Excerpt of Jersey Girl by Robert White

Part 1: The Way Down

CHAPTER 1

Ogoni Village near Abeokuta, Western Nigeria

Raina Burke slept badly through the night into an oily, red dawn. The Range Rover bounced and slewed over mud ruts from the last monsoon but didn’t wake her. In that part of her brain she trusted most, she knew O’Brien ogled the jiggle of her breasts in the camo blouse.

Bringing herself out of sleep by an act of will, she stretched her arms forward to touch the glass of the windshield with her palms and performed a sequence of brief isometrics. She turned her head to stare at O’Brien, but didn’t say a word. No good morning, where are we?, nothing two people traveling through the bush might say to each other. He was the second-most dangerous man she ever knew; the first being back at camp. That one existed within his own monastic silence.

Like the hustlers in Marrakesh who defanged their cobras for the gullible tourists, she was in no danger. That was an alien concept, had been since she left America and found herself reveling in the Nigerian culture. Of all the supernatural beings of Yoruban folklore, she identified most with Oyá, goddess of storms and lightning, transformations, a machete-wielding terror to those who offended her unlike her gentle sister orisha, Oshun, goddess of rivers.

O’Brien said something in the Khana dialect. He’d spent more time in Ogoniland than in the Yoruban country of their encampment. Although she was fluent in three Western languages, Ogoni was a slippery dialect for her, melodious with contradictory pitch variations. Hearing it was like being slightly deaf. She understood nuances better, how people looked when they spoke rather than what they said.

O’Brien, who’d been shuffled between his mother in Tijuana and his father in Los Angeles in youth, asked her for a job at the data farm she supervised. She paid him and Conrad Beyersdorf back at camp, her other security guard, out of the company’s “goodwill” fund, a euphemism for any unorthodox situation requiring her two mercenaries to handle. Many of those deeds her internet company would deny supporting.

“Don’t show off,” she said to him. “Speak English.”

“I said two more miles to go, just ahead.”

By the time the bush came alive with shrieks and howls, she was fully awake. She remained silent, breathing normally while she stretched in her seat. Even during last night’s crisis, she didn’t neglect her power yoga exercises before leaving for the village where she and O’Brien would inform Wilson Peter’s wife Osila that she was now a widow.

The woman’s anguish brought everyone out of their huts to surround them, all speaking in rapid Gokana. One of the village elders, who knew some English, engaged her in a slow conversation with fewer words and mimed gestures. On the way into the woman’s hut, surrounded by consoling and wailing women, she grabbed O’Brien’s wrist, stopping him before he made the throat-slitting gesture for ambush.

Wailing from the new widow, high-pitched keening from the elder women on either side of her made the small space cramped. Sweat dripped off O’Brien’s nose. Men crowded near the entrance. The moans of the aged women surrounding them subsided, she pressed the envelope containing US bills and colorful nairas into the widow’s hand. For a moment, the widow looked at her as though she might throw the envelope back in her face. The squalling brood of toddlers clutching her skirt distracted her.

She nodded to O’Brien, who preceded her outside. The men parted to let them through. Their stares were hostile. O’Brien’s untucked shirt hid his weapons. He was a walking arsenal from his punch dagger in his boot to the .25 Beretta in a pancake holster on his left hip and the Snake Slayer Derringer tucked in the belt behind his back. Under blankets in the back of the vehicle were two locked-and-loaded AR-15s, a .9mm Taurus G2C. His Ruger Mark lay under the seat in the Range Rover, good for plinking snakes out of trees.

At camp, he and Beyersdorf had an arsenal comprising boxes of ammo to cover all situations between wounding a target and inflicting a gaping wound channel, whether the contingencies resulted from dangerous vipers, four-legged killers, or the bipedal species. Poachers were always armed in the bush but they weren’t the worst problem. The box of grenades was a recent acquisition from one of O’Brien’s contacts in Lagos. This was Africa, he liked to say. You could get anything.

She was never sure how the widows or mothers might take news of the loss of a husband or son. Alarm spread through a village like a brush fire; people poured out of their huts. As a teenager in Newark, she saw people step over the legs of junkies paralyzed in a Xylazine nod on the sidewalk. In Africa, strangers came up close enough to smell your breath. She didn’t plan on dying with a burning tire around her neck in a village where piles of animal dung and spoiled chicken carcasses separated huts. Crucifixes around the necks of villagers didn’t mean that much.

She’d served the company in Kenya, Mumbai, and Nigeria long enough to recognize small changes in the landscape to get her bearings, an unusual pattern of divot in the road, a noisy clan of Sclater’s monkeys from the treetops or where the Black-headed orioles clustered and the trills and guttural ooks of Painted snipes courted. A crooked limb in the distance matched the image in her mind like a transparency overlay. The white ribs of a decaying Sahel goat off the track told her down to the kilometer how much time remained before they reached the farm.

That quaint word for the massive warehouse-sized encampment of reinforced structures housing tons of dense hardware, aisles of server racks, miles of color-coded, fiber optic cabling didn’t do justice to the enormity of the place or its expense. The chilled water systems and high-powered fans alone cost hundreds of thousands to the company back in Silicon Valley.  

She picked the last Coca-Cola swimming in tepid water from the ice chest. She rarely drank soda pop in the States; in sub-Saharan Africa, she couldn’t go a hundred yards without a cold soft drink. Yellow-headed daffodils would be trying to burst through rotten snow back home.

“The company should have picked Niger,” O’Brien said. “I like that country.”