She pushed herself to her feet and surveyed the grass. She wasn’t sure how to build a fire. Two of the nights on the safari, the porters had pulled smudge pots from the lorries and used them instead of crafting a pyre from toothbrush trees, acacia, and strangle figs. But she didn’t have a smudge pot. She didn’t have kerosene. She had a lighter （two, as a matter of fact） and whatever brush she could find.
Which was when it hit her. Their baobab was dead. It was a considerable tree. If she could get it to ignite, it would burn like that fucking funeral boat at the end of The Vikings. The ship with the corpse of Kirk Douglas’s character. Of course, that boat had been set ablaze by dozens of cliffside archers, and there’d been that gorgeous sail that caught fire. （Actually, she knew, it had been set ablaze by pyrotechnicians and a special-effects guru. But the archers had been a nice touch, what her father-in-law liked to call “a movie moment.” Classic and magic.）
The gamble was that if no one spotted the fire, they’d both be spending the night here on the ground. In the open.
But this baobab was all fuel, if she could round up sufficient kindling.
She could. She would. She rose, and the vultures flew off. Not far. They never went far when she stood or moved suddenly. They landed about twenty yards away. She looked around and made a plan. She’d round up all the grass and brush she could rip from this arid soil, and then she and Reggie would move to the acacia in the distance and she would burn the baobab to the ground.
That assumed, of course, that Reggie could walk.
Or was even still alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Terrance Dutton
As many as three hundred Americans and Belgians are still held hostage at the Victoria Hotel in Stanleyville. The Simba leaders insist they are being treated well, but no one here has forgotten the cruelties inflicted on the nuns who were taken hostage only last month. Meanwhile, whites continue to flee the Eastern Congo, sometimes passing a gauntlet of Russian and even Cuban soldiers, who are aiding the rebels.
—Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1964
And now there are three of us, Terrance thought. Katie and Billy and me. David was dead and Margie was gone, likely dead too, and who the hell knew what had happened to everyone else. Billy had managed to share with him the news that the Russian captor calling himself Shepard was dead and the Americans in his care had disappeared. Rangers had found the Land Rover.
The fact that he had to withhold from Katie the reality that her husband was dead was easier than he had expected. It wasn’t because he was so bloody talented. It was simply because they weren’t supposed to speak—though they did occasionally whisper a word or two to each other, and their captors seemed willing to tolerate the occasional murmurs—and he was so beaten up that he wasn’t sure what words would even sound like if he opened his mouth and attempted to speak above a murmur. Also, his head hurt. His whole fucking body ached. And they all reeked. Their breath was toxic, and their clothing was wet with their sweat and, he supposed, some measure of urine and shit. He was seething.
They were back in the Land Rover and driving west. Southwest, he suspected. They were still in Maasai country, but he expected soon there would be signs of colonial civilization. They were on hard-packed dirt now: not pavement, but what was clearly a road that was used with some frequency. He knew roughly where in the Serengeti they were when they were abducted, and while the reserve was vast, it wasn’t endless. Eventually they would reach either the Congo or whatever the hell was that secessionist part of the Congo. It began with a K, but that’s all he could recall at the moment. In October, the rebels had taken a bunch of nuns hostage. He thought that had occurred in Stanleyville. But Stanleyville was impossibly far away: he knew that from the map that had hung behind glass in the lobby in the hotel in Nairobi. No, they weren’t going to Stanleyville. Perhaps they weren’t even going to the Congo. This was all conjecture.
He was in the third row, with the Russian who’d commandeered the name Glenn behind him. Billy and Katie were in the second row ahead of him. No one would tell them their destination, but he’d heard Katie whisper to her brother that she prayed it was the safe house with David and Margie. The idea that she could harbor such a hope broke his heart. The reality that they were siblings devastated him too, though he couldn’t quite articulate why in his mind. Was it because their mother might lose both of her children? Perhaps. He supposed even the likes of Glenda Stepanov cared for her young. But there was more to it than that. It was because both siblings were fundamentally good people, despite their upbringing; nature had kicked the shit out of nurture in the Stepanov household.