DESERT BURIAL

An American geologist, licking his wounds in Mali, is pressed into service by an angel of mercy and an evil agent of Big Business. Or Government. Whatever.

The desert and the piteous, stoic refugees of Saharan Africa distinguish this first novel that takes on ethnic warlords, cynical international businesses, UN bureaucrats, the intelligence community, and sundry opportunists hoping to get rich off the disposal of nuclear waste. Ty Campbell is the morose scientist living in a box in the Malian wasteland, monitoring the groundwater and mourning the murder of his wife by sub-Saharan marauders. His weird and solitary world is disrupted by the establishment of a nearby camp for refugees fleeing the bloodthirsty madness of a stalemated civil war. The refugees have lost all links to the world’s rescue machinery save for the labors of Lila, a scrappy young woman who will not give up, even though she has nothing to give but her wits and her formidable will. Lila draws Ty into the Africans’ seemingly hopeless dilemma by her example and then presses him to cooperate with Timbuktu Earthwealth, newcomers digging into the desert bedrock under the direction of Bud Van Sickle, an American with ties to the intelligence community. Van Sickle can do much for the Malians if Ty will agree to pose as a disinterested expert and take a place on the international panel with the power to decide on a dumping site for all the world’s radioactive waste. And, for the sake of the refugees, he does. As aid flows into the camp, Ty flies back to the first world and, after training in a semiofficial boot camp for spooks, learns how to pass for a technocrat and proceeds to deliberative sessions in Switzerland. There are field trips to the three possible dumping sites, all complicated by protests under the direction of a supermodel turned supergreen. Everything comes to a boil back in Mali, where the warlords have resumed their battle.

Much is bitten off and most is chewed, but things end rather hastily in a Bondish way that betrays the wonderfully somber beginnings.