They climbed in and, as he went through the pre-flight, she thought about this extraordinary man and what he had just said to her. Robert Gardiner had started out as a schoolteacher in his native Guyana but he had spent the long vacations working for Save the Children and had proved himself such an able organiser and administrator that he had been employed full-time by the organisation. During the succeeding years he had moved from organisation to organisation, retaining links with each one he passed through. He still had contacts with Save the Children, and with UNICEF, with the World Health Organisation and with the World Food Programme. But he was now a field man for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, specialising in identifying the next likely trouble spots where refugees would result. Specialising in finding the potential flashpoints and trying to put them out.
Which was what he had been talking about earlier. Here they were in a situation already too familiar to him, to her, to anyone who cared to look around the world. A country which had hidden its tribal divisions beneath a veneer of good government, where increasing wealth and national hope was suddenly confronted with anarchy, poverty and despair. A country once strong enough to stand alone, now in danger of falling victim to rapacious neighbours; where millions, desperate and hopeless, were on the verge of becoming the playthings of civil and cross-border warfare. And it was here. Now. The whole situation was simmering on the edge of explosion. How it would come and where was impossible to tell. When would it come? Soon. A day. A week. A month at most. The UN could see it coming, warned by Robert Gardiner and their other representatives on the ground, and there was apparently much bustling in New York as they tried to find some way of slowing down the inevitable slide to costly conflict. But no one quite knew what they were up to and when relief would arrive.
The UN were not the only people involved. There were all too many people who could see immense gains to be had out of anarchy in Mau. And they were out there too. For every Robert Gardiner there were others with much more sinister motives plotting to undo his work.
It was 450 degrees Fahrenheit now, today. And someone was trying to turn the temperature up.
She had come across some rumours last week but hadn’t really understood their full significance. She knew the rough history of the country, knew more detail than most Westerners because she researched her assignments so thoroughly, but it was only a couple of evenings ago when she had been talking to Robert about her interviews that the full significance had emerged.
The plane rumbled down the runway and swooped up into the air. She looked across at Robert but he was still deep in conversation with the control tower. She closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye she could see the first woman she had interviewed as clearly as if she had been sitting on the engine cowling just beyond the Cessna’s windshield. She had looked so old. Far too old to be cradling such a little baby, sitting wrapped in rags by a dead acacia by the side of a country road.
Ann had come out in the long-based jeep Cherokee with a guide duly licensed and recommended by the hotel. They had taken a hotel waiter with a supply of food and drink. It had been almost a picnic; an orientation trip, nothing more. At first.
Commissioned by an uneasy alliance of the publishing house who published her best-selling books and an independent TV producer who wanted a combination of grit and glamour, she had agreed to do a special documentary on Mau. Offered a research assistant, she had defiantly decided to do the groundwork herself and had flown out alone, only to realise when it was a little too late just how alone she really was. It was ten days until her film crew were due. She had that time to find her feet and get the outline of the programme clear in her head. She had phoned some of the names on the list of contacts the TV people had given her and had been invited to several garden parties and a literary evening. That was not what she wanted at all so she had approached the hotel manager and he had been more helpful. He had found her the jeep and the driver, at least.
They had driven out of town heading due east along the main highway. She realised now that they must have passed the airport buildings and she had never even noticed the refugees squatting within them. She knew now that she had chosen the last day before the police roadblocks went up — and suspected that her activities might have contributed to their existence. Had she tried to leave the city alone now, today, she would have been quietly but firmly turned back.
When she saw the figures, the long lines of figures walking wearily down the road, she had assumed they were women from the farms nearby come to trade in the city’s markets. She had taken a photograph or two. Like a tourist. This was not her area of expertise; she had made her reputation writing books about the environment further north and the dangers facing those who worked around the shores of the Atlantic — and those who worked in frail ships upon it. This was her first exposure to Africa and she was only just beginning to realise how much she still had to learn.
Then she had come to the first person who did not fit the simple, safe picture presented by the tall figures walking slowly westward with huge bundles on their heads: a withered old crone sitting with a tiny child. It was a scene familiar from countless reports in the press and on television. The woman and child were clearly at the end of their strength. The shock of recognition literally knocked the wind out of Ann’s body.
She had asked her guide, a Kyoga called Saul, to stop and she had climbed down with her tape recorder. Then, on closer inspection, she put the little machine in her pocket and went back for her water bottle. First the skeletal child and then the gaunt woman wet their lips. Their eyes, the only liquid things about them, came back to life a little. She reached for her tape recorder again. ‘I want to speak to her, Saul, can you translate for me?’
‘I am a Kyoga, lady. This is N’Kuru woman.’
‘Can you understand what she says?’
‘I can speak little N’Kuru.’
The servant from the hotel had climbed out by this point. He was hardly more than a boy but he said diffidently, ‘I am N’Kuru, madam. I can understand her.’
Saul climbed back into the jeep, leaving her with the boy and the woman. ‘How did she get here?’
‘She say she walk.’
‘Alone? Where is her family?’
‘The lions took her husband and her brothers. The dust took all the rest.’
Ann rocked back on her heels at that, thinking of some kind of massacre by wild animals. It had not occurred to her that lions might have a capital L. Robert had pointed it out when she played the tape to him later.
‘What about her daughter? The baby’s mother?’
‘It is her child.’
Ann looked deeply into that gaunt, lined face. A kind of horror swept over her.
‘How old is she?’
This took a little computation, a comparison of events and dates, but at last the boy looked up at her. ‘The woman say she is seventeen.’
They had put the N’Kuru woman in the back of the jeep and, much against Saul’s inclination, driven her straight back into Mawanga to the City Hospital. There, rather dazed staff relieved the angry white-skinned woman of the dying bush native and put her and her child in a room well away from the city folk who understood such things as health insurance and the proper ways of becoming ill.
Ann had been standing, lost and deflated in the reception, with the woman gone and Saul nowhere to be seen, suddenly vividly aware that she didn’t even have enough money on her for a cab back to the hotel, when a square stranger with incredibly black skin had walked up to her and grinned.