Acts of Faith

DIRE STRAITS PLAYED softly on Doug’s cassette player. Dare was seriously considering stomping on it.


Through these fields of destruction

Baptisms of fire

“Can’t believe this is happening,” Handy groaned, stretched out on his air mattress. “Two weeks here, not a problem, and this hits me now.”

“A hundred and three,” Doug said, squinting at Handy’s thermometer.

“They’re leaving before daybreak.” Handy kneaded his stomach. “They’re going to make a night march to the garrison.”

“You haven’t thrown up, so it probably isn’t amoebic,” Doug said encouragingly. “You could be good to go.”

He switched on his headlamp and occupied himself with a bird book—it went everywhere with him—while Nimrod poked at the remnants of his dinner and Dare carefully snubbed a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers and put it back in the pack. He had ten left, enough to last another three days with strict rationing. The prospect of being stuck here without the solace of tobacco wasn’t one he relished. Besides the heat, the ticks, and wretched food, the boredom was beyond anything he’d experienced before. This afternoon, after the training exercise, he’d walked to the radio room, contacted Fitz, and asked if there was any change in the fuel situation. There wasn’t.

As he left, he pilfered a few sheets of paper from the radio operator. Now, in the intervals between budgeted puffs on his cigarette, he composed by flashlight a letter to Mary. He missed her more than he thought possible; missed her smell, her sarcasm, the tuft of fine atavistic down at the base of her spine that he liked to tickle and that embarrassed her. Nights weren’t the worst time; his ache for her was sharpest at dawn—the waking up without her beside him. He was reminded of something an old Air America jockey had told him years ago in a bar in Vientiane: “If you feel like hell when the sun goes down, you’re all right—it’s when you hate to see it come up that you know you’re in trouble.”

At the moment he was thinking selfish thoughts that her father get his dying over with and speed her back to Wesley Dare’s arms and bed. There wasn’t much chance she’d receive the letter before she returned to Africa, even if he mailed it the moment he set foot again in Loki; his only purpose, aside from the mental communion the writing offered, was to keep himself occupied so he wouldn’t go insane.

“Heavenly Father, cure me of this sickness that I’ll be able to film the operation.” Handy was praying aloud. The only thing worse than having a Jesus freak for a roommate was having a sick Jesus freak for a roommate. “You know, Lord, that this footage will bring in the dollars to help your children fight the enemies of your son, Jesus Christ, Amen.”

Dare left off his letter and relit the butt. Two things occurred to him: One, the Muslims in Khartoum were petitioning the same God to aid their fight against the followers of Jesus Christ, so did God ever get confused about which side he was on? Two, people like Handy had an exaggerated sense of their importance, thinking that a Supreme Being with a universe to manage would take time off to play doctor to a guy with the runs.

Handy suddenly popped up and scurried to the latrine—a pit enclosed by a grass fence. It appeared that the Divine Physician had other patients to attend to.

“Doug, do you know how to use a video camera?” Handy asked when he returned.

Doug said he did.

“If I’m not good to go—this is a lot to ask, the risks and all—could you take my place?”

At that Dare glanced at his partner and wasn’t surprised to see the look of zest on his face.

Handy got his camera, a big Sony, then flopped onto the air mattress as if he’d just finished a long run.

“This is a professional’s model,” he said, then showed Douglas how to work it, paying special attention to the zoom. He would be shooting at a distance, and it was critical to use the zoom properly. Then something about light metering, the battery pack, and so on.

When the tutorial was finished, Dare took Doug aside. “What in the f*ck do you think you’re doin’?”

He had a logical explanation—he always had logical explanations for every illogical thing he did. The Friends of the Frontline were a client; therefore he would be doing nothing more than a favor for a client. Also, if Handy’s film was successful, the increased contributions it raked in would ultimately translate into more business for Knight Air.

“Aren’t you mixed up in this shit a little too much already that y’all have to risk your ass to help make a propaganda movie?”

“You’re as mixed up in it as I am, and in some ways a little more.”

“In some other ways, a little less. I mean to get unmixed up when the time comes. This isn’t my war, and not yours either.”

“Yeah, it is,” Doug said with an affectless expression and a spooky tranquillity. “There are times when it’s plain inhuman not to take sides.”

“Me, I’m on Wes Dare’s side. Take some advice from an older man. Tell that Bible-thumpin’ propagandist y’all have changed your mind. You might get hurt, and old Wes doesn’t want to see his partner get hurt, or worse.”

“You’re forgetting. I’ve been in combat.”

“Goddamn it! This is gonna be ground combat, blue-collar combat, in your face and personal, not playin’ computer games in an airplane.”

“It’ll be all right. It might even be fun.”

Dare knew when to quit. Some kinds of ignorance were flat-out invincible.

The next morning, almost hallucinating from fatigue, his tongue swollen from thirst, his feet blistered, and every bone and joint aching, he called upon his sleep-deprived brain to produce one good reason for doing what he’d done. The brain offered a multiple choice: (a) Loyalty to fellow aviators being one of his pillars of wisdom, he’d decided to play the role of the experienced noncom to Douglas’s young, impetuous officer; (b) corollary of (a) he’d realized he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if, for lack of a restraining influence, his partner did something stupid and got himself killed; or (c) the boredom of hanging around camp was so colossal that anything was preferable to it. He chose (d), none of the above, because there was no good reason for subjecting himself to the ordeal of a forced march. He must have acted on blind impulse at three this morning, when, awakened by the sounds of the troops moving out, he saw Douglas shouldering the camera and said, “I’d best go with you.” The younger man grinned and replied, “Knew you would.” Nimrod saw them off with a face that said, “I hope to see you again.”

Dare had almost collapsed, stumbling for hours down a stony track in darkness, his arthritic knees crackling like an echo of the boots, rubber sandals, and plastic slippers crunching the gravel underfoot. Doug had provisioned himself with a canteen of filtered water. It was empty before the march was half through. The troops didn’t carry any water—apparently they didn’t need it.

Now, as Dare lay on a hilltop overlooking the garrison about a kilometer away, his thoughts, hopes, and desires had reduced themselves to one: water. Water in all its tastes and textures. The satiny water of a woodland pond, the icy water of a glacial lake, the crisp water of a mountain stream; tap water with its hint of chlorine, well water with its hint of iron. He pictured fountains, fishtanks, swimming pools, bottles of Evian racked in a convenience-store fridge.

Doug lay on one side of him, cradling the camera in his elbows; Michael was on his right, with Suleiman and the radio operator, his radio wired to a car battery he’d carried on his head the whole way. Four heavy machine guns guarded by a platoon of riflemen were arrayed along the rim of the hill. Mortar crews stood behind them, the tubes elevated on the bipods, the shells laid side by side. Crouched low, barely more than moving silhouettes in the gray light, the assault troops picked their way down the hillside toward the dry riverbed from which they would launch the attack. A couple of hundred yards beyond, across broken ground strewn with boulders and picketed by thorn trees, was the government garrison: brown tents and grass-roofed huts clustered near a stone building, all of it surrounded by a dirt berm, with a bunker at each corner and a wide break in one side. A road led away from the opening and out across the savannah. A look through Michael’s binoculars showed Dare a bulldozer, parked under a tree at the far end of the encampment. Beside it were the prizes—the Land Rover and three trucks.

He licked his parched lips, hoping for a swift victory—the garrison was bound to have a supply of water on hand. The radio crackled: Major Kasli reported that the assault force was in position. Michael called out, “Machine guns! Five hundred rounds each! Guns one and two, fire on the left bunker! Three and four, the right bunker! Mortars! Number one to fire smoke to mark the target! Two, three, four will fire for effect on my command!” The mortar squad leader gave the range and elevation to the first tube’s crew, and the loader stood, poised to drop the marking round into the barrel. “Blast away!” Michael shouted, then looked through his field glasses, the deep, measured dum-dum-dum of the 12.7-millimeter machine guns and the crack of the mortar, sharp and definite, shredding the morning’s peace.

With the target nearly a thousand yards away, the machine-gunners fired with more enthusiasm than accuracy. The bullets spattered into the berm and below it but nowhere near the corner bunkers. The mortar’s marking round, spurting white as surf, fell between the riverbed and the garrison. “One hundred meters more!” Michael stood and ranged up and ran down the firing line, whacking the machine-gunners with his stick. “The bunkers! Damn you! Concentrate your fire on the bunkers!” The next fusillade was closer to the mark, the bullets kicking up dust around the sandbagged emplacements, but the second marking round exploded amid the vehicles. Lucky it was smoke instead of high explosive, or the trucks that were the whole point of this exercise would have been wrecked. “Shorter! Shorter by fifty meters!” The tube cracked again. Twenty seconds later the shell burst on the tents. “You have it! All guns, three rounds each! Fire!” Dare plugged his ears against the reports of the eighty-two millimeters. The salvos blasted the tents flat. A hut’s grass roof caught fire. The garrison had been caught completely off guard. In the light of the risen sun, tiny figures could just be made out, running out of the tents and the stone building, from which a Sudanese flag flew, or rather hung—there was no wind. “Repeat fire for effect!” The projectiles made a dull, crunching sound that echoed across the clay plain below while Kasli’s men, advancing by rushes, dodged and darted among the trees and boulders.

Waving his walking stick, Michael might have been a director, choreographing a war movie. Doug was the cinematographer, now filming close-ups of the gun crews, now zooming on the attack below. His face shone. He was in hog heaven. Rocket-propelled grenades crashed into the bunkers, dirt and debris flying out from the blasts. Government troops had taken up positions on the berm and were firing down on the attacking SPLA. Several men dropped, but it was difficult to tell if they’d been hit or were taking cover. The twelve-sevens, dum-dum-dum, raked the berm. Under their covering fire, half the assault force made a frontal attack on the eastern side; the other half peeled off in a flanking maneuver to charge the south side. Puffs of smoke squirted out of the ground. Dare thought he saw a few men fall. The advancing troops wavered, stopped, then turned and fled behind some rocks. The radio crackled again. Kasli, in a voice registering strain and panic, reported that they’d run into minefields.

“Calm down!” Michael bellowed into the handset, none too calm himself. “I will clear a lane for you with the mortars. You must rush behind them!” He dropped the handset and looked at Dare with a weak smile. “Let us hope my boys are good enough.”

The defenders were trading sporadic bursts with Kasli’s men. The twelve-sevens poured plunging fire on them and once again swept them off the berm. A garrison mortar went into action—the shell crunched into the hillside, about a hundred yards down. A second struck half that distance closer. Shrapnel pinged overhead, a sound like piano wires snapping in two.

“Got us spotted, Doug, walkin’ it in, sixty-ones,” he said, as if identifying the caliber made a difference.

While Michael’s mortars ranged in on the minefield, the enemy’s (Dare had to think of them as the enemy because it was his war now because he needed water and the trucks captured intact because he needed to ride back because another march like this morning’s would kill him if he didn’t die of thirst before then) dropped a shell on the machine gun at the far end of the line. The weapon clattered down the hill, and someone screamed.

The shrieks cued Doug to live out some fantasy of combat heroism. He dropped the camera and started to run to the wounded man’s aid. Dare tackled him from behind, pinning him. “Dude, get off me!” Dare held him down. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, you goddamned idiot!” SPLA mortars fired, the shells exploding in a series of rapid ka-rumps. With Doug squirming under him, Dare raised his head and saw the bug-size specks that were Kasli’s troops sprinting into a pall of smoke. It enveloped them for a moment; then they reappeared, scrambling up the berm, with more men charging behind them, through the breach in the minefield opened by the barrage.

“Cease fire!” Michael called, and now the only sound, aside from the wounded man’s cries, was the distant stammer of semiautomatic rifles. The assault force was shooting into the defenders, caught within their own four walls. It had to be like shooting cattle in a pen, although Kasli’s troops had not blockaded the break in the embankment. They were leaving the militiamen a way out, not, Dare assumed, as a gallant courtesy but to make things easier on themselves. The trapped animal fights the hardest. Some government soldiers took to the escape route and fled down the road on foot. A few more followed in one of the trucks, and though they were supposed to capture it, Kasli’s men couldn’t resist the target the truck presented. An RPG burst under the vehicle, which tottered on two wheels, then rolled over onto its side, spilling its passengers. A second RPG slammed into its undercarriage, and the whole thing was engulfed in a ball of flame. A Hollywood volume of rifle fire, almost as seamless as the tearing of a large sheet of canvas, went on for a full minute, then fell off to scattered bursts, then to single shots, and finally the morning’s peace returned, no more affected by the frenzied noise than a pond by the ripples of a thrown rock.

Michael the Archangel surveyed the destruction with his binoculars. “Let us go and see what we have got,” he said, betraying no emotion.

Inside the garrison every sight, scent, and sound reminded Dare of some other war. The snap and smell of flaming thatch triggered memories of Laos and Vietnam. The corpse with the back of its head blown away and the pudding of brains quivering on the ground called to mind a Congolese rebel, head-shot in a fight over an airfield near the Rwandan border. The dead Sudanese soldier with his abdomen ripped open and his viscera coiling out like some sort of revolting toothpaste from a tube—he’d seen a Contra looking like that in Nicaragua.

“Our boys sure did make these ragheads sorry they joined the army, didn’t they?” he said to Doug. “Don’t forget to get some close-ups of these here bodies. Enemies of Jesus Christ, Handy said.”

Water. He left his partner to go in search of it. Stepping around and over corpses and through the wreckage of the tent camp, cots, blankets, and shredded canvas strewn everywhere, he came to the stone building—the garrison headquarters. Inside, fingers of sunlight pierced the bullet holes in the tin roof and fell on several riddled jerry cans, lying helter-skelter in a puddle. He was thinking about licking the water off the floor when he spotted an undamaged container, upright in a corner. A Sudanese officer slumped against the wall beside it, but he was beyond all need of a drink. The five-liter plastic can was about half full. If he believed in miracles, Dare would have called its survival a miracle. Hoisting it in both hands, he tipped it to his lips. The water was warm and flat-tasting, and he gulped until his gut swelled.

He lugged the can outside and offered it to Doug, busy filming SPLA troops harvesting enemy weapons and loading them onto the two remaining trucks.

“I don’t have any tablets,” Doug said, setting the camera down. “Do you?”

“Sure don’t.”

Doug shrugged and drank with greedy swallows, water dribbling down his chin. “Goddamn, that’s good.” He wiped his mouth and guzzled more. “It’s worth getting sick over.”

Someone fired a shot from across the compound. There was another, and a third. Kasli, with a few other men, was kicking bodies and shooting any that showed signs of life.

“Y’all should get some footage of that, don’t you think?”

“No need for that.”

“Yeah. Handy’s movie would get an R rating instead of PG-thirteen. ‘The following film contains scenes of extreme violence and is not suitable for children.’ Still and all”—he lifted the Sony off the ground and pointed it at Kasli and his cleanup crew—“I figure he’ll want some realism to put those contributors of his in a giving mood.” Dare focused on a khaki-clad militiaman with an arm blown off the shoulder. He was quite dead, but Kasli shot him in the head with a pistol anyway, and then one of his men bent down to pull off the dead man’s boots. “Yup, they’re gonna empty their wallets when they see this.”

“All right, Wes, that’s enough.” Douglas grabbed for the camera. Dare let him take it. “They can barely take care of their wounded, so how can you expect them to take care of the enemy’s? It’s better than leaving them here to suffer.”

“Kind of like a mercy killing?”

“Call it that if you want,”

“Mercy,” Dare said. “Mercy, mercy, mercy.”

 

MICHAEL’S THRILLING, ASTONISHING declaration had left her in no fit condition for work. After she’d finished up with the two remaining meks, she attempted to make a census of the abducted persons from their villages and the others’, but she would count off only a few names before the words “That is when I knew I loved you” caused her to lose track. In her distraction, she wandered the mission grounds alone, asking herself how he could be so sure of his heart and if she loved him. She was learning that war has the same effect on human emotions as a gorge has on a placid river—it accelerates them. She was torn between a desire to be sensible and another to leap recklessly into the swift turbulence and surrender herself to its power.

She used an inflamed tick bite on her arm as an excuse to see Ulrika. Finding refuge from the sun under a tree, she waited until the nurse had seen to her patients. Then, stepping into the hut, hardly bigger than a storage closet, the shelves racked along all four walls making it appear smaller still, Quinette rolled up her sleeve, baring the welt above her wrist.

“You have had in your hands a chicken?”

Quinette nodded. Last night she’d helped Pearl pluck a chicken for dinner.

“Ja. These things come from the chickens. Whoever pulled out the tick left in the head and jaws. This is what causes the inflammation.”

Pushing off one foot, Ulrika rolled herself to the table under the window and removed a scalpel and forceps from a drawer. Taking Quinette’s arm in her thick strong hands, she daubed the bite with a cotton swab soaked in anesthetic. Then she sliced off a thin shred of skin, pulled out a black object the size of a pinhead with the forceps, squeezed ointment from a tube, and rubbed it in.

“I would give you this to take with you, but I have no more left. I have so little of everything. The child died, early this morning.”

“Child?” asked Quinette, buttoning her sleeve.

“The child with the diarrhea.” Ulrika’s eyes, of a pale unearthly blue, gazed at her steadily. “The mother’s milk, it no sooner goes in the mouth than out the other end it comes. The baby dies of the dehydration.”

Quinette detected an accusatory glint in the woman’s stare. No, her own imagination and her guilt had put it there; Ulrika couldn’t know.

“Would you have saved him if you had more medicine?”

“Possibly.”

The indefinite answer left Quinette unsure about her culpability.

“This is certain—if I am not soon resupplied, some other child will die,” Ulrika said.

“As soon as Wes and Doug get back, I’m going to let them know how desperate you are,” Quinette promised, figuring that this intention—the intention alone—would propitiate her conscience. “I’ll tell them to make sure there’s plenty on the next flight in. Give me a list of what you need and I’ll see to it myself that you get it.”

“What do you mean, when Wesley and Douglas get back? Where have they gone?”

“With Michael. On the operation. They went with Michael.”

This was a good moment to change the subject, but she didn’t know how to begin, nor even if she should begin. Wouldn’t she be betraying Michael’s confidence?

Ulrika looked at her quizzically. “There is something else I can help you with?”

“Could I talk to you? It’s not a medical problem. It’s about Michael.”

“What about him?”

She was silent. With a scooping movement, the nurse prodded her to speak.

“Last night he—” Quinette laughed and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Could you keep this to yourself?”

“If I knew what, I would.”

“He told me that he was in love with me.”

“This is not a surprise,” Ulrika said without hesitation. “He speaks about you a great deal. And?”

“I guess I had to talk to someone about it, another woman.”

“Because you don’t know if with him you are in love.”

Quinette said nothing.

“If you don’t know, that means you aren’t.”

Count on Ulrika to be blunt, even brutal, Quinette thought. “It isn’t that, it’s—”

“It is this? If you do love him, you are afraid of what could come of it.”

“Exactly. And I don’t like to think of myself as being afraid of anything.”

“You would be a fool if you were not afraid.” Ulrika patted her arm. “For this I have remedy, for that none. You must look to yourself for the remedy.”

 

DARE HAD FALLEN asleep—passed out was more like it—his chin to his chest, head flopping side to side with the rocking motion of the truck. A jolt knocked his skull against the window frame and woke him. From the rear came the groan of a wounded man, one of several piled up like bloody sacks.

“Sorry about that,” Douglas said.

“Talkin’ to me or him?” Dare jerked his thumb at the back window.

Doug glanced at the odometer. A wonder he could read it, with the talcum-thick dust blowing through the windows. “At this rate, we’ll make the last of it around moonrise.”

They were in a dry riverbed, all six of the Russian army truck’s wheels seeking purchase in the sand. In planning the operation, Michael had neglected to find out which of his men knew how to drive. It turned out none could, with the exception of Suleiman, Major Kasli, and Michael himself. Considering that the object had been to capture motor vehicles, Dare thought that a right strange oversight, but it did save him from leaving the comfort of his prejudices. Michael’s diligent planning and efficient execution of the attack had almost forced him to change his opinions about Africans; now he didn’t have to. No Vietnamese officer would have overlooked such a critical detail, hell no Arab, Honduran, or Nicaraguan would have. It was a very African thing to do.

So Michael had to take the wheel of one truck, with his second in command riding shotgun. Douglas and Dare took the other, and Suleiman, the ex-heavy-equipment operator for the Ministry of Aviation, drove the Land Rover. It was leading the column. Michael’s truck followed, carrying the captured weapons and the dead (he’d lost seven men), then Dare’s and Douglas’s with the seriously wounded. The riverbed made a natural road, and the trees galleried along its banks helped to mask the convoy’s movement from the air. It couldn’t go much faster than a walking pace, so the troops tramping behind and alongside had no trouble keeping up.

“Let me know when you want me to spell you,” Dare said, a sour taste in his mouth.

“Doing fine. Good to go all day. This has been an incredible experience.”

“That’s what you call it? An experience?”

His partner’s face seemed to glow beneath the film of dust. “Seeing the difference we’ve made in action. Two, three months ago these guys couldn’t have pulled off what they did today.”

“Gives you that nice warm feeling, and the best part is, this experience ain’t over yet.”

They drove on, the riverbed narrowing as it rose toward its source in the mountains, wavering insubstantially in the heat shimmer, like an illusion of mountains. Half a mile farther on, the banks became miniature cliffs the height of the trucks’ roofs, with not much more than a yard’s space on either side. Suleiman stopped and climbed out of the Land Rover.

“We cannot go more this way. No room to pass. We must back up.”

They did, and after Suleiman found a way up the bank, they proceeded along the river, weaving through the corridor of trees, until a steep-sided gully twenty feet deep blocked their path. Suleiman turned a hard right and followed the gully out into the rolling, open grasslands. He stuck out his hand, signaling for a halt, then got out again to range ahead on foot, looking for a way across.

“This keeps up,” Dare grumbled, “it won’t be moonrise, it’ll be sunrise tomorrow.”

Then he saw Suleiman running toward them, waving his long arms. “Heel-o-coptar!”

Dare flung his door open, leaped out, and cowered in the riverbed, Doug beside him with the video camera. All around, men were jumping in, taking up firing positions. The helicopter came on with a throaty growl, following the course of the river. Dare reckoned he had a good idea what it feels like to be a field mouse when a hawk shows up in the neighborhood. From somewhere up ahead Michael and Kasli yelled to the men to hold their fire until they got the order. Suleiman, sprawled flat under the opposite bank, was praying out loud—Bismillah ar-rahman, ar-rahim—and Doug lay on his back, the camera aimed toward the sky. Dare tore off his baseball cap and clapped it over the lens. “That thing will flash like a mirror, you goddamned—” He didn’t get a chance to say what kind of a goddamned thing he was. The chopper passed directly overhead, its shadow broken by the trees: an old Soviet MI-24, the gunship that had raised holy hell in Afghanistan, a flying tank. It was five hundred feet above, drifting, almost hovering, its armored underside like the breast of some pterodactyl, bombs and rocket pods racked under its stubby wings, minigun barrels protruding from the nose. Quite a package. Suleiman’s prayers grew frenzied, a garble of pleas in which Dare could distinguish only one word, Allah. The trucks and men remained hidden in the gallery forest, but the Land Rover was parked in the open. The chopper crew had to see it. Then some fool, tempted beyond endurance by the low, slow-flying gunship, opened fire. That gave everyone else the go-ahead, rifles and machine guns ripping through the trees, sending down flurries of shredded leaves. Stung but otherwise unhurt by the swarm of bullets, the helicopter swooped away. Kasli screamed at the soldier who’d shot first, smacked him in the face with his pistol, and kicked him, his lesson in military discipline cut short by the gunship, which looped around and let loose with its miniguns, firing so quickly—four thousand rounds a minute—that the three-second burst made a noise like a millsaw cutting a log. There was a loud whump as the Land Rover’s fuel tank burst. Michael’s troops were firing without restraint. Now a thousand feet up, the chopper wobbled—it had taken a solid hit—and flew off again.

Two men, one with a SAM-7, another with a spare launch tube and missile strapped to his back, sprinted into the open—the trees must have prevented them from taking their shot. Rising to a crouch, Dare peered over the bank. Ten yards in front of him the men lay, the SAM’s launcher resting on a flat boulder. Flames engulfed the Land Rover; smoke funneled upward, a perfect aiming point for the gunship. And if it didn’t serve, the missile-gunner’s outfit would: He was one of the army’s cross-dressers, garbed in a pink housedress.

A mile to two miles out, the MI-24 orbited the savannah. The last burst of ground fire had given the crew something to think about before trying another strafing run. The chopper finished its circle, started another. The missile-gunner got up, his outfit standing out amid the duns and greens, shouldered the launcher, and lined up the fore and rear sights but held his fire.

“Well shoot, for Christ’s sake!” Dare shouted. The trucks had survived the first strafing; they wouldn’t survive the next one. “They’re in range! Shoot!”

Doug said, “What the hell’s wrong?”

“The guy’s dressed like a girl for one, and for another, he was carrying a spear two months ago, that’s what. There’s a two-stage trigger on a SAM. Pull it back once, a green light tells you you’re locked on, the second pull fires the booster. Somebody must have put that thing in his hands with a set of instructions he couldn’t read.”

The gunship banked and came on, nose canted slightly downward, rotors flashing in the sun. Now everyone was yelling in Nuban and English—“Shoot! Shoot!” Doug bounded out of the riverbed, snatched the launcher from the gunner’s hands, shouldered it, and aimed. There was a brief pause; then he fired. The booster rocket flamed and fell; the warhead rocket ignited. A red ball streaked on a trajectory parallel to the gunship’s flight path before the warhead sensed the heat from the engine and curved toward it. The pilot saw the missile. Dare knew he did because he deployed decoy flares. As they hung in the sky like incandescent carnations, the pilot pulled into a turn and roll to throw the missile off course, but the infrared sensors would not be seduced, either by the flares or by the maneuver. The warhead rammed into the jet engine’s exhaust. Dare felt the blast, a punch of wind. The main rotor blew off, twirling away as debris flew in all directions and the fuselage flipped over and crashed upside down, the bombs erupting, the miniguns’ rounds cooking off in the inferno. Everyone lay flat in the riverbed as a maelstrom of shrapnel cracked through the trees above.

When it was over, Michael’s soldiers jumped up and fired celebratory shots into the air. They whooped and cheered. They poured out of the riverbed and mobbed Douglas, chanting his name, “Dug-lass! Dug-lass!”

He was breathing hard, and when he turned to Dare, his eyes had a weird glitter.

“Payback, Wes,” he said.

“And payback is a bitch,” Dare said. “Who taught you to shoot a SAM?”

“You did.”

“You’re a quick study, Dougie my boy.”

Michael elbowed through the crowd, clasped Doug’s hand, then pulled his arms overhead and turned him in a circle, calling out, “Douglas Negarra!” The troops echoed, “Dug-lass Negarra!” and hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him around. Even now Doug maintained his air of self-assured serenity, as if this adulation were his birthright. “Dug-lass Negarra!”

“Negarra,” said Michael, “is like brother but more than brother. When a man is your negarra, it means you will lay down your life for him.”

“Him, too!” Doug hollered from his perch, pointing at Dare. “He told me how to shoot it!” He broke out laughing. “Taught me all I know!”

So Michael raised Dare’s arms and conferred the title on him. The soldiers lifted him up. His bulk proved more challenging, but they managed it. He felt a little silly, bouncing like a kid riding on Dad’s shoulders, a mass of dark, ecstatic faces beneath him, a forest of arms, pumping their rifles up and down in time to the chants. “Dug-lass Negarra! Wes-lee Negarra!”

“Our war, dude! Like it or not, it’s ours.”

“Till I’m gone,” Dare said. “Then it’s all yours.”

The soldiers carrying him changed direction, so he faced the wreckage of the helicopter, its blackened hulk showing through a wall of flames. The smoke joined the plume from the still-burning Land Rover to form a flat cloud dark as a crow’s wing and dense enough to cast a shadow over the charred corpses of the crew, the trees, the riverbed, the triumphant men.

 

SHE FOLLOWED ULRIKA’S advice, and looked to herself but could find no answer there. Returning to her tukul, she forced herself to concentrate on her work, roughing out in her notebook a report she would submit to Ken. It took up most of the day, and when dusk fell without Michael’s return, she was filled with worry, and more than worry—a creeping dread that emboldened her to go his headquarters and ask a radio operator if he’d gotten any news. An officer told her to leave—an operation was in progress and she was not permitted inside.

“I only want to know if Michael’s all right,” she said.

“The operation is going well,” he replied. “Please to go, missy.”

She went back and pressed Pearl if she’d learned anything. Pearl assured her that her father would return.

“You’ve heard then? He wasn’t hurt?”

“My father always comes back,” she said, and gave her a long, penetrating look of uncertain meaning.