Acts of Faith

A GAME OF bau was in progress under a tamarind, men in homespun robes and bark skullcaps gathered with their treasuries of stones around egg-shaped holes scooped out of the ground in double rows. Tara’s driver braked as a goat with prominent ribs ambled across the main road, toward a market where women cloaked against the chill were buying and selling charcoal. Its smell mingled with the smells of woodsmoke and dung, the scent of backcountry Africa. Beyond the town the cliffs of the Mogilla range looked like copper battlements in the new light, the crests of the ridges like copper roofs. In the pickup’s cab, with Douglas wedged between him and the driver, Fitzhugh smoked his second cigarette of the day. The feeling that he was a twig in a current was still with him. He glanced at the plastic bags and cardboard boxes drifted alongside the rutted streets—the detritus of modern life had come to Loki without its blessings—at the rundown shops with signs that were reductively simple—TAILOR—or pretentious—MADAME’S EUROPEAN BEAUTY SALON—or baffling—GOD DOES NOT FORGET YOU, YOU FORGET HIM—and for a slivered moment regretted leaving this tumbledown, fly-plagued, rubbish-strewn crossroads. It would seem like the heart of civilization after a few days in the Nuba.

Douglas reached across his lap and swatted the smoke out the window.

“How did a big-time soccer player get hooked on those damned things?”

They were passing the aid agency camps now. Brown storage tents as big as barns. Stacks of blue fuel drums. Razor wire. Radio antennae soaring.

“After eight years of keeping in training, I felt that I needed a vice,” Fitzhugh grumbled, annoyed at Douglas, not for criticizing his habit but for making them late.

This morning, after taking a long shower, shaving, and combing his hair, he decided he could not appear in the same shirt he’d worn yesterday, as if anyone would notice or care. Finding the one he wanted—a pale blue denim—involved unpacking and then repacking his rucksack and wasted a good ten minutes. In the mess, he lingered over his eggs and bacon and was pouring himself a third cup of coffee when Fitzhugh, patience at an end, tapped his watch and reminded him that they were to have met Tara’s driver five minutes ago. Douglas shrugged and said that no one was going anywhere without them.

A Turkana askari swung open the gate to the airfield, where a PanAfrik Hercules was taxiing for takeoff on the morning run. Tara’s aviation company was headquartered near the western end of the landing strip. Four white Cessna Caravans and two Andovers, each with a maroon stripe and the word PATHWAYS above it in back-slanting letters, were parked on the apron. A wave of reassurance washed over Fitzhugh, calming his fears of flying in small planes. One look at Tara’s, so immaculate they appeared to be made of bone china, told him they weren’t going to suffer engine failure because of careless maintenance. She was in the small terminal, conferring with one of her pilots, an Ethiopian with a chiseled burnt-umber face. Static and distant voices crackled through the high-frequency radio on the varnished counter against which she leaned on her freckled forearms. Flight plans on clipboards hung from the wall behind her, between a tapestry of aviation maps and a chalkboard containing remarks on conditions at various airstrips. All the order and cleanliness of her domain spoke of something deeper than mere efficiency. She herself looked as put-together as her surroundings—khaki trousers with a military crease, starched white shirt set off by captain’s epaulets, hair brushed and makeup on just so.

“I suppose I should be cross,” she said when she finished up with the pilot. “Wheels up at eight, and here you are at ten past.”

Douglas apologized, but some devil in him did not allow him to leave it at that. He explained that they had taken extra time to give their gear a last-minute check, and with a look he asked Fitzhugh not to betray the outright lie.

“No harm done,” said Tara. “I had to go over a flight plan with the chap who just left, George, my senior pilot.”

“Your senior pilot? How many have you got?”

“Twenty.”

Douglas whistled appreciatively.

She packed an insulated cloth case with sandwiches, a Thermos of coffee, bottled water. “Shall we, then?” she said, and slung the case over a shoulder and tucked her sleeping bag under the opposite arm, declining Douglas’s offer to carry one or the other for her.

They crossed the apron to one of the Caravans, Douglas lagging a little, studying the other planes as he had the grounds and buildings in the compound yesterday afternoon—with a covetous, appraising look. Noticing his interest, Tara volunteered that Pathways flew fourteen airplanes, ten out of here, two in Somalia, and two more out of Nairobi.

“I own the Caravans. Lease the rest,” she said, and opened the baggage compartment under the rear door.

Another whistle from Douglas as he stowed his rucksack. What was she going to do if things were ever settled in Sudan? Not that that was likely anytime soon, but what if?

She was standing under a wing, her hand on the strut. “Are you implying something?”

“Nope.”

“That I hope the mess is never settled because it keeps me in business?”

A ground crewman kicked the blocks from under the wheels. There was a silence several seconds long; then Douglas, with outspread hands, appealed to her to believe that his question had been innocent curiosity, nothing more. She opened the door and, with a jerk of her head, told him to climb in.

He strapped into the copilot’s seat, Fitzhugh into the seat behind him.

“Sorry for snapping at you,” Tara said, donning her sunglasses and headset.

“Hey, I’m cool if you are,” Douglas said. “Let’s fly.”

Loki tower—a frame cabin atop a wooden derrick—then hangars and forklifts feeding pallets of sorghum into a cargo plane’s innards shot by before the Caravan left the ground. It seemed to float effortlessly aloft, like a hot-air balloon. Holding her altitude to three thousand feet, Tara followed the Lokichokio-Lodwar highway. It was nearly devoid of traffic, so heavily ambushed by Turkana bandits that only armed convoys dared to travel it. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, she commenced her descent. The town appeared on the sun-blasted, khaki plain that stretched into eternity: a twin-spired mission church, huts fenced by thornbush bomas, the depressing geometry of the refugee camp, rank upon rank of tin-roofed barracks laid out on a grid of dusty streets.

“See the church?” Tara motioned as she made her approach. “Some time ago I fell madly in love with the priest, Father Tony O’Mara. Terrifically handsome in a dark Irish way, but true to his vows, and I know because I did my best to get him to break them. So every time I flew near Kakuma, I buzzed the church to say hello and remind him I was around. In case he had a change of heart.”

She let out a wicked laugh that rang like wind chimes, and her two passengers saw, as faint as a ghost on a negative, an image of the wild girl she must have been. It was hard to reconcile that picture with the contained, middle-aged woman she was now.

The former temptress of a priest, the daredevil who buzzed churches, was quickly all business again, working rudder pedals and flap levers to make a smooth landing on a strip that wasn’t much more than a graded gravel road. Without switching off the engine, she climbed out and directed a couple of Kenyans to begin loading the medical supplies—boxes of surgical gloves, antibiotics, syringes, bandages—into the back of the plane. Two people, faces turned from the whirling dust, approached the aircraft—a short white man and a white woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, which she held tightly to her head with one hand. She and Tara embraced and started talking. Diana. The man with her was Barrett. She stepped under the wing and gestured to open the door.

“Fitz! Doug! Hello!” she shouted over the engine. “John and I had business here, so we thought we’d meet the plane and wish you bon voyage!”

Fitzhugh nodded his thanks, his heart arrested by her smile, the bright hair as yellow as her hat. The Kenyan was loading the boxes into the cart.

“Do give our best to Gerhard,” Diana said.

“Gerhard?”

“All that stuff in back is for him,” Barrett said. “Sort of a sample to show him the things we could do for him once we get the operation rollin’.”

“Who is this Gerhard?”

“Gerhard Manfred.” Diana again. “The doctor who runs the hospital up there.”

“And a dedicated one he is. A bit daft and difficult, but be diplomatic with him. He could be of great help to us. He’ll be happy with those supplies.” Barrett extended his hand. “Best of luck to you. Michael the Archangel will meet you at Zulu One with an armed escort. Godspeed!”

Tara returned to her seat, Douglas latched the door, and Barrett and Diana stood back and waved as the plane taxied away, the cargo stacked under a cargo net. Fitzhugh pressed his face to the window, jumped by strange emotions. A titled lady almost old enough to be his mother, and here he was, wondering if she might be divorced from Mr. Briggs or his widow. He hadn’t noticed a wedding ring.

In a short while they were over the stark Lolikipi plain, veined with dry watercourses, then crossed the northern tip of the Mogillas, fissured and barren. Tara scribbled notes for her log on a pad strapped to her thigh. She spoke into her headset microphone, but Fitzhugh couldn’t hear, he could only see her lips moving. Ending the message, she pushed the mike aside and said they were now in Sudanese airspace and would observe radio silence from here on, emergencies excepted.

The uplands of Eastern Equatoria passed monotonously below in their drab dry-season colors. Seen from twelve thousand feet, the landscape looked as level as a football pitch. You could dribble a soccer ball for a hundred miles and not hit anything but a termite mound, Fitzhugh thought. Farther north, the immense marshes spreading away from the Nile tributaries in smears of somber green relieved the arid desolation with a desolate lushness. Primeval cradles of malaria haunted by venomous snakes and crocodiles. Miles and miles of bloody Africa—the hackneyed phrase seemed apt. Such emptiness.

Looking at it, Tara became nostalgic. She turned on the autopilot, unpacked the sandwiches and Thermos, and over lunch reminisced about her early days, when she flew hunters into Sudan and stayed in their camps, listening to lions call in the darkness. She described an Africa recent in history yet as remote as the continent of Stanley and Livingston: antelope migrating in dust-shrouded rivers of flesh, hooves, and horn, elephants journeying by the hundreds across their native range. Almost all gone now, she said, as much the victims of war and famine as the people who’d slaughtered the antelope for meat, the elephants for the ivory that bought guns and bullets. That Africa ended her idyll. Ever since all she’d done was fly on the light side for the UN, on the dark side for renegade relief agencies. Food here, medical supplies there, priests to beleaguered mission stations. Answering summonses to pick up the victims of snakebite, of malaria, of an accidental blow from a panga or mattock, or any one of the thousand and one mishaps the southern Sudanese suffered whether there was peace or war. Often a few wounded guerrillas would be waiting at the airstrip with the sick or injured civilians. She would take them on board and deliver them to the Red Cross hospital near Loki, her nostrils stuffed with Vick’s camphor rub against the reek of gangrene.

“I’m not really supposed to do that, evacuate rebel casualties, but it would be damned difficult to leave them there.”

“Yeah?” Douglas said. “Well then maybe you understand why I—”

“Oh, I do, Doug. Believe me.” She scanned the skies, glanced at the instruments, and said: “The one thing I haven’t done is run guns for the SPLA. Been asked to, but I won’t.”

“Too risky?”

“In more ways than one. There’s a—how shall I put it? A moral risk. And I know what you’re thinking, the both of you. How much moral difference is there between putting a gun in a man’s hands and flying him to hospital when he’s been wounded so he’ll be patched up to fight and kill again?”

Douglas was silent. Fitzhugh said that a thought like that had passed through his mind.

“The difference might not be all that great,” she said, “but it’s there all the same. Not to sound high and mighty, but I want to have as much to do as I can with saving lives, nothing to do with taking them.”

“We all want that,” said Douglas. He was looking at her, she at him, the expressions in their eyes cloaked by their sunglasses. “Wouldn’t be in this business if we didn’t. But I don’t know that it’s so easy to split things that fine.”

“Directly or indirectly, you’ll get some blood on your hands? Perhaps. But that shouldn’t give you the green light to dip your hands into it.” A keenness had entered her voice. “You have to draw the line somewhere. How did you get into this business, by the way?”

He replied that he would have to give it some thought. Apparently a lot of thought, Fitzhugh surmised after a couple of minutes passed in silence. Tara asked if he’d like to take the controls, to get a feel for the plane.

“Been waiting to hear that, “ Douglas said.

She switched off the autopilot, and he gripped the yoke.

“Three one zero and no loop the loops or chandelles.”

“Hey, there’s old pilots and bold pilots—”

“But no old bold pilots,” she said, finishing the hoary adage. “And I am an old pilot, dammit.”

The Nile appeared ahead, the great umbilical of the continent, the giver-taker, provider of flood and fertility, of commerce and bilharzia. It looked only a yard wide from this height, its banks stitched by slender threads of grass and marsh. Beyond it lay a sea of clay plains. Tara spread a chart on her lap, checked the GPS and compass, and declared they were dead on course, cutting the river midway between Kodok and Malakal.

“I don’t know how to put it without sounding like I’m, you know, a Joe Goodguy,” Douglas said abruptly, and they realized in a moment that he was answering the question put to him a quarter of an hour ago.

“Don’t be shy,” Tara teased. “We’ll forgive you.”

“After I got out of the air force, I thought I wanted to go commercial,” he said, his wrists resting on the yoke. “But pretty quick I realized I wanted to do something more with it, with flying, I mean. Something more than . . . well . . . went to Alaska, flew there for a while. A twin Otter. Delivered mail and stuff to Eskimo settlements hundreds of miles from any road. A lot of school supplies. Computers. It was something to see the look on the teachers’ faces, the kids’ faces when I brought the first computers in. Like I was Santa Claus or an angel. So when I found out the UN was looking for people to fly in Sudan . . . so here I am.”

He left off at that, palpably uncomfortable with talking about himself in this way. Fitzhugh, who’d expected a further insight into what made Douglas Douglas, felt a little let down. Later, he would learn that his friend belonged to the breed of American male who dislikes revealing his innermost self, not because he’s shy or ashamed of what’s there but because he abhors introspection and prefers to act, without giving much thought as to why.

Soon Tara took the controls again, descended to ten thousand, and leveled off above a Mars-scape with trees. She pointed to a long line of distant mountains, shimmering blue-gray in the noonday haze. The Nuba.

“Keep your eyes open for Antonovs. They patrol here fairly regularly.”

“They could shoot at us?” Fitzhugh heard the rise in his voice and wished he’d done a better job of masking his alarm.

“No,” said Tara. “They’re either bombers or recce aircraft. But they could track us and radio their chums on the ground.”

“This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to feel neutral. Okay, I’ll watch the right. Fitz, take the left.”

Douglas did not sound alarmed or tense or anything but stimulated. Fitzhugh shifted to the left-hand seat and looked out the window, alert for any movement in the bright heavens. His imagination got the better of him, transforming a speck on the Plexiglas into a far-off plane. Later he was about to call Tara’s attention to a dark object, soaring between them and the ground, when he realized it was a large bird. They were over the mountains now. The Caravan leaped and fell suddenly, his heart with it. An updraft, Tara explained. Hot air gyring off the mountains. The altimeter needle wound downward, the plane shuddering and bouncing. Fitzhugh was distracted from his observational duties by the terror turbulence always induced in him, and by the wild architecture reeling below. Finger pinnacles, rocky spires and pyramids, boulders and ravines and scree-covered slopes. They swooped over a plateau where the cylindrical huts of a Nuban village clustered between two baobab trees as old as time. Beyond was a valley of dead yellow grass. Tara flew down the length of it, toward a serpentine of scraggly trees that defined a watercourse, winding at the foot of a low, bare escarpment, golden rocks scattered across it like immense nuggets.

Craning her neck, she pointed and said, “There it is, Zulu One,” but Fitzhugh saw nothing that looked like a landing field, only the trees and the riverbed and the meadows. She flew over the escarpment, made a wide turn, and cautioned her passengers to be sure they were buckled up. Fitzhugh tightened his seatbelt. A second later his organs slid into his throat as the plane dived steeply, spiraling as it plunged so that he caught alternating glimpses of ground and sky. He was almost sure that something had gone horribly wrong, that Tara had lost control, but everything was happening too quickly for him to feel anything but nausea. He choked, turned aside, and vomited on the seat beside him, the plane pulling out of the corkscrewing dive at the same instant to shoot over the trees, nearly clipping their flat tops. The landing gear hit the ground. The Caravan bounced, rocked to one side, straightened, touched down again, and made a bumpy roll. A stack of fuel drums went by. Tara braked to a stop and killed the engine.

The silence was eerie after the wind-rushing roar of the dive, but Fitzhugh thanked God that he was alive and on earth again and no longer in motion. Tara turned around and wrinkled her nose at his mess.

“Good thing I’ve got my Vicks with me.” She pulled a rag from under her seat and handed it to him, and he wiped the seat. “Fault’s all mine. Ought to have given you better warning. A precaution, landing in dodgy areas. Coming in like that makes you a difficult target, in case there’s anyone below with a mind to take a shot at you.”

“So that was deliberate? I wasn’t sure.”

Douglas laughed, patted his shoulder.

“First time in the Nuba, and you hurl lunch.”

“Breakfast, too.”

Just then a procession of men emerged from the scrub, men as tall as Dinka but more powerfully built and almost naked. The best clad wore patched shorts, the rest strips of cloth or animal hide tied to braided waist cords or leather belts. Behind them came more giants, gowned in white jelibiyas and leading a string of donkeys toward the plane.

“Give me a hand,” said Tara, motioning at the cargo.

She flipped up the top half of the rear door, then swung open the bottom half. The half-naked men were outside, formed up in a human chain, and the sight of them close up momentarily arrested Fitzhugh and Douglas. One man had cut horizontal bands into his hair so that he seemed to be wearing a striped stocking cap, and another had painted a white streak down the middle of his skull. There were half a dozen more, each proclaiming his individuality with one sort of ornamentation or another: gold hoop earrings and nose rings, feathered ankle bracelets, armbands encircling thick biceps, bead necklaces on muscular necks, bare ebony chests decorated with tribal scarring in the forms of antelope and lizards and leopards.

“They’re quite something, aren’t they?” Tara said.

Douglas pronounced them “incredible” and then, deciding that the adjective was inadequate, “beautiful, magnificent.”

Fitzhugh felt as if he were looking into the face of an Africa that hadn’t changed in a thousand years. The Nuban at the head of the line, making movements with his immense hands, shook him and Douglas out of their trance. Time to do some work. They and Tara pitched the boxes outside, to be tossed down the chain to the giants in white, who wrapped them in hide blankets and lashed the bundles to the donkeys’ backs.

The job done, Tara stood in the doorway and looked around, making a visor with her hand.

“Ah, here he is,” she said, and climbed out, her two passengers following her into a heat aggravated rather than relieved by the sear wind hissing through the trees, the desiccated grass. A man approached them, consuming six feet or more in a stride. His jelibiya, which would have been ankle-length on someone of ordinary height, reached only a few inches past his knees and made a startling contrast with his jet-black skin. He looked like a three-dimensional shadow dressed up as a ghost.

“Goraende?” Fitzhugh asked.

She shook her head.

“Tara! And pleased to see you once again!” the man said in almost perfect English. The top of his skull not far below the Caravan’s overhead wing, he made Fitzhugh and Douglas look short and shrunk Tara to the stature of a child. “Always welcome and good day to you. These are our gentlemen?”

Nodding, she introduced them. The man’s name was Suleiman, and he shook hands by gripping the fingertips and then moving his own fingers rapidly, creating a tickling sensation. Fitzhugh blinked at the peculiar greeting and Suleiman grinned.

“Our way of saying hello! Which of you is the one to look for good landing places?”

“That would be me,” Douglas said.

“We will be working together. I know the Nuba, top to bottom, and I know airstrips, I am your man,” Suleiman declared. “And please for you both to follow me.”

They reached for their rucksacks. Suleiman shook his head and called to one of the half-clothed men in a Nuban dialect. He came up, slipped each fifty-pound ruck over a shoulder with ease, and lugged them to where the donkeys waited in the shade, under their loads.

“We can hump our own gear,” Douglas said.

Suleiman looked puzzled.

“We can carry our packs ourselves.”

“I am sure you can, but why do it when there are donkeys to carry them for you?”

Airtight logic, Fitzhugh thought.

“I’ll be going as soon as I top off the tanks,” Tara said as two men rolled fuel drums across the runway. “If you can, call me on Michael’s radio the day before you’re ready to come out. That way, I’ll be sure to have a plane ready. Whatever, I’ll be here.”

“On the money?” asked Douglas, clasping her hand.

“On the money,” she said, and they turned and followed Suleiman, striding into the trees.