White Bone (6 page)

K
enyan night: as dark as a throat. The few stars couldn’t lift the sky from opaqueness.

Grace recalled the day, of touring the former Oloitokitok health clinic and interviewing Travis Brantingham. She remembered their discussion, her ruse to gain Ethernet access to their network, the last-minute substitution for her driver.

Tucked under a fever tree that had been overtaken by an aggressive vine, she shook from fear and the evening chill, squatting on her haunches in an attempt to keep the ants off her bottom. She fought against sleep, afraid she’d awaken to jaws tearing flesh from her bones. She hid well, but it wasn’t being seen that worried her. They would smell her. They would come for her as food.

Her mind wandered, a product of the heat, dehydration or a subconscious effort to avoid the present threat by reliving the past. The plan to dispose of her had not occurred spontaneously, she thought. Her hacking had been detected.

When the conversation with Brantingham had ended, she’d climbed into a Jeep with a stranger. She’d been told her guide from the lodge had gone off on errands and would be delayed. One of the locals, a younger guy, Leebo, bone-thin with hollow eyes, had stepped in to drive her back across the savanna to Chyulu Hills and the Ol Donyo Lodge. Together, they had set off from Larger Than Life for the ninety-minute trip down a rutted dirt track back to the lodge. How quickly they’d left any sign of the village behind.

Grace remembered that drive more clearly now. She’d ridden in the open-air Toyota, marveling yet again at the lack of fences in the wide-open plain. In the distance, she saw the majesty of Kilimanjaro rising so high that its ice-topped summit looked like clouds. With the onset of evening, the rich blue sky had slowly gone pewter, silhouetting a few small hills to the west. The air blew in her face, warm and fragrant, and she’d closed her eyes for a while, savoring the solitude and the sense of timelessness. The rhythm of the rough road made her eyes heavy. As they fell, she’d had no inkling of what was to come.

When her driver, Leebo, called out, she startled awake.

“Lions! You wish to see them?” He was shouting, pointing.

“Yes, please!” Grace called—and off they went cross-country. He drove hard and fast, but the vehicle handled well. She squinted, trying to see. “Where?” she asked. He pointed. Grace still didn’t see, but that was nothing new: the Maasai could spot game, could track so brilliantly, that they were nearly as entertaining as the wildlife. She held firmly to a safety handle. The vehicle rose and fell. The driver weaved through the vegetation, slower now, his head aimed down at the ground. Tracking.

“Two!” he said. “Young. One year perhaps.” Grace continued scanning the open expanse of buffalo grass, cacti, sagebrush and fever
trees. No sign of movement. The craggy ravines were lined with outcroppings of rock. Thick shrubs and lines of cottonwood and willows clung to the soil, fatigued by hard sun and the endless wind.

“Where?” she shouted. The driver lifted his hand only briefly from the wheel, pointed across the hood and slightly to the right. Grace still saw nothing. She looked behind. No road in sight. She’d lost track of time. Had lost all landmarks but Kilimanjaro and the buttes. “It is getting dark,” she called.

“I know where they go. The lions. There is a wash. A bone wash.” He pointed again. Out. Off. Away.

Several more minutes passed, and with them a great deal of ground. “What is a bone wash?” Grace asked. He didn’t answer.

A hood of clouds had been pulled over the savanna. With it, a false dusk. Distance to the fever trees could no longer be easily judged. Kilimanjaro melted into the horizon. The truck slowed and stopped. “Here! We go here! I will bring the glasses.” He hoisted a pair of binoculars as he climbed down from behind the wheel. Grace stood and looked down. Her foot found the rail. She lowered herself out.

Something sharp pricked her—a needle.

Time passed. The truck took off, the driver back behind the wheel. “Hey!” she called, feeling woozy. Why would he need to move the vehicle? “Leebo!” She tried his name. She sounded drunk. He wasn’t moving the Toyota; he was leaving. “Hey! Come back!” she shouted. Laughing; knowing it wasn’t funny. Her astonishment and disbelief were overpowered by whatever he’d injected into her. Elephant tranquilizer? Ketamine?

Later, when she awoke, she remembered hardly anything. Brantingham. The clinic. A black void of drugs in her system. The wind. Insects. She clasped her arms across her chest.

If this was an attempt to kill her through exposure, to make her
death look like an accident, she believed her attackers would have left a vehicle somewhere in her vicinity. The gas tank would be ruptured, a tire or two flat, the keys missing. She knew the tricks. Scuffs in the dirt leading away.

Death by exposure. She could imagine the stories now. A tourist strays from the vehicle and expires in the bush. Not the first time. Olé, her guide back when she’d been staying at Solio Lodge, had told her that every few years, a safari guest wandered out of camp, usually drunk, and didn’t last the night. Between the lions, hyenas, snakes and jackals, a night in the bush was a death sentence.

The sun had just set.
A vehicle
, she thought.
Out there somewhere
.

She set a goal. She had a mission.

R
ambu’s bulk barely fit behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser. His eyes may have been on the potholed road in front of them, but Guuleed felt that the man was hyperaware of his boss’s presence. Guuleed’s temper was as fast and unpredictable as his scrawny limbs, and his men knew it.

The vehicle, outfitted for nine including the driver, had a canvas top and fold-down windshield. Rambu had smeared mud over the line of five bullet holes in the passenger side and had otherwise cleaned the vehicle to help them blend into city traffic.

Several kilometers from Nairobi’s city center, Guuleed watched the thick line of pedestrians on either side of the road. There were more people than cars. Blue exhaust rose in waves. Marketing flags on PVC poles flapped with wind from the traffic: VW, Windows 10, a supermarket. The Land Cruiser passed a fortressed shopping mall crowded with hyperclean high-end SUVs. Private drivers. A secure entrance with more uniforms than the airport. Little kids were
collected in bunches beyond the eight-foot walls, their bare shoulders glistening, their laughter rising above the groan of traffic.

Guuleed’s anger flashed into his chest, a slow and steady burn. Xin Ha was threatening to kill his wife and children.

“You okay, colonel?”

“Just drive.” Rambu was trying to loosen him up with the “colonel” reference. He wasn’t colonel of anything.

Guuleed rubbed the stump of the missing joint on his finger. Eight days until his family was to be executed. Today he had to face the Chinese bastard behind the threat. He’d been summoned like a common peasant. He wanted to shove his hand down the man’s throat and squeeze his heart to stopping. “After you drop me, you’ll go to the sergeant. Give him the envelope. Tell him the American’s an Eastland Safari guest. It has to be handled professionally. The more legitimate, the better. A passport problem, something out of anyone’s control. You will book a flight out before you leave the sergeant. Tell him to get our friend on that flight.”

This was the third time he’d given Rambu the same instructions. “Yes. It’s not a problem. I understand.” He slowed for traffic. “I hate what this city has become,” Rambu said abruptly.

Guuleed didn’t speak, but he agreed. Nairobi made him long for Somalia and his family. They were involved now. The thought made him ache. He’d seen whole bloodlines wiped out before.

“Our men are inferior,” Guuleed said abruptly. “We need new men. And Faaruq! He started this all!”

“Yes, colonel.”

“Don’t call me that, for fuck’s sake!”

Rambu was smart enough not to mention that Guuleed had been the one to shoot Faaruq in the back of the head, not one of his men; that it had been Guuleed who’d come up with the idea to stage the man’s death as a poacher, shot by KGA rangers.

“This Chinese prick dares to threaten my family?”

Rambu twitched. The Land Cruiser nearly sideswiped a
matatu
.

“You get us in an accident, and I eat your liver. With bacon and onions if I can find them.”

“Yes, sir.” Sweat burst out on Rambu’s face, running in the grooves of his acne scars.
Good,
Guuleed thought.

Red dust rose from the pedestrians teeming on both sides of the road. “Look at them,” Guuleed said, taking in the people. “What kind of fucking life is that? They look like safari ants.”

“Ants or not, my prick goes stiff just looking at some of those women.”

“Yes, that’s for certain.” They laughed not as comrades but as men, no rank between them. Guuleed said, “You will resupply before the shops close. I have the list.” He pitched it into the ashtray. “Handle the sergeant first, then the shopping. If I’m still alive, pick me up when I say so.”

Rambu hesitated, ventured, “He will no doubt be pleased when you tell him about the Chinese woman.”

“If I’m given the chance. He’s a terror, this one. All throttle; no brakes. But you’re right. It’s good thinking, Rambu.” He slapped the man on the shoulder, his flat hand hard as stone. He could see Rambu flinch, and it gave him satisfaction. People were constantly misjudging his strength. “Tell me when we’re ten minutes out.”

Guuleed shut his eyes. He saw his wife’s face, her bare breast suckling their firstborn. He saw all six of his children, gathered outside their modest farmhouse in fierce, slanting light, ready to visit the
musalla
. He saw charcoal pits and ladders rising up the rust-crusted hulls of vessels toward blue sky. Grieving women wailing over husbands stolen from their homes by government troops. All these things in a moment, all part of him and unshakable. He was who he was and only Allah would judge him. Not some Chinese
prick. He expected divine providence. If he allowed his family to be wiped out, he would be looking at hell and eternal damnation.

Nothing short of forever was now at stake.

•   •   •

The concrete block structure,
one of four nearly identical buildings lining a small-business complex cul-de-sac off Jogoo Road, southeast of downtown Nairobi, reminded Guuleed of a school or a prison, the two not being terribly different in his mind. A few cars were parked in the dirt circle.

Guuleed stood before the office building door, feet firmly planted. What to expect? The Chinese egomaniac could be in trouble, might need Guuleed’s muscle and be willing to negotiate down the sentence on his family. He clearly wanted to discuss something he considered too sensitive for even the satellite phones, which was stupid, Guuleed thought. No one could listen in on a scrambled satellite phone.

Whatever the man’s motives, Guuleed would have preferred not to know them. He walked past a Chinese man nearly as large as himself in the lobby. Another two in the hallway outside the office door. It looked like a former doctor’s or dentist’s office. No furniture or artwork in the waiting area. The reception desk was manned by a guy holding an AK-47. Guuleed was frisked and lightened of a Glock semiauto 9mm, three ammo magazines, a U.S. Navy–issue knife and a garrote.

Guuleed found their silence disturbing. He wanted to get on with it. He wanted this over.

In the unremarkable office, Xin Ha moved out from behind a desk crowded with paperwork. He was thin and taut, his age difficult to judge. North of thirty, south of fifty. He wore his oily black hair too long, but his eyes were tough, black.

The man had risen to great power in Mombasa. He controlled most of the port, had enough political leverage to remain untouchable, and an insatiable hunger for more. Poached horn and ivory went north into Somalia or south to Mombasa. Drugs and young women flowed in the other direction; no container, no truck ever ran empty.

Now Xin had moved to Nairobi to appear more legitimate, but most knew he continued to run the port. He was said to refer to himself as the CEO of Kenya, his ego knowing no bounds.

He walked up to Guuleed and appraised him like a man at the racetrack deciding how much to gamble on a horse. Nose in the air. Lips pursed.

“I dislike rumors, don’t you?” he began. Guuleed hadn’t prepared for such inclusion. He’d felt a lecture coming, a berating was more like it. Why ask for face-to-face and take a collegial attitude? The man had promised—not threatened but promised—to slaughter his family! “I have taken on too much, perhaps. We lose patience when we’re pressured, don’t we?” He backed up two steps and took a wider view of Guuleed. “Tell me about the woman.”

“It has been handled. It will look like an accident. A tourist abandoned in the bush. It’s over.”

“That’s good. Better than I thought, at least. Well done.”

Guuleed knew Xin Ha primarily by reputation. He didn’t offer compliments. There was threat and menace couched in every word.

“You understand the shortfall she caused us?”

“I had nothing to do with that.” He said it all wrong, regretted his words immediately. A man of action, talk had not been his forte.

“Is that so? My mistake, not yours? It’s not
your
man who reports such people? She was
inside
my company’s computers. Do you understand the gravity of this?”

“He’s not my man. He’s freelance. It’s true, he reports to me, but—”

“My point, exactly.” Xin Ha sat casually on the edge of his desk. “And did he report to you?”

“I get a dozen such reports a week. Twice that in tourist season.”

“You ignored his report about the woman.”

Guuleed searched for a way to deflect the accusation.

“She caused my investors to panic. Do you understand the cost of closing the clinic? Hmm?” He smiled, the look prohibitively sweet. “I think not. A very dear cost to you if you don’t rectify the situation, to be sure. Please, do not think for a moment I enjoy any of this. A man’s family? It’s horrible! I detest even the thought of it. But examples must be made, hmm? I’m willing to bet you make such examples to your men as well. We each have a cross to bear.”

He was staring in the area of Guuleed’s collarbone, as if unwilling to make eye contact. With a huge effort, Guuleed forced his body to stay still.

“You’re thinking we could have done this by phone. Hmm? And you would be right, except for the rumor I referred to earlier. Do you know the rumor that is troubling me?”

“No,” Guuleed admitted. He’d anticipated a different man, a different conversation altogether. A one-way conversation. “You know what’s troubling me? Your threatening my family.”

Xin Ha failed to react; it was as if he hadn’t heard Guuleed. “First, this American!”

“We are taking care of him. A visa problem. He is being deported. He’s not your concern.”

The man might have nodded; he sucked through his teeth. “Second . . .” He began moving around the room in no particular pattern. Guuleed never took his eyes off him. “There is a rumor, a trustworthy source, that private drones have been deployed.”

Guuleed’s bowels went to water.

“That mess with the hunting of the lion last month. Bleeding
hearts to the rescue! An American donated at least three drones! They can see through cloud, read your wristwatch. They carry photo and radio surveillance into formerly unreachable places. On top of the drones, surveillance may now include mobile phones, possibly satellite phones. Do you understand why you’re here in person?”

“From the sky we look like any other safari base camp. We are registered as a business. We know what we’re doing.”

“If a single automatic weapon is photographed . . . a grenade belt . . . a box of ammunition . . . a scope. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“You will break camp. Relocate. Your existence depends upon it. Your family’s existence depends upon it.” His pallid skin turned a dismal pink when flushed. “You must make up for my losses. Do you see what you’ve done? How many you have put at risk?”

Guuleed wondered if he killed the man right here—regardless of how quickly the man’s guards would kill him—might his family be saved?

Xin Ha lunged toward him and Guuleed flinched, something he never did, something that left him feeling ashamed, humiliated. Xin Ha laughed in his face. Guuleed forced the lid down to contain his temper.

“Out!” Xin Ha said, finally meeting eyes with him.