Cross Country

There’s an unofficial oil-for-diamonds trading corridor between here and there. He’s heavily into it, from what I hear.”
    “Okay. Anything else I should know?”
    He started walking again. “Yeah. You got a best buddy back home? Call him. Tell him where you keep your porn, or whatever else you don’t want your family to find when you’re dead. But hey, have a good trip, and nice knowing you.”
    “Flaherty!” I called, but he refused to look back, and when I got outside the market, I found that he’d stranded me there.
    So I wandered back inside and bought some fresh fruit — mangoes, guavas, and papayas. Delicious! Might as well live it up while I could.
    Tomorrow I would be in Sierra Leone.

Chapter 53
    ON A SUN-BEATEN dirt road that twisted through what used to be a forest outside Koidu, a fifteen-year-old boy was slowly choking to death.
    Slowly,
because that’s exactly how the Tiger wanted it to happen.
    Very slowly, in fact.
    This was an important death for his boys to watch and learn from
.
    He closed his grip even tighter on the young soldier’s esophagus.
    “You were my number one. I trusted you. I gave you everything, including your oxygen. Do you understand? Do you?”
    Of course the boy understood. He’d palmed a stone, a diamond. It was found under his tongue. He was probably going to die for it now.
    But not at the Tiger’s hand
.
    “You.” He pointed to the youngest of the other boy soldiers. “Cut your brother!”
    The lad of no more than ten stepped forward and unsheathed a clip-pointed Ka-bar, a gift for him from the Tiger’s trip to America. With no hesitation at all, he shoved the blade into his brother’s thigh, then jumped back to avoid the spurting blood.
    The Tiger kept his own hand where it was on the thief’s throat; unable to even scream, the boy just gagged.
    “Now you,” he said to the next youngest wild boy. “Take your time. No hurry.”
    Each of them took a turn, one at a time, any strike they chose, any kind of blow, except one that would kill the diamond thief. That right belonged to the oldest — or at least the one who would now be the oldest. “Rocket,” they called him — on account of the bright red Houston Rockets basketball jersey he always wore, rain or shine.
    The Tiger stepped back to let Rocket finish the murder. There was no need to hold the thief down anymore; his body was limp and broken, blood pooling in the dust around his shattered face. Black flies and puffy gnats were already settling on the wounds.
    Rocket walked around until he was standing over the thieving boy’s head. He was casually rubbing at the fuzz of beard he hadn’t yet begun to shave.
    “You shame us all,” he said. “Mostly, you shame yourself. You were number one. Now you are nothing!” Then he fired once from the hip, gangsta-style, like in the American videos he’d watched all his life. “No more trouble with this dumb bastard,” he said.
    “Bury him!” the Tiger yelled at the boys.
    All that mattered was that the carcass stay out of sight until they were gone. This dead boy was no one to anyone, and Sierra Leone was a country of pigs and savages anyway. Unclaimed bodies were as common as dirt weeds here.
    He put the pilfered diamond back in its black leather canister with the others. This was the package a tanker of Bonny Crude had bought him — and it was a good trade. Certificates of origin could be easily purchased or faked. The stones would move with no trouble in London or New York or Tokyo.
    He called Rocket over from the digging of the grave. “Pull his wireless — before you put him in the ground. Keep it with you at all times, even when you sleep.”
    Rocket saluted and went back to supervising the others, a bigger swagger in his walk than before. He understood what had just been said.
Pull his wireless
.
Wear it yourself
.
    He was the Tiger’s new number-one boy.

Chapter 54
    MAYBE I ALREADY knew more than I wanted to about the small, sad country called Sierra Leone. The rebels there had murdered more than three hundred thousand people in recent years, sometimes lopping off their hands and feet first, or setting fire to homes where families slept, or tearing fetuses from the wombs of mothers. They created “billboards of terror,” messages carved into the bodies of victims they chose to spare and then used as walking advertisements.
    I took something called Bellview Air overnight to Freetown, and then a death-defying prop plane all the way