of danger, but he was telling the truth.

Beckett’s call had come in at 6:00 a.m. local time, and by noon they had had all the proof they needed. Although his aides had strongly advised him not to, Reynolds had personally flown to West Darfur to identify Durant’s body. He had not had a decent night’s sleep since. Even with just a couple of months to reflect, he knew that the things he had seen in the charred ruins of Camp Hadith would haunt him for the rest of his life. If he had despised the central figures in the Sudanese government before he’d walked into that hellish scene, by the time his plane had touched back down in Khartoum, he’d hated them all with a passion…every single minister, general, and district governor who’d ever seen fit to support the monstrous regime of Omar al-Bashir.

And that was before he had seen the tape.

It had been released two days after the attack; presumably, it had taken that long for the copies to reach their final destinations, as none were later determined to have been hand-delivered. Al-Jazeera, the controversial Qatar-based Arab news network, was the first station to air it, followed soon thereafter by Syria Satellite, Tunisia National Television, and NBN in Lebanon. Less than an hour after Al-Jazeera ran the tape for the first time, it appeared on Somali TV. Seeking to one-up its competitors, the Mogadishu-based station elected to stream the recording over the Internet, giving the whole world access to the last horrific moments in Lily Durant’s life.

Reynolds had tried to watch the tape, reasoning that it could not be as bad as what he had seen firsthand in the camp. He was wrong. The full-length recording was less than a minute long, but even with the volume turned down, he’d been able to sit through only the first fifteen seconds before the blind fear and utter despair in Durant’s face had compelled him to turn it off. To make matters worse, her state of undress confirmed what everyone had feared right from the start: that her torture had gone far beyond a physical beating. The autopsy, which was carried out three days later at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, verified that Lily Durant had been raped repeatedly before she had died. Unsurprisingly, the cause of death was listed as the gunshot wound she sustained in the tape’s closing seconds.

The public outcry that followed the tape’s release had been predictably deafening, particularly in the United States, where David Brenneman was halfway through his second term in office. While his popularity with the voting public was lukewarm at best, the fact that his niece had been killed in such brutal, dramatic fashion had touched something deep within the American psyche, weary as it was from the Iraqi conflict overseas and economic turmoil at home, imparting a sense of moral outrage that united the country in a way that hadn’t been seen since 9/11.

Or maybe the nation’s outrage had less to do with morality than the need to vent amid the innumerable hardships people were going through. Maybe it was a collective purging of frustration in the wake of record home foreclosures, joblessness, and unending threats from abroad. One day North Korea was testing nuclear missiles in defiance of international condemnation, the next Iran was building them in its factories, and by the way, America, your stocks are worthless, Detroit has gone to hell, and your credit line’s been cut.

Now, here in this place, the most heinous of acts had been committed against a U. S citizen on a humanitarian mission, a pretty young woman who could have been the girl next door but just happened to be the niece of the country’s highest elected official. And the perpetrator was a foreign leader considered a pariah in the civilized world, a figure as hated and loathed as Osama. Knowing the man responsible had given the American people a clear target for their anger, and they had responded accordingly.

How did that old Rolling Stones song go? It had been a favorite in Reynolds’s college days. Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.

Yes, he thought, a shot away. It was possible, he supposed, that a country in need of a bloodletting had found a convenient target for its wrath. That would certainly be the cynic’s explanation, although he’d somehow managed to avoid it in spite of his backstage perspective on global politics, and intimate familiarity with the maneuverings that went on behind the scenes… Call him a die-hard believer in man’s higher nature.

Reynolds drank more of his coffee, realizing he should probably eat something to soak it up a bit, never mind that he hadn’t mustered any kind of appetite today…a sure sign of his growing anxiousness. He already felt a hot, acidic gnawing in his stomach and knew it would turn into full-fledged indigestion by the time he was ready for bed. Sleeplessness, bad dreams, and stubbed toes during urgent midnight trips to the bathroom-there you had the touch-stones of a career diplomat’s dedication to his post.