—
His phone woke him. It was Muhammad, a good soldier and one he trusted. Days before, when Wizard heard where the hostages were, he’d sent Muhammad and three others to watch the road from Dadaab to Ijara for police or anyone who might make trouble. They slept in the bush, hung around Bakafi during the day.
But the road stayed quiet. The Kenyan police had an outpost, but they left it only to drink Tusker and pick up whores at the hoteli. Wizard didn’t know why the Kenyans weren’t looking harder. Whatever the reason, their laziness was one reason he’d decided attacking the camp was a safe bet.
Now someone must have showed up. Muhammad wouldn’t call in daytime otherwise.
“Muhammad.”
“Wizard. A mzungu and his driver come through.”
“American?”
“Don’t know.”
“What kind of car?”
“Cruiser.”
“Just one?”
“Yah. They stop, talk awhile. Now they driving again.”
“Back to Dadaab.”
“No, man. South. Toward the camp.”
“You got pics.”
“Yah.”
“Send them.”
“You want me to watch them?”
Wizard figured the man was driving to the spot where the Americans had first been taken. No way could he find the camp the White Men had hit. It was just four buildings, and hidden in a little valley miles from any road. But if he did find it somehow, he couldn’t be allowed to tell anyone.
“Give them space. Lest they find the camp. Then get them.”
“Kill them?”
“Catch them, kill them, either one.”
“Done and done.”
—
Finally, Bahdoon called with good news. “Cousin. They hit me back. All three. They say, please let them go, don’t hurt them, don’t shoot them, they didn’t do nothing, they good wazungu, came to Africa to help, please please, all that.”
The appeals might have meant more to Wizard if his own mother and father hadn’t been killed by a stray shell fired by African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu when he was ten. “All that. What about paying?”
“They want proof the pictures real. The wazungu got to give you a secret. Like, what they favorite color? What they favorite food to eat?”
“Favorite food?”
“It what they want.”
So Wizard asked the three for a secret and sent the answers to Bahdoon. Next email he’d tell about the one million dollars. He knew he ought to make sure Abukar would take the ransom for him first. But Wizard wasn’t ready to make that call, not until he felt his luck changing, caught the devil looking the other way.
Meantime he waited for Muhammad. But the call didn’t come. At first Wizard wasn’t worried. Maybe Muhammad’s phone had died. He and his men wouldn’t have trouble with one mzungu. But the afternoon stretched on and finally the sun disappeared. Wizard’s hopes sank as the sky darkened. He wanted to send more men into Kenya to find out what had happened, but he couldn’t risk losing them. Not with the Ditas lurking. He was down five soldiers already today. Too many.
He wondered if he should pull up camp, take his men south into the mangrove swamps. They could live with the crocodiles and snakes while they waited out the Ditas. But the swamps had no phone service. Wizard would have to leave to arrange the ransom. Anyway, he hated the place. The ground itself was rotten. A man who stepped the wrong way found the earth kissing his feet, caressing his legs, pulling him under with a lover’s embrace. The mosquitoes never stopped biting, and they came with malaria that could kill a man in a week. The swamps were the last resort. Had to be.
Ali stepped into his hut. “You want dinner, Wizard?”
He joined the line outside the hut where two of his youngest soldiers stirred pots of rice and meal over a low smoky fire. No meat, of course. Wizard still regretted slaughtering his herd on the night he met Awaale. But they had the hostages now and the hostages would pay for all the goats in Somalia. “Smells good tonight,” he said to Ali, loudly, so the men around him heard. They stood straighter when they saw him. The soldiers at the front of the line waved him forward. But Wizard shook his head, stayed where he was. A good leader ate last.
Then, from the northeast, guns popped. A round, another, then a yell and a long, rattling burst of AK fire. The line dissolved as men ran for their weapons. But the shots stopped as abruptly as they’d started. Waaberi’s walkie-talkie crackled. He put it to his ear, listened, strode to Wizard. “Omar say they killed one, caught two more.”
“Ditas?”
“He don’t know.”
“Bring them here.”
—
The boys were small and ragged and bleeding into their camouflage T-shirts. Wizard’s men had tied their hands behind their backs. One couldn’t walk without help, but the other one seemed okay. Wizard waved them into his hut and ordered his men out, all but Ali and Waaberi and Omar, the sentry who’d spotted them.
Wizard looked them over. One had a scar across his forehead big as a squashed bug. The other, the weaker of the two, had only one eye. The left socket was empty, not even a patch, just a sunken space where his eye should have been. They were thirteen, fourteen at most. They barely looked big enough to hold AKs. Wizard would have rejected them if they’d tried to join the White Men. Told them to go to Dadaab where they belonged. He didn’t understand why Awaale had sent them to him to be slaughtered. He wanted to put a knife to Awaale’s thick neck and make him tell.
“Which way they come?” he said to Omar.
“Down from the road that go to Giara El. They walk straight straight toward the old post.” The sentry position that Wizard had ordered abandoned after Hussein defected.
“Have AKs?”
Omar held up three little pistols that looked like .22s to Wizard. “These popguns.”
“They just walk to you.”
“Yeah, we saw them, got ready, made sure they was the only ones, when they got close we blasted them. Kill one there, hit these two.”
“No others.”
“None we saw.”
The boy with one eye was bleeding from his stomach. Hard. Wizard lifted the boy’s shirt, saw two neat holes. “No good for this one. Get me water. Too fast.” He knelt beside the boy, pulled his knife. The boy shirked away, but Wizard twisted him around, cut the plastic cord binding his hands. “What your name?”
“Yusuf, sir.” His voice was a whisper.
“This my land. Why you come to my land?”
“Awaale say—” The words faded into a cough. The boy was losing his way. In another minute, he would be past speaking. Wizard pinched his ear. “He tell you you going to die?”
Ali returned with a cup of water, and Wizard took it and tipped it to Yusuf’s throat. The boy drank a little and then the water came back out of his mouth and he grunted and tipped sideways and he was dead. “No magic for this one,” Wizard said. He looked at Ali. Ali picked up the body, swung it over his shoulder like a sack of rice, walked out. They’d put the corpse in an empty hut and come morning bury it a few hundred meters away, hope to dig a hole deep enough that the hyenas didn’t get it. All they could do.
“Other two dead. You the last one left,” Wizard said to the third boy, the one with the scar. “Tell me why you come here like this.” This one had been shot in his left shoulder, but he wasn’t whimpering. He looked cold and straight at Wizard.
“Awaale send us. Tell us to give you a message.”
“Give it, then.”
“He want the wazungu. He say you have one night to give them over or he coming here to put all your magic and all your blood in the dirt. He say you better give him the answer ’fore the sun comes up. He say the time to play is over.”
Wizard saw that Awaale had sent two messages. The words, and the boys themselves. I have so many men that I can throw away these three. Toss them to you. The only reason the Ditas hadn’t attacked already was that Awaale was worried t
hat the hostages might be killed in the confusion. He knew their worth.
“Anything else?”
The boy shook his head. Wizard didn’t want to kill him. Two useless dead boys was enough for the night. But the White Men couldn’t keep him either. Wizard stood, pulled the boy up by his bad shoulder, punishment for his sass.
“You going back to Awaale. You tell him, he wants the wazungu, it cost him three million U.S. That the price. He don’t want to pay, he can come get them his own self. You understand?”
The boy nodded.
“Tell me so I know you heard.”
The boy repeated Wizard’s words.
“Good. And tell him his other boys best fight better than you. Elseways we gonna have too many bodies for the hyenas to eat.” Wizard shoved the kid away, sent him stumbling. “Put him on the road back,” he said to Omar.
Then he and Waaberi were alone. “It coming,” Wizard said. “Soon enough.”
“Let it come. Long as Awaale keep sending ’em that way, it no problem.”
“Two down. Three hundred to go.”
15
BAKAFI
Wells wasn’t sure that he’d been formally arrested, much less what charges he faced or what rights he had. Not that it mattered. Most Americans thought of police officers as honest and reliable, and cops generally repaid that trust. Anne would take a bullet before she took a bribe. But in Kenya, like many places where Wells plied his trade, the police were best avoided at all costs.
The cuff squeezing his wrist was a simple mechanism, a few links of chain connecting two adjustable steel rings. A trained thief could pop a handcuff with a paper clip in seconds. But if there were any paper clips in this room, Wells couldn’t reach them. He spent a few unpleasant minutes squeezing his thumb against his palm and sliding his wrist against the steel to see if he could slip his hand through, but the cop had cuffed him tight and he was no escape artist. He chafed his skin until it bled, but the cuff stayed in place.
Next he went for brute force. Wells faced the wall and wrapped his left hand high around the chain and twisted his right hand so it, too, held the links. He raised his foot to the wall and shoved his boot against it and tugged until the muscles in his arms felt like Silly Putty. But the metal plate holding the chain to the wall didn’t give a fraction of an inch.
The only item within arm’s reach was a stack of paper on the desk. Though the cop had taken Wells’s phones, he’d missed the lighter that Julia had given Wells. But even if Wells managed to start a fire, he’d still be stuck to the wall. At best, the cops would douse the flames and beat him up for causing trouble. At worst, they’d leave the station and let him roast, a mzungu barbecue. Even so, the lighter might come in handy. Wells extracted it from the front right pocket of his jeans and slid it into his back pocket, where he could reach it even with his hands cuffed behind him.
—
Two hours passed. Wells found himself fighting an ache that slashed across his back to his hips. His body had been wounded by bullets and batons, fists and feet. Aside from lots of Advil, Wells dealt with the damage by ignoring it. But tonight his muscles and joints and bones all sang the same sad song, You’re too old for this nonsense. The clock on the wall magnified his discomfort, seeming to measure not seconds but weeks with each tick. As if whole worlds were dying while he sat in this room. The relativity of arrest.
Finally, the back door opened. The cop walked out, looked Wells over. His eyes were bloodshot and his belly slipped from his shirt over his jeans.
“You work at Dadaab,” the cop said.
“I’m an aid worker.” Using a loose definition of aid. “May I ask your name, sir?” A little deference never hurt.
“Mark.” Though the cop’s Anglo-Kenyan patois made the name sound like Maahk. “What you doing here?”
“Wilfred and I drove to see the place where the volunteers were taken.”
“Don’t you know it’s dangerous? Shabaab kidnapping wazungu.”
Suddenly, Mark the cop was his best friend. “We thought we’d be okay. Wilfred had a pistol. But he tripped and it went off, hit him in the thigh. I bandaged him up, brought him back. I’d seen the infirmary when we drove though.” The story didn’t make much sense. Not that Mark cared, Wells thought. He had his own lies to keep straight.
Mark pretended to smile. “Tomorrow we talk to Mr. Wumbugu, sort this out. Let you go to Dadaab, where you belong. You don’t bother with Bakafi anymore. Of course, we keep the evidence.”
“Of course.” A scheme occurred to Wells. He’d need to be careful setting the hook. Not too much at once. “I see why you have to investigate. We come to the hospital, my driver’s been shot, I have nineteen, twenty thousand dollars.”
“Twenty thousand?”
“Whatever I was carrying.”
The cop stepped close. Wells could have reached out with his free left hand, throttled him. But Wells would still be locked to the wall.
“You said twenty thousand. You carrying five thousand.”
“I don’t know. Whatever I had.”
The cop squeezed Wells’s handcuffed arm, like a manager sending a pitcher to the showers, a friendly warning. “Big mistake to lie to police. Even for a mzungu. Where is it, the rest?”
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”
The cop stepped away, reached under his desk, came up with a black metal tube the size of a flashlight. He pushed a button on the side and the cylinder quadrupled in length. An expandable baton. American cops loved them, and apparently they weren’t alone.
The cop stood before Wells. He raised his right hand high, waggled the baton like a tour guide, brought it down on Wells’s left biceps.
“Come on,” Wells said. As an answer Mark raised the baton again.
“In the Cruiser. In the Cruiser, okay?”
The cop laid the baton against the desk where Wells couldn’t reach it, then walked out the front door. Ten minutes later, he returned, carrying the Mossberg and the Glock. Wells didn’t know where the Makarov had gone.
“These in your car. No money. What kind of aid worker you are?”
“You said yourself, it’s dangerous.”
“Where’s the money?”
“It’s in a trap compartment in the back, hard to find.”
“You show me.”
“You promise to let me go tomorrow.”
“Yes. But this a secret, between you and me. Not—” He pointed at the back door.
Just as Wells had hoped. The cop didn’t want to share this new windfall with anyone. Not even his partner.
“We go get the money, come back. Try to run, I shoot you. Understand?” Wells nodded. Mark unlocked him, cuffed his hands behind his back, marched him out the door and into the night. Only the hoteli, the police station, and the infirmary had generators. The rest of Bakafi was dark, families huddled for the night. The Cruiser was parked where Wells had left it outside the infirmary. Not a great spot for his purposes. He’d have to disable Mark fast, before the guy shouted for help.
At the Cruiser, Wells expected Mark to uncuff him. Instead the cop swung the back gate open. The bulb inside threw dim light on the toolbox and two-by-fours and plastic jerricans in the back compartment. “Where is it?”
“Easier for me to show you.”
“You think I’m stupid? Keep them handcuffs on, tell me where.” He leaned forward, legs spread, and reached inside. With his arms free, Wells would have had plenty of options. Now he was down to one.
“Right there, next to the toolbox—”
Wells sidestepped until he was directly behind the cop. He leaned slightly forward and pulled his arms off his back for balance. He swung his right leg back, then drove it forward, like a field-goal kicker, aiming for a spot just below Mark’s butt. He swung through and felt the soft center of Mark’s crotch collapse beneath his boot. Mark moaned, a sound that under other circumstances could have been mistaken for ecstasy. His knees buckled and he sagged against a jerrican.
Wells turned so that his back was to the Cruiser. He tucked his hands into the waistband of Mark’s jeans and slung him to the ground. The cop was panting now like a dog that had run too long, his tongue looping meaningless circles over his lips. He would be frozen for a minute or more. With his cuffed hands, Wells grabbed a fuel jerrican, flipped it on its side, edged his fingers around the cap, and twisted. Gasoline slopped out. Wells steered the can so the fuel sloshed onto Mark’s shirt.
When Mark was soaked, Wells flipped the jerrican upright. Mark feebly edged his arm toward the pistol holstered at his waist. Wells pulled the lighter from his back pocket. He squatted on Mark’s chest, facing Mark’s legs, so the cop was looking at his back. Wells splayed his own legs, stamped his boots down on Mark’s forearms. The cop’s breath came fast. He smelled like a charcoal grill about to be lit. Wells lifted his cuffed hands. The lighter was simple and plastic, the Kenyan equivalent of a Bic. Wells flicked its flint. “Do as I say or burn. Understand?”
“Yes.”
A light popped on inside the infirmary. The doctor yelled, “Jambo!”
“Tell him, no jambo. Keep him inside.”
Mark coughed, shouted back in Swahili. His voice was halting, but whatever he said seemed to work. The light flicked off.
“Where are the handcuff keys?”
“Right pocket.”
Wells lifted his boot from Mark’s right forearm. “Get them. Slowly.” Mark inched his right hand forward, plucked the keys from his pocket. “Uncuff me.”
“Man—”
Again Wells flicked the flint.
“Okay.” Mark reached his hand higher until it was behind Wells, a dangerous moment. If Mark went for the lighter, Wells had already decided that he would toss it aside. He wasn’t setting this man on fire. He just had to hope Mark wouldn’t take the chance.
The key scraped into the hole with the faint click of metal on metal. Then Mark turned the key, and the steel bracelet came loose from Wells’s wrist. Freedom. Wells lifted his right elbow, reversed it into the cop’s temple, getting his shoulder into the strike. The elbow was underrated as a weapon. Wells couldn’t see what he’d done, but he felt the shiver of contact run up his arm. Mark’s head snapped sideways and a tiny wheeze escaped his throat. Wells grabbed Mark’s pistol, rolled forward into the dirt. He came up and turned around, the pistol in his right hand in case Mark tried to come back at him. But the cop stayed flat on his back. He twisted sideways and vomited a stew of beer and rice.
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