Killing Time (30 page)

When the two French pilots
finally returned from Afghanistan, they were initially in no mood to hear about
ferrying passengers to Africa, regardless of how much money I offered. For a
time it seemed that my plan would never be executed; but luck, or what I took
for luck, soon swung my way, and the men received an offer from a local dealer
to deliver a large shipment of small arms to the man whose tribal forces
currently occupied the Rwandan capital of Kigali. After stipulating that they
would deliver the goods by airdrop only—for no one outside Rwanda, not even
other Africans, could any longer be persuaded to touch down in the pestilential
ruins of that city, where local forces battled in streets strewn with rotting
corpses like dogs fighting over a poisoned bone—the pilots struck their deal.
They then informed me that they intended to make a refueling stop in Nairobi
after their drop; if I was willing to accept Kenya as my point of entry into
Africa, they would be willing to take me along, provided I still had the large
amounts of cash we had earlier discussed.

Thus it was that I found myself
two days later lying atop several packed parachutes, which were in turn laid
out across a half-dozen crates of shamefully obsolete French weapons. To avoid
the interminable savagery of the Sudanese civil war, the plane had flown above
the Red Sea as far as the Eritrean coast, where it was safe to go inland: war,
famine, and plague had wiped out virtually the entire population of not only
Eritrea but Ethiopia beyond. A mad dash across war-torn Uganda was to be the
last leg of our inbound flight, a dangerous maneuver for which the two
Frenchmen apparently thought they could best prepare themselves by mainlining
the large amount of heroin they'd brought along with them. All this would have
made life interesting enough; the addition of antiaircraft fire elevated the
experience to terrifyingly riveting. The pilots were scarcely up to normal
flying conditions by then, much less a fully lethal combat situation, and when
we took a direct hit to one of our engines and began to lose altitude
precipitously, they began to shout at each other so violently and incoherently
that I couldn't see any way the situation was salvageable. The pilots, however,
apparently could: one of them seized a pistol, raced back to where I lay, and,
holding the gun to my head before I could manage to get one of my own sidearms
out of my bag, ordered me into one of the parachutes. Apparently I had been
deemed disposable ballast, and though I tried to argue in broken French, it was
clear that if I didn't comply the man would simply shoot me and throw me out.
Under the circumstances, I jumped.

That my landing near what I later
learned were the Murchison Falls cost me only a mildly fractured left tibia was
actually miraculous, given that I'd never before parachuted from a plane and
had been forced to make my maiden jump over the spectacularly beautiful but
utterly treacherous terrain of central Africa. Of course, even a mild fracture
of the tibia can be exceptionally painful, and as I gathered both my wits and
my few possessions after landing I began to groan with increasing volume: a
mistake. Elements of the force that had been shooting at our plane had
apparently followed my parachute's decent, hoping for a prize captive.
Doubtless they would have been disappointed to get only me, a disappointment
spared them by my rather liberal use of the stun pistol that I wasted no time
getting into my hand.

Determining my location required
some fairly extreme guessing. After stumbling about in fairly high growth for
several hours, I suddenly came upon a vast expanse of water; knowing that we
had not flown south far enough to have reached Lake Victoria, I could only
suppose it to be Lake Albert. I was at the northern end, out of which flowed
waters that I thought I could remember reading were among the sources of the
White Nile: following them, then, would lead me into Sudan, where I certainly
didn't want to go. East and south were the butcher's yard of Uganda, and west?
To the west was yet more war-ravaged country, which had been given so many
names by so many successive regimes during the last twenty-five years that the
rest of the world had gone back to referring to it by its collective ancient
title: the Congo. It was into this great unknown that, by process of
elimination, I now elected to travel, limping through the Mitumba Mountains
with scarcely any idea of where I might be going or what I might hope to do
when I got there.

Days passed, and the reports of
wildlife extermination that I had read before my departure began to ring true:
I saw no signs of any animals big enough to eat and indeed heard scarcely any
signs of life at all save for the echo of gunfire throughout the mountains. Insects,
rainwater collected from enormous leaves, and analgesic—as well as
hallucinogenic—roots became my diet, the last at least keeping my mind off my
throbbing leg. But no amount of mental alteration could disguise the fact that
I would soon be dead; and when my long trek at last took me back into sight of
Lake Albert—for I had no compass, and those who think it's easy for a novice to
find his way through a wilderness by the sun and stars alone have evidently
never tried it—I simply sat down on a steep incline and began to howl
mournfully, keeping up the noise until I finally passed out from hunger and
exhaustion.

That I was revived and then
carried from that spot by a man who spoke English was, at the time, less
remarkable than the fact that I was alive at all. "You are a great
fool," the tall, powerful man laughed as he slung me over his fatigue-clad
shoulder. "Did you come to see the gorillas, then, and discover that they
are all dead?"

"Fool?" I repeated, as
I turned my upside-down head around to see several other soldiers walking near
us, their camouflaged uniforms faded but their assault weapons gleaming.
"Why do you call me a fool?"

"Any stranger in Africa is a
fool," the man answered. "This is not a place to be unless you are
born here. How is it with your leg?"

In fact my leg was throbbing with
every step he took, but I only said, "How did you know—?"

"We saw you jump from the
plane. And land. And shoot our enemies! We thought the jungle would claim you.
But then you began your womanish wailing. It might have attracted our enemies.
So we decided it was better to rescue a fool than become greater fools by
letting him be the cause of our deaths."

"Sound thinking," I
said. "You speak English very well."

"There was still a school
that taught it, when I was a boy," he answered. "Below the
mountains."

"Ah." Wondering how
long I was to hang there, I asked, "Where are we going, by the way?"

"We will take you to our
chief—Dugumbe. He will decide what to do with you."

I eyed the rather
ferocious-looking soldiers again. "Is he a compassionate man, by any
chance?"

"Compassionate?" The
man laughed again. "I would not know. But he is fair, even with
fools." Shifting me onto his other shoulder without breaking stride, he
added, "It must have been something very terrible."

"What must?" I said,
wincing with the shift.

"Whatever drove you
here," the man answered simply. "You must have been driven. I know
this. Because not even a fool would
choose
this place."

The man's name, I soon learned,
was Mutesa; and during the months to come he and his family would prove my
saviors, taking me in as something of a cross between ward and pet after their
chief, the aforementioned Dugumbe, announced that I could not stay in his
tribe's mobile armed camp without a sponsor. Dugumbe fancied himself an
enlightened despot: he dressed in an elaborate combination of traditional garb
and several modern military uniforms and liked to pepper his conversation with
concise denunciations of Western society. His personal code of conduct was
based, or so he claimed, on the principal dictate of one of his
nineteenth-century ancestors: "Only the weak are good—and they are good
only because they are not strong enough to be bad." Yet beneath all this
bluster Dugumbe possessed surprising intellectual rigor, even erudition, and in
time his attitude toward me would soften. Indeed, because of our shared
resentment of the technologically advanced world beyond the shores of Africa,
Dugumbe and I would eventually become friends of sorts; but my primary
gratitude to and affection for Mutesa, his wife, and their seven children was
by then already solidly and irrevocably in place.

Dugumbe made it clear from the
beginning that in addition to requiring a family to shelter and feed me while I
was among his tribe, I would also need to fill some sort of role in his
impressive force of five hundred disciplined, battle-hardened—and, it must be
said, ruthless—men. I had no intention, of course, of sharing the remarkable
technology that was hidden in my shoulder bag; I had already been fortunate
that Mutesa and his detachment had been far enough from the action during my
encounter with their enemies that they'd simply thought that I'd killed the men
with a conventional weapon. Nor did I much relish the idea of going into tribal
battle with an American or European assault weapon in one hand and a crude machete
in the other. I asked Dugumbe whether he had any sort of medical officer, to
which he said that while of course he had his tribal shaman, he was aware that
when it came to the wounds of battle Western doctors could often be more
effective. And so I became a field surgeon, calling on my medical school
knowledge and even more on the basic tenets of hygiene and sterilization.

We campaigned all that winter and
spring in the mountains, where I spent much of my time learning what plants
were known to Dugumbe's people to have medicinal properties. Eventually we assembled
quite a rudimentary pharmacy, which was fortunate, as there were no longer any
"medicines" in the Western sense available to such people: during the
height of the AIDS epidemic, Western pharmaceutical companies—after making
donations of meaningless amounts of anti-HIV drugs for publicity purposes—had
stopped shipping to poverty-stricken Africa not only those expensive products
but also drugs that treated the host of other diseases that were decimating the
continent: sleeping sickness, malaria, and dysentery, to name but a few.
Necessity had, in the years that followed, forced the women in tribes like
Dugumbe's to seek new cures in the jungle forest (his shaman continued to rely
on spells and absurd potions made primarily from desiccated animal and human
flesh), and they had discovered several plants with quite powerful antibiotic
and analgesic powers. Some of these, such as the root I had experimented with
during my first days in the mountains, had extreme side effects ranging from
hallucination to death; but in controlled doses they were quite useful, and it
struck me as deeply ironic that the same drug companies that had written Africa
off so cold-bloodedly could have made enormous profits had they only shown a
bit more foresight.

Dugumbe had decided that the need
to stay on the move precluded his participation in the regional slave trade,
thus saving me from an inconvenient crisis of conscience. Though never really
dead in Africa, trafficking in human beings had in recent years proliferated to
an extent that rivaled its ancient heights; and although I often heard Dugumbe
describe it as an honored tradition, I chose to ignore such statements, just
as I ignored all potentially disturbing aspects of the tribe's folklore,
including and especially the ridiculous edicts of Dugumbe's shaman. My
satisfaction with the way in which I'd removed myself from the information
society that dominated the rest of the world, along with my nightly
conversations with Dugumbe about the evils of said society, allowed me to turn
a blind eye toward not only the petty squabbling that underlay most of the
area's conflicts but also the smaller ways in which purely traditional wisdom
hurt these people of whom I was daily growing fonder. It was not until the
following summer that their customs and rituals would present me with any
serious problem; when it finally came, however, the problem was so serious that
I almost lost my life over it.

One evening, I arrived at the
series of linked canvas tents that was home to Mutesa's family to find the mood
uncharacteristically solemn. Mutesa was striding about with the air of a truly
authoritarian patriarch, which stood in stark contrast to the usual way in
which he joked and played with both his children and his wife. That good woman,
Nzinga, was utterly silent—again very unusual—and while Mutesa's four sons were
going through their usual evening ritual of cleaning both his and their rifles,
the three girls were huddled in one of the tents. All of them were crying; the
loudest was Mutesa's eldest daughter, Ama, who was just thirteen.

I asked Mutesa what evil had come
into his house. "No evil, Gideon," he answered. "My daughters
weep foolishly."

"And me?" Nzinga called
out as she prepared the evening meal. "Do I weep because I am a
fool?"

"You
speak because
you are disobedient!" Mutesa shouted back. "Finish making my food,
woman, and then prepare your daughter! The shaman comes soon."

"The
butcher
comes
soon," Nzinga said as she passed us on her way into the tent where her
daughters were hiding. Mutesa made a move to strike her, but I grabbed his
upheld arm, although I don't think that he would have followed through with the
blow. Nonetheless, he was clearly a tormented man just then—and his discomfort
was becoming infectious.

"Why is the shaman
coming?" I asked. "Is there illness in your house? If so, I
can—"

"You must not interfere,
Gideon," Mutesa said firmly. "I know that you of the West do not
approve—but it is Ama's time."