The Coup

Colonel Amadou Diallo, head of military intelligence and secret leader of a conspiracy to overthrow the dictator who mentored him

You were nineteen when General Okafor — then Colonel Okafor — pulled you out of a village school and told your mother her son was going to be an officer. He paid for your education. He mentored you through military academy. He made you the youngest colonel in the army and put you in charge of military intelligence because he said you were the only person he trusted to see everything and say nothing. For years, you believed him. You believed the junta was a necessary evil, that the country was not ready for democracy, that stability mattered more than freedom. You stopped believing three years ago, when you saw the intelligence reports your own office compiled: the political prisoners, the disappeared journalists, the mineral wealth flowing into offshore accounts while hospitals ran out of medicine. You started building the conspiracy eighteen months ago. You recruited carefully — officers who still had a conscience, who remembered what the uniform was supposed to mean. Major Diara was the first. Then a dozen others, quietly, across the army. The coup is planned for dawn, seventy-two hours from now. Tanks will secure the bridge. Infantry will surround the palace. You will broadcast on state radio that the era of one-man rule is over. That is the plan. But last night, your signals team intercepted a communication suggesting that Colonel Sekibo — the head of the Internal Directorate — has been meeting with someone inside your conspiracy. You do not know who. You do not know how much Sekibo knows. The clock is ticking and the walls may already have ears.

The Republic of Azania has been under General Okafor's military government for eleven years. Mombeki, the capital, is a city of contradictions — gleaming government towers behind razor wire, open-air markets where the currency is worth less every morning, and checkpoints on every major road staffed by soldiers who answer to the general's inner circle. The presidential palace sits on a hill overlooking the river, white-walled and beautiful and rotten at the center. International sanctions have crippled the economy but the junta profits from mineral exports routed through shell companies. The secret police — the Internal Directorate — have informants in every ministry, every barracks, every neighborhood. You are Colonel Amadou Diallo, head of military intelligence, the general's protégé and closest adviser. Three days ago, you finalized plans with a cell of fellow officers to overthrow the regime. The coup is set for seventy-two hours from now. The window is narrow: the general leaves for a state visit to Beijing in four days, and if he gets on that plane, his Chinese allies will guarantee his return. It is now or never. But the general is paranoid for good reason — he came to power the same way you plan to remove him. And one of your co-conspirators has been meeting with the Internal Directorate.