gone pale, every muscle in his face is taut, he is trembling. She isn't even sure she heard him correctly in the wake of the deafening helicopter noise.
He says, louder, though she can still hardly hear him, "You fucking answer me. Did you set me up? Was it you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Veronica manages, totally baffled.
"Don't you lie to me."
"I'm not lying. I don't -"
"Did your husband send you?" he demands.
"What are you talking about? I'm not even married."
"You were. To Danton DeWitt. Did he send you?"
Veronica gapes at him. The world seems to spin around her. She has never spoken Danton's name to Derek or any of her other fellow captives. "How - how do you even know who he is?"
"Did you know he was involved? Is that why you came to Africa?"
"Involved in what?" she bleats.
Derek looks at her, then back to man in glasses outside the helicopter, who has withdrawn something metal and plastic, something familiar, from his shoulder bag. The device is so out of place it takes Veronica a second to identify it as a small handheld videocamera. He puts it to his eye and records as the black men in dishdashes grab the white captives and half-lead, half-drag them away from the aircraft. The Arabic man stays where he is, holding a curved and gleaming panga. Veronica thinks of the American hostages taken in Iraq, captured by insurgents and beheaded alive. She feels dizzy again.
The air smells of wet decay. The ground of the airstrip is not so much grass as dense weeds cut to ankle height, furrowed in places by muddy tire marks. Dozens of gunmen surround them in a circle several rows thick, like an audience for a particularly good street performer. The Arabic man steps up to the roped-together line of captives. Veronica, who is at the front of the line, freezes as he lifts his panga. He cuts her free. Then he cuts loose Derek behind her, grabs him by the back of his neck, shoves him roughly to a point about ten feet away from the others, and gives his panga to another man in a dishdash, the one who looks like a bodybuilder.
"This is a setup," Derek shouts to Jacob, the words spilling out of him, talking as fast as he can. "This was never a random kidnapping, this is a fucking execution. Islamists and interahamwe, working together, that's exactly what I was here to investigate, someone set me up -"
The Arabic man punches him in the stomach. Derek falls to his knees on the airstrip, doubled over, the wind knocked out of him, gasping for air. Then the massive bodybuilder man lifts his panga high and brings it down in a glittering arc so fast Veronica doesn't even have time to scream. Blood spurts from the back of Derek's neck and he collapses onto his belly. His attacker drops to one knee and his panga rises and falls again, and then a third time. Veronica can't scream, none of them can, it is too awful, she can barely breathe. Derek's head rolls forward from his body, leaving a ragged, bloodsoaked discontinuity at his neck. Blood gouts onto the weeds. Veronica's mind reels, but she can't look away. It feels almost like there is something wrong with her vision, not with Derek, like if she looks hard enough she will see his head above his shoulders, rather than the pale knob of his severed spine set in crimson flesh and torn flaps of skin.
Somebody grabs the back of Veronica's neck, pulls her around, leads her past the helicopter, across the airstrip, towards the edge of the gorge. She is vaguely aware that the faint animal keening she hears is coming from her own throat. The others are dragged behind her. The middle-aged man with the camera finishes his close-ups of Derek's beheaded corpse and comes up beside her, walking sideways, filming their staggering march like some kind of demented tourist. The Arabic man walks on their other side, in view of the camera. Veronica wonders if they are going to be thrown off the edge of the gorge. It seems very likely, but she doesn't struggle. She feels like she has been strapped into a runaway train, has lost even theoretical control over anything that happens to her. Derek is dead. They actually cut his head off. Veronica knows intellectually she should try to fight, to run, but the idea seems ridiculous, she is helpless,