Congo Dawn Read online

  Robin called up first the video Carl had inadvertently drawn to the screen. It was only a few minutes long, but by the end Robin’s hands were clenched, her emotions a raging tempest between fury and heartbreak. The backdrop was a rainforest village indistinguishable from hundreds of others. But the fetishes and amulets, the bone-and-teeth necklaces draped over Congolese army uniforms had become too familiar to Robin to be anything but Wamba’s militia, as Joseph had claimed. Robin wanted to cry out a warning as torches were tossed onto thatched roofs, occupants mowed down by gunfire as they scrambled out narrow doorways, women and even young girls grabbed and thrown to the ground.

  When the video ended, Robin opened the photos, several dozen of them. The brutality they revealed was as sickening as it was un­necessary if the only purpose was to make Jini out to be a war criminal. How had Joseph managed to remain silent and immobile long enough to document these atrocities? No wonder the rebel leader battled such overwhelming guilt. And yet to step out into that militia rabble would surely have accomplished nothing beyond throwing his own life away.

  One more video clip was even shorter than the other. But by the time its images ran their course, Robin found herself stabbing at the volume controls to mute the machine, then stepping to the tent flap to ensure no one was close enough to have overheard. Only then did she play it through again. Joseph was right. His proof was as compelling as it was explosive. And far too dangerous for Robin to risk having it found in her possession.

  For in the interval between filming the first and second video, daybreak had arrived at that horrific scene. And if most of the militia shown in video and pictures were too hazy of feature for positive identification, one man had caught the light of dawn full on his face as he strode directly toward where Joseph must have been hiding with that cell phone.

  He was clearly the commander, his harsh voice issuing orders in Swahili that his companions scrambled to carry out. Robin recognized the face and huge, powerful frame as she’d recognized the voice before she’d silenced it. The security chief for Trevor Mulroney’s mining operation and field commander of the Ares Solutions team’s local allies.

  Samuel Makuga.

  Maybe Trevor Mulroney didn’t know just how far Makuga planned to go out there!

  Robin opened her iPad’s Skype function and tapped Alan Birenge’s username. I’ve got to get this sent off, then erase it from my hard drive!

  Robin had been furious when Joseph and Michael scoffed at her cavalier suggestion that the rebel leader surrender himself and let the proper legal authorities sort things out. But now Robin herself was supremely conscious of being a virtual captive on a rainforest base with no way out except aircraft controlled by the very man Joseph accused, while those proper legal authorities consisted of two thousand militia under the very commander she’d just witnessed on her iPad screen ordering unspeakable atrocities.

  What would Makuga do if he found out I have this? What he did to silence those mine victims at the clinic?

  Because whatever excuses or disclaimers Mulroney might still offer for his own actions, she’d no longer any doubt after watching those videos that the Taraja massacre had been by Makuga’s orders, whether he’d been personally present or not. Robin let the Skype call ring again and again until it became clear no one would answer. Perhaps Alan Birenge was simply away from his computer at this hour. Grabbing her cell phone instead, Robin punched in the contact number listed in the journalist’s Skype profile.

  “Who is this? Where did you get this number?”

  Robin was so glad to hear a crisp British accent, she ignored its angry suspicion. “Is this Alan Birenge? I . . . Can you talk?”

  “Speak up! I can’t hear you.”

  Robin didn’t dare speak too loudly. Not with possible listening ears outside her tent. Already she was stuffing iPad, flash drive, cell phone back into her knapsack. Slinging it over her shoulder, she hissed into the phone. “I’m going somewhere I can speak louder. I’m a friend of Dr. Michael Stewart. He asked me to contact you.”

  “Michael!” Suspicion abruptly left the other voice. “That’s all you needed to say! Where is the doctor? I’d like to speak to him too. Is this about the intel he asked me to check yesterday? You wouldn’t believe the hornet’s nest that’s stirred up on my end!”

  While the journalist spoke, Robin had ducked outside and was hurrying through tents and around the storage hut toward the rear of the encampment. She stopped at the perimeter wire. Breaching the electronic fence would trigger all kinds of sensors in the communications trailer. But the only person now in sight was a militia guard patrolling outside the perimeter fence. By the glowing red ember that rose and fell, he was also smoking. And not cigarettes but cannabis, from the sickly sweet smoke a breeze wafted her way. He did not even turn his gaze from the rainforest in Robin’s direction. Nor would he likely speak any English.

  Which left Robin feeling safe enough to raise her voice slightly. “I’m sorry, but Michael’s kind of unavailable at the moment. We’ve got a bit of a hornet’s nest here, too. Which is why he asked me to contact you. I’ve got some photos, video footage, and other files he said you’d know what to do with. I can upload them right now if you have an e-mail address to receive them.”

  The British accent sharpened to sudden interest. “Are you talking Wamba or Trevor Mulroney? I wanted to let Michael know my dead end yesterday on that prison labor business turned out to be a hotter potato than if I’d found something. Within hours of slipping me that non-intel, my informant had Wamba’s police knocking down his door. Thanks to a tip-off, he’d already skipped town. But I grabbed the next flight out to Uganda, along with my wife and kids. Whatever trouble Michael Stewart has found out there at Taraja, I’d rather not be in Bunia when Wamba figures out who my wife’s cousin passed that non-intel to. We’re just exiting the Kampala airport now, in fact.”

  “Oh no!” As her exclamation drew a lethargic glance from the strolling guard, Robin lowered her voice. “I don’t think Michael would want me to put your family in danger by sending you this information. What I’ve got to send is pretty explosive. Is there someone else I could contact? Your embassy, maybe?”

  “I doubt you could find intel more explosive than I’ve seen in a decade of covering this region’s nasty little wars.” The journalist’s response was bone dry. “But if you’ve got dirt on Trevor Mulroney, I want it. I’ve been digging into that man for years. Natural curiosity since like me he arrived in the UK from Africa with hardly a shirt to his back. But something about his rags-to-riches story always smelled a little off. A mercenary turned billionaire may be legit, but when you’re dealing with this part of the world, the odds of funny business are off the charts. Especially if he’s hooking up with a lowlife like Wamba. All to say, I’ll handle worrying about my family’s safety. As to me, this is what I do. Trevor Mulroney may think he’s hot stuff. But in the UK, nothing beats power of the press! You give me the goods, and it’ll be Mulroney breaking on this story, not me. So what do you have?”

  Robin hurriedly summed up Joseph’s narrative. “The pictures and video prove it wasn’t rebels but Wamba’s own troops who massacred those villages. And Joseph says the technical data will show the true value of the discovery. But it’s Michael I’m worried about. He’s out there in the jungle right now. If Trevor Mulroney finds out what he’s doing, what he knows, what I’m sending you—well, running some whistle-blowing news story isn’t going to help much here on the ground.”

  “Don’t let Mulroney find out, then,” the journalist responded uncompromisingly. “And if you’ve got what you say, believe me, it won’t be just a story I’ll be stirring up on my end. Not when Michael Stewart’s involved. I don’t know if he’s mentioned my wife’s from Bunia. Our youngest daughter was born there just three months ago with a hole in her heart. While the local docs told us to plan a funeral, Michael Stewart performed open-heart surgery few docs would care to attempt outside the Mayo Clinic. Our little one’s doing
fine now, thanks to him. So if Michael Stewart asks me to check a story or walk on coals, he can count on it.”

  Another Michael Stewart conquest.

  Robin could hear a roar of jet engines in the background, an excited chatter of children, the wail of an infant. The British drawl was now hurried. “Look, I’ve got to go. Give me an hour to reach the hotel, another to arrange Internet hookup. If you want to send those files so they’re waiting for me, my e-mail address is just my first and last name at BBC.com. Meanwhile, something else you might do for me. If you’ve got a camera, maybe you can take some discreet photos of your own encampment. The militia. Those combat choppers. Any evidence of aggressive intent. If you can catch Mulroney on-site, even better.”

  The journalist broke contact. Hurrying back to her tent, Robin pulled her iPad out again. She grouped the cell phone photos into a zip file, the document folder from Joseph’s flash drive into another, then attached both to an e-mail, hitting Send with a feeling of in­ordinate relief. But the video clips were another matter. Each clip was tenfold the megabytes of both zip files combined. After her Internet connection jammed twice, Robin abandoned her efforts and slipped outside with a digital camera. Even on the highest night setting, her discreet snapshots proved dark. But the impression of a military encampment, especially those two combat helicopters and armed guards, was clear enough.

  Returning to her tent, Robin uploaded the photos, then sent off a third zip file. Another attempt to send the video clips failed. The BBC journalist would just have to settle for photos. Robin itched to scrub her hard drive clean of the telltale files, bury that flash drive and cell phone in some hole in the ground. But caution dictated she confirm first that the files had arrived intact.

  Robin stretched out on her cot, but she was too keyed up for sleep. Had Michael and Joseph reached Jacob yet? Was the boy still alive, or had Robin’s interruption delayed them too long? No, don’t go there! He’ll be fine. He has to be!

  Robin’s thoughts jumped instead to her own earlier harsh words. I told Michael I’d never forgive him! I hope he knows I didn’t mean it! At least once I understood his reasons. That he can forgive me for once again not trusting him!

  But that was an even less pleasant subject to occupy her thoughts. Giving up attempts to doze, Robin reached for her phone. But her sister’s speed dial number elicited only the same message. If they’re still at the hospital, it can’t be good. Maybe the crisis came faster than Kristi’s pediatrician expected. Which means I’ve failed them in not finding funds in time. And now I’m not even there to be with Kristi. And with Kelli. Kelli’s always fallen apart when the smallest thing goes wrong. If anything happens to Kristi, she will completely lose it.

  Or was Robin not giving her sister enough credit? Impulsively Robin reached for her iPad. What was it Miriam had quoted from the biblical story of Job about suffering and trials refining a person like gold?

  Robin’s packing had not included a Bible in years. She wasn’t even sure what had happened to the small leather-bound volume engraved with her name that had been a birthday gift from her mother that last year in Nairobi. Maybe still among effects shipped home from Afghanistan that Robin had never bothered to open. But that was what online search engines were for. It took only a few keywords to find the quote in Job 23:10: “When he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.”

  The site cross-referenced similar Scriptures. Because she needed a distraction, Robin followed their links.

  Psalm 66:10: “For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver.”

  Zechariah 13:9: “I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The LORD is our God.’”

  James 1:2-3: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.”

  1 Peter 1:6-7: “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

  The final reference came from the same epistle of the apostle Peter that Michael’s sister had called a treatise on suffering. Robin read it through again more slowly. Okay, so I get Miriam’s point about why God would let human beings suffer the ultimate consequences of their own constantly awful choices. If nothing else, we just plain deserve it! And I can get the concept of testing and refining to make or break us the way a drill sergeant does at boot camp. I can even understand God doing it for our own ultimate good. Like when I’d take Kristi in for her vaccinations when she was a baby because Kelli couldn’t bear to hear her cry. And it nearly broke my heart too. But I knew it had to be done to prevent far worse pain and sickness down the line.

  But rejoicing in trials and grief and pain? That’s the piece I just can’t grasp. I hated the drill sergeant who tormented me at boot camp. As I’ve hated my father and Kelli’s no-good husband. Even Kelli, too, at times. And Michael. And yes, God, too, for not giving me the fairy tale. For hurting me whether it was for my own good or not!

  And yet when I’d take Kristi in for those vaccinations, she never hated me. No, she trusted me, even though she knew I was the one submitting her to such pain. She trusted my love for her so much that she somehow knew I’d never subject her to a sharp needle if it wasn’t for a purpose, for her own good. And though she still cried because it hurt, she would put her little arms around my neck, let me comfort her, and just keep on loving and trusting me in return.

  Something in her line of thinking caught Robin. Then suddenly her fingers were flying over the screen.

  Yes, there was the link she’d brushed through, a passage Miriam had referenced from 2 Corinthians chapter 1:

  “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

  Four times the passage repeated that single word comfort. Miriam said that in the darkest night of what those men did to her, she felt God in the darkness with her. Comforting her. Loving her. Bringing meaning and hope to her suffering even when he didn’t just whisk it all away.

  Robin’s fingers were flying again. She lingered over a passage in Lamentations 3, finding its heart cry to be so familiar.

  “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

  According to a footnote, the author of Lamentations was the prophet Jeremiah, writing during the final days of his nation’s destruction as Israel was carried off into exile by King Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon. Jeremiah had been a servant of God. Yet he, too, had known bitterness, suffering, wandering, depression.

  But he’d also known hope. The same hope Miriam had expressed. A hope that though the darkness was only too real, God’s love, compassion, and faithfulness were equally real.

  A word search for hope brought up the other reference Miriam had quoted from the book of Romans, chapter 5.

  “We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts.”

  Robin read on, transfixed.

  “How can you sing?” she’d demanded of Miriam only a few hours ago. “How can they sing? How can you let them believe such a terrible, cruel lie?”

  “It isn’t a lie. Far from it! It’s their hope, our hope,” Miriam had insisted.

  And here, leaping from
her iPad screen as though in neon lights, was the explanation for such an improbable statement. The hope that permitted Congolese fugitives to sing with such joy and sincerity in the middle of a refugee camp. That allowed the teenage daughter of foreign missionaries to rejoice despite rape and scars and a child born out of horror and cruelty. That permitted Jeremiah to watch the destruction and exile of his nation with faith instead of despair.

  “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

  Christ.

  Jesus.

  Yesu.

  The common thread of all those Swahili worship songs.

  Yesu, Light of the World.

  Yesu, my Savior.

  Yesu anipenda. Jesus loves me.

  This then was the secret to Miriam’s joy. Not what she knew. But whom she knew.

  Jesus Christ, living evidence of God’s enduring, boundless love for his creation. Light in the darkness of human suffering and evil. God himself, Immanuel, as Miriam had so vividly described, stepping into the confines of his own creation, human time and space, to offer up his own life for an ungrateful, sinful humanity in the ultimate outpouring of divine love and redemption.

  Robin was so engrossed in thought that when an aircraft roared in low above the tent, she jerked upright, knocking her iPad from the army cot. It didn’t seem possible enough time had passed for Trevor Mulroney’s chartered flight to have arrived. But when Robin ­scrambled to pick up the iPad, the clock on the screen read 11:07 p.m. Late enough that Alan Birenge should be calling back any moment as well.

  A reminder of the journalist’s final request. Snatching up camera and cell phone, Robin slipped out of her tent. A graceful white bird was banking against the moonlit night to line up with the airstrip. Along both sides, militia had now lit their flares to mark a corridor. Touching down, the Gulfstream taxied to a stop just beyond the encampment perimeter.