The yardmaster was taking a correspondence course in accountancy from a British school in Manchester. After a long delay occasioned by his mail’s having been held up, there being official displeasure between the governments of Great Britain and Uganda, three lessons had just arrived at once, and he was busily at work on them, between phone calls from dissatisfied customers. Glancing up from an extremely tricky problem in taxable versus tax-exempt interest income with or without compounding at various rates, he frowned at the stationmaster and then at the clock. “I just don’t know what’s happened,” he said. “Could they be broken down?”
“They would phone us from a signal box.”
“Let me call Iganga again,” the yardmaster said, reaching for the phone, and when he got through to the Iganga stationmaster he said, “What time did that coffee train go through there?”
(Beside the track, seventeen miles away, Young Mr. Balim called, “Frank! The first question!”)
“Twelve-fifty-five,” the Iganga stationmaster said.
“It hasn’t been through here yet. No word of trouble up there?”
“Not a thing. Did they break down, do you suppose?”
“They’d phone us.”
“What’s happened, then?”
“No idea. I’ll call you back.”
The yardmaster then tried to call the only other intervening station, just a few miles away at Magamaga, but there was no one on duty in the other office there, and the phone rang uselessly in the locked room.
The yardmaster hung up. He thought for a few seconds, while staring sightlessly at his accountancy problem, and then sighed. “I should go look,” he said.
“You think so?” The stationmaster, though he might regret the interesting days of hard work, did not believe in rushing unnecessarily in the direction of labor. “Why borrow trouble?” he asked.
“Oh, well, it’s my duty, you know.” Getting unhappily to his feet, closing his lesson book, and putting it away in his center desk drawer, the yardmaster put on his official dark-blue jacket and round hat and wheeled his bicycle out from beside the filing cabinet. (It was kept in here to protect it from thieves.) “I keep hoping I’ll hear it coming,” he said. “Ah, well. At least you can take my calls while I’m gone.”
The yardmaster walked his bicycle out to the gleaming tracks in the sunlight, and looked both ways. No train. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked away eastward as far as he could see, and there was no train. In the opposite direction, the bridge over the Nile stretched out, empty and inviting. Behind him were the Jinja yards, dotted with aging goods wagons and just a few tottering old Class 13 shunting locomotives. All around, the town of Jinja slept quietly in after-lunch warmth.
The yardmaster climbed on his bicycle. Bending over the handlebars, he pedaled away slowly along the tracks toward Iganga.
The plane was a Boeing 707, old and sloppy, maintained just well enough to pass the required insurance and governmental codes. Ellen had familiarized herself with it this morning and didn’t consider she would be putting herself at any particular risk in flying it, either to Djibouti or across the Atlantic, though it would likely be considerably less fun than Balim’s little twin-engine six-seater. Now, dawdling over a late lunch in the coffee shop, she could look out the tall windows at the plane, and the other seven planes, all parked in a row on the tarmac. Three more 707s, one Lockheed C-130, and three Douglas DC-9s; a complete grab bag of not-quite-obsolete cargo planes.
At the table with Ellen were the other three members of the crew. The pilot and flight mechanic were both Americans; they had brought the plane in from the States yesterday. They were named Jerry (pilot) and Dave (flight mechanic), and they were both amiable laconic men who found the presence of a female copilot amusing, but not in a derogatory way. The navigator was a silent morose Italian named Augusto, who merely became more silent and more morose when Jerry and Dave decided his name was Gus.
Jerry, who wore a bushy moustache and a prominent thick wedding band, had made it clear last night, and again this morning, that he could take an interest in Ellen, given the slightest encouragement. Dave, who had the shock of unruly hair of the born sidekick, had made it clear that he felt Jerry had seen her first. Ellen had never been interested in such Rover Boy types, and her lack of response was only intensified by the fact that she was spending all her time worrying about Lew.
Which was unfair, damned unfair. When you break up with a man, he isn’t supposed to force you to go on thinking about him by immediately flinging himself into danger. No matter what Ellen might want to do or think about, she was limited to this: she would sit here in Entebbe Airport and wonder if the coffee would show up. If it did, she would then have to wonder what that meant. And if it didn’t, she would have to wonder if the hijack had gone smoothly.
If I had his address, she thought crossly, trying to follow an anecdote of Jerry’s about flying Air America in Laos back when opium was the most important cargo, I’d send him a letter bomb.
Someone was approaching across the nearly empty coffee shop. How will they phrase it? Ellen wondered, and invented a monologue: We’re sorry, but you can go home now. Somebody took our coffee. They got away clean. Thank you and good-bye.
It was the waitress. She said, “Would you like more coffee?”
At twenty past two, Chase and the Mercedes-Benz were nearly to the Rwanda border east of Kabale, near the Rwandan town of Kagitumba. Once safely across the border, he would drive the less than eighty miles to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, where he would be able to charter a plane for anywhere. Probably he would choose to continue westward to Kinshasa, capital of Zaire, from where he could take a commercial flight to Europe.
From Kampala, Chase had driven southwest and then south around Lake Victoria. At Masaka, eighty-five miles from Kampala, he had stopped at the village market to buy fruit and beer and a few pieces of greasy cooked chicken. At Rakai, thirty miles farther on, he had turned off onto a dirt lane leading in to tiny Lake Kijanebalola, where he had found an isolated place in which to remove the two back door panels, stuff his money and jewelry and secondary papers into the window wells, and replace the panels.
After Rakai, Chase had taken minor roads westward, in the general direction of Lake Idi Amin. At Gayaza he’d turned south again, avoided the Tanzanian border running along the Kagera River, and now at last he found himself on the threshold of Rwanda.
The border station was a small shed of concrete block and various mud huts with thatched roofs. Several children playing in the dirt remained hunkered on the ground but watched with silent intensity as Chase left the air-conditioned splendor of the Mercedes for the humid heat of the real world.
There was nothing here, nothing but the shed and the huts, the tentative, worn blacktop of the road, the red-and-white border pole barrier, the children, the tan dusty soil, the single telephone line strung high on narrow wooden poles, a faint smell of some sort of flesh burning. As Chase strode toward the shed, perspiration already starting on his forehead and in the small of his back, a plump dark man bustled out of one of the huts, rubbing sleep from his eyes and pulling on his uniform coat. He was hatless and barefoot. “Jambo, jambo!” he cried.