HAITI
We
roared around the corner, swerved around a pothole big enough to eat a bus,
emergency lights flashing, and went hell-for-leather out of Port Au Prince
towards the desolate country near the border. We tried to stay close behind the
black sedan that carried the Congressman, his Staffer and the party power-broker
who had made this all happen.
The further we got out of town the fewer
potholes we encountered. The Peugeot spun wheels on the soft gravel of the road
and threw a rooster tale of dust behind us. The young African man at the wheel
held his arms rigid, but the beating the front end had taken make his arms shake
like he had Saint Vitis Dance. Beside us the surface of a slate-gray lake was
placid, the low hills beyond them barren, anything combustible long gone as fuel
for cooking. Small boats smuggling fuel down towards the City made a brave
profile in the morning, triangular sails bright in the low, soft light. The lake
was lovely from this vantage. You could see no poverty, or pain, or even a
mounting international imperative.
It was just a place, and a pretty one,
where the light reflected against the green and gray hills that ran away to the
northwest. We could see the Haitian border checkpoint to the right, low crude
cinder block buildings that once had been painted pastel pink and were now going
gray. Brett pointed over the ear of our burly Haitian Armed Forces guard who sat
impassively in the right front seat. The FAH'D had been with us every step of
the way on this trip. The rosy light of dawn was growing over the dark green
Dominican mountains looming ahead.
"Look!" he said, leaning forward
against his lap belt. I could see a cloud of something rising behind the trees.
I yelled back: "the helos are landing at Jimani!"
I squinted into the dawn
and saw the billows of yellow dirt rising against the sun, just as they had the
morning before as we plunged down out of the 21st century into the 19th. It
seemed an eon before, all the action crammed into thirty-odd hours. This was
good. The vision before us meant almost certainly that we were going to live,
and absent some mischance associated from the armed men around me, we would be
home later in the same day.
I wondered if Pierre Cardin saw it the same
way. That was the nom de guerre of our FAD'H Officer Guard. He and his people
had done exactly what they promised. They were professional and mostly prompt,
even if their jackets did not button well across their pistols. A few minutes
and we would be done with him and his guns. But he was staying. The knot in my
stomach began to unwind a bit. There was just a border crossing to go, a
rendezvous with the nice American helicopter people, a flight back to Santo
Domingo. A meeting with ancient Presidente Juan Joquime Balaguer and the
opposition leader and then onto a little Navy jet and back to the capital of the
Free World. Then the island of Hispaneola would be far away and we could take
the message from General Cedras back to the President's people. Maybe we would
invade then and maybe we wouldn't.
The General told the Congressman that
he would go quietly, he just wanted to go with some measure of dignity. The thug
Biambi leaned over and said he wasn't a thug. His family had feelings, after
all. Would our President's people buy the deal? Had we got what we had come
for?
The Dominican General with the fat neck and piggy eyes greeted us on
his side of the border and we sat with him on kitchen chairs placed in the
middle of the road and exchanged pleasantries. I could hear the whine of the
Bell JetRangers and just wanted to get going. I admired the Congressman. Whether
he was flirting with a pretty girl or earnestly talking to some tin-pot dictator
he was always on message. When we were finally back in American hands, the young
civilian crewman handed us bottles of designer water from a cooler. The cover
for this enterprise was an executive ferry service, like there were any
executives in this neck of the woods. The crew worked for somebody spooky and
seemed to be enjoying themselves. We lifted off from the Landing Zone and the
troops and curious kids grew smaller and finally disappeared.
From a
height, you couldn't see that anything was wrong at all.