THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  “That son of a bitch. He knows!”

  “This is a distraction, Mac. The real battle’s down in the Tsavo, Meru, Amboseli, our last elephants—”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “You want me to have a second wife, goddamn it? She was it. Till she couldn’t stand it anymore and broke it off.”

  Outside Government House the air sizzled like molten lead. Couples sat in tree shadows on the lawns; the sidewalks throbbed with bright dresses and men’s dazzling white shirts. The land Rover’s door handle was hot, the seat, steering wheel and air inside on fire till they rolled down the windows and had driven as far as Koinage Street, where the tall buildings and leafy trees offered oases of shadow on the sun-brilliant street. “That’s why Dottie left?”

  “She never knew. It happened two years ago.”

  “You don’t see her anymore?”

  “She won’t see me. If she can help it.”

  “Mac, you’re all smashed up by buffalo and it’s crazy for you to go. Stay here and line up some private aircraft to overfly.”

  “I’m not staying here. I’ll go alone if I have to.”

  Tourists in bush hats and Out of Africa suits clogged the crosswalks against the light. “If you go, take M’kele. Even the clever-eyed thief cannot evade the one who tracks him—kake miiolo enikichokini—that’s M’kele.”

  “How many Europeans’ve been kidnapped by Somalis in the last five years?”

  The tourists thinned and Nehemiah shifted into first. “Maybe ten.”

  “How many have come back?”

  The car nudged forward. “I can think of one.”

  “So we need that plane doing flyovers in outward uonsetic till the second plane arrives and then spread out. With radio contact, two more planes patrolling the borders so they can’t get across—”

  “Mac—”

  “How many Somalis are there? M’Bole didn’t say.”

  Nehemiah geared down and swung the Land Rover off Langata Boulevard and on to Wilson Field, halted at the gate, signed the guardsheet that the sentry handed through the window, resting it on the steering wheel. The engine muttered unevenly in the heat; a light plane droned over on approach. Nehemiah tapped the pen shut on the guard’s clipboard and handed them back. “They won’t even let you keep the one plane, Mac. If you meet M’kele, Darius, and Gideon at Wamba that will get the four of you to North Horr tonight or tomorrow morning, then the plane’ll have to swing back for four more of us. Maybe M’Bole wants you up there, out of the way—”

  MacAdam paced the cool hangar where the voices of mechanics echoed off the uonset roof. The floor was sticky with oil and grit. She’s already dead and that’s all of it, he told himself. They raped her and killed her and the hyenas won’t leave any bones.

  The plane from North Horr was late, must have stopped in Nanyuki. Sun the color of poinsettia was sinking into sunset smog. There was no getting back to North Horr tonight unless the plane hurried, another night she’d be dragged across the desert. Unless she was dead. Of course she was dead. How many of them? M’Bole hadn’t said.

  MacAdam went into the office where Nehemiah sat radioing through to Wamba to tell the men to take the truck up to Marsabit. “I’m going back to get the G-3 and more ammo and my backpack, and rations and extra canteens for everybody. Anything else?”

  “Snake kit and maps.”

  “Got them.”

  “Not of southern Ethiopia.”

  When he returned the Cessna sat on the apron. Nehemiah was talking in the office to an emaciated old black man in a tattered shirt who lay on a wooden bench while a doctor listened for his heart. Then MacAdam noticed he had gray whiskers and was not black but sunburned. It was Hecht looking up at him as if he were not there, as if he’d seen through and past him. You bastard, MacAdam thought. You let her die.

  Hecht’s voice was old and glassy. “Attacked at dawn. Shot our two boys and two students—young man, Cambridge—”

  “How many?”

  “Of them? Oh five at least. Seven. More in the hills.”

  “When? What did they say? Tell me everything about them.”

  For a moment Hecht hesitated, a dislike, and MacAdam wondered if she’d ever told him, in retribution or else some marital reconsideration, some baring of truths that would lead him now to punish her somehow, punish him. But Hecht told it quickly, seemingly without rancor even for the Somalis, as if his desert odyssey had taught him the inefficacy of hate. “Four days ago this morning. Hard not to get mixed up.”

  “She’s dead then,” MacAdam answered, more to hurt himself than Hecht, to hurt himself for hoping, for seeing her step across her kitchen floor to give him a last worried kiss, for feeling again her first kiss unexpected and strong as an electric shock, her arms around him and her sweet long hair against his face.

  “They’ll be sending a letter,” Hecht answered. “I tracked them till they shot at me and said go back or they’d kill her.” Hecht pulled himself up on bony elbows. “What more could I do?”

  The plane sat on the apron with the pilot squatting in its shade, but a mechanic had dismounted the cowl of the port engine, had pulled the plug cables and was unbolting the head. “Shit!” MacAdam screamed running towards him. “I’ve got to use this plane!”

  “Not tonight, Captain.” The Maasai pilot pointed to a wide splotch of oil on the apron. “She’s got a busted rod.”

  MacAdam bent over hands on knees and took a breath, forced himself to take another. “You got one?”

  “Another rod?” the Kikuyu mechanic said. “Damn right, off this baby’s sister—”

  “Goddamn I’ll fly that one!”

  “It’s dead, boss. Pieces.”

  “How long?”

  The mechanic eyed the oil on the ground. “Two days.”

  “Impossible. We have to leave tonight.”

  “Even if the plane’s done, Captain,” the pilot said. “We can’t leave till five. I can take off here in the dark but I can’t land in Marsabit till dawn. They got no lights.”

  MacAdam threw his jacket on the wing, turned to the mechanic. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Keena Ogole.”

  “Let’s go to work.”

  Ogole sadly shook his head. “Waitin’ on the other rod to come in from Kisumu. S’posed to be here, by six.”

  The uonset was dank, airless. Through the open doors came the cries of soldiers playing volleyball, the crackle of small arms, the tread of boots against concrete. He looked out seeing nothing, ran outside, clenched his fists, came back, glanced at his watch, forgot the time. His body felt like a steel spring, wasted. The air was hideously empty. But he could compress himself into a pure perception that almost reached her.

  20

  A BLACK RIDER on a black camel crossed the ridge, a black silhouette with a black rifle cocked across his shoulder. A second black rider dropped down from the ridgeline around a basalt cirque, nonchalantly cantering into rifle range. “Three more on the right,” Rashid screamed, but now there were five, their black cloaks reddened by the low sun, leaning back in their saddles as their camels descended the talus of Daka Qaqala. “Warwar, cover the left!” Ibrahim yelled, and Warwar ran forward, tugging the whitewoman’s camel as Rashid swung round to defend the rear. “Don’t fire till I say.” Ibrahim added as more riders crested the ridge and raised their rifles in a signal to surrender.

  “Keep going,” Ibrahim yelled. “Don’t stop till they fire!”

  “Put down the whitewoman!” Rashid cried. “We’ll get on her camel!” He waved his rifle for the whitewoman to dismount but Warwar only ran faster, stumbling into Ibrahim. More Borani formed a line like trees blocking the rocky slope ahead.

  “We’re dead!” Ibrahim waved his rifle for the Borani to stay back. “Damn your whitewoman!”

  Gripping the camel’s jerking halter with his left hand as he tried to steady the rifle in his right, Warwar could not remember if the rifle
was set to automatic. If it was, then the first shots would waste bullets and they needed every bullet for these black-caped Borani with their narrow desert-blackened faces. Except somehow he must save one bullet for himself at the end, must not be captured, must remember that, must not be captured, or the Borani would make him beg for death for days before they killed him. He wanted to unsnap the clip to extract one bullet to keep between his teeth for later, for there were far far too many Borani and this was going to be a horrible death and the fear inside him was so huge he could not breathe and the water came into his eyes, making it hard to see.

  A Borani broke from the group and rode forward, waved his rifle in a big semicircle, the arm of his cape following the rifle round its ambit like a black wing. The Borani’s voice was loud but Warwar could not understand. Wind chilled the sweat on his face. He was conscious of everything and nothing, of what it would have been like making love with Soraya, of a bird blown like a leaf, a pebble underfoot, the smell of rifles and now the dry palm oil the Borani rub their skins with, like sage and lemon, and the baked black clay odor of their capes, the white beads they wore like bits of skeleton showing through.

  “Offer them the whitewoman,” Rashid hissed.

  “Get down in the rocks,” Ibrahim answered calmly. “Rashid, cover the woman. If they start to shoot, kill her.” Ibrahim yanked his camel forward, the bull elephant’s big tusks bouncing, raised his rifle in salute. “We come in peace,” he yelled, in Somali.

  IN KEENA OGOLE’S HAND the piston rod was like a broken weapon. “It’s when he raised the torque, revving for takeoff,” he said.

  MacAdam swore at the gutted cylinder head with its coils like intestines, congealed oil coating its brachiated exhaust.

  “Better down here than up there.” Ogole laid the broken rod on a white cloth on the hangar floor, measured the substitute rod from the Cessna’s sister ship against it. “Once it builds momentum, warms up, it’s OK. It’s that stress—like if you had to climb too fast.” The replacement rod seemed longer than the other but Ogole nonchalantly began to pin it into its bearings and reassemble the block. MacAdam paced to the hangar edge, measuring the light left in the carmine and blue sunset, with the black trees and rooftops cut clear against it. In the wind he could taste her, from down across the livid sands of the vast Suguta, over mountains and savannas and coiling rivers and jungles and icy peaks, then down the last steamy hundred miles to Nairobi and across its acrylic smog to this breath of air with her molecules inside it.

  “SORRY, MAMA, you got to go with them.” Warwar’s eyes sank pleadingly into hers, begging her to get down so that he could mount the camel and run away, or hide behind her back from the bullets that would slice like white-hot smashing rods through his flesh, begging her not to mind being this sacrifice. The Borani circled closer, guns pointing like sinister petrified bones out of their black capes, their camels’ jaws vengeful.

  The hawk-faced leader’s eyes were lit far back in his skull; his grin was the most frightful thing Warwar had ever seen. Like his eyes his voice came from deep within, a giant’s out of a cavern, yet his body seemed nervous and eager for a reason to shoot. He turned from Rebecca back to Ibrahim, nodded at the tusks atop the two other camels, spoke curtly, and Ibrahim answered him angrily but with a hopeless acceptance in his voice that Warwar recognized as death. “They want the tusks and saddle bags,” Ibrahim said.

  Holding his rifle level, Rashid reached up on his camel, undid both saddle bags, and threw them on the sand beside the leader’s camel. “We come in peace,” he said also in Somali but none of the Borani edging nearer in a tightening circle responded.

  “I’ve been kidnapped,” Rebecca called out. “Will you take me to North Horr, or up to the Addis Ababa road?”

  The fire brightened in the leader’s eyes. “They don’t speak Swahili, Mama,” Warwar whispered. “But don’t talk. You’re much safer with us than them.”

  The leader spoke and another Borani dismounted, opened the saddle bags and handed the white bag of twelve thousand shillings up to the leader. Two others untied the elephant tusks and retied them to empty saddles of their own camels, took the reins of Rebecca’s camel from Warwar’s hand and led it to the leader. He finished glancing through the money, tied the sack and tucked it into his cloak, and pulled her camel to him. His eyes, bereft of pupils, emanated a coarse yellow light; then Rebecca realized it was one eye only that was like that, that it must be blind. Will they kill me now, she wondered, fighting over me, or slower later, fear running perspiration down her ribs and hollowing her lungs. The leader kicked his camel round, jerking hers after it; she gripped the pommel and glanced back imploringly at Warwar, tiny and empty-handed on the sand. The motion made her hat fall forward and the strap slip and she jammed her chin into her chest to catch it but the hat spun away and plunged between the following camel’s hoofs. “Get it!” she screamed, but the Borani kept on riding and her camel jerked harder forward, snapping her neck. Now dust hid Warwar and the other Somalis, and her heart was full of terror and a rage to kill.

  The Boranis’ dust settled slowly on the wind. “You who wanted it all!” Rashid shrilled at Warwar. “Now see what you’ve got!”

  “We were lucky,” Ibrahim said amicably. “They’d sworn an oath of peace. We won’t wait for them to change their mind.” He swung up on to his camel, holding the other camel’s bridle for Rashid to do the same. “You’ll have to run alongside, little one.”

  “They didn’t take our rifles,” Rashid said. “We still have the cameras and little cousin’s ‘far-seeing thing’.”

  “I have to walk all the way back to Somalia?” Warwar called, running behind them.

  “A fitting lesson, after you showed such bad judgment. It’s by wanting too much that one gets nothing.”

  Warwar panted with exhaustion and rage. The land danced round in his eyes. “She was mine! I found her! And you let her go!”

  “I didn’t let her go, foolish child. I bartered her for our lives. Even for yours.”

  “We could have fought them!”

  “Three against thirty?”

  Warwar’s lips felt like leather bands over his teeth. “At night we’ll get them back. Tonight.”

  “Into so many pieces they would carve you,” Rashid sneered. “Making you eat each piece. How many would you eat before you died?”

  “I promised them we’d go in peace,” Ibrahim said.

  “They’ll camp tonight. I’ll find them.”

  Ibrahim neared, reaching down. “Come up with me, nestling. We’re riding home, and in a while we’ll travel south to the Kenya coast—there’s still elephants—we’ll get a few, and you’ll have some precious shillings. Come! Life’s what Allah gives us.”

  Warwar shook his head and walked behind them to the top of the ridge, tears blurring his view of the line of Borani riding north up the valley into the Ethiopian heights, Rebecca’s white shirt a spark against the darkness.

  “THE STROKE won’t be right, because the rod’s too long. Changes the compression.”

  “I don’t give a shit long as it runs. I don’t want to put down anywhere and I don’t want to crash. Can it get me to Marsabit to pick up my squad and then up to North Horr?”

  “You’re asking me to predict the impossible, Captain.”

  “What are the chances?”

  “Like I said. Simon’s not going to want to fly them.”

  “He said he will. He doesn’t give a damn either.”

  “If he doesn’t give a damn why you asking me?”

  THEY RODE INTO A WIDE VALLEY with dark cliffs high above. Brisk evening washed over the stony slopes and down the middle of the valley. She smelled camel-dung smoke, then saw glimmers of flames and the outline of dark yurt-like tents. Children came running with whip sticks in their hands, chattering like birds. They clustered round her camel and gripped her ankles in their tiny hard paws. The leader dismounted, yanked her camel to him, took her arm and pulled her down. His grip was like
a handcuff on her wrist as he led her between the clawing children and women’s curious voices into a yurt, her head banging the hardened bough supporting the door. There was a dung fire in the middle of the floor; its smoke and an infected warm greasy smell filled the choking air. He shoved her down and she lay along one side, trying to breathe beneath the goatskin flap.

  Two women entered, sharp faces and shining black eyes. One gave her a gourd of water, the other a flat piece of bark with a gruel of camel’s milk and barley.

  WHERE WARWAR could find brambles for the two camels on the northwest side of the ridge they stopped for the night. Rashid had killed a lizard on a rock but Ibrahim did not dare to light a fire, so they ate it raw, in thirds, Warwar with the head and neck as far as the front paws. It was rubbery as geb root but he got it down, feeling in the back of his throat a strange sandy taste which must be thirst or maybe only anger over losing the woman.

  Every time he thought of going after her he trembled. Like a person keeping himself away from the edge of a cliff so he wouldn’t throw himself over, he would not think about sneaking into the Borani camp and taking back his woman and the money. It would show them, teach Ibrahim and Rashid how to be men. True, he’d shown them before, at the Land Rovers, and they had not accepted it and blamed him instead. Even now if he rescued the woman they’d criticize him, say he’d increased their danger, but he was not going to think about rescuing the woman because then, fool, he’d try to do it, and the Borani would cut him up in pieces and make him eat them like Rashid said.

  Nevertheless after he had staked out the camels and unrolled his own goatskin on a promontory of stone where Ibrahim had instructed him to guard, and as moonrise silvered the perfect blackness of the valley headwalls, he came to his conclusion, lingered a last moment in the goatskin’s marvelous warmth, then rolled it aside, wiped dew from his rifle with his cloak, and set off north at a run, along the ridge above the valley walls.

  THE HAWK-FACED MAN came into the yurt and held out to her a string of charred intestine, goat or antelope; she ate it, not caring. He pointed to the fire and raised his shoulders in a shivering motion, asking was she warm. He shook the water gourd and finding it empty called out for it to be filled and for a woman to bring a goat cape to cover her shoulders. Smiling, he sat across the fire and spoke as though convincing her of something, revealing good news, his teeth large and very even, lips wide and reddened by the coals.