Young Mr. Balim finished rolling the long wire around the earphones, then tucked the ball of phones and wire under his arm; there was no longer any need to eavesdrop on Jinja. “Wouldn’t you like to be here?” he asked. “I mean, when they realize the whole bloody train is gone.”
“But there isn’t any here here,” Lew told him, and gestured at the ongoing line of the track. “Just twenty-five miles between Iganga and Jinja, and no train.”
“The look on their faces,” Young Mr. Balim said, chortling, and the look on his face changed when he glanced back up the track leading toward Jinja. “Now what?” he said.
Lew turned, and here came the sentry he’d posted down there, pelting along the track, risking his balance by waving his arms over his head as he ran. Lew said, “Find out what it is.”
Young Mr. Balim trotted forward, calling in Swahili. The man stopped to answer, pointing behind himself. Young Mr. Balim turned back to Lew. “He says, a man on a bicycle.”
“Christ.” Lew looked back at the men hammering in the spikes; only a few remained undriven. “Tell them to forget all that. Just get down and out of sight. With their tools.”
“Right.”
While Young Mr. Balim did that, Lew waved vigorously at the other sentry down by the access road. Go away, he waved. Get out of sight. Go down the road. The sentry seemed confused for a moment, but then he saw the workmen hurrying to hide and he responded with a comprehending wave and then trotted away.
The first sentry had already without pausing run through the opening in the hedge, and now the workmen streamed after. Lew went last, pausing for one quick look around, then jumping over the rail and trotting down through the gap.
Half a dozen workmen were poised to slide the blind back into place. They were jockeying it into position when the cyclist first appeared around the curve to the west, riding in the narrow dirt strip beside the railway’s gravel bed. Weary, perspiring in his dark-blue official Uganda Railways jacket and dark-blue round hat, all unknowing he pedaled doggedly past the scene of the hijacking, his right sleeve brushing the blind, his movements watched through twenty tiny chinks in the shrubbery. On he went, pursuing the lost train as doggedly as he pursued his course in accountancy. He didn’t know it yet, but he would bicycle all the way to Iganga.
50
“Your Excellency,” the uniformed male secretary said, “very good news. Captain Chase has been found.”
His ebullient mood having been spoiled by the defection of Chase, Idi Amin had taken to his porch at the Old Command Post, where he now sat with a bottle of beer and four of the returned airmen. They’d been striving very hard to recapture the amiability and self-satisfaction they’d enjoyed at lunch, but without much success; the jokes and laughter and reminiscences, even Amin’s, were too obviously forced. It was harder and harder for Amin to ignore the fact that he wasn’t happy, and the airmen were right to become increasingly nervous, though not smart to show it.
But now, in a flash, everything changed. The sun shone. Amin’s merry smile spread across his face, his eyes lit up, he even clapped his big hands together, the long fingers splayed wide and only the palms hitting, as when children try to applaud. “Ah, now we have something!” he cried. “Where is this scoundrel?”
“Major Okwal is on the phone, Excellency.”
“You boys wait here,” Amin said, heaving himself to his feet. “I’ll tell you about this scoundrel.”
The secretary led the way to Amin’s office, where the phone waited off the hook, then bowed and departed, shutting the door. Amin sat at his desk, picked up the receiver, smiled like a lion who sees a zebra, and said, “So, Major Okwal? You have him?” It was Amin’s practice not to identify himself on the phone, assuming that everyone would know who he was.
“Yes, Excellency.” Major Okwal was a Lugbara, Amin’s mother’s tribe. A colorless man, he had attained a middle rank in the State Research Bureau, where he was an effective if not imaginative interrogator. Amin treated him as he would a dull inoffensive cousin.
“Where is he?”
“Near Kabale.”
“Ah! Trying to escape into Rwanda, was he? Who caught him?”
“The border guard there. Sergeant Auzo. A very good type of man, sir.”
“I was a sergeant,” Amin said reflectively. A vision of the rank from which he’d emerged shone briefly like black steel in his eyes. “I like to encourage the better men in the ranks,” he said. “Send me his name.”
“Yes, sir, at once.”
“And when shall I have my hands on Captain Chase?”
“Ah,” said Major Okwal. “Unfortunately, Sergeant Auzo is shorthanded; he doesn’t feel he has a proper or a secure escort to return Captain Chase.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” Amin nodded, eyes brooding at the opposite wall. “We shall want this fellow back posthaste,” he said, using the English word, which had for him a tone of officially demanded speed that no Swahili word could convey.
“Of course, Excellency.”
“Send me—Hmmm. What of Colonel Juba?”
“No sign, Excellency.”
“He wasn’t with Chase, then?” It had seemed to Amin that Chase had either murdered Juba or corrupted him, and that both were equally possible. He would have thought that of any man.
“Oh, no, sir,” Major Okwal said. “The colonel and his two aides are both completely missing.”
“And his two aides?” Amin couldn’t help but smile; he couldn’t help but admire a villain as vicious as Chase. It would be a pleasure to break him. “Send me General Kekka,” he said.
“Yes, Excellency. At once, sir.”
Amin hung up and sat brooding a long moment, the leftover smile still visible on his face. His hands moved together as though cracking nuts.
General Ali Kekka was a very tall and very thin man of fifty-three, a southern Sudanese very much of the breed called Nubian. His skin was quite dark and lusterless; his cheeks were sunken; his eyes looked at the world without expression. Amin knew that two years ago General Kekka had gone to Mulago Hospital complaining of headaches, that a brain tumor had been diagnosed and an immediate operation urged, and that General Kekka had refused, out of a primitive fear of the knife. The tumor would kill Kekka within the next few years, but in the meantime he was a coiled spring, a man of such sudden, brutal violence that even the men who worked with him at the Bureau were made afraid. Even Amin, who found his affliction useful, felt a sense of wariness in the presence of Ali Kekka.
They sat together on the porch of the Old Command Post, from which the young airmen had been banished now that Amin had more serious things to think about. “Ali,” Amin said, “our friend Baron Chase has turned against us.”
“Of course he has,” Kekka said. “Every white man will turn against you. And most blacks.”
“He has stolen from me,” Amin said, his manner patient and slow-moving, like a man training a hunting dog. “He has some plot against me which I don’t know yet.”
“We’ll ask him.”
“Yes, we will. Ali, he tried to run away, he was caught down on the Rwanda border. I want you to go down there, take a platoon of men, and bring him back.”
“Yes, Field Marshal.”
“He must be alive when he comes to me; he must be able to talk.”
“Yes, I agree.”
“Take him to my office at the Bureau building. Draw as little attention as possible.”
“Then is it the VIP treatment?”
“Not yet,” Amin said. “When you bring him back, Ali, call me at once. I shall deal with my little Baron personally.”
Amin stood on the porch looking down at Kekka’s black Mercedes as it wound away down the drive toward the road. He smiled in anticipation. It was not quite three o’clock.
“Your Excellency?”
Amin turned to see who was in the doorway, and found Moses, the cheerful servant whose job it was to tell him bad news. “Yes, Moses?”
“Ah, Your Excellen
cy,” Moses said, his normal ebullience stripped away, leaving him sad and troubled. “Bewildering bad news, Your Excellency.”
Amin took a step forward. Had they bungled, had they accidentally killed Chase? Or had he gotten away again? “What is it, Moses?”
“The train,” Moses said, and shrugged as though to absolve himself of blame. “The coffee train.”
Relieved that it wasn’t about Chase after all, it was nothing of importance, Amin said, “What about the train?”
Moses wrung his hands. “It’s gone!”
Amin failed to understand. “What’s that you say?”
“Oh, Excellency!” Moses cried, instinctively backing away. “Somewhere between Iganga and Jinja, the great huge train was magicked! It’s gone entirely! Disappeared!”
51
Thirty-two freight cars made a stylized curving scrawl down from the beginning of the spur line past the maintenance depot, over the turntable, down to the end of the permanent track, and on out the temporary rails almost to the lip of the gorge. From the air they were virtually invisible, except that if you knew where the train was, you would understand the occasional glint of reflected sunlight up through the trees.
Each car contained approximately four hundred sacks of coffee of one hundred thirty pounds weight, for a total of twenty-six tons. In all, the train carried just about seven hundred fifty tons of coffee. Each truck could carry no more than twenty tons at a time, so two round trips from them all would be necessary. But that also involved twice shifting seven hundred fifty tons of coffee by hand: from the train to the trucks, and again from the trucks to the rafts. It was going to take several hours, and during most of that time they could expect to be the object of a very determined search.
Lew had posted Isaac as sentry with a walkie-talkie up where the access road crossed the railway line. Young Mr. Balim, with the other walkie-talkie, sat like a slender young Humpty Dumpty atop one of the freight cars, where he could command a view of the entire scene and attract everybody’s attention if necessary. One of the ex-railwaymen stood on the roof of the first car, his hand on the big flat wheel of the brake. Four trucks had been driven in to the depot and backed up to the first four cars, and now they were being hastily loaded by over fifty men, including Frank and Charlie and Lew.
The first loading job went quickly. They were exhilarated from their success in capturing the train, and they were still fresh, the earlier track work forgotten. It was not quite three in the afternoon when they started, and in twenty minutes the trucks were full. Immediately three men piled into the cab of each, with Frank and Charlie in the lead truck, and the vehicles groaned away over Ellen’s Road, their wheels digging deep into the logs and brush, mashing everything down to a mulch-like muddy smoothness.
As soon as the first trucks were out of the way, another four were driven in, turned around, and backed up to the same freight cars, which were now less than half full.
With twelve fewer in the work crew, this second group of trucks took longer to load. But there was a reward ahead for those who still labored here, because, when the trucks were just over one-quarter full, these four freight cars were empty. Jamming the big sliding doors open on both sides of the cars, everybody jumped out onto the ground, chattering and laughing together because they knew what was going to happen next.
Young Mr. Balim climbed down to the ground, where Lew said, “You could have stayed up there and just walked back a few cars.”
“If an error occurs,” Young Mr. Balim said, “I prefer to watch it from here.”
Up on the train roofs, two of the ex-railwaymen were tightening down the brakes on the fifth and sixth cars, while down below a third unhooked the coupler between cars four and five. The other ex-railwayman, having loosened the brake on the first car, stood poised to do the same atop the second. The word was yelled to him, and with a flourish he spun the wheel.
At first, despite the slope, the cars didn’t want to move. Then Lew, with Young Mr. Balim acting as translator, got the watching men to come in and push. Slowly and silently, all at once losing their reluctance, the four cars rolled forward, gathering speed. The ex-railwayman stayed on the roof of the second car, laughing and waving to everybody.
Lew said, “That nut’s going with it!”
But he wasn’t. As the cars hit the temporary track, the ex-railwayman leaped the twelve feet to the ground, rolled, and sprang to his feet. The workmen gave him a huge cheer and laugh, and the four freight cars rolled out into space to tumble end-over-end down through the air, crashing into the water with a crazy series of splashes and bangs, the second car bobbing on the surface long enough to be rammed broadside by the third, then all four wriggling and collapsing downward into the water, after their leader and out of sight.
After that experience, it was obvious that everyone had to have a beer before going back to work. While the ex-railwaymen eased the rest of the train down so the next four cars were lined up with the half-full trucks, two cases of beer were brought out from the engine shed, where they were being kept relatively cool. The engineer and fireman, having sworn oaths to be on their good behavior, were untied from all those ropes and allowed to join the festivities. Beer bottles were distributed, and success was generally toasted.
Meanwhile, Frank and Charlie and the others in the first four trucks ground slowly but steadily along the access road toward Macdonald Bay, twenty miles off. The road sloped downward over the whole distance, so that gravity assisted them to some extent, but with the road so chancy and the trucks so overloaded they couldn’t average much better than fifteen miles an hour. They hadn’t yet reached the bay before the celebration back at the depot was finished, the second four trucks were fully loaded, and they too were on their way, reducing the work force back there by another four.
At last the bay appeared, sparkling and empty, the mud flat surrounded by the ungainly huge rafts covered with brush, as though a beachfront community had been flattened by a hurricane. Everybody climbed down from the trucks, and Frank bellowed the first raft into the water, with Charlie’s left-handed assistance. Then, while Frank and Charlie went to work unmounting the outboard motors and remounting them higher on the raft body, the other ten men started moving sacks.
On the twenty-foot-square surface of the raft they could lie one hundred twenty sacks, in six rows of twenty. The contents of the four trucks would fill this raft, making an unwieldy-looking monster ten layers high, crisscrossed for stability and standing nearly twelve feet tall. In theory, it wouldn’t tip over and it would float.
The first full sack was carried up the plank and onto the raft at five minutes past four.
52
The station clock read five minutes past four when Idi Amin marched into the tiny railway station at Iganga, followed by half a dozen Army officers and uniformed members of the State Research Bureau. Glaring around, Amin said, “Now you’ll tell me what this is.”
Two men were present in the uniform of Uganda Railways, both looking scared out of their skins. The fat one pointed at the thin one and said, “This is Jinja yardmaster, Mr. President. He brought me the information.”
“What information?” Glowering upon the Jinja yardmaster, Amin said, “Explain yourself.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Though terrified, the man was trying for a dignified professionalism. “Iganga station having informed me,” he began, passing the buck right back to his compatriot, “of the coffee train having gone through here at twelve-fifty-five, when it had not appeared at Jinja by two o’clock I became alarmed. Having checked again with Iganga station, Mr. President, that the train had indeed passed through here at that time—”
“Yes, yes,” Amin said, slapping the air in his impatience. “The question is, where is the train?”
“Gone, Mr. President. I’m sorry, sir, but it’s disappeared. Sir.”
“Trains do not disappear,” Amin told him reasonably. “You are a trainman, you should know such a thing. Just the size of a train, the very
size of the thing, will tell you that. Then again, there are the tracks. The train cannot leave the tracks. Not and get very far,” he added, joking, looking around with a big smile to see if his entourage were laughing. They were.
The yardmaster was not. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” he said. “I rode here on my bicycle from Jinja, along the permanent way. There was no train, sir.”
Amin gazed upon this man. Would anyone have the effrontery to make Idi Amin the butt of a practical joke? Would either of these rabbits dare to lie to their president? Speaking slowly and heavily, gesturing pedagogically with one finger in the air, Amin said, “Be very careful now, you. Be very careful, the two of you.”
The Iganga stationmaster, having falsely believed himself to have been safely forgotten, gave a little jump of fear. The Jinja yardmaster stood tall against his fright and said, “Yes, Mr. President.”
“Now, you,” Amin said, pointing at the Iganga stationmaster, the weaker of the two rabbits. “You say this train passed through here at twelve-fifty-five.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“A long train full of coffee. A huge long—How many cars?” he demanded of his entourage.
“More than thirty, Your Excellency,” someone said.
“Good.” Returning to the Iganga stationmaster, Amin said, “Now, this long train of more than thirty cars passed through this station at twelve-fifty-five. And did it return?”
The Iganga stationmaster was too frightened to keep up with sudden leaps like that. “Sir? Mr. President?”
Amin was becoming irritated. “The train! Did it come back through the station?”
“No, no, of course not, Mr. President! It went through, westbound, at twelve-fifty-five, traveling very very fast—oh, more than ninety kilometers an hour—and that was the last I saw of it.”
“Good.” Amin turned to the Jinja yardmaster. “Now, you did not see this train.”
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