by Mike Resnick
“Damn! I forgot all about them!”
“No problem. It’s all taken care of.” They stopped in front of a heavy oak door and he handed her a key. “Now I suggest you get a good night’s sleep. I’ll see you for breakfast.”
She entered the room. It needed some decorating and updating, but it was clean, and that was all that mattered to her. She took a quick shower, then lay down and was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
She awoke to the singing of birds. She put on her clothes, then walked to the window and looked out. The sun was up, a handful of diners were sitting at tables on the lawn, and the sight and smell of the food seemed to have attracted all the local birdlife.
She walked down the stairs and went outside, where she found Oliver already seated at a table, sipping a cup of coffee.
“Coffee?” she said, arching an eyebrow.
“I know it’s sinful for an Englishman,” he explained, “but I’ve had so many American clients who insist on starting the day with it that I’ve fallen into the habit.”
A white-jacketed Kikuyu waiter approached and asked for her order.
“I haven’t seen the menu yet,” she said. “I’ll have some tea when you bring it.”
“Yes, Memsaab,” he said, bowing slightly and heading off to the kitchen.
“Have a banana or a piece of melon while you’re waiting,” suggested Oliver, indicating the bowl of fruit in the middle of the table.
She reached for the bowl and a small starling started screeching.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked it. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s impolite to beg at the table?”
Nobody ever had, and it walked boldly up to her.
“All right,” she said, picking up a small grape and holding it out for him.
It stared at the grape for a moment, then reached forward and took it out of her hand.
“How did you sleep?” inquired Oliver.
“Better than I have in days,” she replied. “I was exhausted, and that was a very comfortable bed. Now I’m ready to eat.” She paused. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“We’re leaving,” said Oliver, suddenly tense.
“When?”
“Right this second.”
“What about breakfast?”
“You don’t want it,” said Oliver, pointing to the starling, which lay on the ground, twitching feebly. As she turned to look at it, it died.
“No, I don’t,” she agreed, getting to her feet.
“Let’s go!” said Oliver urgently.
“Just a minute,” she said. “Someone tried to kill us. Let’s find out who.”
“They know who you are. You don’t know who they are, or how they found you, or even how many of them there are. A betting man wouldn’t take those odds.”
She considered it for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. Let’s get out of here.”
She was actually surprised that they made it to the car without getting shot at.
27
Oliver drove north on unpaved bumpy roads for an hour, then headed east toward the mountains.
“Mount Kenya?” asked Lara, staring at the white-capped peak to the country’s tallest mountain.
He shook his head. “Too many tourists up at Bill Holden’s old place.”
“You mean the Mount Kenya Safari Club?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we going, then?”
“The Aberdares,” answered Oliver. “Except for Meru it’s probably the least-frequented national park in the country. There are a couple of game-viewing lodges, but almost no one ever drives through the park. We’ll go up into the mountains, and God help anyone who thinks he can sneak up on us there.”
“So we’ll spend the night out in the park?”
“No, it’s too dangerous—and not from your Mahdists and such,” said Oliver. “It’s no longer politically correct to shoot lions that eat cattle or attack men, so if they can capture them without killing them, they turn them loose up toward the top of the Aberdares mountain range. There’s plenty of game for them up there—buffalo, bongo, bushbuck, some other stuff—but they’ve developed a taste for men. It’s the one park where I don’t feel comfortable spending the night without even a tent.”
“So what are we doing there?”
“Buying a few hours. When it’s twilight, I’ll drive us to one of the lodges, either Treetops or the Ark. They lock up the approaches at dark, so if we time it right, even if someone figures out that we’re going there, they won’t be able to get in. And if they do, well, these lodges are raised on stilts and overlook spotlighted salt licks and water holes, and people tend to stay up all night watching the game. That’s a lot of witnesses.” He paused. “The lodges use retired white hunters as their animal spotters. I know just about all of them, so wherever we go, I should be able to get a little help guarding you when I get tired.”
“I’m pretty good at guarding myself,” said Lara.
“I know you are, but there are an awful lot of them and only one of you.”
After passing miles of cultivated fields punctuated by little groups of circular thatched huts they entered a small town that was a blend of old colonial structures, a few new stores on the major thoroughfare, and rows of shanties just off the main streets.
“Where are we?” asked Lara.
“This is Nyeri,” answered Oliver. “You’ve passed through here before. We just never stopped when we were on safari.” He pointed to a brick building. “That’s the White Rhino Inn, the counter-insurgents’ headquarters during the Mau Mau Emergency, which the politically correct types now refer to as the Battle for Independence.”
“You look like you’re pulling in there.”
“I am,” he said as the car came to a stop. “Wait here for a minute.”
It stretched to five minutes, but then he emerged from the inn, carrying two cardboard boxes and a sack filled with cans.
“What have you got?” she asked.
“Some box lunches and a dozen cans of soda pop,” he said. “Once we’re in the park there’s nothing to eat, and you were hungry two hours ago.”
“I still am,” she said. “It smells delicious.”
“There’s no law that says you can’t munch on a drumstick while we drive,” suggested Oliver, and she took him at his word, pulling out a piece of fried chicken and eating it ravenously.
They came to the entrance to the park a few moments later. Oliver left the car to enter a small kiosk and pay an entry fee, then got back in when a ranger emerged to open the gates and let him through.
“I think this is my favorite park,” he remarked as they began driving up the dirt road that wound its sinewy way up the mountain range.
“I thought all you ex-hunters liked the Northern Frontier District best.”
“For hunting, yes,” said Oliver. “They always had the biggest tuskers up there. But for beauty, I’ll take the Aberdares every time. They’re always green, and because of the altitude they’re never too hot.”
“Not that many animals, though,” she noted.
“There’s tons of animals up here, as many as anywhere except the Maasai Mara,” he replied. “But most of them are in the forest, and it’s almost impossible to get off the road until we’re above eight thousand feet in altitude.” He came to a gentle stop. “Take a look off to the side.”
She looked out the window. The mountain towered above the driver’s side of the car, but her side was parallel with the tops of some trees that grew on the downslope, and she could almost reach out and touch a family of black-and-white Colobus monkeys that were sitting on a limb, grooming each other and staring in curiosity at the vehicle.
“That’s another thing I like about the Aberdares,” commented Oliver. “Anywhere else you’d have to stand fifty feet below the Colobus colonies and look at them through binoculars—if you could see them at all through all the foliage. But up here they’re almost in your lap.”
&
nbsp; He started the car again, and they drove another two miles, stopping frequently to observe more Colobus monkeys, and once to let a huge bull elephant get off the road before trying to drive past him.
“Did you ever do any hunting here?” she asked.
“Not animals.”
“What, then?”
“This was where the King’s African Rifles fought the Mau Mau prior to independence, here and over on Mount Kenya.” He grimaced. “We won the war, and then Parliament decided it was too expensive to keep an empire, so we gave them independence anyway. Think of the lives we could have saved on both sides if someone had thought of that before the war began.”
“It’s terrible terrain for a war,” she remarked.
“I know,” agreed Oliver. “Sometimes you’d look off in the distance, and see your opposite number on a slope, and you knew it would take you at least three or four hours to climb over there and he’d be long gone by then . . . so you just smiled and waved at each other.”
“I’m amazed that there’s so little residual bitterness,” she said. “Everyone in Kenya seems to get along well these days.”
“Well, most of the men who fought that war are either dead or else getting up there in years,” he replied. “Hell, I was just a teenager when I saw my first action on this mountain. But strangely enough, there was never any lasting enmity, not on either side. It was a war, we all got it out of our system, they got their independence a couple of years later, we got out of the colonization business, they joined the Commonwealth, and everybody was happy.”
The road began leveling off, and suddenly they were driving over a flat field. Finally he stopped the car near a waterfall, pulled out his Magnum and tucked it in his belt, got out, and took the box lunches and a couple of cans of pop with him, and Lara climbed out from her side of the car.
“The Gura Falls,” announced Oliver.
“You couldn’t have chosen a lovelier place for a picnic,” said Lara.
“I didn’t choose it for its beauty,” replied Oliver. “I chose it because there’s not a tree or a bush for three hundred yards. If anything from a lion to a Mahdist approaches, we’ll have plenty of warning.”
“What do we do if a lion approaches?” she asked. “I don’t imagine my pistols would have much effect from more than a few feet away.”
“The only thing to remember is not to run,” said Oliver. “They’re hard-wired to chase about anything that runs away from them. And don’t talk. Human voices seem to irritate the bejabbers out of them.”
“So what do we do?”
“Just stare at them,” he replied. “They don’t like to meet your gaze.”
“And that’s it?”
He chuckled. “Lara, the car’s only ten yards away, and I promise you’ll see any approaching lions at three hundred yards. But even if the car wasn’t there, they probably wouldn’t bother us.”
“Even man-eaters?”
“I don’t like to take chances with man-eaters, which is why we’re not spending the night up here, but you have to remember that most of them became man-eaters because the spread of farms and villages had rid them of their natural prey. There’s plenty to eat up here, and one of Man’s greatest survival traits seems to be that we don’t smell very appetizing or taste very good. Feed a hungry lion, or give him a chance to feed himself, and ninety percent of your man-eaters go back to eating what they’re supposed to eat.” He smiled. “It’s the other ten percent I don’t trust.”
They opened the boxes and began eating the fried chicken and some roast beef sandwiches, washing them down with the soda. When they were done Oliver gathered the boxes and put them in the back of the safari car.
A small family of elephants, four females and two youngsters, broke into the clearing, seemed surprised to see the two humans and the safari car, and gave it a wide berth as they made a sweeping semicircle and disappeared into the bush a few minutes later.
Oliver looked at his wristwatch. “It’s just past noon,” he said. “We can loaf here for the next few hours, or drive around and pretend we’re on safari.”
“I’d love to look around the Aberdares,” said Lara. “But the Mahdists seem so well-organized that I think it makes a lot more sense to stay here in the open where no one can sneak up on us.”
“Whatever you say,” replied Oliver, opening another can of soda and taking a long swallow.
“It’s nice to just sit and relax and not be shot at,” she remarked.
“It’s hard to believe all this is because of some trinket that Chinese Gordon stole from the Mahdi more than a century ago.” He paused. “What do you plan to do with it if you find it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You can’t very well turn it over to a government or give it to a museum, not if a million men are willing to kill whoever you give it to.”
“I haven’t figured it out yet,” she admitted.
“If it was me, I’d take it to Europe and sell it for top dollar. Get filthy rich, retire, and let the Mahdists chase the new owner.”
A pair of vultures began circling lazily overhead, riding the warm thermals, and the discussion changed to raptors and other birds, then to the habits of the animals that lived on the mountain range, and before she quite realized it four hours had passed and Oliver got to his feet and announced that it was time to leave.
“We don’t want to be in the park at sunset,” he explained, “because they lock the gates then and we won’t be able to get out until morning. Also, I lied about our identities when I registered at the gate, but by tomorrow, when we don’t turn up anywhere else, the Mahdists will figure out who we are, so it’s best to be out of here.”
“Which lodge will we go to?”
“The Ark. It’s closer. If we’d kept driving, we’d probably have wound up at Treetops.”
She opened the car door, and suddenly stopped. “Do you smell something?” she said.
“Half-eaten chicken.”
“No,” she said. “I think it’s . . . I don’t know . . . maybe gasoline?”
He sniffed deeply. “Yeah, I smell it.” He frowned. “Might be a little leak.” He handed her the keys. “Start it up and I’ll see if anything’s wrong.”
She climbed onto the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition.
“Gun it,” said Oliver, who had raised the hood and was peering underneath it.
She put her foot down hard.
“Damned if I can see anything wrong.” He lowered the hood, then pulled himself up onto the passenger’s seat. “Long as you’re sitting there, you might as well drive. It’s not often I get to just lean back and appreciate the sights.”
“So we’re not losing any fuel?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“I still smell that odor.”
“Start driving. If we’ve got a fuel leak, the gauge will show it sooner or later. And I’ll check it out thoroughly after we reach the Ark. They’ve got a pretty well-equipped garage there.”
She drove across the flat open area, moved onto the road, and began heading back down the mountain.
“The turn-off’s in about three and a half miles,” he told her. “We’ll still be pretty high up.”
The car began going faster, and raced into a sharp turn on only two wheels.
“Go a little slower,” said Oliver. “You almost went off the road.”
Lara frowned. “I can’t!”
“What’s the matter?”
“The brakes aren’t working!”
“They worked fine all the way up here!” said Oliver.
“Someone at the hotel must have tampered with them!” she said, struggling to hold the road. “We’ve probably been losing fluid all day!”
They came to another curve. Lara floored the brake pedal. There was no response.
“Try the hand brake!” Malcolm shouted.
Lara yanked the hand brake back; there was no response.
The car kept going faster and faster as it raced do
wnhill. She downshifted to second, and they felt the gears strip. Oliver didn’t say a word; he didn’t want to distract Lara while she was trying to negotiate the road at high speed.
It was Lara who finally spoke. “We are in big trouble!” she muttered, staring ahead out the window.
The brakeless safari car was racing downhill toward a herd of elephants that was standing right in the middle of the one-lane road.
28
On the right was the mountain; on the left were the treetops, and a dropoff that would surely kill them.
The car continued careening down the hill, and suddenly Lara leaned on the horn.
The sound panicked the elephants, and they broke for cover on the downslope, pushing the youngest to safety first. One matriarch turned to face the car, trumpeting her rage, ears spread, trunk extended, and Lara was sure they were going to collide with the six-ton behemoth, but at the last second the elephant lost her nerve and raced after the others. The car missed her by less than six inches.
But they weren’t out of danger yet, because they still had no brakes and they were still racing down the steep, winding, single-lane mountain road. Every time they came to a curve she leaned on the horn again to warn whatever unseen animals or vehicles might be ahead. Once they almost ran head-first into a bull buffalo, and another time they barely avoided a greater kudu. A pair of baboons were too slow reacting to the horn, and their shattered bodies went flying down the mountain as Lara tried desperately to stay on the road.
Finally she spun onto a turnoff, where the ground leveled out, and a minute later she was able to bring the car to a halt. She sat, tense and motionless, her sweating hands still gripping the steering wheel.
“Where are we?” she asked at last. “Where does this road lead to?”
“We’re a couple of miles from the Ark,” said Oliver. “Just give my heart a minute to stop pounding and we’ll start walking. Once we’re there I’ll send someone back to tow the car.”
“I don’t see any other car tracks,” she noted, staring at the dirt road.
“Cars don’t come to the Ark very often,” replied Oliver. “Usually a bus picks up all the tourists at the Aberdares Country Club and drives them here as a group. This is just a service road; it probably gets used twice a week, tops.” He opened the door. “Come on. If we hurry we’ll make it there before dark.”
