Acts of Faith

MICHAEL’S STRATEGY TO stage the offensive at the end of the dry season, trusting that the wet would blunt or avert a retaliation, had not presumed a drought. In the fourth week without rain, Khartoum took advantage of the favorable weather and struck back. For three consecutive days, everyone in town and in the garrison heard the distant, ominous rumble of bombs; for three consecutive nights, they saw the spastic flashes of artillery over far-off ridgelines; and for a week afterward reports and rumors came in by radio and bush-telegraph of raids by militia battalions on foot and on horseback, in trucks and tanks. They came from towns Quinette knew and from places she’d never heard of, Toda, Nawli, and Andreba; Tabanya, El Hemid, and Lado. When it was over, seventeen towns had been leveled and thirty-six thousand people had been killed, displaced, or taken into captivity. Tamsit, scorched earth. More woe to the land of the whirring wings beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. New Tourom escaped the onslaught. Government planes attempted to bomb it but were driven off by flurries of anti-aircraft fire; a militia column advancing from a Sudanese army garrison was ambushed before it got within ten miles of the town. It was the safest place in the rebel-held Nuba. For several days, survivors from elsewhere shambled into New Tourom, walking ghosts starved and dehydrated, wounded and sick. They built crude shelters of sticks and straw on the outskirts, and in a short time the town had its own slum of more than a thousand people. It grew to two thousand, to three. The missionaries stopped all other work to help care for the multitudes. Quinette pitched in, making splints and bandages for the injured, dishing out doura gruel, but the numbers kept growing, and with the drought, New Tourom’s citizens resisted parting with their remaining stores of grain. Dysentery swept through the refugee camps. Manfred and Ulrika were overwhelmed. So were Michael’s military police, struggling to maintain order. Clashes broke out between townspeople and refugees, who also fought among themselves over a bowl of food or a jerry can of water. One morning a gun battle erupted between local troops and soldiers who’d fled a distant garrison. Two were killed. Hunger and disease had brought things to the verge of chaos, a breakdown of all ties of family, clan, and tribe that would pit every man against every other man.

With a stunning lack of diplomacy, Kasli chose this time to remind his commander that he had predicted disaster, and now here it was. The dry-season campaign had achieved worse than nothing. The oil was flowing again, all the towns captured had been recaptured and burned to the ground, and half the Nuba was in ruins. Michael couldn’t imagine what his adjutant hoped to gain, speaking to him in such a manner. It was intolerable, he should have sacked Kasli on the spot, but he remained wary of taking that step. Kasli had his followers and sympathizers, fellow Muslims and loyal clansmen, and could stir up trouble if he felt he’d been treated unjustly. Instead of relieving him, Michael sent him into temporary banishment. With a strong detachment, he was to tour the towns hardest hit, assess the damage, and while he was at it, scour the countryside for recruits; Khartoum’s savagery must have created numbers of young men eager to enlist in the SPLA.

Single-handedly, Quinette organized a relief operation.

The emergency had summoned all the discordant strains in her nature to play in concert: her egoism and her desire for self-sacrifice; her need to be of service and also the center of attention; her pity for the victimized and her pride in being their savior; and the lead violinist in this symphony of motives was her jealousy. Her first thought was to aid her husband, who could not cope with a looming famine, a refugee crisis, and his military duties all at once. Her second thought, proceeding from the first, was to show him she was indispensable. She could do what a hundred Yamilas could not. She had the power to make things happen.

She began with Fancher and Handy. Arguing that the needs of the body superseded the needs of mind and spirit for the time being, she convinced them to radio their field office in Loki with a request to send food, medicine, and blankets instead of books, Bibles, and gospel videos. On her laptop she wrote graphic descriptions of the situation, seeing herself as the Nubans’ voluntary amanuensis. Using the garrison’s radio, she broadcast appeals for help to the independent aid agencies. She contacted Doug Braithwaite, begging him to collect supplies and make an emergency delivery. The next day she trekked to the New Tourom airstrip to meet his plane. She gave him her press releases, urging him to fly them directly to Nairobi and hand-deliver them to the news agencies. You could always count on Doug. No other pilot would have agreed so readily to such an extraordinary request.

The independent NGOs came through. Within a week aid flights to the Nuba doubled. Quinette practically camped out at the airstrip, talking to the pilots on a field radio, coordinating the off-loads while a detachment of Michael’s bodyguard kept desperate people from mobbing the planes. Reporters and film crews arrived. Interviewed by the BBC and French and Japanese television, she laced her commentaries with condemnations of Khartoum’s brutality. Phyllis Rappaport from CNN showed up, obnoxious as ever. “You’ve come a long way, baby,” she remarked to Quinette, who swallowed her dislike and gave Phyllis an interview. NBC, German television, Reuters—she’d made the Nuba a focus of world attention, and the publicity brought more assistance. A southern Sudanese doctor and two nurses arrived to help Manfred and Ulrika. John Barrett’s IPA dispatched a team of aid workers with tents, blankets, and cots to build a camp for the refugees. Norwegian People’s Aid established a feeding center. Yet with displaced people still trickling in, all this wasn’t enough.

When Kasli returned from his mission, she obtained the report he submitted to Michael, radioed UN headquarters in Nairobi, and read from the report, requesting airdrops by C-130s and Buffalos. She had to plead with the UN to demand that Khartoum lift its blockade and grant the UN permission to fly into the Nuba.

The demand was made and was predictably refused. Quinette went back to Knight Air, the blockade runners. Doug orchestrated airdrops on the most ravaged areas, using his airline’s Antonovs. One mission took place over New Tourom. With the porters, she watched the plane come to a near stall low in the sky, its nose pointed upward as it dropped a blizzard of white sacks. The women swarmed into the drop zone, hoisted the heavy sacks onto their heads, and carried them into town.

After the food was distributed, the porters gathered around Quinette, singing and clapping their hands. Four lifted her off the ground and bore her through the town and set her down before a crowd of men, assembled beside a tethered cow. A young woman approached, a small mound of ashes in each palm, and while she powdered Quinette’s arms and legs, a man slashed the cow’s throat with a spear. Blood spewed and soaked into the dry ground. The animal wobbled and fell, thrashing its legs, and when the thrashing ceased and the large eyes stared still, the man dipped his spear into the wound, then stood in front of Quinette and flicked the blade, sprinkling her with blood. Blessing her. Ululations rose, hands clapped in rhythm, and she heard in those sounds a declaration that there would be no more whispers about spirits angered by the commander’s union with a stranger. She was the kujur now, the rainmaker who had delivered the people from hunger.

The crisis eased. One day as she left her tukul to go to the airstrip, she found Negev waiting outside the courtyard wall with five members of her husband’s bodyguard. They immediately surrounded her, two in front, one on each side, two behind, and walked with her, silent, vigilant, sandals made from tires slapping the ground. She turned to look at Negev, one of the duo bringing up the rear. “Commander’s orders, missy.” They shuttled her into the headquarters bungalow, where Michael stood studying his wall map. She asked him to explain the cloak of protection. He left off what he was doing and, taking her by both hands, wove his long fingers into hers. The face she loved so wore a complex expression—tender, stern, troubled.

“These men will be with you at all times. You are in grave danger.”

The SPLA had sources of intelligence in Khartoum, from one of which he had received a coded report earlier in the day. Quinette having granted so many interviews, her opinions and activities had not gone unnoticed by the government. An editorial about her had appeared in the official newspaper. Among other things, it accused her of—

“I can guess of what,” she said, and asked what danger she was in from an editorial.

“There are rumors you may be assassinated.”

The word jolted her. At the same time she felt somehow honored. A certain light must have come into her eyes, and through it Michael must have read her thoughts.

“This is not to be taken lightly,” he said, drawing her closer. “This is not cinema. Khartoum has infiltrated the SPLA. And with all these refugees coming in here, who can say who might be among them? So you will go nowhere while you are here without these men.”

“What do you mean, while I’m here? Where else would I be?”

“I have decided to send you away for a time.”

“Away where?” she asked, startled. She did not want to leave his side for a dozen reasons, and she was surprised that her jealousy was among them. She had thought she was over it.

“To Loki. You will be safe there, although Negev will accompany you just in case. Only a short time, long enough for us to screen these refugees. I imagine that if there are assassins among them, they would come after me as well as you. So you are not idle and bored, I suggest you talk with the assistance people about sending us more aid. And I have something I want you to do. It is not a small something.” He withdrew a sealed envelope from a drawer. “Our stores of antiaircraft ammunition and rockets are very low. The need for them is as great as the need for the other things.”

She took the envelope. “Another keyword?”

He nodded and instructed her to present it, as before, only to Douglas or Wesley Dare.

The following afternoon she and Negev, a sidearm concealed under his shirt, boarded Alexei’s Antonov—it had landed at New Tourom after making another airdrop. To avoid problems with Kenya immigration, they were given jumpsuits and smuggled into the country as crew members. Sneaked across an international border. Bodyguards. Assassins. A coded message. Despite Michael’s caution that “this is not cinema,” it was impossible not to feel that she was in a movie, and the thrill of it blunted the sting of missing him, the fear that Yamila would take advantage of her absence.

To Quinette, after many months away, Lokichokio looked like what it was—a foreign country. Alexei gave her and Negev a lift to the Knight Air office. She blinked when Doug greeted her—his nose was covered in bandages. An accident, he said, sounding as if he had a bad cold. She handed him the envelope, and he passed it to Fitz, who wrote out the keyword. Actually, it was two words: Baker’s Daughter.

“Michael must be a man of many facets,” he said. “I didn’t know he read Shakespeare.”

“I don’t think he does,” she said.

“ ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.’ It’s from—I don’t remember. From somewhere in Shakespeare.”

He went to work. Once more she watched him compose scrambled words into a coherent message. So many tons of 14.5-millimeter ammunition, so many shoulder-fired missiles.

“So we’ve got the order,” Doug said, “but no delivery truck. I’m sorry, Quinette. I really am.”

She gave him a puzzled look.

“Wes and I have come to a parting of the ways. There’s no way we can fly this stuff in. Not till we work out a new system.”

After absorbing this disturbing news, she said, “What do I tell my husband? He needs it right away. Without it, the government will have a field day. They’ll bomb and bomb and bomb.”

“I know, “ he said under his breath.

“Can’t you or someone else fly it in? The Antonov we came in on—”

“Quinette, it’s complicated, but we can’t carry military stuff in Knight Air planes, and Knight Air can’t take direct payment from the SPLA. The operation has to be covered. And like I said, we’re working out a new system. We’re not going to leave you people in the lurch. That’s a solemn promise, but it’s going to take a few weeks to set things up.”

Fitz gave her the decoded message. “Perhaps you could talk to Wes yourself. He might make one more trip. I doubt it, but maybe.”

She found him at a part of the Loki airfield known as Dogpatch, a graveyard for derelict planes and home to a few one-pilot, one-plane air operators. Tara Whitcomb’s Cessna was parked there, near Dare’s Hawker-Siddley. A ground crewman was spray-painting the canary under the cockpit window, and the word YELLOWBIRD bled through a thin undercoat on the fuselage. Inside the shabby hangar, with Mary looking over his shoulder, Wes was hunched over a desk, laboriously typing on a laptop with one finger. They looked up as Quinette walked in with Negev.

“Well, don’t y’all look stunning in that jumpsuit,” Wes quipped in his grating accent.

“You might try, ‘Hello, Quinette, it’s good to see you.’ ”

“Sure. Hello, Quinette, it’s good to see you.” He glanced at Negev. “Who’s this?”

“My bodyguard.”

“Y’all rate a bodyguard?”

“Actually, I rate six.”

“What brings you here from Ugga-Buggaland?”

When it came to provoking Quinette’s dislike, he was Phyllis Rappaport’s equal. She showed him the message. He gave it a quick look and said, “Guess you didn’t hear. We’re out of business.”

“I heard you and Doug aren’t working together anymore, not that you’re out of business.”

He folded his hands on his belly and tilted back in his squeaky chair. “So you’ve seen my ex-partner.”

“Half an hour ago.”

“It was me that broke his nose.”

“I won’t ask why.”

“Good. I wouldn’t of given you an answer. Know anyone interested in a right good airplane?” He indicated the laptop, on which he was writing an ad: FOR SALE—1967 HAWKER-SIDDLEY 748. Then some technical data and the price. “That’s reduced as of today,” he said. “A bargain.”

“Wes, we’ve been hit hard. If they start bombing again and we don’t have anything to shoot back with, I hate to think what will happen.”

“We?” was all he said, twirling his sunglasses, his glance sidling away. She looked at Mary, who shrugged and said, “Like the boss said, out of business. At least the business we were in.”

“You’re here, and your plane is out there. Why can’t you make one more run?”

“Y’all want an explanation, I’ll give you two for your trouble. First off, my plan was to fly the hardware for six months. We did seven and change on account of I couldn’t get that Hawker sold for my original askin’ price. Second off, you people are a day late and eighteen thousand dollars short.”

“I thought that got settled weeks ago.”

“It did. What you might call a benefactor paid the SPLA’s debt, but the man can’t make a career out of that. What happened was, the glorious rebel army stiffed us again, the last flight we made. That makes this many times”—Fanning three fingers—“and that many times means out.”

“You owe it to the people up there!” Quinette said, her voice ricocheting off the hangar’s walls of corrugated iron.

“Don’t lecture me, girl. We’re the ones that are owed, me and Mary. I was you, I’d walk out right goddamned now, unless you want to see me forget my manners.”

Outside on the scorching tarmac, she thought of five thousand refugees jammed into an exposed tent camp. It would take one plane to slaughter and maim hundreds, and Wesley Dare would leave them without a shield for eighteen thousand dollars. Such mercenary greed was beyond her understanding. She no longer disliked him, she hated him. Forgive me, Lord, for that, forgive me.

As she stood, perplexed about what to do—really, there was nothing she could do—a pickup truck swung across the asphalt and parked between the Hawker and the Cessna. A familiar figure climbed out and, after staring at Quinette for a second or two, walked over. Put together as always. Not a strand of tinted hair out of place. Pressed white shirt tucked into creased khaki trousers.

“I thought it was you!” Tara said. “Didn’t recognize you in that.” She gestured at Quinette’s apparel.

“A disguise. I guess it worked. How are you?”

“Fine.” Tara hesitated a beat. “Actually not. Had a run of bad luck. Bad luck with a shove from behind. Never mind. How are you?”

“We’ve had a run of bad luck, too.”

“Bloody awful, I’ve heard. How long are you in for?”

“Not sure. A few days maybe.”

“Good! We’ll have a chance to talk. Sorry I can’t now. A flight. Picking up your old boss, as a matter of fact.”

“Ken? Ken Eismont?”

“He is your old boss, isn’t he? I’ll be overnighting. Hope to see you tomorrow then.”

Tara began her taxi to the runway. As she shielded her eyes from the prop-wash, Quinette saw what she could do. Because the idea wasn’t the product of her own mental labors—it came to her as a lyric might come to an inspired songwriter—she concluded it was heaven sent. God wanted His Nuban children to be protected and was directing her to be the agent of His will. Thus she was confident, absolutely so, that she could make it happen.

Telling Negev to wait for her, she went back into the hangar. Wes was looking at a printout of his ad.

“Would you do it if I guaranteed you’d get your eighteen thousand?”

“Jesus Christ! What part of no is it that you don’t understand?”

“I don’t know what went down between you and Doug, but I can see”—she spread her arms and moved her head to point out the ad in his hands, the run-down hangar with engine parts racked along a wall, the tired airplane outside—“that you’re not on top of the world. You could use the money.”

“It wouldn’t be eighteen. Thirty-six. Eighteen for the flight we didn’t get paid for, eighteen for the one you want us to make.”

The peculiar, bashful, sidelong look. He seemed to realize that he’d taken a step back from categorical refusal—he was bargaining.

“I can’t promise thirty-six. Eighteen. If I can raise a little more, you’ll get it.”

“Raise it!” he scoffed. “Y’all gonna hold a bake sale? A raffle?”

“Never mind the how. I know I can put it together and fairly quickly.”

He swept a hard, appraising look across her face. “Wish I could be as sure of you as you are of yourself.”

“Wes . . . ,” Mary said, indicating a corner of the hangar with a jerk of her head. In whispers, the two conferred there for a few minutes. Mary appeared to do most of the talking, Wes with hands on his hips, looking at the floor.

“No less than twenty, “ he said when they came back. “Can you guarantee that?”

She made a rough mental calculation and nodded.

“Hold your bake sale right quick. The Hawker gets sold before you’re done, you’re out of luck. And here’s the important part—you put the money in our pockets first, then we fly.”

“And I’ll have to trust that you will?”

“Trust is a wonderful thing,” Wes drawled.

The next day, as she spoke to Ken Eismont in what had been the Pathways compound but was now under new management, she recalled Michael’s rule: In Sudan the choice is never between the right thing and the wrong thing but between what is necessary and what isn’t. She made a slight revision—in Sudan, the necessary thing is the right thing—which eased the twitches of conscience she experienced, despite her conviction that her plan had divine approval. She wasn’t deceiving Ken and the WorldWide Christian Union to enrich herself or anyone else, but saving lives, aiding in the defense of her people. Who could fault her for using all and any means at her disposal?

When she’d approached him after breakfast, Ken was less than cordial but also less hostile than the last time they’d seen each other. At any rate, he was open to talking to her. They went into the recreation hut and sat behind the billiard table. To evoke his sympathies and improve his opinion of her, she explained the reason for Negev’s presence and related the horrors that the Nuba had recently suffered. Having softened him up, she came to the point: A slave retriever was coming to New Tourom with more than four hundred Nuban captives.

“Four hundred?”

Nodding, she told him, with all the sincerity at her command, that her husband had sent her to Loki to find out if her former employers could arrange a redemption mission. “I was going to see Santino to contact you in Switzerland. I didn’t know you were here already till I ran into Tara yesterday.”

Ken removed his glasses, blew on the lenses, and wiped them with a handkerchief.

“When?”

“In a few days.”

He asked if she knew what were the retriever’s terms. The standard, she replied. Fifty dollars a head. “But he wants payment in U.S., not Sudanese,” she added, a dryness in her mouth.

He flicked his eyebrows and glanced at the blank satellite TV, on a platform hung from the ceiling. “That’s not the way we usually do things.”

“I told him that. I think this is his way of rewarding himself for the chances he took. It’s really dangerous up there. Maybe you could make an exception in this case?”

“Do you know this guy?”

“He’s not an Arab,” she answered. “A Nuban Muslim.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “We were planning to leave this afternoon. I’ll need to find out if the team can extend their stay, then go to Nairobi to put the money together. And I’d like to see if I can bring some media along. Four hundred—we’ve never done that many at one time.”

Feeling both appalled and excited by how easily he’d been taken in, she asked him to call her on the radio a day in advance of his arrival. The captives could be assembled near the airstrip, sparing the team a long trek.

With the first hurdle behind her, she went to Knight Air and begged from Fitz space for herself and Negev on the next relief flight to New Tourom. One was scheduled for that afternoon, but it was fully loaded. To make room for them, cargo would have to be taken off. Then do it! she commanded. It was critical that she get back immediately.

Michael was furious with her for disobeying his orders. Her safety, her very life depended on her doing as she was told. He wasn’t mollified by her explanation for her hasty return. He thought her scheme outlandish and didn’t see how she could bring it off. She begged him to trust her. She knew what needed to be done and how to do it, but she had precious little time and would need his full cooperation. It took a while, but she brought him around.

Accompanied by her phalanx of guards and by interpreters fluent in the various Nuban tongues, Quinette spent the next three days scouring the refugee camp for people who looked the part—the most underfed and ill-clothed. Michael had loaned her a couple of men to help select the cast. Working six to seven hours a day, she mustered four hundred and ten, then assembled them and told them what she wanted them to do. It was very important that they listen carefully and follow her instructions. Through three different interpreters—a very imperfect medium—she tried to explain the connection between the roles they were to play and the delivery of the rockets, guns, and bullets that could be their salvation. Her company appeared bewildered, but the promise of payment, in the form of extra food and clothing, to be drawn from the stores of relief supplies, got them into the spirit of the thing. They enjoyed the novelty, the respite from the monotony of their existence.

She held auditions, choosing a dozen men and women who would give testimony about their enslavement. Drawing on her past experiences, she created a story for each of them, then coached them and the interpreters on what to say. From town, she picked a bright young Muslim to act as the retriever, guaranteeing him a modest cash payment.

The effort was as exhausting as managing the relief operation. Her nerves felt like overstrung piano wires. When, five days after she’d left Loki, Ken called on the radio to say that he and the team would be arriving the next morning, the audaciousness of what she was doing nearly overwhelmed her. Was it really she engineering a hoax—no other word for it—of this magnitude? She collected herself and used the remainder of the day to conduct a kind of dress rehearsal. Then she marched her troupe to the airfield and had them camp out nearby. A night in the open would add to their haggard appearance, make them look more like captives who had come a long way on foot. Inflicting more suffering on people who had suffered so much brought pricks of guilt; but the purpose demanded it, the purpose justified it. She must keep the purpose uppermost in her mind, lest she falter.

Outwardly, she was composed; inwardly, no director or playwright on opening night experienced the anxiety Quinette did when Tara’s Caravan landed at about nine in the morning. Ken stepped out, wearing a soft, short-brimmed hat that looked like a codger’s beach hat. Jim Prewitt, heavier, older, blinking into the mean sunlight, followed him; then came Jean and Mike; then Santino holding the prize, an airline bag of cash; and the media contingent, two correspondents and a film crew.

She greeted each of them, her Nuban dress and hairstyle drawing curious looks from the reporters, then led the group to a grove of trees, beneath which the make-believe slaves were assembled. They looked the role indeed—Quinette herself would have taken them for the real thing—and they played it as instructed, maintaining a wary silence. After introducing him to the retriever, who likewise put in a good performance, she gave Ken a list of names, whispering that she’d done some preliminary work for him. “There’s a check mark by the ones who want to tell their stories,” she said, her heart fluttering with one rhythm, her stomach with another. For a moment, she thought she was going to be sick.

Less than three hours later, she watched the Cessna take off and felt she could soar with it, such was her relief. A grain sack filled with twenty thousand five hundred dollars was at her feet. Two women giving testimony had gotten stage fright and forgotten their lines but remembered after some prompting from an interpreter. Otherwise, the thing had come off without a hitch. The sight of Ken typing fictions of captivity into his laptop brought a new prickling of conscience, which she salved with a prayer for forgiveness and this thought: Ken would benefit, too. The fresh publicity would garner for the WorldWide Christian Union contributions far exceeding twenty thousand.

She and Negev returned to Loki the next day. Wes said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” when he opened the sack and pulled out bricks of hundred-dollar bills. To make sure he kept his end of the bargain, she flew with him to the pickup point on the Uganda border and then on to New Tourom, the Hawker crammed with ammunition boxes, missiles, and launchers. Michael was waiting at the airfield. Observing the off-load, he held her and said, “You are a marvel.”

In all innocence and with perfect certitude, she pointed at the sky and said she’d had a lot of help.

Her life resumed its normal pace—teaching school, ministering, tending her garden. The war had gone into a lull and, deeming it safe to travel, Fancher and Handy departed on one of their evangelizing journeys to a distant town. Michael forbade her to go. Too dangerous, he said, even with half a dozen armed men to watch over her. By this point she thought the threat of assassination was overblown, but she complied without further protest—and was glad she did when, later, she observed Yamila flirting with Michael with her eyes. Yamila’s demeanor and expression underwent a dramatic change whenever he was near, the she-leopard domesticating herself instantly into a demure kitten. Illiterate peasant or no, this, Quinette thought, is a woman who knows how to lure a man.

The missionaries returned from their trip, having harvested several more souls to Christ. For the week following, they oversaw the final repairs to St. Andrew’s mission. The last chips in the church’s facade were patched, windows delivered by an aid plane were installed, and the brass bell and dedication plaque were polished. It looked splendid in the shimmering dust of late afternoon, the trees laying long shadows on mown grounds webbed with rock-lined footpaths leading to the school, to the tailor and carpentry shops, to the cottages where teachers would live when peace came, and to the bungalow that would shelter visiting clergy. The mission compound breathed an atmosphere of order and serenity, and Quinette and Michael gazed at it with pleasure and hope.

A rededication ceremony was held that Sunday, Fancher conducting a praise service. Quinette got chills, listening to familiar hymns made unfamiliar by African voices, African drums. Oh, they made a joyful noise! Fancher delivered a homily, promising better times, assuring the congregation that the will of God would never lead them to where the grace of God could not keep them. He concluded with a prayer for rain.

Afterward, perhaps concerned that the white minister’s petition would prove efficacious and diminish his already-diminished authority, the kujur employed gangs of young people to run through town, whirling sticks tied to long cords. They made a droning sound, like ceiling fans turned to high speed. The devices, part of the rainmaker’s traditional toolkit, were supposed to inspire the heavens to open.

At sundown, as she stood to stretch after weeding her vegetable patch, Quinette looked southward and saw a belt of black clouds, embroidered by lightning. It advanced with incredible speed, pulled by the high wind that drove before it, shaking the palms and baobabs, bending the tall, burnt grass in the meadows. She ran into the house just as a deluge slashed across the courtyard, accompanied by a crash of thunder. Watching the rain transform dust into mud, listening to it splatter against the makuti roof, she wondered if she had unconsciously absorbed the Nubans’ superstitions, if the mountains’ silences and spaces and shadowed crevasses had turned her imagination toward realms unperceived by the senses, her mind toward belief in spirits whose supernatural powers could be invoked through chants and magic; for she was inclined to give the kujur’s whirling sticks as much credit as Fancher’s prayer.

Michael dashed in, totally drenched, laughing. “It has broken!” he shouted, picking her up, spinning her around. “It has broken!”

He peeled off his uniform, kicked off his boots, and as the wind fell, went outside to stand naked in the rain, facing a sky twice darkened by night and cloud, his mouth open. Quinette pulled her dress over her head and joined him, drinking the rain, bathing in it. They laughed hysterically, choking as they laughed, eyes squeezed shut against the heavy wet darts that stung their faces. Then the arms of a former wrestler scooped her off her feet and carried her inside, and she knew, falling on the bed, that this would be the time. The spirits who had broken the drought on the land would break the one in her.

 

THE RAINS DID not fall incessantly but swept over the mountains in tightly wound, localized storms. Avoiding them, government planes resumed bombing, the Antonovs flying at altitudes beyond the range of antiaircraft guns and missiles. The reports crackling over the radio from Michael’s subcommands made it clear that Khartoum was targeting the Nuba’s airstrips. Three were struck in as many days. The purpose was obvious, said Michael. The blockade had failed to stop aid from reaching the Nuba, so now the government intended to isolate it, making it impossible for relief planes to land.

A broadcast on the state-controlled radio, picked up on the shortwave, confirmed his speculations. He translated the Arabic: Sudan’s vice-president had made a formal protest to the United Nations Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, charging that the UN relief operation was being used to channel aid not to civilians but to the SPLA . . . Reliable information had it that some of this aid included weapons . . . In the Nuba mountains in particular, planes based in Kenya were known to have delivered shoulder-fired rockets, one of which was used to down a civilian aircraft carrying oil workers . . . The nation’s military forces had been ordered to strike back and were winning glorious victories on every front.

“So they are on to the game,” Michael said, switching the radio off. “I am amazed it took them so long.”

A fourth airfield was hit. Like the other three, the runway had been blasted end to end. Considering that the bombs were dumped, like cargo in an airdrop, from aircraft four miles up, this degree of precision was remarkable.

New Tourom’s was the fifth.

The air raid came shortly after school had started. Quinette was helping Moses with a spelling lesson when the ground quivered and there came a terrible, ragged roar, followed by another, dust and dirt shaking down from the grass roof. With panicked screams, the pupils fled the building before she or Moses could shepherd them to a shelter. At the same time her guards rushed in and swept her into the nearest one. Just before tumbling into the hole, she glimpsed a wall of smoke rising above the ridgeline three miles away. Antiaircraft fired ceaselessly, but neither they nor the rockets could touch the high-flying planes. The soldiers might as well have thrown spears, and Quinette reflected bitterly on the futility of her effort. She reflected also on the futility of what Michael had done, downing the oil company plane. Had she held on to these thoughts and carried them through, she might have reached some interesting conclusions about actions that arise from deep convictions; but they exited her mind within seconds.

There was the aftermath to deal with. The bombs had fallen just minutes after a relief flight had taken off. Women had been massed on the airstrip, breaking the shipment down into portable loads. No one knew how many there had been killed, and no one would know until each household took a census to discover who was missing. Only sixteen were found alive, some barely so, and the sole advantage to such a death toll was that it gave Manfred, Ulrika, and their aides a manageable number of casualties to care for. They needed help nonetheless. Cutting bandages, disinfecting wounds, her hands dipped in blood, Quinette relived the horrors of her first experience of war. She relived the grief and rage she’d felt over Lily Hanrahan’s death when she saw Nolli, her face covered with bleeding cavities resembling the pustules of smallpox. She recalled that Pearl’s cousin had not answered roll call at school that morning. The girl’s position in Ulrika’s triage, as well as her wounds, indicated that she wasn’t expected to live, an expectation she later fulfilled.

That night and into the next day, soldiers ranged through town, bursting into huts, overturning furniture, ripping up floor mats. They tore through the marketplace, knocking goods off shelves, jabbing poles into roofs. They searched the school, the shops, the mosque, the church. They questioned people, and none too gently.

Michael had been on the heights above the garrison, inspecting defensive positions, when the Antonovs came. Through his field glasses, he’d observed the bombing dispassionately, analytically, noting that three planes each made a single run, dropping their bombs with systematic accuracy: first on one end of the runway, then the center, then the opposite end. People on the ground had to be directing the pilots by radio, and that was what he’d ordered his troops to look for. He contacted his subcommands, instructing them to search for radios in their districts. The hunt went on for two days. A commander in the western Nuba reported in—a radio had been discovered and two men, Nuban Muslims, had been apprehended and summarily shot. Michael reprimanded the officer; the men should have been questioned first, then executed.

A calf betrayed Suleiman. The animal, stabled in a separate room in his tukul, got frightened when a search party entered and kicked over a straw bale. Under the bale was a hole in the floor, covered by a piece of wood, and in the hole were a high-frequency radio and an auto battery. Suleiman, however, was absent. His neighbors said he’d gone to his home village, Kologi, shortly after the air raid to visit his family. A detachment of soldiers was sent in a truck to arrest him and bring him back for interrogation.

“I should have guessed that he was involved,” Michael confided to Quinette at their evening meal. “Suleiman found those airstrips, he knew their exact locations. He must have made coordination with his conspirators with the radios. But how did he get them, how did he distribute them, and how many others are in this with him? Those are the questions I need answered.”

“And then there’s the why,” she said. “To turn on his own people this way—”

“You are being naÏve on purpose? You know.”

“You should have taken Kasli’s advice and not mine, is that what you’re going to say?” she asked, somewhat petulantly. “Who could have predicted he’d go this far? And all because a few people from his religion got converted to another religion? I don’t believe it.”

“Muslims think differently about religion than we do.”

“He must have had other reasons.”

“Possibly. All the same, I am going to have some conversations with your associates when this is settled.”

She wanted to turn this conversation to another, happier topic, but it wasn’t an appropriate moment. Besides, she needed a more positive sign than a missed period before she said anything.

She got it from Dr. Manfred the following noon, after school let out. In the cubbyhole that served as his office, he gave her a blood test—more accurate then a urine test, he said—and sent the sample to the cubbyhole that served as a lab. Half an hour later he said, “Congratulations!” and Ulrika hugged her. “So you see, you did not need those fertile pills.”

Encircled by her security detail, Quinette floated to the mission, where she was to conduct a women’s Bible study. The news lifted her out of the mixed anger and dejection she’d felt over Nolli’s death. Here was a new life to compensate for the one lost. A new life inside her, binding her own more firmly still to the lives of these people, to this place.

The class was assembled under a tree. Michael should be the first to hear, but she couldn’t restrain herself and, through the interpreter, told the women she was pregnant. She received a chorus of ululations. Even the grim watchdogs smiled. She opened to the tale of Sarah, miraculously conceiving in her old age, a story she thought fitting, although she was far from old. She had just gotten into it when a platoon of soldiers came running across the mission grounds, shouting in Nuban as they surrounded the church. Negev and another bodyguard seized her under her arms and, with the four remaining guards forming a cordon around her, brought her inside. Two men took up positions alongside the door, rifles ready to fire; two more stood at the windows, one on each side of the church, while Negev and his comrade all but dragged her up the aisle, as if she were a captive bride, and motioned for her to get down behind the altar, a mud-brick block. They flanked her, weapons slung to hang level from their shoulders, their fingers on the triggers.

“Negev! What is it?”

“Commander’s orders to protect you, missy. There is a big trouble.”

Not a minute later a burst of automatic rifle fire came from the direction of the garrison. Not a minute after that, Fancher and Handy were escorted into the church by more armed men and told to sit alongside Quinette, shielded by the altar. They had no idea what was happening, and beyond “There is a big trouble” Negev would not or could not say more.

Another round of shooting started, more intense and prolonged than the first—fusillades of gunshots interspersed with muffled explosions. “Those are RPGs,” Handy said. “It must be a ground attack. We need to pray.”

Which they did, Fancher calling upon the Lord to shelter them with His wings as the noise diminished, rose, diminished, and rose again, almost symphonic in its rhythms. They sat in anxious, helpless ignorance, listening to the battle’s ebb and flow. “Two hours they’ve been at it,” Fancher announced, with a look at his watch. “This is like being outside a football stadium during a game. You can hear the crowd but you don’t know who’s winning.” That was no football game out there, Quinette thought, terrified for Michael, for the microbe of life in her womb.

The shooting changed tempo, to isolated bursts, long sentences of silence punctuated by single shots. The angles of window light grew shallow, and the racket ceased. After ten minutes of quiet Fancher declared that it was over and stood up. A soldier near him pushed him back down. They waited, Quinette feeling like a defendant while the jury deliberated her fate. At dusk the doors burst open and she heard the voice she’d feared she might never hear again. She and the missionaries were at last allowed to come out of hiding. Accompanied by several officers, Michael strode up the aisle, his uniform splotched with mud, his complexion paled by dust. His expression was like none she’d seen before—his battle face, features immobile, bloodshot eyes almost demonic, like eyes caught by a camera’s flash.

“You are safe now,” he said in a voice from which all wrinkles of emotion had been ironed out. “We’ve made an end of it.”

“An end of what? An end of what, Michael?”

He seemed not to recognize her. Resting a hand on her shoulder, he stared at the floor, muttering, “An end of what.” Then, looking up, his gaze flitted between her and Fancher and Handy. “An uprising. We got most of them, killed or captured. Kasli escaped with fifty or sixty, possibly more.”

Abruptly, it got dark. A soldier lit an altar candle, so the church appeared to be illuminated for a vespers service.

“Kasli?” Quinette murmured.

“Suleiman was brought in this morning. Kasli knew he would confess, as he did, and so he was forced to make his move before he’d planned. A good thing. He didn’t have time to organize. If he did, we’d be fighting for days.”

“Are you saying, a coup?” Fancher asked, his face drawn by tension.

“Attempted,” Michael answered, and turned to Quinette. “Kasli was to be the assassin. Yours and mine.” He sat on the altar step, shoulders stooped from an exhaustion that was more than physical. “Suleiman confessed to most of it, and I have guessed the rest. My adjutant volunteered his services to the government when I sent him on that recruitment mission. Ha! What he did was to recruit men for himself. Through him, Khartoum smuggled the radios into the Nuba. They gave him his instructions. ‘First, assist us in destroying the airfields’—Kasli organized the entire thing!—’next, foment an uprising of Nuban Muslims against the SPLA. In this uprising, the commander and his foreign wife will be killed. You, Major Muhammad Kasli, will then take over, proclaim loyalty to the regime, and deliver the Nuba to us.’ He got Suleiman and the Muslim elders to join him. Two escaped with Kasli. We caught the other two.”

Quinette sat beside him. In the candlelight, they and the missionaries and the soldiers standing all around cast huge, grotesque shadows on the church walls.

“Those two and Suleiman will be shot tomorrow. It won’t be done in secrecy, oh no. I want everyone to see the consequences.”

There was a prolonged silence until Fancher cleared his throat and said in a low, measured tone, “I know you’ve been through a lot, but this is God’s house. It’s not the place to issue a death sentence.”

“Kasli intended to murder the both of you,” Michael said. “After my wife and me, you were next on the list.”

“We came here knowing the risks. We would ask you to show mercy.”

Michael rose, and although he stood a step below the missionary, he was able to look him in the face. “Why?”

“For its own sake. And because executing them could create more recruits for another Kasli. And because it would create resentment and make our work all the harder.”

“Your work,” Michael replied, “gave those men a reason to join Kasli, and I allowed you to give it to them. So you see, all of us here made this situation. But I see no cause for mercy. Go to the graves of the women who were killed at the airfield and ask if they would show mercy.”

With an exchange of glances, Fancher and Handy passed some message to each other.

“If you can’t commute the sentence, could you postpone it?” asked the younger man.

“For what purpose?”

“We’d like to talk to them. We’d like a chance to bring them to Christ. Maybe knowing they’re going to die will help them see the truth. Things like that have been known to happen. It’s a question of saving their souls from hell.”

Michael greeted this request with a look of amazement and a cold laugh. “My friends, that is precisely where I wish to send them.”

The missionaries turned to Quinette, silently imploring her intercession.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, casting her eyes toward her husband. He showed no reaction other than to blink and cock his head, as if he weren’t sure he had heard her right. These were far from the circumstances under which she’d hoped to tell him. “I found out only this afternoon, and if I had to shoot those men myself to protect my baby, I would do it.”

Both men blinked at the rawness of her statement. Or was it the illogic? For Fancher asked her meaning. How would postponing the sentence endanger her baby?

“I saw a young girl die three days ago, Nolli—” she began.

Fancher interrupted. “If you love God, Quinette, and his great commandment to love one another, you won’t argue with us.”

She felt as if the wires and pegs and cords holding her together had pulled out and come apart and were now reassembling themselves into some new configuration. And from this incomplete, unfamiliar form came an unfamiliar voice. “I do love Him, and I love Him by hating the people who hate Him. Ecclesiastes says there’s a time for hate. Well, now is the time for some healthy, holy hate. I saw Nolli die, now I want to see them die, sooner, not later.”

 

IN A LIGHT rain, the two elders went quietly. They said they were martyrs to their faith. One was the old man who had beaten his wife. That made it easier to watch. Suleiman was a different matter. It took five soldiers to drag that very tall man from the hut where he’d been held for the night. His hands were tied with rope and he screamed, now in Arabic, now in Nuban, now in English, screamed Allah’s name, screamed that his was the Islam of the heart. The place of execution was a field near the refugee camp. Three stout stakes had been driven into the ground. The townspeople were gathered in a semicircle around the field. Anyone watching from a distance would have thought it was a festival. The formality of blindfolds was dispensed with. Quinette stood in the front, alongside Michael, and fixed her gaze on the three men as they were bound to the stakes by ropes around their chests. Through a bullhorn, her husband announced that they had been found guilty of treason and sabotage. Then he nodded to the officer in charge of the firing squad. At command, the men leaned into their rifles and fired a short burst. The bodies jerked and twitched, then, heads flopping forward, slumped down the stakes, Suleiman to his knees, the other two into a squat, dark red carnations spreading across their jelibiyas. Floating free of her body, to some point in the air, Quinette could see the crowd, the dead men, Michael, and herself. Her face did not look familiar. She had become someone she did not recognize; yet she felt that she could get to know this stranger and make friends with her.