Black Star Nairobi Read Online Free Page A

bombed and he was on his way there.
    I hadn’t felt American for a long time. In fact, I hadn’t wanted to. A black man from the U.S., I liked getting lost in the sea of blackness in Kenya, rather than standing out in a sea of whiteness in Madison, Wisconsin. But the idea that a fellow American, a black man like me, could be shot and his body left in the middle of Ngong Forest to be devoured by hyenas stirred up an anger in me that I knew was dangerous. In the U.S., we died in all sorts of ways, but never like this.
    My phone rang as we drove toward the explosion. It was Muddy; someone had texted her to tell her that Nairobi was under attack. I told her what I knew—it was just the Norfolk, not the whole city.
    O’s phone rang—Mary had felt the explosion at the apartment and she wanted to make sure he was okay. It was the first time I had ever known her to call O to check on him and that gave me a bad feeling.
    My mind went back to when we had first seen our guy, with his half-smile magnified by the dulled sunlight and the loud silence of the forest. The body in Ngong—it reminded me of English 101,
Antigone
—the king leaves a rebel’s body to be devoured by wild beasts … it didn’t end well for everyone involved. I just knew there was no coming back from this one—whatever it was.

CHAPTER 2
ANCHORING HOPE
    Chaos. Barely two hours after the Norfolk Hotel bombing that had so far left ten Americans, five Europeans, and fifty-one Kenyans dead, the Kenyan Special Branch, CIA, and U.S. Embassy folk—ringed by onlookers and TV reporters with their bright lights—were milling about the bomb site. Car horns were going off randomly, and small fires puttered along until a gust of wind made them flare up, only to be put out by a solitary fire engine that, in true Kenyan fashion, had more men operating it than necessary. There was danger still.
    The power company had shut the electricity off—there had been power cuts that morning anyway, though they never touched tourist locations. But a generator trapped somewhere in the rubble kept surging, powering still-attached air conditioners, hairdryers and—this I could not help thinking in spite of the seriousness of the situation—all sorts of sex toys.
    The chaos was why we were there. There had to be a connection between the bombing and our man. And maybe we could talk to Hassan and the people from the U.S. Embassy while we were at it. We decided to take advantage of the situation and canvass the site for ourselves. No one had stopped us, anyway, not even to ask us for ID. I guess we looked like we belonged.
    The wounded were being rushed to the hospital and thedead to the city mortuary. There were pieces of flesh and bones here and there, some recognizably human, others so torn apart that they looked like something you would see at the back of a slaughterhouse. The scents of blood, oil, water, and dust mixed with the whispery tangy smell of whatever explosive had been used to make the bomb, a smell that stung the back of your throat. Seeing the destruction in the late morning light drove the cruelty of the terror home. There were aged police dogs, given to the Kenyans by the Americans after the last bombing, sniffing in the rubble, looking for survivors. There would be occasional yells of hope from the policemen guiding them, followed by the overmanned fire truck finally pouring water on the area. And then deflated sighs as it turned out to be nothing.
    There were questions of jurisdiction, arguments back and forth. Americans had died, so the U.S. government had a right to conduct its investigations, but it had happened on Kenyan soil and the majority of the dead were Kenyans. Eventually it boiled down to the fact that the Kenyans didn’t have the technology to deal with this kind of thing.
    The final shots were going to be called by those controlling the purse strings. Back in Wisconsin, when I worked on the force, the Chief would bury some cases. Pursuing justice