* * *
Sometime into the night, they had traveled further down the river, mostly thanks to the stream rather than the tiny motor. Nicole had been sleeping soundly for a few hours. But Ethan could not, now that he knew Nicole had been lying to him. What was worse, he couldn’t read the truth between her lies. She was an excellent shot and she was well-connected around these parts. Her agenda though still remained conspicuously well-hidden. Was she simply working for herself, like the Swede? But to what end? Did she really want to find Andy as much as he did? Thoughts like these - and some even worse - tugged at his mind like ropes, bogging him down in a spiral with no real answers, no clear exit.
He felt it was dangerous to stick close to Nicole. But she had saved him more than once so far. Whatever her methods and her real purpose, maybe she had put all that aside for Andy’s sake. Maybe she’d explain later, maybe she had as much trouble trusting him as he did her. Andy was all that mattered and he hoped that soon he’d meet the corpse of some other unlucky bastard, not Andy’s. Nicole couldn’t really be trusted, but he had to admit to himself that she had gotten them this far. Andy was all that mattered, and that was what would keep him focused. That, and keeping a wary eye on her.
The warmth of the night earlier had given its place to a fresh, wet breeze that helped him stay awake despite the small hours. The Swede had helped with some sort of home-made vodka and stories about making even more money when the war would finally end: in the poor light the single lamp offered them, he’d shown him sketches and graphs about cables and telecommunications, satellites and whatnot, stuff that Ethan barely acknowledged they existed. Their little discussion was interrupted by the boy who spat out a glob of some sort of local chewing tobacco variety and said something in what must have been a local Igbo dialect.
He caught their attention and turning to look, they saw a flare lazily falling down, fading away with a trail of smoke behind it. Then another one shot up in the opposite direction further down from the east bank and they could almost see a small band of armed men waiting on a sandy patch of dirt.
“That’s them, two flares, first over the river, the second over land,” said the Swede, eagerly telling the boy in what sounded like very bad Igbo to cut the engine. As the boy complied, he went to the helm and let the stream carry them slowly towards the lowered east bank.
“And the best part is, I don’t have to off-load anything. They do all the work,” he said and pointed at the small group of men who were now holding a few lit lanterns and waving a torchlight to pin-point their location. The more they approached, the clearer it became not all of them were really men. Most were actually the same age the Swede’s helmsman was and some looked shorter, skinnier and every bit younger than the boy.
“They sent the boys to do a boy’s work, no?” said the Swede smiling thinly before shaking Nicole's shoulder gently and waking her up. In a heartbeat or two she was up, and after a couple of deep breaths and a stretch could have fooled anyone that she had slept for almost half a day. Ethan then asked the Swede, while Nicole bent slightly over the rim of the boat and splashed some water on her face:
“And they’ll take us to Owerri?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, but there’s a good chance. I can’t think of a reason they won’t. For a price, of course.”
“I kind of left almost everything back at the hotel in Onitsha. We are kind of short on cash.”
“Even a fiver is worth a month’s food down here. You’ll pass off as a rich man in Biafra,” the Swede replied and Nicole added after a cough:
“There’s always other ways to pay, food and drugs being the highest in demand. And then there are the services.”
“Services? Can’t think there’s much office space in demand right now.”
“Are you really that thick or is this your first war behind the trenches? Prostitution. Very commonplace.”
“I thought the Biafrans are hitting that pretty hard.”
“If you mean hard-ons, that’s true,” the Swede said with a sly grin that almost made him look rather slimy all of the sudden.
They felt the boat settle on the wet sand with ease and the boy jumped outside holding a flimsy, worn rope that filled the role of a mooring line of sorts. One of the boys wearing fatigues from the waist down, seemingly accustomed to the process, found a nearby mangrove and tied the rope around it. Then a man barked a couple of orders and the boys laid down their weapons and formed a sort of ant-line, carefully treading up to the boat where two of them had already began unloading the cargo.
The man in charge wore a full set of fatigues and even sported a red beret. When Ethan and Nicole jumped off the boat, he immediately asked them, making sure with a wave of his hand that a couple of rifles were already aiming at them:
“Who dem they now?” to which the Swede replied casually:
“Looking to get into Owerri. Looking for a Red Cross man. I’ve done business with her. Him, I’ve just met.”
“Ask the Red Cross, then,” the man said with a face that signified hostility.
“The Red Cross lost a caravan. Would you know anything about that?”
“Do I look like the Red Cross, Englishman?” said the man with a sudden, wide grin, barely able to hold a laugh.
“Alright, we just want you to get us to Owerri.”
“What dem for?” asked the man, crossing his arms.
“We need to take a look at a corpse,” said Nicole rather bluntly, almost angrily.
The man shrugged and nodded, before adding in a quite plain fashion:
“Heard stranger things.”
He then shouted a few words that must have been names, because two boys settled down a crate they were carrying and came over to him. A short deliberation later, and after he had pointed at Ethan and Nicole quite fervently, they picked up their weapons and motioned with an awkward, mixed expression of confusion, fear and faked bravado to follow them. The man asked Ethan then:
“Rolex? Tag?”
“No, but it’s eighteen karat gold anyway,” Ethan replied and unfastened it from his wrist, passing it over to the man and giving him an unpleasant look that seemed to go completely unnoticed. The man weighed the clock in his hand first and then asked Ethan with a rather serious tone:
“And her?”
“What do you mean? If this doesn’t seem enough, then-”
“I don’t want her money,” he said and licked his lips provocatively. Nicole shook her head, while the Swede gave his flask of vodka a swig, giggled and snorted.