by Tom Clancy
“In other words,” Lambert said, “a weapon.”
“Not just a weapon,” Fisher corrected him. “A weapon worthy of an epic, nation-saving hero.”
29
KAPEDO, KENYA
Fisher pulled the Range Rover off the dirt track and beneath the canopy of trees hanging over the plank shack. The hand-painted red and white sign was so faded it was barely legible, but he could just make it out: JIMIYU’S. A scrawny, marginally feathered chicken jumped off the shack’s tin roof and landed with a squawk on the Rover’s hood.
“Adede, go, go!” a male voice called. A black man, standing at least six and a half feet tall, ducked out of the shack’s doorway, waving his hands at the chicken. “Bad girl, bad!” His English had only a slight accent.
The chicken stalked across the hood and hopped down.
Fisher opened the Rover’s door and climbed out. “Mr. Jimiyu?”
“Mr. Barnes?” the man replied, walking forward to shake hands. Jimiyu was rail thin, the bones at his elbows and wrists knobby, and he had perfect, white teeth and lively eyes. “Welcome to Kapedo. How was your drive?”
Fisher had left Nairobi just before dawn. It had taken him nearly six hours to cover the one hundred seventy-five miles to Kapedo. Aly’s warning about highway bandits had been prescient. Twice he’d had to use the vintage M-14 rifle she’d loaned him, once on the road between Nakuru and Nyahururu Falls when an ancient Subaru Brat full of pangawielding teenagers had started tailgating him and gesturing for him to pull over; then again north of Nosoguru, where a trio of men had demanded a toll (they’d wanted the Range Rover itself) for crossing a bridge. In each case, Fisher’s casual brandishing of the M-14 had resolved the debate.
“You had no trouble, yes?” Jimiyu said.
“No trouble.”
“Good, good. And tell me: How is Irving?”
Surprisingly, Fisher’s contact for this final leg of the journey to what he assumed/hoped was the Sunstar’s crash site had come not from the CIA but from Lambert himself, who’d simply given Fisher Jimiyu’s name and a four-word guarantee: “You can trust him.” No explanation offered. When Fisher had pressed him for an explanation, Lambert simply winked and said, “Another time.”
“He sends his regards.” Fisher walked to the rear of the Rover, lifted the hatch, and pulled out his backpack. “He had a message for you.”
“Oh?”
“He said, ‘Barasa is doing fine.’ ”
Jimiyu clapped his hands once and grinned broadly. “Excellent. Come, follow me. We’ll have something to eat, then be on our way. With great luck, I will have you there before nightfall.”
* * *
An hour later, Jimiyu led Fisher down a jungle trail to a plank-and-tire dock at the river’s edge. Bobbing gently on the river’s muddy brown surface was a circa World War II eighteen-foot U.S. Navy motor whaleboat sporting a fresh coat of battleship gray paint and a pair of trolling motors sitting on a transom board in the stern.
“Nice,” Fisher said. “Where’d you get it?”
“I found it,” Jimiyu said proudly, his teeth flashing. Fisher cocked his head at the Kenyan. “Truly,” Jimiyu added. “I was fishing near Tangulbe when it came floating down the river. It was empty and barely afloat. A ghost dhow. I swam out, towed it back to shore, then a friend with a truck helped me bring it here. I fixed it, and here it is,” he finished, spreading his hands as though unveiling a magic trick.
“How fast?”
“Twenty-four kilometers per hour. With extra fuel cans, we can go nearly two hundred forty kilometers.”
Fisher did the conversion in his head: about fourteen miles per hour for 150 miles. It would be just enough to reach the crash site and get back to Kapedo. From here all the way to Lake Turkana they would be crossing through the Eastern Rift Valley and Great Rift Valley, which as a whole ran over 3,500 miles, from Syria in the north to Mozambique in south. Formed by the sinking and tearing of the earth’s crust along a tectonic plate that was fifty million years old, the Rift Valley was an ecosystem unto itself, ranging in elevation from 6,000 feet above sea level here in Kenya to 1,400 feet below sea level at the shores of the Dead Sea, and ranging in width from less than a mile to more than one hundred miles.
On the flight to Nairobi, Fisher had studied satellite maps of the area. The seventy miles of river from Kapedo to Peter’s mystery coordinates flowed ever downward through thick, triple-canopy jungle, boiling gorges, and past towering escarpments, until bottoming out at nearly six hundred feet below sea level in a valley that probably hadn’t seen more than a hundred white footprints in its history. If that’s where the Sunstar had gone down, it was no wonder it had remained lost for almost sixty years.
Jimiyu climbed into the stern, and Fisher handed him the extra fuel and water cans, four steel ammunition boxes full of rations and supplies, then cast off the lines and jumped in. Jimiyu braced his bony leg against the dock, pushed off, then pull-started the engines and opened the throttle.
For the next two hours they glided down the river, passing villages and other boats, most of them narrow-beamed fishing dhows. Jimiyu seemed to know everyone, waving and smiling and calling out in Swahili as they passed by, but for the most part the river was empty of traffic. Jimiyu whistled to himself, one hand on the throttle, the other resting on the stock of a vintage Mauser bolt-action rifle. Though his expression was one of contentment, Fisher could see his eyes constantly scanning, from the riverbanks and across the muddy brown water ahead and to the sides.
“Crocodiles?” Fisher asked at one point.
“Oh, yes, very big. And koboku,” he said, and opened his mouth wide and chomped down. “Hippo, too. Watch for floating logs. They might not be logs, understand?”
“I understand,” Fisher said and fingered his own rifle. Though opinions varied, it was widely accepted that hippos killed more people in Africa than all other animals combined. A bull hippo can weigh as much as six thousand pounds, has razor-sharp tusks, a nasty disposition, and can run, at a sprint, over thirty miles per hour.
Fisher couldn’t help but smile. Throughout his career he’d been shot at, stabbed, clubbed, and everything in between. He’d jumped from airplanes at thirty-five thousand feet, piloted minisubmarines, and technically invaded dozens of countries. For some reason, the idea of being killed by a hippo while tooling down a jungle river in the Great Rift Valley while trying to solve one of the twentieth century’s most enduring mysteries amused him. All things considered, there were worse ways to go.
Sam Fisher, koboku fodder.
“There!” Jimiyu called, pointing toward the bank. “Koboku!”
To the left in a shallow cove, were a dozen curved brown backs jutting from the water. As one, lined up as though waiting for a show to start, the hippos studied them, eyes barely visible above the surface of the water, ears twitching.
Jimiyu put the rudder over, steering right to give the pod a wide berth. He caught Fisher’s astonished expression and grinned. “Impressive, are they not?”
Fisher could only nod, eyes still fixed on the gallery of hippos receding in their wake. Each one had been the size of a VW Beetle.
A few minutes later, Jimiyu said, “Irving tells me you are looking for a plane.”
“That’s true.”
“The Sunstar.”
“Yes.”
“Old legend, that one.”
“What’s your opinion?” Fisher asked. “You know the area we’re headed?”
Jimiyu thought for a moment, biting the inside of his lip. “Yes, very well. Many people have come looking for the Sunstar, but no one’s looked in this place yet.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”
Fisher didn’t respond. From his expression, Jimiyu seemed to be still considering his answer. “I think it is either lost in the Rift or somewhere in Turkana. Lake Turkana, you know.”
“I know.”
“That lake — everyone thinks it is very shallow. Mostly it is, but there are parts that aren’
t so shallow.” He grinned knowingly. “If we do not find it here, you and I, we will rent a submarine and look in Turkana, okay?”
Fisher smiled back. “Okay.”
30
GREAT RIFT VALLEY, KENYA
They’d arrived at their campsite — a flat section of beach in a gorge — in the late afternoon the day before, and though there was still four hours of daylight left, they both decided to get a fresh start the next morning. Peter’s coordinates were four miles away, to the northwest. With luck, they could start at dawn, reach the site by midday, and be back to the campsite by nightfall.
They spent the remaining hours of daylight gathering firewood, and then, as Fisher got the fire started, Jimiyu disappeared into the jungle for an hour and returned carrying what looked like a large rat. It was, in fact, a rat, Fisher learned, but charred over the fire it tasted, predictably, like rubbery chicken. After supper, Jimiyu made coffee in a rust-spotted enamel pot, then tossed the remaining wood on the fire and slung a pair of netted sleeping hammocks from trees along the edge of the beach.
* * *
Fisher eased the strap off his shoulder, shifted the M-14 to his right, and then stopped on the trail and gave Jimiyu a soft tsst. On either side of Fisher the jungle was a thick wall of green. He sat down on his haunches. Jimiyu, walking ten feet ahead, stopped and looked over his shoulder. Fisher curled a finger at him, and he walked back.
“We’re being followed,” Fisher said.
“Yes, I assumed so,” Jimiyu replied. “We’re on the border between the Samburu and Turkana tribes. Do not worry; they are simply curious. We are not one or the other tribe, so our presence should not upset them.” Jimiyu smiled and placed a hand on Fisher’s shoulder.
“Is that a hard-and-fast rule?”
Jimiyu shrugged. “I see the jungle is not foreign to you.”
More like an old friend, Fisher thought.
“Perhaps you are Samburu or Turkana,” the Kenyan said. “How did you know?”
“Because there’s a pair of eyes watching us. Ten feet to your left.”
Very slowly, Jimiyu rotated his head to the left and scanned the foliage. As Fisher had said, a pair of white-rimmed brown eyes were peering at them from behind a palm trunk.
“Turkana,” Jimiyu whispered. He raised a hand to chest level, palm out and said, “Hujambo?” Which means: How do you do?
The figure ducked out of sight and a few seconds later soundlessly emerged from the jungle ten feet down the trail. The man was wearing denim shorts and a faded red T-shirt bearing the words THE CLASH ANARCHY TOUR 1976. A butcher knife with a rope-wrapped handle jutted from the front belt loop on his shorts.
“Jambo,” he said.
Jimiyu stood up and walked forward. The men shook hands and began speaking in rapid-fire Swahili. Most Kenyan tribes, Fisher had learned, speak at least two languages — Swahili and their own native dialect, of which there are more than thirty — and many speak a modicum of English. Jimiyu and the man spoke for another few minutes, then shook hands again, and the man stepped off the trail and disappeared.
“What’s the verdict?” Fisher asked.
“He’s Turkana; they and the Samburu have already talked about our presence. As long as we do not hunt here, we have safe passage.”
“He didn’t want to know why we’re here?”
“I told him you were a…” Jimiyu paused and scratched his head. “The word does not translate so well. I told him you were a spoiled white adventurer.”
Fisher laughed, and Jimiyu gave a pained shrug. “Apologies. It was a convenience on my part. Better that than try to explain. I also asked about the plane. Both tribes are aware of the legend, but neither have seen any sign of it.”
* * *
They walked for another three hours, sometimes on well-worn paths, sometimes on narrow game trails, and other times through the thick of the jungle Fisher navigated via his GPS unit. The purist orienteer in him resented the gizmo, but the pragmatist in him knew it was a necessary evil. With limited time on his hands, a compass was a luxury he couldn’t afford.
Jimiyu, armed with a long Ghurka knife, sliced his way through the foliage with practiced swings of his long arms, ducking and weaving like a boxer as he stepped over roots and ducked under branches and pointed out various plants and animals beside the trail along with a running, colorful commentary: “Very rare… do not touch that… not poisonous… tasty, but hard to catch…”
At noon they swung back to the northeast, and after another hour’s walk Fisher heard the muffled roar of water through the trees. The landscape sloped downward until they were picking their way along switchbacked hillside. At last the slope evened out, the trees gave way to low scrub foliage, and they found themselves standing at the edge of a cliff.
Fifty feet below, the river surged down a narrow gorge. The water was a clear blue and in the still pools formed behind the boulders he could see the riverbed covered in smooth, round stones. A hundred yards to their right was a twenty-foot tall waterfall that split into three channels over a jagged rock face before splashing into a pool below.
Fisher studied the GPS unit. “This is the place.” He lifted his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the length of the gorge, tracking along both tree lines as far as he could see in both directions. “I don’t see anything,” he said.
“You are not looking in the right place,” Jimiyu murmured beside him.
“What?”
Jimiyu raised a bony hand and pointed straight ahead at a thick, vine-encrusted tree jutting from the edge of the cliff. Fisher stared at it, seeing nothing for a full thirty seconds, until finally his eyes detected a too-symmetrical shape hidden in the branches: a straight vertical line, another horizontal, a gentle curve…
Good God…
What he was seeing wasn’t a tree. It was the inverted tail section of an airplane.
Fisher was dumbfounded. Of course, the brother in Fisher had prayed Peter’s letter had been more than the ramblings of a sick and dying man, but with the thoughts so seemingly incoherent and far removed from the core of the Carmen Hayes/PuH-19 puzzle, he’d also had his doubts.
But here it was, exactly where the latitude and longitude indicated: a plane. Now seeing it for what it was, Fisher understood how even the Turkana and Samburu, so intimately familiar with the area, had missed it. While the jungle had long ago erased any sign of the impact itself, it was clear the Sunstar had crashed not far from here and ripped through the forest, slowing until the forward half of its fuselage had come to rest perched, hovering, at the edge of this cliff until finally, minutes or hours or days later, physics took over and it tipped over nose first and slid down the cliff face into the river below. Almost six decades of jungle foliage, mold, and lichens had enshrouded the aluminum fuselage, turning it into just another tree trunk.
Fisher dropped his pack and rifle, then pulled a sixty-foot coil of 10mm climbing rope from his pack. As Jimiyu secured the line to a nearby tree, Fisher looped together a makeshift rappelling rig. He stepped to the edge of the cliff and started down.
Pausing every few feet to poke through the vines and leaves with his knife, Fisher walked himself down the cliff until the jabbing of his knife returned not the hollow gong of aluminum, but the screeching of steel on glass. This version of Niles Wondrash’s plane, a Curtiss C-46 Commando, had four fuselage windows, starting at the wing and moving forward to the cockpit windows. The cabin door was set behind these, just forward of the tail fin. Fisher saw no wings, and he assumed they’d been sheared off during the crash.
Now with a point of reference, he scaled upward, again tapping his knife. The windows were set roughly ten feet apart, so… He stopped climbing and studied the fuselage, trying to discern angles and shapes until finally he could make out an up-sloping curve he felt certain was the rear vertical fin. He spun his body and wedged his feet into the vines, then began cutting at the foliage with his knife until slowly, foot by foot, a patch of fuselage appeared, followed
soon after by an inset hatch handle and a vertical seam. He wedged the point of his knife into the seam and began prying, moving inch by inch as though prying open a paint can. After five minutes of work, he heard a groaning screech of metal on metal. The hatch gave way and fell open. Fisher pushed off, avoiding the swinging metal, then swung back and kicked his legs through the opening and wriggled forward until his butt was resting on the hatch jamb.
“I’m in!” he called up to Jimiyu.
On hands and knees the Kenyan leaned over the cliff face and offered him a smile and a thumbs-up. “Be very careful, Sam. Many creatures have probably made that their home, you know.”
Great, Fisher thought. He hadn’t considered that.
He pulled the LED headlamp from his belt, settled it on his head, and toggled the ON button. The beam illuminated the opposite cabin wall, its smooth aluminum surface mottled with mildew. He played the light down the vertical shaft of the cabin. The wall and floor were empty. No seats, no storage racks, no nothing. All of that, either knocked loose during the crash or simply loosened by time and gravity, had likely tumbled down the length of the cabin and into the cockpit below. Fisher did some mental measurements: The cliff was roughly fifty feet tall and about ten feet of the plane’s tail had been jutting above the rim of the cliff. The C-46 Commando was seventy-five feet long, which meant the forward fifteen feet of the craft, including the cockpit, was submerged in the river.
The interior was surprisingly clear of jungle growth. Sealed as it was, with the only breaches probably being the shattered cockpit windows, nothing had had a chance to take root. The Commando was a virtual time capsule. He aimed the headlamp down the length of the cabin, but the walls, having lost their sheen, reflected nothing back. It was like staring down a mine shaft.
Fisher reeled in the rope below him, bunched it in one hand, then tossed it into the cabin. The loose end gave a hollow ting as it bounced off the aluminum, then there was silence.
He lowered himself through the darkness, scanning the light over the walls as he went, until finally his feet touched a horizontal surface — a section of the cockpit bulkhead. Stacked in a jumble around him were the Commando’s seats. Through the tangle of braces and armrests and skeletal seat backs he could see the upper curve of the cockpit door opening; a few feet through that, his headlamp beam glinted off water. Just outside the plane’s thin aluminum skin he could hear the gurgle of the river’s current. The stench of mold was pervasive now, stinging his eyes and making it hard to breathe as though the air itself had grown thick.