Thirty metres sounded very low.
William Grey laughed. ‘It’s not dangerous. When I’m spraying crops I fly six metres above the ground. If you look down to the right you can see the road between Garissa and Liboi. Only passable with four-wheel drive. And this is Dadaab.’
A sea of roofs spread out on either side of the plane in absolutely straight lines that showed this was a UN-sanctioned slum, not some improvised, chaotic version like Kibera.
‘Holy Moses,’ the pilot said, over the headphones. ‘It’s grown a hell of a lot since last time.’
The roofs stretched towards the horizon.
‘Drought, famine and civil war,’ Halenius said. ‘Médecins sans Frontières estimate that there’ll be almost half a million people here by the end of the year.’
At that moment his mobile buzzed. He picked it up and his lips turned white again. Annika’s heart began to race.
‘Fly to -0.00824, 40.968018,’ he read, slowly and clearly.
‘What else?’ Annika said.
‘Wife Annika to put money in driver’s seat.’
She pressed the headphones to her ears. ‘Say again.’
‘You’re to put the money on the driver’s seat.’
‘Driver’s seat?’
‘It doesn’t say anything else.’
Here it was then, the handover location. On the driver’s seat. She couldn’t breathe.
William Grey was tapping at an instrument on the panel, and scratching his head.
‘Problems?’ Halenius asked.
‘They’ve chosen a nasty spot,’ he said. ‘Just a couple of hundred metres from the Somali border, right on the equator. Look, latitude 0.00, longitude 40.9.’
‘South of Liboi?’
‘About forty kilometres south, out in the semi-desert. Do you want to know exactly?’
Halenius shook his head and leaned back in his seat.
The pilot reached for his radio. ‘This is Y-AYH, starting our descent to Liboi,’ he said, to an air-traffic-control tower somewhere.
The sound of the engine changed, the ground came closer, the plane lurched and dropped in the air pockets. A column of camels heading south put their ears back in alarm, Annika saw a tent with a canvas marked ‘UNHCR’. Maybe Frida had decided to put it there.
Liboi appeared below, a street lined with shacks and a few concrete buildings. The plane glided over a bumpy landing strip and carried on south, just above the ground.
Annika put the Ikea blanket back on the floor – it had quickly become too hot.
‘It’s going to hit forty-two degrees this afternoon,’ William Grey said. Liboi disappeared behind them. The savannah rushed past some ten metres below; the plane shuddered in the heat. Annika gripped her seat and stared at the back of William Grey’s head.
‘How much further is it?’ Halenius asked.
The pilot was gripping the control column hard, and didn’t look away from the direction of flight. ‘Half an hour,’ he said. ‘At most.’
Forty kilometres in less than half an hour, so they were flying at something like a hundred kilometres an hour. Annika glanced down: the ground was a brownish-grey blur, without shape or content. Her headphones were silent, no crackle of radio or radar. She could feel the rumbling of the plane’s engine as a vibration in her abdomen. Through the thin seat she could feel the bulk of the tightly packed dollars.
She had been so happy that she had that money in her account. It had given her a sort of freedom, illusory, perhaps, but the simple awareness that it was there meant she could go to work each day of her own free will and know she could stop whenever she wanted.
Her stomach was churning.
Thomas would be desperately disappointed the money was gone. It had been his ticket to a better life, proof that he was worth more, that he could live in a villa by the sea in Vaxholm if he wanted to. Would he be angry? She looked out across the landscape. Just scorched earth and thorny bushes.
‘It ought to be up ahead,’ William Grey said, sounding stressed now.
Halenius squinted at the horizon. His leg pressed against Annika’s. She was staring intently out of her side window.
‘There it is,’ the pilot said.
Annika turned her head and squinted forward.
‘Where?’ Halenius said, craning his neck.
The pilot pointed, and Annika followed his outstretched fingers with her eyes.
He must have been flying a couple of kilometres from the Somali border because now he was banking left, heading directly east.
‘I just need to see the state of the landing strip before I land,’ he said.
Now Annika could see it as well, a narrow line on the ground in front of them. Her pulse started to race and she was having trouble breathing. She felt for Halenius’s hand, found it and squeezed. ‘I can’t do this,’ she said.
‘Yes, you can,’ Halenius said. ‘I’ll help you.’
William Grey flew in over the provisional landing strip, a few metres above the ground. After a couple of hundred metres he pulled a lever and the plane rose again.
‘What?’ Annika said. ‘What’s happening?’
‘The strip’s been used before,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly Heathrow airport, but it’ll be okay to land on. There were a few warthogs halfway along, but they’re gone now.’
He flew over the area in a fairly broad arc, and as he approached the landing strip from the south Annika caught sight of something to the right ahead of them.
The skeleton of a bus. It was so rusty that it was now the same colour as the soil. Plants stuck out through the windows.
She tapped Halenius on the shoulder and pointed. ‘The driver’s seat,’ she said.
William Grey banked sharply and the plane dropped rapidly. Annika’s stomach lurched and she thought she was going to be sick.
‘Hold tight,’ Grey said.
The wheels hit the ground hard. The plane hopped and bounced. Annika’s head hit the ceiling and she ended up half on the floor.
‘Sorry,’ the pilot said.
They rattled over the uneven ground, the engine roaring. It was incredibly hot.
‘You saw the bus?’ Halenius said, through the headphones, and the pilot nodded.
The wrecked vehicle was standing at the southern end of the landing strip. The plane bounced slowly closer, and Annika forced herself to take slow, regular breaths. Fifty metres from the bus the pilot slowed and turned so that the plane was pointing north with the whole of the landing strip stretched in front of it, then switched off the engine.
The silence that followed felt deafening.
Grey took off his headphones. Halenius and Annika followed suit.
‘Well, here we are,’ he said, opening the door and climbing down to the ground.
Halenius helped Annika open her door – it was nowhere near as easy as she had thought when they were in the air. Together the men got the sports bags out. The wind was hot and dry, and her mouth filled with dust.
The bus had once been blue and white – she could just make out the colours through the rust. All of the windows were missing, although the windscreen had a few fragments of glass. One of the rear tyres was still there, but the front wheel was resting on its rim. A dead bush was sticking out of the radiator.
‘I think I saw a door on the other side,’ Halenius said.
Annika had seen it too. She screwed up her eyes and looked around. Why was it so important that she carry the bags over? Were they being watched?
The heat was making the air around them vibrate. She couldn’t see anything but quivering air and scorched brown thorn bushes.
‘It’s probably best to make two trips,’ Halenius said, but Annika shook her head.
She’d rather break her back than have to do this more than once.
She grabbed hold of the bags. Her knees almost buckled, but she forced them to obey her. She felt her spine contract as the handles cut into her palms. An insect caught in her hair.
Sh
e took one step, two, three, and when she was moving, she began almost to jog towards the wrecked bus, the bags hitting her calves. She stumbled but carried on, got caught on a bush and nearly fell.
Four metres from the bus she had to stop and put the bags down while she caught her breath.
It was an old Tata. The headlights had been removed and the holes were like empty eye-sockets.
She took hold of the bags again, barely able to lift them. She walked round the bus, past the dead bush sticking out of the front, and went to the door, where she dropped the bags on the ground.
She took a couple of deep breaths.
The door was still there. It was open, folded back, the glass long since gone. Inside the wreck she could see the rusty skeleton of two double seats.
She climbed cautiously into the vehicle.
The rear was empty, nothing but rust and dust and rubbish, and the remnants of a green vinyl seat. Towards the front the engine compartment formed a raised area, with the driver’s seat alongside it.
She breathed out. ‘Wife Annika to put money in driver’s seat,’ she said aloud.
She got out, grabbed the first bag with both hands and carried it into the bus. The chair cushion was missing, so she put the bag on the floor below the steering wheel. She took a breath, then went and got the second bag and put it on top of the first. Then she stood for a few moments, looking at her money and feeling nothing.
She turned away, jumped out of the wreck and ran back towards the plane. Halenius was holding the video-camera, filming her.
William Grey got back into the pilot’s seat. ‘Let’s go!’ he yelled, and started the engine again.
Halenius tossed the video-camera on to her seat and caught her in his arms. ‘I don’t regret it either,’ he whispered, in her ear, above the noise of the engine.
She wriggled out of his arms, got into the plane and pulled the door closed.
Halenius had barely time to sit down before they started to move.
William Grey revved the engine as hard as he could. The plane groaned and bounced. Annika put on her headphones, looked out through the side window and saw a black vehicle driving across the savannah, a big black Jeep heading straight towards them.
‘Look!’ she yelled into her microphone, and pointed.
‘The Toyota Land Cruiser,’ Halenius shouted. ‘Faster, for fuck’s sake!’
The plane shuddered and left the ground. The engine shrieked as they climbed into the sky, sharply and steeply. Annika was pressed back in her seat, now there was no solid bag of money behind it. The pilot banked hard to the west, away from Somalia and into Kenya, and on the ground Annika saw the black vehicle stop at the southern end of the landing strip. A man dressed in khaki got out of the driver’s door and ran to the wreckage of the bus. She saw him disappear round the other side, and a moment later the ground exploded beneath them. The air turned brilliant white. Halenius let out a shout and the plane was hit by the pressure-wave. A huge pillar of smoke was rising from where the bus had been standing. The Land Cruiser was ablaze and the ground was shaking. She fumbled for something to cling to.
‘What the hell was that?’ William Grey yelled.
The plane was lurching and shrieking as if it were caught in a storm. Halenius’s face was shiny with sweat. ‘Someone had had enough of Grégoire Makuza,’ he said tightly.
The sound of the engine changed, becoming shrill and restless.
‘Good Lord!’ William Grey said, wrestling with the controls. ‘I hope we can make it back to Liboi.’
‘The ransom money,’ Annika whispered. ‘Now they’ll never let him go.’
Chapter 22
She was in the sky, which was white. She was floating high up, nestled in cloud. Everything around her was silent. She took off the headphones but couldn’t hear the engine, just the faint whistle of a distant wind, a winter’s day through an ill-fitting window. She was bathed in light: everything had dissolved. High up a bird was drifting – it looked like an eagle. No, it wasn’t an eagle, it was a kite! It was a kite shaped like an eagle, a brown sea-eagle, and it was flying high among the clouds, so light it might have been made of air. A little boy was standing on the ground far below, holding it. He was so careful with the lines, and he was moving his arms to make the kite dance, and the birds swirled around the boy, calling and chirruping. Annika smiled at him – he was so sweet.
She hit the seat with a thud and slid on to the floor of the plane. Halenius landed on top of her, the engine howled and the wheels slid as they careered across the ground. She put her hands over her head and forgot to breathe.
Finally they stopped. The engine died.
‘Holy macaroni,’ William Grey said. ‘That was close.’
Halenius sat up, then helped Annika up from the floor. Her back hurt.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘Liboi,’ Halenius said. ‘William has to check if the plane’s been damaged.’
‘They blew up the bus,’ she said. ‘The money’s gone. Who did it? Who blew up the bus?’
William Grey was looking at Halenius. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘Who did?’
‘A qualified guess? The Americans.’
‘How did they know where we were going?’
‘My text messages were all forwarded to Interpol in Brussels, so they must have known. But that doesn’t really explain things. They must have had their eye on that landing strip already. The whole bus must have been primed to explode. That’s not the sort of thing you can do in a hurry.’
‘They knew,’ Annika said. ‘They knew the ransom money was there.’
‘The USA is at war against terrorism,’ Halenius said. ‘And they weren’t the ones who started it.’
William Grey got out of the plane and went to talk to a soldier with a large automatic rifle on his back. A sea of people was approaching from the town, men and children of all ages, women in hijabs and burkas. They circled the plane and soon filled the runway.
The pilot opened the door on Annika’s side of the plane. She looked at him through a veil of tears. ‘Now he’s never coming back,’ she said.
‘There’s a man here who wants to talk to you,’ he said.
The soldier with the automatic rifle walked over. People crowded behind him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
‘Who are you?’ the soldier asked in perfect English. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’
Annika opened her mouth to speak, but could only sob.
He was gone. If he was still alive the kidnappers would torture him to death. They’d want revenge for the explosion and their dead leader – oh, God, she hoped he was already dead. She covered her face with her hands.
Halenius stepped up beside her. ‘We’re here for an aid project,’ he said. ‘The Swedish International Development Agency.’
People were shouting and waving – Annika could see them through a haze. It was incredibly hot. The sun was at its zenith, the light corrosive and white. She was crying helplessly, unable to stop.
‘Your papers?’ the soldier said to William Grey, who handed him the flight permits.
The soldier read intently for several minutes.
He would never be coming back to her, and not just because of the explosion. He would never have been the same as he was: the man she had married was long gone, even before the ransom money had disappeared.
Through her tears she looked towards the horizon, towards the south, into the caustic light. She thought she could make out the pillar of smoke, could smell burning.
‘Come with me,’ the soldier eventually said.
‘Can I stay?’ William Grey said. ‘I don’t really want to leave the plane.’
Halenius put his arm round her shoulders but she shrugged him off.
The whole crowd, several hundred people, followed them across the runway towards a group of cracked concrete buildings.
‘What a fuss,’ Halenius said. ‘You’d think they’d never seen a plane before.’
T
he man stopped and turned towards Halenius. ‘Only military planes,’ he said. ‘You’re the first private plane to land in Liboi.’
Halenius looked away.
The ground was covered with stones and rubbish, torn-off branches and car tyres. Annika stumbled several times. She could see houses in the distance, low and white, a goat, people resting in the shade, trees with leathery leaves, fences of chicken-mesh and barbed wire.
The sky was so high, endless.
The soldier led them to a fenced-off yard with a large, round bamboo hut at its centre. She staggered inside, the darkness intense after the sunlight outside. The walls were lined with battered, flowery chintz sofas, she sank on to the nearest one and put her hands over her face. She felt her body shake as tears trickled through her fingers. The air was completely still. It was a hundred degrees outside. An insect was buzzing somewhere.
Thomas was sitting in his office in the council building in Vaxholm, the sun shining on his face and broad chest. He was so young, thinner back then. She was interviewing him, and he was speaking in stuffy, bureaucratic Swedish. She interrupted and asked, ‘Do you always talk like that?’
And he replied, ‘It took me a bloody long time to learn how to do it.’
Three men in military uniforms were standing in front of her in the hut, heavy guns strapped to their waists.
‘So, you are from Sweden?’ the officer in the middle said. ‘For an aid project?’
They stood there, feet wide apart, with all the power bestowed by firearms.
‘We’re here to evaluate the collaboration between the UN and the World Food Programme,’ Halenius said, shaking hands with all three.
‘Really?’ the soldier said. ‘How?’
Annika got to her feet and walked up to him, her eyes stinging. ‘We’re here to look for my husband,’ she said, ‘and it’s your fault he’s gone.’
All eyes turned towards her. Halenius took hold of her upper arm but she pulled free.
‘And the aid project?’ the soldier said. He was wary, his tone suspicious.
‘He was kidnapped here ten days ago,’ Annika said. ‘He landed at this airstrip, just like we did, and he was promised protection and security from you!’ She pointed at the man in front of her and felt herself turning into an angry little animal, a vicious creature with sharp teeth. ‘You promised to protect him and the others, but what have you done? You found his amputated left hand, that’s what!’
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