Chapter One (a)

He moved quickly, because he knew that it was speed or death, and the tangled noise from the streets below sounded all too much like something that would trap him here until they came.

There was money, always; you were a fool if you worked in Kibilisa, Africa, and didn’t have a ready supply of get-me-outta-here-now money. American dollars, because they almost always worked, and little ingots of gold that could be pushed into the specially sown hems of his shirt and pants, and sideways into his boots. The most ignorant bastard child with a Kalashnikov understood the gleam of gold, and he knew all too well how it acted as a universal emollient, unblocking the pipes of industry with a shuffle of palm and nod of head. He shoved wads of tightly coiled cash into his pockets.

He grabbed for the shirt and jacket. Heavy duty, ex-Army, strong enough to keep the thorn bushes and mosquitoes at bay. He strapped his ammunition belt over the shirt, under the jacket. Felt odd, sliding his arms into them in his office, but Jensen Ackles knew about survival, knew all bets and doubts and feelings were out of this particular game. The ranger’s knife was next, slid into the sheath that soaked in his sweat at his side. Lastly, he reached for the old .303 rifle and checked the chamber. His hands were shaking.

Screams outside, breaking of glass and the sudden whump of serious fire. He had to go. The Norton Atlas motorbike he had stashed behind the stairs leading up to his first floor office was fuelled up, packed up, ready to go – but he longed, briefly, for something a little more protected as the sounds from below grew more frenzied. Still, what he lost in protection he gained in mobility, and he knew without looking just how clogged and manic the streets would be.

He slung the rifle across his shoulders. “Thanks, Jim,” he said, to a man one hundred and forty miles north and three weeks ago. He heard the closing of a cabinet in the next room, and glanced around once, in this office, as the only kind of goodbye he could spare. It was only now that he was about to leave that he realized he’d found a crazy kind of sanctuary here.

He grabbed his pack and opened the ratty door between his office and that of his partner. Lonsobwe Mbeka straightened from where he had shredded the most contentious of their files. He was a tall man with cornrow hair and a face like a maze, and Jensen felt a rush of affection and despair that almost undid him.

“I have last year’s pumpkins in my shed.” Lon had always done that, continued conversations from hours or days before without any attempt to re-contextualize. Every conversation was part of the same, long story of his life, and Lon saw no need for anything more than one beginning, one end.

Jensen shook his head. Lon read all that the gesture meant, and shook his head too, grinning.

“They’re good pumpkins. Too good to waste. What would the rebel bastards want with me and mine?” he said.

Jensen gave a vague wave at the office, his throat beginning to close up with emotion he really couldn’t afford. “I’ve got a lot of blood on my hands, Lon,” he said. “I can’t carry any more.”

“It is not your fault.” Lon’s tone was final. “The airport is a death place, now. Even if you had managed to get tickets, we couldn’t get to the planes.”

The pictures from the airfield, of hundreds cramming into the terminal, hundreds running up to and into the planes, had cut out the minute the rebels took the country’s only TV station over on Gamba Hill. The smoke there now was all the picture Jensen and Lon needed. Fighting in the streets, out by the industrial section, almost to the central business district - but they had half an hour, no more, and a week ago they’d been promised two months.

Jensen palmed his forehead.

“You could come with me, now. We’ll pick up Festina and the kids, grab a truck. Lon, I can’t just leave you here.”

“Jensen” – and he pronounced it ‘Jen –Sun’, as he always had – “we are Kiswali. So are the rebels. They are our brothers and sisters, eh? We will have a big barbecue and make friends with them.” He leaned closer, as if imparting a secret. “Jensen, I know how to make things happen. You know this.”

Yes, he did, but his belly was aching with loss and a kind of savage grief. Lon was brilliant, a genius, at getting businessmen to open their wallets or village elders to extend invitations. He could get police and army and bureaucracy to look away when they needed it. Lon could smooth the way through all kinds of briar patches, but that was when he had a chance to sit and smoke and drink kaffe with ‘reasonable’ men. The chances were strong that these children of war would shoot first before he had his gold cigarette case out to offer them the first cigarillo.

“Lon – “

“We are ‘siafu, my friend.” Warrior ants. “We will stay small and strong under their feet, and when the UN comes on its great white horse to rescue my great black arse we will rise up and nip the rebels all the way back to their caves. Jensen,” and he stepped forward, gripped Jensen’s forearm, “Allez et soyez sur.”

Go and be safe.

“Kubanda kyoweka.” Jensen’s voice was soft, as he returned the grip, looked into his old friend’s eyes. It was the Kiswali farewell – ‘to go and come’. To leave was no different to arriving, since it was all one under God.

Another series of shrieks outside, and the wailing of children. Jensen squeezed Lon’s arm once more, and stepped back. “I will look for you, my friend.”

“Eh, eh,” said Lon. “When this is over, you buy me a whisky. None of that American crap. Glenmorangie, yes?”

“Huh. In your dreams.” Jensen paused in the doorway. “Tell you what. We’ll go to Jim’s, have a steak and a scotch and I’ll kick your ass for not coming with me in front of that woman you stole to be your wife.”

“Nah nah nah,” Lon said, grinning widely. “She loves me. You are jealous, whitemeat. Sooo jealous.” The kindest woman in the world and four gorgeous children they’d salvaged from infancy and no, Jensen wasn’t jealous because right now their fragility and looming loss was taking his breath away. He didn’t understand the kind of courage that let Lon smile his farewells.

He waved, once, his own grin fixed, and turned away. The door to the back stairway was little more than a tired old mosquito screen and it really didn’t need the force he applied to bang it open. But chaos and terror were waiting and somehow Jensen felt he couldn’t just creep into it.

The office he and Lon had set up three years ago was in the truly downtown area of downtown. From where he stood he looked out over a sea of flat roofs, all made of the flattened kerosene tins that were the ubiquitous building materials of the developing world. Smoke was billowing from half a dozen places, and he could see that the tiny alleyways were choking with panicked people clutching children and belongings in despair. It had always been a beehive, but now it was ugly, and Africa did ugly in a spectacular way when it was in the mood. Jensen knew the chances of a white man getting out right now were lousy, but staying here like a cornered rat was impossible.

He ran lightly down the stairs to where the Norton was chained and hidden under a blue plastic tarpaulin. The tarpaulin came way easily, then he put the pack on his back, cleared the chains, swung his legs across the bike and put the key in the ignition. A roar, a throb, and the bike was easing forward into the maelstrom.

Jensen was well known in the area, and he had reason to hope he was well enough liked. But this was madness, now, and no-one would look to his name, just his skin and his means of escape. He swallowed, hard, and pushed forward, jostled and shoved as the bike almost tipped. Once he got onto the main road he had a chance of gaining speed but here it was nudge and press and hope to God no resident of the Maboso slums decided that the bike was their salvation and Jensen was the thing that stood between he and it.

He made steady but slow progress to the crossroads where the betel sellers usually sat, their mouths stained red, their calls growing softer and slower through the day. The alleyway opened up into a wider road twenty yards ahead, and for one moment a space seemed to clear for him. He gunned the engine, surged across and reached the last shack before the roadway. He could see the white dust stirred up by a thousand feet, but cars were making their way and so could he. Five blocks east and the main road to Tanzania opened up even further. All the traffic would be going south, away from the rebel advance; but Jensen was heading north.

The engine between his legs picked up a deeper thrum and he leaned into the corner. And suddenly, he was down, his back was burning, and a man with a machete was swinging wildly at him, at the bike.

Jensen had fallen hard, his leg still beneath the bike before it spun off him to crash onto its side ten feet away. The man raised the machete again and Jensen reached to his sheath, wrenched out the knife and plunged it into the man’s calf. It was all so fast he had no time for conscious thought; just an immediate, deep no that filled his senses and forced him to his feet despite the pain that seared him when he moved.

The man was howling, maddened with terror and agony, still waving the machete as if he could subdue the fear by hacking it to death. Jensen staggered sideways, aiming for his bike, but the attacker followed, shrieking curses and stabbing viciously through the air.

“Fuck!” He didn’t know what had happened to his back, but the cold determination that filled him made Jensen swing the rifle off his shoulders and turn to face the madman. “Fuck off, asshole. Nu iimana!”

Suddenly the man slumped to the ground, grabbing at his leg where the blood was pouring from the wound. His shrieks were wails, now, and Jensen stumbled to his bike, one hand keeping the rifle aimed at him, the other reaching to right the Norton. Already there was a small knot of frightened people forming in the larger tangle around him, and Jensen began muttering a mantra of “Back off, fuck off, get away” as more and more pressed closer. He swung the rifle round in a complete arc and as deeply afraid as they were, the people in the dusty street recognized the immediate threat and did as he said.

The moment he tried to right the bike his back flared with pain, and he cursed again. No, dammit, this is bullshit, and although it didn’t make sense it was as much a cry of indignation as anything. He was not going down less than a block from the office. After all he’d done, all he’d survived, there was no way he was going as meekly and stupidly as that.

He got the bike up, mounted, and gave a silent prayer of thanks when it started again without flooding. On this street he could find a little pace, and when he got to the main road it was better again. Going against the traffic and on a bike gave him the chance to weave his way through, drivers too surprised to do anything but veer away from him. It took him less time than he’d feared before he reached the eastern turnoff, and without hesitation, he took it.

His plan was not foolproof. Lon had stared at him quizzically, then shrugged. “Maybe you are right, Jensen. Maybe you’re crazy.” He’d shrugged again, and then snorted out a thick stream of smoke. “Merde.”

Two hundred and twelve miles to the north was the Gamba River. Across that lay Tanzania and sanctuary. One hundred and forty miles north was Jim Beaver’s farm, Anyima. One hundred and eighty miles east lay the rebel stronghold. The rebels had launched themselves with astonishing speed and ferocity in an arc of devastation that cut between where Jensen was in Maboso and where he wanted to go. They’d come before the rains, when every pundit had declared that a major push would wait until after the wet season. They’d come while the UN dickered, while the Government churned money and power between themselves in a kind of incestuous orgy of incompetence and greed, while the army spent their time in the newly built casino in De’shwali or home on their farms. In two weeks they’d crossed terrain the experts had declared would take them two months to conquer, if at all. They’d had Kalashnikovs and trucks and a scorched earth policy that meant they didn’t have to watch their backs as they went. There was no-one left to defend against.

The first reports of the massacres had been dismissed, then the reports had stopped and it was only air surveillance that began incredulously sending photos that showed impossible pictures of impossible disasters. The government forces had been routed in eight days.

Everyone wanted out, and south or west made sense until the rebels swept across the northern routes from east to west and descended upon Maboso from there.  Then south was the only sane option, and Jensen knew that sanity wasn’t always the way to play it in Africa. Especially not when his friend in the Australian embassy had pulled him aside and told him, with a gravity she’d never shown him before and that chilled him to see, that the southern borders would be closed in the next few hours.

Jim Beaver was the smartest guy he knew. His farm was tucked back and away in a small valley, well north of where the rebels were reported as operating. From Jim’s place it was another seventy odd miles to the river, and a crossing that could be made with the right connections.

Jensen swerved and pushed and drove hard, heading up the eastern road that lead straight to the rebel base camp. He’d head east until he hit the village of Kaga’ill, then strike north, right across rebel lines. He planned to go fast, hard, and stupid, and just prayed that if he met up with the rebels they’d be too astonished to do anything before he was nothing more than dust in their faces.