some measure of indignation that will either save them or get them killed.
“Over there!” the captain shouts. Daniel and Andre walk off into the sunlight and stand there squinting while the captain kneels down and starts to go through their bags. Daniel is unsure whether he should put his hands in the air, but Andre hasn’t, and so he just stands there trying to look unconcerned. Daniel watches the captain throw all of Andre’s camera gear onto the ground and then open the knapsack and upend it until everything—the water bottle, the flashlight, his book, his precious notes—has tumbled out. Scattered in the packed red dirt, their belongings look pathetic, almost embarrassing. Dead bodies look pathetic in the same way, Daniel thinks. He hasn’t seen very many, but on some level there’s always some smug thought, “I’m alive, you’re dead.” There’s no greater gulf between two people, no greater inequality.
“You are very lucky,” the captain says. “I would have had a very difficult decision to make, but I am a soldier, and I assure you I would have made it.”
Daniel can’t even bring himself to think about the sat phone. That’s for later; that’s for some long, sick drunk in Nairobi before he goes home. Andre and Daniel are allowed to collect their belongings while the soldiers look off in embarrassment. The one who had his gun on them walks off across the plaza and comes back a few minutes later driving the Suzuki. He risks an apologetic smile and waves them into the truck. The captain says, “If you come back here without permission, you will be shot.” Andre ignores him and climbs into the passenger seat of the truck, and Daniel throws his bag into the backseat and then gets in next to it. The captain walks off, the soldier forces the stick shift into first. He seems to want to get out of there as fast as they do. He’s seventeen, maybe eighteen, and if nothing else he’s going back to Freetown for the day.
Andre is sitting sullenly in front, watching the jungle scroll by, a scraggly green wall occasionally broken by a burnt house or a clearing. The soldier looks over brightly to say something but notices the expression on Andre’s face and decides against it.
“Hey, my name’s Daniel, and my friend here is Andre,” Daniel says, leaning forward into the front seat. The soldier’s Kalashnikov is wedged next to the hand brake; he can feel the muzzle against his chest.
“Na’ me name Sammy,” the kid says, glancing back in the mirror.
“Do you live in Freetown?”
“Yessah.”
“Are you going to see your family?”
“Yessah.”
The kid goes on to say something in Krio that Daniel doesn’t understand. The language is a thick blend of English, French, and native dialects that should be easy to understand, but it isn’t. Then you wake up one morning, Andre says, and suddenly you understand everything.
“He’s inviting us to his house for dinner,” Andre says without turning his head.
“Thank you,” Daniel says. “Maybe we’ll do that.”
Portrait of a soldier and his family, he thinks. A soldier’s-eye view of the war. It’s better than nothing.
“Were you here last year? Were you here for ’99?”
Ninety-nine was the rebel occupation—it lasted two weeks, and it was hell on earth. Amputation squads, children made to shoot their own parents, women raped on bridges and then thrown over the side. There were almost no journalists in the city to report it, and perhaps in a sense it was unreportable anyway.
“Na boat we tek go Guinea, na’ now a de ton back kam,” Sammy says. “A kam back fo’ go skul, na day soljahman dem ketch we, tay tiday nary a ah dae.”
“He went to Guinea but came back for school,” Andre says flatly. “The army caught him, so now here he is.”
The kid says this with a smile, like he’s glad it has all worked out this way. Maybe because he’s driving us two idiots around, Daniel thinks. He’s probably never been in a car with two white guys before. Daniel sees something up ahead on the road, a dark shape askew in some kind of disastrous way. Andre sees it too and instinctively puts his hand on his camera. “Rebel dead,” the kid says. He pulls over to the left to head around it, a pickup truck flipped over onto its roof. It must have been hit by something big, a tank round maybe.
“Stop!” Andre yells. “Stop the truck!”
The kid is startled and skids the Suzuki to a halt. Andre has the door open even before it’s stopped moving. Engine parts are sprayed across the road, and two charred corpses lie contorted in the wreckage. Andre puts the camera to his eye and crouches down, moving from angle to angle, his motor drive whirring.
“Na’ bad bad place dis,” the kid says, turning to Daniel apologetically. “So so rebel, ah no’ go able koba yu oh.”
Lots of rebels, he can’t protect us, Daniel thinks—something along those lines. “Andre!” Daniel shouts. “Andre, come on, let’s go. It’s not safe.”
Andre doesn’t answer. He’s close up to one of the corpses now, the camera right in its face,
“Na’ bad bad place dis,” the kid repeats, still convinced Daniel can do something. “Na’ rebel ah de watch for so.”
Daniel just shrugs. The kid waits another moment, looking at him hopefully, and then gets out of the truck with his gun and walks out to the middle of the road. He starts turning slowly in a circle with the gun at his shoulder, scanning the forest for trouble. Jesus, he’d die for us right here if he had to, Daniel thinks. There’s nothing else to do, so Daniel climbs out of the truck too and walks over to the wreckage and looks down at one of the rebels. His arms are flung over his head and he has a shocked expression on his face, as if in that final moment he had time to register his disbelief. Mouth open, eyes wide, teeth bared. Andre straightens up and drops the camera back onto his neck.
“Okay,” he says. “Done. Let’s go.”
The kid looks over with relief when he sees them move back toward the truck. He lowers his gun and hurries over. “Na’ bad bad place dis.”
Soon they’re speeding down the road again, the forest a pale blur on both sides. Andre empties his camera and slides the roll into his vest pocket and loads a fresh roll. “The editors will never run those photos, but it’s good to send that kind of stuff,” he shouts over the wind. “It reminds them where the fuck you are.”
“Yeah,” Daniel says without much interest. The stunned expression on the dead guy’s face is still in his head. “It sure does.”
The next time the car slows down, it’s half an hour later and Daniel is thinking about Nairobi—about Jennifer, more precisely. It’s been a month since she left him, and they’ve spoken a few times on the phone, but it’s mostly a charade of pretending there’s something left. He carries a kind of bleak nostalgia for her that he realizes—in his better moments—is more about fear than about love. The truck’s speed backs off a notch and Daniel can feel the kid braking—more of a question mark than a real braking action—and he looks up. “Shit,” Andre says.
At first he thinks it’s just another checkpoint, but those are manned by regular army. These guys are shirtless and ill-grouped, ranged along one side of the road with their weapons leveled. Daniel feels Andre go tense. “This doesn’t look good, mate,” he says.
It’s all wrong even before they pull to a full stop. Daniel recognizes the CDF commander from earlier that morning, standing apart from the others. The rest are training their guns on the car. One kid even has a grenade launcher leveled at them. If he fires it, he’ll kill us and half his friends, Daniel thinks. The commander is stripped to the waist and has an ammunition belt over his muscular chest. He’s strung with necklaces of cowry shells and amulets and leather satchels, and he’s got some kind of bowler on his head with a hatband made of more bullet shells. He’s holding a machete in one hand and a pistol in the other, and he walks toward the car pointing the machete at the driver and unloading an incomprehensible torrent of Krio invective. Daniel barely understands a word.
The kid in the driver’s seat puts his palms out and tries to explain himself, but the commander cuts him off in a fury and puts the machete under his chin. The kid falls silent, hands still up. Daniel catches something about the Suzuki and the captain back in town—it’s a matter of respect and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with them— but when Andre tries to intercede, one of the fighters swears and cocks his machine gun with a loud
