White Bone (23 page)

B
eneath a cloud-shrouded, moonless sky, Grace squatted to urinate. The bellyful of milk had sustained her during her attempt to keep up with the fleeing boy, but his Maasai heritage and endurance soon showed, and he left her well behind. By nightfall even the fleeting sight of him had slowly but steadily disappeared, a boat sailing over the horizon.

He’d been aimed directly at Kilimanjaro. As she pursued him, she’d tried to outrun her own incredulity as well: there was no nearby village in this direction. The two herdsmen were a hundred kilometers from home, had probably been in the bush for months, living on cow’s milk and root vegetables.

Olé had spoken of such an existence, but at the time his stories had seemed more lore than reality: an encounter with a lion; a friend dying from a soup he’d made that could have killed them all; hunting gazelle with primitive, poison-tipped spears. The stuff of film.

Slumping down, Grace scraped the hard-packed dirt with the tip
of her attacker’s aluminum spear, trying to break up the surface. Crumbling chunks of sandy dirt began building up in a pile alongside her. The loosened dirt would weigh down a blanket of salvaged car upholstery while she slept.

The night promised to be cool. Running had exhausted Grace; her chills warned of a fever. She’d used up the last of her energy, had begun hallucinating, a vision clouded with red and purple that frightened her. Too much information was a dangerous thing, she realized, trying to ignore the warning signs of her body shutting down. Despair chased away her courageous optimism. Depression replaced hope. She wanted to sleep and never wake up.

Though she could no longer see her hand in the thick dark, she saw herself digging her own grave. She was two people now: a woman who’d been well trained; and another woman, at the whim of the devils and ghosts her superstitious mother had warned her about.

As she thought of her family, Grace broke into tears. Yellow and orange joined the swirling colors. She willed it all away, but to no effect. Closing her eyes tightly, she shook her head in an attempt to clear the canvas. The colors remained, now spinning to create vertigo and push her out of her squat. She fell back onto her bottom.

Lying down felt worse, and she feared that without a substantial layer of dirt atop the car seat fabric she would be at risk of hypothermia. Eyes open, eyes shut. The yellow glow came and went. The purple and red remained.

Focusing on the difference—open, shut—she strained to explain the yellow’s absence when she closed her eyes. The color reappeared when she opened them, stayed in place while the red and purple colors shifted and flowed in her periphery like northern lights.

Eventually she determined that the small yellow blur actually existed in the landscape. It burned, real, steady. A campfire.

T
he Chyulu Hills airstrip was lined with five road flares, black smoke billowing upward as if from long-wick candles. The wind was from their right and slightly ahead. The plane bounced only once and taxied. Knox, consumed in thought, nearly missed seeing the tall Kenyan wearing khakis and a windbreaker standing alongside the army-green safari vehicle.

He was focused on two words in the intercept: “wounded gazelle.” He’d pushed that aside without thought, but now he’d locked in on it. Was it an expression to allow the full meaning of the message to resonate, or was it literal?

“Nice landing.”

The plane shuddered to a near stop and turned a full 180 degrees. “Pleasure,” the pilot said, extending his hand. A dazed Knox took a moment to meet it with his own, then held the man’s hand a little too long.

The pilot throttled the engine down lower, quieting it. The plane rumbled beneath them, as if eager to fly. “Well, it was a pleasure flying you—and the boy, too, I guess.”

“You said Bishoppe ran errands and supplied information for a friend of yours. Do you mind me asking who?” Knox blurted out.

“Not at all. A journalist, Bertram Radcliffe. Bert’s got ears and eyes all over Nairobi.” The pilot reached out and put his hand on Knox’s shoulder. “What is it, man?”

Trying to mask his shock, Knox thanked him and climbed out clumsily, struggling to squeeze his large frame through the small door. He felt sick. Bishoppe connected to Radcliffe, Radcliffe with his bizarre political agenda, his association with the dead reporter, his enlistment of the boy’s services and the trouble chasing on its heels.

A
steady and foul wind blew out of the northwest, drying Guuleed’s tongue. He could still feel grit between his teeth, nubs worn to the nerve from years of chewing
khat
.

His prickly mood matched the weather. Eyes stinging, he knew better than to be outside in such a storm.

He moved for his truck. The remainder of his men huddled inside the two other vehicles, gambling away their meager earnings. A driver sat alone behind the wheel of Guuleed’s truck, monitoring the CB and shortwave radios used by police and KGA rangers.

From the moment the sandstorm had risen and blown across their camps like a dry fog, Guuleed attributed it to Allah. He had ordered his men into the three best trucks and, driving separate routes, they had made for the forested hills in Aberdare National Park, a swath of land east of Kijabi. Allah had provided them cover at a time of need: they’d been hunkered down under the watchful
eye of an overhead drone. The camps had been left intact, along with several vehicles to sell the ruse of their still being occupied.

“Anything?” he asked his driver.

“No mention of us. No deployment. I believe we’re in the clear. Praise Allah.”

“I have already,” Guuleed said testily.

“There is this, on the website.” The man spun the laptop, which was wired to the satellite phone. Guuleed read. Blinked. Read again.

“Do we trust this source?”

“Yes. Absolutely. He works the hotels, same as the others.”

“This is the American?” Guuleed suggested.

“I believe so, yes.”

“A private flight? As soon as this shitstorm clears we head south, the lot of us.”

The driver looked deeply troubled.

“Fucking Leebo’s gone AWOL. Rambu’s shorthanded. Cheer up, man. There’s a woman who’s going to make us rich. The Larger Than Life rangers travel in pairs. We can overpower any of their patrols. In and out. Quick strike. Ten, twenty times the money for you and the men. Our luck changes here.”

K
nox apologized to the hotel driver/guide who’d met him at the grass strip. “I’m fine with paying for a night’s stay in the hotel—two, three, whatever your minimum is—but I need a ride to Oloitokitok now.”

“It is I who is sorry, sir. It is not possible, this request you make. My instructions are to deliver you to the hotel. In the morning, such a trip can be arranged.”

“It can’t wait until morning.”

“Then I am sorry, but you should have instructed the pilot to drop you off in Oloitokitok, sir. This is Ol Donyo. Chyulu Hills. It is seventy-five kilometers on dirt track across the bush. It is slow enough by light. At night, it would be four hours or more. My advice is for you to arrive to the lodge. Wake at sunrise. You will arrive to Oloitokitok at approximately the same hour. It will be my pleasure to drive you.”

“It has to be now. It has to be Oloitokitok. There’s a man there
named Brantingham, Travis Brantingham. Director of Larger Than Life. You’re smiling. You know him?”

“Mr. Brantingham lives five minutes up the road from the lodge, sir.”

“Travis Brantingham? He commutes seventy-five kilometers?”

“Several times a week. Oloitokitok is not so pretty as Chyulu Hills, I think.”

G
race’s initial hope, that the two men around the campfire might be rangers sent to rescue her, was crushed by what she saw. Dressed in ratty bush clothes and car-tire sandals, they sat close to each other, as if for protection. Both looked hardened, and far too comfortable. A blackened saucepan was balanced on stones over a fire no bigger than a fist. It amazed her that she’d spotted it from so far away.

While one of the men cut up a tuber, the other smoked a foul cigar. Its smoke nearly made Grace sick. She left her hole, shed the skirt for fear of it making noise and belly-crawled twenty meters to the edge of the firelight.

In the flickering glow, she saw a backpack alongside the man smoking. He carried a Kalashnikov 74 across his back, the strap pulled over his head and under his opposing arm so the weapon ran on the diagonal. She was close enough to the fire to see what might
have been her own small boot impressions in the sand. They were trackers. They were hunting her.

Both wore equipment belts around their waists, laden with bulging ammunition pouches and Velcro pockets. If there was a second gun, she couldn’t see it.

A light breeze blew. Each time the wind shifted, so did the men.

Seeing the supplies and the rifle, experiencing the dementia brought on by starvation and exposure, Grace nonetheless began plotting. They had water. Every fiber of her body ached at the sight. She would leave with it, or die trying.

She could crawl back into the dark and get as far away as quickly as possible. But they’d tracked her. She wasn’t going to lose them. It was kill or be killed. It was water.

There were opportunities here. She knew Kalashnikovs well, had trained on a Chinese-made replica. But the rifle was out of the question. She’d have to fight the man to get a hold of it.

She sat back, mind whirling. Seeing them there, the camaraderie, the pot waiting to boil—it evoked in her a story Olé had told.

“We were a long way from the village. The grazing was much better there. There were three of us that day. Our friend gathered the roots to make the soup, while my other friend and I looked after the goats. Each day we fixed a meal for ourselves when the sun was at its height. It was his turn. But my friend and I were delayed. One of our goats encountered a snare trap and was in a bad way. We were no more than thirty minutes past the time we had wanted to return to the meal. When we arrived, our friend was dead, the tin he was eating from still gripped in his hand. All the veins in his arms, neck, head—everywhere—bulged to four or five times their size. His eyes were as big as stones in his head. My friend had seen it before. He drew his knife on the dead one’s arm where the veins stuck up like tree roots. The blood was hard, almost dry. I have never seen
anything like it. He explained it is—like what you call a potato. A root that can be mistaken for another you can eat, if you don’t look carefully at the shape of the leaf. We used a goat to drag him back to the village. He was greeted like a leper until an old woman explained what my friend had told me.”

Later, he’d shown her the poisonous plant. Its leaves were like those of a holly bush, distinctive.

“The plant is itself abundant. Its effects are lethal. You must learn this one, Miss Grace.”

The cook was brushing off and cutting the roots and stacking them in a pile at his side. He was going at it slowly, a few slices, some talk, more slices. The discussion was in Swahili and Grace wished she understood it. She assumed they’d tracked her. Perhaps they could read her shortened strides and knew of her exhaustion. She was deeply troubled by the apparent confidence that allowed them to stop for some soup and a midnight smoke.

Again, she considered her choices. Fight or flight? Again, she came to the same conclusion: to slip away and allow them to follow her by daylight was suicide; they’d be on her in a short time—and on their terms instead of hers. Currently, she had the advantage of surprise.

But how close could she get to the fire without being detected? How much was she willing to risk for that water?

She crawled slowly backward, as silent in her retreat as she’d been in her approach. Working at the very edge of the haze of light, she moved stealthily in search of the holly-leafed bush Olé had shown her. Twice she thought she had a candidate, but the feel of the leaf was wrong; she was looking for a firm, waxy leaf, one that might snap if folded. She kept one eye on the camp. The cook took a smoke off his companion and stoked the small fire with a few twigs, conserving what little fuel existed.

Grace had moved nearly halfway around them when she spotted a taller bush, raised up in silhouette, out farther from the fire. She cursed her luck; the moon was rising. She was going to have to act quickly.

The taller bush was indeed the one Grace sought; she recognized the feel of its leaves. She dug at the dirt around its base one-handed, glad for the crackling of the renewed fire.

Like nearly all plants in the bush, its roots were very near the surface, ready to take advantage of the slightest of rains. Grace twisted and broke off a length. It cracked.

The man with the gun turned his head. Already on hands and knees, Grace crawled slowly away from the bush, root in hand.

The man slipped the gun off his back with far too much ease and familiarity, stood and moved to the edge of the light.

She’d already put ten meters behind her. She continued ever so slowly, a wolf on the prowl. He’d given her an idea . . .

The men had an extremely brief exchange, by which point Grace had moved a full ninety degrees clockwise around the campfire’s perimeter. As the cook stood, grumbling, and moved toward the backpack, he provided her with an opening.

She belly-crawled as quickly and silently as possible, her sound partially covered by the rustle of the cook digging through the backpack, and the other man’s movement, the sound of fresh twigs snapping. With both their backs turned to her, she knelt and threw a rock high above their heads in the direction of the bush.

They startled. Grace felt emboldened by her success. This was the turning point in her plan. She slithered to within two meters of the cook’s back, reaching for the pile of tubers.

The cook called out, pointing. The rifleman turned. Grace froze, hand in the air, fully within his field of view. But the gunman was looking at his partner for direction, for an animal or intruder to
shoot, not a shit-smeared, naked Chinese woman, bare bottom to the sky. The cook switched on the flashlight and blinded the rifleman. The cook tossed the flashlight; the rifleman missed the catch and cursed.

Grace slipped the root into the cook’s pile and crawled backward as fast as she could. Sliding back into the dark, she lay still on her stomach, focused on the root she’d left among the others.

And, moments later, the cook’s hand as he reached down to continue filling the pot.