The Smoke Jumper (55 page)

‘Twelve-fifty!’

Connor fisted his right hand and pressed it to his chest.

‘Hey, old friend,’ he whispered in the wind. ‘Hearts of fire.’

‘Twelve hundred! Jump, you crazy fucker!’

Connor launched himself into the night with all the power he had. He felt the warm air rushing past.

‘One-one-thousand . . .’

He was twisting as he fell and looking up he saw the belly of the Cessna tilt sharply away and go into a steep climb toward the clouds.

‘Two-one-thousand . . .’

To give himself the best chance of not being shot he was going to wait as long as possible before pulling the ripcord. He figured he had five seconds, no more. He spread his arms like wings to find the right position.

‘Three-one-thousand . . .’

He was looking down now and the upward rush of air was blasting his eyes and making them stream. All he could see was blackness.

‘Four-one-thousand . . .’

He reached for the ripcord and felt a stab of panic when he couldn’t find it. But then he did and he grasped it firmly.

‘Five-one-thousand . . .’

He tugged it hard and felt the pins give way and then the faint flutter and pull at his back as the pilot parachute broke out, hauling the main chute after it. He braced himself and then, a moment later, felt the whack and jolt to his chest and shoulders as the canopy cracked open and filled. And then that moment of utter calm before sound began to filter in. He could hear the last fading drone of the Cessna and the boom of shell and mortar fire and now the rattle of machine guns too.

He found the toggles, which were of little use for he had only the flimsiest idea of where to steer. It took awhile for his eyes to clear and a little while longer before he realized that they had and that the reason he couldn’t see much was that the air was laced with smoke. It tasted thick and acrid in his mouth and stung his eyes and nostrils and when he looked up he saw it swirling beneath the great white and orange dome of the canopy.

Even in the smoke it was still a massive billboard of a target and the chances were that someone down there would spot him. All he could hope was that whoever did was a long way off and wasn’t much of a marksman. In all the years and all his work in war zones there had been many moments when he had consciously risked his life, but never had he felt so helpless and exposed. Many times he had dared death to take him and perversely it had chosen not to. Maybe it knew and had always known how little he cared, how cheap a price he placed upon his life.

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.