The commander grabbed the wallet from him, tore out all the Congolese money that was inside as well as the wad of US dollars Munro was carrying, his credit cards and American driver’s licence, and stuffed it all in his combat vest. He tossed away the empty wallet.
‘Hey. I didn’t mean for you to take everything,’ Munro protested.
‘Shut up, motherfucka!’ the commander barked.
‘Give me back my dollars and my cards, okay? The rest you can keep. Come on, guys. Play fair.’
Rifles were pointed at Munro’s head and chest. Beads of sweat were breaking out on his brow and running into his eyes. He held up his palms.
‘What is your business here, American bastard?’ the commander asked.
‘Tourists,’ Munro said, his face reddening. ‘Me and my niece here. So can I have my dollars back, or what?’
Rae was thinking, Please be quiet. Please don’t make this worse. How could she be his niece? For such a gifted investigator, he was a hopeless liar.
The commander shouted orders at his men. Two of them stepped up, grabbed Munro by the arms and flung him on the ground. Rifle muzzles jabbed and stabbed at him, like pitchforks poking hay. Rae screamed out, ‘Don’t shoot him! Please!’
More of the weapons turned to point at her. She closed her eyes, but they didn’t shoot. Instead, all three of them were held at gunpoint while the soldiers went on ransacking the Toyota. They opened up the camera cases, spilled out Rae’s gear and quickly found the Canon EOS with the long lens. The commander turned it on and flicked through the stored images, calmly puffing on his joint, until he’d seen enough to satisfy him. He shook his head gravely.
‘You are not tourists. You are motherfucka spies. We will report this to General Khosa.’
At the mention of the name Khosa, Rae went very cold. That was when she knew that nothing Munro could say or do would make this situation worse. It was already as bad as it could be.
‘Spies? What in hell are you talking about? I tell you we’re tourists!’ But it wasn’t so easy for Munro to rant and protest convincingly while he was being held on the ground with a boot sole planted against his chest and a Kalashnikov to his head.
‘Kill this mkundu,’ the commander said to his soldiers. ‘When you are finished with the whore, cut her throat.’
Rae felt her stomach twist. She was going to be gang-raped and left butchered at the roadside like a piece of carrion for wild animals to dismember and gnaw on her bones. She wanted to throw up.
She had to save herself somehow.
And so she said the first thing that came to her.
‘Wait! My family are rich!’ she yelled.
The commander turned and looked at her languidly. He took another puff from his joint. ‘Rich? How rich?’
‘Richer than you can even imagine.’
He showed her jagged teeth. ‘Rich like Donald Trump?’
‘Richer,’ Rae said. That was an exaggeration, admittedly. It might have been true back in about 1971, twenty years before she was born, but the Lee family fortunes had dwindled somewhat since then. ‘If you don’t harm us, there will be a big, big reward for you.’ She spread her arms out wide, as if to show him just how much would be in it for him.
The commander digested this for a moment, then glanced down at Munro and kicked him in the ribs. ‘This motherfucka says he is your uncle.’
Munro grimaced in pain and clutched his side where he’d been kicked.
‘He’s my friend,’ Rae answered, fighting to keep her voice steady.
The commander seemed to find this hard to believe, but his main concern was money. ‘Is his family rich too?’
‘We’re Americans,’ she said. ‘All Americans are rich. Everybody knows that, right?’
The commander laughed. ‘What about him?’ He pointed at Joseph Maheshe.
‘He is just a stupid farmer,’ another of the soldiers volunteered. ‘How can he pay?’
‘This man is our driver,’ Rae protested. ‘He has nothing to do with this. Leave him out of it.’
The commander stepped closer to Joseph and examined him. Joseph had the classic Tutsi ethnicity, with fine features and a rather narrower nose, slightly hooked, that generally, though not always, distinguished them from Bantu peoples like the Hutu. During the Rwandan genocide it had been the worst curse of the Tutsi people that they could often be recognised at a glance.
‘This one looks like a cockroach,’ the commander said. It wasn’t the first time Joseph had heard his people described that way. Cockroach was what the Hutu death squads had called his brother and their parents, before hacking them all to death.
‘Get on your knees, cockroach.’
Without protest, Joseph Maheshe sank down to his knees in the roadside grass and dirt and bowed his head. He knew what was coming, and accepted it peacefully. He knew the Americans might not be as lucky as this. He was sorry for them, but then they should not have come here.
The commander drew his pistol, pressed it to the side of Joseph’s head and fired. The sound of the shot drowned out Rae’s cry of horror. Joseph went down sideways and crumpled in the long grass with his knees still bent.
‘We will take these American spies to General Khosa,’ the commander said to his men. ‘He will know what to do with them.’
The soldiers tossed the camera equipment into the back of one of the armed pickup trucks. The two prisoners were shoved roughly into the other, where they were forced to crouch low with guns pointed at them.
‘You saved my life,’ Munro whispered to Rae.
Eventually, that would come to be something he would no longer thank her for. But for now they were in one piece. Rae looked back at the abandoned Toyota as the pickup trucks took off down the rough road. Joseph’s body was no more than a dark, inert smudge in the grass. Just another corpse on just another roadside in Africa. The vultures would probably find him first, followed not long afterwards by the hyenas.
As for Munro’s fate and her own, Rae didn’t even want to think about it.
At various and frequent points throughout the ups and downs of what was turning out to be an unusually eventful existence, Ben Hope was in the habit of pausing to take stock of his life. To evaluate his current situation, to consider the sequences of events – planned or not – that had got him there, to ponder what lay ahead in the immediate and longer-term future, and to reflect on how he was doing generally.
All things considered, he had always thought of himself as being a pretty normal type of guy, and so he figured that this stocktaking exercise must be something most normal folks did, even though most normal folks probably didn’t tend to find themselves in the kinds of situations that invariably seemed to keep cropping up in his path. Just like most normal folks didn’t have to do the kinds of things he had to do in order to get out of those situations in one piece.
In his distant past, Ben’s stocktaking had involved thoughts like: Okay, so passing selection for 22 SAS might be the toughest challenge you’ve ever taken on, but you will not fail. You can do this. You will be fine.
Many years later it had been more along the lines of: All right, so you’ve walked away from the military career you struggled so hard to build and the future looks uncertain. But it’s a big world out there. You have skills. You will make it.
Or, some