THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  SIMON FLEW THE PLANE LOW over the scrubby windblown hovels of the North Horr police post and landed in a cloud of dust gilded by the sun. A lone blue Land Rover trailed its smaller scarf of dust out to meet them. MacAdam leaped from the wing, then bent double swearing with the pain in his chest, then became conscious of his hand clamped on the searing aileron and M’kele peering down puzzled from the wing. A burly Suk policeman dismounted from the Land Rover and opened its back door for Darius and Gideon to load the packs and rifles. “We’ll pick up the camels,” MacAdam said, “then drive to where the woman was taken.”

  The policeman looked worried. “Camel not come, sir.”

  “What do you mean camels not come! We called through last night for six camels to be sent up to the place, for us to follow the trail!”

  “Trail disappears, sir. Camels all taken by Gabbra, last week. Not enough food here so Gabbra take them Bura Galadi. Sure we bringing them back, tonight, fast as can come.”

  “How the fuck were you following up the trail?”

  “Trail disappears, sir.”

  MacAdam leaned against the Land Rover, its dusty superheated metal a vague consolation for all that did not work, that would not be. Decide now, he told himself. This is where the fate of things is told. He bowed his head, took a long breath, forced himself not to think, then to imagine it all, what he should do. He spun round so fast his chest felt speared, re-shattered. “Tell me, friend,” he said to the policeman, “how likely will the camels come tonight?”

  The man’s outspread hands were like an apology for Africa: if you need to believe, I will tell you what you want to hear. “Two men leave last night, soon as call come through. Sure by now they have camels, coming back.”

  “How many hours?” To MacAdam, everything seemed weighed in hours, life too. Remember, he reminded himself, she’s already dead.

  The man’s pouched cheeks were a parody of calculation. “Perhaps by sunset.”

  MacAdam tucked back his bush hat; already the heat had soaked the band, was running rivulets of sweat down his cheeks and neck. Each breath of air seemed from a foundry. The lungs tried not to inhale it. “Tell me, brothers, what are your thoughts?”

  Gideon wiped his star-shattered glasses on his camo shirt. He too, MacAdam saw, was sweating. “Either we all wait for the camels, or we all go in this man’s vehicle to the place she was taken kidnap, and try to track them on foot. Or some go and some wait.”

  MacAdam nodded. “What would you do?”

  Gideon bit his lip. “I’m not CO, sir.” He looked up towards the sun. “But I would like all to go.”

  “You guys?”

  “We all go,” said Darius.

  M’kele watched the dusty runway by MacAdam’s feet, as if the tracks began there. “Trouble if all go, we likely never catch them. They have camels, five days’ start. What chance is that?”

  When MacAdam held his hands over his eyes the light turned pink within them, bright bars between the fingers. Now fate’s told. If she’s not already dead. “You and I, M’kele, must go now to the place she was taken, pick up the trail. If they’ve covered it well there’ll be time lost finding it. Assuming they’ve gone north, Darius and Gideon can bring the camels straight across, joining up with Nehemiah and the others when Simon flies them up, instead of turning south. That way you’ll meet us, or follow our trail and catch up quickly.”

  Regret shadowed Gideon’s face. “May not be the wisest way.”

  “Even if they’ve gone north,” Darius said, “will they not now already be in Ethiopia?”

  WHEN IBRAHIM let her down from his camel Rebecca was so sore and weary the ground seemed to fall away beneath her feet. “Dibandiba,” he said, and other words in Somali, but Dibandiba to her was only a peak on a remembered map, on a line between Kenya and Ethiopia; the other words she couldn’t understand. But in his voice there was something more easily understood, an undertone of desertion, the way one speaks to someone whose fate no longer matters because it’s been determined.

  “Warwar?” she answered, as if her supposed concern for him would keep her one of them. Ibrahim jerked back his head in surprise. He spoke to Rashid, scoffing, and in the words she heard Warwar’s name and understood they were speaking also of her. She suddenly had a sense of no longer being alone, of being part of something.

  SURELY THE BORANI would see him now, smell him in his hole among the boulders fiery with the sun, as they rode back and forth across the vast ruptured slope, the soft click of their camels’ hooves and their savage birdlike cries nearing, withdrawing, and nearing again. Warwar wormed tighter down into the shallow trough between two halves of boulder split long ago by heat, his back and chest against two searing sheets of stone, his rifle too hot to touch at his side, and waited without hope for the circling Borani to find him. Now that it was too late he understood why Ibrahim had done this—now Ibrahim would be safe and have the whitewoman’s ransom and Soraya to himself completely. Warwar would never take her by the spring or underneath the palms, while Ibrahim was elsewhere. Like all fools, Warwar saw, he’d devised his own demise.

  23

  FROM NORTH HORR the Suk policeman drove MacAdam and M’kele in the Land Rover east and south across the Chalbi, raising a tall dust plume, till they picked up the ruts of two vehicles and Hecht’s returning footprints west of the Huri Hills. They followed them north, the ruts sometimes diverging, sometimes doubled, till M’kele raised his hand sharply and the policeman stopped.

  The hoof prints of three camels came suddenly from the east and paralleled the ruts. “That’s them,” the Suk policeman said.

  MacAdam felt the bitter intuition of failure. He cleaned the dust from his glasses and, leaning forward between the seats of M’kele and the driver, watched through the windscreen as the twin grooves of the Land Rovers paired, diverged, and paired again, Hecht’s lonely returning footprints vacillating along them, the walls of the box canyon rising steadily on either side.

  Again he had the sense of her beside him, remembered how it felt to hold her. “Klaus hasn’t made love to me in two years.” She spoke into his shoulder as he held her close, fitting so perfectly the way he loved, her body’s pressure responding equally to his.

  “He’s insane,” he replied.

  “I even tried having my own bedroom—to shock him.” She laughed. “I think he liked it better.”

  “Why be married, then?”

  “He likes companionship, support. We’re very fond of one another.” Her hands drew up his shoulder blades, pressing them, making his body feel strong and light. “And the boys—they’re our sons. How can I divide that?”

  “Does he love them?” MacAdam thought of them without remembering their names—one was a little older than the other, both with truculent, disinterested faces, thick bodies, and their father’s puffy eyes and sarcastic smile.

  “He’s very good to them.”

  “Dottie says he only loves himself.”

  “He’d seem that way—until you knew him.”

  MacAdam felt her defense of her husband stiffening, which angered him, but he told himself don’t push it. Loving the scent and taste of her hair as it curled around her earlobe whose ruby and diamond pierced earrings felt sharp against his cheek, he kissed the side of her neck. “If I were married to you we’d make love three times a day.”

  “You’re married to someone else,” she said.

  The car slowed, jerked, and stopped. MacAdam raised his eyes to the ruins of a fire, two deserted Land Rovers pocked by bullets, one with a shattered windshield. Equipment lay piled around them, the foodstuffs scavenged, their paper wrappings pinned to thorn scrub by the wind. Footprints of hyenas, sandals and boots webbed the sand, among them slender sneaker tracks he took to be hers. On the far side of the vehicles from the fire, broken and gnawed bones were scattered, some still showing bits of dried black flesh.

  M’kele circled the fire, the Land Rovers, then moved in widening ellipses round the edges of the cam
p. The Suk policeman hitched up his blue trousers till they were taut above his black combat boots. “Four dead,” he said to MacAdam. “We check to National Museum at Nairobi: two drivers, a student of Mombasa, and one of England.” The policeman kicked one of the bones as if dispelling doubt. It was a chunk of pelvis, MacAdam realized, as it scuttled across the sand, flies and wasps rising from it in alarm. “They shoot dead the motors,” the policeman continued, striding towards the punctured Land Rovers as if MacAdam were incapable of seeing for himself. MacAdam picked an empty cartridge from the sand. “Do an analysis on these?”

  The policeman peered into MacAdam’s hand. “AK47.”

  “Chinese, Russian or Czech?”

  The policeman shrugged. MacAdam handed him the cartridge. “We’ll follow the tracks in your vehicle till the terrain gives out or you run low on gas. When you get back to North Horr, send this to Nairobi, for ballistics.”

  “I don’t have much gas, Captain.”

  “Don’t worry, soon we’ll have to go on foot.” He checked the sun—midafternoon—and reinvestigated the two Land Rovers. A small duffel bag half-open on the sand held her clothes—cotton shirts and jeans, thin underpants, white cotton socks balled in pairs, a comb and brush, tampons, a pair of Bata sneakers, a windbreaker. Dear Rebecca, you must freeze at night, he thought. He took her windbreaker, a change of clothes and toilet articles from the duffel bag. Feeling infinitely hungry for her, he emptied his backpack and put them at the bottom.

  “What you doin’?” M’kele said, returning.

  “Insurance.”

  “It was the same three camels. They went the short way from Gamura to Balesa and came down the east side, there.” M’kele pointed to a sandy gully pouring down the cirque-like wall of the canyon. “They tied up the camels in that laga; two guys went north on foot; the third, he came straight from east, the one with the light tracks. The one who shot the four people.”

  MacAdam smiled at M’kele’s assurance. “How do you know?”

  “Same rifle, bwana. 7.62mm Czechoslovakian, used by Ethiopian Army.”

  “So where are they now?”

  “Ethiopia, maybe, on their way across to Somalia.”

  MacAdam finished reloading his backpack and lowered it carefully into the Police Land Rover, feeling it tug at his stitches. “Maybe they’re Ethiopians.”

  “They have the wide sandals of Juba people. From the way they travel, how thin their camels—they’re Somali.”

  “Soon as we catch them they’ll be dead.”

  With the Police Land Rover it was at first easy to follow the prints of the three pairs of sandals and Rebecca’s sneakers, Hecht’s heavy wide boot marks skirting them. When they reached a narrow lip of lava that had poured down long ago from the Huri Hills, Hecht’s tracks turned back and the terrain stiffened over the jumbled sharp rocks. They came to where the camels had been tied up in the sandy laga; Rebecca’s sneaker marks disappeared; the track of the three camels and three pairs of sandals was like an arrow diminishing into infinity across the wavering sand. “All three camels are heavily loaded,” M’kele said.

  At first the Police Land Rover could move quickly across the desert, but now the trail snaked up into the Maikona cliffs and they had to drive many kilometers around them, the car nosing among boulders and canyons for a way up the rugged slope, till they crossed the sandy track known as the North Horr-Marsabit road. The sun had nearly set by the time they found the tracks again—now nothing but a chipped stone or crushed pebble here and there and once a camel’s hoof print. The Land Rover’s gauge was on one-quarter; the Suk policeman’s wide white eyes inspected the lowering horizon and the towering black abutments to the north. “I’m low on petrol, Captain.”

  Behind them, the North Horr-Marsabit road lay like a golden thread in the setting sun, a last link with the world of humanity. “Wish I could go with you, Captain,” the policeman said.

  MacAdam noted how the man’s stomach bulged against the steering wheel, his fat thighs stretching his shiny blue trousers. You couldn’t run a mile, he wanted to say, let alone two hundred. “I need you to stay,” he said. “When our camels come, send them, with Nehemiah and the other men, straight here.”

  M’kele followed the faint trail at a run, swinging his rifle easily, his head slightly downbent to see the tracks, MacAdam ten yards behind. Despite the setting sun the heat was immense and the air burned MacAdam’s throat. He wiped perspiration from his eyes and it returned at once; after a while his arm became too heavy to raise and he ran half-blinded by salty sweat, M’kele’s image hovering before him, sometimes distancing itself, and he would hurry to catch up, M’kele always trotting with that slow easy rapid stride, his slender limbs effortless as a bird’s.

  At dusk they rested for a few minutes by a whistling thorn whose lower branches had been browsed by the kidnappers’ camels. She’s been here, MacAdam reminded himself, she’s sat on a camel and seen this tree. He scanned the footprints: one kidnapper was young and light-footed, almost a girl, the one who shot everyone. One of the others had a slight limp; the third was heavier, with a long stride. Rebecca’s tracks were nowhere. Maybe they’d already killed her, and it was her body they were carrying on camel back. Maybe they’d never taken her at all, her bones back at the campsite and the camels just loaded with things they stole. He remembered her small footprints from the campsite; now they assumed a totemic value, like the last words of someone you’ve loved.

  M’kele ran steadily, swinging his rifle loosely in one hand, MacAdam after, the G-3’s web sling biting into his shoulder, each step tugging his chest muscles; he could not inhale deeply because of the broken ribs, and could feel the new stitches giving way one by one like an old sock unraveling, the blood mixing with sweat and soaking his chest.

  Before dark the kidnappers’ trail skirted a long lava slope laid down millennia ago by the now-blunted Huri Hills. M’kele stooped beside the tracks. Ah, he’s tired too, MacAdam decided. But we’ll keep going. The thought gave him new strength.

  “Her tracks,” M’kele said.

  MacAdam bent over panting but could see nothing but ripples of sand unevenly marching westwards, a series of random indentations angling across them. “Where?” he gasped, hope mounting absurdly: maybe they’d let her go.

  M’kele fingered the sand that cast down tiny runnels at his touch. He turned and ascended the slope, peering into the dusk. “She came down here,” he called. Descending the slope he followed the indentations a few meters and called again, “She’s made a circle, escaped them; she’s going west.”

  M’kele checked the darkening sky, began to run, leaning forward over the tracks, faster and faster as Rebecca’s direction firmed and MacAdam also could see the faint furrow stretching ahead against the violet twilight. It seemed possible now, she might be hiding at some water hole, or already sheltered in a Gabbra village, gathering her strength.

  M’kele’s shoulders sagged; he halted. Even he, MacAdam noted, was breathing hard. “The others.”

  MacAdam’s joy escaped like water into sand: there they were, the camels, coming in from the northeast and linking up with her, as if they and she had been flung apart by chance and now were reunited. As if without the bad there could be no good, as if everything was paired.

  “You remember the Somalis from the Ewaso N’giro?” M’kele spoke slowly, thinking this out.

  MacAdam tried to remember what the Ewaso N’giro was; the words were familiar. Christ yes, the river. The Somalis—the poachers. Another lifetime.

  “It bother me since we see these tracks today,” M’kele continued.

  Then MacAdam knew before M’kele could say it. “It’s them.”

  “The very same.” M’kele trembled with excitement. “You see, we didn’t lose the other poachers after all.”

  24

  SINCE THE LAST TRACE of red had vanished from the west there had been no sound nor smell of the Borani but the long dim rumble of their retreat. Warwar knew it was a ruse
, that most of the Borani lay waiting among the rocks, but that he must try to escape now, before the moon rose. And he knew the Borani knew this too.

  On this wide ridge under the stars he wanted to widen his cloak and fly away from it all, like a swallow to his nest and gladdened mate. He felt the sting of tears. Never had he flown above the sorrow of being without father and mother, and now he’d lost Ahmed. If one day he could make a new nest the past would go away. He would be the father he never had, and Soraya the mother. Their children would be beloved on both sides, their son Ahmed a wise warrior and leader of the clan.

  But he forced himself to concentrate until the layout of this place was inside his mind as if seen from above, each little rock and crevice clear, the Borani in their black capes like prone chunks of stone, and within their capes as they glanced up to check the stars he saw their skulls coated in black skin. Then he found the widest hole between them and slipped quietly free, running downhill softly in the penumbra of the nearly risen moon.

  MACADAM KNELT EXHAUSTED to rest a moment beside a thorn bush. He sat up suddenly, stared round—the moon had risen like a chiding eye. He could not understand, then remembered. His back prickling with fear, he wondered what had wakened him, reached to shake M’kele but M’kele was not there.

  M’kele’s pack lay on the ground but his rifle was gone. Bent low to minimize the target he presented, MacAdam sectored off the desert beginning now to sparkle under the moon, and watched each sector intently, but there was no movement save the quick veer of a single nightjar seeing him at the last moment, uttering its warning churr as it darted away.

  There was no sign of a struggle by M’kele’s pack. There were faint footprints circling the pack and moving westwards; MacAdam followed them till they joined those of Rebecca and the three camels.