Never, page 2
“You’re right. And the lake used to cover ten thousand square miles, but now it’s only about five hundred. A lot of these people are on the edge of starvation.”
“What do you think of the Chinese plan?”
“A canal one thousand five hundred miles long, bringing water from the river Congo? Chad’s president is keen on it, not surprisingly. It might even happen—the Chinese do amazing things—but it won’t be cheap, and it won’t be soon.”
China’s investments in Africa were regarded, by Tamara’s bosses in Washington and Tab’s in Paris, with the same mixture of awestruck admiration and deep mistrust. Beijing spent billions, and got things done, but what were they really after?
Out of the corner of her eye Tamara saw a flash in the distance, a gleam as of sunlight on water. “Are we approaching the lake?” she asked Tab. “Or was that a mirage?”
“We must be close,” he said.
“Look out for a turning on the left,” she said to Ali, and then she repeated it in Arabic. Both Tamara and Tab were fluent in Arabic and French, the two main languages of Chad.
“Le voilà,” Ali replied in French. Here it is.
The car slowed as it approached a junction marked only by a pile of stones.
They turned off the road onto a track across gravelly sand. In places it was hard to distinguish the track from the desert around it, but Ali seemed confident. In the distance Tamara glimpsed patches of green, smudged by heat haze, presumably trees and bushes growing by the water.
Beside the road Tamara saw the skeleton of a long-dead Peugeot pickup truck, a rusting body with no wheels or windows, and soon there were other signs of human habitation: a camel tied to a bush, a mongrel dog with a rat in its mouth, and a scatter of beer cans, bald tires, and ripped polythene.
They passed a vegetable patch, plants in neat straight lines being irrigated by a man with a watering can, then they came to a village, fifty or sixty houses spread randomly, with no pattern of streets. Most of the dwellings were traditional one-room huts, with circular mud-brick walls and tall pointed roofs of palm leaves. Ali drove at walking pace, threading the car between the houses, avoiding barefoot children and horned goats and outdoor cooking fires.
He stopped the car and said: “Nous sommes arrivés.” We have arrived.
Tamara said: “Pete, would you please put the carbine on the floor? We want to look like students of ecology.”
“Sure thing, Ms. Levit.” He put the gun by his feet, with its stock hidden under his seat.
Tab said: “This used to be a prosperous fishing village, but look how far away the water is now—a mile, at least.”
The settlement was heartbreakingly poor, the poorest place Tamara had ever seen. It bordered a long, flat beach that had presumably been underwater once. Windmills that had pumped water to the fields now stood far from the lake, derelict, their sails turning pointlessly. A herd of skinny sheep grazed a patch of scrub, watched by a little girl with a stick in her hand. Tamara could see the lake glittering in the distance. Raffia palms and moshi bushes grew on the near shore. Low islets dotted the lake. Tamara knew that the larger islands served as hideouts for the terrorist gangs who plagued the inhabitants, stealing what little they had and beating any who tried to stop them. People who were already impoverished were made absolutely destitute.
Tab said: “What are those people doing in the lake, do you know?”
There were half a dozen women standing in the shallows, scooping the surface with bowls, and Tamara knew the answer to Tab’s question. “They’re skimming edible algae from the surface. We call it spirulina but their word is dihé. They filter it, then dry it in the sun.”
“Have you tried it?”
She nodded. “It tastes awful but apparently it’s nutritious. You can buy it in health food shops.”
“I’ve never heard of it. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that appeals to the French palate.”
“You know it.” Tamara opened the door and stepped out. Away from the car’s air-conditioning, the atmosphere struck her like a burn. She pulled her scarf forward on her head to shade her face. Then she took a photo of the beach with her phone.
Tab got out of the car, putting a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, and stood beside her. The hat did not suit him—in fact it looked a bit comical—but he did not seem to care. He was well-dressed but not vain. She liked that.
They both studied the village. Among the houses were cultivated plots striped with irrigation channels. The water had to be brought a long way, Tamara realized, and she felt depressingly sure that it was the women who carried it. A man in a galabiya seemed to be selling cigarettes, chatting amiably with the men, flirting a little with the women. Tamara recognized the white packet with the gold-colored sphinx head: it identified an Egyptian brand called Cleopatra, the most popular in Africa. The cigarettes were probably smuggled or stolen. Several motorcycles and motor scooters were parked outside the houses, and one very old Volkswagen Beetle. In this country the motorcycle was the most popular form of personal transport. Tamara took more pictures.
Perspiration trickled down her sides under her clothes. She wiped her forehead with the end of her cotton headscarf. Tab took out a red handkerchief with white spots and mopped under the collar of his button-down.
“Half these houses are unoccupied,” Tab said.
Tamara looked more closely and saw that some of the buildings were decaying. There were holes in the palm-leaf roofs and some of the mud bricks were crumbling away.
“Huge numbers of people have left the area,” Tab said. “I guess everyone who has somewhere to go has gone. But there are millions left behind. This whole place is a disaster area.”
“And it’s not just here, is it?” said Tamara. “This process, desertification at the southern edge of the Sahara, is happening all across Africa, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.”
“In French we call that region le Sahel.”
“Same word in English, the Sahel.” She glanced back at the car. Its engine was still turning over. “I guess Ali and Pete are going to stay in the air-conditioning.”
“If they have any sense.” Tab looked worried. “I don’t see our man.”
Tamara was worried, too. He could have been dead. But she spoke calmly. “Our instructions are that he will find us. Meanwhile we have to stay in character, so let’s dip and look around.”
“What?”
“Let’s go and look around.”
“But what did you say before? Dip?”
“Sorry. I guess it’s Chicago slang.”
“Now I could be the only French person who knows that expression.” He grinned. “But first we should pay a courtesy call on the village elders.”
“Why don’t you do that? They never take any notice of a woman anyway.”
“Sure.”
Tab went off and Tamara walked around, trying to remain unflustered, taking pictures and talking to people in Arabic. Most villagers either cultivated a small piece of arid land or had a few sheep or a cow. One woman specialized in mending nets, but there were few fishermen left; a man owned a furnace and made pots, but not many people had any money to buy them. Everyone was more or less desperate.
A ramshackle structure of four posts holding up a network of twigs served as a clothes dryer, and a young woman was pinning up laundry, watched by a boy of about two. Her clothes were the vivid shades of orange and yellow that the people of Chad loved. She hung up her last item, put the child on her hip, then spoke to Tamara in careful schoolgirl French with a strong Arabic accent and invited her into her house.
The woman’s name was Kiah, her son was Naji, and she was a widow, she said. She looked about twenty. She was strikingly beautiful, with black eyebrows and bold cheekbones and a curved nose, and the look in her dark eyes suggested determination and strength. She could be useful, Tamara thought.
She followed Kiah through the low arched doorway, taking off her shades as she moved from the glare of the sun into deep shadow. The inside of the hut was dim and close and scented. Tamara felt a heavy rug under her feet and smelled cinnamon and turmeric. As her eyes adjusted she saw low tables, a couple of baskets for storage, and cushions on the floor, but nothing she recognized as regular furniture, no chairs or cupboards. To one side were two canvas palliasses for beds and a neat pile of thick wool blankets, brightly striped in red and blue, for the cold desert nights.
Most Americans would see this as a desperately poor home, but Tamara knew that it was not only comfortable but a touch more affluent than the average. Kiah looked proud as she offered a bottle of local beer called Gala that she had cooling in a bowl of water. Tamara thought it would be polite to accept hospitality—and anyway she was thirsty.
A picture of the Virgin Mary in a cheap frame on the wall indicated that Kiah was Christian, as were some 40 percent of the people of Chad. Tamara said: “You went to a school run by nuns, I suppose. That’s how you learned French.”
“Yes.”
“You speak it very well.” This was not really true, but Tamara was being nice.
Kiah invited her to sit on the rug. Before doing so, Tamara went back to the door and glanced out nervously, screwing up her eyes against the sudden brightness. She looked toward the car. The cigarette vendor was bending down by the driver’s-side window with a carton of Cleopatras in his hand. She saw Ali behind the window, his scarf wound around his head, making a contemptuous flicking-away gesture with his fingers, evidently not wanting to buy cheap cigarettes. Then the vendor said something that altered Ali’s attitude dramatically. Ali jumped out of the car, looking apologetic, and opened the rear door. The vendor got into the car and Ali quickly closed the door.
So that’s him, Tamara thought. Well, the disguise is certainly effective. It fooled me.
She was relieved. At least he was still alive.
She looked around. No one in the village had taken any notice of the vendor’s getting into the car. He was now out of sight, hidden by the tinted windows.
Tamara nodded with satisfaction and went back inside Kiah’s house.
Kiah asked her: “Is it true that all white women have seven dresses and a maid to wash a different one every day?”
Tamara decided to answer in Arabic, as Kiah’s French might not be good enough. After a moment’s thought she said: “Many American and European women have a lot of clothes. Exactly how many depends on whether the woman is rich or poor. Seven dresses wouldn’t be unusual. A poor woman would have only two or three. A rich woman might have fifty.”
“And do they all have maids?”
“Poor families don’t have maids. A woman with a well-paid job, such as doctor or lawyer, will usually have someone to clean the house. Rich families have many maids. Why do you want to know all this?”
“I am thinking of going to live in France.”
Tamara had guessed as much. “Tell me why.”
Kiah paused, collecting her thoughts. She silently offered Tamara another bottle of beer. Tamara shook her head. She needed to stay alert.
Kiah said: “My husband, Salim, was a fisherman with his own boat. He would go out with three or four other men, and they would share the catch, but Salim took half, because it was his boat, and he knew where the fish were. That is why we were better off than most of our neighbors.” She lifted her head proudly.
Tamara said: “What happened?”
“One day the jihadis came to take Salim’s catch. He should have let them have it. But he had caught a Nile perch and he refused to let them take it. So they killed him and took it anyway.” Kiah’s composure was shaken, and her noble face twisted in grief. She paused, suppressing emotion. “His friends brought me his body.”
Tamara was angered but not surprised. The jihadis were Islamist terrorists, but they were also criminal gangsters. The two things went together. And they preyed on some of the poorest people in the world. It made her mad.
Kiah went on: “When I had buried my husband I asked myself what I should do. I can’t sail a boat, I can’t tell where the fish are, and even if I could do both of those things the men would not accept me as their leader. So I sold the boat.” She looked fierce for a moment. “Some people tried to get it for less than it’s worth, but I wouldn’t do business with them.”
Tamara began to sense a core of steely determination within Kiah.
There was a touch of desperation in Kiah’s voice as she went on: “But the money from the boat won’t last forever.”
Tamara knew that family was important in this country. “What about your parents?” she said.
“My parents are dead. My brothers went to Sudan—they work on a coffee plantation there. Salim had a sister, and her husband said that if I let him have my boat cheap he would always take care of me and Naji.” She shrugged.
“You didn’t trust him,” said Tamara.
“I didn’t want to sell my boat for a promise.”
Determined, and no fool, Tamara thought.
Kiah added: “Now my in-laws hate me.”
“So you want to go to Europe—illegally.”
“People do it all the time,” Kiah said.
This was true. As the desert spread southward, hundreds of thousands of desperate people left the Sahel looking for work, and many attempted the perilous journey to southern Europe.
“It’s expensive,” she went on, “but the money from the boat will pay my fare.”
The money was not the real issue. Tamara could tell, from Kiah’s voice, that she was frightened.
Kiah said: “They usually go to Italy. I can’t speak Italian but I’ve heard that once you are in Italy you can easily go to France. Is that true?”
“Yes.” Tamara was now in a hurry to get back to the car, but she felt she had to answer Kiah’s questions. “You just drive across the border. Or take a train. But what you’re planning is terribly dangerous. People smugglers are criminals. They may just take your money and disappear.”
Kiah paused, thinking, perhaps seeking a way to explain her life to this privileged Western visitor. After a moment she said: “I know what happens when there is not enough food. I have seen it.” She looked away, remembering, and her voice went quieter. “The baby gets thinner, but at first that doesn’t seem too serious. Then he gets sick. It’s a childhood infection such as many children catch, with spots or a runny nose or diarrhea, but the hungry child takes a long time to recover, then he gets another illness. He is tired all the time and grizzles a lot and he doesn’t play much, just lies still and coughs. And then one day he closes his eyes and doesn’t open them again. And sometimes the mother is too tired to weep.”
Tamara looked at her through eyes full of tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wish you luck.”
Kiah became brisk again. “It is kind of you to answer my questions.”
Tamara stood up. “I need to get going,” she said awkwardly. “Thank you for the beer. And please try to find out more about the people smugglers before you give them your money.”
Kiah smiled and nodded, responding politely to a platitude. She understands the need to be cautious about money better than I ever will, Tamara thought ruefully.
Tamara went outside and found Tab heading back toward the car. It was close to noon, and the villagers were no longer in sight. The livestock had found shade under makeshift shelters evidently built for that purpose.
When she stood close to Tab she noticed a light aroma of fresh sweat on clean skin, and a hint of sandalwood. She said: “He’s in the car.”
“Where was he hiding?”
“He was the cigarette vendor.”
“He fooled me.”
They reached the car and got in. The air-conditioning felt like an Arctic sea. Tamara and Tab sat on either side of the cigarette vendor, who smelled as if he had not showered for many days. He held a carton of cigarettes in his hand.
Tamara could not contain herself. “So,” she said, “did you find Hufra?”
* * *
The cigarette vendor’s name was Abdul John Haddad, and he was twenty-five years old. He had been born in Lebanon and raised in New Jersey, and he was an American citizen and an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Four days ago he had been in the adjacent country of Niger, driving a battered but mechanically sound off-road Ford up a long hill in the desert north of the town of Maradi.
He wore thick-soled boots. They were new, but they had been treated to look old, the uppers artificially worn and scratched, the laces mismatched, and the leather carefully stained to appear much used. Each deep sole had a hidden compartment. One was for a state-of-the-art phone, the other for a device that picked up only one special signal. Abdul carried in his pocket a cheap phone as a diversion.
The device was now on the seat beside him, and he looked at it every few minutes. It confirmed that the consignment of cocaine he had been following seemed to have come to a halt somewhere ahead. It might simply have stopped at an oasis where there was a gas station. But Abdul hoped it might be at an encampment belonging to ISGS, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.
The CIA was interested in terrorists more than drug smugglers, but they were the same people in this part of the world. A string of local groups, loosely associated as ISGS, financed their political activities by the lucrative twin businesses of drug smuggling and people smuggling. Abdul’s mission was to establish the route taken by the drugs in the hope that it would lead him to ISGS hideouts.
The man believed to be the leading figure in ISGS—and one of the worst mass murderers in the world today—was known as al-Farabi. This was almost certainly a pseudonym: al-Farabi was the name of a medieval philosopher. The ISGS leader was also called “the Afghan” because he was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. His reach was long, if the reports were to be believed: while based in Afghanistan he had traveled through Pakistan into the rebellious Chinese province of Xinjiang, where he had made contact with the East Turkestan Independence Party, a terrorist group seeking autonomy for the ethnic Uighurs, who were predominantly Muslim.
