Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  The end of the runway was ahead. The jeep, having lost the race, veered sharply to get onto the runway and chase from behind. The plane nosed up, like a sleepy horse finished with its oats; it seemed to see the sky, to take a sudden interest, at last to understand. Wings out, nose rising, tail canted at a jaunty angle, the plane soared up over the end of the runway, over the scrub, over the muddy coast, over water glinting with shattered reflections of the quarter-moon.

  Ellen switched off every light except the small green ones illuminating the control panel. She’d never flown in such darkness before. The altitude meter read three hundred feet; angling downward, she banked sharply to the left.

  Lew said, “Ellen? You’re going back?”

  “I can’t get any control-tower guidance,” she told him. “They’re sure to scramble other planes after us. Out over the lake we’d simply get lost, so I’m going down on the deck so their radar can’t see me, find that highway that goes to Kenya, and run along beside it.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Lew said. “That’s terrific.”

  “Thank you.”

  He was leaning forward again, his right hand on her right shoulder. Sincerity dripping from his voice, he said, “I really appreciate this, Ellen. I want you to know that.”

  She shrugged, bouncing his hand off. “I’d do it for anybody,” she said. She was really very angry.

  75

  Charlie waited for Mguu to do it, but Mguu just stomped around in his usual style, being angry and accomplishing nothing. Charlie waited for Isaac to order somebody to do it, or for Mr. Balim to hire somebody to do it, but Isaac was spending all his time in fruitless frustrating conversation with the two slippery government men from Nairobi, while Mr. Balim remained seated on the chair of concrete blocks and planks that Charlie had made for him, sighing and gazing unhappily out at the lake.

  Mr. Balim was sad about his son. Wasn’t that reason enough to do it?

  This Baron Chase from Uganda was a very bad man. He sat there against that dead tree, smiling, happy about himself, but he was a very bad man who had done many bad things. He was the one who had sent the ship to murder them and rob from them. And now he was stealing the coffee again, with the help of those government men from Nairobi.

  But that wasn’t the reason. The reason was that this man Chase had robbed Mr. Balim of his son. He had made Mr. Balim unhappy in a way that no robbery of money or power could do. He had stolen the light from Mr. Balim’s eyes. Charlie could see it, if none of the others could; and Charlie loved Mr. Balim above all human beings; and that was why.

  He walked over to where Baron Chase was seated, and bent over him as though solicitously, in a posture he knew Chase would like to see. “Sir?” he said.

  Chase glanced up with casual recognition. “Yes?”

  “Look,” Charlie said, and withdrew from his sleeve the long narrow extremely sharp blade. As Chase opened his mouth, his hands beginning to move, Charlie inserted the blade between the man’s ribs and pressed it home, directly through the heart.

  It hit Chase like a drug. First there came the rush, the jolt, the shock; his eyes bulged, his neck muscles tensed, his hands curved like talons, his feet kicked out. Then the drug took hold; his eyes lost their luster, his mouth sagged open, his hands lay peacefully at his sides. The drug was death.

  Charlie watched the death rise like mist, until it covered Chase to the eyes, and above the eyes. Then he drew out the blade and slipped it back under his sleeve. The heart was not beating, so there was almost no blood. Charlie strolled away into the darkness behind the floodlights.

  76

  Lew wished Patricia wouldn’t persist in holding his hand. He understood she was only doing it because she was frightened; he was certain Ellen couldn’t see it; and under the circumstances he wasn’t likely to become aroused by it; still, he wished she wouldn’t do it.

  He also wished Ellen would get over her mad. But more than anything else, he wished he’d been able to find Bathar. (Since the poor guy was probably dead by now, or soon would be, he deserved his own name, not that dismissive Young Mr. Balim.)

  “Here they come again,” Ellen said.

  Patricia squeezed Lew’s hand even tighter as he said, “Where?”

  “Ten o’clock high.”

  Leaning forward, ducking low so he could look up past Ellen’s left ear, Lew was just in time to watch the two jets flash across the black sky from left to right, blazing with noise and light and speed and their own significance. For the last fifteen minutes these two had been skating back and forth up there, like kids who didn’t realize they were late for supper. At first Lew had been convinced they would spot the Cessna with no trouble and would simply shell them into abrupt oblivion—the golden-red instant fireball would be beautiful against the night sky, too bad he wouldn’t be around to see it—but as the jets kept flashing back and forth, nervous hunting dogs who had lost the scent, he realized their very speed and power worked against them. A poky little Cessna, running without lights, skimming the treetops just south of the A109, was beneath the range of their vision.

  Which didn’t mean they couldn’t get lucky. Ellen was doing her best to avoid all ground lights, but the jets’ angle of view constantly changed; if one of those pilots looked in just the right place at just the right time, and if he saw a little black object pass between himself and some streetlamp or lit-up house, he’d be on them in a second.

  “I wish they’d give up,” Ellen said, echoing Lew’s own thoughts.

  “They don’t dare,” Patricia said. “Amin would slice them to pieces. They’ll stay up until we’re found or they run out of gas.”

  “I’d rather you lied to me,” Ellen said.

  “I’d prefer it myself,” Patricia answered, and squeezed Lew’s hand again, this time suggestively.

  Uh-oh. Lew had been on enough cliff edges for one day. Gently but firmly, he removed his hand and grasped his other elbow with it. So she put her hand on his thigh.

  Ellen said, “Do you see them?”

  “What, the jets? No.”

  “Not out this side,” Patricia said.

  “I’ve got to cross the road,” Ellen explained. “Jinja’s up ahead, I don’t want to go over the lake, they’d be able to spot us there against the water.”

  “They’re not around,” Lew assured her. He didn’t mention, because of course both women already knew, that the jets tended to arrive very fast, without advance warning.

  “Now or never,” Ellen said. She’d already been barely a hundred feet in the air, and now she banked sharply to the left and dropped even lower. Lew could see a kerosene-lit living room through a curtainless window in a roadside house as they flitted by. The man reading a book on the sofa was just lifting his head at the engine noise; then they were past.

  Jinja had seemed quite dark when he had driven through it, first in the pickup and then in the coffin, but from the sky it was a blaze of light; particularly if you were trying to avoid light. Ellen kept angling farther and farther north, and then to complicate matters Jinja Airport was dead ahead, so she had to turn westward again, back toward Kampala, flying low over the little villages, dirt roads, small isolated lights.

  “There they are!” Patricia cried, her hand convulsively clutching Lew’s thigh. “Over on the—Over there!” She was making herself angry and panicky by being unable to describe simply and quickly where the jets were. “To the right! Up!”

  “Three o’clock high,” Lew said, ducking down to look for them out Patricia’s window. Realizing he was putting his head in her lap, he immediately sat up again.

  “I hate this,” Ellen said. She throttled back, and Lew felt that roller-coaster feeling in his stomach when the Cessna slowed and dropped another twenty feet.

  “Oh, my God,” Patricia said, and simply came over and wrapped her arms around Lew and his seat back both. He had no choice but to hold her.

  Ellen said, “How tall do the trees grow around here, Miss Kamin?”

&nb
sp; “Patricia. Call me Patricia.”

  “All ri—Where are you?” Because of course Patricia’s voice had come from directly behind Ellen, where Lew was supposed to be sitting.

  Patricia clung to Lew, staring around. “Are they gone?”

  “Yes,” Ellen said. “Lew?”

  “Here,” said Lew.

  Returning to her own side of the plane, Patricia said, “I’m sorry. They just scare me, I can’t help it. I don’t know about trees, but I think they must grow taller than this.”

  “After Jinja we’ll be all right,” Lew said. “There aren’t any more big towns till Tororo, right at the border.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Ellen commented, swinging the Cessna around through the north to an easterly direction again.

  Patricia gave Lew a shaky smile, her face mysterious in the faint green light from the instrument panel, her dark skin gleaming with a sensually metallic look, as though she were the alien beauty in a science-fiction movie. “I am sorry,” she said. “I’m under control now.”

  In the Toyota, on the way to Entebbe, he had told her what he and Ellen were to each other, so he knew she now meant she wouldn’t make any more trouble. “It’s all right,” he assured her. “We’re all a little tense.”

  “There’s the Nile,” Ellen said.

  “So just relax,” Lew continued, patting Patricia’s hand, “and listen to our tour guide.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Ellen said, but she sounded a bit less bad-tempered.

  Brightly lighted Jinja lay away to their right. Ahead, to the east, the darkness seemed unbroken, but there would be plenty of lights to greet them along the way.

  For fifteen minutes they droned eastward, Jinja dropping away behind, the A109 angling north to meet them, the little towns passing with their dim half-hidden lights. Their only route to safety, just as though they were an earthbound automobile, was that narrow line of highway down there. Anyone going to Kenya tonight, by air or by land, would follow that road.

  As they hummed along, dark in the dark sky, Lew explained to Patricia the clock method for describing where one had seen another plane in the sky, and once they saw far above them the light and flame trails of a multi-engine jet streaming northward above the planet, but that sighting of the two fighter jets while Ellen had been skirting Jinja Airport remained their last appearance. “Maybe,” Lew said, voicing a thought he’d been silent about for five minutes, “maybe their search area only extends as far east as Jinja.”

  “I was thinking that,” Ellen told him. “I was afraid to say it.”

  “So was I. Let’s see if I brought us bad luck.”

  But another five minutes went by without the jets’ return, and finally they did all begin to relax and to believe they would get away with it. They were past Iganga, past Bugiri, over a hundred miles from Entebbe, with less than forty miles to the Kenyan border. Ellen, increasingly confident that they were alone in this part of the sky, was flying much closer to the highway, an unlit faintly paler ribbon across the black chest of the world. An occasional car appeared down there, moving at less than half their hundred twenty miles an hour.

  “That looks like the flashes,” Patricia said.

  Lew, his long day ending, had been half-asleep. He sat up, blinking. “What?”

  “The flashes, when they were shooting at us at the airport,” Patricia explained. “That looks like the same thing. What would make that?”

  She was pointing out her window, down toward the road. Leaning over, his arm against her breast, he looked down and at first saw only an automobile, a Peugeot, speeding along down there, traveling east as they were. They were already ahead of it, and pulling away. But then he saw the flashes at the side windows and said, “They’re shooting, that’s why.”

  But what were they shooting at? Ahead of the Peugeot, visible in its headlights, being steadily overtaken, was someone on a small motorcycle, a narrow figure hunched over the handlebars, about to be shot or run down, his motorcycle or moped slower than the—

  Moped. Lew stared. “That’s Bathar!”

  “What?” Ellen dipped the right wing for a better look, dumping Lew more firmly into Patricia’s lap. “My God!” Ellen cried, “they’re killing him!”

  “Jesus! Bathar!” Lew picked himself out of Patricia’s lap and held onto the back of Ellen’s seat. “I completely forgot that goddam moped!”

  Ellen was swinging left, away from the road. She said, “Lew, do you have a gun?”

  “Of course.”

  “The window flap by my elbow here. It opens. But not yet, wait’ll I throttle back.”

  Ellen’s left turn segued into a long arc to the right, finishing with her over the road, facing the other way, the Peugeot and moped just ahead, rushing toward them. She throttled back, dropping low, the wheels no more than twenty feet above the road. Lew, arm sticking out the top-hinged window flap, fired three shots as they and the car passed one another, but to no effect. “No good,” he said. “I can’t see. I can’t aim. Run parallel, let me broadside them.”

  “They’ve stopped,” Patricia said, looking back.

  So they had, apparently startled by the sudden appearance of a plane shooting at them. But as Ellen swung around for another attack, they started up again, tearing down the highway. “Good,” Ellen said. “The faster they go, the easier it’ll be to pace them.”

  They came in on the car’s right, flying low, Ellen slowing to match the car’s ninety miles an hour. This time she held the flap up and out with her elbow while Lew crouched against her seat back, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip, bracing it by pressing his knuckles against the door panel just under the window, the barrel sticking out through the opening. The driver was on this side, clearly visible, staring at the plane, his eyes huge white circles in his dark face, making a toy target. A passenger in the seat behind him was firing wildly in the general direction of the plane.

  Lew’s first shot went nowhere in particular, but his second made that target face disappear, like something in a shooting gallery. The car slued and careened, turned sharply right, went over on its side, rolled completely over twice, and landed bone-jarringly on its wheels, smoking. Ellen lifted them higher, and looking back Lew saw the first flames, and two men staggering out onto the pavement.

  Ahead, Bathar and the moped still ran, not looking back, not slackening pace. Ellen accelerated to overtake him, while Patricia said, “Who is that?”

  “A friend of ours. My employer’s son. We thought he was dead.”

  “He almost was.”

  They flew over the speeding Bathar, then Ellen brought the Cessna down onto the highway for a very bumpy and scary landing, the fuselage fishtailing the whole time. Once they’d stopped, Ellen opened the door, leaned out, looked back, and said, “Where is he?”

  Lew went through the contortions necessary to get past Ellen’s seatback and stick his head out the doorway. The road back there was dark and empty. “He’s hiding,” Lew said. “He’s hiding from us. Let me out, I’ll go get him.”

  “We can’t stay here forever,” Ellen pointed out, climbing down so he could get out. “Sooner or later, there’ll be traffic.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Taking a few steps back behind the plane, Lew cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Bathar!” No response. He yelled it again, then muttered something, and went jogging away down the middle of the road. He counted fifty paces, then stopped and yelled, “God damn it, BATHAR!”

  A distant unbelieving voice said, “What?”

  “Bathar, it’s Lew! Come on!”

  A shadow separated itself from the roadside darkness some distance away. “Lew? Honest to God?”

  “No, I’m lying. Come on, Bathar!” Lew gestured mightily for Bathar to come on, then turned and jogged back toward the plane.

  Behind him, the moped sounded its nasal sputter. It rapidly approached, passed the jogging Lew, and as he reached the plane, Bathar was off the moped and embracing Ellen with great vigor. “Say, t
here,” Lew said.

  Bathar, grinning from ear to ear, released Ellen, then immediately grabbed her again and kissed her smiling mouth. Then he truly did release her, turned, and enthusiastically shook Lew’s hand in both of his, saying, “I can’t believe it. I thought this was a dead Paki, Lew, I really thought that, I really did.”

  “Let’s get in the plane,” Ellen said.

  “Right,” Lew said. He started forward, but Ellen put up a hand to stop him, saying, “Oh, no, you don’t. You ride up front with me.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Get in, Bathar. Step there, and there.”

  “Very good.” Bathar hoisted himself up, climbed into the plane, and was heard to say, “Well, hello.”

  Patricia’s grin sounded clearly in her voice: “Hello, yourself.”

  Lew went next, working his way over to the front passenger seat, and then Ellen climbed aboard and at once started them rolling down the potholed road.

  “By golly, here comes a car,” Lew said, seeing the headlights appear around a curve far ahead.

  “I hope he has sense enough to get out of the way.” Ellen switched on the Cessna’s landing lights so the oncoming driver would at least know what was out in front of him.

  He wasn’t a particularly intelligent driver. First he flashed his high beams; whether requesting this airplane to get out of his way or objecting to the brightness of its single forward floodlight, it was impossible to guess. Then he just kept coming, for the longest while. In the backseat, Bathar and Patricia were oblivious, engaged in mutual introductions. “Ellen,” Lew said, “what if he doesn’t stop?”

  “Guess,” Ellen said.

  But the clown finally did stop, and in fact he steered himself off the road, which was just as well, because the Cessna needed more road before it could struggle back into the air. The verge dipped down here, which was also good; the Cessna’s speeding left wing swept by just over the roof of the car while its driver gaped idiotically at them. Sometime later, they became airborne at last, and Ellen switched off all the lights. Then Bathar told them his story.