to make that call, not until he felt his luck changing, caught the devil looking the other way.
Meantime he waited for Muhammad. But the call didn’t come. At first Wizard wasn’t worried. Maybe Muhammad’s phone had died. He and his men wouldn’t have trouble with one mzungu. But the afternoon stretched on and finally the sun disappeared. Wizard’s hopes sank as the sky darkened. He wanted to send more men into Kenya to find out what had happened, but he couldn’t risk losing them. Not with the Ditas lurking. He was down five soldiers already today. Too many.
He wondered if he should pull up camp, take his men south into the mangrove swamps. They could live with the crocodiles and snakes while they waited out the Ditas. But the swamps had no phone service. Wizard would have to leave to arrange the ransom. Anyway, he hated the place. The ground itself was rotten. A man who stepped the wrong way found the earth kissing his feet, caressing his legs, pulling him under with a lover’s embrace. The mosquitoes never stopped biting, and they came with malaria that could kill a man in a week. The swamps were the last resort. Had to be.
Ali stepped into his hut. “You want dinner, Wizard?”
He joined the line outside the hut where two of his youngest soldiers stirred pots of rice and meal over a low smoky fire. No meat, of course. Wizard still regretted slaughtering his herd on the night he met Awaale. But they had the hostages now and the hostages would pay for all the goats in Somalia. “Smells good tonight,” he said to Ali, loudly, so the men around him heard. They stood straighter when they saw him. The soldiers at the front of the line waved him forward. But Wizard shook his head, stayed where he was. A good leader ate last.
Then, from the northeast, guns popped. A round, another, then a yell and a long, rattling burst of AK fire. The line dissolved as men ran for their weapons. But the shots stopped as abruptly as they’d started. Waaberi’s walkie- talkie crackled. He put it to his ear, listened, strode to Wizard. “Omar say they killed one, caught two more.”
“Ditas?”
“He don’t know.”
“Bring them here.”
—
The boys were small and ragged and bleeding into their camouflage T-shirts. Wizard’s men had tied their hands behind their backs. One couldn’t walk without help, but the other one seemed okay. Wizard waved them into his hut and ordered his men out, all but Ali and Waaberi and Omar, the sentry who’d spotted them.
Wizard looked them over. One had a scar across his forehead big as a squashed bug. The other, the weaker of the two, had only one eye. The left socket was empty, not even a patch, just a sunken space where his eye should have been. They were thirteen, fourteen at most. They barely looked big enough to hold AKs. Wizard would have rejected them if they’d tried to join the White Men. Told them to go to Dadaab where they belonged. He didn’t understand why Awaale had sent them to him to be slaughtered. He wanted to put a knife to Awaale’s thick neck and make him tell.
“Which way they come?” he said to Omar.
“Down from the road that go to Giara El. They walk straight straight toward the old post.” The sentry position that Wizard had ordered abandoned after Hussein defected.
“Have AKs?”
Omar held up three little pistols that looked like .22s to Wizard. “These popguns.”
“They just walk to you.”
“Yeah, we saw them, got ready, made sure they was the only ones, when they got close we blasted them. Kill one there, hit these two.”
“No others.”
“None we saw.”
The boy with one eye was bleeding from his stomach. Hard. Wizard lifted the boy’s shirt, saw two neat holes. “No good for this one. Get me water. Too fast.” He knelt beside the boy, pulled his knife. The boy shirked away, but Wizard twisted him around, cut the plastic cord binding his hands. “What your name?”
“Yusuf, sir.” His voice was a whisper.
“This my land. Why you come to my land?”
“Awaale say—” The words faded into a cough. The boy was losing his way. In another minute, he would be past speaking. Wizard pinched his ear. “He tell you you going to die?”
Ali returned with a cup of water, and Wizard took it and tipped it to Yusuf’s throat. The boy drank a little and then the water came back out of his mouth and he grunted and tipped sideways and he was dead. “No magic for this one,” Wizard said. He looked at Ali. Ali picked up the body, swung it over his shoulder like a sack of rice, walked out. They’d put the corpse in an empty hut and come morning bury it a few hundred meters away, hope to dig a hole deep enough that the hyenas didn’t get it. All they could do.
“Other two dead. You the last one left,” Wizard said to the third boy, the one with the scar. “Tell me why you come here like this.” This one had been shot in his left shoulder, but he wasn’t whimpering. He looked cold and straight at Wizard.
“Awaale send us. Tell us to give you a message.”
“Give it, then.”
“He want the wazungu. He say you have one night to give them over or he coming here to put all your magic and all your blood in the dirt. He say you better give him the answer ’fore the sun comes up. He say the time to play is over.”
Wizard saw that Awaale had sent two messages. The words, and the boys themselves.
“Anything else?”
The boy shook his head. Wizard didn’t want to kill him. Two useless dead boys was enough for the night. But the White Men couldn’t keep him either. Wizard stood, pulled the boy up by his bad shoulder, punishment for his sass.
“You going back to Awaale. You tell him, he wants the wazungu, it cost him three million U.S. That the price. He don’t want to pay, he can come get them his own self. You understand?”
The boy nodded.
“Tell me so I know you heard.”
The boy repeated Wizard’s words.
“Good. And tell him his other boys best fight better than you. Elseways we gonna have too many bodies for the hyenas to eat.” Wizard shoved the kid away, sent him stumbling. “Put him on the road back,” he said to Omar.
Then he and Waaberi were alone. “It coming,” Wizard said. “Soon enough.”
“Let it come. Long as Awaale keep sending ’em that way, it no problem.”
“Two down. Three hundred to go.”
15
BAKAFI
Wells wasn’t sure that he’d been formally arrested, much less what charges he faced or what rights he had. Not that it mattered. Most Americans thought of police officers as honest and reliable, and cops generally repaid that trust. Anne would take a bullet before she took a bribe. But in Kenya, like many places where Wells plied his trade, the police were best avoided at all costs.
The cuff squeezing his wrist was a simple mechanism, a few links of chain connecting two adjustable steel rings. A trained thief could pop a handcuff with a paper clip in seconds. But if there were any paper clips in this room, Wells couldn’t reach them. He spent a few unpleasant minutes squeezing his thumb against his palm and sliding his wrist against the steel to see if he could slip his hand through, but the cop had cuffed him tight and he was no escape artist. He chafed his skin until it bled, but the cuff stayed in place.
Next he went for brute force. Wells faced the wall and wrapped his left hand high around the chain and twisted his right hand so it, too, held the links. He raised his foot to the wall and shoved his boot against it and
