“Don’t antagonise him,” I said. “He is more dangerous than you realise. Let me handle this.”
I opened my door and climbed out.
“Where’s the gun?” Alassane asked.
“I left it there,” I said.
“Hold your arms up.”
Alassane patted me with shaking hands. He found no gun on me.
“Let’s go,” he said, and opened his jacket so that we could see the holster with another Makarov tucked into it. His hand rested on the butt. I guessed he didn’t want to pull it out, lest any of the loitering passengers happened to see. But he would need to draw the gun before firing it. That would be my single, brief opportunity.
Nine
Bibata went ahead of me, her bag clutched before her. The interior of the hangar was a wall of darkness, heavy with the smell of oil and jet fuel. It took my eyes a moment to adjust as we walked in from the bright sunshine. I almost walked into Bibata, who had turned to face me, and was holding out the Makarov in its leather pouch. I took it from her, making it look as if I had bumped into her, and the two of us stumbled slightly.
Then it happened very fast, as I knew it would. Alassane was momentarily blinded. But he noticed me crouching as I pulled the Makarov from its pouch, flipped the safety.
Alassane raised his gun and squeezed the trigger without taking the time to aim. The barrel was not pointing at me. I squeezed the trigger of my Makarov. Then realised that his bullet had struck Bibata. She spun about from the force of it, uttered a cry, and fell to the ground beside me.
My bullet struck Alassane in the hand, shattering a bone and spraying blood into his face. He howled with pain and surprise, and the pistol dropped from his hand.
I rushed up to him.
“Who else?” I asked in a voice that was almost a shout to grab his attention. The pain and the panic were consuming him, and I needed an answer before it was too late.
Alassane’s response was another howl. He dropped to his knees, holding his shattered hand before him, his attention consumed by the sight of his own blood.
I pointed the Makarov at his forehead.
“Whose idea,” I shouted. “Whose idea was this?”
“Don’t kill me,” he wailed.
“Who?”
“It was me,” he said. And in saying it, despite the pain and terror, a glimmer of self-satisfied pride came to his eyes. “It was me,” he said again. “All my idea. I fooled all you foreigners. The general is dead. And the world will know it was you. It is done.”
I noticed his left hand drop to find his fallen Makarov. He raised it, not to point at me, but at Bibata, who had struggled up to her knees and was swaying unsteadily on all fours.
“Yes,” I said. “It is done.”
His eyes twitched. He was pulling the trigger with his left hand.
I squeezed the trigger of the Makarov.
Alassane’s dead body fell back and flopped onto the concrete floor. His left index finger released the trigger and the gun dropped from his lifeless hand.
Bibata had taken Alassane’s bullet just above the hip on her left side. She was in a great deal of pain, and suffering from shock, but I inspected the wound and decided it was not serious. There was muscle and tissue damage, but no bones or organs had been affected.
“That’s why God gives us Burkinabé women the extra curves,” she said, and smiled through the pain.
She helped me unlock her phone with shaking hands, gave me the emergency number, and I called for an ambulance. I tore strips from the bandage on my arm, found a faucet in a corner of the hangar, and cleaned her wound.
“My grandmother said they sent you to kill him,” she said. “To kill Alassane, not the general. Is that true?”
“Your grandmother is crazier than I thought,” I said.
“She got one thing right though.”
“What was that?”
“She said that you would save me.”
“She said that?”
“If it hadn’t been for you, he would have killed me. I am sure of that. When we were driving around, waiting for you to come out, I realised it.”
Bibata flinched with pain.
“You should stop talking,” I said.
“My grandmother told me that I was not to stop you from doing what you needed to do. She said some things need doing.”
An ambulance siren sounded in the distance. Bibata closed her eyes and winced from the pain. I made sure that she was comfortable, then found a side door to slip out of. I joined the small crowd of travellers who had heard the gunshots and had gathered anxiously outside the entrance to the hangar. We watched with ghoulish fascination as the paramedics helped Bibata into the back of the vehicle, then carried the covered body of Alassane out on a stretcher and loaded that too.
I had a couple of hours until my flight to Paris. I stood with the others outside the terminal building, smoked a few cigarettes, and watched the storm approach.
Bibata’s grandmother had been right about something else. Without realising it, I had made a decision.
I was done with killing; it was time for me to stop. I had decided I would change the course of my life. It was time to lay down my gun and find a new way.
Ten
“When do you make the decision to kill?” I asked the captain in the middle of the night.
Hours after we dropped into the forest to find the survivors of the plane wreck. And we found survivors, but only five of them. They emerged from the forest like pale, terrified ghosts. Captain Chandler administered tranquillisers to the survivors. No tranquillisers for us.
Only five survivors. Twenty passengers and the crew were killed on impact and a further fifteen passengers were taken to a clearing by ADF terrorists. They did not leave that clearing.
We removed the bodies from the fuselage. It took us several hours
