Macie Nze had done his best to mark the 4×4’s route, and by that guess its general destination. The sounds and smells coming through the open front windows made it apparent that he’d been taken into the bush. Deep into the bush to judge from the long, punishing drive, which already seemed to have gone on for half the night. Though his eyes were covered by a canvas hood or sack, he was convinced his captors had headed south for dozens of kilometers, and then east for dozens more, putting him somewhere near the Wonga-Wongé Preserve, if not within its actual boundaries.

Nze had fought to hang on to his wits, stay alert to surrounding noises, keep track of turns the vehicle had made . . . lefts, rights, curves wide or sharp. Orienting himself hadn’t been easy. Wherever he’d been brought and held for many hours after his abduction was clearly within the city limits, but he’d been forced to wear the hood the entire time and gotten only a vague sense of his starting point. Yet neither his negated eyesight, his fear, nor his constant discomfort—and occasionally dreadful pain—had stopped Nze from being able to tell when the 4×4 was crossing bridges or stopping at intersections. Or when its tires had left Port-Gentil’s paved streets and thoroughfares for the outlying bush country.

The feel of the unimproved roads he’d traveled ever since had held their own clues to his direction. Even a newcomer to the land could have differentiated between highway macadam and rutted wilderness path, and except for his four years abroad at university, Nze, who was a month shy of his fiftieth birthday, had lived in Gabon his entire life. He could identify the type of surfaces over which he’d been driven, whether coastal sand or laterite, a soft, iron-rich earth that was typical of inland marshes and lagoons, and would hold moisture through all but the harshest dry seasons. For a while now the laterite had been sucking at the vehicle’s wheels, causing it to pitch and yaw, repeatedly bogging it down in claylike red muck.

That continuous rocking was bad enough for Nze, but the jolts he took in the 4×4’s cargo section whenever it was pushed out of a bog were far worse, and had wrung stifled groans of agony through the thick band of duct tape over his mouth. After the abductors walked him from his temporary holding place—hooded, gagged, and at gunpoint—they had forced him to squat on his knees in the 4×4’s cargo section, and then bound his wrists and ankles together from behind with electrical cord. The first rattling bump had knocked Nze off balance onto his left side, flinging his body against a heavy tire stowed in back with him . . . presumably a spare. He’d remained there since, unable to pull himself up, the grooved pattern of its treads stamping into him through his clothes. Movement just worsened the abominable strain on his neck, back, and legs. And those sudden forward lurches of the vehicle, mon Dieu, they were almost unendurable.