Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [71]
She had no memory of dozing off; there was only a blank, then the thing that shouldered her out of sleep, wakefulness a half-beat behind the fear. She opened her eyes to see the herons flapping toward the treeline.
“Shhh!” hissed Pa Conteh. “You hear that?”
A faint clattering in the distance, bursts of automatic fire like nails raining down on a sheet-metal roof. With a word from their sergeant, the soldiers pulled their rifles from the jeeps and formed a loose perimeter around the stand of trees. The officer was talking steadily into the radio now, taking notes, shuffling through his stack of maps. No one seemed rattled or panicked, Jill noticed; they’d simply gotten extremely efficient in their movements.
“Rocket,” Pa murmured when the explosions started. RPGs, standard with the rebels—Jill had learned about rockets the year before, while she sat out the fighting in the basement of the Cape Hotel.
“It’s getting closer?” Pa asked.
“I think it is.”
For the next twenty minutes they sat and listened while the gunfire grew more distinct, an excruciating exercise in self-control. Pa groaned and shook his head; Jill jammed the daypack farther underneath the seat and made herself sit completely still. Finally the officer climbed out of his jeep and walked toward the truck. His name was stenciled over his right breast pocket, Sawhey; he was folding a map as he came, bending it back along the creases as he approached Jill’s door.
“So sorry for the delay.” His voice was calm, matter-of-fact; Jill felt herself release a breath.
“That’s all right.”
“Apparently the situation is quite serious,” he continued in the same conversational tone. “I’m afraid that Makela is out of the question today. We have a sizeable garrison in Guendu, however,” he laid the map on her windowsill and pointed to a town, “and we believe the roads are clear. I strongly recommend that we proceed there.”
“Could we just go back to Falla?”
“No. Apparently the situation has deteriorated there as well.”
“Wow.” Jill laughed without exactly meaning to. “That was fast.”
“Yes,” Sawhey said briskly. “So it’s Guendu, then?”
“Guendu’s fine. Whatever you say.”
“We would like to make a detour, here,” he went back to the map, “we’ve been asked to evacuate a small NGO group in this location. Would you be willing to carry them in your lorries?”
“Of course.”
“That would be most helpful. Let’s proceed then.”
They followed Sawhey’s jeep as it turned and headed east, back the way they’d come; as the Mazda made its lumbering U-turn, Jill could see columns of smoke rising to the west. They drove for several miles, then turned south and took a trail through the deserted countryside, their route little more than a confluence of dry streambeds and overlapping ruts. After an hour of crawling along in low gear they came to a highway, the road littered with chunks of macadam and broken rock. They turned west, the low sun blinding them now, an orange ball raging just above the horizon; after several miles they followed Sawhey’s jeep onto a dirt road marked by crumbling stone gates. The road wound through a narrow belt of grassland, the jungle framing the margins like sheer canyon walls. Ahead Jill could see a set of smaller stone portals with a cyclone fence stretching to either side, then a surreal cluster of ranch-style homes. Tennis courts, a basketball hoop, the angled stanchion of a high-dive—she’d seen such places before, self-contained bits of suburbia plopped down in the bush to house foreign logging or mining engineers. She started to ask Pa if he knew this place when a flash of movement caught her eye. A man, shirtless, in torn camouflage pants, had stepped from the trees, then fifteen, twenty, thirty wild-looking men were strung along the edge of the bush, waving rifles and machetes and screaming at the trucks.
“Shit,” said