The Threat

The tents started dotting the gravelly, wasted terrain half an hour before they turned off the road. The van lurched. Rocks screeched along the pan and whanged in the wheel wells. Some were cloth shelters, military surplus, but most were nothing more than sticks propping up blue plastic tarps with the letters UNHCR on them.

He looked at the briefing sheet again. A million dead, hacked apart with machetes. A million and a half refugees, fleeing rape, militia rampages, looting, and tribal terror. Their hovels were crammed campfire to campfire all the way to distant green mountains streaked with mist, or smoke, or maybe even volcanic vapor. Supposedly the last mountain gorillas lived up there. Or had, until hungry humans had invaded their domain.

When they got out the humid, cloying heat closed down like a sauna at full blast. A distant murmur surrounded them, and a stink like smoldering matches. The volcano had burned this whole valley out only a few years before. It still smoked on the horizon, chuffing out sulfurous gas and a fine gray fog. That fog was a choking-fine powder of ash, and the gas turned to sulfuric acid in the lungs and eyes. The briefing sheet said that the volcano could explode again any time. Fumes, clinkers, and a gritty black dust like hard, shiny little particles of fly shit permeated everything.

The UN resident commissioner was waiting on a little drab hill of what looked like frozen mud. Dan, following the president’s party across it, realized it was a mixture of volcanic rubble and some sort of petrified or vulcanized dung, human or animal he couldn’t tell.

Following the commissioner, handkerchiefs to their faces, they trailed the president and a slowly walking Letitia De Bari down into the valley. Under the equatorial sun, as if developed by the fumes, colors grew feverishly vibrant as they drew closer over the dead black ground. Traces of strangely too-green grass lay trampled and scorched. The refugees’ visages were inky holes under their scarves, clothes a fluorescent riot of cheap oranges, sick blues, hot pinks. They milled slowly, coughing, on the far side of a bright yellow webbed-plastic crowd barrier. He coughed too, feeling the acid bite into his lungs, as the administrator began, “They call this the Valley of Death.”

The president and first lady looked uneasy as Ericssen gave them the rundown on the refugees. “As you can see, this is wasteland, avoided and dreaded before they arrived. There are no wells; this is lava mantle beneath us. No water and no drainage equals epidemics. Typhoid. Dysentery. Malaria. Blackwater fever. The mass graves are half a mile east of here. We lost twenty thousand this summer to cholera.”

Empty eyes followed them as they picked their way downhill. A female staffer turned an ankle and went down. When she lifted her hands blood trickled from all-but-invisible lava cuts. The commissioner droned on in a digital voice, hands in his pockets and a gaze blank as those of his charges. He spoke of rations. Transport. The hostility of the indigenous population. The destruction of the gorillas. The denuding of the mountains to feed the greenwood cookfires that Dan realized were responsible for as much of the haze as the volcano. Each sentence he formed, each shack they passed, each group of huddled, vacant-looking human beings, was more hopeless. From inside one tent, as they drew near, a woman was screaming and crying.

“This is just horrible,” Mrs. De Bari interrupted at last, voice high and breaking-brittle. “All these people. Somebody should do something.”

“We’re trying our best,” the commissioner said. “HIV infections have jumped elevenfold this year, due to rapes, prostitution, and lack of both condoms and an understanding of the disease…”

Under the plastic sheeting the woman came into view, rocking and hugging a wrapped bundle. Dan looked at the president. De Bari’s face shone with sweat. Dark half-moons bearded the armpits of his golf shirt. He looked poleaxed, like one of the steers on his ranch.

His wife asked to be taken back to the limo. De Bari looked longingly after her. Dan waited, clutching the football. He kept checking the barrier, noting the thousands of bodies on the other side. If they decided to swarm, was he really going to shoot to keep some starving refugee’s hands off the SIOP? He decided he wasn’t. Nobody here was going to call in an option on encrypted UHF.

When he looked back toward the president he caught his breath and began hurriedly picking his way over the sharp ground after him. A thin wailing chorus came from the fog-smoke ahead. POTUS was not walking back, toward the motorcade, air-conditioning, and safety. He was headed up one of the lava-strewn hills that rose into the haze. Maybe to see better, but not pleasing McKoy. Dan heard the lead agent shouting, but didn’t catch De Bari’s reply.