Acts of faith (6 page)

“But it could well get worse. This is where the first reason, the political and religious one, comes in.” Barrett, his face gone florid again, flattened one hand to cover the reddish-brown swath on the map. “What you’ve got up here are brown Arab tribes and black Nuban tribes livin’ more or less cheek by jowl. Some of the Arabs support the government, some don’t, some don’t care one way or the other. And the blacks, some of ’em sympathize with the SPLA and some don’t. Anyway, up until recently this mixed lot—Christians, Muslims, ancestor-worshippers, whatever else—more or less got along. Yeah, the odd tribal dust-up now and then, but mostly live and let live, and that mob of fundamentalists in Khartoum can’t tolerate that sort of toleration. Want
everybody
to be reading the Koran,
everybody
to follow Islamic law. Makin’ that bloody oil pipeline secure gives ’em a perfect excuse to do what they’ve been wantin’ to do for a long time.”

“But worse. You said it could get worse,” Fitzhugh said. “Like I said, what you’re telling me doesn’t sound any worse than—”

“Because the Nuba is so isolated,” Barrett said, cutting him off. “No pryin’ eyes to report on what’s goin’ on up there. Khartoum has declared that the whole bleedin’ place is a no-go zone, thirty thousand square miles, a million people. A few Nuban
meks—
that’s what they call their big chiefs up there—somehow got word to the UN and appealed for ’em to send in some assistance. A couple of NGOs were ready to, but those outfits are under the UN umbrella, and the UN muckety-mucks said no.”

“Another excuse to do nothing,” Douglas interjected. “Sometimes you have to take sides.”

He gave Fitzhugh a glance whose meaning was ambiguous.

“I have no problem taking a side, if I think it’s right. I believe I’ve shown that.”

Douglas eked out a thin smile that hovered between arrogant and self-assured. “Fitz, if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

They were through testing him, if that’s what they’d been up to, and at last clued him in. Barrett said he had presented the board of International People’s Aid a plan for delivering assistance to the Nuba. Obviously the group would be operating independently, off the UN reservation. Barrett’s strategy was to provide disaster relief at first and then development aid to rebuild bombed-out roads and devastated farms and above all St. Andrew’s mission, where, after his conversion to Protestantism, he had preached as a guest minister.

There had been nothing like it in all the Nuba, he said, with its fine church of brick and granite quarried from the surrounding hills, with its clinic and primary and secondary schools, its guest house for visiting clergy, its training center where agriculture, carpentry, and tailoring had been taught. A lodestar of progress and education, a refuge for the sick. A prosperous town, called New Tourom, had grown up around it, and so the fanatics had had to erase it from the map. Bombed it first with cluster bombs, armed and incited a tribe of Baggara Arabs from the plains to raid it. The minister, the canon, and three teachers were killed, along with sixteen schoolchildren and an unknown number of townspeople. More were captured, to be taken to the camps or sold into slavery. Others fled deep into the bush.

Barrett had returned there a month ago to inspect what was left and was sickened and outraged by what he’d seen. He must have delivered electrifying sermons, for he painted a vivid scene of biblical desolation. The town that had once harbored twenty-five hundred souls now counted under a thousand. Houses had been devoured by red ants. Terraced farm fields had gone back to scrub. The ruined church was a nest for rats and snakes.

“The only bright spot,” he went on, “is that the SPLA has opened up a Nuban front—War Zone Two, they call it. They’ve moved troops into the mountains and the rebel headquarters are near New Tourom. A full regiment, nearly a thousand men. Man in charge is a Nuban himself, Lieutenant Colonel Goraende. Splendid soldier. He’ll provide you with security.”

Fitzhugh wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Me?”

“Who else would I be talkin’ about? Rebuildin’ the mission, that’s our long-range goal, but for the meantime there’s more immediate needs to be addressed. IPA’s board has to have an estimate of what those needs are and their costs. I can’t give ’em the costs without knowin’ the extent of the needs, and that’s where you come in.”

Fitzhugh was beyond incredulous. “You want
me
to assess what they are? I’m to go into the Nuba mountains? Alone?”

Everyone was silent for a moment or two; then Diana turned sharply to Malachy, who raised both hands in a mock plea for forgiveness.

“Told him you were planning to take some bold steps, that was all. Didn’t seem prudent to say anything more on the phone, and once he got here, well now, I thought it best he heard it from you.”

“Oh dear, Fitz, we’re awfully sorry.”

The clear, steady blue eyes, the smashing smile, the face that belonged in a garden party in the London suburbs. She started to say more but stopped herself at some vague sign from Douglas.

“You won’t be by yourself,” he said. “I’ll be going with you.”

“A tough business, and risky, I know,” Barrett chimed in. “You won’t, of course, be expected to cover all the Nuba, just as much as you can in a fortnight. That would give us a picture of the whole. The board’s given me the okay to offer you five thousand U.S.”

Fitzhugh shook his head.

“Not enough?” asked Diana, frowning.

“Oh, no. Fine and dandy. Much more than the UN would have paid for a fortnight’s work. But you see—” He broke off, silently questioning Malachy’s assessment of Diana as a woman whose head wasn’t a hatchery for mad schemes. Maybe she didn’t hatch this one, but she sure was part of it. His glance moving to the window and the trellis outside, with its cascades of red and purple bougainvillea, he recalled that he’d read or heard somewhere that the air in the Kenyan highlands had caused the early European settlers to lose their senses, filling them up with grandiose visions. Evidently it had not lost its power to addle the white mind.

“The Nuba is a thousand kilometers from Loki,” he said, starting over. “How do we get in there, and what’s more, out?”

Diana gave him a quizzical look. “We’ve chartered Tara Whitcomb. She’s not averse, if the occasion demands it, to fly on the dark side. And she knows Sudan better than any pilot in Africa. She’ll fly you and Douglas in, same as she did John. You know Tara, don’t you? At least heard of her?”

He nodded.

“To reduce the risk of the wrong people finding out where you’re going, she will file a false flight plan,” Diana continued, a sudden chill in her voice. “As she did with John.”

“And we didn’t have a wink of trouble,” Barrett added by way of assuring him. “Khartoum makes a lot of threats, but they haven’t got the means to carry the half of them out.”

Fitzhugh wanted to say that it was the other half that concerned him, but he kept silent on that point, going straight to the crux of the issue and of his confusion. As far as he knew, there were no landing fields in the Nuba mountains capable of handling cargo planes. How, then, did the well-meaning Canadians of International People’s Aid propose to deliver tons of aid to the Nuban people? Were they going to build airstrips? Use airdrops? With Arab raiders on the ground and government planes in the sky? He asked these questions one after the other,
bim, bam, boom,
not so much to elicit answers as to show how crazy and impossible the entire enterprise sounded to him.

“It’s going to work this way,” Douglas answered. “I’ve incorporated an air charter company, Knight Air Services. All the red tape’s been taken care of. Like I said, all I need is an airplane.”

“An essential piece of equipment, I’d say,” Fitzhugh remarked drily.

“I’ll get one, and once I do, IPA is going to be my first client. I won’t be playing Mother May I? with Khartoum. It’ll be nothing but flying on the dark side.”

“Running the blockade,” Fitzhugh murmured. An excitement, tinged with fear, spread through his chest.

The American’s eyebrows lifted and dropped, quickly.

“While you’re doing what you’ve got to do, I’ll be looking for drop zones for airdrops, I’ll be looking for suitable sites for landing strips. We’re going to need more than the one Tara landed at. Good hard ground, room for bigger planes to land and take off. And yeah, we’ll get them built. I
know
we can do this. It’s a place where a few people can make a big difference.”

Fitzhugh didn’t share his confidence; he was all but certain that they could not do it. The plan had the quality of a behind-enemy-lines operation that seemed to call for commandos, not a cargo pilot and an aid worker with a bum knee. Astonishing himself, he stuck out his hand and told Douglas and the others that they could count him in. He wondered if the heady highlands atmosphere had affected the vulnerable Caucasian part of his brain, for at that moment he had a sensation of being split in two. His dark-skinned half, skeptical, sober, wise, stood off to the side, as it were, and frowned at his light-skinned half, shaking hands and announcing that he could be counted in.
Sleep on it, think it over, you might regret this,
the dark warned the light, but the light had the upper hand. Much later the clarifying beam of hindsight would show that it wasn’t any hundred-proof air that had undermined his better judgment; it was Douglas and Douglas’s remark:
“It’s a place where a few people can make a big difference.”
Fitzhugh wasn’t immune to the desire that’s in most people to spray graffiti on the cold rock of the world and say “I was here and what I did counted for something.” For someone of his temperament, the mere notion of undertaking a dangerous endeavor on behalf of a desperate people held an irresistible appeal. But there was still more to it: He felt that he would have disappointed Douglas if he’d said no. He could have said it to Barrett or Diana but not to him. He didn’t know why. There was something about the American that made you not want to let him down.

He wasn’t, however, so drunk on the idea that he was ready to pack his bags then and there and fly off blindly into the unknown. “You are sure that this lieutenant colonel—what was his name?”

“Goraende. Michael Archangelo Goraende.”

“You are sure he will provide us with security?”

“He’ll have a detachment of his best lads to look out for you,” Barrett assured him. “Should give you some comfort. Michael the Archangel is the patron saint of warriors, the Roman Catholic version of Mars.”

Fitzhugh said he would be grateful for any help he and Douglas could get.

“Would you be a Catholic yourself?” asked Barrett, in as friendly a manner as he’d shown all afternoon. “Malachy tells me you’ve a bit of Irish in you.”

“Only a bit.”

“But enough to put the smile in that voice of yours. Comes from the Irish, make no mistake about it.”

Mustang

“G
OOD MORNIN
’
AND
jambo,
rafiki.
”

He showed his pass with a quick flip of his wallet, a pointless formality; none of the askaris at Wilson Field ever looked at the damned thing. That one was no exception, waving him through without a glance, his bored expression as fixed as a mask.

The ancient Volvo’s engine rattled as he eased the clutch and followed the line of pickup trucks through the gate. He parked beside his copilot’s car while the trucks proceeded across the tarmac toward the Gulfstream. In the morning twilight its dingy white fuselage reminded him of a seagull in need of a bath. Must’ve been a right smart thing in her day, when she ferried CEOs to big important meetings. No frequent-flyer first-class-upgrade bullshit for those boys, no sir, no way.

Feeling a bit old—a resistance in his joints not alarming in itself so much as in its portent—Wesley Dare got out of the car, leaned against the door, and finished the lukewarm coffee in his Thermos. He swallowed half, spit out the rest. How in the hell can it be, he asked himself, that in a country where such fine coffee gets grown, no one can brew a pot that doesn’t taste like it’s been filtered through a secretary’s pantyhose after a ten-hour day? Out on the tarmac the boys were unloading the trucks. A tally-man, a big guy, heaved the fifty-pound bags off the asphalt and held them up by the hook of a hand scale, squinting to read the weights. He called them out to Nimrod, who was Dare’s loadmaster, bookkeeper, and fixer, all wrapped up in a squat package of somber conscientiousness and honesty, or what served as a reasonable facsimile of honesty in Kenya. “Twenty kilos . . . twenty-one . . . twenty-two . . .” chanted the tally-man, while Nimrod totaled up on a pocket calculator.

Dare lit a cigarette, one of the five he allowed himself each day, and watched Tony Bollichek, his Australian first officer, do his walk-around, checking the belly of the aircraft, the landing gear, the props for dings and pings. A fine, careful pilot, in contrast to Dare, who was a fine pilot but not a particularly careful one—the casualness of his maintenance and preflight checks were legendary in the bush pilot fraternity. Tony’s girlfriend walked beside him, the Canadian, Something-Anne, or Anne-Something. Anne-Louise? Anne-Marie? Jane-Anne? In addition to her name, Dare had forgotten that she would be flying with them today. She’d spent the last three months copiloting UN Buffalos on airdrops over Sudan, and now her contract had expired and she was looking to get checked out on the G1. He suspected that she and Tony hoped he would offer her a job.