by Ian McDonald
‘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 hands, 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.
The crowds were denser closer to the town centre. Bodies squeezed the ATV tight. The heel of Gaby’s hand never left the horn. She imagined she could smell sweet-sour fear-sweat blowing through the air-conditioning vents. A cute Azeri boy-trooper with acne pressed hands and face to the driver’s window, licked the glass, rolled his eyes.
‘Fuck off,’ Gaby growled, heart hammering in case he should catch sight of the treachery in the back seat.
‘Oh, you beautiful boy!’ Faraway exclaimed, snapping his fingers in delight. ‘He has got an officer! Contact! The officer is asking him if has any money.’
‘They don’t believe in beating about the bush,’ Gaby said.
‘I do,’ Faraway said, radiantly happy. ‘I will beat any bush with you, Gaby. William is offering him the thousand shillings. It is right in front of the lens. Tembo, my brother, your wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin raised smart children. Oh, this is beautiful. They have taken the money, but they think because he has a thousand shillings to give away, he may have more. They are asking to see what else he has. Give them the disc player, William. I wonder, Tembo, was your wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin ever in Nairobi? Maybe there is some Faraway in him. He is clever and handsome enough. Go on, take it. Made in Japan. Not European Union rubbish. Yes, they like it. That will do them very nicely, thank you William. Now, just give him the paper, and take him through to the trucks. Why will you not do this? Give him the paper, he has given you all he has, greedy m’zungu’.
‘I do not like this,’ Tembo said. ‘Can we get closer?’
‘I’ll try,’ Gaby said. ‘But these crowds.’ Do not think of the annihilation of the mob, she told herself as she navigated the ATV closer.
‘Oh Jesus Mister Christ,’ Faraway said.
Gaby glanced at the monitor. The picture was badly broken, as if the shoulder bag were being shaken violently.
‘I see them!’ Tembo shouted. He was on the edge of his seat with worry. William and the Azeri officer were playing tug-of-war with the bag containing the camera and transmitter. William turned, saw the electric blue ATV, looked right at the white woman driving it. Gaby could hear his cry for help inside and outside the four by four.
‘Jesus. We’re rumbled.’
The officer stared at Gaby with a look that passed from recognition to comprehension to hatred in a few muscle twitches. Exactly the look Raymond Burr gave in Rear Window when he rumbled Jimmy Stewart. She knew her father’s old video collection too well to have forgotten what happened next.
Tembo heaved the big heavy camcorder out of the back, switched it on and brought it to bear on the officer. The officer’s hand had been straying to his sidearm. The watching eye of the world kept it safe in its holster. In the moment’s diversion William twisted free from the officer and fled through the crowd, leaving behind the shoulder bag with the clever little camera and cleverer little transmitter. Faraway put his hands on his head in despair. It was only partly for the loss of expensive equipment.
Gaby floored the accelerator. People parted before the ATV like the waters before Moses. They passed the stunned officer, they passed the running William. Faraway flung open the rear door, seized William’s wrist and pulled him ungently in. The open door flapped wildly on its hinges. Evacuees jumped back.
‘Move move move!’ Gaby screamed at them. They moved moved moved. It was better than death. She threw the wheel from side to side, dodging by instinct alone. The loom of faces places objects was absurdly like a computer game. Only game over is gang rape if you are lucky, a bullet in the back of the head and every vulture for fifty kays around coming to the wake if you are not, she thought. The sweat she could now smell in the car was her own. Fat drops rolled coldly down the sides of her body.
She heard Tembo’s cry and spun the wheel without looking. There was a loud bang. The car lurched as it ran over something. In her wing mirror Gaby saw a dog spin across the road. Intestines sprayed from its burst stomach. Gaby wailed. The back door was still swinging and banging. Faraway did not dare risk his fingers trying to catch it.
William pushed his head between the front seats.
‘Go right here,’ he said. ‘There is an earth road goes west into the valley of the Kiboko, and then south to the Chaga.’
‘I don’t want to be anywhere near the Chaga.’
‘They will have blocks up on the roads north and east.’
Gaby slammed the Nissan into four-wheel-drive and swung off the road. The car shook. Speed on the earth road was like driving on corrugated iron. She could barely hold the wheel steady. Now we will see how good the manufacturer’s promises are, Gaby thought. Cars with factory test-to-destruction ratings of five years fell apart after ten months on East Africa’s laterite roads. You’re a long way from sweet home Yokohama now, little Nissan. God, they can probably see my dust trail from the moon. Why is it the thing you feel worst about is the dog? It was only a poor dumb mutt and if you hadn’t burst its guts it would just have been run over by a truck or left to starve in the Chaga or maybe some soldier would have taken pity on it and blasted its brains out with his AK47. So why does thinking about it spinning across the road make you want to cry? Maybe it is not the dog you are crying for, but your brilliant career that got left with tyre tracks across its belly in the middle of the Merueshi road.
Faraway stuck his face between the headrests.
‘I think it might be a good idea to go a little faster.’
‘Not without flipping this thing right over.’
‘I think you should reconsider, because I think hell is coming after us. There are two armoured personnel carriers on your tail.’
She spared a glance in the rearview mirror. A mile down the tracks were two rising plumes of dust, each with a white speck at its head.
‘Oh, Jesus
,’ she moaned.
‘I know you do not believe in it, but I am praying to God for our deliverance,’ Tembo said.
‘You’ll do better than God. You’ll get on the cellphone to T.P. Costello and tell him to call the UNHCR or UNECTA or whoever the hell runs this show down here and tell them that we know what’s going on and they’d better leave us alone.’
The dirt road fought Gaby like it was trying to steal her car. Muscles were knotted up and down her bare arms with the intensity of the struggle.
‘I am afraid we are probably out of range of the cell network,’ William said coolly.
‘Well, that is just wonderful,’ Gaby said. ‘Just fucking wonderful.’