AK

by Peter Dickinson

  But I will strike at my enemy, thought Paul. Basso-Iskani has Michael in his prisons, and this is his car. I will show him he hasn’t won yet.

  Justin had given the Warriors a lesson in how to destroy army trucks, using their own fuel, or a petrol bomb if they were diesel-powered. No bottle. Gas, though, maybe. He crawled out around the flank of the car and found the gas-tank cap by touch. It wasn’t locked. Fumes reeked out into the stifling air. That would explode all right! But he’d need a good long fuse. What? Aba!

  He crawled forward to where Jilli lay peering through one of the eyelets.

  “Look, Paul,” she said. “Fields, like the Strip!”

  Paul peered. She was right. Dusty green fields stretched away. Farmers hoed and plowed and carried water on shoulder yokes. The train must be passing through the ring of irrigated land, fed by the water from the aquifer, that surrounded Dangoum.

  “We’ll be getting there soon, Jilli. Put on your town clothes. And can I have your grass belt, please?” “What for?”

  “Blow up Basso-Iskani’s car. Boom!”

  He grinned at the thought.

  “Ah, the car’s too pretty!”

  But she unwound the belt and gave it to him. It was just what he needed, a half-inch ribbon of plaited grass, bone dry and about five feet long. He crawled back, unfastened the gas cap, and fed one end of the belt down into the tank as far as it would go. When he pulled it out it was reeking wet. He did the same with the other end and replaced the gas cap—it was too risky to allow an explosive mixture to build up under the canvas, or the car would explode as soon as he lit a match.

  Carefully he pinched the belt double all down its length and opened it out into a V section, so that when he laid it along the timber beside the rear wheel and the crate behind it didn’t lie flat. Then he crawled to the front again, unclipped the magazine of the AK, and folded the butt, and rolled them up in the leather from the car seats, wrapping the strips of cloth around the parcel and tying them loosely in place. Mentally he rehearsed the moves he’d need to cut the cord, assemble the gun, and fire. About eight seconds, he thought.

  “Okay,” he said. “Come along back. You bring the flask.”

  Carrying the satchel in his teeth and cradling the AK he led the way to the rear. Once there he took out the matches and laid them ready, with the butt of one protruding from the box, then stacked flask, gun, and satchel against the back of the crate. With his knife he slit the tarpaulin almost from side to side, just above the line of the eyelets. The train wasn’t going fast enough to make it flap, and the taller railway car behind hid the slit from the guard’s-van.

  He raised the canvas and they peered out. There was a road now, running beside the track, with a few shacks and a dump of wrecked cars through which children roamed. An airliner climbed into the sky beyond, so the airport must be over there. About two miles to go now. Next time the train stopped they’d make a run for it.

  “Okay,” he said. “Be ready. When I say ‘Go’ you get out, quick as you can. I’ll pass you the gun. You put it on the ground. I’ll give you the flask and the satchel and you take them back under this next truck, quick as you can. Wait for me by the back wheels. Okay?”

  She touched the gun parcel, flask, and satchel in turn, and nodded. There were shanties now beside the track, with only a chain-link fence, rusted and broken in many places, to keep them from spilling onto the railway. Rubbish littered the railside. Kites probed and squabbled. If only the train would stop here, it would be easy. Twice it seemed to be slowing and Paul tensed for action before it picked up speed again. And now there were rusty, broken sheds and shabby cinder-block buildings, and a few sidings.

  The train slowed, whistled, slowed to a crawl. The bang of closing buffers began.

  Paul wriggled along by the crate, undid the gas cap, laid the end of the belt into the pipe, and wedged it in place with the little grass apron. The flat-top jarred to a halt as he twisted back.

  “Go!” he shouted. “Go!”

  Jilli was out by the time he reached the corner of the crate, her hand groping through the slit. He passed her the gun, then the satchel and flask, wriggled back around the corner again, picked up the matches, struck one, and laid it against the belt. Blue and yellow, the flame moved away, dazzling in that dark.

  He flung himself backward, twisted at the corner, and dived head first through the slit, grabbing the hook of the farther truck and tucking his knees up to swing himself down through the gap. The gun was laid ready. He snatched it, still in the momentum of his rush, and ducked in under the next car. Jilli was there, crouched by the farther axle. As he wriggled beneath the near one the car went up.

  It exploded with a soft, enormous whoosh. Heat crackled along either side of the track. Yellow tussocks went suddenly black, the flame of their burning invisible in the sunlight. The reflected heat blasted, roasting in under the shelter of the railway car, then passed on.

  “Quick! Quick!” Paul snapped, gesturing with his free hand.

  At once Jilli was twisting beneath the axle, ducking across the slot of sunlight between the cars and in under the next one. Legs appeared in the open, men jumping from the guard’s-van. There were yells. She froze. Paul slipped across the gap and crouched in the shadow beside her. The legs ran past, three pairs in khaki fatigues and one in jeans, all on the left of the train. Paul twisted and looked the other way. A shed of some kind, a cinder-block wall and the bottom of a broken window, only a few feet from the track.

  “This way!”

  He scuttled into the open, rose and dashed along beside the wall. The heat of burning smote at his shoulders. He whipped around the corner of the shed and on around the next corner, then stood with his back against the wall, with the gun parcel in his left hand and his knife poised to cut the cords. A scamper of feet and Jilli was at his side with the satchel and flask.

  A few yards away stood a truck, its axles propped on blocks and all four wheels missing. The door hung open, half off its hinges. Paul pointed and at once Jilli was across the gap and wriggling up. He followed. The windshield was broken. Crouching in front of the seat they peered through the cracked glass. Men came pouring out of sheds in ragged working clothes, mostly barefooted. They stared for a moment at the blazing wagon and ran towards it. Soldiers appeared around a corner, half a dozen of them, with AKs. They too stared and ran. The last stragglers went by.

  “Okay,” said Paul. “Let’s go.”

  He slid down and waited, clutching the gun parcel under his arm. She passed him the satchel and followed.

  “Don’t hurry,” he said.

  “Let’s make like we’re sweethearts,” said Jilli, twining her fingers into his. She laid her head against his shoulder and giggled as they strolled away. At the corner around which the soldiers had come Paul risked a glance back. The car and the crate behind it were both ablaze, and the box-wagon beyond was burning too. A ring of soldiers and onlookers watched from a safe distance. Jilli sighed.

  “You’re my friend, Paul?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ll be a big man, one day. A big man in the government. Then you’ll buy me a pretty car like that one?”

  8

  Behind them in the railway yard something exploded, followed by screams and yells, but there was no pursuit, and the road ahead was as empty and silent as the bush. They trudged through the roasting grey dust, between storehouses and workshops which had been built near the railway years ago, when trade had been good, but were now mostly broken and boarded up. The reek of heated metal blasted from one open doorway, but the men who’d been working there were now settling into bits of shade for their midday rest. None of them glanced at the passersby.

  Rubbish lay in drifts around the buildings. A burnt-out pickup nuzzled into a wall—it must have tried to take a corner too fast. Paul had seen pickups like that careering around Dangoum on his previous v
isit, crammed with illegal fare-paying passengers. This one had been battered and patched many times before its final crash, and one of the patches was a strip of corrugated iron, now almost loose. Paul wrenched it free, bent it double, and slotted the parcel with the gun in it into the fold, tying it firm with the last of his cord.

  “Best if I carry it,” said Jilli.

  She made a pad with his spare shirt and he helped her balance the awkward load on her head, then took the flask and walked beside her.

  “You look fine,” he said. “We’re just another couple of people who’ve made it to Dangoum to look for money.”

  Jilli stopped in her tracks and gazed at the desolate, sun-blasted road between the abandoned sheds. A three-legged dog was sniffing the skeleton of a mule for scraps the kites had missed.

  “You mean this is Dangoum?” she whispered.

  Paul grinned at her. Dangoum would be as full of dangers as the bush—fuller, because he didn’t yet know its tracks or odours or places of safety, but he felt quite confident, in control. The burning of the Mercedes was a sign to him, not just because he’d made it work and struck a blow at his enemy, but because it had turned out the best thing he could have done. Without that diversion, how would they have got clear of the train and the railway yard? It was as though there had been something helping him, putting the car on that very train, then putting the idea of destruction into his mind. No, not something, someone. My mother, the war. She loves me still. She is on my side.

  “It’s not all like this,” he said. “The market’s the best bit—I’ll show you that, and the Hilton, and Boyo’s palace. But first I’ve got to find my friends, okay?”

  They trudged on, sweating. The road narrowed till it was almost blocked in places by the shacks and shanties propped against the walls of old sheds. Around the railway the air had smelled mainly of coal and ash and acids. Here it smelled of people. Soon the real shantytown began. A few women and children, listless with heat, moved around, but the men lay like dead bodies in any shade they could find. The burning air was filled with the stenches of cooking and rot and dung, though the downright sun dried any filth it could reach hard and harmless in a couple of hours, and the kites carried away whatever they could eat. Last time he’d come to the shanties Peter had told him he was lucky not to be seeing them in the rains, when the spaces between the huts became a marsh of puddled mud and death was something you could smell in the steamy air. Even now, despite the occasional thump and wail of a radio the shanties seemed like hell, hopeless and helpless. It’s a bad time of day, Paul thought. Maybe they’ll come alive in the evening.

  He walked in front, because that was what a man would do. Nobody looked at them. They were normal—another couple of kids who’d made it across the Flats and were collecting scraps of things they could build a shack with.

  The path widened, making space for a small local market, not even stalls, just baskets on the ground with shade umbrellas above—a woman with two wizened cockerels in a coop, a boy with a mug and water jar, a woman with a pile of orange beans, another with slices of watermelon, another with shrivelled black bananas. They looked as if they’d sat there since the last rains, with no one coming to buy anything. A man with one arm was stirring a pot over a fire.

  “What’ve you got in there?” said Paul.

  The man spooned a ladle up and let the stuff slop back. It was mealie porridge, flavoured with a few herbs.

  “How much?” said Paul.

  “Two gura a ladle.”

  “Pay you three for two.”

  “Let’s see your money.”

  Paul produced a five-gura note and his cooking pan and the man spooned the stuff in. Another gura bought two mugs of water. He settled with Jilli in the shade of the one-armed man’s umbrella to eat the porridge with his fingers. He was very hungry.

  “Pretty good,” he mumbled through porridge.

  “Better than we used to eat in the bush,” said the man.

  “That where you lost your arm?”

  “Bullet through my elbow. Doctor in Shidi cut the rest off.”

  Paul grunted understanding. If he’d been in Shidi the man was probably from one of Malani’s commandos. Better not say anything yet, though a contact like that might be useful later.

  “How did you get yourself money?” said the man.

  “My uncle found a dead elephant.”

  “There’s some born lucky … Your girl’s Fulu, right? And your uncle said no so you stole some of his elephant money and cleared out?”

  The woman with the bananas cackled and started to pass the joke on to the woman with the beans. Finding a dead elephant was a way of talking. If you were a poacher you shot your elephant and it fell down so you had to go and find it, and of course it was dead by then. You cut off the tusks and sold them to a dealer. A good pair was worth a year’s wages. Paul had thought the story out on the train, in case.

  “Where’s the next stand-pipe?” he said.

  “Up along that way. Bear right at the booze shop. Get a move on, or they’ll have closed—or maybe it won’t, because the Red Scorpions beat the Deathsingers up a couple of nights back and they’ll be wanting to show us they’re good guys. It’ll still cost you a couple of gura, though.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be free.”

  “Try telling the Scorpions.”

  Paul thanked him and moved on. As they passed the bar the porridge-seller had mentioned a man came staggering out, yelling, his face streaming with blood from a knife slash over his eye. The stand-pipe had a line waiting, patient in spite of the sweltering sun. One man was working the tap, another taking the money, and a third looking on. All three wore T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, but also army berets and leather belts from which hung savage-looking knives. They had long black faces like Kashka’s, and their foreheads were smeared with a scarlet squiggle which might have been a scorpion. They spoke to each other in Baroba. They took no special notice of Paul as he paid his money, filled his flask, and carried it back to where Jilli was sitting on the bundle containing the AK. He was impressed, but not frightened. He’d known that Dangoum would have its dangers, like the bush. These were some of its lions.

  “I’m tired,” said Jilli.

  “Keep going. We’ll find you some friends in the market. This way, it should be.”

  Paul’s mental map of Dangoum was not as detailed as his one of Nagala, but it had a few fixed points. The railway line had come past the airport—he knew where that was—but had then, judging by the swing of the shadows, run north before turning east again to reach the railway yard. Since then they’d come about a mile south, so the downtown towers should be over on their left, with the market roughly half left. He headed that way until he heard the distant thud of drums from big loudspeakers. Then all he had to do was follow the sound.

  Most of the stalls had closed down till the evening, with the stall-holders sleeping beside or beneath them, but the music still roofed the whole space over with noise. Paul moved along the edge to get his bearings. They had come out of the shanties in an area occupied by patchers and menders. Just opposite them a man was finishing a solder job on an old radio. Next door were a couple of bike-repair stalls, beyond that a smithy where the heat of a charcoal furnace still blasted out while three naked men, glistening with sweat, lay in the shade farthest from it. Then a pyramid of used batteries which an old woman employed children to cut apart to extract the lead. Then several stalls which cobbled crude shoes out of worn tires. Now he knew where he was and headed in, making for the coppersmiths’ area.

  Their hammers were silent now, but they were a good landmark. Paul had become interested in them on his earlier visit because they managed to do things their own way, despite being part of the market. They all came from one small tribe in the east and had been copper workers for generations. They were small, dark people, very proud and independent,
who could mend anything copper but also made huge round copper bowls, which in the old days used to be given to great chiefs to show how important they were. They had their own priest in the market, blind and old, but when the two boys who looked after him banged his big copper gong all the smiths would stop what they were doing and come and see what he wanted.

  They were resting for the afternoon, like everyone else, but Paul led Jilli past them and on past several stalls where tall women from the far south with black gum rings in their hair sold gaudy blankets, to the area he’d been looking for.

  “Yeh!” squeaked Jilli. “They’re Fulu!”

  As fast as her load would let her she headed for the nearest stall, where a woman was sitting, resting her back against a stack of large round baskets. She was obviously Fulu, with her pale skin, small bones, and hair in a topknot, though she wore an ordinary T-shirt and a green wraparound skirt. She twittered an answer to Jilli’s question and pointed. Jilli thanked her and stalked off to a stall which sold boat-shaped head baskets. Here the stall holder was already lying down, but couldn’t quite have gone to sleep yet, as she sat up when Jilli spoke to her, then rose and took Jilli by the shoulders and stared at her. Jilli, clearly surprised, fell silent. The woman spoke. Paul could hear the sorrow in her voice. Jilli’s look of eager greeting changed. She swayed and let go of her load, but Paul managed to catch it as it fell and lower it to the ground. She sat down, put her head in her hands and moaned, rocking to and fro. The woman, crouching beside her with an arm around her shoulders, looked up at Paul.