by Marc Parent
“What do you think we should do?” Tim asks, breaking a long silence. Daniel is mildly surprised he’s asking his advice.
“I don’t know.” Not very journalistic of him, but it was the truth.
“We’re nowhere with these guys,” Tim says. “We’re not in town but we’re not out at the front either. We should’ve hooked up with those kids from this morning.”
“Are you joking?”
Tim rubs his forehead. “Aw, we’re white, they wouldn’t mess with us.”
“What makes you think that?”
Tim doesn’t answer.
“Listen, they have no problem—none—with the idea of killing, they barely even have a problem with the idea of dying. What possible motivation could they have to not mess with us?”
“You’re right,” Tim says sarcastically. “We’d better play it safe.”
Silence. Fuck you, Daniel thinks. He’s not nearly as experienced as Tim but he’s no idiot either. After college Daniel worked his way through various small-town papers and finally escaped his native Midwest six months ago by moving to Nairobi to try freelancing. A few weeks into it his girlfriend Jennifer was robbed at knifepoint, and within days she was on a plane home. He stayed. A couple of assignments came in. He was prone to shameful bouts of loneliness and the dismal conviction that he had no business being here at all. Which—he thinks, glancing through the darkness towards a road that leads north, basically straight into hell—he probably doesn’t.
“Do you have any food?” Daniel asks after a while.
“I don’t think we should eat in front of these guys,” Tim says. “They don’t have much. I wish we had the goddamn sat phone,” he goes on. “At least I could call my editor. He has absolutely no idea where I am.”
Daniel doesn’t respond—the satellite phone is back in the hotel because he, Daniel, forgot it there, a completely unprofessional move. Daniel doesn’t know what to say and so he just leans back and closes his eyes. A cigarette would help things tremendously right now. “Look, I want to get a story as much as you do,” he finally says. “I want to get a story and get out of here. But we have a responsibility—”
“I know, to our families, our newspaper.”
“To not get ourselves killed like a couple of assholes.” Daniel tries to say this with just the right amount of bravado, but the dismal truth is that the idea of going another hundred miles into this freak show is about the most frightening thing he can think of. Tim seems like he would do it with barely a second thought. There is no way to head into something this uncertain, this dark, and not be scared about the outcome. You have to abandon any real interest in the rest of your wonderful young life. Tim is married to a Czech girl in Paris who seems to put up with his shit and he has a couple of girlfriends scattered around Africa’s capitals and maybe at heart he really just doesn’t give a shit about anything.
“All right,” Tim declares, “how about this. These guys move forward, we go with them; they sit around for another day, we go back, file, and figure out what to do next.”
“No militias?”
“Not this time.”
Tim unscrews the cap of the water bottle and takes a swallow and re-caps the bottle and puts it away. “You’ll see, you’ll love it up there,” he says. “It’s beautiful country, I swear. I’ve been all over Africa. It’s a country like no other.”
Daniel doesn’t answer and neither of them says anything for a while. It must be around ten or eleven o’clock, five or six hours until dawn. “Do you ever get lonely out here?” Daniel finally asks. “I mean is this it for you?”
“Lonely? No, I guess not.”
“And your wife?”
Tim settles back with his hands clasped behind his head. “What about her?”
“You don’t miss her?”
“Not in the way you mean.”
“What way is that?”
Tim thinks for a moment. “Well, like I’d rather be there than here.”
GRAY LIGHT AND whooping bird calls. Low Krio voices. It’s dawn and the soldiers are stirring. Yesterday filters back into Daniel’s mind, leeching through some strange dream about his girlfriend that’s gone as soon as he tries to capture it. Ex-girlfriend. Daniel sits up, pulls the cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and slides one into his mouth. He finds a book of damp matches in his pocket and manages to light the third one. A cigarette goes a long way towards making something feel manageable. Daniel coughs and pulls on his cigarette and watches the soldiers stumble around in the growing light. Tim is still asleep next to him, apparently untroubled by Lariam delusions or the prospect of what is waiting for them.
When Daniel was a teenager he and some friends went out to a flooded quarry to dive off the cliffs. They dove at thirty feet and then at forty feet and then when the guys started talking about the high ledge—sixty feet or so—Daniel walked off into the woods to take a leak and just kept walking. There was no way he was jumping off sixty feet—even at forty feet, the acceleration was so out-of-control it felt almost malicious. He walked all the way home and never talked to any of those guys again.
Tim finally stirs and then sits up abruptly, looking around in puzzlement. Daniel watches him figure out where he is. Tim rubs his eyes and reaches for a cigarette. There’s no need to dress because they slept in their clothes; they even kept their shoes tied. You never know how quickly you’re going to have to wake up. The soldiers are shuffling around but there’s no food to cook so they have nothing to do but wait for orders. Before Daniel has finished his cigarette the captain comes over and Daniel and Tim stand up and the captain says that they’re going to move up the road back into Masiaka. They’re going to set up a command post and wait for reinforcements and food. Then he turns and walks away.
Daniel has the feeling he’s not terribly thrilled that he and Tim are there. He watches Tim’s ill mood return in a matter of seconds. “I told you we were fucked,” says Tim, fishing for another cigarette in his vest. “We can’t go forward and we can’t go back.”
Daniel doesn’t react. He wonders what Tim thinks of him— deadweight? Worse? Maybe he’s so absorbed with what he’s doing he doesn’t even have an opinion. “All right,” Daniel says. “One day, up and back, that’s it. You get us the ride, militias, whatever, I don’t care. If things look bad out there I’m turning around and you can do whatever the hell you want.”
Tim turns and looks at him without expression. If Daniel was looking for approval—was he?—Tim wasn’t going to dole it out that easily. It was possible that he, Daniel, had just traded a trip up-country for absolutely nothing at all. “You won’t regret this, mate, I promise,” Tim says, flicking his cigarette towards the road. “One day, in and out.”
Five soldiers are already on the pavement milling around in the half light. The APC coughs and shakes and belches smoke behind them. Daniel picks up his knapsack with his notebooks and flashlight and water bottle and slings it over his shoulder while keeping an eye on the captain. He’s walking around sour faced. The captain climbs onto the APC and it jolts into first gear and then clanks out onto the old asphalt road. Daniel and Tim follow behind it along with the rest of the soldiers. They’re only five minutes outside of Masiaka and by the time they’re clustered in the red-dirt plaza the first rays of the equatorial sun are touching the low brick-and-mortar buildings. They’ve been gutted by five years of war but they were once an elegant colonial-pink with stone balustrades overlooking what must have been the town marketplace. Someone has set up a PK machine gun on a tripod on one of the balconies. Its ugly little barrel pokes out over the square like an admonishing finger.
Fighters emerge by twos and threes, the guys who’ve been left behind to guard the town. They keep their distance from the new arrivals, so Tim walks over to them, and Daniel follows a few minutes later. He takes out his notebook and writes, Destroyed colonial town pink facades a few kids on guard no apparent order. The day is already getting hot and the sun hasn’t even risen.
“These guys say there’s a big fight going on at a town called Mile 61 on the road to Makeni,” Tim says. He’s snapping photos of the kids while he talks. “I think we should go.”
“What was yesterday like?” Daniel asks, flipping his notebook open. “What was the battle like?”
The kid unleashes a fast, guttural account that is accompanied by chops and slashes with his hands. Daniel barely understands any of it. Native fighters with loops of ammunition over their shoulders and leather pouches and feathers and beaded fetishes around their necks, he writes.
“They came in last morning and cleared the plaza and killed three rebels,” Tim says. “There were at least two hundred rebels. They’re regrouping up-country. There’s going to be a big fight.”
Daniel scribbles, 200 rebels, three dead. “Is it safe to go up there?”
“Da road dae no’ fine,” the kid says. “So so soljahman, so so rebel.”
“The road’s no good, too many rebels,” Tim says.
“What do you think of those guys?” Daniel says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the soldiers. The kid spits into the dust and shrugs. Daniel offers the kid a cigarette, which he takes. He pulls one out for himself but doesn’t light it. It occurs to him that he’s smoking too much. He can quit when this thing’s over with. A few more fighters wander over with their guns over their shoulders. Some have sunglasses and some have no shirts and some are barefoot. Most of them have lines of parallel scars on their cheeks that were put in when they were young. Pretty soon there’s a crowd of ten or twelve of them pressed around. Daniel hands out more cigarettes. They’re so young that if it weren’t for the guns, he’d feel like some schoolyard pervert corrupting the neighborhood children. “This is a waste of time,” Daniel says to Tim. “We’re not getting anything.”
“We’re not getting a ride, that’s for sure,” Tim says. He drops his camera back onto the strap around his neck. The kids are starting to lose interest and edge off around the empty plaza. Daniel hasn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, his stomach is a sour mix of bile and cigarettes. He’s starting to think about disengaging from the group and walking back to the APC when he hears the sound of a car engine. Two pickup trucks come around a building from the other side of town and they drive through the plaza and come to a stop in the open and a dozen fighters jump out. They’re from one of the militia groups. The letters CDF are badly painted on the door of one of the trucks, the Civilian Defense Force, a frankly terrifying bunch of lunatics who would probably be attacking Freetown if they hadn’t been bribed into defending it. Daniel can see the captain watching them carefully. “Those guys,” says Tim. “Maybe those guys.”
Even at a distance the energy coming off them is agitated and ugly; the kids in the square seem to sense it as well. Daniel reluctantly follows Tim over to the trucks. It doesn’t even feel safe to approach them, much less beg a ride to the front, but the fighters barely acknowledge their presence. There’s a dead guy in the back of one of the trucks but Daniel doesn’t know if he’s a rebel or not. There’s a lot of excited talk but Daniel doesn’t understand much of it—he busies himself writing down what he sees. Local color but it’s better than nothing. Tim finally barges into the conversation. “Mile 61,” he says. “We’re trying to get to Mile 61.”
That prompts a lot of shouting. The CDF commander pulls back the cocking bolt on his machine gun and points the barrel into Tim’s chest. His eyes are blank with an inexplicable rage. “WHATIN NA’ YOU NAME?” he screams.
Tim doesn’t flinch. Daniel feels his bowels slide around hotly inside him. “Tim and Daniel,” Tim says. “We’re journalists. We’re hoping to go north.”
All the men seem to have both hands on their guns. The commander screams some more and the other fighters look around uncomfortably. The sun is barely up and we’re already in trouble, Daniel thinks. Tim has his hands up apologetically and he starts to back up and Daniel backs up with him and soon they’re walking back to the APC. The soldiers stare at them when they return. Tim doesn’t say anything, just walks by them to the fresh early-morning shade behind the APC and sits down against one of the oversized tires. “All right, I give up,” he says. “We’ll take the next ride out of here.”
A little while later the CDF trucks start up and drive off with five or six fighters in the back and more hanging out the windows, rifles and RPGs pointing up into the air. One of them fires off a short burst from his gun and the shots clatter across the plaza and make everyone jump, even the captain. A sick infusion of adrenaline doesn’t reach Daniel’s system until long after the echoes have died off, and it lingers in his gut for a while like warm poison.
THEIR RIDE COMES that afternoon. Tim doesn’t say a word the entire time and Daniel is just as glad; they just sit hungry and silent watching the road leading south to Freetown. Daniel pretends he has decided to leave Africa—in fact to leave journalism—to see how it makes him feel, but it doesn’t seem to solve anything. A whole new set of problems appear. What’s more frightening at age thirty, a rebel checkpoint or a job interview for a life you don’t want? Eventually a convoy of trucks appears in the heat shimmer a mile away and the soldiers take up positions because of course there are no radios and no communication and they have no idea who it is. The trucks turn out to be more regular army—four flatbeds filled with soldiers and a Suzuki Samurai sporting a bad camouflage paint job and more soldiers standing up in the back. The trucks chug to a stop in the shade and the soldiers jump down and start unloading ammunition. Daniel watches the captain walk over to talk with them.
“You think he’s trying to get us a ride?” Daniel asks.
“I think he’s trying to get us the fuck out of here if that’s what you mean,” Tim answers.
The captain is gesturing vigorously and then turns to look at them and continues talking. Several of the soldiers look over as well.
“I think we’ve just become part of our story,” Daniel says. “That’s a big ethical no-no at journalism school.”
Tim flicks a pebble into the dirt. “Ethics,” he grunts. “I’d drive this piece of shit myself if they’d let me.”
Tim as some kind of rogue reporter who’s gone native up-country with an APC is not hard for Daniel to imagine. He has the sort of hard confidence—coupled with a deep exasperation with the natives—that kept the Brits in control of places like this for generations. But he also has a nearly bottomless sympathy for the locals that Daniel can’t hope to match. Daniel is endlessly polite, he never yells at the drivers or the translators or tries to bully the soldiers, but in his heart he knows he also doesn’t give a damn about these people. At the end of the day he’s going home and Tim isn’t—Tim belongs here and the locals can tell that in an instant.
The conversation over by the trucks breaks up and the captain starts walking back towards the APC. Tim and Daniel get to their feet. “This better be good,” Tim mutters. The captain stops in front of them looking displeased. The other soldiers seem to sense things are not going well and look away.
“You’re leaving now and you will not come back,” the captain says in his good English. He’s obviously had some schooling, maybe even in London. “You’ve caused a lot of problems.”
“What kind of fucking problems,” says Tim. “We’re journalists and we’re just trying to do our work.”
“You didn’t get permission from the Minister of Information to come out here,” the captain says. “You know very well you were supposed to. Back in Freetown they’re saying you’re spies.”
Spies is bad, Daniel thinks. Spies gets you killed.
“Spies? You know damn well we’re not spies,” Tim says, his voice rising. “This is fucking outrageous, we have press passes from your government.”
The captain goes from polite to steely in an instant. The soldiers shift on their feet, unsure whether to stay out of it or present some kind of backup for their captain. The captain is shouting now: “You are in a military zone without permission. You have asked about troo
p strength. You’re trying to get up to the front line. Do you have a satellite phone in your bag?”
“Of course we don’t have a satellite phone,” Tim says. “If we did—”
“If you do,” the captain interrupts, “you will be taken right over there and shot. Soldier!” One of the young soldiers jerks to attention. “Take control of these men.”
The bewildered soldier cocks his machine gun and points it unsteadily at their bellies. Daniel can feel his heart suddenly whacking sickly in his chest. His head is not swimming yet, but that’s next. Tim is holding on to some measure of indignation that will either save them or get them killed.
“Over there!” the captain shouts. Daniel and Tim walk off into the sunlight and stand there squinting while the captain kneels down and starts to go through their bags. Daniel is unsure whether he should put his hands in the air but Tim hasn’t, and so he just stands there trying to look unconcerned. Daniel watches the captain throw all of Tim’s camera gear onto the ground and then open the knapsack and upend it until everything—the water bottle, the flashlight, his book, his precious notes—has tumbled out. Scattered in the packed red dirt their belongings look pathetic, almost embarrassing. Dead bodies look pathetic in the same way, Daniel thinks. He hasn’t seen very many but on some level there’s always some smug thought, “Ha, I’m alive, you’re dead.” There’s no greater gulf between two people, no greater inequality.