by Peter Tonkin
Fortunately, he was a frequent visitor here and was no stranger to Harry’s Land Rover. He chucked the Remington into the back seat and slammed the rear door while she clambered into the front and paused to pull Harry’s pistol out of her waistband. Robert had the elderly vehicle in first gear while Ann was still settling in the seat at his side and was rolling forwards almost as soon as Harry would have been.
‘Which way?’ he yelled.
She pointed out across the bush and he took her at her word, slamming up through the gears and keeping his right foot hard on the floor - very hard, for the seat was set in Harry’s driving position and Robert’s legs were half a metre longer.
Ann swung round, searching the shadowed slope with wild eyes. The flame-etched rim was still so close. What had Harry said about the Remington? It would kill at a kilometre! What sort of guns would these people have? She could see the shape of the rifle clutched across the dead soldier’s chest, with its strange butt and long, curving magazine, but she didn’t know enough about guns to identify it; certainly not enough to assess its killing range. She put the camera to her eye and everything swam out of focus at once. Horror gripped her. The camera was broken! She was going blind! She lowered the camera and wiped her face, rubbing her eyes fiercely with the back of a trembling hand. She was crying.
She looked back with her eyes clearer just in time to see the first figure top the rise behind them. It was impossible to judge the distance, but there was no way it could be a kilometre yet.
The figure came up to full height and brought a rifle up.
‘NO!’ she screamed again, howling more loudly for herself than she had done even for Harry. She never even thought of trying to shoot back with the pistol, or of trying for the Remington. ‘NOOOO!’ she screamed.
Robert tried to swing the wheel, but he lacked Harry’s wiry strength and bludgeoning technique. The Land Rover continued sedately along the straight line of its path.
The soldier on the crest put the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at them. Ann stopped screaming then, gulped, and watched, fascinated. Knowing that the gun was pointed straight at her, knowing it could not miss, knowing she should be cowering down and getting out of the line of fire, she watched as he drew his bead on her.
And hesitated. Looked around, down the slope. The barrel wavered and fell. The soldier stood there uncertainly until another man joined him then together they turned and looked after the fleeing Land Rover. A third figure joined them, began to gesture, wave his arms. The same scene began to play itself out on the top of the hill behind them as Ann had seen in the seconds after Harry’s death. It continued as she and Robert made good their escape. But the man who hesitated and let them go did not meet the fate of the man who had murdered Harry and sprung the trap too soon.
Or at least he had not done so by the time they were out of sight.
~ * ~
‘Where are we going to go?’ asked Ann wearily when the dawn at last showed them that there was nothing more threatening nearby than some zebra and a few distant giraffe, and allowed them to roll to a stop.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he answered, his voice rusty with fatigue and thirst, and the roughness resulting from discussing over and over again what had happened to Harry and what Ann had subsequently seen. A conversation interrupted only when she hurled herself periodically over the door top to throw up down the Land Rover’s side. ‘We have to go north.’
‘North! But we need to get to Mawanga city. On the coast. That’s west!’ Her voice was also weak. She had not had a drink in several hours - even the slightest sip started her vomiting again, and she couldn’t work out whether it was exhaustion, shock or a gastric infection. It could even have been motion sickness, she supposed; the ride had been rough enough, for they had tried to keep clear of roads.
‘I know we have to get to Mawanga, but we’ll never make it if we go directly. First, we’ll run out of petrol and although I’ve got local currency and cards, there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to get any if we go west. They built great roads but no gas stations on them. Secondly, with or without Rover here, we’re bound to get mixed up with the refugees heading that way, which will mean going through a police or army checkpoint. They’ll have that camera off you in a second. You wouldn’t stand a chance. They’d detain us at the least. Maybe disappear us, if you know what I mean. Especially if we still have the guns on us. And of course if we don’t take the guns we’ll get mugged by the refugees. No. It’s too risky.’
‘OK,’ she said slowly. ‘What’s north?’
‘Two things. First of all, Harry hid petrol and supplies in caches on his domain. Never knew when he or his askari would need them.’
He pulled out a battered map case from the pocket in the Land Rover’s door. ‘Marked on a map in here. Some of them must still be there, though I doubt he’s topped them up for months.’
‘That’s one. You said two.’
‘The N’Kuru townships. We’ll still stand out like sore thumbs but we’ll have a better chance. There aren’t so many refugees in that area and as far as I know there are no roadblocks yet.’
‘So we can get in. So?’
As he had been speaking, he had been unfolding Harry’s map. Now, holding it across the steering wheel and letting it flap up onto the windscreen, he pointed with a bright pink fingernail. Leading from the townships, across a bridge just below the Leopold Falls then on down to the coast, following an apparently insane course halfway up the tectonic cliff above the river was a long dark line scarred with short cross-marks. She knew it, though she had to reach right back into fourth grade geography to name it. ‘It’s a railway line,’ she breathed.
~ * ~
They found petrol at the nearest cache marked on Harry’s map, which was lucky but logical enough: they were working northwards from the game reserve now, coming into more populous regions. This was therefore the cache least likely to have been found and robbed by the desperate population. There was enough petrol to get them up to the nearest township, but nothing more. They filled up and pressed on. The game roaming the outskirts of Harry’s jurisdiction was thinner but there were still wildebeest and zebra and once, in the distance, elephants. Ann’s camera stayed packed away. She had more important things than animal photos on her mind now.
Seeming to interweave with timeless inevitability, the last few wild herds and the first few scarecrow figures shared the same barren scrub. As they left behind the last family of emaciated little gazelle they passed the first dispirited family of starving N’Kuru, sitting round a fire of thorn scrub cooking something in a copper pot. Probably a bit of gazelle.
The people of the bush gathered dejectedly round the outskirts of the town; more like beggars, never really achieving the status of refugees. There were not enough of them and there was too much food - not enough to keep them alive, just enough to stop them from dying at once. Their encampments thickened and began to form patterns as the tracks became roadways and as the strange grey hillocks in the distance suddenly gleamed dazzlingly as the sun caught their windows. Then the tracks were metalled, or at least tarmacked, and the hillocks were revealed to be clumps of high-rise buildings.
‘But this is a city!’ exclaimed Ann. She was feeling much better. She hadn’t vomited again since they’d found Harry’s cache. ‘Couldn’t we get things rolling from here?’
Robert looked down at her. ‘I have no contacts here. I wouldn’t know who to trust. Where do you suggest we start?’
‘Embassy? Consulate?’
‘Not here. This is upcountry. Certainly nobody of ours. Nobody from Europe either. Only the Angolans, the Russians and Congo Libre have limited diplomatic representation here. The rest are down at the coast.’
‘Firms? Companies? Anyone with a darkroom and a fax!’
‘Plenty of those. One or two oil companies with American staff. One of those new concerns with people checking out local cures and forest plants for new drugs. Very green, but a
n unknown quantity. Old-fashioned drugs firms. Copper works. Beer factory. Freedom Brand cigarettes - tobacco was a big cash crop here once upon a time. Sweat shops. Clothes of course - labour even cheaper than Taiwan. They make TVs and hold some local franchises for computers, videos, and of course cars and trucks. All a bit shabby since Julius Karanga died. You know how it goes. Western companies sensing a profit but they don’t train the locals properly. Short-term moneyspinning; nothing solid at all. Big plans fallen flat. Lot of people pulled out, gone broke. It’s been a while, but I can ask around. If you can do your own developing it will be much safer.’
‘I can’t. Well, I can but I’d hate to risk it. I’m not very skilful and one mistake would blow the lot.’
‘Dangerous, then. If anyone even dreams we’ve got those photographs, the chances are we’ll simply disappear.’
‘Oh, come on . . .’
‘You got any contacts in the government?’
‘Well, no ...’
‘Anyone powerful? Influential?’
‘No.’
‘Then who’s to stop it? Those photographs prove that this country is on the verge of civil war. That it can’t govern itself properly. Have you any idea what getting them out into the Western news media is going to do to people in this country? How many people it’s going to inconvenience, maybe destroy? Powerful people. Ruthless people.’
‘Oh, come on . . .’ She wasn’t so sure now. What had been done in the village was all too real. What had been done to Harry. She would not have believed such things could ever happen in her ordered world. Until yesterday. Until last night. Robert was right. She had to widen her horizons here over what was or was not likely to happen.
‘So if the wrong people find out about this we will probably never be seen again.’
‘We’ll disappear,’ he repeated. ‘And most likely not too slowly or comfortably.’
‘You mean the police or the army would arrest us, torture us and kill us.’
‘Probably. Or the Lions. Lots of them around here. Fifth columnists from Congo Libre. Probably rape us too. You, certainly.’ His voice was flat, matter-of-fact. Utterly believable.
They entered a suburb. Corrugated iron twisted itself into huts. Clapboard held garish paint, flaking. Beaten-mud footpaths. The first fat date palms, stripped. Two children and a dog ran into the road screaming. Robert braked and a battered Mercedes overtook him on the wrong side, narrowly missing the dog. In the quiet after the Merc’s blaring horn, a transistor radio played loudly enough to drown out the Rover’s engine and Robert’s colourful language. He swerved to avoid a broken beer bottle in the road.
‘It’s make up your mind time,’ he said. ‘We’re in civilisation now.’
~ * ~
The railway station was right in the centre of town. Its white marble portico stood between a tall building whose frontage was decorated with Arabic writing in gold and a Mercedes-Benz car dealership which presented the latest models, all white, on velvet behind thick dark glass, as though they were pearls. They parked and Robert had to go through the ridiculous process of finding enough change for the parking meter.
As they got down onto the pavement, they were given a pointedly wide berth by half a dozen young Arabic men in Italian suits hurrying towards the skyscraper. ‘But there’s so much money here!’ whispered Ann, feeling suddenly badly out of place not because she was white but because she was so untidy.
‘There always is, for the right people. That’s part of the attraction.’ He looked around, hawk-eyed. ‘Take everything you can carry. Keep the gun hidden in your camera case. I’ll take the Remington and we’ll pretend we’ve been doing a spot of hunting if anyone asks.’
He jerked the gun out of the back as though it was a suitcase. She did the same with her camera bag. Robert put the rifle casually over his shoulder and strode up the white marble steps with all the thoughtless swagger of Ernest Hemingway coming back from Kilimanjaro. She followed just behind him, trying to emulate his ease without seeming to do so. She was very scared indeed.
If they turned any heads or raised any eyebrows, the fact was not obvious.
The great cool marble hall of the station was packed with people and the noise they were making echoed overpoweringly in the white vaulted caverns above. In front, beyond the throngs, waited the maw of the departure gate. To the left, at the head of a shuffling, raucous snake of women, lay the ticket offices. On the right had once stood a parade of neat white shops. One or two still retained some kind of hoarding or counter but most of them had been ripped open and now contained market stalls laden with local produce which few here could afford, which no one in the shanties beyond the suburbs would ever see. Mangoes, pawpaws, bananas and oranges. Green plantains, dates and coconuts. A wealth of jewel brightness. And beside the fruit stalls were the travelling oven men with their half-barrels made of steel and filled with glowing charcoal. Roasted plantain, fresh cooked bread, various types of meat, their mingled fragrance filled the air. Two young women, scarcely more than children, attended a fat-uddered goat, selling fresh milk. Behind the goat, incongruously, stood a crate of Coca-Cola. Ann’s mouth flooded with saliva, her stomach cramped fiercely enough to make her stagger.
Before she could pull herself together and look for Robert, she was surrounded. A mob of little boys varying in age from five to fifteen descended on her with ruthless single-mindedness. Their cries - offers, suggestions, imprecations, demands - were overpowering. They waved pieces of cloth at her, leatherwork, shoes, pots, jewellery, craftwork made of wood, skin and horn. In a range of broken languages and dialects, they begged, cajoled and offered - their fathers, their brothers, themselves.
And she had nothing at all to give them.
She looked around desperately as their demands became more insistent, threatening. She saw a sea of black faces all frowning with terrible single-minded desperation. Hands pulled at her clothing, demandingly, pleadingly, intimately. She felt the camera bag jerk once, twice. Then, like a fisherman feeling a fish on the line, she felt the hands begin to pull the bag away from her with irresistible purpose. She swung round and tore it free. In the distance she saw Robert, unconcerned, unaware, shouldering his way with lordly disdain towards the ticket office. Hating to be reduced to this, she made a break for his protection.
In fact it was the women waiting in the queues who saved her, for in order to get to Robert she had to go among them and when the mob of boys followed, with the determination of a pack of wolves chasing a wounded deer, it was the women they disturbed. The hubbub on the air intensified briefly. Shrill N’Kuru was augmented by the sound of slapping and screaming, and a good deal of laughter, and she was alone, struggling past the patient lines, half blinded with tears, tripping over bundles of possessions, clothing, chickens, babies.
‘The next train to Mawanga will depart within the hour,’ the clerk in the ticket office was explaining to Robert in perfect English. The slightness of his stature and the lignite gleam of his skin proclaimed him to be of Kyoga extraction. A perfect civil servant. ‘No, there is no first class. Nor any other class, sir. Those days, alas, are gone. You may purchase either a seat or simple passage. Purchase of a seat permits you to ride inside the carriage. We do not guarantee you will actually be able to sit down, however.’
Robert looked at him for an instant. ‘Have you ever worked for British Rail?’ he asked.
‘No sir!’ The clerk seemed much offended. ‘Now, what will you require? I should inform you that the queues are for passage only tickets.’
Robert looked back. There were perhaps a thousand women waiting - or so it seemed. ‘Two seats,’ he said at once.
‘Two seats.’ The clerk began to leaf through a box of tiny cardboard rectangles. ‘Will that be single or return?’
‘Single.’
The clerk stamped the tickets carefully and handed them over. Robert paid. The clerk counted the money twice and handed over the change. ‘Persons in possession of seat tickets may board at t
heir convenience,’ he informed them. ‘The train is at platform number one.’ He smiled and rose, crossed to a table a metre or two behind him and poured himself a cup of tea. Ann began to understand why the queues were so long.
With the tickets in their possession, their next priority was to get aboard the train. They had to be strictly disciplined about this, for their bodies were making increasingly urgent demands upon them. For drink, food, relief and rest. But as all travellers who do not hold specific reservations know, mistaken priorities at this stage could all too easily lead to a complete journey standing wedged in a corridor. They passed through the barrier at once, had their tickets inspected and clipped punctiliously by a Kyoga in a heavy serge uniform, and crossed through a seemingly undiminished throng to platform one.