Slave Safari

by Warren Murphy

  “Butler,” said Obode. “I think there are times when there are some things you not only fail to understand, but you refuse to try understanding.”

  “I’m only a colonel,” Butler said.

  “All right. Now you’re a general. You must understand everything now. Understand this, General. I take no chances with the Loni legend. I do not want Westerners in Busati. I do not want this Remo Mueller. I do not want any more of your white women from America.”

  “As one general to another, Big Daddy, let me say I’ve got to have one more.”

  “Get one from China.”

  “No. It’s got to be America. It’s got to be a certain one.”

  “No more,” said Obode.

  “This one is the most important one. I’ve got to get her. If you say no, I’ll resign.”

  “Over a white woman?”

  “A special one.”

  Obode thought deeply for a few seconds. He cupped his chin in his ham-wide, cave-black hands. “All right. But this is the last.”

  “After her, General, I will want no more. She makes it all perfect.”

  “And you say I am hard to understand,” said Obode. “One last thing, General Butler. Do not think the legends are all lies or that General Obode is a fool.”

  He put a heavy hand on Butler’s shoulder. “Come, I will show you something you do not think I know. You have been watching that tail under the bush, you think there is no predator around because you do not see one. You think the lizard ran into the sun for no reason, right?”

  “Well, yes, I guess that’s what I was thinking,” said Butler, surprised that Obode had seen his interest in the bush.

  “Good. Good to show you a point. Even if you cannot see something, it does not mean that it does not exist. There is a predator around.”

  “I saw no rats or birds. I still see the tail.”

  Obode smiled. “Yes, you see the tail. But come quickly or you will not see it.”

  When they reached the bush, Obode drew aside the green foliage. “Look,” he said, smiling.

  Butler looked. He had seen a tail all right, but that was all that was left of the lizard, sticking from the full mouth of a very fat frog.

  “Sometimes when you run from danger, you run to it,” said Obode, but he forgot the lesson very quickly that afternoon when he again not only refused to see the writer, Remo Mueller, but ordered him evicted from Busati. Immediately.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE BUSATI HOTEL HAD air conditioning that did not work, faucets that gave no water, and elegant carpeting with inlaid old food. The rooms were like furnaces, the hallways smelled like sewers and the only remnant of its former grandeur was a clean brochure with Victoria Hotel scratched out and Busati Hotel penciled in.

  “Spacious, air conditioned and elegant, the Busati Hotel offers the finest conveniences and the most gracious service in all East Africa,” read Remo.

  Chiun sat on the floor, his white robe flowing and motionless behind him. Remo sat on the edge of the bed with the high brass posters.

  “I’ve heard of untruth in advertising,” said Remo, “but this is a bit much.”

  Chiun did not answer.

  “I said this is a bit much.”

  Chiun remained a silent statue.

  “Little Father, there is no television set before you. You’re not watching your shows. So why don’t you answer me?”

  “But I am watching my shows,” said Chiun. “I am remembering them.”

  Remo was surprised that he shared a bit of Chiun’s anguish at the Master’s loss of the daytime soap operas. They had been a constant nettle to Remo through the years, but now that they were gone, he felt sorry for the Master of Sinanju.

  “That Watergate thing will not last, Chiun. All your shows will return.”

  “I know that,” said Chiun.

  “So you don’t really have to sit staring at a wall.”

  “I am not staring at a wall. I am remembering. He who can remember the good things as though they were present can live his happiness forever.”

  “Well, let me know when you stop remembering, so we can talk.”

  Remo looked at his wristwatch. At home, Chiun’s soap operas went off at 3:30. He would time Chiun and see how close he came to judging the time.

  At 3:27 by Remo’s watch, Chiun toward turned him.

  “You missed, Chiun.”

  “Missed? What stupidity are you pursuing now?”

  “The shows go off at 3:30. And it’s only 3:27 and you were done,” Remo said triumphantly. “Three minutes off. A child could have a better sense of time than that. Three minutes is a long time.”

  “Three minutes is not very long in the life of one who has dedicated every minute to foolishness,” Chiun said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, you forgot the moments of selling. I do not watch them. I do not use soap powder.”

  Chagrined because he had indeed forgotten the three minutes of commercials at the end of the day’s stories, Remo said, “Yeah, well, anyway, I was talking about the brochure.”

  “It may not be a lie,” Chiun said.

  “Look around you, it’s not a lie?”

  “I look around and I see that perhaps at one time it was the truth. I see elegance in decay. So if these things were said about this palace when they were true, then the advertisement is true.”

  “Are you telling me, Little Father, that to say this is a stinkhole is a lie?”

  “I am telling you that truth is a matter of time. Even in this very land there are people who were once great and who now hide in the hills like frightened calves.”

  “Well, I don’t need that drivel now, Chiun. I need advice. I’m supposed to see the top man in this country to find out about that white house, without letting him know that I know. But he won’t see me.”

  Chiun nodded. “Then my advice to you is to forget all your training and run head first like a crazed dog into what you, in your lack of perception, think is the center of things. There, thrash about like a drunken white man, and then, at the moment of maximum danger, remember just a brief part of the magnificent training of Sinanju, and save your worthless life. At the end of this disgrace, you might by good fortune have killed the right man. This then is the advice of the Master of Sinanju.”

  Remo blinked. He stood up from the bed.

  “That’s utterly stupid, Chiun.”

  “I just wanted for once to give you advice I am sure you would follow. But since I have invested such wealth of knowledge with you, I shall increase this investment. You think because the emperor appears to be the center of things, he is the center of things.”

  “It’s president, not emperor.”

  “Whatever name you wish to give to an emperor is your pleasure, my son, but emperors do not change in nature. And what I am saying to you is that you must know the center of this thing before you can attack it. You are not an army that goes blindly wandering through bush and hill and can by sheer weight of numbers accidentally accomplish what it wants. You are skill, a single skill that is designed to crush one point, not ten thousand. Therefore you must know that point.”

  “How can I find that point waiting around here in this crummy hotel?”

  “A man sitting sees many sides very well. A man running sees only ahead.”

  “I see many sides when I run. You taught me that.”

  “When you run with your feet,” said Chiun, and was silent. Remo left the room to see if he could find something to read, someone to talk to, or even a vagrant breeze to get into the middle of. He was unsuccessful. But at the stately doors of the hotel, he saw a busboy run desperately past him with fear in his eyes. The manager of the hotel hid the books. The doorman snapped to attention.

  And then Remo saw it. Coming up the main street of the capital city of Busati, an army convoy, machine guns bristling from jeeps. Leading it was the man who had extended the invitation that writer Remo Mueller see General Obode.

  When th
e lead jeep of the convoy arrived at the doors of the Hotel Busati, it stopped in a screech of dust off the unpaved street. Soldiers jumped off their jeeps all along the line before their vehicles braked.

  “Ah, Remo, glad to see you,” said now–General William Forsythe Butler, quickly climbing the once-white front steps of the hotel. “I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. The bit is you’re returning to America this afternoon. But I’ve got some good news for you too.”

  Remo smiled perfunctorily.

  “The good news is I’ll be going with you and I’d be happy to answer every question you have. As a matter of fact, Busati feels it owes you a favor which it hopes to repay.”

  “By kicking me out of the country?”

  “President Obode has had some very disappointing experiences with white journalists.”

  “Then why’d you say I could get to see him?”

  “I thought I could prevail upon him but I couldn’t.” Butler shrugged, a big muscular shrug of his shoulders. “We’ll talk about it some more on the way to the airport.”

  Frankly, Butler was relieved that this Remo Mueller would be leaving the country since the fewer Americans there were nosing around, the less chance of the white house being discovered. That relief only grew when he got his first look at Remo Mueller’s traveling companion, an aged Oriental who padded silently out of the Busati Hotel behind Remo, acknowledged Butler’s lukewarm greeting with a silent stare, and sat like stone in the back seat of the jeep.

  What was it Obode had said? “When East and West are like father and son near the Busati River, then a force that no man can stop will come to shed blood in the river and on the mountains.”

  East and West. The aged Oriental and the young white American.

  Butler could do without Remo and the Oriental. He had his own interpretations of the legend…an interpretation that he knew would carry him to the Busatian residential palace, and power over all the people of all the tribes.

  He thought about this in silence as the jeep convoy rolled toward the airport, and then realized he was being a bad host.

  It was where the road banked in along the Busati River, that he turned toward the back seat to see how his passengers were doing,

  They were gone.

  “What the hell?” said Butler. “Stop the damned convoy.”

  He looked at his driver, then looked back to the rear seats. They were indeed empty.

  “Did you see them jump out?” asked Butler, almost as a reprimand.

  “No, General,” said the driver. “I didn’t know they were gone. We were doing forty-five miles an hour, General.”

  The long convoy bunched up into tightly packed jeeps as it stopped on Busati’s Route One and Only, which ran from the capital city to the airport. Butler could see for a half-mile in each direction. There was no sign of them.

  “Their bodies must be up the road no more than a hundred meters or so, General.”

  Butler stood up in the jeep signaling to the vehicle cramped in tight behind him.

  “Sergeant, did you see our passengers?”

  “Sir?” called out the sergeant.

  “The white man and the Oriental. Did you see them jump from the jeep?”

  The sergeant threw the snappy kind of British salute Butler hated so much. He used the word “sir” to punctuate his reply.

  “Sir, no sir. No passengers observed leaving your vehicle, sir.”

  “Form search parties and scour the road. Fan out. Find them. They do not know this earth.”

  “Sir, very good, sir,” said the sergeant.

  But Remo and Chiun were not found, although it came to be believed that at least five men might have stumbled on them or on something, because the necks of the five were broken and they lay peacefully in search formation, the safeties off their rifles and their fingers on the feather-light triggers, as though a breeze of death had gently put them to sleep.

  Three other men were missing, one of them a captain, but General Butler would not wait. He would not have waited if the gates of hell opened before him. He was going to catch a plane for America to settle the last payment on a three-hundred-year-old debt, and when that had been collected, the world might see greatness as it had not for thousands of years.

  At the airport, Butler told his personal Army detachment to continue the search for the Oriental and the American and to hold them in custody until he got back. “I shall be back in two days,” he said, and with that walked quickly to the loading ramp of the Air Busati 707, with British pilots and navigators.

  Three years before, in an advertisement for Air Busati, two Hausas posed in pilots’ uniforms for photographs and the planes emptied of passengers in less than a minute, most of the passengers being Hausas too.

  This Butler remembered as he entered the plane on which he would be the only passenger and headed for the lounge in the back to change from his military uniform. Butler remembered the advertisement well. It did not appear in any African newspaper for fear of losing Air Busati the few passengers it had, but it made quite a hit in The New York Times where one militant several days later had called on the Busati Air Force to launch an immediate strike against South Africa.

  The militant had held up the advertisement as he said: “Why don’t these black pilots spearhead an attack on racist South Africa? I will tell you why. Because capitalism forces them to fly commercial airliners.”

  Butler had almost cried when he saw the news story about the militant, and when he thought that black men did indeed fly fighter aircraft—in America.

  As the 707 jet rose sharply into the darkening Busati sky for the first leg of its journey to Kennedy Airport in New York City, William Forsythe Butter leaned back in a reclining seat, aware that he was making his last trip west to a land to which centuries before his ancestors had been transported, shackled in the holds of ships built for carrying cattle.

  Those trips had taken months. Many had died and many had thrown themselves overboard when they had a chance. They had come from many tribes—Loni, Hausa, Ashanti, Dahomey—and they would surrender this heritage to become a new people called “nigger.” Few would ever find their way home.

  William Forsythe Butler had found his way home. In the depths of his bitterness, he had found his home and his tribe and his people, and a curious legend that told him what he must do. Although in truth, he had always been the kind of boy—then man—who seemed to know what he would do and how he would do it.

  When he was eleven years old in Paterson, New Jersey, he suddenly realized he was very fast afoot, as fast as the wind. He was reading when this realization overcame him. He told his sister.

  “Get outa here, Billie, you’re a fat chubkins,” she had said.

  “I know, sis, I know. But I’m fast. I mean, I got the speed in me.”

  “I can outrun you, fatty,” said his sister.

  “Today, yeah. But not next month. And the month after that you won’t even see me.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna move that flab fast, fatty,” said his older sister.

  But Billie Butler knew. All he would have to do would be to find that speed in himself. And he did. In football, he became high school All-American, and did the same at Morgan State.

  His performance there was good enough to get him an offer from the Philadelphia Browns which, at the time, had an interesting way of judging football talent. They could have done it with a light meter. If you were black and fast and didn’t come from a Big Ten school, you were a cornerback. And if your name was William Forsythe Butler, you became Willie Butler. Not Bill, not Billie, but Willie.

  “I don’t want to play defense,” Butler had told them. “I want to play offense. I know I can play offense.” But the Browns already had one black halfback. Butler became a cornerback.

  He swallowed his pride and tried to look straight ahead. He read about the black reawakening, which seemed to center around kids calling press conferences to announce imminent rebellions, which featured every sort of cuckoo
in the black community being exalted by the white press as a black leader; and featured very few of his own people, the people who had sweat blood and tears and pain to wrest even the ownership of a home from a hostile land.

  Just as he had known as a child that he had speed within him, he knew now what would happen in this still-hostile land of America.

  He tried to explain to one militant he met on a plane.

  “Look, if you’re going to have a damned revolution, it might help not to announce your plans in The New York Times,” he had said.

  “Revolution is communication with the masses,” the militant had said. “They must first be conscious that power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that the whites have most of the guns?”

  “Whitey soft. He through. He dead, man.”

  “God help you if you ever back him into a corner,” Butler told the youth, who responded that Butler was an Uncle Tom of a dead generation. Butler saw the name of the militant again one month later when the newspapers reported the youth had been arrested for holding up a drugstore.

  Some of Butler’s friends said this was a sign that the youth was really arrested for his political beliefs.

  “Bullshit,” said Butler. “If you know anything about how anything operates, that kid is just what you want for an enemy. He wasn’t doing any harm to the government. He was really helping it.”

  “He was raising the consciousness of his people,” said Butler’s sister.

  “Every time that kid opened his mouth, ten thousand whites moved to the right.”

  “That’s a twisted way of thinking,” said his sister. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of Tomming.”

  “And I’m tired of losing. We’re cutting off all our support in the north, and in the south, forget it.”

  “We got the Third World. We outnumber Whitey.”

  “Numbers don’t count any more,” Butler had said. “An army is made up of people who can work together and, most important, be in the right place at the right time. If I were running a black revolution in this country, I’d give the kids watches, not rifles.”