The Serene Invasion

Chapter SEVEN





SALLY HAD AN aversion to using bribery to get what she wanted – aiding and abetting a system that was responsible for much that was at fault in the continent of Africa – but in this instance it was the only way to achieve her goal.

It cost her one hundred US dollars, slipped into the cold palm of the desk sergeant, to be allowed into the holding cell at the Kallani police headquarters.

She was taken to a tiny concrete room, divided by floor-to-ceiling bars, with a plastic bucket seat positioned on either side of the bars.

She sat down. A minute later the door in the other half of the cell opened and Josef Makumbi, shackled hand and foot, shuffled through.

He looked sullen, and his eyes widened fractionally when he saw her.

He slumped into the seat and stared at her.

“Hello, Josef.”

He stared at his lap, then looked up at her. “What do you want, Dr Walsh?”

She looked at the man who had cold-bloodedly taken the lives of at least four of his colleagues. She was tempted to ask him why, but restricted herself to the reason for her visit.

She said, “Three days ago I was taken, along with Dr Ben Odinga, by three men who drove us north and held us prisoner. One of the men was named Ali.” She hesitated. “Who was he, Josef?”

He stared at her with bloodshot eyes, and surprised her by asking, “Why haven’t they beaten me, Dr Walsh? They brought me here, locked me up, and then one man, a big sergeant, he comes in with a baseball bat... I could see the look in his eyes. He wanted to kill me, Dr Walsh. He wanted to punish me for what I did.” He shook his head. “And he tried to. He lifted the bat, tried to hit me, but something stopped him.”

She said, “I want you to tell me the full name of your accomplice, Ali, and where I might find him.”

“Will they kill me, Dr Walsh? I know they want to, for what I did.”

She shook her head and ran a tired hand over her face. She felt the sweat and grime of her long drive north. She said, “Please, tell me Ali’s full name and where I might find him.”

He stared at her.

She returned his gaze, looking into the eyes of one of the last men on Earth, she realised, to commit the act of murder. At any other time she would have been curious to know what had motivated the man to turn on his colleagues – but all she wanted now was to confront the man who had tormented herself and Ben, to hear his side of the story.

“Well?” she said.

“If I tell you, they will not beat me to death?”

She inclined her head. “I promise.”

He nodded, licked his lips. “His name is Ali al-Hawati, and he is from the village of Benali. He has a wife there, but no children. He works as a fisherman on the river.”

The village was a hundred kilometres east of Kallani, on the border with Kenya. It would be a long, hot drive, with no guarantee at the end of it that she would be able to find and confront the man who would have willingly taken her life and filmed the process for all the world to see.

She would never have had the courage to attempt to track down her tormentor, normally. But, with the coming of the Serene, things were very different.

She stood. “Thank you, Josef.”

“You will make sure they will not beat me to death, Dr Walsh?”

She stared down at him. “You have nothing to worry about on that score,” she told him, and left the cell.





EARLIER THAT DAY, after arriving at Kallani from Entebbe, she had met Yan Krasnic and told him of her decision to leave Kallani and return to England. She offered to work until the end of the month, but Krasnic smiled and said, “No, you can go now. The relief team arrived yesterday, and since the coming of the starships... well, we can concentrate on treating victims of the drought, of famine. No more do we have to contend with the casualties of war and bush skirmishes, though for how long that might last...”

“And you?” she asked.

He looked through the window of his surgery. Krasnic was in his early fifties. He looked about seventy. “I’m okay... After what happened the other day, I too have decided to return home, to Croatia. It’s a beautiful country, Sally. I miss it. I think I will retire.”

She hugged him before leaving, then found Ben Odinga and said goodbye.

“God is great,” he said, smiling at her. “I will miss you.”

She returned to Mama Oola’s, packed her scant belongings, and said a tearful goodbye to the matriarch, promising to return one day.

Then she had made her way to the police headquarters and bribed the grinning desk sergeant.

She left Kallani at one o’clock and drove east. While at Entebbe that morning she had booked a flight to London on a plane leaving Uganda at noon the following day. That would leave her with enough time to do what she had to do, for her peace of mind, and return to Kampala in the morning.

As she drove through the drought-stricken, sun-pummelled land, a hellish landscape devoid of life, where even the trees stood stark and leafless like charcoal twigs in the parched earth, she considered her motives in confronting Ali al-Hawati.

What did she want? For that matter, what did she expect?

She did not want to know of his motivations, for she could guess them. He was politically driven, or religiously driven – they were one and the same. He wanted his worldview to prevail, and saw her and her fellow aid workers as legitimate targets in the war against decadent Western liberalism.

She had no illusions that she would gain his forgiveness; he would hate her now – if not more so, given her escape – as he had hated her the other day.

No, what she wanted was to look him in the eye and tell him that his chance had come and gone, that, with the coming of the Serene, the opportunity to get what he and his fellow believers wanted was a thing of the past. She wanted to tell him that he had lost the war, and that everything would be very different, now.

She wanted to tell Ali al-Hawati that no longer did she fear him and his kind.

Then she would smile, and turn her back on him, without flinching at the thought of attack, and walk away.





AS SHE DROVE through the punishing afternoon heat, she turned the car radio to Uganda FM and listened to the latest reports from around the world.

She would have liked to have had Geoff’s softscreen with her now, despite her frugality and anti-materialism that had never allowed her to indulge herself. For the past few years she had made do with a cheap wind-up radio to provide her with news of the outside world.

Republicans in America were encamped outside the White House in protest at their government’s inability to confront the extraterrestrials. Shares in arms manufacturers around the world had tumbled, and in the States the gun lobby and pro-hunting groups were vociferous in their complaints about having their rights violated by the aliens. The President had gone on live TV last night to demand a meeting with the leader of the ‘alien invasion.’

Sally smiled to herself and tuned into a music station.

Three hours later she came to the river and the village of Benali, its inhabitants stirring in the cooler hours of late afternoon. Women washed clothes in the river and children played with tyres in the dusty streets. It was a scene, typical of Africa, which had changed little in a hundred years.

She made out a large number of Yemeni men and women among the Ugandans. After the Israeli strikes on Sana in 2019, displaced Yemenis had fled south, settling in Ethiopia, Somalia, and even as far as Uganda. They were largely fisher-folk, drawn to the coastal regions or, in this case, the wide river on the border with Kenya.

She braked on the crest of the road overlooking the village and the river. The shanty town looked impoverished, a series of corrugated metal huts, patched with multi-coloured polythene sheets – where Islamists must have found eager recruits among the poor, displaced Yemenis.

She wondered if al-Hawati had been lured into terrorism by the promise of riches, or the reward of a martyr’s place in paradise. Would she despise him any the less had his motivations been the former?

Her arrival caused a commotion amongst the village children. They flocked around her car, keeping a safe distance, watching her with big eyes, mistrustful yet curious.

She climbed out and smiled at the children, African and Yemeni, and singled out the tallest – a boy clutching a deflated vinyl football – and said, “I am looking for Ali al-Hawati, a fisherman. Do you know where he lives?”

This provoked an intense and noisy debate among the crowd. The boy with the football shouted loudest, then looked at Sally. “He lives beside the river. Come with me.”

She followed the boy, followed, in turn, by the ragged posse of village children, chattering among themselves.

A few days ago, she thought as she hurried down the sandy track after the boy, she would never have dared enter a Yemeni village known to harbour terrorists. Even now she experienced a residual fear at what she was doing, tempered by the knowledge that no one, now, could harm her physically.

Nevertheless, as they turned a corner and came to a line of huts fronting the river, her heart set up a laboured pounding.

A Yemeni woman in a stained shalwar kameez and a half niqab veil sat before the second hut, mending a fishing net. She looked up and stared at Sally, her brown eyes massive above the fabric that covered her mouth and nose.

The young boy said something to the woman, and without a word she stood and hurried into the hut. Behind Sally, the children stopped as one and watched in silence.

Seconds later a man, wearing only shorts and a ripped vest, stepped out.

He stopped dead when he saw Sally, and she was gratified at the expression of shock on his thin face. The jagged scar that ran across his cheek was red raw; he had declined her advice to seek medical help.

In English he said, “What do you want?”

“I came to see you, Ali.”

His eyes narrowed, flicked beyond her to see if she were alone.

“Why?” he snapped. “What do you want with me?”

Behind him, the woman – presumably his wife – ducked from the hut and stood watching them.

Ali turned and, with surprising vitriol, shouted at the woman. Her gaze fell from Sally, as if in shame, and submissively she scurried back inside.

“I came, Ali, simply to talk.”

Her words discomfited him; his sneer faltered. He looked beyond her at the gallery of watching children, and he gestured with anger and yelled at them in Arabic.

When Sally turned, she saw that every last one of them had fled.

She wondered at the power this man had wielded in the village, and if the reason for the anger that manifestly simmered beneath the surface of his superior demeanour was that he realised, with the coming of the Serene, that his ability to command fear, and therefore respect, would in time diminish.

They stood in the late afternoon sunlight, facing each other, and Sally felt as if they were the only people in the world.

“I came to tell you,” she began, “that what you did the other day, when you attacked the medical centre and kidnapped me and my colleague, made me more fearful than I had ever been in my life. I feared what you were going to do to me. And at the same time I was angered by my powerlessness to do anything to prevent what you were doing. To you, I was nothing – I, who had for years helped Ugandans and Yemenis, was less than nothing in your eyes. You would kill me and film my death, and show it to the world... and that filled me with anger and hatred and fear.”

He spat, “You are all the same, Westerners, men and women, you bring your ideas here and we do not want them!”

Sally smiled. “And that’s where you’re very wrong, Ali. You see, we are not the same at all. It’s convenient and easy for you to think that we are all the same, but unlike you and people who think like you, we, my colleagues at the centre, are all very different in our opinions and politics, our beliefs or non-beliefs. I work with Muslims and Christians and atheists, with many nationalities... We are all very different, but we work together for the common good.” She shook her head. “But I could talk to you for a million years, and I would never make you understand the values by which I live.”

“I despise your values!”

She smiled at him, and said softly, “But you do not know my values, Ali. You do not know who I am, or what I believe.” She waved, as if to dismiss all this, and went on, “But the reason I came here is to tell you, Ali, that I no longer fear you. Everything is different now, with the coming of the aliens. They have brought a truth to our planet which you, in your ignorance, will have to come to terms with. Perhaps, in time, you will learn peace, and look back and see the wrong you did. I hope so. But...” she smiled at him, radiantly, suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of liberation, “I want to tell you that I no longer fear you, and nor do I hate you.”

She reached into the breast pocket of her shirt. “I have brought you something, Ali.”

She held it out.

He stared at the small tube of antiseptic in her hand.

“For your infection. It needs treatment.”

With great deliberation, he filled his mouth with phlegm and spat in the sand at her feet. “I do not need your Western medicine!”

She shrugged, returned the tube to her pocket, and turned to leave. This was the moment she would turn her back on him, fearing nothing, and walk away.

He said, “What now?”

She hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“You have told the police about me, where I am?”

“I’ve told them nothing,” she said. “But I think Josef Makumbi might. He is in jail now, and in time he will be questioned by the police, and in fear I think he will tell them everything.”

She smiled at the sudden flare of alarm in his eyes, and it filled her with satisfaction.

He stepped towards her, his intent obvious. She held her ground, did not flinch as he came within half a metre of her and tried to raise his arm.

His inability to carry through the action that his will dictated, the thwarted expression on his face, was almost comical to behold. He began to shake.

She peered at him. “Go on, Ali. Try it. Hit me. That’s what you would like to do, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “The days when you could dominate with violence are gone, Ali. Goodbye.”

She turned, a feeling like jubilation swelling within her, and walked away.

She was halted by another cry, but this one was not from Ali.

His wife had emerged from the hut, a plastic carrier bag clutched in her right hand.

She surprised Sally by saying in English, “You are leaving Benali?”

Sally nodded. “I’m going to Kampala.”

The woman hesitated. Ali stared at her, a look of terrible realisation dawning in his eyes.

At last his wife said, “Please, take me with you. I wish to leave.”

Ali shouted something in Arabic, took a step towards his wife. She flinched, cowering and bringing her arm up to protect her face. Ali stood over her, frozen, and tears tracked down his face, trickling into the runnel of his scar.

Slowly, Sally stepped forward and took the woman’s arm. “Come with me,” she said softly.

Silent, eyes fixed in fright on her husband, the woman nodded. Sally drew her away, along the track from the river towards the road and the hill where her car was parked.

Behind them, Ali cried out. He was giving chase, calling out almost incoherently. His cries drew an audience of faces which emerged from the huts on either side and stared at him, which enraged him further.

They reached the car and Sally opened the passenger door and the woman, clutching her scant possessions to her chest, slipped inside.

Ali stood beside the car, ranting now, attempting to reach out but each time finding his movement restricted like a puppet whose controller was suffering a fit.

Sally climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. Beside her, the woman pulled down her veil and spoke quietly to her husband through the open window. Ali opened his mouth to reply but, this time, no words came.

Sally looked at Ali, and their eyes met. He spat, “You will not win!”

“This is not about winning or losing,” she said. “It is not a contest.”

They left the village of Benali and headed south.

They were silent for a time, and then Sally asked, “What did you say to him?”

The woman stared ahead. “I simply told him that I have never loved him, and that every day with him I dreamed of escaping,” she said, then went on in almost a whisper, “Four days ago he told me what he was going to do to the people he took from the medical centre – to two doctors. He was proud and boastful, but when he came back here yesterday he was quiet, and he said nothing about what had happened.”

“We escaped, my colleague and I.”

The woman smiled. “Escaped, like I am doing now.”

They drove on in silence, and a little later Sally asked, “You have money? Will you be okay in Kampala?”

“I have saved a little. I will be fine. In Kallani I trained to be a secretary. I can use a computer and many programs, though for many years I have mended fishing nets and suffered my husband’s beatings.”

Sally slowed down and held out her hand. “I’m Sally,” she said.

The woman smiled and took her hand. “I am Zara,” she said, “and I am very happy to be leaving.”

Sally smiled. “I know exactly what you mean, Zara,” she said.

She accelerated, heading south towards Kampala, and smiled as she considered the new life awaiting her in England.