The Outlaw (22 page)

"Sure," said Jake. "That might work."

The sun was fully above the horizon now and shining into their eyes. Jake moved over into the shade of the motorcycle. It was going to be another hot day.

"That story about the calabar duel," Yakuuba said. "I lied."

"Really?" Jake looked up sharply.

"Not to you," said Yakuuba quickly. "I lied to Beogo."

"How do you mean?"

"I didn't eat the bean."

"But how did you—"

"Sleight of hand," said the outlaw. "I pretended to swallow it, but I didn't. I put it down my trousers and swallowed a coffee bean instead."

"Clever," said Jake, impressed.

"Not especially. I hate coffee."

From far away to the south came the unmistakable yammer of helicopter blades. The boys sat still and listened as it came closer. There it was, a black speck low in the sky. There was no point running anymore. If it was FIMO, so be it. But Jake suspected otherwise.

They watched the helicopter hack its way through the early-morning sky. It was heading straight toward the Red Cross marquee, nose slanted downward as it powered toward its destination.

Before long it was starting its descent. Jake and Yakuuba closed their mouths tight and shielded their eyes. Great clouds of sand and dust whirled around them as the helicopter touched down. A door opened, and a tall angular figure strode through the dust toward the marquee.

"Blinking Stockholm syndrome!" bellowed a familiar voice. "As soon as we get you back to England, son, you're going to write a whole blinking essay about it."

But the expression on his father's face belied his angry words.

In a novel it is not always easy to distinguish fact from fiction. What follows is a brief guide to
Outlaw
—what is real and what is not.

All the towns and villages mentioned in this book are real places. At the time of writing, my family and I live in Djibo in the far north of Burkina Faso. We often travel to Ouagadougou, passing through Burizanga, Kongoussi, and Sogolzi.

Modern Africa is a complex place. It is a continent of hospitality, joy, wisdom, and wit, but at the same time there is immense human suffering and widespread corruption. I have met countless wonderful people in Burkina Faso, but I have also met mayors and councilors seeking to get rich rather than to govern justly, charlatans selling empty promises and worse-than-useless "medicines," grain merchants meeting at night to engage in illegal price fixing,
gendarmes
intimidating civilians and extorting arbitrary "fines," and European and American miners making vast profits by extracting gold in desperately poor regions.

The character of the Chameleon came out of my longing to see more African men and women take an imaginative, nonviolent stand against injustice and corruption. I would stress the word
nonviolent,
because terrorism is on the rise in the Sahel and the Sahara, as in so much of the world. At the time of writing, AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) is increasingly active in Algeria, Mali, and Niger.

Geothimble does not yet exist, but there are plenty of other options for GPS adventurers. You might try confluencing (www.confluence.org) or geocaching (
www.geocaching.com
).

Sheikh Ahmed's levitation is a Criss Angel trick that can be viewed on YouTube. Also on YouTube is the video "How to charge your iPod using whipped cream and AA batteries" (thanks, zepplinkin).

Mungo Park was a young Scottish explorer who followed the river Niger all the way to its source. His journals,
Travels in the Interior of Africa,
are available free from Mobile Read (www.mobileread.com).

The Chameleon spoke French with Jake, but all of his proverbs are in Fulfulde, one of West Africa's many indigenous languages. Jake's initial rescuer spoke the same language:
mi faamaay
(pronounced "Me Fahm Eye") simply means "I do not understand."

Fulfulde pronunciation is relatively easy. Simply pronounce all the sounds as they are written, except for the double vowels, which sound something like this:

 

aa the long-drawn-out ah in the sheep sound "baa"

ee the long vowel sound in "Heeey, what's up?"

ii the vowel sound in "key"

oo the vowel sound in "four"

uu the vowel sound in "cool"

 

The Mosquito is a siren that drives away teenagers from no-loitering zones. It whines at a frequency that can be heard only by young people. The Mosquito ringtone is based on the same idea and can be downloaded free from
www.teenbuzz.org
.

UCAVs such as the Predator have been regularly used by the U.S. military, as has the brutal and controversial Hellfire missile. And while the HI-MEMS program (cyborg insects created to act as surveillance droids) may seem like the stuff of science fiction, it is scarily real, thanks to research at the University of Michigan.

The Ouagadougou cattle drive leaves from Djibo every Thursday morning. It consists of four men and a hundred or more cows. I joined them once but got only as far as Kongoussi. You can read about that on my blog
www.voiceinthedesert.org.uk/weblog
, along with stories of my other adventures in West Africa.

Thanks ever so much for choosing
Outlaw.
I do hope you enjoyed it.

An excerpt from Stephen Davies's novel

Hacking
Timbuktu

Blind
and silent as a mole, Akonio Dolo crawled toward the gold. It was a tight squeeze, but Akonio didn't mind. He loved his tunnel. He had enjoyed planning it, he had enjoyed digging it, and most of all he had enjoyed stealing gold through it.

The silence was broken by footsteps in the mosque above. That had to be Sheikh al-Qadi, high professor of Timbuktu, arriving to sing the morning call to prayer. Akonio Dolo lay still and listened to the soft, unhurried footfalls of the sheikh.

The call to prayer began, but to Akonio's surprise the voice did not belong to Sheikh al-Qadi. It was far deeper and richer than al-Qadi's voice, and it reverberated down through the earth in a way that made the boy's spine tingle with pleasure.

"
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
"

"God is great," breathed Akonio, and he wriggled forward again.
God is great.
The quality of the new caller's voice was extraordinary—pure yet powerful, a voice to get even the most impious student out of bed at dawn. Not that there were many impious students in Timbuktu. Only one, according to Sheikh al-Qadi. He had always said that Dolo the Dogon would come to no good.

 

"Come to prayer, come to prayer.
Come to success, come to success."

 

"Come to success," breathed Akonio Dolo, edging ever closer toward the vault at the end of the tunnel. He knew what awaited him in that vault: a wall of pure gold two ingots thick. A year and a half ago the wall had been nine ingots thick, but Akonio had been working hard. So far he had stolen almost two million mithqals of gold, making him the second richest person in the whole of Mali at the age of only seventeen! It was a beautiful heist. So long as the wall remained intact on the guards' side, no one would realize there was a single mithqal missing.

 

"God is great! God is great!
There is no god but God!"

 

A tiny shower of earth fell from the tunnel roof onto the back of Akonio's neck. The boy thief frowned. Above him the voice of the prayer caller rumbled louder still.

 

"Prayer is better than sleep!
Prayer is better than sleep!"

 

A clump of earth fell onto the tunnel floor behind Akonio, and he glanced round in surprise. "Don't let me down, tunnel," he whispered. "These past two hundred nights I've found no fault in you. Don't waver now."

The tunnel replied by dumping a heavy shower of dirt on his head.

It's the vibrations caused by the new caller's voice,
thought Akonio.
That voice is going to bury me alive!
He began to wriggle forward with a new urgency, legs kicking back and forth, fingernails scrabbling on the dirt floor.

"In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful," sang the caller, and a whole section of roof collapsed on Akonio's legs. He flailed desperately to free himself, and when at last his feet came loose, he crawled ahead at breakneck speed, blinking against a rain of laterite. He could not be far from the end of the tunnel. Any moment now he would feel the welcome draft of the vault.

"Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom You have favored, not of those who have incurred Your wrath, nor of those who have gone astray."

WHUMP! The tunnel roof collapsed completely, knocking all the breath out of the boy's body. Instinctively Akonio turned his head face-down to make a tiny pocket of air under nose and mouth. He tried to arch his back against the weight on top of him, but it was no good. He was pinned from head to toe, as helpless as the butterflies that lined al-Qadi's study walls. The pocket of air would last for what—five shallow breaths? Ten at most.

The caller had stopped his recital. He must have heard the subsidence and felt the floor of the prayer room dimple and pucker beneath his feet—enough to make even the most fervent caller pause for thought.

All around Akonio Dolo the earth throbbed with the words of the Book. "Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgment." With his final breaths Akonio couldn't help wondering what judgment God would pass on him. Would God agree with Sheikh al-Qadi's assessment?
I always knew that Dolo the Dogon would come to no good.

Akonio wept. Sheikh al-Qadi disliked him only because he slept in class. But God knew all the facts—God knew how hard it was for a boy to stay awake in class after a busy night of tunneling. And God knew that the theft was not Akonio's fault. It was inevitable! What kind of fool stacked gold nine ingots thick from floor to ceiling and wall to wall in a vault dug out of
earth?
They were simply
asking
for someone to tunnel in. It would have been rude of Akonio
not
to have stolen the gold!

The boy took another feeble breath. Who was he trying to kid? He was a miserable thief. He knew it, God knew it, end of story. And at that moment he couldn't help but wonder:
If you're already buried, is it too late to repent?

The boy thief pricked up his ears.
What was that?
The heavy clink of gold on gold, muted but unmistakable. Someone was dismantling the wall of ingots in the vault. The guards had heard the tunnel collapse and were coming to investigate.

"Look at this!" The voice was not far away from where Akonio lay. "This pile is only two ingots thick!"

"No! It should be nine."

"There's a gap where the gold should be."

"Can you get in?"

"I think so."

Akonio's heart pulsed weakly against the earth below. His air supply was exhausted. He was going to die.

"There's some kind of tunnel here! It looks like it's collapsed!"

"That explains the sound we heard."

"There's a lot of loose earth. I'll just try and—
wallaahi!!!!
"

"What is it?"

"Fingers! I've found fingers!"

"Thieving fingers, I'll be bound. Wait there, Yusuf, we'll come and help you."

Working together, the guards scrabbled to remove the body of the thief from its tomb, clearing earth from hands, arms, head, and shoulders. The youngest guard gave a sudden cry of recognition.

"It's the Dogon boy! It's Akonio Dolo!"

"I don't believe it," said another. "All this time, he's been stealing gold from right under our noses."

"Grab his armpits. Let's get him out of here."

The guards yanked the boy out of his hole and manhandled him through the wall of gold, up the steps, and out into the open air.

They laid him down by the eastern wall of the great Sankore mosque. This mosque was the beating heart of Timbuktu University. It was built entirely of mud brick, except for one hundred fifty short cedar sticks protruding at regular intervals from the walls and minaret, sticks that served as scaffolding for the annual repairs to the flawless façade. Akonio Dolo looked very small next to the magnificent building.

The guards stood around the body, unsure of their next step.

"We should wash it and prepare it for burial," said one.

"We should cut off its hands," said another.

"That's not for us to decide," said a third. "We'll wait here for Sheikh al-Qadi."

The sheikh was already on his way. White robes billowed around him as he hurried to where the guards stood.

"It's Dolo the Dogon!" exclaimed the sheikh. "Why is he so dirty?"

"He's dead."

"Dead! How so?"

"The tunnel collapsed on top of him."

"What tunnel?"

"The tunnel he used for stealing gold."

A muscle in the sheikh's jaw twitched. "You mean he actually got some?"

"More than some. He got hundreds of ingots."

"
What? Where did he put it all?
"

"We don't know."

The sheikh spun round to face the rising sun and tore his outer robe from top to bottom. "Betrayed by one of our own!" he cried. Sheikh al-Qadi was a dignified man, and the guards were surprised by this sudden display of passion.

"Quickly!" cried the sheikh. "Go and search the boy's room!"

When the guard came back, he said, "A camel saddle, a few clothes—and this." He held out a wad of paper.

"
Introduction to Magic Squares,
" read the sheikh, "by Abu al-Kabari." He riffled the pages and threw them petulantly to the ground. "It's nothing," he muttered. "An old mathematics treatise from the university library."

If only you knew,
thought Akonio Dolo.

Akonio Dolo was not quite dead; at least he didn't think he was. He breathed in slowly through earth-caked nostrils and felt his lungs fill with air.