“He says we’re okay,” Frank said. “Just tourists flying around.”
“I was afraid we were the ones he was supposed to shoot to see if his guns worked.”
Frank laughed, and Ellen completed the three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, coming in over Macdonald Bay again, this time much lower. The scar was now clearly a road, but it still disappeared under the thick dark-green trees.
“Head northwest,” Frank said, taking pictures.
Below them, the forest was impenetrable, nothing but the thick-leafed branches. Frank lowered the camera. “Thruston Bay over there,” he said, pointing ahead and to the left. “The turntable should be between us and it.”
Traveling very slowly, just clearing the treetops, she turned toward Thruston Bay. “Wait,” she said, throttling back, then had to rev up.
“What was it?”
“I thought I saw something shine.”
They were over the bay. Ellen made a tight turn in the sky and headed back over the trees. Frank said, “When you get where you saw it, turn left.”
That would be inland, away from the lake. “Right.”
She saw no glint this time, was not in fact absolutely sure where she’d seen it before. When she felt she must be past it, she turned left, and very soon they crossed a railway: a single pair of tracks and the gleaming line of metal sleepers.
“We’ve gone too far,” Frank said. “The turntable’s between the railroad and the lake.”
Ellen started another turn, the sweep taking them over the highway just north of the track. Down there, three cars were stopped in an odd relationship, like a chinese ideogram: two black cars at angles to a yellow car between them. A group of men stood in the middle of the road around a lone man.
Ellen stared. “The car—that’s Lew!”
“Holy shit,” Frank said.
One of the men hit the man in the middle with an object of some kind, a stick or pipe or gun barrel. The man fell, and two of the men kicked him, and he curled up like a leech when salt is poured on it.
Frantic, staring around at the unforgiving forest, Ellen cried, “Where can we land? Where can we land?”
“Are you crazy? This is Uganda! Get back to Kisumu, fast!”
Two of the men had looked up, were pointing at the plane. One hurried toward a black car; to radio someone?
Ellen accelerated into the turn, climbing higher into the empty comfortless sky. “We’ll get to Balim,” Frank was saying. “He’ll know what to do.” He’d undone his seat belt to turn and put the camera bag on the backseat.
Bracing herself, Ellen abruptly pulled back on the stick, and the plane dropped fifty feet like a stone before she accelerated again. She’d been ready for it, but Frank hadn’t. He was thrown violently up against the metal top and flung just as violently down again. “Jesus!” he yelled, scrabbling for something to hold on to. “Watch it!”
“I am watching it, Frank,” she said, and her tone of voice made him stare at her in sudden alarm. The airspeed indicator kept climbing. Not looking at him, she said, “You sent Lew over there today so you could fuck me.”
“It should have been safe!” He was hurriedly trying to get his seat belt snapped. “I told you, we needed both—”
This time she sideslipped, cracking his head smartly against his side window. He yelled, and she said, “Don’t argue with me, Frank. I could kill you up here, and you don’t dare touch me because I’m the pilot. You want another taste?”
“No! Jesus Christ,” he said, trying to hold his head and at the same time brace himself for any conceivable shift in speed and direction. “What’s it for?”
“I want Lew back,” she told him. “And I want you to know how serious I am, Frank.”
“Don’t do it again!”
She didn’t. “I want him back.”
“You’ll get him,” Frank promised, grim and sullen and abashed. “You’ll get him. And welcome to him.”
11
Like Rome, Kampala is built on seven hills, and is in fact named after one of them, Kampala meaning “Hill of the Impala,” that graceful harmless antelope of the long curved horns, a peaceful herbivore. Another of these hills is called Nakasero, and on its crest sat the Presidential Lodge, one of many residences the restless, discontented Amin maintained throughout Uganda. In rustic luxury, the Lodge nestled amid mango and gum trees, bougainvillea vines, frangipani, and hibiscus. By day the sweet-smelling groves rang with the laughter of Idi Amin’s children; he had at least twenty-five, by five wives.
Down the hill, farther down the hill, within sight of the windows of the Lodge, was a large lovely open park, a green, four hundred yards wide. On one side of it stood All Saints Church, the See of Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum, who had been murdered personally by Idi Amin on February 17, 1977. Opposite stood the French Embassy and, next to that, a three-story pink building surrounded by barbed wire. This was the State Research Bureau, in an office of which Amin had shot the archbishop in the face, then had phoned one of his useful white men to say, “I’ve lost my temper. I’ve shot the archbishop. Do something.”
Lew was semiconscious, in the trunk of one of the Toyotas, when the two cars drove in at the front gate of the State Research Bureau. He felt fevered, delirious, but was conscious enough to know he was in the worst trouble of his life. He didn’t know, and wouldn’t have been cheered to hear, that someone had once said of the State Research Bureau at Nakasero, “When you go in there, the question is not when or if you will come out. The only question left is when the pain will stop.”
They opened the trunk of the Toyota and pulled him out by his ankles and elbows and hair, letting him fall to the ground and then kicking him for his clumsiness, yelling, “Up! Get up!” in Nubian dialect. Lew curled into a ball, protecting his head and torso, his back shielded by the Toyota, until they stopped kicking him and grabbed his arms to jerk him to his feet. Swimmingly in the glare of the sunlight he saw the green beyond the barbed wire, and what appeared to be the mirage of a cathedral far away. Parked next to the barbed wire, one side dented, was a bus in which, two months ago, a group of hospital nurses had been coming back to Kampala after a dance at Makerere University; State Research Bureau men had stopped it, driven it here, and beat and raped the nurses through the night, releasing them in the morning. There had been no retribution.
Lew was hustled into the building, where a harsh-looking man in Army uniform sat at a reception desk. A Colt .45 was on the desk, easy to his right hand. Lew, blinking, trying to rid his eyes and mind of fuzziness and spots of deadness, looked at that automatic on the desk and licked his puffy lips, tasting blood. But even if he were fully conscious, with all his coordination, grabbing for that gun would be a very stupid move.
“Name?”
“Lew—” He coughed and cleared his throat and tried again. “Lewis Brady.”
He saw the man write it down in a long ledger, the dark parody of a hotel register. The book was thick, the open page in the middle, a dozen names already listed before Lew’s. Reading upside down, blinking and blinking, Lew saw that there were two headings at the top of the page: NAME and CHARGE. Under CHARGE, after his name, he watched the Army man write “Not specified.” Almost all the other entries on the page said the same thing.
“Valuables.”