Babylon's Ark by Lawrence Anthony Page A

Come to help out at the zoo.”
    â€œThe zoo? The one down the road?”
    â€œJa. It’s in a complete mess. They fought a battle right through it. Shot the shit out of the place.”
    The man laughed as if this were the funniest thing in the world, his chest heaving with crazy mirth. “Everything’s a fucking zoo here, man.”
    I laughed self-consciously with him.
    Eventually he put out his hand, stilling chuckling. “Alistair McLarty. Where’re you from back home?”
    I shook the proffered hand. “Zululand. And you?”
    â€œJo’burg. Shit, didn’t think I’d find another compatriot in this hellhole.”
    I waved a hand down the corridor. “Which room do you recommend?”
    Alistair paused for a moment. “This floor ’s no good. You’ll want to go higher.”

    He then looked at me for a long moment. He was sizing me up; should the DOD photogs allow me on their floor? In a situation where resources were minimal, you jealously guarded what meager assets you had. This was their floor. They were there first on it, and they decided who stayed there. Or not.
    â€œWhat do you do back home?” he asked.
    â€œI have a game reserve,” I replied. “Thula Thula.”
    â€œI’ve heard of it. That’s where they handle problem elephants. Is that you?”
    â€œThat’s me.”
    Most South Africans have empathy with wild animals. It’s part of the national bushveld psyche.
    He stroked his chin, as if wrestling with a dilemma. “Well, okay. Let’s see what there is here.”
    We forced our way into the first room, shoving the sledgehammer-shattered door aside.
    â€œThe first thing is to check out the toilet,” said Alistair.
    He gingerly opened the bathroom door and then slammed it shut with force.
    â€œWhoa! You don’t want to go in there!” He shuddered, his face wrinkling with revulsion.
    We tried a few more, and Alistair eventually declared that under the circumstances Room 720 wasn’t too bad—which meant the toilet wasn’t more vile than absolutely necessary. I took that room and the Kuwaitis took the room next door.
    Exhausted after the tense nine-hour drive through smoldering battle zones and our first depressing introduction to the zoo, we ate some of the canned food we had brought with us and went to bed.
    It was not an agreeable night. The disheveled beds had been slept in before, and dust and grit layered the grimy sheets. The floors were so filthy we left smudgy footprints wherever we walked.
    The key choice facing everyone in the hotel was whether to close the windows and steam in the sauna-temperature rooms or open them and be eaten alive by the seething clouds of flies and mosquitoes. Most chose the latter option.

    I closed my eyes. Sleep was elusive, despite marrow-sapped exhaustion. I kept getting magnetically pulled to the window by the sounds of fighting that thundered across the city. Tracer bullets and parachute flares incinerated in the sky while tank shells screamed into targets with meteoric ferocity. Firefights erupted every few minutes or so, and just as I fell into a fitful doze, the stuttering hammer of machine guns somewhere on the streets roused me with a start. Radios regularly clattered into life in the hotel around me, and through the open windows I could hear the revving engines of tanks and Humvees seven floors below.
    Often in strange places you wake wondering where the hell you are. Not in Baghdad. You knew every minute, indeed every second, exactly where you were: in a damned war zone.
    Sweating, filthy, scratchy, mosquito-itchy, noisy … it was wretched. Absolutely wretched.
    I closed my eyes.
    The initial thrill of adventure was by now harshly sullied by the reality of where I actually was. In the middle of a very real, very violent war. This was not part of the plan. Not at all.
    God, I’d better not tell Françoise about this.

FOUR
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