Acts of faith (44 page)

A
BLOSSOM OF
smoke and a hard, flat, crunching explosion became Dare’s translator. The SPLA soldiers swung their weapons off their shoulders and ran for cover, hollering to one another. Crying out, the women sprinted away, a human herd in a blind animal panic. Lots of places to run out here, nowhere to hide, and there was nothing he could do for them now. The shell had burst toward the far end of the airstrip, but a good hundred yards to the east of it, a ranging round. He dashed for the plane and heard the whine and growl of the starboard engine starting up, then the port.
Bless her, I’d fly to Mars with her.
He ran up the steps and dogged the cargo door shut.
Ca-rump.
A second shell struck somewhere west of the airfield. The next would split the difference between the first two, and if the mortarmen knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t need another to have the runway zeroed in. His capacity for fast thinking and effective action in a crisis, the gift of his unreflective, pragmatic brain, went to work, bits and bytes of information flashing through his mental microcircuitry.
Mortars firing from the south, that end of the runway pointing right at them, or almost. They’re going to walk their fire down the runway to try to hit the plane. Roll now, we’ll be moving into their fire, and it’s always harder for mortarmen to shorten their range than to lengthen it, so if we time it right, if we’re real fucking lucky, they’ll be elevating their tubes and we’ll be airborne.
He rammed the throttles forward, praying to the God he didn’t believe in. The Hawker bounced and squealed and rattled down the rough strip. She seemed, this insentient piece of metal, rubber, and rivets, to be conscious of the danger she was in. Dare didn’t say a word. Mary didn’t say a word. A gray-black flower bloomed fifty yards ahead and a little to the left. Plane and shrapnel sped toward each other, colliding in a splattering like the crackle of hail on a tin roof. One piece, or a rock thrown up the blast, struck a glancing blow at the side window behind Dare’s head. He couldn’t turn around to see if it had shattered. One-fifteen now. Rotation speed. He pulled back hard, the Hawker’s prop blades dug into the air, her nose tilted, and she was aloft, two shells exploding not far in front of her and fifty feet below, close enough for her to buck and shudder in the blast waves, as she would in a wind shear. Dare was sure her undercarriage had gotten peppered, how badly there was no way to know. She skimmed the trees beyond the runway’s end. Dead ahead was a sight that he knew would be engraved in his memory for as long as he had one. It looked like a rodeo stampede with all the cowboys dressed in bedsheets: a horde of robed horsemen galloping across the tree-spotted plateau. They were going to go through the scattered SPLA defenders like a semi-trailer through a snake-rail fence. The women wouldn’t have a chance.

At five hundred feet he made a hard left turn and saw riders swarming all over the plateau; saw, with the acuity that comes to human vision in situations of extreme stress, that several horsemen had halted and were firing at the Hawker. Trusting they would miss, shooting as they were from the saddle at a high, fast-flying target, he climbed away and called for the flaps. Mary acknowledged, and he called for gear, and Mary uttered the aviator’s favorite four-letter word, as useful in moments of mere annoyance as it is in moments of mortal danger, and quite often the last word recorded on the black box when a pilot runs out of altitude and ideas at the same time: “Shit!”

The gear light was still green, indicating that the wheels remained down and locked.

She pulled the knobbed lever once more, but the light stayed green. The absence of the thunk and thud of retracting gear and the Hawker’s vibrations declared that the problem wasn’t a faulty light switch.

“Shrapnel must have severed a hydraulic hose.”

She pointed at the annunciator light for leaking fluid; it was dark.

“Maybe we got a damaged circuit, too.”

They were making a hundred and sixty knots a thousand feet above the plain that lay like a waterless sea between the hospital and the Kologi hills.

“One more time.”

She pulled the lever again and said “Shit” again.

He glanced at her. Her complexion had the color of an oyster shell. “There is nothing so stimulating as to be shot at without effect.” So said Winston Churchill. Mary had been stimulated by that flap back in Somalia last year, but this was different. If he was right about the shell fragments, they’d been shot at
with effect,
the effects of which were yet to be determined.

“Shit is the watchword of the day,” he said, leveling off.

Mary asked what airspeed they had to maintain to avoid ripping the gear off the plane.

“What we’re doin’ now,” Dare answered. “One sixty. One sixty indicated will give us a true airspeed of two twenty at twenty thousand. Trouble is, with the gear down, the drag is gonna increase our fuel consumption a lot, and we might have nothin’ but fumes to land on if we try to make Loki.”

How much brighter their prospects would be in the civilized world. Call the tower, state the problem, request emergency vehicles, and while ground crews foam the runway, circle the airport, dumping fuel, and then come on in. He could think of only one advantage to this situation: it prevented him and Mary from dwelling on what had almost happened to them and on what was happening to the people they’d left behind. No way he could have saved them. Still, he felt that he’d abandoned them. He felt, despite the heart that bled solely for himself, that he’d incurred a debt.

Dare thought their best bet would be to land at the big UN airfield at Malakal, on the Nile. It was only a hundred and forty miles away, so they would have plenty of gas to get there. Plus, Malakal had fuel and a flight mechanic. If they needed parts for the repairs, he could radio Douglas to fly them in on the G1C.

“You work out a course. I’ll find us a way through that shit up ahead.”

He gestured out the windshield at a bastion of dark anvil-cumulus looming in the south. At the moment, he could not see an opening in them, nor in their image on the radar screen—a line of red ellipses welded end to end.

T
HE WOMEN WERE
in a pit, sending up doleful cries, arms raised, faces turned toward Ibrahim, standing far above. Their arms grew longer and longer, reaching for him with wriggling fingers, like a nest of rising serpents with worms for heads. They clasped his ankles, twined around his legs and chest, crushing the breath out of him.

With a strangled yell, he woke up, his heart thudding, flesh clammy and hot at the same time. Ribbons of smoke curled around him. He could see no stars, no light of any kind, except for a few red circles glowing demonically in a darkness doubled by the smoke that scorched his lungs.
And the companions of the left hand shall dwell amidst burning winds and scalding water, under the shade of a black smoke, neither cool nor agreeable.
He tried to stand, to rise above the smoke and breathe clean, cool air, but his legs wouldn’t move. Now, overcome by terror, he understood that he was in the pit, pinned down by the abid women, a captive of his captives. He couldn’t see them, yet he felt the pressure of their fingers, the coil of their arms. They no longer called to him for mercy, and he knew why: those appeals had been false; a trick to draw him to the edge of the pit so they could seize him and plunge him into eternal anguish. False! False! He’d mistaken the thing they were pleading for. They wanted his soul!
On the day of resurrection some faces shall become white, and other faces shall become black. And unto them whose faces shall become black, God will say, Have you returned unto your unbelief, after you have believed? Therefore taste the punishment. . . . As for the unbelievers . . . they shall be the companions of hell fire.
. . . His sins had made him like an unbeliever, deserving the infidel’s chastisements in hell, and the only cry he heard now was his own prolonged howl.

Suddenly he was free. He sat up, again with thudding heart and hot, wet skin; again his lungs and nostrils burned, again he saw fuzzy, scarlet circles shining through vaporous ribbons, but when he looked up, he beheld the lights of heaven and realized that the smoke and red light were from the fires the Brothers had lighted to keep insects out of camp. His previous awakening had been an illusion, a passage from one dream into another. Now he was truly awake. Delighting in the real-world scent of Barakat’s sweat, impregnated in the saddle blanket, in the tingle of this world’s smoke in his nose, he wanted to shout for joy. Only a dream! No ordinary dream, though. In its clarity, in its
reality,
it had seemed like a revelation, such as a prophet would receive. He rearranged his goat-hair blanket, lay down on his back, and tried to interpret the meaning.

While he pondered, he once more heard cries, sobs, groans. How could this be? Was he going mad that he should hear those lamentations when he was not asleep? Or had the women become jinns, determined to pursue and afflict him in his waking hours as well as in his dreams? Or was he still dreaming after all? Had he awakened from one into another, thence into a third? A thick ball of smoke rolled over him, and he coughed and returned to his senses. He wasn’t mad, wasn’t dreaming, and the captive women were not jinns.

Some of his men had invaded the zariba where the abid were being held and were taking women out to satisfy their carnal appetites. Ibrahim was exhausted, having fought a battle and ridden all day, the last hour in the late-season downpour, and the screams and wails were stripping off what bark remained on the branches of his nerves.
Damn those men!
he thought. He had issued express orders that no one was to touch the women captives. Most of those taken in the raid were young, and though their youth didn’t guarantee that they were virgins—Nubans were licentious, and it wasn’t uncommon for unmarried females to have had sexual relations—it did make virginity more likely. Virgins were coveted as concubines, bringing better prices from the traders than tampered merchandise. So it made sound business as well as moral sense to leave them alone. Yet there was the moral issue, and that was the reason for his dream. Through it God had shown him the torments that he would suffer if he failed to stop his men from sinning. To allow them to continue with what they now were doing would be the same as committing rape himself.

Picking up his rifle, he buckled on his ammunition belt, jammed his whip into the belt, and with his torso pitched forward and his head tucked into his shoulders, he struck off toward the zariba. Horses stood tethered to the trees, men lay snoring, barely visible in the darkness. He tripped over someone. The man cursed and said, “Watch where you step.” Ibrahim Idris cursed him back and said, “Watch where you lie down!”

Foul with the reek of bodies and shit and piss—couldn’t these people control themselves till morning, when they knew they would be allowed to relieve themselves?—he smelled the zariba before he saw it. When he got to the enclosure, a ring of sticks and thornbushes, he was shocked to find it unguarded. Not a single sentry in sight, and he’d commanded a double watch posted, both to enforce his order and to prevent escapes. The sentries were absent because it was they who’d raided the very thing they were guarding: plunged in, selected their victims, and made off with them, like hyenas raiding a stock pen. Ibrahim’s anger blew up into an exalted rage.

In today’s attack he’d lost only two men and five horses while slaying more than twenty abid soldiers. The airfield had been destroyed by the militia engineers. One hundred and fifty captives, more than Ibrahim had ever taken in a single action, had been seized, along with goods worth tens of thousands of pounds: clothes, implements, food, and medical supplies. All in all a successful mission, except for the airplane, and to Ibrahim that was no small exception. He could still see it, soaring so low above his head it seemed he could snatch it from the sky with his bare hands; so low it seemed impossible that he and his men could not shoot it down. They filled the air with bullets, and yet it flew on, and his hopes for rewards and honors went with it. The prizes he did take compensated somewhat for losing the one he coveted most. Now the miscreant sentries, thinking with their penises, had put it all at risk. A good thing the captives still inside the zariba were so frightened—they might try to flee otherwise. A fine job that would make, gathering them up in the middle of the night.

He caught voices and stifled cries coming from somewhere off to his left.

He came to a clear space in the woods and stopped at its edge, the shadows of the trees concealing him. A few meters away the long, skinny legs of a girl, flung down on her back, glistened in a fire’s embers. Her arms were pulled back past her shaved head and were held at the wrists by one man, while another, his jelibiya rolled up around his waist, knelt between her splayed limbs and ravished her with the spastic thrusts of a dog mounting a bitch. Finished in seconds, he got to his feet and traded places with his companion. It was like a dance, so fluid and practiced were their movements. Several more of these criminal couplings were taking place, farther from the fire. Ibrahim couldn’t tell how many, nor identify the culprits—a mere cuticle of a moon was shining—but he was able to observe that the girl in front of him was quite young. The sentries had taken the most valuable. Ibrahim was appalled by their disobedience, their carelessness, their lack of self-control. Had he raped Miriam after capturing her? He’d had no relations with her till he’d returned to his camp and brought her into his house as his formal serraya. Self-denial, self-restraint were marks of Humr manliness. These Brothers were not manly but slaves to their impulses. And yet he did nothing, said nothing, held in mute arrest by the lurid, captivating choreography of white-clad men, wreathed in smoke tinged red by the embers, leaping onto black bodies, lying so still he would have mistaken them for dead if not for their muffled sobs. The two murahaleen closest to him were finished with their victim and called to a third, and in the instant before the man fell on her, Ibrahim saw her fully from the side, her young belly flat and her small breasts flattened also by the pull of her outstretched arms, her face turned aside so that she seemed to be looking straight at him with a look such as he’d seen on the faces in his dream.
False! False!
he thought. He fancied he saw an enticement in her eyes, a beckoning that spilled the pollutant of desire into the fine, pure waters of his rage. He was surprised that he should feel such lust—he expected better of himself; so when he lunged out of the shadows, in two big strides, the rifle in his left hand, the whip in his right, and laid a hard stroke across the man’s back, Ibrahim was lashing out at himself as well.