Chapter 4: New Identities
-Three Years Later-
The gust blows a small whirlwind of red dust down the road and straight into her eyes. Blinking furiously, Gabi yanks her cotton headscarf over her face, shielding her eyes, nose and mouth from the stinging grit. It doesn't do much to disguise the smell—the unmistakable stench of too many refugees crammed into too little space with open sewers and minimal supplies of water. Shifting the strap of her duffel bag a bit higher on her shoulder she plods on, keeping her head down.
The road is not really a road, more a rutted dusty track between rows of identical blue plastic sheet tents in the Aba displaced persons camp run by the UNHCR. It's just one of the displaced persons camps that now ring the state of South Sudan, mostly in Uganda and Kenya, providing emergency relief and humanitarian aid to the two and half million people who have fled the civil war in the very troubled country. This camp in the Haut Uèlè province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is now the temporary home of nearly five thousand of the half million South Sudanese in the country.
From the frying pan into the fire, Gabi thinks; it's exactly the worst place refugees could have chosen. The local Hema and Lendu ethnic groups on this side of the border have been at war with each other sporadically for the past twenty years. The South Sudanese refugees are caught in the crossfire, victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It's somehow fitting that she has ended up here, hiding in the back of beyond. She, too, is a refugee fleeing from disaster, hoping to avoid attracting too much attention from the wrong kind of people.
Halfway through the camp, Gabi spots through the red haze the queue of women she's been looking for. Figures swathed in fabric are standing stoically, their backs turned to the dust storm. Those with children try to shelter them from the stinging sand. As she heads in their direction, Gabi spares some sympathy for them. Their journey here has been more arduous than hers. They came on foot as undocumented, anonymous victims of a civil war. Almost all of them are women; the men of their villages were rounded up and shot, or perhaps some of them are still fighting in the ranks of scattered guerrilla troops. Boys had been hauled off to become soldiers in the one side or another of the civil war. The psychological damage in these refugees is severe— many have been the victims of rape and most have experienced the trauma of watching their loved ones die. Some of the physical wounds Gabi has helped tend to have been horrific. Even with medical treatment, some are beyond help, their immune systems too compromised by starvation to be able to respond. Many children suffer from a tick list of about every disease going: kwashiorkor, measles, TB, rickets and — of course — malaria.
The first step will be to register the refugees as Médecins Sans Frontières patients and then send them into the nurse's tent for triage. Gabi follows the snaking line of woman to the front and ducks into the clinic administrator's tent.
A white woman is sitting in a rickety chair in front of a wooden packing case that is almost as old as the war itself. Like almost everything in this camp, it's been repurposed from its original duties carrying medical supplies into serving as a makeshift desk. The woman's short, dark hair is dusted with the red sand that gets everywhere. She's filling in a form, one ear dipped to hear the words of the local Zande-speaking woman who is translating for the young refugee standing in front of the desk.
Without looking up from the clipboard, she greets Gabi. "Well, look at you, the prodigal daughter returns, back from your holiday in Yei. What's the news?" Her French-accented English is so stereotypical that it almost always makes the American want to smile. If she tried to add it to her own repertoire of accents, she'd be laughed at as sounding more Hollywood than Parisian.
With an exaggerated sigh of exhaustion, Gabi drops into the folding chair behind the desk and pushes her own brown shoulder length hair away from her face. Water is scarce; showers an unbelievable luxury. She takes a cautious breath, testing to see if the air is marginally cleaner in the tent. When she's filled her lungs, she mutters, "As if news could be anything but bad."
Her trip to the regional capital of the Yei River province of South Sudan had been a long and dangerous journey through areas of the country where no one could claim to be in control. Ambushes were common; she'd been in a Kevlar flack-jacket, surrounded by armed men, with a UN cruiser both in front and behind hers. She'd volunteered to go to get the latest info from the MSF unit there. For interesting political reasons, the MSF organisation in Kinshasa were not interested in the work of their colleagues who had come south with the South Sudanese refugees. "Not our problem; we have enough of our own here" is the usual response. Gabi had been sent back across the border to find out when the next supply convoy would be hazarding the journey and to demand a faster schedule.
"Not yet is the answer." Gabi shrugs philosophically. "The view from Juba is that the Azande refugees are better off here than in the warzone, but if you ask me, it's because they're Nuers who don't want the hassle of feeding these people."
The French woman is shaking her head in disbelief. "We have less than a month's supply of antibiotics left."
Gabi laughs. "That doesn't matter to them. The only government less able to guarantee safe passage of a humanitarian convoy than the DRC is the South Sudanese."
"Maybe not. There's always Yemen."
The French woman had spent time in that hellhole before being reassigned here, and Gabi is grateful that she's not been assigned there. Her nursing skills are not on the same level as those of clinic management, so were less in demand. That had given her more flexibility in choosing assignments. The more obscure and out of the way, the better had been her motto.
Even so, Gabi knew it was time to consider moving on. Her trip of Yei had been convenient for personal reasons, because there were things she needed to collect there—stuff that had been brought out to the place by one of the UNMISS peacekeeper officers. The man was amenable and she'd bribed him to collect a package for her when he was on a brief leave in Helsinki. "You might have a point, Nix. The gossip is that the peace negotiations might well bear fruit, and there's talk that the refugees will be repatriated. That's not even on the horizon for Yemen."
The French woman drops her clipboard on the top of the makeshift desk with a theatrical slap. "We've heard that before; it just means Juba's elites are hungry and want the peasants back to plant crops. No one sitting in an office's air-conditioned splendour has any idea what the people are actually suffering. The place is a fucking war zone."
Gabi unzips the duffel bag at her feet and tosses a carton of Gauloises cigarettes on the table.
"Magnifique!" Within seconds, the rank odour of a refugee camp is masked by the harsh aroma of tobacco.
Gabi draws in a breath and asks, "And what about here, Nix? How's tricks?"
The French woman snorts. "You sound so American when you do that."
The smirk is immediate, as is the reply, "Well, what do you expect?"
"You're a long way from San Diego, Gabrielle Ashdown." Nix doesn't look up from the form on the clipboard.
"And you're a long way from the Left Bank of Paris, Nicolle Blanchard," replies Gabi.
In chorus, they both say to one another, "Then what the fuck are we doing in this African arse hole?" and start laughing.
If they didn't indulge in occasional humour, the two women would probably have left long ago. The conditions are dire, the plight of the refugees heart-breaking, and there is no end in sight to the conflict that sent these people from one war zone into another.
Nix knocks the first bit of ash from the cigarette, plants it in the corner of her mouth as she completes the form. Once she's signed it, she tears off a perforated strip of plasticised paper at the bottom of the form and gestures to the translator to get the refugee to hold out her hand. When an emaciated hand emerges from the swathed fabric, Nix wraps the band around the too thin wrist and pulls the flap to expose the sticky tape, then seals the two edges. In a well-rehearsed request, the translator explains how the wrist band will be scanned with a phone app each time she is given medical help.
Nix waits until the translator to finish before reminding her, "Tell her that if she tries to take it off or tampers with the seal, she'll lose it and all her rights to treatment."
Gabi wonders how long the phones will keep their charges; the sand storm makes solar rechargers temperamental. MSF has been forced to resort to this sort of tagging because the black market for scarce medicines leads desperately ill patients to sell their medicines in exchange for money to buy food for their families. She leans forward to take the cigarette from Nicolle's mouth long enough to take a puff of her own from it.
As she exhales and feels the nicotine rush to her head, the tent flap opens and in strides a dark West African man in a khaki uniform with a bright blue beret. Seko Kouassi is an impressively tall, well-fed, well-muscled and well full of himself man, in Gabi's view.
"Salutations, mesdames."
She's never liked Seko, one of the MONUSCO peacekeepers from Côte d'Ivoire, liaising between the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the UNMISS peacekeeping force in South Sudan.
As both women are employed by MSF, they have an ambivalent attitude towards the UN peacekeepers in both countries. The presence of the troops has not stopped the wars that have caused the massive migrations across borders of peoples desperate to find some safety. The toll on civilians has been appalling over the past fifteen years, and there is no sign of a let-up. The mineral riches of the eastern DRC clash with the needs of the South Sudanese refugees, and more than once Gabi has come to realise that the MONUSCO forces may well be dipping their own beaks into the trough of mineral riches. A blue beret does not make one immune to the bribery and corruption that is rife in this area. And this man has been known to abuse his position, indulging his sexual needs with the refugee women who are in an impossible position, unable to refuse.
Gabi stifles her natural urge to push back against the man's arrogance with sass; no need to draw attention to herself. It's more important to keep every official uninterested in her; what they don't know about her won't hurt her. This is a vital part of her modus operandi, and the reason why the new passport under a new name is being kept safely tucked away.
The next Azande woman waiting in the queue has turned her face away from the man, almost cringing. Gabi can tell that her need to register fights with her instinct to escape from a man in a uniform. She is likely one of the many rape victims who show up at the clinic looking for some treatment for a wide variety of STDs or vaginal damage. The sense of disquiet in a man's presence seems to infect the rest of the women waiting in the queue. There are murmurs of conversation and the shifting of bare feet in the sand on the tent floor.
"What can we do for you, Lieutenant?" As Gabi asks the question, she stands up; the habits of half a lifetime as a mercenary make it hard to mask her physical reactions to the sort of threat that the UN man carries in his stance.
"You can stop registering these women. We'll be trucking them all back to Yei in the morning."
At the desk, the French woman is outraged. "What?! Why?"
"Because this camp is being closed. Your organisation in Kinshasa has been informed and agreed. The people here are being moved back across the border—all of them."
"That's not possible!" Nix is now on her feet, too, bristling with indignation. "There are thousands of patients here whom we are treating, many patients too sick to move. If they are sent back into a war zone, you are sentencing them to death."
"Not my problem. I just carry the message. Someone in the Juba government has done a deal with the President in Kinshasa. South Sudan's refugees are no longer welcome here."
"You can't just close the camp and kick people out!"
The Malawian's face breaks into a toothy grin. "Yes, we can. It's all agreed. The local people don't want these Azande here, and we have a job to do to keep the peace in the DRC. The UNHRC corps that runs this camp is already starting to take the infrastructure down."
Nix gets up from the desk and leans across it, glaring at the officer. "MSF does not work for the UN."
The Ivorian laughs. "No, you don't. If you did, you might have been consulted. The Congolese think you are part of the problem; the medical support you provide is a magnet for refugees who are not wanted here."
He glances down at the packing case and then grabs the clipboard, scanning the new intake. "Be ready to leave tomorrow morning at dawn. Start dismantling things and packing up your supplies. We'll take a record of everyone who leaves here, fingerprinting everyone—aid workers, too. If anyone is caught crossing back into this country, the prints will be checked and those people will be repatriated."
Gabi controls her reactions; as a seasoned professional with several years' experience in the mess that is central Africa, she knows that protesting now would mean that the MONUSCO officer would be likely to put them on the first truck back across the border. That is definitely not where she should be going, especially if the transit is going to involve fingerprinting.
The local translator has listened to their conversation and starts talking to the queue of women. There is a burst of alarmed conversation. Then, the women start fleeing the tent in a panic.
oOoOoOoOo
After an exhausting afternoon spent packing things up, Gabi finally has a chance to retreat to her tent. Sleepless, she lies back on her camp bed and contemplates the canvas over her head as if it had all the answers to all the questions that are keeping her awake. For almost an hour, she alternates between a sense of panic about what is coming in the morning and borderline depression about how powerless she feels. The choices go around and round in her head, and she can't break free from the cycle of bad—worse—worst scenarios; no matter what she tries to conjure up as a solution, each one breaks down in a matter of minutes under operative scrutiny.
In utter frustration, she lets the tears escape. It had been her father who had taught her that when emotions threaten to overwhelm logic, it is better to have a good cry and then get back to analytical thinking. The emotional release is oddly comforting.
In the camp bed next to her, Marie turns over and asks quietly, "You okay?"
Gabi whispers back, "Not really. I feel for these women, being forced to return to such a nightmare." It's not true—well, not entirely anyway. What is really upsetting her is that she can't see a way out for herself.
"Mon ami, this is their life. We can only go with them to do what we can to help."
Her colleague's unselfish concern makes Gabi realise that she can no longer play the part. "I'm not going. I'm done with South Sudan."
"Oh!" Marie doesn't mask her surprise. "Why?"
"I've reached the end of the road. Compassion fatigue, I guess."
"Perhaps you should sleep on it; we'll talk in the morning."
This has been Marie's answer to any wobble amidst the MSF nurses, and usually she's right. A lot of the doctors and other staff had these dark nights of the soul but came to their senses in the morning when the need to help overcame the exhaustion.
Morning won't change anything for Gabi; she knows she won't change her mind. As Marie's breathing slows and takes her tent companion into restorative sleep, Gabi reminds herself that she is a professional, used to making decisions based on what limited information is available to her. Right now, she knows that her choices are very limited indeed. For the past three years, she's had over a dozen different identities and made random choices about her journeys, using tradecraft to bury her trail and make it nigh on impossible to follow her.
Her gut is telling her now that what is impossible for most people won't be for a certain person: Hawking Man. AKA Axel and Fyodr. When they'd parted ways, the IOU she owed him was an unnamed threat, a promissory note. She'd had no choice back then except to sign the blank cheque or end up in a shallow grave in a Russian forest. Hostage to the planning of the man who had engineered the betrayal of AGRA, she could do nothing but go along, hoping that an opportunity to cut and run would present itself. She doesn't believe in mind-readers, yet every possible option she'd considered on their way from Georgia to Moscow had been blocked by a man who seemed always to be two steps ahead of her. By the end of their time together, she was admitting something that she'd never felt before—she'd been out-gunned, out-manoeuvred and outwitted. It had terrified her in a way she had never experienced before. Whatever payment he would demand from her was going to be lethal not just to a target of his wrath but to her as well; getting something done in a way that would eliminate her as a loose end is likely a package deal too irresistible to miss. Knowing that, she'd run for her life. As far and as fast as she could, burying herself in a plethora of different disguises, never staying anywhere for long, never making contact with anyone who might have links to any intelligence service anywhere. She'd headed straight for civil wars, floods, famines, earthquakes, epidemics—the worst of the worst, places where anyone willing to help was put to work with very few questions asked. The trail should be impossible to follow, and the South Sudanese camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is about rock bottom.
Yet now, even that is being taken away from her.
If she tries to go south, she'll end up in a shooting war and at risk of being put to work on Ebola cases that could kill her as well. If she goes north, she will be fingerprinted and all of her travels will come to nothing. Somehow, she knows that such incontrovertible evidence of her presence would mean her nemesis will be able to find her. Passports can be forged; the biomedical data on some countries' documentation raises the price, but money is something she's been able to stash away over the years, as a freelancer. Few countries have the technology to scan retinas on entry, and those that do can be avoided by using passports without that data. The one thing that can't be faked is a fingerprint, and that fact makes crossing back into South Sudan tomorrow something that she is not prepared to do. No matter how far she has travelled or how many miles she has put between her and Axel, the risks of being fingerprinted are too great.
Yet, after three years and countless reincarnations in places that most people had never heard of, the woman with too many names, none of which are her own, is tired of running. The name on a birth certificate had been Růžena Marie, but no one other than her parents has ever called her that and they are long dead. The places she's been, the horrors of human depravity to which she's been exposed, have all taken a toll.
She's tired. Is this really living? Could it really be any worse than what Hawking Man had planned for her? She's done. Finished. Broken. Fed up with running, too tired to continue this farce. If this is what life is going to be like, her only purpose in life being trying to avoid Hawking Man, then she questions whether it is really worth it.
Is it too much to ask to find a way to disappear into a normal life? Her biological clock is ticking. If she ever wants to have a child, it's going to be soon or never. She's never thought it would be possible—not with her chosen profession and her current circumstances. What she wouldn't give for just one chance, a shot at a real, ordinary, normal life. Find a normal man to love, build a relationship, get married, have a child. Is that beyond her reach? Staring at the seams of the tent above her head—the one that leaks because it had never been properly sealed—she knows the answer. She's spent too much time in places where normal people don't go, dealing with problems so far beyond people's usual experience sphere that they would terrify anyone who isn't an adrenaline junkie or somehow damaged in another way.
Maybe it's time to come in from the wild and ferocious places and try instead to hide in plain sight. The passport that she's got hidden in her pants is that of a Finnish national, a nurse named Marjaana Järvinen. Tomorrow, she will go to the UNHCR operatives running this camp and hitch a lift to their field office across the border in Uganda. Once there, she will use her new passport to get into the EU and then go to England. Maybe her contact there will have worked out the identity of the betrayer of the AGRA operation by now. For all she knows, Hawking Man could have been identified and neutralised while she's been away. She wants nothing more than a quiet life and a chance to be normal and she'll regret it forever if she doesn't at least give it a try.
Decision made, she breathes a sigh of relief and finally allows sleep to take her.