Night Of Knives

Chapter 8

Three men emerge from the wooden building: two in dishdashes, and a smaller man dressed neatly in hiking boots, jeans and a blue button-down shirt. The hollering teenagers fall silent and back away from the helicopter as these men approach. The smaller man wears glasses. His face is lined, his hair is beginning to go gray, but he is still trim and fit. Except for the little fur pouch hanging on a gold chain around his neck, he looks like a middle manager on casual day, would fit neatly into any Western street scene.

Veronica sees Derek start suddenly, as if remembering something. He says something that sounds like "euthanasia."

One of the two men in dishdashes is black, short but hugely muscled, like a professional wrestler. The other is lighter-skinned, Middle Eastern. He shouts to the men in the back of the helicopter in a guttural language that must be Arabic. Veronica moans when she hears this. It feels like final confirmation that Derek's worst-case scenario is somehow, unbelievably, exactly what has happened. They have been seized by Islamic terrorists.

Derek turns to Veronica and demands in a shaking, angry voice, "Was it you?"

She stares at him. He has gone pale, every muscle in his face is taut, he is trembling. She isn't even sure she heard him correctly in the wake of the deafening helicopter noise.

He says, louder, though she can still hardly hear him, "You fucking answer me. Did you set me up? Was it you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Veronica manages, totally baffled.

"Don't you lie to me."

"I'm not lying. I don't -"

"Did your husband send you?" he demands.

"What are you talking about? I'm not even married."

"You were. To Danton DeWitt. Did he send you?"

Veronica gapes at him. The world seems to spin around her. She has never spoken Danton's name to Derek or any of her other fellow captives. "How - how do you even know who he is?"

"Did you know he was involved? Is that why you came to Africa?"

"Involved in what?" she bleats.

Derek looks at her, then back to man in glasses outside the helicopter, who has withdrawn something metal and plastic, something familiar, from his shoulder bag. The device is so out of place it takes Veronica a second to identify it as a small handheld videocamera. He puts it to his eye and records as the black men in dishdashes grab the white captives and half-lead, half-drag them away from the aircraft. The Arabic man stays where he is, holding a curved and gleaming panga. Veronica thinks of the American hostages taken in Iraq, captured by insurgents and beheaded alive. She feels dizzy again.

The air smells of wet decay. The ground of the airstrip is not so much grass as dense weeds cut to ankle height, furrowed in places by muddy tire marks. Dozens of gunmen surround them in a circle several rows thick, like an audience for a particularly good street performer. The Arabic man steps up to the roped-together line of captives. Veronica, who is at the front of the line, freezes as he lifts his panga. He cuts her free. Then he cuts loose Derek behind her, grabs him by the back of his neck, shoves him roughly to a point about ten feet away from the others, and gives his panga to another man in a dishdash, the one who looks like a bodybuilder.

"This is a setup," Derek shouts to Jacob, the words spilling out of him, talking as fast as he can. "This was never a random kidnapping, this is a fucking execution. Islamists and interahamwe, working together, that's exactly what I was here to investigate, someone set me up -"