Acts of faith (43 page)

“My life of course is stress free,” he said, not yet willing to let things go. “Yup. One fun thing after another, like flyin’ five hundred miles across a war zone just to bring this stuff to you.”

“And I do thank you for it,” Manfred said, though with difficulty.

“Thank you? Did you say thank you? Well, holy shit. You’re welcome. So to show my appreciation, I’m gonna bring in some camo netting for you next trip, so y’all can cover up those solar panels and that shiny roof if you need to. You can see ’em for about a hundred miles.”

“The government continues to respect the hospital’s neutrality,” the doctor affirmed, sounding as if he were responding to a question at a press conference.

“I’ll bring it anyway. In case they get a change of heart.”

In Nuban, Manfred summoned one of the men from the rear of the plane, then climbed down the boarding stairs and crossed the runway to his Land Rover with the motions of a windup toy wound too tight, the Nuban following with the box of X-ray plates on his shoulder.

Dare noticed Suleiman stacking more of the medical supplies on the vehicle’s roof-rack. Mary, in the snug khakis that so flattered her ass, its delectable curve visible from fifty yards away, was photographing him. She took pictures compulsively; she had a film record of every mission they’d flown. He found this endearing.

He went into the cockpit and fetched two sandwiches and two Cokes from an insulated bag. Outside, the gift of the breeze was nullified by the full force of the afternoon sun, thumping his skull like an L.A. cop’s nightstick.

“I’m takin’ you to lunch, First Officer English.” He handed her a Coke and sandwich.

She unwrapped it and cautiously, as if something might jump out at her, parted the slices of bread to examine the contents. Finding them acceptable, she bit down as the wind raised her hair into a coxcomb. It was all he could do to restrain himself from smoothing the unruly strands, and he stepped away, munching on his baloney and cheese, and called out,
“Ma’salame!”
to Suleiman, who was lashing a tarp over the roof-rack.

“Ha-llo, Captain Wes. And how are you?”

“Pretty good. I’d be better if the offload speeded up. These boys don’t understand me when I tell ’em it’ll go faster if they put those wheelbarrows to use. Y’all mind tellin’ ’em for me? I’d like to be out of here before midnight.”

“Straight away, Captain Wes.”

After Suleiman got the work crews organized into a human conveyor belt, men pushing empty wheelbarrows to the plane and full ones from it, he said good-bye and levered his long frame into the Land Rover beside the doctor. The two drove off slowly down a rutted path not much wider than a city sidewalk. Guarded by a few SPLA soldiers, two dozen porters followed on foot, loads on their heads, their arched backs exaggerating the thrust of their breasts, the protrusion of their high, bubble-shaped butts.

“Y’know, lookin’ at them,” Dare remarked to Mary, “reminds me that my Baptist mama would’ve killed me, she ever found
Playboy
in the house. So I used to read
National Geographic
to look at the pictures of the nekked native women. I was in college before I realized that white women had tits, too.”

“Another charming commentary. I have to pee. Don’t leave without me.”

He lit his first cigarette of the day, pleased with himself for holding out this long, and returned to the Hawker to check on the offload’s progress. Ten, fifteen minutes more, he judged, then sat in the shade of a wing to finish his cigarette. Mary would scold him for smoking this close to the airplane. A dust-devil tripped across the runway. Some distance to the south, a great sheet of dust raised by some freak gust formed a scintillating curtain that blurred a far-off range of hills. Douglas and Fitzhugh had a romance going with the Nuba—Douglas called it the “real” Africa, as if the rest of the continent were an illusion—but it ranked high on Dare’s list of desolate places, and it took some doing for a place to qualify as desolate in the eyes of a man born and raised in West Texas. Another gang of porters was filing off into the scrub, flanked by their guards. He watched them, perplexed and amazed; several women were carrying loaded wheelbarrows on their heads.

Mary emerged from behind her privy bush and approached the plane with her sporty walk, a kind of straight-shouldered bounce. He turned aside, took a last puff, and snubbed the cigarette underfoot. A cold pain bolted through his chest; then he felt a frantic thudding against his breastbone and ribs. If he hadn’t experienced this unpleasant sensation before, he would have mistaken it for a coronary.

He waved to Mary to hurry up. When she got to him, he told her he was going to help finish the off-loading; she was to get the plane checked through for takeoff, so that all that would need doing when he took his seat was to start the engines.”I want to be ready to go the second the last box is off this airplane.”

“Sure.” She offered a Girl Scout salute in response to his Schwarzkopf-in-the-Persian-Gulf tone of voice. “What’s up?”

There was no way to tell her that he was experiencing a thoracic turbulence caused by an imaginary bird inside him that beat its wings furiously whenever he was in imminent danger. Even if Mary were to accept this feathered guardian angel as an actual being, she would want to know, What danger? And he would have to answer that he didn’t know because the canary’s warnings, like a watchdog’s bark in the night, alerted him to a threat without revealing its precise nature.

In the cargo bay, he dragged two sacks of sorghum across the floor and dumped them outside.

The dust cloud.

He’d noticed that it hadn’t moved when he turned to take a final drag of his smoke. If it had been raised by a high wind, it would have blown away, but it was hovering right where he’d glimpsed it a minute earlier, off to the south and low over the trees, which is what dust would do if it were stirred up, on a day of light airs, by movement on the ground. A lot of movement, judging from the amount of dust. And what was moving? Whatever it was he’d glimpsed when they were coming in for a landing, and he now realized what that was. He leaped from the plane and told the men unloading it, “Finished now! All done!” He waved his arms like a referee, then like someone shooing unruly kids out of a house. “You people have got to get going, now. Go on. Get going. Get a move on.”

He jogged to the side of the airstrip where the cargo was piled and grabbed a young woman by the arm and shoved her, pointing in the direction he wanted her to go, then back over his shoulder. “Get moving! Arabs!”

She gave him a fierce look. A couple of SPLA interposed themselves between her and Dare, and one pushed him backward with the flat of his rifle.

“You assholes! I ain’t your problem! Set up a firing line over there! Give these people a chance to get the hell out of here!” He snatched the soldier’s collar and spun him around, motioning at the dust in the distance. “Arabs! See!”

The scowling soldier poked him in the chest with the gun barrel. What a time for a failure in communication! He wished Suleiman and Manfred had stuck around a little longer.
The Arabs are coming, the Arabs are coming.
He was Paul Revere in the Nuba mountains, and no one could understand what he was trying to tell them.

“Y
A
,
IBRAHIM
! Y
OU
didn’t need to hit him. It’s worked out for the best.
Allah ma’ana.
”

The captain of militia carefully folded his scarf and retied it to his forehead. Behind him, atop the gentle rise on which he and Ibrahim Idris sat, the captain’s artillerymen were setting up the mortars, three of them, each leaning on two metal legs, the bombs stacked neatly on the ground.

Bombs, like the kind that killed Ganis.

“The trees here are not so many as in there,” the captain said, gesturing at the acacia forest they had passed through. “It would have been hard to find a place in there to fire the mortars, but here, not so many trees to get in the way, and from this little hill, I can see the target and adjust my fire immediately.” He pointed at the airfield, two, perhaps three kilometers to the north. The foreigners’ airplane was clearly visible to the unaided eye. “So you see,” the captain continued, “it has been for the best that these niggers got us lost. Perhaps God directed them to do that.”

One of the two Nuban guides sat nearby in sullen silence; the other, lying on his back and looking as though he had a large mango stuck in the side of his mouth, would be silent for a few days to come. A couple of minutes ago Ibrahim had broken his jaw with the butt of his Kalashnikov. The savages had cost them a great deal of time, stumbling in the woodlands. Instead of leading them straight to the airfield, the two had brought them here, well south of it, and as the country south of the airfield was more open than that to the west, it would be more difficult to achieve surprise. A look through the binoculars had also revealed a great many women leaving with things that had been unloaded from the plane. Far ahead of them, Ibrahim had observed the rolling dust of what he assumed was a motorcar or a lorry, and it was doubtlessly taking more things away. He concluded that the guides had got lost on purpose, delaying the murahaleen so their fellow Nubans could make off with the booty he regarded as belonging to him and the Brothers, while at the same time forcing him to attack from a disadvantageous direction. In a flare of temper, he ordered them to be executed as traitors, but the captain intervened, calming him by pointing out that the two abid weren’t smart enough to have devised such a ruse, besides which, the guides might be needed on the return journey. Ibrahim saw the sense in the captain’s advice, but his fury had to be appeased, and so he dismounted and struck the man with his rifle.
If I don’t know the reason why, you will.

Now he stood beside Barakat as all around the murahaleen assembled for the attack. Their leaders commanded them in conversational voices—he’d adjured them to be as quiet as possible, as sound carried far in this flat, open country. The horses wheeled and snorted and pawed the ground and kicked up a lot of dust, more than Ibrahim Idris liked. A cloudburst would have been welcome, but God was not so with the murahaleen as to gray this blue, blue sky. The plan was to advance at a trot in two long lines, single-mounted warriors in the first rank, double-mounted in the second; at his signal—three rifle shots—the Brothers would charge at full gallop and, inshallah, overrun the infidel defenders, who did not appear to be many.

The maneuvering into position was going too slowly, and in his anxiety to attack, he disobeyed his own order for quiet and yelled, “Quickly, Brothers!” It would be impossible to catch up with the motorcar, but the porters could be overtaken easily by men on horseback—he would send a detachment in pursuit. His concern now was that all this delay would rob him of the airplane. There it sat with silent motors, so vulnerable. Grasping it with his eyes, actually seeing its size, shape, and color, had heightened his hunger to grasp it with his hands. A prize of war. His,
his.
God willing, he would also capture the foreigners who’d flown it. Perhaps that would bring an extra reward.

He saw that the first rank had got itself organized—three hundred murahaleen extending in a line nearly a half kilometer long—but the second was suffering from some confusion, which he intended to cure immediately. He jammed a booted foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle.

“Watch us through your glasses,” he said, looking down at the captain. “When you judge us halfway there, begin firing. Move the fire back from the near end of the airfield to the far. I don’t want my men blown up by yours.”

“Don’t worry.” The captain raised a fist.
“Allahu akhbar.”

“Yes, of course. Allahu akhbar,” Ibrahim replied, for the form of it.

He pushed in among the jostling horses, whacking some with his whip, jabbing riders with the whip handle and calling out, “Quickly, you idiots, get yourselves straightened out!” Barakat’s nostrils flared and a wild look came to his eyes, and he shook and reared his head against the bit as Ibrahim held him to a slow walk. The men in the second rank were still having difficulties; the mounts weren’t accustomed to carrying two riders and were balky. He couldn’t wait any longer. Spurring Barakat, he trotted along the front line, a tall, bearded man in white on a chestnut Arabian, a ribbon of his turban streaming behind him. “Forward at a quick walk when I command it! Charge at my signal, three shots!” Repeating the order, he rode on. The acrid stink of sweating horseflesh and sweaty saddle leather was strong, his nose seemed so keen that he could distinguish the scent of his elephant-hide reins from those other smells. The hard sun sparked off rifle barrels and the trees glittered, greener than they were only minutes ago, and the ache in his joints had dissolved, and with it the reluctance he’d been feeling these past several days. The strange intoxication of battle’s prelude was the balm his body and spirit needed; would he be able to go back to herding cattle, would he return contented to the sweet, easy life he dreamed of nearly every day, or would he be restless, longing for these moments when his senses grew sharp and the quick, corsair’s blood leaped within him, and five hundred quick-blooded men on quick-blooded mounts waited to ride into combat at his word? He came to the end of the rank, turned, and cantered out to the front, where he halted. Standing in the stirrups, leaning well forward, he stuck his backside up in the air, looked back over his shoulder, and gave the command he was known for, the one the men loved to hear: “Follow my ass, Brothers! Follow my ass!”