He looked out the window and saw a body of water in the distance, to the north. It looked substantial, and his first thought was that it was Lake Victoria. But he really had no idea. Before they left Nairobi, Charlie Patton had given them all crappy little black-and-white maps of the reserve, and the lake had been in the upper-left-hand corner. Still, the water could be anything. A wide river. A different lake. He noted there were neither buildings nor signs of mining operations.
Which was when the Land Rover bounced like a plane in an air pocket and he heard a pop and something metallic snapping, and the vehicle tilted and swerved. For a split second, he feared it was going to roll over. At first he thought it was a gunshot and, along with Katie and Billy, he ducked. But when the driver cursed and Glenn laughed at the panicked reaction of the three Americans, he realized it was something else. The vehicle slowed to a stop, half on and half off the hard-packed dirt track.
He looked up, and even though their abductors were speaking Russian, it was clear what had happened. They had a flat tire and something worse. He glanced out the back of the Land Rover at a deep fissure that ran across the road. The chasm had, he suspected, snapped the rear axle. Their driver got out and stood staring at the leaning vehicle with his hands on his hips.
Cooper, the one with the blue eyes who was in charge of this madness, was exasperated. He climbed from the front passenger seat and stood beside the driver. Then he said something to Glenn, and Glenn began to escort the Americans from the vehicle at gunpoint.
* * *
.?.?.
The five of them were drinking in the dusky light at the bar of the West Hollywood hotel where Eva Monley and Judy Caponigro were staying, the Chateau Marmont. Joining the two women, who had flown in from Nairobi only the day before, were Katie and David and Terrance. They were seated on stools around a high-top table with a red candle in a hurricane glass in the center, as well as an art deco ashtray with a naked water nymph that seemed to have mistaken the tray for a pond.
Eva had just turned forty, and she’d been working as a location scout, script supervisor, and production manager on films set in Africa for a decade and a half, including King Solomon’s Mines and The African Queen. Last year she’d shifted gears and worked with Preminger on his epic The Cardinal, which was set （it seemed） on every continent except Africa. Judy, a little younger, was an actress who might have been a very big star—Terrance knew that she was often compared to Gina Lollobrigida, and he saw it in her wonderful sultry eyes, and that thick mane of （tonight） umber-colored hair—but after she went to Kenya to film The Missionaries, her priorities changed. She fell in love with Nairobi and put down roots there. Kept her last name professionally, Caponigro, but married a Brit who had acres and acres of coffee plants. She still worked, just not often and not in the sorts of leading roles casting agents might have expected of her once upon a time. It was rumored that both Eva and Judy had been lovers of Robert Ruark, a big-game hunter and novelist whose fame was so evident—at least in the minds of his publishers—that some of his books used only his last name on the front cover and spine, the type so elephantine it dwarfed the titles. Katie Barstow had heard the two women were in town at the behest of Preminger, who was contemplating a new adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She invited them for drinks because next month was her honeymoon safari and she thought it would be interesting to hear what Monley and Caponigro had to say about the “situation” right now in East Africa. （Situation was the word that was sometimes used by the press, a polite euphemism for upheaval and slaughter.）
Over the summer, Katie had told Terrance a little bit about what David’s father did: something heroic （or at least important） with the OSS in World War II. Now he was with the Foreign Service, whatever that was, and David’s parents had moved to the capital. She’d said that David’s father had expressed some reservations when David had outlined the safari itinerary, but he hadn’t been sufficiently alarmed to encourage them to postpone the trip or change their plan. And, Terrance supposed, David’s father would know. Nevertheless, Katie thought it would be worthwhile getting reconnaissance from two people who had spent serious time in East Africa.
“Kenya isn’t the Congo,” Judy was telling them. She pulled an olive from her martini and popped it into her mouth. “And neither is Tanganyika. Good Lord, the Serengeti is nothing like the Congo. Tanganyika is as safe as, I don’t know, Canada. I’ve even flown in and out of that new airport in Kilimanjaro.”