Acts of faith (54 page)

Mary was at first ecstatic with relief—as if she’d beaten cancer, she’d said—but after a time the reaction set in. She got to feeling guilty and remorseful, and through some kind of twisty feminine logic (an oxymoron if ever there was one, Dare thought) she decided that Dare was to blame for the whole sorry mess, as if he were a matinee idol who’d stolen her from the boy next door.

So here they were, lovers flying cargo together, like those boy-girl teams of long-haul truckers. The thermal lifted them into the anvil, where lightning flickered, then popped them out into the bright ultraviolet at twenty-eight-five, and there abandoned them. Dare nudged the throttles forward. They didn’t need much to maintain cruising speed in the slender air.

He raised Douglas on the radio and asked for a report about conditions at Zulu Three, the airstrip nearest to the SPLA’s Nuban headquarters and the town of New Tourom. Skies clear, light wind out of the southeast, visibility couldn’t be better. A heavy rain last night had rendered the first fifty meters of the runway unusable, but the remaining eight hundred were in good shape. A rare pleasure, having a reliable source of information on the ground. In most cases he had to rely on local rebel commanders for assessments of landing conditions, and they inevitably exaggerated. Runways were always at least a hundred meters longer in their sunny reports than in reality, visibility infinite; strong crosswinds never blew, nor was there ever any fighting within fifty miles.

“How’s the security situation?”

“No worries,” came Douglas’s disembodied voice. “The Archangel has men posted on all the high ground and around the landing field. Haven’t seen a sign of the bad guys since we got here.”

“They’re all bad guys, rafiki, it’s just that some are worse than others,” Dare replied, and signed off.

Doug and Fitz had been in the mountains the past three days, shuttling tribal dignitaries to the mission from far-flung villages and setting up the stage and sound equipment for their extravaganza like a couple of rock concert impresarios. A real promoter, Doug was. If he laid off the high-minded speeches, Dare might begin to like him, but Doug the crusader lived side by side with Doug the promoter. He and Knight Air were going to be the Nubans’ saviors. Lately Dare found himself looking at his partner and all the do-gooders in Loki not with his usual cynicism but with anthropological curiosity. They were almost a distinct subspecies, possessing an ability to breathe in, to thrive on, the molds and pollens of altruism that caused him to suffer severe allergic reactions. What made them the way they were? His best guess—and he knew it wasn’t good enough—was that for one reason or another they needed to be needed.

He pushed the yoke, plunged back into the thunderstorm, and after another wild ride found smooth flying above fleets of stratocumulus that appeared motionless, as if tethered to the mat of grass and trees below. Silvery watercourses threaded the plain, and solitary massifs rose from it. Westward, distance merged two mountain ranges into one, creating the impression of a continental coastline. Dare turned toward it, descending as he turned until he could make out the old British road that led to the town of Kauda, which was held by the SPLA. There the road ended in a junction with another, running south toward Talodi and north toward Heiban, which were in government hands, with army garrisons in both. He never liked coming into Zulu Three. The distance between it and the garrisons—never more than twenty miles in either direction—was much less than he cared for.

“Sometimes I think you and me ought to quit this,” he said, his glance flitting from the windshield to the instruments and back to the windshield, boxing the plain and the road and the blue mountains, drawing closer.

“And do what?” Mary asked, looking out the side window.

“I don’t know. Something else.”

She said nothing, squinting at something below. She reached behind her seat for the binoculars. “I’ll be damned. A whole herd of ostrich. Is that right? Herd? A gaggle of ostrich? A flock?”

“How about a covey?” Dare said. “And how about some feedback? One thing I can always count on from you is feedback.”

She put the binoculars down and sat primly erect, in a way that reminded him of a witness in a jury box. “I kind of like this work, y’know?”

“Wonderin’ all the time if you’re gonna get shot out of the sky or get mortared on the ground. You like that?”

“The work, I said. I like the work, and I like the money, and that other stuff goes with the territory. Got to take the shit with the sugar. I think we’re there, Dad.”

She jerked her head at the windshield to indicate Kauda, a cluster of tukuls and trees a few miles ahead and more than a mile below. Dare called for the flaps, and they came in on their base leg, swooping over rocky cornices and a bowl valley ringed by terraced hillsides. Dare spotted the airstrip, a long hashmark on the valley floor, and then white patches glinted through the camouflage netting thrown over Doug’s G1C, parked in a clearing at the edge of the runway, near a grove of palm trees. Just in case his partner had been mistaken about the absence of bad guys, he put the plane into a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, losing altitude at the same time so the Hawker dropped as if caught in a whirlpool. He reckoned the maneuver had his passengers reaching for their barf bags again.

Ten minutes later they were disembarking on wobbly legs into the cloying heat of a wet-season morning. A few looked ready to kiss the ground in gratitude. Two plus hours without a bathroom break sent a few more, that tall Bible-bouncer among them, scurrying for the bushes. They weren’t likely to find much privacy; the usual mob greeted the Hawker’s arrival. There were teenage rebels in ragged uniforms or in just plain rags, a few armed with spears, the rest with used and abused AK-47s. Men in shorts and ratty jelibiyas clambered into the dark, still-frigid cargo hold. Women porters, clad in flowered dresses or wrapped in
kangas
topped by T-shirts bearing the names of famous beers, American football teams, and Canadian hockey teams, streamed down from the ridge and swarmed across the runway to descend like flies on the cargo the men were tossing onto the ground: South African sugar and Egyptian powdered milk, pharmaceuticals, soap, plastic jerry cans, washbasins, and sorghum seed in sacks stamped
CANADA
or
USA
, boxes of pencils and school notebooks and one crate of Arabic-language Bibles. Four Nuban Land Rovers—camels—knelt down with flapping lips amid the boys with the guns and spears and the women and the listless, orange-haired children clinging to their mothers’ hips, tiny heads wobbling like the heads of puppets. Near Douglas’s plane stood a detachment of SPLA guerrillas who presented a sharp contrast to their tattered adolescent comrades. They wore canvas boots instead of flip-flops or sandals cut from truck tires. Their weapons were in top shape, their uniforms uniform, and they had the look and carriage of crack troops: veterans of the southern battlefields who now served as Michael Goraende’s bodyguard, although their job today would be to guard the tender bodies of the aid workers on the walk from the airstrip to New Tourom. It would be bad publicity for the cause if one or two of them were to get killed.

Douglas came up, his face sunburned, his jaw roughened by a three-day growth of sandy beard. “It’s coming off, almost can’t believe it myself.”

“Yeah. If somebody ever wants to restage Woodstock, I’ll give y’all a recommendation.” Dare motioned at the G1C. “Know what that looked like when we were comin’ in? Like a camouflaged airplane. You should get a few of these boys to stick some branches in that netting—that white fuselage shows up like bare tits in church.”

Douglas turned to look at the plane. “Why don’t you take care of that?” he asked in the harried voice of someone with more important things to do. “I’d better get everyone on the road. It’s a two-hour hike.”

Dare put the airfield sentries to work, and in about twenty minutes the plane was festooned with palm and acacia branches. By that time, the crowds had cleared out. A silence as oppressive as the heat fell over the airstrip. There was no sound except the wind, the rattle of palm leaves, and an occasional murmur from the pubescent sentries, lolling about in a manner that didn’t inspire confidence. One tore a page out of a pilfered Bible and used it as rolling paper for a cigarette, which Dare figured would do the kid more good than reading it would have done. Standing at the back of the airplane, cleaning his fingernails with the blade of his Leatherman, he watched the processional of aid workers, guards, porters, and laden camels winding up the ridge, around slabs of rock leaning like abandoned idols. Mary, who’d begun to add video footage to her photographic archives, was filming their departure with her new camcorder.

“Ever wonder where the hell they go with all that stuff?” he said. “I mean look at this place. Where is it? It’s nowhere. They pick it up in a nowhere place and take it to some other nowhere.”

“Is something bothering you, baby?” He loved it when she called him that. “You don’t seem quite yourself today.”

“Bothering me? I don’t know. Here’s what I’m thinking right now. As far as the people at Loki tower know, this airplane isn’t here. It’s three hundred miles away—I’m gettin’ right creative with those phony flight plans. And all that cargo those folks are carryin’ off from no place to no place, none of it was registered with Kenya customs. That midget Barrett pays the customs people off to avoid the duties. In so many words, we fly cargo that doesn’t officially exist on flights that don’t officially exist to places that don’t officially exist on anybody’s map. If you and me pranged up and got killed, nobody would know we were dead because we don’t officially exist. We’re phantoms, we’re the Flying Dutchman.”

She rubbed his arm up and down sweetly. “You’re thinking about flying those rock bands again, or the governor of Texas.”

“This kinda work, it doesn’t seem dignified for a man of my age and talents.”

“Love you, Wes, but I’m sticking with it. I’m not your age.”

“Stick with this, and you’ll catch up in no time.”

Q
UINETTE HAD NEVER FELT
as far from home and all things familiar as she did out here, and this feeling pleased her. Resting with the others atop a promontory, she looked back at the way they’d come, the stony track winding downhill past a baobab, across a valley where huge rocks leaned into one another to form arches and tunnels, then up the western side of the ridge whose opposite slope faced the airstrip, the track vanishing in the flame-yellow grass near the ridge-crest, beyond which a savannah flung itself toward a far-off range that appeared to be an extension of the thunderclouds hovering above it. The Nuban landscape was more pleasing to the eye than the monotonous flatlands farther south, but it was tougher on the body. The scree was treacherous, ankles turned on the rocky trails, and the heat was intense despite the altitude. Sweat popped from every pore in Quinette’s skin, blackening her shirt and cotton trousers. Her hair, when she passed her fingers through it, felt like a mat of seaweed.

“What in the bloody hell did we get ourselves into,” said Lily, her fair cheeks and forehead reddened. “The Devil himself would need a cold pint in this place, and it’s only ten!”

Quinette jerked her head at the girls who’d been roped into service to carry the aid workers’ and reporters’ rucksacks. They wore cloth circlets on their heads for bearing the loads. “Look at them. They’re not complaining.”

“They live here,” Lily said emphatically. “I’d like to see how well they’d make out in a good cold Irish rain.”

Quinette was grateful for the many long treks she’d made with Ken, and for her regimen of walking and biking every day in Loki. Weakened though she was by her illness, she was in much better shape than her companions, sprawled out as if they were on a death march—except for the indefatigable Phyllis, taking notes, and two fit men who hadn’t allowed the porters to carry their packs and now stood with the packs on their backs as if to show off their physical superiority. One middle-aged, the other maybe thirty, both quiet and aloof, they were from California and belonged to the Friends of the Frontline.

“Everybody got their second wind?” Douglas Braithwaite called out, sounding as chipper as a scoutmaster on a hike. Lily was a little gaga over him and flirted with him, holding out her arm and asking him to help her to her feet. “Not much further,” he said, all white-bread handsome and smiling and barely a blot of sweat on his shirt. “Twenty minutes, half an hour at the outside.”

Single file, flanked by their SPLA escorts, the delegation of relief workers and correspondents trooped down from the promontory and made their way into New Tourom. The town lay on a plateau beneath bare crags and pinnacles resembling a fortress wall. Young women squatted in little gardens, pulling weeds, or went at the brute hard labor of pounding millet, mashing groundnuts on grindstones. A listless, melancholy air hung over the place. New Tourom had obviously once supported a much larger population. All around, crumbling tukuls stood amid farm fields and fruit orchards whose neat, domesticated ranks had been invaded by weeds and brambles. In the middle of town was the biggest church Quinette had so far seen in Sudan. Its tall windows had been blown out and gaped tragically in its brick walls, its domed tin roof was partly collapsed and full of holes. Among the outbuildings, one was undergoing repairs, but the others were wrecks: a long bungalow that looked as if it had been peppered from the blast of a giant shotgun; roofless, fire-blackened huts facing a dirt lane, two obliterated structures, nothing left but a few fragments of wall attached to cement-slab floors partly buried under shattered beams and chunks of concrete.