But Juma. There was room for him.
LB’s feet itched to walk away. His fingers played over the radio. He jerked his head at Promise and Karskie.
“Let’s go.”
Juma lifted a palm like a stop sign in front of Karskie.
“I don’t see why everyone has to leave.”
The big boy reacted before LB could speak.
“No. Look, no.” Karskie raised his own hand against Juma’s and staggered backward as if he might somehow slip away. “I’m not that important. Really.”
Juma motioned to the lawn chair.
“Have a seat, Mr. Karskie.”
Good Luck, already seated, pointed at the lawn chair across from him.
He lisped, “Sit.”
Karskie shot LB a pleading look. Get me out of this.
The boy was as good as dead if he stayed, if LB blew the missile. Karskie hadn’t signed on for that. LB had.
LB said the words fast, so they were out before he could hesitate. It was like jumping from a plane, once he stepped, all he could do was fall.
“I’ll stay.”
Lush Life was crumpled, a little bleary, and needed a shave. Up close, he smelled stale. He had a stupid, fake name. But Juma didn’t talk whenever he did.
“Sergeant.”
“What?”
“Who is Mr. Karskie? Really?”
“A parks employee. Like his ID says.”
“Why did you bring him here?”
“To verify who I am.”
“Why do you have no papers? No patches on your fatigues. Not even your name.”
“This is supposed to be a covert mission.”
“So if you’re found dead, you would be unknown. Is that right?”
“Right.”
“That takes courage.”
“I don’t think about it.”
“Then Mr. Karskie is as he says. Unimportant.”
“He’s not much of a bargaining chip, no.”
“I believe . . .” Lush Life tapped the side of his nose twice, then pushed his fingertip into LB’s vest. “I believe he will be for you.”
Karskie flapped his arms.
LB and Lush Life were close to the same height. LB outweighed him by seventy pounds. The white-haired old man didn’t blink. He had some steel in him. Or, just as likely, he was missing something. LB pushed Lush Life’s finger down from his chest.
“Let him go.”
“You prove me correct, Sergeant. Tell me something else.”
“If I have to.”
“Why did you bring the girl? She could’ve stayed outside the village. Why bring her in here? To anger my mate Juma?”
Promise started forward, tipping to her toes, arming her answer. LB silenced her with a raised hand. He did this to answer for her, just as he had for Karskie. The only way to keep them both safe was to show Juma and Lush Life that they didn’t matter.
“She wanted to come.”
“Why?”
“Why do you care?”
Juma shifted beside Lush Life. Side by side the two couldn’t have been more different. A massive black man, nattily dressed, next to a short, spotty old Englishman with flyaway hair wearing slept-in clothes. But something about them had been paired long ago, and though they were crooked as lightning, they were friends.
“I don’t expect you to understand, Sergeant.”
“Try me.”
“We had a saying in the mines. ‘I am well if my friend is well.’ ”
LB had seen all this before. Honor killings in Afghanistan. Tribute murders in Honduras. Stonings to salvage a family name in Iraq. People who used force instead of real human dignity to get ahead, people who made the rules to fit themselves. LB imagined these two had it tough early in their lives and decided to survive together, screw the cost to others. They were loyal and believed that made them respectable. It made them little more than mobsters.
LB tugged the small radio from his web vest to show it.
“I stay. As soon as Karskie and Promise are safe out of here, I’ll call it in. Then we’ll wait for payment together. You, me, Juma.”
LB indicated the seated Good Luck.
“And handsome here. That’s my deal. There isn’t another one.”
Karskie shook his head in tight, tiny tremors. LB couldn’t tell if he was shivering or saying no. Promise plainly shook her head no.
Again, the destination. LB had been here before in his thoughts, many times. The intense training of every pararescueman forced all GAs to wrestle this notion to the ground, to imagine that defining moment when one’s own life may become forfeit. LB had been here in the field, too, on combat missions and rescues, facing enemies and long odds. Each man and woman who went into battle knew his or her life might be the price. But only the Guardian Angels wore a patch that said so. “That others may live.” LB didn’t mind coming to this lonely place again without the patch on his sleeve. He’d worn it a long time.
Time slowed. Every moment was a large fraction of what he had left to him. LB drew a deep breath, allowed himself a long blink to smell the world and hear it, too. He had no regrets for things left undone and only some for the unsaid. He was sad to go but thankful to choose this fate of a Guardian Angel, instead of a later, different, sadder, hollow death he would not pick.
To Promise and Karskie, he repeated himself.
“There’s no other deal.”
Lush Life paused, stymied, while LB held out the radio. Good Luck didn’t care, and the four guards appeared disconnected and a little high.
Big Juma wagged a sausage-sized finger.
“Sergeant, no. This is Macandezulo. My Macandezulo. You do not dictate terms here.”
The great finger shifted to Karskie.
“He will stay.”
LB puffed out his chest, swelling before confronting Juma.
“I said no.”
“And that is precisely why I say he will.”
Again, Lush Life interceded, this time taking big Juma by the arm to walk him several steps away. The two conferred quietly in a language LB had never heard before. When they returned, Lush Life spread his hands accommodatingly. The little man had pull with Juma.
“Sergeant. You may stay.”
As he’d learned before when doing the hardest things, LB acted quickly, faster than his heart. He told Promise and Karskie to go.
Neither moved.
A titter, then a cough tumbled through the doorway of the blockhouse. The sounds were followed by shuffling bare feet scuffing the stairs, descending from the second floor.
Into the sunlight stepped eight women. Each wore white, their loose garb stained in some places, torn in others, but pale against ebony flesh, without undergarments. They filed between LB and Juma like geese, honking in a gaggle, oblivious to what they interrupted. They were glib, giggling, dully touching the guards as they passed. One cupped Karskie’s dropped chin. Another stroked Promise’s khaki shorts before walking on.
Karskie regained himself before LB could speak. He pointed after the girls. None of them strolled a straight line.
“What is it, Juma? Meth?”
“Yes.”
“You got your own lab?”
Juma tipped his brow at a shanty close to the blockhouse. LB figured it to be within the blast range. Karskie bounced his gaze back and forth to the hut, measuring; he might have been thinking the same.
On the radio, LB’s thumb settled over the first number, five, but did not push it.
“Sex slaves, Juma?” LB asked.
“Sex workers. And, Sergeant, you and I are not explaining ourselves to each other.”
Juma aimed his thick finger at the chair Karskie had vacated.
“Sit.”
LB did not. He wasn’t of a mind to take orders. Instead, he indicated the blockhouse.
“Is that all the women?”
“Yes. Why? Didn’t you see one you liked?”
The women had already tottered thirty yards up the stre
et and were headed farther. They were not geese or slaves but safe at that distance.
LB took Promise by the arm. Pulling her close, he returned the soft, small nod she’d given him down in the armory.
“Go. Go right now.”
LB had spent a dark night in the Kruger. Promise’s eyes were darker.
She spoke past him.
“Juma.”
“What?”
“Let me stay.”
She tried to free her arm from LB. He resisted until Juma asked him to let her go.
Moving to her great-uncle, Promise flattened both hands against his wide belly. She pressed her cheek to his chest. She seemed to be listening through a wall.
“I’m in trouble with the rangers. They know what I did for you. That’s why I came with the American. So I could ask you to let me stay. Juma, I’ll go to jail. They might kill me.”
Gently, Juma enveloped her wrists.
“Nomawethu. You are my family.”
“Yes.”
“I will give you one more gift.”
He eased her hands away from him, pushed her back a step, then set her loose. Juma spread his arms wide. Like this, he was immense.
“Do what the sergeant says and go now. Or you have my word you will die where you stand.”
“Juma.”
His eyes did not break from hers. Leaving his arms out, Juma retreated, some ceremony of departure and damnation.
“Good Luck, the next word she says, shoot her.”
The toothless poacher didn’t stand from the lawn chair when he shifted the rifle off his knees. Lush Life seemed appalled, wanting to say something. But he only appraised his mountainous friend and found him unmovable. The old white man put an arm around Promise’s waist to nudge her away from Juma. He backed her beside Karskie, muttering, “Sorry, dear,” and left her.
Karskie put his back to Promise and LB. He faced the dirt road of Macandezulo. The boy’s shoulders rose and fell. One more time, Karskie’s hands flapped against his pockets.
He pirouetted, quickly if not nimbly, and caved into the lawn chair opposite Good Luck. Juma dropped his arms. LB lowered the radio he’d been holding out.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s not your fight, LB. I wish it was, trust me. But it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“The missile’s yours, but not the rest of it. You’ve seen one rhino. I’ve been here a month and already seen a hundred, all dead. Tell my father I said that. It’s good.”
The whores up the street had gathered behind a hovel. Some squatted inside their skirts, one worked a well pump, the rest splashed in the spilling water.
“Get up, Karskie.”
“It’s alright. I got this.”
“No, you don’t.”
“It’s sitting in a chair. My skill set.”
“Get up.”
“You save people, right? That’s what you do.”
“It is.”
“Then you should keep doing it. You know. Me next. Because I’m scared shitless.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“No, I don’t. Tell my father that, too. And Neels.”
LB couldn’t insist further, couldn’t argue without tipping his hand to Juma and Lush Life that whoever sat in this lawn chair had a strong chance of never leaving Macandezulo.
The first of the women began to filter back toward the blockhouse. They’d bathed in their clothes, their cotton gowns clung and turned translucent. The women became geese again, cackling, wet and dumb to their own danger.
“Will they pay, LB? If you tell them to?” Karskie asked.
LB nodded. Karskie shrugged, extending an empty palm to him. The gesture said, Then I leave it to you.
The big boy sat back against the flimsy chair. Good Luck glowered in his leopard pelt, returning the rifle across his lap.
Karskie folded his hands.
“Chess?”
Good Luck showed his tongue and gums.
Karskie pretended LB was not standing there. He watched the whores come.
This was not the first time LB’s fate had taken a hard turn. For twenty years, as a Ranger and a PJ, whenever he thought he’d bought the farm, he’d been wrong. Those times, he’d been left standing in the smoke or panting on the ground, but alive, wondering how the hell he’d been spared, and why? He never could figure out how, just the fog and fortunes of war. But the why, LB always knew. He was meant to live for the next time. And each of them, like this one, felt like the end until LB found it wasn’t.
He didn’t move until Promise tugged on him.
“We have to go.”
Juma snapped his fingers at his four armed guards. The men shook off the laziness that had settled over them. They formed a picket in front of Juma, Lush Life, and their hostage, Karskie. Above them, Juma inclined his head at LB.
“Midnight, Sergeant.”
Without a glance at Promise, the big man squeezed through the blockhouse doorway and vanished.
In the sun, Lush Life focused on his bare feet.
LB asked, “You’re a smart guy. How’d you get caught up in this?”
Lush Life made a smacking, regretful noise.
“It’s only been minutes since I’ve been caught up in anything. It all seemed quite simple before you.”
Lush Life flicked a finger at Promise.
“And her.”
Lush Life tipped his brow at Promise in parting. Turning on his bare feet, he spoke across his shoulder.
“Midnight, Sergeant.”
Lush Life did not join Juma in the blockhouse but strode up the street. He passed through the returning flock of women, hands in his wrinkled pockets. The man couldn’t have been more different from the women, all of them black, young, and sloppily sensual. But as they flowed around the old white man, LB noted a kind of bond between them, a kinship of despair, the taint of a cage. All their feet dragged, none of their heads were up, and even as some of the women traced their hands over Lush Life, the touches meant nothing to him or any of them.
Looking old, Lush Life stepped up on the tilting porch of a pink house, one of the few with four straight walls. From there, he watched the whores return to the blockhouse above the missile. He sat on the house’s rotten steps while LB and Promise walked out of the village.
Chapter 32
At the edge of Macandezulo, Promise put a hand to LB’s back. She meant it as empathy, knowing he was torn. LB misinterpreted the gesture, thinking she was asking him to act now. He shook his head.
“I can’t do it.”
He considered Promise for long moments. She expected him to ask if she could. But he did not. LB wasn’t a man to seek approval.
She would have pressed every button. And like LB, she would not have asked what anyone else thought.
Promise told him that Karskie was right, he wasn’t important. But none of them were, or they wouldn’t be out here. That got a rise from LB. When the hard muscles in his back quaked from a quiet laugh, she dropped her hand.
With the sun well past noon, they reentered the bush. Fever trees, fat jades, and spiky acacias made their path roundabout, but Promise soon guided LB to the rusty soil of the creek bed. Along the way they walked side by side but exchanged no looks or words. The buzzards circled again in the distant crystal sky.
LB broke the long silence.
“Did you mean it, when you told Juma you wanted to stay?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re in trouble?”
“I haven’t much purpose left.”
“What if I’d blown the building?”
“I would have kept Good Luck near it.”
Their boots had fallen into the same cadence in the red dust. They walked back to Neels and whatever awaited there.
“We have things in common, LB.”
“That so?”
“You and I both considered dying in Macandezulo. I think we both have less purpose than we would wish for.”
“You don’t know me, lady.”
With their steps in rhythm over the dry ravine, Promise told him a quick story. Two months ago, she and Wophule reported a rhino that had a thorn in its eye. They guided a vet into Shingwedzi. When they found the sick rhino, it was in the company of two others, both bulls. Wophule darted the beast with the bad eye. It fell, and while it was down the vet pulled the thorn and disinfected the eye. The other two rhinos backed off fifty meters and stood, still as boulders.
“They did not move. They would not be frightened away. They could do nothing else but safeguard their comrade. I have seen you, LB. Your kind of beast. In the bush, many times.”
“So I’m a rhino.”
“If you wish. I can grant that.”
Again, Promise rested her hand along LB’s spine. She left it there over many strides, and he did nothing to make her remove it.
She had thought to die in Macandezulo. But not like LB, not to protect someone, but to find a way to avenge Wophule. What sort of man was this under her hand? What would he be like to know? A man who would lay his life down for a stranger, a mission, a missile. What kind of life could LB build if every day he was willing to spend it? Like a house you might leave at any time, how could you settle in, how could you make it a home for yourself or anyone else? How could you love?
Promise and LB had both been sent away from their deaths, she by Juma, LB by Karskie and Lush Life. Both walked on, joined by that, by the silent bush, and her hand bridging to his back.
She pitied him along with herself. She spoke without voice, uttering only the breath of the words so they would enter the world but LB would not hear. “Uxholo, umnunzan.” (I am sorry, sir.)
The Devil's Horn Page 27
