The Night Ranger

26

LOWER JUBA REGION

After Wizard dismissed Gwen, she trudged across camp, hoping the storm would wash her clean. She knew Wizard could have punished her far more brutally than he had. Still she hated him for the way he’d made her shame herself.

At the hut, she found Owen leaning against the dirt bike she’d ridden, his thumb against the starter like he wanted to see for himself how she’d messed up. The AK was still strapped across his chest, Yusuf’s blood glinting off its butt. Owen didn’t say a word when Gwen explained what Wizard had said. He fiddled with the rifle, his new favorite toy, flicking the safety. Like he’d known all along that Wizard wouldn’t let them out. She wondered whether he’d sent her out simply to humiliate her, but she was too tired to ask.

She sat against the back wall and ran her hands across the dirt floor, sifting the soft grit through her fingers, a strangely comforting feeling. A few feet away, Yusuf lay under the shredded motorcycle poster. A dribble of blood leaked down his face as he mumbled to himself. Gwen had brought a water bottle from Wizard’s hut. She handed it to Yusuf now. “Drink.”

He looked at her blankly and raised the bottle to his mouth and sipped, his lips working it like a baby’s. The skin on his temple flapped loose, exposing the bright pink flesh underneath, intimate and terrible.

“What are you doing?” Owen said. “He’s the enemy.”

“He’s scared out of his mind. We need to let him go.”

“Then what leverage will we have?”

“Drop it, Owen,” Hailey said. She sat near the doorway, peeking at the men guarding them. The three of them were staying as far from one another as possible, Gwen saw.

“Now you’re on her side,” Owen said.

“Tried your way.”

“If she’d known how to ride like she said, we might be in Kenya by now—”

Gwen stopped listening. She didn’t understand how Owen had turned into a man who wanted to deny this boy water. They were molting, all of them, shedding their skin and finding a rougher underlayer. Though the change had some benefits, at least for her. A week ago she would have been crying at this moment, indulging herself in the pointless luxury of tears. Instead, she wasn’t even bothering to defend herself. She knew she’d done her best with the bike. She didn’t care what Owen thought.

Hailey came over, sat beside her. “Truth is, he just doesn’t want to admit how stupid his idea was.”

“The truth is I wanted to get us out of here before—”

An explosion tore through the night to the east. The hut’s walls shook. Owen grinned at her like a scientist who’d predicted the end of the world for years and finally had the thrill of seeing the cataclysmic asteroid coming. We’re all going to die, but at least I was right. Gwen felt nearly serene, nothing like the panic that had come when Wizard raised his knife. Getting blown to bits would be quick and painless. So she hoped.

“Before something like that happened.” Owen hopped off the dirt bike and looked out the doorway before striding back to her. He reeked of sweat and testosterone and mud and blood. Gwen felt a wholly inappropriate warmth between her legs. Now that he was a grade-A jerk, she wanted him? She and her libido needed to have a serious talk.

“Looks like a third-grade fire drill out there,” Owen said.

“What was that?” Hailey said.

“I think it was a bomb. And I think it was one of ours. Felt too big to be anything else.”

“They found us here in a day when they couldn’t in Kenya for a week?”

“Maybe they’ve been looking for us here all along,” Hailey said. “Maybe they didn’t look in Kenya, they figured we had to be in Somalia.”

“Which would mean Wizard did us a favor after all,” Owen said.

“So why just one bomb?” Gwen said. “A warning?”

“Or they were trying to calibrate it or something,” Owen said. “Either way, if the SEALs or whoever did it, they have to know we’re here. And they’ve got to be close.” He stood, put his hand over his heart. “God bless America, land that I love—”

Gwen couldn’t decide if he was terrified or high on hormones and sleeplessness. “If they line us up and shoot us, how will you feel about spending your last few minutes in full jackassery?”

“They line us up and shoot us, Ah don’t suspect Ah’ll care.” In a mock southern accent. “Let me tell you something about Wizard, Gwen. He’s a moron. He thought if he got us to Somalia nobody would come for him. How’s that working out?”

“You know, with Scott gone, you could have gotten some if you played your cards right,” she said. “A pity lay for all those hours you spent mooning over me. From the way Scott described your equipment, it really would have been pitiful.”

The cheapest of cheap shots, especially since Scott hadn’t said anything of the sort. But Owen looked down at his crotch like it had betrayed him. Forget the very real risk they wouldn’t see the dawn. He had a bigger worry now. Did his junk measure up?

Men.

—

Outside, Wizard was yelling. After he stopped, Gwen snuck to the doorway. Wizard was gone, but Waaberi and his men watched the hut from three angles. They weren’t smiling. One of them, the tall one who had caught her by the latrine, saw her looking. He nodded and then slowly, distinctly, passed his fingers across his throat.

She wanted to scramble away. Hide in the corner. Last week she would have. Not now. They would do what they would do, but she wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of knowing that they frightened her. She stared right back.

She could hear the hens clucking and the goats scraping at the mud in their pen. They’d had as long a night as everyone else. She felt the most profound fatigue she could imagine. But when she closed her eyes, they fluttered open on their own, as though her mind knew it couldn’t risk sleep. So she sat against the wall, waited, as the rain lightened and the clouds thinned.

But she did sleep, she must have, because time leapt forward without her realizing, and when she opened her eyes she saw Wizard coming out of the darkness, and beside him a tall man covered in a coat of mud so thick that at first she couldn’t tell if he was white or black. As he got closer she recognized him, not from his face but from the size of his shoulders and his arms. He was the white man Wizard had shown her on the cell phone the day before, in the Land Cruiser with the black guy. Gwen had asked if they were looking for her, and he’d said, If they are, they won’t be much longer. In his cool Wizard way. But he’d been wrong about that, along with everything else.

The man didn’t seem to be a prisoner. His hands were free. He wasn’t hooded. Owen and Hailey stood beside her and watched as Wizard led the man to his hut. “Maybe he’s here with the ransom,” Hailey said. “Maybe that pack is filled with money.”

“Why they dropped the bomb, a carrot-and-stick thing,” Owen said. “Luca Brasi making an offer even Wizard isn’t dumb enough to refuse.”

Gwen wondered what he was talking about and decided she didn’t care. Behind them, Yusuf groaned. She turned just in time to see him pull himself onto all fours and vomit a stream of clear liquid.

She went to him, tucked herself under his bony left arm, straightened him up. His skin was sticky and feverish, his eyes unfocused. He stank of grease and sickness. The top of his head barely reached her chin when she pulled him to his feet. He couldn’t have weighed much more than she did, which was lucky, because when she edged him from the wall, he sagged onto her.

“Hailey—”

Hailey came over, put a thumb under his chin to lift his head.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I’m more at the holding hands while the nurse gives you an ouchie level of medical expertise.”

“We’re getting him out of here.”

“Nobody out there can do anything for him, either,” Owen said.

“It’s too hot in here and he’s scared. We’re taking him out.”

Owen put a hand under his rifle. He wasn’t exactly aiming it at them, but he wasn’t exactly pointing it away, either.

“Planning on shooting us?” Hailey said. She came under Yusuf’s right side and lifted him. Together she and Gwen walked him past Owen. He took his hand off the rifle. His mouth was notched open, like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just done.

Gwen and Hailey reached the doorway and stood with Yusuf between them. The rain had stopped now, and the clouds were lifting. A few stars shone weakly. Gwen sensed that the sun was close by, ready to banish the night.

Three White Men trotted over and took Yusuf, squawking at him in Somali. “What you do to him?” one said in English. He spat at her feet. Gwen wondered if she’d made a mistake, if Owen had been right that without Yusuf they were defenseless.

While she tried to figure out what to say, Wizard and the white man came out of Wizard’s hut. Wizard shouted at his men, and they backed away from Gwen unwillingly, like dogs that didn’t want to listen to their master. Owen put down the AK and stepped forward. The three of them stood side by side, a welcoming committee, as Wizard and the white man walked up to them.

“I’m John Wells. Nice to meet you.” He’d washed his face, though mud still caked his clothes.

He had a low laconic voice, easy and confident. She wanted to put her arms around him and not let go. As she looked closer, she saw he was sick, shivering under his muddy clothes in the cool night air, his eyes red-rimmed. Still, she’d gladly take her chances with him.

“This man come to take you home,” Wizard said.

Before Gwen could exhale, before she could exult over that word and everything it meant, Wells raised his hand. “It may not be quite that easy.”