Pete Nimec and Vince Scull waited under the hot yellow sun in the market of Le Grand Village, holding pain beurre they had bought on their way into the plaza, the pan fried, heavily buttered breads greasy in their wax-paper wraps. There were throngs of people around them. Hawkers, shoppers, beggars. Many of the latter were children with the filmy stares of oncho—a parasitic river blindness—who squatted at the periphery of the square. In a wildlife dealer’s stall some yards to the right, a bright green parrot fluttered on its perch in a crude screen cage atop a display table fashioned of two wooden barrels that had been bound together with a thick hemp rope. Fluffs of emerald down clung to the cage’s rusty metal bars like dandelion seeds. The newspapers lining the bottom of the cage were covered with a thick dry encrustation of droppings and cracked nut shells. A second parrot lay unmoving in the layer of waste, dead or close to dead. In a bloody canvas sack hanging from a post above the cage, an unseen creature released a shrill animal cry as it thrashed repeatedly against the cloth in a vain struggle to free itself.

Nimec turned from the stall, swallowing a bite of his fry bread without appetite. It was like he’d hurled the food down into a ditch. The happy traveler.

He desperately missed Annie and the kids.

He looked over Scull’s shoulder toward the north end of the outdoor market and spotted Steve DeMarco and Andy Wade approaching through a crowded aisle. They were a conspicuous pair. Both men had on pastel short-sleeved shirts, while the Gabonese strongly preferred colorful prints . . . or simple undyed kaftans in the case of the population’s devout Muslims. DeMarco’s whiteness and Wade’s blackness made them even easier standouts. Whites in this country were almost always foreigners—expats or short-term visitors—and lived in a sort of proximate separation with the nationals. Stranger that he was here, Nimec’s study of his mission briefs, and his first-hand impressions of the place, pointed toward very little true social mingling between people of different races. They shared the same streets, stayed at the same hotels, and ate at the same restaurants in self-segregated clusters. What interactions they had seemed driven mainly by commerce and politics.

The relaxed companionability of the two Sword ops as they walked together would leave observers with scant doubt they were of another place and culture.

Scull had noticed Nimec looking past him.

“See anybody?” he said.

“Yeah,” Nimec said. “DeMarco and Wade.”

Scull grunted and bit into his fry bread. He was sweating profusely, his sparse hair pasted to his head, dark rings of moisture staining the underarms of his shirt.

“Ackerman’s on his way in, too,” he said. “Coming from behind you.”

Nimec gave him a nod. That accounted for everybody except Conners, who was decoying.

He and Scull waited in the pressing afternoon heat and humidity. After a few moments the men reached them.