Force Protection. Gordon Kent

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      ‘My son says there is a bad crowd in the street. Perhaps you should go now.’

      Alan looked out the shop doorway, wondering how long the boy had been waiting for this ‘bad crowd.’ Then he could hear, in the distance toward Fort Jesus, a sound like waves on a beach.

      The street in front of the little shop was empty.

      Bad crowd?

      Alan took his little cup of tea and drank it off, holding the other man’s eye. Now he was more than a customer; he was a guest.

      ‘How bad is it, mzee?’

      ‘I have no idea.’ The mzee was calm, attentive, dignified. ‘It might be better, after all, if you stayed here; these things soon pass.’ He picked up the necklace, studied it, said in the low voice of a man speaking to one who he thinks is sympathetic, ‘You understand: we are Muslims, and the government is not our friend.’

      ‘I appreciate your hospitality.’ Alan could hear the beach noise louder now, as if waves were breaking higher. It was a crowd, all right. But it didn’t sound angry.

      ‘But I should go. I have a friend looking for me by Fort Jesus.’

      ‘Please go carefully.’

      ‘I’ll be back for the necklace,’ Alan said. The noise was growing louder still, and the young men were restless.

      ‘Inshallah,’ the older man said with a bow.

      The old man had had no idea there was trouble in the street. But the young ones had expected it.

      ‘Allahu Akbar,’ Alan said and hoisted the helmet bag through the door. God is great.

      The crowd was thicker at the end of the street; men and women mixed, so not immediately dangerous. Still, the non-Muslim Kikuyu shops that pretended to be part of Old Town seemed to be closed, their half-Masai guards glowering from the height advantage of their steps. The street he entered from the back street with the silver shop was narrow at the best of times; now it was claustrophobic, with at least a thousand men and women jammed along its length. Alan began to shoulder his way along it, looking for Craw, for any white face, but there was none. He got as far as the gap between two ancient houses and he turned into it and pushed along through a smell of urine until he reached the next street, which was almost as full. He shoved himself toward Fort Jesus, navigating by the minarets of two mosques.

      Men were pulling prepared signs about a jailed leader and economic conditions out of their houses. Some were in English, but all were labeled with the green sigil of the Islamic Party of Kenya – the IPK. Women were pulling the black abyas over their street clothes. He was acutely conscious of his color and of the fact that he was in the dressing room of a major demonstration – Old Town Mombasa was emptying into the streets that led up past Fort Jesus and into the center of town.

      Despite his unease, he kept pushing his way along, apologizing – sameheni, pole, sameheni, pole. Twice, men bumped him hard or elbowed him; not enough to do damage, but enough to remind him to keep moving. His missing fingers itched and he felt trapped. If it hadn’t been for Craw, he would have gone around the other end, through the back alleys below the dhow port; he could walk that way and come out high up on Kenyatta Avenue. But if he did that, he’d be leaving Craw wandering Old Town in a riot.

      He could see the corner and the peach flank of Fort Jesus rising beyond it, and then he caught sight of a white face and bushy eyebrows, a dark polo shirt. Craw. None too soon, he thought, and began to burrow toward him when three men off to his right registered as being different, somehow not part of the crowd. He couldn’t put a finger on it and he was eager to get Craw’s attention, but they were all three lighter skinned, carrying bundles that struck Alan as wrong. Some kind of tension. He hoped they had only swords or cudgels. The rest of the crowd seemed to keep them a little distant, too; he could see they were not ‘with’ anyone.

      ‘Craw!’ he yelled – pointlessly, as it turned out. There was too much noise. He kept burrowing. The three men were still there, just off to his right, and they were all looking at him now. Great. ‘Craw!’

      Craw was standing on a step next to a half-Masai guard. The man was ignoring him, and Craw was looking up and down the street. Alan willed him to look a little farther back, and kept pushing, an inch at a time. Suddenly, as if a dam had broken, the crowd began to move the way he wanted to go, and the sound crested and crashed like the noise of the sea. Now Alan had to fight to reach the edge of the street and the human eddy where the Masai guard next to Craw was using a club to keep the crowd from his shop. Alan got clubbed on the shoulder as he struggled to get Craw’s attention.

      ‘Whoa, Ben, that’s my guy! Cool it!’ Craw stuffed a bill into the other man’s hand.

      ‘Glad to see you too!’ Alan shouted and got up on the step. From his new vantage point he could see the crowd sweeping up the hill out of the square at the base of Fort Jesus and into the park where the British colonial office had been. He couldn’t grasp how many they might be, but they didn’t seem any less packed in the larger area. They were loud, but almost half were abya-wearing women.

      ‘Riot?’

      ‘Protest, I think.’ But Alan couldn’t forget the three men he’d seen.

      At the top of the park, as many as twenty trucks full of what appeared to be soldiers in camo with assault rifles were deploying. Alan leaned past the Masai guard and shouted into Craw’s ear. ‘General Service Unit. Nasty. Those guys will shoot first and ask questions later.’

      The ground rose in a gradual curve uphill from Alan to the park, giving him a dramatic view over the heads of the crowd. The protestors had marched to the park on Nkrumah Road and now it was the only exit. A man with a loudspeaker was bellowing from an incongruous gazebo in the park’s middle, and a Kenyan cop with a bullhorn was yelling back at him from the top of a truck cab. The loudspeaker droned on. Alan couldn’t catch much of the Swahili, but the man in the gazebo appeared to be using the rhetoric related on the signs – demands for the release of Sheik somebody.

      He shouted into Craw’s ear again. ‘I think we should get out of here the other way.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I think we should get out of here the other way!’

      ‘What other way?’

      ‘Back through Old Town.’

      Alan waved his hand toward the little street from which he had come. A flicker of motion in the second storey across the street caught his eye, and he watched, appalled, as the barrel of a rifle poked from the window and fired. The report was audible over the crowd noise. Alan was trying to point it out to Craw when the GSU officer with the bullhorn was cut off the truck cab and flung fifteen feet. The GSU response was immediate and brutal: a volley of fire swept the front of the crowd. Even from hundreds of feet away, Alan could see the mist of blood as the whole front of the crowd was cut down, and the rising scream of panic and hate that rose behind it. The rifle in the building across the street was firing steadily now. The crowd, trapped in the square, broke from the police guns and trampled their own dead, jammed the two exits, and then seemed to flinch away. The scream rose to an impossible pitch as the guns fired. Alan could smell the copper taint of blood on the air. He wanted to close his eyes. The line of fire from the GSU to the crowd meant that high shots went straight at their position on the step; bullets chipped СКАЧАТЬ