The main office in the red-brick station building was a long narrow room in which an L-shaped, chest-high, dark-wood counter kept the public limited to one quarter of the available area, nearest the door. There was just enough space beyond the counter for two desks, two chairs, one tall filing cabinet, and a wooden pigeonhole arrangement on the wall, holding freight manifests and unsold passenger tickets. One of the two desks was assigned to the stationmaster (and ticket agent), while the other was for the yardmaster (and chief of security).
There was a great deal of pilferage going on in the railway these days, and no one seemed able to stop it. There was a general public suspicion, well founded, that railway employees were themselves responsible for a great percentage of the losses. The result was, most of the phone calls to Jinja station were from irate and suspicious freight customers whose shipments had disappeared.
The yardmaster, himself an honest man, could do nothing for such callers but sigh and agree and promise to look into it. His days were increasingly frustrating and unsatisfying, and if he could have thought of anything else to do with his life he would have quit this job long ago. As it was, he spent his time searching for honest men to stand guard over the yards, and apologizing to customers who no doubt thought he was a crook, too. A very sad situation.
At one-forty-five that afternoon, the yardmaster hung up the phone after one more such unhappy call, and looked up at the round railroad clock on the wall. “That freight didn’t go through, did it?”
The stationmaster was working on the fumbo in today’s paper. “I just can’t get three down,” he said. “A seven letter word meaning ‘trade fair or international mart.’ First and last letters both O.”
“Onyesho.”
“That fits!”
While the stationmaster laboriously printed in the letters, the yardmaster again frowned at the clock. “It must be nearly an hour since they went through Iganga.”
“What’s that?”
“The special train. The coffee freight.”
“They’ll be along.”
“It shouldn’t take an hour.”
“Maybe they saw a pretty girl beside the line and stopped to bless her.”
The yardmaster laughed. The phone rang, and he stopped laughing.
There was no direct rail service to Entebbe. After an early lunch, Patricia drove Sir Denis to Luzira, Kampala’s port, where the major freight yards were located and where the train would terminate. This was an official trip, in order for the yardmaster at Luzira to show Sir Denis the trucks waiting to carry the coffee from the train to the aircraft at Entebbe.
As they drove, alone in the car, they talked about their plans. “I’m not making any promises,” Patricia said.
“Of course not. We’ll simply take each day as it comes.” Sir Denis beamed on her. “I’m looking forward to showing you Brazil.”
“Brazil.” She shook her head, a bemused smile on her lips. “That’s one future I never even suspected,” she said.
Amin had anticipated a report from Colonel Juba about Chase sometime this morning. When the colonel hadn’t appeared by eleven o’clock, Amin telephoned his office at the Bureau, only to be told the colonel wasn’t there. Nor was he at home.
Amin came to the conclusion that Juba, to keep Chase’s arrest secret, had taken him to some other safe place, such as a rural police station, until he’d extracted the man’s story. “Inform me immediately,” he ordered, and went off to lunch.
Today’s lunch was more enjoyable than most. He was welcoming back his young Air Force men who’d just been ejected from the United States.
American companies such as Bell Helicopter had been training Amin’s pilots for several years, but recently a few busybody American congressmen—mere publicity seekers—had applied pressure, claiming to be humanitarians, claiming the United States shouldn’t do business with a country like Uganda—as though America’s skirts were clean.
The bad publicity had frightened the American companies, though, and the whole problem had been compounded last October, when the only three Christian Ugandans enrolled with the eighteen Muslim Ugandans being trained by the Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida, had defected, asking the American government for political asylum and being granted it, and then of course telling all sorts of wild stories.
The upshot was, the several dozen Air Force men in the United States—some of whom had already received British training in Perth, Scotland—had all now left America and returned to Uganda, their courses incomplete. And it was to greet the last six of these, just back from Vero Beach, Florida, that was the purpose of today’s lunch.
Amin loved contact with his brave young airmen. They reminded him of himself, or of the smoother and more sophisticated person he might have been if he’d had a firm proud good Idi Amin Dada to help him along the way in those early years. At the same time, it made him feel good to know he was still better than any of them. He could beat them at boxing, at basketball, at swimming races. And in the last analysis he was the father who made them possible.
There was much laughter and beer drinking at lunch, and many lies told about American women. Amin challenged all comers to arm wrestling, and won every match. His plan to buy long-range bombers and attack South Africa was discussed and given a respectful hearing. Amin emerged from lunch in a very happy frame of mind.
Which was at once spoiled, because neither Chase nor Juba had been found. Where were they? Amin gave orders, and soon learned they were positively nowhere in the Bureau building, though last night’s duty officer did remember having seen Chase leave the place around midnight.
Leave? Chase? Alone?
A call to Chase’s bank confirmed Amin’s suspicions. The man had been in this morning, and his safety-deposit box proved to have been cleaned out. What was worse, he had apparently turned over a chit for five thousand U.S. dollars in cash, forged in Amin’s name!
“He’s running, my little Baron.”
Calls to the airports at Entebbe, Jinja, Tororo, Soroti, and Kasese confirmed that Chase hadn’t yet left the country, at least by air. No white man, in fact, had flown out of Uganda in the last twelve hours.
Which left the roads and the lake. The lake was very unlikely; Chase had no boat of his own and had never cultivated any acquaintanceship with boat owners. He had always made it plain that he didn’t enjoy the occasional jaunt on Amin’s yacht. He wouldn’t like the sense of exposure, of limited options, associated with escape by water.
Which left the roads. “Call every border post,” Amin ordered. “If Chase went through, we want to know where, and what name he used. If he tries to go through now, he should be stopped and sent back here. I don’t care what condition he’s in when he gets here, just so he can still talk.”
The stationmaster put down his completed fumbo and yawned. Although the job had been much more strenuous back in the days of East African Railways, it had been more interesting, too. The stationmaster looked up at the clock, and was disheartened to see it was only five past two. Three more hours of boredom.
“Say, old man,” he said to the yardmaster, “where’s that train of yours?”
The yardmaster was taking a correspondence course in accountancy from a British school in Manchester. After a long delay occasioned by his mail’s having been held up, there being official displeasure between the governments of Great Britain and Uganda, three lessons had just arrived at once, and he was busily at work on them, between phone calls from dissatisfied customers. Glancing up from an extremely tricky problem in taxable versus tax-exempt interest income with or without compounding at various rates, he frowned at the stationmaster and then at the clock. “I just don’t know what’s happened,” he said. “Could they be broken down?”
“They would phone us from a signal box.”
“Let me call Iganga again,” the yardmaster said, reaching for the phone, and when he got through to the Iganga stationmaster he said, “What time did that coffee train go through there?”
(Beside the track, seventeen miles away, Young Mr. Balim called, “Frank! The first question!”)
“Twelve-fifty-five,” the Iganga stationmaster said.
“It hasn’t been through here yet. No word of trouble up there?”
“Not a thing. Did they break down, do you suppose?”
“They’d phone us.”
“What’s happened, then?”
“No idea. I’ll call you back.”
The yardmaster then tried to call the only other intervening station, just a few miles away at Magamaga, but there was no one on duty in the office there, and the phone rang uselessly in the locked room.
The yardmaster hung up. He thought for a few seconds, while staring sightlessly at his accountancy problem, and then sighed. “I should go look,” he said.
“You think so?” The stationmaster, though he might regret the interesting days of hard work, did not believe in rushing unnecessarily in the direction of labor. “Why borrow trouble?” he asked.
“Oh, well, it’s my duty, you know.” Getting unhappily to his feet, closing his lesson book, and putting it away in his center desk drawer, the yardmaster put on his official dark-blue jacket and round hat and wheeled his bicycle out from beside the filing cabinet. (It was kept in here to protect it from thieves.) “I keep hoping I’ll hear it coming,” he said. “Ah, well. At least you can take my calls while I’m gone.”
The yardmaster walked his bicycle out to the gleaming tracks in the sunlight, and looked both ways. No train. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked away eastward as far as he could see, and there was no train. In the opposite direction, the bridge over the Nile stretched out, empty and inviting. Behind him were the Jinja yards, dotted with aging goods wagons and just a few tottering old Class 13 shunting locomotives. All around, the town of Jinja slept quietly in after-lunch warmth.
The yardmaster climbed on his bicycle. Bending over the handlebars, he pedaled away slowly along the tracks toward Iganga.
The plane was a Boeing 707, old and sloppy, maintained just well enough to pass the required insurance and governmental codes. Ellen had familiarized herself with it this morning and didn’t consider she would be putting herself at any particular risk in flying it, either to Djibouti or across the Atlantic, though it would likely be considerably less fun than Balim’s little twin-engine six-seater. Now, dawdling over a late lunch in the coffee shop, she could look out the tall windows at the plane, and the other seven planes, all parked in a row on the tarmac. Three more 707s, one Lockheed C-130, and three Douglas DC-9s; a complete grab bag of not-quite-obsolete cargo planes.
At the table with Ellen were the other three members of the crew. The pilot and flight mechanic were both Americans; they had brought the plane in from the States yesterday. They were named Jerry (pilot) and Dave (flight mechanic), and they were both amiable laconic men who found the presence of a female copilot amusing, but not in a derogatory way. The navigator was a silent morose Italian named Augusto, who merely became more silent and more morose when Jerry and Dave decided his name was Gus.
Jerry, who wore a bushy moustache and a prominent thick wedding band, had made it clear last night, and again this morning, that he could take an interest in Ellen, given the slightest encouragement. Dave, who had the shock of unruly hair of the born sidekick, had made it clear that he felt Jerry had seen her first. Ellen had never been interested in such Rover Boy types, and her lack of response was only intensified by the fact that she was spending all her time worrying about Lew.
Which was unfair, damned unfair. When you break up with a man, he isn’t supposed to force you to go on thinking about him by immediately flinging himself into danger. No matter what Ellen might want to do or think about, she was limited to this: she would sit here in Entebbe Airport and wonder if the coffee would show up. If it did, she would then have to wonder what that meant. And if it didn’t, she would have to wonder if the hijack had gone smoothly.
If I had his address, she thought crossly, trying to follow an anecdote of Jerry’s about flying Air America in Laos back when opium was the most important cargo, I’d send him a letter bomb.
Someone was approaching across the nearly empty coffee shop. How will they phrase it? Ellen wondered, and invented a monologue: We’re sorry, but you can go home now. Somebody took our coffee. They got away clean. Thank you and good-bye.
It was the waitress. She said, “Would you like more coffee?”
At twenty past two, Chase and the Mercedes-Benz were nearly to the Rwanda border east of Kabale, near the Rwandan town of Kagitumba. Once safely across the border, he would drive the less than eighty miles to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, where he would be able to charter a plane for anywhere. Probably he would choose to continue westward to Kinshasa, capital of Zaire, from where he could take a commercial flight to Europe.
From Kampala, Chase had driven southwest and then south around Lake Victoria. At Masaka, eighty-five miles from Kampala, he had stopped at the village market to buy fruit and beer and a few pieces of greasy cooked chicken. At Rakai, thirty miles farther on, he had turned off onto a dirt lane leading in to tiny Lake Kijanebalola, where he had found an isolated place in which to remove the two back door panels, stuff his money and jewelry and secondary papers into the window wells, and replace the panels.
After Rakai, Chase had taken minor roads westward, in the general direction of Lake Idi Amin. At Gayaza he’d turned south again, avoided the Tanzanian border running along the Kagera River, and now at last he found himself on the threshold of Rwanda.
The border station was a small shed of concrete block and various mud huts with thatched roofs. Several children playing in the dirt remained hunkered on the ground but watched with silent intensity as Chase left the air-conditioned splendor of the Mercedes for the humid heat of the real world.
There was nothing here, nothing but the shed and the huts, the tentative, worn blacktop of the road, the red-and-white border pole barrier, the children, the tan dusty soil, the single telephone line strung high on narrow wooden poles, a faint smell of some sort of flesh burning. As Chase strode toward the shed, perspiration already starting on his forehead and in the small of his back, a plum dark man bustled out of one of the huts, rubbing sleep from his eyes and pulling on his uniform coat. He was hatless and barefoot. “Jambo, jambo!” he cried.
“How do you do,” Chase said, smiling. “I’m sorry, I have no Swahili.”
“Oh, yes. English fine. You, sir,” the plum guard said, gesturing for Chase to precede him into the hut. Behind him, a skinny weirdly-boned woman wrapped in a cheap bright-patterned red cloth emerged from the hut, carrying an old desk drawer full of forms and stamps and pencils.
Chase had to duck his head to get through the doorway. The interior contained a wooden tabletop supported on old beer cases. Two backless chairs faced one another across this table.
The plump guard, entering, gestured to the chair Chase was to take, then settled himself with comic grandeur on the other.
The woman came in, put the desk drawer handy to the guard’s right elbow, and stood to one side behind him, hands clasped in front of her crotch.
Chase handed over his Ugandan passport, saying, “As you see, I am a member of the government.”
“Ah! Fine!” said the guard, using his English. “Very fine.” He took the passport and opened it.
Chase saw him change; that was the first thing. The guard was not a subtle man, nor a very bright one. His smiling face became stiff with shock; his shoulder hunched; he began very rapidly to blink.
So I didn’t have this much time after all, Chase thought. He folded his arms, the fingers of his right hand snaking in under his left sleeve toward the automatic.
The guard stared too long and too unseeingly at the passport, attempting to compose himself. Then he looked up, still furiously blinking, and gave Chase a huge smile in which panic was the chief component. “More papers,” he said. “Me papers.” Then he turned to the woman, as t
hough instructing her in what papers she was to get; but what he said in Swahili was, “Get Ulu and Walter. This is the man the President wants. When he goes out, they must shoot his legs.”
“All right,” the woman said. Now she too was ineffectively hiding fear and excitement and panic.
“But they must not kill him,” the plump guard said. “The President wishes to speak to him.”
I bet he does. Smoothly rising, drawing the automatic from his sleeve, Chase said in Swahili, “Don’t move.” He didn’t shoot them right away because the sounds would attract Ulu and Walter.
The damn woman. The gun frightened her, all right, but it frightened her the wrong way. Instead of freezing, she screamed and jumped and then ran at Chase! She dashed at him the way the dazzled rabbit hurls itself into the automobile’s headlights, and to the same effect: Chase killed her.
But it was no good. He’d had to shoot, and yet she kept coming. He shot again, and she threw her arms around him in an embrace of death. The miserable little .25 had no stopping power.
The dying woman encumbered him, pressing his gun hand between their bodies. By the time he freed it the plump guard was ready, the desk drawer held high over his head, papers and rubber stamps flying every which way as he brought the drawer crashing down onto Chase’s wrist.
Then two men came running into the shed and knocked him down.
They were both the dead woman’s lovers. It was all the plump guard could do to keep them from kicking Chase to death.
49
Lew and Young Mr. Balim stood on the track and watched the last two dozen spikes being driven into the sleepers. The rails had been put back where they belonged. Two of the ex-railwaymen were attaching the joint plates, spitting on them, smearing them with dirt to hide the new scratches. Most of the work crew had already left, going down with Frank to start the unloading.
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