Night Of Knives

III: Zimbabwe - Chapter 29

Veronica says, "Where there's smoke there's fire."

Jacob half-smiles. "Except here."

The pale plume rising into the sky half a mile away, seen over the trees that line the road, looks exactly like smoke from a big fire. Even the distant noise sounds like something far away burning furiously. High above, the noon sun is surrounded by something Veronica has never seen before: a perfectly circular rainbow.

She takes a moment to appreciate the beauty, then takes a deep breath and looks back down to earth. No sense delaying any longer. "All right. Let's go."

The road that carried them the ten kilometres from Livingstone to the border ends at a chainlink gate. A series of other fences steer the small queue of pedestrians into a squat building labelled ZAMBIA EMIGRATION. Beyond this checkpoint, a metal bridge about three hundred feet long traverses a steep-walled gorge.

Jacob takes her hand as they wait, holding the small day packs that carry all their remaining worldly possessions. "Almost there."

Veronica forces a smile. This is their fourth border in four days. She knows in theory the line is good - busy officials are likely to hurry them along, bored ones are dangerous - but the anticipation is always worse than the crossing itself. Assuming of course that they don't get caught. A fate more likely to happen here than anywhere else. The tiny posts where they entered and exited Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania were so far from modern networked civilization it will likely take months for those immigration officers to learn that Jacob and Veronica were wanted fugitives, but this is a major transit nexus. When Veronica sees computers beyond the building's glass-fronted wickets, her stomach tenses and she starts to breathe fast.

"Those won't be connected to anything," Jacob says quietly into her ear. His voice is reassuring, but his hand is clammy. "They'll only know if they call in our names. They won't do that unless they get suspicious. And they won't get suspicious. There's nothing suspicious about us. Nobody's even dreaming that we'd come down here. Just stay cool and we'll be fine. If you're shaking, just pretend you're sick or something."

The line edges forward. They begin to near the uniformed immigration officer. Veronica can't believe she's here, doing this, sneaking across a border, hoping to escape an Interpol warrant. It doesn't feel real. Nothing about their epic journey across half of Africa, in the hundred hours since they escaped Uganda, has felt particularly real.

Sunset at the Kenya-Tanzania border, watching clouds of winged termites erupt from a mound the size of a small house, with snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro looming in the distance beyond. Their roller-coaster early-morning flight to Dar es Salaam, followed by a panicky taxi ride to the railway station, arriving only ten minutes before the departure of the weekly train to Zambia. A young woman moving along the length of the train at one of its many unscheduled stops, selling live locusts, a local delicacy, from a red plastic bowl. Ghostly stick-figure men and women, more like shadows than humans, standing beside the tracks and staring as the Tazara train rolled through the desiccated, drought-blasted hills of southwest Tanzania.

"Passport," the immigration officer says.

Now that she is at the front of the line, in the moment of truth, she feels inexplicably calm and relaxed; her breath has slowed, her muscles have loosened. Maybe she has just run out of adrenalin. Veronica produces her passport and passes it over with steady hands. It seems strange that so much rests on that little blue booklet, that her ability to pass between nations is determined solely by the words and pictures within. The Zambian officer stamps it and hands it back without even looking at her name. Jacob receives the same treatment. Veronica's legs are weak with exhaustion and relief as they walk out of the immigration post. Only one more border post to go, and it should be the easiest of all.