Andrew Britton: The Exile

McCabe leaned forward and tapped on the door. There was a brief silence, and then a voice called out for Harper to enter.

CAMP DAVID

Like the rest of the building, the living room was draped in shadow. Harper thought that during the day, the picture windows on the east wall would have provided a spectacular view of the Monocacy Valley. Now, at this early hour, they offered nothing more than a hazy reflection of the room itself. A large fieldstone fireplace dominated the southwest corner of the room, the chimney towering up to the open second floor, and framed photographs of former presidents occupied every inch of the beige walls. The carpet was government issue, gray and sturdy, and the mismatched furniture looked as if it might have been purchased at a yard sale.

Harper was dimly aware of all of this, but for the most part, his attention was fixed on the three other men in the room-and on one man in particular.

Robert Andrews, the director of Central Intelligence and Harper’s immediate boss, was seated on a red leather love seat facing the fireplace. He was a heavyset man with dark, curly hair, dressed in his standard Ralph Lauren suit. He nodded curtly as his deputy crossed the room toward the seating area. The man seated to his left, Harper saw, was General Joel Stralen. In his early fifties, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was wiry and tan, with a sparse fringe of iron gray hair, thin lips, and deep-set eyes. He was wearing his customary blue USAF service dress uniform, though his jacket was slung over the back of his chair. Harper returned Andrews’s strained, silent greeting but ignored Stralen, who was staring at him with undisguised contempt. Instead, he began moving toward the man standing in front of the large windows.

On any given day David Brenneman looked at least a decade younger than his fifty-five years. However, the news he had just received had aged him in a way the rigors of the office had never managed to do. His silver-brown hair was disheveled, his eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, and his mouth had set in a tight, angry line.

As Harper approached, he was acutely aware of the president’s stance. Dressed in a navy tracksuit bearing the insignia of his alma mater, Georgetown University, he stood with his feet apart and his hands curled into useless fists by his sides, like a fighter who’d been sucker punched bracing for a second blow.

Harper could only imagine what he was feeling at that moment. David Brenneman was arguably the single most powerful person in the world, and yet, for all that, he had just taken a hit to the gut from which he would probably never recover. Worse still, there was nothing he could do to make it right, despite the enormous resources at his disposal. Harper couldn’t have articulated why, but the tracksuit made him look all the more exposed. Brenneman was the president, yes. But this morning he was first and foremost a man reeling from grief.

Harper stopped a few feet away and forced himself to meet Brenneman’s eyes.

“Sir,” he began awkwardly, “I’m truly sorry for your loss. Believe me, we will do everything in our power to find the people who are responsible, and when we do, there is nothing to stop us from-”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

At first Harper didn’t know where the words had come from. Then he turned to face the man who had snapped out the question. Stralen had jumped out of his chair and was staring at him with a mixed expression of irritation and disbelief.

“Excuse me?” Harper said.

“You heard. What are you talking about?” said Stralen. “We already know who did the deed. It was one man, and we know exactly where to find him. The only question is what we’re going to do about it.”

Harper let his gaze drift from Stralen to his immediate superior. Andrews was shaking his head slowly, almost imperceptibly, his gaze fixed on some distant corner of the room. Clearly, he wasn’t about to stand up to his counterpart at the DIA. Harper wondered how long he had been able to withstand the blunt force of the general’s rhetoric, or if he had even tried.

“Sir, with all due respect, it’s too early to draw any conclusions about-”

“That’s bullshit,” Stralen said. “You know damn well that Bashir was behind this. It’s payback for the sanctions we slapped on them last month. What else could it be?”

Harper frowned. “I don’t think that’s likely. Bashir may be dangerous, but he isn’t certifiably insane. Why would he do this? What could he possibly hope to gain?”

Stralen was already shaking his head. “Who knows?” he snapped. “A world court’s issued a warrant for him-and backed him into a corner. When he tried to attend Zuma’s swearing-in conference as president of South Africa, Bashir was warned to stay home. Even those corrupt bastards in Uganda reluctantly washed their hands of him through diplomatic channels. As signatories to the ICC they’d have had to arrest him if he showed at their regional conference.”

“How’s any of that lead him to an act of retribution against us?” Harper asked.

“I don’t know how his mind connects the dots. Or even what dots they connect. But it’s a moot point, anyway. There are witnesses. ” Stralen pounded his right hand into his left to emphasize the point. “The camp’s doctor, Beckett, the man who reported the attack in the first place. He ran when the bombs started to fall, but he didn’t run far. He saw the whole thing from a distance, and he swears that he saw a man in army uniform getting out of a white Mercedes. Besides, there was a plane. If there was no government authorization, where did the plane come from?”

“I don’t know,” Harper said carefully.

Stralen narrowed his eyes. “Are you telling me you don’t think the Sudanese government has a hand in this?”

“I think it might bear some level of culpability.”

Stralen narrowed his eyes. “What does that mean, ‘some level’?”

“I mean Bashir provides funds and training for the Janjaweed through the army,” Harper explained. “But he does not direct ongoing operations in Darfur. He leaves that to his generals. There is a good chance he wasn’t even aware of this particular attack, much less who was stationed at the camp.”

“You can’t be serious.” Stralen looked at Andrews, then back to Harper, as though searching for an explanation. “Do you really expect us to believe that this was a mistake? Some kind of coincidence?”

“No, of course not. That is not what I’m implying. I’m simply saying that Bashir might not have authorized it,” Harper asserted.

“And what about the plane? Let’s not forget that bombs were dropped,” said Stralen.

“I haven’t.” Harper sighed. “But a lot of ordnance and combat equipment is floating around out there on the black market. And across the region. Tanks, attack boats-”

“I repeat, Harper. This was a bomber. An F-7N, according to our real-time infrared satellite data. What does that tell you?”

Harper didn’t answer. Acquired from Iran back in the late nineties, the Chinese-built warplanes were known to have been used in Sudan’s bombing campaigns against rebel ground troops during its last civil war. Which in his mind still proved nothing.

He turned toward the president; the last thing he wanted here was a spitting contest. “Sir, I know it must seem pretty clear-cut from where you’re standing. But I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence Omar al-Bashir ordered the attack, and I don’t think we’ve established motive. He knows the consequences for himself and his government. To go after you personally, and in this way, would be an incredibly stupid thing to do at a time when he’s already under siege. Bashir is a lot of things, but he isn’t stupid. It would be an act of sheer lunacy for him to authorize your niece’s murder.”