by MP Miles
Three soldiers stood in a semicircle. Angel guessed they were Acholi from north central Uganda, Obote supporters. Unlike those at the roadblock these looked more disciplined and they were armed. A boy sat cross-legged on the tarmac, his hands on his head.
He looked thin, his hair curling at his shoulders. He had shorts and a faded beige tee shirt with some black writing in large letters on the front. A dusty blue rucksack lay at his feet. A soldier waved a gun at him and the boy started to remove his walking boots. Angel guessed that despite his youthful appearance he was about eighteen years old. He had blond hair.
Angel thought quickly. He had very little time. All three men had weapons pointed at the boy. Their guns had a distinctive shape with a forward curve to the magazine and varnished plywood stocks, pistol grips and hand guards. The weapon was influencing Angel’s course of action. They were AK47s.
Production of the AK had been licensed by the Russians to dozens of countries. Some had been perfectly engineered but many were not. Angel imagined these were most probably Egyptian, not the best but not the worst. Accuracy of Egyptian AKs was ‘good enough’ up to about three hundred metres. Beyond that distance even expert shooters couldn’t put consecutive rounds onto a target.
He looked closer at the men. All the weapons had the stock attached; often they had been removed. It was a small point but Angel recognised it to be in favour of the soldiers. The weapon was more accurate with the stock, but more importantly its cleaning kit lived in the butt. Although renowned for its ruggedness and ability to endure large amounts of foreign matter without failing, the AK did appreciate occasional cleaning. But had they been taught how to strip the weapon? Many users, including the Soviets, simply threw them away if they stopped working. Soviet doctrine said that it should be cheap and disposable. Very few operators went to the trouble of replacing the small parts and springs, as required after every few thousand rounds. Perhaps the weapon would not even fire, and conceivably they may not have any rounds. Under Amin only a few trusted units were allowed ammunition.
Angel had to assume they worked. He needed to be at the service station, grab the boy and then be three hundred metres away out of the effective range of an AK before the soldiers reacted. How long would that take? With the Hilux he could cover that distance quite quickly. A quarter mile was about four hundred metres. Could his two-litre Hilux do a quarter mile in twenty seconds? Maybe when new but now, ten hard years later, it would probably be closer to thirty seconds. And he needed time to get the boy into the vehicle. It could be a total of a minute. Would he be able to create a diversion that gave him sixty seconds to get the boy on board and clear of the range of an AK47?
He looked at the Land Rover parked across the fuel pumps. They were tough vehicles but so was the Hilux, which had a pedigree going back to the Toyopet SB, a one-ton light truck, and like the Land Rover also dated from 1947. The Land Rover’s bodywork was aluminium. If he hit it laterally in between the wheels, rather than at the front or back, the Land Rover would crumple a little, absorbing some shock.
Angel started the Hilux and pulled into the bus station, his back to the service area. He got out of the pickup, untied the goat and pulled it down to the ground. He stroked its head.
“Weeraba. Goodbye, Ekibi.”
An old man stood with three young girls. He may have been caring for his granddaughters, their parents long dead. Angel handed him the rope.
“Ssebo, take the goat. For the girls.”
He sat back in the Hilux and put on his seatbelt. He took the kofia from his head and pushed his hair to the back out of his eyes, rolling up the soft hat and wrapping it around the top of the steering wheel.
Across the road a soldier placed Ralph’s walking boots on the sidewalk. It had to be now. Angel took a deep breath.
Seventeen
Ralph saw a red pickup truck reversing towards the service station at speed. It crossed the main road, the gearbox whining, its momentum building. With a muffled crunch it struck the Land Rover amidships, in between the wheels, pushing it sideways across a petrol pump that snapped backwards and immediately caught fire. The pickup pulled forward sharply, free of the Land Rover but trailing its own tailgate and the Land Rover’s driver’s door.
An explosion rocked the forecourt, the shock wave pushing the pickup further away and throwing the soldiers to their feet. Glass shattered in the garage shop, and smoke and debris covered Ralph on the ground.
Through it all a man appeared. He stood as if on a cloud, the sun shining through the smoke. It illuminated him from behind and dazzled Ralph’s eyes. The man was dressed in a white robe, his long hair flowing either side, his arms outstretched. He appeared to be wearing a strange hat that glittered like a crown of light, or a halo.
Ralph wondered fleetingly if he might be dead. The man called someone’s name. It was his name. He shouted for Ralph.
Ralph stumbled towards him on bare feet and was pushed into the Toyota. The man seemed pleased. He smiled as he accelerated onto the road, heading east.
He started laughing.
“Under a minute,” he said.
Ralph stared at him, unable to speak.
Angel drove hard, the feeble Toyota engine screaming as they re-entered the Nabira Forest. He didn’t want to talk. Angel used English infrequently, aware that when he did it was with the Cockney accent of a boyhood roaming London’s grittier streets, one that stubbornly refused to be polished by an expensive public school in Dorset.
Ralph started to shake. He looked at his feet.
“Where are my shoes? Where are we going?”
Angel said nothing. Ralph watched him concentrating, looking frequently in his mirror. He remembered sitting on the ground and the soldiers ridiculously accusing him of being a spy.
“They asked me to take them off,” he said. “They probably thought it would be harder for me to run away.”
Angel looked at him. Pairs of shoes left by the side of the road had become a symbol during Idi Amin of a life taken by government troops, a warning. In eight years, Amin’s soldiers had murdered an estimated three hundred thousand Ugandans in a Commonwealth country. They had left three hundred thousand pairs of shoes by the roadside. Obote’s troops were just continuing the tradition. It shouldn’t be hard to find Ralph a new pair of boots.
“You were just minutes away from being shot and killed,” Angel said.
“What do you mean?”
Angel needed to cover the thirty-seven kilometres back to Jinja as quickly as possible. A roadblock there at the Nile River bridge would seal them off inside Uganda.
“Be quiet. We’ll talk later. We must cross the Nile as soon as we can. If we can do that we have a chance of reaching Kenya.”
“What do you mean?” Ralph repeated. “Who are you?”
Angel took no notice of him. He’d been driving fast but slowed through the town of Njeru. They were close to the Nile crossing, the most dangerous time. Angel needed Ralph to be alert but he seemed in shock.
“Listen.”
“Hmm.”
“You have been in great danger.”
Angel let that soak in.
“But now you are safe.”
He looked at him consolingly.
“Who were you travelling with?”
“They arrested me for spying. They wanted my money,” Ralph said, and pulled a stained leather wallet from under his tee shirt at the end of an old brown bootlace.
“Did they take your money?” Angel asked.
“No, I said I needed it.”
Angel, amazed that Ralph was alive, realised that he’d been very lucky.
“Who were you travelling with?” he said.
“I got a ride with a truck. They stopped for fuel.”
“From Kampala?”
“No, from the border with Rwanda.”
“The Rwanda
–Uganda border?”
“The Burundi–Rwanda border,” Ralph corrected.
It made sense. Fuel trucks going to landlocked Burundi from Mombasa.
“They left when the soldiers came and pulled me out.”
Angel nodded.
“Somalis?”
“Yes.”
They’d been wise to leave. Ralph hadn’t been such a good talisman after all, more like a target.
“Okay. Now pay attention. If we can get over this bridge we’ll be safe. I can take you all the way to Nairobi. But if they’ve put a roadblock on the crossing we’ll be in trouble.”
Ralph nodded. It was nine in the morning, a busy time with building traffic. A bad time, or possibly in their favour, Angel couldn’t decide.
“Can we just take another bridge?” Ralph asked.
It was a reasonable question, except there wasn’t another bridge.
“This is the Nile crossing point where the river leaves Lake Victoria. There are rapids and falls all the way to Lake Kyoga. The next vehicle crossing is an unreliable ferry at Masindi Port about 250 kilometres north. The next bridge across the Nile isn’t until Karuma Falls, but that’s over three hundred kilometres away. It’s about a four-and-a-half-hour drive.”
Angel thought of the logistics. Three hundred to the next bridge then nearly four hundred back along the northern side of Lake Kyoga, through Saroti and Mbale to the Kenyan border. A seven-hundred-kilometre round trip through dangerous country. His cover story wasn’t designed for that. He had no papers and the now damaged vehicle on false plates had been in an incident with soldiers earlier. He’d entered the country illegally, and he had a conspicuous foreign boy with him.
“It is impossible to drive around,” Angel said. “If we have problems our fallback is to go south through the town toward the lake; it’s only a few kilometres. We’ll dump the vehicle and cross the old railway bridge tonight on foot.”
“Who are you? Why are you helping me?”
Angel didn’t reply. He hadn’t thought this through. He remembered that in training at The Farm, students had been taught that the best and easiest lie was the one as close to the truth as you could get away with. You couldn’t pretend to be an airline pilot if you’d never flown a plane.
“I’m Swazi. I’ve been sent here by my government.”
“Your English is very good, like a real English person.”
“All Swazis speak good English. We have English-run schools.”
Ralph nodded. He’d heard of schools like that in South Africa.
“I haven’t been to Swaziland,” he said.
He watched the traffic as Angel drove.
“How did you know I was in trouble?”
“You mean other than the guns pointed at your head?”
Ralph stared at him.
“I used to be a policeman but now I work for the UN. I monitor what’s happening in this part of Africa from my office in Nairobi and report the situation to my boss.”
He spoke softly.
“I know how much trouble you were in, Ralph.”
They moved slowly but without stopping towards the river. The Nile road crossing ran initially along the top of the Owen Falls Dam to an island midstream. A short bridge crossed the final part of the river.
“Do you have a hat?”
Ralph shook his head. Angel gave him the kofia to cover his blond hair.
“Here, put this on and look at the floor.”
They passed a police vehicle. Ralph glanced at it and at a hydroelectric station below.
“Head down,” said Angel. “Nearly there.”
The Nile looked slow for the longest river in the world, as though it would run out of power and trickle into the sand. From the bridge it still had 6,853 kilometres to flow to the Mediterranean Sea. Ralph didn’t think it would make it that far.
A lorry in front slowed on the final bridge but then accelerated and they were across. It was still over 120 kilometres to the Kenyan border but the routes they could take across country were now infinite. Angel relaxed. He felt tired now after action. He’d had a bad night in a cheap hotel, driven for over ten hours and had a night without sleep waiting to cross the border. The contact at the service station had awakened him but the adrenaline had long worn off.
Thirty minutes from Jinja, in a small town called Mulingilile, Angel stopped by the side of the road and looked at his maps. He yawned.
“Are we stopping?” Ralph asked.
“No, we need to keep moving.”
Angel thought hard. Should they swap vehicles? Should they steal another one here in this town?
“Is it far to the border?” asked Ralph.
“About a hundred kilometres.”
Angel felt their luck couldn’t last much longer. He didn’t know how they would get through a roadblock.
“We are going across country from here. We need to get off the main roads.”
He measured the distance with his thumb on a map.
“It’s a little further and it’ll be slower but the chance of a random police or army stop will be much less.”
Ralph knew what he was thinking. Alone he might talk his way through a roadblock. With Ralph along it would be impossible.
“What if I just get out here and find my own way?” he said.
Angel thought about it before replying.
“No, you’ll never make it.”
“You don’t have to look after me, you know.”
Angel suddenly became angry with the boy. His fatigue and anxiety rose to the surface in a hot bubble.
“You have no idea where you are. These people will shoot you out of curiosity, just to see if your blood is the same colour as mine.”
Ralph reached for the door handle.
Angel held his arm.
“Sit there. If you move, I might shoot you myself.”
He threw the maps on the seat and pulled from the road that ran through town onto a hard dirt track. Red dust, redder than the Toyota, trailed them like smoke from a tank on a firing range.
*
The Toyota ran uncomfortably over corrugations in the dirt track for over an hour through rural hamlets shown on the map on Ralph’s lap as Lugolole, Mayuge, Buganda and Kyemeire. His finger traced their dusty progress. Ralph estimated they had a little over fifty kilometres to go. He looked at the man driving. No words had been spoken since Mulingilile, and Ralph struggled to understand why he’d been so angry with him. He sounded like a policeman. Perhaps that had made him taciturn. It could be down to hours walking the beat in Swaziland, directing traffic, or rounding up stray goats from the road.
He ventured to find out.
“We’re making steady progress.”
It was a positive statement. Ralph expected an encouraging response but the man just grunted. Ralph wondered if he might be slightly simple, even potentially dangerous. He thought to engage him in conversation about their route, or the economy of the villages they were passing through, calmly, in the way that he would talk to an aggressive drunk, but the man surprised him by talking first.
“When do you leave Africa?” he asked, his head tilted to the side, his long braids of hair rattling on his shoulder.
“Oh, um… well, I have a flight from Nairobi next week.”
Angel knew which day next week. He knew the time, the flight number, the aircraft’s call sign and its hours to next overhaul, the name and home address of the rostered captain and the seat already assigned to Ralph. Zelda, the National Intelligence Service’s agent at South African Airways, had, as usual, been very accommodating.
“Do you have somewhere to stay in Nairobi?”
For a moment Ralph wondered if the man was gay. He made light of the question.
“Oh, somewhere cheap I expect.”
The man t
hought for a moment.
“Madame Roche’s is a nice guesthouse. It’s cheap and safe. It’s out of town. Ask for the Aga Khan Hospital. You can’t miss it.”
“I will. Thank you.”
“Do you need money?” the man asked.
Ralph laughed to cover his nervousness.
“Well, that’s kind of you but I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
“How much money do you have left?”
Ralph thought it was a curious question, as if the man knew how much money he’d had to start with.
“Oh, enough I think.”
“How much?”
Ralph hesitated. He kept most of his cash rolled up tightly in a small plastic bag slipped inside the aluminium tube frame of his rucksack. He thought he had about 250 dollars inside his rucksack, the money in his wallet around his neck just a sacrificial decoy. Ralph hoped it would be a significant enough amount to deter thieves from searching further. It would be a pity to lose it but better than losing the lot.
Ralph lied.
“About fifty I think.”
“Dollars?”
Ralph nodded.
Angel said nothing.
“Are you sick?” he asked, and then after a while, “Any fevers? Stomach problems?”
Ralph laughed.
“No, I’m fine thanks.”
“Do you drink local water?”
“Well, yes, I do as a matter of fact.”
“Hmm,” said the man.
He seemed to relax.
“Have you spoken to your father recently?”
Ralph was amazed.
“What? No. Have you?”
Angel looked at him.
“You know you could go to the British Embassy in Nairobi.”
“What for?”
“They would give you a phone number that your father could call at an arranged time. You could send a cheap telegram giving him the details and then speak to him.”
Ralph thought about it.
“There’s no point. We never really speak when I’m at home. I mean, we talk, but not about anything important. You can’t debate with my father. Any opinion other than his own isn’t considered much.”