Acts of Faith

Well, it’s floodin’ down in Texas

And all the telephone lines are down . . .

Whipper Layton, banging out a slow blues beat on the drums. Long, mean riffs, mean but sad at the same time, poured from Stevie Ray’s guitar, notes running like muddy water over rocks, and Dare pictured a windowless cinder-block roadhouse with its complement of pickup trucks in the dirt parking lot and enough secondhand smoke inside to give you instant lung cancer, urban cowgirls grinding up against their urban cowboys never rode a horse cuz they don’t know how.


And I been tryin’ to call my baby

And Lord I can’t get a single sound . . .

Dark clouds are rollin’

Man, I’m standin’ out in the rain . . .

Yes, flood waters keep on rollin’

Mine’s about to drive poor me insane.

He tuned down the cassette player and pulled out the chart wedged between his seat and the pedestal, checked the course directions grease-penciled on the acetate cover, and then his dead-reckoning against the coordinates flashing on the GPS.

“Should be comin’ up on it in just a few minutes,” he said.

Mary, flying the plane, nodded. They were into their descent, the Hawker bobbing in the turbulent columns of hot air whirling up from the jumbled landscape below: grassy flats wedged between scattered beige hills; long narrow ridges of exposed rock smooth as the overturned hulls of ships, Nuban villages perched atop them. Suleiman had told him that the Nubans built their houses on hills and ridgetops for defense and because the air on the heights was healthier than in the hollows, advantages that had been nullified by the Sudanese air force. Easy targets for Antonovs and helicopter gunships, the villages were neither defensible nor healthy places to be. Some had been blasted back into their component dust, some were abandoned, makuti roofs rotted away so that, from above, the cylindrical huts looked like giant gopher holes.

The next tune drove hard, like a runaway train, echoes of Chuck Berry in the high, fast wails of Stevie Ray’s electric Fender.


Well, I’m a love-struck baby, I must confess . . .

Dare’s theme song. But how ridiculous for the veteran of four divorces, a man who suspected that all women were terrorists of the heart, to have his own kidnapped by someone who’d been, let’s see, in seventh grade when he was the age she was now. Was this what they called midlife crisis? That millions of men suffered the same emotional insanity didn’t comfort him; it made him feel worse about himself, because it meant he was no different from every other potbellied fiftyish male, and he’d never seen himself as a guy who ran with any herd.

“Visibility sure is rotten up here today,” she said, squinting into the brassy haze.

Not the slightest sign, not the vaguest blip, acknowledging that she sensed his attraction to her. That meant one of three things: she wasn’t very perceptive, she was pretending not to notice, in the interest of keeping their relationship strictly professional, or—the explanation he preferred—he’d done a very good job of masking his feelings, in the interest of maintaining his masculine pride.

He’d hoped that the shared routine of piloting the Hawker would have the same effect on his perception of her as it had on his perception of Sally McCabe, his copilot back when he was flying a 727 for Federal Express. That hope failed, he’d come to realize, because it hadn’t been the workaday association with Sally that had made her androgynous; it was Sally herself, a Miss Six o’Clock in the figure department, who never wore makeup and kept her hair cut boyishly short and was kind of boring, too. Not much amperage in Sally, whereas Mary had more than a twenty-four-volt battery and would need to wear a dropcloth to hide the virtues of her body. He liked the smart remarks that crackled from her mouth as much as he liked its shape. And those cascades of blond hair—well, Stevie Ray was singing now what that did to him.


Every time I see you, I feel so fine

My blood is runnin’ wild.

Her only interest in him, far as he could tell, was in his role as her mentor. She was competitive and ambitious. She admired Tara Whitcomb and was envious of her at the same time for establishing a feminine beachhead on one of the last male-held islands in the world. Commercial airlines, fearful of lawsuits alleging sex discrimination, courted female pilots, but there was no affirmative action program in the bush-pilot fraternity; a woman had to prove herself, and Mary was determined to do just that, eager to learn the tricks and techniques that would turn her from an average flier into a polished ace like Tara. The fine points that would shave minutes off the time it took her to reach cruising altitude, to save fuel costs. Things like that. He was just as eager to teach her, though he did so with conflicting hopes. Hope A was that his skills and knowledge would overwhelm her into falling in love with him; Hope B was that nothing of the sort would happen, sparing him, her, and Tony from entrapment in the awkward geometry of a love triangle. It was the more realistic hope by far, because his age, bulging gut, Dumbo the Elephant ears, and obnoxious ways were liabilities that outweighed his assets by a considerable margin. Hope B, however, dissolved in a stormy fusion of jealousy, heartache, and bug-eyed lust whenever he saw Mary and Tony walking hand in hand into the tent they shared. Hope A then would get the better of him, and he would give serious thought to putting a big move on her when her boyfriend was away, just to see what would happen. But he never got beyond the thinking stage. He behaved impeccably. No advances or innuendos; no invitations to meet him for a drink at the bar. Although he liked to think that his self-restraint evidenced a certain nobility in his character, proving that he treasured loyalty to his former first officer above all else, he knew it was due only to his fear of making a fool of himself.

“Dead ahead. The envy of every guy, lust-object of every size queen.”

Mary pointed through the windshield at the landmark, a red rock pillar, rounded at the tip, rising in the haze-dimmed light from between a pair of low testicular hills. A couple of months ago, when Dare took him up for an aerial tour of Nuba landing strips, Suleiman had dubbed this formation “The Mahdi’s Penis” in tribute to his hero’s manhood.

“You’ll make a shallow turn when we’re over it,” Dare instructed Mary. “Bearing three one zero. Michael’s boys are supposed to light a fire when they hear us, give us the wind direction by the smoke, but don’t count on it.”


She’s my sweet little thing

She’s my pride and joy

She’s my sweet little baby

And I’m her little lover boy.

“Wes, think we could conclude our program of in-flight entertainment? It’s distracting.”

He switched the cassette player off as she banked into the turn and commenced to descend, shooting over Manfred’s hospital, its new tin roof and the solar panels atop it glinting off the starboard wing. She dropped to two thousand feet, which became fifteen hundred when the land ascended to the plateau west of the hospital. A thousand feet now, eight hundred, coming in on her base leg. Zulu Two appeared in the distance, a red scar showing through the acacia trees.

Dare lowered the wheels.

“Gear down and locked. No smoke yet, like I figured.”

“I’ll make a pass. We can assess the wind ourselves. We don’t need no stinking smoke.”

“Flaps down.”

She reduced power to approach range and decreased altitude to five hundred feet, then two hundred, and now they could see Manfred’s cream-colored Land Rover, a Red Cross painted on its roof. (Dare thought it would make a fine aiming point for a Sudanese pilot.) Women porters, scores of them, waited near the airstrip, their dresses a kaleidoscope of colors amid the pale green scrub. Mary flew along the right edge of the runway, allowing Dare to visually inspect its condition. He saw a long strip of white cloth flying from a pole as a windsock. Suleiman would have thought of that in lieu of the smoke. A good man was Sul-ee-man.

“Got a little bit of a crosswind out of the southeast. We’ll have to come in at the rough end,” Dare said, referring to the corrugations, like the washboards in a gravel road, at the north end of the runway.

Mary circled around to bring the Hawker in on final, and as the plane was halfway through the turn, Dare caught something in his peripheral vision—movement of some kind, flickers of white in the dense forests that covered the western side of the plateau all the way out to where it fell steeply to another plain. He tried for a better look, but then Mary completed her maneuver and his side window was facing the opposite direction and the view out of hers was blocked by her head.

 

WHEN IBRAHIM HEARD it in the distance, he thought it was an Air Force Antonov. The sound grew louder. He couldn’t see the airplane, the forest here being thick, the trees too high, but he knew it must be flying low; most times the Antonovs, which in his opinion were flown by cowards, stayed up so far they made barely a whisper. He reined up to listen. Louder still, then faint, then loud again. Suddenly he didn’t hear it at all. Thinking it must have flown on out of earshot, he nudged Barakat forward; an instant later, realizing that the plane had landed and shut down its motors, he stopped again.

“Allah karim!” he muttered under his breath, for God was presenting him with an opportunity. He told Hamdan and the militia captain that the plan had changed; he wasn’t going to split his force. They would attack the airfield as one.

Hamdan balked, baffled by this order, and asked the reason for it. That was the Brothers’ way. They weren’t disciplined soldiers, like the captain’s men, trained to obey without questioning. The Brothers preferred discussion, and so he took a few moments, precious moments, to explain that the village wasn’t important; it would be nearly empty because most of the abid, maybe all, would be at the airfield unloading the plane, which was not an Antonov but a smuggler’s plane. It was now on the ground. That was why the sound had stopped so suddenly.

“If we move fast, we can capture everything that’s in it and destroy it before it takes off!” he went on, underscoring his urgency with extravagant gestures. “And take many abid captive besides!”

Hamdan’s confusion vanished, and an excited expression came to his face. The government had posted a standing reward of five hundred thousand pounds to any murahaleen commander who destroyed a smuggler’s airplane, and Hamdan knew that Ibrahim, the generous one, would share the reward. He also knew that the contraband cargo could be sold at fine prices in the marketplaces, in addition to whatever the captives fetched. This could be a very lucrative expedition. As for Ibrahim himself, he hoped for profits beyond the material. So far no commander had seized a plane. He would present Colonel Ahmar with a piece of this one as proof of his achievement; luster would be added to his fame, and the nazirship could be his for the asking. He was feeling much better about the jihad now. He gave Barakat his heels and rode on at a trot—the crowded trees wouldn’t allow anything faster—and the mass of horsemen wheeled to follow him.

 

“WO IST ES?”

When he was agitated, which in Dare’s experience was pretty near all the time, Gerhard Manfred reverted to his native language.

“Wo is what?”

“X-ray film! Where?”

It had taken less than fifteen minutes on the ground to turn the Hawker’s interior into a microwave, and the doctor was hemorrhaging sweat as he pawed through the stuff piled up in the forward end like a frantic shopper at a rummage sale.

“Should be right where you’re lookin’,” Dare said from the rear, where he was working up a dense sweat of his own, helping a couple of Nubans with the offloading. Cartons of surgical masks, surgical gloves, surgical instruments, syringes, and pills, plastic jerry cans of water, white sacks of sorghum and seed, farm and garden implements bound together with duct tape, bags of salt, boxes of soap and cooking oil, pots and pans in net bags, bundled T-shirts, shorts, and dresses collected by small-town church groups out on the Canadian steppes, wheelbarrows, and several bales of snow fence (Dare would love to see what use they would be put to) were tossed out the rear door into the hands of strapping SPLA guys, who hauled it across the runway and stacked it up and then came back for more while the female porters wrapped the supplies in shawls and blankets or stuffed them into baskets that they would transport on their heads, some to their villages, some to the hospital, half a day’s march away. Men seldom served as porters in these hills. Dare reckoned that would make a swell feminist issue if these people ever got enough of a break from war and hunger to think about feminist issues.

“Hey, y’all,” he called to a six-foot-six-inch bruiser carrying one small box. “This would go a lot faster if you put a bunch of those in one of those wheelbarrows and made one trip instead of a dozen.”

The man walked on.

“Hey! The wheelbarrow!”

“They don’t understand English, you fool!” Manfred snapped. His face was the scarlet of imminent stroke. “Why can’t I find this film? You are sure you brought it? I have three patients in urgent need of X-ray!”

F*cking kraut.

Dare went forward, caught his foot on a corner of the cargo net, and almost fell face-down onto a steel-banded box stenciled with a description of its contents.

“Here you go, Adolf Eichmann. Reckon you can’t read English.”

Manfred gazed down at the container reproachfully, as if it were a dog that hadn’t come when called. “That was a crude and insensitive remark you made just now to me.”

“Callin’ a man a fool ain’t my idea of sensitive.” On their first meeting, about two months ago, Dare had taken a deep and instantaneous dislike to the doctor, which Manfred never failed to nurture.

“But in your case, ‘fool’ is more accurate than referring to me as Adolf Eichmann,” he said.

“Hey, rafiki. I ain’t clever with my mouth, so I’ll tell you what. Call me a fool once more, and I’ll drop-kick you straight back to your butcher shop.”

Manfred regarded him for a moment, assessing the seriousness of Dare’s words. A warning or a promise? “You must understand how much stress I am having. More fighting now, and so more patients than ever. My logistics man Franco is sick with the diarrhea, so I had to leave my patients to drive myself to here.”

It wasn’t an apology, but the tone was less belligerent, confirming Dare’s belief that physical violence, or the threat of it, remained a useful tool in promoting civil behavior.

“My life of course is stress free,” he said, not yet willing to let things go. “Yup. One fun thing after another, like flyin’ five hundred miles across a war zone just to bring this stuff to you.”

“And I do thank you for it,” Manfred said, though with difficulty.

“Thank you? Did you say thank you? Well, holy shit. You’re welcome. So to show my appreciation, I’m gonna bring in some camo netting for you next trip, so y’all can cover up those solar panels and that shiny roof if you need to. You can see ’em for about a hundred miles.”

“The government continues to respect the hospital’s neutrality,” the doctor affirmed, sounding as if he were responding to a question at a press conference.

“I’ll bring it anyway. In case they get a change of heart.”

In Nuban, Manfred summoned one of the men from the rear of the plane, then climbed down the boarding stairs and crossed the runway to his Land Rover with the motions of a windup toy wound too tight, the Nuban following with the box of X-ray plates on his shoulder.

Dare noticed Suleiman stacking more of the medical supplies on the vehicle’s roof-rack. Mary, in the snug khakis that so flattered her ass, its delectable curve visible from fifty yards away, was photographing him. She took pictures compulsively; she had a film record of every mission they’d flown. He found this endearing.

He went into the cockpit and fetched two sandwiches and two Cokes from an insulated bag. Outside, the gift of the breeze was nullified by the full force of the afternoon sun, thumping his skull like an L.A. cop’s nightstick.

“I’m takin’ you to lunch, First Officer English.” He handed her a Coke and sandwich.

She unwrapped it and cautiously, as if something might jump out at her, parted the slices of bread to examine the contents. Finding them acceptable, she bit down as the wind raised her hair into a coxcomb. It was all he could do to restrain himself from smoothing the unruly strands, and he stepped away, munching on his baloney and cheese, and called out, “Ma’salame!” to Suleiman, who was lashing a tarp over the roof-rack.

“Ha-llo, Captain Wes. And how are you?”

“Pretty good. I’d be better if the offload speeded up. These boys don’t understand me when I tell ’em it’ll go faster if they put those wheelbarrows to use. Y’all mind tellin’ ’em for me? I’d like to be out of here before midnight.”

“Straight away, Captain Wes.”

After Suleiman got the work crews organized into a human conveyor belt, men pushing empty wheelbarrows to the plane and full ones from it, he said good-bye and levered his long frame into the Land Rover beside the doctor. The two drove off slowly down a rutted path not much wider than a city sidewalk. Guarded by a few SPLA soldiers, two dozen porters followed on foot, loads on their heads, their arched backs exaggerating the thrust of their breasts, the protrusion of their high, bubble-shaped butts.

“Y’know, lookin’ at them,” Dare remarked to Mary, “reminds me that my Baptist mama would’ve killed me, she ever found Playboy in the house. So I used to read National Geographic to look at the pictures of the nekked native women. I was in college before I realized that white women had tits, too.”

“Another charming commentary. I have to pee. Don’t leave without me.”

He lit his first cigarette of the day, pleased with himself for holding out this long, and returned to the Hawker to check on the offload’s progress. Ten, fifteen minutes more, he judged, then sat in the shade of a wing to finish his cigarette. Mary would scold him for smoking this close to the airplane. A dust-devil tripped across the runway. Some distance to the south, a great sheet of dust raised by some freak gust formed a scintillating curtain that blurred a far-off range of hills. Douglas and Fitzhugh had a romance going with the Nuba—Douglas called it the “real” Africa, as if the rest of the continent were an illusion—but it ranked high on Dare’s list of desolate places, and it took some doing for a place to qualify as desolate in the eyes of a man born and raised in West Texas. Another gang of porters was filing off into the scrub, flanked by their guards. He watched them, perplexed and amazed; several women were carrying loaded wheelbarrows on their heads.

Mary emerged from behind her privy bush and approached the plane with her sporty walk, a kind of straight-shouldered bounce. He turned aside, took a last puff, and snubbed the cigarette underfoot. A cold pain bolted through his chest; then he felt a frantic thudding against his breastbone and ribs. If he hadn’t experienced this unpleasant sensation before, he would have mistaken it for a coronary.

He waved to Mary to hurry up. When she got to him, he told her he was going to help finish the off-loading; she was to get the plane checked through for takeoff, so that all that would need doing when he took his seat was to start the engines.”I want to be ready to go the second the last box is off this airplane.”

“Sure.” She offered a Girl Scout salute in response to his Schwarzkopf-in-the-Persian-Gulf tone of voice. “What’s up?”

There was no way to tell her that he was experiencing a thoracic turbulence caused by an imaginary bird inside him that beat its wings furiously whenever he was in imminent danger. Even if Mary were to accept this feathered guardian angel as an actual being, she would want to know, What danger? And he would have to answer that he didn’t know because the canary’s warnings, like a watchdog’s bark in the night, alerted him to a threat without revealing its precise nature.

In the cargo bay, he dragged two sacks of sorghum across the floor and dumped them outside.

The dust cloud.

He’d noticed that it hadn’t moved when he turned to take a final drag of his smoke. If it had been raised by a high wind, it would have blown away, but it was hovering right where he’d glimpsed it a minute earlier, off to the south and low over the trees, which is what dust would do if it were stirred up, on a day of light airs, by movement on the ground. A lot of movement, judging from the amount of dust. And what was moving? Whatever it was he’d glimpsed when they were coming in for a landing, and he now realized what that was. He leaped from the plane and told the men unloading it, “Finished now! All done!” He waved his arms like a referee, then like someone shooing unruly kids out of a house. “You people have got to get going, now. Go on. Get going. Get a move on.”

He jogged to the side of the airstrip where the cargo was piled and grabbed a young woman by the arm and shoved her, pointing in the direction he wanted her to go, then back over his shoulder. “Get moving! Arabs!”

She gave him a fierce look. A couple of SPLA interposed themselves between her and Dare, and one pushed him backward with the flat of his rifle.

“You a*sholes! I ain’t your problem! Set up a firing line over there! Give these people a chance to get the hell out of here!” He snatched the soldier’s collar and spun him around, motioning at the dust in the distance. “Arabs! See!”

The scowling soldier poked him in the chest with the gun barrel. What a time for a failure in communication! He wished Suleiman and Manfred had stuck around a little longer. The Arabs are coming, the Arabs are coming. He was Paul Revere in the Nuba mountains, and no one could understand what he was trying to tell them.

 

“YA, IBRAHIM! YOU didn’t need to hit him. It’s worked out for the best. Allah ma’ana.”

The captain of militia carefully folded his scarf and retied it to his forehead. Behind him, atop the gentle rise on which he and Ibrahim Idris sat, the captain’s artillerymen were setting up the mortars, three of them, each leaning on two metal legs, the bombs stacked neatly on the ground.

Bombs, like the kind that killed Ganis.

“The trees here are not so many as in there,” the captain said, gesturing at the acacia forest they had passed through. “It would have been hard to find a place in there to fire the mortars, but here, not so many trees to get in the way, and from this little hill, I can see the target and adjust my fire immediately.” He pointed at the airfield, two, perhaps three kilometers to the north. The foreigners’ airplane was clearly visible to the unaided eye. “So you see,” the captain continued, “it has been for the best that these niggers got us lost. Perhaps God directed them to do that.”

One of the two Nuban guides sat nearby in sullen silence; the other, lying on his back and looking as though he had a large mango stuck in the side of his mouth, would be silent for a few days to come. A couple of minutes ago Ibrahim had broken his jaw with the butt of his Kalashnikov. The savages had cost them a great deal of time, stumbling in the woodlands. Instead of leading them straight to the airfield, the two had brought them here, well south of it, and as the country south of the airfield was more open than that to the west, it would be more difficult to achieve surprise. A look through the binoculars had also revealed a great many women leaving with things that had been unloaded from the plane. Far ahead of them, Ibrahim had observed the rolling dust of what he assumed was a motorcar or a lorry, and it was doubtlessly taking more things away. He concluded that the guides had got lost on purpose, delaying the murahaleen so their fellow Nubans could make off with the booty he regarded as belonging to him and the Brothers, while at the same time forcing him to attack from a disadvantageous direction. In a flare of temper, he ordered them to be executed as traitors, but the captain intervened, calming him by pointing out that the two abid weren’t smart enough to have devised such a ruse, besides which, the guides might be needed on the return journey. Ibrahim saw the sense in the captain’s advice, but his fury had to be appeased, and so he dismounted and struck the man with his rifle. If I don’t know the reason why, you will.

Now he stood beside Barakat as all around the murahaleen assembled for the attack. Their leaders commanded them in conversational voices—he’d adjured them to be as quiet as possible, as sound carried far in this flat, open country. The horses wheeled and snorted and pawed the ground and kicked up a lot of dust, more than Ibrahim Idris liked. A cloudburst would have been welcome, but God was not so with the murahaleen as to gray this blue, blue sky. The plan was to advance at a trot in two long lines, single-mounted warriors in the first rank, double-mounted in the second; at his signal—three rifle shots—the Brothers would charge at full gallop and, inshallah, overrun the infidel defenders, who did not appear to be many.

The maneuvering into position was going too slowly, and in his anxiety to attack, he disobeyed his own order for quiet and yelled, “Quickly, Brothers!” It would be impossible to catch up with the motorcar, but the porters could be overtaken easily by men on horseback—he would send a detachment in pursuit. His concern now was that all this delay would rob him of the airplane. There it sat with silent motors, so vulnerable. Grasping it with his eyes, actually seeing its size, shape, and color, had heightened his hunger to grasp it with his hands. A prize of war. His, his. God willing, he would also capture the foreigners who’d flown it. Perhaps that would bring an extra reward.

He saw that the first rank had got itself organized—three hundred murahaleen extending in a line nearly a half kilometer long—but the second was suffering from some confusion, which he intended to cure immediately. He jammed a booted foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle.

“Watch us through your glasses,” he said, looking down at the captain. “When you judge us halfway there, begin firing. Move the fire back from the near end of the airfield to the far. I don’t want my men blown up by yours.”

“Don’t worry.” The captain raised a fist. “Allahu akhbar.”

“Yes, of course. Allahu akhbar,” Ibrahim replied, for the form of it.

He pushed in among the jostling horses, whacking some with his whip, jabbing riders with the whip handle and calling out, “Quickly, you idiots, get yourselves straightened out!” Barakat’s nostrils flared and a wild look came to his eyes, and he shook and reared his head against the bit as Ibrahim held him to a slow walk. The men in the second rank were still having difficulties; the mounts weren’t accustomed to carrying two riders and were balky. He couldn’t wait any longer. Spurring Barakat, he trotted along the front line, a tall, bearded man in white on a chestnut Arabian, a ribbon of his turban streaming behind him. “Forward at a quick walk when I command it! Charge at my signal, three shots!” Repeating the order, he rode on. The acrid stink of sweating horseflesh and sweaty saddle leather was strong, his nose seemed so keen that he could distinguish the scent of his elephant-hide reins from those other smells. The hard sun sparked off rifle barrels and the trees glittered, greener than they were only minutes ago, and the ache in his joints had dissolved, and with it the reluctance he’d been feeling these past several days. The strange intoxication of battle’s prelude was the balm his body and spirit needed; would he be able to go back to herding cattle, would he return contented to the sweet, easy life he dreamed of nearly every day, or would he be restless, longing for these moments when his senses grew sharp and the quick, corsair’s blood leaped within him, and five hundred quick-blooded men on quick-blooded mounts waited to ride into combat at his word? He came to the end of the rank, turned, and cantered out to the front, where he halted. Standing in the stirrups, leaning well forward, he stuck his backside up in the air, looked back over his shoulder, and gave the command he was known for, the one the men loved to hear: “Follow my ass, Brothers! Follow my ass!”

 

A BLOSSOM OF smoke and a hard, flat, crunching explosion became Dare’s translator. The SPLA soldiers swung their weapons off their shoulders and ran for cover, hollering to one another. Crying out, the women sprinted away, a human herd in a blind animal panic. Lots of places to run out here, nowhere to hide, and there was nothing he could do for them now. The shell had burst toward the far end of the airstrip, but a good hundred yards to the east of it, a ranging round. He dashed for the plane and heard the whine and growl of the starboard engine starting up, then the port. Bless her, I’d fly to Mars with her. He ran up the steps and dogged the cargo door shut. Ca-rump. A second shell struck somewhere west of the airfield. The next would split the difference between the first two, and if the mortarmen knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t need another to have the runway zeroed in. His capacity for fast thinking and effective action in a crisis, the gift of his unreflective, pragmatic brain, went to work, bits and bytes of information flashing through his mental microcircuitry. Mortars firing from the south, that end of the runway pointing right at them, or almost. They’re going to walk their fire down the runway to try to hit the plane. Roll now, we’ll be moving into their fire, and it’s always harder for mortarmen to shorten their range than to lengthen it, so if we time it right, if we’re real f*cking lucky, they’ll be elevating their tubes and we’ll be airborne. He rammed the throttles forward, praying to the God he didn’t believe in. The Hawker bounced and squealed and rattled down the rough strip. She seemed, this insentient piece of metal, rubber, and rivets, to be conscious of the danger she was in. Dare didn’t say a word. Mary didn’t say a word. A gray-black flower bloomed fifty yards ahead and a little to the left. Plane and shrapnel sped toward each other, colliding in a splattering like the crackle of hail on a tin roof. One piece, or a rock thrown up the blast, struck a glancing blow at the side window behind Dare’s head. He couldn’t turn around to see if it had shattered. One-fifteen now. Rotation speed. He pulled back hard, the Hawker’s prop blades dug into the air, her nose tilted, and she was aloft, two shells exploding not far in front of her and fifty feet below, close enough for her to buck and shudder in the blast waves, as she would in a wind shear. Dare was sure her undercarriage had gotten peppered, how badly there was no way to know. She skimmed the trees beyond the runway’s end. Dead ahead was a sight that he knew would be engraved in his memory for as long as he had one. It looked like a rodeo stampede with all the cowboys dressed in bedsheets: a horde of robed horsemen galloping across the tree-spotted plateau. They were going to go through the scattered SPLA defenders like a semi-trailer through a snake-rail fence. The women wouldn’t have a chance.

At five hundred feet he made a hard left turn and saw riders swarming all over the plateau; saw, with the acuity that comes to human vision in situations of extreme stress, that several horsemen had halted and were firing at the Hawker. Trusting they would miss, shooting as they were from the saddle at a high, fast-flying target, he climbed away and called for the flaps. Mary acknowledged, and he called for gear, and Mary uttered the aviator’s favorite four-letter word, as useful in moments of mere annoyance as it is in moments of mortal danger, and quite often the last word recorded on the black box when a pilot runs out of altitude and ideas at the same time: “Shit!”

The gear light was still green, indicating that the wheels remained down and locked.

She pulled the knobbed lever once more, but the light stayed green. The absence of the thunk and thud of retracting gear and the Hawker’s vibrations declared that the problem wasn’t a faulty light switch.

“Shrapnel must have severed a hydraulic hose.”

She pointed at the annunciator light for leaking fluid; it was dark.

“Maybe we got a damaged circuit, too.”

They were making a hundred and sixty knots a thousand feet above the plain that lay like a waterless sea between the hospital and the Kologi hills.

“One more time.”

She pulled the lever again and said “Shit” again.

He glanced at her. Her complexion had the color of an oyster shell. “There is nothing so stimulating as to be shot at without effect.” So said Winston Churchill. Mary had been stimulated by that flap back in Somalia last year, but this was different. If he was right about the shell fragments, they’d been shot at with effect, the effects of which were yet to be determined.

“Shit is the watchword of the day,” he said, leveling off.

Mary asked what airspeed they had to maintain to avoid ripping the gear off the plane.

“What we’re doin’ now,” Dare answered. “One sixty. One sixty indicated will give us a true airspeed of two twenty at twenty thousand. Trouble is, with the gear down, the drag is gonna increase our fuel consumption a lot, and we might have nothin’ but fumes to land on if we try to make Loki.”

How much brighter their prospects would be in the civilized world. Call the tower, state the problem, request emergency vehicles, and while ground crews foam the runway, circle the airport, dumping fuel, and then come on in. He could think of only one advantage to this situation: it prevented him and Mary from dwelling on what had almost happened to them and on what was happening to the people they’d left behind. No way he could have saved them. Still, he felt that he’d abandoned them. He felt, despite the heart that bled solely for himself, that he’d incurred a debt.

Dare thought their best bet would be to land at the big UN airfield at Malakal, on the Nile. It was only a hundred and forty miles away, so they would have plenty of gas to get there. Plus, Malakal had fuel and a flight mechanic. If they needed parts for the repairs, he could radio Douglas to fly them in on the G1C.

“You work out a course. I’ll find us a way through that shit up ahead.”

He gestured out the windshield at a bastion of dark anvil-cumulus looming in the south. At the moment, he could not see an opening in them, nor in their image on the radar screen—a line of red ellipses welded end to end.