The Lioness(34)

“Don’t call for your friends,” the driver warned. “Don’t call for anyone.”

“And if I have to fucking pee?”

The driver shrugged unconcernedly.

When he left Billy alone, he closed the door and the hut was darker than night. There was a little blood trickling from his left nostril, and he wanted to wipe it away. Had they tied his wife this way? His sister?

God, the women. And David hadn’t really fought in the slightest for Katie. Here he was the son of…

And that’s when it clicked: maybe this kidnapping was all about David. He was the son of a CIA…something. Wasn’t it possible that David’s father was involved in a clandestine operation in East Africa, and these Russians had taken the man’s son and his wife’s safari party to gain some sort of leverage? An upper hand to convince the Americans to back off or dial down whatever the hell they were doing?

He opened his eyes as wide as he could, aware that the pupils would never open wide enough for him to see a whole hell of a lot. Still, he rolled his head in all directions, hoping to find any pinpricks or markers of the world outside these walls.

This was worse, a thousand times worse—and he would never have guessed this was possible—than the front closet in his childhood home in which his mother would punish him. Yes, the closet was dark, too, and it had its penumbra of ghosts, the stink of boots, and that dangling freak show of his mother’s fur coats: but it didn’t have snakes and spiders and, he guessed, whatever rats called the Serengeti home.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


    Benjamin Kikwete





And while Katie and her guests will be far from most modern amenities we take for granted, Charlie Patton—who we spoke to in Nairobi—said that his team is capable of bringing many aspects of civilization to the Serengeti. “My guests sleep well, eat well, and—most importantly—drink well,” he told us. “And the men who work for me? I trust them with my life.”

—The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964



Benjamin’s hands were bound at the wrists, but he was able to bring them to his face and use his thumb to brush a determined fly off his cheek. Patton and the Americans were gone.

He counted the men in the truck with him, and altogether—counting the porters, cooks, Muema, and himself—there were twelve of them wedged in the back. That meant there were two porters or cooks he couldn’t account for. Perhaps they were in the little pickup, the last of the convoy, with the corpses of poor Juma Sykes and the rangers. Or maybe they were dead too. The staff hadn’t torn down the camp, but Patton’s men had been ordered to gather the food, the petrol, and the hunting rifles, working at gunpoint, and now Benjamin and the others were sitting in the back of the second largest of the three lorries, all with their hands and feet tied. The truck wasn’t moving. It was still parked at the edge of where the movie star and her friends had camped last night.

He was sitting beside Muema, the second guide. Only Juma had been more senior. Muema, though shaken himself, had been trying to comfort the rest of the group, and his reassurances had made Benjamin feel better. At least a little better. But the intruders had murdered Juma and the two rangers, that fact remained, and their cavalier disregard for life had meant that Muema’s faith that all would be well was rather like aspirin for a broken leg. It helped, but only a little.

“They’re not just kidnappers,” he was telling Muema now, speaking quietly both because he didn’t want to anger the white guy who was pacing back and forth with one of the rifles he’d taken from Patton’s armory, and because the porters and cooks were already frightened. “They’re Russian kidnappers. I only saw a few of them, but I saw and heard enough to know. They’re Russian. And you know what happened when Charlie took some Russians hunting a few years ago. I was there.”

“I know.”

“It was a nightmare.”

“As is this.”

“And if this was just about hostages, they wouldn’t have killed—”

“Once you kidnap Americans,” Muema said, shaking his head as he cut him off, and whispering into his ear, “you’re in so deep, you might as well kill any African you like. If you’re caught, you’re dead anyway. I’m going to lie to everyone else to keep them calm. I am balancing the fact they have not killed us yet with the fact they were willing to shoot my friend and two rangers. But Benjamin? We are surrounded by hyenas. I don’t know the way out, but if we don’t find one or they don’t get what they want? Yes, they very well might kill us too.”

Benjamin took this in. He felt the same way. “Are they poachers?” he asked. “Or were they poachers? Is that part of this?”

“No. Look at the back of that one over there,” he said, and with his head he motioned at the shirtless fellow holding the Kalashnikov with two hands, the barrel pointing at the ground. There were no deep bruises or creases in the skin along his shoulders. If he were a poacher, there would be. Poachers used wooden bars like yokes to carry from the reserve the tusks or horns or even the meat they carved from the animals they killed illegally.

“Where do you think they’re taking us?” Benjamin asked.

“I have no idea.”

“I understand why they killed the rangers—”