by Bobby Adair
“Let’s be pragmatic, you and I,” The General said.
“How so?” Austin asked.
“You know this word, pragmatic?”
“Of course,” Austin answered.
The General nodded. He pointed at the chair opposite his. “Sit.”
Austin did.
“I can’t understand the Chinese accent.” The General took another greasy bite of meat. “Sander is a simple man with simple thoughts, not much better than my soldiers. He’s been in Africa too long, chasing monkeys to sell to your pharmaceutical companies.”
Austin nodded agreement because it seemed like the correct response.
“Sander has no education, no interests beyond finding the company of a woman.”
Austin nodded.
“You speak American English. The accent is easy for me to bear.” The General sat up and leaned over the table. “But you have an American attitude.”
Immediately on the defensive, Austin shook his head. “I...I don’t know what you mean.”
The General grinned. “Like the English. You think anyone with an accent other than yours is stupid.”
“No,” Austin shook his head, trying to sell the lie. “I don’t.”
“You are here because I will make money on you when I sell you back to your rich parents.”
“I don’t have rich parents,” Austin protested.
The General held up a hand to silence him. “You have value to me. I don’t hate you. I don’t look down on you. I require that you do things while you are in my custody, as a way to maximize your value to me. Do you understand?”
“Sure,” Austin replied.
“Hate me if you will,” said The General. “Or see the situation as pragmatically as I, and talk to me like one educated man to another.”
Austin didn’t know what to say.
“I enjoy intelligent conversation,” said The General. “I don’t get that here.”
Austin thought for a moment. “And if you don’t like what I say? Then what?”
The General laughed. “I don’t need a pretense to beat you, or maim you, or kill you. I do what I want here, Ransom. You choose. Be an adult. Talk if you can accept your situation for what it is, a business transaction—unfortunate for you, fortunate for me. You will be gone in a month or two. If your family cooperates, you will leave with all of your body parts and I will have my money.” The General smiled and shrugged. “If you cannot be a man about it, then go back to your wall and glare at me in quiet petulance. You choose. Do it soon.” The General looked down at his plate. “I am nearly finished.”
Austin looked at the plate, looked back up at The General, and decided, why not? “Why don’t you feed your hostages more?”
The General laughed. “I had hoped for a better subject for our first conversation.” He laid his hands on the table and scrutinized Austin. “Westerners eat too much already. You won’t starve on what I give you.”
Austin started to argue but stopped himself. He was hungry. He felt like he was starving.
“Think of it this way,” said The General. “In this camp, I am the Westerner. You and the other ransoms are the rest of the world. I eat all I want.” He patted his belly. “I may even fatten myself needlessly. You?” The General laughed. “You get the scraps from my table. Now you complain, as does the rest of the world. The analogy is perfect, don’t you think?”
Austin, without an argument he could put together said, “That’s not true.”
“I’ve angered you into sullenness already,” The General observed. “I will leave it up to you, Ransom. I will give you a plate as full as mine if you wish. You may eat what I eat.”
Austin eyed The General cautiously. “I only require that you eat it in front of your fellow hostages. Their rations will remain the same. Perhaps then, you will understand my point.”
Austin looked at the remains of The General’s meal.
“You’re hungry, right? You want more food, don’t you?”
Austin nodded.
“What will you do, then?”
Reluctantly, Austin said, “I’ll eat what the others eat.”
The General laughed again.
Chapter 65
The General and a dozen of his men lay in ambush across a shrub-covered crest of muddy rock that stretched outward from the base of a cliff rising steeply to their left. Behind them and well down the slope, Austin, Sander, and Wei squatted among the giant tree trunks and underbrush, waiting, silent. In front of The General and his men a path wound along the base of the cliffs on this side of Mt. Elgon. The path took a tight turn around a small pond before starting a series of zigzags down the mountain.
Austin stared into the branches of the trees a hundred feet overhead, seeing sky and mountain beyond. He listened to the howls of distant monkeys and heard the squawk of tropical birds. He wondered what unfortunates would be coming down the trail. Would they be government soldiers on patrol, or farmers hauling their coffee to market?
Either way, slaughter lay in their future.
Austin thought about what he could do to stop the killing before it started and save the unsuspecting victims, warning them away. His only weapon was his voice. A shout would get him a beating, of that he was certain. What he didn’t know was how irrationally The General would behave under the influence of his inflamed temper. The General had hacked off part of Tian’s foot, and Tian was one of his hostage investments. Now Tian was so sick with infection that his life was in danger. Would an angry General kill?
Probably.
Austin looked up the steep slope at the feet and butts of The General’s men arrayed in the shrubs. If Austin yelled—assuming he could somehow select the right time for it—would anyone on the other side of the rise hear or understand him? If they did, would they even heed his warning?
Instead, Austin went back to wondering why he had been dragged along on a two-day hike across the side of the mountain. Was he to be a stretcher-bearer for the wounded? The thought of schlepping half the weight of a wounded rebel all the way back to camp did not appeal to him one bit. He hoped that any of the uneducated rebels who met the business end of a bullet would at least have the courtesy to die.
Austin leaned close to Sander and whispered, “Where are the stretchers?”
Sander looked back at him, a lack of comprehension clear on his face.
Austin felt a rough nudge at the back of his neck. He looked up at the guard behind him who was prodding with the barrel of his rifle. Austin got the message. Be quiet.
A few small rocks tumbled down the slope and Austin looked up. Feet sticking out of the bushes up there were starting to shuffle with nervousness. At least the end of the ordeal was coming.
Noise, strange and indistinct, bounced around on the tree trunks. It sounded like animals, perhaps oxen pulling carts. Austin guessed coffee farmers hauling a year’s worth of their labor down the mountain to sell at a market in Kenya. Austin decided The General wasn’t a patriot. He was just a bandit twisting religion around his charisma to keep his impressionable young men subservient.
The animals grew louder and closer. They snorted and stomped. Tree branches snapped. The beasts sounded enormous.
One of the AK-47s fired.
Someone shouted.
An elephant trumpeted.
Two more rounds popped off.
More shouting, and all of the rifles erupted. Elephants grunted and cried out in shrill panic. The ground shook and trees quaked with the impact of the giants turning and bumping.
As suddenly as it started, the shooting stopped. The men atop the hill shouted excitedly as they got up and started forward. From the other side of the mound, the sound of wet wheezing through blood-filled trunks mixed with deep, guttural groans.
“Up, up,” the guard told the prisoners. “Go. Go.”
Austin, Sander, and Wei shuffled up the hill, feet still shackled with their ropes.
The men on the other side of the hill were joyous.
&nbs
p; The General, ebullient, and suddenly unable to keep quiet, came back to the top edge of the ridge saying, “A great day. A great day. A quarter million US, at least. Maybe twice that much. Maybe not. But a quarter, at least. Hurry! Hurry!”
“Go!” The guard urged.
“Two bulls,” The General continued. “Maybe a third somewhere up the trail. A great day.”
Three more gunshots popped.
After climbing the slope, Austin and his fellow hostages pushed their way through the bushes at the crest and looked down the slope toward the game trail. At the edge of the pool inside the curve lay two huge elephants. One with enormous tusks struggled futilely to right itself, while the other with much shorter tusks, breathed shallowly and bled from a few dozen wounds.
One of the soldiers walked up to the struggling bull, aimed his rifle at the top of the elephant’s skull, ripped through six rounds, paused, and fired again. The elephant’s massive body settled to the ground, and its last breath flowed out of its lungs in a great groan.
Austin stopped, stunned. A hand pushed him from behind. The death of the great elephant was, in its way, as troubling to him as the death of some of the people he’d seen. It didn’t make sense, but there it was, a stark, rasping, and cruel, death, singular but on an enormous scale.
Two of The General’s men stepped up to the elephant’s carcass and started hacking at its face with machetes.
Sander whispered, “You and I will be carrying those tusks back to camp.”
Austin felt ill.
The other elephant, still breathing, with a trunk moving in a drunken snake dance made no move to react when two more men stepped up on each side of its enormous head.
“It’s not dead,” Austin hollered.
The two men with machetes poised to cut at the dying elephant’s face froze. The General started to laugh. He pointed at Austin and said, “Ransom, come down here.”
Sander said, “You should have stayed quiet.”
Austin started down the embankment, slipped and skidded part way on his back then got his footing and continued. At the bottom he skirted the pool of water and walked over to where The General had positioned himself near the top of the bleeding elephant’s head.
“You want to do the humane thing, no?”
Austin nodded, knowing The General was asking him to finish the suffering animal, but at the same time, wanting no part in the slaughter.
The General laughed, and so did the two men with machetes. The General held his AK-47 out to Austin.
Austin looked at it.
“Take it,” The General said.
Austin didn’t.
“Take it,” The General ordered, harshly. “I think you’re afraid to kill the elephant yourself.”
Austin reached up and laid his hands on the weapon. The General let go as he said, “Careful.”
In front of him and off to the sides, several men raised their rifles and aimed them at Austin. His throat went dry. He looked around at the men. And very slowly, very deliberately, he brought the rifle’s barrel to bear on the top of the elephant’s skull. The elephant’s groaning and bloody wheezing didn’t change. Its big golden-brown eye looked at Austin, as though to tell of its suffering.
The General leaned close, and in a confidential tone said, “If you’re quick about it, you could kill me, you know.”
Austin cut his eyes at The General.
The General leaned back and nodded. “If you’re quick.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to Austin, he’d been focused on the dying elephant. The General was right. Austin could swing the barrel around and shoot until the magazine emptied. He’d never shot such a weapon before, but felt positive that enough of the bullets would rip through the evil thug’s chest that he would die. Out here in the middle of the jungle, without the slightest hope of getting to a hospital in time, of course The General would die. It would be a trade, Austin’s life for a thug’s.
Was it worth it?
Austin glanced around at the hard faces of the men with weapons trained on him, and decided he would not make the trade.
It wasn’t fear that stopped him. It was the look on the faces of those rebels. A few bullets in The General’s heart would change nothing. While The General was still bleeding, still trying to bite a mouthful of his own last breath, one of those hard men would step in to fill his spot—the new head thug, leading the other thugs on to brutalize good people in the towns and villages below the mountain.
Austin wasn’t going to waste his life on futility.
But a time would come, he promised himself that.
Austin snugged the butt of the rifle up against his shoulder, sighted the gun, aimed it at the center of the elephant’s head and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The General burst into a laugh. All of his men laughed along with him.
Austin looked down at the rifle with no idea what he’d done wrong.
“The safety,” The General said, reaching over to reposition a large lever just above the trigger. Then he grabbed the top of the rifle and said, “Bullets cost money. Would you like to buy one?”
“You’ve stolen my money,” Austin said, coating his words with vitriol.
“Then you must trade for a bullet, if you want one.”
“I have nothing to trade.”
“You do,” countered The General.
“What?” Austin asked.
The General reached into his pocket and pulled out the credit card Dr. Littlefield had given him. “The PIN number on this credit card.”
“For a bullet,” Austin confirmed.
“The PIN for a bullet. Yes.”
Shaking his head as he thought about what The General might do, what he might buy that could be used to hurt someone else, Austin realized he couldn’t know and he didn’t care. He cared about the elephant. “I’ll give you the PIN.”
The General smiled and said, “But if your PIN does not work, if you lie to me, you’ll still pay for the bullet.”
“Will you beat me?” Austin asked. “Starve me?”
“No,” The General said. “The bullet will cost you a finger.”
The General reached over and put the tip of his finger on Austin’s index finger, still wrapped around the AK-47’s trigger. “That one.”
“I’ll give you the right PIN.” Austin looked back down the rifle sight, took a deep breath and squeezed. The gun kicked. Red exploded from a spot on the elephant’s head. The elephant’s body jerked and the two men with machetes jumped back a step. Still conscious of the rifles pointed at him, Austin slowly lowered his weapon and he waited for the elephant to stop breathing.
It didn’t.
He’d only succeeded in making one more bleeding wound.
The General reached over and took hold of the rifle. He asked, “Would you like to trade for another bullet?”
Austin didn’t respond. Why wouldn’t the elephant just die?
“For a finger,” The General said, “You may shoot it again. I’ll even let you select the finger.”
“Die,” Austin said to the elephant. “Die.”
“A bullet?” The General asked again.
Austin was very suddenly being forced to put a tangible and high price on a principle he hadn’t even known he had. Something about that elephant seemed more sentient than beast, more human than The General. He said, “No.”
Very amused by the game, The General laughed.
Austin handed the rifle back, and without consciously choosing to do so, he balled his precious fingers into his palms and pushed his hands into his pockets.
The two men with the machetes stepped up beside the elephant’s head and started hacking. The elephant screeched and sprayed blood as the blades slashed into its face.
Chapter 66
The order in the world’s endless scatter of arbitrary people, places, and businesses was impossible to discern without the aid of a cell phone. Salim had grown up in the cell phone generation. A
ny question he had could be answered with a query to the device. It was the conduit through which the world’s complexity unfolded in near instant response to his wishes. Without it, tasks once trivial became difficult.
Finding an attorney was among the first of his problems.
Having taken fingertip access to information for granted all his life, it never occurred to Salim to plan the next step during his single-minded effort to get himself out of the hospital. Unfortunately, as he walked hurriedly down the street that night, away from the hospital and the volatile mob surrounding it, he realized he had no place to sleep. He didn’t know where the nearest hotel was. He didn’t know how much of his meager cash he’d be required to pay for a room.
Worse still, he was clueless on how to find an attorney with the experience and desire to take his case. Indeed, aside from walking down randomly selected streets and reading signs, he had no idea where he was going.
All access he had to telephones and computers—though he had no official access to those—lay in the hospital. Getting out was one thing. Getting back in, even if he became desperate enough to try, would likely be impossible. Doctors, nurses, and the dying were allowed entry, no others.
With no other options, Salim spent the remainder of the night walking down major thoroughfares, reading signs. Another drawback of having no cell phone was that Salim had no place to type in a note to remind him of the locations of the offices he did come across. He had no paper or pencil. After all, who thinks to carry such things these days? All he had was his memory.
After spending the balance of the night searching for lawyers’ offices, and then spending the morning and the early part of the afternoon hiking from one office to another, suffering one dismissive rejection by one receptionist after another, Salim finally found himself sitting in an office half-filled with overflowing file folders reeking of old cigar smoke.
Bill Buchanan looked at Salim with two emotionless blue fish eyes, set in a deflated basketball of a head. His mouth smiled in a lie so brazen it dared to be called out. Salim chose not to. He was happy to be talking to anyone with a lawyer shingle hanging on the door.