Ellen laughed, her mouth full of sandwich.
“Anyway,” Frank said, “Speke showed Mutesa the first firearms he ever saw in his life. Mutesa had him shoot some cows. Then Speke gave Mutesa a carbine, and Mutesa—he was on his throne, in court—he gave the carbine to a page and told him to go outside and shoot somebody and let him know how it worked.”
Ellen stared. “You’re making this up.”
Shaking his head, Frank said, “The page went out, Speke heard a bang, the page came back and said it worked just fine, the fellow was lying out there dead.”
Ellen kept trying to read hoax in Frank’s face, but it simply wasn’t there. She said, “But who did he kill?”
“Nobody knows. It didn’t matter. Listen, if you don’t believe me, you look it up. Speke wrote about it in a book. Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.”
“That’s the most awful thing I ever heard.”
“They haven’t changed much since,” Frank said in gloomy satisfaction.
Finished with lunch, Ellen circled low over the lake while Frank dropped the paper bag of their garbage. Then she turned north, toward the lowering dark coast of Uganda.
Flying along, relaxed from the beer and from the successful conclusion of the bedroom scene, she said, “You worked it this way on purpose, didn’t you? Separating Lew and me.”
“Sure,” he said, comfortable and self-assured. “But we really do need both. The man on the ground to look up close at what’s there. And the aerial surveillance to know what the enemy will be able to see when the time comes.”
The enemy. Despite himself, Frank couldn’t help but view this as a military maneuver. Ellen smiled to herself and flew northward while, beside her, Frank studied the charts. “There’s Dagusi Island,” he said, pointing ahead and slightly to the right. “Stay to the right of it; we’ll go over Macdonald Bay. That’s where the road ends.”
Uganda sloped sharply upward from the lake, heavily forested, unlike the brown scrubland along the Kenyan coast. Macdonald Bay was an irregularly shaped pocket of restless water, glinting and glistening.
Frank had dragged up from the rear seats the khaki canvas bag with his cameras, one of which he selected, screwing a lens on. “The road should be somewhere along the left shore,” he said. “It won’t be much; it hasn’t been used for years.”
“Is that it?”
A faint scar of brown scratched westward from the water’s edge, disappearing almost at once into the trees. “Good eyes,” Frank said, looking through the camera’s viewfinder. “Get down on the deck, let’s take a—”
A jet buzzed them, crossing their route from left to right, going very fast. It was all so sudden and so close that Ellen automatically pulled up, then had to retrim, while the afterimage cleared in her brain. A fighter, with camouflage paint. “What was that?”
“MiG,” Frank said, sounding grim but not yet scared. He held the cameras in his lap. “Ugandan Air Force.”
“What’s he doing?” She craned forward to look all over the sky but couldn’t see him.
“Well, we’re in his airspace. Coming back at three-o’clock level.”
Once again the jet whooshed by, this time more slowly, arcing lazily away at the last instant as Frank gave a big hearty wave and smile out his window. In addition to its registration numbers, the plane had a symbol on the side of the fuselage: a flag shape divided diagonally from bottom left to top right. The upper triangle was green, the lower an orangy-red.
“He’s making me nervous,” Ellen said. “I’m going back over the lake.”
But halfway through her turn, the jet appeared again, sailing by. It was so much faster than they were—and couldn’t slow to their speed without risking burnout—that it was hard to get a clear picture, but she had the impression the pilot had waved this time on the way by. For confirmation, the jet waggled its wings once it was out in front, then lifted into the sky, hurrying away, due west.
“He says we’re okay,” Frank said. “Just tourists flying around.”
“I was afraid we were the ones he was supposed to shoot to see if his guns worked.”
Frank laughed, and Ellen completed the three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, coming in over Macdonald Bay again, this time much lower. The scar was now clearly a road, but it still disappeared under the thick dark-green trees.
“Head northwest,” Frank said, taking pictures.
Below them, the forest was impenetrable, nothing but the thick-leafed branches. Frank lowered the camera. “Thruston Bay over there,” he said, pointing ahead and to the left. “The turntable should be between us and it.”
Traveling very slowly, just clearing the treetops, she turned toward Thruston Bay. “Wait,” she said, throttling back, then had to rev up.
“What was it?”
“I thought I saw something shine.” They were over the bay. Ellen made a tight turn in the sky and headed back over the trees. Frank said, “When you get where you saw it, turn left.”
That would be inland, away from the lake. “Right.”
She saw no glint this time, was not in fact absolutely sure where she’d seen it before. When she felt she must be past it, she turned left, and very soon they crossed a railway: a single pair of tracks and the gleaming line of metal sleepers.
“We’ve gone too far,” Frank said. “The turntable’s between the railroad and the lake.”
Ellen started another turn, the sweep taking them over the highway just north of the track. Down there, three cars were stopped in an odd relationship, like a Chinese ideogram: two black cars at angles to a yellow car between them. A group of men stood in the middle of the road around a lone man.
Ellen stared. “The car—that’s Lew!”
“Holy shit,” Frank said.
One of the men hit the man in the middle with an object of some kind, a stick or pipe or gun barrel. The man fell, and two of the men kicked him, and he curled up like a leech when salt is poured on it.
Frantic, staring around at the unforgiving forest, Ellen cried, “Where can we land? Where can we land?”
“Are you crazy? This is Uganda! Get back to Kisumu, fast!”
Two of the men had looked up, were pointing at the plane. One hurried toward a black car; to radio someone?
Ellen accelerated into the turn, climbing higher into the empty comfortless sky. “We’ll get to Balim,” Frank was saying.
“He’ll know what to do.” He’d undone his seat belt to turn and put the camera bag on the backseat.
Bracing herself, Ellen abruptly pulled back on the stick, and the plane dropped fifty feet like a stone before she accelerated again. She’d been ready for it, but Frank hadn’t. He was thrown violently up against the metal top and flung just as violently down again. “Jesus!” he yelled, scrabbling for something to hold on to. “Watch it!”
“I am watching it, Frank,” she said, and her tone of voice made him stare at her in sudden alarm. The airspeed indicator kept climbing. Not looking at him, she said, “You sent Lew over there today so you could fuck me.”
“It should have been safe!” He was hurriedly trying to get his seat belt snapped. “I told you, we needed both—”
This time she sideslipped, cracking his head smartly against his side window. He yelled, and she said, “Don’t argue with me, Frank. I could kill you up here, and you don’t dare touch me because I’m the pilot. You want another taste?”
“No! Jesus Christ,” he said, trying to hold his head and at the same time brace himself for any conceivable shift in speed and direction. “What’s it for?”
“I want Lew back,” she told him. “And I want you to know how serious I am, Frank.”
“Don’t do it again!”
She didn’t. “I want him back.”
“You’ll get him,” Frank promised, grim and sullen and abashed. “You’ll get him. And welcome to him.”
11
Like Rome, Kampala is built on seven hills, and is in fact named after one of the
m, Kampala meaning “Hill of the Impala,” that graceful harmless antelope of the long curved horns, a peaceful herbivore. Another of these hills is called Nakasero, and on its crest sat the Presidential Lodge, one of many residences the restless, discontented Amin maintained throughout Uganda. In rustic luxury, the Lodge nestled amid mango and gum trees, bougainvillea vines, frangipani, and hibiscus. By day the sweet-smelling groves rang with the laughter of Idi Amin’s children; he had at least twenty-five, by five wives.
Down the hill, farther down the hill, within sight of the windows of the Lodge, was a large lovely open park, a green, four hundred yards wide. On one side of it stood All Saints Church, the See of Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum, who had been murdered personally by Idi Amin on February 17, 1977. Opposite stood the French Embassy and, next to that, a three-story pink building surrounded by barbed wire. This was the State Research Bureau, in an office of which Amin had shot the archbishop in the face, then had phoned one of his useful white men to say, “I’ve lost my temper. I’ve shot the archbishop. Do something.”
Lew was semiconscious, in the trunk of one of the Toyotas, when the two cars drove in at the front gate of the State Research Bureau. He felt fevered, delirious, but was conscious enough to know he was in the worst trouble of his life. He didn’t know, and wouldn’t have been cheered to hear, that someone had once said of the State Research Bureau at Nakasero, “When you go in there, the question is not when or if you will come out. The only question left is when the pain will stop.”
They opened the trunk of the Toyota and pulled him out by his ankles and elbows and hair, letting him fall to the ground and then kicking him for his clumsiness, yelling, “Up! Get up!” in Nubian dialect. Lew curled into a ball, protecting his head and torso, his back shielded by the Toyota, until they stopped kicking him and grabbed his arms to jerk him to his feet. Swimmingly in the glare of the sunlight he saw the green beyond the barbed wire, and what appeared to be the mirage of a cathedral far away. Parked next to the barbed wire, one side dented, was a bus in which, two months ago, a group of hospital nurses had been coming back to Kampala after a dance at Makerere University; State Research Bureau men had stopped it, driven it here, and beat and raped the nurses through the night, releasing them in the morning. There had been no retribution.
Lew was hustled into the building, where a harsh-looking man in Army uniform sat at a reception desk. A Colt .45 was on the desk, easy to his right hand. Lew, blinking, trying to rid his eyes and mind of fuzziness and spots of deadness, looked at that automatic on the desk and licked his puffy lips, tasting blood. But even if he were fully conscious, with all his coordination, grabbing for that gun would be a very stupid move.
“Name?”
“Lew—” He coughed and cleared his throat and tried again. “Lewis Brady.”
He saw the man write it down in a long ledger, the dark parody of a hotel register. The book was thick, the open page in the middle, a dozen names already listed before Lew’s. Reading upside down, blinking and blinking, Lew saw that there were two headings at the top of the page: NAME and CHARGE. Under CHARGE, after his name, he watched the Army man write “Not specified.” Almost all the other entries on the page said the same thing.
“Valuables.”
He gave them everything, but they wanted more than everything and made that clear by hitting him on the sides and the back of the head with gun butts. They wanted his shoes and belt, and when he turned them over he was taken up a flight of stairs to a long wide corridor and told to sit there on a wooden bench. All but two of the men went away, the remaining pair leaning against the opposite wall, frowning at Lew with great intensity, as though their hostility were the only thing they clearly understood.
The half hour on the bench was a very good time; if it was supposed to be a psychological ploy to increase his nervousness, it had quite the opposite effect. Lew began to think again, to recover a bit from the beatings, and to observe the area around himself. He was in a long bare corridor lined with office doors, perhaps a third of them open. From within one office toward the far end came the halting sound of amateurish typing. At intervals along the walls were large notices: SILENCE. Here and there between the demands for silence were hung framed printed slogans and sayings; the one Lew could read said “NO WISDOM IS GREATER THAN KINDNESS. THOSE WHO BUILD THEIR SUCCESS ON OTHERS’ MISFORTUNES ARE NEVER SUCCESSFUL.” It was signed “Mjr Farouk Minawa.”
The least encouraging thing about the corridor was the thick bloodstains along the wall above the bench, just at the height of Lew’s head. Clearly, it was a habit here to beat the heads of seated prisoners against the concrete walls. An abrupt and messy death. Or possibly merely a fractured skull and irreparable brain damage. Lew sat braced to defend himself should either of those men across the way decide to play the game on him; even though he knew resistance was hopeless.
A strange thing about the two men guarding him: the nail on the little finger of each hand was over an inch long, curved and sharp and yellowish-gray, like the talon of a hawk.
After thirty minutes, two new men appeared from down the corridor and said to Lew, “Come with us.” Lew got to his feet, his former guards went away, and he walked between these new men down the corridor to the end and into a large office marked HEAD OF TECHNICAL OPERATIONS, where a thick-faced uniformed man sat at a large table piled with an assortment of junk.
This was Major Farouk Minawa, commander of the State Research Bureau and author of the homilies framed in the corridor. It was Minawa, a Nubian Muslim, who along with the Ugandan Chief of Protocol, Captain Nasur Ondoga, on July 5, 1976, at nine in the morning, went to Mulago Hospital, yanked Mrs. Dora Bloch (the only unrescued Israeli hostage) from her bed, dragged her screaming down three flights of stairs while staff and patients stood by in helpless shock, threw her into a car, drove her twenty miles from Kampala on the road toward Jinja, pulled her from the car, shot her by the roadside, and tried unsuccessfully to burn the body. (The white hair didn’t burn, and was the first clue to her identity.)
There were also three other Research Bureau men in the room, in their uniforms of bright shirts, platform shoes, bell-bottom trousers, dark sunglasses. One of these sprawled on a sofa to one side, drinking a bottle of soda. There were two other sofas, both empty, while the other two Research Bureau men prowled the room like big cats in a zoo. The two who had brought Lew in walked over to one of the empty sofas and sat side by side there, casually crossing their legs, looking around, as though waiting for a bus. Everyone in the room but Minawa had the long nail extending from the little finger of each hand.
Minawa pointed at the carpeted floor in front of Lew. “Sit down.”
“On the floor?”
“Sit down!” Minawa fairly bounced in his chair with his sudden rage.
Sensing movement behind him from one of the roving men, Lew dropped quickly to the floor, bringing his knees up, folding his arms around them. Minawa glared across his messy desk, but when he next spoke, his voice was once more calm. “What did the CIA order you to do in Uganda?”
“The CIA?” In his bewilderment, Lew had one millisecond of joy, in which this would turn out to be somebody’s error and he would simply be released with apologies; but the fantasy didn’t last.
There were rifles, pistols, automatic guns stacked and stuffed under the sofas. One of the seated men took out a knife and studied the blade with great concentration.
“The CIA! The CIA!” Minawa pounded the tabletop. “You think we’re stupid here? You think we’re niggers?”
“I have nothing to do with the CIA,” Lew said.
“You are an American.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Your name is Lewis Brady.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Call me ‘sir’!”
“Yes, sir, my name is Lewis Brady.” To have refused the demand would have invited another beating. It wasn’t fear that kept Lew from wanting another beating, but the knowledge that he wou
ld need to be in the best possible physical and emotional shape for whatever came next; there would clearly be beatings enough without his requesting extra portions.
“In nineteen seventy-four,” Minawa said, referring to a sheet of paper on the table before him, “you were assigned by the CIA to the repressive government of Ethiopia.”
“No, sir,” Lew said. “Ethiopia hired me as an instructor. That had nothing to do with the CIA or any—”
“In nineteen seventy-five,” Minawa interrupted, “the CIA transferred you to the Angolan National Union. You won’t deny that was a CIA operation.”
“If it was,” Lew said, “I didn’t know it.”
The man lying on the sofa said, “You think you’ll kill us, but we can see you.”
“We have lists,” Minawa said. “When you crossed the border, we looked at the list.”
“What list would I be on?”
One of the roaming men, behind Lew at that moment, kicked him painfully in the ribs. “You will call the major ‘sir.’
“I beg your pardon.” The kick made breathing difficult, but Lew tried not to show that. These creatures were more beasts than men, and would be attracted to weakness or fear. He said, “Sir, would you tell me what list my name was on?”
“Mercenaries,” Minawa said, “that our friends have identified as CIA.”
“What friends? Sir.”
“Our friends!” Minawa’s sudden displays of rage were metronomic, seeming to arise at specified intervals regardless of provocation.
“We have many friends,” the man on the sofa said. “And you have no friends at all.”
“The holy rebels of Chad learned the truth about you,” Minawa said, “and that was when you fled to Ethiopia.”
“Chad?” Briefly Lew had been involved in a rebellion in Chad, back in 1974, but why would—? And then it came clear. “Holy rebels” indeed; that was the rebellion financed by Libya. And wasn’t Colonel Gaddafi of Libya very tight with Idi Amin? “Libya,” Lew said.
They didn’t like it that he had seen through their mystery. The man on the sofa looked up at the ceiling as though no longer taking part in the conversation, and Minawa busily moved things around on his messy table, glowering and moving his lips.
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