Kahawa

44

Eight a.m. The train—locomotive, tender, twenty-seven coffee-laden cars—pulled out of the yards at Soroti, headed south. A brief sprinkle before sunrise had left the world sparkling clean. The engineer and fireman, drinking their after-breakfast beer and feeling the deep vibration of the locomotive as it pulled eight hundred tons of coffee over the shining rails, sang happy songs together as they sailed along the track through the green countryside. They called to pretty schoolgirls crossing the fields toward the main road, carrying their books against their breasts. Some of the girls waved back.

Lew stood aside while the four men who’d built this blind carefully removed it, pulling it downhill and to the left, leaning it against a tangle of shrubbery. “Very pretty,” he said, and stepped through the magic doorway in the jungle to look at the railroad track. “Very pretty indeed.”

Young Mr. Balim, who claimed to speak Swahili sufficiently well for the task, had assigned himself to Lew as translator. Following through the gap, he said, “My goodness. To hear about it is one thing, but to see it is something else.”

“Bathar, tell them this is a very very pretty structure. They did a Grade A job.”

Young Mr. Balim’s translation was at least close enough to wreathe the faces of the four men in proud smiles. They did a lot of nodding and pointing and talking, all of which Young Mr. Balim translated as “They say they had much difficulty, but they knew the job was very important.”

“They did just fine. Thank them again.”

While that was going on, Lew studied the rails. Unlike American track, which is laid with staggered joints so that each joint is always at the midpoint of the opposite rail, the British habitually lay track with parallel joints. This practice makes for a marginally less solid line, but it does come in handy for hijackers intending to divert the track. “These joints here,” Lew said to Young Mr. Balim, having walked down the line a bit to the west. “This is where we’ll open the track. Ask them if they agree.”

Young Mr. Balim posed the question, which Lew had asked since after all these men had been hired for their railway experience. And the answer was “Yes, they say that’s the place they had in mind.”

The up freight had gone by two hours ago, just after dawn, when the brief rain was stopping. The railway was theirs. “We might as well get the work crew up here,” Lew said, “and get started.”

Isaac, in his Ugandan Army captain’s uniform, approached the truck, where Frank was suspiciously watching the twenty men chosen as drivers select clothing out of the boxes before climbing aboard. He looked as though he suspected them of lying about their ability to drive; which was in fact possible. Isaac said, “How does it look?”

“What? Oh, the uniform. Fine,” Frank said. “You could strike terror in my heart at forty paces wearing that.”

“That’s reassuring,” Isaac said.

“Good. Charlie!”

A part of Mazar Balim’s business was a brisk trade in Army surplus and used clothing, which was where all the stuff in the boxes had come from. Charlie was helping the men find military-style clothing that fit, though what Charlie knew about right-fitting clothing was anybody’s guess. He looked up at Frank’s voice, said, “Yes, Frank?” and trotted over to receive instructions.

“Tell those clowns,” Frank said, “we want those uniforms back.”

“Okay, sure.”

“Those duds are for sale in the shop in Kisumu, they’re supposed to go back on the shelf when we’re done, so they shouldn’t get ’em all dirty and fucked up.”

“Okay, fine.”

Something about Charlie’s translation struck the men funny; Isaac, listening, faintly smiled, until he saw Frank glowering at him, beetle-browed. “Did he tell ’em what I said?”

“Oh, sure,” Isaac said, and in essence Charlie had delivered Frank’s message. Isaac thought it better if Frank remained unaware of the details. He said, “Couldn’t we speed up this loading process?”

Frank grinned at him. “In a hurry to get started?”

“No,” Isaac said truthfully, “I’m in a hurry to get it over with.”

The bank opened at nine-thirty, and Chase was its first customer, striding in with smiling confidence, greeting the assistant manager by name, handing him the forged request chit from Idi Amin for five thousand dollars U.S., in cash. (That, Chase knew, was the highest amount the assistant manager would give him without telephone verification.) “While you’re getting it,” Chase went on, “I’ll just visit my box.”

“Certainly. Of course. Miss Ngana? Would you take Mr. Chase to the safe-deposit boxes?”

Chase had always assumed that Amin knew what was in his safe-deposit box, so he’d never kept anything there but some jewels and personal identification. These he now removed, so that when he returned upstairs with the willowy Miss Ngana, he carried in his pockets about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of ivory figurines and small pieces of jewelry in gold.

The small canvas packet was waiting on the assistant manager’s desk. Approaching, Chase was overcome by a huge yawn. “Very sorry,” he said, when he could. Not wanting to risk a return to his own house, he’d spent last night with a whore of his acquaintance, who had insisted on giving him his money’s worth.

“Not at all,” the assistant manager said, smiling. “Many mornings I feel the same myself.”

“Coffee, that’s what I need.” Chase smiled his secret smile.

“And less love life,” the assistant manager said, beaming broadly and nervously to show he had dared a joke.

“That, too. Well, good morning.”

“Good morning, Mr. Chase.”

Outside, Chase strode briskly to the Mercedes he’d commandeered last night from the Bureau building’s parking lot. Stuffing the bag of money under the front seat, he started the engine and drove quickly away. He still had three more banks to visit, plus several shops.

Even success, though, had its bitter taste. Amin is taking millions out of this rotten country, Chase thought, and I’m taking thousands. Big fish, little fish. Ah, well; we all eat as much as we can.

Frank didn’t realize it, but when he shinnied up a telephone pole wearing earphones connected to a dangling ball of wire he looked like some sort of bear act in the circus. That’s why there was so much snickering going on below. He suspected the racket had something to do with him, however, and resolved to kick ass just as soon as he got to the ground.

The Ugandan telephone system had last been cared for by the British sixteen years ago. Since then, there had been very little maintenance and absolutely no upgrading. Half the glass insulators were broken or stolen, and the old wires themselves were frayed. The service box was dented and rusty, but when Frank opened it the old diagrams and layout in English inside the door were still readable. Still, he had to attach the alligator clips several times before he found the direct line from the railroad office at Jinja. “My, how they chatter,” he said aloud.

Between the earphones and the alligator clips was a thirty-foot ball of wire, much more than enough to reach from here to the ground. Looking down, Frank saw Charlie directly below, gesticulating and grimacing for an appreciative audience. Taking careful aim, he dropped the earphones and was gratified to see them bounce off Charlie’s head. “Watch out below!” he called amiably, then double-checked that the alligator clips were firmly in place, shut the service-box door, and shinnied back down the pole.

Ten-fifteen. If the train could be said to have a schedule, it was running ahead. There was something about the sunniness of the morning, the clarity of the air, that made even lazy people feel like working. The one car at Okungulo and the two cars at Kumi had been attached almost before the train was completely stopped, and now the same thing was happening at Kachumbala with its one car. The train was now thirty-one freight cars in length; only the two at Mbale were left to pick up. “We’ll be in Kampala before dinner-time,” the engineer said.

“If nothing goes wrong.”

“On a day like this? What could go wrong?”

Lew had posted one sentry where the access road crossed the track, and the other fifty yards from the work site in the opposite direction, where the curve to the right sharpened. If either of them saw anything, he was to wave his arms energetically over his head. That signal would cause Young Mr. Balim to call out “Chini!” the Swahili word that means “down,” which in turn would cause the work crew, carrying their tools, to scatter off the tracks and take cover in the underbrush on either side. Lew had made them practice this maneuver twice, and believed they understood it. As for Young Mr. Balim, he took his task with utter seriousness, striding back and forth beside the track, frowning first at one sentry and then at the other.

Even with nearly thirty men at work, under the instructions of the four former railway employees, it was a long and cumbersome job. Four spikes had to be levered out of every metal sleeper over a distance of some forty yards; that was nearly a hundred sleepers. The joint plates with their rusty nuts and bolts had to be removed at the point of the break. Then, inch by painful inch, the two lengths of rail, about seven tons of metal in all, had to be pried away from their nests in the sleepers and urged toward their new alignment. To do it, twenty men would stand in a row beside one rail, holding twenty prybars angled under it; at a signal, all twenty would heave upward and the rail would move; not very far, but it would move.

Meanwhile, the rest of the work force was digging shallow trenches for logs to be used as crosspieces on the new trajectory. Not only were one hundred sleepers at seventy pounds apiece too much to move in the time they had, but at the end of the exercise, in order to hide themselves, they would have to put this goddam track back together again.

While Lew oversaw the trackwork with the help of Young Mr. Balim, Frank roamed the entire area of the depot looking for trouble to yell at. Down the track a ways Charlie, now wearing the earphones, hunkered against the telephone pole Frank had climbed, chewing sugarcane stalks as he listened contentedly to the conversations from Jinja railway station. If Frank in earphones on that pole had looked like a performing bear, Charlie in earphones drooling under the pole looked like a performing monkey in the same circus.

By ten-thirty the new spur was beginning to take shape. The southernmost rail had been pried and levered and shoved and inched and cursed into place, up on the logs, angling now leftward away from its original bed, curving over the logs and down to meet the end of the spur track, where it was over two feet too long.

“Shit,” said Lew. “All right, we have to increase the angle up at the other end.”

With several spikes driven in near the spur end to keep that part from moving, the workmen levered the other end back toward the original bed, increasing the angle of the curve. The end of the rail where it lay overlapping the rusty spur seemed to shrink, jerking backward an inch or more at each heave.

“Chini! Chini!”

Young Mr. Balim was so excited at being useful, he was actually hopping up and down, flapping his arms like the young traveler in the Indian tales who sees the djinn. Most of the men wasted a few seconds looking around for Lew, to see if this were another test, but when they saw the sentry at the access road waving his arms over his head they scattered in commendable fashion, leaving nothing behind except a very oddly splayed section of line. The sentry stopped waving and, apparently having already been seen by whoever was coming, hunkered down on his heels beside the track like any unemployed man waiting for a train; not to board it, to look at it.

From his concealment Lew could see the crossing, and what first appeared on it was a cow, ambling along with slow purposefulness as though returning from church. It was tan, tall, long-nosed, big-shouldered, bony-legged, half-wild, looking more like an ox than a cow, and nothing at all like the picture-book black-and-white cows in American fields.

Beside Lew, Young Mr. Balim giggled. Lew shook his head, and the giggling stopped.

Three more similar creatures now appeared, two of them stopping in stupid-cow fashion to graze on the crossing, where there was nothing green. The herder, a gray-brown boy of about seven wearing a crimson shirt and short brown pants and carrying a stick almost twice as long as himself, came up onto the crossing to lecture the dawdlers, his manner that of a patient but disappointed teacher in a class for slow pupils. He and the sentry nodded to one another, and two more cows stepped up onto the crossing, heads nodding as they wondered what the stopped ones had found to eat.

The boy had charge of nine cattle in all, and obviously knew them very well. And they knew him; he merely had to show the stick to get them moving. In three minutes the cattle had finished crossing the track, and a minute later the sentry waved the all clear.

As everybody came back up onto the track, Frank came stomping up the spur line and stopped to give a critical eye to their progress. “Coming along, huh?”

“Slow and unsteady,” Lew said.

Frank nodded, looking at the track. The northern rail was still part of the main line, but the southern rail was curved down to the spur. “I never saw a railroad spread her legs before,” he commented.

I’m getting too cocky, Isaac warned himself. It isn’t this easy; something could go terribly wrong.

But at the moment things were going wonderfully right. The same motor-pool sergeant was in the office, and apparently Isaac had sufficiently cowed him last time, so that today all he wanted was to show how cooperative he could be. “Twenty trucks,” he announced as Isaac walked in on the dot of eleven. “All gassed up and ready.”

“That’s fine,” Isaac said. “I told the General we could count on you.”

“You did? Thank you, that’s very good of you. And accurate, accurate.” Grabbing a clipboard off the wall, the sergeant said, “Come along and look at your trucks. Beauties, every one of them.”

The sergeant had a strange eye for beauty. The twenty trucks lined up on the tan dirt of the yard looked as though they might have taken part in the retreat to Dunkirk: battered, filthy, canvas covers ripped, headlights broken, windshields starred, bumpers missing. Mostly British Leyland, but with a few Volvos and even some Mercedes-Benz and Fiat diesels, they looked more like vehicles coming in to the motor pool for general repair than going out for regular use. But so long as the tires were sound and the engines ran, Isaac wouldn’t complain. “Many general dents and scratches,” he wrote on the form on the sergeant’s clipboard, and signed: “Captain I. Gelaya.”

No old friend appeared today to stop his heart. It was clear that Obed Naya had not turned him in, had kept his own counsel. What had the man thought was going on? If only there were some safe way to get in touch, to thank him, but any contact at all would be dangerous to Obed. A letter or a phone call would attract the wrong attention. It would be a poor thank-you to get his old friend killed.

Once he’d signed for the trucks, he went back to the one he’d driven here and ordered the men out. In their ragbag of army clothing they looked about like the other soldiers at Jinja Barracks. Isaac enjoyed pretending to be a tough officer, barking at the men, ordering them into the trucks. Once he saw that in fact all the engines did work, he thanked the sergeant once more, promised to return the trucks by noon tomorrow, and led the convoy out of the Barracks and eastward out of town.

They were merely an Army convoy, one of the commonest of sights on Ugandan roads. No one gave them a second glance.

At a quarter to twelve, Chase came smiling out of the jewelry shop on Kampala Road. Ugandan shillings would be useless to him after today, so he had just converted most of his into a small but lovely diamond necklace. He should be able to sell it for at least twenty thousand dollars once he got to Europe.

This was his last stop. Eat lunch now, before departure? No; now that things were in motion he was increasingly gripped by a sense of urgency, a strong desire to keep moving. He could stop at a market, buy some food to eat on the way. Deciding that, he returned to the Mercedes, stowed the small flat box containing the necklace in the glove compartment, and drove away from there. Westward, away from Kampala, away from Jinja and the coffee train. Away from Uganda, away from the past. Away from danger.

Frank walked along the track to where Charlie half snoozed, smiling dreamily inside the earphones, listening to the busy talk of the workaday world. It was just noon. “Charlie,” Frank said. “Where’s the train?”

“Oh, hello, Frank. They just called.”

“Who did?”

“Tororo station. Train gone through, making good time.” Frank stared at him. “Gone through Tororo?”

“Sure. Very fast train.”

“Jesus H. Galloping Christ!”

Frank pounded back up the track to where Lew and the workmen were easing that second rail closer and closer to the spur. “Son of a bitch, Lew!” he yelled. “The fucking train’s ahead of schedule!”

Lew looked down the track, as though expecting to see the thing coming. “Where is it?”

“Eighty miles from here. Gone through Tororo already. The bastards are highballing.”

Lew looked around, then bawled, “Bathar!”

Young Mr. Balim appeared, as though from under a sleeper. “Here I am.”

“Tell them,” Lew said, “we’ve got to do this faster. The train’s an hour from here.”

“Oh, my gosh.”

“Not an hour,” Frank said. “They can’t do eighty, not that full.”

“Tell them an hour,” Lew insisted.

While Young Mr. Balim translated—it griped Frank’s ass that a punk like that could rattle off the fucking Swahili—Frank turned and saw an army truck just going over the level crossing. “Isaac’s back! Get these people moving, Lew.”

Frank trotted down the track to the access road, where truck after truck was now lumbering across. Who asked the goddam railroad to run ahead of schedule? Jumping up onto a passing running board, Frank rode down to where Isaac was directing everybody where to park. “Hey, Isaac!”

Isaac waved, grinning from ear to ear, the ultimate schoolboy playing hooky. “No trouble at all,” he called. “I am reborn a highwayman.”

Frank had no time for amenities. “Isaac, the train’s running ahead of schedule. It’s already past Tororo. Get your drivers up to help Lew move that fucking track.”

“Tororo!” Turning away, Isaac started shouting panicky instructions at his drivers. More Swahili.

It was like a conga line, with Lew at the head, Young Mr. Balim behind him, Frank, Isaac, the four ex-railwaymen and the forty-eight laborers. Fifty-six men in a row, all stooping over to grasp the double lip of the rail in both hands, tensing, waiting.

“On three,” Lew called. “You do it, Bathar.”

Young Mr. Balim’s voice sounded clear and musical over the tracks: “Moja! Mbili! TATU!”

The hundred twelve hands gripped; the fifty-six backs strained and lifted; the rail cleared the ground and moved leftward not quite a foot, and fell.

“Again!”

“Moja! Mbili! TATU!”

“Moja! Mbili! TATU!”

“Jesus,” Frank grumbled, “isn’t the fucker there?”

Lew looked down at the two lengths of rail, the main track gleaming, the spur orange-red with rust. We should have guessed, he thought. “It’s there,” he said. “Come take a look.”

While the men all straightened and rubbed their backs, stretching and laughing at one another, Lew and Frank and Isaac and Young Mr. Balim and the ex-railwaymen all stood looking at the rails. Frank said it: “It’s two fucking feet too fucking short.”

Lew sighed. “We took two straight lines,” he said, “and curved them. The outer curve has to be longer than the inner curve to come to the same place.”

“Two feet. We’ll derail the fucking train if we try to run it over that.”

Lew turned to Young Mr. Balim. “These men have been working here for a week. Ask them if they’ve seen any short piece of rail we could fit in there.”

Young Mr. Balim asked the question, but didn’t have to translate the negative headshakes. Frank said, “Goddam son of a bitch dirty bastard.”

Hardly noticing the fact, Lew had taken over. “Frank,” he said, “we didn’t come this far to get stopped by some little gap in the rail. We’ll work something out. You start them driving spikes. Have we got the measure?”

“Right here,” Young Mr. Balim said, picking up the long notched stick they would use to be sure the rails were the right width apart.

“Give it to Frank. You and these guys come with me. There’s got to be something in this depot we can use.”

Frank stood holding the stick Young Mr. Balim had given him. He looked truculent and confused. “Now what?”

Lew said, “Frank, we’ve got the first rail spiked into place. You use the measure to put the second rail the right distance from it, and have the men spike it in. I’ll be right back.”

“Where’s my translator?” Frank was demanding; as Lew led his party down toward the engine shed, Frank overrode Isaac’s attempt to volunteer by bellowing, “Charlie, you asshole, get over here!”

The interior of the engine shed was an agglomeration of half-eaten food, ancient rotting leaves, animal and bird droppings, rusting tools and metal tables, rotted planks and foul woodsmoke. Lew and the other five searched through this mess without result; everything they came up with was either too long or too fragile for the weight it would have to support.

“Something,” Lew said, hands on hips, glaring around. “Something.”

“Not in here,” Young Mr. Balim said.

“Outside, then.”

Outside, beside the shed, there were still a few unused rails, but they were all sixteen-footers. No good. While the others scuffed through the trash beside the building Lew, not knowing what he was looking for, wandered alone down the spur line to the turntable, paused there to look around and see nothing of use, and walked on. The last of the added rails stopped less than five feet from the lip of the gorge. Far below, the water of Thruston Bay could be heard beating against the coastal rocks.

What could they use? Turning back, Lew was starting to retrace his steps when he saw the old buffer that had been removed from the end of the track now lying off to the right in the weeds. A trapezoid around a large thick rusty spring with a black rubber knob on the front, the frame of the buffer was made of lengths of rail!

“Jesus Christ,” Lew said for his own benefit, then yelled, “Bathar! Bring ’em down here!”

There were gaps at both ends of the inserted piece, but neither was more than an inch long. Extra log supports were under the insert, which had been fixed in place with so many spikes it looked as though it had acne.

“All right,” Frank said as he threw away the measure stick. “Now we’ve finally got the welcome mat, let’s go steal the fucking train.”

45

The train ran west from Tororo at fifty-five miles an hour. The heavy-laden cars roared and rumbled on their way, the wheels banging into the joints, the metal couplers gnashing together, the bodies swaying and jouncing left and right on their old springs. The locomotive strained forward as though representing steam engines everywhere, hurling defiance at the world of diesel. The big steel wheels ran so fast the connecting bars were a blur. Smoke and steam fled out the stacks, and the engineer wailed the whistle for the level crossings, where people stared as the huge snarling shrieking metal snake, a third of a mile long, went thundering by.

Back when they’d been picking their path through the Tororo yards, they’d had to slow to such a crawl that the fireman had hopped out, run to the station, bought two sandwiches and four beers, and was back aboard before the transfer was completed to the east-west line. But now, as they ate the sandwiches and drank the beer, there was nothing ahead but fine weather and clear track.

The little stations shot by: Nagongera, where the sleeping station-master leaped out of his chair on the shaded platform as though the devil himself were rushing by; Budumba, just before the clattering trestle bridge over the swampy southern toe of Lake Kyoga; Busembatia, where the train quivered and clanged over the switches that led to the northbound Mbulamuti branch loop; Iganga, where a school soccer game faltered to a stop as the white-shirted boys in dark-blue short pants turned to stare and the black-and-white soccer ball went bounding away on the green grass. The engineer laughed and sounded the banshee whistle one extra time for luck.

“Flag ahead!”

The engineer turned and frowned, and the fireman pointed dead ahead, where a very sloppy soldier beside the track waved a red flag vigorously over his head.

Automatically, the engineer released the throttle bar and applied the brakes, and they shot by the grinning flag-waving soldier. What did it mean? The next station was Magamaga, just before Jinja. Was there trouble there? Trouble on the track?

Down the line another soldier waved a red flag, and beyond him an Army truck straddled the rails, blocking the train.

“It’s Army,” the fireman said. He sounded frightened.

“We have to stop.” The engineer sounded frightened, too. The Army. Who knew whose side the Army was on these days?

But stopping a train this big, this long, this heavy, was easier said than done. The brakes slammed on all the way down the line of cars, the impulse running back through the hydraulic hoses, the wheels under the cars shuddering to a halt, skidding and scraping along the rails, throwing sparks. The locomotive hurled up a great whoosh of steam, neighing like a fractious horse, not wanting to stop, fighting the brakes. The wide-eyed driver of the truck (an Asian, he looked like, what was an Asian doing in Uganda?) hurriedly drove off the track, but the train did finally grind down to a loud, steam-hissing, metal-banging, infinitely prolonged halt, forward motion ceasing just before it reached the spot where the truck had been.

The second soldier was an officer. The engineer, torn between worry and irritation, watched him trot this way along the gravel beside the track, still carrying his red flag. Far back, well beyond the last car, the other soldier had thrown his own flag away and could faintly be seen running in this direction.

The officer was out of shape; a desk man, probably. He was winded when he reached the locomotive, where the engineer yelled down to him over the continuing hiss of steam, “What’s the matter?”

The officer gasped and blew for a minute, increasing the engineer’s impatience, before he managed to say, “Trouble.”

“Trouble? I guessed there was trouble. What sort of trouble?”

“You’re being hijacked,” the officer said.

The engineer didn’t at all understand. “What’s that?”

A voice behind him said, in English, “We’re taking over the train.”

The engineer and fireman were both fairly proficient in English, and they understood that sentence well enough. They spun around and stared in absolute amazement at two white men who had climbed up into the cab on the other side—while the Army officer had distracted them—and who were now standing there with guns in their hands.

“You—” The engineer couldn’t figure out how to put his astonishment and disbelief into words in any language. “You—You can’t—This is a train!”

The bigger older one said, “We know it’s a fucking train, fella, and we’re taking it over.”

The Army officer had now climbed up into the cab, and the fireman said to him, “The Army? What does the Army want with our train?”

“They’re not Army,” the engineer told him. He’d at least worked out that much.

“Talk English,” said the older white man.

The younger one stepped closer to the engineer. “You’ll drive now,” he said. “But slowly.”

“It would have been a record!” wailed the fireman, the enormity of it coming home to him.

“Talk English, goddammit!”

The younger one gestured with his gun at the engineer. “Start now.”

“Wait for Charlie,” said the officer.

The older one said, “Fuck Charlie.”

“No,” said the younger one. “Where is he, Isaac?”

The officer leaned out the cab window. “He’s climbing on the last car. Give him just a second… okay.”

“Start.”

The engineer started. Once again, smoke balls puffed upward; the wheels spun on the track; they caught; the locomotive surged forward. Clang, clang, clang, the couplers crashed all the way down the line as the slack was taken up, and the entire giant snake lunged forward.

They passed the truck, stopped now on the dirt road beside the track. The driver—he was an Asian—waved and drove away as the train slowly gathered speed.

The younger one was carefully watching the engineer’s moves. He means to run it himself, the engineer thought. Aloud, he said, “This is foolish, you know. What are you going to do with a train? When we don’t arrive in Jinja, they’ll come looking for us.”

“Stop now,” the younger one said. “We’re here.”

They’d traveled perhaps half a mile. “Here?”

The train was doing barely ten miles an hour, and was very easily stopped. But where was here? An empty stretch flanked by jungle growth, near a level crossing for an abandoned road.

“Last stop,” the older one said. “Everybody off.”

The engineer, the fireman, the Army officer, and the older white man all climbed down to the ground, where the older man yelled up, “Don’t fuck up this train now! It’s the only one we got!”

“I’ve always wanted my own train,” the younger one said, grinning out of the cab at them.

The other soldier, the one they’d called Charlie, was running along the tops of the cars, leaping the spaces like a deranged impala. The engineer and the fireman looked around, wide-eyed, and here was more astonishment. Just up ahead, the track had been moved! While the rest of the line continued on as before, curving slowly away to the right, this one section had been curved sharply to the left, through a gap in the encroaching shrubbery and out of sight.

“Stand clear, now,” the older white man said. “We got an amateur up there at the throttle.”

46

Lew couldn’t stop grinning. The train seemed to breathe under him, a huge panting powerful tame beast, waiting for his command. The throttle bar had to be held down to make the beast move; a safety measure, the dead-man’s bar, so that if the engineer had a heart attack the train wouldn’t continue on with nobody at the throttle.

It had been decided that Lew would drive this part, just in case they had to deal with an engineer of heroic cast, who might try to sabotage the train before it was well hidden. Now Lew touched the bar and felt the beast’s vibration against his palm. He pressed, and the vibration multiplied a hundred times, and through a great rasping roar he heard somebody down there yell, “Easy! Easy! Not so fast!”

Not so fast? The train wasn’t moving, so he must be spinning the wheels. He released the throttle, and the noise died away, and he settled down to learn this beast, which maybe wasn’t as tame as he’d thought. He hadn’t known he was going fast. He touched the bar again, and this time depressed it very very gently.

The roar started, but not so angrily. The vibration increased, but not so dramatically. The train moved! Startled, Lew released the throttle, and the train stopped.

“Will you quit fucking around up there?”

“Shut up, Frank,” Lew yelled out the window, and put his hand again on the bar.

The roar. The increasing vibration. A jolt, and once again the train inched forward.

Lew kept his hand exactly where it was, and the train slowly gathered speed, and from behind him came the diminishing crashes of the couplers losing slack.

The train was doing at most five miles an hour, with the diverted track just ahead. As he looked down on it from way up in the cab, it seemed to Lew that what they had built was too flimsy, the logs too uncertain a replacement for metal sleepers, the bed too soft, the rails insufficiently spiked into place. It’s a child’s toy, he thought, and I’m bringing a life-size locomotive onto it.

If it fell over, should he stay with the engine or try to jump clear?

“Take it slow, Lew! Slow and easy!”

“Shut up, Frank!”

The locomotive sagged to the left as they moved down off the regular roadbed. The observers on that side scattered, and the locomotive hesitantly rolled down over a track that had suddenly become all hills and valleys.

“Don’t stop! Keep moving!”

“Blow it out your ass, Frank,” Lew muttered. Out ahead, as the locomotive slowly curved through the gap in the wall of shrubbery, he could see the ex-railwaymen and the workers, all expectant and excited, watching this huge black metal monster nose down into their world.

It was such a short distance from the solid main line to the solid spur line, but now it seemed a million miles long. The entire locomotive was on the temporary track, weaving from side to side as wood and metal groaned and cracked beneath the wheels. The tender followed like an obedient child, much more docile than its parent on the new line. The cars came along like sheep, one after the other, clanking, grinding, wheels screeching where the rails were too close together.

The locomotive dropped, on the right side, about an inch, lurching as though it had been shot. Lew lost control of the throttle, and when he grabbed to regain it he pressed down too hard. The wheels spun with that grating roaring sound, but then the right side lurched up again and the locomotive lunged forward onto the old spur track like a bear hurling itself away from thin ice.

That sound was a cheer! Lew looked out of the cab, and on both sides of the locomotive the men were yelling and grinning and clapping and jumping up and down. Even Frank was cheering instead of giving advice, and the former engineer and fireman were surreptitiously grinning at one another. Leaning far out of the cab and looking back and up, Lew could see Charlie about eight cars back, capering on the roof like a mannequin whose strings are pulled by a child.

Isaac, grinning like a Halloween pumpkin and carrying a walkie-talkie, climbed up into the cab. Pointing at Lew’s own grin, he said, “You’ll crack your face.”

“So will you.”

Now it was easy. While the men surged forward to grab for the ladders on the freight cars, climbing aboard for the ride, some going up top to the roofs, some hanging on the sides, Lew eased the locomotive on down the spur track. Smoothly and neatly, it rode the switch that diverted it from the engine shed toward the turntable. Clack went the wheels when they hit the minutely off turntable, and clack again on the other side.

Isaac said, “You know, that’s a gorge just ahead.”

“Oh, I know it.”

At the end of the regular spur was more temporary track; again the locomotive sagged and hesitated. Lew took his hand off the throttle, and for an agonizing instant the train kept rolling toward the end of the track and the lip of the gorge. But then it faltered, and then it stopped.

Isaac’s walkie-talkie cleared its throat with scratchy static sounds, then squawked in a parrot’s version of Frank’s voice saying, “Take it on down.”

Isaac said, “It is on down.”

“Repeat?”

“We’re here, Frank, at the end of the track.”

The walkie-talkie made indignant sounds: “I still got cars up here! I gotta get ’em off this track! Run the fucking engine into the gorge!”

Lew said, “Ask him if he wants to ride shotgun.”

Another Americanism to confuse Isaac. “What?”

“Never mind. Tell them out there to unhook the cars from the tender. We don’t want the whole train in the gorge.”

“Right.”

As Isaac started down out of the cab, Lew said, “And send somebody up with one of those little pieces of rail.”

“Right.”

That happened first; a grinning workman clambered aboard, toting a two-foot piece of rail from the dismantled buffer. He stood in the cab, grinning, looking around at everything, and Lew said, “Wanna ride over the cliff in it?” But the man had no English, and after a minute he left.

Down below, Lew could hear the walkie-talkie skreeking Frank’s impatience, and Isaac calmly answering. Frank wanted the workmen, so Isaac called to them to hurry back up to the main line. Reluctantly they left, looking back, wishing they could watch the locomotive go over the cliff.

Meanwhile, two of the ex-railwaymen worked at unhooking the lead car from the tender. The other two had climbed to the top of the first two cars to turn the big flat wheels of the hand brakes.

“All set!”

Lew had already propped the piece of rail on the cab’s windowsill, and now he lowered it gently onto the throttle bar. The engine roared, the wheels spun, and before he had the thing balanced they were already rolling toward the cliff. Quickly he lifted the rail, but the locomotive wasn’t pulling any weight now, and saw no reason to stop.

Hell and damnation. Feeling the pull of that gorge, Lew dropped the rail onto the throttle, turned, and dove headfirst out of the moving cab.

He landed in a lot of sharp nasty branches, rolled over, sat up, and watched the front wheels of the locomotive run off the end of the track and dig a plowlike furrow into the ground.

The locomotive slowed; it strained; the rear thrusting wheels bit in hard against the rusty rails; the front wheels sliced slowly through that final five feet of earth toward the gorge.

Isaac had come running, squawky walkie-talkie in hand. “Are you all right?”

“Just look at that son of a gun.”

Lew clambered to his feet, and he and Isaac stood and watched the locomotive doggedly commit suicide. It pushed, it strained, the tender patient and obedient behind it, until all at once chunks of earth gave way at the lip of the gorge, and the locomotive shot suddenly forward. “There it goes!” Isaac cried.

But not yet. Lew had had all the time in the world to climb in a dignified fashion down out of that cab. He and Isaac ran through the scrub to the edge of the cliff as the locomotive ground slowly forward, the front wheels now dangling free in space. The nose very gradually drooped downward, as though the locomotive were reluctant to see where it was going. Then it spurted forward, the front half stuck itself black and huge and defenseless out into the air, the wheels lost their traction on the rails, the rear lifted, the nose turned down, and with a sideways lurch as though acknowledging defeat, the great monster slid over the edge.

Thruston Bay was narrow and crooked and very deep, almost more a river than a bay, with steep clay cliffs on both sides, covered with tenacious shrubbery. The locomotive, immediately looking tiny and weightless when it was in the air, plummeted straight down, hit the cliff face a glancing blow midway, and then spun crazily the last fifty feet, shaking itself loose of its tender and hitting the water with a huge, satisfying, craterlike splash, into the bull’s-eye of which the tender dropped like an unimportant afterthought.

There was an underwater explosion when the cold water hit the roaring-hot boiler, and the already roiled surface of the bay seemed to lift in a body, like bread rising. Then the surface ripped apart and the giant cough of the explosion was released, along with a great gout of steam. The steam fled away up into the air, dissipating, and the torn water fell back to form a surface again, which rapidly smoothed itself. The locomotive was gone.

Lew and Isaac stared at one another, their faces delighted and awed, like children on Christmas morning. “That,” Isaac said, his faint and dazzled voice seeming to come from the tree branches above his head, “that, that was the most satisfying sight I ever did see in my entire life.”

“What is so beautiful as a falling locomotive?” Slowly nodding, Lew said, “No matter what else happens to me in my life, that made it all worthwhile.”

“Oh ho ho!” Isaac laughed, staggering backward. He might have gone over the edge himself if Lew hadn’t grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “And Mazar Balim,” Isaac cried through his laughter, “Mazar Balim said don’t volunteer! Ho ho ho ho ho!”

A sudden thought left Lew stricken. “Oh, my God,” he said.

Isaac’s laughter cut off. “What’s wrong?”

“We didn’t take any pictures.”

Isaac gave that serious consideration, then shook his head. “They wouldn’t have come out. Something like that never does.”

“You’re right,” Lew said, relieved. “In a photograph, it’s just a toy train.”

“We have the pictures here,” Isaac said, tapping his head.

“Forever,” Lew agreed.

Reluctantly, they turned away from the placid bay, to see the rest of the train rolling slowly toward them. Letting gravity do the work, the ex-railwaymen atop the front two cars turned the brake wheels, making tiny adjustments, permitting that great weight to inch slowly down the gradual slope but not to build up momentum.

“I hope they know what they’re doing,” Lew said. “After all this, I wouldn’t want to see six million dollars of coffee go crashing into the bay.”

“We wouldn’t want a camera for that.” Isaac said.

47

When the goddam cars at last began to roll forward, Frank knew they’d gotten rid of the locomotive. He’d yelled himself hoarse into that goddam walkie-talkie, and all he got for his efforts was a sore throat. But now at last the cars were moving, though awfully goddam slow.

Up toward the main line, the work crew was already busily pulling spikes from the temporary track. The engineer and the fireman, trussed with ropes, sat to one side, their backs against trees, and watched with unflagging astonishment. Charlie had been put back to work as Frank’s translator, and was capering around in his usual style, while down the line Young Mr. Balim had been put in charge of the earphones, to spy on the railroad station at Jinja. Frank hated to have to admit that Young Mr. Balim could be useful, but there it was. At least Young Mr. Balim, unlike Charlie, could be counted on to report anything he might hear of interest.

The cars stopped. That was too soon; most of the last car was still on the rails that had to be moved. Frank yelled into the walkie-talkie, “Move the damn thing!” He waited an eighth of a second and then bellowed, “Is anybody goddam there?”

It was Lew’s voice that responded, not Isaac’s. “You don’t need the walkie-talkie, I can hear you without it.”

“Then move the goddam train!”

“We did. The locomotive’s gone. It was a very pretty sight, Frank.”

Frank had no time for pretty sights. “I’ve still got wheels on the main line.”

“The only thing we might do, Frank, is throw the first car over.”

“Do it!”

“We won’t have time to unload it.”

“One fucking car? Don’t be greedy, throw it over!”

“It’s done,” Lew promised.

Shaking his head, Frank stuck the walkie-talkie under his arm like a swagger stick and walked up to where the men were pulling spikes. Every spike was thrown away over the bushes and every tie would be dragged off out of sight, and all the digging would be smoothed over. If there was time.

Two of the ex-railwaymen were up at this end of the work. One of them now came over to speak very earnestly at Frank in that goddam Swahili, all the while pointing at the end of the spur track. Probably wanting to know when they could separate that joint. “We’re working on it,” Frank assured him. “I hope to Christ we’re working on it.”

The ears moved. They stopped. They moved again, inching along, the rear wheels of the last car creeping toward the joint and the start of the rusty spur track. They reached the joint, they flowed over it, they went on another two or three feet, and then they stopped.

“Now,” Frank said, and the happy ex-railwayman went purposefully to the joint, carrying several tools.

Frank walked down the track to Young Mr. Balim. “Anything doing?”

Young Mr. Balim pushed one earphone back onto his head so he could listen simultaneously to Frank and Jinja. “Not a word,” he said. “Most of the calls are about missing freight, not missing trains.”

“It’s early yet,” Frank said. “They’ll push the panic button, don’t you worry.”

“The missing train,” said Young Mr. Balim, and smiled. “What a wonderment.”

“It is kinda nice,” Frank admitted, and looked back up the track to where fifty men were just starting to shuffle the northern rail back to its original position.

48

The city of Jinja, population fifty-two thousand, in addition to being the spot where the Nile emerges from Lake Victoria, so that it is therefore a port of some importance, is also a railway hub, an important freight stop on the main east-west line as well as being the western terminus of the northern loop branch line through Mbulamuti. The railroad station at Jinja, as a result, was kept manned all day even under the current reduced level of rail service.

The main office in the red-brick station building was a long narrow room in which an L-shaped, chest-high, dark-wood counter kept the public limited to one quarter of the available area, nearest the door. There was just enough space beyond the counter for two desks, two chairs, one tall filing cabinet, and a wooden pigeonhole arrangement on the wall, holding freight manifests and unsold passenger tickets. One of the two desks was assigned to the stationmaster (and ticket agent), while the other was for the yardmaster (and chief of security).

There was a great deal of pilferage going on in the railway these days, and no one seemed able to stop it. There was a general public suspicion, well founded, that railway employees were themselves responsible for a great percentage of the losses. The result was, most of the phone calls to Jinja station were from irate and suspicious freight customers whose shipments had disappeared.

The yardmaster, himself an honest man, could do nothing for such callers but sigh and agree and promise to look into it. His days were increasingly frustrating and unsatisfying, and if he could have thought of anything else to do with his life he would have quit this job long ago. As it was, he spent his time searching for honest men to stand guard over the yards, and apologizing to customers who no doubt thought he was a crook, too. A very sad situation.

At one-forty-five that afternoon, the yardmaster hung up the phone after one more such unhappy call, and looked up at the round railroad clock on the wall. “That freight didn’t go through, did it?”

The stationmaster was working on the fumbo in today’s paper. “I just can’t get three down,” he said. “A seven letter word meaning ‘trade fair or international mart.’ First and last letters both O.”

“Onyesho.”

“That fits!”

While the stationmaster laboriously printed in the letters, the yardmaster again frowned at the clock. “It must be nearly an hour since they went through Iganga.”

“What’s that?”

“The special train. The coffee freight.”

“They’ll be along.”

“It shouldn’t take an hour.”

“Maybe they saw a pretty girl beside the line and stopped to bless her.”

The yardmaster laughed. The phone rang, and he stopped laughing.

There was no direct rail service to Entebbe. After an early lunch, Patricia drove Sir Denis to Luzira, Kampala’s port, where the major freight yards were located and where the train would terminate. This was an official trip, in order for the yardmaster at Luzira to show Sir Denis the trucks waiting to carry the coffee from the train to the aircraft at Entebbe.

As they drove, alone in the car, they talked about their plans. “I’m not making any promises,” Patricia said.

“Of course not. We’ll simply take each day as it comes.” Sir Denis beamed on her. “I’m looking forward to showing you Brazil.”

“Brazil.” She shook her head, a bemused smile on her lips. “That’s one future I never even suspected,” she said.

Amin had anticipated a report from Colonel Juba about Chase sometime this morning. When the colonel hadn’t appeared by eleven o’clock, Amin telephoned his office at the Bureau, only to be told the colonel wasn’t there. Nor was he at home.

Amin came to the conclusion that Juba, to keep Chase’s arrest secret, had taken him to some other safe place, such as a rural police station, until he’d extracted the man’s story. “Inform me immediately,” he ordered, and went off to lunch.

Today’s lunch was more enjoyable than most. He was welcoming back his young Air Force men who’d just been ejected from the United States.

American companies such as Bell Helicopter had been training Amin’s pilots for several years, but recently a few busybody American congressmen—mere publicity seekers—had applied pressure, claiming to be humanitarians, claiming the United States shouldn’t do business with a country like Uganda—as though America’s skirts were clean.

The bad publicity had frightened the American companies, though, and the whole problem had been compounded last October, when the only three Christian Ugandans enrolled with the eighteen Muslim Ugandans being trained by the Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida, had defected, asking the American government for political asylum and being granted it, and then of course telling all sorts of wild stories.

The upshot was, the several dozen Air Force men in the United States—some of whom had already received British training in Perth, Scotland—had all now left America and returned to Uganda, their courses incomplete. And it was to greet the last six of these, just back from Vero Beach, Florida, that was the purpose of today’s lunch.

Amin loved contact with his brave young airmen. They reminded him of himself, or of the smoother and more sophisticated person he might have been if he’d had a firm proud good Idi Amin Dada to help him along the way in those early years. At the same time, it made him feel good to know he was still better than any of them. He could beat them at boxing, at basketball, at swimming races. And in the last analysis he was the father who made them possible.

There was much laughter and beer drinking at lunch, and many lies told about American women. Amin challenged all comers to arm wrestling, and won every match. His plan to buy long-range bombers and attack South Africa was discussed and given a respectful hearing. Amin emerged from lunch in a very happy frame of mind.

Which was at once spoiled, because neither Chase nor Juba had been found. Where were they? Amin gave orders, and soon learned they were positively nowhere in the Bureau building, though last night’s duty officer did remember having seen Chase leave the place around midnight.

Leave? Chase? Alone?

A call to Chase’s bank confirmed Amin’s suspicions. The man had been in this morning, and his safety-deposit box proved to have been cleaned out. What was worse, he had apparently turned over a chit for five thousand U.S. dollars in cash, forged in Amin’s name!

“He’s running, my little Baron.”

Calls to the airports at Entebbe, Jinja, Tororo, Soroti, and Kasese confirmed that Chase hadn’t yet left the country, at least by air. No white man, in fact, had flown out of Uganda in the last twelve hours.

Which left the roads and the lake. The lake was very unlikely; Chase had no boat of his own and had never cultivated any acquaintanceship with boat owners. He had always made it plain that he didn’t enjoy the occasional jaunt on Amin’s yacht. He wouldn’t like the sense of exposure, of limited options, associated with escape by water.

Which left the roads. “Call every border post,” Amin ordered. “If Chase went through, we want to know where, and what name he used. If he tries to go through now, he should be stopped and sent back here. I don’t care what condition he’s in when he gets here, just so he can still talk.”

The stationmaster put down his completed fumbo and yawned. Although the job had been much more strenuous back in the days of East African Railways, it had been more interesting, too. The stationmaster looked up at the clock, and was disheartened to see it was only five past two. Three more hours of boredom. “Say, old man,” he said to the yardmaster, “where’s that train of yours?”

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.

“How do you do,” Chase said, smiling. “I’m sorry, I have no Swahili.”

“Oh, yes. English fine. You, sir,” the plump guard said, gesturing for Chase to precede him into the shed. Behind him, a skinny weirdly boned woman wrapped in a cheap bright-patterned red cloth emerged from the hut, carrying an old desk drawer full of forms and stamps and pencils.

Chase had to duck his head to get through the doorway. The interior of the shed contained a wooden tabletop supported on old beer cases. Two backless chairs faced one another across this table.

The plump guard, entering, gestured to the chair Chase was to take, then settled himself with comic grandeur on the other. The woman came in, put the desk drawer handy to the guard’s right elbow, and stood to one side behind him, hands clasped in front of her crotch.

Chase handed over his Ugandan passport, saying, “As you see, I am a member of the government.”

“Ah! Fine!” said the guard, using his English. “Very fine.” He took the passport and opened it.

Chase saw him change; that was the first thing. The guard was not a subtle man, nor a very bright one. His smiling face became stiff with shock; his shoulders hunched; he began very rapidly to blink.

So I didn’t have this much time after all, Chase thought. He folded his arms, the fingers of his right hand snaking in under his left sleeve toward the automatic.

The guard stared too long and too unseeingly at the passport, attempting to compose himself. Then he looked up, still furiously blinking, and gave Chase a huge smile in which panic was the chief component. “More papers,” he said. “Me papers.” Then he turned to the woman, as though instructing her in what papers she was to get; but what he said in Swahili was, “Get Ulu and Walter. This is the man the President wants. When he goes out, they must shoot his legs.”

“All right,” the woman said. Now she too was ineffectively hiding fear and excitement and panic.

“But they must not kill him,” the plump guard said. “The President wishes to speak to him.”

I bet he does. Smoothly rising, drawing the automatic from his sleeve, Chase said in Swahili, “Don’t move.” He didn’t shoot them right away because the sounds would attract Ulu and Walter.

The damn woman. The gun frightened her, all right, but it frightened her the wrong way. Instead of freezing, she screamed and jumped and then ran at Chase! She dashed at him the way the dazzled rabbit hurls itself into the automobile’s headlights, and to the same effect: Chase killed her.

But it was no good. He’d had to shoot, and yet she kept coming. He shot again, and she threw her arms around him in an embrace of death. The miserable little .25 had no stopping power.

The dying woman encumbered him, pressing his gun hand between their bodies. By the time he freed it the plump guard was ready, the desk drawer held high over his head, papers and rubber stamps flying every which way as he brought the drawer crashing down onto Chase’s wrist.

Then two men came running into the shed and knocked him down.

They were both the dead woman’s lovers. It was all the plump guard could do to keep them from kicking Chase to death.

49

Lew and Young Mr. Balim stood on the track and watched the last two dozen spikes being driven into the sleepers. The rails had been put back where they belonged. Two of the ex-railwaymen were attaching the joint plates, spitting on them, smearing them with dirt to hide the new scratches. Most of the work crew had already left, going down with Frank to start the unloading.

Young Mr. Balim finished rolling the long wire around the earphones, then tucked the ball of phones and wire under his arm; there was no longer any need to eavesdrop on Jinja. “Wouldn’t you like to be here?” he asked. “I mean, when they realize the whole bloody train is gone.”

“But there isn’t any here here,” Lew told him, and gestured at the ongoing line of the track. “Just twenty-five miles between Iganga and Jinja, and no train.”

“The look on their faces,” Young Mr. Balim said, chortling, and the look on his face changed when he glanced back up the track leading toward Jinja. “Now what?” he said.

Lew turned, and here came the sentry he’d posted down there, pelting along the track, risking his balance by waving his arms over his head as he ran. Lew said, “Find out what it is.”

Young Mr. Balim trotted forward, calling in Swahili. The man stopped to answer, pointing behind himself. Young Mr. Balim turned back to Lew. “He says, a man on a bicycle.”

“Christ.” Lew looked back at the men hammering in the spikes; only a few remained undriven. “Tell them to forget all that. Just get down and out of sight. With their tools.”

“Right.”

While Young Mr. Balim did that, Lew waved vigorously at the other sentry down by the access road. Go away, he waved. Get out of sight. Go down the road. The sentry seemed confused for a moment, but then he saw the workmen hurrying to hide and he responded with a comprehending wave and then trotted away.

The first sentry had already without pausing run through the opening in the hedge, and now the workmen streamed after. Lew went last, pausing for one quick look around, then jumping over the rail and trotting down through the gap.

Half a dozen workmen were poised to slide the blind back into place. They were jockeying it into position when the cyclist first appeared around the curve to the west, riding in the narrow dirt strip beside the railway’s gravel bed. Weary, perspiring in his dark-blue official Uganda Railways jacket and dark-blue round hat, all unknowing he pedaled doggedly past the scene of the hijacking, his right sleeve brushing the blind, his movements watched through twenty tiny chinks in the shrubbery. On he went, pursuing the lost train as doggedly as he pursued his course in accountancy. He didn’t know it yet, but he would bicycle all the way to Iganga.

50

“Your Excellency,” the uniformed male secretary said, “very good news. Captain Chase has been found.”

His ebullient mood having been spoiled by the defection of Chase, Idi Amin had taken to his porch at the Old Command Post, where he now sat with a bottle of beer and four of the returned airmen. They’d been striving very hard to recapture the amiability and self-satisfaction they’d enjoyed at lunch, but without much success; the jokes and laughter and reminiscences, even Amin’s, were too obviously forced. It was harder and harder for Amin to ignore the fact that he wasn’t happy, and the airmen were right to become increasingly nervous, though not smart to show it.

But now, in a flash, everything changed. The sun shone. Amin’s merry smile spread across his face, his eyes lit up, he even clapped his big hands together, the long fingers splayed wide and only the palms hitting, as when children try to applaud. “Ah, now we have something!” he cried. “Where is this scoundrel?”

“Major Okwal is on the phone, Excellency.”

“You boys wait here,” Amin said, heaving himself to his feet. “I’ll tell you about this scoundrel.”

The secretary led the way to Amin’s office, where the phone waited off the hook, then bowed and departed, shutting the door. Amin sat at his desk, picked up the receiver, smiled like a lion who sees a zebra, and said, “So, Major Okwal? You have him?” It was Amin’s practice not to identify himself on the phone, assuming that everyone would know who he was.

“Yes, Excellency.” Major Okwal was a Lugbara, Amin’s mother’s tribe. A colorless man, he had attained a middle rank in the State Research Bureau, where he was an effective if not imaginative interrogator. Amin treated him as he would a dull inoffensive cousin.

“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.

At first, despite the slope, the cars didn’t want to move. Then Lew, with Young Mr. Balim acting as translator, got the watching men to come in and push. Slowly and silently, all at once losing their reluctance, the four cars rolled forward, gathering speed. The ex-railwayman stayed on the roof of the second car, laughing and waving to everybody.

Lew said, “That nut’s going with it!”

But he wasn’t. As the cars hit the temporary track, the ex-railwayman leaped the twelve feet to the ground, rolled, and sprang to his feet. The workmen gave him a huge cheer and laugh, and the four freight cars rolled out into space to tumble end-over-end down through the air, crashing into the water with a crazy series of splashes and bangs, the second car bobbing on the surface long enough to be rammed broadside by the third, then all four wriggling and collapsing downward into the water, after their leader and out of sight.

After that experience, it was obvious that everyone had to have a beer before going back to work. While the ex-railwaymen eased the rest of the train down so the next four cars were lined up with the half-full trucks, two cases of beer were brought out from the engine shed, where they were being kept relatively cool. The engineer and fireman, having sworn oaths to be on their good behavior, were untied from all those ropes and allowed to join the festivities. Beer bottles were distributed, and success was generally toasted.

Meanwhile, Frank and Charlie and the others in the first four trucks ground slowly but steadily along the access road toward Macdonald Bay, twenty miles off. The road sloped downward over the whole distance, so that gravity assisted them to some extent, but with the road so chancy and the trucks so overloaded they couldn’t average much better than fifteen miles an hour. They hadn’t yet reached the bay before the celebration back at the depot was finished, the second four trucks were fully loaded, and they too were on their way, reducing the work force back there by another four.

At last the bay appeared, sparkling and empty, the mud flat surrounded by the ungainly huge rafts covered with brush, as though a beachfront community had been flattened by a hurricane. Everybody climbed down from the trucks, and Frank bellowed the first raft into the water, with Charlie’s left-handed assistance. Then, while Frank and Charlie went to work unmounting the outboard motors and remounting them higher on the raft body, the other ten men started moving sacks.

On the twenty-foot-square surface of the raft they could lie one hundred twenty sacks, in six rows of twenty. The contents of the four trucks would fill this raft, making an unwieldy-looking monster ten layers high, crisscrossed for stability and standing nearly twelve feet tall. In theory, it wouldn’t tip over and it would float.

The first full sack was carried up the plank and onto the raft at five minutes past four.

52

The station clock read five minutes past four when Idi Amin marched into the tiny railway station at Iganga, followed by half a dozen Army officers and uniformed members of the State Research Bureau. Glaring around, Amin said, “Now you’ll tell me what this is.”

Two men were present in the uniform of Uganda Railways, both looking scared out of their skins. The fat one pointed at the thin one and said, “This is Jinja yardmaster, Mr. President. He brought me the information.”

“What information?” Glowering upon the Jinja yardmaster, Amin said, “Explain yourself.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Though terrified, the man was trying for a dignified professionalism. “Iganga station having informed me,” he began, passing the buck right back to his compatriot, “of the coffee train having gone through here at twelve-fifty-five, when it had not appeared at Jinja by two o’clock I became alarmed. Having checked again with Iganga station, Mr. President, that the train had indeed passed through here at that time—”

“Yes, yes,” Amin said, slapping the air in his impatience. “The question is, where is the train?”

“Gone, Mr. President. I’m sorry, sir, but it’s disappeared. Sir.”

“Trains do not disappear,” Amin told him reasonably. “You are a trainman, you should know such a thing. Just the size of a train, the very size of the thing, will tell you that. Then again, there are the tracks. The train cannot leave the tracks. Not and get very far,” he added, joking, looking around with a big smile to see if his entourage were laughing. They were.

The yardmaster was not. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” he said. “I rode here on my bicycle from Jinja, along the permanent way. There was no train, sir.”

Amin gazed upon this man. Would anyone have the effrontery to make Idi Amin the butt of a practical joke? Would either of these rabbits dare to lie to their president? Speaking slowly and heavily, gesturing pedagogically with one finger in the air, Amin said, “Be very careful now, you. Be very careful, the two of you.”

The Iganga stationmaster, having falsely believed himself to have been safely forgotten, gave a little jump of fear. The Jinja yardmaster stood tall against his fright and said, “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Now, you,” Amin said, pointing at the Iganga stationmaster, the weaker of the two rabbits. “You say this train passed through here at twelve-fifty-five.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“A long train full of coffee. A huge long—How many cars?” he demanded of his entourage.

“More than thirty, Your Excellency,” someone said.

“Good.” Returning to the Iganga stationmaster, Amin said, “Now, this long train of more than thirty cars passed through this station at twelve-fifty-five. And did it return?”

The Iganga stationmaster was too frightened to keep up with sudden leaps like that. “Sir? Mr. President?”

Amin was becoming irritated. “The train! Did it come back through the station?”

“No, no, of course not, Mr. President! It went through, westbound, at twelve-fifty-five, traveling very very fast—oh, more than ninety kilometers an hour—and that was the last I saw of it.”

“Good.” Amin turned to the Jinja yardmaster. “Now, you did not see this train.”

“No, Your Excellency.” A fast study, this Jinja yardmaster had needed only once to hear how the president was properly addressed by his entourage.

“You are a man who sees things,” Amin suggested. “This train could not have gone through Jinja while you were having a piss in the men’s room.”

“Your Excellency, I didn’t relieve myself at all, Your Excellency, in that hour. And the stationmaster was with me as well. Your Excellency, I swear by my life, that train did not go through Jinja.”

“Your life. Yes,” Amin said, brooding at the man, seeing the shock in his eyes.

A member of the entourage said, “Your Excellency, there are seven stations after Jinja to Luzira. Every one has been called; none has seen the train.”

Another member of the entourage said, “Your Excellency, we have checked with Kakira and Luzinga on the Mbulamuti northern branch from Jinja. The train did not go up that way.”

“It couldn’t have, Your Excellency,” the yardmaster said, “without switching through my yards. I would have seen it.”

“You bicycled,” Amin said, brooding, beginning to hate this smart fellow and all this “Excellency”-ing. “This train went through Iganga. It did not appear at Jinja. It can go nowhere but on the track, so it stands to reason it must be on the track between Iganga and Jinja! But you bicycled.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Yes, Your Excellency!” Amin mimicked, beginning to give himself over to the pleasure of losing his temper. “Yes, Your Excellency! You saw no train, no accident, no evidence, nothing!”

The yardmaster, now too frightened to reply at all, stood helplessly staring at Amin, and in the silence they all heard the sound: chuff. And again: chuff. Looking up, away from the miserable yardmaster, Amin saw a locomotive through the station window, slowly easing past. “It’s there!” he cried.

“No, Your Excel—”

But Amin had forgotten the yardmaster. Pushing through his entourage, he stepped out onto the sunny platform, where the curious spectators, mostly children, fled in all directions. Big, heavy, glowering, triumphant, jaw sticking out, Amin stepped forward, put his hands on his hips, and glared in sudden bewilderment.

It wasn’t the train. It was just a locomotive and tender, and in any case it was pointing the wrong way: from Jinja. It was a 29 Class, just like the missing Arusha. This one was numbered 2938 and named Samia.

The entourage and the much more reluctant railwaymen came out onto the platform. The Jinja yardmaster said, “Your Excellency, I had this engine sent from Jinja to help us study the track.”

“Very good,” Amin said grudgingly. The man rubbed him the wrong way, that was all. Like all those doctors, professors, lawyers; all those Baganda, Langi, Acholi; all those smooth bastards who thought they were better than the poor Kakwa soldier Idi Amin.

The engineer of Samia had climbed down out of the cab, and now he reported to Amin in great excitement, “Oh, Mr. President, there was nothing! Not a sign, not a trace!”

“The coffee,” Amin said, as though to himself. Slowly he nodded. “My little Baron,” he said, while his entourage looked at one another in confusion. “That’s what he’s up to, he’s stealing my coffee. But how is he doing it?”

Everyone waited respectfully while Amin thought. It would be hours before Chase was brought back from the Rwanda border; by then his scheme, whatever it was, might already be accomplished. Even now, in some unimaginable way, the coffee train could be on some track—some unknown, other, mysterious, incomprehensible, mind-bending track—steaming away out of the country.

“No!” Amin cried, punching the air with his big fist. “They won’t do it! You,” he said, pointing at Samia’s engineer, “turn that thing around.”

The engineer looked dumbstruck. The Jinja yardmaster said, “Your Excellency, there’s no turntable here. But the train can run just as well backward.”

“Then we run it backward,” Amin decided. “Come along,” he said, shooing the engineer in front of himself. “They’re stealing my coffee. We must find them and stop them.”

They ran it backward. They traveled slowly, and Amin stood up on top of the tender, arms akimbo, glaring every which way, looking for signs of where the train had gone and how it had been done.

(If he’d come through half an hour earlier, standing that high atop the tender, he would probably have seen over the hedge the last two cars of his missing train, but by the time Samia passed that place four cars had been dumped into the gorge, the rest of the train had rolled forward among the trees and shrubbery, and there was nothing to be seen.)

Here and there dirt roads crossed the track, some abandoned, some still in use. None showed the slightest indication of any odd activity lately. An antismuggling helicopter was visible at one point, way to the south over the lake, and Amin thought for one mad instant of the train’s being spirited away by helicopters. But thirty helicopters, dangling thirty railway cars, not to mention however many helicopters it would take to lift one of these extremely heavy steam engines? And no one anywhere to see it happening? Not even the Israelis could pull off such a thing.

As Jinja appeared dead ahead with no train in sight, Amin yelled, “Stop! Go back again, go back! It’s somewhere, it’s here somewhere, the clue is somewhere!”

Three members of his entourage were crowded into the cab with the engineer and the fireman. The others had piled into the automobiles to drive along the highway paralleling the rail line, occasionally visible when road and track ran close together. Now, with a great deal of fuss the engine was reversed again, to run frontward, and the automobiling entourage also reversed.

Nothing, nothing, and still nothing. When they traveled in this direction, smoke and steam made it impossible to ride atop the tender, so Amin crowded down into the cab with the rest, where he couldn’t look at both sides of the track at the same time. The frustration, the overcrowding, the blindness on one side; all combined to make him finally yell, “Stop! Stop here!”

They stopped. Amin, with his belief in witchcraft and spirits, was now convinced something from another world had given him this sign, had told him where and when to stop. (The coffee train, however, had been removed from the track three miles farther on.)

What was the clue? What was the thing that made this spot call out to him? Amin tramped up and down the track in front of the sporadically coughing locomotive, glaring at the rails, the spikes, the joint plates, the sleepers, the gravel bed, the narrow dirt trails on both sides, the encroaching jungle growth.

Frustration built and built, and at last he stopped and stamped one booted foot hard on a sleeper. That was good, but not good enough. “I want my coffee!” he bellowed into the empty air. Jumping up high, he crashed both booted feet onto the sleeper; that was better. Doing it again, jumping up and down, waving his clenched fists over his head, Idi Amin roared, “I want my train! I want my coffee! I want my traaaaaaaiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnn!!!!!”

53

Mazar Balim owned radios. Any number of radios: shortwave, commercial band, two-way, any kind you-might want. He sold them at retail in his three stores, in Kisumu and Kericho and Kakamega. He sold them at wholesale out of his five-eighths-blue warehouse buildings on Kisiani Street. And he did not understand why it had not been possible to demand that Bathar take a radio with him.

Oh, he knew the reasons; the traceability of radio signals and all that. But when he paced the rooms of his two buildings, unable to sit still in his office, and when he passed the carton after carton of radios on his storage shelves, it bothered him horribly. It was terrible that he couldn’t reach out to one of these wonderful machines, made in Taiwan or Hong Kong, that he couldn’t switch it on and have Bathar right there, Bathar’s voice reaffirming that he was alive and well, although in Uganda.

If at least Isaac were still here, Balim would have someone to talk with about his anxieties, he wouldn’t have to keep them buried inside. Isaac would be sympathetic, sensible, reassuring. Except, of course, that the sensible, reassuring Isaac was now gadding about Uganda himself, playing at pirate, swashbuckling deep within the borders of a nation where, for him in particular, discovery meant death.

As it did for Bathar. An Asian. A smuggler. A man already expelled from Uganda once.

Perhaps I should let him go to London. Perhaps Africa is no good at all for Asians, no accommodation ever will take place. But that was a hard thought for Balim to accept. Prowling his merchant domain, frightened for his boy, brooding about the past and the future, Balim still felt the weight of his own father upon his shoulders.

Mazar Balim had been raised in the absolute knowledge that he would one day take over the family business. There had been no option, nor any reason to think of an option. He had tried to instill the same feelings in Bathar, but something had changed, some aura in the air had shifted, and none of today’s generation was so unthinkingly secure as he had been about the future or about the continuation of family business.

The common reference to the Asians as the Jews of Africa was perhaps after all too glib. There were certainly similarities enough: the outsiders who retained their own customs and languages and religions; the shopkeepers and bankers, harbingers of the middle class, bringing with them civilization and usury, hated for their knowledge and success and difference. But in Europe and America it had finally been possible for the Jew to assimilate if he wanted to, or at most times and places to retain his difference if he preferred. Though anti-Semitism certainly existed, the Nazi experience was seen as an aberration, whereas in Africa the expulsion of the Uganda Asians had been hailed by politicians of the surrounding black countries as a template for their own futures.

If Bathar were in London, the firm of Balim & Son would eventually cease to exist.

If Bathar were murdered in Uganda, the firm of Balim & Son would certainly cease to exist.

At least in London they won’t kill him. So long as he stays out of the East End.

If my boy comes back alive, God, I promise I will let him do what he wants with his life.

Late in the afternoon a stockroom worker approached, hesitantly, unused to dealing directly with the owner. “Master,” he said, “men in the office.”

Balim frowned, his mind still full of thoughts of expulsion and pogrom. “Men in the office?” And Isaac not here, Frank not here, Lew Brady not here! Reluctant to confront them, these men in his office, he asked, “How dressed?”

“Northern clothes, master.”

Suits; somewhat reassuring. Possibly merely salesmen. “What people?”

“Bantu, master.”

Black; could be good, could be bad. Government functionaries, seeking a bribe? “How many?”

“Two, master.”

So at least physical violence was unlikely. “Thank you,” Balim said, with more careful courtesy than he usually showed his employees, and hurried away to the offices, where he found the two men at their ease in Isaac’s room. How empty the place looked; how vulnerable Balim felt; how secure and comfortable these black men were, seated and smiling in their own country.

They rose, almost identical men of the civil service mode, a bit rumpled as was considered the appropriate way to express their independence from the European culture that had engulfed them. One had a thick moustache, the other black-framed eyeglasses. Both carried soft leather document cases under their left arms.

The moustached one stepped forward, smiling. “Mazar Balim?”

“I am Balim. In what way may I serve you?”

“I am Charles Obuong,” the moustached man said, not offering to shake hands, using his right hand instead to indicate his companion. “And this is Godfrey Magon. We are with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, just up from Nairobi.”

“Import Control Department,” Godfrey Magon added. They both spoke in correct academic English.

A bribe, then; on what pretext? “I do hope I may be of assistance.”

“Oh, we think that quite possible,” Charles Obuong said. “We are here to discuss with you this shipment of coffee you are anticipating.”

Shock froze Balim, but none showed on the surface. Polite but puzzled, he said, “Coffee?”

Godfrey Magon smiled, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. “From Uganda,” he said.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” Balim said. He had begun to perspire fiercely under the arms. He accepted the belief that Africans have a keener sense of smell, so he pressed his arms tightly to his body to keep them from getting a whiff of his fear. They know! he thought. They know everything!

“It would be better,” Charles Obuong said, “if we could dispense with the first several hours of denials and evasions.”

“You see,” Godfrey Magon explained, his manner almost kindly, “we believe someone else plans to steal the coffee before it reaches Kenya.”

“With violence,” Charles Obuong said.

Balim by now had given up trying not to look shocked and fearful. “With violence?”

Charles Obuong nodded, smiling as though he quite enjoyed the anticipation of violence. “Oh, I’m afraid so,” he said.

“Unfortunately,” Godfrey Magon said, “our investigator was murdered by one of your people before he had completed his investigation.”

“Oh, no, surely not!”

“I’m afraid so,” Godfrey Magon said, but not as though he intended to make a major issue of it. “None of us can understand,” he said, “why your chap wanted to murder a simple boneman.”

“Boneman?” Balim shook his head; innocence always left him at a loss. “I know nothing of this,” he said.

Charles Obuong waved a deprecating hand. “That is beside the point, for the moment. The concern for now is our desire that this coffee should come to Kenya.”

Balim stared. “Oh, yes?”

Both men beamed at him. Godfrey Magon said, “Have you not heard of balance of payments? Of the difficulties of such small nations as ours in avoiding trade deficits? Of the terrible prices we are paying for the importation of oil?”

“Uganda plants,” Charles Obuong said. “Kenya harvests. So good for our trade deficit. You are a patriot, Mr. Balim.”

“Perhaps,” Godfrey Magon said, “we would be more comfortable if we continued this chat in your private office.”

54

When he heard Kekka’s voice, Chase felt a moment of utter black despair. Amin, that cunning cunning bastard. Of all the crooks and incompetents in Kampala, by God he’d chosen the one who’d give Chase the most trouble. Could Kekka be outfoxed? Could he be bribed? Chase remembered, vividly, all those sessions in the State Research Bureau, and he knew he absolutely had to get out of this. Some way, any way. Somehow, between here and Kampala, he must either escape or die.

They had tied him with many ropes, his arms twisted painfully behind him, his knees bent and one rope looped first around his ankles and then around his neck, so that if he tried to straighten he would choke himself. But not to death, unfortunately; at the instant of unconsciousness, his legs would relax, the pressure on his throat would ease, and he would live some more.

The only faint hope he could retain was based on the lucky chance that he apparently had no broken bones. Those bastards had tried enthusiastically enough, but for all their pummeling and kicking they seemed merely to have given him a lot of bruises and scrapes. So long as he was not physically impaired, there was still some faint chance he could get himself out of this mess.

How many hours had he been lying here in the stench and heat inside this mud hut, the packed ground painful under his bruised body? The corner of the outside world he could see through the angle of the low doorway was still in daylight, though the shadows were lengthening. And now one of the shadows was Kekka’s, and he could hear Kekka’s voice giving orders, and two soldiers came in to grab Chase by the ankles and the belt and drag him outside, not caring whether they choked him or not.

Kekka stood in front of the hut, spraddle-legged in the dirt, hands on hips, staring with those cold eyes at Chase on the ground. With him was that damned fat border guard, and angry-looking Ulu and Walter, and a platoon of uniformed soldiers. In the background was a camouflage-painted armored car, dusty from the road.

I’m honored, Chase thought ironically. They’re taking no chances with Baron Chase.

Kekka said, “So, Captain. They tell me you speak Swahili after all.”

It was too late to deny it. His voice horribly hoarse—it was so important not to seem weak now, or afraid—he croaked in Swahili, “Ali. Let me talk with you, friend.”

“I don’t like your accent,” Kekka said.

“Ali, I have something for you.”

“And I,” Kekka said, opening his trousers, “have something for you.”

Chase squeezed his eyes shut, clamped his mouth tight, and felt the spray of warm urine rove over his face and hair, while the soldiers giggled together. When at last it stopped, Chase kept his eyes closed but called, “Ali, motakaa.” Automobile. Then, hoping Kekka would know the English but none of the others would, he added, low and intense, “Money!”

A kick in the stomach knocked the wind out of him and bounced open his eyes. He stared up at Kekka’s contempt. “If you speak again, in that miserable accent,” Kekka said, “I shall have my men shit on you.”

Something something some way out some hope somewhere some way not finished not finished not finished like this. The silent Chase stared, panting like a long-distance runner.

“Put him in the car,” Kekka said, and turned away.

The soldiers picked him up, not gently, and carried him toward the armored car. To one side the Mercedes stood silent, all doors open. These fools here had run it all afternoon, crowding in for the air conditioning, until they’d used up the gasoline. Tens of thousands of dollars were in the panels of those open-sagging doors. There had to be a way to buy safety with that much. “Ali!” Chase called, not caring what he risked. “The Benz! Don’t leave the Benz!”

There was no reaction at all, not even a kick. They threw him on the metal floor in back; then eight soldiers climbed in with him, four on the bench on each side, all using his body as a footrest and a target for when they had to spit. Kekka and the driver rode up front. The car jolted forward, leaving the Mercedes behind.

“Money?”

Chase, in fear and exhaustion, had lost consciousness for some time, until he heard that English word whispered in his ear. Then he opened his eyes to the semidark of twilight, no movement, and an armored car empty except for himself and the young avid-eyed soldier leaning over him. “Where—” Chase asked, and had to clear his throat and swallow.

“They’ve gone to eat,” the soldier said in Swahili. “I made sure to be left as guard. General Kekka had one of his headaches; he required food. You know General Kekka’s headaches?”

Chase nodded. He was still trying to work saliva into his parched mouth and throat.

“Sometimes,” the soldier said, “General Kekka kills with his headaches.”

Chase waited, watching the young soldier’s eyes.

“This is Mbarara,” the soldier said, keeping his voice low, just for Chase. “Not far yet. I heard you say ‘money.’ I know what that is. Fedha.”

“That’s right,” Chase whispered. Here’s my man! he thought. Here’s my man! Here’s my man!

“In the automobile,” the soldier said, his eyes gleaming not only with cupidity but also with his own cleverness. “That’s what you meant! Money in the automobile!”

“Yes! If you—”

“How much?”

Chase thought. “You know who I am,” he whispered, not yet trusting his voice. “You know I would not run away with a little money.”

“Yes. Yes. How much?”

“Enough for two. One million British pounds, and four gold bars from Zaire.”

The soldier’s eyes bulged in his head; saliva reflected from his teeth. “We go there!” he whispered in shrill excitement. “You show me where you hide all this!”

“Yes, yes, just untie—”

But the man was gone. Rearing up as best he could, the neck rope biting into his throat, Chase stared and listened, and couldn’t understand what was happening until all at once the armored car’s engine started, the vehicle jolted backward, stopped, jolted forward, swung around in a tight U-turn, and went bouncing out some bumpy driveway to the road.

The bastard! The dirty dirty dirty bastard! As the armored car tore south, jouncing and swaying on the unrepaired road, Chase bitterly saw the soldier’s plan: he would bring Chase back to the border, torture him until he got his hands on the hidden loot in the Mercedes, then murder Chase, bribe his way across the border, and enter Rwanda a rich man.

No. No. Fighting his ropes, fighting gravity, fighting the thuds and crashes as the armored car plowed from pothole to pothole, fighting his own battered weary body, Chase squirmed to the rear of the car. With his shoulders, with his forehead, he forced himself around into a position on knees and shoulders; then, at a particularly vicious jounce, he propelled himself upward so that he knelt sitting on his haunches with his back against the tailgate.

Outside, the road swept away at a dizzying pace under the armored car. Mbarara was less than fifty miles north of the border, and the soldier was clearly trying to get there and across before the alarm went out.

Still, as the road moved up into the hills there were more and more curves, and the soldier would eventually either have to slow down or crash. Chase waited, battered by the armored car’s gyrations, his balance unsteady, and finally the armored car nosed up and turned into a sharp uphill curve. As it slowed, Chase pushed down with his legs, heaved himself up, flung himself backward. For one dreadful moment he hung there, the small of his back teetering on the tailgate, his feet stretched to their maximum, the rope grinding deep into his neck. Then the armored car once more jounced, and shrugged him off.

Strapped, swaddled, out of control, Chase fell heavily onto his head and ceased to struggle.

Jouncing. It was a dream, Chase thought, bile in his mouth. A dream of escape, nothing more. He moved his horribly aching body, and it was without ropes! And he was sitting on, propped up on, something soft, something that gave with the bumps.

His eyes flew open, staring for a dislocated instant without recognition at the nighttime road seen through a truck windshield. “AAAH!” he cried, and threw his hands forward onto the dashboard for support.

“You’re awake, poor man,” the driver said, in English.

“Stop! God, stop!”

The driver pulled off the road and stopped, and Chase fumbled open his door, fell out onto the ground, and vomited until he was down to dry heaves. Beside him, the man who’d been driving the truck knelt and consoled him, brushing his shoulder with a solacing palm. And when Chase finished, the man gave him a cloth to wipe his face. “I’m sorry I have no water for you,” he said. “But it’s not far to Mbarara.”

Mbarara! Again! Chase looked up, and saw the turned-around collar; a minister. “You saved me,” he said.

“The government doesn’t like me to be out,” the minister said, “so I visit my parishioners at night. You were set upon and robbed?”

“Yes. They took my car.”

“You are very fortunate they didn’t take your life,” the minister said, helping Chase to his feet. “In Mbarara, we can get you medical assistance. And of course police.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

Chase permitted the minister to help him back up onto the passenger seat of the small battered pickup truck. His foot hit two metal tire irons on the floor, clanking them together.

“Such a messy car,” the minister said, reaching forward. “I’ll move those.”

“No, no, that’s all right.”

The minister shut the door and walked around the front of the truck while Chase reached down for one of the metal bars. It was too bad this Good Samaritan story had to end on such a sour note, but Chase had need of this truck and couldn’t afford the alarm to be raised.

It was no good trying to go back for the Mercedes; he had to cut his losses on that one. There was only one exit route left: back the other way, eastward, through Kampala and Jinja. He had to reach the coffee thieves before they emptied the train and started away across the lake.

The minister opened the driver’s door. “Lucky I came along,” he said.

55

Through the afternoon and into the night the transfer of the coffee went on. It took half an hour to load a group of four trucks, and nearly an hour for the trucks to drive down to the lake. With the work force at the lake half the size of that at the depot, it took another hour to unload each group of trucks onto the rafts, spread the tarpaulins on top, then moor each raft in the calm water just off-shore.

There was of course no way to hide these loaded rafts from the air, but the few planes and helicopters that passed overhead before nightfall paid them no attention. Those aircraft belonged to Uganda’s antismuggling patrol and had been called in from duty over the lake to help look for the missing train. They saw the tarpaulin-covered rafts in the bay but ignored them. They could be floating there for any of a hundred reasons, ranging from fishing to oil exploration to archaeology, and certainly could have nothing to do with a stolen train.

The first batch of trucks to reach the lake was no more than half unloaded when the second arrived, and as the first quartet finished and started back up the access road the third came into view. Frank returned to the depot with the first group, leaving Charlie and a crony of his to remount the rest of the outboard motors. Their trucks squeezed by the downward-traveling fourth group halfway back, and arrived at the depot, just before six o’clock, in time to help finish loading the fifth and final batch of trucks.

Twelve freight cars had been tossed into the gorge by now, in three clusters of four, and each jettisoning had been the occasion for another round of self-congratulation and beer. Frank found the work force, including Lew and Young Mr. Balim and Isaac—who had been replaced as sentry by a workman who’d fallen off the back of a truck with a sack in his arms and landed under it—all feeling very chipper and optimistic indeed. “Have a beer, Frank,” said Isaac. Isaac!

Frank took the beer, but gave them all a look of disapproval. “When we get drunk is afterward,” he said.

Lew came smiling over to say, “Take it easy, Frank. We’re moving the stuff. And there’s a kick here, you don’t know about it yet, there’s something… Just wait for it.”

Frank knew Lew Brady to be a solid reliable professional, if a trifle young. But now, peering into Lew’s eyes, he saw a glittering spark that surprised him, a rashness he hadn’t realized was there. He said, “Lew? What is it?”

“Just wait for that truck there.”

He meant the truck Isaac had borrowed from the Ugandan Army a few days ago. Lighter and smaller than the other trucks, it was being used now to take the last coffee from the four freight cars currently being unloaded; eight or ten tons in all.

Frank swigged his beer and watched the men work, and even though it seemed to him their attitude was somehow frivolous, he had to admit they were doing the job, moving quickly and smoothly. And when that lone truck was filled and starting on its way—the driver had been the loser in a brisk short-straw contest—Frank got to see what drug it was that had made them all so high.

It was danger. As an ex-railwayman uncoupled the four empty cars, the thirty workmen all clambered up their sides, some climbing onto the roofs, some hanging on the ladders, the rest going inside the big open doors, all yelling and hurrahing, laughing and waving their beer bottles around.

Frank looked for Lew, to ask him what this was all about, but Lew was scrambling up onto the roof of the lead car. Young Mr. Balim was grinning in the doorway of the third car, taking deep swigs from his beer bottle.

Frank found himself almost alone on the ground, with Isaac. “Isaac,” he said, “what the hell is this?”

“Boys will be boys,” Isaac said. “That was Lew’s explanation.”

“Sounds like one of Charlie’s.”

The grinning ex-railwayman between the cars yelled and waved his arms to indicate the coupler was unfastened. The grinning ex-railwayman atop the fifth car waved and nodded to indicate his car’s brake was securely on. And the grinning ex-railwayman on the first car drained his beer bottle and tossed it ahead of the car into the gorge. Then, with a grand gesture, he spun the wheel to release the brake. And nothing happened.

So why was everybody cheering? Frank looked, and the thirty men on and in and hanging from the cars were all whooping and cavorting and leaping and dancing around, stomping their feet like crazy people in the Middle Ages trying to frighten away plague.

“It’s been building from the start,” Isaac said, at Frank’s elbow. “It’s bigger and more ridiculous every time. God knows where it will lead.”

The vibration. Now Frank saw what those clowns were up to; the vibration of their dancing and carrying on was overcoming inertia, starting the empty cars forward on the slight slope, sliding every damn one of those idiots toward the cliff!

“Jesus H. Christ, Lew!”

The men on top of the lead car were running now, Lew among them, leaping across the space to the next car. The ones riding below jumped out the open doorways on both sides, while the ones hanging onto the ladders simply dropped off and fell to the ground or on top of one another, laughing and kicking their legs.

There was some sort of contest taking place up on the roofs. The idea seemed to be to wait until the car you were on was actually falling, its front wheels already in space, before leaping to the next car back. The first car had already gone into the gorge; the second was going; the whole mass was accelerating. There wasn’t room on the narrow roofs for everyone who wanted to play chicken; from the second car roof a half dozen men dove sideways at the last possible instant, rolling on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling, hands scrabbling for holds in the scrub.

“Holy leaping shit!”

And Lew was up there with those assholes; he was in the middle of it; he was a fucking ringleader. Always on the front car, he was never the first nor the last to jump back to the next, but invariably timed his move just before the last-second rush. Frank thought, I’m too old for this, by Christ. I am gonna retire.

“Frank!”

It was Young Mr. Balim calling. Frank watched in horror, thinking of what he would have to say to the old man, while Young Mr. Balim in the third car waved and grinned and waited until what had to be too long before pirouetting out of the car, beer bottle held high, and crumpling all in a heap next to the edge. Frank stopped breathing, and Young Mr. Balim uncurled and crawled quickly forward to look over the lip and watched his car fall.

Frank breathed. “Isaac,” he said. “Isaac, how can you let them do this?”

Isaac’s expression was doleful, but still good-humored. “How can you not?” he asked.

With a concerted cheer, and with bodies hurtling in all directions, the fourth car sailed out over the edge and into eternity. Amid the whooping and the hollering, Frank and Isaac stood unsmiling and alone, like a couple of preachers in a cowtown on a Saturday night.

Lew came over, grin and bottle both intact, bottle half-full, clothing spotted with dirt and twigs. “Whadaya say, Frank?”

“I say, if you aren’t drunk you’re fucking crazy.”

“Then I’m fucking crazy, Frank.” Lew lifted his bottle in a toast and swigged half the remainder.

“What makes you so goddam cheerful?”

“I’ll tell you, Frank,” Lew said, and pointed with his free hand. “You see that sign?”

“Ellen’s Road. I’m sorry I put the fucker up.”

“Don’t be.” Lew turned to give his happy grin to the remaining cars of the train, sliding down now into position for the next four to be unloaded, then looked back at Frank. “I’ve been with these guys all day,” he said. “Every time I look up I see that sign and I wonder what went wrong, and then I look around at what I’m doing, shlepping coffee sacks, and I wonder why I’m so happy.”

“Beer.” Frank said.

“Maybe.” Lew was plainly cheerful enough to agree with anything: that the world is flat, that the end justifies the means, that this is the Pepsi Generation, just any damn thing at all. “What I think it is,” he went on, “more than the beer, I think I’ve figured out who I am.”

“An asshole,” Frank said. “Trying to be a dead asshole.”

“Maybe that, too. But something more.” Within Lew’s merry madness, seriousness lurked. He said, “You know, Ellen isn’t a one-man woman any more than I’m a one-woman man. I’m not gonna put on a tie and go down to the office, and she’s not gonna stay home and sort the laundry. We’re absolutely perfect for each other, and it’s a great relief to me to know that.”

“I’m glad for you.”

“Thank you, Frank. Why Ellen and I are so perfect for one another is because we’re so alike. And because neither of us wants the other one to be anybody but who we are.”

“And who the fuck are you?” Frank asked, feeling more sour by the minute.

“I’ll tell you who I am.” Lew was really very excited. He said, “It came to me in a revelation, this afternoon. That sign, this train, that cliff. I’ve accepted my destiny, Frank. I’m the hero!”

Frank stared at him. “You’re the what?”

“The hero. That’s what I was born to be. And that’s why I can go up on top of those cars and take a couple chances.” The bastard had the effrontery to pat Frank on the cheek. “The hero doesn’t get killed,” he explained.