Acts of faith (68 page)

Outside, closely watched by the soldiers, a crew of civilians, barefoot and with prominent collarbones showing above their tattered undershirts, were lugging crates and containers out of the forest, toward the airplane.

With an amused expression, the officer glanced at the protruding butt of the Beretta.

“All Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms,” Dare said.

“I know. My brother is in America. He recently got his green card. I and a few of my men will be accompanying you to Yei to make sure you arrive safely.”

“You must of gotten some bad information, major. We’re goin’ to the Nuba, War Zone Two.”

“You
were
going there. Your destination has changed. Your cargo is now needed more in Yei than in the Nuba.”

Doug said, “We can’t do it. Can’t take you and your men. We’d be overloaded.”

The officer gave an abbreviated nod that more or less congratulated Doug for making a nice try. He then snapped an order to a couple of his men. Motioning with their rifles, they instructed the workers to put the weaponry on board.

“I don’t believe this. You’re hijacking cargo that’s meant for someone fighting on the same side as you.”

A quick, efficient smile—Doug’s indignation appeared to amuse him as much as Dare’s pistol.

“Know what, major?” Dare said. “When you started talking, I thought you were some kinda customs man. Like you only wanted to collect duty on imported goods.”

The officer straightened his shoulders, bracing his swagger stick across his thighs. “Thank you for the promotion, but I’m a captain, not a major. Also a fighter, not a bureaucrat.”

“I was only joking. But what would you figure the customs duties would be on all this stuff?”

“I have no idea.” He spoke with firmness, but a wavering look came into his eyes. “Perhaps you do?”

He didn’t slam the door, I can get to him,
Dare thought. “I’ve got something in the plane that will give me an idea. Y’all don’t mind if I take a look at it?”

“Not at all.”

With Douglas, he went into the cockpit. Quinette, occupying the pilot’s seat, was looking out the window at the captain.

“I’ve been a good girl and stayed in my room, so tell me what’s going on.”

Dare reached into the seat pocket where he stowed flight manuals and charts and withdrew a vinyl purse, the kind shopkeepers use for carrying cash to the bank. It contained his emergency gratuities fund.

“What’s goin’ on is a lesson on why these blacks are never gonna win this war. Some commander over in Yei has decided he needs what we’ve got more than Michael does, and he sent that errand boy to collect.”

She clasped his wrist tightly. “We can’t let that happen.”

“I’m tryin’,” he said, counting out the fives and tens.

“If you need more, there’s fifty in my rucksack,” she said.

“Think this will do,” Dare said, and wrapped the bills into a delectable bundle that he secured with a rubber band. Figuring the captain would want to conduct business in private, he called through the window, “If it’s not inconvenient, could you join us up here?”

Douglas and Quinette stood outside the cabin door to make room for their guest.

“I calculate the duty fees come to this,” Dare said quietly, and held the wad close to the man’s face.

It probably was as much as a junior officer in the SPLA made in a year, yet the sight of it, the smell of it, the nearness of it, all in U.S. currency, did not have the desired effect. The captain looked over his shoulder, past Doug and Quinette into the rear of the plane, where Nimrod was supervising the loading.

“I am under orders,” he said. “I have got to show something.”

He proposed a compromise: Dare would leave half the military cargo here, fly the other half to Yei, then return to pick up what had been left behind and go on to the Nuba.

Dare reflected for a few moments. What difference would it make to him if one SPLA commander stole from another? He was getting paid eighteen thousand to make a delivery, to whom didn’t matter.

While he pondered, Quinette said, “You people need medical supplies, don’t you?”

The captain almost did a double-take, as if he were surprised that a woman would take part in the conversation. “Always,” he said.

“We’ve got about half a ton, right there. Why don’t you take that instead? You can tell whoever it is you need to tell that that was all we had on board.”

Douglas looked at her with admiration. “It’s a good idea, Wes.”

“That stuff is for the German nurse. She’s expecting it.”

Doug said, “There are priorities here, and bandages and syringes don’t make the top of the list.”

“Well, listen to the two angels of mercy. Do-gooders gone bad.”

“Gone bad?” Quinette said with anger. “Listen, I saw my friend with her legs blown off. One antiaircraft rocket would have saved her and a whole lot of other people. And since when did you start giving a damn about anything? You’re the most cynical man I’ve ever met.”

Which was why, Dare thought, he hadn’t come up with the idea of trading syringes and bandages for weapons. It took an innocent’s conviction to make that offer. He turned to the captain.

“Well?”

His face assumed a grave expression. “You understand, the man I report to might not believe that medical supplies were all you had. I would need to convince him, so I must ask for duties on the medicines in addition.”

“I’ve got it right here,” Quinette said, and bent down to open her rucksack.

She placed two twenties and a ten in the captain’s hand, smugly, piously, like a parishioner dropping a big donation into the collection plate.

Nimrod was bewildered when Dare told him to offload the arms and wait at the airstrip with the workers until the plane returned. There were no problems at Yei. The captain’s boss, a more senior captain, was in fact skeptical that the plane was carrying only medical aid, but a share of the wealth allayed his doubts.

They flew back to New Cush, got the shipment on board, and finally left for the mountains, Dare climbing quickly to cruising altitude to conserve fuel. The Hawker had a range of fifteen hundred miles, and the detour had consumed most of his reserve.

“So what are we gonna tell that Ulrika?” he asked.

Quinette said, “The truth.”

“I’m kinda wonderin’ what that is.”

“That her stuff was confiscated by SPLA troops in Yei.”

“I’d call that a half truth.”

Douglas said, “Christ, Wes, our job is to get arms to the Nuba, not to every goddamned commander who gets a notion that he’s entitled to them. We had to make a sacrifice. There’s nothing to feel guilty about.”

“Well, I’m gonna leave it to you two to explain to Ulrika why she’s gonna have to send her patients to the witch doctors.”

In the jumpseat Quinette had to speak to the back of Wes’s head, its bald spot ringed by fine, tight reddish curls. “Ulrika will understand,” she said.

She wasn’t going to let Wes make her feel bad about herself. She was a citizen of the war, she had an obligation to do her bit, and she’d done it. Her idea had saved the day. Doug was right—there was nothing to feel guilty about. And if there was, she took comfort in the knowledge that God forgave all.

Behind her Nimrod lay asleep on a blanket, his head propped against a sack full of mortar shells. Could she ever describe this experience in one of her letters home? Who in that distant, drab, everyday world would believe that she was in a plane piloted by gun-runners? She hardly believed it herself. Had she ridden a rocket into orbit, she would not have felt farther away from all she’d come from.

Chin on her knuckles, she stared past the controls at the instrument panel, its dials as indecipherable as Chinese calligraphy. The only one she could read was the airspeed indicator. Two hundred and ten knots. It was over two hours to the Nuba. She wished she had the power to think herself there. She stretched out her legs, into the space between the bulkheads. Her legs were her best feature, but with bulky hiking boots reaching up to her ankles and baggy safari shorts down to her knees, their virtues weren’t apparent. She frowned. She wanted to look as attractive as she could. Michael’s last communication to her, delivered just three days ago, had been as dry and businesslike as the first, telling her he had compiled information she would find useful and had made arrangements that would ensure her a successful visit. The conclusion “I look forward to your arrival” was as personal as it got.

She dozed off, until a fullness in her ears woke her up. The plane was descending over blond hillsides and Nuba farmsteads, ringed by terraced fields stippled with sorghum.

“Zulu Three, this is Yankee Bravo approaching from the southwest,” Dare called on the radio. When he received an acknowledgment, he asked if fuel was available. Yes, a voice replied.

An African truth, he thought when the top fell off a fuel drum as he, Nimrod, and Doug rolled it toward the plane. A mixture of Jet A1 and muddy water spilled out. Inspection of several other drums revealed that they too had been tampered with. Dare knew what had happened: villagers had siphoned fuel for their fires and lamps and topped off the drums with rain water to conceal their theft. While Michael’s troops unloaded the plane, breaking open the crates like kids at Christmas, he radioed his problem to Fitz in Loki.

“Damn good thing we found out what was inside the drums,” he said, trying to look on the bright side of his situation. “Been in a world of hurt if we’d pumped that shit into the tanks. Gonna need a fuel delivery soon as you can get me one.”

Fitz told him to wait. When he came back on, some fifteen minutes later, he gave Dare the good news—Alexei would bring the Jet A1 in the Antonov—and the bad news—because of flight commitments, he couldn’t make it for three days.

“There it is, Doug,” he said with a shake of his head. “Y’know, I’ve always thought of myself as lucky, but lately it seems my good luck mostly consists of gettin’ through the fixes my bad luck gets me into.”

S
HE STOOD AT
the side of the runway, near the grove of doum palms where she had seen wounded and dead for the first time, but the sight of those trees evoked no dread or dark memories, only anticipation as Michael emerged, surrounded by his bodyguard.

“Miss Quinette Hardin, so very glad to see you again,” he said, and took both her hands in his, his slowly spreading smile squeezing her like an embrace.

She would have preferred the other kind of embrace. She sensed—or was it hoped?—that he would have as well, but they stood an arm’s length apart. This was one of the rare times when Quinette didn’t place all her trust in feelings, because she wasn’t sure what to call the emotion he awakened in her. She’d longed to see him, but now that she did, she was reminded anew of how different they were, how remote were the chances that anything could develop between them.

At the head of a column of soldiers and porters half a mile long, they climbed the path toward New Tourom but skirted the town, following a riverbed in which scattered pools, remnants from the wet season, lay in rocky basins, their surfaces creased by the wakes of aquatic insects. It was the hottest part of the day, and Wes, Doug, and Nimrod were soon very thirsty but didn’t dare drink from the muddy, bug-infested pools. They hadn’t expected to be on foot today and were unprepared for it. Quinette shared her water bottles with them and felt field-wise and competent when she paused at a pool to refill them with her filtration pump.

About a kilometer from town they came to a range of low hills and filed through a narrow passage into a broad bowl, with steep, tiered slopes on all sides. The effect was like passing through the entrance into a vast amphitheater. At the far end, three or four miles away, a line of trees trooped up a ridgeline, marking a watercourse. The place had the quality of a lost and isolated world, a kind of Shangri-la. It was anything but—gun emplacements picketed the hills.

They walked on, past men threshing grain with heavy wooden paddles, women balancing on their heads the inevitable baskets piled high with sorghum ears. As in Dinkaland, Quinette attracted a retinue of teenage girls, full of excitement and curiosity. They took turns carrying her rucksack, tousled her hair and twined it around their fingers, and touched her arms, chattering incomprehensibly.

Michael’s garrison looked more like a Nuba village than a military base, except for the numbers of armed men moving about, the radio antenna sprouting from a nest of solar panels, and the SPLA flag flying over a mud-walled bungalow. Inside, several officers, among them the dour Major Kasli, stood at a table covered with maps. Another map, under a plastic sheet marked with arrows, circles, and rectangles, papered half of one wall. Wes, Doug, and Nimrod gathered with Michael around the radio, tucked in a corner atop a wooden crate. Wes called Lokichokio, and after a few minutes Fitz’s voice, high pitched and chipper, broke through the barrage of static. Quinette sat down and waited while the two men talked. Once Kasli looked up from the maps to cast an unwelcoming glance her way. He was an unattractive man, with close-set bloodshot eyes and an exceptionally narrow head—a kind of squashed oval; his pointed chin accentuated by a goatee.

“Okay, Fitz knows we’ve arrived,” Wes said, motioning to her to come to the radio. “Y’all better tell him to get a message to your boss, on account of you’re gonna be a little late getting back to work. Fuel shortage in Loki. Now it’s five days instead of three. Five at least.”