Acts of faith (61 page)

“I’ve seen a great deal of death,” he said, “so much of it that even the sadness of losing a wife and two children did not last as long as it should have.”

“Do you have another wife? Your father had three.”

“No. No other.” He was silent for a time. “Miss Hardin, will you be returning to the Nuba?”

“I don’t know. It depends.”

“On what?”

“If my boss decides there’s work for us to do up here.”

“There is. As I told you, a great many of our people have been taken captive.”

“It’s not that simple, it’s a complicated process,” she said. “We don’t have any contacts up here. We would—”

“We could help you make these contacts. I would very much like it if—if you were to come back here.”

She couldn’t quite read that remark; his expression was likewise illegible in the wan lamplight. “May I ask why?”

“For selfish reasons. I enjoy talking to you.”

“You’d like me to bore you some more.”

With a tentative movement, he touched her knee and grinned. “Oh yes, bore me to death. No, no, of course not. It has been a long time since I’ve spoken to a woman as I do to you. My wife and I used to talk a lot. Like you, she was an educated woman.”

Quinette stifled a yelp. “Educated? Educated doesn’t describe me.”

“Compared with the women here, you are. Many of them cannot read or write.”

“By that standard, I’ve got a Ph.D.,” she said.

“I should be going,” he said abruptly.

“Do you have to? I enjoy talking to you.”

“Another time. Tomorrow.”

She leaned forward as he began to rise, intending to give him a chaste kiss good-bye; but she felt as if she’d fallen into some kind of magnetic field, for she kept leaning, her face drawn toward his, seemingly against her will. In the next moment she was on top of him, straddling his lap, clasping the back of his neck while he held her around the waist and they kissed; kissed without a pretense of tenderness, she biting the inside of his lips, his tongue darting for her throat.

They drew back from each other and into an awkward silence. To her, the surprising thing was that the kiss didn’t surprise her. It had a quality of inevitability, of something foreordained from the moment she’d first seen him, yesterday morning.

He reached out and pulled her to him, and they kissed again. His mouth broke free and roamed over her face, until they heard someone walking outside. Ulrika! In a panic, Quinette leaped up, went to the window, and saw an orderly trudging toward the casualties’ shelter, where the pressure lanterns flared.

“It’s all right, it isn’t her,” she whispered.

Michael got out of the chair. “It will be next time. I must go.”

“You could stay,” she pleaded. “We could talk a while longer.”

He silenced her with a subdued laugh. “I’m afraid that talking isn’t what we would do.”

That declaration made her feel wanted, even irresistible, but it was a poor consolation. She stood in the doorway and watched him stride across the hospital grounds, into the enveloping shadows. He didn’t look back. She shut the door, afraid that if she left it open another second, she would succumb to a reckless impulse to run after him. She got into her sleeping bag. A faint growl of thunder sounded in the distance, rousing a hope that it would rain hard all night and wash out the airstrip and strand her here indefinitely. That wasn’t likely, she couldn’t rely on circumstance, she would have to find a way to return; and looking at the roof beams, she began to scheme how to do it.

“M
Y MAN
! C
OFFEE
’
S ON
!”

Sitting on his sleeping bag under the Gulfstream’s wing, Fitzhugh ignored Douglas’s cheerful summons, although he needed some caffeinating after a night of fractured sleep and fearful dreams inspired by the previous day’s events. The contents of the nightmares had mercifully fled his mind as soon as he woke up, a quarter of an hour before sunrise. Terror lingered in him for a while longer but dissipated as the sun bulged out of the crenulated mountains, magnified to twice its high-noon size, its sharply slanting light heightening the shades of ochre and terra-cotta in the earth and rocks. Feeling like an astronaut who’d landed on some austerely beautiful planet, he gazed at the scene in blank-minded admiration until thoughts of Diana intruded and, so to speak, brought him back to earth.

The horror of seeing her covered in blood, the elation of discovering that it wasn’t hers had shredded his notion to live their affair in the moment, shocked into an awareness of the depth of his love and into recognizing the truth that a serious romance cannot abide stasis; it must go in one direction or the other. Grow or die. Having no wish to allow the relationship to die, he would have to nurture its growth, which meant working toward marriage or some arrangement unsanctioned by law or clergy. The trouble was, the picture of them sharing a roof and bed was as fuzzy as ever; indeed, he couldn’t see it at all, much as he wanted it. His desire for children was the biggest obstacle. That was curious; he hadn’t given fatherhood much consideration before he’d become involved with Diana; it had been an abstraction. Now it had become a concrete issue, because to fulfill his love would be to foreclose on the possibility. He’d spoken about none of this to her. She was the one who seemed content with things as they were, happy to carry on in the present.

“Yo! Fitz! Get it while it’s hot!”

He looked through the web of camouflage netting and across the runway toward Douglas, squatting beside a smoking campfire with Suleiman and the soldiers guarding the plane. There were times, and this was one, when his friend’s sunny voice, his exuberance, got on Fitzhugh’s nerves. Americans—now there was a people who managed to live in the future and in the here and now at the same time. To them, the future
was
the here and now.

He recalled a conversation he’d had with Malachy about Douglas’s “cool idea” to save the Nuba. They concluded—somewhat reluctantly—that only an American could have come up with such a scheme, only an American could have had the confidence and enthusiasm to see it through. And so the discussion turned from Douglas to Americans in general. Malachy, who had relatives in the United States and visited there often, opined that they were an optimistic people with an almost childish faith in themselves and in the future because they lacked a tragic sense, not because America had never experienced tragedy but because Americans refused to admit that tragedy existed. Slavery and the Civil War and the Great Depression and the Vietnam War hadn’t shaken their conviction that tomorrow would be better, and if it failed to deliver, the next day would. And why was that so? Fitzhugh inquired. Americans believed in a radiant tomorrow, Malachy replied, because they possessed an uncanny ability—it was a kind of self-induced amnesia combined with a deliberate blindness—to forget the bad things that had happened yesterday and to ignore the bad things that were happening today. He remembered being in the United States in the aftermath of Vietnam and the hostage crisis in Iran, the pall cast by those disasters darkened by a recession, inflation, the menacing shadow of the Soviet Union on the march in Afghanistan. What had America’s president said to all this? What did that smiling movie actor tell his people? “It’s morning in America!” And what did his people reply? “Why, yes it is!” Of course it wasn’t morning in America, but Americans couldn’t see that, dazzled by the illusory sunrise summoned up by the smiling actor. And look at where they are now! said Malachy. Richer than ever, victors in the cold war, the envy of all the world! Do you see, my old friend? It became morning in America because Americans willed it to be so.

“If Muhammad won’t come to the coffee, then the coffee’s got to come to Muhammad.”

Holding a steaming tin mug in each hand, Douglas parted a flap in the netting and joined him under the wing. “Just the way you like it. Three sugars.”

With the tip of his tongue, Fitzhugh tested the mug’s rim for heat before he took a sip.”Two is how I like it.”

“Lousy, isn’t it? I got it from the compound’s mess. You know what Wes always says about the coffee in Kenya.”

“ ‘How come in a country where such fine coffee gets grown, the stuff tastes like it was filtered through a secretary’s pantyhose after a ten-hour day?’ ” Fitzhugh said, attempting Dare’s country-boy twang. “His figures of speech are very colorful. He said that once to Rachel in the office. She didn’t appreciate it.”

Douglas combed his days-old beard with his fingertips. It became him, maturing his undergraduate looks. “But he’s right. You can’t get a decent cup in Nairobi or anywhere. That gave me a really cool idea. I’m going to mention it to Hassan, see if he thinks it could fly. We open a coffee shop in Nairobi, kind of like a Starbucks back in the States. Serve cappuccino and espresso besides regular coffee. Cheap. If it goes over, we open another, build a local chain.”

This early in the morning it was difficult to keep up with Douglas’s inspirations.

“Diversify,” he added. “We’ve got to do something with Knight Air’s profits besides park them in a bank, so we put the money to work in another enterprise. Really good coffee at reasonable prices. Everyone benefits.”

“Only you could find something socially redeeming about a chain of coffee shops.”

“What is it, my man? You seem a little on edge. Look, I know you’re thinking about what happened yesterday—”

“Actually, I was thinking about something else.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Douglas carried on, not listening. “The NGOs will be scared of committing to the Nuba. Too dangerous. And that’s what Khartoum wants them to think. Somebody tipped off the bad guys about what we were doing, so they figured to send a message, and a few dead relief workers would have been the way to send it, loud and clear.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know it.” Then Douglas rested an encouraging hand on Fitzhugh’s shoulder. “But I gave it some more thought this morning, and it came to me that things could work out just the opposite. Those people could be back in Loki right now, saying, ‘We aren’t going to be intimidated, things are really rough up in the Nuba, it needs all the aid we can send.’ And if they’re not saying that, that’s how we should spin it when we get back. It’s possible, I’m saying, that that mortar attack was the best thing that could have happened.”

Pausing to absorb this remarkable statement, Fitzhugh lit a cigarette, his first of the day. “What you did yesterday impressed me, but you know, you make it hard for me or anyone to admire you completely. Because you have an unfortunate genius for saying things like you just now said.”

He received in response the patented gaze, the disarming smile. “Hey, you don’t really think I’m
happy
about these people getting killed and wounded, do you? All I’m saying is that some good might come out of it.”

“Let’s drop the subject. I was thinking about something else anyway. About Diana and me.”

Douglas frowned. “Diana and you?”

“Barrett knows, so you might as well, too. We’re involved.”

“You’re involved sex-wise?” Douglas asked, each word rising up the scale, the final one coming out in a high tenor of disbelief.

“I prefer love-wise. We’re in love, and I was wondering where it’ll lead to, if it can lead to anything.”

In a parody of astonishment, Douglas slapped his forehead. “First Wes and Mary, now you and Diana. What the hell am I running? An airline or an odd-couple dating service?”

“Think of it as diversification,” Fitzhugh remarked and, in an idle shift of his glance, noticed that Suleiman and the soldiers were standing in frozen postures, faces turned toward the sky. In a moment, Suleiman fell to his knees and scooped dirt onto the campfire to douse the smoke. He and Douglas heard it then—the low, uninflected growl of a high-flying Antonov.

The sound reduced everything else that was on their minds to triviality. They ran out from under the net and joined the soldiers in an apprehensive vigil, heads turning as they tracked the plane, a silvery cross in a powder-blue sky striated by cirrus clouds. It flew northward; then, with the leisured arrogance of an unchallenged bird of prey, it made a slow turn. The sound faded, but the plane was still visible as it overflew the hospital, several miles away, before turning again.

Douglas said, “I’m going to get Gerhard on the radio, tell him to start Michael and those girls back here right now.”

Fitzhugh heard the growling noise once again. The plane had dropped in altitude. He fetched binoculars from his rucksack and saw the big, over-wing engine cells, the tailfins spread above the rear cargo door. The cargo door that doubled as a bomb bay. It was open. The soldiers had taken cover in the woods edging the airstrip, except for two, who’d leaped into a pit dug last night for their 12.7-millimeter machine gun, a weapon that had purely symbolic value against an aircraft flying at ten thousand feet.

It commenced another circle, descending farther as it headed eastward.

“Talked to the logistics dude, that Italian, Franco,” Douglas called down from the cockpit window. “It flew right over them the first time around. Our people should be here—”

The muffled rumble of a bomb cut him off. In the distance a column of smoke roiled straight up and crowned out into a shape resembling a tree, one whose growth from sapling to full height was compressed into seconds, as in a time-lapse film. Fitzhugh felt a tremor beneath his feet as another tree rose, a third, a fourth, black and evil. Far above, flying slowly with its nose pitched up, the Antonov excreted the seeds.