Acts of Faith

Brothers and Sisters in Arms

THEY MADE THREE flights in the first week, departing Loki at dawn with light loads of innocuous cargo, landing at an SPLA airstrip on the border to take on military hardware smuggled through Uganda in crates labeled “sewer pipes” (antiaircraft missiles), “insecticide” (triple-A machine guns), “fertilizer” (mortar shells), “typewriters” (mortar fuses), and “bulldozer parts” (mortar tubes), then flying on to the Nuba mountains for a quick off-load and a return to Loki in time for a late lunch. The second week was much the same. Mary videotaped and photographed these flights to the dark side. Dare indulged her hobby at first, then suggested that she leave her cameras behind in the future; keeping a pictorial record of their activities wasn’t a smart idea. “The wrong eyes see that stuff, we’ve got big problems.” And what about the videos she’d already shot? Did he want her to burn them? No, but it would be wise to buy a safe and lock them up. “All right,” she said agreeably. “I don’t need any more pictures. One mission is pretty much like another. Funny, isn’t it, how even running guns can get to be routine.”

Dare’s canary warned him that a comment like that would not go unpunished. On their next mission, minutes before they were to take off from an airfield near Nimule, a deluge washed out the runway, stranding them for over two days. They drank river water filtered through a hand pump, painted themselves in Deet against the swarms of mosquitoes, and breathed through bandanna masks against the stench of the corpses littering the bush nearby. The bodies belonged to soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army, an exceedingly violent band of crackpot Christians in rebellion against the Ugandan government. To retaliate for Uganda’s support of the Sudanese rebels, Khartoum had overcome its abhorrence of infidels and armed the Lord’s Resistance Army. A detachment of these lunatics, either on their own initiative or on orders from their Muslim allies, had crossed the border to seize the airfield. The SPLA defenders wiped them out and left them unburied to discourage further attempts.

“Africa sure is an interesting place,” Dare said as they sat inside the airplane to get away from the stink. “Had enough of it yet?”

On the second day he figured the smell was more endurable than the Hawker’s saunalike interior and went outside to check the runway’s condition. After his inspection, he sat down for a smoke—and felt a dagger pierce his calf. In seconds an excruciating pain bolted up his leg. He hobbled back to the plane, flopped onto a cargo pallet, and groaned. Mary rolled up his pant leg, exposing a bulging red welt.

“Scorpion,” she said. “You take it easy, baby. Mary will take care of it.” She sharpened her jackknife, sterilized it with a cigarette lighter, and sliced the wound to bleed out the poison, then rubbed it with crystals of potassium permanganate from the first-aid kit.

Hours of throbbing misery followed. Dare’s leg swelled up to the thigh. By morning the runway was usable, but he couldn’t operate the rudder pedals well enough to fly. Mary said she would skipper the plane back to Loki—he needed a doctor. It was too risky to land there with a planeload of weapons, so she hustled some of the SPLA guards to take them off. With their roles reversed—she as captain, he as first officer—they made the trip without incident. She drove him to the Red Cross hospital, and as she helped him walk to admissions, he said, “I don’t know what the hell I’ve done to deserve you, but I must of done it.”

She kissed his cheek. “Nobody deserves what they get, good or bad.”

While he recovered, Mary was summoned back to Canada by news that her father had pancreatic cancer and wasn’t expected to make it through the month. Her departure forced Dare to revise his operational scheme and take Doug as copilot on the next flight. There were two others on Knight Air’s roster more qualified to fly Hawkers, but he couldn’t chance expanding the circle of the clued-in. Which was the reason why he was incredulous when Doug, before leaving on their second mission together, announced that they would be carrying a passenger—Quinette Hardin. She needed a lift to their final destination, Zulu Three. Before flying there, they were to put down at New Cush and pick up the latest shipment for Michael’s forces—four eighty-two-millimeter tubes, two SAM-7 missiles, and three tons of ammunition.

“Are you nuts?” Dare said. “The slave queen? We can’t let her see what we were doin’.”

“Wes, she’s known about it since the beginning. Before the beginning, when Michael first brought it up to Fitz and me. She’ll keep her mouth shut.”

Dare wasn’t reassured. He recalled Mary’s description of Quinette as “an innocent abroad” and his reply that he didn’t think she was all that innocent. What if he was wrong? In his experience, an innocent caused trouble without meaning to, like a four-year-old playing with Dad’s revolver.

“Dire Straits, a golden oldie from the eighties,” she said from the jumpseat behind him and Doug. “Mary told me your in-flight entertainment is always Stevie Ray Vaughan.”

Dare ignored her.


I’m a soldier of freedom in the army of man

We are the chosen, we’re the partisan.

“It’s my tape,” Douglas said. “A guy I flew with in the Gulf War said the problem with real war is that there isn’t any background music. So we provide our own.”


The cause it is noble and the cause it is just

We are ready to pay with our lives if we must.

“Well, I guess it’s appropriate,” Quinette said.

“Sure, if y’all are ready to pay with your life, which I’m not with mine.”


Nothing gonna stop them as day follows night

Right becomes wrong, the left becomes the right.

The song intruded on his thoughts of Mary. She’d been gone nine days and six hours to keep vigil at her dying father’s bedside. She had never talked much about her family, and he hadn’t asked her to. You didn’t think of the nomad aviators in Loki as having families, or roots, or lives other than the ones they were living now. Cut off from their origins, it seemed as if, through some process of spontaneous creation, they’d sprung full grown into existence right here in Africa.

Quinette unbuckled her belt and stretched forward to look out the cockpit window. “This part looks so different. Like Africa the way I pictured it before I came here. Jungly.”

“How about sittin’ back down and strappin’ in,” Dare said in a rare display of safety consciousness. In the distance a thunderstorm was making up, a tightly wrapped, nasty-looking sucker, the cloud resting on a blue-black shaft of rain like a golf ball on a tee. He switched on the intercom and said, “Nimrod, wheels down in ten. Let’s try for a quick load. Might rain, and I do not intend to get stuck again.”

His loadmaster rogered him from the rear, in which a half ton of medical supplies were piled up under the cargo nets, destined for delivery to the clinic Ulrika had cobbled together in New Tourom, out of the stuff she’d salvaged from the hospital’s wreckage.

Doug’s tape wound on.

“Y’all like this shit?”

“Sure,” Doug said, but offered to turn the cassette player off.

“That’s okay. I like to keep my first officers happy. It’s a fringe benefit of flyin’ with Captain Wesley Dare. Flaps.”

Doug lowered them, and they descended over bright green hills and valleys, laced with glittering streams. The New Cush airstrip, lying between two low ridgelines, resembled a fairway in need of serious maintenance. Dare radioed the SPLA on the ground, asking if the field was secure. Someone said it was, but there was tension in the voice, and DeeTee chirped an alert. Dare pulled his Beretta from under the seat and jammed it into his belt.

A strand of black smoke rose from one end of the runway, indicating a crosswind. He quartered into it, then touched down. As Nimrod opened the aft cargo door, a squad of SPLA soldiers popped out of the surrounding brush, led by an officer who looked ready for a parade: clean boots, a clean uniform, a polished shoulder-holster, and a silver-knobbed swagger stick, which he brought to the brim of his beret in jaunty salute.

“Good day, captain!” he called, standing below the cockpit.

Dare opened the side window. “And good day to you, rafiki. How y’all?”

“Quite well, thank you. May I have a word with you, sir?”

“Polite as hell, ain’t he,” Dare said in an undertone. “C’mon, Doug. I think we’ve got problems. Quinette, you stay inside.”

“What kind of problems?” she asked.

“Soon as I find out, you’ll be the first to know.”

Outside, closely watched by the soldiers, a crew of civilians, barefoot and with prominent collarbones showing above their tattered undershirts, were lugging crates and containers out of the forest, toward the airplane.

With an amused expression, the officer glanced at the protruding butt of the Beretta.

“All Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms,” Dare said.

“I know. My brother is in America. He recently got his green card. I and a few of my men will be accompanying you to Yei to make sure you arrive safely.”

“You must of gotten some bad information, major. We’re goin’ to the Nuba, War Zone Two.”

“You were going there. Your destination has changed. Your cargo is now needed more in Yei than in the Nuba.”

Doug said, “We can’t do it. Can’t take you and your men. We’d be overloaded.”

The officer gave an abbreviated nod that more or less congratulated Doug for making a nice try. He then snapped an order to a couple of his men. Motioning with their rifles, they instructed the workers to put the weaponry on board.

“I don’t believe this. You’re hijacking cargo that’s meant for someone fighting on the same side as you.”

A quick, efficient smile—Doug’s indignation appeared to amuse him as much as Dare’s pistol.

“Know what, major?” Dare said. “When you started talking, I thought you were some kinda customs man. Like you only wanted to collect duty on imported goods.”

The officer straightened his shoulders, bracing his swagger stick across his thighs. “Thank you for the promotion, but I’m a captain, not a major. Also a fighter, not a bureaucrat.”

“I was only joking. But what would you figure the customs duties would be on all this stuff?”

“I have no idea.” He spoke with firmness, but a wavering look came into his eyes. “Perhaps you do?”

He didn’t slam the door, I can get to him, Dare thought. “I’ve got something in the plane that will give me an idea. Y’all don’t mind if I take a look at it?”

“Not at all.”

With Douglas, he went into the cockpit. Quinette, occupying the pilot’s seat, was looking out the window at the captain.

“I’ve been a good girl and stayed in my room, so tell me what’s going on.”

Dare reached into the seat pocket where he stowed flight manuals and charts and withdrew a vinyl purse, the kind shopkeepers use for carrying cash to the bank. It contained his emergency gratuities fund.

“What’s goin’ on is a lesson on why these blacks are never gonna win this war. Some commander over in Yei has decided he needs what we’ve got more than Michael does, and he sent that errand boy to collect.”

She clasped his wrist tightly. “We can’t let that happen.”

“I’m tryin’,” he said, counting out the fives and tens.

“If you need more, there’s fifty in my rucksack,” she said.

“Think this will do,” Dare said, and wrapped the bills into a delectable bundle that he secured with a rubber band. Figuring the captain would want to conduct business in private, he called through the window, “If it’s not inconvenient, could you join us up here?”

Douglas and Quinette stood outside the cabin door to make room for their guest.

“I calculate the duty fees come to this,” Dare said quietly, and held the wad close to the man’s face.

It probably was as much as a junior officer in the SPLA made in a year, yet the sight of it, the smell of it, the nearness of it, all in U.S. currency, did not have the desired effect. The captain looked over his shoulder, past Doug and Quinette into the rear of the plane, where Nimrod was supervising the loading.

“I am under orders,” he said. “I have got to show something.”

He proposed a compromise: Dare would leave half the military cargo here, fly the other half to Yei, then return to pick up what had been left behind and go on to the Nuba.

Dare reflected for a few moments. What difference would it make to him if one SPLA commander stole from another? He was getting paid eighteen thousand to make a delivery, to whom didn’t matter.

While he pondered, Quinette said, “You people need medical supplies, don’t you?”

The captain almost did a double-take, as if he were surprised that a woman would take part in the conversation. “Always,” he said.

“We’ve got about half a ton, right there. Why don’t you take that instead? You can tell whoever it is you need to tell that that was all we had on board.”

Douglas looked at her with admiration. “It’s a good idea, Wes.”

“That stuff is for the German nurse. She’s expecting it.”

Doug said, “There are priorities here, and bandages and syringes don’t make the top of the list.”

“Well, listen to the two angels of mercy. Do-gooders gone bad.”

“Gone bad?” Quinette said with anger. “Listen, I saw my friend with her legs blown off. One antiaircraft rocket would have saved her and a whole lot of other people. And since when did you start giving a damn about anything? You’re the most cynical man I’ve ever met.”

Which was why, Dare thought, he hadn’t come up with the idea of trading syringes and bandages for weapons. It took an innocent’s conviction to make that offer. He turned to the captain.

“Well?”

His face assumed a grave expression. “You understand, the man I report to might not believe that medical supplies were all you had. I would need to convince him, so I must ask for duties on the medicines in addition.”

“I’ve got it right here,” Quinette said, and bent down to open her rucksack.

She placed two twenties and a ten in the captain’s hand, smugly, piously, like a parishioner dropping a big donation into the collection plate.

Nimrod was bewildered when Dare told him to offload the arms and wait at the airstrip with the workers until the plane returned. There were no problems at Yei. The captain’s boss, a more senior captain, was in fact skeptical that the plane was carrying only medical aid, but a share of the wealth allayed his doubts.

They flew back to New Cush, got the shipment on board, and finally left for the mountains, Dare climbing quickly to cruising altitude to conserve fuel. The Hawker had a range of fifteen hundred miles, and the detour had consumed most of his reserve.

“So what are we gonna tell that Ulrika?” he asked.

Quinette said, “The truth.”

“I’m kinda wonderin’ what that is.”

“That her stuff was confiscated by SPLA troops in Yei.”

“I’d call that a half truth.”

Douglas said, “Christ, Wes, our job is to get arms to the Nuba, not to every goddamned commander who gets a notion that he’s entitled to them. We had to make a sacrifice. There’s nothing to feel guilty about.”

“Well, I’m gonna leave it to you two to explain to Ulrika why she’s gonna have to send her patients to the witch doctors.”

In the jumpseat Quinette had to speak to the back of Wes’s head, its bald spot ringed by fine, tight reddish curls. “Ulrika will understand,” she said.

She wasn’t going to let Wes make her feel bad about herself. She was a citizen of the war, she had an obligation to do her bit, and she’d done it. Her idea had saved the day. Doug was right—there was nothing to feel guilty about. And if there was, she took comfort in the knowledge that God forgave all.

Behind her Nimrod lay asleep on a blanket, his head propped against a sack full of mortar shells. Could she ever describe this experience in one of her letters home? Who in that distant, drab, everyday world would believe that she was in a plane piloted by gun-runners? She hardly believed it herself. Had she ridden a rocket into orbit, she would not have felt farther away from all she’d come from.

Chin on her knuckles, she stared past the controls at the instrument panel, its dials as indecipherable as Chinese calligraphy. The only one she could read was the airspeed indicator. Two hundred and ten knots. It was over two hours to the Nuba. She wished she had the power to think herself there. She stretched out her legs, into the space between the bulkheads. Her legs were her best feature, but with bulky hiking boots reaching up to her ankles and baggy safari shorts down to her knees, their virtues weren’t apparent. She frowned. She wanted to look as attractive as she could. Michael’s last communication to her, delivered just three days ago, had been as dry and businesslike as the first, telling her he had compiled information she would find useful and had made arrangements that would ensure her a successful visit. The conclusion “I look forward to your arrival” was as personal as it got.

She dozed off, until a fullness in her ears woke her up. The plane was descending over blond hillsides and Nuba farmsteads, ringed by terraced fields stippled with sorghum.

“Zulu Three, this is Yankee Bravo approaching from the southwest,” Dare called on the radio. When he received an acknowledgment, he asked if fuel was available. Yes, a voice replied.

An African truth, he thought when the top fell off a fuel drum as he, Nimrod, and Doug rolled it toward the plane. A mixture of Jet A1 and muddy water spilled out. Inspection of several other drums revealed that they too had been tampered with. Dare knew what had happened: villagers had siphoned fuel for their fires and lamps and topped off the drums with rain water to conceal their theft. While Michael’s troops unloaded the plane, breaking open the crates like kids at Christmas, he radioed his problem to Fitz in Loki.

“Damn good thing we found out what was inside the drums,” he said, trying to look on the bright side of his situation. “Been in a world of hurt if we’d pumped that shit into the tanks. Gonna need a fuel delivery soon as you can get me one.”

Fitz told him to wait. When he came back on, some fifteen minutes later, he gave Dare the good news—Alexei would bring the Jet A1 in the Antonov—and the bad news—because of flight commitments, he couldn’t make it for three days.

“There it is, Doug,” he said with a shake of his head. “Y’know, I’ve always thought of myself as lucky, but lately it seems my good luck mostly consists of gettin’ through the fixes my bad luck gets me into.”

 

SHE STOOD AT the side of the runway, near the grove of doum palms where she had seen wounded and dead for the first time, but the sight of those trees evoked no dread or dark memories, only anticipation as Michael emerged, surrounded by his bodyguard.

“Miss Quinette Hardin, so very glad to see you again,” he said, and took both her hands in his, his slowly spreading smile squeezing her like an embrace.

She would have preferred the other kind of embrace. She sensed—or was it hoped?—that he would have as well, but they stood an arm’s length apart. This was one of the rare times when Quinette didn’t place all her trust in feelings, because she wasn’t sure what to call the emotion he awakened in her. She’d longed to see him, but now that she did, she was reminded anew of how different they were, how remote were the chances that anything could develop between them.

At the head of a column of soldiers and porters half a mile long, they climbed the path toward New Tourom but skirted the town, following a riverbed in which scattered pools, remnants from the wet season, lay in rocky basins, their surfaces creased by the wakes of aquatic insects. It was the hottest part of the day, and Wes, Doug, and Nimrod were soon very thirsty but didn’t dare drink from the muddy, bug-infested pools. They hadn’t expected to be on foot today and were unprepared for it. Quinette shared her water bottles with them and felt field-wise and competent when she paused at a pool to refill them with her filtration pump.

About a kilometer from town they came to a range of low hills and filed through a narrow passage into a broad bowl, with steep, tiered slopes on all sides. The effect was like passing through the entrance into a vast amphitheater. At the far end, three or four miles away, a line of trees trooped up a ridgeline, marking a watercourse. The place had the quality of a lost and isolated world, a kind of Shangri-la. It was anything but—gun emplacements picketed the hills.

They walked on, past men threshing grain with heavy wooden paddles, women balancing on their heads the inevitable baskets piled high with sorghum ears. As in Dinkaland, Quinette attracted a retinue of teenage girls, full of excitement and curiosity. They took turns carrying her rucksack, tousled her hair and twined it around their fingers, and touched her arms, chattering incomprehensibly.

Michael’s garrison looked more like a Nuba village than a military base, except for the numbers of armed men moving about, the radio antenna sprouting from a nest of solar panels, and the SPLA flag flying over a mud-walled bungalow. Inside, several officers, among them the dour Major Kasli, stood at a table covered with maps. Another map, under a plastic sheet marked with arrows, circles, and rectangles, papered half of one wall. Wes, Doug, and Nimrod gathered with Michael around the radio, tucked in a corner atop a wooden crate. Wes called Lokichokio, and after a few minutes Fitz’s voice, high pitched and chipper, broke through the barrage of static. Quinette sat down and waited while the two men talked. Once Kasli looked up from the maps to cast an unwelcoming glance her way. He was an unattractive man, with close-set bloodshot eyes and an exceptionally narrow head—a kind of squashed oval; his pointed chin accentuated by a goatee.

“Okay, Fitz knows we’ve arrived,” Wes said, motioning to her to come to the radio. “Y’all better tell him to get a message to your boss, on account of you’re gonna be a little late getting back to work. Fuel shortage in Loki. Now it’s five days instead of three. Five at least.”

She couldn’t say that this news displeased her. Pulling the handset to her mouth, she gave Fitz Ken’s number, told him exactly what to say, and promised to pay the sat-phone charges when she returned.

“It happened for a reason,” she said to Michael as he walked her up a path. “Nothing happens without a reason.”

“And what could that reason be, Quinette?”

She was glad to hear her first name. “I don’t know, but I assume we’ll find out.”

Here at his base, his bodyguard wasn’t compelled to shadow him everywhere, but they weren’t quite alone. Her followers walked alongside, fussing with her hair.

“I’ve assembled several meks for you to talk to. They will give you numbers and names of people abducted from their villages. Also, that trader you mentioned on your last visit, Bashir.”

“He’s here?”

“Major Kasli located him. He knows where many of the captives are. You’ll meet everyone tomorrow in New Tourom. I’ll have a translator for you.”

“You won’t be there?”

“Very busy now. Planning an operation. We’re going on it day after tomorrow.”

“You’ll be leaving?”she asked, disappointed. “What sort of operation?”

“Military secret,” he answered. “This is where you’ll be staying.”

Ducking their heads, they passed through a low keyhole-shaped entrance into a courtyard formed by a ring of three tukuls, each joined to the other by a high wall.

“In here,” Michael said, beckoning her to the center hut.

The dim, windowless room was hot. When her eyes adjusted, she saw geometric designs and primitive figures of people and animals painted in red and ochre, black and white on the clay walls, which threw off a dull bluish gleam, as if they had been varnished or rubbed to a shine. The air was filled with the strong aroma of the bunched herbs and dried bean pods hanging from pegs high up on the walls. A crude bed—sticks lashed together between four thick crooked posts, with a mosquito net overhead—was the only furniture, while a few straw mats did for carpeting.

“No TV or refrigerator,” said Michael, grinning, “but you do have a shower.” He pointed at a little alcove, where a flat boulder lay on the floor and a large calabash hung from a pair of cattle horns more than six feet above. “You fill this up and take this out”—he pulled a wooden plug from the bottom of the calabash—“but use the water with care. The dry season is here and water is like gold.”

She loved its rough simplicity, and the gaiety and mystery of the wall paintings, and when they stepped outside into the courtyard, the feeling of cloister rendered by the encircled huts.

“This is my house,” he said, “but of course I can’t stay here with you.”

“Of course.”

“My daughter and her two cousins will be with you. Her name is Toddo, but you can call her Pearl because that’s what it means in English. She and her friends will cook for you, look after you.”

“It seems all the girls want to do around here is pull my hair,” she said.

“They think it’s disorderly. They want to braid it, like theirs. I must go. A conference with my staff.”

Pearl, a pretty girl of fourteen, with Michael’s rounded chin and soft eyes, had learned English from him and at school. There was a somberness about her—how could she be anything but somber after losing her mother and siblings?—but she had a lively curiosity and, as the other two girls ground sorghum with a wooden pestle, asked Quinette about America, where her father had learned to be a soldier. He’d told her that no one there ever went hungry, that there were black-skinned people in America who’d once been slaves but now were as free as their former masters, and that farmers did not plant and harvest by hand but had machines to do the work for them.

Quinette didn’t want to disillusion her, so she confirmed this idyllic picture. More or less to establish some common ground with Pearl, she mentioned that her father had been a farmer who’d grown corn and raised some cows, as Nuban men did; that he too had once been a soldier, that he’d died when she was fourteen, and that his death still made her sad.

“You are very high, like Nuba woman,” Pearl said, raising her hand.

“The Dinka think so, too. Sometimes they call me the White Dinka Woman.”

“No. You are not so skinny like a Dinka. You should be called White Nuba Woman.”

“Well, you can call me that if you want.”

“I don’t like your hair.”

“So your father told me.”

“Can I fix it?”

Quinette hesitated, then said, “All right.”

For the next hour she sat on the ground while Pearl changed her hairstyle.

“Your hair is too much skinny,” the girl said, which Quinette interpreted to mean that it was finer than a Nuban woman’s and difficult to weave into the tight plaits they favored. A bead was fastened to the tip of each strand. When she was finished, Pearl dipped her fingers into a clay jar of sesame oil and with it plastered the braids to Quinette’s head. Then she leaned back to study her artistry. “Better now. I will show you.”

She produced a small square mirror, with a corner missing and the backing so worn that the glass was almost as dull as tin. Quinette wasn’t sure what to think of her new appearance. The braids on the top of her head were pulled straight back, making her forehead too prominent, and the oil that gave a Nuban woman’s hair an appealing brilliance caused hers to appear greasy.

Pearl noticed her frown and assured her that she looked beautiful. “My father will like it.”

Quinette felt a blush come to her cheeks. “I like you, Pearl,” she said. “We’re going to be great friends.”

 

THE TICK BITES, inflicted on them almost the instant they lay down on their beds, itched like scabies, and it made Dare sick just to look at the mush a village girl brought to him, Doug, and Nimrod for lunch. The goddamned fuel problem had condemned them to a week of this. He’d rather spend a week in a Mexican jail, as in fact he’d done in his younger days. Noticing the three men clawing at their forearms and waists, the girl, with sign language, instructed them to drag their beds outside. That done, she whacked the posts with a stick to drive the insects out, and while they stomped on their tormentors, she poured boiling water on the posts to wipe out remaining pockets of resistance.

They carried the beds back inside the hut and turned toward the door when a voice boomed, “Hey, Doug!”

There, like a hallucination, stood a young American, short but powerfully built, carrying a video camera and wearing a high-and-tight buzz cut, basketball shoes, cammie trousers, and a sweat-stained Pepperdine University T-shirt. He had the look of I-don’t-touch-alcohol-drugs-or-tobacco wholesomeness that Dare loathed. He’d seen the man before but couldn’t place him. On his back was a rucksack, which he slipped off with a “Whew!” and a theatrical swipe at his brow.

“Rob,” Doug said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You don’t know? You’re here to take me out, except you’re four days early.”

Doug gave him a look of incomprehension. Now Dare recalled who he was: Rob Handy, one of the Holy Rollers from the Friends of the Frontline.

“There’s been a screw-up, hasn’t there? Couple of days ago I radioed Fitz not to send a plane for me till the end of the week, when the show’s over. You didn’t get the word?” Handy met Doug’s puzzled gaze with one of his own. “One of your crews flew me in here two weeks ago, with a load of tools and construction materials. Those Russians.”

“That would’ve been Alexei,” Doug said. “Sorry for the confusion, I don’t keep up on the flight schedules. That’s Fitz’s job.”

“You’re not here to pick me up?”

“No.”

“And you been here two weeks?” Dare asked.

“It’s been terrific,” Handy said. “I was just getting footage of the school we’re rebuilding.”

“You’re making a film?”asked Doug.

“For our fundraising drive. It’s unbelievable how many people back in the States have no idea what’s going on here. The peril their fellow Christians are in. The fight they’re putting up.”

Lord, spare me from these people, Dare thought.

“Michael’s given me the okay to film the operation he’s got coming up,” Handy burbled on. “I just got back from his staff conference. You know about the operation?”

Doug replied that they did not.

“You soon will. He wants to talk to you about it. It’s going to be incredible, the climax of the film. Our contributors, they’ll eat it up. Most of them are vets. But you know that. I was in the Gulf War myself. Fitz told me you were in that one, right?”

“Flew A-tens,” Doug answered.

“No kidding,” said Handy, dragging his rucksack inside to stand it against a wall. “I was with a Warthog squadron, too. Enlisted, though. What squadron were you with?”

Doug didn’t answer. Glancing at the rucksack, he asked, “You’re moving in? It’s going to be crowded in here.”

“It’s the other way around,” replied Handy. “You guys moved in on me. No problem. I sleep outside. It’s cooler.”

Dare sat on his fumigated bed and fumbled for a smoke. He was still holding himself to five a day, although he might need to increase his allotment now that he had a Christian soldier for a roommate.

Michael arrived later with Major Kasli. It was an official call. After asking how the guests found their accommodations—Dare chose not to answer—Michael sat down and inquired if Dare’s sources could obtain 120-millimeter mortars and semtex.

“Reckon so. They’re a one-stop shop. None of my business, I suppose, but why one-twenties and semtex?”

“You are correct,” said Kasli. “It is not your business.”

“I’ll decide that, major,” Michael said. “This dry season, I intend to carry the fight to the enemy. We are going to destroy an enemy airfield and sabotage the oil pipeline.”

Doug let out a low whistle.

“That’s ambitious,” Dare commented. “How far is this airfield?”

“From here, a little more than a hundred kilometers. It’s an oil company airfield, but Khartoum uses it as a base for its Antonovs. The plane that bombed Dr. Manfred’s hospital left from it.”

“A one-twenty mortar weighs a helluva lot,” Dare pointed out. “How are y’all gonna move heavy mortars and the shells to go with them over a hundred kilometers? You’d need a camel caravan or a whole shitload of porters.”

Major Kasli took off his wraparound sunglasses and smirked. “I see you are a tactician as well as a flier.”

“Yeah, a goddamned Napoleon with a pilot’s license.”

“We are going to transport the mortars and the ammunition in lorries,” Michael said. “And where do we find the lorries? We are going to seize them from the government.” He smoothed the dirt with his palm and, with his finger, drew a map. “Here is Kologi. Douglas, you remember your visit there?”

“Sure. Suleiman’s village. The Kowahla.”

“Yes. We have learned from Suleiman that the government has made an offer to the nazir of the Kowahla. If he swears allegiance to Khartoum and its jihad, he will receive for himself a Land Rover and his people will get lorries to carry their cotton crops to market. If he does not, then the Kowahla will be considered infidels and will be treated accordingly.”

Dare flexed his hand, working the stiffness out. “The old carrot and stick. Works every time.”

“Not this time,” said Michael, his almost feminine eyes going hard. “Here is where we are and here is Kologi.” He made two dots in the dirt. “And here between us, near this road junction, is a Sudan army garrison. Two days ago the lorries arrived there, three of them with the Land Rover. Day after tomorrow we will attack the garrison and take them.”

“Well, good luck is all I’ve got to say.”

“I’m leaving as little to luck as I can,” Michael said. “I’ve been training my men hard for a month. There will be more tomorrow afternoon. You’re welcome to observe.”

Dare clawed at a bite on his arm, hard enough to make it bleed. “It’s better than gettin’ bit.”

 

HE RETURNED AT dusk, tired and preoccupied, and the scene that played out afterward was a peculiar version of a domestic evening in some 1950s American suburb. The man of the house, after a hard day at work, hangs up a pistol belt instead of an overcoat, then sits down to a family dinner, with the ground in place of a table and wooden bowls of doura and bean cakes in place of meatloaf and potatoes on china. At the end, completing the picture, he gives his teenage daughter permission to go to a dance with her friends. The intermingling of the familiar with the strange, of the ordinary with the extraordinary, beguiled Quinette. She recalled something Ken Eismont had said on one of their journeys—that the human race was born in Africa, so to come to Africa was to experience a kind of homecoming. That didn’t square with what the Bible or Pastor Tom taught, but she was inclined, now, toward Ken’s point of view. It was as good an explanation as any for the weird connectedness she felt to her present surroundings. The tukuls, the snug enclosure of the courtyard, seemed more like home than home. Looking at Michael, his face highlighted by the paraffin lamp, at the ground ribbed with the marks of the girls’ twig brooms, and at the stars, like a million crystal rivets tacking a black velvet cloth to an immense cupola, she thought, I could be happy here.

“I like this,” he said, passing a hand through her braids, the beads clattering softly.

“I was wondering when you’d notice.”

“Oh, I noticed straight away,” Michael said, then after the girls left, “Wesley told me, when we were walking here from the airfield, about what you did. That was quick thinking, and I’m grateful.”

“It seemed like the right thing. I hope so.”

“This is Sudan. The choice is never between the right thing and the wrong thing, but always between what is necessary and what isn’t. And the supplies brought in today are necessary. Without them, I would be unable to carry off the operation.”

“Is it still top secret?”

“For now, yes. I’m tired of thinking about it.”

“It’ll be dangerous?”

“Of course, but more dangerous for the men than for me.”

“You’ll be gone a long time?”

“If all goes well, it will be over in one day. But no more about it. I want to hear more about where you come from. Iowa.”

“We pretty much exhausted that boring topic the last time.”

“As I told you then, I like being bored. Boredom to me is a luxury.”

“I had enough of that luxury to last me a while. A long while. Forever.”

“Then tell me more about this work you do, this redeeming of captives.”

She described the field missions, and the satisfaction she derived from seeing the joy on the former slaves’ faces. It was the worthiest work she’d done, but, she was quick to add, the sights she’d seen in the Nuba had made it seem insufficient, awakening an urge and a will to do more. She thought she should be playing a larger role, though she didn’t know what it could be. They fell into an intense discussion about the war, about the aid campaign, about restoring St. Andrew’s mission and Michael’s vision of creating a new Sudan, with the divisions of tribe and faith swept aside. Their shoulders occasionally touched as they talked, she watched the movement of his fabulously long fingers, and she smelled his sweat, but it was his voice and his ideas that generated the same magnetism that had drawn them into a kiss more than a month ago. She was sure he felt it, too, yet something restrained them now. Something like fear.

They lapsed into a silence, then he pointed at the cicatrix stitching his brows. “Do you know what these mean?”

“They’re decorative aren’t they?”

“Yes, but it is also believed that they improve eyesight.”

“And do they?”

“My eyes saw you, didn’t they? That day when all of you came to New Tourom, out of all the women with you, I noticed you first and then noticed no others.”

This confession, coming so suddenly, left her momentarily breathless.

“I’m very plain. I know that.”

“I don’t think so. I looked at you and thought, ‘She has legs like a gazelle.’ ”

“Every woman around here has legs like a gazelle.” She paused. “All right, I’ll tell you something. When I saw you getting ready for your wrestling match, covered in that ash, I thought you looked like Adam, the second after God made him. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

He brushed her plaits again. “How can I say it sounds ridiculous when you compare me to the father of the human race? You wouldn’t be Eve, would you?”

From a distance, the sounds of drums, horn and whistle blasts, and singing spared her from answering.

“That’s the dance?”

“There is dancing now almost every night. For the harvest. It is a ceremony we call sibr. Sibr is the name for sacred spirits and the ceremonies that honor them. This one is the Sibr of Fire. Would you like to see it?”

“Would you?”

“I’ve seen it a thousand times. I would rather be here, talking to you.”

“You knew that’s what I wanted to hear.”

“I’m not a fool. But it’s true all the same. If you want to hear music, I will make it for you.”

He went into one of the huts and came out with a small handmade harp with three strings. Sitting again, he strummed and sang. She couldn’t understand the words, but an undertone of sadness in the melody came through plainly enough. He finished the verse, then translated.


It is a big sibr, and they are happy

They are celebrating because today is the sibr

Of those who died long ago.

Because today is the day the spirits have said

We will celebrate the dead.

“Is it about her?” Quinette asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“No. It’s only a song.”

“I’m sorry. That was unfair of me,” she said.

“I remember her and honor her,” he said. “We always remember and honor our dead. We pray to their spirits for aid, but that is very different from loving them.”

She wondered if he was being completely honest. No matter how much death he’d seen, how could his sorrow fade after only two years? And if he still grieved for her, was there love in his grief, breathing and beating still?

Then he kissed her forehead, and she almost wept when the carapace of his reserve broke and he clasped the back of her neck, pulling her mouth to his. She craved him more than she’d craved anyone, and yet was relieved when he drew away. There was another silence, and in that silence a distance grew, and filling the distance was the understanding that if they made love, it would change their lives in ways neither of them could foresee.