Cross Country (15 page)

A
FEW SECONDS later, the entire greenhouse reverberated with a half dozen or more gun blasts coming from outside. And then bursts of machine-gun clatter.

"Do you hear that?" the Tiger shouted at the top of his voice. "You hear it? All your fault!"

There was more gunfire. Then screams — women first, followed quickly by boys, their voices high and pitiful.

"That," the Tiger told him, "is the sound of your mistakes, your greed, your stupidity."

Shol grappled with both hands at the Tiger's huge and unmovable wrists. His eyes reddened and veins appeared ready to burst at his temples. The Tiger watched, fascinated.

It was possible, he'd learned, to bring a man to the edge of death, and then keep him there for as long as he liked. He liked this because he despised Shol and his kind.

The greenhouse door shattered as two bodyguards arrived to rescue their employer. "Come in!" shouted the Tiger. In one motion, he spun Mohammed Shol around and pulled a pistol from the paddle holster at his ankle. He charged forward, Shol in front as a shield, firing as he came!

One bodyguard went down with a nine-millimeter hole in the throat. The other sent a bullet through his employer's outstretched hand, then into his shoulder.

Shol screamed, even as the Tiger launched him the last several feet across the floor, where he crashed into the guard. Both men went down. Then the Tiger shot the second bodyguard in the face.

"Oga!" Rocket said as he appeared in the empty doorway. Oga meant "chief" in Lagos street parlance. The Tiger liked the designation, and it came naturally to his young soldiers.

The screaming had all but stopped in the house, but there were still sounds of breakage and gunfire as his boys let off the last of their venom and steam.

"There was a tutor. Children being taught."

"Taken care of," said Rocket.

"Good." The Tiger watched as Shol struggled to stand. He fired once into his leg. "You'll need a tourniquet or you'll die," he said to the businessman.

Then he turned to Rocket. "Tie Mr. Shol up. Then put this in his mouth. Or up his ass, if you like."

"This" was an M67 — a grenade.

"Pull the pin before you leave."

E
VERYTHING CONTINUED TO feel unreal and fantasylike to me.

My cot was at the far end of one of three lodges, long high-ceilinged dorms off the main corridor where breakfast would be served in the morning.

Alex Cross, I thought. What have you come to? What have you done this time?

The guy in the next bed was the same guy as the night before, a Jamaican man by the name of Oscar. He didn't talk much, but the strained look in his eyes and half-healed track marks told his story.

He lay on his side and watched me while I rooted around for a toothbrush.

"Hey, mon," he said in a whisper. "Dey is some shorty man o' God lookin' your way. He dere now."

Father Bombata was standing at the door. When I saw him, he beckoned with a finger, then walked back out of the dormitory.

I followed him outside and into a hall packed with last-minute arrivals. I pushed upstream toward the front doors, until I caught up with the priest.

"Father?"

I saw then that he was dialing a cell phone and wondered who he was calling. Was it good news or bad that I was supposed to hear?

"Ms. Tansi wishes to speak with you," he said and handed over the phone to me.

Adanne had news! An assassination in South Darfur had occurred that day. One of the representatives to the Sudanese Council of States was dead — and his family had been slaughtered.

"Any connection to Basel Abboud in DC?" I asked her.

"I don't know yet, but I can tell you that the Tiger does frequent business in Sudan."

"Weapons? Heroin?" I asked her. "What kind of business, Adanne?"

"Boys. His loyal soldiers. He recruits at the Darfur refugee camps."

I took a breath. "You might have told me about this earlier."

"I'll make it up to you. I can have us on an air freighter to Nyala first thing in the morning."

I blinked.

"You said 'us'?"

"I did. Or you can fly commercial to Al Fasher and see about ground transport from there. I leave it to you."

Any other time I never would have considered it. But then, I'd never been five thousand miles from home without a lead and sleeping in a men's homeless shelter before.

I put my hand over the phone. "Father, can I trust this woman?" With my life?

"Yes, she is a good person," he said without hesitation. "And I told you, she is my cousin. Tall and beautiful, just like me. You can trust her, Detective."

I was back on the line. "Nothing goes into print until we both say so? Do we have a deal on that?"

"Agreed. I'll meet you at the Ikeja Cantonment, at the main entrance by five. And Alex, you should prepare yourself emotionally. Darfur is truly a horrible place."

"I've seen a few horrors," I said. "More than a few."

"Perhaps you have, but not like this. Nothing like this, believe me, Alex."

S
O FAR, ADANNE'S connections were very good, and I was impressed by how quickly and efficiently she got things done.

We were in the air by six, the only civilian passengers on a plane carrying millet, sorghum, and cooking oil to Darfur.

The murder investigation continued, and now it was airborne and seemed to have more purpose than ever.

I borrowed a situation map from one of the flight crew and saw that Darfur was about the size of Texas. If I was going to get anywhere, I had to run with a few assumptions — one, that the Tiger had been in Nyala at the time of the massacre of the Shol family, and two, that Adanne's information was correct, and he might still be culling boys from camps for displaced persons in the area.

Given all of that, how far would he have gotten in the past eighteen hours? That was the next question that had to be answered.

During the flight, Adanne patiently told me much about Darfur and Sudan, and though she spoke in a low-key manner, there was no disguising the horrors — especially against women and children, thousands of whom were raped, then branded to increase their humiliation.

"Rape has become such a cruel weapon in this civil war. Americans have no idea, Alex. They couldn't possibly."

"Sometimes the Janjaweed will break a woman's legs first so she can't possibly escape and will be an invalid for the rest of her life. They like to flog victims; to break fingers one by one; to pull out fingernails," Adanne said in a voice that barely got above a whisper.

"Even some of the 'peacekeepers' are guilty of rape, and of using the refugees as prostitutes. What's worse, the government of Sudan is behind much of it. You won't believe what you will see here, Alex."

"I want to see it," I told her. "I made a promise to a man in Sierra Leone that I would tell Americans what was happening here."

"T
HIS IS KALMA." She pointed at a yellow triangle on the map. "It's one of the largest camps in Darfur. I'd wager that the Tiger knows it well. Everyone around here does."

There were more than a hundred camps in all, Adanne explained. Green meant inaccessible during rainy season, and blue was closed to nonmilitary aid organizations, based on current fighting conditions. Raima's yellow meant open.

That's where we would start our Tiger hunt.

"And these?" I ran a finger over a line of red flame icons. There were dozens of them.

Adanne sighed before answering my question.

"Red is for villages that are confirmed destroyed. The Janjaweed burn everything they can — food stores, livestock. They put human and animal carcasses down the wells, too. Anything to ensure that no one comes back. In Arabic, Janjaweed means 'man with a gun on horseback.' "

These were the Arab militias, widely believed to be supported by the current government in a vicious campaign to make life as unsafe as possible for black Africans in the region. An unthinkable two million people had already fled their homes and more than two hundred thousand had died. Two hundred thousand that we knew of.

It was Rwanda all over again. In fact, it was worse. This time the whole world was watching and doing almost nothing to help.

I looked out my porthole window at the Sahel landscape twelve thousand feet below.

It was actually quite beautiful from up here — no civil war, no genocide, no corruption. Just an endless, peaceful stretch of tan, sculpted earth.

Which was a lie, of course.

A beautiful, very diabolical lie.

Because we were about to land in hell.

A
T THE BASE in Nyala, we secured a ride out to the Kalma Camp with a five-truck convoy carrying sacks of grain and crates of F75 and F100 baby formula. Adanne seemed to know everyone here, and I found it interesting to watch her work. Her gracious smile, not her attractiveness, seemed to be her secret. I saw it succeed again and again with people who were overworked and stressed to their limits.

Yes, there were tents and lean-tos and stick-straw huts, but they stretched for miles and miles. One hundred and fifty thousand people lived here. That's a city. And one that was overflowing with unbearable suffering and heartbreak and death by everything from Janjaweed attacks, to dysentery, to childbirth without drugs, and usually without a doctor or midwife.

Around the camp's center were some signs of permanence, at least. A small open-air school was in session, and there were a few walled buildings with corrugated tin roofs, where limited food supplies were still available.

Adanne knew exactly where we should go first. She took me to the United Nations' Commission on Refugees tent, where a young soldier agreed to do some translating for us, although many of the refugees knew bits of English.

The soldier's name was Emmanuel, and he had the same kind of sinewy height, dark skin, and deep-set eyes I'd seen on many of the so-called Lost Boys who had emigrated to DC over the years. Emmanuel spoke English, Arabic, and Dinka.

"Most of the people here are Fur," he told us as we started down a long dirt avenue. "And eighty percent are abused women."

"Most of their men are dead, or looking for work, or for resettlement," added Adanne. "This is the most vulnerable city in the world, Alex. No exception. You will find out for yourself."

It was easy to see what Adanne and Emmanuel were talking about. Most of the people we found to speak with were women who were working outside their shelters. They reminded me of Moses and his friends, because of how eager they were to share their terrible stories with someone from the outside.

One woman, Madina, cried as she wove a straw mat and told us about coming to Kalma. The Janjaweed had destroyed her village and killed and mutilated her husband, her mother, and father. Most of her neighbors and friends were burned alive in their huts.

Madina had arrived with three children and literally nothing else. Tragically, all three of her children had died at the camp.

The sleeping mats she made were in demand because of dooda worms, which came out of the ground at night and burrowed into the refugees' skin. Whatever she earned went toward onions and grain, though she hoped to have enough to buy a patch of cloth one day. She'd been wearing the same toab since she'd gotten here.

"When was that?" Adanne asked.

"Three years ago" was Madina's sad answer. "One for each of my children."

"I
HAVEN'T LOST sight of your Tiger," Adanne said as we trudged along. "He recruits boys here. It's easy for him."

I was eager to speak with people in as many sectors of the camp as possible, but when we came to one of the few medical tents, I had to stop again. I had never seen such a bewildering sight in my entire life.

The tent was overflowing with sick and dying patients, two and more to a cot. Bodies were jigsaw-puzzled into every available space. To make matters worse, long lines extended outside, at least three hundred very sick women and children waiting for treatment, or for a better place to die.

"Sadly, there's little to be done to stop their suffering," Adanne told me. "Medication is scarce, much of it stolen before it can get here. There is starvation, pneumonia, malaria. Even diarrhea can be fatal — and with the water and sanitation problems, there is no end to it."

I saw one doctor and two volunteer nurses. That was it. The entire hospital staff for thousands of very sick people.

"This is what they call the 'second phase' of the crisis," Adanne went on. "More people dying inside the camps than outside. Thousands. Every single day, Alex. I told you that it was horrifying."

"You understated," I said. "This is unimaginable. All these people. The children."

I knelt down by a little girl in one of the few beds. Her eyes were clouded and looked unreal. I brushed away a buzzing cluster of black flies gathered at her ear.

"How do you say 'God be with you'?" I asked Emmanuel.

"Allah ma'ak," he told me.

I said it to the tiny girl, though I don't know if she heard me.

"Allah ma'ak."

Somewhere along the way today, I'd stepped away from a terrible, terrible murder investigation and into an unbelievable holocaust. How was this possible in our world? Thousands dying like this every day?

Adanne put a hand on my shoulder. "Alex? Are you ready to go? We should move on. You are here for the Tiger, not for this. There's nothing you can do about this."

I could hear in her voice that she'd seen all this before, many times probably.

"Not yet," I said. "What needs doing around here? Anything?"

Emmanuel's quick answer was not what I expected.

"That depends. Can either of you handle a rifle?"