The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  Yet as he floated down through the smoke and the dark, he realized that the stakes had changed. Now he did care. He had two good reasons to live and they were somewhere out there beyond the smoke and the flame. If they were alive, somehow he would find them. And if they were dead, then death could happily have him too.

  When he was still some eighty feet from the ground the smoke seemed suddenly to clear. Somewhere away to his left he heard men shouting and then caught the briefest glimpse of figures running toward him, maybe three or four hundred yards away. And then he looked down and saw the dark tops of some giant palm trees racing up toward him as if through a zoom. There was a paler space on the far side, away from where the men were, and all he could do was hope that it was a clearing. He toggled hard and lifted his knees as high as he could and the next thing he knew he was being dragged chest-high through the clattering palm fronds and then he was dropping fast beyond them. His boots hit the ground hard and he rolled and somersaulted and came to rest on his back in time to see the canopy floating down over him like a premature shroud.

  He felt a jab of pain in his right shoulder but his legs were fine and that was what mattered. He found the edge of the canopy and hoisted it and froze for a moment to listen. He could hear the voices, though how close he couldn’t tell for the sound was baffled by the trees, but he knew he had only seconds to free himself from the chute and disappear.

  The clearing was cultivated and seemed to be in a plantation of some sort. The vegetation on the other side looked thick. Connor fumbled with the harness buckles. They were of a type he didn’t know and one of them seemed to be jammed. He could hear the men’s voices much closer now. He should have practiced a release on the plane and he cursed himself for a fool. In a few moments, however, he was free and he ran as fast as he could for the cover of the trees.

  Once he was among the trees all he could hear was the pulsing scream of frogs and insects. The undergrowth was dense and tangled and he had to duck and crawl and stamp and scramble to make any progress at all. He had but the vaguest notion of which direction he was headed but from his last brief view of the burning town he figured he was moving south. Every so often he paused and held his labored breath while he listened for the men. But the only movement he heard was the branches that he had parted twitching back into place.

  Just when he was starting to feel safer he startled some roosting birds who erupted around his ears squawking and thrashing their wings and Connor thought his heart was going to explode. He swore at them and spurred himself on for his pursuers would surely have heard them. Whether the men were Makuma’s or UPDF he didn’t much care. Either way they were likely to kill him before he had a chance to explain what the hell he was doing dropping in on them uninvited.

  How far he traveled through the bush he had no way of knowing. Every so often through the fringe of the trees he would catch sight of the burning town and at last he saw the great water tower that stood near the marketplace and he was able to get his bearings from it and adjust his course. The shelling had stopped. Sometimes he saw soldiers, small and silhouetted by the flames as they ran across the fields firing from the hip in the way that Makuma made them. Connor saw two get hit and fall. Once he saw a helicopter gunship come swerving out of the night above them, the flames reflecting a sickly orange along its belly as it strafed the southern end of Karingoa. In the confusion he could only guess, but it seemed as if the rebels had almost succeeded in taking the town, with the government forces putting up some last resistance in its southern enclaves.

  As Connor headed yet farther south, the town became obscured by trees and soon all he could see of it was the rising glow of fire above them. At last, through the darkness, he saw what he had been searching for: a pale horizontal band with the black shapes of trees beyond. It was the rear wall of the convent gardens and he jumped the ditch before it and stood with his hands pressed to the crumbling whitewash and his head bowed while he gathered his breath. He was panting hard and drenched in sweat and his face and hands were cut and bloody from thorns and razored leaves and creepers. Kriel’s black jacket was soaked and hot enough to cook him but it made him less visible and he kept it on. He rested only a short while then clambered above his bloody handprints on the wall and hoisted himself over into the garden.

  The convent was burning and so was the chapel. From the shelter of the orange trees he could see the flames licking hungrily from the upstairs windows and one by one the burning wooden shutters breaking away and crashing to the ground in great cartwheeled explosions of spark. He was expecting to see soldiers but the place seemed deserted, nor was there any sound of gunfire now, only the rumble and crackle of the burning building.

  He watched awhile longer, trying to picture the place as it was and to imagine Julia and Amy living there, but such thoughts seemed to belong to another universe. He walked across the playing field through flaming scraps of debris, past the looted kitchens and the smoldering shreds and poles of the dining tent and then around the side of the chapel where little flames raced along the charred rafters like gleeful demons. When he came around to the front of the building he startled a mangy dog carrying something pale in its jaws and it skittered off into the mango trees and vanished.

  Connor walked up the driveway beneath the flame trees and didn’t once look back at the blazing convent. As he drew near to the gates he saw that the road outside was blocked by two overturned trucks, both of them in flames. A moment later he heard the rattle of a heavy machine gun and ducked in among the mango trees and almost at once tripped over a soldier.

  The man was lying in the grass under cover of the wall with his assault rifle trained on the gate. From his uniform Connor was almost certain that he was UPDF. There were others too, six or seven of them, all lying there. Connor got to his knees but they yelled at him to get down and no sooner had he hit the ground when a grenade went off between the gates.

  ‘Come! Come! Come!’

  Suddenly they were all up and running across the driveway and without a moment’s thought Connor got up and ran with them. As they crossed the gateway through the clearing smoke of the grenade, the machine gun opened up again and Connor saw the dust around him kick and heard the bullets thwack against the stucco columns and go screaming in ricochet into the trees. Nobody was hit and they ran ducking and dodging among the bushes and trees, and when they got to the side wall of the convent grounds they helped one another and Connor too to scramble up and over and down into the scrub beyond. One of them had a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. He grabbed hold of Connor’s shoulder.

  ‘You are a teacher?’

  For a moment Connor didn’t know what he meant. The sergeant jerked a thumb at the burning convent.

  ‘A teacher, here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come now. We must go quick.’

  About a mile down the road they reached a small convoy of trucks that stood waiting for them under cover of some tall eucalyptus trees with the jungled hillsides of the valley looming black on either side. The waiting officers were shouting at everyone and the constant frenzied ranting of shortwave radios only helped stoke the sense of burgeoning panic. Everyone clearly wanted out as soon as possible.

  Connor was the only civilian and foreigner among them but nobody bothered to ask who he was or what he was doing there so he stayed close to the young sergeant and climbed with his men into the open back of one of the trucks. As each truck filled, so it was waved out onto the road and soon Connor’s too was heading off through the choking dust with the flames of St. Mary of the Angels lighting the sky behind.

  The rebels seemed to have circled around the town in an attempt to cut the valley road, for along the hilltops on either side there were sporadic flashes and booms and in the headlights of the truck behind he could see the road was cratered with shell holes and strewn with the debris of evacuation and the burnt-out carcasses of cars and trucks. There were bodies too and as they went by, Connor scanned them with a growing sense
of foreboding, telling himself again and again with fading conviction that the two he loved most in all the world were somewhere safe.

  Some of the soldiers huddled around him were wounded and all seemed too tired or shocked to talk and just stared blankly into the night or at the bouncing metal floor. The one sitting opposite Connor couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. He was bleeding from a head wound and shivering and Connor took off his jacket and laid it gently around the boy’s shoulders.

  Not long after that the air above them ripped asunder and they all flinched and ducked and looking up Connor saw three fighter planes skimming the valley treetops and heading north to Karingoa. Moments later came the boom of their missiles and it echoed and rolled around the hills and all along the valley. No sooner had the sound died when more planes came screaming overhead and did the same and then more and yet more until the truck had traveled so far down the valley that their bombing was only a muffled murmur and a dim red reflection in the distant sky.

  How long he slept he didn’t know, but when he woke, the sky was washed with dawn. Most of the soldiers in the truck were still asleep. The clouds were low and leaden and the air was damp and smelled the way it always did before rain. Still only half awake, Connor looked back along the road, idly watching the dimming lights of the truck behind them in the convoy as it slowed to maneuver around some burntout vehicles.

  And that was when he saw it. The convent’s ancient doubledecker bus.

  He leaped to his feet and yelled for the driver to stop and the soldiers around him woke and some of them grumbled or shouted at him to sit down. He yelled again but the driver clearly couldn’t hear or didn’t care for he began to accelerate away. Connor turned and scrambled forward over the soldiers’ legs and they cursed and shouted at him some more but he wasn’t going to be stopped. He reached the back of the driver’s cab and hammered on its rear window and then on the roof.

  ‘Stop! You gotta stop!’

  The driver didn’t look pleased and yelled something back at him, but Connor couldn’t hear what it was and just kept on hammering until the truck slowed and even before it came to a halt he had hoisted himself over the side and jumped down onto the road. He fell as he landed but was on his feet straight away. The driver climbed down from the cab haranguing him and many of the soldiers in the back were doing the same but Connor didn’t care.

  ‘The bus! That’s the convent bus! My family!’

  He turned and started to run. The truck coming toward him blasted its horn at him but he ignored it and ran past. It was no more than a hundred and fifty yards back to the bus but it felt as many miles. Gertrude lay askew with one wheel in the ditch and tilting perilously as though a mere touch might topple her. Long before he got there, Connor could see that she had been burned out. The glass of the windows had gone and the roof and uppers were blackened and buckled and only along her lower flanks were there still some patches of blistered red paint. The lower front where once the grille had been was splayed like a charred shellfish from some great explosion. In the driver’s cab, hunched and curled, as if even now in death he sought to protect himself, was a body burned beyond recognition.

  Connor braced himself to find more bodies inside. But he checked both decks and found none, nor in the burnt shell of the truck behind. The young sergeant and two of his men had arrived now to bring him back.

  ‘We must not stop here,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘You go on.’

  ‘No. You must come. It is dangerous here.’

  He put a hand on Connor’s shoulder but Connor brushed it off distractedly and told him again to leave. His mind was reeling with images of what might have happened here. As there was only one body, maybe the others had managed to escape unscathed. Maybe they had been picked up by other vehicles.

  ‘Come,’ the soldier said. ‘There is nothing here for you.’

  ‘They might be here. Somewhere.’

  ‘Where? Look, there’s no one.’

  Another truck roared by along the road, sounding its mournful horn as it passed. Connor turned away in anguish and looked up at the seamless dark green jungle of the hillside, its top veiled by the lowering cloud. He felt a slow, churning sense of loss and desperation rise within him and he walked in faltering steps into the scrub at the side of the road and howled at the sky.

  ‘Julia!’

  The sound echoed along the valley and he called her name again and again so that the echoes redoubled each time. And when the last echo faded he stood and scoured the hillside for any sign of movement but nothing stirred.

  Then the rain began to fall, slowly at first, in heavy drops that slapped upon the ground and upon his face and shoulders and quickly filled the air with the smell of thirsting dust.

  ‘Come,’ the sergeant said gently.

  Connor couldn’t speak. He shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps you find them in one of the camps.’

  Connor nodded and bowed his head. The rain was thicker and faster now and his hair and his shirt were already soaked. The others waiting down the road in the open back of the truck were calling impatiently.

  ‘Come now,’ the sergeant said. Again he put a hand on Connor’s shoulder and this time he didn’t have the will to remove it and instead let himself be steered in his desolation back toward the truck.

  When they were halfway there the calling of the soldiers suddenly seemed different, as if they were no longer chiding him. And the sergeant beside him glanced back toward the bus and then stopped.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  Connor turned. The rain was so heavy now and his eyes so brimmed with tears that at first he saw nothing. And then the figure standing in the scrub at the side of the road moved and he saw her.

  ‘Connor?’

  Through the rain her voice sounded small and frail and full of disbelief.

  ‘Connor? Is that really you?’

  He started to walk back along the road and his legs felt so weak that he almost stumbled. She was stepping onto the road now and walking toward him through the pale curtain of the rain.

  ‘Julia?’

  They stopped when they were still a little way apart and stood staring at each other as if they were seeing each other’s ghost. Her cotton dress was ripped, her face filthy and her short hair bedraggled. Even in all his years of dreaming she had never looked more beautiful.

  ‘Why are you . . . ?’ she said. ‘What are you . . . ?’

  ‘I heard you were here. I had to find you.’

  She shook her head slightly and then her face crumpled and he stepped toward her and took hold of her and he could feel her whole body begin to shake. And he tried to say just a little of what was in his heart but he couldn’t find the words nor even the voice to utter them. He held her face to his chest and stroked her head and she slowly lifted her arms and put them around him and clung to him. She tried to say something but couldn’t and just started to sob until he thought she would break.

  Over her shoulder he saw the others now, emerging from the trees like wary and disheveled prey. He saw Pringle, the doctor, and Sister Emily holding the hands of two children and others following, ushered by the nuns. And hurrying past them now onto the road and running through the rain toward her mother came Amy, the daughter he hadn’t held since she was a baby and who was now this tall, fine girl with a smudged and worried face and a mass of sodden blond curls.

  ‘Mommy?’

  Julia gathered her in her arms and started to explain who Connor was, but somehow the child already knew and tentatively reached out to him and took his hand. And with the rain beating down upon them and turning the road around them to a river, the three of them stood clinging to one another as if the world and whatever it might bring would never be allowed to part them.

  32

  It was one of those crystalline Montana mornings, when the freshly fallen snow glinted in the sun like sequined satin and the mountains stood so bold against the blue of the sky that you could count eve
ry frosted crevice. Julia followed the dogs out onto the pristine planks of the new porch and closed the kitchen door behind her. Even in the cold the sawn-timber floor still smelled of resin. She stood for a moment peering at the mountains through the icicled fringe of the eaves, her breath billowing, while the two young collies squirmed and bounced around her.

  ‘Hey, you guys. Down now. Get down.’

  She came down the steps and stopped again and shielded her eyes from the glare of the snow to see more clearly. The only trace of the horses were the twin tracks that led from the barn and out past the corral and then up and away in a gentle curve across the hillside and into the trees. She guessed that they would probably be coming back their usual way so she turned up her collar and headed down toward the creek.

  The house that they had built stood in a low fold of the hills some dozen miles east of the massive limestone wall of the Rocky Mountain Front. The building was low and modest and made of wood and, with the smoke curling from its stone chimney and the sun flecking the pale stems of the aspen behind, it already looked as if it belonged. It had taken them more than a year to build. And with each beam and nail, each rafter and strut, so too the new construction of their lives had slowly taken shape.

  Their homecoming had been hard.

  In those few days that they spent in Kampala before flying home, Julia and Amy had stayed cocooned in their hotel room, shell-shocked and licking their wounds, while Connor rushed around the city organizing things. He wanted to help Sister Emily start looking for a new home for the children of St. Mary’s and then he had to reunite Thomas and Lawrence Nyeko who had both now been adopted by Connor’s friends the Odongs. He even helped arrange the funeral of poor George the gardener who had taken the full blast of the mortar round and by some miracle been the sole casualty of the flight from Karingoa. The result was that Julia and Connor had scarcely had a moment to themselves. Even the airline conspired against them. There weren’t three seats together, so Connor sat separately.