“You think he’s trying to get us a ride?” Daniel asks.
“I think he’s trying to get us the fuck out of here, if that’s what you mean,” Andre answers.
The captain is gesturing vigorously and then turns to look at them and continues talking. Several of the soldiers look over as well.
“I think we’ve just become part of our story,” Daniel says. “That’s a big ethical no-no at journalism school.”
Andre flicks a pebble into the dirt. “Ethics,” he grunts. “I’d drive this piece of shit myself if they’d let me.”
Andre as some kind of rogue reporter who’s gone native up-country with an APC is not hard for Daniel to imagine. He has the sort of hard confidence—coupled with a deep exasperation with the natives—that kept the Brits in control of places like this for centuries. But he also has a nearly bottomless sympathy for the locals that Daniel can’t hope to match. Daniel is endlessly polite—he never yells at the drivers or the translators or tries to bully the soldiers—but in his heart he knows he also doesn’t give a damn about these people. At the end of the day, he’s going home and Andre isn’t—Andre belongs here, and the locals can tell that in an instant.
The conversation over by the trucks breaks up, and the captain starts walking back toward the APC. Andre and Daniel get to their feet. “This better be good,” Andre mutters. The captain stops in front of them, looking displeased. The other soldiers look away.
“You’re leaving now and you will not come back,” the captain says in his good English. He’s obviously had some schooling, maybe even in London. “You’ve caused a lot of problems.”
“What kind of fucking problems?” says Andre. “We’re journalists, and we’re just trying to do our work.”
“You didn’t get permission from the minister of information to come out here,” the captain says. “You know very well you were supposed to. Back in Freetown, they’re saying you’re spies.”
Spies is bad, Daniel thinks. Spies gets you killed.
“Spies? You know damn well we’re not spies,” Andre says, his voice rising. “This is fucking outrageous. We have press passes from your government.”
The captain goes from polite to steely in an instant. The soldiers shift on their feet, unsure whether to stay out of it or present some kind of backup for their captain. The captain is shouting now: “You are in a military zone without permission. You have asked about troop strength. You’re trying to get up to the front line. Do you have a satellite phone in your bag?”
“Of course we don’t have a satellite phone,” Andre says. “If we did—”
“If you do,” the captain interrupts, “you will be taken right over there and shot. Soldier!” One of the young soldiers jerks to attention. “Take control of these men.”
The bewildered soldier cocks his machine gun and points it unsteadily at their bellies. Daniel can feel his heart suddenly whacking sickly in his chest. His head is not swimming yet, but that’s next. Andre is holding on to some measure of indignation that will either save them or get them killed.
“Over there!” the captain shouts. Daniel and Andre walk off into the sunlight and stand there squinting while the captain kneels down and starts to go through their bags. Daniel is unsure whether he should put his hands in the air, but Andre hasn’t, and so he just stands there trying to look unconcerned. Daniel watches the captain throw all of Andre’s camera gear onto the ground and then open the knapsack and upend it until everything—the water bottle, the flashlight, his book, his precious notes—has tumbled out. Scattered in the packed red dirt, their belongings look pathetic, almost embarrassing. Dead bodies look pathetic in the same way, Daniel thinks. He hasn’t seen very many, but on some level there’s always some smug thought, “I’m alive, you’re dead.” There’s no greater gulf between two people, no greater inequality.
“You are very lucky,” the captain says. “I would have had a very difficult decision to make, but I am a soldier, and I assure you I would have made it.”
Daniel can’t even bring himself to think about the sat phone. That’s for later; that’s for some long, sick drunk in Nairobi before he goes home. Andre and Daniel are allowed to collect their belongings while the soldiers look off in embarrassment. The one who had his gun on them walks off across the plaza and comes back a few minutes later driving the Suzuki. He risks an apologetic smile and waves them into the truck. The captain says, “If you come back here without permission, you will be shot.” Andre ignores him and climbs into the passenger seat of the truck, and Daniel throws his bag into the backseat and then gets in next to it. The captain walks off, the soldier forces the stick shift into first. He seems to want to get out of there as fast as they do. He’s seventeen, maybe eighteen, and if nothing else he’s going back to Freetown for the day.
Andre is sitting sullenly in front, watching the jungle scroll by, a scraggly green wall occasionally broken by a burnt house or a clearing. The soldier looks over brightly to say something but notices the expression on Andre’s face and decides against it.
“Hey, my name’s Daniel, and my friend here is Andre,” Daniel says, leaning forward into the front seat. The soldier’s Kalashnikov is wedged next to the hand brake; he can feel the muzzle against his chest.
“Na’ me name Sammy,” the kid says, glancing back in the mirror.
“Do you live in Freetown?”
“Yessah.”
“Are you going to see your family?”
“Yessah.”
The kid goes on to say something in Krio that Daniel doesn’t understand. The language is a thick blend of English, French, and native dialects that should be easy to understand, but it isn’t. Then you wake up one morning, Andre says, and suddenly you understand everything.
“He’s inviting us to his house for dinner,” Andre says without turning his head.
“Thank you,” Daniel says. “Maybe we’ll do that.”
Portrait of a soldier and his family, he thinks. A soldier’s-eye view of the war. It’s better than nothing.
“Were you here last year? Were you here for ’99?”
Ninety-nine was the rebel occupation—it lasted two weeks, and it was hell on earth. Amputation squads, children made to shoot their own parents, women raped on bridges and then thrown over the side. There were almost no journalists in the city to report it, and perhaps in a sense it was unreportable anyway.
“Na boat we tek go Guinea, na’ now a de ton back kam,” Sammy says. “A kam back fo’ go skul, na day soljahman dem ketch we, tay tiday nary a ah dae.”
“He went to Guinea but came back for school,” Andre says flatly. “The army caught him, so now here he is.”
The kid says this with a smile, like he’s glad it has all worked out this way. Maybe because he’s driving us two idiots around, Daniel thinks. He’s probably never been in a car with two white guys before. Daniel sees something up ahead on the road, a dark shape askew in some kind of disastrous way. Andre sees it too and instinctively puts his hand on his camera. “Rebel dead,” the kid says. He pulls over to the left to head around it, a pickup truck flipped over onto its roof. It must have been hit by something big, a tank round maybe.
“Stop!” Andre yells. “Stop the truck!”