The Taste of Fear (14 page)

“What do they do?” Thunder asked. “Your Aussie mates?”

“Two of them are actors.”

“There’s a good gig, I reckon. Read a few lines, blow a few things up, and get paid for doing it.”

“Admittedly, I’ve never heard of acting described quite like that.”

“How about the others? Your Aussie mates again. They can’t all be actors.”

“Just one more. She’s a singer.”

“Actors and singers.” He whistled. “What a gang.” He peered through the windshield at a passing road sign. “How far is the airport from the turney?”

“The turnoff? I’m not sure, maybe five miles.”

“Tell you what. I’ll drive you there myself.”

“It’s out of your way.”

“No dramas. You’re the best conversation I’ve had all arvo.”

“You had better conversation this morning?” she teased.

“There was this woman back at the hotel in Arusha. She only had a few teeth, could barely speak English. But she swore she was an aristocrat.”

“You were in Arusha?”

“It was base camp for the climb up Kili.” He nodded out the window at Kilimanjaro.

“Oh wow.” She craned her neck to stare up at the massive snow-capped mountain. “Was it dangerous?”

“Nah. The fourteen in the eight-thousand-meter club are the ones you have to be careful with—Everest, Lhotse, K2.”

“Have you climbed any of those?”

“Not yet. But I reckon I’ve just found a new hobby. How about you? Safari?”

“How did you know?”

“Every foreigner up this way is either climbing Kili or going on safari. That, or they’re with some church group spreading the Good Word.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Dar es Salaam.”

“You’re not flying?”

He jerked a thumb at the backseat. Scarlett turned and saw it was piled high with climbing gear, so much so Sal would have had a tough time squeezing in back there. “More in the boot too,” he said. “They barely let me take it on the jet from Brizzie. No way it was all getting on one of those rinky-dinky things that fly up here. Where do you reckon I turn?”

“No much farther,” she told him. “Do you do this a lot? Climb mountains and stuff?”

“I’m a lawyer, actually.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Can’t see me in a suit?”

She eyed his board shorts and flip flops. The slogan on his T-shirt read: Kimchi Cures Bird Flu. “No, I can’t,” she said with a smile.

“That the turney?”

She made an impulsive decision. “Keep going.”

“Wait, there’s a sign. This is it.” He flicked the blinker.

“Keep going,” she repeated.

He gave her a curious look but didn’t slow.

“I’m going to Dar es Salaam as well,” she explained.

“You want a ride all the way there?” he said, surprised.

“If you don’t mind?”

“Not at all. But what about your flight?”

“Screw it.”

“And your husband?”

She shrugged. “Screw him too.”

Scarlett was pleased with her decision to remain in the car. Not only was Thunder a much needed breath of fresh air, he was genuine, a rare find among her Hollywood crowd. And apparently he didn’t recognize her, which was also a refreshing change. She felt like she could be herself, without the pressure of meeting the impossible ideals that people expected movie stars to meet. Indeed, instead of Thunder telling her what she wasn’t, he was accepting her for what she was. Moreover, she no longer had to worry about negotiating her way onto the plane, getting from the airport to the embassy, and most of all, Sal. In short, she couldn’t have asked for a better stroke of luck than for Thunder to have come by when he did.

During the ride, Scarlett told her new companion a little about the safari, purposely omitting the hot air balloon ride and the lioness attack. The balloon ride was personal. The lioness attack was just plain disturbing to recount, even now, in the light of day.

She asked him about his climb up Kilimanjaro. She’d never known someone who’d climbed a mountain before, certainly nothing the size of Kilimanjaro—the only thing most of her friends climbed, including herself, were stair climbers—and she was both fascinated and impressed. According to Thunder, there were a number of routes to the summit. He had taken Lemosho, the longest and most scenic. Seven days of hiking through terrain such as rainforests and snowfields and ice cliffs. He’d hired two porters—a cook and a guide—and they were the ones who’d told him the tales concerning the eight-thousand-meter club, tempting him to give one of them a go. He told her if he ever made it to the top, he was going to hit a golf ball off, to get into the
Guinness Book of World Records.
Scarlett still wasn’t sure if he was kidding about that or not.

“Why did you come to Africa in the first place?” she asked him.

“Short and long of it, my dad died, which made me sort of pause and evaluate my life. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t like the direction it was heading.”

“You mean as a lawyer?”

“I worked my arse off for the past ten years. Moved up through the firm. But I realized the next ten would be more of the same, and the ten after that. More money, I reckon, more prestige, nothing new. So I left.”

“You’re not on vacation? You actually quit?”

“Best decision I ever made. I finally feel free. Climbing Kili, all I thought about was getting to the top, nothing else. Not deadlines. Not clients. Not contracts.”

Scarlett realized she was envious of him. “What are you going to do now?”

He shrugged. “No idea. But I’ve saved up enough to last me a while until I figure it out.”

Scarlett wondered if she could ever quit acting just like that. For so many years it had been all she’d wanted to do. Recently, however, the glam was wearing thin, and it was starting to feel more and more like hard work: the early mornings and long hours in the makeup chair, the charity dinners and interviews and photo shoots, the constant pressure of shouldering multimillion-dollar productions. But if she ever did quit, what would she do with her time? Sleep in late every day? Climb mountains? Sail around the world? Sure—why not?

A Swahili hip hop song spliced with an English chorus came on the radio. It was pretty catchy, and they listened to it in silence for a while, Thunder tapping the beat on the steering wheel. Scarlett saw another junked car on the side of the road, bringing her number count to twelve so far. Five miles farther on Thunder mentioned he needed gas and pulled into a Shell station.

“Petroli? Dizeli?”
an attendant said, rushing over as they got out of the car.

“Do whatever you need to do, mate,” Thunder told him.

The attendant shook his head, not understanding. Thunder wrapped his arm around the much smaller man’s shoulder, pointed to the gas cap, and pantomimed filling the tank. The little guy grinned and got to work. Thunder went to the small service station to pay, and Scarlett, alone for the first time in hours, found herself wondering about Sal. Namely, where was he right then? Probably already at Julius Nyerere International Airport. But so what? Once she reached the U.S. Embassy, she’d get an emergency passport issued, get her manager to wire her some money, then buy a ticket on the first flight back to LA. She’d be home soon enough. She didn’t need Sal. She’d made the right choice leaving him back there on the highway.

Thunder returned a few minutes later and said, “Any idea what time your embassy closes?” He handed her an orange juice. “This is the main highway to northern and eastern Tanzania. If it’s anything going into the city like it was coming out, then there’s going to be heaps of trucks. Traffic is going to be killer.”

Scarlett checked her wristwatch. It was two o’clock. Was there a duty officer or someone on staff twenty-four seven in case of emergencies? She didn’t know, and she wondered what would happen if she missed getting to the embassy before it closed. She didn’t have money to rent a hotel room anywhere, which meant she would have to find a twenty-four-hour coffee shop and stay awake all night. Wonderful.

At least she didn’t have to worry about getting robbed again: she had nothing more to give. No, that wasn’t true. She still had her watch and jewelry. Could she pawn some of it? Her engagement ring alone would get her a week in the city’s top hotel with plenty of change to spare.

“I don’t have a mobile,” Thunder went on. “But there’s a payphone over there. Why don’t you ring the embassy?” He handed her a phone card. “I picked this up inside. The phones don’t take coins.”

Impressed by his thoughtfulness, Scarlett hurried past the pumps to a payphone in a yellow-and-white booth. She scanned the plaque titled “Welcome to Rafiki User Instructions,” picked up the receiver, and found the instructions to be redundant as a voice prompt asked her to choose between either English or Swahili.

Two minutes later she was back at the car. “The embassy closes at six,” she told Thunder.

“Then let’s get cracking,” he said. “It’s going to be tight.”

“Don’t be daft. I might be unemployed, but I’m not broke yet. Take it.”

Scarlett reluctantly accepted the money. “Thank you again, Thunder, really.”

She leaned across the seat and kissed him on the cheek, letting her lips linger for a moment or two longer than appropriate.

A loud pop, like a blown tire, startled them apart.

Scarlett snapped her head toward the embassy gate. A Marine was lying on his side, next to an idling white van. Suddenly three more vans screeched around the corner, pulling up behind the first. The tailgates burst open and six men spilled out. They all wore scarves around their faces and carried AK-47s. They immediately sprayed the gatehouse with bullets. One of them lobbed a grenade.

Thunder yanked Scarlett down against the seat and covered her with his body.

The spitfire cadence of the assault rifles on full automatic continued. There was a loud bang—the grenade going off—followed by a motor revving and roaring away in the direction of the embassy.

All of this happened in the space of a few seconds, not more than a hundred feet away. Scarlett was crazily thinking she was on a movie set—the Marine on the ground an actor, the machine guns shooting blanks—only she knew what blanks sounded like, and it wasn’t anything like the screaming, angry roars of those automatic weapons.

A thunderous second explosion dwarfed the first. Vibrations burrowed up through the seat, rattling her teeth and bones. She squeezed her eyes shut as a shockwave imploded all of the Rav 4’s windows. Gummy shards of safety glass rained down on them.

That
was no pyrotechnics.

“My God!” she exclaimed.

“Quiet,” Thunder said.

He pushed himself up and off her. She titled her head and saw him peering over the dashboard, through the open space where the windshield had been. She sat up. The remaining three vans were speeding through the embassy gate. One wall of the gatehouse was in rubble. A funnel of black smoke curled into the air, beyond the perimeter wall.

Thunder said something.

“What?” Her ears were ringing loudly.

“Stay here!”

“Where are you going?”

“They might still be alive.”

“Who?”

He said something else, but she didn’t catch it. The low whine in her head was like electricity whistling along a wire, driving her crazy. He shoved open the door and took off, keeping his head low, running toward the Marine lying prone on the ground. Scarlett followed, not sure what she was doing, only that she wanted to be doing something. She stopped next to Thunder, her eyes widening in horror. The head of the young man in the desert battledress uniform at her feet was surrounded by a pool of blood. Half his face was missing. She spun away and vomited everything that was in her, which wasn’t much. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand while looking around through blurry eyes for Thunder, who was nowhere in sight.