by Ian McDonald
He extended a gloved hand. Gaby did not take it.
‘Haran. I need to ask a favour in return of you.’
‘You are aware that what I have asked you to do is in repayment for the favour I did you in the Independence Day thing. This will be a fresh account.’
‘I am aware of that.’
Haran folded his hands in his lap, like a priest awaiting a confession.
‘What is it you would ask me?’
‘Peter Werther.’
‘I gave you him as a token of our relationship.’
‘Dr Daniel Oloitip says he’s disappeared.’
‘One does well not to pay too much attention to what Dr Oloitip says.’
‘He says he hasn’t so much disappeared as been disappeared. By the UN. A joint US/Canadian airborne force hit the What the Sun Said community up at Lake Naivasha and took him.’
Haran studied the outspread fingertips of his gloves.
‘These are serious allegations Dr Oloitip is making.’
‘Haran, I want you to find out if this is true, and if so, where Peter Werther is.’
‘Are you asking me as a favour?’
He was looking right at her. She had never seen his eyes so clearly. They were like two spheres of lead.
‘I am asking you as a favour.’
‘Finding out and finding where are two favours.’
‘Then I am asking you as a favour, twice. And I will owe you, twice.’
Haran snapped his hands shut. The lemon-yellow leather gloves made a soft, rustling snapping, like a lizard trapping an insect.
‘I shall do what I can. I can promise no more than that. You understand that things are not so simple with the UN, or I would not have had to ask you the favour I have. My boys must be discreet if they are not to be discovered. It may be that they will find nothing. But you will still owe me the favour. Two favours.’
‘Haran, I knew from the moment I met you I would always be owing you.’
He smiled. Like his lead eyes, she had never seen him smile before. She wished she had not seen him smile now.
‘I shall have one of my boys escort you back to SkyNet. The streets are no longer as safe for visitors as they were, especially for white women. I am afraid there are thieves and conmen on every street corner.’
Gaby got up from the table. Mombi’s handsome envoy had returned with fresh coffee. Haran gently ran his gloved right hand along the possegirl’s jawline. Gaby shuddered.
20
‘Ten years ago this dusty, rutted dirt road would have been nose-to-tail with tour buses heading to the game lodges of West Tsavo National Park. Now the only vehicles that move along it are United Nations truck convoys. I counted fifty go past me ten minutes ago. Their dust still hangs in the air. And the place to which they are headed, where once Masai cattle and wild animals existed peacefully together, has turned into something from the Old Testament: an entire nation of refugees.
‘In the last census two years ago, the town of Merueshi had a population of three thousand. Today UNHCR estimates there are over one hundred thousand people camped out around Merueshi. In those two years, the Chaga has come. Terminum is just two kilometres to the south of us, ten minutes’ walk, and that, the UN says, is close enough. Everyone, and everything, is to be moved, down to the last cow and goat, the last stick of furniture.
‘From fifty kilometres around, the people have come to Merueshi to be evacuated. Some have their own transport, others were brought in by truck and bus, most have walked carrying all their worldly possessions. Now they wait to be taken north, and they wonder if the UN trucks will reach them before the Chaga does, and if they do make it out of here, what kind of life can they expect in the townships?
‘To be forced away from everything you have ever known is hard. What is intolerable is then to have even those few, precious things you have managed to salvage taken from you.
‘I’ve come to Merueshi, to the very edge of the Chaga and this scene of near-Biblical desolation, to investigate reports of widespread looting and extortion of refugees’ property. Not by criminals or gangs of bandits, those certainly exist, or even by profiteers selling space on their own truck trains, but by the very United Nations soldiers who are meant to be protecting them. I have received evidence of black marketeering in stolen goods by one particular unit of Azerbaijani soldiers under the flag of the United Nations.
‘And cut it.’
‘We’re still running,’ Faraway said behind the camera. ‘You can say it if you want to.’
‘Oh, all right then. You can edit this later. I’ll give you a mark.’ Gaby made a chopping motion with her right hand across the camera’s field of vision. ‘Gaby McAslan, SkyNet News, Merueshi, Kenya.’
‘And we are out.’
‘Did it look good? Is this sleeveless denim thing all right? No sweat stains under the armpits? If you made my ass look fat I will hang you by your balls. God, was my nose too shiny?’
Faraway doubled over with laughter.
‘You bitch just like Jake. You looked fine. You always look fine to me, Gaby. Mighty fine indeed. Two things, if you please. One, don’t swipe at flies with your hand, and two, your hair was blowing across your face. It might be a good idea to shoot it again.’
‘Jesus, Faraway. That bastard helicopter will come back. I know it. And I’m never as fresh the fourth time.’
She could see that Faraway was considering a sexual riposte, but instead he said, ‘Jake would do it again.’
‘Fuck Jake.’
She knew the look.
‘All right. We’ll do it again. Got the camp framed? I’ll give you a mark.’
‘One moment please. There seems to be a problem with the white balance.’
‘I knew it. You haven’t the first idea about that camera, have you? We should have waited for Tembo to come back. I don’t know why he trusted you with it.’
‘You trusted him with your Nissan.’
‘That’s different. He has to get the boy. I can’t go: the only white woman in fifty miles? What kind of relation is he anyway?’
‘Wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.’
‘Blood is much thicker than water in this country.’
‘But not so thick as money. And remember, I am only doing this because you promised to let me see you with no clothes on. Five minutes. In the middle of my living room.’
‘You can’t possibly hold me to that; come on, it was five o’clock in the morning, I would have promised anything.’
Faraway grinned behind the eyepiece as the lens closed in and pulled out into a wide-angle.
‘You have always known that what I want most in the world is to undress you and then fiki-fiki you as you have never been fiki-fikied before, Gaby McAslan. Is it red down there too?’
‘Shut your gob and we’ll go for another take.’
The bastard helicopter came back. It turned high in the air and swooped down low across the camp from its station to the east. Children hid from the hammer of its blades. Women pulled sheets over their heads to protect them from the dust. Lop-eared goats plunged and kicked on their hide tethers; a shit-smeared cow broke loose and careered between the huddles of people. Men in frayed shorts, faded T-shirts and baseball caps with the names of fertilizer companies on the front shooed it away with outspread arms. The helicopter hovered a moment over the refugees, delighting in the chaos it created, then put its down nose and slid up over the low hill where Gaby and Faraway did their fourth take of the news report. Dry brown grass raged and stormed. Dust flew up in a suffocating cloud. Faraway fought with the velcro closures on the camera hood. Gaby watched her prompt notes fly away from her. Combing her hair from her face, she could clearly see the pilot in the forward cockpit raise a forefinger in an obscene gesture. Gaby screamed curses into the roar of rotors shredding air. The helicopter banked again and slid away north along the line of the road in search of others to intimidate.
‘You will have your revenge,’ Faraway said. He
was videoing cut-away footage of the camp. ‘Here it comes.’ A line of dust moved across the plain: an electric blue Nissan ATV, driving as fast as the mass of people permitted. ‘I am thinking,’ he continued, following it with his lens out of the camp and up the hill, ‘that maybe this is a thing worth doing after all. Maybe this will work and we will all be Leonard and Bernstein and have our faces on the television and not behind it.’
‘Woodward and Bernstein,’ Gaby corrected. She knew his cool by now. Anything that would earn him fame and face, especially among the easy women he met in Friday night jit-clubs, he would follow with the same phallic determination that he followed those same women home to their beds. Once vanity got him started, he was kept moving by a deeply uncool, unstreet sentimentality about the world’s unfairness. Tembo had required a different tack. Righteousness roused him. He was small, but mighty for justice. As Gaby had unrolled her story, Tembo had fetched the equipment her plan required and threw his overnight ready bag into the back of the ATV. His wife had gone about her early morning tasks with the patient resignation of African women who know that they carry the whole world on their backs.
The first person Gaby had confided in was Miriam Sondhai. She needed the blessing of the sacerdotal woman.
The Somali woman had been slow to answer. It was her way, Gaby had learned. Only when a thing had permeated into her like the rain into dry earth, found its level and risen again to the surface would she speak. That evening after her run she had come out with a book to sit with Gaby on the side of the verandah that caught the best late sun. Gaby had smoked and worked at her laptop, preparing scripts. Suddenly, Miriam had put down the book and said,
‘You must do this.’ The fossil water had risen. Gaby set down her laptop. ‘You see, they rocketed the hospital for an hour and a half before the troops came in. American Apaches, that was the name of the helicopters. They said the war-lords were using it as a headquarters. They were selling the drugs from the pharmacy for arms. Always drugs, for Americans. It is their great Satan. They should fear their own love of weapons, that makes them build things like Apache attack helicopters and anti-personnel rockets. I saw them hit one of the nurses as she ran across the compound looking for cover. The way they work is to explode into thousands of flechettes. It shredded the skin and flesh from her bones. I was nine years old and I saw a woman turned into a skeleton.
‘My father got as many as he could down to the lower levels, but there were many who could not be moved; in traction, or hooked to machinery, or premature babies in incubators. Some of the nurses stayed with them all through the aerial and ground assaults. The ground troops were Pakistanis. They had UN blue helmets, they had been sent to keep the peace between the tribal factions. They came through every ward, emptied every bed. They pulled people off life-support machines, they tipped babies out of incubators. They went into the theatres and took the operating equipment. They were the ones looted the pharmacy of all its drugs. Any medical equipment they could move, they took. They loaded it into white army trucks with United Nations painted on the side. They said the trucks were for prisoners but they were not the kind of truck that could hold people securely. They came knowing what they wanted. They had it all planned. I firmly believe they made up the story about the war-lords using my father’s hospital as a base as an excuse to loot it, and so the Americans, because they are so afraid of drugs, would rocket the hospital for an hour.
‘We saw it on the satellite news months later. President Zulfikar was pinning medals to the officers who had led the raid. They all looked very clean and very smart and they stood very upright, as Pakistani soldiers do, but what the satellite news did not tell was that the medals were not for service with the UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia, but for their generous donation of ten incubators, three life-support units, two dialysis machines, an X-ray lab and a complete operating theatre to the new Benazir Bhutto hospital in Islamabad.
‘The hospital did not get the drugs. The soldiers split what they had stolen and sold it to the Americans. Some of the deaths among the UN peacekeepers were from accidental overdoses on medical-grade opiates.’
Gaby’s cigarette had burned down into a drooping curl of ash.
‘This is why you must do it,’ Miriam Sondhai said. ‘It is a bad thing when the military is a parasite on its own nation, but it is much worse when someone else’s army is parasitical on your nation, and with the blessing of the organization that is supposed to restrain the strong and protect the weak. You must do this, Gaby.’
She had her blessing. Hers was holy work. But she wished her motivations were as clean as Miriam’s expectations.
Tembo drove the ATV like a maniac. The boy he had brought was tall and thin and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt for a band that had broken up long ago. His hair was shaved so short it looked painted. He radiated that angelic, androgynous beauty peculiar to young African men and women. His name was William. He did not say very much more than that, except that he wanted his money now, thank you.
Gaby drilled him while Tembo wired him with the minicam in the strap of his shoulder bag and fitted the mikes and relay gear. In the back of the ATV, Faraway tuned receivers and monitors and gave encouraging thumbs-ups.
‘It’s simple,’ Gaby said. ‘You go in, you walk around, you see anything that looks like soldiers taking magendo, you get in close, but not too close. They won’t suspect you, there are too many people, but don’t attract attention to yourself. If they stop you and want something, offer them a thousand shillings, and if they still want more, give them this portable CD-radio. If they don’t get it, you can keep it, and the thousand shillings as well, if you can hold on to it. Now, what’s the range of the transmitter?’
‘Two hundred metres.’ His voice was soft and sexless too, a man/woman whisper.
‘We’ll be in the four by four, close by at all times. If there’s any trouble, we’ll pull you out, but I really don’t think there will be. Go in, get your stuff, come back, and you’ll get your face on satellite television. You’ll be a big star, just like Jackie Chan. Jean-Claude van Damme. A hero.’
Tembo looked at Gaby in a way that said that such was poor currency for the soul of his wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.
They dropped the kid half a mile from the town centre. He looked back nervously. Tembo waved him on encouragingly. He worked his way into the knots of people. Gaby let him get a hundred yards ahead before following in low gear. For all the people, there were few blue-helmets. A solitary APC passed. The soldier in the front hatch saw a white woman driving and curled his tongue to touch the lower edge of his shades. For the first time the realization of what might happen if something went wrong struck Gaby. She was monstrously isolated, professionally, geographically, racially, sexually. If she fell, there would be no hands to catch her but those of men with guns.
William stopped to talk with some young men he knew sitting on the white stones that marked the forecourt of Merueshi’s solitary gas station. Gaby stopped the ATV. In the back Faraway waved his thumbs on the air. The boy’s talk was coming through loud and clear. One of the youths pointed into town. William moved on. The four by four followed.
The soldiers had set up a processing station in front of the district magistrate’s office. A funnel of parked armoured cars directed the press of people past a table where a swarthy officer with the thinnest moustache that could possibly call itself such checked names on a PDU. Beyond him were the trucks.
‘Go to it, go to it,’ Gaby shouted to her stool-pigeon. Unhearing, William melted into the crowd. ‘Damn it. Can’t see him.’ She stopped the car and peered over the back seat at Faraway’s monitors.
‘Much meeting and greeting and no magendo,’ Faraway said. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ The jerky, wide-angle image of the shoulder-mounted minicam had caught a soldier standing talking with a bearded, barefoot man in shorts. You could see at once that the bearded, barefoot man was at his wits’ end. He pleaded with his hands. The soldier caught his eloquent hand
s, turned them over. The bearded, barefoot man wore a copper bracelet on his left wrist.
‘Turn to it, please turn to it,’ Faraway begged. ‘Oh, boy, if only you had some lessons in basic camera technique.’
‘But do not get too interested,’ Tembo said, mindful of his wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin’s safety.
On the ten-centimetre monitor they saw the bearded, barefoot man take off the copper bracelet and give it to the soldier. The soldier put it in one of the pockets of his combat pants and handed the bearded, barefoot man a slip of paper. The bearded, barefoot man thanked the soldier effusively with his eloquent hands. He signalled to a thin woman and four children who had been sitting on the earth close by to pick up their things. The soldier led them all away, shouting a path through the crowd. The people pushed in behind them and William’s camera caught no more.
‘One moment,’ Faraway said. He wound the disc back frame by frame. ‘There.’ In the shuffle, William had been pushed against the soldier and the unit flashes on his uniform had come into sharp focus. The alphabet was indecipherable, but the regimental badge of a stooping eagle in a blue triangle was unmistakable. Haran’s instructions had guided them true.
‘Result!’ Gaby McAslan yelled, punching the air and forgetting the low roof.
Kid William moved inward. The ATV crawled after him. The camera saw a soldier take a thousand shillings from a distraught pastor and his family. It saw three blue-helmets laugh at a desperate old man offering them the only thing he valued; an aged, aged black bicycle. They saw a boy in combats with an AK47 order a family to spread all their goods on a blanket on the ground and pick through them, taking here a brass-framed mirror, there a wedding ring. The boy-soldier was seventeen at the most.
What appalled was the blatancy at it. There was no attempt at concealment or discretion, no implication of shame or misdoing. It was a public market that ended in a slip of paper and the people who received it being taken to the trucks beyond. When a truck was full, it would drive away, the people on board pressing their hands together in thanksgiving and weeping with joy, and another would come forward to take its place.