Acts of faith (15 page)

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.

Maroor

“D
O YOU SUPPOSE
war to be here what wars are elsewhere?” Stopping in midstride, Gerhard Manfred flung one thick arm at a Nuban hospital aide sterilizing surgical instruments over a campfire. “Do you suppose that it is an event, with a discrete beginning that will proceed to a discrete middle
und so weiter
on to a discrete end? No! It is a condition of life, like drought. There is war in Sudan because there is war.”

“Like Vietnam?” Douglas murmured. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

Manfred’s gaze passed from the American’s face to his boots, then back up again.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.” His English bore only a whiff of Teutonic accent; otherwise he sounded like a Cambridge don. He was a man of fifty or so, judging from the white invading his blond hair, and powerfully built in a way that wasn’t threatening; his square, compact body looked more adapted to withstanding punishment than to dishing it out. “What has Vietnam to do with this?” He jerked his cleft chin at the aide, whose surgical smock rode up his long legs as he bent over, stoking the fire to make thin flames lap the soot-streaked sides of the sterilizer. “Did you Americans experience this in Vietnam? The coils shorted out one month ago, and of course I have not a technician to fix it, nor has a replacement been sent, so now this is how I sterilize my instruments. And why? Because there is war. Why is there war? Because there is. Ha! Make note of that, my friend—” He addressed Fitzhugh, who had his pocket notebook out. “Write that down, please.”

Fitzhugh stood silently for a moment, feeling light-headed. Yesterday, with Michael Goraende, Suleiman, the porters, and a rebel escort of twenty men, he and Douglas had walked for hours from Zulu One over a rough, rocky track and under a punishing sun until the drone of an enemy Antonov forced them to hide in a dense acacia grove. There, with the pack animals tethered to the trees, they waited until dark before setting off again, the path illuminated by a gibbous moon. They made a cold camp under a giant baobab at midnight and, without so much as a cup of tea, resumed their march at four this morning, tramped on through a ruby dawn, and came to a hilltop village, from which they could see the hospital on a lower hill a kilometer away: two long, mud-walled bungalows joined by a breezeway, umbrellas of solar panels gleaming incongruously on its thatch roofs. Crossing the narrow valley between the two hills, they arrived at Manfred’s compound just as the heat was making itself felt and the doctor was beginning his day of treating people for fever, goiter, snakebite, broken bones.

Straight away the man seemed intent on making himself as unpleasant as possible. He inspected the medical supplies without a word of gratitude to anyone for delivering them, shook hands with Douglas and Fitzhugh as if they were inconsequential tourists, and then, instructing them to remain, told Michael to vacate the premises with his men. The hospital was neutral ground, and Manfred intended to keep it that way. Suleiman and the porters, being unarmed, could stay, but not the guerrillas; if it became known that he’d welcomed rebel soldiers to his compound—and the bush telegraph would be sure to carry the news to the government garrisons scattered throughout the mountains—the army would have a perfect excuse to bomb or shell the place. Fitzhugh wasn’t entirely confident that an army that felt no restraints about bombing schools and missions needed an excuse to blow up a hospital. Twenty men with automatic rifles would be no defense against a high-flying plane; all the same, their presence was reassuring, and he hoped the guerrilla commander would tell the doctor to kindly leave matters of security to him. Michael was an imposing man, six and a half feet tall, but he was as deferential toward Manfred as a schoolboy toward a teacher and made only a mild protest, explaining that Douglas and Fitzhugh were under his protection. Manfred insisted; they would be safe with him. Michael gave in and led his men back to the village.

“You want me to write down what?” Fitzhugh asked.

“That we need a new sterilizer, what do you think? Also diesel fuel for our auxiliary generator, for use when the solar power is lost. Also . . . everything else. Yes! Everything is needed now in the Nuba, which makes your task of assessing our needs an easy one. This place should be called the Needa. Ha! Need a what? Need a whatever you can think of. Come along, I will show you.”

It seemed Manfred needed a tranquilizer. Well, Barrett had warned that he was a bit daft, so maybe his rudeness wasn’t intentional, but a symptom of that peculiar form of daftness summed up in the word
bushed.
The simmering anger, the lack of simple civility—Fitzhugh had seen it all before, in aid workers isolated too long, working sixteen hours a day because more than a few hours’ rest seemed an unjustifiable indulgence in the face of colossal suffering. That, and Barrett’s caution to be diplomatic, inclined him to humor the doctor’s idiosyncrasies.

He led them around the back of the hospital to a neat stone bungalow, picturesquely situated in ficus shade, overlooked by a soaring butte. A former British rest house, Manfred said, which he’d restored as a residence for himself. There was a lemon grove behind it, and a vegetable garden tilled by a young Nuban with a makeshift hoe. The doctor called to him in some local dialect, and the young man trotted toward them, a harlequin figure in patched denim shorts and a red and white T-shirt stamped with a faded legend
PROPERTY OF OHIO STATE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT
. Manfred seized the hoe by its thick handle and, as if to test Fitzhugh’s forbearance, thrust the blade at him with such violence that he had to step back to avoid being hit in the face.

“Do you know what this is?”

“I believe it’s a hoe.”

“No! This! What is this?”

Manfred brushed the dirt off the blade, revealing a couple of yellow cyrillic letters painted on the olive drab metal. Fitzhugh squinted at the writing and shrugged.