The plan had been to sit here for a few weeks, get distance, and decide when to try to get out of the country and sit out the disaster that was about to begin.
But now the doorknob turned and Orrin Sykes somehow just stepped into the apartment. How could he have a key? The private security guard downstairs was “here twenty-four hours a day,” the rental agent had promised. Khan had pushed it, demanded, “What happens if someone gets past security,” and the beefy guard behind the desk had laughed, nodded at video monitors showing elevator interiors, and said, poking his chest with pride, “Ex-ATF,” as if that guaranteed that no intruder, no stranger, not even a ninety-year-old cripple would pass his station without proper ID.
But Sykes was a ghost, and now the man stood just ten feet away, same distance as the phone. For an instant Tahir flashed back to a film he’d seen in freshman biology class, too many years ago. It had been called Animal Camouflage. It had featured creatures — a certain frog, a moray eel, a crab — all of which looked beautiful, and rarely moved, and then with sudden shocking aggression would lunge. A tongue would flick out. A mouth would open. Whatever life form had been innocently feeding nearby a moment before would be gone, and the killer would be sitting there again.
“Come on, Tahir. Pack a bag. Let’s go home.”
“Really?”
“What do you think, I’d hurt you? You’re valuable.”
He started to feel relief. The sweat flow dissipated to a trickle. Was it possible? He began to babble, as he moved backward, toward the bedroom, toward his ratty suitcase in the back closet, all the time watching for Orrin to lunge.
“I didn’t tell anyone. Who would believe it, right?”
Sykes nodded. “You had doubts.”
“I admit I thought about calling a reporter. Or the FBI. I did. I considered it. But I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to get away. For a little while. To think.”
“Think.”
“Everyone needs time to think.”
“I know I do,” Sykes agreed, nodding.
The bedroom lay down a short hallway from the living room, and the walk gave Sykes a view of all the other rooms in the condo. Kitchen, empty. Bathroom, empty. Guest bedroom, empty. Master bedroom.
“No one really here,” Sykes said.
“I told you that.”
“I was just checking,” Sykes said.
Tahir opened the mirrored sliding closet door with shaking hands. He reached up for his suitcase. He actually felt Orrin move before, it seemed, the reflection did in the three mirror panes. Tahir did not have time to turn. In the mirrors three meaty arms circled three skinny throats and three Tahirs were lifted bodily off the carpet. There was an awful cracking sound and he watched his head spin around. Orrin’s face remained expressionless.
In a freshman biology class at SUNY, Tahir had heard a professor say once that after a human being is killed, the brain keeps functioning for a few more moments. Now his brain processed that he was being carried back into the living room, and that he was hanging over the patio railing. Wow, I am dead, he thought, falling, the concrete flecked with shiny mica, its squares forming a chessboard, the empty squares coming up fast.
ONE
Lionel Nash’s plea for help went unanswered because I could not reach my ringing satellite phone. My hands were occupied, gripping the steel fuselage in back of a C-130 Hercules, to keep me from sliding out of the plane. One engine had failed but the other three held altitude. I was strapped by bungee cord to the wall, six hundred feet above southern Sudan, as the big transport went semivertical, nose up, rear ramp open. I heard, over ringing, the high-pitched scream of wind, and the prop engines. Through that open door, I glimpsed six thousand starving Dinkas below, waiting for our life-giving cargo of Kansas-grown grain to fall.
There had been some mechanical problems over the last couple of weeks when it came time to release food. I’d insisted, against Eddie’s objections, on riding in back today to see if I could find the snag. It had been small. I’d fixed it. Drop the food and let’s go home, I’d told the three-man crew up front.
The ringing stopped as we hit drop-angle. Not many people had my number. That the phone was ringing meant there was an emergency. In this part of the world, that could mean any number of things.
It could be a government attack on rebels. Disease. Aid workers injured. The whole continent is a basket case.
I was the only person in back; no seats here, just the steel cave, and centering it, a track on which sat wooden pallets piled with 110-pound burlap sacks, filled with sorghum. From the outside, our blue UN markings were supposed to protect us if Sudanese MiGs showed up. Sometimes precautions worked. Sometimes rebels or government troops shot at relief planes. Sometimes planes — rattletrap workhorses to start with — failed and fell to the savannah below.
The phone began ringing again.
Below, men, women, and children had been waiting for food for days, sitting on their haunches, a silent crowd an eighth of a mile deep. Some had walked a hundred miles to reach the huge field, an arbitrary rectangle of grass. Looking up at us was a sea of hungry faces smeared with chalky dung powder, natural protection against sand flies. Twelve thousand eyes watched this afternoon’s lone contribution to the bucket brigade of aid planes feeding four hundred thousand Africans at the junction of Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan, amid drought last year, flooding this year, and a thirty-year-old civil war.
Gravity did the job. The bags began to slide down the track, sluggish at first, then faster, food going down a gullet. The palettes and sacks tumbled out to separate and drop like bombs toward the veldt, where UN food monitors kept the crowd and a crew of TV journalists from running onto the drop zone, for a better shot, or for the food.
Last week a news show host from Copenhagen had done just that, stupidly had run onto the field to be on camera when the sacks hit the ground. Too late, she realized the bags were falling directly toward her. She tried to run, but her high heels snagged and a bag smashed her legs, and Eddie and I helped to amputate them back at the base.
She’d been airlifted home, a twenty-five-year-old blond beauty who had only weeks before appeared in Scandinavian magazine ads, and now would be fitted with artificial legs, who had considered Africa a form of entertainment or career advancement, and had come to see that it represented a more basic role than that.
What happens here threatens the world.
The ringing started up again as the plane stabilized and the remaining inboard port engine coughed. We limped toward home. I answered and went still, shocked when I heard who was calling. I’d thought today’s mission was over. But what was starting would turn my world — the whole world — upside down.
My name is Joe Rush and I’m a medical doctor, all right, but also a retired Marine colonel who occasionally goes back on duty to do jobs for my old unit in D.C. My records have been sheep dipped, given selective truths. Kid from a Massachusetts town, that part is true, as is the ROTC training and Parris Island and later assignments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Iraq. Marksman, the file says, capable of running a field op. True. Forty-one years old. Divorced by a wife who got tired of secrecy. I live alone now in the town where I grew up and I advise the Wilderness Medicine group at Harvard two days a week on medical work in “difficult” areas of the world. The file looks complete, to an outsider.