Cali woke to the mindless frenzy of gunfire.
With her hotel windows open, the sound seemed amplified. She tensed, waiting for return fire from the jungle that would surely come. Instead she heard the steady beat of a heavy rain and then a burst of drunken laughter. The local troops sent to oversee the evacuation of Kivu had been drinking steadily since their arrival. The lone officer sent to control them seemed to be the worst offender. Not even the six Belgian peacekeepers the UN had dispatched bothered to keep the soldiers from the booze or from smoking the potent marijuana called bhang.
Cali remained on the floor where she’d slept. She’d learned her first hour here that the piebald rug was home to far fewer insects than the bed. Mashed breasts were preferable to being eaten alive by fleas and God knew what else. There had been no water in the hotel when she’d arrived late yesterday so she smelled of sweat, dirt, and DEET. A rotten night’s sleep had done nothing to relieve her aching body following the torturous drive from the capital, Bangui. She rolled onto her back. She’d slept in shorts and a sports bra with her boots lightly laced. Her tongue was cemented to the top of her mouth, and when she finally got it unstuck she found her teeth sticky.
Dawn was slowly creeping over the town. With the approaching sun the canopy of trees outside her room resolved themselves in shades of gray and silver. Mindful that light might attract a burst of gunfire from the drunken soldiers, Cali left her flashlight next to her bedding, slid her arms into a bush shirt, and cautiously went to the window.
The town clung on the muddy banks of the Chinko River, a tributary of the Ubangi, which eventually flowed into the mighty Congo. Kivu had grown around colonial French plantations that had long since been reclaimed by the forest. While mostly built of round mud huts thatched with reeds, Kivu boasted a cluster of concrete buildings arranged around a central square; one was an abandoned government office that now housed the soldiers, and another was her hotel, optimistically named the Ritz, a two-story structure that was riddled with bullet holes after decades of civil war. A quarter mile upriver lay a dirt airstrip that was still serviceable.
Kivu was a tiny island surrounded by a forest sea, an impenetrable expanse of trees and swamp that rivaled the Amazon. There was no electricity now that the owner of the general store had fled with his family and the town’s only generator, no sewer or running water, and the only ready communications with the outside was the satellite phone in her rucksack. Kivu had changed little in a hundred years and it was unlikely to change much in the next century. If it survived the week.
Two weeks earlier, reports had filtered in to the capital that a group of rebels had crossed the border from Sudan and were making their way south in an effort to isolate the eastern third of the country. It was now believed that the vanguard of Caribe Dayce’s Army of Popular Revolution was a mere four days from Kivu. From here it was only thirty more miles to the Ubangi River and the border with the Congo. The government of the Central African Republic planned to make their stand there, outside the town of Rafai; however few believed the CAR’s meager forces would prevent Rafai from falling to Dayce. Any people still in the region afterward would find themselves under the authority of a rebel who found inspiration in Idi Amin and Osama bin Laden.
Cali muttered an oath under her breath.
The Central African Republic was one of the few nations that even the poorest of third world countries could look to and feel proud of their own success. Most mid-sized American companies had more revenue than the CAR. The average person made less than a dollar a day. There were few natural resources, little infrastructure, and absolutely no hope. Why someone would take the time to carve out a piece for himself defied logic. Caribe Dayce would soon make himself the ruler of a few thousand square miles of nothing.
The rain slashed through a thin fog that oozed up from the river, obscuring shapes and making the first stirrings of the townspeople look like ghosts meandering back to their graves. A driver from a relief organization opened the door to his big Volvo truck and fired the engine. The first load of refugees for the day would be on their way out in a half hour or so.
With luck Cali would make it the last miles up to where the Scilla River emptied into the Chinko this morning, check her theory, and be back on the road to Bangui by noon.
She turned from the window, first buttoning her shirt, then using a rubber band she kept on her wrist to tame her red hair into a ponytail. A baseball cap hid the rest of the snarls and tangles. She brushed her teeth with bottled water and spit in the sink anchored to the wall outside the toilet cubicle. She teetered over the seat rather than let her skin touch the filthy commode. She didn’t want to waste her precious water supply so she made do with a towelette from a foil packet to clean the sleep from her face. Using a hand mirror, she applied spf 30 lipstick. Although her hair was a deep shade of red-thank you, Clairol-she still had the pale complexion of a carrottop, with a generous dappling of freckles to match.
Looking at her reflection in the kind light of the dawn, Cali admitted that even in these rough surroundings she managed to look years younger than thirty-seven. In the past year her work had kept her away from home nearly eight months, in places where she was hard-pressed to find enough food to spend her per diem, so she maintained her shape without becoming a slave to a health club.
Shape, she thought without looking down, a nearly six foot bean pole with B cups, no hips, and a flat ass. She didn’t even have the green eyes the red heads in romance novels always seemed to possess. Hers were dark brown, and while they were large and wide-set, they weren’t green. Her older sister had gotten those, along with the boobs and the butt and all the other curves that had attracted men since she’d hit puberty.
At least Cali had gotten The Lips.
As a child she’d always been self-conscious about the size of her mouth. Like any adolescent, she hated to stand out. It was bad enough she had hair that shone like a beacon and that she was taller than all the boys in her class, but she’d also been given a mouth much too large for her face and lips that always looked swollen. She’d been teased about it from kindergarten. Then suddenly, in her junior year of high school, the teasing stopped. That summer her face had matured and cheekbones had appeared, graceful curves that transformed her mouth from something oversized into something sensual. Her lips gained a pouty ripeness that continued to spark carnal fantasies to this day.
Cali packed her toiletries in her rucksack, swept the dim room to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, and headed down to the hotel’s lobby. The eight-room establishment’s reception area was an open space defined by arches along three walls. At the back was the reception desk, which doubled as a bar, and a door leading to the kitchen. A collection of mismatched chairs and tables dotted the flagstone floor. Beyond the arches, the steamy rain came down in curtains. The town’s dirt square had turned into a quagmire. A group of villagers huddled at the back of a truck for their turn to join the exodus. Their few meager possessions were carried in plaited grass bags or piled on their heads.
Cali took a seat near the back of the lobby.
“Ah, miss, you are awake early.” As with many businesses in Western and Central Africa, the hotel’s owner was Lebanese.
“You can thank the assault rifle alarm clock,” Cali said and accepted a cup of coffee. She eyed the owner, her expression asking the question.
“Yes, yes, yes, the water was boiled, I assure you.” He looked out beyond the falling rain. “The troops the government sent are no better than Caribe Dayce’s bandits. I think if UN had not sent observers the government wouldn’t have even come for us.”
“I was in Bangui yesterday,” Cali told him. “It’s just as bad there. People who can get out of the country are.”
“I know. My cousins live there. Many believe that Dayce will move on the capital after he takes Rafai. Tomorrow I will join my family and we go to Beirut at the end of the week.”
“Will you come back?”
“Of course.” He seemed surprised by her question. “Dayce will eventually fail.”
“You sound sure.”
“Miss, this is Africa, eventually everything fails.” He went off to take the order of the truck driver who’d just stepped out of the rain.
Cali ate two of the plantains he’d brought to her table, and left ten dollars. By Kivu’s standards the Lebanese was a wealthy man, but she felt the need to give him something extra, maybe just the knowledge that people on the outside still cared.
She’d parked her rented Land Rover under a crude lean-to in a dirt yard behind the hotel. The rain drumming against its tin roof sounded like a waterfall. She kept her head down as she slogged through the clinging mud, so she didn’t see the damage until she’d slid under the lean-to’s roof. The four bullet holes in the Rover’s windshield
