Acts of Faith

BOOK TWO

Flights to the Dark Side


 

PART ONE

Nuba Day!

WHEN HE WAS asked, the next morning at breakfast, how his date with the old girlfriend had gone, Fitzhugh replied that he wasn’t the kind to kiss and tell. Douglas didn’t press him—he had bigger things on his mind. He was ebullient to the point of giddiness and barely touched his bacon and eggs, hands flying with Mediterranean abandon as he described the outstanding results of last night’s dinner with Adid. The one-man conglomerate had pledged to rescue Dare’s G1 from legal no-man’s-land—it would take no more than a phone call or two—and to make an initial investment of five hundred thousand dollars, with another half million to come. “A mil, Fitz! A cool mil!” Douglas gushed. “With that kind of money, we can buy two more planes, maybe three!” Adid had demanded quids for those quos—he was to participate in any major business decisions; he would not venture the second half of his investment until he saw a return on the first, along with a sound plan for expanding operations; finally, Dare could retain ownership of the Hawker 748 and continue leasing it to the company, but that cozy arrangement would not apply to the Gulfstream. If Dare wanted it out of hock, he had to agree to sell it to Knight Air, receiving in exchange company stock equal to its market value. Dare resisted at first, said he wanted twenty tons of cold metal in his hands, not pieces of paper. Adid argued that he couldn’t be expected to risk his assets when one of the partners wasn’t willing to risk his. If Dare was that skeptical about Knight Air’s future, then perhaps he, Adid, would need to rethink his offer. With no alternative except to continue waging a hopeless court battle, Dare gave in.

Fitzhugh couldn’t quite focus on the conversation or, rather, monologue; thoughts of the previous night distracted him. He’d been as nervous as a boy. Undressing her slowly, tentatively, he was fearful that Diana naked would not be half so attractive as she was clothed. He’d told himself that appearances shouldn’t matter, if he truly loved her; nevertheless, they did matter. Fortunately, his concerns along those lines proved unfounded. He knew women his age who would have traded bodies with her; and he was happy to discover that the marks the years had made on it possessed a kind of charm, like a warrior’s scars. He kissed the lines etched into her hands, the little belt of flab around her abdomen, the cellulite puckers on her thighs and hips; and he blessed her and loved her the more for the humor that overcame his awkwardness. Laughter in her eyes, she stroked his erection and said, “So glad I did this, Fitz. It would have been a waste of a natural resource if I didn’t.”

She’d left his room at six this morning, to make sure she wasn’t discovered by Fitzhugh’s companions. That bothered him—a woman like her ought not to be stealing out of a hotel in the predawn twilight. As Douglas rattled on—“Hassan suggested we market ourselves more aggressively, and that’s what we’re going to start doing the minute we’re back in Loki”—he felt almost breathless. He was caught up in a love affair that had gone from zero to a hundred overnight, and he wondered where it was headed, if it was headed anywhere. Then Dare, unshaven and smacking his lips, came down and joined them for breakfast.

 

ADID WORKED HIS MAGIC, and the G1 was soon in service, in a new coat of green and white. Two more pilots were hired, another two to fly a used twin Beechcraft bought with a portion of Adid’s investment to ferry aid workers to and from their assignments in Sudan. The company now had five aircraft—the two Gulfstreams, the Hawker, the Antonov, and the Beechcraft—and seventeen people on its payroll. Grow or die! Adid had proclaimed, but while Knight Air’s fleet and payroll had grown, its revenues had moved in the opposite direction. The rule that what was bad for the southern Sudanese was good for the company and vice versa had taken effect, with the advent of a new wet season as generous as the previous one had been penurious. Bahr el Ghazal was delivered from famine, and with the easing of the crisis there, invoices declined sharply. Frantic to meet Adid’s targets, Douglas hustled a contract with World Vision to deliver aid to Somalia. The G1 was taken to Nairobi to fly those missions. The Hawker and the G1C, meanwhile, continued to make runs into the Nuba mountains for IPA and the Friends of the Frontline, but not frequently enough to compensate for the shortfall. Douglas then decided to attempt once more to get the other independent agencies to commit to the Nuba. He devoted his not-inconsiderable mental energies to figuring out how to sell them on the idea and asked Fitzhugh to help him, but Fitzhugh wasn’t of much help because he was preoccupied.

He was required to go to Nairobi once a month to deposit Knight Air’s receipts and contrived reasons to send himself to the capital more often. He would arrive at Diana’s Karen estate with a briefcase, pretending he was there on business, to avoid scandalizing her staff. They would talk and take tea in the room where he’d met Douglas and Barrett for the first time, the open windows admitting a perfume of frangipani, bougainvillea, and hibiscus that doubled the light-headed feeling her nearness induced in him. He was amazed and gratified, how comfortable they were in each other’s company, talking about her work and his, about Africa’s plight, about books and politics; but there was a tension in every conversation, for they were eager to touch and kiss but had to restrain themselves, what with the presence of the servant, the cook, the housekeeper, the gardener, the driver, the groom, the askaris at the gate, and the restraint heightened their need until it became almost unbearable. Diana got some relief by riding after their conversations. Poor Fitzhugh had no outlet as he stood by the steel fence and watched her, cantering around and around in boots and a jacket pinched at the waist, her legs sheathed in jodhpurs. It was more than he could stand, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, thrilled by her mastery. When she took a jump, leaning forward in the saddle, her thighs and hips forming a delicious curve, woman and horse looked like one mythic being, poised in midair.

She wouldn’t allow him into her bedroom, again in the interests of propriety, but put him up in the guest house. She came to him there after her staff had gone to bed. Diana made love with an intense but bridled passion, her legs flung over his shoulders, her back arching at her orgasm, her head thrown back and her gasps becoming one long, muted cry that fell off into a silence in which he swore he could hear his blood and hers, flowing through their veins. In the early morning, before dawn, she would leave him and creep back into her own room. He never felt so lonely and desolate as he did then, with her scent impregnated in the sheets and on the pillow. After his third visit he was sure they weren’t fooling anyone, but it seemed the housekeeper, the cook, etc., would tolerate their mistress’s liaison so long as she respected their sensibilities and kept up appearances. How he resented them, forcing him and Diana to sneak around like adulterers. He wanted to sleep beside her in a mutual bed and wake up with her in the morning. He wanted them to have dinner together without a lot of strained dissembling. The thought of marrying her had slipped into his mind, though he knew that was impossible; knew as well that not all the impediments to it arose from the conventions and prejudices of the society she lived in but from himself. He would like to be a father someday, and although Diana had not yet undergone the change, it couldn’t be far off. Nor could he picture what a future with her would be like. When he reached her age, she would be seventy. Seventy! How would that work out? They couldn’t give any serious thought to the future. Rowers in a tide too strong for their oars, they could only go where it took them, out to sea or to an unknown shore.

He returned from one of their trysts to discover that another odd love affair had caused a crisis. The day before, Tony had marched into the office to announce that if Douglas didn’t get rid of Dare and Mary, he was going to quit. Said he’d rather starve than suffer the humiliation of being around those two—“a whore and a fat wanker,” as he described them. After recovering from his shock, Douglas pointed out that he couldn’t fire his partner and asked the reason for Tony’s outburst. “Talk to your f*cking partner” came the answer. Douglas did, and that provoked an argument between him and Dare. To the Texan’s remark that what he did with his personal life was of no concern to anyone, Douglas replied that it damned well was when it affected business. “Because of this high school shit, I’m going to lose a damn fine first officer!” In the end, a way was found to keep Tony on the payroll: Douglas transferred him to Nairobi to skipper the G1 on the Somalia runs, at an increase in salary, and brought the plane’s captain back to Loki to take Tony’s place as copilot on the G1C.

“So that little romantic intrigue is going to cost us another grand a month,” Douglas complained to Fitzhugh. “Dare and Mary, an item! Can you feature that? Talk about beauty and the beast. What the hell does she see in him?”

Involved as he was in his own intrigue, Fitzhugh elected not to speculate. The intricate equations that have bedeviled mathematicians for centuries were easier to solve than the riddles of the heart.

The problem in employee relations, combined with the financial stresses, made Douglas irritable and short-tempered. Once, in front of Fitzhugh and Rachel, he flung a pile of papers off the desk—they contained the business plan, which he was refining.

“I hate this!” he shouted. “You said it a while back, Fitz. Is this what we came here to do?”

“Yes, I did. But you see what’s causing this? It’s that wabenzi’s promise of more money. Forget that, and you’ll—”

“I’m not going to forget it, goddamn it! What the hell is the matter with you?” He paused and with a look directed the secretary to pick up the papers—Douglas wasn’t inclined to clean up the messes he made. “We have got to find some way to get those agencies on board. It’ll be good for us, it’ll be good for the people in the Nuba.”

“Win-win,” Fitzhugh murmured. “And the big mo.”

“There it is.”

Yes, there it was, Fitzhugh thought. Douglas was a soul split down the middle, the entrepreneur and the idealist. If he could enlist those agencies in his crusade, he could reconcile the halves of his divided self and serve God and Mammon at the same time.

A memoir written by a long-dead colonial official—Douglas had found it in a Nairobi bookshop—gave him an inspiration.

In the days when the British ruled Sudan, after Gatling guns and lyddite howitzer shells had opened the Native’s mind, disposing him to hear the missionary’s word and the lessons served up by apostles of Advancement and Justice—young men in topees and khaki drill who appeared in out-of-the-way places with vaccination kits or lists of crop production quotas or a contingent of Native policemen—a ceremony called Governor’s Day was held once a year. It provided a holiday for farmers and herdsmen, their chiefs with a venue to air their needs and gripes to His or Her Majesty’s representative, and him with a chance to tell His or Her Majesty’s subjects what the government would do for them and what it expected from them. The memoir contained a colorful account of a Governor’s Day celebration in the Nuba mountains, which Douglas read to Fitzhugh and Rachel one humid morning. It sounded like a real show, mingling aspects of imperial pomp with those of a tribal festival. A regimental band tooting the airs of empire; native soldiers presenting arms; turbaned dignitaries greeting the governor-general and his retinue of district officers; lofty speeches and exciting dances (the sort of dances that both shocked and captivated the Victorian mind, while reinforcing the conviction that it was the mind of a far superior civilization); and wrestling matches staged between champions cloaked in animal skins and plumed in ostrich feathers, grappling and tossing, bashing each other with iron bracelets that spilled as much blood as a bare-knuckle prizefight.

“Nuba Day!” Douglas cried out, closing the book with a clap and so startling the secretary that she accidentally hit the delete key on the desktop and sent an hour’s work into the ether.

“We must get a new computer. This one, you make one mistake and you lose everything and can’t retrieve it,” Rachel said.

“That’s what we’ll do! Nuba Day!”

Fitzhugh, working out flight schedules for the next day, looked up. He recognized from the tone of voice and the quick, mechanical pacing, like a sentry’s at a memorial tomb—one two three four turn about one two three four turn about—that Douglas was in the throes of what he called a “cool idea.” Cool ideas were not like ordinary ideas—he didn’t have them, he experienced them, as an epileptic experiences seizures.

“So we’ll do the same thing, only we’ll call it Nuba Day!” he said, coming to a halt to face his audience of two, though he seemed to be talking mostly to himself.

Fitzhugh asked what the purpose of this event would be. To make the relief agencies aware of the Nubans’ plight and convince them to send assistance—via Knight Air, Douglas answered, as if the purpose were so obvious it didn’t need explaining. Pacing the room, he outlined a plan in staccato bursts, and Fitzhugh realized he was making it up as he went along.

A representative from each NGO would be flown to the mountains, to—where? To St. Andrew’s mission, that would be the perfect setting . . . Michael Goraende would assemble tribal officials to describe what their people were going through and their needs . . . The agencies would hear it first hand . . . We’ll need translators and sound equipment, and a generator for that, maybe solar panels if we can’t get a generator . . . And Manfred! We’ll bring the German in to talk about his hospital and the problems he’s got, keeping it in operation . . . Okay, it shouldn’t be all work . . . The Nubans would do a traditional dance for entertainment, and wrestling matches . . . Michael could set that up, too, that would be a sight to see . . . And maybe we could stretch it into two days, have those agency people spend a night in a Nuban village and see for themselves what things are like up there . . . Media! Christ, if we could round up a couple of reporters . . . Hey, I know—that woman who works for those slave redemption people, Quinette? They deal with the media all the time, maybe she would help us get some coverage. The Arabs are taking captives in the Nuba, same as they are in the south, that should get her group interested . . . Okay, I’ll work with Michael and Manfred, setting things up at that end—Fitz, you’ll be in charge at this end, lining up the NGOs, and tell ’em we’ll fly ’em up there free of charge . . .

Douglas’s enthusiasm was infectious, as always; yet Fitzhugh foresaw any number of problems, with communications, with timing and coordination and security. And if the scheme didn’t work, providing nothing more than some amusement and an all-expenses-paid adventure for the aid workers, much time, effort, and money would have been wasted. He aired none of these thoughts. He knew from previous experience that it would do no good, when Douglas was gripped by a cool idea, to present the difficulties standing in the way of its realization and suggest they deal with them ahead of time. Something in his nature—the font of his confidence, his optimism, his immunity to self-doubt—prevented him from seeing obstacles to his plans until they confronted him directly. His misgivings aside, Fitzhugh thought the scheme could be made to work.

“I’ll get on it as soon as I can,” he said, then returned to the flight schedules. Finished with that task, he took a legal pad and ballpoint and began to list the things that would need doing to turn Douglas’s cool idea into a reality. This was expected of him, the right-hand man. He expected it of himself.

 

THE PLANE SHUDDERED in wing-wagging leaps and sudden dips, and Quinette’s delicate stomach felt each one. A week of Cipro and Imodium had tamed the dysentery but hadn’t conquered it. As miserable as it had made her—it felt as if ground glass were in her belly—she’d welcomed the infection; it was part of her initiation into the sorority Lily Hanrahan and Anne Derby belonged to—the Honorable Order of Old Africa Hands, they called it. You couldn’t be considered for membership until you’d survived at least one bout of amoebic and another of malaria. She’d dodged malaria so far but figured she’d catch it eventually and in a way looked forward to it. She envied Lily and Anne their sufferings. They’d passed a test.

Lily was suffering now. Her complexion matched her name as she sat on the canvas jumpseat, her rucksack clamped between her knees. Even the Kenyan cameramen on Lily’s left appeared to be turning a shade of white tinged with green, and Phyllis Rappaport was holding a barf bag to her mouth. The reporter’s distress caused a bubble of pleasure to rise in Quinette. Phyllis was the same acerbic woman she’d met last year. It was hard to tolerate her, much less embrace her with Christian love. This morning, as they were boarding the plane, was a good example. Because of Quinette’s efforts, Phyllis had been included in the press pool, the first to go into the Nuba mountains. Did she say thanks? No. Attitude instead of gratitude, that’s what Quinette got from her. “What are they doing here?” she’d asked, indicating the other two correspondents. “You told me I was getting an exclusive.”

“I don’t think I said that at all.”

“I think you did.” Phyllis took a step closer. “Look, Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen aren’t exactly glued to the TV, waiting to hear the latest news from Sudan. I sold the news desk on this story on the basis that it was a CNN exclusive. What do I say when they see it in The New York Times and on the AP wire? That I fell for your bullshit?”

Drawing a few words from the vocabulary she’d stopped using after she was saved, Quinette reminded Phyllis that the press release she’d sent to news bureaus in Nairobi had told everybody the same thing: a group of relief workers was going into the Nuba; there would be room on the plane for a limited number of media people; this was an exclusive opportunity to report from an arena of the war that had so far been uncovered. Exclusive opportunity didn’t mean the same thing as an exclusive.

“That’s cute,” Phyllis said. “You’re a real wordsmith. Okay, I’m here. Guess I’ll make the most of it, but I’ll thank you not to bullshit me again, Mizz Hardin.”

As she climbed into the plane, it was all Quinette could do not to crack her on the back of her red-haired head. She’d worked so hard on drafting the message, striving to make it as enticing as possible without going overboard. Fitz had given her a little help, but most of the wording was hers. Yes, she had changed “unique opportunity” to “exclusive opportunity” because she’d become familiar enough with reporters and their wants to know that the word exclusive would pique their interest; but it wasn’t as though she’d lied. She’d presented the final draft to Fitz for his approval. She was proud of her effort; proud too that the people at Knight Air had had enough confidence in her to admit her into their clubby circle and give her a role to play in one of their operations. Fitz had approached her, told her what he and Douglas were planning to do—they were removing the cloak of secrecy from their activities—and asked if she could help them get press coverage. She knew most of the correspondents in Nairobi—at one time or another, they’d gone with her and Ken and Jim Prewitt on redemption missions—and she gave him the names of two print reporters. What about TV? TV coverage was what they really needed. Quinette suggested CNN. Later, she contacted Ken in Switzerland, asking him to authorize her to go on the trip. It would be, she argued, a fact-finding mission to learn about the slave trade in the Nuba, though in truth her motives were more personal than professional. She was curious about that mysterious region; she wanted to see it.

Mary emerged from the cockpit, looking jauntily professional in her aviator’s shirt and cocked baseball cap with earphones clamped over it. She leaned for support against the cargo pallets stacked in the middle of the airplane and, raising her voice above the engine noise and the cacophony of bangs, rattles, and bumps, apologized for the rough ride. “We’ll be out of this soon and it’ll be smooth sailing. We should have you back on Mother Earth in about an hour.”

“An hour,” Lily groaned as Mary returned to the cockpit. “A bloody hour of this, and I’ll be ready for hospital.”

Quinette looked out the porthole, streaked with quivering filaments of rain, and watched the wing knifing through dense, roiling clouds, vapor trailing from its tip. Her heart nearly stopped when lightning lit up the gloom. The plane shuddered. She felt it was her responsibility to pray for all. Don’t let any lightning hit us, Lord. Hold us in the hollow of your hand. She couldn’t imagine that a merciful God would send them on this mission, only to have them die pointlessly in a crash.

 

“HOW’S EVERYTHING BACK THERE?”

“Much longer in this shit, and we’ll run out of barf bags,” Mary answered, looking a little peaked herself. “Good thing I thought to bring them.”

“Nuthin’ like a woman’s touch.”

“Right. Next thing I’ll hang curtains.”

Dare laughed, keeping both hands firmly on the yoke. He never felt so at one with an aircraft as in a thunderstorm, a unity he compared to a champion rodeo-rider’s with a bronc, anticipating each buck, jump, and twist so that he knew what the horse was going to do before the horse knew. Dropping his glance from the rain-webbed windshield to the altimeter and radar screen, he said, “A few more minutes, we’ll be there.”

“Wonder what our passengers would say if they knew they were guinea pigs in an experiment.”

“This ain’t an experiment.”

“Wes, you’ve got a college degree, why do you insist on speaking like a rube?”

Mary, he’d come to find out, was big on proper grammar and syntax. “It’s my way of stayin’ in touch with my roots. Like I said, this ain’t an experiment. I’ve done it dozens of times. What this is, it’s part of your postgraduate education, darlin’.” Now that they were officially lovers, she’d ceased her objections to that term of endearment. “We don’t waste fuel goin’ around thunderstorms, we fly into ’em and use ’em to get a free ride up. There’s good pilots and then there’s really good pilots, and really good pilots know how to get the most out of every drop of gas. Gas is money.”

“Okay, professor.”

His skills and knowledge—as long as he held on to them, he would hold on to her. The plane jumped, as if yanked by a string; then the string parted, and it fell. A few moments later it was out of the turbulence and in the aerial equivalent of a millpond. The altimeter began to tick upward without a change in altitude.

“We’re in the elevator now,” Dare said, meaning the shaft of warm air rising in the heart of the storm. The Hawker rose with it toward the anvil as effortlessly as a soaring bird riding a thermal. “No stops till the penthouse. It’s rough goin’ in, and it can be rough goin’ out if the storm’s big enough—y’all want a big storm because then the column of hot air is big enough for you to stay inside the shaft—but it sure is smooth once you’re inside. Now we ease up on the gas pedal.” He pulled the throttle levers back. “See? It’s as easy as losin’ your kid’s child support money in Vegas.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. Heard from yours lately?”

“Me and Bobby mostly communicate by rumor,” Dare quipped, masking a hurt that had never healed completely. “Last I heard—it was a year ago—he’d started University of Texas at Austin.”

“How much do you reduce power?” Mary asked, returning to her lesson.

“Depends. One time—this was in Honduras—I rode one of these, and it spit us out at thirty-two thousand with both engines damned near on idle.”

“My hero!” she said in a falsetto to make sure he didn’t take her seriously. In case he didn’t get the message, she turned to him and stuck out her tongue. A little innocent razzing mixed in, he judged, with some genuine resentment.

In the weeks following their romp in Malakal, she’d managed to duck the consequences by sleeping with both him and Tony; with Tony in the tent they shared in Loki, with Dare on a sleeping bag in the Hawker after they were finished with an offload—the aviator’s version of getting laid in the backseat of a car, but with more room. He was surprised at Mary’s capacity for compartmentalizing her emotions. They would finish up, she would dress and climb into her first officer’s seat and be all business; and at the Hotel California mess, she would sit next to Tony and feign that everything was as it had been, feign so well that Dare began to entertain serious doubts about her. Her ability to pretend suggested a sociopathic personality, though he was doing a credible job of pretending himself. Sometimes he felt sorry for his former copilot, which made him all the more uneasy about his present copilot—if she could lie so convincingly to Tony, then she could lie to him, too. Still, he found the arrangement convenient if not altogether satisfactory. Like an affair with a married woman, it spared him from making a commitment that could draw him into another marriage. As much as he loved her, he didn’t think he could take that drastic step ever again. He’d once heard a second marriage called “the triumph of hope over experience.” By that standard, a fifth would be considered the triumph of sheer insanity. So he was content to let things go along in their sordid, furtive way. But Mary wasn’t.

Whether her conscience got the better of her, or the tension got to her, he couldn’t say. Whatever, she told him, one day on a short hop into eastern Sudan, that she was “sick of living a lie.” She was going to break it off with Tony, as gently as she could. Dare’s feelings were mixed. He was gratified she had found a bottom to her reservoir of pretense, but he was anxious. “Y’all don’t have to tell him everything,” he’d advised. “Just say your feelings have changed, you want to move out.” That isn’t what she told Tony. She didn’t tell him anything. Her nerve failed her, and all she did was to stop making love to him, pleading the standard excuses from the female playbook. That he fell for this, not for a few days but for two full weeks, caused Dare’s pity to sour into contempt. If the Aussie was that lunk-headed, he deserved to lose her. Finally, Tony confronted her, asking what the hell was going on, and she broke down and confessed. Confessed to it all and took the brunt of his anger, which included a backhanded crack that knocked her down and blackened her eye. She said she didn’t mind the blow, she’d earned it and felt that it paid her debt in one installment. Dare wasn’t so tolerant. He went to Tony’s tent. “I’m the worst pig there is,” he said, “but I ain’t never laid a hand on a woman. You had best not even think of hurting her again.” Tony was silent but not intimidated. “Y’all need to hit someone, here I am.” Tony said, “In my own time, mate. You’ll hear from me in my own time, my own way,” and gave a look that Dare wouldn’t forget soon, hurt, betrayal, and wrath congealing into a glare that could have frozen meat.

Mary was at first ecstatic with relief—as if she’d beaten cancer, she’d said—but after a time the reaction set in. She got to feeling guilty and remorseful, and through some kind of twisty feminine logic (an oxymoron if ever there was one, Dare thought) she decided that Dare was to blame for the whole sorry mess, as if he were a matinee idol who’d stolen her from the boy next door.

So here they were, lovers flying cargo together, like those boy-girl teams of long-haul truckers. The thermal lifted them into the anvil, where lightning flickered, then popped them out into the bright ultraviolet at twenty-eight-five, and there abandoned them. Dare nudged the throttles forward. They didn’t need much to maintain cruising speed in the slender air.

He raised Douglas on the radio and asked for a report about conditions at Zulu Three, the airstrip nearest to the SPLA’s Nuban headquarters and the town of New Tourom. Skies clear, light wind out of the southeast, visibility couldn’t be better. A heavy rain last night had rendered the first fifty meters of the runway unusable, but the remaining eight hundred were in good shape. A rare pleasure, having a reliable source of information on the ground. In most cases he had to rely on local rebel commanders for assessments of landing conditions, and they inevitably exaggerated. Runways were always at least a hundred meters longer in their sunny reports than in reality, visibility infinite; strong crosswinds never blew, nor was there ever any fighting within fifty miles.

“How’s the security situation?”

“No worries,” came Douglas’s disembodied voice. “The Archangel has men posted on all the high ground and around the landing field. Haven’t seen a sign of the bad guys since we got here.”

“They’re all bad guys, rafiki, it’s just that some are worse than others,” Dare replied, and signed off.

Doug and Fitz had been in the mountains the past three days, shuttling tribal dignitaries to the mission from far-flung villages and setting up the stage and sound equipment for their extravaganza like a couple of rock concert impresarios. A real promoter, Doug was. If he laid off the high-minded speeches, Dare might begin to like him, but Doug the crusader lived side by side with Doug the promoter. He and Knight Air were going to be the Nubans’ saviors. Lately Dare found himself looking at his partner and all the do-gooders in Loki not with his usual cynicism but with anthropological curiosity. They were almost a distinct subspecies, possessing an ability to breathe in, to thrive on, the molds and pollens of altruism that caused him to suffer severe allergic reactions. What made them the way they were? His best guess—and he knew it wasn’t good enough—was that for one reason or another they needed to be needed.

He pushed the yoke, plunged back into the thunderstorm, and after another wild ride found smooth flying above fleets of stratocumulus that appeared motionless, as if tethered to the mat of grass and trees below. Silvery watercourses threaded the plain, and solitary massifs rose from it. Westward, distance merged two mountain ranges into one, creating the impression of a continental coastline. Dare turned toward it, descending as he turned until he could make out the old British road that led to the town of Kauda, which was held by the SPLA. There the road ended in a junction with another, running south toward Talodi and north toward Heiban, which were in government hands, with army garrisons in both. He never liked coming into Zulu Three. The distance between it and the garrisons—never more than twenty miles in either direction—was much less than he cared for.

“Sometimes I think you and me ought to quit this,” he said, his glance flitting from the windshield to the instruments and back to the windshield, boxing the plain and the road and the blue mountains, drawing closer.

“And do what?” Mary asked, looking out the side window.

“I don’t know. Something else.”

She said nothing, squinting at something below. She reached behind her seat for the binoculars. “I’ll be damned. A whole herd of ostrich. Is that right? Herd? A gaggle of ostrich? A flock?”

“How about a covey?” Dare said. “And how about some feedback? One thing I can always count on from you is feedback.”

She put the binoculars down and sat primly erect, in a way that reminded him of a witness in a jury box. “I kind of like this work, y’know?”

“Wonderin’ all the time if you’re gonna get shot out of the sky or get mortared on the ground. You like that?”

“The work, I said. I like the work, and I like the money, and that other stuff goes with the territory. Got to take the shit with the sugar. I think we’re there, Dad.”

She jerked her head at the windshield to indicate Kauda, a cluster of tukuls and trees a few miles ahead and more than a mile below. Dare called for the flaps, and they came in on their base leg, swooping over rocky cornices and a bowl valley ringed by terraced hillsides. Dare spotted the airstrip, a long hashmark on the valley floor, and then white patches glinted through the camouflage netting thrown over Doug’s G1C, parked in a clearing at the edge of the runway, near a grove of palm trees. Just in case his partner had been mistaken about the absence of bad guys, he put the plane into a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, losing altitude at the same time so the Hawker dropped as if caught in a whirlpool. He reckoned the maneuver had his passengers reaching for their barf bags again.

Ten minutes later they were disembarking on wobbly legs into the cloying heat of a wet-season morning. A few looked ready to kiss the ground in gratitude. Two plus hours without a bathroom break sent a few more, that tall Bible-bouncer among them, scurrying for the bushes. They weren’t likely to find much privacy; the usual mob greeted the Hawker’s arrival. There were teenage rebels in ragged uniforms or in just plain rags, a few armed with spears, the rest with used and abused AK-47s. Men in shorts and ratty jelibiyas clambered into the dark, still-frigid cargo hold. Women porters, clad in flowered dresses or wrapped in kangas topped by T-shirts bearing the names of famous beers, American football teams, and Canadian hockey teams, streamed down from the ridge and swarmed across the runway to descend like flies on the cargo the men were tossing onto the ground: South African sugar and Egyptian powdered milk, pharmaceuticals, soap, plastic jerry cans, washbasins, and sorghum seed in sacks stamped CANADA or USA, boxes of pencils and school notebooks and one crate of Arabic-language Bibles. Four Nuban Land Rovers—camels—knelt down with flapping lips amid the boys with the guns and spears and the women and the listless, orange-haired children clinging to their mothers’ hips, tiny heads wobbling like the heads of puppets. Near Douglas’s plane stood a detachment of SPLA guerrillas who presented a sharp contrast to their tattered adolescent comrades. They wore canvas boots instead of flip-flops or sandals cut from truck tires. Their weapons were in top shape, their uniforms uniform, and they had the look and carriage of crack troops: veterans of the southern battlefields who now served as Michael Goraende’s bodyguard, although their job today would be to guard the tender bodies of the aid workers on the walk from the airstrip to New Tourom. It would be bad publicity for the cause if one or two of them were to get killed.

Douglas came up, his face sunburned, his jaw roughened by a three-day growth of sandy beard. “It’s coming off, almost can’t believe it myself.”

“Yeah. If somebody ever wants to restage Woodstock, I’ll give y’all a recommendation.” Dare motioned at the G1C. “Know what that looked like when we were comin’ in? Like a camouflaged airplane. You should get a few of these boys to stick some branches in that netting—that white fuselage shows up like bare tits in church.”

Douglas turned to look at the plane. “Why don’t you take care of that?” he asked in the harried voice of someone with more important things to do. “I’d better get everyone on the road. It’s a two-hour hike.”

Dare put the airfield sentries to work, and in about twenty minutes the plane was festooned with palm and acacia branches. By that time, the crowds had cleared out. A silence as oppressive as the heat fell over the airstrip. There was no sound except the wind, the rattle of palm leaves, and an occasional murmur from the pubescent sentries, lolling about in a manner that didn’t inspire confidence. One tore a page out of a pilfered Bible and used it as rolling paper for a cigarette, which Dare figured would do the kid more good than reading it would have done. Standing at the back of the airplane, cleaning his fingernails with the blade of his Leatherman, he watched the processional of aid workers, guards, porters, and laden camels winding up the ridge, around slabs of rock leaning like abandoned idols. Mary, who’d begun to add video footage to her photographic archives, was filming their departure with her new camcorder.

“Ever wonder where the hell they go with all that stuff?” he said. “I mean look at this place. Where is it? It’s nowhere. They pick it up in a nowhere place and take it to some other nowhere.”

“Is something bothering you, baby?” He loved it when she called him that. “You don’t seem quite yourself today.”

“Bothering me? I don’t know. Here’s what I’m thinking right now. As far as the people at Loki tower know, this airplane isn’t here. It’s three hundred miles away—I’m gettin’ right creative with those phony flight plans. And all that cargo those folks are carryin’ off from no place to no place, none of it was registered with Kenya customs. That midget Barrett pays the customs people off to avoid the duties. In so many words, we fly cargo that doesn’t officially exist on flights that don’t officially exist to places that don’t officially exist on anybody’s map. If you and me pranged up and got killed, nobody would know we were dead because we don’t officially exist. We’re phantoms, we’re the Flying Dutchman.”

She rubbed his arm up and down sweetly. “You’re thinking about flying those rock bands again, or the governor of Texas.”

“This kinda work, it doesn’t seem dignified for a man of my age and talents.”

“Love you, Wes, but I’m sticking with it. I’m not your age.”

“Stick with this, and you’ll catch up in no time.”

 

QUINETTE HAD NEVER FELT as far from home and all things familiar as she did out here, and this feeling pleased her. Resting with the others atop a promontory, she looked back at the way they’d come, the stony track winding downhill past a baobab, across a valley where huge rocks leaned into one another to form arches and tunnels, then up the western side of the ridge whose opposite slope faced the airstrip, the track vanishing in the flame-yellow grass near the ridge-crest, beyond which a savannah flung itself toward a far-off range that appeared to be an extension of the thunderclouds hovering above it. The Nuban landscape was more pleasing to the eye than the monotonous flatlands farther south, but it was tougher on the body. The scree was treacherous, ankles turned on the rocky trails, and the heat was intense despite the altitude. Sweat popped from every pore in Quinette’s skin, blackening her shirt and cotton trousers. Her hair, when she passed her fingers through it, felt like a mat of seaweed.

“What in the bloody hell did we get ourselves into,” said Lily, her fair cheeks and forehead reddened. “The Devil himself would need a cold pint in this place, and it’s only ten!”

Quinette jerked her head at the girls who’d been roped into service to carry the aid workers’ and reporters’ rucksacks. They wore cloth circlets on their heads for bearing the loads. “Look at them. They’re not complaining.”

“They live here,” Lily said emphatically. “I’d like to see how well they’d make out in a good cold Irish rain.”

Quinette was grateful for the many long treks she’d made with Ken, and for her regimen of walking and biking every day in Loki. Weakened though she was by her illness, she was in much better shape than her companions, sprawled out as if they were on a death march—except for the indefatigable Phyllis, taking notes, and two fit men who hadn’t allowed the porters to carry their packs and now stood with the packs on their backs as if to show off their physical superiority. One middle-aged, the other maybe thirty, both quiet and aloof, they were from California and belonged to the Friends of the Frontline.

“Everybody got their second wind?” Douglas Braithwaite called out, sounding as chipper as a scoutmaster on a hike. Lily was a little gaga over him and flirted with him, holding out her arm and asking him to help her to her feet. “Not much further,” he said, all white-bread handsome and smiling and barely a blot of sweat on his shirt. “Twenty minutes, half an hour at the outside.”

Single file, flanked by their SPLA escorts, the delegation of relief workers and correspondents trooped down from the promontory and made their way into New Tourom. The town lay on a plateau beneath bare crags and pinnacles resembling a fortress wall. Young women squatted in little gardens, pulling weeds, or went at the brute hard labor of pounding millet, mashing groundnuts on grindstones. A listless, melancholy air hung over the place. New Tourom had obviously once supported a much larger population. All around, crumbling tukuls stood amid farm fields and fruit orchards whose neat, domesticated ranks had been invaded by weeds and brambles. In the middle of town was the biggest church Quinette had so far seen in Sudan. Its tall windows had been blown out and gaped tragically in its brick walls, its domed tin roof was partly collapsed and full of holes. Among the outbuildings, one was undergoing repairs, but the others were wrecks: a long bungalow that looked as if it had been peppered from the blast of a giant shotgun; roofless, fire-blackened huts facing a dirt lane, two obliterated structures, nothing left but a few fragments of wall attached to cement-slab floors partly buried under shattered beams and chunks of concrete.

Douglas led his pilgrims to a dusty flat surrounded by low hills, forming a natural arena. It was thronged with people, assembled under fluttering flags, and here the atmosphere was festive.

“All right, folks, you’re about to be greeted Nuban style,” Douglas announced.

A weird noise split the air as a man sporting a pith helmet and sunglasses blew on an antelope horn with a long wooden tube fitted into one end. A mob of warriors, wearing loin cloths and feathered circlets tied to their arms and ankles, sprinted toward the visitors, waving spears longer than the men were tall, and they were quite tall, built like football players. Quinette saw Phyllis’s cameraman heft his video camera to his shoulder, then lower it, as if he were afraid the onrushing wild men would mistake it for a weapon and turn him into a human pincushion. They peeled off and began to dance around and around the visitors, stomping their feet to a drum; around and around, loosing incomprehensible cries with a trancelike glassiness in their eyes until, with a leap and a single ear-splitting yell, the dance ended, the mass of bodies parted, and Quinette and her companions found themselves facing two uniformed giants.

In a bass voice, smiling a smile that could have advertised toothpaste, the one on the left welcomed them and introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Goraende, the other as his adjutant, Major Kasli. At six feet five or six, Goraende was the shorter, but also broader, his shoulders and chest suggesting the solidity of a monument. He wore the badges of a high-ranking SPLA officer—scarlet beret, red and gold shoulder boards, carved walking stick, pistol—but the gold earrings that were pierced through the top of his left ear, the crucifix hanging from his throat, and the slight upturn to his full lips saved him from looking too stern and military. He shook everyone’s hand. When he enveloped Quinette’s, she had an urge to curtsy, his bearing was so dignified.

He brought them to a small wooden stand, shaded by a canvas tarp and facing a platform with a stand-up mike wired to a relic of a speaker wired to a solar panel. Quinette was surprised to see Diana Briggs and John Barrett sitting on the topmost bench. She almost didn’t recognize them, out of their usual context. A third person was with them, a stocky, frowning man with flaxen hair. She waved hello and took a seat in the front row. The crowd of Nubans had moved off into the shade of the surrounding acacia trees. A few men in turbans and jelibiyas remained nearby, standing in a line alongside Douglas.

For two sweltering hours, the delegation listened to speeches. Barrett led off, talking about the work International People’s Aid was doing in the Nuba, and pleading that it could not do it without help from other agencies. The stocky man followed, Gerhard Manfred, a doctor who ran a hospital in another part of the mountains. The gist of his address was that the government of Sudan made things difficult for him by stealing the supplies and equipment sent to him from Germany, forcing him to seek clandestine help from outside.

Then came the turbaned men, who were called meks. Like a master of ceremonies, Douglas introduced each by name. Their speeches took a long time, because they had to be translated from Nuban into Arabic by one man, then from Arabic into English by another. They told tales of bombings, raids, and abductions, of families driven off their farms and into concentration camps. That plucked a sympathetic chord in Quinette. Her family had not been exiled by bombs or raids, but she knew what it was like to lose your land and your place in the world, whether you were robbed of it by a violent tyranny or by the tyranny of banks and mortgages and big corporations.

The meks went on, and their stories added up to one long cry of need, one long appeal for the gears in the machinery of compassion to begin turning for them. The reporters and relief workers took notes during the first two or three speeches, but the litany of sorrows grew so repetitious that they stopped and just stared as if hypnotized. Until, after the last mek had said his piece, Michael Goraende mounted the platform with a stunning young woman six feet tall, with a kanga knotted over one shoulder, the top of her skull shaved, and the hair on the back of her head trailing in tight braids down past her shoulders. Her skin was as black as a panther’s and she moved like one, and the look of proud ferocity on her strong square-jawed face, accentuated by the tribal scars stitched across her eyebrows, completed the picture of dangerous beauty.

Goraende said that her name was Yamila and that she’d been taken captive a while ago and sold into slavery. Now she wished to tell the distinguished guests what had happened to her. Quinette removed her tape recorder from her fanny pack and handed it to the Arabic-to-English translator, instructing him to speak into it. The young woman’s fierce expression melted into one of fright as she stood awkwardly at the microphone and faced a score of strangers. The commander whispered to her, and she began in a halting monotone. Her story was one Quinette had by now heard hundreds of times, but it had one unusual twist: Yamila had escaped her Arab captor. One of his wives, jealous because Yamila had delivered a son whom the man doted on, helped her get away. With her child, she fled back into the mountains, found her home village a deserted ruin, and went on to a neighboring village, where she was given food and water. But the people there were from a different tribe and, fearing the Arabs would come after her, told her to leave. They directed her to New Tourom, where other refugees had settled. She arrived after a three-day journey on foot, but not before her breasts ran dry (from fear, exhaustion, lack of nourishment, Quinette surmised). Her son died on the night of the second day, and she carried his corpse the rest of the way and buried him in the mission cemetery.

Yamila stopped there, looking uncertainly at Goraende. Lily and a few other women in the stand choked up, but Quinette’s eyes were dry. “Takes some getting used to, but you don’t want to get too used to it,” Jean, the Canadian nurse, had advised her that first time in Sudan. She didn’t think she’d become hardened, she was only being professional when, as Yamila was about to leave, she asked her when and where she was captured, and the name of her master and how he’d treated her. The translator passed the questions on. “It was in the Moro hills, south of here,” the girl replied. “He was called Ibrahim Idris. He treated me not so bad.” She hesitated. “Not so bad as some others, if I did what he wanted.” She wouldn’t say more, stepped down, and with her head and back erect, walked away, toward the long shadow of a tree.

The audience’s bodies and emotions were given a break. A lunch of hard-boiled eggs, millet bread, and soda was served under a fly-tent lashed between two tall mahoganies. Quinette left the eggs alone and stuck to the millet, washing it down with a nearly boiling ginger ale.

Sitting on camp stools at two joined cafeteria tables, the group must have looked like one big safari party. Goraende was at the head, his adjutant to one side, eyes cloaked by opaque sunglasses. Fitz was giving an interview to the Times correspondent; Barrett, Diana, and the German had been cornered by Phyllis, while Douglas held court at the foot of the table, talking up his airline to Lily and a couple of other NGO representatives. Quinette had yet to form a firm opinion of him. Except for the squint lines at the corners of his pilot’s eyes, he looked like the frat boys she used to see on the UNI campus, and he sometimes displayed a frat boy’s cocksure, superior attitude. At the same time he had charm, a way of talking to you as if he considered you the most important person in the world, and his winsomeness was having an effect on Lily. She all but batted her eyelashes at him.

At the end of the meal Goraende rose to announce that his guests were to be treated to some traditional entertainment, wrestling matches.

Everyone returned to the field where the speeches had been made, once again alive with crowds gathered under their village banners, women in the background, men up front in a big circle. Wrestling, said John Barrett, who’d taken over from Douglas as master of ceremonies, was the Nubans’ national sport. Wearing ratty shorts or skirts made from strips of cloth or wide leather belts to which eagle and ostrich wings had been attached, the contestants came out blowing tin whistles and making animal noises or bird cries, their bodies daubed in ash from burned acacia leaves—it was supposed to protect them from harm, so Barrett said. Two men would square off, watched by a referee wearing a red fez. The object was to toss your adversary onto his back. Most bouts didn’t last more than fifteen or twenty seconds; several minutes if the wrestlers were evenly matched. They would go at it, locking arms, locking legs, bear-hugging each other. Sometimes two men would become so intertwined, with the ostrich or eagle wings flailing, that they looked like one eight-limbed being, part human, part bird. All the while, drums throbbed, antelope horns blew, the crowds yelled and cheered their favorites—a frenzy of noise, wild and breathtaking.

At the end of the last match the victor, a house of a man, was carried around by his fans. After they let him down, he strutted over to where Goraende and his adjutant were sitting, dropped to his knees, and made odd dancing movements with his hands and arms. At first Quinette thought he was dedicating his triumph to the SPLA commander. He looked amused by this demonstration, but when the wrestler raised his palms and lowered them, pressing them flat on the ground at his feet, Goraende’s expression turned serious. He strode into the center of the ring, conferred with the referee, then snatched, from a man nearby, a long pole with a wooden triangle at its top and banged it on the ground several times. A cheer went up, rippled through the crowd, and swelled into a roar.

“Well now, you are about to see something interesting, an unscheduled event,” Barrett explained to the bewildered visitors. “That fellow has challenged Michael to a match, and when one man challenges another like that, getting down on his knees, it can’t be refused. Michael, you should know, was a champion in his day, never defeated, but of course it isn’t his day anymore.”

Michael. Quinette decided she preferred his given name. Sitting at the far edge of her row, she had a clear view of him, stripping his clothes off some distance away. Apparently he was so at ease in his own skin that he didn’t mind baring it with a crowd of foreigners nearby. His one concession to modesty—if it was a concession and not merely an accident—was to stand facing away from them. Quinette averted her glance, but her own sense of decency wasn’t equal to her curiosity, and she looked again, watching him squat over a mound of ash to scoop handfuls over his shaved head and chest while an assistant covered his back. The ritual took a few minutes. When he stood, an arm crooked to rub ash into the back of his neck, his strong legs, taut buttocks, and flaring back, every inch powdered gray, arrested her gaze. She thought he looked like Adam the moment after God molded him from the dust of the earth and breathed life into him.

He did a literal girding up of loins, wrapping a red sash around his midsection, tucking the end between his legs and tying it off. Walking into the arena, he seemed shut up in his own world. His opponent was shorter but younger, with a tree trunk of a chest. The two men crouched face to face, elbows on their knees, hands out, and circled each other, looking for an opening. The younger man’s arm lashed out for Michael’s ankle, but he saw it coming, shot both legs backward, and as the challenger stumbled forward from his own momentum, whirled and gripped him around the waist from behind. The SPLA soldiers in the crowd let out a yell. The challenger twisted free, and both combatants were head to head, hands clasping the backs of each other’s necks. In that position they pushed, shoved, waltzed back and forth. Suddenly the challenger sidestepped, turning his immense torso at the same time. As his supporters bellowed, he hooked his left arm through Michael’s right and drove him to his hands and knees. Dropping to his own knees, he attempted to flip Michael onto his back, but with one palm on the ground, Michael spun away and got up to face his adversary once again. The challenger lunged with both arms for Michael’s head—a feint, for as Michael drew out of the crouch, raising his arms to block the move, the younger man ducked under his guard and clutched him in a bear hug. In that moment, their foreheads clashed with an audible crack. Michael wasn’t cut, but blood was streaming into his adversary’s eyes. Red blood on black skin, the coats of protective ash streaked with sweat—Quinette gasped at this exhibition, at the pure, raw maleness of it. Michael hooked one leg over the back of his opponent’s and tried to trip him. He might as well have tried to trip a stone block. Straining, grunting, his face a mask of pain and effort, the half-blinded challenger lifted Michael off his feet and pressed forward. Michael began to topple backward but pulled the challenger down with him, breaking the bear hug; then, in a quick, fluid motion, he locked his adversary’s arms in his, twisted sideways, and rolled him onto his back.

The defeated man lay there for a moment, panting. A couple of men rushed in to bind his wounded forehead with palm leaves. There was a delirium of shouts and yells as soldiers hoisted their champion onto their shoulders. Two women in Quinette’s group, sitting just in back of her, complained that this had been a bit too brutal, a bit too much. Maybe it had been, but there had been a real passion in it, too, Quinette thought. She jumped up and applauded as Michael was paraded by.

A fascination had been awakened in her, but she couldn’t admit that it was the reason she went to speak to him after he’d cleaned up and got back into his uniform. She persuaded herself that she needed more information about the slave trade in the Nuba. A few yards short of his circle of aides and bodyguards, a fit of shyness overcame her and she hesitated, lurking like someone who wants to join a cocktail party conversation but lacks the nerve. The adjutant spotted her.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Oh!” she said, startled. “I—I just wanted to say that we were all thrilled by the matches, and to congratulate the commander on his win.”

Michael laughed a laugh that sounded the way velvet felt and said he was lucky. He shouldn’t have accepted the challenge. The military commander of liberated Nuba had a certain dignity to uphold, and tussling in the dirt with a man ten years younger wasn’t the way to do it.

“We were told you had no choice, that you couldn’t turn him down.”

“I could have,” he said, twirling his walking stick in his long fingers. “I’m thirty-six years, and everyone knows that’s too old to be wrestling. Pride made me do it, and I was taught that pride goes before the fall.”

“Well, the other guy took the fall.”

“Ha! Yes, he did! That guy is strong, but he’s not very good, he only thinks he is. He was also tired from his previous match.”

She drew closer. It was a tad awkward, talking to a man she’d glimpsed in the buff only an hour ago.

Michael tapped the stick’s ivory handle in his palm. “And you are who?”

“Quinette Hardin.”

“American, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And you are with which agency?”

“It’s not an agency exactly. A human rights group, the WorldWide Christian Union.”

“Which does what?”

She told him and complimented his command of English.

“I see,” Michael said. “So, Miss Hardin, what do you speak besides English?”

“Nothing. Unless you want to count two years of high school Spanish.”

“I would be delighted to meet someday an American who speaks more than English. You Americans own the world now and you don’t have to learn.” There was no edge to the remark; he made it as if stating a mathematical fact. “But someday someone else will own the world, and then you’ll have to learn their language. Who do you think it will be? The Russians? The Arabs? The Chinese?”

“Couldn’t say. Never thought about it.”

“I’ll bet on the Chinese. The Arabs are too crazy to be masters of the world. The Russians are too drunk. But the Chinese, oh, they’re so disciplined and hardworking, and there are so many of them!” With a languid movement, he pointed the stick toward the mission, hidden in the trees a few hundred yards off. “I learned there. The Englishman’s English. The American English I learned taking military training at your Fort Benning in Georgia state. Do you know Georgia?”

“Not really. I’m from far away. Iowa.”

“Where our commander in chief went to university.”

“Yeah. Someone told me Garang went to Iowa State.”

“Iowa State,” Michael said distantly. “He studied agriculture, animal husbandry, I think. He’s a Dinka, and the Dinka are like the Arabs. How they love cattle. Cattle are their lives. They’re African cowboys, and the Arabs in Sudan are Arab cowboys. So this war, it’s not cowboys and Indians, it’s cowboys and cowboys.”

“What is it you wish to speak to the commander about?” the adjutant growled, bootlegging into the question an impatience with the chatter.

“I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,” Quinette said.

“Major Muhammad Kasli.”

You can’t get more Muslim than Muhammad, she thought. Lord, you needed a program and a scorecard to keep track of who was on whose side in this war. To entice the major out of his dour attitude, she offered her hand and the wide, friendly smile that came naturally to a midwesterner (the tyrannical farmbelt grin, Kristen used to call it, because it announced that the one who wore it was so inoffensive that the one upon whom it was bestowed didn’t dare to be otherwise). The pleasantries of the American heartland didn’t apply out here. Major Kasli merely nodded, without so much as a pleased to meet you.

“The major, Miss Hardin, sees to it that my time isn’t wasted,” Michael added, with the faintest trace of sarcasm.

She took the cue and stated her business. What was the extent of the slavery problem in the mountains? Any estimates of how many people had been seized?

“I don’t know much more than what I told you earlier,” Michael said with a weary shrug. “How many have been taken?” Another shrug. “A few, like that young woman who spoke to you, escape and give us some names. We get some informations from people whose families have paid Arab traders to return them.”

“We work a lot with a trader named Bashir. Is he one of them?”

“I have no idea.”

“I know of this Bashir,” Major Kasli interjected. “He’s gotten rich selling slaves back to freedom.”

Michael glanced at him sidelong, then said, “The taking of captives isn’t our problem, it’s the symptom of a problem.” Looking away, he waved his stick at the red wafer of the sun, suspended on the rim of the far ranges.”There’s the problem.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Quinette said.

“Those hills, and those over there, and those behind us. These mountains are so isolating. You have in one valley a village and you have in another valley another village and the people don’t even speak the same language. This makes it easy for the Arabs to give rewards to one tribe if they will join with the government. Yes, I’m sorry to report that many Nubans have been bribed to fight against their own people. The old tactic, divide and conquer, and we do half the work for them by dividing ourselves. Tribalism is the problem here, in all Sudan, in all of Africa. Who brought the first African slaves to the slave ships? Other Africans.”

He fell into a silence, looking at her as if he expected a response. She couldn’t think of any. Her only thought was that he was a strikingly handsome man.

He turned from her to glance over his shoulder, toward the mission and its surrounding village. “I would like to show you something, Miss Hardin. If you care to see it.”

“What?”

“What I hope will be a solution to the problem.”

In the dusk that had dropped like a stage curtain, they walked a rutted lane, past tightly clustered huts, Michael presenting verbal snapshots of the town when it had been home to more than two thousand souls. The thriving marketplace, the harvest festivals, the church filled with congregants, the school with pupils, their voices and laughter ringing in the air when classes were over.

“And then Khartoum’s bombers came, and then the raiders, and it became a village of ghosts,” he said. “Only a few people escaped death or captivity. Those drifted back and discovered that the Arabs had failed to destroy the wells. Why, no one knows. News of this traveled, and in time refugees from elsewhere began to arrive. Because there was water. Water is hope. These new settlers began to rebuild the houses, to plant gardens and tobacco and sorghum fields.” He stopped and motioned at a cooking fire, its glow illuminating the face of an old woman squatting before it. “She and her family are Moro tribesmen. And over there”—he walked further, toward the wink of a paraffin lamp—“are Nubans from the Tira hills. And there in those houses are Masakin Nuba.”

Quinette nodded to be polite. None of the tribal names meant anything to her. Off in the distance, men and women were dancing, drums and chants providing a kind of background music to Michael’s soliloquy.

“After I was given command of the SPLA forces in the Nuba and I saw what was happening here, I made my headquarters nearby. This is my main task—to unite the Nuba in a common cause. Very difficult, maybe impossible, but it begins here”—he stomped a foot—“because here the people have been uniting themselves. Without intending to, out of necessity, they’ve planted a seed. When you plant a garden, you build a fence around it. We fighters are the fence. Since we came, more people from all over the mountains have been settling in this refuge, and there have been no attacks. We now have almost half the original population, but from different tribes, learning one another’s dialects and customs, discovering what they have in common. New Tourom belongs to no one tribe, it belongs to all. Out of destruction, the seed of a new society, with the old divisions and suspicions set aside. Now we must nurture it, help it grow into a fine big tree.”

Darkness had fallen, a full moon had risen, and he stood in its light, a tall soldier speaking improbably like a visionary.

“Do you know what I think of when I see what’s happening here?”

“N-no,” she said, struck by the way his hands moved when he spoke; his fingers seemed to be plucking invisible harp strings in the air.

“My year in America, and the soldiers I trained with at Fort Benning. White soldiers, black soldiers, brown ones. Soldiers with English names and Spanish names and Chinese names, all fighting for the same flag. I read about your history. You people began with one small colony, no bigger than this village. And it drew others like a magnet. A nation of immigrants, you call yourselves. Aren’t these people here immigrants also? The relief organizations call them internally displaced persons, but I like to think of them as immigrants and of what’s happening here as a . . . what is the word I want? An experiment? And I intend to make this experiment a success.”

He led her to the mission, their legs swishing through knee-high grass. Michael stopped in front of the building that was under reconstruction, moved on to the long bungalow with flayed brick walls, then on to the row of roofless huts—living quarters for the teachers, he said—and from there to a shell that had been a clinic, to the carpentry and blacksmith shops, and finally to the church, crouched under the rock pinnacles. It had looked merely sad in the afternoon, but the moon transformed it and the damaged structures all around into something mysterious and romantic.

“For almost forty years this was here, not touched, till that day the Antonovs came.”

He pointed to a plaque, bolted into a stone pedestal, over which a brass bell hung from a tripod of steel rails. CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW. 1957.

“Catholic?” she asked.

“Oh, no. ECS. The Episcopal Church of Sudan. Let me show you inside.”

He opened the tall wooden door. Arrows of moonlight pierced the holes that bomb fragments had torn in the roof, and a diffuse beam fell through a gaping rip in the altar dome, illuminating the simple altar, some wooden pillars, and the halved logs that served as pews.

“I was baptized here,” he said, the words echoing in the cavernous interior.

She didn’t know why, but she was pleased to learn that he was Protestant.

“And the small man who spoke today, John Barrett, do you know him?”

“Yes.”

“He preached here some years ago. He was once Catholic, a priest, but one of our local girls caused him to change his mind.” Michael smiled. “Who could have thought then what would happen? That bombs would fall on a church?”

They went out and stood very near each other. In the cool night air she could feel the warmth coming off him and caught the rich, loamy scent of his skin, mingled with the sour odor of his unwashed uniform.

“When I was in school here”—looking directly at her—“the minister at the time taught us about doing certain things to show that we are true Christians. Acts of faith, he called them. To bring all this back would be an act of faith. Faith in the future. John’s agency and one other are helping us to rebuild the school. With more help we can rebuild the clinic and train nurses and medical assistants. We’ll rebuild the tailor shop and bring in sewing machines and teach women to use them. We’ll rebuild the carpentry and blacksmith shops so the men can make useful things. We’ll restore the church. It will be as it was, but better. All tribes living together in harmony. That’s the tree I hope will grow from the seed, and perhaps the winds will scatter its seeds through all the Nuba, all of southern Sudan.”

His voice seemed to set off vibrations that she could feel inside, like bass notes from an organ. She laid a hand on his forearm.

“What is it, Miss Hardin?”

“If you’d spoken like this today, all those other speeches would have been unnecessary. You should go back right now and tell everybody what you’ve just told me. You’ll have them lined up, ready to give you whatever you need.”

“Unfortunately, I’ve got to get back to my base.” He jerked his head. “It’s over that way.” He stood quietly for a few moments, tapping the ground with the walking stick. “Perhaps you could speak to the others for me?”

She sensed that this was more than a request; a commission, rather. “I will. I will do that.”

 

WITH OPEN EYES, she lay on her sleeping bag on a tukul’s floor. It wasn’t the long peals of thunder and the furious spatter of rain on the grass roof that kept her awake; it was the recordings of Michael’s voice playing in her mind, the mental pictures of his smooth blue-black skin dusted in ash that produced a euphoric insomnia, a little like the crystal-meth highs she’d experienced in her bad-girl period. What a difference between him and other rebel commanders she’d met in her travels, with their narrow, foxhole views of things, their petty squabbles and conspiracies. Here was a big man with big ideas, and how privileged she felt that he’d chosen to share them with her. She’d carried out her commission and shared them with her colleagues at a lamplit dinner under the fly-tent. Lily had interrupted her at one point, asking, “Did he appoint you as his spokeswoman? Why doesn’t he tell us what he’d like us to do himself?” Quinette told her why, but now she wondered if there might have been another reason for her appointment. She sat up and, peering at the prone forms of Lily and two other women, pondered the possibility that God was urging her to work on behalf of Michael’s plans. God would give her a clear signal in His own good time.

Outside the wind picked up, the canvas covering the doorway billowed and sagged with a snap, and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees in a few seconds. She wriggled into her sleeping bag and curled up, her arms between her legs. To muffle the racket of the rain against the roof, she pulled the sleeping bag over her head. In the darkness of that cocoon, she fell asleep to images of Michael’s fingers, strumming invisible strings in the air.