After several hours on the road, they reached Mbale. The army truck with its load of bored soldiers worked its way through the slowly moving traffic, with the other vehicles behind. It wasn’t until well after four o’clock that the caravan drove north out of Mbale and toward the little collections of farmhouses on the road to Kapchorwa.
Twice along the road, the doctors brought the convoy to a halt at certain clumps of houses and huts so they could get out and talk to residents about their health. When they got out at each stop, the medical workers would put on surgical masks and gloves. Mitch thought it wise to do the same. Those stops dragged on past the point of boredom. Mitch wandered among the houses and bushes, observing the people and looking for anything out of the ordinary. It was clear early on that not one of the farmers was going to admit to anything. Mitch spied several at the first stop taking off across a cornfield. They didn’t want anything to do with soldiers or doctors.
Some farmers stood far back inside their houses and talked from there. Others who talked to the doctors outside their huts kept a distance from them and denied that anyone they knew or were related to was sick. Talk of Ebola was everywhere, but the disease itself was always a rumor away in the next tiny village up the road or around the bend.
They found no direct evidence of the disease. But at each stop, Mitch grew more and more certain that it was lurking nearby. He was careful to avoid touching anything or anyone. He didn’t drink water at any place they stopped. Although he was growing hungry with the dinner hour upon them, he made no more purchases from roadside markets.
They passed the military roadblock, and what they learned from the men there was no different than anything else they’d heard or seen on their trip: rumors and worry.
With the army roadblock twenty or thirty minutes behind them, it was starting to get dark. Mt. Elgon’s peak and higher elevations glowed orange and red in the light of the setting sun. Male cicadas started their distinctive nighttime song, and nocturnal birds added their calls.
Mitch was staring at the colors slowly changing on the mountainside, not paying any attention to what was going on around him, when the driver slowed the vehicle in response to the squeaking brakes of the military truck up ahead. The road was dirt by then—they’d been off pavement since a few miles out of Mbale—and a cloud of red grit surrounded them.
Mitch coughed and blinked the dust away as he disembarked from the truck, not really curious about why they stopped. It was more out of boredom as he looked for something to do.
The doctors in the vehicle ahead—they were all doctors to Mitch—were all out by then, with a few walking forward, perhaps to relieve their own boredom. Mitch passed by one of the doctors standing by the vehicle, “What’s up?”
“Don’t know.” The guy answered. “I was asleep.”
The road dust was settling, more than a little of it in Mitch’s hair and on his clothes. He walked up to two doctors at the rear of the army truck—one man, one woman—who were looking at a few felled trees blocking the road ahead. The soldiers were standing by the trees, looking around, gesturing, and assessing the situation. They knew they’d be tasked with clearing the road and were talking it through.
“We’re here,” the female doctor said.
The man—soft, young, pale-skinned, and maybe not even old enough to be a doctor—asked the woman in a high school kid’s voice, “Why do you say that?”
She pointed at the trees down in the road. “Villagers do this when they want to isolate themselves from sickness, to keep it out.”
A single shot cracked through the air, and the soft young man crumpled.
Before Mitch could react, more shots followed. The air was full of whizzing bullets and the sound of automatic weapons fire. He dove behind the truck, dragging the woman down with him into the dirt. Mitch was on his knee behind a big rubber wheel with his compact Glock instinctively in his outstretched hand, looking for targets that would be way too far away to hit.
The soldiers ran back from the downed trees and around behind the truck. A few jumped up inside and retrieved their weapons, passing them quickly down to the others.
The gunfire still came. Mitch couldn’t find a target.
The UPDF soldiers—armed and as organized as they were going to be—took a defensive position behind the truck, while leaning over and spraying off shots down the road.
The female doctor cried out and Mitch realized she wasn’t behind the cover of the truck. She had gone over to help the downed man. Mitch lowered his pistol and holstered it. He leapt across the open ground between the truck and the man, grabbed a handful of the wounded man’s shirt, and dragged him behind the truck. The woman voiced her gratitude, but by then Mitch was looking around, feeling vulnerable to an ambush from either side.
The doctor began working fervently on her downed coworker as he struggled to breathe, bleeding profusely from a bullet hole in his chest.
Mitch caught the attention of a few of the soldiers and pointed to the trees and bushes on both sides of the road behind them. They caught his meaning right away. Mitch knelt down beside the doctor. “Can he be moved?”
“He needs a hospital,” she shouted above the gunfire.
Without much thought about his own safety, Mitch shoved his arms beneath her patient and hoisted him up with a grunt. “C’mon.” He charged as fast as he could move with the extra weight of the incapacitated man.
Mitch lifted him inside the back door of the doctors’ truck. His two escorts were immediately beside him with weapons at the ready. Turning to address the woman, he shouted, “Follow us. We’ll escort you back to Mbale. I know where the hospital is there.” He ran back to his truck and jumped into the driver’s seat.
His two men didn’t need to be told what to do. They each took a seat inside and trained their weapons out a window on either side. Moments later, they were racing back down the road to Mbale, with the medical people following as closely behind as speed and the dust allowed.
Chapter 59
It had been a rough ride. After leaving Kapchorwa in the back of a farm truck with guys who were dirty, sweaty, and blackened with ash, they watched Kapchorwa’s flames grow in the night sky. Over the course of enough miles, the flames turned to a western glow in the darkness. There was only the rumble of the engine, the rattle of the old truck, and the grunts of the unnamed jihadists in the back with Salim. Each time the tires rolled through a particularly big hole in the road, they’d all bounce off the truck’s bed. Salim earned a new bruise with each landing.
The sky slowly opened up to black and a billion pinpricks of stars, most of which Salim had never seen. Denver cast off too much light pollution for much of anything to be visible in the night sky. The truck left the road after driving for maybe an hour, earning Salim and his compatriots plenty more bruises. The truck moved much too fast for safety—much less comfort—across rough ground. Throughout what seemed like an unending trip, none of them spoke. Mostly they stared with the empty looks of men who’d done something that shamed their souls. To fight America’s tyrannical, selfish policies by shooting at soldiers in the field was one thing, but burning sick people in their homes was another altogether.
Somewhere in the chaos of preparing for the burning, Jalal had disappeared. Whether burned in the village, beheaded for disobeying, or on another truck headed east, Salim could only guess. To take his mind off of the atrocities in the village, he spent a lot of time guessing what might have happened to Jalal and imagining about how they might meet up again. At the moment, Jalal was the only real friend he had. Well, perhaps Austin was a friend. He’d risked his life to save Austin and the girl with the weird French name he couldn’t remember.