Fallout

29

Fisher pulled the Range Rover off the dirt track and beneath the canopy of trees hanging over the plank shack. The hand-painted red and white sign was so faded it was barely legible, but he could just make it out: JIMIYU’S. A scrawny, marginally feathered chicken jumped off the shack’s tin roof and landed with a squawk on the Rover’s hood.

“Adede, go, go!” a male voice called. A black man, standing at least six and a half feet tall, ducked out of the shack’s doorway, waving his hands at the chicken. “Bad girl, bad!” His English had only a slight accent.

The chicken stalked across the hood and hopped down.

Fisher opened the Rover’s door and climbed out. “Mr. Jimiyu?”

“Mr. Barnes?” the man replied, walking forward to shake hands. Jimiyu was rail thin, the bones at his elbows and wrists knobby, and he had perfect, white teeth and lively eyes. “Welcome to Kapedo. How was your drive?”

Fisher had left Nairobi just before dawn. It had taken him nearly six hours to cover the one hundred seventy-five miles to Kapedo. Aly’s warning about highway bandits had been prescient. Twice he’d had to use the vintage M-14 rifle she’d loaned him, once on the road between Nakuru and Nyahururu Falls when an ancient Subaru Brat full of pangawielding teenagers had started tailgating him and gesturing for him to pull over; then again north of Nosoguru, where a trio of men had demanded a toll (they’d wanted the Range Rover itself) for crossing a bridge. In each case, Fisher’s casual brandishing of the M-14 had resolved the debate.

“You had no trouble, yes?” Jimiyu said.

“No trouble.”

“Good, good. And tell me: How is Irving?”

Surprisingly, Fisher’s contact for this final leg of the journey to what he assumed/hoped was the Sunstar’s crash site had come not from the CIA but from Lambert himself, who’d simply given Fisher Jimiyu’s name and a four-word guarantee: “You can trust him.” No explanation offered. When Fisher had pressed him for an explanation, Lambert simply winked and said, “Another time.”

“He sends his regards.” Fisher walked to the rear of the Rover, lifted the hatch, and pulled out his backpack. “He had a message for you.”

“Oh?”

“He said, ‘Barasa is doing fine.’ ”

Jimiyu clapped his hands once and grinned broadly. “Excellent. Come, follow me. We’ll have something to eat, then be on our way. With great luck, I will have you there before nightfall.”

An hour later, Jimiyu led Fisher down a jungle trail to a plank-and-tire dock at the river’s edge. Bobbing gently on the river’s muddy brown surface was a circa World War II eighteen-foot U.S. Navy motor whaleboat sporting a fresh coat of battleship gray paint and a pair of trolling motors sitting on a transom board in the stern.

“Nice,” Fisher said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I found it,” Jimiyu said proudly, his teeth flashing. Fisher cocked his head at the Kenyan. “Truly,” Jimiyu added. “I was fishing near Tangulbe when it came floating down the river. It was empty and barely afloat. A ghost dhow. I swam out, towed it back to shore, then a friend with a truck helped me bring it here. I fixed it, and here it is,” he finished, spreading his hands as though unveiling a magic trick.

“How fast?”

“Twenty-four kilometers per hour. With extra fuel cans, we can go nearly two hundred forty kilometers.”

Fisher did the conversion in his head: about fourteen miles per hour for 150 miles. It would be just enough to reach the crash site and get back to Kapedo. From here all the way to Lake Turkana they would be crossing through the Eastern Rift Valley and Great Rift Valley, which as a whole ran over 3,500 miles, from Syria in the north to Mozambique in south. Formed by the sinking and tearing of the earth’s crust along a tectonic plate that was fifty million years old, the Rift Valley was an ecosystem unto itself, ranging in elevation from 6,000 feet above sea level here in Kenya to 1,400 feet below sea level at the shores of the Dead Sea, and ranging in width from less than a mile to more than one hundred miles.

On the flight to Nairobi, Fisher had studied satellite maps of the area. The seventy miles of river from Kapedo to Peter’s mystery coordinates flowed ever downward through thick, triple-canopy jungle, boiling gorges, and past towering escarpments, until bottoming out at nearly six hundred feet below sea level in a valley that probably hadn’t seen more than a hundred white footprints in its history. If that’s where the Sunstar had gone down, it was no wonder it had remained lost for almost sixty years.

Jimiyu climbed into the stern, and Fisher handed him the extra fuel and water cans, four steel ammunition boxes full of rations and supplies, then cast off the lines and jumped in. Jimiyu braced his bony leg against the dock, pushed off, then pull-started the engines and opened the throttle.

For the next two hours they glided down the river, passing villages and other boats, most of them narrow-beamed fishing dhows. Jimiyu seemed to know everyone, waving and smiling and calling out in Swahili as they passed by, but for the most part the river was empty of traffic. Jimiyu whistled to himself, one hand on the throttle, the other resting on the stock of a vintage Mauser bolt-action rifle. Though his expression was one of contentment, Fisher could see his eyes constantly scanning, from the riverbanks and across the muddy brown water ahead and to the sides.

“Crocodiles?” Fisher asked at one point.

“Oh, yes, very big. And koboku,” he said, and opened his mouth wide and chomped down. “Hippo, too. Watch for floating logs. They might not be logs, understand?”

“I understand,” Fisher said and fingered his own rifle. Though opinions varied, it was widely accepted that hippos killed more people in Africa than all other animals combined. A bull hippo can weigh as much as six thousand pounds, has razor-sharp tusks, a nasty disposition, and can run, at a sprint, over thirty miles per hour.

Fisher couldn’t help but smile. Throughout his career he’d been shot at, stabbed, clubbed, and everything in between. He’d jumped from airplanes at thirty-five thousand feet, piloted minisubmarines, and technically invaded dozens of countries. For some reason, the idea of being killed by a hippo while tooling down a jungle river in the Great Rift Valley while trying to solve one of the twentieth century’s most enduring mysteries amused him. All things considered, there were worse ways to go.

Sam Fisher, koboku fodder.

“There!” Jimiyu called, pointing toward the bank. “Koboku!”

To the left in a shallow cove, were a dozen curved brown backs jutting from the water. As one, lined up as though waiting for a show to start, the hippos studied them, eyes barely visible above the surface of the water, ears twitching.

Jimiyu put the rudder over, steering right to give the pod a wide berth. He caught Fisher’s astonished expression and grinned. “Impressive, are they not?”

Fisher could only nod, eyes still fixed on the gallery of hippos receding in their wake. Each one had been the size of a VW Beetle.

A few minutes later, Jimiyu said, “Irving tells me you are looking for a plane.”

“That’s true.”

“The Sunstar.”

“Yes.”

“Old legend, that one.”

“What’s your opinion?” Fisher asked. “You know the area we’re headed?”

Jimiyu thought for a moment, biting the inside of his lip. “Yes, very well. Many people have come looking for the Sunstar, but no one’s looked in this place yet.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

Fisher didn’t respond. From his expression, Jimiyu seemed to be still considering his answer. “I think it is either lost in the Rift or somewhere in Turkana. Lake Turkana, you know.”

“I know.”

“That lake — everyone thinks it is very shallow. Mostly it is, but there are parts that aren’t so shallow.” He grinned knowingly. “If we do not find it here, you and I, we will rent a submarine and look in Turkana, okay?”

Fisher smiled back. “Okay.”