Warren Murphy: Slave Safari

"Ah, Remo, glad to see you," said now-General William Forsythe Butler, quickly climbing the once-white front steps of the hotel. "I've got a bit of bad news for you. The bit is you're returning to America this afternoon. But I've got some good news for you too."

Remo smiled perfunctorily,

"The good news is I'll be going with you and I'd be happy to answer every question you have. As a matter of fact, Busati feels it owes you a favour which it hopes to repay."

"By kicking me out of the country?"

"President Obode has had some very disappointing experiences with white journalists."

"Then why'd you say I could get to see him?"

"I thought I could prevail upon him but I couldn't." Butler shrugged, a big muscular shrug of his shoulders. "We'll talk about it some more on the way to the airport."

Frankly, Butler was relieved that this Remo Mueller would be leaving the country since the fewer Americans there were nosing around, the less chance of the white house being discovered. That relief only grew when he got his first look at Remo Mueller's travelling companion, an aged Oriental who padded silently out of the Busati Hotel behind Remo, acknowledged Butler's lukewarm greeting with a silent stare, and sat like stone in the back seat of the jeep.

What was it Obode had said? "When East and West are like father and son near the Busati River, then a force that no man can stop will come to shed blood in the river and on the mountains."

East and West. The aged Oriental and the young white American.

Butler could do without Remo and the Oriental. He had his own interpretations of the legend… an interpretation that he knew would carry him to the Busatianp residential palace, and power over all the people of all the tribes.

He thought about this in silence as the jeep convoy rolled toward the airport, and then realized he was being a bad host

It was where the road banked in along the Busati River, that he turned toward the back seat to see how his passengers were doing,

They were gone.

"What the hell?" said Butler. "Stop the damned convoy."

He looked at his driver, then looked back to the rear seats. They were indeed empty.

"Did you see them jump out?" asked Butler, almost as a reprimand.

"No, General," said the driver. "I didn't know they were gone. We were doing forty-five miles an hour, General."

The long convoy bunched up into tightly packed jeeps as it stopped on Busati's Route One and Only, which ran from the capital city to the airport. Butler could see for a half-mile in each direction. There was no sign of them.

"Their bodies must be up the road no more than a hundred meters or so, General."

Butler stood up in the jeep signalling to the vehicle cramped in tight behind him.

"Sergeant, did you see our passengers?"

"Sir?" called out the sergeant

"The white man and the Oriental. Did you see them jump from the jeep?"

The sergeant threw the snappy kind of British salute Butler hated so much. He used the word "sir" to punctuate his reply.

"Sir, no sir. No passengers observed leaving your vehicle, sir."

"Form search parties and scour the road. Fan out Find them. They do not know this earth."

"Sir, very good, sir," said the sergeant.

But Remo and Chiun were not found, although it came to be believed that at least five men might have stumbled on them or on something, because the necks of the five were broken and they lay peacefully in search formation, the safeties off their rifles and their fingers on the feather-light triggers, as though a breeze of death had gently put them to sleep.

Three other men were missing, one of them a captain, but General Butler would not wait. He would not have waited if the gates of hell opened before him. He was going to catch a plane for America to settle the last payment on a three-hundred-year-old debt, and when that had been collected, the world might see greatness as it had not for thousands of years.

At the airport, Butler told his personal Army detachment to continue the search for the Oriental and the American and to hold them in custody until he got back. "I shall be back in two days," he said, and with that walked quickly to the loading ramp of the Air Busati 707, with British pilots and navigators.

Three years before, in an advertisement for Air Busati, two Hausas posed in pilots' uniforms for photographs and the planes emptied of passengers in less than a minute, most of the passengers being Hausas too.

This Butler remembered as he entered the plane on which he would be the only passenger and headed for the lounge in the back to change from his military uniform. Butler remembered the advertisement well. It did not appear in any African newspaper for fear of losing Air Busati the few passengers it had, but it made quite a hit in The New York Times where one militant several days later had called on the Busati Air Force to launch an immediate strike against South Africa.

The militant had held up the advertisement as he said: "Why don't these black pilots spearhead an attack on racist South Africa? I will tell you why. Because capitalism forces them to fly commercial airliners."

Butler had almost cried when he saw the news story about the militant, and when he thought that black men did indeed fly fighter aircraft—in America.

As the 707 jet rose sharply into the darkening Busati sky for the first leg of its journey to Kennedy Airport in New York City William Forsythe Butter leaned back in a reclining seat, aware that he was making his last trip west to a land to which centuries before his ancestors had been transported, shackled in the holds of ships built for carrying cattle.

Those trips had taken months. Many had died and many had thrown themselves overboard when they had a chance. They had come from many tribes—Lord, Hausa, Ashanti, Dahomey—and they would surrender this heritage to become a new people called "nigger." Few would ever find their way home.

William Forsythe Butler had found his way home. In the depths of his bitterness, he had found his home and his tribe and his people, and a curious legend that told him what he must do. Although in truth, he had always been the kind of boy—then man—who seemed to know what he would do and how he would do it.

When he was eleven years old in Paterson, New Jersey, he suddenly realized he was very fast afoot, as fast as the wind. He was reading when this realization overcame him. He told his sister,

"Get outa here, Billie, you're a fat chubkins," she had said.

"I know, sis, I know. But I'm fast. I mean, I got the speed in me."

"I can outrun you, fatty," said his sister.

"Today, yeah. But not next month. And the month after that you won't even see me."

"Ain't nobody gonna move that flab fast, fatty," said his older sister.

But Billie Butler knew. All he would have to do would be to find that speed in himself. And he did. In football, he became high school All-American, and did the same at Morgan State.

His performance there was good enough to get him an offer from the Philadelphia Browns which, at the time, had an interesting way of judging football talent. They could have done it with a light meter. If you were black and fast and didn't come from a Big Ten school, you were a cornerback. And if your name was William Forsythe Butler, you became Willie Butler. Not Bill, not Billie, but Willie.

"I don't want to play defence," Butler had told them. "I want to play offence. I know I can play offence." But the Browns already had one black halfback. Butler became a cornerback.

He swallowed his pride and tried to look straight ahead. He read about the black reawakening, which seemed to center around kids calling press conferences to announce imminent rebellions, which featured every sort of cuckoo in the black community being exalted by the white press as a black leader; and featured very few of his own people, the people who had sweat blood and tears and pain to wrest even the ownership of a home from a hostile land.