Selous said. "That they didn't really need me as a hostage- that our cities were hostage if we only knew."
"God, why do people talk like that?" Laura said. "Gre- nada, Singapore... " It made her feel very tired.
"You know what I think, Laura? I think they are taking us to their test site. To make a statement, yes? Me, because I am
Azanian, and we Azanians are the people they need to im- press at the moment. You, because you have witnessed their weapon ship. Their delivery system."
"Could be, I guess." Laura thought it over. "What then?
Do they free us?"
Selous's greenish eyes went remote and distant. "I'm a hostage. They will not let Azania attack them without a price."
Laura could not accept it. "That's not much of a price, is it? Killing two helpless prisoners?"
"They'll probably kill us on camera. And send the tape to
Azanian Army Intelligence," Selous said.
"But you Azanians would tell everyone, anyway, wouldn't you?"
"We've been telling people about FACT from the beginning,"
Selous scoffed. "No one would trust us if we said
Mali had the bomb. No one believes what we say. They only sneer at us and call us an 'aggressive imperialist state.' "
"Oh," Laura hedged.
"We are an empire," Selous said firmly. "President Umtali is a great warrior. All Zulus are great warriors."
Laura nodded. "Yeah, we Americans, uh, we had a black president ourselves."
"Oh, that fellow of yours didn't amount to anything,"
Selous said. "You Yankees don't even have a real govern- ment-just capitalist cartels, eh. But President Umtali fought in our civil war. He brought order, where there was savagery.
A brilliant general. A true statesman."
"Glad to hear it's working out," Laura said.
"Azanian black people are the finest black people in the world!"
They sat there sweating. Laura could not let it pass. "Look,
I'm no big Yankee nationalist, but what about... you know
... jazz, blues, Martin Luther King?"
Selous shifted on her bench. "Martin King. He had a dinner party, compared to our Nelson Mandela."
"Yeah but ...'
"Your Yankee black people aren't even real black people, are they? They're all Coloureds, actually. They look like
Europeans. "
"Wait a minute ... '
"You've never seen my black people, but I've certainly seen yours. Your American blacks crowd all our best restau- rants and gamble their global hard currency in Sun City and so on.... They're rich, and soft."
"Yeah, I come from a tourist town, myself."
"We have a wartime economy, we need the exchange money.... Fighting the chaos...he endless nightmare that is Africa.... We Africans know what it means to sacri- fice." She paused. "It seems harsh, eh? I'm sorry. But you outsiders don't understand."
Laura looked out the back of the truck. "That's true."
"It seems to be the duty of my generation to pay for history's mistakes."
"You're really convinced they'll kill us, aren't you?"
She looked remote. "I'm sorry you should be involved."
"They killed a man in my house," Laura said. "That's where it all started for me. I know it doesn't seem like much, one death compared to what's happened in Africa. But I couldn't let it pass. I couldn't shrug off my responsibility for - what happened on my own home ground. Believe me, I've had a long time to think about it. And I still think I was right, even if it costs me everything."
Selous smiled.
They had picked up a convoy. Two armored half-tracks had swung into action behind them, jouncing over the rutted road, the long, ridged wands of machine guns swaying in the turrets.
"They think they have an answer," Selous said, looking at the half-tracks. "It was worse in Mali before they came."
"I can't imagine anything worse."
"It's not something you can imagine-you have to see it."
"Do you have an answer?"
"We hold on and wait for a miracle-save whoever we can.... We were getting somewhere in the camp, I think, before the F.A.C.T. seized it. They captured me, but the rest of our Corps escaped. We're used to raids-the desert is full of scorpions."
"Were you stationed in Mali?"
"Niger actually, but that's a formality only. No central authority. It's tribal warlords mostly, in the outback. Fulani
Tribal Front, the Sonrai Fraternal Forces, all kinds of bandit armies, thieves, militias. The desert crawls with them. And
FACT's machineries, too."
"What do you mean?"
"That's how they prefer to work. By remote control. When they locate the bandits, they attack them with robot planes.
They pounce on them in the desert. Like steel hyenas killing rats."
"Jesus."
"They're specialists, technicians. They learned things, in
Lebanon, Afghanistan, Namibia. How to fight Third Worlders without letting them touch you. They don't even look at them, except through computer screens."
Laura felt a thrill of recognition. "That's them all right.... I saw all that happen in Grenada."
Selous nodded. "The president of Mali thought they. did fine work. He made them his palace guard. He's a puppet now. I think they keep him drugged."
"I've seen the guy who runs Grenada-I bet this Mali president doesn't even exist. He's probably nothing but an image on a screen and some prerecorded speeches."
"Can they do that?" Selous said.
"Grenada can-I saw their prime minister disappear into thin air."
Selous thought it over. Laura could see it working in her face-wondering if Laura was insane, or she herself was insane, or whether the bright television world was brewing something dark and awful in its deepest voodoo corners. "It's as if they're magicians," she said at last. "And we're just people. "
"Yeah," Laura said. She lifted two fingers. "But we have solidarity, and they're busy killing each other."
Selous laughed.
"We're going to win, too."
They began talking about the others. Laura had long since memorized the list. Marianne Meredith, the television corre- spondent, had been the ringleader. It was she who had invented-or already knew, maybe-the best methods of smug- gling messages. Lacoste, the French diplomat, was their interpreter-his parents had been African émigrés, and he knew two of Mali's tribal languages.
They had tortured the three agents of Vienna. One of them had turned, the other two had been released or, probably, shot.
Steven Lawrence had been taken from an Oxfam camp.
The camps were often raided-they were dumping grounds for scop, the primary source of food for millions of Saharans.
The black market for single-cell protein was the major econ- omy of the region-the "government" of Mauritania, for instance, was little more than a scop cartel. Foreign handouts, a few potash mines, and an army-that was Mauritania.
Chad was a malignant welfare bureaucracy, a tiny fraction of aristocrats whose thugs periodically emptied automatic weapons into starving crowds. The Sudan was run by a radical Muslim lunatic who consulted dervishes while facto- ries washed away and airports cracked and burst. Algeria and
Libya were one-party states, more or less organized in the coastal provinces but roiling tribalist anarchy in their Saharan outback. Ethiopia's government was preserved by Vienna's fiat; it was as frail as a pressed bouquet, and under siege by a dozen rural "action fronts."
All of them drawing venom from the lethal inheritance of the last century, a staggering tonnage of outdated armaments, passed from government to government at knock-down prices.
From America to Pakistan to mujahideen to a Somalian splin- ter group with nothing to recommend it but a holy desperation for martyrdom. From Russia to a cadre of bug-eyed Marxist strongmen shooting anything that even looked like a bourgeois intellectual.... Billions in aid had been poured into the sub-Sahara, permanently warping governments into bizarre funnels of debt and greed, and as the situation worsened more and more arms were necessary for "order" and. "stability"