The four outboard motors on each raft had been yoked together so they could be steered by a single L-shaped arrangement of boards. With the men distributed on each raft and the gangplanks pulled on board, they allowed themselves to drift a bit farther from shore before starting the engines. The first few made a kind of muted snarling sound, easily lost in the immensity of air over the lake, but as more and more engines turned over the quality of the noise changed, and by the time the full forty were running it sounded as though Berkeley Bay had been invaded by all the world’s killer bees. In a straggling line, the ten rafts moved out onto the lake.
Lew and Young Mr. Balim traveled with three other men on the last raft, Lew manning the steering bar. The oil drums were lashed beneath the rafts, broadside to the direction of thrust, and their rounded metal sides slid through the water with a surprising lack of friction. There was no great speed to be had with these rafts, but the smoothness of the journey came as a surprise to them all.
Antismuggling patrols were likely, both ships and helicopters. To help evade them, the big gray tarpaulins were unrolled before the rafts crossed into Ugandan territorial waters at Sigulu Island, covering the passengers and supplies so that no reflection from metal, no distinctive shape, would give them away. Now the rafts had become twenty-foot-square gray islands, low and lumpy, almost invisible from the air. Lew and the other pilots remained outside the tarpaulins, watching the thin moonlight shatter on the water.
The men had used poles and mounds of supplies to prop up the tarpaulins enough to create tent spaces within, in which they sat and talked together, the soft burr of Swahili resonating out over the lake. Beneath that, and the sputtering roar of the outboard motors, the clicking sound of pebbles meant kalah was being played, in the dark. By touch alone, the players would know how many pebbles were in each of the twelve cups, and what the implications were after each move. Lew had played kalah, but never well, and would never play against these men for money; you had to be born and raised to that game. Like chess masters, the best players knew at all times where all seventy-two pebbles were and what every possible future sequence would create for the next five or six moves. In the old days, entire herds of cattle, hundreds of slaves, even entire kingdoms, were won or lost at kalah.
Young Mr. Balim sat just under the edge of the tarp, his back against two wooden cartons filled with fruit. After a long silence, while he looked back past Lew at the shoreline they were leaving, he said, “Do you know why my father agreed?”
“Did you need his agreement?”
“Ah, yes, I’m afraid so,” Young Mr. Balim said, grinning. “He consented because he saw my restlessness was becoming again too strong, and it was time to give me a small concession. I may be twenty-eight, you know, but I am not my own man. By no means.”
“Why not?”
“Money. I am like a wife, I am dependent on my father.”
“Do you have to be? Can’t you get money on your own?”
“Then I am a house pet,” Young Mr. Balim said, easily shifting his justifications, “too spoiled by the easiness of my life.”
“Then why come along tonight?”
“A conflict.” Young Mr. Balim seemed to spend most of his time laughing at himself. “I want to be a grown-up, but I don’t want to give up the easy life.” Leaning forward, tapping Lew’s boot for emphasis, he said, “Here’s my harebrained scheme. I shall be a party to this escapade. My father will not be able to refuse me some small share of the profits. With that money I shall go back to London and set myself up in some sort of business.”
“London?”
“Oh, yes, I love London. Nowhere else on earth for me. That’s why my father gives me motorcycles instead of cash, you see; so I can’t get away. He wants me to stay in Kisumu and take over his business someday. But what he refuses to think about is that the Kenyans will throw us out.”
“You think so?”
“Why not? The Ugandans did, and there are constant rumors that the Kenyans will, the Tanzanians will. In Zaire it is already almost impossible for an Asian to live. They’ll throw us out of all of Africa someday, you wait and see.”
“You could be right,” Lew agreed.
“And what price our Kisumu warehouses then? Oh, but London!” Young Mr. Balim beamed. “The worst they will do in London is insult me.” Mimicking some nasal voice calling a dog, he said, “Here, Paki; there, Paki; go away now, Paki.” He laughed and said, “So they call me Paki. I was born in Uganda of a man who was born in Uganda of a man who was born in India, but that’s all right, I’m a Paki. And even a Paki can go to the West End, can shop in Harrods, can buy a little maisonette in Chelsea. A Paki can open a store, and the English will shop there. A Paki—I know a Paki who opened a little advertising agency for little Paki accounts—little travel agencies and tailors and so on—and he did well, and the English began to hire him. Because they saw he was good, you see, valuable to them. Give me a pragmatic people, and I won’t care what they think of me.”
Smiling, Lew said, “What sort of business will you open?”
“We wait upon opportunity,” Young Mr. Balim said. “First this adventure, and then we settle down to Paki respectability.”
The thirty miles to Macdonald Bay took just over three hours, of which the last part was the most difficult. The rafts weren’t particularly agile and had to be jockeyed into position against a very narrow slice of muddy shoreline. Shutting down three of the four outboard motors on each raft, they eased in very slowly, the others drifting slightly while Frank went first, thudding his raft too hard into the shore, ripping loose one of the oil drums. His men saved the drum, unloaded the raft, and dragged it up onto the shore.
By the time Lew steered the tenth raft toward land, gently nudging the mud flat, the other nine had already been dragged as far as possible beneath the cover of the trees and, under the direction of Isaac and Charlie—a true odd couple, that—the men were further hiding the rafts with tree branches and brush. Once Lew’s final motor was shut down, he could hear the receding whine of another motor going away inland; that would be Frank, traveling by moped up to get the truck.
The next three hours were all logistics, the slogging boring frustrating job of getting all your men and all your supplies to the place where they’ll eventually be needed. Lew knew this phase from many battles in several wars and had long ago learned the only thing to do at such a time was to cease having opinions. It was a mistake to think that such-and-such an event should have happened by now, or that this person should have realized that fact, or even that somehow there should have been a better way.
There was no better way. No matter what you thought or planned, the truck would be overloaded the first time after Frank brought it down from the depot, and it would become mired three miles up from the lake, forcing everybody to trek those three miles, unload the damn truck, drag it out of its muddy ruts, and then reload it again, all by the shifting uncertain beams of several flashlights invariably being aimed at the wrong spot.
It was also inevitable that several fistfights would break out, that the soft ground of their landing site would be churned by all those feet into mud, and that when there weren’t too few men for the unloading at the lake there would be too few for the unloading at the depot. And it was probably even inevitable that the truck, on one of its return trips, would drive over a case of beer, smashing all the bottles and giving itself a flat tire, which also had to be changed by flashlight, the whole area stinking of beer.