Acts of faith (99 page)

There was the aftermath to deal with. The bombs had fallen just minutes after a relief flight had taken off. Women had been massed on the airstrip, breaking the shipment down into portable loads. No one knew how many there had been killed, and no one would know until each household took a census to discover who was missing. Only sixteen were found alive, some barely so, and the sole advantage to such a death toll was that it gave Manfred, Ulrika, and their aides a manageable number of casualties to care for. They needed help nonetheless. Cutting bandages, disinfecting wounds, her hands dipped in blood, Quinette relived the horrors of her first experience of war. She relived the grief and rage she’d felt over Lily Hanrahan’s death when she saw Nolli, her face covered with bleeding cavities resembling the pustules of smallpox. She recalled that Pearl’s cousin had not answered roll call at school that morning. The girl’s position in Ulrika’s triage, as well as her wounds, indicated that she wasn’t expected to live, an expectation she later fulfilled.

That night and into the next day, soldiers ranged through town, bursting into huts, overturning furniture, ripping up floor mats. They tore through the marketplace, knocking goods off shelves, jabbing poles into roofs. They searched the school, the shops, the mosque, the church. They questioned people, and none too gently.

Michael had been on the heights above the garrison, inspecting defensive positions, when the Antonovs came. Through his field glasses, he’d observed the bombing dispassionately, analytically, noting that three planes each made a single run, dropping their bombs with systematic accuracy: first on one end of the runway, then the center, then the opposite end. People on the ground had to be directing the pilots by radio, and that was what he’d ordered his troops to look for. He contacted his subcommands, instructing them to search for radios in their districts. The hunt went on for two days. A commander in the western Nuba reported in—a radio had been discovered and two men, Nuban Muslims, had been apprehended and summarily shot. Michael reprimanded the officer; the men should have been questioned first, then executed.

A calf betrayed Suleiman. The animal, stabled in a separate room in his tukul, got frightened when a search party entered and kicked over a straw bale. Under the bale was a hole in the floor, covered by a piece of wood, and in the hole were a high-frequency radio and an auto battery. Suleiman, however, was absent. His neighbors said he’d gone to his home village, Kologi, shortly after the air raid to visit his family. A detachment of soldiers was sent in a truck to arrest him and bring him back for interrogation.

“I should have guessed that he was involved,” Michael confided to Quinette at their evening meal. “Suleiman found those airstrips, he knew their exact locations. He must have made coordination with his conspirators with the radios. But how did he get them, how did he distribute them, and how many others are in this with him? Those are the questions I need answered.”

“And then there’s the why,” she said. “To turn on his own people this way—”

“You are being naÏve on purpose? You know.”

“You should have taken Kasli’s advice and not mine, is that what you’re going to say?” she asked, somewhat petulantly. “Who could have predicted he’d go this far? And all because a few people from his religion got converted to another religion? I don’t believe it.”

“Muslims think differently about religion than we do.”

“He must have had other reasons.”

“Possibly. All the same, I am going to have some conversations with your associates when this is settled.”

She wanted to turn this conversation to another, happier topic, but it wasn’t an appropriate moment. Besides, she needed a more positive sign than a missed period before she said anything.

She got it from Dr. Manfred the following noon, after school let out. In the cubbyhole that served as his office, he gave her a blood test—more accurate then a urine test, he said—and sent the sample to the cubbyhole that served as a lab. Half an hour later he said, “Congratulations!” and Ulrika hugged her. “So you see, you did not need those fertile pills.”

Encircled by her security detail, Quinette floated to the mission, where she was to conduct a women’s Bible study. The news lifted her out of the mixed anger and dejection she’d felt over Nolli’s death. Here was a new life to compensate for the one lost. A new life inside her, binding her own more firmly still to the lives of these people, to this place.

The class was assembled under a tree. Michael should be the first to hear, but she couldn’t restrain herself and, through the interpreter, told the women she was pregnant. She received a chorus of ululations. Even the grim watchdogs smiled. She opened to the tale of Sarah, miraculously conceiving in her old age, a story she thought fitting, although she was far from old. She had just gotten into it when a platoon of soldiers came running across the mission grounds, shouting in Nuban as they surrounded the church. Negev and another bodyguard seized her under her arms and, with the four remaining guards forming a cordon around her, brought her inside. Two men took up positions alongside the door, rifles ready to fire; two more stood at the windows, one on each side of the church, while Negev and his comrade all but dragged her up the aisle, as if she were a captive bride, and motioned for her to get down behind the altar, a mud-brick block. They flanked her, weapons slung to hang level from their shoulders, their fingers on the triggers.

“Negev! What is it?”

“Commander’s orders to protect you, missy. There is a big trouble.”

Not a minute later a burst of automatic rifle fire came from the direction of the garrison. Not a minute after that, Fancher and Handy were escorted into the church by more armed men and told to sit alongside Quinette, shielded by the altar. They had no idea what was happening, and beyond “There is a big trouble” Negev would not or could not say more.

Another round of shooting started, more intense and prolonged than the first—fusillades of gunshots interspersed with muffled explosions. “Those are RPGs,” Handy said. “It must be a ground attack. We need to pray.”

Which they did, Fancher calling upon the Lord to shelter them with His wings as the noise diminished, rose, diminished, and rose again, almost symphonic in its rhythms. They sat in anxious, helpless ignorance, listening to the battle’s ebb and flow. “Two hours they’ve been at it,” Fancher announced, with a look at his watch. “This is like being outside a football stadium during a game. You can hear the crowd but you don’t know who’s winning.” That was no football game out there, Quinette thought, terrified for Michael, for the microbe of life in her womb.

The shooting changed tempo, to isolated bursts, long sentences of silence punctuated by single shots. The angles of window light grew shallow, and the racket ceased. After ten minutes of quiet Fancher declared that it was over and stood up. A soldier near him pushed him back down. They waited, Quinette feeling like a defendant while the jury deliberated her fate. At dusk the doors burst open and she heard the voice she’d feared she might never hear again. She and the missionaries were at last allowed to come out of hiding. Accompanied by several officers, Michael strode up the aisle, his uniform splotched with mud, his complexion paled by dust. His expression was like none she’d seen before—his battle face, features immobile, bloodshot eyes almost demonic, like eyes caught by a camera’s flash.

“You are safe now,” he said in a voice from which all wrinkles of emotion had been ironed out. “We’ve made an end of it.”

“An end of what? An end of
what,
Michael?”

He seemed not to recognize her. Resting a hand on her shoulder, he stared at the floor, muttering, “An end of what.” Then, looking up, his gaze flitted between her and Fancher and Handy. “An uprising. We got most of them, killed or captured. Kasli escaped with fifty or sixty, possibly more.”

Abruptly, it got dark. A soldier lit an altar candle, so the church appeared to be illuminated for a vespers service.

“Kasli?” Quinette murmured.

“Suleiman was brought in this morning. Kasli knew he would confess, as he did, and so he was forced to make his move before he’d planned. A good thing. He didn’t have time to organize. If he did, we’d be fighting for days.”

“Are you saying, a coup?” Fancher asked, his face drawn by tension.

“Attempted,” Michael answered, and turned to Quinette. “Kasli was to be the assassin. Yours and mine.” He sat on the altar step, shoulders stooped from an exhaustion that was more than physical. “Suleiman confessed to most of it, and I have guessed the rest. My adjutant volunteered his services to the government when I sent him on that recruitment mission. Ha! What he did was to recruit men for himself. Through him, Khartoum smuggled the radios into the Nuba. They gave him his instructions. ‘First, assist us in destroying the airfields’—Kasli organized the entire thing!—’next, foment an uprising of Nuban Muslims against the SPLA. In this uprising, the commander and his foreign wife will be killed. You, Major Muhammad Kasli, will then take over, proclaim loyalty to the regime, and deliver the Nuba to us.’ He got Suleiman and the Muslim elders to join him. Two escaped with Kasli. We caught the other two.”

Quinette sat beside him. In the candlelight, they and the missionaries and the soldiers standing all around cast huge, grotesque shadows on the church walls.

“Those two and Suleiman will be shot tomorrow. It won’t be done in secrecy, oh no. I want everyone to see the consequences.”

There was a prolonged silence until Fancher cleared his throat and said in a low, measured tone, “I know you’ve been through a lot, but this is God’s house. It’s not the place to issue a death sentence.”

“Kasli intended to murder the both of you,” Michael said. “After my wife and me, you were next on the list.”

“We came here knowing the risks. We would ask you to show mercy.”

Michael rose, and although he stood a step below the missionary, he was able to look him in the face. “Why?”

“For its own sake. And because executing them could create more recruits for another Kasli. And because it would create resentment and make our work all the harder.”

“Your work,” Michael replied, “gave those men a reason to join Kasli, and I allowed you to give it to them. So you see, all of us here made this situation. But I see no cause for mercy. Go to the graves of the women who were killed at the airfield and ask if they would show mercy.”

With an exchange of glances, Fancher and Handy passed some message to each other.

“If you can’t commute the sentence, could you postpone it?” asked the younger man.

“For what purpose?”

“We’d like to talk to them. We’d like a chance to bring them to Christ. Maybe knowing they’re going to die will help them see the truth. Things like that have been known to happen. It’s a question of saving their souls from hell.”

Michael greeted this request with a look of amazement and a cold laugh. “My friends, that is precisely where I wish to send them.”

The missionaries turned to Quinette, silently imploring her intercession.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, casting her eyes toward her husband. He showed no reaction other than to blink and cock his head, as if he weren’t sure he had heard her right. These were far from the circumstances under which she’d hoped to tell him. “I found out only this afternoon, and if I had to shoot those men myself to protect my baby, I would do it.”

Both men blinked at the rawness of her statement. Or was it the illogic? For Fancher asked her meaning. How would postponing the sentence endanger her baby?

“I saw a young girl die three days ago, Nolli—” she began.

Fancher interrupted. “If you love God, Quinette, and his great commandment to love one another, you won’t argue with us.”

She felt as if the wires and pegs and cords holding her together had pulled out and come apart and were now reassembling themselves into some new configuration. And from this incomplete, unfamiliar form came an unfamiliar voice. “I do love Him, and I love Him by hating the people who hate Him. Ecclesiastes says there’s a time for hate. Well, now is the time for some healthy, holy hate. I saw Nolli die, now I want to see them die, sooner, not later.”

I
N A LIGHT
rain, the two elders went quietly. They said they were martyrs to their faith. One was the old man who had beaten his wife. That made it easier to watch. Suleiman was a different matter. It took five soldiers to drag that very tall man from the hut where he’d been held for the night. His hands were tied with rope and he screamed, now in Arabic, now in Nuban, now in English, screamed Allah’s name, screamed that his was the Islam of the heart. The place of execution was a field near the refugee camp. Three stout stakes had been driven into the ground. The townspeople were gathered in a semicircle around the field. Anyone watching from a distance would have thought it was a festival. The formality of blindfolds was dispensed with. Quinette stood in the front, alongside Michael, and fixed her gaze on the three men as they were bound to the stakes by ropes around their chests. Through a bullhorn, her husband announced that they had been found guilty of treason and sabotage. Then he nodded to the officer in charge of the firing squad. At command, the men leaned into their rifles and fired a short burst. The bodies jerked and twitched, then, heads flopping forward, slumped down the stakes, Suleiman to his knees, the other two into a squat, dark red carnations spreading across their jelibiyas. Floating free of her body, to some point in the air, Quinette could see the crowd, the dead men, Michael, and herself. Her face did not look familiar. She had become someone she did not recognize; yet she felt that she could get to know this stranger and make friends with her.