Acts of faith (69 page)

She couldn’t say that this news displeased her. Pulling the handset to her mouth, she gave Fitz Ken’s number, told him exactly what to say, and promised to pay the sat-phone charges when she returned.

“It happened for a reason,” she said to Michael as he walked her up a path. “Nothing happens without a reason.”

“And what could that reason be, Quinette?”

She was glad to hear her first name. “I don’t know, but I assume we’ll find out.”

Here at his base, his bodyguard wasn’t compelled to shadow him everywhere, but they weren’t quite alone. Her followers walked alongside, fussing with her hair.

“I’ve assembled several meks for you to talk to. They will give you numbers and names of people abducted from their villages. Also, that trader you mentioned on your last visit, Bashir.”

“He’s here?”

“Major Kasli located him. He knows where many of the captives are. You’ll meet everyone tomorrow in New Tourom. I’ll have a translator for you.”

“You won’t be there?”

“Very busy now. Planning an operation. We’re going on it day after tomorrow.”

“You’ll be leaving?”she asked, disappointed. “What sort of operation?”

“Military secret,” he answered. “This is where you’ll be staying.”

Ducking their heads, they passed through a low keyhole-shaped entrance into a courtyard formed by a ring of three tukuls, each joined to the other by a high wall.

“In here,” Michael said, beckoning her to the center hut.

The dim, windowless room was hot. When her eyes adjusted, she saw geometric designs and primitive figures of people and animals painted in red and ochre, black and white on the clay walls, which threw off a dull bluish gleam, as if they had been varnished or rubbed to a shine. The air was filled with the strong aroma of the bunched herbs and dried bean pods hanging from pegs high up on the walls. A crude bed—sticks lashed together between four thick crooked posts, with a mosquito net overhead—was the only furniture, while a few straw mats did for carpeting.

“No TV or refrigerator,” said Michael, grinning, “but you do have a shower.” He pointed at a little alcove, where a flat boulder lay on the floor and a large calabash hung from a pair of cattle horns more than six feet above. “You fill this up and take this out”—he pulled a wooden plug from the bottom of the calabash—“but use the water with care. The dry season is here and water is like gold.”

She loved its rough simplicity, and the gaiety and mystery of the wall paintings, and when they stepped outside into the courtyard, the feeling of cloister rendered by the encircled huts.

“This is my house,” he said, “but of course I can’t stay here with you.”

“Of course.”

“My daughter and her two cousins will be with you. Her name is Toddo, but you can call her Pearl because that’s what it means in English. She and her friends will cook for you, look after you.”

“It seems all the girls want to do around here is pull my hair,” she said.

“They think it’s disorderly. They want to braid it, like theirs. I must go. A conference with my staff.”

Pearl, a pretty girl of fourteen, with Michael’s rounded chin and soft eyes, had learned English from him and at school. There was a somberness about her—how could she be anything but somber after losing her mother and siblings?—but she had a lively curiosity and, as the other two girls ground sorghum with a wooden pestle, asked Quinette about America, where her father had learned to be a soldier. He’d told her that no one there ever went hungry, that there were black-skinned people in America who’d once been slaves but now were as free as their former masters, and that farmers did not plant and harvest by hand but had machines to do the work for them.

Quinette didn’t want to disillusion her, so she confirmed this idyllic picture. More or less to establish some common ground with Pearl, she mentioned that her father had been a farmer who’d grown corn and raised some cows, as Nuban men did; that he too had once been a soldier, that he’d died when she was fourteen, and that his death still made her sad.

“You are very high, like Nuba woman,” Pearl said, raising her hand.

“The Dinka think so, too. Sometimes they call me the White Dinka Woman.”

“No. You are not so skinny like a Dinka. You should be called White Nuba Woman.”

“Well, you can call me that if you want.”

“I don’t like your hair.”

“So your father told me.”

“Can I fix it?”

Quinette hesitated, then said, “All right.”

For the next hour she sat on the ground while Pearl changed her hairstyle.

“Your hair is too much skinny,” the girl said, which Quinette interpreted to mean that it was finer than a Nuban woman’s and difficult to weave into the tight plaits they favored. A bead was fastened to the tip of each strand. When she was finished, Pearl dipped her fingers into a clay jar of sesame oil and with it plastered the braids to Quinette’s head. Then she leaned back to study her artistry. “Better now. I will show you.”

She produced a small square mirror, with a corner missing and the backing so worn that the glass was almost as dull as tin. Quinette wasn’t sure what to think of her new appearance. The braids on the top of her head were pulled straight back, making her forehead too prominent, and the oil that gave a Nuban woman’s hair an appealing brilliance caused hers to appear greasy.

Pearl noticed her frown and assured her that she looked beautiful. “My father will like it.”

Quinette felt a blush come to her cheeks. “I like you, Pearl,” she said. “We’re going to be great friends.”

T
HE TICK BITES
, inflicted on them almost the instant they lay down on their beds, itched like scabies, and it made Dare sick just to look at the mush a village girl brought to him, Doug, and Nimrod for lunch. The goddamned fuel problem had condemned them to a week of this. He’d rather spend a week in a Mexican jail, as in fact he’d done in his younger days. Noticing the three men clawing at their forearms and waists, the girl, with sign language, instructed them to drag their beds outside. That done, she whacked the posts with a stick to drive the insects out, and while they stomped on their tormentors, she poured boiling water on the posts to wipe out remaining pockets of resistance.

They carried the beds back inside the hut and turned toward the door when a voice boomed, “Hey, Doug!”

There, like a hallucination, stood a young American, short but powerfully built, carrying a video camera and wearing a high-and-tight buzz cut, basketball shoes, cammie trousers, and a sweat-stained Pepperdine University T-shirt. He had the look of I-don’t-touch-alcohol-drugs-or-tobacco wholesomeness that Dare loathed. He’d seen the man before but couldn’t place him. On his back was a rucksack, which he slipped off with a “Whew!” and a theatrical swipe at his brow.

“Rob,” Doug said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You don’t know? You’re here to take me out, except you’re four days early.”

Doug gave him a look of incomprehension. Now Dare recalled who he was: Rob Handy, one of the Holy Rollers from the Friends of the Frontline.

“There’s been a screw-up, hasn’t there? Couple of days ago I radioed Fitz not to send a plane for me till the end of the week, when the show’s over. You didn’t get the word?” Handy met Doug’s puzzled gaze with one of his own. “One of your crews flew me in here two weeks ago, with a load of tools and construction materials. Those Russians.”

“That would’ve been Alexei,” Doug said. “Sorry for the confusion, I don’t keep up on the flight schedules. That’s Fitz’s job.”

“You’re not here to pick me up?”

“No.”

“And you been here
two weeks
?” Dare asked.

“It’s been terrific,” Handy said. “I was just getting footage of the school we’re rebuilding.”

“You’re making a film?”asked Doug.

“For our fundraising drive. It’s unbelievable how many people back in the States have no idea what’s going on here. The peril their fellow Christians are in. The fight they’re putting up.”

Lord, spare me from these people,
Dare thought.

“Michael’s given me the okay to film the operation he’s got coming up,” Handy burbled on. “I just got back from his staff conference. You know about the operation?”

Doug replied that they did not.

“You soon will. He wants to talk to you about it. It’s going to be incredible, the climax of the film. Our contributors, they’ll eat it up. Most of them are vets. But you know that. I was in the Gulf War myself. Fitz told me you were in that one, right?”

“Flew A-tens,” Doug answered.

“No kidding,” said Handy, dragging his rucksack inside to stand it against a wall. “I was with a Warthog squadron, too. Enlisted, though. What squadron were you with?”

Doug didn’t answer. Glancing at the rucksack, he asked, “You’re moving in? It’s going to be crowded in here.”

“It’s the other way around,” replied Handy. “You guys moved in on me. No problem. I sleep outside. It’s cooler.”

Dare sat on his fumigated bed and fumbled for a smoke. He was still holding himself to five a day, although he might need to increase his allotment now that he had a Christian soldier for a roommate.

Michael arrived later with Major Kasli. It was an official call. After asking how the guests found their accommodations—Dare chose not to answer—Michael sat down and inquired if Dare’s sources could obtain 120-millimeter mortars and semtex.

“Reckon so. They’re a one-stop shop. None of my business, I suppose, but why one-twenties and semtex?”

“You are correct,” said Kasli. “It is not your business.”

“I’ll decide that, major,” Michael said. “This dry season, I intend to carry the fight to the enemy. We are going to destroy an enemy airfield and sabotage the oil pipeline.”

Doug let out a low whistle.

“That’s ambitious,” Dare commented. “How far is this airfield?”

“From here, a little more than a hundred kilometers. It’s an oil company airfield, but Khartoum uses it as a base for its Antonovs. The plane that bombed Dr. Manfred’s hospital left from it.”

“A one-twenty mortar weighs a helluva lot,” Dare pointed out. “How are y’all gonna move heavy mortars and the shells to go with them over a hundred kilometers? You’d need a camel caravan or a whole shitload of porters.”

Major Kasli took off his wraparound sunglasses and smirked. “I see you are a tactician as well as a flier.”

“Yeah, a goddamned Napoleon with a pilot’s license.”

“We are going to transport the mortars and the ammunition in lorries,” Michael said. “And where do we find the lorries? We are going to seize them from the government.” He smoothed the dirt with his palm and, with his finger, drew a map. “Here is Kologi. Douglas, you remember your visit there?”

“Sure. Suleiman’s village. The Kowahla.”

“Yes. We have learned from Suleiman that the government has made an offer to the nazir of the Kowahla. If he swears allegiance to Khartoum and its jihad, he will receive for himself a Land Rover and his people will get lorries to carry their cotton crops to market. If he does not, then the Kowahla will be considered infidels and will be treated accordingly.”

Dare flexed his hand, working the stiffness out. “The old carrot and stick. Works every time.”

“Not this time,” said Michael, his almost feminine eyes going hard. “Here is where we are and here is Kologi.” He made two dots in the dirt. “And here between us, near this road junction, is a Sudan army garrison. Two days ago the lorries arrived there, three of them with the Land Rover. Day after tomorrow we will attack the garrison and take them.”

“Well, good luck is all I’ve got to say.”

“I’m leaving as little to luck as I can,” Michael said. “I’ve been training my men hard for a month. There will be more tomorrow afternoon. You’re welcome to observe.”

Dare clawed at a bite on his arm, hard enough to make it bleed. “It’s better than gettin’ bit.”

H
E RETURNED AT
dusk, tired and preoccupied, and the scene that played out afterward was a peculiar version of a domestic evening in some 1950s American suburb. The man of the house, after a hard day at work, hangs up a pistol belt instead of an overcoat, then sits down to a family dinner, with the ground in place of a table and wooden bowls of doura and bean cakes in place of meatloaf and potatoes on china. At the end, completing the picture, he gives his teenage daughter permission to go to a dance with her friends. The intermingling of the familiar with the strange, of the ordinary with the extraordinary, beguiled Quinette. She recalled something Ken Eismont had said on one of their journeys—that the human race was born in Africa, so to come to Africa was to experience a kind of homecoming. That didn’t square with what the Bible or Pastor Tom taught, but she was inclined, now, toward Ken’s point of view. It was as good an explanation as any for the weird connectedness she felt to her present surroundings. The tukuls, the snug enclosure of the courtyard, seemed more like home than home. Looking at Michael, his face highlighted by the paraffin lamp, at the ground ribbed with the marks of the girls’ twig brooms, and at the stars, like a million crystal rivets tacking a black velvet cloth to an immense cupola, she thought,
I could be happy here.