the idea that koevoet would send helicopters, the idea that they would risk them on a night mission when all they would see would be one fire among others, normal cooking fires here and there in the desert, was not worth worrying about, in his humble opinion.
Kerekang was directing everyone to sit down. Kevin opened Kerekang’s camp stool and got Kerekang seated and then he himself came around to sit cross-legged beside Morel, behind Ray. The three of them were becoming a team, a sort of team.
It was hard to attend to what was going on. Now that Ray was out of the maelstrom of danger, his injuries were hurting more insistently. He wanted a bath. He wanted to be ushered into a well-appointed large bathroom and left there with the hot water running. He wanted to get into a deep tub of hot water. When his brother had been a small boy he had liked to lather his hair and twist it up into devil horns to make everybody laugh, and they had laughed, and now his brother was dead. He wanted his brother to not be dead. He wanted to get into a tub and have his back washed by Iris, with a loofah. He wanted to be able to look forward to that.
There was a protocol to the present event. Each of the comrades was making a preliminary statement, in turn. Everything was in very rapid Setswana, but oddly accented Setswana. The language was spoken differently in the various regions of the country. The exchanges were more than usually opaque to Ray, but his fatigue was hurting his ability to concentrate.
He turned to look at Morel. His brows were knitted. He was struggling to follow. He was having his own difficulties with the Setswana, with this rapid and dialectal Setswana with, Ray was now realizing, inclusions of a second language, Sekgalagadi, laced in.
He was out of his element but he didn’t mind. He was in the presence of a harmonious organism, the band of fighters, operating by cues and understandings he was not part of. That was fine with him. And this organism was operating in darkness, among boulders and thorn trees and odd cries, animal cries, coming out of the darkness. He would never see it again. What he needed to do was to concentrate less on trying to understand what was being said and more on keeping himself from falling over into another bout of exhausted sleep.
He was trying and then there was a blank moment and then he was being hauled to his feet by someone behind him, by two people, Kevin and another comrade, a Mosarwa. Clearly he had missed something.
Morel also was standing. They were being led off into the night by Kevin, who seemed sullen. Ray resented leaving the campfire. The night was bitter.
Ray felt better when he realized that their destination was another fire, a smaller one but still a fire, burning in the lee of a massive, slightly concave hump of a rock.
“What is it, Kevin? Why are we… where are we going?” Ray asked.
“Just there.” He pointed at the fire by the rock.
Morel said, “They asked the makhoa to leave while they finished talking. They think we understand more than we do. They have a right, though, to their privacy. But I couldn’t catch a quarter of what they were saying.”
Ray said, “But Kevin, what about you? You and this man? Go ahead, you can go back.”
Kevin said, “Nyah, rra. I was told to stay with you.”
Morel was annoyed. He said, “Hey, what are we going to do, creep around to spy on you? This is silly.”
“My orders are to stay, rra.”
Ray felt as though he were being dragged to the new fire like a dummy. The small fire was better than nothing, but he wanted to go back to the main fire, where the sleeping bags were, and go to sleep there.
Morel said to Ray, “Stop talking. Kevin has something to tell us.”
“By all means,” Ray said. He wasn’t aware that he had been talking. Who was it who had said, Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to myself. It had been Iris or it had been something Iris had reported her sister as saying. It was too bad that Morel couldn’t have managed to cross paths with Ellen during his peregrinations and fallen in love with her instead of Iris. That would have solved a multitude of problems. The man would have made an excellent brother-in-law.
Kevin said, “Setime will come to tell you this himself, but we have reached a decision as to what should be.
“First they are saying you might take the Land Cruiser and drive it south as far as you can, straight south from here…”
Morel said, “You are saying drive overland, not go back to Route 14? I don’t see why.”
“You have to give your word to do it just as we say. You must go straight down as far as you can, down to Mabuasehube…”
Morel said, “The idea being to distract anybody who would be interested in finding the group.”
Kevin said, “Yes, and then at Mabuasehube you will be below the line of control and you can find game scouts and others in the park to see you on to Gaborone. You will be tired, rra.”
Ray said, “If you’re still worrying about helicopters coming down from Caprivi, I can tell you the odds are so”—Morel subtly nudged him—“hard to elucidate,” Ray said.
“Nyah, but we are listening to Mokopa on this one. And we will send two Bedfords that way, but not so far as Mabuasehube, but just to point toward that way.”
Ray said, “So you figure all of the drivers would be taking the chance of helicopters coming after them.”
“They would,” Kevin said.
Morel said, “But don’t forget that the farther south anybody gets the less the chance that koevoet would risk showing up and risking their most precious equipment. I mean, this country does have an air force and it would be obligatory for them to take notice of an incursion coming anywhere near the population centers, places like Kanye or Jwaneng. Even if the BDF is turning its face away from what’s happening in the north, that would be too much. I think.”
“What will you do, Kevin?” Ray asked.
“I am deciding about it, rra.”
Ray went on. “So one possibility would be that you would go with Kerekang to…?” He had to be careful with his questions, not to seem like his former self.
Kevin hesitated before saying, “We have friends in Namibia. From Gobabis we can go where we like.” He was uncomfortable saying so much, Ray could tell.
It was a shame. Ray’s old self would have been elated to get any shreds and pieces of information that linked Ichokela with SWAPO in Namibia, which was essentially what Kevin was saying existed. I could have gotten one of those invisible medals the agency gives, based on a report I am never going to write, about the ZAPU caches and about this new connection, he thought. He had done his greatest work, alas, in this outing.
The cadres were going to disappear into the landscape, which would be child’s play for the Basarwa and less easy but possible for the other rural types, where they would hibernate. Setime would cross over into Namibia, to Gobabis, and then go down through Windhoek or Walvis Bay to the Republic. There were hundreds of points of entry where Kerekang would be able to get in without showing a passport.
Ray understood part of what was going on, but he wanted it confirmed. His notion was that the shock of unexpected success, at Ngami Bird Lodge, was behind everything. They had done too well. They had bloodied the nose of a supposedly invincible enemy force. They had to let what they had done turn into a myth, a social myth. And they needed not to be caught and punished, to make the myth work. And then there would be another day.
There were a couple of things he had to know about. He said to Kevin, “Tell me about the staff at Ngami Bird Lodge, what happened to them?” He needed to know. Because they hadn’t come out into the bush with the witdoeke.
“They are fine. We sent them back to Route 14. We took them there. They were slaves, rra, in that place. We saw that they were picked up. We waited to see that they had transport. Phalatse was in hiding, watching, and so he tells us it went.”
“That’s good,” Ray said. He forgot what the other thing he wanted to know about was.
Morel, full of eagerness but trying to be delicate, measured, said, “And the idea is definitely that Ray and I would be the ones to take the Land Cruiser down to the south, to Mabuasehube?”
“He will tell you when he comes to talk to you, Setime will.”
“When would we leave?” Ray asked.
Ray repeated his question. “When would we have to leave? Because I want to tell you something. If they say
