Maybe when they were closer . . .
But they never got the chance. Trey caught a glimpse of a sudden dark form rising from the canopy directly in front of the Piper. The computer in his brain, the part that identified and categorized everything he saw, said: Bird. Raptor. Black kite. Second-year male.
Then it struck the plane’s propeller and became nothing but chunks of meat and a burst of feathers. A dark penumbra that wreathed the windows for an instant before being whipped away.
The plane’s engine coughed, choked. Died.
They flew, glided, in silence. The single propeller on the Piper’s nose did not move.
Malcolm, his left hand fighting the yoke, his right reaching for the ignition, said, “Shit.” Trey didn’t need the headset to hear him.
The plane dipped toward the canopy. Trey braced himself for the impact.
I’ll live, he thought.
I’m not done yet.
They were maybe twenty feet from the topmost limbs when the engine fired. The propeller spun, slowed, then sped into a blur. Malcolm pulled back on the throttle and the plane’s nose rose. Just a little.
They hit an air pocket and dropped ten feet. Trey could see butterflies spinning amid the branches below. A tiny pool of water trapped in a bromeliad plant winked in a beam of sunlight.
Malcolm pulled back harder. Again they rose, the engine coughing and groaning. The plane swung north. Trey lifted his gaze and saw, a mile or so ahead, the edge of the forest, the almost surgical line where the jungle came to an end and the savanna began.
The savanna. Flat land. Fields and pastures and roads, any of which could be used as a landing strip if you really needed one.
Trey knew that the pilot’s thoughts were traveling the same track. Malcolm pulled back on the yoke one more time. The Piper fought its way upward, until the rumpled forest was a thousand feet below. Trey could see the yellow grasslands, the gleaming silver stripe of the Gambia River, the blue Atlantic.
The engine died again.
“Hang on,” Malcolm said.
The plane glided on the hot, rising air, losing altitude faster and faster even as they came closer to the savanna and possible salvation. Trey looked down and saw the forest reaching for them as they fell. He could see the muscles on Malcolm’s arms knot as he struggled with the yoke.
Their destination lay just ahead: a flat grassy field across the Massou-Djibo Road, which ran along the forest’s edge. Trey’s brain calculated distances and speed, and he knew they wouldn’t make it. They were going to hit the trees.
But they didn’t. Trey hadn’t calculated for Malcolm’s cussedness, or his understanding of his little bush plane. Through sheer willpower and physical strength, the pilot wrestled the dead plane over the last line of forest. Vines whipped the wings as they went past, and then suddenly they were a hundred feet over level, treeless ground. The dirt road sketched a red-earth line through the grassland below.
“Hang on,” Malcolm said again. The Piper glided, the blurred ground racing just below them. A moment later they made contact, rose a few feet, and then touched down for good and were bumping across the field. Stones kicked up by the tires rattled off the fuselage.
Malcolm brought the plane to a halt. After a few moments’ silence, Trey pulled off his headset. “Thanks.”
Malcolm shrugged and stretched his arms. “No worries.”
Then, scanning the empty landscape around them, he sighed. “Guess we’ll have to walk out,” he said.
Trey unsnapped his harness, swung open the door beside him. Hot air wafted in, along with the sound of crickets and the staccato call of a red-eyed dove.
“Won’t be the first time,” he said.
Malcolm laughed. “Or the last.”
* * *
THEY STOOD ON the road. There was no sign of cars, or people, in any direction. A single cow stared at them from a nearby pasture. Clouds were piling up to the west, foretelling storms that afternoon. There were storms in the Casamance every afternoon.
“Gonna get wet,” Malcolm said. Then he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know: Won’t be the first time.”
“Let’s go,” Trey said.
They set off, maintaining an easy pace that still ate up the distance. Both of them were tall, but after that the similarities ended. Trey, an American, was dark, olive complexioned, with deep-set eyes and a strong nose and chin. People said they could never tell what he was thinking, which was fine with him.
Malcolm, who’d grown up in Cape Tribulation, Australia, was more solidly built, with a broad, flat face and blue eyes. If he ever traded this life for a desk job, he’d be fat in a month. His unkempt blond hair was thinning, and his face and freckled arms were always either pink, sunburned, or peeling.
Trey was thirty-six. He’d never asked Malcolm’s age, but guessed about fifty.
As if intuiting Trey’s thoughts, Malcolm said, “This is where I s’pose I should say that I’m getting too old for this crap.”
Trey didn’t even dignify that with a response.
* * *
THEY’D WALKED FOR about a half hour when Trey stopped still in the middle of the deserted road. He leaned his head back, let his eyes scan the sky until they focused on a martial eagle circling, a black cross against the blue sky high above.
Malcolm had seen this behavior before. He wanted to get back to civilization so he could collect his tools and a vehicle, come back, and rescue his plane, but he knew there was no point in interrupting Trey’s train of thought.
As they stood there in silence, thunder rumbled in the distance.
Finally Trey allowed his gaze to drop. “Malcolm,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Back then, right before we hit that kite, did you smell something?”
Malcolm blinked. This wasn’t what he’d expected. “Did I what?”
“There was an odor rising from that dying forest, something I’ve never encountered before. Didn’t you notice it?”
After a pause, Malcolm shook his head. “Sorry, but if I did, the memory’s been wiped clean by the almost-dying stuff that happened afterward.”
Trey frowned. Before he could speak, they heard the sound of an engine. Perhaps a mile up the road, a pickup truck was heading toward them. A plume of reddish dust rose in its wake and the sun reflected off its black metal cab. They were about to be rescued.
Trey said, “What’s killing that forest?”
Malcolm had no answer.
But it didn’t really matter. When Trey got like this, he wasn’t really talking to you. He was talking to himself, and you just happened to be in the vicinity.
TWO
Mpack, Senegal
IF YOU SPENT most of your life in the wilderness, you learned to be a light sleeper.
Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe only people who could awaken instantly chose to spend so much time alone in places inhabited by poisonous snakes, scorpions, and spiders, not to mention bigger creatures with sharp teeth and irritable dispositions.
Trey came alert in his one-room stone hut. For the briefest instant—as always—he was surprised to find that he was under a roof, not canvas, the forest canopy, or the sky. Then he was off his cot and getting dressed even as he registered what had woken him.
The sound of a man shouting, followed by a high and keening cry, a woman’s voice, quickly cut off.
By the time Trey was out the door, into the damp morning air, there was little to see. A few young boys, already in their uniforms, were kicking a soccer ball around the town square as they waited for school. The doors to all the houses around the square were closed, which was unusual even at this early hour.
Trey knew these schoolboys. He’d caught their attention—and earned their laughter and catcalls—on the town’s soccer field as soon as he’d arrived. And some real respect wh
en he’d started to learn Kriol, their local lingua franca, right away.
Since then, they’d usually come running whenever they saw him, asking endless questions about America or showing him the latest lizard, frog, or insect they’d caught.
But now, as he walked into the square, they looked away, refusing to meet his eye. If anything, they seemed a little afraid.
This was interesting. Trey walked up to them, focusing on Moussa, the boy he knew was their leader.
Tall, thin, the most athletic of the group, Moussa held his ground as Trey approached. The other boys scattered, though all stayed within earshot. There was a hum of tension around them that Trey hadn’t seen before.
“What was that shouting about?” he asked Moussa.
The boy said nothing, but Trey had expected no different. The unspoken answer, from several of the others, was just as clear as words would have been. They all looked at the medical clinic on the opposite side of the square.
The Diouf Health Center, a compact building of red stone erected within the past decade. A gift from the French government, complete with state-of-the-art scanning and surgical technology, as penance for two centuries of colonization and slavery.
Moussa followed Trey’s gaze. “You cannot go in there,” he said.
That was never the right thing to tell Trey.
* * *
THERE WAS A trail of blood, drying black in the warming sun, leading across the square toward the clinic.
As he approached, Trey saw a young man carrying a Kalashnikov rifle step out the front door. Dressed in a ragged camo uniform, complete with the square cap Senegalese soldiers all wore, he looked confused, shaken. Trey wondered if he’d been told to guard the entrance but wasn’t sure exactly how. Was he supposed to shoot anyone who came in for Band-Aids or aspirin?
The blood trail led up three stone steps, between the soldier’s feet, and under the closed door. Trey walked up the steps and said to the soldier, “Pardon me.”
“It is closed,” the soldier said. He was eighteen, maybe, with a child’s smooth cheeks and no authority but what his gun gave him.
“Look,” Trey said, pointing at the sign hanging beside the red wooden door. It read, Toujours Ouvert. Always Open.
The man stared at the sign without apparent comprehension. It was quite possible he only knew how to read Diol or one of the other local dialects, if he could read at all. When his gaze returned to Trey’s face, Trey said, “Seydou Honso wants to see me.”
The guard frowned. While he was pondering his response, Trey walked around him, opened the door, and stepped through into the waiting room.
The room was empty and dark inside. Someone had turned off the bright fluorescent lights that usually made everyone, pink skinned or brown, look jaundiced. The only light came from the blue-green glow of a computer monitor.
Trey took in a breath. The clinic was suffused with the smell of blood. And something else, too, a bitter, acidic odor.
A smell Trey had encountered once before.
The door leading into the examination room hung open, and through it Trey could see a single light burning. Four figures stood there, little more than backlit shadows clustered around the steel examination table.
There was something on the table. The light was focused on it, so Trey could see what it was.
As he made to step closer, two of the figures moved toward him. They came through the door, which they closed behind them.
Even in the shadowy light, Trey knew who they were. Seydou Honso, the physician who ran the clinic—and, according to legend, all of Mpack—and his daughter, Mariama.
Seydou was about sixty-five, with a face so lined and furrowed that it was easy to miss how clear his eyes were, how sharp his gaze. The people at the International Conservation Trust had urged Trey to stay on his good side or risk finding that no one in town, in the Casamance, would help him.
They’d also warned Trey to avoid Mariama Honso like the plague. Slightly built, with a square, determined face and the same piercing gaze as her father, she was no more than thirty. She had already made a name for herself in Senegal. Several names: Activist. Troublemaker. Agitator. She’d spent more than one stint in jail for speaking out against the government’s treatment of the people of the Casamance.
Heeding ICT’s warning as much as needed most, Trey had invited Mariama out for a drink the day he’d arrived. They’d gotten to know each other a little, and so far the world hadn’t ended.
Now the two of them were looking at Trey, as if trying to figure out what he knew, what he’d guessed. How smart he was.
“You must leave,” Seydou Honso said in French. “Now.”
Trey didn’t move. “What is that smell?” he said.
The old man’s hands twitched at his sides. His daughter’s chin lifted.
“I’ve smelled it before, you know,” Trey said.
Neither spoke.
“Over a stretch of dying rain forest five miles south of the Massou-Djibo Road.”
Trey never forgot the reaction this last statement provoked. Seydou Honso’s face clenched, his eyes nearly disappearing behind the bunched ridges of his wrinkles. But Mariama’s seemed to light up, her eyes gleaming even in the dimness.
“Papa,” she said, “we have to—”
“No.” The word rang out in the silent room. An instant later, Trey heard the front door open. Footsteps. The end of a rifle poking into his back.
Trey’s arm rose to knock the gun away. Then, just barely, he restrained himself and allowed the soldier to push him toward the door.
Mariama’s voice came from behind him. “Papa, listen—”
“No,” said Seydou Honso again.
* * *
SOMETHING TREY HAD learned during his long solitary years in the world’s last wild places: Pay attention to anything that doesn’t fit. It’s usually what’s most important.
So as he crossed the square, the young soldier standing on the steps behind him, gun at the ready, he thought about what he’d glimpsed in the examination room.
The four figures: Seydou and Mariama Honso and two soldiers, both as young as the one who’d been guarding the door. The soldiers’ faces, Trey had seen, had been filled with fear, even horror as they gazed down at what lay on the steel table.
Trey could understand why. They were looking at another soldier in uniform, lying on his back. Even at a distance, Trey had seen he was dead. His unmarked face had been frozen in its last expression of shock and horror, his eyes wide, his mouth pulled back to expose clenched teeth.
His face might have been untouched, but his midsection—everything from his waist to the middle of his rib cage—was an unrecognizable mass of shredded fabric and meat, glistening with black blood and bits of white bone.
As the Honsos came through the door and blocked his view, Trey had noticed one more thing: The fabric, and some of the man’s flesh, was scorched. He’d been shot at closer than point-blank range. Someone had jammed a gun, something powerful like a Kalashnikov, into his belly and fired a burst from it.
Maybe the dead soldier had done it himself.
* * *
MOUSSA WAS CROUCHED in the center of the square, examining the splatter pattern of dried blood. Already tiny black ants and a beetle the color of an emerald had come to feast on it.
The boy stood when he saw Trey. “Phone,” he said.
Trey thought about this. Mpack had no cell-phone service. The only public telephone was located in a concrete shack at the far end of the square, a building people called “the office,” because it contained a desk, a chair, and that phone.
Who was calling? It was unlikely to be Malcolm Granger, who was fully occupied repairing the Piper. Anyway, Malcolm hated telephones as much as Trey did. If he needed to say something, he just showed up and said it.
Someone fro
m New York, the closest thing Trey had to a home base? Equally unlikely. He had no family there, and not many friends, few of whom had any idea where in the world he was at any given time.
His brother, Christopher? No. Since Christopher had settled in Queensland, Australia, two decades earlier, he and Trey had spoken only once or twice a year. After their parents died, there hadn’t seemed much reason to stay in touch.
Trey sighed, thanked Moussa, and walked toward the office, knowing before he picked up the receiver whose voice he’d hear and what she’d have to say.
He’d heard it all before.
* * *
“WE’RE PULLING YOU out,” Cristina Kendall, his boss at ICT, said.
What Trey had expected. “No,” he said. “I’m not done here.”
“This is not a request.” Cristina was calling from Dakar, the capital city, but she sounded like she was right there in the room lecturing him. “We got the order today,” she went on. “You’re not welcome in the Casamance, in Senegal, effective immediately.”
Trey was silent.
Her sigh came clearly over the line. “So,” she said, “who’d you piss off this time?”
He didn’t reply. Some strange, clanging music rang down the line.
When Cristina spoke again, her tone had hardened. “Trey, it’s—what, about a seven-hour drive from Mpack to Dakar?”
After a moment, he said, “Yeah.”
“Well, throw your stuff in your car and start driving. I’ve told our staff to expect you by evening.”
Trey was quiet.
“You hearing me?”
He said, “Yeah.”
“Listen,” she said, her voice now little more than a venomous whisper. “You’re dancing on very thin ice this time, Trey. One of these days you’re going to fall through, and no one’s going to care enough to pull you out. Got that?”
Trey hung up the phone.
THREE
CRISTINA KENDALL HAD ordered Trey to return immediately to Dakar. Instead he drove his Land Rover three hours in the wrong direction.
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