The Lioness(40)

“We have to bury them,” she continued. “We’ll bury them and put a marker so someone from the government can find the bodies.”

Bodies. Plural. She was thinking even of their captors. He guessed she was feeling guilty. As was he. He had to remind himself that these men had shot Juma—or men from their group had. They had murdered the rangers. They were killers. He wanted to make her see reason, remind her that they themselves were injured and didn’t even have a shovel. And this ground? Pretty damn hard. They couldn’t bury anyone. Certainly, they couldn’t dig a hole deep enough to prevent the corpses from being exhumed and scavenged. But he didn’t want to argue with her. When she calmed down, she would see the reality of their predicament. She would understand that they had to get out of here and get help. They couldn’t remain beside the Land Rover, because eventually the other abductors would wonder why this vehicle hadn’t reached its destination and they’d backtrack. Whoever had attacked the safari was likely to get here long before rangers or rescuers—assuming anyone was even out there looking for them yet. He had no idea when or how often rangers were supposed to check in, but he realized that was his big hope. Someone soon would go off in search of the missing rangers.

And so he held her and rubbed the small of her back, while in his mind he started to make an inventory of the things he would look for inside the Land Rover. Things they would need as they tried to cross the savanna. The most important items were the guns and the water. But he had a feeling there was a lot more in there they could use. Hats and sunscreen. Maybe there was aspirin in the glove deck. He had no idea whether they could reach help before dark, and he wanted to be as prepared as humanly possible.

His mind paused on those last two words. Humanly possible. This seemed the last place on earth where two humans could survive. At least two humans who, unlike the Maasai, didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell they were doing. And then, instantly, he recalled Okinawa, and the pit vipers, the sea krait, and the myriad insects and jellyfish that lived on the island or in the waters around it. He had survived Okinawa. Somehow, he and Carmen would survive the Serengeti.

He looked up at the sun. Nearest civilization, he guessed, was west. Congo. He hadn’t followed the news there the way others on the safari had before leaving California, and he didn’t know many details. The names Mobutu and Mulele rang a bell for him. The Simba rebellion. Mobutu was backed by the West. That meant the Simbas were backed by…

He had no idea. The Soviet Union? The sons of bitches who’d attacked their safari?

Or were the Simbas revolutionaries who wanted an independence unencumbered by the East or the West, which, whether it was Belgians or Germans or English, had exploited East and South Africa forever? Since they had first set foot here. Copper. Cobalt. Diamonds. Gold. Uranium. They mined it all, often with slave labor and always with exploited labor.

But it was the idea of the uranium that had stayed with Reggie, and that was because of Okinawa. Most of the uranium that the Americans had used in the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki had come from a Congolese mine owned, at the time, by the Belgians. So, he was, perhaps, alive today because of that mine. He had no doubt he would have been part of the invasion of the Japanese home islands if the United States hadn’t dropped those two bombs and Japan hadn’t surrendered.

Which brought him back to where he and Carmen should go. Which direction.

Did that matter?

Yes. Good God, it was everything. They had to get out of here before they were eaten or died of exposure or infection or dehydration. The air was broiling, heavy with heat. It wasn’t humid the way Okinawa had been, but just standing here was searing his skin and making him tired. They had gone back in time to a world without people, a cosmos of rivers with prehistoric-looking hippos lounging like boulders in the shallow water and crocodiles with mouths that could tear antelopes the size of ponies in half. And on the land? There were too many predators to count, too many cats or snakes or bugs or trees—Jesus, there were trees and shrubs here at least as lethal as the ones on Okinawa—that could do the two of them in. What mattered now was finding other humans: humans who, at the very least, didn’t want to kidnap or kill them.

Which was when the realization, formless and fuzzy at first, began to grow firm in his mind. What had he been thinking when he had taken out his Boy Scout knife and killed their guard in the back seat? Yes, he and the driver had been willing to slay their African guide. They had been willing to execute the rangers. But they were never going to murder Carmen or Felix or him. At least they probably weren’t. At least not until they had gotten their ransom. He and the other two Americans, after all, only had value when they were alive.

Still, who was to say when that would have happened or what might have occurred after they got their money? The kidnapped often were killed, whether they were a famous pilot’s baby boy or a millionaire’s twin granddaughters. So, he shook his head, trying to cast aside the second guess as if it were a fly in his hair.

Carmen pulled away from him and wiped her nose with the sleeve of her blouse. He noted how quickly her eye was swelling shut.

“Fine,” she agreed suddenly, coming to her senses. “We won’t bury them. We’ll roll up the windows. At least that way, they won’t get eaten.”

Roll up the windows. The car was on its side, closer to upside down than right-side up. This, too, was the irony of language.