End Game Read online

  July 5 2018, Masini, Uganda:

  218 people are massacred when the Lord’s Resistance Army attack an undefended hospital. Amongst the dead are 32 American medical volunteers.

  September 12, UN Security Council:

  The US announces its plan to eradicate the Lord’s Resistance Army once and for all. But it will mean military intervention in China’s African sphere of influence. The message from the Chinese is keep out.

  October 17, Wall Street:

  Stock prices tumble as a wave of uncertainty sweeps US markets. Memories of the collapse a decade ago are still fresh, and Washington is prepared to do what it takes to prop up America’s banks. But the government’s concern is that this time the turmoil is orchestrated. That someone is deliberately undermining the US markets.

  Three unrelated incidents, or the opening moves in a much larger confrontation between two superpowers?

  With hawks and hardliners on both sides keen to provoke conflict, the crisis escalates inexorably. US ambassador Marion Ellman must defuse the situation before it is to late. She knows that the first shot fired will have catastrophic consequences, but with American and Chinese carrier groups massing off the Horn of Africa, her time is running out…

  Will the world’s two superpowers pull back from the brink, or is this the end game?

  Matthew Glass remains anonymous – though many people who have read his books have speculated that he might be an insider who cannot reveal his true name. The critically acclaimed Ultimatum, his first novel, was published by Atlantic Books in 2009. He lives somewhere in the UK. End Game is his second novel.

  END GAME

  END GAME

  MATTHEW GLASS

  First published in the UK in 2011 by Corvus,

  an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Matthew Glass, 2011. All rights reserved.

  The moral right of Matthew Glass to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84887-774-0 (hardback)

  ISBN: 978-1-84887-775-7 (trade paperback)

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-266-9

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  END GAME

  prologue

  Masindi, Uganda

  July 5, 2018

  PEOPLE BEGAN ARRIVING at daybreak. They came along the dirt roads and tracks leading into the town, some on foot, some in brightly painted trucks that bounced in and out of potholes, bringing the products of the local countryside, maize, chillies, sweet potato, okra, tomatoes, onions, gourds. They spread their wares on rugs in the marketplace. Business began, as it did every Thursday. A group of policemen stood by, lazily leaning on their rifles and exchanging remarks with the traders. The colonial-era shopfronts around the market were faded and peeling, bearing handwritten signs. The Bamugisa Barber Shop. Honest Brothers General Store. The shopkeepers waited in the doorways and bantered with the country people, enticing them inside.

  By four o’clock it was over. The market emptied. The people who had come into the town made their way back into the countryside. The shopkeepers watched them go.

  Night fell. The bare red dirt of the streets turned inky black. Lights glowed for a while in the shops and then went out.

  And then they came. Out of the scrub north of the town. Twenty-five, maybe thirty. They wore green fatigues. Some were tall, lean, in their late teens or twenties. Others were children. They carried machetes and rough wooden clubs. The older ones had Kalashnikovs.

  In the Masindi Hotel, a colonial building dating from the 1920s, a few westerners were drinking in the bar. The town had nothing much of interest for tourists. Travellers who stopped in Masindi were usually on their way to the Murchison Falls, sixty miles to the northwest, or on their way back. A couple of the drinkers were aid workers from the town’s hospital, where an American medical charity, Health for All, supplemented the government service.

  But the hotel wasn’t the objective of the group that had come in from the bush, and they slipped silently past it, hugging the shadows and ignoring the lights and the sound of voices from the bar. One of them knew the town and was leading the others. They used the darkest streets, avoiding the police station. They streamed through the empty market and past the shops, now shuttered, that surrounded it. Finally they stopped.

  Further along the street a naked bulb hung at the entrance to the hospital compound. Inside the fence, a row of long, barracks-like wards stood in the darkness. Beyond the wards were the living quarters of the foreign staff.

  The leaders of the group exchanged words. One of them went up the street and looked and came back. There was no sign of a guard at the gate. More words were exchanged. Then the adults amongst them grabbed hold of the children, in case they should try to back off, and they moved up the street and went in.

  The killing began with machetes and clubs. The screams of the patients woke the four guards who were asleep in their shack in the compound. They had pistols. Gunfire broke out. Twenty minutes later a group of police arrived in an open-top vehicle and were mown down by two of the attackers who had been left at the gate, while behind them the frenzy of killing in the compound continued. Soldiers from the regional army barracks joined the assault. They stormed the entrance, losing a number of their me
n in the street. Inside, they had to fight for the hospital ward by ward. Then they had to fight for the grounds. It wasn’t until dawn that they took back control.

  The light of morning revealed the death toll. Two hundred and eighteen bodies were found in the hospital, the living quarters and the grounds. Most had been clubbed or hacked to death. At least as many again were injured. Six attackers were taken alive with wounds of varying severity.

  Word of the massacre was already being fed to the world over mobile phone. News outlets around the globe carried interviews with confused tourists who had awoken to the sound of gunfire from across the town. The district’s civil governor made a statement that admitted an incident had taken place but gave no details. In the army infirmary, the captured attackers were being interrogated. Lying on bloodstained stretchers, they claimed to be fighters of the Lord’s Resistance Army, making no attempt to hide their identities. The district military commander was skeptical. LRA activity had been subdued over recent months, and the group had never struck so far from the heartland of its insurgency in the far north of the country. Masindi was over a hundred miles from the jungle borderlands of Uganda, Congo and Sudan where the LRA had waged a thirty-year war of terror. It had always been safe from such attacks.

  Yet the injured prisoners persisted in their story, even when their interrogators used blows to try to beat an alternative version out of them. They seemed to want to be sure the authorities knew. And the killing method and the presence of children amongst the attackers were consistent with the practices of the LRA. It seemed that the LRA had chosen to strike the town as a way of sending a message to the government that it was still in business, more dangerous than ever.

  Over the next day, the bodies were identified. Of the dead, one hundred and seventeen were patients, fifty-nine were hospital staff, twenty-four were police and soldiers, and eighteen were the corpses of attackers.

  Amongst the fifty-nine dead staff, thirty-two were citizens of the United States.

  1

  HE OPENED THE file. It wasn’t the first time he had looked at it. He glanced down the lines of the first page, a summary of the known sequence of events. The following two pages were intelligence background on the LRA and the regional political situation. The next page was an outline of possible options for response from his national security advisor. After that were pictures and short biographies of each of the dead Americans, four to a page. There were eight pages of them. Another three had died of their wounds since the file had been prepared, and a number of others were in critical condition.

  He looked through the pictures. Then he turned back to the page that set out the options for response. He had issued an immediate condemnation of the killings. One of the options was to leave it at that. There were several others. In the wake of the attack, the Ugandan government had called on the US to aid it in eradicating the LRA.

  He read over the options, thinking through the implications.

  Thomas Paxton Knowles was a tall man of fifty-eight with a jutting, square jaw and a full head of greying hair. President for eighteen months, he had spent twenty years of his life making his way towards the White House, the last four as governor of Nevada.

  Like any president, Tom Knowles had inherited a ready-made complexity of foreign involvements the day he walked into the Oval Office. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan US forces were still deployed in and around Kabul, supposedly acting as advisors and trainers to the Afghan army, and American drone aircraft were a constant feature in the skies over the Pakistan border. Five years on from the Georgia crisis the presence of US troops remained a constant irritant with the Russians, without any obvious exit strategy. Closer to home, what had started as a program of joint US and Mexican border patrols had turned into a fortified deployment with a virtual war being fought with armed drugs gangs on both sides of the border and frequent US casualties. Colombia, Liberia, Haiti and the Philippines were all places where there were US missions of varying sizes.

  That was a good long list and it posed enough challenges without requiring any additions. The Masindi Massacre was one in a litany of outrages by a longstanding, local insurgency in a distant country in which a group of Americans had happened to get involved. The charity had been warned by the State Department about sending people to serve in Uganda. It would be perfectly possible for him to do nothing beyond the condemnation he had already issued.

  But thirty-two Americans – rising to thirty-five, and possibly going higher – had been killed in cold blood. And who was to say the LRA hadn’t targeted the hospital compound in Masindi because they knew Americans would be there?

  A good part of the Republican Party was demanding some kind of response, but Knowles didn’t need political pressure to make him feel the need for action. From all he had been told in the last couple of days, the LRA was a cancer on humanity. It had no apparent program beyond the murder, rape and robbery of the local populations in a terrorized triangle of territory in northern Uganda, southern Sudan and northeast Congo. Like some kind of hideous reptile, it survived in the dark crevices created by the political tensions between the three affected states. Every time the group seemed to be dying away, it flared back into life, usually with a spectacular atrocity like the Masindi Massacre. Peace talks had brought the insurgency to the brink of cessation a number of times, only to collapse when the leaders of the group disappeared into the jungle to restart hostilities. At other times the Ugandan army had mounted a drive to eradicate it but had ground to a halt in the dense jungle of the area through inadequate manpower and lack of resolve from the other two countries where the LRA found temporary shelter before reinfiltrating its Ugandan base. And while this was happening, the ranks of the insurgents were constantly replenished by the abduction of children and their forced conversion into soldiers. There were stories of children being taken back to their villages and compelled to kill their own parents to prove their loyalty to their abductors. After thirty years of fighting this monster the Ugandan authorities felt powerless to eradicate it.

  Knowles could envisage himself agreeing to the Ugandan government’s request. If he gave the go-ahead, US troops could probably be on the ground in weeks. Eradicating the LRA was a clear objective, defined, contained, with a short time horizon, a willing local government, and an unambiguous case for intervention in the name of humanitarian goals. He hadn’t seen a military assessment yet, but he didn’t think an outfit like the LRA would pose much of a threat to the US army. His national security advisor, Gary Rose, thought likewise. The situation in Uganda had nothing in common with the awful embroilments in Afghanistan and Georgia, where military success was prevented by constant political double-dealing and corruption.

  But Tom Knowles was a politician, not a crusader. As the standard bearer of the centrist wing of the Republican Party, he had taken the Republican nomination two years previously after a bruising set of primaries that narrowed down to a straight runoff with Mitch Moynihan, an Idaho senator out of the hardcore Republican right. The election he fought the following November was the first in which the recession that came out of the credit crunch of ’08 and its long, lingering shock waves were beginning to seem a thing of the past. The pendulum had swung back and the country right across the political spectrum, left as well as right, responded to a rhetoric of smaller government, tax cuts and reduced federal spending. Knowles carefully kept his program moderate. He crafted a kind of reverse-Obama coalition of Republicans and centrist Democrats that swept him to power. His first eighteen months in the Oval Office had delivered economic stability and rising markets. That was the first thing the American electorate demanded of its president and would be until the trauma of the economic crisis was a lot more distant still. Rectitude and trust, as he said in just about every one of his speeches on the economy. Growth without overheating. That was the focus, a sound and stable domestic economy, and that was what he aimed to deliver. New foreign adventures weren’t supposed to be on the menu.

 
Yet presidents aren’t elected so as not to raise their eyes beyond the horizon, even presidents elected to steer a steady course away from the reef of a monumental economic trauma. Like all his predecessors, Tom Knowles took his place in history extremely seriously. He did have an international agenda, although not one that he had talked about much in the election or in the eighteen months since he had been sworn in. Together with his national security advisor and defense secretary, he felt that over the last eight years the US had led too little, had been too much interested in consensus and too little prepared to act. It was as if the country had looked at what it had done during the Bush years, saw the results, and been fearful of doing the same again, so fearful that it hadn’t trusted itself to do anything on its own. It was a fearfulness that made him angry. Knowles believed that the world needed leadership now more than ever before. As China and India and Brazil rose to prominence – each with its different perspective and political culture – he felt strongly that the world needed someone to set out certain common, ineluctable principles and to be prepared to put those principles into action. Rightly or wrongly, Tom Knowles believed that only the United States could play that role.

  The truth was, he couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity than the one the Masindi Massacre presented. It came at the perfect time in his first term, with eighteen months of solid governance behind him to show that he was no trigger happy adventurer and enough time left ahead of him to get the whole thing done before he faced the American people again. None of the current US foreign interventions was of his making and each was bogged down in one way or another, in his view, because of compromises and poor decisions made by previous administrations. This one would be his, one that he could launch, prosecute and bring to a close on his watch, one that would allow him to show how a US military intervention should be done.

  Beyond the effect of freeing the people of north Uganda from a terrorist menace, an intervention against the LRA would make a strong point. It would make the kind of statement Knowles wanted to make about American leadership in the world and about American willingness to exert that leadership when the cause was just.