The Contractors Who Go Where Governments And Armies Can’t Or Won’t

Four miles out of town, Booyse’s car broke down, and Booyse radioed for help. Juba is a dirt grid on the Nile, a mega-village of several hundred thousand. It lacks municipal water, sewers, and electric power. The company’s compound stands near the center. The radioman there once showed up in a pink suit and tie. He informed Booyse that a mechanic would be dispatched to solve the problem. The arrival time was another matter, and Booyse did not ask. For hours he waited with his team beside the road. Then suddenly the radioman called againâ€"this time about a deadly explosion in a local street market said to be littered with dangerous munitions. The United Nations asked G4S to intervene fast. Booyse commandeered the ambulance and rushed back to town.

The market is called Souk Sita. It occupies a junction of footpaths and dirt tracks in a neighborhood known as Khor Williamâ€"a garbage-strewn district of shacks and mud huts inhabited largely by impoverished soldiers and their families, and centered on decrepit military barracks belonging to the S.P.L.A. Some of the children thereâ€"maybe homeless, and certainly wildâ€"spend their days collecting scrap metal to sell to Ugandan dealers, who occasionally show up in a truck to buy the material for penny-on-the-dollar cash, or for ganja, a potent form of marijuana, apparently laced with chemicals. Routinely the scavenged metal includes live ordnance. That morning the Ugandan traders had arrived as usual, andâ€"in the likeliest scenarioâ€"a boy perhaps 10 years old had accidentally detonated a medium-size device while trying to dismantle it. The explosion had killed him and three other boys of about the same age, along with one of the Ugandan adults.

Booyse arrived at Souk Sita at 3:30 P.M., five hours after the explosion. By then the bodies had been taken to the morgue, and all that remained of the carnage was a small crater and some bloody shoes. Booyse’s immediate problem was to remove the visible ordnance before dark, only three hours away, because the place was obviously dangerous and could not be cordoned off. Treading softly among the munitions, he counted three 82-millimeter mortar rounds, two 62-millimeter mortar rounds, seven 107-millimeter rocket warheads, one complete 107-millimeter rocket (fuzed and fired and therefore rigged to blow), seven 37-millimeter anti-tank high-explosive incendiary projectiles, a hand grenade with a sheared-off fuze, and a heavily dented rocket-propelled grenade. He instructed his crew to take a thin-skinned metal box from the ambulance and fill it initially with a few inches of sand to create a stabilizing bed for the ordnance. Over the next few hours he gently laid the items into the box, cradling the pieces and snuggling them into periodic supplements of sand. He drove off with the load at dusk, taking care not to jostle the box on Juba’s atrocious streets, and deposited the lot in a purpose-built bunker at a G4S logistics base on the north side of town.

In the morning he returned with his team and continued with the surface cleaning, gathering scrap metal into piles, and finding plenty of small-arms ammunition. Two days later, when I first met him, he was still at itâ€"a bearded figure in sunglasses and bandanna working with one of his de-miners in intense heat while the rest of the crew went door-to-door to ask about other munitions and to try to establish the identities of the victims. Booyse invited me into the work area, saying, “It’s probably safeâ€"just please don’t bang your feet on the ground.” We stood by the crater. He guessed it had been made by a medium-size mortar. His de-miner swept a patch of ground with a detector that squealed loudly. Booyse raked the patch and uncovered a spoon, a nut, a nail, a twisted wire bundle, and several AK-47 rounds. Leaning on the rake and sweating, he said, “Ach, you just get more and more the more you go down.” But the chance of finding anything large was small. The door-to-door search was hardly better. That morning the team had found five pieces of unexploded ordnance, but two had disappeared before they could be collected. Most of the residents questioned had professed ignorance, and a few had demanded cash. With more fatigue than humor Booyse said, “Because, you know, the African five-point plan is ‘What’s in it for me?’ ”

Four days after the accident, the names of the dead remained unknown, and the South Sudanese government could not be roused to care. This was now high on the list of concerns, because for the U.N. no job is finished until the paperwork is complete. With Booyse busy securing the market, G4S managers decided that someone should go to the morgue to see what could be learned directly. For this they enlisted the company’s indispensable man, a typically tall Dinka named Maketh Chol, 34, who first went to war in 1987 at the age of 9, and nowâ€"in street clothes, as a serving S.P.L.A. lieutenantâ€"works as the chief liaison officer and fixer for G4S. The Dinka constitute the dominant tribe of South Sudan, whose men are born to rule and taught to disdain menial labor, but Chol is not just one of themâ€"he is also a member of LinkedIn. On his page he lists G4S as a recreational company, but that is merely a mistake. Feel free to contact him directly if you have a good commercial idea. Beyond his duties at the headquarters compound he is an energetic entrepreneur. Among his ventures already, he owns a sewage-trucking company that empties the septic tanks of certain establishments in town and disposes of the waste somewhere somehow. And he would be a good partner in other affairs. He speaks at least four languages. He is reliable. He has a wife and three young children whom he supports in Kenya because the schools are better there. He spent 20 years in a particularly brutal liberation warâ€"two million dead among huge populations uprootedâ€"but he seems not to know that he should be traumatized.