The first person Gaby had confided in was Miriam Sondhai. She needed the blessing of the sacerdotal woman.
The Somali woman had been slow to answer. It was her way, Gaby had learned. Only when a thing had permeated into her like the rain into dry earth, found its level and risen again to the surface would she speak. That evening after her run she had come out with a book to sit with Gaby on the side of the verandah that caught the best late sun. Gaby had smoked and worked at her laptop, preparing scripts. Suddenly, Miriam had put down the book and said,
‘You must do this.’ The fossil water had risen. Gaby set down her laptop. ‘You see, they rocketed the hospital for an hour and a half before the troops came in. American Apaches, that was the name of the helicopters. They said the war-lords were using it as a headquarters. They were selling the drugs from the pharmacy for arms. Always drugs, for Americans. It is their great Satan. They should fear their own love of weapons, that makes them build things like Apache attack helicopters and anti-personnel rockets. I saw them hit one of the nurses as she ran across the compound looking for cover. The way they work is to explode into thousands of flechettes. It shredded the skin and flesh from her bones. I was nine years old and I saw a woman turned into a skeleton.
‘My father got as many as he could down to the lower levels, but there were many who could not be moved; in traction, or hooked to machinery, or premature babies in incubators. Some of the nurses stayed with them all through the aerial and ground assaults. The ground troops were Pakistanis. They had UN blue helmets, they had been sent to keep the peace between the tribal factions. They came through every ward, emptied every bed. They pulled people off life-support machines, they tipped babies out of incubators. They went into the theatres and took the operating equipment. They were the ones looted the pharmacy of all its drugs. Any medical equipment they could move, they took. They loaded it into white army trucks with United Nations painted on the side. They said the trucks were for prisoners but they were not the kind of truck that could hold people securely. They came knowing what they wanted. They had it all planned. I firmly believe they made up the story about the war-lords using my father’s hospital as a base as an excuse to loot it, and so the Americans, because they are so afraid of drugs, would rocket the hospital for an hour.
‘We saw it on the satellite news months later. President Zulfikar was pinning medals to the officers who had led the raid. They all looked very clean and very smart and they stood very upright, as Pakistani soldiers do, but what the satellite news did not tell was that the medals were not for service with the UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia, but for their generous donation of ten incubators, three life-support units, two dialysis machines, an X-ray lab and a complete operating theatre to the new Benazir Bhutto hospital in Islamabad.
‘The hospital did not get the drugs. The soldiers split what they had stolen and sold it to the Americans. Some of the deaths among the UN peacekeepers were from accidental overdoses on medical-grade opiates.’
Gaby’s cigarette had burned down into a drooping curl of ash.
‘This is why you must do it,’ Miriam Sondhai said. ‘It is a bad thing when the military is a parasite on its own nation, but it is much worse when someone else’s army is parasitical on your nation, and with the blessing of the organization that is supposed to restrain the strong and protect the weak. You must do this, Gaby.’
She had her blessing. Hers was holy work. But she wished her motivations were as clean as Miriam’s expectations.
Tembo drove the ATV like a maniac. The boy he had brought was tall and thin and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt for a band that had broken up long ago. His hair was shaved so short it looked painted. He radiated that angelic, androgynous beauty peculiar to young African men and women. His name was William. He did not say very much more than that, except that he wanted his money now, thank you.
Gaby drilled him while Tembo wired him with the minicam in the strap of his shoulder bag and fitted the mikes and relay gear. In the back of the ATV, Faraway tuned receivers and monitors and gave encouraging thumbs-ups.
‘It’s simple,’ Gaby said. ‘You go in, you walk around, you see anything that looks like soldiers taking magendo, you get in close, but not too close. They won’t suspect you, there are too many people, but don’t attract attention to yourself. If they stop you and want something, offer them a thousand shillings, and if they still want more, give them this portable CD-radio. If they don’t get it, you can keep it, and the thousand shillings as well, if you can hold on to it. Now, what’s the range of the transmitter?’
‘Two hundred metres.’ His voice was soft and sexless too, a man/woman whisper.
‘We’ll be in the four by four, close by at all times. If there’s any trouble, we’ll pull you out, but I really don’t think there will be. Go in, get your stuff, come back, and you’ll get your face on satellite television. You’ll be a big star, just like Jackie Chan. Jean-Claude van Damme. A hero.’
Tembo looked at Gaby in a way that said that such was poor currency for the soul of his wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.
They dropped the kid half a mile from the town centre. He looked back nervously. Tembo waved him on encouragingly. He worked his way into the knots of people. Gaby let him get a hundred yards ahead before following in low gear. For all the people, there were few blue-helmets. A solitary APC passed. The soldier in the front hatch saw a white woman driving and curled his tongue to touch the lower edge of his shades. For the first time the realization of what might happen if something went wrong struck Gaby. She was monstrously isolated, professionally, geographically, racially, sexually. If she fell, there would be no hands to catch her but those of men with guns.
William stopped to talk with some young men he knew sitting on the white stones that marked the forecourt of Merueshi’s solitary gas station. Gaby stopped the ATV. In the back Faraway waved his thumbs on the air. The boy’s talk was coming through loud and clear. One of the youths pointed into town. William moved on. The four by four followed.
The soldiers had set up a processing station in front of the district magistrate’s office. A funnel of parked armoured cars directed the press of people past a table where a swarthy officer with the thinnest moustache that could possibly call itself such checked names on a PDU. Beyond him were the trucks.
‘Go to it, go to it,’ Gaby shouted to her stool-pigeon. Unhearing, William melted into the crowd. ‘Damn it. Can’t see him.’ She stopped the car and peered over the back seat at Faraway’s monitors.
‘Much meeting and greeting and no magendo,’ Faraway said. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ The jerky, wide-angle image of the shoulder-mounted minicam had caught a soldier standing talking with a bearded, barefoot man in shorts. You could see at once that the bearded, barefoot man was at his wits’ end. He pleaded with his hands. The soldier caught his eloquent hands, turned them over. The bearded, barefoot man wore a copper bracelet on his left wrist.
‘Turn to it, please turn to it,’ Faraway begged. ‘Oh, boy, if only you had some lessons in basic camera technique.’
‘But do not get too interested,’ Tembo said, mindful of his wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin’s safety.
On the ten-centimetre monitor they saw the bearded, barefoot man take off the copper bracelet and give it to the soldier. The soldier put it in one of the pockets of his combat pants and handed the bearded, barefoot man a slip of paper. The bearded, barefoot man thanked the soldier effusively with his eloquent hands. He signalled to a thin woman and four children who had been sitting on the earth close by to pick up their things. The soldier led them all away, shouting a path through the crowd. The people pushed in behind them and William’s camera caught no more.