Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
T efere took the binoculars from Zere, his second-in-command. They lay in a grove of pine trees a quarter of a mile from the Delos School in Addis Zemen. The November weather was cloudy and it had rained the night before. They’d driven up in a rusted white Toyota van from Bahir Dar a week ago. He and his ten soldiers lay in wait, on their bellies, well-hidden so that no one could see them where they’d taken cover within the tree line. Below, he saw three trucks on their way from the dirt-strip airport that was just a mile away. The twin-engine Otter, owned by Delos, the one with the red and yellow stripes running along the length of its fuselage, was constantly landing, and taking off. He’d counted four times today already that it had brought in what looked to be construction equipment.
His hands tightening on the binoculars, he watched as the three trucks pulled into the gravel driveway of the school. On either side of the vehicles were school children, aged between six and seventeen, boys and girls alike, all on their way into the one-story cinder block building. He knew from one of his soldiers, posted here a week earlier, that more than two-hundred children attended this charity school. His lip curled. The children all wore blue-and-white uniforms. The girls were all neatly clean, their hair either in braids, or knotted up on top of their small heads, wearing white blouses and dark-blue skirts. The boys all had short, shaven hair, and were dressed in their own version of the school uniform: white button-up shirts and dark-blue pants. Each carried a knapsack that was blue and white as well, loaded with books. The women teachers, all Ethiopian, stood in colorful dress, their heads wrapped in matching cloth, smiling, touching the children, and speaking to them as they filed in through the double doors. Hatred for the Americans and this charity they supported rose up in Tefere.
He remembered his own bitter childhood years, growing up in a poor village to the south. His younger sister and brother had both starved to death. The only reason he’d survived was by being the bigger and stronger, stealing the food from their very mouths. His parents had always struggled to find food, as had the entire village. The drought had hit them hard. The agriculture that had fed the village for decades had been burned up by the sun, and the land had cracked and dried. The herds of cows, which had showed a family’s wealth, had been slowly slaughtered and eaten over time. They had even drunk the cattle’s blood to stave off the constant threat of death through dehydration.
His mind focused back on the present. For the past three weeks, supplies had been flown in, the three trucks carrying their loads from the landing strip ceaselessly up the slight slope to where the large school with its many windows stood. There was no greenery growing around the little campus, because of the drought. This area of Ethiopia was hanging on, but water was still in short supply. A week ago, one of those huge helicopters, known as a ‘crane’, had flown in a well-drilling truck.
The school was going to get a well, and that was a huge plus for them. The well-drilling crew had been working from dawn to dusk. The pounding sounds of the pipes being driven into the earth had been constant. The well was being drilled below the school grounds while other construction workers were laying open the land with a backhoe so that pipe from the well to the school itself could be laid into the ditch and covered with gravel and then soil.
Word of the new well had spread fast throughout the small town of twenty-four thousand. Tefere had watched parents of the attending children walk miles to come up to the school to watch the progress. Others owned a donkey and cart, and would bring their whole family up to excitedly show them the well being drilled. It was a very big deal for Addis Zemen; everyone would have water, free of charge, and could come and fill their plastic gallon jugs any time they wanted. There was one pump inside the Delos school, and one outside it for the people of the town. Tefere had heard, as he’d walked the streets of the town, that the drilling crew was going to stay on, and sink three more wells nearby, in different parts of the city. No one would die from lack of water. That had been a momentous revelation for the gang lord. Climate change had made the rains that normally came to this region terribly weak and sporadic in comparison to the downpours they had provided in the past. This valley where the town sat had, for centuries, relied solely on water from the sky. Now, with the sinking of four wells, the Farm Foundation of Delos charity was working with the city fathers to lay out a long-term irrigation plan for surrounding farms to grow produce and feed the people. Indeed, Delos was on the lips of every inhabitant. There were even prayer services held for the charity in the Ethiopian Orthodox churches. Tefere scoffed at their stupid, blind faith in a God he had long ago stopped believing in. The only thing he believed in was his ability to survive.
The late November sun had just crested the horizon, sending its rays in broken, hazy beams across the lumpy, yellow, dried hills and the dead terraces around them, only highlighting the disaster the drought had brought. Soon, with a constant supply of water, those terraces would once again be filled with many kinds of vegetables. There would be the replanting of the many fruit and nut trees that had died in the drought, soon to be resurrected by these wells. The breeze was such that his flaring nostrils could smell the breakfast being served in the school’s cafeteria for the children. One of his soldiers had told him that the children came in at seven a.m., had breakfast, went to classes, ate lunch, more classes, and then at three p.m., were each given a sack of snacks large enough for their entire family, and taken home by the six yellow school busses that lined up in front of the school.
Tefere felt the sting of bitter jealousy once again; each child looked apple-cheeked and a good, solid weight for their age. He’d been a skin-and-bones skeleton growing up. His ribs had always protruded, his belly always distended.
The man in the red hard hat was the boss, his soldier had told him. Another spy that Tefere had placed in Addis Zemen had informed him that particular boss, a certain ‘Shep Porter’ by name, sometimes ate lunch down there in town around noon. And this ‘Shep’, it seemed, usually ate with Tefere’s target of interest, the red-haired woman pilot known as Willow Chamberlin. The pair favored a tiny Ethiopian cafe run by several women, all widows. And many times, they would bring back dozens of boxes filled with sacks of the local fare the women had cooked up. Those sacks would be distributed among the hard-working well-drilling team and the security people.
Tefere’s brow fell just even thinking about the head of security: Luke Gibson. He would bet good money that the tall, alert man, who always carried an M4 military rifle with the muzzle down across his Kevlar-covered chest, had been in the military. He always wore a brown baseball hat with that rising sun logo on the front of it. He was always wearing dark glasses and shooter’s gloves. Those gloves were a huge reason why Tefere knew in his heart that the man was ex-military; Gibson had cut off certain glove fingers so he could have direct contact with the trigger on his rifle. SEALs did that, and so did Army Delta Force operators.
The security force hired by Delos was thorough and smart. They had four white Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, each with an array of radio and communications antennas and devices bristling from their tops. Two operators rode in each. Earlier, a small Caterpillar bulldozer, brought in by the crane helicopter, had created a long, oval dirt road ranging about one-quarter of a mile around the entire school, its playgrounds and buildings. The security men would slowly drive around this oval. The two security trucks would each go off in different directions so that they had eyes on the entire area. At night, these trucks did the same thing. The timing of when they made their circuits was always altered, making it all the more difficult for Tefere to move any closer to the school. And it was just another sign that Gibson was ex-military. Vets knew that, by never doing the same time twice, they kept any potential attack at bay. And it worked, damn them.
The next waves of incoming school children seemed happy, smiling and laughing together, as they disembarked from the yellow buses. There seemed an air of unearned pride in them, and Tefere snarled a curse under his breath, “The privileged little shits!”
The school had a kindergarten, grades one through twelve. There were fifteen teachers, a principal, an assistant principal, a school nurse, and many women employees making up the office staff. He’d found out from his spy that, while there were two other schools in this town, a lottery was held to choose the lucky children who would come here to the far superior school.
The chill of the morning made his skin bump up in response. He wore a matching heavy dark-green jacket and trousers, with sturdy leather combat boots on his feet. How badly he wanted to just march in and shoot up the school, as he had so many villages. But the big deterrent was that ever-alert, heavily armed security force. Every one of those men and women were military operators and he knew it. They wouldn’t only shoot to kill. Even worse, they’d hit center mass in his soldiers with their first shots and they’d be dead before they even got close.
No, his plans to kidnap the red-haired woman would not happen here. He had to devise another plan where it would be easier to apprehend her. If nothing else, Tefere had patience. And that had helped him build a five-hundred-man army over the last ten years. He would continue to have his spy follow this woman, find out her habits, and then he’d figure out the best way to kidnap her.
Removing his red hard hat, Shep was looking forward to seeing Willow alone, in her condo. It was the weekend, and he’d given himself permission to come back to Bahir Dar with Luke Gibson, to have some downtime after a month of hard pushing to get the project up and on its feet. They sat on the deck of the Otter as it landed on the concrete airstrip at the large, bustling city near Lake Tana. The day was cloudy, maybe promising rain. Rain that was desperately needed during Ethiopia’s winter season.
As Willow guided the Otter over to the Delos hangar, they were met by three Ethiopian mechanics. She shut off the engines and waited until they placed a hook on the main landing gear and started to pull the plane into the huge aluminum hangar with a small gasoline-fed cart. Unstrapping from her harness, she took off her earphones and set them on the cockpit dashboard. Turning, she saw Shep and Luke sitting cross legged on the deck a few feet from the cockpit entrance.
Dev seemed happier than usual and Willow, once more, wondered if it had something to do with Luke. For the first time, she saw her copilot actively engaging with a man on a friendly basis. It was probably only just that, she thought as she wedged between the seats and straightened up in the cabin. She felt happy at the thought that Dev had finally made some kind of peace with the opposite sex, but she still caught herself wondering if it was turning serious between the two, even as unlikely as that seemed. They’d been flying five to eight times a day in and out of Addis Zemen, and there’d been little time to chit-chat about anything else other than the on-loading and off-loading of the ferried supplies.
Shep unwound from the deck and gave her a warm look as she hunched over and walked past him to open up the hatch door. The airplane was slowly being taken into the cavernous hangar. She pushed the door in and over, her hands on either side of it, watching the two other crewman giving hand signals to the cart driver. The air was dank smelling, but at least the high humidity was decreasing. During the winter season, November through January, it was drier here, except on the occasional rainy day. She touched the tendrils of hair brushing her temples. They felt thicker and curlier. Her wavy hair did exactly what it wanted to do and, in high humidity it frizzed, which she disliked, but seemed ‘tamer’ today.
She felt Shep come up behind her. Not so close as to cause her discomfort, but she felt his presence nonetheless, and absorbed it hungrily. The last three weeks? They’d had little time with one another. About twice a week, he would drive her down to that nice little Ethiopian cafe and they’d order to-go for the security and well-drilling crews, plus eat a meal together there. And those were the only moments they’d had alone time with one another.
Willow had her condo, and she would finish each day by flying back at dusk or sometimes after dark, drive home with Dev, and crash on her bed, exhausted. Only later, after waking up around midnight usually, would she get out of her sweaty, smelly flight uniform and go take a welcoming cool shower where she’d wash her hair and scrub the smell of perspiration off her body with fragrant soap. At least, until she entered the cockpit the next morning, she felt clean. By midday again, both she and Dev would smell, but it couldn’t be helped. They were constantly out on the baking tarmac with loud, belching trucks bringing supplies to be placed into the Otter, and had lengthy weight load calculations to consider on every flight. They were out in the heat and humidity of the day, sweating, and only dreaming of the air-conditioned comfort of their condos.
She’d tried to tone down her expectations with Shep. But hungering for deeper discussions with him, exploring him personally, and learning so much more about why he was the way he was, had driven her to ask him over for dinner tonight. Willow didn’t know what was going on, why they were like north and south magnets, powerfully pulled toward one another. Again. This reminded her of when they’d first met, unable to stay away from one another whenever they’d had the downtime to spare. Her heart ached to have quiet, personal time with this man. Were the changes she was seeing in him real? Lasting? Or was he doing it on the spur of the moment to entice her in once more? She wasn’t sure which was the truth and felt gun-shy.
Looking at her watch as the Otter came to a gentle stop, she saw that it was four in the afternoon. She felt Shep behind her, sensing again that he wanted private time with her. The last three weeks had made her want intimate communication with him more, not less. It was like opening a treasure chest and finding that he was finally sharing some of those private hidden gems within, however painful that was for him. How hungry Willow had been for just such a breakthrough. Again, she wondered if all this was honestly real, or something he was wearing like a mask.
The two mechanics put chocks behind and in front of the landing gear wheels, then brought over a rolling staircase and slotted it against the fuselage. Only then, did they finally give her the signal that everything was locked into place, and they could disembark. She smiled and waved to them in thanks.
“Okay, all ashore that’s going to shore,” she called over her shoulder. She saw Dev hunched over behind Shep, close to Luke. Willow wished nothing but happiness for her friend. Could this truly be the right man to open her up? To help her heal? To learn that not all men were to be feared? Dev hadn’t been able to separate out her traumatic experiences with one man from all the rest. Maybe, just maybe, Luke was showing her that she didn’t have to be wary and afraid of him. Fingers crossed! She stepped down the ramp’s stairs quicky onto the concrete floor of the hangar, straightening to her full height, waiting for the others to egress.
Then, it was the usual uncomplicated transit back to the condo for all of them. Once there, the men went one way, and they went the other. Willow and Dev got off the elevator at the fourth floor. The silent look that Shep had given her had been filled with readable longing. Her heart was unsure what it would do when he was back with her tonight. Once in the condo, she checked her slow cooker that had wat in it. With lamb and veggies this time. The smells of spices filled the condo, and she inhaled them hungrily, her stomach growling. The sponge bread was ready as well. Quickly setting the table and getting everything prepared for Shep to arrive at five p.m., Willow then hurried to the bathroom to shower and wash her hair.
Shep tried to still his expectations as he stood at Willow’s condo door, and knocked on it. At last. Three weeks of hell, not being able to have a moment alone together for some decent downtime with her, had finally paid off. The door opened. His heart thudded in his chest. Willow had traded out her olive-green flight suit, showered, and now wore a pair of light-blue linen slacks and a loose pink cotton top. Her hair was piled up haphazardly on top of her head with two thin copper combs. She was barefoot, and he smiled. She loved being barefoot and hated shoes, wearing them only when mandatory.
“Come on in,” Willow invited, stepping aside.
Shep inhaled as he entered. “Whatever you’re making smells great.”
“It’s that Ethiopian meal of wat that you’ve come to love,” she said, shutting the door and locking it. “Hungry?”
Shep nodded, following her in, appreciative of the sway of her hips. Seeing the table was already set, he noted that she’d poured some red wine in goblets, as well. “What are we celebrating?” he asked, pointing to the wineglasses.
She smiled and pulled out a chair for him. “Our quiet time and being away from that stress everyone is under. Sit. I’ll bring the wat casserole over.”
He saw the sponge bread on the counter. “Let me help? Do you trust me to bring over the basket of bread?” and he slid her a teasing look. She looked damned delicious, her hair up, wild and unruly wherever the combs could not tame it. Willow always looked so young when she wore her hair like that.
“Sure. Bring it over.” She put on two oven mittens and lifted the steel pot off the Wolf stove. “You’re favorite wat meal: lamb.”
He set the basket of bread between their plates and stepped aside, giving her enough room to place the pot on the metal trivet in the center of the small table. “There’s nothing I won’t eat. Being in the military, you know we’re garbage cans. If it don’t move first? We’ll eat it.”
Setting the potholders aside, Willow grinned and nodded. She thanked him for pulling out her chair for her. After she sat down, he joined her at her left elbow. “You’re right about that.” she replied.
“We’ve been out at sites in Peru, in the jungle, and someone would kill a snake and bring it in for the meat,” he said. He handed her some of the folded, warm bread. Anything to touch this woman even briefly.
“Ugh, no snake meat for me.”
“Well,” he said blandly, holding up his bowl as Willow filled it with the wat, “it was better than starving. There’s not much protein in Peru, except for eating guinea pigs.”
“But they are such cute little things,” she said, distressed, filling her bowl. “What did the snake taste like, Shep?”
“Actually, like chicken. The jungle has plenty of snakes, and the village where we were working made it part of their normal weekly meat source.”
Wrinkling her nose, she said, “I’ll stick to the known meats in the USA, thank you very much.”
“Hey,” he said, holding up his glass, “let’s make a toast?”
She raised her eyebrows, picking her own glass up. “Oh? What’s the occasion, Porter?”
He held her amused green gaze. “Us.”
“How so?”
“Because we’ve been working around one another for three weeks without ONE argument. Isn’t that a new personal best for us?”
Laughing, she toasted him and took a sip. Setting her glass aside, she said, “I guess it is.”
“When we were married, we fought nearly every day.”
“Sadly, we did,” she said, spooning in the delicious-tasting stew.
They ate in silence, the iPod’s classical music playing in the background. She knew Shep liked coming to her condo because it felt alive. In part, it was the green plants throughout it, but mostly because he’d always seen her as a bright spot in his life. There wasn’t a day that went by when she hadn’t looked forward to seeing him. She and Dev stayed at their homes in Bahir Dar. Shep and everyone else had been over at that old barracks turned into a hotel at the construction site.
“I’ve missed seeing you around,” Shep admitted.
She slanted him a glance. “Why? Because we aren’t fighting like dogs and cats?” and she added a teasing smile, not wanting him to take it as a personal hit. He became thoughtful.
“You have always been the sunlight to my darkness. I know I never admitted that to you… until now…”
Her heart twinged. She heard the sadness blanketed in his tone, saw that familiar heat in his eyes, and knew Shep still desired her. She said, “I’ve always thought of you as the moonlight to my sunlight. Nothing wrong with that.” She saw his face grow more relaxed. It was true: they both were intelligent people and, whenever they’d chosen to mix it up verbally and spar with one another, it had always turned into a take-no-prisoners, blade-cutting duel. And they’d both been guilty of it. And now, they could admit it to one another, their egos far more mature and tamed than back then.
“I don’t mind being seen as your moonlight. It feels like a compliment?”
“It is,” she murmured between bites.
“Maybe, one of these days… if things keep up the way they are? I can be real moonlight, instead of the darkness I became in your life, Willow.”
She pushed her emptied bowl aside, pouring them coffee from a dispenser. “We didn’t always have darkness in our marriage, Shep, and you know that. We had good times, too. Laughter. Sunlight and moonlight.” She handed him his mug.
“Toward the end of it, mostly dark and stormy, though.”
Willow couldn’t disagree. “What do you attribute to us not fighting with one another here?”
He laughed a little. “Absence in the other person’s life? You’re flying nonstop from dawn to dusk. I’ve got my head down on getting this project online and keeping it on a daily schedule. We rarely see one another.”
“Hmm.” She held his gaze. “How about we’ve grown up and matured a little? Not the childish brats we used to be? We’ve had time to reflect on what we did right and wrong in our marriage?”
Nodding, Shep sat back, enjoying her company and the dark, rich Ethiopian coffee. “All of the above.”
“It’s nice to have two days off after the brutal schedule we’ve been keeping,” she admitted. “It’s supposed to be cloudy and cool this weekend. Maybe some rain if we’re lucky. I’d like to show you around Bahir Dar, take you out on a small motor boat so you can see Lake Tana. It’s really beautiful, quiet and peaceful. I think we both need that kind of environment.”
“I love the water and I know you do, too,” Shep said. “Sounds like a good destressor to me.”
“After we come back to shore, we can buy fresh catch from some of the local fisherman. I can make us a delicious fish dinner.”
“That’s a win-win for me,” he said. “If I wasn’t surfing? I was spearfishing in the kelp beds off La Jolla.”
“Yep, no surprises with you, Porter: food always got your attention every time.”
“No,” he murmured, “YOU get all my attention, Willow. Nothing compares to you and never will. Food comes in a very poor second.” He held her startled gaze.
She sat there not lying to herself: she had been aching for alone time with Shep. “Has the last three years mellowed you, Shep?”
“Where you’re concerned, yes,” he said, holding her stare.
Her whole body was flowing with quiet joy over his admittance. Was it possible that they might be able to get together again? Willow didn’t want just sex with Shep. She’d never been the type of woman to have sex for sex’s sake. There always had to have been a deep, ongoing emotional connection with the man first.
“How does that make you feel?” he wondered.
“Scared as hell. How about you?” and she dug into his pondering expression. She knew Shep was not the type of man to tease about serious things. Especially something like this.
“Same here.” He gave her a hopeful look. “Can we be scared as hell together?”
She tucked her lower lip in, staring at him. “You’re not teasing, are you?”
Shaking his head, he said, “I’d never do that to you, Willow. We might have had a lot of rocky ground between us, but I wouldn’t hurt you like that. God knows, I’ve hurt you enough, anyway.”
Willow wouldn’t argue that point, but she wasn’t about to drag up the past any more than she had to. “I guess,” she admitted, “I never saw this coming.”
“What?”
“You. In my life again.”
“But you knew I was on this project. You approved it, Willow.”
“That isn’t what I was talking about.” With all her heart, she wished Shep could understand the gravity and weight of what she meant, but his damned engineer’s mind couldn’t plumb a loaded word like ‘you.’ He was struggling, she could see that, but mostly he was confused by her statement. Maybe they would always have this mess of multi-level communication, each talking but the one not grasping the wholeness of what the other was really trying to say. How she wished that would change, but her gut told her it never would. Shep’s brain was wired differently than hers in that respect. But he wasn’t the kind of person to use it against her, either. He was always asking for clarification on whatever was said, or he’d stumble over a certain word with each of them taking it the wrong way. And that led to massive miscommunication and the verbal battle would begin. But sometimes… sometimes Willow just wished he could mind read her or tap into the emotional intelligence that all humans possessed, to understand what she was saying. She swore men were born without that connection that women automatically had. She’d seen it more or less in every man she’d ever dealt with professionally or personally. What a bummer. It was a loss for both genders.
“Oh,” he said, more in a growl of frustration. “Is this one of those times we had? Where I was supposed to plumb the depths of what you said?”
“Yes,” she sighed, giving him a tired look. She didn’t want to hurt Shep because she could see him laboring with it. “Look, it’s okay,” she said, holding up her hand. “I’ll re-explain what I meant. When I said ‘you’ it was about you . I’m wary of you, Shep. I still care for you. I didn’t think I would, but there it is.”
He moved the empty cup slowly around in his hand, staring at it for a long moment, his brows drawing together. Looking up, he held her gaze. “I guess, if we’re coming clean with one another on this? I’ve never stopped caring about you, Willow. I know I never said it in our sparse emails we traded with one another over the years. Frankly? I thought we were done. You never gave any inkling in your emails that you still cared about me.”
“I know,” she said wearily.
“Well? Then it’s a fact we both still somehow continue to care for one another?”
She heard the hope in his low voice, saw the yearning in his eyes. Feeling trapped, she said, “Just like the engineer you are, Shep. You’re great at looking at all the puzzle pieces and putting them together to make a picture.” She saw him preen a little. Willow knew how hard she’d been on him leading up to her wanting a divorce. His confidence had taken a helluva beating. But if it had? Today? These three years later, he looked even more fit, more in command, and more a natural leader than she’d ever seen him be before.
“Thanks. At least I didn’t completely destroy this conversation between us tonight. That’s a little progress. Right?”
Willow wanted to hold him. Sometimes, she could see the hurt little boy recessed in his eyes when they would have verbal blind canyons with one another. Instinctively, she knew some of these communication issues had something to do with his growing-up years. Maybe that’s one reason why Shep appeared to bumble around and not understand her whenever she tried to communicate with him.
She stood, gathering the bowls and flatware. “I can see you trying, Shep. That’s good enough for me. Okay?” Willow saw such sharp relief in his expression that her heart twisted with sympathy for him. As good as he was at construction, his greatest weakness was not being able to communicate properly with her.
“Okay. It’s a positive start, Willow.”
As she took the dirty dishes to the sink, she still wasn’t sure, but her heart urged her to remain open and accessible to Shep. He had never been violent or cruel toward her. She rinsed off the dishes, wondering what would it take, then, to open him up more to her? Because of the family he was raised in, did it mean he saw all women through some kind of warped lens? If that were the case, it could explain why their marriage had never stood a chance.