Chapter 6 #2
They did it the way I’d have bet against my own paycheck they would.
They’d stopped taking it seriously somewhere in the last few hours, too sure of themselves to believe anyone could cross their own ground without their knowing it.
They bunched at the gap between the vehicle bay and the leaning water tank, three of them together with their rifles slung, joking, watching the track where a vehicle might come and nothing else.
Two more wandered over to join the talk.
They glanced at the horizon now and then, more for show than for real, and not one of them thought to check the ground twenty yards off their flank, where I lay, gaining a few feet each time they turned their heads.
It took the better part of an hour to cross ground a lethargic man could have walked in ninety seconds.
By the time the light started to fail, Andrew and I were flat in the tall grass at the edge of camp, close enough to the heart of it to hear them talk. All we had to do now was wait for Cole’s distraction, whatever he’d decided that would be.
We didn’t have to wait long.
Baraka came ambling out toward the edge of camp on his own, working at his belt, in no hurry, certain as anything that this ground was his. Andrew’s voice was the barest breath against my ear.
“How about we make an example of him?”
So we let him come. He stopped a few feet from where Andrew and I lay, close enough that I could have counted the laces on his boots, and never once thought to look down.
He just stood there in the last of the light and took a leak into the grass, the loudest man in camp gone quiet and careless all at once.
That was when Cole made his entrance.
He’d gone with the bull-in-a-china-shop approach.
A great crashing racket tore out of the brush on the far side of camp, branches breaking, the sound of somebody lumbering through cover in a hurry.
To twelve kids who’d spent the whole afternoon braced for the Americans to come, there was only one thing it could be, and it was on the far side of camp entirely.
Baraka’s head came up. He didn’t run at it the way the others did, being otherwise occupied, but he had plenty to say, waving an arm back over his shoulder and shouting the whole pack off to run down the Americans who’d finally, obligingly, blundered in on the wrong side of camp.
They went.
“Wait.” The voice was young and thin, and it came from back by the water tank, from the boy who hadn’t joined the rush. “Shouldn’t some of us stay here?”
“I’ll be right here.” Baraka never turned around, still glancing back over his shoulder toward the noise and the men he’d sent after it. “Go get them, Jomo.”
So he was looking exactly the wrong way, and still holding himself, when Andrew and I came up out of the grass and took him down before he could make a sound.
Andrew had an arm around his neck and a hand clamped over his mouth before Baraka understood he’d been taken, and I threw myself over the both of them to keep us all hidden in the grass. He thrashed once and worked out that the thrashing bought him nothing.
Andrew’s breath found my ear. “His shirt. Run it up in the middle of camp.”
“Now you’re thinking,” I breathed back.
We stripped it off his back, his eyes gone wide over Andrew’s hand, the fight already out of him. Andrew settled his weight to keep him pinned and quiet, and nodded me on.
I crossed the emptied camp on my own, past the abandoned watch, past the boy with the built-up boot who watched me go and said nothing, to the water tank standing over the middle of it all.
I went up the leg of the stand and ran Baraka’s shirt to the top, where the last of the light caught it and left it hanging over the whole camp for anyone to see.
Their leader’s shirt, flying where we’d planted it.
When the runners came straggling back, winded and empty-handed, that was what waited for them.
Their leader in the dirt between two painted strangers who hadn’t existed an hour before, and his own shirt flying from the top of the water tank over the middle of the camp.
And a sixteen-year-old with a built-up boot standing exactly where he’d started, the one among them who’d called it before it happened.
Nobody said anything clever. We didn’t have to, and we didn’t try. We let them stand there and understand, all at once and without a word, exactly how dead every one of them would have been.
“Okay.” Baraka’s voice came up from the ground with something gone out of it. “Okay. You’ve made your point.”
We let him up. There’d be time to build on it in the morning. Tonight, the lesson was enough on its own.
I looked for the boy at the edge as we went. He was still watching us, the only one who hadn’t been surprised.
I walked back toward the cabins with the paint still on my face and the grass still down my collar, and that was when I saw her.
Sarah stood outside the vet facility in the last of the light, and she wasn’t alone.
A knot of village children had gathered around her, five or six of them, drawn to the red hair the way I’d been told they always were, reaching up to touch the braid of it like it was a thing that couldn’t quite be real.
She’d crouched to their level and was laughing at something one of them had said.
Whatever she was in that moment, I had no defense built for it.
Then she looked up and found me.
I saw it land on her. She took in the paint and the gear and the shape of a man who’d spent his evening turning himself into something that moved through the dark, and the ease drained out of her all at once.
Whatever version of me she’d carried out of Paris, it wasn’t this one, and the sight of me like this put a wariness in her face I hadn’t seen her wear.
I held her eyes a beat longer than I had any business holding them. She held mine.
Then one of the children pulled at her hand, and she looked away.
“She’s not admiring the camouflage,” Andrew said, arriving at my shoulder. He’d wiped his face on his sleeve and mostly made it worse.
“Leave it.”
“I’m only observing. Professionally.” He followed my line to where she stood and made a low sound. “For a man who swore up and down that Paris was nothing, you’ve got an awful lot of nothing on your face tonight.”
I didn’t answer him. Across the camp, she rose, drew the children in against her, and steered them toward the dining tent without once looking back my way.
I’d just walked into the middle of twelve armed men without making a sound. The only thing in this whole camp that had managed to rattle me was a hundred pounds of veterinarian who wouldn’t hold my eye.