Acts of faith (73 page)

“Would you have saved him if you had more medicine?”

“Possibly.”

The indefinite answer left Quinette unsure about her culpability.

“This is certain—if I am not soon resupplied, some other child will die,” Ulrika said.

“As soon as Wes and Doug get back, I’m going to let them know how desperate you are,” Quinette promised, figuring that this intention—the intention alone—would propitiate her conscience. “I’ll tell them to make sure there’s plenty on the next flight in. Give me a list of what you need and I’ll see to it myself that you get it.”

“What do you mean, when Wesley and Douglas get back? Where have they gone?”

“With Michael. On the operation. They went with Michael.”

This was a good moment to change the subject, but she didn’t know how to begin, nor even if she should begin. Wouldn’t she be betraying Michael’s confidence?

Ulrika looked at her quizzically. “There is something else I can help you with?”

“Could I talk to you? It’s not a medical problem. It’s about Michael.”

“What about him?”

She was silent. With a scooping movement, the nurse prodded her to speak.

“Last night he—” Quinette laughed and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Could you keep this to yourself?”

“If I knew what, I would.”

“He told me that he was in love with me.”

“This is not a surprise,” Ulrika said without hesitation. “He speaks about you a great deal. And?”

“I guess I had to talk to someone about it, another woman.”

“Because you don’t know if with him you are in love.”

Quinette said nothing.

“If you don’t know, that means you aren’t.”

Count on Ulrika to be blunt, even brutal, Quinette thought. “It isn’t that, it’s—”

“It is this? If you do love him, you are afraid of what could come of it.”

“Exactly. And I don’t like to think of myself as being afraid of anything.”

“You would be a fool if you were not afraid.” Ulrika patted her arm. “For this I have remedy, for that none. You must look to yourself for the remedy.”

D
ARE HAD FALLEN
asleep—passed out was more like it—his chin to his chest, head flopping side to side with the rocking motion of the truck. A jolt knocked his skull against the window frame and woke him. From the rear came the groan of a wounded man, one of several piled up like bloody sacks.

“Sorry about that,” Douglas said.

“Talkin’ to me or him?” Dare jerked his thumb at the back window.

Doug glanced at the odometer. A wonder he could read it, with the talcum-thick dust blowing through the windows. “At this rate, we’ll make the last of it around moonrise.”

They were in a dry riverbed, all six of the Russian army truck’s wheels seeking purchase in the sand. In planning the operation, Michael had neglected to find out which of his men knew how to drive. It turned out none could, with the exception of Suleiman, Major Kasli, and Michael himself. Considering that the object had been to capture motor vehicles, Dare thought that a right strange oversight, but it did save him from leaving the comfort of his prejudices. Michael’s diligent planning and efficient execution of the attack had almost forced him to change his opinions about Africans; now he didn’t have to. No Vietnamese officer would have overlooked such a critical detail, hell no Arab, Honduran, or Nicaraguan would have. It was a very African thing to do.

So Michael had to take the wheel of one truck, with his second in command riding shotgun. Douglas and Dare took the other, and Suleiman, the ex-heavy-equipment operator for the Ministry of Aviation, drove the Land Rover. It was leading the column. Michael’s truck followed, carrying the captured weapons and the dead (he’d lost seven men), then Dare’s and Douglas’s with the seriously wounded. The riverbed made a natural road, and the trees galleried along its banks helped to mask the convoy’s movement from the air. It couldn’t go much faster than a walking pace, so the troops tramping behind and alongside had no trouble keeping up.

“Let me know when you want me to spell you,” Dare said, a sour taste in his mouth.

“Doing fine. Good to go all day. This has been an incredible experience.”

“That’s what you call it? An experience?”

His partner’s face seemed to glow beneath the film of dust. “Seeing the difference we’ve made in action. Two, three months ago these guys couldn’t have pulled off what they did today.”

“Gives you that nice warm feeling, and the best part is, this experience ain’t over yet.”

They drove on, the riverbed narrowing as it rose toward its source in the mountains, wavering insubstantially in the heat shimmer, like an illusion of mountains. Half a mile farther on, the banks became miniature cliffs the height of the trucks’ roofs, with not much more than a yard’s space on either side. Suleiman stopped and climbed out of the Land Rover.

“We cannot go more this way. No room to pass. We must back up.”

They did, and after Suleiman found a way up the bank, they proceeded along the river, weaving through the corridor of trees, until a steep-sided gully twenty feet deep blocked their path. Suleiman turned a hard right and followed the gully out into the rolling, open grasslands. He stuck out his hand, signaling for a halt, then got out again to range ahead on foot, looking for a way across.

“This keeps up,” Dare grumbled, “it won’t be moonrise, it’ll be sunrise tomorrow.”

Then he saw Suleiman running toward them, waving his long arms. “Heel-o-coptar!”

Dare flung his door open, leaped out, and cowered in the riverbed, Doug beside him with the video camera. All around, men were jumping in, taking up firing positions. The helicopter came on with a throaty growl, following the course of the river. Dare reckoned he had a good idea what it feels like to be a field mouse when a hawk shows up in the neighborhood. From somewhere up ahead Michael and Kasli yelled to the men to hold their fire until they got the order. Suleiman, sprawled flat under the opposite bank, was praying out loud—
Bismillah ar-rahman, ar-rahim
—and Doug lay on his back, the camera aimed toward the sky. Dare tore off his baseball cap and clapped it over the lens. “That thing will flash like a mirror, you goddamned—” He didn’t get a chance to say what kind of a goddamned thing he was. The chopper passed directly overhead, its shadow broken by the trees: an old Soviet MI-24, the gunship that had raised holy hell in Afghanistan, a flying tank. It was five hundred feet above, drifting, almost hovering, its armored underside like the breast of some pterodactyl, bombs and rocket pods racked under its stubby wings, minigun barrels protruding from the nose. Quite a package. Suleiman’s prayers grew frenzied, a garble of pleas in which Dare could distinguish only one word,
Allah.
The trucks and men remained hidden in the gallery forest, but the Land Rover was parked in the open. The chopper crew had to see it. Then some fool, tempted beyond endurance by the low, slow-flying gunship, opened fire. That gave everyone else the go-ahead, rifles and machine guns ripping through the trees, sending down flurries of shredded leaves. Stung but otherwise unhurt by the swarm of bullets, the helicopter swooped away. Kasli screamed at the soldier who’d shot first, smacked him in the face with his pistol, and kicked him, his lesson in military discipline cut short by the gunship, which looped around and let loose with its miniguns, firing so quickly—four thousand rounds a minute—that the three-second burst made a noise like a millsaw cutting a log. There was a loud
whump
as the Land Rover’s fuel tank burst. Michael’s troops were firing without restraint. Now a thousand feet up, the chopper wobbled—it had taken a solid hit—and flew off again.

Two men, one with a SAM-7, another with a spare launch tube and missile strapped to his back, sprinted into the open—the trees must have prevented them from taking their shot. Rising to a crouch, Dare peered over the bank. Ten yards in front of him the men lay, the SAM’s launcher resting on a flat boulder. Flames engulfed the Land Rover; smoke funneled upward, a perfect aiming point for the gunship. And if it didn’t serve, the missile-gunner’s outfit would: He was one of the army’s cross-dressers, garbed in a pink housedress.

A mile to two miles out, the MI-24 orbited the savannah. The last burst of ground fire had given the crew something to think about before trying another strafing run. The chopper finished its circle, started another. The missile-gunner got up, his outfit standing out amid the duns and greens, shouldered the launcher, and lined up the fore and rear sights but held his fire.

“Well shoot, for Christ’s sake!” Dare shouted. The trucks had survived the first strafing; they wouldn’t survive the next one. “They’re in range! Shoot!”

Doug said, “What the hell’s wrong?”

“The guy’s dressed like a girl for one, and for another, he was carrying a spear two months ago, that’s what. There’s a two-stage trigger on a SAM. Pull it back once, a green light tells you you’re locked on, the second pull fires the booster. Somebody must have put that thing in his hands with a set of instructions he couldn’t read.”

The gunship banked and came on, nose canted slightly downward, rotors flashing in the sun. Now everyone was yelling in Nuban and English—“Shoot! Shoot!” Doug bounded out of the riverbed, snatched the launcher from the gunner’s hands, shouldered it, and aimed. There was a brief pause; then he fired. The booster rocket flamed and fell; the warhead rocket ignited. A red ball streaked on a trajectory parallel to the gunship’s flight path before the warhead sensed the heat from the engine and curved toward it. The pilot saw the missile. Dare knew he did because he deployed decoy flares. As they hung in the sky like incandescent carnations, the pilot pulled into a turn and roll to throw the missile off course, but the infrared sensors would not be seduced, either by the flares or by the maneuver. The warhead rammed into the jet engine’s exhaust. Dare felt the blast, a punch of wind. The main rotor blew off, twirling away as debris flew in all directions and the fuselage flipped over and crashed upside down, the bombs erupting, the miniguns’ rounds cooking off in the inferno. Everyone lay flat in the riverbed as a maelstrom of shrapnel cracked through the trees above.

When it was over, Michael’s soldiers jumped up and fired celebratory shots into the air. They whooped and cheered. They poured out of the riverbed and mobbed Douglas, chanting his name, “Dug-lass! Dug-lass!”

He was breathing hard, and when he turned to Dare, his eyes had a weird glitter.

“Payback, Wes,” he said.

“And payback is a bitch,” Dare said. “Who taught you to shoot a SAM?”

“You did.”

“You’re a quick study, Dougie my boy.”

Michael elbowed through the crowd, clasped Doug’s hand, then pulled his arms overhead and turned him in a circle, calling out, “Douglas
Negarra
!” The troops echoed, “Dug-lass
Negarra
!” and hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him around. Even now Doug maintained his air of self-assured serenity, as if this adulation were his birthright. “Dug-lass
Negarra
!”

“Negarra,”
said Michael, “is like brother but more than brother. When a man is your negarra, it means you will lay down your life for him.”

“Him, too!” Doug hollered from his perch, pointing at Dare. “He told me how to shoot it!” He broke out laughing. “Taught me all I know!”

So Michael raised Dare’s arms and conferred the title on him. The soldiers lifted him up. His bulk proved more challenging, but they managed it. He felt a little silly, bouncing like a kid riding on Dad’s shoulders, a mass of dark, ecstatic faces beneath him, a forest of arms, pumping their rifles up and down in time to the chants. “Dug-lass
Negarra
! Wes-lee
Negarra
!”

“Our war, dude! Like it or not, it’s ours.”

“Till I’m gone,” Dare said. “Then it’s all yours.”

The soldiers carrying him changed direction, so he faced the wreckage of the helicopter, its blackened hulk showing through a wall of flames. The smoke joined the plume from the still-burning Land Rover to form a flat cloud dark as a crow’s wing and dense enough to cast a shadow over the charred corpses of the crew, the trees, the riverbed, the triumphant men.

S
HE FOLLOWED
U
LRIKA
’
S
advice, and looked to herself but could find no answer there. Returning to her tukul, she forced herself to concentrate on her work, roughing out in her notebook a report she would submit to Ken. It took up most of the day, and when dusk fell without Michael’s return, she was filled with worry, and more than worry—a creeping dread that emboldened her to go his headquarters and ask a radio operator if he’d gotten any news. An officer told her to leave—an operation was in progress and she was not permitted inside.

“I only want to know if Michael’s all right,” she said.

“The operation is going well,” he replied. “Please to go, missy.”

She went back and pressed Pearl if she’d learned anything. Pearl assured her that her father would return.

“You’ve heard then? He wasn’t hurt?”

“My father always comes back,” she said, and gave her a long, penetrating look of uncertain meaning.