“Where is he?”
“Near Kabale.”
“Ah! Trying to escape into Rwanda, was he? Who caught him?”
“The border guard there. Sergeant Auzo. A very good type of man, sir.”
“I was a sergeant,” Amin said reflectively. A vision of the sink from which he’d emerged shone briefly like black steel in his eyes. “I like to encourage the better men in the ranks,” he said. “Send me his name.”
“Yes, sir, at once.”
“And when shall I have my hands on Captain Chase?”
“Ah,” said Major Okwal. “Unfortunately, Sergeant Auzo is shorthanded; he doesn’t feel he has a proper or a secure escort to return Captain Chase.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” Amin nodded, eyes brooding at the opposite wall. “We shall want this fellow back posthaste,” he said, using the English word, which had for him a tone of officially demanded speed that no Swahili word could convey.
“Of course, Excellency.”
“Send me—Hmmm. What of Colonel Juba?”
“No sign, Excellency.”
“He wasn’t with Chase, then?” It had seemed to Amin that Chase had either murdered Juba or corrupted him, and that both were equally possible. He would have thought that of any man.
“Oh, no, sir,” Major Okwal said. “The colonel and his two aides are both completely missing.”
“And his two aides?” Amin couldn’t help but smile; he couldn’t help but admire a villain as vicious as Chase. It would be a pleasure to break him. “Send me General Kekka,” he said.
“Yes, Excellency. At once, sir.”
Amin hung up and sat brooding a long moment, the leftover smile still visible on his face. His hands moved together as though cracking nuts.
General Ali Kekka was a very tall and very thin man of fifty-three, a southern Sudanese very much of the breed called Nubian. His skin was quite dark and lusterless; his cheeks were sunken; his eyes looked at the world without expression. Amin knew that two years ago General Kekka had gone to Mulago Hospital complaining of headaches, that a brain tumor had been diagnosed and an immediate operation urged, and that General Kekka had refused, out of a primitive fear of the knife. The tumor would kill Kekka within the next few years, but in the meantime he was a coiled spring, a man of such sudden, brutal violence that even the men who worked with him at the Bureau were made afraid. Even Amin, who found his affliction useful, felt a sense of wariness in the presence of Ali Kekka.
They sat together on the porch of the Old Command Post, from which the young airmen had been banished now that Amin had more serious things to think about. “Ali,” Amin said, “our friend Baron Chase has turned against us.”
“Of course he has,” Kekka said. “Every white man will turn against you. And most blacks.”
“He has stolen from me,” Amin said, his manner patient and slow-moving, like a man training a hunting dog. “He has some plot against me which I don’t know yet.”
“We’ll ask him.”
“Yes, we will. Ali, he tried to run away, he was caught down on the Rwanda border. I want you to go down there, take a platoon of men, and bring him back.”
“Yes, Field Marshal.”
“He must be alive when he comes to me; he must be able to talk.”
“Yes, I agree.”
“Take him to my office at the Bureau building. Draw as little attention as possible.”
“Then is it the VIP treatment?”
“Not yet,” Amin said. “When you bring him back, Ali, call me at once. I shall deal with my little Baron personally.”
Amin stood on the porch looking down at Kekka’s black Mercedes as it wound away down the drive toward the road. He smiled in anticipation. It was not quite three o’clock.
“Your Excellency?”
Amin turned to see who was in the doorway, and found Moses, the cheerful servant whose job it was to tell him bad news. “Yes, Moses?”
“Ah, Your Excellency,” Moses said, his normal ebullience stripped away, leaving him sad and troubled. “Bewildering bad news, Your Excellency.”
Amin took a step forward. Had they bungled, had they accidentally killed Chase? Or had he gotten away again? “What is it, Moses?”
“The train,” Moses said, and shrugged as though to absolve himself of blame. “The coffee train.”
Relieved that it wasn’t about Chase after all, it was nothing of importance, Amin said, “What about the train?”
Moses wrong his hands. “It’s gone!”
Amin failed to understand. “What’s that you say?”
“Oh, Excellency!” Moses cried, instinctively backing away. “Somewhere between Iganga and Jinja, the great huge train was magicked! It’s gone entirely! Disappeared!”
51
Thirty-two freight cars made a stylized curving scrawl down from the beginning of the spur line past the maintenance depot, over the turntable, down to the end of the permanent track, and on out the temporary rails almost to the lip of the gorge. From the air they were virtually invisible, except that if you knew where the train was, you would understand the occasional glint of reflected sunlight up through the trees.
Each car contained approximately four hundred sacks of coffee of one hundred thirty pounds weight, for a total of twenty-six tons. In all, the train carried just about seven hundred fifty tons of coffee. Each truck could carry no more than twenty tons at a time, so two round trips from them all would be necessary. But that also involved twice shifting seven hundred fifty tons of coffee by hand: from the train to the trucks, and again from the trucks to the rafts. It was going to take several hours, and during most of that time they could expect to be the object of a very determined search.
Lew had posted Isaac as sentry with a walkie-talkie up where the access road crossed the railway line. Young Mr. Balim, with the other walkie-talkie, sat like a slender young Humpty Dumpty atop one of the freight cars, where he could command a view of the entire scene and attract everybody’s attention if necessary. One of the ex-railwaymen stood on the roof of the first car, his hand on the big flat wheel of the brake. Four trucks had been driven in to the depot and backed up to the first four cars, and now they were being hastily loaded by over fifty men, including Frank and Charlie and Lew.
The first loading job went quickly. They were exhilarated from their success in capturing the train, and they were still fresh, the earlier track work forgotten. It was not quite three in the afternoon when they started, and in twenty minutes the trucks were full. Immediately three men piled into the cab of each, with Frank and Charlie in the lead truck, and the vehicles groaned away over Ellen’s Road, their wheels digging deep into the logs and brush, mashing everything down to a mulchlike muddy smoothness.
As soon as the first trucks were out of the way, another four were driven in, turned around, and backed up to the same freight cars, which were now less than half full.
With twelve fewer in the work crew, this second group of trucks took longer to load. But there was a reward ahead for those who still labored here, because, when the trucks were just over one-quarter full, these four freight cars were empty. Jamming the big sliding doors open on both sides of the cars, everybody jumped out onto the ground, chattering and laughing together because they knew what was going to happen next.
Young Mr. Balim climbed down to the ground, where Lew said, “You could have stayed up there and just walked back a few cars.”
“If an error occurs,” Young Mr. Balim said, “I prefer to watch it from here.”
Up on the train roofs, two of the ex-railwaymen were tightening down the brakes on the fifth and sixth cars, while down below a third unhooked the coupler between cars four and five. The other ex-railwayman, having loosened the brake on the first car, stood poised to do the same atop the second. The word was yelled to him, and with a flourish he spun the wheel.