“And I’m Cole McBride, veterinarian and PhD student here with Gorilla Doctors.”
“Ah, a veterinary doctor. I wondered.”
Cole frowned. Always playing second fiddle to the
real
doctors, there was no way around it.
“I heard you were calling in reference to my message through ProMED this morning?”
“Yes, I’ve got something interesting for you here at the hospital.”
“What, did someone bring in one of the dead gorillas or something?” The situation had just gone from bad to worse. “I hope you’ve got it appropriately quarantined.”
“No, no, much more serious than that. It’s a human.”
Cole held his breath.
“A live human. I believe we have the first human case.”
Lars Olsson pulled out of the gated Doctors Without Borders compound with two honks on the horn and a harsh spinning of tires on gravel. He peeked at his only passenger and smirked with satisfaction at her white-knuckled grip on the armrest. This was going to be fun.
“How far did you say it was to the border?”
Claire had to shout over the fast Congolese rumba beat blasting from the truck’s rugged speakers. She had already undergone a regrettable transformation in his mind from intriguing to annoying. It was to be expected, of course, but most women lasted longer than a few hours. Half a day suffering through the self-important Brit’s questioning had been enough.
“The border?” He shook his head, dismayed. “It’s just across town, twenty minutes at most.”
Had she really spent a week in Goma without grasping this most basic fact of the city’s geography? Its proximity to the Rwandan border was the root cause of so much grief over the past twenty years. After a triumphant Tutsi victory ending the infamous genocide, millions of Hutu refugees had poured into Goma and brought their violence with them.
“And from there to this gorilla vet headquarters?” she asked.
“Musanze. Shouldn’t be more than an hour or so, depending on the roads.” The doctor slammed a hand down onto the steering wheel, but the blasting horn had no effect on three old women crossing the dirt road in front of the vehicle. The wrinkled skin drooping off their bare arms provided a sharp contrast to the bright patterns bursting from their flowing dresses. After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the other side, and Lars stepped on the gas briefly before bringing the truck to a screeching stop again. This time it was a group of goats, grazing contentedly on a pile of trash in the middle of the road.
“And traffic,” he added. Car traffic was rare in all but the biggest African cities, but the never-ending stream of people and animals apparently intent on obstructing his forward movement more than made up for its absence.
“You mean this gigantic Land Cruiser doesn’t have the desired imposing effect?” Claire laughed.
“Sadly, it’s just the opposite,” he admitted. The trademark vehicle of the humanitarian community attracted the needy masses like moths to a light bulb.
“Well you can’t blame them. Every time your type pulls up in a big white SUV it means free goodies, right?”
“Something like that,” he said dryly. He was past the point of trying to keep up their flirting banter. She did have a point, but his days of handouts and photo opportunities were long gone. Leave that to the celebrities out on their annual poverty safaris.
He turned the volume up several notches.
“I guess they don’t want what we’re carrying this time, though.” The wannabe journalist was leaning across the center console now, her shouting mouth almost touching his ear. She just wouldn’t give up.
He glanced in the rearview mirror at the cooler tied down between benches in the back of the Land Cruiser. She was right. No one in their right mind would want anything to do with the special cargo they carried. Ten kilos of ice surrounded three layers of sealed sample bags, delicately packed just twenty minutes earlier. It was a lot of effort for one little biopsy cup and a tube of freshly-drawn blood. But it was worth it, if that American veterinarian turned out to be right.
Olsson shifted his line of sight just over to the right. He couldn’t help but admire the woman’s high-cheekbones and full lips, all framed by rosy blond waves cascading down past her shoulders. Something about her appearance seemed to exude the noble genes of which she was so consciously proud. It would be a conquest to remember, and even better, to regale his old med school friends with back in Denmark.
Might as well give her another chance
. He relented, and turned the volume back down.
Claire tapped a hand against the side of her seat and crossed her legs again. The urge to pee had been growing ever since they left the compound. Why didn’t she go before they left? Somehow she’d never grown out of this childish lack of foresight, and she often suffered through embarrassing situations as a consequence.
Like now.
At least Olsson had started being friendly again and wasn’t giving her too difficult a time about it. He promised that there was a somewhat private hole-in-the-ground she could use at the border station up ahead. But the long line of cars they had been sitting in for the last twenty minutes wasn’t moving at all. The heavy black smoke billowing up from over the last hill before the Rwandan border only added to her anxiety. Of course, in most situations she would have swallowed her pride and done the deed right on the side of the road, royal honor be damned. But the line of vehicles they sat in was surrounded by a swelling crowd of angry-looking Africans, and there was no way in hell she was going to pop a squat right in the middle of this chaos.
“You holding up okay there?” Lars asked. She still couldn’t tell when he was being genuine.
“Not really, actually.” She wanted to scream, but they weren’t quite close enough for that yet. “How long do you honestly think we could be stuck here?”
“No way to know.” He laid on the horn again.
“I wish you would stop doing that. It just makes them look at us with even more evil in those dark eyes.”
She hated that the men passing the Land Cruiser could peer right in through the window, their bitter faces just inches from her own. The women and children walking with them seemed more content keeping their eyes to themselves.
“So you’re done pretending you actually care for the people here?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “Just that I didn’t come here for the people. You know my story focuses on the plight of the gorillas.” Couldn’t he appreciate that?
“Ah yes, your precious gorillas. And yet you’ve never even seen one, have you, in its natural habitat?”
“Don’t start that again, please. You’re much more fun to be around when you’re playing nice.”
“We Westerners will shell out our gold and even lay down our lives for the endangered mountain gorilla,” he continued. “But does anyone raise a finger when five million human souls are sent to hell?”
“Five million?” Was he being serious? She knew a lot of people had died, but that seemed like an exaggeration.
“Even more than that. All killed here in the Congo over the last two decades of conflict.” The doctor shook his head, and his face showed a confusing mix of disgust and pity. “But no, please go ahead and write your story about the mountain gorillas. At least it puts this place on the map.”
“And you think that could help somehow? With the greater conflict?” Claire felt an amplified sense of purpose surging inside her. It was a rare sensation.
“As long as the mountain gorillas are alive and well, the rest of the world has a reason to care about Virunga and the Congo. Kill them off, and it’s all over.”
“What is? I mean, are you saying the gorillas have something to do with everything else that’s going on here?”
Claire wanted to make sure she understood the connection clearly. It might be just the unique angle she needed to get her story published with one of the big-name magazines. She glanced out the window and noticed that the crowd was moving more quickly.
“Well good, I guess you’ve got a head on your shoulders after all.” The doctor smiled wryly. It was an attractive smile, in that alluring middle-aged guy kind of way.
“Go on.”
“What I’m saying is that people care a lot more about the plight of eight-hundred endangered mountain gorillas than they do five million anonymous Africans.”
He stared at her, his ice blue eyes drilling a hole into her soul. “The world doesn’t care about one more African boy being forced to kill his parents as initiation into a tragic life as a child soldier. It doesn’t care about one more little African girl being kidnapped and forced into bondage as a sexual plaything for warlords four times her age. What the world cares about are cute baby mountain gorillas losing their jungle homes.”
A single bead of sweat broke free from his forehead and traced a path down the doctor’s dusty cheek.
“Take the gorillas out of the equation, and this place descends into an even greater hellhole of violence and economic exploitation than ever before. Journalists like you stop coming, donor money stops coming, international organizations pull out, and the heart of darkness reigns supreme.”
“Wow.”
Claire wouldn’t have guessed such an emotional diatribe could come from the rather cynical aid worker’s mouth, but there it was. The sense of greater conviction that had been hiding under too many layers of her own psyche crested a wave of new inspiration.
A fist slammed against the driver’s side window, just as the hideous rattle of a machine gun sounded in the distance.
Claire jumped halfway out of her seat and felt her head smack against one of the hardened steel roll bars along the Land Cruiser’s roof. A wet warmth spread between her thighs.
“What the—” Lars yelled. She saw him tug on the wheel as the SUV lurched away from the offending contact.
But the fist followed, and now it was pounding again and again. A large black face pressed against the window.
“Doctor Lars, doctor Lars!”
“Oh shit,” Lars said. “Guess I know this guy.”
The cars in front of them started moving, and the mass of people outside was now running, frantic faces and crying children. She crossed her legs and pulled a bag up onto her lap. Not perfect, but it did the job.
Lars rolled down the window a few inches.
“Doctor Lars, you treat my son at hospital, two weeks past.” The man was breathless, an expression of uncontrolled fear glowing in his brown eyes.
“
Eh bien. Je vois.
”
Claire swore under her breath as Lars and the man carried out a hurried exchange in French. The only words she could pick out were what sounded like three letters repeated over and over.
L-R-A
.
“LRA
viennent,
” the man was whispering. “
Vous devez échapper. Evadez-vous maintenant!
”
“
Merci, mon ami,
” Lars replied. “
Allez avec Dieu.
”
The man disappeared into the crowd as Lars stepped on the gas and swerved onto a small rutted track cutting off the main road.
“What did he say? What are you doing?” Claire realized she was shouting. She tried to continue more calmly. “My French is horrible already, but I can’t understand anything with that awful African accent.”
Lars kept his eyes ahead as he responded quietly. “He seems to think that the LRA is here.”
“LRA?” She recognized the letters from somewhere, but there were too many acronyms in this swarm of rebel groups and government forces to keep track of them all.
“Lord’s Resistance Army. Joseph Kony and his crazies. That LRA.”
Now she remembered. Kony 2012 and all that YouTube hype. Hadn’t they caught him already? Claire knew the psychotic Ugandan warlord was famous for his brutality, but she was still shocked to see the change that had come over Olsson’s face. It looked as though all the healthy tanned color had drained away, leaving a much frailer old man in its place.
“Where are we going?”
Claire laid a hand on his wiry arm, feeling her own fear dissipate slightly as an honest tenderness welled up within her. Did he have some kind of history with them?
“There’s another route that can get us to the border,” he said. “Runs parallel to the Goma-Gisenyi road.”
The color was already returning to his face, accompanied by a fierce look of hardened resolve. But that didn’t change what Claire had seen moments before. He was vulnerable after all, this jaded humanitarian who seemed to take such pleasure in making her feel small.
“Won’t they close the border station?”
“They might try,” he said. “As long as we can get there we should be okay. I’ve been known to play the doctor card to great effect.”
“Doctor card?”
“Here in Africa they love us white doctors.” He shrugged.
Claire looked out the window as they bumped along the muddy track. Dilapidated tents were crammed one after another on either side, and there was no sign of a cross path that might let them continue eastward toward the Rwandan border. She hadn’t spent much time in the informal refugee camps surrounding the city, but something seemed to be wrong here. Where were all the people?
There. A break in the tents opened up ahead. The SUV skidded to a stop, and Olsson began turning the wheel to maneuver it onto an impossibly narrow path. Now they were going in the right direction, at least.
Claire gasped.
A monstrous black pick-up truck turned into their path, not more than fifty yards ahead. She could see four men above the darkly tinted windshield, their arms cradling scary-looking guns as they leaned casually over the top of the cab. As if on cue, the men raised their weapons.
“Well that throws a wrench in our plans.” Lars slammed on the brakes and then shifted into reverse, sending Claire flying forward against the windshield. “Sorry about that, better buckle up and hold on tight, sweetie.”
She lifted one hand to her throbbing forehead as she fastened the seat belt with the other. A knot was already forming, and her fingers came away slick with blood. What the hell did he think he was doing, trying to outrun these guys? She could just make out the look of astonishment on their faces, and one of the men pointed his rifle to the sky and fired off a quick burst.