occasional bird screech somewhere, a rattle of insects. Andre is quiet, maybe he’s sleeping, and the soldiers are just shapes in the darkness. There are sentries somewhere out there in the bush, but they’re probably asleep as well. For some reason, there are no mosquitoes; back in Freetown there were swarms of them. Foul, ruined Freetown… children with no arms and packs of feral dogs on the white-sand beaches and young toughs standing around on street corners with long knives in their belts. Daniel was sent there several weeks ago by an American newspaper to cover the peacekeeping efforts, but the situation fell apart almost immediately, and suddenly you couldn’t even go out at night without risking your life. The rebels were moving mortars and their ammo trucks forward in preparation for an assault, and more rebels were rumored to be in the city itself, just waiting for the signal to rise up. People in the city were jumpy and paranoid—the last time the rebels had gotten this close, it had taken Russian mercenaries flying attack helicopters from their hotel lawn to drive them back.
“What do you think we should do?” Andre asks, breaking a long silence. Daniel is mildly surprised he’s asking his advice.
“I don’t know.” Not very journalistic of him, but it’s the truth.
“We’re kind of nowhere with these guys, you know,” he says. “We’re not in town, but we’re not out at the front, either. We should’ve hooked up with those kids this morning.”
“Are you joking?”
Andre rubs his forehead. “Aw, we’re white: they wouldn’t mess with us.”
“What makes you think that?”
Andre doesn’t answer.
“Listen, they have no problem—none—with the idea of killing. They barely even have a problem with the idea of
“You’re right,” Andre says sarcastically. “We’d better play it safe.”
Silence. Fuck you, Daniel thinks. He’s not nearly as experienced as Andre, but he’s no idiot, either. After college, Daniel worked his way through various small-town papers, and he finally escaped his native Midwest six months ago by moving to Nairobi to try freelancing. A few weeks into it, his girlfriend, Jennifer, was robbed at knifepoint, and within days she was on a plane home. He stayed. A couple of assignments came in. He was prone to shameful bouts of loneliness and the dismal conviction that he had no business being here at all. Which—he thinks, glancing through the darkness toward a road that leads north, basically straight into hell—he probably doesn’t.
“Do you have any food?” Daniel asks after a while.
“I don’t think we should eat in front of these guys,” Andre says. “They don’t have much. I wish we had the goddamn sat phone,” he goes on. “At least I could call my editor. He has absolutely no idea where I am.”
Daniel doesn’t respond—the satellite phone is back in the hotel because he, Daniel, forgot it there, a completely unprofessional move. Daniel doesn’t know what to say, and so he just leans back and closes his eyes. A cigarette would help things tremendously right now. “Look, I want to get a story as much as you do,” he finally says. “I want to get a story and get out of here. But we have a responsibility—”
“I know, to our families, our newspaper.”
“To not get ourselves killed like a couple of assholes.”
Daniel tries to say this with the right amount of bravado, but the dismal truth is that the idea of going another hundred miles into this freak show is about the most frightening thing he can think of. Andre seems like he would do it with barely a second thought. There is no way to head into something this uncertain, this dark, and not be scared about the outcome. You have to abandon any real interest in the rest of your wonderful young life. Andre is married to a Czech girl in Paris who seems to put up with his shit, and he has a couple of girlfriends scattered around Africa’s capitals, and maybe at heart he really doesn’t give a shit about anything.
“All right,” Andre declares, “how about this. These guys move forward, we go with them; they sit around for another day, we go back, file, and figure out what to do next.”
“No militias?”
“Not this time.”
Andre unscrews the cap of the water bottle, takes a swallow, recaps the bottle, and puts it away. “You’ll see—you’ll love it up there,” he says. “It’s beautiful country, I swear. I’ve been all over Africa. It’s a country like no other.”
Daniel doesn’t answer. It occurs to him that Andre might simply be crazy. “Don’t you ever get lonely out here?” Daniel finally asks. “I mean, is this it for you?”
“Lonely? No, I guess not.”
“And your wife?”
Andre settles back with his hands clasped behind his head. “What about her?”
“You don’t miss her?”
“Not in the way you mean.”
“What way is that?”
Andre thinks for a moment. “Well, like I’d rather be there than here.”
Gray light and whooping birdcalls. Low Krio voices. It’s dawn and the soldiers are stirring. Yesterday filters back into Daniel’s mind, leeching through some strange dream about his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—that’s gone as soon as he tries to capture it. He sits up, pulls the cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, and slides one into his mouth. He finds a book of damp matches in his pocket and manages to light the third one. A cigarette goes a long way toward making something feel manageable. He coughs and pulls on his cigarette and watches the soldiers stumble around in the growing light. Andre is still asleep next to him, apparently untroubled by Lariam delusions or the prospect of what is waiting for them.
When Daniel was a teenager, he and some friends went out to a flooded quarry to dive off the cliffs. They dove at thirty feet and then at forty feet, and then when the guys started talking about the high ledge—sixty feet or so—Daniel walked off into the woods to take a leak and just kept walking. There was no way he was jumping from sixty feet—even at forty feet the acceleration was so out of control it almost felt malicious. He walked all the way home and never did anything with those guys again.
Andre finally stirs and then sits up abruptly, looking around in puzzlement. Daniel watches him figure out where he is. Andre rubs his eyes and reaches for a cigarette. There’s no need to dress because they slept in their clothes with their boots on. You never know how quickly you’re going to have to wake up. The soldiers are shuffling around, but there’s no food to cook, so they have nothing to do but wait for orders. Before Daniel has finished his cigarette, the captain comes over and Daniel and Andre stand up and the captain says that they’re going to move up the road back into Masiaka. They’re going to set up a command post and wait for reinforcements and food. Then he turns and walks away.
Daniel has the feeling he’s not terribly thrilled that he and Andre are there. He watches Andre’s ill mood return in a matter of seconds. “I told you we were fucked,” says Andre, fishing for another cigarette in his vest. “We can’t go forward and we can’t go back.”
Daniel doesn’t react. He wonders what Andre thinks of him. Deadweight? Worse? Maybe he’s so absorbed with what he’s doing that he doesn’t even have an opinion. “All right,” Daniel says. “One day, up and back, that’s it. You get us the ride, militias, whatever, I don’t care. If things look bad out there, I’m turning around, and you can do whatever the hell you want.”
Andre looks at him without expression. If Daniel was looking for approval—was he?—Andre wasn’t going to dole it out that easily. It was possible that he, Daniel, had just traded a trip up-country for absolutely nothing at all.
“You won’t regret this, mate, I promise,” Andre says, flicking his cigarette toward the road. “One day in, one day out.”
Five soldiers are already on the pavement, milling around in the half-light. The APC coughs and shakes and belches smoke behind them. Daniel picks up his knapsack with his notebooks and flashlight and water bottle and slings it over his shoulder while keeping an eye on the captain. He’s walking around sour-faced. The captain climbs onto the APC and it jolts into first gear, then clanks out onto the old asphalt road. Daniel and Andre follow behind it, along with the rest of the soldiers. They’re only five minutes outside of Masiaka, and by the time they’re clustered in the red-dirt plaza, the first rays of the equatorial sun are touching the low brick-and-mortar buildings. They’ve been gutted by five years of war but were once an elegant colonial pink, with stone balustrades overlooking what must have once been the town marketplace. Someone has set up a PKM on a tripod on one of the balconies. Its ugly little
