Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker

Nairobi, U.S. ambassador Prudence Bushnell was conducting a polite meeting with several Kenyan trade officials on the eighteenth floor of the Cooperative Bank building, a high-rise with long rows of windows on each floor, affording views of the entire city. She had a brief news conference for local reporters, then they served tea. Two doors down at the embassy, State Department employee Frank Pressley was talking to his colleague Michelle O’Connor about a broken fax machine in the General Services office. He noticed a commotion outside. They were at the back of the building, with a view of the parking lot, and he could see men running. A tremor ran along the walls and windows, as if there had been a small explosion. People joined him at the window.
    Then there was a tremendous blast that seemed white at its core, and the shock waves roared through ten blocks of downtown Nairobi. Vans were blown off the street, cars flipped into the air. Eighteen stories up, the windows shattered, the furniture flew across the room, and Ambassador Bushnell was thrown to the floor. Ufundi House, a five-story office building between the embassy and the bank, collapsed like a stack of pancakes. In the embassy, Michelle O’Connor was decapitated. A passing school bus was lashed with flame, killing several children on board. The twenty-two floors of glass in the Cooperative Bank building blew out, the shattered panes spinning two hundred feet above the street, and then they tumbled down, down, falling sheets of glass that cut pedestrians in half and gouged out their eyes and sliced off their arms and fingers. Pressley, knocked unconscious, came to on the floor of the embassy, looking at blood on the walls and O’Connor’s remains. He looked down. “I saw my body sticking out of my shirt,” he later told a Manhattan jury. His jaw and part of one shoulder had been torn away from his body.
    There was a vast silence, and then the air seemed to condense and everything rushed together, the screams of the dying and a dense plume of dust and smoke rising into the air. Desks and chairs dangled out of the windows of the Cooperative Bank, then plummeted to the parking lot below. The deadliest attack on a U.S. embassy since the Beirut bombing in 1983 was over, but the death toll was just beginning.
    In Kinshasa, almost halfway across the continent, Ann and I were still scrambling around town, preparing for the invasion. The rebels were now moving hard for the city’s airport. The word was that the airfield would shut down the next day, if not that afternoon. At a sullen little outdoor cafe, I used a cell phone to call my desk back in the States.
    “Thank God,” said editor Joyce Davis when she heard my voice. “The bombing is all over everything. I’ve been trying to reach you for two hours.” I stood up and scanned the horizon, hating to be scooped on a bombing in Kinshasa by an editor in Washington, but saw no plume of smoke. I sat down, wrote “bomb” on my notepad, and turned it around so Ann could see it. “We were just getting our cell phone so I could call in,” I said, stalling for time.
    “They’re saying at least one hundred dead, likely more. That building behind the embassy just collapsed.”
    I stood up again, by now alarmed that Ann and I were twiddling our thumbs while our colleagues were across town, covering the story of the year. “Right, right. Which embassy was that again?”
    “Nairobi, of course, the U.S. embassy,” she said. “And at Dar es Salaam too. A smaller one there. Ah—wait. It’s on CNN again. My God, that building is just flattened. People are screaming. It looks terrible. How quick can you get there?”
    “Real quick,” I lied, furiously scribbling notes for Ann: “U.S. embassy bomb—Nairobi—100+ dead.” She took one look and started for the taxi. “There’s just one small bit of bad news, Joyce, which is that they’re closing the airport here.”
    “
Closing
it?” Joyce shouted. “How can