The very one...
If it's still there, yes, it is the Chicken Tetrazzini restaurant on the next street parallel to the one the BRC is on, the one that leads to that big market if you turn right, close to the main road to the airport which is reached by turning left.
All that advice about varying your route to work is all very well but there just aren't that many different ways to get to work from the BRC, are there?
The guys who shot up the bus were idiots. Once they opened fire what did they expect us to do, just sit there and wait to die? If they had held us at gunpoint without shooting they could have got whatever they wanted. The story we got was that they had tried and failed to rob a wealthy Nigerian up the road somewhere, when they must have blundered across us as we tried to cut into the usual heavy traffic, five ex-pats in a bus.
The stupid thing is that the American Embassy, for one, sell off their used vehicles, including some fitted with armour, so that it might be possible easily to source something like a Ford Econoline fitted with real Kevlar armour and run-flat tires and then re-fit it with bullet resistant glass. That would take some thought and a bit of action, of course. All we got were interviews with a Shell doctor and some little white pills to help us sleep, plus the usual BS about how deeply, deeply concerned they were about all this.
There is no intrinsic reason why a similar attack should not occur in the same way at the same place. Well, not that I can think of, so that, yes, I used to feel like a real chump sat in the same bus in the same place.
If they still have that white Ssangyong bus take a close look at the forward bench seat and you might see the little holes in the seat back I was writing about, one in the back and another in the front. You may also notice that the headrest on the right has a different covering. That is because it has a bullet hole right through it. I was keeping it for a souvenir until I saw the other holes, when it then really didn't seem to matter very much. I got it reupholstered and put it back in the bus after that.
The mind is a funny thing. I was sat there in that bus, bent way over with dirt jumping off the floor of the bus hard enough to sting my face as rounds came past, feeling rather depressed about all of that. Then I thought that I might as well see if I could get Isaac to get a move on, assuming we weren't blocked in. That worked a treat.
It all went so quickly that we were back at Doc Kupa's before the right rear tire had finished going flat from a shotgun pellet. Something like ten minutes, tops. The back of the bus looked as if someone had been killing chickens in there from where my British colleague had been bleeding heavily and I found that sight profoundly troubling. That seems a bit odd, doesn't it? It took a long time to get the sight out of my mind to the point where I could sleep at all well.
The whole thing quickly descended into farce at Doc Kupa's when my British colleague, now laid face-down on an operating table, made a very strange request...