The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  Once across the border they were met by a Land Rover and driven south for many miles along dirt roads and then across dry savannah until at dusk they arrived at an army barracks. It was at the edge of a small town and Connor asked its name but the sergeant wouldn’t tell him. At the barracks they were separated and Connor was led to a room with a dirty cement floor and bare walls with barred windows. There was a table and two chairs and he sat waiting for a long time until a young major in a smartly pressed shirt came in and sat in the other chair on the other side of the table and asked all the same questions again and many more besides.

  The man spoke precise English and had a brisk manner in painful contrast to the slow and meticulous handwriting with which he noted every answer. When Connor told him about his botched attempt to buy back the abducted children he seemed mystified.

  ‘But you are a photographer. Why would you want to do such a thing?’

  Connor shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you do.’

  ‘You really want to know? Well, I guess it was something to do with the fact that all these years I’ve made a living out of other people’s misfortune. At the outset you figure the pictures might help in some way but after a while you discover they don’t change a thing. I guess I just wanted to try giving something back. You know? To do something rather than just stand there and watch.’

  It was the only answer that the man didn’t bother to note.

  Afterward Connor was led across the compound to some sort of detention block where he found Lawrence already in the cell waiting for him. The boy looked relieved to see him and said that they had asked him questions but hadn’t beaten him.

  The cell had two narrow bunks. It was the first time in almost three months that Connor had slept in anything like a proper bed and even though the mattress was hard and full of lumps and the blanket mangy it felt like five-star luxury.

  The next morning he was summoned once more to see the major and this time the man’s manner was friendlier. He said he had made a number of calls, including one to the U.S. embassy in Kampala. Someone there had in turn managed to get hold of Harry Turney at the agency in New York and even tracked his mother down in Montana.

  ‘Everybody thought you were dead. You have been missing for a long time, much longer than you told me.’

  ‘I was traveling.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘All over. Australia, India.’

  He didn’t elaborate and the major didn’t press the point. ‘You and the boy will be taken today to Kampala.’

  ‘We have to get to Karingoa.’

  ‘That is impossible. The rebels have made a great push south. There is much bad fighting. The army has sealed off that whole section of the country. You cannot even get to Gulu.’

  Connor asked if he could call St. Mary’s to tell them about Lawrence but the major said this too was impossible. All communications with Karingoa had been cut.

  Connor sat on the bed looking out over the hotel gardens and waiting for the operator to call him back. A pair of marabou storks were tumbling and flapping in the tops of a row of flame trees and he couldn’t decide if they were fighting or mating or playing. Maybe it was all three.

  It was late afternoon and after all the frantic activity of the past hours he suddenly felt weary. He had spent the day so far shuttling around Kampala, talking to government officials and aid agencies and people at the U.S. embassy and generally trying to figure out what to do about Lawrence. The embassy people were going to fix Connor a new passport and they let him use the phone to call his bank in Nairobi to arrange for some money to be wired. Meanwhile, so that he could buy them both some new clothes, he had borrowed money from the only real friend he had in Kampala.

  Geoffrey Odong was a journalist whom he had met on his first ever visit here before going into Rwanda. He was a year or two younger than Connor and being bright and ambitious had since risen to become an assistant editor of the country’s leading newspaper. Both he and his wife Elizabeth were Acholis and it was they who had first made Connor aware of what was going on in the north and about the extraordinary work being done at St. Mary of the Angels. Elizabeth worked part-time for a local radio station and they lived with their three daughters in a modest house at the foot of one of the city’s seven green hills.

  Connor had called them the previous night as soon as he and Lawrence arrived in the city after a sweltering and spine-jarring day’s drive from the northeast in the back of an army truck. Geoffrey came at once to collect them and insisted they stay the night. Elizabeth was appalled at how emaciated they were and fed them until Connor thought the boy was going to burst. Their eldest daughter was Lawrence’s age and after a shy start the two of them were getting along well. The place was small and Connor felt bad that the girls had been ousted to the living room so that he could have their bedroom. After heavy protest, Elizabeth had reluctantly conceded that he should move to the Sheraton, but only on condition that Lawrence stay on.

  Connor had never much cared for the kind of antiseptic corporate luxury which such hotels seemed to deem necessary. And after his long weeks of deprivation the room with all its cellophaned frippery made him feel like a visitor from another planet. The chilled air and the white roar of the air-conditioning marooned him from the world outside and even that, the rolling acres of lush and manicured garden, the silent traffic, the white office blocks and the tree-lined hills beyond, all seemed faintly surreal.

  Stranger by far was the figure he saw in the fluorescent glare of the bathroom mirror. He had asked the concierge for a razor and shaving foam and after showering for at least twenty minutes (a luxury that he wasn’t going to knock) he had slowly scraped off the scraggly beard and watched another alien version of himself emerge, this one with vanished lips and white and hollowed cheeks and his long hair wildly adrift like some fanatic frontier preacher.

  He sat now with a towel wrapped around his waist and another over his shoulders, wondering if the operator had forgotten about the call he had placed or if all the lines to New York were still busy. The storks in the flame trees had been joined by four others now and they were all flapping and cavorting and he still couldn’t figure out what they were up to. The clock-radio on the bedside table clicked to ten past four, which meant it was ten past nine in the morning in New York and ten past seven in Montana. His mother normally slept until eight, so he’d decided first to call Harry Turney. At last the phone rang. The operator said she had New York on the line and told him to go ahead. Connor asked for Harry Turney and waited.

  ‘Turney.’

  ‘So they didn’t fire you yet.’

  ‘Jesus, Connor! Where the fuck have you been?’

  ‘Did you miss me?’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘You know, in all these years, I don’t think I ever heard you swear till now.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, you save it for when you need it. What the fuck have you been doing? I mean, Jesus Christ, Connor, how can you do that? If you want to go get yourself kidnapped and killed, that’s your business, but at least you might have the sense or decency to let someone know where the hell you’re doing it.’

  ‘Harry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘So you damn well should be. Have you called your mother?’

  ‘I’m just about to.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Get off the phone and do it now. I’ll call you back. I got about a thousand messages for you. What’s your number?’

  Connor told him and hung up, smiling to himself guiltily. He called the operator to give her his mother’s number and while he waited for the call to come through dressed himself in his new shirt and pants.

  His mother was a lot more forgiving. She said that she had long ago gotten used to his vanishing acts and even if it had been five times longer than any of his previous ones she hadn’t been worried. Connor didn’t believe her for a moment.

  She wanted to know when he was coming home and he said soon, as soon as he coul
d find a way of reuniting Lawrence with his brother. He asked her how she was and about the ranch and she told him she had found an eager and hardworking young fellow from Augusta who was helping out with the cattle. That aside, nothing much in her life seemed to have changed.

  ‘You heard about Ed, of course.’

  ‘What about him?’

  There was a long pause and he asked again.

  ‘Son, Ed died. Christmas before last. I forgot how long you’ve been gone.’

  Connor was stunned. She told him what had happened and what a shock it had been for everyone and Connor sat on the bed and listened in a muted daze.

  ‘How are Julia and Amy?’

  ‘Well, heck, they’re right out there where you are.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re out there in Africa.’

  ‘In Uganda?’

  ‘Yeah. At least, I think it’s Uganda. Tell the truth, I get a little confused with all those different places you go to. But, yeah, she’s gone out to work with those poor kids you photographed, you know, the ones they turn into soldiers. Taken Amy with her.’

  ‘In Karingoa? St. Mary of the Angels?’

  ‘That’s the place. I had a postcard about a month ago. Her mother got herself all wrought up about Amy going, but it sounds like they’re having a real good time.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Connor? Are you there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  But he was too choked with emotion to go on speaking. In little more than a whisper he promised his mother that he would call again later and hung up.

  An hour later he was pacing back and forth across Geoffrey Odong’s cubicle of an office at the newspaper. Through the open doorway he could see the tension mounting in the newsroom as the evening deadline approached. Geoffrey was leaning back in his chair behind a desk piled high with papers. For the past twenty minutes he had been on the phone to an old college friend who was now a senior officer in the northern command of the UPDF.

  Connor could hear only one side of the conversation but he had already gotten the drift. At last Geoffrey hung up. He gave Connor a gloomy look and shook his head.

  ‘There’s no way. There are roadblocks on every route into the area. You wouldn’t even get as far as Gulu. They’re not letting anyone near the place, least of all any journalists.’

  ‘What’s happening in Karingoa?’

  ‘He said the rebel advance has been checked, but I don’t think I believe it. They’re attacking on two fronts, Makuma to the northwest and Kony’s forces to the east.’

  ‘How near are they to Karingoa?’

  ‘He says about twenty miles. My guess is that they’re nearer. He said many people have already left. He claims that the situation is under control but it sounds to me as if the government has greatly underestimated the rebels’ strength.’

  Connor turned and stared out of the window at the street below. A truck had overturned and spilled its load of green bananas and all the blocked cars and taxis and buses were blaring their horns. A woman sheathed in vivid yellow was weaving gracefully through the chaos, carrying a vast wrapped bundle on her head and leading a small child by the hand. The last of the sun bathed them in a golden glow and cast their shadows long over all they passed.

  ‘Geoffrey, I have to get to them.’

  ‘There is no way. In any case, they may have already been evacuated.’

  ‘If I know Sister Emily, they’ll be the last to leave.’

  Connor turned to face him.

  ‘Do you know someone who would fly me up there?’

  ‘Don’t be crazy.’

  ‘Do you?’

  31

  Three times now the Government soldiers had come to advise them to leave and every time Sister Emily had refused. To flee from the devil, she told them, only helped him flourish; St. Mary of the Angels had stood firm against Makuma’s threats and thieving raids upon the town for more than a decade and she wasn’t about to yield to him now.

  At first the calm and confidence that she displayed had been infectious. She told both children and staff that there was nothing to fear; that the shell fire that they could hear at night was from the government forces bombarding the rebel positions and driving them back; that it had happened before and would no doubt happen again. If things got bad, she said, they could all pile into Gertrude, the doubledecker bus, and be away in minutes. Everyone seemed reassured, even inspired.

  Yet as the days went by and the boom of the guns grew nightly nearer, it became apparent that this was more than another ‘thieving raid.’ On the road beyond the convent gates the trickle of refugees was swelling to a steady flood. From dawn to dusk they filed by, the twice displaced and dispossessed, the ragged and the wretched, watching with blank eyes while UPDF trucks packed with soldiers thundered past the other way, heading north toward the battle front.

  Several times Julia had found children at the windows watching all this and though she did her best to allay any worries they voiced, she had secretly begun to share them. It wasn’t for herself that she worried but for Amy, who had at first seemed blithely unconcerned. With her great gift for guilt, Julia had now managed to rekindle all those early anxieties about bringing the child here in the first place. Her mother had been right. Perhaps they should go before it was too late. Ever alert to Julia’s moods, Amy seemed to sense this change in her and now she too was showing symptoms of anxiety. She was quieter, always checking where Julia was; and she began to sleep poorly, cuddling close and asking often if the shell fire sounded closer.

  Last night, after the soldiers’ third visit and all the children had gone to bed, Sister Emily asked Julia, Françoise and Peter Pringle to convene in her office and, after pouring each of them a cup of the Queen of England’s favorite tea, announced quietly that they should consider themselves free to leave.

  ‘I still refuse to believe there is any cause for concern. The lieutenant assured me that the rebels are being pushed back and yet still he says we should flee. I asked him why and he said because he could not guarantee our safety. I told him only Our Lord Jesus can do that.’

  She wagged a finger and narrowed her eyes.

  ‘I suspect the real reason is that they want to use this place as a barracks. It was the same two years ago. They created panic and many people left.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘Then . . . they came back.’

  She took a sip of tea.

  ‘Makuma is like a frightened dog who barks ferociously. You run away, he chases you. You stand still, it’s he who runs away. But, Julia, if you are concerned about Amy, then you should go. George can drive you both down to Gulu and from there you can go on to Kampala. We would all understand. ’ She turned to Peter Pringle and Françoise.

  ‘The same goes for both of you. We would miss you, of course, but we can manage.’

  There was a short silence. Pringle cleared his throat.

  ‘Well, I can only speak for myself,’ he said. ‘But as long as you and the children are here, I’m not going anywhere.’

  His little declaration made Julia feel ashamed. That night, for the first time in a week, there was no sound of shell fire. Amy slept without stirring and Julia lay scolding herself for being weak and foolish. How could she, even for one moment, consider abandoning everyone? Wasn’t that what she had done all those years ago with Skye? Once was enough.

  She woke in the morning with a new resolve.

  But it lasted only a few hours. At sunset the shelling started up again, louder and nearer than ever. And there was a new accompaniment now, a thudding sound that Peter Pringle said was mortar fire. As they were sitting down for supper in the tent, a white Land Rover came roaring around the side of the building. It skidded to a dusty halt outside the kitchen compound and two people, a man and a woman, climbed quickly out. Julia recognized them. They were Danish aid workers, a young married couple who sometimes came here to eat, but it was all too apparent that they hadn’t come now for their supper.

  They re
ached the staff table and Sister Emily and all of them stood and gathered around. The man was breathing heavily and trying with little success to conceal his alarm. The children had all gone silent and sat watching from their tables.

  In a low voice he told them that Makuma had broken through and that the government forces were retreating in disarray before him. The rebels were less than ten miles away and moving steadily toward the northern outskirts of the town, looting and burning all before them.

  The man sat with his bare elbows on the table either side of his beer, his bushy blond mustache propped on his cupped fists and his pale blue eyes fixed unblinking on Connor. His forearms were massive and sunburned and on the left one, above the heavy gold Rolex, was a tattooed crest of an open-winged eagle which Connor figured must be the emblem of some elite military corps. His neck was thicker than his bristled head and a thatch of blond chest hair sprouted from the collar of his dark green sports shirt.

  It had taken Geoffrey just three phone calls to find the kind of person Connor needed but beyond that he didn’t want to be involved. Johannes Kriel ran a small aviation company and was rumored to be involved in smuggling, gunrunning and many darker deeds beside. Connor was told to go to the Parkside Inn next to the old taxi park and find a table out on the balcony. Kriel would join him there.

  When he did, the man neither said hello nor offered his hand. In a clipped South African accent he told the waiter to bring him a Nile Special and then he sat down and told Connor to go ahead and say what he wanted. He listened without any hint of what he might be thinking. But his condescending smile now, as Connor finished, told it all.

  ‘Did anyone tell you there’s a war going on up there?’

  ‘Just get me as near as you safely can.’

  ‘Safely? Makuma’s got fucking heat-seeking ground-to-air missiles.’

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘I know that.’