Free African Ice by Jeff Buick

lay strewn about. The stench was overpowering. They rolled up the windows, but nothing could stop the smell from entering the trucks. Babies suckled dry breasts, and the eyes that stared back at them were tired and haunted. Samantha turned away. This was the side of Africa that sickened her—the starving children, lacking even the simplest of life’s necessities. They crested the last of Kigali’s four hills, and swung onto the country road heading northwest.
    What had been poor road conditions in Kigali became horrendous. It was mid-May, and the February-to-April rainy season had just ended. The road was unpaved and deeply rutted. In places water still pooled, and the drivers took care to skirt these puddles, not knowing how deep they might be. The going was slow, and Samantha calculated they would reach Gisenyi, on the Rwandan side of the border, just before dusk. An entire day to travel sixty miles.
    Ahead of them to the north loomed the Virunga Mountains. Drenched in foliage like an undulating green veil, they both welcomed and threatened visitors. From a distance, the rifts and valleys looked peaceful and serene, but when the group began the uphill climb into the hills, the road became a treacherous series of switchbacks. No guardrails protected the Land Rovers from the sheer drops that punctuated the drive, and the muddy road was slick from the recent rains. Numerous times, the four-wheel-drive vehicles came perilously close to sliding off the road and down the steep hills bordering the canyons.
    They crested the southern range at Ruhengeri and began the equally tricky drive down the other side of the pass. This time, the trucks had gravity pulling them toward the edges as they inched forward, and Sam simply closed her eyes a few times, willing the truck to stay on the road. It was more than two hours and a few miles from Gisenyi before they reached level ground. They made good time once on flatter terrain, and pulled into the border town of Gisenyi at four o’clock.
    Samantha was taken aback by the condition of the town. Once a destination spot for wealthy European tourists, Gisenyi was now a shell of its former self. The beaches bordering Lake Kivu were still rimmed with glistening white sand, but the backbone of the town was broken. The formerly impeccable stucco hotels that lined the main drag were covered with English, French, and Kinyarwanda graffiti. From what she could read, the messages were hateful and reflected the violence that had previously shrouded the country. Garbage littered the paved streets, and poverty, not affluence, now gripped the village.
    Their drivers motored through the town center to the border crossing, stopping or slowing on occasion to allow a wayward potbelly pig to cross the road. Samantha dug around in her pack looking for her passport as they pulled up to the shack that housed the border guards. A young soldier, his military shirt unbuttoned to his navel, moved slowly from the shade toward the Land Rovers. A rifle was slung over his shoulder. Two more border guards exited from the shack, both with their rifles horizontal.
    â€œCan I see your papers?” the guard asked. He spoke French.
    â€œOf course,” Travis answered back in the same language, one of three other tongues he’d learned while with the SEALs. He gathered passports from Samantha and Hal and handed them over. Acundo and his partner also gave the man their DROC passports. The young guard looked flippantly through the DROC papers and handed them back. He studied the American papers closely, then motioned for the driver to turn the truck off. He moved to the second truck and repeated the procedure. As he took the five American passports into the guard shack, he said something to the other two soldiers, and they moved closer to the trucks, the safeties off their weapons.
    Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Travis grew restless with the wait, and when the elapsed time hit twenty minutes, he opened