Acts of faith (72 page)

Dare had almost collapsed, stumbling for hours down a stony track in darkness, his arthritic knees crackling like an echo of the boots, rubber sandals, and plastic slippers crunching the gravel underfoot. Doug had provisioned himself with a canteen of filtered water. It was empty before the march was half through. The troops didn’t carry any water—apparently they didn’t need it.

Now, as Dare lay on a hilltop overlooking the garrison about a kilometer away, his thoughts, hopes, and desires had reduced themselves to one: water. Water in all its tastes and textures. The satiny water of a woodland pond, the icy water of a glacial lake, the crisp water of a mountain stream; tap water with its hint of chlorine, well water with its hint of iron. He pictured fountains, fishtanks, swimming pools, bottles of Evian racked in a convenience-store fridge.

Doug lay on one side of him, cradling the camera in his elbows; Michael was on his right, with Suleiman and the radio operator, his radio wired to a car battery he’d carried on his head the whole way. Four heavy machine guns guarded by a platoon of riflemen were arrayed along the rim of the hill. Mortar crews stood behind them, the tubes elevated on the bipods, the shells laid side by side. Crouched low, barely more than moving silhouettes in the gray light, the assault troops picked their way down the hillside toward the dry riverbed from which they would launch the attack. A couple of hundred yards beyond, across broken ground strewn with boulders and picketed by thorn trees, was the government garrison: brown tents and grass-roofed huts clustered near a stone building, all of it surrounded by a dirt berm, with a bunker at each corner and a wide break in one side. A road led away from the opening and out across the savannah. A look through Michael’s binoculars showed Dare a bulldozer, parked under a tree at the far end of the encampment. Beside it were the prizes—the Land Rover and three trucks.

He licked his parched lips, hoping for a swift victory—the garrison was bound to have a supply of water on hand. The radio crackled: Major Kasli reported that the assault force was in position. Michael called out, “Machine guns! Five hundred rounds each! Guns one and two, fire on the left bunker! Three and four, the right bunker! Mortars! Number one to fire smoke to mark the target! Two, three, four will fire for effect on my command!” The mortar squad leader gave the range and elevation to the first tube’s crew, and the loader stood, poised to drop the marking round into the barrel. “Blast away!” Michael shouted, then looked through his field glasses, the deep, measured
dum-dum-dum
of the 12.7-millimeter machine guns and the crack of the mortar, sharp and definite, shredding the morning’s peace.

With the target nearly a thousand yards away, the machine-gunners fired with more enthusiasm than accuracy. The bullets spattered into the berm and below it but nowhere near the corner bunkers. The mortar’s marking round, spurting white as surf, fell between the riverbed and the garrison. “One hundred meters more!” Michael stood and ranged up and ran down the firing line, whacking the machine-gunners with his stick. “The bunkers! Damn you! Concentrate your fire on the bunkers!” The next fusillade was closer to the mark, the bullets kicking up dust around the sandbagged emplacements, but the second marking round exploded amid the vehicles. Lucky it was smoke instead of high explosive, or the trucks that were the whole point of this exercise would have been wrecked. “Shorter! Shorter by fifty meters!” The tube cracked again. Twenty seconds later the shell burst on the tents. “You have it! All guns, three rounds each! Fire!” Dare plugged his ears against the reports of the eighty-two millimeters. The salvos blasted the tents flat. A hut’s grass roof caught fire. The garrison had been caught completely off guard. In the light of the risen sun, tiny figures could just be made out, running out of the tents and the stone building, from which a Sudanese flag flew, or rather hung—there was no wind. “Repeat fire for effect!” The projectiles made a dull, crunching sound that echoed across the clay plain below while Kasli’s men, advancing by rushes, dodged and darted among the trees and boulders.

Waving his walking stick, Michael might have been a director, choreographing a war movie. Doug was the cinematographer, now filming close-ups of the gun crews, now zooming on the attack below. His face shone. He was in hog heaven. Rocket-propelled grenades crashed into the bunkers, dirt and debris flying out from the blasts. Government troops had taken up positions on the berm and were firing down on the attacking SPLA. Several men dropped, but it was difficult to tell if they’d been hit or were taking cover. The twelve-sevens,
dum-dum-dum,
raked the berm. Under their covering fire, half the assault force made a frontal attack on the eastern side; the other half peeled off in a flanking maneuver to charge the south side. Puffs of smoke squirted out of the ground. Dare thought he saw a few men fall. The advancing troops wavered, stopped, then turned and fled behind some rocks. The radio crackled again. Kasli, in a voice registering strain and panic, reported that they’d run into minefields.

“Calm down!” Michael bellowed into the handset, none too calm himself. “I will clear a lane for you with the mortars. You must rush behind them!” He dropped the handset and looked at Dare with a weak smile. “Let us hope my boys are good enough.”

The defenders were trading sporadic bursts with Kasli’s men. The twelve-sevens poured plunging fire on them and once again swept them off the berm. A garrison mortar went into action—the shell crunched into the hillside, about a hundred yards down. A second struck half that distance closer. Shrapnel pinged overhead, a sound like piano wires snapping in two.

“Got us spotted, Doug, walkin’ it in, sixty-ones,” he said, as if identifying the caliber made a difference.

While Michael’s mortars ranged in on the minefield, the enemy’s (Dare had to think of them as the enemy because it was his war now because he needed water and the trucks captured intact because he needed to ride back because another march like this morning’s would kill him if he didn’t die of thirst before then) dropped a shell on the machine gun at the far end of the line. The weapon clattered down the hill, and someone screamed.

The shrieks cued Doug to live out some fantasy of combat heroism. He dropped the camera and started to run to the wounded man’s aid. Dare tackled him from behind, pinning him. “Dude, get off me!” Dare held him down. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, you goddamned idiot!” SPLA mortars fired, the shells exploding in a series of rapid
ka-rumps.
With Doug squirming under him, Dare raised his head and saw the bug-size specks that were Kasli’s troops sprinting into a pall of smoke. It enveloped them for a moment; then they reappeared, scrambling up the berm, with more men charging behind them, through the breach in the minefield opened by the barrage.

“Cease fire!” Michael called, and now the only sound, aside from the wounded man’s cries, was the distant stammer of semiautomatic rifles. The assault force was shooting into the defenders, caught within their own four walls. It had to be like shooting cattle in a pen, although Kasli’s troops had not blockaded the break in the embankment. They were leaving the militiamen a way out, not, Dare assumed, as a gallant courtesy but to make things easier on themselves. The trapped animal fights the hardest. Some government soldiers took to the escape route and fled down the road on foot. A few more followed in one of the trucks, and though they were supposed to capture it, Kasli’s men couldn’t resist the target the truck presented. An RPG burst under the vehicle, which tottered on two wheels, then rolled over onto its side, spilling its passengers. A second RPG slammed into its undercarriage, and the whole thing was engulfed in a ball of flame. A Hollywood volume of rifle fire, almost as seamless as the tearing of a large sheet of canvas, went on for a full minute, then fell off to scattered bursts, then to single shots, and finally the morning’s peace returned, no more affected by the frenzied noise than a pond by the ripples of a thrown rock.

Michael the Archangel surveyed the destruction with his binoculars. “Let us go and see what we have got,” he said, betraying no emotion.

Inside the garrison every sight, scent, and sound reminded Dare of some other war. The snap and smell of flaming thatch triggered memories of Laos and Vietnam. The corpse with the back of its head blown away and the pudding of brains quivering on the ground called to mind a Congolese rebel, head-shot in a fight over an airfield near the Rwandan border. The dead Sudanese soldier with his abdomen ripped open and his viscera coiling out like some sort of revolting toothpaste from a tube—he’d seen a Contra looking like that in Nicaragua.

“Our boys sure did make these ragheads sorry they joined the army, didn’t they?” he said to Doug. “Don’t forget to get some close-ups of these here bodies. Enemies of Jesus Christ, Handy said.”

Water. He left his partner to go in search of it. Stepping around and over corpses and through the wreckage of the tent camp, cots, blankets, and shredded canvas strewn everywhere, he came to the stone building—the garrison headquarters. Inside, fingers of sunlight pierced the bullet holes in the tin roof and fell on several riddled jerry cans, lying helter-skelter in a puddle. He was thinking about licking the water off the floor when he spotted an undamaged container, upright in a corner. A Sudanese officer slumped against the wall beside it, but he was beyond all need of a drink. The five-liter plastic can was about half full. If he believed in miracles, Dare would have called its survival a miracle. Hoisting it in both hands, he tipped it to his lips. The water was warm and flat-tasting, and he gulped until his gut swelled.

He lugged the can outside and offered it to Doug, busy filming SPLA troops harvesting enemy weapons and loading them onto the two remaining trucks.

“I don’t have any tablets,” Doug said, setting the camera down. “Do you?”

“Sure don’t.”

Doug shrugged and drank with greedy swallows, water dribbling down his chin. “Goddamn, that’s good.” He wiped his mouth and guzzled more. “It’s worth getting sick over.”

Someone fired a shot from across the compound. There was another, and a third. Kasli, with a few other men, was kicking bodies and shooting any that showed signs of life.

“Y’all should get some footage of that, don’t you think?”

“No need for that.”

“Yeah. Handy’s movie would get an R rating instead of PG-thirteen. ‘The following film contains scenes of extreme violence and is not suitable for children.’ Still and all”—he lifted the Sony off the ground and pointed it at Kasli and his cleanup crew—“I figure he’ll want some realism to put those contributors of his in a giving mood.” Dare focused on a khaki-clad militiaman with an arm blown off the shoulder. He was quite dead, but Kasli shot him in the head with a pistol anyway, and then one of his men bent down to pull off the dead man’s boots. “Yup, they’re gonna empty their wallets when they see this.”

“All right, Wes, that’s enough.” Douglas grabbed for the camera. Dare let him take it. “They can barely take care of their wounded, so how can you expect them to take care of the enemy’s? It’s better than leaving them here to suffer.”

“Kind of like a mercy killing?”

“Call it that if you want,”

“Mercy,” Dare said. “Mercy, mercy, mercy.”

M
ICHAEL
’
S THRILLING
,
ASTONISHING
declaration had left her in no fit condition for work. After she’d finished up with the two remaining meks, she attempted to make a census of the abducted persons from their villages and the others’, but she would count off only a few names before the words
“That is when I knew I loved you”
caused her to lose track. In her distraction, she wandered the mission grounds alone, asking herself how he could be so sure of his heart and if she loved him. She was learning that war has the same effect on human emotions as a gorge has on a placid river—it accelerates them. She was torn between a desire to be sensible and another to leap recklessly into the swift turbulence and surrender herself to its power.

She used an inflamed tick bite on her arm as an excuse to see Ulrika. Finding refuge from the sun under a tree, she waited until the nurse had seen to her patients. Then, stepping into the hut, hardly bigger than a storage closet, the shelves racked along all four walls making it appear smaller still, Quinette rolled up her sleeve, baring the welt above her wrist.

“You have had in your hands a chicken?”

Quinette nodded. Last night she’d helped Pearl pluck a chicken for dinner.

“
Ja.
These things come from the chickens. Whoever pulled out the tick left in the head and jaws. This is what causes the inflammation.”

Pushing off one foot, Ulrika rolled herself to the table under the window and removed a scalpel and forceps from a drawer. Taking Quinette’s arm in her thick strong hands, she daubed the bite with a cotton swab soaked in anesthetic. Then she sliced off a thin shred of skin, pulled out a black object the size of a pinhead with the forceps, squeezed ointment from a tube, and rubbed it in.

“I would give you this to take with you, but I have no more left. I have so little of everything. The child died, early this morning.”

“Child?” asked Quinette, buttoning her sleeve.

“The child with the diarrhea.” Ulrika’s eyes, of a pale unearthly blue, gazed at her steadily. “The mother’s milk, it no sooner goes in the mouth than out the other end it comes. The baby dies of the dehydration.”

Quinette detected an accusatory glint in the woman’s stare. No, her own imagination and her guilt had put it there; Ulrika couldn’t know.