Oath of Office

He adjusted the fanny pack on his waist to keep it from flopping as they headed down the wooded trail. The Glock 19 he carried inside the small nylon bag wasn’t a huge weapon, but he didn’t have a lot of extra padding and the ten-kilometer course up the hill behind the embassy and around behind the Hotel Mont Fébé gave it plenty of time to give him a hellacious bruise on the point of his hip if he wasn’t careful. He was tall, a little on the gaunt side, with the dark copper complexion of his Navajo mother. A desert rat at heart, he’d grown up on the reservation near Blanding, Utah, and would never get used to humidity like that of West Africa. Carr subscribed to the maxim that golf was a good walk spoiled, but the course behind the embassy offered a great place to run without getting run over by some crazy taxi driver. Better still, it was manicured and relatively well drained after the last week of constant rain. There was the off chance that some rascal would try and rob him during the run, which was the point of carrying the Glock.

He’d started calling the bad guys “rascals” when he was RSO in Papua New Guinea, the assignment prior to this one. The word had a quaint connotation in the United States — mischievous. But in PNG, the masked bandits would hack you to pork chops with a bush knife if they didn’t shoot you in the face with a homemade shotgun.

Carr’s mother was from the Two Rocks Sit clan, daughter of a long line of Navajo holy men. She believed in skin walkers, curses, and all manner of witches and spirits, but those highland tribes Carr met in PNG took it to an entirely new level. Those rascals burned women to death for sorcery on a regular basis. As with most assignments, he and Linda had made many friends in PNG, but the three years in Port Moresby had been an eternity, with him worried about his wife every time she went to the store. Cameroon was poor, rife with political corruption, and pretty much looked as if the whole country had just been carpet-bombed. But it was a picnic compared to their time in PNG. It was sure as hell better than going back stateside. He’d already been told he would be tapped as a supervisory agent at WFO — the Washington Field Office — on his return and he wanted to stay away from D.C. as long as possible. Besides, he and Linda were in this for the adventure. Africa was a good place for that. Black mambas, bush cobras, rampaging elephants, Boko Haram — there was plenty to love. He’d heard the rascals were a little more civilized in Cameroon, but the ones he’d seen still carried big bush knives, and he didn’t intend to find out how eager they were to use them. Especially not with the ambassador in tow.

The last chief of mission had contracted malaria and returned to Iowa. Burlingame had been in Cameroon for only two months, but he wasn’t new to Africa, having worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in several other countries. The ambassador was an inch or two taller than Carr, well over six feet, with sandy blond hair that he kept just long enough to part. He carried himself well, and, as anyone who’d spent any length of time on the continent, understood that unpredictable things happened for one simple reason—TIA.

This Is Africa.

“Adin,” Burlingame said, hardly even breathing hard after five and a half of their six-mile run. “What do you say we add a couple of klicks to our run tomorrow.”

“I’m heading to Botswana tomorrow to teach a class at the regional police academy. I’m game for Friday.” Carr shot his boss a grin. “But you might keep in mind that I not only have to run, I have to be in good enough shape to fend off a deadly forest cobra while you escape if we get into trouble.”

Burlingame chuckled — something the previous guy rarely did, even before he got malaria. “Then who am I supposed to run with while you’re gone to Botswana?”

“You could stay inside, where—”

Emergency sirens that Carr had mounted on the embassy walls stopped him in his tracks. Painfully loud, the wailing sirens pulled double duty, warning everyone on the compound that something bad was going down, and, it was hoped, scaring some sense into any vandals who might be trying to pull a Tehran.

Carr ducked sideways, toward the shadow of some trees, grabbing Ambassador Burlingame by the shoulder of his T-shirt and dragging him along.

“A drill?” the ambassador asked.

Carr crept forward, keeping an eye peeled for the whiplike form of any Jameson’s mambas as he pulled aside the greenery for a better look at the embassy grounds.

“Nope,” he said. “Not a drill.”

“How can you know?”

“Because I’m the one who schedules the drills.”

The scene came into view for both men at the same moment, and their reactions were 180 degrees apart. Burlingame gasped, bolting forward, ready to run headlong to the fence. Carr yanked him back, keeping him in the safety of the trees.

Burlingame attempted to pull away. “I have to get down there.”