Night Of Knives

Chapter 24

The red dirt road is terrible, carved with more craters and ravines than the surface of Mars. It takes thirty bumpy minutes to drive the eight kilometres to the refugee camp. Entrance is barred by a pair of concrete guard huts and a steel bar across the road, manned by uniformed Ugandan soldiers, and for a moment Jacob is worried they will simply be denied access and sent back; but when he invokes Susan's name, the soldiers' faces clear with recognition, and they raise the bar to allow the Toyota access.

UNHCR Semiliki is an encyclopedia of suffering, a tent city of misery in a small valley surrounded by steep and largely denuded hills. A half-dozen brick buildings cluster in the middle of the settlement. The camp proper boasts a smattering of thatched mud huts. But most of its thousands of shelters are blue plastic or green canvas tarpaulins stretched over frames made of tree branches. Whole families live in each. A few roads radiate out from the brick buildings at the center of the camp, but in the anarchic wedges between those roads, the tents are packed so densely that there is rarely enough room for more than two to walk abreast. There are people everywhere, the camp seems flooded with them, some well-kept and clean, most dressed in rags. A few goats and chickens pick their way through the dirt. Jacob wonders what they eat; the ground throughout the camp is entirely mud, even weeds have been trampled to death. He doesn't want to even imagine what the camp is like in rainy season.

There are more women than men, and amazing numbers of children. A few have the distended bellies that said malnutrition. Many children, and a few adults, turn and wave, smiling hopefully as the Toyota passes. Others stare with lifeless eyes. A few look angry, hostile. Jacob hears snatches of French through the open window. The air holds a stale, faintly rancid smell of smoke and filth. He sees a huge tent beneath which a teacher teaches mathematics to several hundred children, in the failing red light, with no aids but chalk and a single blackboard. He sees and smells a long, low, filthy building labelled LATRINE, its wrecked door hanging open like a broken jaw. Old women lug yellow jerrycans full of water, and others queue to fill theirs from rusted taps that protrude from the ground. Pots boil over open-pit fires next to wood-and-canvas shelters.

The brick buildings with tin roofs in the middle of the camp seem like an island of peace and civilization. Here the soft background chatter of the refugees is drowned out by the hum of multiple generators. Veronica parks the Toyota at the end of the row of cars in front of another guard hut, populated by a half-dozen Ugandan soldiers. Jacob wonders if these soldiers, and those by the gate, are intended more to protect the refugees, or to keep them in the camp and under control. He wonders how effective they would be against Athanase's veteran interahamwe force.

"Susan Strachan, please, can you direct us to her?" Jacob says to the soldier who comes to investigate.

The soldier nods and leads Veronica and Jacob between two of the permanent buildings to a large shade structure made of metal struts and a green plastic ceiling. Several dozen desks are arranged underneath it, adorned by lights and laptop computers connected to a central generator via an interwoven tangle of power cords clumped on the dirt floor like old spaghetti. It is like some kind of surreal parody of an open-concept office plan. Susan sits at a desk crowded with papers near the edge of the tent. When she sees Veronica and Jacob her mouth literally drops open with astonishment.

"Surprise!" Veronica says, trying for enthusiasm.

"Bloody hell," Susan manages. "What are you two doing here?"

"It's a long story," Jacob says. He wishes they had gone to Susan earlier, before she left Kampala. He'd intended to, but then events overtook them, he'd forgotten all about her and the Semiliki refugee camp until he saw where the tracker was going. "You have a moment?"

Susan shakes her head, still amazed. "I suppose I must, for you two."

Veronica says, seriously, "In private."