African Ice by Jeff Buick Page A

the smoothest part of the road. “If we miss what we’re aiming at, we’re screwed. The missile is totally blind. It won’t look for a heat source or a denser mass than the surrounding air. It’ll just keep going. It comes down to how accurate the shooter is.”
    â€œHow accurate
are
you?” she asked.
    He grinned. “I suck. Troy’s the guy you want working the missiles. He’s done it before, in Lebanon.”
    â€œDid he hit what he was aiming at?”
    â€œNo, but he came real close.” Travis glanced at her, amused by the concerned look on her face. “Relax; we still made it out.”
    Samantha kept her grip on the truck to keep from being banged about as she looked out the side window. Dense jungle flashed by in the early evening light, broken by an occasional grouping of wattle-and-daub huts. Smoke curled into the night sky from small cooking fires that dotted the pockets of the most basic civilization on earth. Bantu natives huddled about the flames watched the procession of trucks with trepidation and fear. Samantha knew the local tribes had no use for the military, that they had suffered horrible injustices from the very men who were supposed to protect them. Rapes and beatings often accompanied a visit from the soldiers. Sometimes the machetes came out and then villagers died. No one wanted the trucks to stop at their village.
    She lived in a world where the good guys were the cops, and they protected honest citizens from the element of society that would break the laws justly imposed by a functional judicial system. The lines that delineated good from bad were clear, easy to discern. But in the Congo, there were no such lines; nothing was black and white. Everything functioned in a zone of shimmering gray, convoluted by corruption at every level. The viewer was never allowed a clear picture. Just as the African sky was constantly mutated with heat waves rising from the scorched savannahs or the steaming jungles, so was the world between normalcy and horrendous atrocities ever blurred. One moment dinner stewed above the evening fire, the next a group of soldiers or rebels stopped at the small grouping of wattle-and-daub huts. The result was inevitably the same. Young women were raped, sometimes taken. Men who objected were hacked to death with rusting machetes. People died, people mourned, life went on. And there was no justice. There were no courts to punish the guilty, no jails to hold the perpetrators of atrocities so horrific they would sicken even the hardest European or American. It was the way things were. It was life as normal in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was unbelievable.
    So the villagers watched in fear as the trucks motored past, hoping that death passed them by today. And for a moment, as part of the convoy, Sam felt the loathing aimed at her. She dropped her head to her chest and felt the tears start. Tears of sadness that the world could be such a brutal and uncaring place. As she sat in the Land Rover, a world away from the peasants who crouched at their nearby fires, she vowed to try to make a difference. Somehow. She had been brought back to Africa, and she began to wonder why. Was she here for more than locating a trove of diamonds? It
had
to be more. For her sanity.

S IX
    The rising sun attacked the crisp morning air with an unrelenting vengeance, heating it wave by wave as its rays advanced over the rain-forest canopy. The equatorial heat pounded the gentle predawn breeze into submission and replaced it with stagnant humidity as the moisture was sucked from the exposed soil into the still air. A family of aardvarks retreated from open ground and found refuge under the prop roots of a nearby umbrella tree. A speckled tinkerbird hovered overhead for a few moments, then nestled into the relative safety of a prosperous breadfruit. Only an occasional duiker braved the intense heat to graze on some fresh shoots. It was still early, but