—
South of Bakafi the land turned hilly, a blanket on an unmade bed. The road faded until it was little more than potholes in the scrub, and Wells’s legs ached as the Cruiser thumped along. They drove about forty minutes before the road came over a hill and swung hard left. Wilfred stopped and pointed at a mess of cigarettes and water bottles in the road ahead.
The kidnappers had chosen wisely. Wells figured they’d blocked the road with one or two of their own SUVs. A driver coming over the hill would have only seconds of warning. If he tried to swerve past the roadblock, he would risk getting stuck in the hill’s soft dirt or flipping over. But once he stopped, he’d be trapped. Gunmen would have positioned themselves behind the WorldCares SUV, pinning it down.
Wilfred eased past the kidnapping site, stopping a hundred feet away. Wells tucked the Glock into his waistband and walked back under the hammering noontime sun. On all sides, the land was surpassingly quiet. No railroad tracks or cell towers. To the west and southwest, he saw scattered huts, but nothing that qualified as a village, much less a town. East, toward Somalia, the land appeared entirely empty. Southeast, maybe five miles away, Wells saw a few black smudges coasting through the sky. Smoke, maybe. He checked through his binoculars. He couldn’t be sure, but they looked like birds. Big ones. A bunch of them, widely spaced, but all moving southeast.
Rich tourists came to Africa under the illusion they would see the untouched world. But mostly they stuck to national parks or private game reserves as closely managed as zoos. They should have come here instead. Wells squatted down, pored over the road, the land around it. But the police had destroyed whatever evidence the kidnappers might have left. The soft red dirt held at least a half-dozen different tire tracks, dozens of footprints. Maybe the guys from CSI could tell the tracks left by the kidnappers from those left by the cops. Wells couldn’t. Pretending otherwise would only waste time.
Still, this trip strengthened his certainty that Suggs was involved. First, the kidnappers must have known the route the volunteers were taking. Why else wait here, on a road used by only a few vehicles a day? On the flip side, Wells couldn’t imagine why the volunteers would have chosen this route unless Suggs had suggested it. The road barely appeared on the map, and it was terribly slow. They’d covered a little more than 150 kilometers—not even 100 miles—in three hours. Going to Garissa and then south on the gravel road to the coast would surely have been faster, even with roadblocks.
“What do you think?” Wilfred said.
“I think Kenyan cops smoke a lot. Any of these brands unusual? Somali?”
“No, all Kenyan.”
Then Wells realized what he hadn’t seen. No spent rounds, no brass casings. No evidence of a firefight. He double-checked to be sure. Yes. Another sign that the kidnapping had gone off without a hitch. He took one last look around, walked back toward the Cruiser.
“That’s it?” Wilfred said. “We came all this way for that?”
“Sometimes you have to see a place with your own eyes.”
“Now we go back to Bakafi, see if anyone talks?”
“No. South.” Wells felt strongly that the kidnappers had gone away from Dadaab. If they had planned to hide in the camps, they would have taken the volunteers much closer to Dadaab.
“And you think these people around here want to talk to you?”
“Never know unless you ask.”
“I can tell you they aren’t much interested in talking to outsiders. Maybe you tell them you’re an Arab and you want to buy the girls for slaves. Like a vulture coming in after the kill.”
Wells raised his binoculars and looked at the black smudges on the horizon. They were still heading southeast. They’d shrunk to specks now. But even as he watched, another entered his field of view. This one was closer, close enough for him to see its wings, big and black and jagged, like they’d been sewn on the cheap and could unravel easy as tugging a string. The bird rode a thermal, rising hundreds of feet in seconds, then flicked its wings and circled southeast, same as the others.
“That way.” Wells pointed toward the vulture.
—
The track south ended a half hour later at a T-junction with another, equally unimpressive road. Twenty or so huts lay a kilometer west. Wilfred turned left, east. Toward Somalia, which was no more than thirty barren kilometers away. Wells racked the slide on the Glock, making sure it was loaded. The pistol felt strange in his hand, heavier and bigger than the Makarov he had carried for so many years. But Anne was right. He should have retired the Mak long ago. Now he had an excuse, a new pistol that fate, in the form of a plug-ugly Irishwoman, had pressed on him.
The smudges in the sky were as good as a GPS. They’d all heard the same announcement: Delicious carrion in aisle two. They might be headed for a cow or a sheep or even a camel. But Wells didn’t think so. After another twenty minutes in the Cruiser, Wells could see the birds slowing, organizing themselves into a ragged circle. They were almost directly to the south, maybe five kilometers. Three swung lower, disappearing behind a hill. Soon they popped up again. Wells imagined they’d tried to feed and been chased out by stronger predators, jackals or hyenas or even lions. The big Kenyan national park called Tsavo East lay about 150 kilometers southwest of here. No doubt lions sometimes ranged this far from its boundaries.
The birds rose, riding on thermals, black spurs against the empty blue sky. Wilfred pointed to a faint pair of ruts marked by a cairn of a half-dozen stones. He started to turn into the track, but Wells put a hand on his forearm.
“Go straight. Park over the next rise. Then we leave this and walk.”
“It will take forever. And snakes. There are snakes.”
“We go on foot, no one knows we’re coming.”
“Better to have this.” Wilfred patted the dashboard like a horse’s flank.
“We walk. You don’t like it, stay in the car.”
—
They trudged south through the ugly low scrub. The dirt was soft, almost spongy, swallowing their steps. The refugees walked through hundreds of miles of this to reach Dadaab. No wonder they were starving when they arrived. Wells carried the essentials in his pack: water, a first-aid kit, binoculars, a sat phone and GPS. He’d strapped on a climber’s headlamp, goofy-looking but essential for keeping his hands free if he found himself in a dark hut. The shotgun was slung across his chest, the Glock tucked into his waistband. He’d given Wilfred the Makarov.
“You don’t shoot unless I shoot.”
“Okay, yes.”
The Land Cruiser’s clock had read 14:20 when they left. Wells figured they’d need close to an hour to reach the area directly beneath the vultures. That didn’t give them much time on target if they were going to return to the Cruiser before dark. They walked in silence, Wells a few feet ahead, scanning for smoke, huts, any sign of human habitation.
A high-pitched cackle, an ugly gasping sound, half laugh, half choke, erupted somewhere in front of them. Wells stopped with one foot in the air like Wile E. Coyote. “Hyenas?”
“That’s their song.”
“Pretty.”
“The devil rides them through hell.”
“Save the folk tales for the anthropology professors.”
Wilfred shook his head in perplexity.
“Come on. Unless you want to be out here in the dark.”
Twice more they heard the cackling, and once an answering call behind them. Neither man mentioned it. The vultures floated high overhead, using the thermals, barely flapping their wings.
A half hour later, Wells came over a hill and saw the huts. Four in all. Three small and close to each other. The last larger, maybe fifty meters away from the third. They were mud-brick, hand-built, like a thousand other huts that Wells had seen that day. The big one had a tin roof, angled slightly so the rain would pour off. The other three had traditional branch roofs. No walls or barbed wire separated them from the land around. Hidden in plain sight. No
