Acts of Faith

Man of All Races

THEY WERE BY the pool, drinking beer and talking while Turkana women passed down the dry riverbed in front of them, beyond the barbed-wire fence. The tribeswomen wore long skirts of brown cloth or cowhide and bead necklaces stacked to their chins. Fitzhugh enjoyed watching them, striding boldly, balancing bundled sticks on their shaved heads, their backs so straight they looked like exclamation points in motion, their gazes fixed on the path ahead, as if they couldn’t stand to look at the tents, warehouses, and bungalows sprawling alongside the riverbed. An eyesore crowded with pink-faced strangers.

Tara Whitcomb’s compound, where Fitzhugh and Douglas were staying, occupied one small corner of the vast encampment, and a cushy neighborhood it was, its guest tukuls built to resemble Turkana dwellings, with amenities no Turkana could have dreamed of, like electricity and running water and concrete floors swept daily by maids in starched outfits. The place looked like a luxury safari camp. Its occupants were doctors from Médicins sans Frontières, aircrews from Douglas’s former employer, PanAfrik, volunteer aid workers from religious NGOs, most of whom were American evangelicals whose homogenous wholesomeness made them look more or less identical, like soldiers in uniform. Last night, sitting outside the tukul he shared with Douglas, Fitzhugh overheard a few of these pilgrims reading scripture aloud in the neighboring hut, after which they beseeched God to bless and protect their Sudanese brethren. He was touched by their fervor, their heartfelt expressions of solidarity.

It seemed to him that he needed some of what they had—the calm of an abiding conviction. He wasn’t getting cold feet, but he felt a slight chill down there in his soles. Lacking religious impulses, he knew he couldn’t undergo a sudden conversion. If not faith, then what? An outlook? A philosophy? An attitude? At any rate, some sort of inner resource that he could draw on. He had gotten out ahead of himself, enlisting in Barrett’s cause in a moment of enthusiasm before he’d had time to prepare himself, psychologically and emotionally, for the trial ahead. Tara had painted a picture of the Nuba for Douglas and him at least as grim as Diana and Barrett’s. The war had made it a wilderness once more or, more accurately, a wasteland, as near a thing to a terra incognita as you were likely to find this late in the twentieth century.

“I’m actually hoping for bad weather, though we’re not likely to get it this time of year,” she was saying now, sitting erectly at the head of the table, sunglasses cocked over her forehead, reading glasses, hung from a cord around her neck, resting on the top button of her white captain’s shirt. “Tail end of the wet when I flew John in. Better that than this”—she motioned at the cloudless sky—“and it’s like this now in the Nuba.”

Douglas questioned her with a look.

“There’s a government garrison here, and another here,” she answered, pointing at the map spread in front of her. “And here’s Zulu One, the airstrip.”

An understanding nod from Douglas. There was between him and Tara the special bond that made bush pilots seem like members of a secret society who could speak volumes to each other with a few words.

“Do you mind explaining why you want the weather to be bad?” Fitzhugh asked. To him, small planes and thunderstorms weren’t a desirable combination.

“Our course takes us between the garrisons.” Tara gave him the indulgent smile a kindly teacher bestows on a slow learner. “In clear weather, it will be easier for the troops to . . .”

“Shoot at us?”

“I’m not too worried about that. We’ll be flying out of small arms range. I’m more worried they’ll send patrols to find out where we’ve landed. If that happens, Zulu One will be compromised, and then I shall have a jolly time coming in to pick you up, won’t I? Zulu One is it for the Nuba, although by the time you’re ready to be taken out, I hope Douglas will have found a couple of alternatives.”

She looked at Douglas expectantly, but he only turned his head, his attention drawn by the birds flitting in the branches of a nearby tree. Flashes of dark blue, iridescent blue, russet.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” he remarked, with an irritating irrelevance and a seeming indifference to what Tara had said. An indifference underscored by his posture: slumped low in his chair, ankles crossed, fingers clasped behind his head. “As common as robins back in the States, but I never get tired of looking at them.”

“Which? The superb starlings or the rollers?”

“Both.”

“Are you a birder? You don’t look like one.”

“How is a birder supposed to look?”

“Oh, owlish, I guess.” Tara grimaced as if in disapproval of her own pun. Like Diana Briggs, she was a woman of a certain age who looked much younger. The same clear English complexion, somehow preserved from the effects of time and African suns; the same startling blue eyes, the same blond hair, though hers was a darker blond and cut shorter than Diana’s. The two women could have been sisters. Close cousins anyway. Tara was taller at five-eight or -nine, and broader boned, with a strong, square face and an aloof, self-contained air that came from years of flying solo over wild and dangerous country. Not unfriendly, but certainly a woman who would prefer a handshake to a kiss on the cheek, no matter how long she’d known you. “I flew lots of birders into Tsavo in the old days, and they all looked owlish to me. Glasses like this”—circling her eyes with thumbs and forefingers—“thick in the middle, skinny legs. They were always in a sweat to see carmine bee-eaters.”

“That’s an incredible bird!” Douglas popped out of his slouch in a burst of enthusiasm, the first time Fitzhugh had seen him shuck off his cloak of studied cool. “I saw a few down there myself last year. Got pictures of them.”

“Ah! So you are a birder.”

“Not the one my mother is. If it’s got feathers and it flies, she can identify it, tell you where it winters and summers, and maybe imitate its call. She came over to go to Tsavo with me. Maybe I ought to say I went with her. She’s been around half the world with her binoculars and bird books, and when she isn’t gallivanting, she’s out on the San Pedro or Sonoita Creek. Nature preserves near Tucson.”

“That’s in the West, correct?” asked Tara as Fitzhugh thought, A mother who can afford to come all the way to Africa just to look at birds?

“Arizona,” Douglas informed her. “And that’s north of Mexico, south of Colorado, east of California.”

“A geography lesson. Splendid. Now I shall give one. As far as anyone in Loki is concerned, we’re flying to Kakuma tomorrow,” she said, referring to a mission station and refugee camp a short hop south of Loki. “And in fact we will be going there, to give ourselves a cover in case anyone gets nosy. We will pick up supplies for a hospital in the Nuba. It’s run by German Emergency Doctors, the only NGO Khartoum allows to operate up there. Of course, the hospital is not supposed to be receiving supplies from outside Sudan, but it’s been in a fix lately, short of everything. We will leave for the Nuba, and when I get back, I will tell everyone I was delayed in Kakuma by mechanical trouble. I cannot stress enough the need for discretion. I prefer that to ‘secrecy,’ don’t you? After all, we’re not spies.”

Douglas shrugged to say that he was neutral about semantics.

“But Khartoum has its spies around here,” Tara went on. “Let’s say they have a controller or two at Loki tower on the payroll. He finds out where we’re bound, we are in a fix.”

“But we’re flying with Tara Whitcomb, the legend, the modern-day Beryl Markham,” Douglas said with utmost sincerity. His eyes fastened onto her, and Fitzhugh suddenly felt shut out of the conversation; felt moreover that he had disappeared as far as Douglas was concerned.

“I am fifty-five years old.” Tara, with a laugh, gave her head a stiff, controlled toss backward. “Quite beyond flattery.”

“I wasn’t flattering. I heard about you almost from the day I got here. How some missionary was sick in a no-fly area. The mission radioed Loki for an evac. UN flight ops told them they would have to wait until they negotiated with Khartoum for clearance to land.”

Tara nodded, adding that someone in flight operations sent a message to the mission, urging them to evacuate the dying man by road, a ridiculous idea, as it was the middle of the rainy season and the road to Loki impassable, or nearly so, not to mention the chance of ambush by Turkana or Tuposa bandits.

“So you got him. You said, ‘F*ck all this chickenshit red tape,’ and went in and got him.”

“I didn’t use that sort of language, Doug.”

“You had to fly through a helluva storm, I heard. You called the mission and told them to have the guy at the airstrip at such-and-such a time and you’d be there.”

“Three twenty-five,” she said.

“And they were there at three twenty-five and so were you. Right on the money.”

“Oh, really.” With a small movement of her head and a quick shrug, she signaled that the accolades were beginning to embarrass her. Then, pushing back from the table, she clasped her hands over her crossed knees and gave Douglas the same direct, penetrating look he was giving her. “There’s quite a lot of stories floating around here about you, you know. You’ve gotten quite the reputation.”

The remark appeared to catch him off guard. His back stiffened.

“What sort of reputation?”

“Depends on who you’re speaking to. To some people, you’re a hero. Others . . . to them you’re an air pirate, or the next thing to it.”

“What?”

“They say that what you did came this close”—holding her forefinger next to her thumb—“to a hijacking.”

He said nothing and, with a shift of his glance, invited Fitzhugh back into the conversation, though Fitzhugh had no idea what to say. Ever since meeting him, he’d been eager to learn what had caused Douglas’s departure from PanAfrik and put him on the UN’s shit list; but when he had asked, on the flight to Loki yesterday, the American had answered with a blank-faced silence, as if he liked playing the mystery man. In the past forty-eight hours, all he’d revealed about himself was that he was thirty-one years old, hailed from Tucson, Arizona, and had flown for the U.S. Air Force in the Persian Gulf War, a spare autobiography that was the source of some anxiety for Fitzhugh. He didn’t relish the notion of tramping through the Nuba mountains with a man about whom he knew almost nothing.

“Who in the hell accused me of hijacking?” Douglas asked, in a tone more wounded than angry.

“No one’s really accused you,” answered Tara.

“I can make a good guess. That Dutchman in flight operations, Timmerman. That’s the kind of thing he’d say. Fact is, he did say it to me after I got sacked. A hijacking. Jesus H. Christ. I was the first officer. How can anyone say that I hijacked my own flight?”

“Doug, if I’d known it was going to upset you—”

“Hey, Tara, if you found out a story like that was going around about you, it wouldn’t upset you?”

“Of course it would. But if you will allow me to . . . I mean to say, if you were first officer, then it wasn’t your flight, strictly speaking.”

Douglas frowned, half-cocking one ear toward her. “I don’t believe you said that.”

He came out of his chair, suddenly enough to startle her and Fitzhugh. His lips parted, but he appeared to have second thoughts about whatever he intended to say and, muttering that he had better give his gear one last check, walked off.

“Oh dear, I’m afraid that wasn’t very diplomatic of me.” Tara turned to watch him, striding down the path toward his tukul. “Now I shall have to make amends.”

Fitzhugh asked, “What happened? What is this about a hijacking?”

Tara shook her head. “I had better apologize straight away.” But she hadn’t gotten across the pool terrace before Douglas returned, chin tucked in, eyes level, arms swinging at his sides. He seized her elbow and towed her back to her chair, then dropped into his.

“It was my flight,” he said. “Estrada got sick. Dysentery. He couldn’t fly. Turned the plane over to me. T. J. Estrada, stocky Filipino guy, forty-five, maybe fifty? Crew cut? Flew Hercs for the Filipino Air Force?”

“I—I may have seen him around,” she said, a little stunned by the way he’d manhandled her.

“He got sick. It was a check-out flight for me, and he was the captain and my check pilot. Routine airdrop out near Ayod. Sixteen tons of maize. Poor guy was on the deck behind the flight engineer, doubled up, shitting all over himself. He’d been complaining about a bad stomach, but it really hit him right before we got the call to divert and pick up those people in Ajiep. He gave me the con, so it was my flight, if that makes any difference.”

“Yes, you said that, but I think you’re going a bit fast.” She nodded in Fitzhugh’s direction. “He doesn’t know any of it.”

The American stopped and rewound his narrative, beginning it again at the moment of the drop. Having told Fitzhugh nothing, he now seemed intent on telling him everything, his tongue loosened by the need to defend his reputation. He didn’t discriminate between relevant and irrelevant facts, informing his listeners that the cockpit was decorated with photos of bare-breasted Filipina pinup girls, that the weather over Sudan was unsettled that day, the sky dotted with compact squalls, and that he remembered the smell of rain coming in through the auxiliary vents as the engineer depressurized the cabin on the descent toward the drop zone. Estrada had flown the plane from Loki, but as it neared the DZ, the captain turned the controls over to him.

“This is when he got sick?” Fitzhugh asked.

“No!” Douglas answered with a swat of his hand. “Told you, it was a check-out flight. He was checking me out, evaluating me. He gave me the controls but not command of the plane. That came later.”

He passed his test. The captain gave him a B-plus and said he’d make it an A-minus if Douglas took the plane back to Loki. “Musta caught a bug. Feels like termites are eating my guts.”

Douglas climbed toward cruising altitude. The plane wasn’t halfway there when the captain got out of his seat and went for the head, bent at the waist, sweating. He didn’t make it. A stench filled the cabin, and he fell onto the deck, knees drawn into his chest.

“A Herc is fairly easy to fly, but I wasn’t wild about the idea of taking it back to Loki single-handed, with a captain in the shape he was in. How about another beer?”

Tara signaled a waiter and told him to bring two Tuskers and a Coke. Douglas picked up the thread of his story, saying that only minutes after Estrada was stricken, an urgent call came in from flight operations Loki, ordering the Hercules to change course for Ajiep, almost two hundred miles to the west; the town was under threat of attack by government militia; the supervisor of the UN compound there had requested an emergency evacuation for him and his staff, fifty-odd people all together.

The waiter came and set the bottles, sweating in the afternoon heat, on the table. Douglas wiped his with the tail of his shirt, took a drink, and sat silently for a few moments, holding the bottle by the neck.

“I plugged Ajiep’s numbers into the GPS and did a one-eighty and told the engineer to clue Estrada in—Estrada had his headset off, remember, and hadn’t heard any of it. Had to hand it to the old guy. Pulled himself together. Got into his seat, said he’d do what he could. The plane was mine, but he’d do whatever he could. Yeah, had to hand it to him. He was feverish and stinking like hell, Jesus, the whole cabin smelled like a horse stall. One of the loadmasters got the first-aid kit and gave him a bunch of pills, Imodium, I think, which was pretty much like putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.”

They flew on for an hour, crossing vast swamps, then descended over arid scrub stretched to the horizon. The Jur river lay ahead, a glinting cord in the stark landscape. Beyond it pillars of smoke leaned in the wind, and Douglas knew by the looks of them that they were not from seasonal fires set by slash-and-burn farmers. He raised the UN outpost on the radio. The supervisor—Douglas recalled that he spoke with a French or Belgian accent—told him the town had been shelled half an hour ago.

“We are afraid there are Arab horsemen approaching,” the man said. “If they are here before you, I will shoot myself. Better to shoot myself.”

Like everyone else in Sudan, Douglas had heard stories about the mounted warriors who served as the government’s irregular cavalry. They called themselves by their tribal names, Messiriya, Humr, Hawazma, Rizeygat, but were collectively known as murahaleen, holy warriors. The stuff of nightmares for white man and black man alike, they attacked without warning, materializing out of the desert like the jinns of their own mythology, five hundred to a thousand men robed in white, Koranic talismans fluttering from saddle blankets, a reincarnate terror from another time, with only their assault rifles to testify that they were coming on in the here and now.

Douglas followed the Jur like a radio beacon, coming in over the town and the dust-reddened tents of the aid agency compounds.

“The runway there is metaled and long enough for a Herc, but just long enough,” he said and, like every pilot in history, illustrated with his hands. “I wanted to give myself every foot of roll I could.” He skimmed a palm over the tabletop, then slammed it down. “Dropped her, like you do on a wet runway. Bang! We stopped with maybe a hundred and fifty feet to spare. I turned her around for takeoff. Keep the engines running, get the people aboard, and the hell out.”

A pickup truck and a couple of Land Rovers were parked beside the runway. The loadmasters went to the rear, the ramp was lowered. The aid workers, men and women bent under hastily packed rucksacks, piled out of the vehicles and jogged toward the plane. That was when Douglas saw the townspeople, sitting or standing in the grass and thornbush groves nearby: women in pink and white pinafores, children, a few old people. A fountain of brown smoke rose through the trees a kilometer or two away; a sound like a heavy steel door slamming shut, muted by the engines. The crowd did not stir. They were all very still, staring at the Hercules, their only hope for deliverance from the evil gathering itself, out there in the desert.

“What got to me was how calm they were. Some of them were standing in line, like they were at an airport. I don’t mean resigned. Accepting, I guess. That’s what got to me. It was tough to see them, waiting like that. Waiting to find out if we’d take them or not.”

The loadmaster called him on the intercom. The aid workers were on board. And then: “There’s a Sudanese guy here says he needs to talk to the captain.”

Douglas turned to Estrada, who told him to see what the man wanted, but to be quick about it.

The Sudanese was nearly seven feet tall and immensely dignified. With a formality out of phase with the circumstances, he introduced himself as Gabriel, the chairman, but did not say what he was chairman of. A handful of SPLA guerrillas stood behind him, Kalashnikovs slung across their backs, and a girl lay on a litter at their feet, wild-eyed, breathing heavily. She looked to be fifteen or sixteen and was naked from the waist up, her belly enormous. An older woman in an orange smock—mother? midwife?—was beside her, holding a reed basket and skin waterbag in either hand.

“Do you suppose you could take her, captain?” asked Gabriel. “I know your regulations, but she is very close to her time.”

“What was I supposed to tell the guy?” Douglas asked his listeners rhetorically. “ ‘If you know the regs, dude, then you know that we’re authorized only to evacuate civilians who’ve been wounded in the fighting. And snakebite, that’s okay, too. Otherwise, tough shit.’ Was I supposed to tell him that?”

Two rebel soldiers lifted the litter and carried the girl into the plane, the older woman following. Another shell exploded, near to where the first had struck. With a languid movement of one huge hand, Gabriel gestured at the people waiting in the distance and pleaded with Douglas to take them as well.

“All of them?”

“It’s a very big plane and they are not many,” Gabriel said, speaking with great composure. “If the murahaleen come, you know what will happen—” Another shell, bursting somewhat closer, interrupted him. Douglas noticed a movement in the crowd, a rippling as of grass in the wind, and he thought or imagined the people made a sound, a kind of collective sigh, as of wind moving through grass.

He took a headset from one of the loadmasters and told Estrada what was going on.

“I’m hurting, man, really hurting” was all the captain said. “C’mon, get up here and let’s go.”

“Call Loki. Ask them to authorize.”

“Forget it! They’re not going to let us bring half the town into Kenya. Get on up here before we get blown off this runway!”

“Is it still my plane or what?”

“Get your ass up here now.”

Douglas felt a flashing envy for people who dwelled in the peaceful nooks of the world, where there was time to ponder before making difficult moral choices.

“All right, but get them aboard in a hurry,” he said to Gabriel, then returned to the cockpit, stepping over the pregnant girl, while the aid workers, strapped into their web jumpseats, looked at him, bewildered.

If Estrada had not been so sick, he might have taken a swing at his copilot. He called the loadmasters on the intercom and ordered them to raise the ramp. They said they couldn’t; there were people on it. Then kick ’em off, Estrada said. The loadmasters couldn’t do that either because there were too many, sixty, seventy at least, and what was more, men with guns standing outside the door.

“All right, Yankee boy, you caused the problem, you fix it. Turn those people around. Tell ’em big mistake. This isn’t American Airlines.”

At Douglas’s refusal, the captain rose from his seat and turned to go to the rear of the plane. Just then, another wave of dysentery bound his guts, and he doubled over again. Seeing his chance, Douglas strapped himself in and told the loadmasters to continue boarding the refugees. A few moments later, when the DOOR OPEN light went dark, he pushed the throttles, let go the brakes, and started his roll.

“Good thing there weren’t any weapons on board. I think Estrada would’ve put a pistol to my head.”

“Yes, I think I might have, too,” Tara said with a sternness that chipped the armor of Douglas’s self-assurance.

His gaze wandered for a moment; he drummed the table with his fingers.”Listen, I found out later that what the French or Belgian guy was afraid would happen did happen. Five, six hundred Arabs on horseback overran the airfield less than half an hour after we got out of there. The big guy, Gabriel, got killed, I heard, and whoever was left in town either got killed or was hauled off into slave camp.”

“Yes. I think you did the wrong thing for all the right reasons.”

He drew back, as if Tara had raised a hand to slap him.

“You did commandeer the aircraft. And I say that in the spirit of constructive criticism.”

But he did not take it that way. He looked insulted and incredulous, as if he were convinced that his actions had been so manifestly right that only a blind, stupid, or morally corrupt person could think they’d been otherwise.

“All right, I’ve heard the criticism, what’s the construction? Clue me in.”

The combination of petulance and flippancy made her wince. For his part, Fitzhugh had fallen in love. The American was a spiritual brother, with a zeal and daring he could only wish were his own. He decided to give Douglas a little support. To put everything on the line to save a few strangers of no importance to anyone, he told Tara, had been a triumph of conscience over self-interest.

“I did say it was for the best of reasons, didn’t I?” An adamantine varnish seemed to flood her eyes, and their hard blue glare unsettled him. “But from what I heard, the story didn’t have a happy ending. Immigration incarcerated those people, then packed them off, back to where they’d come from.”

“A better ending than the one that could have been,” Douglas observed.

“I can’t argue with that, but—”

“You will anyway.”

“Sudan being what it is,” Tara said, “one has to wonder if you spared them from their fate or merely postponed it.”

“Hey, I made my call. I stood by it. I stand by it now. Okay?”

“Fair enough. Do you know what happened to the pregnant girl?”

“You just said it. Sudan being what it is. The things that happen there break your heart when they don’t turn your stomach.”

“Either she died or the baby or both.”

“The kid.” Douglas nodded. “It happened on the plane, when we were only an hour from Loki. The loadmasters told me about it after we landed. I saw the girl holding the kid in a blanket, a piece of cowhide really. She wasn’t crying. Like she expected it.” He paused just long enough to highlight the next statement: “Maybe I should have, too.”

A lilt in his voice turned it into a question, and Tara, her expression softening, told him he could not have possibly expected any such thing and shouldn’t blame himself. Biting his lip, Douglas nodded to accept her reassurance, which could have been what he sought; the appeal for solace implicit in the way he’d spoken those final five words seemed intentionally to draw her sympathies toward him and his feelings, as if they and not the girl’s tragedy were what mattered in the end. That was Fitzhugh’s impression, but being in love, he immediately dismissed it as a figment of his imagination, telling himself he was making too much of a mere phrase, a tone of voice.

“Didn’t mean to sound like such a scold,” Tara was saying. They were getting used to her quirk of being brutally candid, then apologizing for it. “You already got your paddling in the headmaster’s office. You don’t need another from the likes of me.”

“Two paddlings,” said Douglas. “First PanAfrik’s boss told me that if he had anything to say about it, I’d never fly anything for anybody ever again. And then the flight coordinator, that Dutchman, told me I was no better than a common hijacker. That son of a bitch. Can you imagine that coming from him? Every day he has to fax Khartoum a list of every destination the UN is flying to and ask permission to land. How can he look at himself in the mirror? So I told him he was on the wrong side, he was on Khartoum’s side, and he said the UN wasn’t on anyone’s side, that the situation was so complicated that if it did take sides, it would quote turn a disaster into a calamity unquote.”

“You don’t think he had a point?” Tara asked, meaning that she thought so.

“C’mon, Tara.” He presented his most engaging smile and leaned over to lay his palm lightly on her wrist. He had an instinct for knowing where and how to touch someone he wanted to win over, but the instinct failed him in this instance, Tara sitting with cool rigidity, demanding that he respond, and not with pretty smiles and intimate touches. His hand rose to her elbow, then lighted on her shoulder, and finally dropped in defeat. “All right, here’s what I think. I told that dude that sometimes people make things more complicated than they have to be so they don’t have to get off their asses and take a stand. Sometimes neutrality is just another word for cowardice.”

“And how did he react to that?”

“Oh, he got cute and said that ‘neutrality is another word for cowardice’ sounded like one of those bumper stickers Americans are so fond of.”

Tara laughed. “Well, it does, doesn’t it? Let me tell you about something that happened a couple of years before you got to this part of the world.”

Tara then related the tale, with which Fitzhugh was familiar, about the conflict that arose between Riek Machar, second in command of the SPLA, and John Garang, the commander in chief. Machar and one of his deputies attempted a coup to remove Garang from power. Irreconcilable differences over war aims were the stated reasons—Machar wanted an independent southern Sudan, Garang a united, secular Sudan.

“But that was rubbish,” Tara went on. “It was tribal. You do know, don’t you, that Machar is a Nuer and Garang a Dinka?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Douglas muttered.

“So the Nuer and the Dinka are rather like the Serbs and the Croats. Hated each other ever since, oh, the big bang. The Nuer, most anyway, decided to follow Machar, and the Dinka lined up with Garang, and the next thing you know, there is no longer one SPLA but two. Machar’s men attacked Bor—that’s Garang’s hometown—and slaughtered two thousand people. Tied children up and executed them. Hung old people from trees. They disemboweled women, whether after they’d shot them or before, I don’t know. After, one hopes. The rest, thousands of them, fled into the swamps, and a lot of them died of starvation and malaria. I evacuated some of the victims, by the way. I saw it, Douglas. Garang’s troops retaliated in kind, and it goes on to this day.”

“Okay, proving what exactly?”

Tara looked surprised by the question, its answer was so plain. “Well, Machar and Garang both hold doctoral degrees, so to get philosophical about it, I suppose it proves that education is no vaccine against savagery, even though many people persist in thinking otherwise. More to the point, it proves that one cannot take sides. You’re on the side of the southern Sudanese? But which southern Sudanese? The Nuer or the Dinka? And what of all the smaller tribes, some allied with the Nuer, some with the Dinka, some with their own armies? The southerners are their own worst enemy, and—”

“The fanatics in Khartoum are their worst enemy,” Douglas interrupted.

“Oh, have it your way, then. I must say all this chatter makes me glad I fly planes instead of make policy.”

“Fly planes instead of make policy? Hey, what are we? Bus drivers? It’s our responsibility, yours, mine, Fitz’s, everybody here”—he made a wide sweep of his arm—“to think about what we’re doing, and if it’s the wrong thing, make it right. Otherwise, we might as well pack our trash and go home. There’s things we can do, big things, and Fitz and I are going to start doing one of them tomorrow, and you’re going to be part of it, even if you think all you’re doing is driving the bus. Sorry if I sound like I’m lecturing.”

“Oh, I suppose it’s good for the middle-aged soul to be lectured by the young now and then. My children, and there are four of them, do it all the time.”

“I haven’t spent the last couple years out here just playing Herc jockey,” Douglas carried on, as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’ve read a lot about Sudan’s history. How the Brits divided the country, just about built a great wall of China between the north and south, and when they left, way back before I was born, told the Arabs and blacks that now it was up to them to figure out how to get along.”

“Oh God, don’t remind me that nineteen fifty-six was way before you were born,” Tara said, with another restrained, backward toss of her head. “I remember when we—when the British left. I was one of the ones doing the leaving.”

They each gave her a questioning look.

“I was raised in Sudan, you know. My father was an engineer, in charge of a postwar development project. A sort of social experiment. Provide land and income to tribesmen without either.”

“Then you know better than anybody what I’m talking about.”

“Actually, no.” Tara smiled, but the stern look, returning to her eyes, nullified it. “I’m not defending colonialism, but I rather think the argument that it’s to blame for Africa’s problems has worn a bit thin. Something else is going on. As far as Sudan goes, I think it’s up to the southerners to sort themselves out.”

“And up to us to pitch in and help them do the sorting.”

“You don’t make a good carpenter by building his house for him,” she said.

“Right. You give him a hammer, show him how to use it. But then you don’t stand back and feel real good about yourself and say tsk-tsk when he bends a nail or whacks his thumb. Sometimes your arm has to get sore with his. Sometimes your sweat has to drip on the ground with his. Sometimes you have to swing the hammer with him, and yeah, sometimes you have to swing it for him, not sit in the air-conditioning like Timmerman with maps and pins and fax machines.”

“And you don’t eat Danish ham and drink French wine while the other guy gets by on his porridge and bad water,” Fitzhugh added, his own fervor rising with the fervor in Douglas’s voice. “And when the job’s done, you leave with the shirt on your back, not a hundred thousand in back pay.”

Douglas made a fist and rapped him on the shoulder. They were at that moment like two wires, feeding off the same current.

“I’m impressed with your passion, and I mean that.” Tara’s body canted forward to emphasize her sincerity. “But Sudan, it’s a vast place, and there’s something about it—” She hesitated, searching for words; she was a pilot, accustomed to expressing herself in the language of action. “Something bigger than its size. All that distance is inspiring, it gives you the impression that anything is possible, but then it deals you a nasty setback, and you think nothing is. That’s the physics of Sudan. For every emotion there is an equal and opposite emotion.” A slight, uncertain smile—she was pleased with the turn of phrase but unsure if it made any sense. “My father’s project didn’t come to much. He knew our time in Sudan was coming to a close, he wanted to leave a legacy. Toward the end he saw nothing of the sort was going to happen. Dad left a disappointed man, wondering if all he’d accomplished for all those years was to draw a paycheck and provide an interesting life for himself and his family. Oh dear, listen to me! Nattering on. I’m afraid I’m not doing a good job, getting my point across.” She stood abruptly, straightened her shirt, and tugged at her jeans, a little too tight for her figure. “So I’d best shut up. My vocal cords aren’t used to all this talking. See you tomorrow, then? Wheels up at eight. I’ll have a driver come round to pick you up. Half past seven.”

They watched her walk off, her steps quick and short, her honey-blond hair bouncing over the back of her upturned collar.

“My goodness, looking at her from behind, you would think she was thirty,” Fitzhugh observed. “Her and that Diana.”

“Yeah,” Douglas drawled, stretching with a long, languid movement. “What do you figure all that was about?”

“Some advice from an old hand?”

“More to it than that, it seemed to me.”

Tara was by now out of sight, but Douglas continued to look after her, as if following her movements in his imagination.

“Pretty nice operation she’s got going here.” His head turned in a slow arc to take in the stone-walled tukuls, the bar and pool, the groundskeepers raking the dirt pathways bordered by whitewashed rocks, the gardens that scented the dry air. It was more of an examination than a casual survey, as if the place were for sale and he a prospective buyer. “Has her own airline and her own hotel. Yeah, pretty nice. It’s a safe bet that when she leaves, it won’t be with just the shirt on her back.”

Fitzhugh’s own words, but he didn’t care for the inference—if, that is, Douglas was making one.

“What are you getting at?”

“Ask you something? Do you think she’s on our side?”

“Of course she is!” The question shocked Fitzhugh. He rather liked Tara. “Would she be taking a big risk for us if she wasn’t? I think maybe you’re rankled by some of the things she said to you.”

“Doesn’t pull her punches, for sure. But I admire her for that.”

Fitzhugh finished his now-warm beer, put the back of his hand to his mouth, and belched.

“Now let me ask you something. Of all the sides in this war, which one do you think is ours?”