But then it banked, dipping its left wing. It was circling back around, after all, and she collapsed onto her knees, sobbing, as the noise grew louder and the plane grew bigger as it descended. Then, with barely a bounce, it landed on the hard, flat grass between the burning baobab and the acacia and rolled to a stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Benjamin Kikwete
The Belgian paratroopers were dropped from American C-130 airplanes, and after securing the airfield at Stanleyville, battled their way to the Victoria Hotel. The house-to-house fighting against the Simba rebels was arduous and bloody, and as the Belgian soldiers neared the hotel, the rebel leaders marched their American and Belgian hostages into the streets and began to execute them.
—Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1964
The lorry stopped, and one of the Russians climbed from the front of the truck and peed into the nearby brush. It was midmorning and the sun had burned off the morning fog, and the chill air of dawn was already a distant memory. They’d spent the night in the back of the vehicle, and Benjamin was surprised that he had nodded off for a couple of hours despite the way his hands were bound and the metal pressed hard against his spine no matter how he tried to position himself.
The Russian had left the door open, and Benjamin could hear the vehicle’s radio. Not the walkie-talkie radios that the guides sometimes used to tell one another about a sighting or a road that had flooded out, but the radio that—depending upon the weather and where you were in the reserve—might pick up some music or news out of Nairobi or Arusha. The Russians were listening in this case to news, and discreetly Benjamin nudged Muema. He wanted him to hear this too. It was an English-language station out of Kenya, and it sounded like the fighting in Stanleyville had escalated: Belgian soldiers were on the ground and there was fighting in the streets. But it was clear that the Simbas were losing.
In the distance, he heard an engine. Maybe more than one. The noise wasn’t loud enough to drown out the truck radio, but it was real and the Russian who was guarding them stood up and squinted as he stared into the dust. The one who’d been relieving himself near the thorn brush zipped up, and Benjamin noticed that he switched off the safety of his assault rifle as he returned to the side of the lorry. The driver opened his door and stood on the step, his palms on the roof of the cab, and peered into the distance. Then he lifted one hand off the metal, which Benjamin knew was scorching, and used his fingers like a visor against the sun.
Approaching them were two vehicles, blurred by the waves of heat that rose up from the savanna like gauze.
“Rangers,” Muema murmured. “Or soldiers.”
The Russian who was returning from the brush started yelling at his comrades, and the driver responded with shouts of his own. The driver clearly didn’t believe a truck full of hostages could outrun the jeeps, but the one in charge wanted them moving, and moving now. He jumped into the back with the captives, and the driver reluctantly ducked into the cab and slammed the door.
And they were off, racing down the dirt track road, going faster than they ever had, and the men in the back were jostled so badly that it crossed Benjamin’s mind that some of them would be tossed accidentally over the side and, because their wrists were bound, perhaps break their necks when they landed hard on the ground. They passed a herd of buffaloes and a lone running ostrich—though it took them time to overtake the massive bird—but Benjamin kept looking back at the vehicles that were chasing them. The pair was gaining, narrowing the gap slowly but inexorably. And the Russians in the back with them could see this, too. Eventually their pursuers would be within shooting range, and Benjamin knew who would fire first. The Russians were both at the lorry’s back gate, their attention divided between their hostages and the jeeps that were pursuing them. They would have the first and the best shot. They might have the only shots. Would those rangers or soldiers even fire at the truck and risk injuring the hostages?
Nevertheless, those jeeps might represent rescue. Deliverance.
Assuming, Benjamin thought, that we survive the firefight.
* * *
.?.?.
Benjamin had been on a safari with Charlie Patton in which one of the cooks was a Tutsi refugee from Rwanda. Easily 130,000 Tutsis had left Rwanda after the Hutu revolution of 1962. The cook was in his early twenties, older than Benjamin, and he was angry and intense and told Benjamin that he never expected to return to his home country. In January 1964, however, Benjamin learned that the fellow did, in fact, go back. One time. He saw the cook’s name in the newspaper one morning in the lobby of the Nairobi hotel before they all set out once again, as they stood surrounded by the safari guests’ suitcases and trunks and valises. The cook had been among a group of a few hundred men who’d crept across the border into Rwanda with bows and arrows, and managed to seize considerably more deadly weapons from a military outpost. They stole some vehicles and drove to Kigali, the capital city, planning to incite a rebellion.