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An Expensive Education

Atlantic Monthly Press

Chapter One

It was a simple mission, really. Deliver some money and a cell phone to a rebel named Hatashil, take a look around. Too good to be true had been Teak's first thought when he finished reading the file on Hatashil. Hatashil was a freedom fighter. An autodidact orphan warrior. A humanitarian and a leader. Teak was trained to be wary of those words, as if promise too bright was never fulfilled, ultimately betrayed. Daylight on colonial brick.

But Teak had been comfortably in-country for a year and a half and also thought that maybe it didn't have to be that way. Or at least he didn't have to be that way. He wasn't sure. This was his problem and as he drove deeper into the green and brown landscape he felt disconnected from his surroundings, and then alienated too from his car, his gun. It occurred to him that finally on the right kind of mission, he might be the wrong kind of guy. He chalked this up to nerves and drove on, which was what, he understood at age twenty-five, a professional did.

There were five suitcases in the backseat. Cheap luggage for poor travelers, inelegant, plastic. They were Teak's second cover. He stopped the truck and consulted his phone, checking his position against the village coordinates. On track, on time.

As he shifted back into gear, Teak noticed movement on the horizon. Through a gap in a stand of acacias far down the track, a dust cloud. It was the first dust he had seen in over a hundred miles and he resumed his drive at a faster pace. He lost sight of the cloud, caught sight again as it rose over the trees. At best a lunatic safari, at worst-Teak briefly recalled the tortures that had befallen one of his predecessors, his jellies scooped out, his abdomen cut to bits on rusty blades. Tied to a tree and left to die. No reason to waste a bullet.

Three vehicles. They stopped, lined up across the track. Teak stopped too, a mile out, and looked at them through his monocular. A white minivan, of the sort that usually safaried Japanese tourists, and two rusted pickups. Teak watched the men riding in the back of the trucks jump out and pull a metal gate off the roof of the van. All armed.

Shifta, Teak thought, tensing. In Amharic the word meant social bandits. A whole story distilled into a single word. Wrong-doer. He drove toward them.

* * *

The shifta, twenty-two of them by Teak's count, waited for him. They were younger than he expected and rich, with the van and that gate, which they had set up across the track. Might be a particularly shrewd crew, Teak thought.

Two men stood directly in front of the gate. One wore camouflage pants and a T-shirt with the D.A.R.E. antidrug logo. The other wore mesh shorts and a khaki safari shirt. Both carried Kalashnikovs. The man in shorts also wore a leather shoulder holster.

"Hello," said Teak, sticking his head out the window as he slowed. Best to use English, lingua idiota.

"Checkpoint," said the man in the antidrug shirt.

Teak stopped and let the Land Cruiser idle. He looked off to the sides of the track. He could drive around them but then they might chase him, shoot at his tires, probably miss, but maybe break his windows. Maybe worse. Better to talk. A boy holding a cleaver sat cross-legged on the side of the track, staring at Teak. Strange. Usually no children with the shifta. Teak winked at the child but the child just stared.

"Checkpoint?" said Teak, in his best baffled colonial, "on whose authority?"

The two men in front looked at each other. Mesh Shorts theatrically drew an old .38 from his shoulder holster. "Authority of General Hatashil," he said, tapping the rear door of the car with his pistol. "What's here?"

"Shit," Teak said for their benefit, putting his head in his hands.

They opened the doors, pulled the suitcases out onto the dirt, and ripped one open.

"You know, there's a zipper on that you could use," said Teak.

A cheer went up when they saw that grey-green khat filled the case.

Teak shook his head.

"You have a problem?" asked the shoulder-holster boss.

"No," said Teak, suddenly brightening and extending a hand out the window. "I'm Teak."

"I am Commander Moalana," said the man in mesh shorts, surprised, briefly taking Teak's hand in a kind of half shake. Teak smiled at him and Moalana began to stroke his chin. He was almost gleeful, toying with Teak for his men, extremely grateful that this lone man with his bags full of drugs had crossed his path.

Moalana's men had been frustrated that morning. But then, Moalana reflected, they're frustrated all the time. He could take the car, too, but orders were orders. Restraint, Hatashil had said. After they had killed that last man as a spy, Hatashil had been angry. We do not leave our allies tied to trees! Hatashil had calmed down quickly, though, and delivered a lecture. Misunderstandings happen, he had concluded, but always restrain yourself. Moalana had been grateful for Hatashil's understanding in the face of so great a blunder.

Moalana offered Teak a bit of khat. Teak accepted and began to chew. He did not enjoy the bitter taste, like cabbage. "Can I keep one?" he asked.

"One bag," Moalana laughed for the benefit of his men, "how will you keep one?"

Before Teak could answer, Moalana cut him off. "Not one," he said, and his men began loading the cases into the trucks. The boy sitting cross-legged, Teak noticed, had become distracted from robbery and was drawing in the dry dirt with his cleaver. An older boy called to him as the rest of the shifta put the gate back on top of the van and lashed it in place.

Moalana waved his hand once from the window of his truck as it passed.

Teak spat the khat out and watched them disappear down the track. The whole encounter had taken less than five minutes. The khat cases had worked. He was still in no hurry.

Miles down, hours later, off a track off the track, the scrub dissipated into rocky plain, but first, a blessed stream. On the bank a crooked date palm, a dozen huts, goats, and children like miniature guardian angels. Teak liked the look of it. He parked a hundred yards from the village so as not to further disturb the corraled livestock. A few tattered goats bleated at the Land Cruiser.

From his pocket, a key, and Teak unlocked the glove box, took out a sealed FedEx envelope. He stepped out of the car and stretched his legs, reflecting on the temperature as he put on the wrinkled jacket of his khaki suit. He wore the same thing everywhere, and it was cooler now. Not that he minded the heat. His pale skin had a permanent burn but that was fine with him. A short lifetime of...