The England Operation

Prologue

Senlac Hill, near Hastings, England, Saturday October 14, 1066, 5p.m.

Amid the hubbub, the screams of the dying, the moans of the wounded, the shouted orders of his commanders, the chanted prayers of the priests mingled with the oaths of the soldiers, the dull clink of chain mail and thud of axe on shield as his men dressed their depleted ranks, the king felt it. There was little breeze on that crisp autumn afternoon, and the sun still stood clear of the hills across the valley. But the elusive shift in the air that marks the descent from afternoon into evening was unmistakable. If only we can hold out until nightfall, he thought.

He looked down at the mass of enemy soldiers and horses milling about in the shadows of the valley below. They were preparing for another charge, he knew. All day, since dawn that morning, he and his men had withstood wave after wave of mounted attacks. The piled-up dead, horses and mail-clad men alike, formed a grisly barricade before the English lines. But for all the damage his men and their fearsome axes had inflicted on the invader, the enemy cavalry had taken a terrible toll. Already his brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, lay dead, along with many of the cream of the Anglo-Saxon nobility. We are just a handful, he thought, and barely a mile from here, people are going about their business with no idea that the fate of their country is being decided here, now, on this pleasant Saturday afternoon.

A slight breeze brought to his ears the sound of shouting. Even from here, he could recognise the bulky, energetic figure in the valley below, riding backwards and forwards, waving his arms about, bellowing at his men. William the Bastard, he thought, fouling the air of my realm with his bastard Norman French, bawling at his soldiers like a fishwife abusing kitchen maids.

Some of the words carried across the valley and up the hill. Mil ans!

A thousand years, the king thought. The Bastard is promising his thugs that they and their descendants will rule my country for a thousand years, if only they can muster the strength to mount one last charge. If they can break my lines before the sun goes down, and before we can slip away under command and reform up-country, raise a muster of men from the shires and trap the bastard duke and his gang of thieves and murderers and wipe them all out. If we can hold out until sunset.

He was tired. Under the chain mail, his body was clammy with sweat. He slipped off his helmet, but resisted the urge to sink to his knees and rest his weary legs. All his men were exhausted, he knew. Only days ago, in far-off Yorkshire, they had fallen on the host of that other invader, Harald Hardrada of Norway, and defeated them at Stamford Bridge. No sooner had they celebrated that victory than news had arrived of William’s landing at Pevensey Bay, in Sussex, at the other end of the country. Undaunted, the king had led his men in a forced march southwards, picking up levies on the way to replace his losses and stragglers but losing many as well. By the time his scouts had located William’s force the previous evening, Friday the thirteenth of October, the king knew he was taking a gamble. All his instincts impelled him to attack the enemy now, while his force was still in being, before Duke William could establish himself in England as the rightful heir to King Edward the Confessor. The Norman leader had secured the blessing of the pope—the king could make out the papal standard, white and gold, dangling limply in the unmoving air. Worse, William would spread the story of how the man who now called himself king, when a virtual prisoner in William’s castle in Normandy some years earlier, had sworn allegiance to William and recognised the duke’s claim to the English throne. The king was resolute. The risks of an immediate attack with a footsore and weary force were high, but the danger of delay was greater. So he had drawn up his force around an apple tree atop this low hill in a green field near Hastings, and set up his royal standard, the Fighting Man, blocking William’s way to London.

William, the king could see and hear, was still haranguing his men. What would the king say in response, if he thought his men needed to hear it? The issue was very simple. He knew the Normans well. This was no raiding party. They meant to steal his country if they could. If he and his army could survive the next hour and fight on over the next few days and weeks to destroy the invader, England would enjoy peace, freedom and prosperity. But if William managed to break the English lines tonight, then for decades—perhaps centuries—the English would face tyranny, poverty, degradation and slavery in their own country.

He was sure of it now, and he could tell his men sensed it as well. The sun was slipping westwards and dusk was in the air. Down in the valley, the Normans were still manoeuvring awkwardly into battle formation. They were tired too, and frightened of the English axes, and perhaps many of them were regretting that they had thrown in their lot with the Norman adventurer in the hope of stealing a piece of England. Like the defeated Harald Hardrada, perhaps they feared they might only get six feet of it. But the king did not allow himself to be too hopeful at the sight of this disarray and confusion among the enemy. Once committed to battle, the Normans were formidable, and their desperation would make them fight all the more fiercely. Dex aie! he could hear them bawling in their atrocious French. Yes, God help us, he thought. All we need is just one more hour …

Now the enemy cavalry was drawn up for the charge. The king heard the word of command from the valley below. His own men began their battle chant: Out! Out! Out! Time to put his helmet back on. All at once, the air was filled with a spiteful whiffling sound—the shower of arrows that inevitably preceded the attack. Instinctively, the king looked up …

Chapter 1

World Organisation HQ, Nairobi, 1141

1

Where? said Abdul Hakim.

Uingereza, Bwana. England, said his special assistant, Saloth Sar. It’s in the south-eastern part of this island, here, off the north-west coast—

I know where England is, said Abdul Hakim. Suspecting that most people considered him impatient, he hoped it was said of him that he did not suffer fools gladly: that he was businesslike and no-nonsense, brisk rather than brusque.

He need not have troubled to work on the first impression he created. Even to a complete stranger, seeing him from a distance, the type was unmistakable—from his heelless pointed slippers to his white lace skullcap and the green cotton gown that covered him from neck to ankle—he was the very image of the entitled upper-class Ivy League graduate, the cream of Tsumkwe Prep or the playing fields of Bulawayo Academy, striding confidently across the hallowed quadrangles of Timbuctoo to a meeting of his secret society, always cultivating that essential air of effortless superiority. No deliberate parody of an upper-class, elite modern African of the mid-twelfth century would have been closer to the type.

He was indeed a Timbuctoo man (Double First, PPE), MA (Political Science) (Witwatersrand), PhD from the Kisangani Higher Institute for International Relations magna cum laude (he entitled his thesis The Influence of Climate and the Environment on Tendencies towards Aggression in Barbarian States, with Special Emphasis on North America)—and certainly he knew where England was. What he didn’t understand was why the world’s premier intergovernmental body, the Organisatio Nationorum Orbi, should want to send a peacekeeping force there.

They don’t have roads, do they?

Some roads. From the main ports on the Channel to the commercial capital. Saloth Sar wondered if he should add London, but decided that Abdul Hakim knew that, or would want his assistant to believe he knew it.

Abdul Hakim searched the recesses of his memory. This civil war … it’s still going on?

There’s a lull, probably only temporary, while King Stephen and the Empress Matilda regroup their forces and try to raise money to continue the fighting. But on both sides, control of their troops is very tenuous. Most of the time the soldiers go around robbing, raping and pillaging civilians, even the ones supposedly on their own side. Their allegiance to one party or the other is purely nominal, and powerful barons or large groups of armed men tend to switch sides if they get a better offer, or think the enemy is going to win the battle.

With the slightest movement of his hand, Saloth Sar gestured gracefully at the draft report he had placed in front of Abdul Hakim. He was a diminutive, slender, softly-spoken Nirvanan, the son of two dancers from the Royal Khmer Dance Company. His movements were fluid, graceful, deft and economical. Many men assumed that he was homosexual, although most women did not make that mistake.

There’s quite a lot in the draft report about the humanitarian and human rights situation, and something from the child-protection people, he said. It looks pretty bad. The secretary-general is aware of the situation and wants the council to set up a peacekeeping operation. We’ve put in the report that we’re going to send a technical survey team.

Abdul Hakim leaned back in his swivel chair. To gain time, and to look thoughtful, he reached out and picked up the pipe lying in the glass ashtray on his wooden desk. Then he put it back down again. The desk officers of the Europe Etc. Division of the ONO Office for Keeping the Peace Up—of which I have the honour to be director, as he liked to say—were already stretched by five major missions in the North American Great Lakes/Middle West region and Newfoundland, not counting a separate initiative by the secretary-general’s personal envoy, the Illyrian ambassador Redl (a pompous and lazy time-server, in Abdul Hakim’s opinion, whose secretive backstairs deal-making did more harm than good). This was not the time to take on a new operation, especially in England. Cold, bleak, muddy, rainy, snowy, foggy, sleety, remote, roadless, godless, unfriendly, uncivilized, Christian, quarrelsome, unforgiving, profitless, backward England—the place screamed quagmire. Logistics would be a nightmare. Saloth Sar had said there were roads out of London. He could picture them. Corrugated grass-grown tracks more likely, and in the wet season—did they have a wet season?—axle-hugging, wheel-clinging mud-baths. Everything would have to be moved by barge and balloon. And troop contributors—how would they be able to entice any country to send soldiers to a place like England?

With a sigh of resignation, Abdul Hakim started to read the document Saloth Sar had brought him. REPORT OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL ON THE SITUATION IN ENGLAND, symbol S/1141/–. Well, things certainly did look bad. Country split by civil war between rival factions for the throne. Both claimants descended from the Conqueror, each with a strong following of his or her own. Armies running amok throughout the land, preying on civilians. Large provincial towns such as Worcester and Gloucester sacked and burned, amid murder and rape. More murder, rape, destruction of villages, pillage, poisoning of wells, abduction and recruitment of children into armed forces, widespread hunger and exposure, huge population displacements, and heavy death toll directly and indirectly caused by the fighting. All right, can’t have that kind of thing going on. But would they agree to let ONO deploy a peacekeeping operation?

It seemed they would. The parties had fought each other to a temporary standstill, and as part of the manoeuvring they had signed a ceasefire agreement (all right, they didn’t call it that; thankfully they hadn’t yet quite reached the firearms stage) at a place called—he riffled through the pages of the draft report—ah, yes, Bletchley. Such charming names these native places had! The text of the agreement was annexed to the report. Hmmm. Fairly crude example of this kind of battlefield agreement. Called for all forces to remain in their present positions, except for essential resupply (and, he supposed, regular raping and looting excursions, which for these kinds of forces usually constituted essential resupply); set up a provisional council with representatives of both parties to resolve the question of succession; humbly appeal to Her Holiness the Pope to guide their deliberations and invoke God’s heavenly grace in resolving this issue. So maybe there was already a nuncio en route from Rome to chair this committee, unless there was already one resident in—what was that place called? There it is, the Holy City of Canterbury. Now, where do we come into this?

By paragraph 45, the signatories called on the Organisation of Nations of the World to send a force to supervise and guarantee the implementation of this agreement by the parties, and to assist them in the resolution of the present conflict. Abdul Hakim felt a brief flare of irritation. So the church gets a humble appeal to send one man, who’s probably already there, and whose only job is to tell them what God wants them to do. ONO, which will have to spend tens of millions of taxpayer shillings to sort out this mess, gets a perfunctory calls on. Not much respect there.

It got worse. The Bletchley agreement also called for negative forces to be tracked down. Apparently this was a reference to an English terrorist group calling itself the Sons of Hereward, in honour (if that was the word) of the leader of the original English resistance to William the Conqueror, back in the 1070s and 1080s. They were based in the marshy fenlands in the east of the country and, if reports were correct, were violently hostile to the English government (which they called the Norman Occupation Government, or NOG); and they expressed their hostility through killing, raping and robbing inoffensive civilians in their vicinity, most recently in the town of Cambridge—the site, it seemed, of a small university. The agreement was written—deliberately, Abdul Hakim supposed—in the passive voice, raising the question of who was supposed to do this tracking down. He made a mental note to flag to his boss, the under-secretary-general for peacekeeping, that this tracking down was definitely not a task for ONO.

Supervise and guarantee the implementation of the agreement—what would that mean? Monitoring the ceasefire, verifying the positions of the military of both sides and observing their movements, reporting any violations to the Security Council. Need that entail more than a few hundred unarmed military observers? Milobs were easier to find than armed contingents, because ONO paid them more than they would normally receive in their own armies, and there were fewer of them. On the other hand, they would have a lot of negotiating, explaining and politicking to do, even at the local level. What languages did these people speak, anyway?

The original language of the agreement was Latin, but Abdul Hakim’s political staff had already sent the document for advance translation into Swahili. In theory all ONO staff were supposed to be able to work in Latin, but many here in Nairobi, if asked, would be forced to describe their Latin as rusty. Later the report would be translated into the other ONO official languages: Arabic, Chinese, Persian and Sanskrit.

The agreement went on: and to assist them in resolving the present conflict. That would require much more than a simple technical military monitoring presence. The mission would need a political element, under a fairly prominent special representative, or head of mission. And with all these horror stories, it would need humanitarian, human rights and child-protection components. Public information? Yes, they would need a radio station. There would be no newssheets up there in England, he was sure. Most of the population was probably illiterate anyway.

Saloth, I’ll get to this tonight, but what are we recommending?

Sending a technical survey team to report on the practical modalities of a future implementation.

A bit tentative, don’t you think? The situation looks pretty bad. I know it hasn’t really come up on the council’s radar screen—no press interest that I’m aware of—but some of the northern Europeans must be aware of this. Normandy? Yes of course, they’re one of the concerned regional powers. The Viking League? Any of them on the council at the moment?

Denmark. Next month’s president. The presidency of the Security Council rotated on a monthly basis, in Swahili alphabetical order.

There you are, then. We’d better put some more meat in it. Can’t we recommend the immediate deployment of military observers to the headquarters of the opposing sides? That would look as if we were getting things moving. These ceasefire agreements in the field can be very shaky. It wouldn’t do to have them start fighting again while we’re faffing about with a technical survey team. We’d need the team as well, of course. How long would it take to put one together?

I’ll talk to Field Support. On the political side, Leclerc could go. He speaks French.

Is that what they speak? I had a strange notion that they might speak English in England.

Not the people we’ll be dealing with. Anyone of importance in England will be Norman. They all speak French, and the really important ones will probably be able to manage in Latin.

Thank heavens for that level of civilisation, anyway. I don’t suppose any of them will speak Swahili?

Sorry, bwana.

What makes you such an expert, anyway, Saloth? Have you been to this Allah-forsaken place?

Not within a thousand miles. But we had an English nurse when I was growing up. My brother and I. A slave, of course. The most amazing-looking creature—hair as yellow as butter, and skin the colour of cream.

You make her sound like a dairy product.

Well, she did like that sort of thing—always hankering after cheese and butter and milk and so on. She was fixated on something called curds and whey. She’d learned Khmer, which is why we bought her. That and her sweet and gentle nature, and her striking appearance. Her eyes were the colour of the sky. Most people in our town had never seen a cream-coloured person before. When they saw her blue eyes they would think she was blind, and try to help her across the street. But she was really quite intelligent. She could even dance—she had a fine natural sense of rhythm. But of course she lacked the discipline and sophistication that a proper dancer needs. Oh, and the most important thing—she taught us some English.

You speak the language?

Heavens, no. Just a few words. I remember what she used to say to calm me and my brother down when we were fighting. Oi, yew tew! Fakkin shattit oral wollop apairaya! Saloth Sar smiled fondly at the memory. Probably some traditional Anglo-Saxon lullaby. There’s a rough poetry to some of these primitive languages, don’t you think? Fakkin shattit.

Be careful not to tell too many people you speak some English. You might end up as district officer for the Holy City of Canterbury, or wherever. They’ll be needing to send some people from HQ. This is going to be big. We won’t be able to staff the entire mission with temporary appointees and ONO volunteers.

After Saloth Sar had left the office, Abdul Hakim spent a few moments gazing out of his large, steel-framed window, through the peeling blue-green film intended to provide protection from the setting sun. From his thirty-seventh-floor office, he had a fine view of midtown Nairobi. Directly below his window, across First Avenue, the Isaiah Steps led up to the short spur of Forty-Third Street to the low granite pile of Grand Central Station, where, every morning, trains brought in three million commuters from every corner of the vast urban sprawl of this mighty city. He never tired of the view from his window. Look at that new building on Second Avenue and Forty-Sixth, a cylinder of silver-grey glass reflecting bright shards of the mild January sun down onto the shadowed street below! And that red marble tower on Lexington, with its top five storeys a gigantic replica of a traditional hut—a thousand tons of concrete and steel masquerading as thatch. With his conventional background and education, it pleased him to see these classical touches, in a world he often thought was growing more brutish every year.

2

The Security Council had scheduled the introduction of the England report for late Thursday afternoon: the least auspicious time. Though the report had been out for almost two weeks, not a single member had mentioned it, still less called the secretariat with questions. England was definitely off their radar screen.

The discussion was scheduled to take place, as usual, in the cramped, utilitarian consultation room, behind the celebrated Security Council chamber where the council held its public meetings. It was in here, not out there, that the members of the council worked out in private the decisions later announced to the world with carefully choreographed public pomp. Off to the side of the consultation room was an even more cramped and uncomfortable caucus room, where smaller groups of lower-level diplomats could retire to hammer out gritty details beneath the notice of their excellencies, the ambassadors.

They were tired, Abdul Hakim could see, as he returned to the consultation room at about four o’clock. They’d spent practically all morning and most of the afternoon discussing the Middle West. He had briefed them himself on developments in the Manhattan and Chicago operations—another roadside bomb in Breukelen had killed two ONO peacekeepers, as well as a dozen or so civilians, and the Canadians were being blamed. The USA had restated their commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle West, but sometimes Abdul Hakim wondered if African involvement in North America was doing more harm than good.

The council reluctantly put away its discussion of the Middle West and, even more reluctantly, it seemed to Abdul Hakim, opened its discussion of the question of England. The small consultation room, crowded for the briefing on the Middle West, started to empty out. It was late afternoon on a Thursday, and the council was about to discuss the situation in England. The bar was open. The night was young. The weekend beckoned. Already hardened drinkers were gathering under the red-and-white striped awning of their favourite Forty-Fifth Street bar, TAIT—Thank Allah It’s Thursday—to start the weekend’s drinking. Most of the ambassadors and even the minister councillors slipped out of their seats, yielding place to their deputies and going home to prepare for their official receptions and dinners. Eight or ten of the fifteen seats, at best, were occupied by first secretaries, Hakim concluded. The chairman called on him to introduce the report.

The round of comments that followed his brief introduction could best be described as desultory. Few of those present seemed to have read the report. The Danish Ambassador, Sweyn Forkbeard—the only permanent representative-level diplomat who had stayed for the England meeting except for the chairman himself—was the best informed, reciting the statistics for civilian deaths resulting from the conflict and saying his delegation would agree to send a technical survey team and deploy milobs immediately. Copenhagen was conscious of its cultural, historical, and religious links to its Christian sister country and former colony, England, and would probably provide a dozen or so observers. The US representative demanded an estimate of the deployment costs, saying her delegation would not be in a position to vote on any future resolution that had cost implications until Kinshasa had been notified, and the congress had had an opportunity to consider its position. The representative of Rome said his delegation would take the lead on consultations at the expert level to develop a draft resolution. And that was more or less that for the night.

Back at the office on Sunday morning, Abdul Hakim cast an eye over the brief report Saloth Sar had put on his desk concerning Thursday afternoon’s council consultations. Do you think Rome will have a draft resolution by the end of this week? Will we get a look at it?

The experts are meeting this afternoon. I’m not sure exactly what the hurry is, considering nobody on the council is really engaged.

Maybe they really are deeply concerned at appalling violations of human rights, the dire humanitarian situation, the threat and use of force by armed groups against the innocent civilian population, the recruitment and deployment of children by armed groups, and all the other stuff they’re going to put in the preambular part of the resolution. But not because there’s any particular interest on the part of the great powers, because there isn’t. Nobody has a dog in this fight.

Some people do say, though, that that’s when ONO is most effective—when none of the permanent council members are particularly engaged, but the council does what the ONO Charter says it’s supposed to—you know, the ending-the-scourge-of-war thing. Great-power involvement isn’t always helpful. I mean, look at the USA in the Middle West. No offence.

No offence taken, said Abdul Hakim. I’m not here as an African. I’m an impartial ONO Secretariat official, regardless of nationality, colour or creed. Please don’t blame my country’s foreign policy on me.

Who can we blame it on, then? said Saloth Sar, not waiting for an answer as he glided from the room.

But Abdul Hakim was wrong in thinking that England held no interest for the great powers. For the moors and dales and hills of the northern counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, as well as the flat grasslands in the east of the country, nurtured a treasure that had already attracted the attention of the cold-eyed women who controlled the world’s most important industry. From their skyscraper offices in Lagos or Babylon or Osaka, these women, aware of the soaring demand, were constantly on the lookout for new raw materials to supply their market. In these circles, England was already being spoken of as the land of white gold: wool, that is. Word had got out that English sheep were as fine as any in the world and that, properly taken in hand, England could produce enough high-quality wool to reinvigorate a textile industry that, in recent times, had been reduced to using polyester. English wool was going to be the saviour of the global textile industry, and tough-talking, tobacco-chewing Nigerian wool-women were determined to control the supply. To do so, they would use their influence with the government of the United States of Africa, and would deal with anyone else they needed to deal with.

3

Yves Leclerc, a Canadian from Mont Réal and Abdul Hakim’s choice to lead the technical survey team, had served on three missions himself—none in the Middle West or the Great Lakes region, where his nationality might have put his impartiality in doubt, but in eastern Europe. The team was told to return in four weeks with a detailed plan for the deployment of a peacekeeping operation in England.

Four weeks! said Wei Chang, the human-rights officer, as the team members gathered at Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Airport the following Thursday evening, after a three-day scramble to get tickets, security release, travel advance, visas, medical examinations, and shots, and to buy cold-weather clothing from the Nairobi branch of Outward Bound—the Store for all your Wilderness Needs. It isn’t much time, is it? continued Wei. With a week’s travel time, minimum, each way. Plus we’ll scarcely be able to get out of London in that time. All the atrocities are going on up-country. You been to England before?

No, said Leclerc. The closest I’ve been is Normandy a couple of times. It was freezing. And that was July. (Leclerc was always fascinated at the way Chinese people spoke Swahili, transposing the l and r sounds just like Rwandans.)

Their flight was called. They finished up their drinks and sauntered over to the gate. Travel Section had put together a complicated itinerary—cross-country south-westwards to Windhoek, to pick up the African Airways Transafrica Western Corridor flight up from Cape Town; and then from Windhoek, via Luanda, Lagos and Timbuctoo to Casablanca, where they would change for the Atlantic Transfer to Gibraltar, their first landfall in Europe. Things got a bit more difficult after that. Some European aviation company could take them via Madrid to Paris, but that was pretty much where reliable commercial flights stopped. The Paris office of the ONO Development Programme would be able to hook them up with a charter as far as Caen in Normandy. After Caen, it would be ground transportation to Brest, a Channel crossing to Hastings, and so to London, where someone from the London sub-branch office would meet them and arrange accommodation and ground transportation, and help them set up meetings.

Why Caen? Leclerc had asked Abdul Hakim. Can’t we go Paris–Calais–Dover?

But Abdul Hakim told him that the Norman Permanent Representative to the ONO, His Excellency Fulk the Surly, had insisted on this particular route. The Norman government would be pleased to provide a briefing to ensure that the team was properly prepared. Normandy is a regional power with great influence in England, on both sides, said Abdul. We can’t really operate in England without the Normans—our supply lines will run right through Normandy. Besides, it’s on the way. Well, sort of. Anyway, nzuri safari. Or should that be bon voyage—did I say that right?

Even after years of travelling, Leclerc still enjoyed taking the Transafrica. Air travel anywhere in Africa or Asia was agreeably unhurried, but the Transafrica’s combination of luxury, convenience and startling speed—the entire north-to-south length of the continent in only thirty-six hours!—made it a deeply sensuous experience. Standing on the forward observation deck of a luxury liner, like the President Kabila that was taking them to Casa today, sipping a banana beer, smoking a cigar, and watching the incandescent webs of Africa’s great cities slip by five thousand feet below; seeing the sun come up over the Congo Basin forest reserve; or gazing down on those endless plantations of corn, rice, coffee, bananas, cotton, tobacco, and more cotton, unfold beneath your feet. And those magnificent cities!—it took three hours to fly over Lagos, and the same for Windhoek, Khartoum or Dar-es-Salaam, Lubumbashi, Bujumbura or Bulawayo. Leclerc never tired of gazing down on a big African townscape from the air: the arrow-straight boulevards set out with cross-streets in a grid pattern that covered hundreds of square miles, the palaces and stately homes of the suburbs adorned with private pools, the gracious parks and ornamental lakes, the huge stadiums and sports grounds, and the glittering crystal towers of the downtown business districts, vibrant with wealth and power and successful busy-ness.

This Africa was a mighty continent, he told himself. The scale and power of the gigantic industrial plants never failed to take the breath away. He remembered the first time he had seen the solar fields of Namibia, mile after mile of featureless grey panels, like so many giant turned-off TV screens, soaking up the light and heat of the sun and transforming it into electricity. Sahara Solar was even bigger. Electricity from the Namib Desert alone was enough to power the whole continent: every home, every lift in every skyscraper, and every escalator in every brightly-lit, air-conditioned shopping mall, as well as the titanic industries hungry for power, the factories working 24-hour shifts, the entertainments (horse- and dog-tracks, movies, football, rugby and cricket night matches under massed banks of floodlights), the glaring advertisement hoardings, the churning cement mixers on busy building sites, and every last blessed electric toothbrush, from Cairo to the Cape, or Dakar to Dar, all run by Namib or Kalahari or Sahara power drawn down from the blazing African sun. Not to mention the tens of millions of vehicles, private cars, trucks, buses, street-cars, subways, trains, and ferries all run by the electricity generated from those featureless grey plains below. Once, long ago, it had been a desert: mile after mile of empty sand, along with a couple of shipwrecks. In olden times they’d called it the Skeleton Coast. Now it was the Power Coast.

And there, down below, were the Sixteen Sisters, the chain of huge desalination plants along the coastline north of Cape Cross, feeding the water grid of all Africa, sucking in a billion tons of seawater a day from the Benguela current up from Antarctica and turning it into pure potable water. Looking down on all this vast expanse of prosperity and order and peace from his luxurious airship, Leclerc was pained by the contrast with his own fractured and war-ravaged country. Maybe, one day, peace would come to Canada, and eventually to the whole Middle West. Maybe even, one day, to all of North America—but he didn’t expect it in his lifetime. Why can’t everywhere be like Africa? he thought.

4

In the spacious marble-floored lobby of the ONO Secretariat building, Saloth Sar waited for Callixtus Ntezimana, a friend from student days at the Kisangani Higher Institute for International Relations. The telecaster above the reception desk was on, and he watched the news-items idly as he waited. Things in the Middle West seemed to go from bad to worse. The Spyders, a hot new girl-group from Lubumbashi, had achieved an unprecedented double number one in the hit parade. It Might As Well Rain ’til Iid el Fitr was tied with Itsy Bitsy, Teeny Weeny, Yellow Polka-Dot Hijab, the announcer disclosed breathlessly (She was afraid to go down to the Mosque, warbled the girls in the background). A retired insurance-claims assessor, Mr. Hamid Ghabi, and his wife Leila, a retired home-economics teacher, both of Mogadishu, Somalia, had been captured by pirates while sailing in their yacht off the coast of Cape Cod. The pirates were demanding ransom. We do not negotiate with terrorists, said a US State Department spokeswoman sternly. An outbreak of boll-weevil threatened to devastate the Egyptian cotton crop. We think we can handle it, a textile-industry representative was saying. Fortunately, there is no sign of this pest in the West African cotton fields. At that moment Callixtus arrived.

So, Saloth, said Callixtus, who worked for the Office of Political Affairs, as the two walked out of the Secretariat building together into the warm, sunlit early evening. First Avenue was sibilant with six lanes of rush-hour traffic heading uptown. Will the council approve a peacekeeping mission to England, do you think? And if they do, will you go?

Yes, and no, said Saloth Sar. That is, yes, I think the council will approve a mission, because they can sense that’s what the secretary-general wants. And I think the SG is in favour of it because he thinks that’s what the council wants. Nobody cares what happens in England. People are far more interested in the Middle West and Chicago and Manhattan and all that. So the thing will take on a momentum of its own. Not because someone is for it, but because nobody cares enough to be against it.

A perfect ONO solution. And ‘no’ because?

No, I’m not going there. Are you mad? Nobody will want to go there. England is a horrible place.

I don’t know, said Callixtus. I spent a year in London myself, did you know? It’s not so bad.

They crossed First Avenue. Where are we going? asked Callixtus. Thank Allah It’s Thursday?

No, let’s try somewhere else. I know a good place. Do you know Chumley’s? Used to be a speakeasy. Down off Bedford and Barrow.

I’m going for a new job. Don’t tell anyone, said Saloth Sar.

Where?

There’s a post opened up in the SG’s office. Special adviser on Northern Europe. Seems Bibi’s really interested in what’s going on up there, and thinks ONO is neglecting the region. All secretariat staff referred to the secretary-general as Bibi, the Swahili word for grandmother or lady. The nickname reflected the man’s importance as well as his niceness.

ONO is neglecting the region. Europe has no strategic or commercial importance.

I know. But he seems to think ONO should be helping poor, weak, obscure countries, not just running around the fringes of the great-power conflicts like in the Middle West.

Well, coming from a poor, weak obscure country himself, he would see things from that point of view. The ONO Secretary-general, Danny Bibi Gold, was a citizen of Israel.

Arriving on the corner of busy Second Avenue, Saloth Sar hailed a passing black-and-yellow Checker Cab and they climbed into its roomy interior.How long have you been in ONO now? he asked Callixtus. The cab’s electric motor whined as the driver pulled away from the curb and re-entered the dense midtown traffic, heading south.

"Two years. Always in OPA. It’s OK, but it’s all vellum-work. Not many opportunities to get out and see the