The shock of the thing was manifold. Just the reminder that I'd not so long ago been involved in so insidious an enterprise was, of course, disquieting now that I was away from it. But even more, I knew that from that moment on any news report I might happen to read or see, no matter how momentous its details, might be a lie; and the flimsy connection to reality that I had carefully nursed during my weeks of hiding began to fall away. I took to drinking heavily, telling myself that it was simply to blend in with and secure the goodwill of the locals so that none of the regional constabularies would think to send my face out over the Net or run my discs through the universal DNA database. But in truth I had nothing else with which to relieve the utter alienation. As I made my way down into the lower part of the Italian peninsula, I descended into severe alcoholic confusion, and when it became difficult to obtain money due to the unreliability of electronic banking in that near-anarchic part of the country, the confusion became degradation. By the time I reached lawless Naples, I looked as though I belonged on its streets; and it was only a chance sighting of a meaningless piece of wall decoration in a decrepit bar that changed things.
In a stupor, I looked up from the redolent table on which I'd been resting my addled head for the better part of an hour one evening to see a yellowing poster that advertised the beauties of Africa. The thing was, of course, some forty years old, a relic from the time when what in recent years the public and media had once again taken to calling the Dark Continent had not been almost depopulated by tribal wars and the AIDS epidemic; but it nonetheless ignited my drunken imagination. Wild visions of a land of lush jungles, windswept savannahs, and marvelous wildlife — all of it uninfected by the plague of information technology, since Africa was the principal island in the analog archipelago — took an iron hold on my debilitated mind in the days that followed, and I even spent one night trying to sober up in order to determine if the idea of going there had any merit at all. I found to my great surprise that it did, although sobriety also brought a realistic appraisal of contemporary Africa's afflictions. But I decided that I would rather take my chances with disease and war than with imprisonment and insanity. I therefore cleaned myself up, took on the identity of a respectable American businessman with a bad gambling habit, and found my way to a notorious Neapolitan loan shark. Thinking me a safe risk who would stray no farther than the local high-stakes games, this man proved more than willing to provide the U.S. dollars I needed to achieve my desperate purpose.
During my weeks as a habitué of the city's worst drinking and drug-dealing dens, I had made the acquaintance of two particularly unsavory French pilots who ran guns to various parts of the analog archipelago and who spent their downtime in Naples because they could get exceptionally potent heroin and hashish on its streets. Returning to one of their haunts, I discovered that they were delivering a shipment to, of all places, Afghanistan, but that they were expected back within the week. Those next days were restless but hopeful ones for me, as I became more convinced than ever that I would soon be in territory that the information revolution had passed over, where all the complex philosophical and social issues that had put my life in such a state of upheaval would not hold sway, and to which continual rehashings of the destruction of Moscow — and the attendant speculation about the mysterious "phantom ship" that had been detected in the area of that disaster — would not penetrate.
As I dried out and began to invest my money in travel books rather than drink, I even went so far as to imagine that I might start a new life in Africa; this despite the constant reminders of those same books that most of the species of wildlife that had once brought tourists to the continent were now extinct and that because of widespread disease and unrest, any foreign travelers who still wanted or needed to visit the area must receive copious inoculations and stay in constant touch with either their country's consulates or representatives of the United Nations. These latter admonitions I could not, of course, heed: the first because it would have meant offering a doctor a DNA sample, the second for even more obvious reasons. Still, desperately attached to my dreams, I proceeded with my preparations with a dedication I can only describe as feverish.
When the two French pilots finally returned from Afghanistan, they were initially in no mood to hear about ferrying passengers to Africa, regardless of how much money I offered. For a time it seemed that my plan would never be executed; but luck, or what I took for luck, soon swung my way, and the men received an offer from a local dealer to deliver a large shipment of small arms to the man whose tribal forces currently occupied the Rwandan capital of Kigali. After stipulating that they would deliver the goods by airdrop only — for no one outside Rwanda, not even other Africans, could any longer be persuaded to touch down in the pestilential ruins of that city, where local forces battled in streets strewn with rotting corpses like dogs fighting over a poisoned bone — the pilots struck their deal. They then informed me that they intended to make a refueling stop in Nairobi after their drop; if I was willing to accept Kenya as my point of entry into Africa, they would be willing to take me along, provided I still had the large amounts of cash we had earlier discussed.
Thus it was that I found myself two days later lying atop several packed parachutes, which were in turn laid out across a half-dozen crates of shamefully obsolete French weapons. To avoid the interminable savagery of the Sudanese civil war, the plane had flown above the Red Sea as far as the Eritrean coast, where it was safe to go inland: war, famine, and plague had wiped out virtually the entire population of not only Eritrea but Ethiopia beyond. A mad dash across war-torn Uganda was to be the last leg of our inbound flight, a dangerous maneuver for which the two Frenchmen apparently thought they could best prepare themselves by mainlining the large amount of heroin they'd brought along with them. All this would have made life interesting enough; the addition of antiaircraft fire elevated the experience to terrifyingly riveting. The pilots were scarcely up to normal flying conditions by then, much less a fully lethal combat situation, and when we took a direct hit to one of our engines and began to lose altitude precipitously, they began to shout at each other so violently and incoherently that I couldn't see any way the situation was salvageable. The pilots, however, apparently could: one of them seized a pistol, raced back to where I lay, and, holding the gun to my head before I could manage to get one of my own sidearms out of my bag, ordered me into one of the parachutes. Apparently I had been deemed disposable ballast, and though I tried to argue in broken French, it was clear that if I didn't comply the man would simply shoot me and throw me out. Under the circumstances, I jumped.
That my landing near what I later learned were the Murchison Falls cost me only a mildly fractured left tibia was actually miraculous, given that I'd never before parachuted from a plane and had been forced to make my maiden jump over the spectacularly beautiful but utterly treacherous terrain of central Africa. Of course, even a mild fracture of the tibia can be exceptionally painful, and as I gathered both my wits and my few possessions after landing I began to groan with increasing volume: a mistake. Elements of the force that had been shooting at our plane had apparently followed my parachute's decent, hoping for a prize captive. Doubtless they would have been disappointed to get only me, a disappointment spared them by my rather liberal use of the stun pistol that I wasted no time getting into my hand.