Acts of faith (42 page)

Mary, flying the plane, nodded. They were into their descent, the Hawker bobbing in the turbulent columns of hot air whirling up from the jumbled landscape below: grassy flats wedged between scattered beige hills; long narrow ridges of exposed rock smooth as the overturned hulls of ships, Nuban villages perched atop them. Suleiman had told him that the Nubans built their houses on hills and ridgetops for defense and because the air on the heights was healthier than in the hollows, advantages that had been nullified by the Sudanese air force. Easy targets for Antonovs and helicopter gunships, the villages were neither defensible nor healthy places to be. Some had been blasted back into their component dust, some were abandoned, makuti roofs rotted away so that, from above, the cylindrical huts looked like giant gopher holes.

The next tune drove hard, like a runaway train, echoes of Chuck Berry in the high, fast wails of Stevie Ray’s electric Fender.

Well, I’m a love-struck baby, I must confess . . .

Dare’s theme song. But how ridiculous for the veteran of four divorces, a man who suspected that all women were terrorists of the heart, to have his own kidnapped by someone who’d been, let’s see, in seventh grade when he was the age she was now. Was this what they called midlife crisis? That millions of men suffered the same emotional insanity didn’t comfort him; it made him feel worse about himself, because it meant he was no different from every other potbellied fiftyish male, and he’d never seen himself as a guy who ran with any herd.

“Visibility sure is rotten up here today,” she said, squinting into the brassy haze.

Not the slightest sign, not the vaguest blip, acknowledging that she sensed his attraction to her. That meant one of three things: she wasn’t very perceptive, she was pretending not to notice, in the interest of keeping their relationship strictly professional, or—the explanation he preferred—he’d done a very good job of masking his feelings, in the interest of maintaining his masculine pride.

He’d hoped that the shared routine of piloting the Hawker would have the same effect on his perception of her as it had on his perception of Sally McCabe, his copilot back when he was flying a 727 for Federal Express. That hope failed, he’d come to realize, because it hadn’t been the workaday association with Sally that had made her androgynous; it was Sally herself, a Miss Six o’Clock in the figure department, who never wore makeup and kept her hair cut boyishly short and was kind of boring, too. Not much amperage in Sally, whereas Mary had more than a twenty-four-volt battery and would need to wear a dropcloth to hide the virtues of her body. He liked the smart remarks that crackled from her mouth as much as he liked its shape. And those cascades of blond hair—well, Stevie Ray was singing now what that did to him.

Every time I see you, I feel so fine
My blood is runnin’ wild.

Her only interest in him, far as he could tell, was in his role as her mentor. She was competitive and ambitious. She admired Tara Whitcomb and was envious of her at the same time for establishing a feminine beachhead on one of the last male-held islands in the world. Commercial airlines, fearful of lawsuits alleging sex discrimination, courted female pilots, but there was no affirmative action program in the bush-pilot fraternity; a woman had to prove herself, and Mary was determined to do just that, eager to learn the tricks and techniques that would turn her from an average flier into a polished ace like Tara. The fine points that would shave minutes off the time it took her to reach cruising altitude, to save fuel costs. Things like that. He was just as eager to teach her, though he did so with conflicting hopes. Hope A was that his skills and knowledge would overwhelm her into falling in love with him; Hope B was that nothing of the sort would happen, sparing him, her, and Tony from entrapment in the awkward geometry of a love triangle. It was the more realistic hope by far, because his age, bulging gut, Dumbo the Elephant ears, and obnoxious ways were liabilities that outweighed his assets by a considerable margin. Hope B, however, dissolved in a stormy fusion of jealousy, heartache, and bug-eyed lust whenever he saw Mary and Tony walking hand in hand into the tent they shared. Hope A then would get the better of him, and he would give serious thought to putting a big move on her when her boyfriend was away, just to see what would happen. But he never got beyond the thinking stage. He behaved impeccably. No advances or innuendos; no invitations to meet him for a drink at the bar. Although he liked to think that his self-restraint evidenced a certain nobility in his character, proving that he treasured loyalty to his former first officer above all else, he knew it was due only to his fear of making a fool of himself.

“Dead ahead. The envy of every guy, lust-object of every size queen.”

Mary pointed through the windshield at the landmark, a red rock pillar, rounded at the tip, rising in the haze-dimmed light from between a pair of low testicular hills. A couple of months ago, when Dare took him up for an aerial tour of Nuba landing strips, Suleiman had dubbed this formation “The Mahdi’s Penis” in tribute to his hero’s manhood.

“You’ll make a shallow turn when we’re over it,” Dare instructed Mary. “Bearing three one zero. Michael’s boys are supposed to light a fire when they hear us, give us the wind direction by the smoke, but don’t count on it.”

She’s my sweet little thing
She’s my pride and joy
She’s my sweet little baby
And I’m her little lover boy.

“Wes, think we could conclude our program of in-flight entertainment? It’s distracting.”

He switched the cassette player off as she banked into the turn and commenced to descend, shooting over Manfred’s hospital, its new tin roof and the solar panels atop it glinting off the starboard wing. She dropped to two thousand feet, which became fifteen hundred when the land ascended to the plateau west of the hospital. A thousand feet now, eight hundred, coming in on her base leg. Zulu Two appeared in the distance, a red scar showing through the acacia trees.

Dare lowered the wheels.

“Gear down and locked. No smoke yet, like I figured.”

“I’ll make a pass. We can assess the wind ourselves. We don’t need no stinking smoke.”

“Flaps down.”

She reduced power to approach range and decreased altitude to five hundred feet, then two hundred, and now they could see Manfred’s cream-colored Land Rover, a Red Cross painted on its roof. (Dare thought it would make a fine aiming point for a Sudanese pilot.) Women porters, scores of them, waited near the airstrip, their dresses a kaleidoscope of colors amid the pale green scrub. Mary flew along the right edge of the runway, allowing Dare to visually inspect its condition. He saw a long strip of white cloth flying from a pole as a windsock. Suleiman would have thought of that in lieu of the smoke. A good man was Sul-ee-man.

“Got a little bit of a crosswind out of the southeast. We’ll have to come in at the rough end,” Dare said, referring to the corrugations, like the washboards in a gravel road, at the north end of the runway.

Mary circled around to bring the Hawker in on final, and as the plane was halfway through the turn, Dare caught something in his peripheral vision—movement of some kind, flickers of white in the dense forests that covered the western side of the plateau all the way out to where it fell steeply to another plain. He tried for a better look, but then Mary completed her maneuver and his side window was facing the opposite direction and the view out of hers was blocked by her head.

W
HEN
I
BRAHIM HEARD
it in the distance, he thought it was an Air Force Antonov. The sound grew louder. He couldn’t see the airplane, the forest here being thick, the trees too high, but he knew it must be flying low; most times the Antonovs, which in his opinion were flown by cowards, stayed up so far they made barely a whisper. He reined up to listen. Louder still, then faint, then loud again. Suddenly he didn’t hear it at all. Thinking it must have flown on out of earshot, he nudged Barakat forward; an instant later, realizing that the plane had landed and shut down its motors, he stopped again.

“Allah karim!” he muttered under his breath, for God was presenting him with an opportunity. He told Hamdan and the militia captain that the plan had changed; he wasn’t going to split his force. They would attack the airfield as one.

Hamdan balked, baffled by this order, and asked the reason for it. That was the Brothers’ way. They weren’t disciplined soldiers, like the captain’s men, trained to obey without questioning. The Brothers preferred discussion, and so he took a few moments, precious moments, to explain that the village wasn’t important; it would be nearly empty because most of the abid
,
maybe all, would be at the airfield unloading the plane, which was not an Antonov but a smuggler’s plane. It was now on the ground. That was why the sound had stopped so suddenly.

“If we move fast, we can capture everything that’s in it and destroy it before it takes off!” he went on, underscoring his urgency with extravagant gestures. “And take many abid captive besides!”

Hamdan’s confusion vanished, and an excited expression came to his face. The government had posted a standing reward of five hundred thousand pounds to any murahaleen commander who destroyed a smuggler’s airplane, and Hamdan knew that Ibrahim, the generous one, would share the reward. He also knew that the contraband cargo could be sold at fine prices in the marketplaces, in addition to whatever the captives fetched. This could be a very lucrative expedition. As for Ibrahim himself, he hoped for profits beyond the material. So far no commander had seized a plane. He would present Colonel Ahmar with a piece of this one as proof of his achievement; luster would be added to his fame, and the nazirship could be his for the asking. He was feeling much better about the jihad now. He gave Barakat his heels and rode on at a trot—the crowded trees wouldn’t allow anything faster—and the mass of horsemen wheeled to follow him.

“W
O IST ES
?”

When he was agitated, which in Dare’s experience was pretty near all the time, Gerhard Manfred reverted to his native language.

“
Wo
is what?”

“X-ray film! Where?”

It had taken less than fifteen minutes on the ground to turn the Hawker’s interior into a microwave, and the doctor was hemorrhaging sweat as he pawed through the stuff piled up in the forward end like a frantic shopper at a rummage sale.

“Should be right where you’re lookin’,” Dare said from the rear, where he was working up a dense sweat of his own, helping a couple of Nubans with the offloading. Cartons of surgical masks, surgical gloves, surgical instruments, syringes, and pills, plastic jerry cans of water, white sacks of sorghum and seed, farm and garden implements bound together with duct tape, bags of salt, boxes of soap and cooking oil, pots and pans in net bags, bundled T-shirts, shorts, and dresses collected by small-town church groups out on the Canadian steppes, wheelbarrows, and several bales of snow fence (Dare would love to see what use they would be put to) were tossed out the rear door into the hands of strapping SPLA guys, who hauled it across the runway and stacked it up and then came back for more while the female porters wrapped the supplies in shawls and blankets or stuffed them into baskets that they would transport on their heads, some to their villages, some to the hospital, half a day’s march away. Men seldom served as porters in these hills. Dare reckoned that would make a swell feminist issue if these people ever got enough of a break from war and hunger to think about feminist issues.

“Hey, y’all,” he called to a six-foot-six-inch bruiser carrying one small box. “This would go a lot faster if you put a bunch of those in one of those wheelbarrows and made one trip instead of a dozen.”

The man walked on.

“Hey! The wheelbarrow!”

“They don’t understand English, you fool!” Manfred snapped. His face was the scarlet of imminent stroke. “Why can’t I find this film? You are sure you brought it? I have three patients in urgent need of X-ray!”

Fucking kraut.

Dare went forward, caught his foot on a corner of the cargo net, and almost fell face-down onto a steel-banded box stenciled with a description of its contents.

“Here you go, Adolf Eichmann. Reckon you can’t
read
English.”

Manfred gazed down at the container reproachfully, as if it were a dog that hadn’t come when called. “That was a crude and insensitive remark you made just now to me.”

“Callin’ a man a fool ain’t my idea of sensitive.” On their first meeting, about two months ago, Dare had taken a deep and instantaneous dislike to the doctor, which Manfred never failed to nurture.

“But in your case, ‘fool’ is more accurate than referring to me as Adolf Eichmann,” he said.

“Hey, rafiki. I ain’t clever with my mouth, so I’ll tell you what. Call me a fool once more, and I’ll drop-kick you straight back to your butcher shop.”

Manfred regarded him for a moment, assessing the seriousness of Dare’s words. A warning or a promise? “You must understand how much stress I am having. More fighting now, and so more patients than ever. My logistics man Franco is sick with the diarrhea, so I had to leave my patients to drive myself to here.”

It wasn’t an apology, but the tone was less belligerent, confirming Dare’s belief that physical violence, or the threat of it, remained a useful tool in promoting civil behavior.