Acts of faith (57 page)

Outside the wind picked up, the canvas covering the doorway billowed and sagged with a snap, and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees in a few seconds. She wriggled into her sleeping bag and curled up, her arms between her legs. To muffle the racket of the rain against the roof, she pulled the sleeping bag over her head. In the darkness of that cocoon, she fell asleep to images of Michael’s fingers, strumming invisible strings in the air.

Balm in Gilead

I
N THE MORNING
they discovered that Zulu Three’s runway was one long slick of mud. With the cautious shuffle of someone walking a frozen river, Suleiman went up and down the length of it, stopping occasionally to probe with a long stick. He tapped bricks of muck from off his sandals and returned to the
doum
palm grove where Fitzhugh waited with Douglas. They’d arrived at the airstrip well ahead of time, to make sure it was usable after last night’s thunderstorm. Barrett and Diana had come with them.

“Slippery, but this deep only,” Suleiman reported, forking two fingers above the tip of the stick. “Very hard underneath. The naga’a clay. Rains run off it like it is cement.”

Douglas clutched his arm and said, “Good man!” as though Suleiman were responsible for the runway’s sound condition. “By the time our passengers get here, that surface gunk should be dry enough. Loki by lunchtime.”

“And a proper bath and no more bloody ticks,” Diana said, holding out a bare forearm blotched by two dime-size welts. Last night, before they’d made love, Fitzhugh had removed the ticks by the light of a paraffin lamp—a novel form of foreplay, she’d called it. He examined the bites now and in the morning glare noticed that four days and nights in the bush had left her skin looking shriveled and scaly. While this observation did not affect his feelings for her, the mere fact that he’d made it troubled him.

An eager grin cracking through his blond stubble, Douglas looked at Barrett, sitting cross-legged against the trunk of a palm tree.

“So what do you think? How did we do?”

“It all went much better than I expected. The wrestling was a big hit. I give the show four stars.”

“I meant, do you think we won over any hearts and minds? It was hard to tell.”

“Well, I’m not sure the matches and the dancing were a good idea,” Diana said. “Everyone looked so fit and jolly that the aid workers must have questioned if things here are as bad as we say.”

“Ah, but we may have a few converts—that Hardin woman, for one,” said Barrett. “As for the rest”—he spread his hands—“we’ll have to wait and see.”

Douglas stood, brushed off the seat of his pants, and said he was going to radio Michael that the airfield was in good shape and to bring the passengers. As he went toward the airplane, which Suleiman and a work gang were divesting of its camouflage net and branches, Fitzhugh moved off into the bushes to take a leak. Barrett intercepted him on his way back.

“A quiet word?” He jammed his hands in his back pockets and shyly looked down, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Now then, Fitz, I want you to understand straight away that I’m the last one to moralize—”

“You’re the most moralizing man I’ve ever met.”

“Sure, when it comes to politics, but I’m not talkin’ public morals in this instance.” Barrett raised his eyes. “It’s private behavior I’d never moralize about.”

A bulbul sang plaintively. Fitzhugh knew it was a bulbul because Douglas had taught him to recognize its call. He shook out an Embassy, its tip yellow from his dried sweat.

“I figured she would have to confide in somebody sooner or later. I’m glad it was you.”

“She didn’t. I’ve suspected somethin’ between you two for a while. It’s been obvious, to me at least. The way you two look at each other. She’s one of my dearest friends. A very capable woman, but she’s got her vulnerabilities.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Fitzhugh said defensively. “About all I can do is swear to you that it isn’t that. I really do love her.”

“You’ll understand why I find that strange?”

“Sure. So do I. So does she. Is this the place for this conversation?”

“No place is,” Barrett said with another downward glance. “All right, I’ll believe you that your feelings are genuine, but feelings change. Ah, she’s goin’ to be an old woman in ten years. I can’t see what good can come out of a relationship like this.”

“John, what good could come out of one between a five-and-a-half-foot white excommunicated priest and a six-foot African woman?”

“Sure and you’ve got me there,” he said with a laugh. “I’m afraid of her gettin’ hurt.”

Fitzhugh was beginning to feel like a young suitor with a father’s shotgun pointed at him. “She won’t be.”

“I hope so. I’d appreciate it if you wait till we’re out of here to tell her about this little talk.”

He readily agreed to the condition, although it made things a bit awkward when he again sat down next to Diana. Still, he was relieved to have the secret out. The clandestine trysts and the pretending that they were no more than friends in public were wearing him out. Maybe he should have announcements printed up for general distribution. Mr. Fitzhugh Martin and Lady Diana Briggs are pleased to announce that they are lovers. Mr. Martin wishes to declare that he’s not after Lady Briggs’s money. Better leave that last declaration out—it sounded like protesting too much.

The relief workers and the press contingent arrived about three hours later, accompanied by meks and villagers bidding them farewell. Watching the procession wind down the ridge, SPLA soldiers out in front and on the flanks, the church canon holding up a gold-plated crucifix before a couple of hundred hymn-singing men and women, Fitzhugh recalled Barrett’s characterization of the war as a resumption of the Crusades.

“Let’s get her ready to go,” Douglas said.

They went to the airplane as strains of the hymn, sung to a drumbeat, lilted down from above. Fitzhugh strapped himself into the worn copilot’s seat and slid the side window open to let some air into the stifling cockpit.

“Shall I read it off to you?” He picked up the clipboard that held the plastic-covered checklist. “It would make me feel useful and authentic.”

“My man, I can do it in my sleep,” Douglas boasted, his hands darting across the confusing array of switches, knobs, and instruments.

Only two days before flying into the Nuba, the G1C’s copilot, an American farm boy of heroic size and with a heroic appetite for anything alcoholic, had got himself heroically drunk and fallen into a trash pit on his way to bed, breaking a leg. There had been no time to find another first officer. Douglas would have to fly the plane single-handed. He’d issued Fitzhugh a white shirt and epaulettes, instructing him to play the role of copilot but to please, for Christ’s sake,
not touch one damned thing.

Sweating, waiting for the air-conditioning to kick in before he shut the window, he watched the deacon emerge from the palm grove and lead the choir along the side of the runway to the solemn beat of the drum. The porters filed behind, and then came the passengers, shepherded by their armed escorts. The drum changed pitch: two flat, hollow thuds that sounded like warehouse doors banging shut. Douglas shouted, “Holy shit!” and pointed out the window on his side of the airplane. There was another, louder thud as a fountain of gray-black smoke shot up at the far end of the airfield.

The singing stopped, the drum fell silent, people scattered in several directions. Fitzhugh’s senses were transmitting bits of information faster than his brain could sort them out.

Soldiers running.

People throwing themselves to the ground.

Five or six almost simultaneous explosions, rocks and dirt splattering with terrible velocity. The solitary figure of the deacon, marching down the middle of the runway, the crucifix held high.

Douglas yelled, “What the fuck is he doing?”

The man walked on, toward the dissipating smoke of the last mortar bursts, raising the bright cross higher, like an exorcist doing battle with demonic forces. Two soldiers tackled the lunatic and were dragging him away when thick vaporous arms enveloped all three and flung them through the air. Fitzhugh, pinned to his seat by shock as much as by the safety harness, stared at the broken bodies, one lying across another, a third sprawled several yards away. Diana! Where was Diana? Snapping out of his stunned state, he unbuckled the harness, rose from the seat, and fell back. It was only then that he realized that the plane was rolling.

“What’re you doing? Diana’s out there!”

Douglas seemed not to hear his cry, a deaf machine in control of another machine, canted forward in his seat, his eyes nailed to the runway ahead, one hand frozen to the yoke, the other ramming the throttles forward. The plane swerved in the still-slick surface mud, and Fitzhugh saw the ground falling away.

“You can’t do this! Can’t leave her—can’t leave everybody—”

Douglas said nothing. He cranked a wheel in the pedestal, pulled a lever, and looked at the instruments or out the windshield with fierce concentration. He turned westward, leveled off at a thousand feet above the mission, then banked sharply and passed over the airfield, half obscured by torn veils of smoke and reddish dust. The Gulfstream flew on over the plain to the east and banked again. Douglas broke his silence.

“You didn’t hear the gear retract, did you? I’m saving the airplane. Soon as the shelling lifts, I’ll land and pick everybody up. Your job will be to get their asses on board in one hell of a hurry. Nobody’s going to be left behind.”

Fitzhugh wanted to rush to Diana’s side and at the same time dreaded returning to the ground. The explosions, those compact maelstroms with their awful noise, a noise of things going out, of things rent and crushed, had unnerved him. Douglas circled the airfield again.

“Holy shit! There they are! There!” He pointed at a cone-shaped hill barely more than a mile away. “There! Dead ahead!”

Douglas changed the radio frequency and contacted Michael by his call sign, Archangel. There was no answer. He called again, and Michael’s voice came through the static of his field radio.

“Archangel, I’ve got the mortars spotted! At the base of a hill southeast of the strip! Do you see it? Looks like a pyramid! Do you see it?”

“No! Give me an azimuth, give me the range!”

“Roger. Fitz, I’m gonna need you. Keep your eyes on this”—he motioned at the compass on the overhead panel—“and give me the bearing when I ask for it.”

Turning again, they skimmed the ridgetop and sliced across the runway, the Gulfstream’s nose aimed straight at the hill.

“Okay, now.”

Fitzhugh squinted at the instrument, a strange dry taste in his mouth, as if he’d been sucking on the tip of a lead pencil, a quivering in his legs. He couldn’t think.

“Give me the fucking bearing, goddamn it!”

The hill loomed larger in the windshield, a tall mound of jumbled rocks and grass the color of a lion’s mane.

“One-fifty . . . one-fifty-five. Yes, one-fifty-five.”

Douglas’s glance flicked to the compass the moment before he hauled back on the yoke to clear the hill’s peak. Something metallic glinted through sun-scorched trees fringing a wadi a few hundred feet below.

“Archangel, Archangel. Bearing one-five-five, range three thousand meters. Did you read that?”

Static.

“Archangel, do you read me? Bearing one-five-five, range three-zero-zero.”

Michael answered and repeated the information.

“Fire a marking round, tell me when you’ve shot, and I’ll try to adjust from up here,” Douglas said, then made another turn, an airborne hairpin that brought a tug of G-forces.

“What’s happening? What’s going on?”

“We’re in it, my man, that’s what. We are in the goddamned war!”

Two minutes later, as they orbited the plain, they heard Michael report, “Shot out!”

They circled for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty . . .

Michael called, “Did you spot the round?”

“Negative. Give us one more.”

A pause, then: “Shot out!”

Fitzhugh’s heart leaped when he saw a geyser of dense white smoke somewhere between the hill and the airstrip.

“Archangel, you’re way short!” Douglas said. “You’re short five hundred! Add five hundred!”

Another geyser rose, well up on the slope.

“Too much! Drop two hundred!”

They flew on, banked, and with the Gulfstream tilted at a thirty-degree angle, the right side facing away from the target, Fitzhugh was blind to the next shot. Douglas’s shout, blasting through his headset, hurt his eardrums.

“You’re on ’em, Archangel! Fire for effect! They know you’re on ’em, they’re hauling ass! Fire for effect!”

As the plane completed its turn, Fitzhugh saw men running from out of the wadi. He saw them with a peculiar thrilling clarity—brown-clad figures scrambling and stumbling up the slope, some with what looked like sewer pipes on their shoulders. Shells from Michael’s mortar battery burst in the wadi. The G1C sailed upward and looped around for another pass.

“Add one hundred! No, make that two hundred! Repeat fire for effect!”

Shells burst amid the fleeing figures. It was weird, not hearing the blasts, like watching a silent war movie. The leaden taste was gone from Fitzhugh’s mouth. He felt a wild enthusiasm for the game, fancied himself and Douglas as film-land heroes, partners in daring. That the pathetically small creatures in panicky flight below had been the source of his terror seemed absurd. With godlike detachment, he saw a body tossed into the air. The hilltop passed below. The landscape beyond was empty and serene.