Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  They drove the length of the lake on a pretty good road. The smell was, indeed, harsh. Flamingos rose in great clouds, swirled like pink leaves, and settled again on the water. Below Magadi, the road got narrower, became a sandy depression between scrub-grass banks. Nonetheless, the village of Shompole had shade from big trees; they passed a school—mud walls, windows without screens or glass, tin roof—and a store with a Somali name on it.

  “Somali?” Alan said.

  “Somali,” the driver said, as if the word were a curse.

  “I thought all the dukas were run by Indians.”

  “Somali, Somali. Somalis taking over everything.”

  They drove beyond the village. The hill of Shompole, now sensed as a mountain, rose on their left as they curled around it. The clusters of huts and corrals they had seen from the air proved, from the ground, to be small Masai hamlets, each, according to the driver, occupied by one extended family. Nobody waved or came running with tourist trinkets. “This is real Masai country,” Alan said, meaning that it was not touristed like the lands to the north and west.

  “All Masai here,” the driver said. He waved a hand that took in everything from Shompole to the distant escarpment. “Down there, too.” He nodded toward Tanzania. A minute later, he pulled up at what was clearly the end of the road.

  “Kwisha barabara?” Alan said.

  “Kwisha, kwisha.”

  “Let’s walk.”

  Triffler looked pained but got out. They walked along the shoulder of Shompole, on their right the river, which seemed hardly more than a creek now, most of its water sunken into the ground to supply the coarse, lush grass that grew around it. “Where does Tanzania start?” Alan said.

  The driver laughed. “Who knows?” he said. He waved his long, graceful hand again. “To Masai, no Tanzania, no Kenya.” People lived their lives and died here. When a man wanted a new spear, he walked down into Tanzania because there was no smith nearby on this side. Some of the families slept in Kenya and drove their cattle into Tanzania every day.

  “A perfect place for a high-risk meeting,” Triffler muttered. “Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. We’ll see Lao coming miles away with all this dust. Any surveillance, too.” Then he saw a scorpion in the shade of an acacia, and he decided that it wasn’t quite so perfect.

  Alan walked out of Shompole’s embrace to the flat plain by Natron. He was certainly in Tanzania by then; no matter. The landscape was flat; the trees were few; but there were volcanic rocks everywhere, thrown, he thought, by the dead volcano that bulked on the other side of the lake. The lakeshore beyond Shompole was mostly semi-swamp, and it was cut by erosion gullies. Turning back, however, he saw a strip of soda-encrusted lakeshore that was flat and treeless and, he thought, mostly rock-free because the thick soda crust had covered everything. He moved out to it, thinking he might sink through if the soda was only crust over more muck, but it held him. He jumped. The sun beat down. He had a boonie hat and a short-sleeved shirt, but he was baking. He jumped again.

  Triffler, who had waited in the mangy shade of an acacia, made a megaphone of his hands and shouted, “The heat’s boiled your brain!”

  Alan laughed and jumped again. When he got back to the tree he said, “I could land out there,” and Triffler rolled his eyes. “You’re crazy with the heat,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They walked back to the driver, who was sitting in some real shade, smoking. He handed them a water bottle. He had driven Americans around before.

  Dar es Salaam.

  Colonel Lao entered his office early. He had not slept. He walked with dignity into his inner sanctum and placed the remains of Colonel Chen in a sealed plastic box, then taped the box into a plastic envelope and affixed a brief contact report about the meeting. The report was factual. He left no nuance of the meeting undescribed, clearly stating that the barbarian had dangled at him and had suggested the existence of vast sums of party money. It gave him some secret satisfaction to know that, somewhere, a clerk would read what were, in effect, his allegations of corruption among the warlords, as stated by the barbarian. He hid nothing.

  Except that, whether by intent or forgetfulness, he did not include the details of the meeting site at Magadi. No, not forgetfulness, of course. Shame, perhaps. And fear, for his family if not so much for himself. It made him smile—fear was what he felt at border crossings. Well, death was a border crossing.

  When Jiang arrived more than an hour later, Lao had already passed his report, the package, and the slip of paper containing what the barbarian alleged to be computer code to a diplomatic courier. It had already disappeared into the embassy. It might already be on its way to China.

  Jiang regarded him with something like suspicion, because Lao refused to tell him what had happened. He told Jiang that he had already filed his report. It amused him that Jiang suspected him, because he was taking this action to keep Jiang and Jiang’s loyal service well clear of what he now expected to be a blast from Beijing.

  And yet—yet he still hoped that he was wrong, that the message back from Beijing would be different. He wondered how long it would take. He could still hope. He went to work on reports of insurgent activity in Somalia and northern Kenya, and Jiang watched him warily.

  The morning passed away. For minutes at a time, Lao forgot his predicament. He wrote a report and did a week’s work, reviewing backlogged agent reports, making comments, and signing them off. Jiang was unable to keep up. At mid-morning, they shared a cup of tea while Lao read Jiang’s surveillance report from Nairobi and suggested some changes.

  Lao read on, flipped through Jiang’s photos. The barbarian entering the restaurant. He looked dangerous, low-browed, but relaxed, and it crossed Lao’s mind that whatever their problems of racism and capitalism, his current predicament was unlikely to happen to the barbarian. He would not be summoned home for “consultations.” He banished the thought.

  He looked at another photo of a small man in a safari vest holding a camera. In a second photo he was using the camera.

  “Are you sure that this man was not just a tourist?”

  “Look at the next one.”

  In the next frame, the small man was pointing his camera directly at the photographer. Lao smiled. “Something of a double kill, I think. But well-done. You needn’t put the last in your report. Just the first two.”

  Jiang beamed at the unexpected praise. “Won’t you tell me what happened?”

  “I have made my report, Captain.”

  That ended any possibility of conversation. At lunch, he went home to spend an hour with his wife. She was delighted to see him, and he was attentive, so that partway through the meal they changed their minds and went to the bedroom. It was not epochal, their lovemaking, but it was friendly. He whispered in her ear. She laughed. Then he dressed and went back to work.

  He was late, but he couldn’t regret it. As he walked into his outer office, however, he noticed a difference—the silence.

  There was no one there.

  There was no one anywhere. He smiled grimly, understanding at once, understanding everything. Nonetheless, he didn’t regret sending the report.

  He was going back to talk to his wife.

  He was going to Shompole, after all.

  Somewhere in the private recesses of his mind, the color of the cherry blossoms changed.

  Dar es Salaam.

  “Heads up.”

  The brief equatorial sunset was coloring the western sky, the first sun color to touch the slate clouds in two days. The wind was less, and the palm trees were no longer whipping themselves into a frenzy overhead.

  Harry was still at his post in his banda. Local Africans were getting curious, and he had had to deal with a queue of vendors attempting to assess his willingness to buy their goods earlier in the day. It was getting to be time to wrap this up.

  “Subject is moving.”

  Lao had come home twice, once at lunch for a long time, and then just after five. Now he was pulling
the car out, carefully backing down his short, weed-strewn driveway. Harry had low-light binoculars and other toys denied to Dukas’s team in Nairobi. Not least of Harry’s toys were voice-activated wireless mikes that were invisible to onlookers and that broadcast an encrypted signal for a relatively short range. They were illegal in Tanzania, but that didn’t trouble Harry much. He didn’t expect to get caught.

  He swept the high ground beyond the housing development and saw lights that he hadn’t expected.

  “Bravo, this is Alpha. What’s that vehicle near your position?”

  “Wait one.” Bravo was Alice. She would be moving around inside her parked Land Rover, trying to get a sight line.

  “Please describe.”

  “Vehicle looks to be a white Toyota pickup with a red stripe over the hood.”

  “Wait one.”

  Harry watched the top of Lao’s car picking its way through the housing development and out to the gate. He could just see the tip of the gate as it swung up. He now owned the gatekeeper, or at least was in a position to get reports from him through a cutout. Details mattered. Mike Dukas was getting his money’s worth.

  Alice’s voice came again, describing the hostile pickup truck. “Vehicle has two male passengers, one Asian, one local. Vehicle is flashing its lights.”

  “Copy.”

  Harry watched the white Toyota with the red stripe pull out on the road about two hundred meters behind Lao.

  “Bravo, pick me up at the road. Delta, take the con.” Delta was Dave Djalik.

  “Roger, Alpha. Delta taking the con.”

  Harry picked up a bag from a folding table, glanced around the banda for anything he might want, chose a flashlight and a heavy knife, and ran down the little dirt street to the road. Alice arrived a few seconds after he did. She didn’t even stop her truck, and Harry was in. They had chosen the pickup point for its screening, a slight bend in the road with palms on one side and acacia on the other. Harry pulled on a ball cap for an Italian soccer team.

  “Sorry, Harry. I don’t get it. I thought we were here for his missus?” Alice’s gravelly voice and English accent floated out of the dark on the other side of the cab.

  “Something’s going down. Lao’s going somewhere with a travel case, and those guys aren’t guards. They’re following him.”

  “Following him?”

  “They’re doing exactly what we’re doing. I had a bad moment when I thought they were watching us. Now I’m sure they’re watching Lao.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I think it means that Mike Dukas is about to be a very happy man.” He opened his satellite phone and began to call Dukas in Nairobi.

  Alice dropped Harry at a second vehicle, kept well out of town, and then sped ahead to maintain contact with Lao, or at least the truck following him. Once the chase had begun, Harry and Alice were both constantly reminded of the hazards of surveillance in Africa. There was no road net, only single tracks across vast, empty spaces. In the mountains, it was possible to hide your vehicle from the person you were watching, but on the flat roads near the coast and up by the great plains of the Serengeti, there was no place to hide. Your target could look in his rearview mirror and see every car on the road for ten kilometers.

  Harry took his time catching up to Alice. His own truck was a locally purchased white Mahindi jeep with a cheap plastic top. It was covered in rust and had very little to offer in terms of comfort. It was one of the commonest vehicles in Tanzania, however, far more common than Alice’s colorful Land Rover. It was hard to shift, had heavy manual steering and a poor turn of speed. Driving it a long distance would be work. It was a price Harry was willing to pay to blend in.

  Once he started to get close, he tried Alice several times on his radio. Static told him that Alice was still well ahead. Short range wasn’t always a disadvantage, however. Harry had chosen these little radios because they were difficult to detect beyond a mile or so. He drove on, his low-set headlamps punching through the early darkness to illuminate potholes. Every few miles, a row of bandas would appear by the side of the road, sometimes announced by the smell of wood fires. Every little banda would have a few candles or paraffin lamps burning. Harry always thought that driving through Africa at night was like driving into the past—his past, in at least one sense: He had been a CIA officer here, driving these roads for months to set up routes. But, now, it was tiring to worry constantly about the possibility of children on the road, or adults, blending with the night. Twice he passed groups that he had to fight the wheel to avoid.

  Roadside towns had a different feel. He caught Alice in Korogwe, a crossroads with a gleaming, modern truck stop and a row of shopfronts that would not have disgraced the set of a spaghetti western—tall false fronts all along the road.

  “Bravo, this is Alpha, over,” he said for the eighth or ninth time.

  “. . . broken, Alpha,” he caught. He hit the accelerator, but she was getting gas and he pulled in behind her at the AGIP station a minute later. He got out and nodded to one of the attendants, who started to fill his tank. It was cooler in the hills away from the coast.

  “Just the one truck,” she greeted him.

  “Any chance it’s with him?”

  “Not bloody likely, Harry. They hang back and hang back.”

  “What’s your read?”

  “They want to know where he’s going.”

  “Unless they’re going to grab him somewhere ahead.”

  “Ooh! I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  “I think we have to be ready. Did they stop for gas?”

  “No.”

  Harry looked up the road into the dark. “We’d better fill our jerry cans, too. Stations will be closing in an hour.”

  “There’s gas at Moshi. All night. I’ve been there.”

  “That’s four hours. I like to be safe.”

  The terrain rose around them in the dark until mountains loomed, heavy shapes in the moonlight. Harry took the lead for a couple of hours, making contact from time to time but otherwise staying back. He knew where Lao was going, and that allowed him some caution. He didn’t want the white pickup with the red stripe to make him.

  The road wound on and on, climbing away from the coast until even in the moonlight Harry could see the shapes of Kilimanjaro and Meru ahead. An hour to Moshi. He accelerated, caught a glimpse of the now-familiar red taillights, and slowed again. He would have liked to kill his own headlights when he approached them, but the road was too difficult, and he hadn’t driven it since he was a young case officer years before. Even in the dark, a few things were familiar, but never familiar enough that he could relax. There was never a stretch where he could simply drive, and he began to get tired. Somewhere in the fourth hour after Korogwe, he drifted off for a moment. He awoke with a sharp jerk of the head to find the little Mahindi jeep was bouncing along the steeply angled verge. He got back on the road without losing the undercarriage, suddenly sweating with adrenaline. He rolled the jeep to a stop.

  “Bravo, I’ve got to stretch my legs.”

  “Roger.”

  He got out into the African night, quiet after the rush of the car and yet full of its own motion and noise. He filled his tank from a jerry can and waited for Alice to catch up. He drank some rancid coffee from his thermos and smiled at the rush of memories it brought. It tasted like the Navy.

  Alice pulled up behind him and cut her lights.

  “Your turn,” he said. “I’d like you to stay in contact for a while. If it’s going to happen, it will be right after Moshi.”

  Alice looked exhausted. Her eyes had pouches under them, and her normally sharp features were bloated, thick.

  “You okay?”

  “Don’t worry about me, Harry. I’ll be fine.”

  “That’s not some stiff-upper-lip crap?”

  She lit a cigarette. “Sod off, Harry. If I wasn’t fine, I’d say so.”

  “Those things’ll kill you, Alice.”

  She la
ughed, took another drag.

  “You awake?”

  Harry was down on the surface of the road, doing push-ups. It helped dispel the lethargy. He got up and dusted his hands. “Be careful, Alice.”

  “Sure.” She said it with all the feeling that everyone did in Africa.

  Coming down into Moshi, there was a double switchback on a big, long hill. He remembered it, looked forward to it as the sign that they were nearing their goal. Moshi was at least three hours’ drive from the meeting at Magadi, and, even at this rate, Lao would be lucky to be on time, but that double switchback would mean that they were entering the last leg, the endgame. Harry was wide awake, now. It was still long before dawn, but there was some hint of light to the sky that promised that dawn was on its way. They hadn’t seen a vehicle in hours, but now two big trucks laden with logs passed him, the glare of their headlights giving warning. The second one forced him over to the shoulder, where his little jeep bounced along for a moment, hanging on the edge and spitting gravel before he fought his way back on the road.

  Suddenly there were more lights ahead of him. He wondered if the trucks had spilled Lao, or the white pickup, or even Alice into the ditch by the side of the road. He slowed warily and heard a shot, then another. He cut his lights even as he gunned the engine. Something heavy hit the front of his jeep and he ducked. A branch. He skidded the Mahindi to a stop. Two sets of taillights were going away down the switchback. A stream running off to his right covered most of the sound of the night. He cleared his shotgun out of the bag on the seat next to him and cocked it.

  Alice’s Land Rover was in the ditch. There were a few logs on the road, as if a truck had gone over there or lost a part of its load. Lao’s little green car stood in the middle of the road with its lights on. Harry got low, cradling the shotgun. It looked as if whatever had happened here was already over, but he was wary.

  Of course they had made the grab before Moshi. He cursed his own lack of foresight and scrambled along the ditch until he reached Alice’s car. The glass of her windshield was punctuated with stars. Someone had fired through it repeatedly. He walked around, sure now of what he would find, anger growing in him. She had been hit, had rolled into a ball, and been executed. Someone would have leaned in and shot her in the head. He was so angry at himself, he missed her first call.