Eventually the truck arrived at another dust-covered road. The ride became smoother, and the truck moved faster. The tallest tip of Mt. Elgon started to glow pink in the early sun. They had to be east of the mountain then, back in Kenya, and morning was coming.
Salim watched the mountain change as washes of morning color crept down the slopes. He thought of lava pouring out of the extinct volcano. The country on both sides of the road emerged from blackness, and Salim saw farm after farm after farm growing all manner of crops he couldn’t identify. In many ways, it reminded him of eastern Colorado with its rolling hills and plains covered with farms, pastures, and majestic mountains rising in the west.
It wasn’t until he was shaken awake that he realized exhaustion had gotten the better of him, and he’d dozed off.
“Wake up, brother. You can sleep on the plane.”
“The plane?” Salim asked, realizing the truck’s engine was off. The truck was empty, and he could see his companions walking toward a dilapidated building.
The Arab man pointed in the direction of the other men. “Follow them. You can wash off when you get inside. You’ll get new clothes.”
“The plane?” Salim asked, realizing only then that his bag, his passport, and his billfold were gone.
The man guessed the question. “Your things are inside.”
Salim slowly stood, feeling the physical abuse he’d put himself through over the past days.
“Hurry. Your plane leaves in thirty minutes.”
“Okay,” Salim jumped down off the bed of the truck, wobbled on his knees, and followed the others toward the shabby building.
Looking around in the dawn, it occurred to him that he hadn’t slept that long. Mt. Elgon still stood tall off toward the west. The surrounding land was mostly flat farmland with the exception of the rural airport and a few cobbled-together municipal buildings. A runway stretched off in two directions. A commuter plane sat on the tarmac, looking large enough to hold everyone in the truck and maybe a few more.
Besides the building the men were being herded toward, only one other small building, with an array of oddly-shaped antennae on the roof, stood on the immediate property. A curved wall of square window panes faced the runway. It had to be the terminal.
Perhaps this was the first real step on the way home to Denver.
Once inside the building, Salim guessed it had to be a hanger, built to house two or three small private planes, which were absent. At one end, the other men from the truck were either naked and washing themselves with soap and a garden hose, or stripping and waiting their turn.
Salim took his place in line, waiting as men hurried through their cleaning in front of him. Toward the far end of the hangar, a few tables with pants and shirts in various colors in Western styles lay on the table. On the floor leaning against a wall he spied his travel bag.
It was the first thing he had to feel good about in days.
Exactly thirty minutes after Salim rolled himself out of the bed of the truck, the commuter plane taxied down the runway and climbed into the thin Kenyan air. Some in the passenger cabin seemed to know each other and hushed conversations ensued. Salim contented himself to watch the houses and trees below shrink and merge into colored patterns with the other features on the ground.
A man came up out of the rear of the plane, passing out bottles of water and food.
Another man stood up at the front of the plane with a satchel he then handed to a guy on the first row. “Inside is an envelope with your name on it. Find your envelope and pass the bag to the next man. We will be landing in Nairobi in forty minutes. Some of you have flights leaving shortly after we arrive. You’ll find airline tickets and itineraries in your envelope with your information. You will also find credit cards in your name and cash in the currency of your country of origin. All of you have connecting flights and long layovers. You’ll each be traveling for most of the next two days.”
The plane bounced through some turbulence and the speaker fell to the side, hitting roughly against the door. When he stood back up, embarrassed, he shrugged and smiled. A few of Salim’s compatriots chuckled softly. It was almost normal.
The speaker straightened himself out and put his serious face back on. “While you are in each airport, walk around, learn what you can about the security, the layout, and look for weaknesses. Don’t write anything down that could be used as evidence to detain you. You each have a prepaid cell phone in your envelope. A phone number has been added to the contact list for someone called Mother. Mother will call you to give you instructions. If you need to call for questions, call Mother, but don’t make a habit of it. We know what your schedules are, so don’t worry if you find yourself coming to the end of your itinerary. We’ll contact you with instructions before that.”
More turbulence but the speaker caught himself on a seat back and smiled confidently. “Otherwise, enjoy your Western lives. Eat at restaurants. Spend the money. Smile, just like holiday travelers. Talk with other passengers, get to know them. The hard part is behind you. From here forward, your main purpose is to fit back into the country you came from. Don’t spend any time worrying about when you will be called up for a mission. That day is far in the future.”
Chapter 60
Mitch spent the evening and the night in the hospital. His first impulse was to leave the doctors and aid workers there with their wounded man, pull some strings to get the Uganda People’s Defence Force in gear, and go back to the village that night. The more he thought about it, the more he came to believe whatever was going on up the road had to do with the Ebola outbreak. And as much as his intuition told him Ebola and terrorism were intersecting up that road, it was his task to find proof of that. He was a disgruntled, self-proclaimed embassy playboy, out to do his part in the War on Terror. The agency must have been taken by surprise to dump all of this in his lap.
With his options waning, he stayed in the hospital and befriended the woman who’d been near him when her coworker was shot. The woman, a Dr. Mills from Tampa, Florida, was young, dark-haired, and athletic—exactly the kind of girl he’d try to bed. But that wasn’t why he’d cozied up to her. If terrorists were up that road to Kapchorwa fiddling with a way to weaponize Ebola, he’d need help from at least one doctor in putting those pieces together.
The wounded guy died sometime around three a.m., putting the doctors into a frenzy of heated arguments and phone calls. Mitch—by then on a first-name basis with the survivors—stayed on the fringes and nudged them to go back. He tried convincing them that they needed to find out what was so important up that road that it needed to be protected.
In the end, he won. Not completely, but enough. Dr. Mills and another doctor named Simmons agreed to go back with Mitch, provided the army went first and secured the village. On that particular point, Mitch had been assured by his boss that the UPDF was heading up that road in force at sunup.
So after sleeping too few hours, and eating something from a food vendor on the street, Mitch loaded his two doctors into a truck, along with his two men from the day before, and four more armed contractors in another vehicle which took the lead.
Six menacing, quiet black men with guns made the doctors feel more secure. Knowing the army had gone ahead several hours earlier helped a lot with that feeling.
Chapter 61
When they finally drove into Kapchorwa, Dr. Mills quietly shuddered, “My God.”