himself just as the sun rose.
The scene here was, for some reason, sadder to me. In Kabul, we had been able to shorten the attack, and kill those responsible. Here, we were too late. With eleven people dead, the damage had been done.
The next room we looked in had a small pile of clothes inside the door. I reached down and pulled up a young girl’s dress. A large portion of it had burned away. The seared edges crumbled in my fingers. I didn’t know if the dress had belonged to a daughter in the British family that had been killed in this attack, or if it had simply burned in the fire after another family had evacuated. In reality, it didn’t matter.
We might have been too late to save the eleven people that died here, but we were not too late to find the monster that did this.
I let the dress drop back to the ground. “I’ve seen enough,” I said.
I n the lobby , we met one of Kahembe’s men we recognized from yesterday. As he was telling us how the cleanup effort was coming along, the soft sound of distant thunder interrupted. I looked out through the damaged portico.
“Thunder?” Sterba asked.
The weather in Tanzania, especially at this high altitude, can be changeable. But there was nothing indicating a storm was nearby. The silence was broken by a chirp on the officer’s radio.
“Please excuse me,” he said, turning away and putting the radio to his ear. Two other policemen just outside the lobby were doing the same.
“I don’t think that was thunder, Sterbs.”
The policemen began shouting to one another in rapid Swahili. The officer we had been speaking with broke out of the conversation to explain.
“The airport,” he said, urgency in his voice. “Another bombing. I must go.”
“We’re right behind you,” I said. “Kilimanjaro?”
“No, Arusha,” he said as he ran to the car park.
9
“ I t appears an explosive device was in one of the suitcases,” Lieutenant Kahembe explained as we stood on the apron at Arusha’s tiny regional airport. “It detonated after falling off one of the baggage carriers that were being hand-towed to the plane.”
Having left our vehicle in the dirt parking lot, Sterba and I were brought immediately to the scene of the detonation. Lieutenant Kahembe stood before a train of three small metal wagons that were used to pull bags to the aircraft. The device had obviously been in a bag on the last wagon, because the frame was a tangled mess, covered by suitcase fragments and singed strips of clothing.
A man in a dirty high-visibility vest held a battered red water can, the black hose in his other hand delivering a tiny stream of water over the smoldering pile of tattered luggage. Behind him, a fire truck—easily fifty years old—rested. It’s hood was up, and two men were arguing about something to do with the engine.
This was the kind of sleepy little airport that, under any other circumstance, I loved. A place where, after your flight landed, you’d help the pilot unload the bags, and then join him at the pub for a beer. But terrorism put more and more of these precious, informal gems on the endangered species list.
“Casualties?” Sterba asked.
“The baggage handler pulling the hand truck was injured quite severely. He’s been taken to hospital,” Kahembe replied. “But thankfully, there were no deaths.”
“Lucky it didn’t detonate when the plane was in the air,” Sterba said, pointing to the small twin engine that had been roped off.
Kahembe nodded. “Baggage is typically stored in the nose and just behind the last row of seats. They would have had no chance if the device had gone off in flight.”
As they spoke, I ran my eyes across the airport and the crowds that had gathered. The first thing we needed to do was assume another device was on site and get passengers scheduled to be on this flight to safety, while remembering that one of them could be the bomber. Kahembe, however, appeared to be a bit stunned, and wasn’t showing
The scene here was, for some reason, sadder to me. In Kabul, we had been able to shorten the attack, and kill those responsible. Here, we were too late. With eleven people dead, the damage had been done.
The next room we looked in had a small pile of clothes inside the door. I reached down and pulled up a young girl’s dress. A large portion of it had burned away. The seared edges crumbled in my fingers. I didn’t know if the dress had belonged to a daughter in the British family that had been killed in this attack, or if it had simply burned in the fire after another family had evacuated. In reality, it didn’t matter.
We might have been too late to save the eleven people that died here, but we were not too late to find the monster that did this.
I let the dress drop back to the ground. “I’ve seen enough,” I said.
I n the lobby , we met one of Kahembe’s men we recognized from yesterday. As he was telling us how the cleanup effort was coming along, the soft sound of distant thunder interrupted. I looked out through the damaged portico.
“Thunder?” Sterba asked.
The weather in Tanzania, especially at this high altitude, can be changeable. But there was nothing indicating a storm was nearby. The silence was broken by a chirp on the officer’s radio.
“Please excuse me,” he said, turning away and putting the radio to his ear. Two other policemen just outside the lobby were doing the same.
“I don’t think that was thunder, Sterbs.”
The policemen began shouting to one another in rapid Swahili. The officer we had been speaking with broke out of the conversation to explain.
“The airport,” he said, urgency in his voice. “Another bombing. I must go.”
“We’re right behind you,” I said. “Kilimanjaro?”
“No, Arusha,” he said as he ran to the car park.
9
“ I t appears an explosive device was in one of the suitcases,” Lieutenant Kahembe explained as we stood on the apron at Arusha’s tiny regional airport. “It detonated after falling off one of the baggage carriers that were being hand-towed to the plane.”
Having left our vehicle in the dirt parking lot, Sterba and I were brought immediately to the scene of the detonation. Lieutenant Kahembe stood before a train of three small metal wagons that were used to pull bags to the aircraft. The device had obviously been in a bag on the last wagon, because the frame was a tangled mess, covered by suitcase fragments and singed strips of clothing.
A man in a dirty high-visibility vest held a battered red water can, the black hose in his other hand delivering a tiny stream of water over the smoldering pile of tattered luggage. Behind him, a fire truck—easily fifty years old—rested. It’s hood was up, and two men were arguing about something to do with the engine.
This was the kind of sleepy little airport that, under any other circumstance, I loved. A place where, after your flight landed, you’d help the pilot unload the bags, and then join him at the pub for a beer. But terrorism put more and more of these precious, informal gems on the endangered species list.
“Casualties?” Sterba asked.
“The baggage handler pulling the hand truck was injured quite severely. He’s been taken to hospital,” Kahembe replied. “But thankfully, there were no deaths.”
“Lucky it didn’t detonate when the plane was in the air,” Sterba said, pointing to the small twin engine that had been roped off.
Kahembe nodded. “Baggage is typically stored in the nose and just behind the last row of seats. They would have had no chance if the device had gone off in flight.”
As they spoke, I ran my eyes across the airport and the crowds that had gathered. The first thing we needed to do was assume another device was on site and get passengers scheduled to be on this flight to safety, while remembering that one of them could be the bomber. Kahembe, however, appeared to be a bit stunned, and wasn’t showing
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