Candace Sessou was a bright and sassy teenybopper girl from a middle-class neighborhood of the city of Kinkala, near the former Brazzaville part of Kongoville in the southwest of what had been the Republic of the Congo before Nshombo and Tom liberated it. He was constantly surprised she’d survived to make it out of the labs alive. She had a problem with authority.
So did Tom.
“You are,” he told the group. “The Revolution is for everybody. It’s about liberating everybody. The people of the world. The people of the South Sudan. You.”
The handlers shot him barbed looks, as if he were giving the children license to eat them all alive. None of them had the guts to say anything. They were bullies, all of them. But he couldn’t very well let the kid aces go all Lord of the Flies on them, either. Time to try getting their twisted little minds right.
“But the Revolution is all about discipline, too,” he told the children. “About putting aside your selfish little ego trips and squabbles. See, the way the Man keeps the people down is divide and conquer. So what you need to do is pull together. Do your parts for the Revolution, for all the other kids suffering oppression around the world, and most of all, for each other. Can you dig it?”
“Yeah!” They shot to their feet, throwing their little fists up in the air on skinny arms.
“That’s the spirit. That’s my brothers and sisters. The Man can’t stand against commitment like that. You kids will save the world!” He let them soak that up. Then he said, “Now listen up. We got a job to do. And this time you kids are gonna make all the adults in the world sit up and take notice.”
8
Thursday,
December 3
Near Lake Tanganyika
Tanzania
The Cessna Bobbed and weaved through the air, tossing them violently from side to side. Wally clenched the seat in front of him so hard that the metal frame dented. Finch grinned back at them from the pilot’s seat, his stubby rhino ears twitching. Whenever he glanced at Jerusha, his gaze seemed to drift down to her chest and linger there. At least she’d worn an athletic support bra. “Bit of a rough ride, eh?” he said. “But we’re almost there.”
The turbulence grew brutal, and Finch paid more attention to the plane than to Jerusha. They skirted purple- grey thunderheads tossing lightning down toward the savannah and occasionally passed through rain showers. Tanzania glided slowly underneath them, and finally ahead, Jerusha could see an immense stretch of blue water. Finch spoke over a crackling radio as he circled the aircraft as they neared the lake’s shore. “We’re setting down there,” he said, pointing to a tiny airfield.
Ten minutes later, in a cloud of brown dust, they were down and taxiing up to a long Quonset hut. Finch cut the motor-the silence was deafening, the roar still echoing in Jerusha’s ears. Finch opened the doors and gestured. The air outside was sweltering and humid; she could see the orange spots beginning to dot Wally’s skin again. Huge mountains loomed to the east, but Jerusha could glimpse the lake to the west, beyond the buildings of the town. “Welcome to Kasoge,” Finch said.
There was a squad of a half-dozen soldiers leaning against the hut. As Jerusha stepped from the plane, they began to saunter over toward them. When Wally followed her, they stopped. One of them snapped something, and the muzzles of their rifles suddenly came up.
“Hang on now, mates,” Finch called out, his hands lifted and open. Jerusha followed his example, but Wally only raised an eyebrow. Deliberately, he stepped in front of Jerusha. The gesture was touching, but it meant she couldn’t see. She moved around him. Finch was talking to the soldiers in what Jerusha assumed was Kiswahili.
Their voices were loud and strident at first, and Jerusha’s hand drifted to her seed belt, her fingers curling around kudzu seeds. A quick toss, and she could entangle them…
She took a step to Wally’s side. The soldiers were still staring at them, but their weapons had dropped back to their sides. Finch was still talking, waving his hands. “I need your passports,” he said. Jerusha handed them to him.
The squad’s officer glanced through the documents, finally passing them back to Finch. The soldiers went back to the hut, conversing among themselves and still watching them. “Those blokes are looking for PPA incursions, or for refugees from there,” Finch told them. “I told them we’d come from Dar es Salaam, not the Congo. I told them you had no interest in the PPA. I think they believe me.” He sniffed, the horn on his snout tossing. “So-was that true?”
Jerusha didn’t answer; Wally just shrugged. If there were soldiers patrolling the shores of Tanganyika, they were going to have to be very careful. “If Wally and I would like to take a boat ride on the lake tomorrow,” she said to Finch, “would you be able to negotiate that for us? We could pay you…”
“Boat ride, eh?” Finch scowled, tiny ears fluttering while he fixed Wally and Jerusha with a scowl. “A nice, leisurely sightseeing ride?”
“Yep. That’s right,” said Wally. “Sightseeing.”
Behind him, Jerusha sighed.
Finch scratched at the base of his horn with one long, blackened fingernail. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. He narrowed his little eyes, taking a long, hard look at Wally and Jerusha. He seemed to spend more time looking at Jerusha. His gaze was a little less angry when he looked at her, too; he never seemed to have much to say to Wally.
“Well, I expect that since you’re just a pair of innocent tourists with no interest in the People’s Paradise of Africa you’ll not know that the border between Tanzania and the PPA runs straight down the middle of the lake.” Finch hacked up something dark and wet. He spat it in the dirt, adding, “And you do not want to find yourselves on the wrong side of that line.”
Jerusha said, quietly, “What would happen if we did? What would we find? Just out of curiosity.”
“Rebels and Leopard Men. If you’re lucky.”
Leopard Men? Rebels? What the heck was going on over there? What the heck had happened to Lucien? Wally couldn’t help it: “Holy cow! Leopard Men?” The soldiers over by the Quonset hut looked up from their private conversation. Worrying about Lucien had got him worked up; he’d asked a little more loudly than he’d intended.
“It doesn’t bloody matter, does it? Since you’re not going over there.” Finch had a strange look in his eye, like he was saying one thing but meant something else. “All you need to know is that they’d shoot you dead the moment they noticed you.” He punctuated the last with a sharp jerk of his head, pointing his horn toward the lake and, by extension, the PPA.
“Well, look, buddy, bullets don’t-”
Jerusha clapped a hand on Wally’s arm. “Thanks for the warning. We wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.” She emphasized “misunderstandings.” Then she tugged at Wally. “We’ll trust you to hire a boat for us.”
Once out of earshot from Finch, Wally asked her, “What if he gets a boat that won’t go across the lake?”
“I don’t think that will be a problem, Wally. I think Finch had our number the minute he laid eyes on us. He thinks we’re on a secret mission for the Committee.”
They followed the road to a narrow bend. In one direction, from where they’d walked, Finch unloaded more crates from his battered Cessna. In the other direction, around the bend, Wally got his first glimpse of the outskirts of Kasoge.
It wasn’t all that different from the other villages they’d visited. The buildings he saw were a random assortment of wood, mud-brick, and sometimes metal siding. They gave the impression of having been built, or rebuilt, from whatever was handy at the time. Wind sighed through the trees that grasped at a bright tropical sky. It carried with it the earthy smell of jungle, the dead-fish-and-fresh-water scent of the lakeshore, and the stink of the garbage fires. The smoke stung Wally’s eyes.
From above, in Finch’s plane, Africa had seemed like a paradise that stretched from horizon to horizon. But down on the ground, Wally noticed different things. Like the garbage fires. People just collected their trash into piles
