Acts of Faith

FITZHUGH SAT IN the cockpit, the voiceless wind in his earphones ominous and irritating. He looked fixedly at the radio as if through sheer concentration he could force it to give the response that Douglas’s incantations had so far failed to produce. “Zulu Two Hotel, this is Foxtrot Twelve, do you read me, over.” Pause and repeat the call. Switch from the hospital’s frequency to Michael’s. “Archangel, Archangel, this is Foxtrot Twelve, do you read me, over.” Pause and repeat, but the answer was the same sibilant static.

It was seven-fifty, half an hour since the air strike. With his habitual pessimism, Fitzhugh feared no one was left alive to answer their calls.

Douglas pulled his headset off and said, “Okay, that’s it. We go in for a look.”

Fitzhugh was relieved; any form of action was preferable to waiting. He stuck his head out the window, calling down to Suleiman to remove the camouflage netting. Suleiman and the soldiers went to work while Douglas, with movements that reminded Fitzhugh of a pianist playing a complicated score, readied the plane for takeoff. Then came the jarring roll, the sensation of lightness as the wheels left the ground.

“I’ll make the pass from the north, into the wind,” Douglas said, pulling into a climb. “Two hundred feet at stall plus twenty, like an airdrop. You’ll be my eyes. That low and that slow, I’ll want to keep mine on the road.”

On the approach, Douglas dipped the right wing to give Fitzhugh a better view. The destruction was worse than he’d feared. Through a thin canopy of smoke, bomb craters, pulverized buildings, and puddles of fire passed below. He caught the glint of twisted tin roof. The new tin Knight Air had delivered months ago to replace the makuti in which snakes and spiders nested. The shiny metal, combined with the solar panels, must have made highly visible targets. That would explain the air strike’s accuracy. Thus the tin that had eliminated the danger of the patients suffering a bite had drawn the bombs that obliterated them in their beds. The law of unforeseen consequences was still in effect.

“See anybody moving around down there?” Douglas asked.

“Yes, but I couldn’t tell how many or who.”

“I’ll come around lower.”

They were above the savannah south of the hospital, the very one they had crossed on foot, in what seemed like another lifetime. Fitzhugh remembered that grueling night march and the festivities in Kowahla the following night. He remembered the bewitching moment when Suleiman’s youngest wife had flung her braids over his face and how, after he’d danced with her, he felt that he’d made a commitment to her and, through her, to all the people in these war-stricken mountains.

Coming in at a hundred feet and straight on, he could make out bodies strewn everywhere, like so much blown trash. Douglas cursed the fanatics who’d committed this atrocity; Fitzhugh cursed right along with him. The two men were in tune once again. Climbing away, banking tightly, descending again, they buzzed the compound a third time and spotted someone near a cluster of intact buildings, waving his arms at the oncoming plane. It was Michael.

Douglas wagged the wings. A moment later the radio came to life: “Foxtrot Twelve, this is Archangel.”

“You are loud and clear, Archangel! We’ve been trying to contact you. What’s the situation?”

Ghastly was what it was. Franco and Lily dead, Manfred slightly injured but in severe shock. Michael couldn’t estimate how many others had been killed or severely injured. He was going to collect the survivors and the walking wounded and lead them to the airstrip on foot. Both Land Rovers had been destroyed, so those who couldn’t walk would have to be left behind.

“We’ll see about that,” Douglas said, after pausing to absorb this information.

They arrived at a little past noon, faces plastered in dust and sweat: Michael trailed by Ulrika and Manfred, shoulders slumped, head held low, Quinette following with the radio operator and two orderlies, still clad in their smocks. They were carrying a body on a stretcher, covered by a blanket and attended by an assembly of eager flies whose buzzing was audible from several yards away. Lily’s pale arms hung over the sides and flopped back and forth in a disturbingly lifelike way. After setting her down at the side of the runway, Quinette and her fellow stretcher-bearers hurried into the shade of the Gulfstream’s wing. Her face was blanched. The water bottles in her fanny pack were drained. Fitzhugh passed his canteen to her. She nearly emptied it in one gulp, poured the rest over her head, and thanked him. He noticed that there was something different about her, a taut, drawn quality that accentuated the planes of her cheekbones. She lay down without a word. In two minutes, she was asleep.

Ulrika meanwhile attended to Manfred, sitting with his chin on his chest and his hands lying listlessly in his lap. Michael described what had happened to him. When he’d refused to leave the hospital and insisted on completing his “operation,” the nurse fetched a tranquilizer and syringe from the dispensary and sedated him. As difficult as it was to like him, Fitzhugh would have given anything to see him restored to his voluble, irascible self.

Quinette stirred, making an unintelligible sound. A remarkable young woman, said Michael. (Fitzhugh traded glances with Douglas as Michael placed a hand on her forehead and then stroked her long brown hair.) She would not allow her friend’s remains to be left behind. He had objected—carrying the body for ten kilometers would be exhausting—but Quinette prevailed, saying that she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try. Michael occasionally spelled his radio operator or one of the orderlies, but Quinette wouldn’t accept relief. She clung to the stretcher pole for that entire punishing walk.

The survivors straggled into the airfield for the next half hour. There weren’t many, and Michael said he would bring them to New Tourom, where they could either stay or make their way back to their home villages. Their injuries were slight enough to be treated by field medics from his headquarters. As for the badly wounded he’d been forced to abandon . . . he shrugged.

“They’re going to be taken care of,” Douglas said, and revealed that he and Fitzhugh had spent the past three hours organizing a medical evacuation by radio. Alexei and his crew would be arriving about an hour from now, with Knight Air’s pickup truck in the cargo bay. The casualties would be shuttled from the hospital to the airstrip in the truck. Alexei would then fly them to the Norwegian People’s Aid hospital in Chukudum, to avoid hassles with the Red Cross and Loki officialdom. It was all set up. Michael had only to order Suleiman and the soldiers to remain here to assist in the evacuation.

“You will need someone to make the triage,” Ulrika interjected. “So I too will stay.”

Quinette sat up abruptly and said she would as well.

“You will not!” Michael commanded.

She gave him a reproving look, and to soften his tone, he added half humorously, “After all, I am the military commander here. What I say goes, and I say you go back to Loki.”

Douglas said, “All right, Ulrika, you’d better put the doctor on the plane with us and come along. We’re going to have to get him to Nairobi.”

Manfred broke his drugged silence and said in a slow, thick voice, “I am not going to Nairobi.”

“Herr Doktor, you need rest.” The redoubtable nurse turned to the American. “I will not go with you. I will stay here to make the triage and then go with Michael to New Tourom and continue as best as I am able. Perhaps, with some help, we can build someday there a new hospital. We must. Now the people have no choice but to go to the government’s camps when they are sick. “

“Yes. I think that was why the bastards committed this crime,” Michael declared, “but what good will it do to build a new hospital?”

“What good?” Quinette asked rhetorically. “So the bastards don’t get the satisfaction, that’s what good it would do.”

“Building a hospital is not the way to deny them the satisfaction.” Michael leaned out from under the wing to glance at the mercilessly clear sky, then faced Douglas and Fitzhugh. “I thank you for everything you’ve done these months. All the Nuba thank you. The seed you have brought, the tools, the implements, the clothes, the oil presses, the medicines, the clean water—very nice. And I saw that you brought us some Bibles this time. Also very nice. The spirit must be taken care of, too. And all the things you delivered to Dr. Manfred, very, very nice. The X-ray film he needed, the malaria medicines, the fuel for his generators—”

“The tin for the roofs,” Fitzhugh interrupted, just to get in a word.

“The tin. Yes, the tin roofs. But where is the tin now? What’s happened to the X-ray film? Blown up, burned. Why? Because you cannot shoot down a bomber with a Bible or an oil press. You cannot destroy the airfield the bomber leaves from with a hoe or X-ray film. What is the point of bringing all those things to us if the government can do what it did today anytime it wishes?”

He conferred on the two men from Knight Air a solemn, inquisitive gaze, and Fitzhugh realized that the question he’d just asked wasn’t the question on his mind.

“Twenty-five hundred meters, three thousand,” he resumed. “The plane was no higher than that. With heavy antiaircraft guns or shoulder-fired missiles, we could have brought it down. But you see there—” gestured languidly at the machine gun—“the biggest gun we have got. Good for shooting the helicopters, but against the Antonov, the MIG, it’s no better than a spear. And of course that’s all some of my fighters have got. Spears. We fight an enemy who has got helicopter gunships and Antonovs and cluster bombs and we have spears! Whatever else we have is just enough to defend ourselves, and not even enough for that, as you have now seen this day.”

Douglas extended his legs and leaned back on his hands, the relaxed posture out of phase with the attentive look on his face. Michael continued.

“You see, to Garang and the high command, the Nuba front is not the central front. It’s a sideshow. They send us arms and equipment, but most of it, the best stuff, Garang keeps for himself and his Dinka commanders. But there is another difficulty.” With his walking stick, he made some marks in the dirt. “Here is the Nuba, down here the Sudan border with Uganda. Most of the military assistance the SPLA receives comes through Uganda. The Uganda government is our ally, and the Sudan side of the border is firmly under SPLA control, but it is more than one thousand kilometers from the Nuba. So what few military supplies Garang does send to me must travel overland, and you can imagine what happens to them along the way. Local commanders help themselves, bandits steal it.”

From its length and coherence, it was obvious that this speech wasn’t entirely impromptu. These were thoughts he’d been considering for a while.

“You should tell them, Michael,” Quinette interjected suddenly.”Why don’t you just come right out with it and tell them?”

She was gazing off into the middle distance with an expression like an injured wildcat’s—a ferocity mingled with pain, in which there was both an appeal for comfort and a warning that you might get bitten or scratched for your trouble. This, Fitzhugh thought, as if seeing her for the first time, could be a dangerous woman.

Michael gave her a reproving glance, then back at the two men. “We need your help. Can you give it?”

And Fitzhugh seemed to be seeing Michael for the first time. At any rate, he wasn’t the same lyre-playing, ballad-singing man who’d presented himself on their first meeting nearly two years ago. He was more calculating. He’d been waiting for the right moment for his proposal to fall on receptive ears. He could not have asked for a better moment than now.

Douglas looked at Ulrika, who was within earshot. “Michael, Fitz, why don’t we take a walk?”

They all three started down the airstrip, heat shimmers rising under the vertical sun, Michael tapping his walking stick. With each step Fitzhugh felt that he and Douglas were approaching a boundary, poorly marked but there all the same.

“I have to ask this,” Douglas said. “Where would the money come from?”

“You are referring to the . . . shall we call them delivery charges?”

“Let’s call them that.”

Tap-tap-tap went the stick. “From the SPLA. We have representatives in Uganda. I would put you in contact with them. They would inform you of when and where the cargo is to be picked up, and pay the charges.”

“I want you to know that after what I’ve seen, I’d do it for nothing if I could, but I can’t.”

“Charity isn’t what I’m looking for,” Michael said, paused, and pointed his stick at the plane. “Nothing at all can be done without that. Everything depends on what you decide to do, Doug-lass.”

It was just the sort of comment to flatter the American’s ego, his sense of himself as the essential man. He turned to Fitzhugh. “What do you think?”

Fitzhugh said nothing. It came to him that his old self would not have taken this walk, a short one in terms of distance, a long one in other terms; but the old Fitzhugh Martin had disappeared during the last twenty-four hours.

“For my part, yes,” he said at last. “But other people would be involved.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to talk this over with my partner before I decide anything,” Douglas said, but Fitzhugh knew the decision was already made, the boundary crossed.

They heard then a distant droning in the sky. Alexei’s green and white Antonov was approaching on its base leg. They quickly walked back to the Gulfstream. Quinette was standing under its nose, a question on her face. Michael nodded to her.

“Balm for Gilead,” she said.