by Giles Foden
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘The underground fuel-storage depot could go up …’ She tried to focus. ‘We better warn somebody.’
She ran over to tell a marine, hurting her feet on the carpet of fragments that covered the ground.
‘OK,’ he said, his face clown-like with dust. ‘You get out now.’
But how? The main gate was impassable. Its steel bars had twisted, some of them fused together by the heat. A truck lay near to the guardhouse, the walls and windows of which were totally smashed. It had been stripped of everything but its chassis. The iron skeleton of the thing was glowing hotly. Next to it was a large crater. Miranda was slowly becoming aware how very great the force of the shock wave must have been. At first, she thought the glowing truck was the remains of the water tanker. But it was the other one that was glowing, she realised, the one with the canvas cover that had pulled up behind. The water tanker itself was now over by the chancery building, up against the front wall. Having been carried over the lawn and the motor pool, it had evidently taken much of the blast. The tank had been squashed inwards like cardboard tube. The driver must certainly be dead, she thought. Chilled, she realised she had escaped by a matter of minutes. Had she waited to see the water tanks filled, she would have been at the heart of the explosion, and reduced to particles. As it was, the blast had taken out the walls on each of the chancery’s three levels on the facing side. The building was now charred a deep black, full of gaping holes. Smoke was still billowing out of the holes and the remaining window frames.
The motor pool was especially chaotic. Fire engines were arriving, ambulances were arriving. There was more smoke, from burning cars. Some members of the marine detachment were trying to secure the area, kneeling down and training their guns on the Africans who were gathering at the edge of the compound. Others were trying to herd embassy staff away. One marine, having grabbed a ladder and put it up on the perimeter wall, was ushering folk over. The wall itself was cracked and, in some places, covered in blood from where wounded people had touched it. They were a sorry-looking bunch, those waiting anxiously in line for the ladder. One muscular young man – it was the secret-service guy, Denham, Miranda realised – had only one shoe and was limping badly. Others in the line, which she herself joined, were calling emergency services, colleagues and relatives on their cellphones. As she waited, she heard the sirens of more ambulances and fire engines.
On the other side of the wall, the Peace Corps people, who had rushed over from their nearby complex as soon as they heard the bomb, were waiting in vehicles to ferry people away to hospitals. Two Peace Corps nurses climbed over the wall to help the injured who were still in the compound. On the pavement outside, the embassy’s physician, Dr Macintyre, was treating those who needed immediate attention. Two people, both Tanzanians, were lying on makeshift stretchers – doors blown off their hinges at houses and offices nearby. Many of these buildings had caved-in walls and roofs, and all had lost the glass in their windows.
A helicopter droned overhead. Beneath it, a vast crowd began to converge on the scene, running up to look inside the compound, horrified at the damage. Firemen were beginning to hose the building, sending up plumes of steam to mix with the smoke and dust. Here and there, shafts of sunlight were coming down through the palls.
After making sure that Macintyre knew about Ray, she went in one of the Peace Corps vehicles to the house of the chargé d’affaires. It had been agreed that this was to be set up as a temporary headquarters. On the way, suddenly aware that she was still trembling with shock, Miranda heard the news that there had also been a near-simultaneous bomb at the embassy in Nairobi. It was by all accounts a much worse and deadlier explosion. As they sped through the city, she shivered at the thought that anything could be worse than what she had just experienced. Looking back, she saw a cloud of black smoke rising into the air, carrying up shreds of paper and cloth. The vast crowd was now running away from the scene.
She told the lady in the front, leaning forward urgently, as if it were something with which either of them could help.
‘They must be frightened too,’ the woman replied. ‘There’s rumours of secondary bombs going round. Kampala and Khartoum as well, they’re saying.’
‘Who do you think it is?’ Miranda asked, wincing. Her eardrums were hurting badly.
‘Must be the Islamics. Got to be. The Tanzanians have no axe to grind with us.’
At the chargé’s house, more Peace Corps people were on hand with coffee and sodas. She drank a Coke, feeling light-headed – and guilty at having left Ray behind. Someone brought her a facecloth soaked in disinfectant with which to dab her cuts. She was still trembling, she realised.
After gathering her wits, she set about trying to help as further staff appeared. There was so much to do. First of all they had to account for everyone, locate them, and try to work out how many had been injured. Miranda assisted with the list-making, finding out contact details of relatives in the United States. This was then read down the continual open line to the Operations Center of the State Department: the name of the employee and family, the name of the person to call, the phone number, which was then rung by State so that people wouldn’t wake up in the morning and hear it on the news. A similar list was made on behalf of Tanzanian employees, but many did not have phones.
By six o’clock they had ascertained that at least ten, maybe eleven people had died at Dar. Over eighty others had been injured. One of these was Juma the guard, whom the blast had plucked from his booth and thrown bodily into the air. Just after he had landed, a car had fallen next to him, less than a metre away. The glass in the car’s windows had shattered and entered his body like buckshot. The doctors said it would take months to remove all the tiny fragments. Several of the other local guards were dead.
It was no consolation that US nationals were not among the fatalities at Dar. As two-way radios crackled and mobile phones warbled their incongruously cheerful signatures, it became increasingly clear that the situation in Kenya was far bleaker. The Nairobi death toll rose throughout the day. The figures were still hazy, but it seemed that over two hundred people had been killed, twelve of them Americans. Up to five thousand Kenyans had been wounded in the streets and offices around the Nairobi chancery.
As the afternoon wore on, more and more people crowded into the chargé’s house, sitting on cushions on the floor or huddled together in small, blood-soaked groups. An improvised first-aid station was set up on the first floor of the chargé’s house, where Dr Macintyre, with the Peace Corps nurses, could attend to those who didn’t require immediate hospitalisation. Many people needed stitches or were hysterical and had to be calmed down. In between comforting people and making cups of tea and coffee, Miranda helped a medical orderly dispense tranquillisers. She heard that Ray had been taken to hospital and that his condition was stable. She tried to keep busy, not to think about the bodies of Mrs Ghai, or George, or the gardener.
Each new arrival brought some fresh horror story. At about five-thirty, Corporal Rossetti arrived, pale and dishevelled, still carrying his M16. He was utterly exhausted – reduced to near incapacity by the effort of rescuing people, assisting the badly wounded, and protecting what remained of the chancery. This included the task of destroying classified documents and equipment. After seven hours, Rossetti had – wisely – agreed to hand over guard duties at the embassy to a mixed force of military staff from a number of third-party diplomatic facilities based nearby (including the British and the Israelis), in conjunction with the Tanzanian police.
He related in more detail the scene that Miranda had briefly witnessed from the back of the Peace Corps vehicle: how the crowd of onlookers on Laibon Road, nearly a thousand strong, had been successively driven away by scares and, in turn, attracted by the terrible fascination of catastrophe.
‘I nearly had to fire over their heads,’ said the Corporal, whose own head was in his hands. ‘We had to get control. It was like a huge wave. They kept to-ing an
d fro-ing. Rushing at me, and then falling back in a mass movement.’
*
There were other movements, other spheres. High in the sky, above the carnage at both sites – above the dead in their ungainly postures, above the maimed and the punctured, above the broken buildings and the still-billowing palls of smoke, above the looping sirens and the nervy crowds – the most sophisticated communications network known to man was responding to contingency. Naturally, the President had been informed at once. At the White House, at the Pentagon, at CIA and FBI headquarters, emergency meetings had been hastily convened and action plans laid down. Secretary Albright and the Department of State’s Operations Center were charged with coordinating the response.
Later that afternoon, President Clinton himself, along with Secretary Albright and other notables, telephoned the chargé’s house to express their sympathy. Later still, Miranda and the others were told that planes were on their way from home. The secret-service man, who still had only one shoe and a sock full of blood, stood on the chargé’s dining-room table to give a briefing.
‘We now have a twenty-four-hour open line to the State Department,’ Denham said. ‘You may have heard there were bombs in cities other than here and Nairobi. I am pleased to say that that is not the case. There were threats, but these have been neutralised. People have been picked up. But Nairobi is very bad. Much worse than here. The good news is that hundreds of government employees – FBI, Army, doctors, post-disaster experts and secret-service personnel – are on the way. All need to be found accommodation, vehicles and phone lines. What I suggest is that everyone who is able and not deemed essential personnel goes home and gets some sleep. But don’t leave this house unless you have some means of keeping in contact. Keep a low profile anyhow. In the morning, get back here and help man the phones and fix stuff up. Bring your mobiles. We’re going to need people to liaise with the hospitals, with Washington, with expediting stuff through the airport.’
Miranda didn’t go home in the end. Oyster Bay was too far, and she was still too shaken up anyway. She slept on the floor under a blanket, waking to television pictures from Nairobi of the rescue effort. It had continued through the night. There was rubble everywhere, interspersed with chunks of metal, pieces of cars, bodywork, engines, all twisted out of shape and black with soot. Under rows of bright arc lamps, a crane was pulling away blocks of masonry too heavy for pickaxes and crowbars. Acetylene torches and angle-grinders were being used to cut through steel rods. The TV microphones picked up clearly the voices of those who were trapped, crying out for help.
She stayed until lunchtime helping with the phones and organising the installation of further lines. In the afternoon, famished and weary, she went to the hospital in a taxi to visit Ray, buying a take-out (something she never normally did) from Jambo Snacks under the clock tower and eating it on the way.
Ray was to be evacuated to London that night, Britain being nearer than the US. She wept when she saw him there in the hospital bed with both legs in casts, even though he maintained his customary spirit.
‘Don’t cry, sweetie. I’ve been lucky really. My internal organs are OK. And my dick, thank the Lord.’
‘What about walking?’
‘Ah yes. Mobility. Well, they go all quiet when I ask them about that. Apparently my kneecaps are crushed.’
An image of broken eggshells went through Miranda’s mind as she remembered the bones she saw. Tears started to run down her face again.
‘Come on now,’ he said. ‘Give me a kiss and go do something useful. I’m sure those Brits will sort me out.’
She kissed him, but was still crying when she got back in the taxi. Instead of returning to the chargé’s, she asked the taxi driver to drop her at a local rental place, where she hired a new car. Her own, like those of most of her colleagues, had been wrecked by the blast. Then she drove quickly back to the house, where she was due to staff the open line again. On arriving about three o’clock, she ran into Clive Bayard. She realised she hadn’t spoken to the archivist properly since ‘the event’, as the Op Center was now calling it. It was he who had taken yesterday’s call from Clinton.
‘It was weird,’ he confided to her a little later, over coffee and doughnuts in a brief moment of downtime. ‘I’ve never been much of a fan of the President, especially not since this stuff with the women. All that business offended my sensibilities. But when I heard his voice on the phone asking me my name and giving his support and saying what a terrible thing it was that had happened to us, I knew that he meant it right from his heart. He was genuine. You know, I don’t care what that guy does now, he can seduce every American woman possessed of dark hair and breasts between Montana and New Mexico, and damn me if that doesn’t include you, Miranda.’
She stared at him, amazed. Clive was a strict Baptist and she had never heard him blaspheme or mention sex before. He had taken off his spectacles and was continuing in the same vein, holding the glasses in one hand and gesticulating with a half-eaten doughnut in the other.
The image stuck in her head as she drove back to Oyster Bay. Clive wasn’t alone in seeming out of character, volatile. The bomb was having strange effects on many people – jolting their self-images, altering personalities and relationships. More strangely, it seemed to be jolting time and place, too, which had the appearance of chopping back and forth as the event jumped and quickened in the memory. It was disconcerting, she thought as she collapsed on her bed the second night after the bombings – like a movie that messed with appearance and reality.
Only this was real … Back in her familiar patterned sheets, back in her own bed at last, Miranda Powers was about to slip into the toils of sleep. She reached over to the bedside table. The last thing she saw, as she turned off the light, was the baby turtle shell Nick Karolides had given her on their way back from Lyly.
PART THREE
23
The least consequence of what transpired at 10.39 a.m. on Friday August 7, 1998 – date never to be forgotten, time branded on her memory– was the loss of her alarm clock. Miranda threw the sheets aside quickly, realising that she had overslept – on such a day. She had woken up easefully, thinking of Nick and the twanging guitars at the night club on Zanzibar, and the sweet air of the garden afterwards, where he had kissed her. Then her thoughts turned, in a single, self-punitive flash, towards poor Mrs Ghai, George the cleaner, the gardener, Ray, the body without a head. Towards the hundreds of others in Kenya, some still trapped beneath the rubble, alive or dead.
After dressing quickly, and grabbing a few mouthfuls of yogurt and muesli for breakfast, she rushed back to the chargé’s house. She had to fight her way through. Once the bomb had gone off, the world’s media – CNN, BBC and many more – had quickly started to gather round the ruined chancery. Now they had begun to concentrate on the emergency op centre at the house.
During the night, a public-affairs strategy had been devised by the Department of State. Orders were given that the media were to be kept away from evidence-sensitive bomb sites and prohibited from conducting on-camera interviews with victims. But it was too late: a number of images were already out and flashing round the world. Some of them were deemed too grisly for the international networks, and were shown only on African TV. These included one of a hand with a ruby ring still on one of its fingers.
Mrs Ghai’s. Miranda fled to the bathroom, holding her own hand over her mouth.
Later she saw another image, from Nairobi, of bloody hand-prints on a wall, which she guessed were those of an injured person dragging themself to safety. Again she had to turn away. The chancery public-affairs officer tried to clamp down on such broadcasts. Instead, proper briefings, stand-up press conferences, were to be given to the hundreds of journalists who now congregated in Dar.
Miranda watched President Clinton and other members of the government make statements on CNN. ‘These acts of terrorist violence are abhorrent,’ said the President, standing in the White House rose garden. ‘They a
re inhuman. We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes.’
‘Terrorists rejoice in the agony of their victims,’ said Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. ‘What we want to do is take the joy out of their celebration, and we will do everything in our power to track them down.’
Secretary Albright announced a $2 million reward for information leading to the conviction of those responsible for the bombings. ‘Our nation’s memory is long and our reach is far,’ she said.
Miranda could not bear to think what it was like for those families who had lost sons or daughters, mothers, fathers. In Nairobi, it had taken over twenty-four hours of constant digging by Marines and special-forces personnel to remove the bodies from the rubble. The TV showed Marines and Kenyan soldiers standing by the ruined building, which was now ringed with coils of barbed wire and piles of sandbags, in anticipation of further attack. Behind the barrier a bulldozer pushed a jumble of debris. Miranda saw bodies being wrapped in plastic or having numbered aluminium tags attached to their ankles for identification. She saw coffins, made of red wood, being loaded onto the backs of pickups and, as was the custom for the Africans, being taken for burial to their home villages.
* * *
The Administration acted promptly to deal with the crisis, initiating a rescue plan and taking steps to apprehend those responsible. Not surprisingly, however, things were a bit chaotic. It was not until forty hours after the bombings that the C-17 Globemaster III carrying the Tanzanian FEST (Foreign Emergency Search Team) arrived in Dar. The regular FEST plane had been despatched to Nairobi and it was only later, as the scale of the tragedy became apparent, that it was decided to send a separate one to Tanzania. The delay was partly to do with accessing an appropriate aircraft and partly to do with the availability of a second stream of equipment: radios and telephones, search dogs, tools for the excavation and extraction of buried personnel, medical supplies, next-of-kin records and other emergency documentation. It took a lot of work to get all this together.