feels.”
He had to admit that it felt good — the same confidence-inspiring solidness of the Sig Sauer without the weight.
“Do you mind?” Smith said, pointing to the range.
“Please.”
He fired a round at the fifty-meter target, putting it dead center in the human silhouette.
“It seems to agree with you,” Janani said, a craftsman’s pride audible in his voice.
“Fits good, shoots nice. But will it stop anything? The recoil feels light.”
“You’re firing a 170-grain ten-millimeter round with a thirteen-hundred-foot-per-second muzzle velocity.”
“Come on…Really?”
The African dipped his head respectfully.
“So what’s the verdict, mate?” Howell said.
“If it’s reliable, it’s the best thing I ever shot.”
“Of course it’s reliable!” Janani whined. “Certainly more so than anything the
“All right,” Howell said. “We’ll take it and another one like it for me. Then I’ll need a couple assault rifles. Something maneuverable along the lines of a SCAR-L, but I’ll leave the final decision to you. No point in traveling light, so say a thousand rounds for the rifles and a hundred each for the handguns. Three spare clips apiece.”
“Of course. We can have them ready by morning. Can I interest you in anything else? Perhaps a portable rocket launcher? I have a prototype that I think you’d find very compelling.”
“Tempting, but we’re trying to keep a low profile. You wouldn’t happen to know anybody in the car business, would yo—”
“Excuse me!”
They all turned toward Sarie, who was waving a hand irritably. “Are we forgetting someone?”
The African was clearly confused. “I’m sorry. Are you making a joke?”
“I think she’s serious,” Smith said.
Janani shook his head miserably. “Women have become so…What is the word you use? Uppity. It’s this new feminism.”
He walked over to a chest of drawers and pulled out a minuscule chrome.32. “This looks very nice with a handbag.”
Even Howell managed a laugh, less at Janani’s joke than at Sarie’s deadly expression.
“I was thinking of something more like this,” she said, walking up to a row of scoped semiautomatic rifles. She grabbed one and pulled the bolt back, confirming that it was loaded before starting for a table piled with sandbags.
“That’s not a toy,” Janani said as she laid the gun down and knelt behind it.
When she didn’t acknowledge his warning, he turned back to Howell and Smith. “My first wife behaves like this. I blame Oprah. We get—”
All three of them ducked in unison as an explosion rattled the rickety thatched roof above them. There were shouts from inside the building and a number of armed men ran out, only to find Sarie joyfully clapping her hands. “You put dynamite behind them? I love that!”
The African frowned, looking at what was left of his plywood target cartwheeling through a distant cloud of dirt and shattered rock. “Only the ones at eight hundred meters.”
“Do you mind if I shoot another?”
Janani walked over and snatched away the rifle. “Out of the question, madam. This weapon is far too heavy for you and the stock is all wrong. I’ll have something more suitable when you and your friends return.”
27
“No problem. Hotel.”
Sarie chuckled quietly in the backseat as Jon Smith’s head sank into his hands. They’d found their driver a few miles from the arms market hoofing it back to Kampala. He’d seemed a little shocked to see them alive but gratefully climbed back behind the wheel after checking his rust bucket of a cab for damage.
“No,” Smith said for the fifth time. “
Howell’s detour, while admittedly productive, left them no time to stop at the hotel before their appointment with the director of Kampala’s main medical facility.
“No problem. Hotel.”
Smith groaned and fell back into his seat.
“I think he’s missing the subtlety between the words ‘hospital’ and ‘hotel,’” Sarie offered. “What’s it actually called?”
He must have been more tired than he thought not to come up with that himself. Sixty hours of travel took a hell of a lot more out of him than it had when he was thirty.
“Mulago,” he said, enunciating carefully. “Not hotel. Mulago Hospital.”
The driver’s eyes widened with understanding. “Mulago? You sick?”
“Yes! You’ve got it! I’m sick. Very, very sick.”
“Mulago. No problem.”
Fifteen minutes later they pulled up to an enormous crate of a building surrounded by a railing painted an unfortunate baby blue.
“Mulago!” the driver announced as Smith threw open the door and slid out from beneath his pack.
He crouched and leaned back in to look at Howell. After his hour of normality at the arms market, he’d turned melancholy again — something worryingly at odds with his personality. “Can you stay with the car, Peter? We won’t be long.”
The Brit leaned his head back and stared up at the mildewed headliner. “I don’t have anything else on my calendar.”
Hello, I’m Dr. Jon Smith and this is Dr. Sarie van Keuren. We have an appointment with Dr. Lwanga.”
The woman stood with surprising nimbleness from behind a desk about half her size. The stern expression she’d worn when they approached transformed into a toothy smile. “Of course,” she said in lightly accented English. “I have your appointment right here. If you will just follow me, please.”
She led them less than ten feet to an open office door and then stepped ceremoniously aside so they could enter.
“Dr. Lwanga?” Smith said, approaching a bespectacled man standing at an odd angle that suggested childhood polio. He closed the book in his hand with a snap and limped toward them. “Drs. Smith and van Keuren. It is a great honor.”
“Likewise,” Sarie said. “You have a beautiful facility here.”
“There isn’t much money,” he responded. “But one does what one can.”
“We know you’re busy, Doctor, and we don’t want to take up too much of your valuable time…,” Smith started.
“Of course. What is it I can do for you?”
Smith fell silent, letting Sarie take the lead as they had agreed. She was a minor celebrity across the continent for her work on malaria and knew better what questions to ask. He’d just stand by and make sure she didn’t get overexcited and reveal too much.
“Jon and I are heading north on a brief expedition to find a parasitic worm that affects ants. But while we were doing our research, we found a mention of another parasite that caught our attention.”
“I’m afraid this isn’t really my area,” Lwanga said apologetically.
