And Billy didn’t care, because—whether it was pious or pathetic—all he cared about that moment was getting his wife and his unborn child out of there.
“Poachers?” Terrance asked, but Juma ignored him.
Their guide had just eased the clutch into gear and started to accelerate when the back window and one of the side windows of the Land Rover exploded and Billy felt the glass shards raining upon Margie and him, and something sharp slicing into the back of his neck, just above his shirt collar. Once more, his wife was screaming, and before the vehicle had gone very far—maybe twenty yards, maybe thirty—he felt the back of it wobble like a plane flying through a patch of （a synonym he noticed more and more pilots and stewardesses using these days） rough air. He told Margie to duck, and he may have shouted the word, wrapping himself over her crouching body as if he were a blanket. Juma tried to gun the Land Rover, but it was evident that one of the tires had been shot and he was riding on a rim. He stopped.
“Do we get out and run?” Katie asked.
“Can you outrun a bullet?” Juma asked in return.
Billy held Margie as tight as he could, hoping to quiet her because she was sobbing. Over and over, she moaned, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,” her body timorous and small.
“They won’t kill you,” Juma reassured her. “Stay here.”
Katie turned back to her guests in the second and third rows of seats, her eyes wide but unreadable: Billy couldn’t tell how deep was his sister’s terror, though on the surface she seemed a hell of a lot more stoic than Margie. The five of them watched as Juma climbed out the driver’s-side door of the Land Rover, his hands up as if he were acting—surrendering—in one of Katie’s movies. He was standing there, right beside the vehicle, when they all heard another shot and the glass window beside the door was awash in Juma’s brains and blood, a Rorschach of red, gray, and black, and the body dropped like a shot topi or eland or any of the other beautiful antelopes they’d seen here in the Serengeti. And somehow Billy knew—he just knew, even as his wife started once more to howl—that the poor son of a bitch had been killed by that double-barreled rifle that was meant to bring down game much bigger than a topi or eland. Juma Sykes had been all but decapitated by a goddamn elephant gun.
CHAPTER FOUR
Benjamin Kikwete
The “honeymoon” safari will be led by the great white hunter, Charlie Patton, and his team. Patton and his staff used to cater to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, and Katie and her guests will be cared for by the sons of some of the very same men who would skin “Papa” Hemingway’s trophies.
—The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964
He was down in the dirt on his stomach beside Muema, the second guide, neither of them wounded, watching as the tallest of the intruders—a man so thin and lanky, his Adam’s apple looked like a small jackfruit on his neck—shot out a couple of windows and one of the wheels of the Land Rover. He was an expert marksman. So far, Benjamin had counted seven men, all white, who’d appeared out of nowhere from the brush behind the dining tent, but he knew there were more. He tried to account for the guests, but it was happening quickly and he didn’t know who was in the retreating Rover and who wasn’t. He tried to find his boss, Charlie Patton, but he had no idea now where he was, either.
Benjamin respected Patton, but he didn’t revere him the way his father did: his father had worked for the man, too, as a gun bearer when Patton was still running hunting safaris exclusively. Patton was almost four times Benjamin’s age: Benjamin’s father had told him the man was sixty-eight.
Now the porter put his head up, scanning the horror that was unfolding, raising up on his elbows to survey the whole of the camp, and instantly he felt Muema’s hand on his back, pressing him back into the ground. They were beside a tire track: a groove. Benjamin noticed a dung beetle trying to roll a piece of elephant shit it had meticulously shaped into a marble up and out of the rut, but the rut was like a canal to the insect. Twice the beetle had almost pushed the excrement over the side and onto the flat dirt beyond, and each time the weight of the dung had been too much and it rolled back over the creature to the bottom of the track.
* * *
.?.?.
Earlier that week, Benjamin hadn’t expected a movie star among the clients. When Patton was briefing his team and they were gathering in the street outside the hotel in Nairobi, he had known there would be nine wealthy Americans, six men and three women. There were three married couples and three single men, and six tents for the guests. That was all he was focused upon: the catering needs of nine people who had never before been to the Serengeti. He understood, more or less, the type and what to expect: he’d accompanied his father perhaps two dozen times since he’d been barely a teenager, and Patton’s groups would arrive in Kenya and start south into Tanganyika. His father had watched as Patton transitioned his business from escorting hunters who wanted to bring home trophies to tourists who expected only to bring back photographs. Patton still carried himself with the bravado and élan of one of the great white hunters, but most of the times that Benjamin had been among Patton’s porters, the groups had been photo safaris and his boss hadn’t even bothered with gun bearers and skinners.