Acts of Faith

Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia

THE UKRAINIAN, a dark-haired man with coal dust on his jaws, arrived Sunday night, on the same Kenya Airways commuter that carried Phyllis Rappaport. The next morning Mary brought him to Dogpatch, where Dare waited with the Hawker’s records tucked under an arm. He steered his customer to the plane, which the ground crew had finished cleaning, inside and out, an hour ago. It looked so good that Dare was almost sincere when he said he hated to part with it. The Ukranian examined the interior, from the cockpit to the rear of the cargo bay, then did a thorough walk-around outside, tugging the flaps, inspecting the props, the undersides of the wings, the wheel wells. He frowned at a water jug and a few plastic bags that some sloppy ground crewman had left lying beneath the left wing, but the plane was in perfect condition. Going into the hangar, Dare presented the folder containing the aircraft’s maintenance records and documentation. The Ukrainian studied them as if he were cramming for a test.

“A lot of hours on these engines,” he remarked at one point.

“Completely overhauled—hell, damned near rebuilt. Mechanics finished up only yesterday. New O-rings, new props, the works.” Dare heard the overeagerness in his own voice and cautioned himself to sound a little less motivated. “Here’s the record of the overhaul,” he added, tugging at some papers, “but the best thing is to take her up for a little test drive. Take the controls, get a feel for her yourself.”

“I am not aviator. Businessman,” he declared. “But I will make offer now, then tomorrow, you fly me to Nairobi. Everything is okay, I will buy, we take care of paperwork, registration.”

“And the offer is—?”

“Two hundred fifty thousand.”

Dare bowed his head and let out a long, regretful sigh.

“Good price for Hawker-Siddley this old, this many hours,” the Ukrainian said.

Dare regarded the man’s face, with its three-day growth, its sharp, slightly Asiatic cheekbones, its black eyes like buttons, and knew he had no hope of getting his asking price, three hundred. He tried for it nonetheless. The Ukrainian dipped into his briefcase, pulled out a three-ring book of oversize checks, and asked Dare how to spell his name.

“Take or leave,” he said, handing over a check, dated for the following day. It was an old tactic, but the sight of the number 250,000 had the desired effect. They shook on it, then the man took the check back, saying he would hold on to it until tomorrow. If the plane performed as advertised, the money was Dare’s.

“We could fly to Nairobi right now,” Dare said. “Why wait?”

“I have here more business for today. Tomorrow.”

“So how do I do as a used-plane salesman?” he asked Mary after dropping their buyer off at the old Pathways camp, where he was staying.

“Better than you did as an airline executive.”

“Sweet thing! Honey bunch!” he said, clowning it up, bending his twang into curly-cues of sound. Sah-weeet thang! Hawnee buuunch! “That’s over and done. Come tomorrow, we’re gonna have us seven hundred grand in the bank. You ought to look a lot happier than you do.”

“The point is, I am now completely dependent on you,” Mary declared. “You’re my sugar daddy.”

“We’re gonna be man and wife. Property in common.”

“And that reporter—that doesn’t make me real happy.”

“Well, it does me. Wish I could be here to see Dougie boy’s face when that shit hits the fan.”

“Talking about her, do we still fly her today?”

“Hell, no. I ain’t riskin’ our investment, not for no lousy six thousand.”

“Not for any,” Mary corrected. “We’d best tell her. I think Tara is free, and she could use the money.”

“All right, and then we celebrate. I’ll get the bartender to open early.”

“No celebrating until tomorrow,” Mary said. “When we deposit the check, that’s when we’ll celebrate. And do you know what you’re going to do?”

Dare started toward the Hotel California compound to see Phyllis. “Not a clue, but I know you’ll tell me.”

“You are going to buy me a new dress. Then you’re going to get a suite at the Norfolk or the New Stanley and order a bottle of Dom Perignon from room service. You are going to take me to dinner—your choice, but it had better be four stars. And finally, you are going to take me dancing, and no Texas two-step. You want to play sugar daddy, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

“I’m not any sugar daddy, I’m your goddamned fiancé,” Dare said.




FITZHUGH LAID HIS HEAD on the desk. Having “minded the store” for five days on his own, he was tired. Now, in the muggy heat of a rainy-season afternoon, he had to juggle tomorrow’s and Wednesday’s flight schedules because Alexei’s Antonov was grounded in Sudan, mired in a runway that was supposed to have been serviceable but turned out to be eight hundred meters of muck. Dealing with such problems—ordinary in the context of African bush aviation—took his mind off more serious issues. There had been no word from Douglas until Saturday afternoon, when he called on the satellite phone. His message was guarded and, at eight dollars a minute, brief. He had met with Hassan, it had been an ugly scene, but Hassan had come up with some “fresh ideas” on resolving their predicament that wouldn’t require any resignations. They were working things out, and that would keep him in Nairobi until the middle of next week. Fitzhugh was to keep him informed of any new developments.

There had been none, except that Phyllis had returned to Loki last night. He assumed she was now in the air with Wesley, heading for the Nuba. Douglas’s call had given him cautious hope for a clean resolution of the current mess. He would have liked to hear Adid’s “fresh ideas” firsthand but was glad he’d been spared the scene that preceded their presentation.

He went to the coffee urn to fortify himself for the rest of the afternoon. A liquid resembling melted asphalt leaked from the spigot.

“Rachel,” he said, “I have got to get these schedules finished, and I can’t do it on this.”

“I will make a fresh pot. But you know you have to be at the UN flight office in just ten minutes.”

She raised her appointment book.

“I completely forgot. Asante.”

Distracted, I am too distracted, he said to himself, driving to the UN compound for a meeting with the flight coordinator about changes in the airstrips where UN-authorized flights were permitted to land. A pickup appeared behind him, lights flicking, horn honking. He waved to the driver to pass. The vehicle swung out and came alongside, a woman at the wheel signaling to pull over. This he did, the pickup parking in front of him. Pamela Smyth sprang out and ran toward him through the mist of laterite dust.

“Fitz! I have been looking for you! Do you have a plane and crew available? It’s Tara!”

“Trouble?”

“She called in a Mayday half an hour ago, and I haven’t been able to raise her since.” Leaning into the window, Pamela clutched his arm. “She’s gone down somewhere. We need a plane for a search.”

“Gone down?” Somehow he could not imagine Tara Whitcomb crashing. “Gone down where? Did you get coordinates?”

“Only part . . . wrote it down—At the office. Please follow me.”

He almost said, “But I am late for a meeting,” and then made a U-turn.

Tara’s office was a tin shack near the Dogpatch hangar, in front of which a twin-engine plane was parked. Fitzhugh entered the shack, and then it registered on him that the plane was Dare’s Hawker. Freshly painted and washed, he hadn’t recognized it at first glance. Dare’s trip must have been delayed or called off.

Pamela was more collected now, though her voice quavered as she said, “This is all I got from her,” and showed him a scrap of paper on which she’d written one set of GPS coordinates, which wasn’t very useful without the other set.

“Tell me what you heard,” Fitzhugh said, looking at the wall map.

“She called in the Mayday at”—Pamela went to her radio log—“at twelve-oh-five. She sounded quite scared, and you know Tara—she never sounds that way. There was something about fire, and then she repeated the Mayday and gave that set of numbers and then the radio went dead. All I got was static, and another noise, like a screech, a split-second screech, and then nothing.”

A morbid silence pervaded the room. Fitzhugh knew what that screeching noise must have been—the sound of impact. He was semiliterate in map reading, but he stared at the map regardless, trying to divine where Tara might have crashed.

“Where is her flight plan?” he asked.

“Won’t do you any good. It’s false. She was headed for a no-go zone. The Nuba mountains, Zulu Three.”

“Zulu Three?” His question sounded more like an exclamation.

“Yes.”

“What was she taking there?”

“What bloody difference does that make?” Pamela said. “Besides, it was who, not what. Three passengers. A woman and two men. Journalists. They’d chartered her just this morning, a last-minute thing.”

Fitzhugh felt slightly nauseous.

A firm look gathered on Pamela’s face. “It’s Knight’s responsibility to look for her. If you don’t have a plane available, divert one. You people are responsible for this. In the old days she never would have taken a charter like this, at the very last minute, if—”

“We’re responsible,” Wesley said, swinging through the door with Mary. “It was our charter.” Fitzhugh and Pamela stared at him. “Loki tower picked up the Mayday. It’s all over town. Okay, Pam, give us what you’ve got.”

She repeated the information she’d given Fitzhugh. Dare asked for Tara’s takeoff time. Nine forty-five, Pamela replied.

Taking the paper with the coordinates, Dare went to the map. “If she was flying the standard route,” he murmured, tracing a course with a pencil, “at a Caravan’s cruising speed—one eighty-five, right Pam?” Pamela confirmed the speed, and Wesley took out a pocket calculator. “That would have put her somewhere in here when she called the Mayday.” He drew a small square on the map. “Fits with the coordinates she gave you—that line runs right through here. It’s a valley, pretty flat. If she still had control, she might have been able to make an emergency landing.”

“That’s very near New Tourom,” Fitzhugh said.

“Middle of the square would be about thirty miles southeast. Arab nomad country.”

“We could radio Michael. It’s near enough for him to send out a search party.”

“Too risky,” Dare said. “There’s an army garrison here, another one here”—he jabbed with the pencil—“if they intercept the message. We do not want them to know there’s a plane down in the area. They’ll have patrols crawlin’ all over. Y’all heard the word fire,” he said to Pamela. “She was on fire, she had a fire? What?”

“I don’t know. Fire, that’s what I heard.”

“How about ‘taking fire.’ ‘We’re taking fire,’ somethin’ like that.”

Pamela gnawed her lip. “It could have been, I don’t know.”

“See, you thread a kinda needle flyin’ into that airstrip, between those two garrisons. Don’t have to stray too far off course to get smack over one or the other. And that close to destination, Tara would of been into her descent, seven, eight thousand figure. In range.”

“But it was probably some mechanical failure,” Fitzhugh said, unwilling to entertain the possibility that Tara had been shot down; for if she had been, it meant that no one on that small aircraft had any chance of surviving.

“From what Pam said, it would of been a catastrophic failure,” Dare said. “But there’s not a pilot in Africa more careful about maintenance than Tara.”

“The UN has planes at Malakal, that’s close,” Pamela said. “We could ask them to send one to search the area.”

“They’ll tell y’all to wait till they get Khartoum’s okay to enter a no-go zone.”

“And you might as well wait for Khartoum to invite the pope for a visit,” Mary scoffed.

“You’re ready to fly?” Pamela asked.

“Ground crew fueled the plane early this morning,” Dare said. “How about it, Mary girl. I ain’t doin’ this without your say-so.”

“It was our flight, could have been us,” she said. “Only option I see is the one I couldn’t live with.”

Fitzhugh heard Wesley say in an undertone, “Picked a winner this time.” He was obviously proud of her. So was Fitzhugh—and ashamed of himself. He felt he had somehow willed this disaster to happen, as though a desire to be rid of Phyllis for good and all had taken refuge in his unconscious mind and petitioned the fates to make it happen. He asked Dare to go along—“another pair of eyes.”

Wesley shook his head. “This one could get dicey. Best thing for you is, park yourself by a radio and wait to hear from us. Pam, what’s your frequency?”

She gave it to him, and he and Mary walked out. Fitzhugh followed them to the plane, asking Dare to reconsider.

“Listen, we’ve got to search at low altitude. If she was shot down, the troops who did it could still be in the area. We’ll risk our butts, no one else’s. Y’all monitor the radio.”

 

IN THE HANGAR, Nimrod filled a duffel bag with tins of food, granola bars, a first-aid kit, and plastic water bottles stuffed in fertilizer bags to prevent breakage, then lugged it to the plane. He also volunteered to help them look.

“Damn, sure are a lot people wantin’ to live dangerously today.” Dare crunched the small man’s shoulders. “No way, y’all got a wife and kids.”

He and Mary were airborne a quarter of an hour later and, after making their turn, soared over the Mogilla range into Sudan. He called Pamela for a radio check, punched his waypoint into the GPS, and climbed toward twenty-one thousand feet, the savannahs and cattle pastures of eastern Equatoria falling away and away, until they showed as a sheet of wet-season green stretched to a horizon lost in haze. He went on autopilot and gave Mary his plan: descend to five thousand at the point where he thought Tara had gone down, decrease airspeed, conduct a box search, the plane flying in ever-widening squares.

“We’ll be there in two hours. It’ll be gettin’ late, and at that level we’ll be suckin’ up the fuel, so I figure we’ll have ninety minutes max search time before we’ve got to call it a day.”

“And if we do spot something?”

“If it’s a muzzle flash, we get the hell out of there. Looks like a wreck, we go down for a closer look. We see signs of life, we give ’em a wing-wag, then you take the con. Y’all are my airdrop expert, since you flew ’em for the UN. Make a pass at seven hundred, five if you can, I harness myself in at the aft cargo door and kick out the survival gear.” That there were survivors, Dare thought, was like the existence of unicorns: more a conceivability than a real possibility; but for him the conceivability was sufficient. It was a matter of keeping the one faith he believed in. “If we don’t see any Sudan army in the area,” he went on, “we radio the location to the Archangel and hope the wrong people ain’t listenin’ in. We tell him to send some people to evacuate the casualties to Zulu Three. We land and medevac ’em to Loki. It’ll take a while for the troopers to get ’em to the airstrip, so count on an overnight stay.”

“And there goes our customer and a quarter of a million dollars. We’re so goddamned noble, I can hardly stand it.”

“Time comes, I’ll radio Pam and ask her to pass the word to him that we’ll be delayed twenty-four hours. Figure he won’t find another Hawker that quick.”

They flew on. Cruising altitude, his natural habitat, the clear, cold realm where he thought clearly, where he was in control, where he knew what to do next. Not ten minutes after this smug thought passed through his mind, the left engine started to run rough; moments later, the fuel pressure began to drop drastically. Warning lights flashed on the control panel.

“Son of a bitch! Quick, get out the emergency checklist,” Dare said.

Moments after they began the check, the engine quit cold.

“Wes! What the hell is happening?”

“Got no idea,” Dare said, his heartbeat springing into the triple digits. He willed it back down to a normal rate, then tried to restart the engine. Nothing. A sentimentalist might have kept trying, a sentimentalist might have hoped that the gods of the air, moved by the compassion that had moved him and Mary to undertake this mission, would show him what the problem was and how to fix it. The unsentimental Wesley Dare put the plane into a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, then radioed his situation to Pamela and told her that he had to abort the search. He called Loki tower. “This is Yankee Bravo Three Yankee Zulu. I’ve got engine problems and I’m coming in on one engine. Have the crash trucks standin’ by.”

“Roger that,” replied the disembodied voice.

Mary reached across the pedestal and touched his arm, her fingers damp against his skin.

“I’ve landed on one before, lots of times,” he said. “Nothin’ to worry about.”

They finished running the emergency check. It did not indicate a fuel leak. It did not tell them anything. All they knew was that fuel was not getting to the stalled engine.

“What do you think happened?” asked Mary, staring at the warning lights.

The gears of Dare’s efficient brain engaged and drew a mental schematic of the Hawker’s fuel system—tanks, fuel lines, pumps. He could think of only one explanation why the engine wasn’t running.

“Think we’ve got a malfunction in both pumps,” he said.

“Overhauled just last week and both pumps go?”

“Maybe African workmanship. A.W.A., darlin’, Africa Wins Again.”

A moment after he made that comment, Dare recalled the day he and Doug had landed at Zulu Three and discovered that the villagers had stolen fuel and put rainwater in the drums to conceal the theft.

“But maybe it’s somethin’ else,” he said. “Contaminated fuel. Maybe there’s muddy water in the starboard tank. That would cause the pumps to fail.”

Impossible, Mary replied, reminding him that they had drained the system before taking off. Any contaminants would have been expelled then.

Nevertheless, he was sure of his diagnosis, and as he flew southward, backtracking to Loki, he pondered how the contaminants could have gotten into the tank. Again, he made a mental sketch of the fuel system, but this time it wasn’t any technical analysis that gave him an answer; his mythic bird, DeeTee, gave it with four words: water jug, plastic bags. He switched from the tower’s frequency back to Pathway’s and asked Pamela to put Fitz on.

“Listen up, rafiki,” Dare said. “It’s my fuel pumps—”

“Yes, yes, your fuel pumps,” Fitz said. “What about them?”

“They ain’t workin’. I’ll explain later,” Dare said. “In the trash barrel by the hangar there’s a water jug, the kind you take on picnics, and some plastic bags. Take them out and hold them for me till I get in, and if there’s anything in the jug, don’t empty it.”

There was a static-filled pause before Fitz replied, “What is this about a picnic? I don’t understand you.”

Dare repeated the request and, thinking aloud, added, “Whoever left those things did it because he had to clear out in a hurry.”

That only confused Fitz further. “I read you loud and clear, Wesley, but what are you talking about?”

“Never mind. Just get that stuff out of the . . .”

A sudden sputtering in the left engine cut him short. Mary rapped his shoulder and pointed at the fuel pressure gauge—it was falling. Dare’s heart rate jumped back to three digits; this time, he could not lower it by force of will. He pulled the “Jungle Jepps” from between his seat and the pedestal and tossed the book into Mary’s lap.

“There’s an old airstrip east of here, Echo One. Find it. Give me the coordinates. We’re gonna have to put down there.”

As Mary flipped through the diagrams of Sudan airfields, he made a hard left turn, then pushed the yoke forward to lose altitude.

“Thirty miles out, bearing one five five,” Mary said, her voice strained.

Dare adjusted his course, descending sharply. “What else does it say?”

“ ‘Caution: No longer maintained. For emergencies only,’ ” she replied. “ ‘Tall grass, forty foot trees at both ends and both sides of runway. Very uneven. Treacherous at southeast end.’ ”

“Well, this sure is an emergency,” he said. “Dump fuel.”

While she did that, Dare called in to Loki tower, reporting that he was about to lose his second engine and was going to attempt an emergency landing at Echo One. He have the coordinates, in case the old airfield was no longer on the map. The engine was coughing, but it was still running, a fact he could attribute only to the intervention of the gods of the air or his luck. That happy situation wasn’t going to last, but the Hawker had a glide ratio of about ten to one and he was at seventy-five hundred feet. That would give him roughly fifteen miles of glide, just enough to make a dead-stick landing, which was something he had not done lots of times. In fact, outside of simulators in flight training, he’d never done it.

Altitude three thousand feet, airspeed one hundred and sixty knots, the plains and marshes between Nile tributaries and the Ethiopian border coming up. Dare made a shallow turn and picked up a road that led to the airstrip. He could land on the road if he had to, although it was barely more than a cattle trail. Altitude two thousand . . . Air speed one-fifty. Ten miles to go, then five.

The left engine’s propeller flopped to a standstill and the cockpit went silent, except for the muffled rush of wind outside. He was a glider pilot now.

“Oh my God, Wes! Oh my God!”

“Easy, easy,” he said, expelling every unnecessary thought and emotion, summoning up all he’d learned in a lifetime of flight. Find the balance between three vectors—the plane’s forward momentum, the friction of the air it passed through, and gravity. Deflect the flaps to increase lift, but not so much as to cause excessive drag, which could cause the plane to stall. A kind of physics problem, which, if he failed to solve it, would cost him and Mary their lives. Altitude one thousand . . . Airspeed one-thirty. The airstrip showed as a lane of grass and shrubs between the tall trees. He waited till the last possible second to call for the landing gear. Too soon and the increased resistance could add to the turbulence created by the deflected flaps and give the Hawker the flying characteristics of Isaac Newton’s apple.

“Gear down and locked!” Mary said.

Altitude five hundred . . . airspeed one-fifteen. The Hawker was wobbling, about to surrender to gravity. Fighting to keep the nose up, Dare now saw that what had appeared to be shrubs from higher altitude were in fact saplings ten feet high. From the northwest end, they encroached well out onto the runway. To make sure he cleared them, he had to put down almost in the middle of the strip, leaving a mere six hundred yards before he rolled into the treacherous southeast end. The Hawker swooped in, quiet as a bird, and bounced through the high grass at ninety miles an hour. Without power, he could not use the props for aerodynamic braking. All he had to slow his roll were friction and the hydraulic brakes. He pressed the brakes. Mary cried out, “We’ve done it! We’ve made it!” There was a fearsome bang and thud as the nose gear collapsed. He and Mary were wrenched forward against their harnesses. The plane skidded nose first, then slewed sideways, the main gear breaking. A shriek of tearing metal, rivets popping, glass shattering as the Hawker slammed broadside into a row of trees, spun part way around, and came to rest.

When he regained consciousness, he was shivering from shock, blood was running down the side of his head, and each breath brought a sharp pain, as though someone were stabbing his lungs with an icepick. The yoke had crunched against his ribs, fracturing them. The right side of the cockpit, Mary’s side, was stove in. She was slumped face-down across the pedestal, her back peppered with shattered glass. The stink of aviation fuel permeated the air—there hadn’t been enough time to dump it all—and smoke curled into the cabin from the mangled cargo compartment. The smell and the smoke gave him the necessary adrenal rush to overcome his shock, unbuckle his harness, free Mary from hers, and pull her out of the wreckage. Taking her by the wrists, he dragged her as far as he could. The effort exhausted him, and he nearly blacked out from the pain.

He propped Mary’s legs on a fallen log, to prevent blood from draining from her head, and kneeling on both knees, he held her wrist and felt a faint pulse. Her face was a mass of lacerations and blue-black lumps, her right eye a slit in a contusion half as big as a man’s fist. Her right side had been crushed by the cabin bulkhead, punched inward by its meeting with the trees. The severity of her injuries, the razing of her beauty made him choke. He cradled her head in his hands and brought his lips to her ear.

“Don’t you die on me, Mary girl,” he whispered. “We’re less than an hour’s flying time from Loki. They know where we are. They’ll send a plane to look for us. We’re gonna make it out of this, but y’all have got to not die on me.” She made a sound, a rattling gasp. “That’s the stuff. That’s my lady.”

He staggered back to the plane and tried the radio. Dead. He got the duffel bag containing the water, food, and first-aid kit. He saw what had happened. The southeast end of the runway was black cotton soil, mushy as loam. The surface crust had broken under the Hawker’s weight, the gear had crumpled from the stress and spun the aircraft into a sideways skid.

He cleaned Mary’s face with alcohol and bandaged the worst gashes, then splinted her ribs with a stout stick and surgical tape. She made another sound. Her good eye, half shut, twitched. “That’s it, stay with me. Someone will come. You could be in a hospital by tonight, tomorrow for sure.”

He propped her head in his lap and put a water bottle to her lips. The water dribbled down her chin. He forced her mouth open with his fingers and allowed a few drops to fall on her tongue, then finished the rest himself. He drained another bottle. It amazed him how thirsty he was.

His watch had been smashed. The hands on the glassless dial stood fixed at twenty past two—the moment of impact. Judging from the sun, it was now around three. Even if a search plane found them, a rescue could not be effected until tomorrow.

Gather firewood, that was the thing to do next. A fire to signal a plane, a fire for the night.

An hour later he had accumulated a satisfactory pile of deadwood, fetched from a dry riverbed nearby. That done, he harvested green branches to create as much smoke as possible and laid them next to the wood. These labors had taxed his injured body to the limit, but he couldn’t permit himself to sleep. He had to stay awake at least till dusk. “Wasn’t no . . . any accident . . . uh-uh, no accident . . . and when we get back, I’ll find out who did it and I’ll kill him, kill him for you, baby.”

He waved off the flies drawn to her wounds, stroked her blood-matted hair, its golden color darkened to copper, and plucked a shard of glass from her scalp. She didn’t move or utter a sound. Her pulse was still there, faint but there. He spoke more encouraging words about their imminent rescue. He talked about the music acts they would fly in the States, about buying a ranch in the Texas hill country, about Stevie Ray Vaughan, about his early days flying Steerman crop dusters, about his father, the Mustang pilot, the World War II ace, six Jap Zeros to his credit, about a dead python he’d seen stretched out on an airstrip in Laos, about his mother, who’d told him he was as ugly as homemade sin and who, he was sure, would never speak to him again if he let Mary get away—“which I’m not about to do.” He talked and talked, free-associating, convinced that his voice was getting through to her, keeping her alive. Talking also kept him awake and held at bay the terrible silence of the desert. If not for the humming flies, it would have been as quiet as the surface of the moon. In the pauses between his tales, he listened for the buzz of an approaching plane. Once he swore he heard it, but it soon vanished, and there was only the silence, so profound it was a noise in itself, a kind of voice whispering in a tongue he couldn’t understand. He looked around, struck by the empty landscape, to all appearances devoid of any sentient life. It lay inert under an empty sky, its passivity strangely hostile. He would have preferred an overt aggression, some violent force he could oppose and conquer, or be conquered by; for these inattentive expanses seemed to be trying to tell him something, if only he could interpret the language of their stillness. He was glad he could not, sensing instinctively that it was something he did not want to know, must not know if he was to go on.

He talked to Mary as the sun inched toward the horizon. Dusk fell, swiftly dragging night behind it. Dare lit the fire and continued with his tales until exhaustion overtook him. His head slumped to his chest, he fell asleep beneath the stars’ neutral gaze.

An awful noise woke him, at what hour he didn’t know. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating; but no, the noise was as real as the ground he sat on: cackles, whoops, howls, bellows, demented giggles. If hell had a choir, he was listening to it. No moon shone. Starlight revealed vague shapes on the runway, moving toward him with a weird hopping gait. The fire had burned down to coals. He fed a few small sticks into it, then larger pieces. It blazed up, silencing the demonic chorus. Moving back to Mary’s side, he drew the Beretta and sat with the pistol in both hands, elbows wedged to his knees to steady his aim. This he could deal with, this was more like it. The fire mounted, disclosing several pairs of eyes, glowing a fluorescent yellow-green in its light. The creatures cautiously drew nearer, he could hear them panting as they halted, one in the lead, the rest a little behind, doglike heads held low, topped by big ears shaped like toadstools, obscene jaws parted, backs humped, scruffy fur bristling, nostrils twitching. He aimed at the leader, slowly let out a breath, and fired twice. He heard the smack of the 9-millimeter rounds striking flesh. The hyena screeched, all four feet leaving the ground at once, and rolled over dead. The rest of the pack, yelping and hooting, ran off a short distance and then turned and held their ground. The two bravest, or maybe they were the hungriest, lunged forward and tore into the carcass of their fallen mate. One turned broadside to Dare, its spotted flanks showing in the firelight. He centered on the shoulder and fired again, and the heart-shot hyena dropped without a sound. The others rushed in and Dare allowed them to drag both carcasses off, to about the middle of the runway. He listened to their snarls, the crunching of bones, the repulsive slurping of entrails, and decided they were still too close. Getting to his feet, he lumbered toward them, against the pain in his side, shooting two more rounds blindly into the darkness. “Go on, eat your buddies, you ugly bastards! She’s not on the menu tonight, and no other night neither!”

He went back, gasping, the icepick jabbing his lungs. “Gone,” he wheezed, and flopped down. “It’s all right, baby, they’re gone, they’re not gonna hurt you.” He looked at her and saw a single greenish-gray eye, wide open and staring at him without a blink. He laid his palm on her forehead and could not remember feeling anything so cold.

She had been dead probably for a couple of hours, and the keen-nosed hyenas had caught the first faint scent of death. He closed the eye and held her and apologized for falling asleep. He was determined to stay awake, in case the animals came back for her. For the rest of the night, watching the stars wheel down the ecliptic, as they always had and always would, for as long as there were stars and a heaven to hold them, he kept his vigil over the one person who had taught him to believe in something beyond himself, to have faith in love and the promise of love.

The sunrise was a wound in the sky. Just like that old Air America pilot had told him in Vientiane a thousand years ago: You’ll know you’re in trouble when you hate to see it come up. He more than hated to see it now. The joyless light peeled the shadows away and revealed to him again the same arid vacancy of sand, dirt, rock, and sparse trees, motionless and indifferent beneath the same annihilating sky; and its disquieting quiet, the silence that wasn’t silent, pressed down on him, as tangible as the heat in the whitening sun. Somehow he knew, as surely as he’d known anything, that a plane wasn’t going to come—not today, tomorrow, or the day after, and even if one did, he would not light his signal fire. He would hide in the trees and wait for his deliverers to fly off.

Mary’s body had grown stiff during the night. One arm was bent at the elbow, the palm facing out, as if she were taking an oath. He tried to straighten it, but it was frozen into that position by the cold a hundred suns couldn’t thaw. The odor of decomposition was now apparent even to the human nose. Flies covered her, she was almost black with them. He fanned them off with his cap, but the instant he stopped, the insects pounced on her again. He would have to bury her. That was the next thing to do. He got up, feeling as though he were rising against a great weight, went off a short distance, and began to claw at the soft soil that had caused his plane to careen off the runway. An hour of digging produced a rectangle six feet long and half a foot deep. He could dig no further—he was spent, and the roots of the grasses and shrubs formed a dense mat under the topsoil.

Dragging her by the legs, he laid her in the grave and covered her as best he could, which was nowhere near well enough. Her rigid arm stuck out. The hyenas would be back for her tonight. They could very well devour her within his sight, and there would be nothing he could about that either: He didn’t have enough bullets to kill them all.

Thirsty, weaving from fatigue, he returned to the ashes of the fire and pulled another water bottle from the duffel bag and drank it dry. He had no idea why he was slaking his thirst, no idea why he should endure his pain, physical and otherwise, for another second. He’d done everything possible, and none of it had been enough. He wasn’t able to keep his plane in the air and, once he landed, wasn’t able to keep it from crashing. He wasn’t able to keep Mary alive or straighten her arm or dig her a decent grave. He was overwhelmed by a sense of futility—the futility not only of his own efforts but of all effort, not only of his existence but of all existence. “Why should I?” he cried out, and his answer was the vast African silence. This time he understood its message, and to it, his faith in himself was no reply; indeed, he no longer had any faith in himself. Nevertheless, he sat there as still as the landscape and realized there was yet one more thing he couldn’t do, though the means to do it was at hand. The raw, animal instinct for survival was all that restrained him, and it was enough.

A tug at his boot startled him into consciousness. With a yell, he jerked his foot out of the hyena’s jaws, leaped up, and saw that it wasn’t a hyena but a young man, no less startled than Dare. Tall, bone thin, clad in rags, with one black leg and the other as white as ivory, he had a round face and ruthless eyes. A dozen others were with him, boys not men, gaunt and barefoot. Twenty or thirty more were swarming into and over the wrecked plane like ants. Except for two carrying spears, only the young man with the two-toned legs was armed—a Kalashnikov with a folding stock was slung over one emaciated shoulder.

“Who are you?” Dare asked in a scratchy voice.

“I am Matthew Deng,” came the reply in a British-tinged, mission-school English. “Who are you?”

Dare answered and asked Matthew Deng if he was SPLA.

“I was one time SPLA, before this.” He tapped his artificial limb. “I thought you were died. I wanted your shoes. For him.” He motioned at a kid of eleven or twelve whose feet were cut to ribbons. “Is that your aeroplane?”

That was how he said it, aer-o-plane. Dare nodded.

Another kid ran up and spoke to Matthew in Dinka. “He says there is no assistance in your aeroplane.”

“No, there isn’t.”

He pointed at the duffel. “What is in there?”

“See for yourself.”

He lifted the bag upside down, his stony eyes widening as the bottles, tins, and granola bars tumbled out. A yell went up, and the crowd of boys fell on the stuff in a way that reminded Dare of the hyenas falling on the carcasses of their dead mates. Displaying his SPLA training, Matthew restored order with the help of his two lieutenants, the ones with the spears. Snapping commands, prodding with their weapons, they got the boys to form two lines. Matthew opened a tin of hash and scooped out a mouthful with his fingers. It was obvious he wanted to finish it, but he restrained himself and passed the tin to one of the spear-carriers, instructing him to take only one bite and then to pass it on. He opened several more and rationed them out to the rest, with the water. Their discipline was amazing. One by one they stepped up, took a bite of food, a drink, and stood aside.

While this strange feast went on, Matthew told Dare a fantastic tale.

He and his companions had been on the march for six months. They all came from Bahr el Ghazal, more than six hundred miles away. At the end of last year’s rainy season, murahaleen attacked their villages, burned them to the ground, and either killed everyone or took them as slaves. Matthew himself lost his father, mother, two brothers, and a younger sister. He’d survived because he was some distance from the village, in a cattle camp. His camp-mates, numbering about a dozen boys and young men, had also lost their entire families. Being the oldest, and with his military experience, Matthew became their leader. They trekked to another village, seeking refuge, but it too had been annihilated. Picking up several more orphaned boys, they wandered for over a month, scavenging on the carcasses of dead livestock, of warthogs killed by lions. Sometimes they lived on nothing more than roots and leaves. Along the way they were joined by still more youths, until they numbered nearly three hundred.

Eventually they arrived at an SPLA camp, where they were given food and shelter and some military training, except, of course, for Matthew. They remained there for about two months, when a group of hawaga—Matthew recalled that they arrived in a plane bearing a Red Cross—arrived and made a fuss. They accused the SPLA of recruiting child soldiers. The hawaga made such a big fuss that the SPLA was forced to expel the boys from the camp.

Journeying mostly at night to avoid government troops and slavers and hostile tribes like the Nuer, they crossed swamps and great marshes where some died of disease, crossed rivers where some drowned or were devoured by crocodiles, savannahs where the weak and the sick who fell behind were taken by lions, deserts where some perished from thirst. They were bombed by government planes. They continued on, and still more died of malaria or thirst or hunger, still more were taken by crocs and lions, and once Matthew and his two spearmen deliberately fell behind and killed a lioness that was stalking the column.

“This is all that is left of us,” Matthew said. “We are going to Kenya. The SPLA told us there is a camp in Kenya, at a place called Kakuma, where we will be fed and sleep in houses. I was to Kenya one time a long time ago. It is where I was given this white leg. Tell me, mister, how far is it to Kenya?”

“I’d reckon two hundred kilometers,” Dare said, understanding the look in Matthew’s eyes: it was the ruthlessness not of cruelty but of survival; and he also understood that Matthew would kill him if he had to. “Kakuma’s got to be another hundred from the border.”

“Okay,” Matthew said, as though three hundred kilometers were a day hike. “Tell me, mister, what are you doing here?”

“Waiting for a plane. I’m waiting for an aeroplane to come from Kenya and pick me up.”

“When does this aeroplane come?”

“It’s never gonna come.”

Matthew contemplated this statement for a minute. “Then you should come with us.”

The offer astonished Dare. “I’d never make it. My ribs are broken, and I’m old. I’d only slow you down. Y’all are gonna have a hard enough time makin’ it as it is.”

“But we are going to take what is left of your food and water, all of it, and your shoes also,” Matthew said, without apology or malice but as a declaration of fact.

Dare said nothing. This kid had tramped a thousand miles on an artificial leg, he’d led a band of orphaned boys on a march that would have turned U.S. Marines into a mob of blubbering babies, he’d killed a lion, and for what? To get to an overcrowded refugee camp, where they would have a grass roof over their heads and maybe two bowls of porridge a day. And then what? An indefinite stay with no homes or families to return to if and when they got out. To go through so much for so little required either complete stupidity or a powerful belief that the future would somehow be better. That any African, even a kid, could have faith in the future baffled him. His own future, without Mary in it, was no future at all. The human capacity for hope when no hope was visible, the human will to live, to blindly, dumbly go on, were riddles that he would never solve—and didn’t want to solve. Yet there was one last thing he could do.

“I could stop you from takin’ the rest of my food and water,” he said, surprising Matthew when he pulled the Beretta from his back pocket and pointed it at his belly. “Before you could get that AK off your shoulder or one of those boys could chuck his spear, I’d have a bullet in your guts. So you ain’t takin’ a thing. I’m givin’ it to you. Same goes for my shoes.” Pocketing the pistol, he sat down, took off his shoes and socks and tied the laces together and set them on the ground. The movements made him grimace, but this was what he could do, make a contribution to the boys’ welfare, to the future they believed in, and in the process abbreviate his own. His one fear was that, even facing slow death by thirst or starvation, he would not be able to take the quicker way out.

Matthew mutely stared at the shoes.

“Well,” Dare said, “there you be. That kid with the torn-up feet will need them more than me. They might be too big, but—”

But the boy with the torn feet had discovered a pair closer to his size. Squatting by Mary’s shallow grave, he was tugging at one of her buff desert boots. Because her body had bloated in the day’s heat, it would not come off. The result was that he pulled her partway out of the grave.

“Get your hands off her!” Dare raged. “Y’all got mine! Don’t you touch her!”

The boy looked at him, then continued to tug. Dare rose and half-ran, half-stumbled to him and jerked him away. Mary’s bandaged face, puffed up and yellowing, had come out of the dirt. “You little son of a bitch, I said nobody touches her.”

“Who is this?” Matthew asked.

“She was my—nobody touches her.”

“But mister, she is died. She has no need of shoes.”

In the anger born of his love and grief, Dare was impervious to this logic. Matthew gave him a good hard shove—he was very strong for one so thin—and, holding Dare at bay with both hands, told the boy to go ahead. He tugged again and, after dragging Mary’s body halfway out, succeeded at removing the boot. As he started on the other, Dare took two quick hops backward and drew the pistol again. If love was worth living for, it was worth dying for. It was the only thing worth dying for.

“Now get the hell away from her.”

The boy turned to him, more with curiosity than fear, and then to Matthew, and then back to Dare.

“Mister,” Matthew said quietly, and slipped the Kalashnikov off his shoulder, “you don’t know what you are doing.”

But he did. As he moved the barrel to fire a yard wide of the boy, he knew exactly what he was doing. He heard the pistol go off—but not the crack of Matthew’s rifle.

 

“READY IN A minute, mate,” said Tony, smacking his sleep-dried mouth. “Come on in.”

His hut was the opposite of Douglas’s, an offense to anyone with a minimal sense of cleanliness and order. A bed that looked as if it hadn’t been made in days. Dirty laundry mounded two feet high in a corner, giving off a musty odor that mingled with the smells of grease, gasoline, and dried sweat emitted by a pair of coveralls flung over a chair. Manuals and papers strewn on the floor.

“Doing your own maintenance these days?” Fitzhugh asked. He gestured at the coveralls, crinkling his nose.

Tony snatched them off the chair and tossed them onto the laundry pile. He pulled a clean shirt from a duffel bag, sniffed it, and put it on. “Let’s get this done.”

Venus was still glimmering in the west when they took off, Fitzhugh in the copilot’s seat of the Beechcraft, the company’s smallest plane. They were prepared for the only two possible outcomes, in the event Dare and Mary were found: in the back were a box of food, a jerry can of water, and a medical kit; also two rubber body bags and latex gloves supplied by the Red Cross hospital. Another crew, Alexei’s, was searching for Tara’s downed Cessna.

They flew for an hour, bearing a little east of north. Through his side window, Fitzhugh saw the arid uplands of Ethiopia and the fragmented sparkle of an intermittent river.

“That would be the Akobo,” Tony said. “We’ll be over the airstrip in a few minutes.” Those minutes passed, and he declared, “Here we are,” motioning at the GPS.

He banked, descending a little. Fitzhugh scanned with his binoculars and said to go lower.

“Low as I go, mate.”

“Tony, we are going to land if we find anything. Less altitude, yes? I can’t see anything from up here.”

With the cessation of Busy Beaver’s operations, Tony was an idle pilot, but he’d refused to take on this mission when Fitzhugh asked him last night. You’re not the boss, he’d said, so Fitz had called the boss in Nairobi on the sat-phone. Douglas’s return message had ordered Tony to go.

Alexei’s crew had not exactly been eager to look for Tara. Two planes down in a single afternoon was an unusual occurrence that had spooked all the aid pilots in Loki. Yesterday Fitzhugh had made the mistake of repeating Dare’s speculation that she might have been shot down. Rumors ran through the compounds and expat bars, transforming the possibility into established fact. Khartoum had taken the gloves off. Any plane in a no-go zone was going to be blown out of the sky. For years that specter had ridden with every crew flying on the dark side; but no plane had fallen to enemy fire, which had fostered a belief among the pilots, flight engineers, and loadmasters that they were charmed, immune, blessed; if the blessing had been withdrawn from Tara, who by virtue of her integrity seemed the most deserving of it, then it had been withdrawn from all.

“Five thousand,” Tony said. “How’s this?”

“Damn you, they might be alive down there. Maybe you don’t care what happens to Wesley, but I would think you’d care about her.”

“The both of them can rot in hell for all I care.”

“A thousand feet,” Fitzhugh demanded.

Muttering an expletive, Tony pitched the plane over into a steep dive before pulling back hard to describe a tight parabolic curve in the air. He laughed harshly. “Bloody hell if you don’t look like a white man now.”

“Was that necessary?” Fitzhugh said, his stomach settling back into its rightful place.

“You wanted lower, you got it.”

At eight hundred feet they flew over a road. It ended at the old airstrip, a rough lane with tall trees on one side. Through the trees Fitzhugh glimpsed the Hawker’s fuselage. In its new coat of white paint, it looked like some huge discarded appliance. Tony circled to give him a better view. The plane lay broadside to the trees, her right wing sheared off near the root, her nose cone crushed. A short distance away, amid low, scattered shrubs, a flock of vultures clustered, feeding on something.

“Another pass, Tony. As low and slow as you can.”

They skimmed the runway. Frightened off, the vultures rose toward the trees with a slow flapping of dark wings. Fitzhugh saw a body lying on its back, one arm flung out wide. It might have been Wesley.

“Land,” he said.

“They’re dead,” Tony said, gaining altitude.

“I saw only one. The other one could be in the plane.”

“Well, I don’t like the looks of that runway.”

“Stop arguing with me. We took this plane so we could land on a short strip. Now do it, land.”

Tony turned and touched down.

Fitzhugh recognized Wesley only by his clothes and his curly reddish hair, disturbingly lifelike as a breeze moved through it. Mary’s body lay half buried a little distance away. The vultures had not gone to work on her; presumably they would have once they were finished with Wesley. Sorrow and disgust moved through him at once. Two people he’d known for three years, sentient beings who had spoken to him only twenty-four hours ago, reduced to this, to carrion.

“Tony, what do you think happened?”

“Not enough usable runway for a Hawker,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Wes ran out of runway and ideas at the same time.”

“Someone tried to bury her. It must have been Wes.”

There might have been a tremor in Tony’s jaw as he looked down at his former lover; then he turned away and said, “Who else?”

“But if he had the strength to drag her this far and to dig a grave, you would think he wasn’t injured that badly. You would think he’d still be alive. And look, they’re both barefoot. Why’s that?”

“Wouldn’t know. What difference does it make?”

“Maybe nothing. There is a lot here that doesn’t make sense. Wes said something very strange in one of his last transmissions. There was something about his fuel pumps, something about a water jug and plastic bags in a trash barrel. What do you make of that?”

Tony jammed his hands into his back pockets and looked at the ground. “Sounds to me like he was daft. Let’s get them and ourselves out of here.”

They got the body bags from the Beechcraft and put on the latex gloves and the surgical masks that the Red Cross, in its foresight, had also provided. They loaded Mary’s corpse first. As they struggled with Wesley’s bulk, the rigid body rolled over, revealing a brown smear on the grass and three holes in its back.

“Holy shit!” Tony said. “He was shot. Those are exit wounds, you can tell by the size.”

“They can’t be. There was nothing in front.”

“The vultures, mate.”

“But who would have shot him out here? It’s a wilderness, there isn’t a village within fifty kilometers. Who and why? Bandits? Is that who took their shoes?”

“What are you, a f*ckin’ detective? Let’s get it done and out of here.”

The blood-browned grass, the three ragged holes, the vultures roosting in the trees, and the trees hissing in the wind that blew out of the east, out of Ethiopia—Fitzhugh felt a chill from within and didn’t stop feeling it until they were a mile in the air.

“I am going to try to talk the UN into sending a crash investigation team out here,” he declared suddenly.

Tony gave him a quick glance. “What the hell for? What’s the point?”

“There are too many riddles for me. I want to find out what happened, and I’ll start with what forced Wesley to land in that godforsaken place.”

After returning to Loki and delivering the bodies to the Red Cross morgue, where the logisticians of death would take care of the details—collecting personal effects, shipping the remains to their families—Fitzhugh received a radio call from Alexei: He had located the wreck of the Cessna, a mere ten miles from Zulu Three. SPLA troops were on their way to search for survivors, but he was sure there weren’t any. That was confirmed the next day, when the Antonov landed in Loki with five more corpses. It would take dental records to sort out who was who. The rumors were likewise confirmed: Alexei said Michael’s troops had found a piece of one wing, perforated with bullet holes. Tara must have flown over a government patrol from one of the two nearby garrisons. The terrifying specter had come to life.



 

Fields of Destruction

THEY WERE GOING to cut off the serpent’s head, inshallah.

The yearnings in Ibrahim Idris’s breast for love and power would be fulfilled, inshallah.

Behind him, in a double file reaching so far back he could not see its end, five hundred Brothers rode, keys to Paradise around their necks, talismans hanging from their saddles, fluttering from their rifle barrels. Somewhere off to his left the militia column—a thousand men with mortars and light artillery—pressed forward on foot and in lorries. Spearpoints aimed at the infidel’s heart, a mighty host, the scourge of God upon Dar Kufr, the House of the Unbeliever.

So had spoken Colonel Ahmar, commander of all murahaleen, before the Brothers set out yesterday morning. Brandishing rifles, clutching the hotel keys blessed by mullahs to open the gates of heaven, the massed riders roared as one, Allahu akhbar! Allah ma’ana! In the past, Ibrahim had expressed more a hope than a conviction when he’d uttered the murahaleen’s war cry. This time it had been different. He had seen in a recent confluence of events the hand of Providence that his deceased nephew Abbas used to see in everything.

About a fortnight ago the slave-trader Bashir had appeared in Ibrahim’s camp. “I bring you one who can deliver Miriam to you and very much more,” he had said. This man was a Nuban Muslim who had deserted the rebel army with one hundred others. He had fled from New Tourom, the town where Miriam dwelled. Mindful of the agreement reached with Ibrahim long ago, Bashir had led the deserter straight to his camp. He demanded that Ibrahim uphold his end of their bargain.

“Let me see him and talk to him first,” Ibrahim said.

He was a tall thin man wearing a beard on his chin, named Muhammad Kasli. He surrendered himself and his men to Ibrahim, who took the precaution of disarming them and then afforded them the hospitality of his camp.

Drinking tea under the Men’s Tree, Kasli told his story. He had been no less than second in command of all the rebel forces in the Nuba mountains. It turned out that he had changed sides sometime earlier. To prove that his loyalties lay with the government, he had taken on a secret mission to assassinate his commander and stir an uprising of Nuban Muslims. Had it been successful, all those parts of the Nuba held by the rebels would have been restored to government control without a battle; but God had not willed it to be so. The attempt failed and Kasli was forced to flee. He and his men had traveled for several days, intending to surrender themselves to the army garrison at Kadugli; but moving at night, they’d gotten lost. Their path crossed with Bashir’s the next day. Now, said Kasli, he had information valuable to the government—information that, if put to proper use, would crush the resistance in the Nuba with a single blow, God willing. And what was this information? He had intimate knowledge of the rebel headquarter’s defenses, the numbers of the soldiers, their weapons and dispositions. He would say no more until he was presented to higher authorities.

Al-hamduillah! Ibrahim said to himself. Praise be to God! A great prize had landed in his lap, but not by chance. God had guided Kasli’s footsteps to Bashir, and through Bashir to him. Ever on the lookout for his own interests, he immediately thought how to turn this situation to his benefit. Of late he had been intriguing to get the nazir removed from office and then to declare himself the best candidate to replace him. Were he to take part in a campaign to end the rebellion in the Nuba, the honor and fame could do nothing but advance his ambitions. And there was Miriam, now closer to his grasp than she had been since her escape. God willing, he would recapture her and make her a proper Muslim. He would make her his wife.

“There is a woman who lives in New Tourom. She goes by the name of Yamila. Do you know her?”

Kasli looked perplexed. Bashir had put that same question to him, he said. Of what significance was this woman?

“Do you know where she lives in the town? Describe her house to me. Show me where it is.” He handed Kasli a stick. “Draw a picture of the town and show me.”

Kasli smoothed the dirt near the fire and made a crude map—big squares representing an infidel church, a school, a souk, smaller squares for houses.

“She lives somewhere in here, the western side, near a wadi,” Kasli said, pointing with the stick. “In a house with a family of Christians. They took her in when she came to New Tourom. This house has a cross painted above its door, in green paint, and some pictures also and the words ‘God Bless This House,’ which are written in English. May I ask why you wish to know this?”

“Because she belongs to me, and you are going to help me find her,” Ibrahim answered.

He and Kasli journeyed by lorry to Colonel Ahmar’s headquarters in Babanusa town. The colonel spoke to Kasli at great length, to make sure that his surrender wasn’t a trick. One could never tell, these abid switched their allegiances back and forth, and Kasli might have had another change of heart. Satisfied that the Nuban’s defection was genuine, he asked Ibrahim to remain and assist him and his lieutenants in planning the battle. “You did well to bring him here,” the colonel said. “We are going to chop off the head of the snake, inshallah, and you and your boys will have the honor of firing the first shots.”

 

YES, THE INTRUDER was here. The Enemy was whispering to him that he had done the unforgivable, lying to him that God’s love was not infinite. The intruder was here in their house, trying to steal him from her, a different sort of rival than Yamila but a rival nonetheless. “Darling, please not now,” she said, then realized she’d sounded sharp, selfish, and unfeeling and reached out to stroke his cheek. “I’m sorry.”

He sat with folded hands, thumbs joined to press his brow. “I wish I could get it out of my head.”

“You will in time.” She moved to sit next to him, an arm around his waist. “You prayed for forgiveness, like I asked?”

“Oh, will you stop that.”

“But you must. You must. And you must believe that God will give it to you. You have to believe there are no limits to Christ’s love, no limits to his grace. You must believe that, darling.”

“The missionary speaks to the native. The missionary tells him what he must do.”

“Please, no sarcasm,” she said, seeking words to banish this trespasser who dwelt in his mind, this despair implanted by the Enemy. “I know one thing—there was no way we could have known it was Tara. It was supposed to have been Dare, and he betrayed us, just as much as Kasli and Suleiman did. He was probably paid to do it, he’s so greedy. And that woman, that bitch. She didn’t care how much damage she did, how many lives her story would cost. We’re fighting for survival here.”

“Do you think you are telling me things I haven’t told myself? But I gave the orders, not you. It’s on my conscience.”

“Mine, too. I didn’t object to your orders, and I could have. Do you think I haven’t agonized about that? But Dare and that woman were collaborators as far as I’m concerned. It was done for survival and so much more. For every soul in these mountains. For him”—she placed Michael’s hand on her stomach—“so he can grow up in peace. Do you think Christ doesn’t understand that? Of course he does, and he forgives. He forgives and forgives. Seven times seventy-seven.”

“How very nice it must be to believe that. Do as you wish and then ask for forgiveness and everything is fine.”

“Between what’s necessary and what isn’t—that’s the choice. You said that. Christ knows you did what was necessary. He knows that nobody warned you it was Tara flying Phyllis in here. Tara was an unfortunate accident.”

“She was a good woman, I was fond of her,” he said. “How can I call myself a soldier now? A murderer, that’s what I am.”

Tears came to his eyes. She had never seen him cry before. He was weeping for Tara and for his own soul, damned not by God but by himself. His sorrow only made her more determined to break the Enemy’s grip on him.

“All right, a murderer, but even murder is forgivable,” she said in a stern voice. “The only thing that’s unforgivable is to think you can’t be forgiven. You really must do what I told you, or this will get the better of you, and you won’t be able to carry on. The people need you, Pearl needs you, I need you. We need you to be strong, Michael.”

He rose and stood by the door, looking out into the courtyard. At the moment she couldn’t bear the sight of his back turned to her. She got up and went to him, folding her arms around him, laying a cheek between his shoulder blades. “Would you come with me? To our secret place?”

He stiffened. “What are you suggesting? At a time like this?”

“Not for that, darling. To show you what I’ve been telling you.”

They climbed the steep, stony path to the refuge. It was behind the pinnacle rocks rising above St. Andrew’s church—a grotto facing a granite slab into which untold ages of weather had carved a cistern, its sides as smooth as a potter’s mold, its ten-foot depth filled with water in the rainy season. A strict prohibition had forced them to choose this secluded spot for a rendezvous. Among the Nubans, sexual intimacy was forbidden while new life grew within a woman’s body; they believed it made the baby impure, and that a couple who violated the ban would be punished by the illness or early death of their child. Quinette had seen expectant girls leave their husbands to live with their parents; she’d heard stories about men who had been caught secretly visiting their pregnant wives and suffered such scorn that they had to move to other villages.

Michael did not believe in the taboo, but he had to keep up appearances and insisted that she move into the empty tukul between the one they shared and Pearl’s and Kiki’s. She hated the arrangement—sleeping in separate rooms, like some Victorian couple—and had hoped he would come to her at some late, discreet hour. Fear of disgrace restrained him: the bodyguards standing watch outside the compound walls might hear them and spread malicious gossip. It was no wonder Nuban men took several wives. Quinette trusted the mind-heart half of her husband; it was the physical part she did not trust. Its hungers could eventually drive him to seek satisfaction with another woman, and she feared who that woman might be. She’d taken the initiative, telling him that she couldn’t bear the abstention, and was there some place they could be alone together? “I know of one,” he’d said, his look telling her that he was grateful she had broken the ice.

“Now what is it you are going to show me?” Michael asked.

Without a word, she removed her kanga and sandals and hopped across the granite—exposed to the sun, it was hot underfoot—and launched herself into the cistern. The water was tepid at the surface but grew colder as she dove to the bottom. Touching it, she arched her back and kicked back up. It was delightful. The grime on her skin seemed to peel away, like a sheer wrapper.

She braced her elbows on the cistern’s rim and looked up at Michael. “Come in.”

“But you know I don’t swim.”

“Just lower yourself in and hold on like I am.”

This he did, an anxious look on his face. It was odd to see him vulnerable.

“Now let me duck your head. Hold on tight with your hands and I’ll duck your head.”

“No.”

“Please.”

He slid his forearms off the edge and clutched it with his fingers. Treading water behind him, Quinette put both hands on his shaved scalp and pushed him under, holding him there until he began to struggle. Sputtering and spitting, he lunged out and sat down.

“Were you trying to drown me? Is that what you want to show me? This is what it is like to drown.”

“I wanted you to trust me. I want you to think of this pool as God’s grace. You don’t fight it, you immerse yourself in it with trust in your heart. And it washes you clean. Trust me, Michael, and trust in God. You are forgiven. I know because I prayed for forgiveness, and it was given.”

He offered his arm to help her out. They sat for a while, drying in the sun and wind. The cool water had tightened his skin and muscles, giving them the chiseled look they must have had when he was a young wrestler. An onyx statue come to life, she thought, and said on impulse, “You are a beautiful man.”

“And look at you.” He held her arm next to his. “Brown as an Arab. And all over, too.”

At least she had gotten him to talk about something other than Tara. “It’s those treatments Pearl and Kiki give me. Lying naked in the sun, coated in lemon and sugar.”

“And what will our child be? Brown or black?”

“Black. I know it.”

The word seemed to strike him in a peculiar way; he winced when she said it, and then he was off again, into the depths of his inner space.

“I think it is not forgiveness I want,” he said after a silence. “It is forgetfulness. I keep seeing her when the men brought her and the others to the airstrip.”

“It must have been horrible,” Quinette said.

“No more horrible than other things I’ve seen. All the same, I still cannot get it out of my head.”

Words had not evicted the interloper. Her body and her love would, though she had said that wasn’t her purpose in coming here. She leaned forward to kiss him, her hand falling between his legs. The life blooming within her gave her a sense of female power; she could get him to do what she wanted, to make love, to forgive himself. Rising, she entered the grotto, trailing the kanga behind her. She didn’t look to see if he had followed her; she knew he would. She spread the kanga on the flat rock floor and sat down, holding her arms out to him. “Let me help you get it out of your head,” she said.