dressed in red and purple Chaga-combats under football managers’ coats. The cartel banners drooping from the
The Tacticals waved through a pick-up hidden under a pile of firewood. Gaby fished out a couple of Krugerrands. The Land-cruiser crawled closer. A smoke-belching municipal bus went through the checkpoint. Gaby had not thought they were still running.
‘Hide your guns,’ Gaby hissed. ‘You in the back, look scared.’
‘That is not difficult,’ Mrs Tembo said.
A Soca Boy in a Grampus 11 coat came to the open window.
‘Hello,
The helicopter came in from nowhere across the shanties, hard and fast: a big Hokum gunship with UN painted on the side. At the sight of it, the Soca Boys ran for their vehicles. The helicopter turned in the air. The
‘Isn’t that where you led the choir?’ Gaby asked as they passed a big red brick church with a red tin roof.
‘St Stephen’s, yes,’ Tembo said. ‘But no one is singing there any more.’
The United Nations East Africa Military Logistics Command Headquarters, formerly the Church Army training centre, was directly opposite St Stephen’s Church. Once again, identifications and authorizations were inspected, and Gaby marched the family into the reception area and refused to move them until she saw whoever was in charge of exit visas. She only had to wait thirty-five minutes this time for an aide to talk to her, Tembo and Faraway. They waited another thirty-five while the aide referred the application to his superior, and another thirty-five while the superior checked with the people down in reception and decided if he could talk to these civilians. Tembo’s wife and children sat on plastic chairs under the window of the temporary building that was the reception area and ate vending machine sandwiches and chocolate. Faraway looked out the window, drinking coffee. He is one of those men, Gaby thought, who unconsciously relax into postures that look good to women.
The superior said that he could not vet an application for an emergency visa on Gaby’s authority alone. Faraway negotiated in his capacity as Deputy Station Manager. The officer was still not convinced. Faraway called T.P. on his cellphone and gave it to the officer. Gaby looked out of the window at the soldiers sitting by the side of Jogoo Road. She saw a man in Islamic dress come up the road pushing something that looked like a dog kennel on wheels. Gaby remembered this man, this machine. There would be a veiled woman hidden inside, with only her eyes catching the light. Some of the soldiers offered the man money. He refused to accept any of it. Gaby watched him pass up the road. He is part of the Kenya that was, she thought, that I loved but cannot find any more, for it has turned alien and ugly, like a rotting slum, or a woman hidden in a wooden hutch.
Faraway had his PDU on the desk. Hardcopy documents were squeezing forth. The officer took them across the compound, past the chapel to the accommodation block where the work was done. Tembo looked from Faraway to his wife to his children. Some of the military who came and went through the reception area squatted down to talk to Tembo’s beautiful daughters.
The robed man with the wooden hutch on wheels was coming down Jogoo Road again. Gaby watched him pass again the soldiers sunning themselves. They did not offer him any money this time.
The officer was coming back across the compound now. He looked out of breath. His white face was red. He seated himself behind the counter and put two forms in front of Faraway for him to sign.
Gaby saw all the things that happened next as separate, discrete edits of experience.
She saw the beggar man in Arab dress come running up the road as fast he could. He did not have the trolley with him.
She saw the soldiers at the side of the road get to their feet as he ran past.
She saw Faraway turn from the reception desk with his biggest smile and a piece of paper in either hand.
She saw the white light, and the fireball inside the white light.
She heard the explosion. She heard it like it had blown into every cell of her body and shaken its death- noise out of them.
She saw the window of the reception cabin fly inward in a million stinging insects of glass. She saw Tembo throw wife and children down as the glass passed over their heads. She saw Faraway dive for the floor, tuck himself into a ball, arms wrapped over head. She saw the reception staff take cover behind their desks and counter as the glass rained down on them.
She seemed to be the only one standing, like the domed building in Hiroshima that was directly under Fat Boy.
Gaby could take in every detail in a flicker of an eyelid. The man in Arab dress was lying face down in the middle of Jogoo Road. The bomb had gone off a hundred yards further down. There was nothing left of the wooden trolley that had carried it. Three trucks were burning; one of the refugee buses was overturned. The bodies of the soldiers were scattered like chaff. Over everything hung a huge silence and slowness. Then the sound rushed into the still place after the bomb and there were screaming men and burning vehicles and yelling people.
‘Come on!’ Gaby shouted to her team. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
Faraway jammed the emergency visa into Mrs Tembo’s hands and ran after Gaby.
It was like she was a neutrino. She moved through the destroyed vehicles and the knots of shocked people without interacting with them, without being deflected by their confusion and suffering from her purpose. Soldiers pulled comrades from the tangled wrecks of vehicles; dragged shattered bodies away from pools of burning fuel. Gaby passed by. Scraps of meat and seared cloth were scraped into a gutter. Gaby sent the eye of the lens over them and moved on. Troopers comforted their screaming friends. A man sitting beside a soldier with no face shouted and shouted and shouted for a doctor to help his buddy. Combat medics triaged victims. Sirens wailed in the distance: ambulances, fire engines, fast approaching. In the middle of all, Gaby sent her camera eye probing. No one noticed her. The fire engines foamed down the burning vehicles. Ambulances, civilian and military, moved between the army trucks and disgorged trauma teams. Still no one saw Gaby and Faraway and Tembo. It was only when the military police came to seal the area that people saw there was a news team among them, filming the worst moment of their lives. Two white-helmets rounded Gaby and Faraway and Tembo up and pushed them beyond the edge of the cordon.
‘Fucking ghouls,’ one of the MPs said.
Gaby did not hear him. She had seen a UN jeep arrive at the centre of the destruction. A man jumped out and was saluted by a soldier, who escorted him through the wreckage and the bodies.
Gaby knew that man.
‘Shepard!’ she shouted. ‘Shepard!’
But she could not make him hear her over the sound of the sirens and the dying.
58
‘So, I must find out on the satellite news that Gaby McAslan is back in Nairobi,’ Oksana Telyanina said. The samovars still bubbled in the Elephant Bar, but a boxing ring stood where the fire pit had once burned. Framed signed photographs of woman kick-boxers competed for wall space with the icons and photographs of Russian aircraft, alongside mandalas and neo-Pagan posters. There was serious money in unlicensed kick-boxing, the
