The American insurrection in Darfur, Sudan

American mercenaries annex a portion of Darfur, Sudan
Although “Revolt of the Sergeants, An American Insurgency in Sudan” has been out of print for many years, the book, dealing as it does with Darfur, the janjaweed, American mercenaries, famine, war, and misrule, still seems pertinent, and the institute puts it up for that reason.


Copyright 1979, 1985, 2008

Questions to “philgarlington@yahoo.com”


Revolt of the Sergeants
An American Insurgency in Sudan
By Dexter Deitz
With a foreword by Lt. Col. Gatling Fellows (USA-Ret)







Other books by the same author:

Pensees on Turning Sixteen
A glance backward

The Big Lemming Parade
Conformity in a Conventional World

Rat’s Guide to the Sinking Ship
It’s Way Too Late

Spirt of the Bayonet
Drill Instructor: “What is the spirit of the bayonet?”
Recruits (in unison): “Kill.”
Drill Instructor: Ah-cahnt-hee-er-yew. What…is the spirit of the bayonet?”


Diet of Worms
Confronting the Food Nazis






Praise for Revolt of the Sergeants


“The Whizzer of the book obviously is none other than the certified world traveler Barry Demolay, known to all on the sub-Saharan hippie trail for his ingenuity in finding a bed and meal for nothing. I remember coming across him recovering from a bad bout of malaria and a superficial bullet wound at the Magadi Black Bear hostel in Nairobi, I would guess very shortly after the events related. A few weeks later I caught a glimpse of him boarding a mammy wagon on Kuna Street, and looking fit except for a slight limp. So I can report that he escaped the plateau.”

Jess Dickson
Mombassa Telegraph


“Hurtle to the point! Hurtle to the point! The amazing deal here is that half a dozen white ex-Army lifer non-coms managed to take over an entire province of Sudan. That’s the story! We don’t need all this long-winded crap about some mindless floozy or some dickhead language professor. Get to the point!

MSgt. Edward Keen
Fort Bliss, TX


“Revolt of the Sergeants is a story that nobody needs to know about, and it’s too bad it had to be published. A lot of us are still around who remember the real ‘Mac’ and went to some of the meetings of the old Sergeants’ Book Club at Fort Benning. Some of the other guys who went to the so-called Jebba are still kicking, and this book may well relight some of the bad feelings, particularly in Khartoum. They probably still would like to get their mitts on the Americans who chased the government out of Darfur.”

MSgt. Harvey Cotton, (USA-Ret.)
San Angelo, TX


“Many of the ex-pats here refuse to believe that the sergeants didn’t have some ulterior motive for their usurpation in Darfur. As one of the few former members of the delegation who ever got to visit Rembec (as a guest of missionaries) I can tell you, there ain’t nothin’ worth having. The people are dirt-poor, diseased, and constantly involved in bloody squabbles. The land is barren, waterless, and without resources. I think it’s true that whatever the sergeants were doing there basically was a test to see if their severe methods could bring about some kind of order.”

Patrick Duncan Fife
US Foreign Service, Ret.
Nairobi, Kenya



“The sergeants are revolting.”

John Hurst
Los Angeles Times






Editor’s Preface

“Revolt of the Sergeants: An American Insurgency in Sudan,” as the blowzy title may suggest, is a roman a clef based on an amateurish and ill-fated paramilitary scheme carried out in the impoverished Darfur region of Sudan in the spring of (date deleted). In a word, five retired US Army soldiers, animated by quixotic fantasy and in my view by overt pathology, entered southwestern Sudan in stolen aircraft and routed the ragtag government garrison from the provincial capital of Rembec. Sharking up a militia, they became for a few months the de facto government of the province, repelling government counterattacks and briefly curbing some of the endemic banditry. Inevitably and quickly, their unsupported insurrection collapsed and the province returned to its usual misrule.

Apparently these balding ex-rankers were not soldiers of fortune. There is no fortune in Darfur, which then and now is an arid, isolated, disease-ridden, economically prostrate running sore of misery. The superannuated quintet had not been hired, nor did they expect to find compensation for their risky enterprise. The Americans financed their low-budget rebellion solely through the sale of captured weapons. Consistently describing themselves (satirically, one hopes) as “students,” they claimed they were merely undertaking “an experiment” that looked into methods for stabilizing anarchistic societies. The charismatic leader (the “McDonald” of the book), alleges the sole motive for annexing a remote and forbidding African basket case, at gunpoint and at great trouble, was to test “management ideas” discussed earlier at a book club meeting at Fort Benning, Georgia. One’s eyebrow must rise. At the same time, no other motive is apparent.

According to this account, the sergeants briefly achieved a measure of security in lawless Darfur, and altruistically provided some basic services. But if by their own lights they were not self-interested mercenaries, neither were they missionaries. Their methods as described here were Draconian and sadistic.

When the publisher broached the idea of my editing this book I initially demurred. I had spoken against the purchase of the manuscript. In my view the work has many elements that are repugnant. A leitmotiv of sadism and misogyny runs through it. Most of the characters, even in part the main narrator (the medic Doc), are unredeemed by compassion or morality. The events described are paltry, and occur in a venue of no significance. While others saw noir humor, I did not. One of the characters (Basir Nasr) is in my opinion one of the most repellent creatures ever to ooze across the written page. Throughout, the writing frequently descends to vulgarity. Much of what we see is ugly. The book’s stance, if that is the word, is one of total cynicism. One watches many manuscripts drop over the transom. Most, as most biological species, are slated for quick oblivion. This one seemed to me an excellent candidate for Darwinian suppression.

Others prevailed. Had I been given a choice, I would have begun by excising several chapters, particularly the appalling final one. My mandate, however, has been simply to clarify through reorganization. I have taken several steps that may appear drastic. In the original manuscript, the story begins with a physical overview of prostrate Darfur (called the “Jebel Marra” here). I have chosen to start instead on a lighter note, with the book’s one humane chapter, a description of McDonald’s boyhood in Arkansas. The enigmatic McDonald, who launches this strange enterprise, remains opaque, and only this allusion to his origins offers any insight into the springs of his character.

Also rather boldly, I have moved the foreword from Col. Fellows to the middle of the book, where it sits immediately prior to the events it helps elucidate. Several other chapters have been shuffled in a way I hope will make the story a little more lucid.

One might ask, as I did, why this is presented as quasi-fiction. Many of the actors still live, I am told, and might be subject to prosecution or reprisal. Thus, the retiring author doesn’t wish to mention names. Apparently other practical reasons preclude a direct telling. In any case, I have done what I can with this, given my charge, and hope my assistance will help the book reach whatever audience there is for it.

Celia Sharp
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Sayeth the Preacher Press

(Publisher’s note: Ms. Sharp has been overruled; the manuscript stands as written, with the exception of the placing of Col. Gatling Fellows’ foreword.)




Chapter 1

The Jebel Marra plateau in southwestern Sudan doesn't get many visitors. A US State Department advisory in effect for two decades cites the civil war as a disincentive to travel. In any season banditry and clan strife are normal on the plateau. Even absent the chronic turmoil, the rigors of the terrain and a pestilential climate would limit the Jebel only to the most nonchalant wanderer.
East of the plateau stretches parched savanna, a shimmering road-less Sahel of stunted acacia trees. It escapes being classified as desert on a technicality: the annual three or four inches of rain, which falls all at once during the September monsoon. For eleven months the wasteland east of the plateau presents nothing but burning rock and a parched throat to the presumptuous nomad who lacks tribal connections. The few known seeps are guarded by reed-slim gunmen in caftans. To a kinsman, they grudgingly dole out a liter of living green fluid in gourds or a goatskin bag. Strangers are never welcome.
This arid savanna, sparsely populated by the cattle-raising Dinka, the Fau, the ferocious Nuer, is hemmed on the north by the Sudd, a vast, weed-choked bog through which the White Nile meanders between ill-defined banks. Inside the Sudd’s malarial embrace it is impossible to leave the main course of the river except on flimsy reed boats, shaped like saucers, that, when poled by expert Murrini, can skim like beetles over the undulating wet mass of water hyacinth. For such a passage the native traveler must encase himself in a crust of mud, to thwart the fog of mosquitoes that envelop any warm-blooded creature like a living mantle.
Descending from the plateau's western escarpment is true desert. The westering monsoon has been squeezed dry, and the scorching breath of the hatmatta, blowing off the Red Sea, brings no relief to an empty waste. Here rise the rounded volcanic plugs of the Jebel Marra Mountains, the highest ground in the Sudan. No pass divides the range, whose slopes are indented by steep ravines choked with jumbled rock.
This mountain chain forms a sort of boundary with two other benighted states, Chad and the Central African Republic, although the actual frontiers have never been surveyed. Lawlessness and violence have always prevailed here. Renegade Arabs, the janjaweed, surviving in the infertile heights on goat milk and the slave trade, raid against the more settled Nilotic tribes. In the foothills, roving gangs of bandits, often mutineers or the residue of defeated tribal armies, plunder any foolish wayfarer with impunity.
Across the hypothetical border, in the capitals of N'djamena and Bangui, a semblance of order is enforced by the presence of several battalions of French Legionnaires. But the desert country west of the plateau has never known anything but anarchy.
To the south of the plateau lie the forested plains of Zaire. Once a free and easy commerce flowed between Oguooma and the principal southern Sudanese city of Juba. Traders pushed their bicycles laden with cheap radios, flashlight batteries and khat across a porous border.
But beginning with the rise of the maniacal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, a long night of terror settled over the south. The border with Zaire closed. Sudanese traders who ventured south of Juba were murdered or robbed. Even with Amin deposed, the borders remained sealed, since none of the succeeding local chieftains wielded sufficient power to quell the violence raging among competing files of teenage thugs.
To add one more disincentive to Zairian travel, another killer reappeared. Tsetse fly, temporarily controlled during British rule in Uganda, took advantage of the chaos to reemerge. Once again trypanosomiasis began depopulating the villages skirting the southern forests.
Thus, fenced about by mountain, desert, swamp, pestilence and amok bandits, the Jebel Marra plateau remains sealed to the world.
This cannot be completely true. A competent pilot at the controls of a reliable machine could reach the plateau in a day's flight from the Kenyan border. No established airfield exists on the plateau, and gasoline is scarce. It is illegal to enter Sudan this way. Then again, much of the land atop the plateau is flat. Gasoline can be found for a price. No troops patrol the frontier.
An attempt to reach the Jebel plateau overland would be dangerous and very arduous. The traveler would have to reach Juba somehow, even though this ancient city is garrisoned by fanatical, ill-disciplined mujhadeen on permanent jihad. These ill-sorted levies, in turn, are surrounded by roving files of khat-intoxicated rebels, who have learned to treat travelers as their commissary. If successful in reaching Juba, the would-be visitor to the Jebel would have to join one of the bicycle caravans sent out periodically by the city's Chinese merchants. The traders push sturdy Chinese-made bicycles, draped with wicker baskets, across 200 miles of bush. Following waddies and climbing knobs, the clunky, heavily-laden bicycles slowly wend from one village to the next, dispensing flashlight batteries, needles, lamp wicks, candy, aspirin, knives and Japanese radios.
Sometimes, if a rebel column finds them, or if the janjaweed are raiding, the Juba merchants lose everything. Other times the caravan guards, armed with antique Enfields, manage to beat off an attack. Then the Chinese bicycles roll through Bat and Al Ovan and Kash and a dozen other squalid settlements of mud huts along the rim of the plateau.
Travel to the Jebel Marra is difficult. Few wish to go. The climate is unpleasant. Although a thousand feet above sea level, the equatorial plateau is an inferno during the ten-month summer. Afternoon temperatures can reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Drought and famine are normal. Disease is epidemic, varied, and horrific. Medical facilities hardly exist.
Once there had been a doctor at the Rembec Christian mission on the plateau. But he had been murdered many months before.



Chapter 2

Returning to the Rembec mission late in the afternoon Brevold had tumbled into his cot exhausted. That morning a highland Dinka had come in, a herdsman from one of the outlying camps. The nomad was tall, emaciated, jet-black. Like all of them, he wore mission castoffs: a green pair of swim trunks and a bright red tee shirt with the Nike logo. Cocked on his head was a brightly beaded taboosh. An assegi and a bundle of toy-like spears were slung across his shoulder. He had come from Government Well Five. It was the usual story. A child was sick and the Dinka wanted the white doctor.
Brevold had explained. The doctor was dead. The nearest medical help was in Wau, a hundred miles to the north. Brevold knew it was vain. The herdsman squatted on his heels and smiled serenely. Imauy. The nomad pointed his finger. You. You must come.
Already the word was spreading in the bush. Following the murder of Dr. Reisenflaus, Brevold had been seen working in the clinic. It didn’t matter that Brevold had no medical training, that he was merely a mechanic temporarily assigned by the synod to repair water pumps and gasoline engines. He had been seen setting bones and taking temperatures, re-hydrating babies and probing bullet wounds. It didn’t matter what he said. He was d’maa dacta. The white doctor.
From what the Dinka had been saying, in the clicking hill dialect that Bevold still had trouble understanding, the child back at Well Five already had lapsed into a coma. It was his throat. The Dinka man pulled at the folds of skin on his neck and gasped loudly.
Wearily, sickened by the hopelessness of it, Brevold had followed the man five miles on a narrow trail through the scrubby, goat-bitten thorn trees to the old well sunk by Chinese engineers back in the Socialist days. The well had silted in from neglect. But the Dinka, by assiduous priming and tinkering, managed to coax a trickle from the iron pipe that emerged from the concrete sump cover. The trickle was just enough to water several hundred cattle and a patch or two of yams and scraggly tobacco.
From a mile away Brevold could pick out the camp. A pall of yellow smoke drifted over the huts and brush corrals from smoldering dung fires, lit to temper the attacks of mosquitoes and biting flies. The narrow track took them through a small copse of Doleib palms and baboob trees, planted by enthusiastic troops of Solidarity Cadre in the Socialist heyday. Ruefully, Brevold saw that all the trees were dying, the bark gnawed away by goats. For the nomadic Dinka, the cattle herds, if kept in check, were their staff of life. The goats were unalloyed evil.
In the encampment Brevold saw that the families had set up the usual flimsy huts, a skeleton of twigs and branches covered over with cow hides and motley of rags from the mission rag bag. Some calves, still too young to make the trek to grass, were tethered near the fires, watched over by prepubescent boys with fly whisks. Women, thin-armed, with drooping dugs, bent in the scant shade of the huts, grinding the daily manioc. Brevold noticed to his dismay that many of the women were coughing, spitting the collected phlegm into the stone mortars. Tuberculosis already had turned up at the clinic among the lowland refugees. It wouldn’t be long before it swept through the hill tribes.
Brevold followed the man into a hut and saluted his wife, who was squatting over a small bundle of rags. The woman, still young, wore the usual copper bracelets. The usual pounded copper saucers dangled from her ear lobes. She gazed at the bundle of rags with a stoic mask but her body slumped in despair.
Peeling away a strip of rag, Brevold could see the child was unconscious. The tiny creature didn’t seem to be breathing at all. But fingering the tiny wrist he detected a faint pulse. The delineation of the child’s neck had disappeared under a collar of spongy flesh. It was nothing unusual. A typical viral respiratory infection gone amok because of malnutrition and an immune system compromised by malaria. It was hopeless. Thousands of kids were dying like this all over the Jebel Marra plateau. It was the drought. There was nothing he could do about it.
The parents had squatted on their heels and were waiting patiently. Brevold opened the canvas bag, the legacy of the late Dr. Reisenflaus, and rummaged through the contents. He had the doctor's instrument case, a bottle of carbolic, a few sutures. Of course he hadn’t any anesthesia, no antibiotics, not even an aspirin. There hadn’t been anything like that in Rembec for months. It was hopeless. The infant was gong to slowly strangle from the edema. The only chance would be a tracheotomy to open the windpipe, then a prayer that the kid had enough fight left to throw off the inevitable infections.
Brevold knew it would be better to let the baby die. He should say to the parents, “It’s in God’s hands now.” But the parents, rocking on their heels, watched his every move intently, expectantly, for the miracle that would come out of the cheap canvas bag. What did God want of him? Brevold used to think he knew what God wanted of him. He didn’t know anymore. The chance of a successful operation in this filth, with no antibiotic, no anesthesia, approached the vanishing point. Yet, in truth, he had seen among these people amazing recoveries. It was wrong to underestimate the toughness and resiliency of these hill tribesmen. Perhaps it was no accident that he was here now. Perhaps God wished him to try everything to preserve this human life.
Brevold had decided to open the trachea. Two other Dinka men came in to help the father hold the child while Brevold cut into the swollen throat. Suddenly the infant’s eyes shot open, the mouth yawned in a silent scream, revealing an engorged mass of red tissue. Pus squirted everywhere, all over Brevold’s shirt, and he had to twist to avoid getting fluid in his eyes.
The child was gasping, breathing again, through the hole in his windpipe, making strangling noises as he choked on the pus and blood. Fully conscious now, the child began a horrible gagging kind of screaming, writhing under the hard hands of the Dinka men. Brevold then had crudely cauterized the incision with a heavy needle turned red hot with the flame of a butane cigarette lighter. He had no tubing of course. At least he knew the Dinka words for “bird” and “bone.” He had cut a two inch quill, dipped it in carbolic, and then pushed it into the incision. Maybe the hollow bone would keep the incision open. The father would have to bind the child’s hands and take turns with the other men holding him. But Brevold knew it was hopeless.
In the darkness of his shuttered room Brevold twisted on his narrow cot, leaden with fatigue but wide awake. He had no business doing this. He had never even taken a first aid course. This had all been forced on him, when Obo’s men had killed Dr. Reisenflaus, and he had been abandoned here by the mission. Every bed at the mission clinic had been filled with victims of the drought. There was no one else. He had looked at the books in the cabinet, he had tried to learn. The boy would soon die, that was certain. The infection had been too advanced. So what purpose, then, the numbing ten-mile walk in the flaming sun, the clumsy surgery, the child’s horrible pain? The child would suffer a few more hours or days. The grass around Government Five was exhausted. The Dinka and their cattle had to move. Tomorrow the child and his family would be miles out on the plateau. If he had left the child alone it would have died quietly tonight. Now everyone would go on suffering. That couldn’t have been what God wanted.
Brevold hadn’t expected to sleep, but as he lay in semi-consciousness in the stifling room, he gradually perceived that the screaming was not coming from a dream. He wasn’t replaying in his head the gagging shrieks of an infant boy. This was high-pitched, feminine. A screaming woman.
Groggily, Brevold swung his legs over the side of the cot and listened. The screaming had stopped, but now from far away he heard shouting voices and then, unmistakably, the staccato report of gunfire.
Brevold cracked open the shutter. The late-afternoon sun, palpable with dust, slanted across the room and illuminated the small writing desk in a corner. Brevold, aware of the putrid odor form his soiled shirt, found his hat where he’d flung it, and ducked out the doorway.
He could sense immediately that something had stirred up the village. The shaded meeting area under the acacia trees, where the women usually gathered at this hour to pound sorghum, was empty, although bowls and wooden pestles, and mounds of grain, were set in rows along the fire pit.
To his right Brevold heard another gun go off. Tucking his shirt as he walked, Brevold headed toward the sound of voices, along the narrow, hard-packed earthen path that separated the wattle huts. Obviously taking fright at something, the people had scuttled inside, and from an oval-shaped doorway he could see faces peeping at him.
Rounding a turn in the path between the huts Brevold almost stumbled over the corpse of young woman. She lay sprawled in the path with her skirt pulled over her head. Blood matted her pubic hair. Her thighs, spread wide apart, had been slashed so deeply that Brevold could see the yellow layers of fat inside the wounds.
Brevold kneeled and pulled her skirt down from her face. She had been shot once through the temple. The entrance wound was neat and round, surrounded by granulated powder burns. But the impact had blown a gaping hole in the back of her skull, creating behind her head an alluvial fan of bloody cortex and bone fragments.
Despite her contorted face, Brevold recognized the woman as one of the aides at the school. He had seen her daily pounding sorghum under the frond awning across from his room, her infant children capering around her knees. Brevold thought about replacing the skirt over her head. But instead he roughly pulled it down over her hips, then rolled her over on her face.

At the corner of a hut Brevold stopped. Across an open patch of ground he could see teenage boys in khaki shirts and baggy parachute pants clustered on the steps of the mission hospital. Peals of childish laughter reached him as one of the boys methodically knocked out the front window panes with the butt of his rifle. Brevold, putting his hand against the side of a daub and wattle hut, tried to compose himself. He was shivering violently, and felt dizzy.
Father in heaven, help thy unworthy servant...
Aware of his sharp intakes of breath, Brevold made an effort to control his shaking. He stood up straight. There was another crash and the tinkling of broken glass. As Brevold walked toward the hospital, the teenagers on the steps kicked open the door and rushed inside. Brevold heard screams and a rifle shot.
Inside, Mr. Murchin, the mission’s elderly caretaker, lay dead in the aisle, blood still welling into an expanding pool under his body. The ineffectual bamboo cane he had raised in defense of the hospital lay by his elbow. A handful of patients, all children, cowered on their cots; others lay too sick with fever to be roused
At the end of the aisle the teenage vandals had gathered around the steel cabinet that contained the clinic’s meager supply of medicines. One of the youths, glancing around, saw Brevold standing in the doorway. At first his mouth dropped, but then, grinning, he prodded his fellows, who turned and pointed their Chinese rifles, with the ungainly banana-shaped cartridge clips.
"D'maa dacta," shouted the youths. The white doctor.



Chapter 3

Doc awoke in a strange bedroom. Already he could remember some stuff. Later he'd probably remember more.
He might as well start by counting the drinks. After he'd left his room at the Ajax he'd gone downstairs to that toilet, the Tropicana Lounge. He'd sat there, had four drafts, twelve-ouncers, happy hour, buck a pop. That'd been before dark. He'd got restless finally, sitting alone at the gloomy bar, staring at the endlessly revolving neon waterfall, some kind of beer ad. He'd got up, mumbled to the Sheila, walked downtown aimlessly.
He'd stopped in front of that joint that didn’t look that ritzy from the street. It was...what? Africa something. But then in the window he'd seen the picture of the grenade-and-skull insignia of the Legion's parachute regiment. Their fucking dumb motto, like, "Guerre et Mort," or some shit.
He hadn't figured the place for a fern joint until he was inside. But he'd figured: what the fuck, over: one drink. He was just about tapped out on severance, and it looked posh. What the fuck. His ticket was punched.
Until he totaled the drinks he wouldn't know how big the cross. He shouldn't risk moving his head. Even so, he raised himself slightly to peer across his shoulder at the slick next to him.
She was on her side. All that Doc could see was the top of her head. Dyed blonde hair, with the white streaky lines the city Sheila did. Doc slid down a few inches. Full lips. Average pretty. The sheet pulled around her hip made a white bell. Doc remembered that with her dress off she’d been kind of thick in the leg. Basically okay, though. Good heavy tits, a little droopy and lined with soft creases. But pretty good.
The woman was still sleeping. And not faking either, because she was snoring. Not obnoxiously, but not like a slick would by choice.
He'd only had one beer at the fern joint when he’d started hitting on her. Her name began with "S." Sharon? No. Maybe Sue. Sue didn't sound right either. Anyhow, whatever. He'd also had a second beer, because now he remembered, four bucks a pop. Fucking outrage. And to himself he'd been all, for that tariff, switch onto whisky. What the fuck, over. Pissing away the last of his coin in a fern bar.
Considering his low money situation, Doc hadn't really been scamming for poon. But Sue or whatever was an instigator, all laughing and going along with the program. And it was all that don't-I-know-you kind of lame bullshit. He had followed her to her table.
She was sitting with some other slick and a couple of poofter-looking gym muffins. The guys were junior to her, a couple of five-jump-Johnnies in tight pants and sleeveless pullovers, showing off some gym beef. They gave him a look. But they were nothing. Short-twitch wannabes. Besides, they'd figured he'd self-destruct. An old dude, short final for forty, buzzed haircut, dumb luau shirt.
The woman next to Doc stirred, and her breathing stopped with a sudden intake of breath. Then the snoring resumed. Doc held still. He didn't want her waking up until he at least got her name.
Alright. What'd he had? Four, maybe five shooters, plus the two pints, plus the four twelve-ouncers at the toilet... Henry Africa's. That was the name of the fern joint. Okay, probably five shooters, actually hella generous, with maybe four eight-ounce beer chasers... It was starting to look bad.
Experimentally, Doc moved his head. Movement was painful. But not Force Ten. It probably meant he was still drunk.
By this time, daylight was filtering through the frilly curtains and his eyes could make out features in the room. The dresser topped by a clutter of perfume bottles. The chair, with his clothes slung anyhow. The usual posters on the wall, a castle in Germany, another of some palms on a beach, probably meant to fire up the working girl for the big vacation.
The window suddenly let in a bar of sunlight that fell across the wooden floor. It must be seven. Doc usually was up at oh-five. Sometimes not, if he'd been boozing. The woman's warm body was resting on his right arm so he couldn't see his watch. Actually, he hadn't been up at oh-five in awhile. He'd been on the bottle, lately. Since separating, the cross was getting regular.
When he was still in, he'd liked breaking out with the horn. By this time he'd have been through mess and on the way back to barracks with his Thermos.
Very slowly, careful not to wake the slick, Doc began to edge his arm away.
Maybe he could just slip out. Leave a note. Except he couldn't remember the slick's name. "Dear Nameless Poon..." Fuck the note. He wasn't gonna see her again anyway.
Doc held his breath and began wriggling obliquely toward the side of the bed.




Chapter 4

The boys were Murrini, from the Sudd, with the tribe's peculiar diamond-shaped tattoos, carved on their jaws during the puberty ritual. One of the boys raised his assault rifle, taking aim at Brevold, but another youth held up his hand, saying something in the sibilant Murrini dialect.
"Your fathers would be ashamed," Brevold said, in the pidgin Arabic used by the Nilotic tribes as a lingua franca.
The boys burst into laughter. One of them, sneering, returned to his rummaging of the meager offerings of the medicine cabinet, but soon gave it up. All the codeine and morphine had long since been used or stolen.
Two of the boys -- Brevold estimated their age at fifteen or sixteen -- sauntered over and began pushing him back, prodding him with their rifle muzzles.
Laughing and chatting, the boys drove him along the path leading from the hospital up the hill toward the reservoir. As they walked a loud explosion sent a column of black smoke gushing up over the huts.
At the top of the rise Brevold could see a cluster of men in ragtag uniforms -- baggy camouflage pants, brown shirts, red or blue berets -- standing by the wooden shed that contained the diesel engine and pump. Two young soldiers were wiring what Brevold assumed to be explosives to the pump house. Across the pond he could see that an explosion already had demolished the stone sluice gates that impounded the water, and now water was rushing down the parched hillside where it would be uselessly absorbed before it reached the irrigation ditches.
The gates had taken Brevold and a succession of work parties more than four months to complete; that it had taken two fistfuls of plastic to wreak the project attested to the workmanship.
Several soldiers on the bank were amusing themselves by tossing grenades into the reservoir. With every muffled explosion, huge bubbles roiled the water. Already the surface was glistening with the bellies of hundreds of carp and tilapia that Brevold had been raising to supplement the protein-deficient diet of the refugees at the lower camp.
As Brevold was hustled up to the little group by the pump house he realized for the first time that the boys were not soldiery of the Sudanese army. In the Southern department's bastion at Juba, Brevold knew, most of the conscripts were Nilotic blacks serving under Arab officers. Now he saw that these men, officers from the metallic insignia on their collars, were black also. This meant that they were probably part of the southern secessionist movement. Or they might simply be a pickup collection of bandits, taking advantage of the prevailing anarchy on the Jeba.
In the midst of the laughing officers Brevold saw the familiar squat figure of the witch Kareni Kisi, naked except for a filthy loin cloth, and utterly repugnant, with her withered dugs and huge splayed feet, toes sticking in every direction. As usual, she smelled of grease and onions, and smoked a short, tar-fouled clay pipe, which she removed every other puff to either spit or laugh. With her laughter, she revealed a toothless purple mouth, and her eyes completely disappeared inside a mesh of wrinkles.
She was beaming with satisfaction as Brevold approached under the prodding of his two teenage guards.
"And here is the white father," she said in lowland Dinka, emphasizing the last word in sarcastic allusion to Brevold's youth. Then, switching to pidgin Arabic, she said to the officers, "I told you he would find us."
One of the officers, a tall stout man of forty with close-cropped hair and a bulbous shining forehead, turned and smiled at Brevold.
"Ah, the missionary," the officer said in careful schoolbook English. "I am General Obo, and here...are my staff. Or is? I don't know. Staff…are more than one."
Brevold was startled. He hadn't expected Obo himself to be among the marauders. The last time Obo's men were in Rembec, some lesser officer had been in charge. The one who had killed Reisenflaus.
"I'm not a missionary," Brevold said in English, trying to control his voice. "I'm a technician."
"Okay sorry," said Obo. "Is word I don't have."
Brevold racked his brain for something like mechanic in pidgin. "I work for the mission...I fix things."
The general shrugged his shoulders. "White man, mission, missionary, I think so."
Another muffled explosion brought more dead carp floating to the surface, to the delight of the teenage grenadiers.
"Is this an attack on fish?" Brevold said.
"Ha, ha. Factually, no," said the general. "The witch want it. We are come to punish the hajji."
"There are no Arabs in this village," Brevold said carefully. Strictly speaking that was true. There was, however, a contingent of Arab mullahs, representatives of Khartoum, in the refugee camp on the river below the town. And of course there were hundreds of Nilotic Moslems in Rembec, and hundreds more Islamic refugees in the lower camp. The civil war had pitted the southern black tribes against the Semitic rulers in Khartoum. But many blacks in the south long ago had accepted Islam.
The general airily waved his cane. "Oh well, we take stop now for cargo. We punish hajji…some other day."
Brevold relaxed a little. Apparently the general and his rapacious children were out entirely for pillage. If they were only bandits, it would be unlikely that they would see a need to massacre the Islamic blacks. Certainly none of the refugees in the lower camp had anything worth stealing.
Brevold saw that Obo had folded his arms and was scrutinizing him. "You know something pretty funny," the general said. "The witch here say you are…of Kansas. Like Wizard of Oz.”
Obo laughed and looked around at the other officers, who also laughed, although it was doubtful they understood English or had heard of either Oz or Kansas.
Brevold suddenly felt the fear lift off his chest. Perhaps it was possible, if he talked calmly, that he could persuade the self-appointed general to round up his murderous children and leave with their loot without doing further harm.
"It is true I was born in Kansas," Brevold said, speaking slowly so the general could keep up. "You speak very good English."
The general's face lit up with a huge smile, and he translated Brevold's compliment to the officers, who also smiled.
"For one year I live in Trenton, New Jersey," Obo said. “I saw many movies. I think Eddie Murphy the best."
From behind him, Brevold could hear sporadic bursts of rifle fire, punctuated by the high-pitched screams of Dinka women.
"I also like…his name Crosby."
The Murrini children were running wild all over the village, but at least the witch didn't have the general's ear.
"You like Bill Cosby?" Brevold said.
"Oh yes, so much."
It would be useless to appeal for clemency, or to argue that these were his own people of the south he was robbing and killing. In the general's mind, they were no more his people than the residents of Trenton or Topeka. They were Dinka, he was Murrini. They might as well be from different planets. The Murrini were hereditary enemies of the upland Dinka, Bani and Neur. If the upland tribes were caught in the vice of drought, good. If they had been forced off their grazing lands by government troops, good. If Obo could get away with raiding the Dinka village of Rembec, so much the better.
One of the lesser officers detached himself from the shed and shouted something in Murrini.
"Okey dokey," Obo said. "We take the fish pen. The witch said this. Her spirits don't like. Do this, no curse."
The old woman chortled, patting the encrusted wrinkles of her face, while she eagerly scanned Brevold’s face for the signs of impotent rage he must be feeling, in seeing his pet project about to be destroyed.
Brevold lowered his eyes and met the gaze of the cackling old crone. She had resisted Brevold from the start. When the river had become a sewer, Brevold had tried to convince the people the untreated water caused their cholera and dysentery. The witch told them drinking Brevold's filtered water would dry up the woman's breasts and take away the man's fluid. When they got sick, she warned them against the mission hospital, in favor of buying her amulets and potions.
"Oh, be not angry," Obo said. "All want me kill you. I am saying not." Karini Kisi nodded her head vigorously. Evidently the witch wished to savor Brevold’s discomfiture at leisure.
"Yes," continued the general, brightening at a new thought, "Maybe when we more rule, we come kill her." Obo translated his last remark into pidgin, and the other officers laughed, as did the witch, who understood perfectly.
She could laugh. During her long years she had seen that it was very difficult for anyone to rule the Jeba. She was not impressed with the chances of this latest bunch. Packs of brigands always marauded across the plateau, but nobody kept the upper hand for long. The Murrini were useful to wreak the mission man's fish pond. In return they could rape the silly girls who had been slow about scuttling into the bush. But they would never rule.
One of the soldiers who had been fiddling with the wad of plastic on the pump house came trotting over and threw an off-hand salute.
Obo, waving his cane, motioned everybody away. The whole party walked a hundred meters to the meager shade thrown by a couple of desiccated and goat-gnawed acacias. In another moment a huge explosion shattered the pump house with a tremendous roar. The precious diesel engine tumbled in pieces through the air amidst an expanding column of smoke and dust.
A party of soldiers burdened with loot stopped on their way up the hill to give a huzzah and fire their rifles. The old woman, meanwhile, was capering on her large feet and clapping her hands in glee.
"I like to make the people happy," Obo said.



Chapter 5

When she heard the door shut, Sally carefully opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. She lay still for a minute, to make sure he was gone, and wouldn't be barging back in for a forgotten wristwatch or car keys. When she was sure she heard his footsteps descending the staircase, she rolled out of bed, hurried to the door, and snapped the bolt into place.
She must never do that kind of thing again! It wasn't the first time she had brought home strange from Africa's. But this was getting dangerous, this taste for rough trade, every time she got a little crazy on wine.
And this dude had been the absolute worst, beat-up and mean-looking, with the whacko-jacko grin and the blurry biker tattoos and the long ropey veins popped out in his arms. And the creepy, wolf-y eyes. And the stupid tennis ball haircut. He could have murdered her in her sleep! Sally couldn't help trembling as she padded into the kitchenette to find some aspirin.
Standing by the cupboard, Sally looked down at her bare legs, covered with goose bumps. Her thighs looked fat. For an instant she considered stepping on the scale by the refrigerator, but she changed her mind on that one. She was depressed enough.
She was 32 years old and she was getting fat. There was a bulge of delineated fat beneath her navel. Her breasts, by far her best feature, had begun to flatten and sag. The awareness of so much flab creeping over her once-nubile body made her glum. Maybe that's why she went to Africa's. She could forget about it there, with the wine spritzers coming and the hoards of attentive guys shooting her compliments.
But to get shit-faced and pick up some lifer soldier. She had never, ever done anything that blatant before. The big question was, would it get back to the office? The girlfriends she'd been sitting with worked in the same building, but not, thank God, for Beneficial. Anyway, Margo had left early, and Gail had gone upstairs to dance with the two bodybuilders. So maybe nobody saw her leave with Sergeant Tennisball Haircut.
Sally relaxed a little as she plugged in the coffee. Probably it wouldn't get back. Donald MacAteer would never find out.
Donald MacAteer was Sally's main hope in life. He was old, almost fifty. But he was the company's vice president for marketing. And he was very competent and self-assured and very, very successful. Sally had never even dreamed he'd noticed her. Then he'd asked her to dinner twice, and on the third date he'd fucked her back at his absolutely super apartment, which had a huge terrace overlooking the financial district.
He'd had her over a couple of times since then. Maybe it was, like Gail said, just for fucking. But it could be that he really liked her.
To jeopardize any chance she might have with Donald MacAteer by picking up some lowlife wallet-and-keys thug in Africa's was…just beyond belief. If Donald found out what a slut she was he'd dump her fast. She wouldn't blame him. She was a slut, to bring home some wallet-and-keys loser. And there was no use blaming it on booze either. She'd always had a disturbing trait, going back to high school, to pick up the losers and misfits, particularly if they looked like rough trade.
Well, this was the end of that. Donald MacAteer might have thin arms, and love handles, but he wasn't one of life's losers. He was important in the world. He made differences. And he was what Sally wanted, not some hairy, whiskery stack-of-logs wallet-and-keys nobody like Sergeant Tennisball Haircut.
Sally poured a cup of coffee and went back into the bedroom to look at herself in the mirror. She was really disgusting. Sally turned for a side view. She was fat. And she had circles under her eyes, and downy hair had started to grow over her lip. She was a fat slut, and it would serve her right if Donald MacAteer found out all about her.
But just in case he didn't, she was going to join the gym on Monday. And that was it for Africa's. No more.
As Sally dejectedly examined herself in the glass a rivulet of semen dripped from her vulva and trickled down her thigh. With a shudder of revulsion, Sally plucked a Kleenex from the dispenser. Truly, truly disgusting. Sally wiped her leg and tossed the rumpled tissue into the wastebasket.


Chapter 6

A wintry breeze swept along Market Street. Doc crossed at the intersection in a rush of early morning office help. The workers hastened away, clutching leather cases or white paper bags dripping coffee. Everybody in a big fucking hurry. How could there ever be enough office stuff to occupy them all?
Since separating, Doc has scanned the classifieds. Marketing rep? Entry level data retrieval? Telemarketing? Sixteen years Army infantry had not prepped him for this computer bullshit. He’d figured he’d catch somewhere as an EMT. He figured he had all the punches. But when he called some ambulance outfit it turned out he needed a state ticket with a bunch of new punches that Doc hadn’t even figured out yet.
Security guard. That was it for now. He’d be another bean head ex-sergeant standing in some lobby under a bank of TV screens.
All the mopes rushing past Doc across the intersection looked scrubbed and earnest. He probably looked like some bum coming off a jag, with his wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and crummy jacket. When the day was over, these people went back to clean apartments. Doc’s rucksack was on a thin mattress at the Ajax.
In the last weeks Doc had walked this street at night. Smiling couples ate dinner behind plate glass. To them he was just a gray lump in the dark. The Army had been his dad so long. He’d forgotten what it was like being alone on the outside...
Fuck that whining bullshit! The thing now was to shake the cross. Doc turned down Sixth and pushed through the door of a corner grocery. It was barely eight, but the winos already lounged outside, bickering, counting their dimes. Several were handing around a bottle wrapped in a twisted brown sack.
Doc took a beer from the case, fumbled for money. The Chinese clerk barely looked up from his paper.
Outside Doc walked a few paces to separate himself from the cluster of winos before skinning back the paper bag and popping the can. The beer honestly tasted good, even as he stood shivering in the wind. It gave him the premonition the alcohol would flare off some of the crud in his head.
It wasn’t the first time Doc had dropped the cross this way. It was the first time as a civilian, though. This wasn’t going to be regular. He’d known too many guys who fell into the bottle. By lunch they couldn’t put a sentence together. This wasn't going to be the beginning of that.
Some of the winos had been casing him, nudging each other, probably trying to recruit somebody to put the arm on him. Finally, a young mope with a fall of greasy hair detached himself and took a few shambling steps. In the Army Doc had picked up the trick of making a growl in this throat, like a dog. The young bum stopped, eyed Doc, then edged back to his mates. The dog growl was good for discouraging asshole company.
The beer steadied him. Next was food. Then 800 milligrams ibuprofen. Then hump some klicks for endorphins. Get this fucking morning behind.
Doc crossed Market again on his way to the Federal Building. On the second floor was a cafeteria that had a breakfast special, coffee, oatmeal, toast, for a buck-fifty. It wasn’t just the special. Doc liked the Federal caf because he liked to line up with other people and push his tray along the rails of the steam table. He’d done it all his adult life. Eating by himself in a regular restaurant made him feel conspicuous.
In the caf, Doc paid the cashier and stood with his tray in front of the condiment stand, scanning the room for an empty table. Next to him were a couple of shabby pensioners whose social security kept them one click above destitution. They were pouring heaps of sugar in their coffee. To Doc they had the beaten, shuffling look of total failure. Instinctively, he moved away, looking for a seat.
Doc’s swiveling head stopped. Across the room, by the window, sat a short, thin, middle-aged pensioner with close-cropped hair, round face, and a beak-like snoot stuck in a newspaper. Doc studied the man, then began threading his way through the tables.
“Yo, Keyes.” Doc placed his tray on the table and sat down.
The little man looked across the table and scrutinized Doc’s face. It was clear Sergeant Keyes was having trouble placing him. It wasn’t surprising. They hadn’t crossed paths in five years, and then only infrequently at the Fort Benning NCO Club.
“So it’s you,” Keyes said finally. “The nurse.”
“Yup,” said Doc. “I’m out.”
“You couldn’t take the mickeymouse.”
“That’s right,” Doc said.
“Twenty?”
“Negative,” Doc said. “Sixteen.”
“Well,” Keyes said. “You got no pension.”
Keyes shrugged and began stirring his coffee. It looked like he might drop the conversation and go back to his paper. Truth was, Doc had never cottoned that much to Keyes. Keyes was too much the book. Always butt-up for the program. Years before Benning, they had rotated through the Zone same time for jungle school. Keyes was one of those happy butts who wanted to eat a snake. And at Benning he’d been one of MacDonald’s fatboys in the Sergeants' Book Club.
Still, after weeks being pretty much alone, Doc was glad to see a familiar face.
“How long you been out?” Doc said, to break the silence.
“Oh, it’s been...I don’t know. Awhile.” Keyes had stopped reading the paper and was now staring at Doc, as if some idea had suddenly clicked over him like a cartoon light bulb.
Doc busied himself with removing the bowl and coffee mug from the tray. It was a good idea now and then to eat with other people. His table manners had gone to hell. He’d noticed he’d been bolting his food. Aware that Keyes was watching him, Doc handled his spoon carefully to control the shakes. He made sure to chew slowly.
“You still a nurse when you pulled the pin?” Keyes was staring at him.
“Same MOS,” Doc said. He’d liked being medic in a straight-leg infantry company. It was only when they'd seconded him to the fucking hospital that all the mickey started.
Keyes smoothed the folded paper, took a mechanical pencil from the pocket of his shiny Kmart jacket, and began doodling swirls, crosshatching the enclosed spaces.
“Remember back there in the Zone? Was it you that rotated through Trop Med? Or was that...”
“That was me,” Doc said. Doc had gone through the tropical medicine cycle right after jungle school.
“You stay up to speed?”
“Kep up a little. After Benning, I went to the Seventh Cav. Lots of parasites in Korea.”
“Fucking parasites,” Keyes said, doodling with his pencil. “Fucking malaria. Fucking dengue fever.”
Doc’s mind toggled to red. The fumes lifted from his brain like a curtain. Until now he’d been more or less off guard. He and old Keyes had never been asshole buddies. But seeing him had been kind of like running into a friend.
But something had gone hinky with Keyes. He’d been indifferent when Doc sat down. Now he was eyeballing Doc the way Dee-Eye Dog looks at Private Steppinshit. The old bald-headed idiot was thinking.
“How about schistosomiasis?” Keyes said.
Schistosomiasis? Doc looked at Keyes in amazement. Where the fuck was the old dude coming from? Water-borne liver flukes that could crawl up your urethra. A nasty deal in fucked up countries. But strictly basket case. Not found in USA.
“Yeah?” Doc said.
“Much you can do about it?”
Doc spoke slowly. “There’s some prophylactic meds. Best thing is to stay out of infested water. But there ain’t nothin’ like that...”
Keyes abruptly was on his feet.
“Gotta go,” he said. “Here. He pushed the folded newspaper toward Doc. “Get rid of this for me.”
Before Doc could say anything, the compact little man was moving through the tables, a short, taut, unremarkable figure exactly like all the other shabby pensioners, except that he moved quicker.
Doc felt a little tremor of excitement as he picked up the newspaper. The margin was filled with crosshatched doodles. But Doc saw that Keyes had penciled a word inside one of the swirls.
Doublewide.


Chapter 7

A young woman of surpassing beauty had got Hassan Bashir Nasr, professor of comparative linguistics and Middle Eastern Languages, into serious difficulties. Not only was she his student, and twenty years his junior; not only had their tempestuous affair come to the attention of his department head at the University of California, Berkeley; but then he had committed the unpardonable folly of marrying her.
Professor Bashir Nasr, seated under an awning outside a coffee house on Telegraph Avenue, idly stirred the thick syrupy coffee in his demitasse, while under indolent lids he eyed the human traffic flowing by on the sidewalk.
Watching the sloppily attired young men and woman, so nonchalant, so blasé, Bashir Nasr reminded himself how much he despised American students. All of these overweening young Americans puffed with ridiculous self-importance. Callow, grotesquely sentimental, intellectually stunted. Of course they had to be: nursed from the cradle on cinema pap and the neuron-devouring tube.
Bashir Nasr knew he shouldn't let himself be peevish. But really, look at them on parade! Egotistical popinjays! Vapid preening self-absorbed infantile boors, prattling endlessly, as they sauntered along, about their sterile media-mandated preoccupations. Robotic lemmings, willingly incorporated and indoctrinated as minions and minion-ettes of the American Borg, either genuflecting to gurus and frauds, or seig heil-ing the twaddle of the latest Hollywood poseur. Of course. Americans were all like that, when one thought about it: absurdly egotistical; seduced by poll-takers and talk-show hosts into believing their shallow uninformed bias was in some way consequential. Grossly ignorant, functionally illiterate…
The professor peevishly rattled his tiny spoon against the saucer. Even his own students, allegedly the very cream of the University system, were guilty of holding premature opinions. Liberal arts graduate students were the worst. Most of them couldn't find Gaza or the Sea of Galilee on a map. Yet every one was ready – instantly -- to blather away on Iranian hegemony, Palestinian irredentism, expansionist Zionism, or any other topic that floated into his foolish head.
That handful of plodding technical students who drifted through his Culture of the Middle East seminar seemed a little better. Stolid boys from the Engineering Department. They felt, correctly, that completion of his seminar would enhance resumes submitted to Bechtel or Halliburton. They had the sense to keep silent, ignorant, but unpretentious.
It was becoming more and more difficult for Bashir Nasr to get through a semester. All his students were immune to irony; it rolled over their oblivious heads. Only the coarsest sarcasm could dent their conceit. And weren't they surprised, and weren't they hurt, when their esteemed professor failed to value them as seriously as they insisted on valuing themselves.
The females were the worst. Why females had ever been allowed into university completely baffled Bashir Nasr. They were not equipped. The average American female university student, without a blush, could mouth sufficient nonsense in one minute to make an educated man cringe with embarrassment. Complete boorish idiocy, expressed in a bleating concatenation of clichés. And how she bristled when one laughed in her cow-like face. Hadn't there been a documented study at the University of Rabat demonstrating that the x-chromosome neurons lacked certain chemical transmitters? Something like that. It didn’t matter. The American female’s intellectual debits were obvious to anyone with an ear.
In light of this, Bashir Nasr had found it more than a little provoking, the manner in which God in his unfathomable wisdom had seen fit to physically configure the average American university female. In fairness it wasn't all God's doing. American females had been trained by their culture, by the implacable taunting media, to flaunt their bodies like Cairo whores. The revealing attire, the brassy emphasis on sexuality; what difference, really, between a Berkeley coed and a bazaar prostitute hanging in her wicker cage?
In fact, when it came to whoredom, the pinnacle had been reached right here, exactly where Bashir Nasr sat. For it was fecund California that had produced, in tandem with its wretched suburbs, the most perfectly formed, milk-skinned, blonde-tressed, small-nosed, large-breasted females in the history of the world.
As he sat, ankles crossed, endlessly stirring the hyper sweet coffee, Bashir Nasr felt he might as well admit it. Even now, after all his suffering, the only reason he sat here at this ersatz Mediterranean cafe, was to watch the parade of females. They were unbelievable, these honey skinned creatures, half-dressed, tousled tangles of silky hair, pouting succulent lips stained blood red; God in Heaven, what divine lathe had turned those smooth limbs to such perfect tolerances, or pressure-molded those ripe provoking rumps, those flat tummies, those pendulous breasts with symmetrical nipples like bridge washers, struggling to loose themselves from a filmy halter...
The taunting young blonde harlot coming toward Bashir Nasr now; why shouldn't she be perfect? given her unlimited freedom and leisure. She fasted, she lived in gymnasiums, she lightly tanned her flawless torso under lamps. She bathed daily, and rubbed her hairless skin with unction. Her breath was minty, her teeth expensively rearranged and bleached. Because of her early diet of cow's milk, her dugs inflated evenly without droop or wrinkle.
And now, at the zenith of her bloom, in glowing backlit halo-ed beauty, she presented her scented body practically unclothed to public scrutiny. In the street! Right next to Bashir's table. Bashir Nasr had been in America five years and still couldn't get over it.
At first it had all been rather wonderful, this seeming good fortune to arrive in a pleasure garden full of ripe figs ready to drop in his basket. It helped that many American female students found him attractive, most often comparing his to the famous Egyptian movie actor who played bridge. Actually, Bashir Nasr was much shorter and rather plump. But he did have in common with the film idol the striking black mustache and a dazzling smile.
He also had to admit that his upbringing had given him the kind of ineffable panache (along with a broad cosmopolitan outlook) that was pretty much absent among men in mechanized, materialistic America. Understandably, his female students, without any hint of intellectual accreditation themselves, were overawed. There had been a string of quick victories that (in perfect hindsight) had blinded him to the looming danger.
Imperceptivity, Bashir Nasr shrugged his shoulders. Was he being too hard on himself? Sproul Plaza after all was the world's crossroads of desirable flesh. Naturally he had been thrown into a mindless rut, as would happen to anybody, particularly after half a lifetime of purchasing furtive and not very satisfactory favors. One golden goddess after another tumbled willingly into his bed. His usual good sense had been overthrown by pure sensation.
And in the end one could say truthfully, he had gone temporarily insane, as one might with hashish. That explained why he had ended his long mindless spree with California blonde whores...by marrying one of them.
How could he have done it? She wasn't any different than the others. She had come up to his room and, just like that, without any courtship preliminaries save a middling bottle of wine, she had wiggled out of her Levies, and allowed him...every liberty, virtually every liberty he wanted with her body. Yes, it had been bliss, bliss, his amazed and happy phallus plunging wildly within her cushioned loins. But there had been many others who had given his penis the same delights.
He could have had many more. Every female student welcomed an affair with a professor, particularly one with the added cachet of being foreign-born, impeccably dressed, supremely intelligent and (Bashir might as well say it) very handsome. And a full professor with tenure. And a professor of languages, at that (as opposed to, say, psychology or home economics). And a bona fide prince. Yes, a real sheik. What could possibly be more romantic for the lucky females he anointed?
But the easy conquests had sapped his vigilance. And now he bore like a putrefying bird around his neck the disgusting result. Janet Bashir Nasr, nee Thornton. Bashir Nasr shuddered so violently that his tiny cup clattered against the saucer.
Why had Bashir Nasr blundered? Janet Thornton had put up no more resistance that the others. Why had she, of all his victories, been able to lead him like a blind, bellowing ox straight into the shambles of a ridiculous marriage? She was the quintessential California surfer girl. So were many of the others. Yes, she was a true platinum blonde, from head to mound. And perfectly tanned, breast and buttock. And tall (a full foot taller than Bashir Nasr). Perhaps it was because tanned blonde surfer girls had been all the rage among his faculty colleagues. They were being flaunted at faculty parties, these long-limbed porcelain girls who hardly had a nose. The vapid countenance gave an impression of girlish simplicity, yet the bodies were lush, mature melons and pumpkins, and smooth round bellies.
He could admit, even now, after all he knew, that that first afternoon, after the wine and the increasingly breathless conversation, when the frictionless panties had slithered to the floor, and she had said, "Oh, Professor Bashir Nasr," and then opened her silken thighs, yes, that had been a superlative moment. He had prepared her well, of course, with wine, and talk, and expert caresses, and he had been rewarded with puppy yelps as he grazed her moist delicious recesses. She seemed then a blessed female creature, quick to lubricate, submissive, anxious in her heat to be mounted, with all her childishly obscene pleadings, but enjoying the teasing too, until Bashir Nasr finally consented to make her complete, and her happy, yearning vagina swallowed him whole in one buttery gulp.
Never had piston worked more smoothly in a bore. Never had frictionless pleasure been keener. He could feel her tissue palpably quivering, and her hoarse gasps burned his ear, while her enameled nails fluttered on his back like birds. At the moment of her crisis she had enfolded him in her arms and legs with the strength of an anaconda. And his own release, the convulsive splash of seed, had been a supreme moment of ecstasy.
If then, after that afternoon hour of perfection, he had thanked her, promised to call, and showed her to the door, he could have had a sublime memory to revisit. Instead, he had had a complete lapse of sanity, which, in the pathetic end, had caused him to shackle himself to this writhing, blubbering, sweat-drenched, mentally retarded giantess.
Was it his own vanity? He had actually thought it would be amusing to show her off to Dr. Malami and Professor Steinmetz, and other colleagues, many of whom always tried to outdo each other in the youth and beauty of the students they took up. That was really it, if he had the courage to face reality. His own vanity had tripped him into this monstrous fiasco.
Of course, once married, the scales had fallen away overnight. Janet Thornton was coarse and ordinary. Her gaping stupidity, her braying laugh, her uncanny magnetism for the inappropriate, robbed any pleasure that Bashir Nasr might had derived from displaying her oversized body at faculty gatherings.
And even the flesh itself, the sun-basted skin he had worshiped with his lips, had become disgusting and gross to him. Particularly when he compared her Amazonian proportions with the trim little figures of the Asian females that some of his colleagues in the department were succeeding with now. He had been saddled with a Nordic Valkyrie, just at the moment when a growing supply of petite, supple Asian girls was arriving at the university because of their superior scholastic standing. Professor Haskins already had a sloe-eyed Nippon creature that had scored 1400 on the SAT after a decade of drudgery and parental terror. Merrill, that pedantic buffoon, had hooked a saffron-skinned sushi who could speak four languages. The Asian girls really did seem to be the ideal amalgam of rote intelligence dampened by ingrained submissiveness. It was completely out-of-time for Bashir Nasr to be pinned down by this towering raw-boned milkmaid of the chromium hair.
Bashir Nasr glanced at this watch, and a grimace of pain contorted his usually smooth forehead. It was past four already. It meant that Mrs. Bashir Nasr nee Thornton had finished her Contemporary Authors seminar and was back at the apartment, perhaps already preparing one of her concoctions of meat and salt. And of course with the lard and the brine came the reproaches, the pointed sighs, the pouting silences. One would think that even an American Neanderthal-ette would have an inkling that in civilized circles one didn't expect slavish allegiance to monogamy.
But no. Ever since she had tumbled to the existence of Miss Wetzleman of Arabic 202 his homecomings had degenerated into nightmarish ordeals. Bashir tugged his mustache. His father would not have stood it; he would have thrashed the daylights out of any of his wives who had dared to utter the mildest reproach about his excursions into Cairo. Of course here (in a land where it was unsafe to walk any street) they had made emasculating laws that undercut a husband's supremacy.
Another consideration -- one didn't care to admit it -- was that Mrs. Bashir Nasr was a very large woman. Really, a very masculine, pushy, aggressive woman who might, conceivably, strike back. Thank God his father was far away in Riyadh and not here to see his only son shrinking from a female.
"Hello, Professor."
Bashir Nasr started at the unexpected voice. He looked up to see the dark hair, olive skin and small but busty figure of Miss Wetzleman. He hastily rose to offer a seat.
"I just wanted to let you know I finally finished that paper," Miss Wetzleman said, raising eyes that to Bashir Nasr seem charged with significance.
Bashir Nasr nodded and smoothed his mustache. Wetzleman was one of those Jewish girls who were always hopping over to Israel. She already spoke passable Hebrew and now was tackling Arabic. She believed the Palestinian question could be resolved, and congratulated herself for seeking out the company of cultivated and reasonable Arabs. She had been very easy to seduce, and while she wasn't Asian, she was at least diminutive.
"I'm looking forward...very much," said Bashir Nasr, recalling the previous effort, a disorganized mélange of naiveté and bias.
"Well," said Miss Wetzleman, pursing her lips in a way Bashir Nasr remembered from a less public occasion. "I could bring it to your office. Or... It's up at my apartment..."
Bashir Nasr flashed what he knew to be a warm and disarming smile. She was just a touch thick in the thighs, but her breasts were superb, pert and well-modeled. And like all Jewish girls, she was expert and unabashed in her oral worship. Perhaps they were instructed by their mothers.
"I have a moment right now," Bashir Nasr said. He would miss dinner, of course; he would have to face the Viking's recriminations. But Bashir Nasr didn't care. He was tired of being pushed around._


Chapter 8

By afternoon the rain was coming down in sheets. Fine. Doc figured the rain would make it easier to hitch a ride, what with the sympathy factor. After returning to his dingy cubicle at the Ajax, he had shoved his few belongings into the rucksack. Anything that didn't fit he abandoned.
At the money exchange on Third he cashed the last of his checks and put the cash in his money belt with his license and passport. His double-edged boot knife was hidden in a sheath under his belt, the haft concealed by his un-tucked shirt.
The rucksack held a change of clothes, a water filter, a can of Sterno, a canteen, a flashlight, a compass, an abridged Merck's Manual, a plastic ground sheet, the med kit, a watch cap, some mittens, an air mattress, and a thin down sleeping bag. He wore his poncho.
He'd made the go-decision as soon as he'd found Doublewide in the library atlas. It might be a goose chase. Doublewide was in Nye County, Nevada, way the fuck off in the boonies. Nothing Doc could see on the map showed any reason for the existence of the tiny blue dot (pop. 140) out in the Sonoran desert. It was in the middle of an Empty Quarter, 20 miles from the interstate, 50 miles from Vegas.
Doc had been pretty damn sure right off the bat that Doublewide had to be a place name. All over the West instant towns were popping up. It made sense, one of these trailer villes being named after the most popular type of family trailer.
Old Keyes had been trying to tip him to something. The old idiot had promised somebody not to blab. But he blabbed anyway.
The first ride let him off in Sacramento. Doc lettered a crude sign, "Vegas," on a scrap of cardboard, and eventually got picked up by a load of frat boys driving straight through to the brothels.
"Don't usually pick up hitchers," one of the boys said. "But we figured the four of us can handle you."
"That's right," said Doc. He liked these kids right off the bat.
The ancient beater hurled through the night. Doc realized that the gloom and depression of the weeks since bailout had lifted along with his hangover. He was enjoying himself for the first time as a civilian. It was fun to be with these college kids, sloughing around curves on the mountain highway. It was great they'd given him a lift. Maybe he didn't really look so much the tramp, even if he was soaking wet, his boots caked with mud.
When one of the boys in the back seat offered Doc a beer he gladly accepted.
At midnight, at Echo Summit, the boys stopped to piss and change drivers. The new driver evidently was in no hurry, and gave the tires and brakes a rest as they coasted down the grade. On the Nevada side Doc started to doze a little.

Doc figured she was the typical slick that hung out in fern bars. Leggy. Legs encased in shimmering silver hose. Silky green blouse, top buttons undone, breasts pushed up. Dark-blondish hair, streaked. Glossy red lips. As she walked she trailed perfume. She was probably thirty, with a few years before she lost her waist.
Doc said something, some dumb crack, and then, half-drunk, weaved after her to a table already crowded with identical slick and a couple of young Johnnies. The slick rolled her eyes at her pals: look what I dragged in. Doc could see she was half in the bag herself.
All her shrill pals were shrieking with laughter, but the blonde slick wasn't in on the joke. Her patronizing lop-sided smile started to flutter.
Doc made the bold move. The slick was stirring some kind of spritzer drink. Doc grabbed her hand and put her wet finger in his mouth. The other girls at the table, noticing him for the first time, shrieked with laughter. The slick started to pull her hand away but then stopped. Doc knew then he was going to fuck her. She had a heat on and was feeling her juice. It was just the usual problem of cutting her out from her friends.
By the time Doc got her up to her apartment he felt his best. He was at the perfect state, where he felt he could go forever. The slick had started kissing him in the elevator. Once inside the apartment door her breasts tumbled out of the flimsy blouse, plump, and creased with soft lines. She nuzzled against him and her mouth made a stream of little "mmmmms." The slick began pulling his arm toward the darkened bedroom.
Doc easily lifted her onto the bed. He was showing off. She was a big girl, and probably not used to being lifted off the floor. But the booze made him aware of his strength. All the imperfections that Doc would have seen with time were wiped out by shadow and the booze. The slick's body was perfect, her skin silk, her face young and alluring.
Gently, Doc pushed her bare shoulders toward his waist, and with another string of murmured mmmms she willingly took the plug, then held it against her cheek while she caught her breath.
Although still in perfect control, Doc felt the rising familiar urgency. He lifted her body and positioned her thighs on the bed, flattened her nipples against her rib cage, and bent to...

Doc was awakened by a rough shake.
"Topaz Junction," said the driver. "You sure you want off. Don't look like nothin's open."
Doc stood blinking in the cold desert air as the red taillights winked off down the freeway. A gas station, cafe, grocery, all closed at 4:35 a.m. The map put Doublewide 20 miles southwest on a two-lane. Doc shouldered the pack and started walking.
As he strode along the few green and red neon lights behind him disappeared and he was alone under the canopy of stars. The only sound was his regular footfalls and his panty breath. He'd let himself go to hell in the city.
Soon he started to grin and shake his head with pleasure. He felt his health coming back with every lungbag of sweet air. All the confusion and doubts and fearsickness of the city had gone away. He felt strong out here, by himself.
"Hah," yelled Doc, into the dark and empty desert. "Hah."



As the morning wore on, several pickups did pass, going his way, but Doc, into his rhythm, didn’t turn, and the drivers didn’t slow. A little before noon he breasted a rise and saw the clump of houses set in a little valley below him. Pretty much as he figured: a couple of dozen trailers clustered around two or three frame buildings, a store with a few gas pumps, across the road a Quonset hut garage. Doc couldn’t see any reason for the settlement, except that a line of cottons running through revealed a creek, probably seasonal.
On either hand now Doc could see other trailers, singlewides, set back on narrow dirt lanes, surrounded by the usual gutted cars and junk, guarded by the usual mongrels that already had started yowling.
The general store was the typical board and batten, the white paint peeling. Doc’s boots clunked along the wooden slats of the porch. He threw his pack next to a well-worn wooden bench, and went inside. The half-empty shelves held canned goods, a rack of candy; in back the usual refrigerator case crammed with beer and soda, and a tiny deli containing some unappetizing gray pork chops.
In front, by the cigarettes, sat a shriveled little crone, her face a reticule of deep wrinkles set off by a dash of red lipstick. She regarded Doc’s wanderings around the store with unfeigned suspicion.
Now that he was here Doc didn’t know what to do. Slowly wandering under the gaze of the old woman Doc picked up some breakfast: a large Coke, a Hostess cherry pie, some corn chips, a stick of jerky, an Eskimo Pie. At the counter he added a hardboiled egg from a huge jar. The crone silently took his money and put it in an ancient cash register with fancy silver inlay.
Nothing stirred outside except a dog across the road that got up, barked twice, turned around, and lay down again. Over the roofs the desert, flat and featureless, stretched to the horizon. The midday sun already had sucked up all the color, the purple and magenta of sunrise replaced by dune brown and yellow. A few miles to the south, a tiny plane circled, probably a duster, or a farmer’s toy. Doc glanced at the thermometer on the porch. Eighty-six. He decided he’d better eat the ice cream first.
An elderly man in coveralls and wearing a welder’s cap, a pipe in his teeth, stepped out of the Quonset hut and ambled toward the store. On the steps he stopped, looked at Doc eating the Eskimo Pie, then turned to squint off over the desert toward the little plane turning circles.
“Reckon they’ll be over for you pretty soon,” the old man said.
“I suppose.” Doc found it hard to keep a grin off his face. “I don’t like to wait.”
“Ha,” said the man. “I don’t guess you got a choice.”
“I could walk,” Doc said. “How far you reckon it is?”
“Ten mile easy, and there ain’t no road. Just keep your shorts on. It don’t look like they could do it, but they land that little bitty plane right behind the store.”
Doc craned his neck. “Don’t seem like they could.”
“It may not seem to you, mister, but they do it pretty near every week.”
“You been out there?” Doc nodded vaguely southward.
“I don’t go where I ain’t invited,” said the man, sending a stream of spit over the railing.
Doc shaded his eyes. “I guess that plane’s pretty much right over the place.”
“Pretty near,” said the old man. “Well, you just sit tight.” In another second he was inside the store, exchanging gruff pleasantries with the old woman.
A mile out of town, after making sure the road was clear, Doc ducked down the culvert and struck out across the open desert. Only when he figured he was out of sight of the road did he stop long enough to take a compass bearing.


Chapter 9

Jaybut Shaybin was the proprietor of the single modern commercial enterprise on the Jebel Marra plateau. Every village had its squalid little market, where flat-dugged toothless hags squatted before a few eggs, a basket of sorghum, or a handful of bulging flashlight batteries that already had started to leak acid. But Shaybin’s establishment, a true general store, had walls, a tin roof, sometimes even electricity, when he had diesel to run the ancient generator.
Shaybin's ancestors had left Bombay on a trading dhow two hundred years before, landed at Mombassa, and the family had never looked back. Of course, when a bride was needed, the family sent to India. But otherwise, the Shaybin clan had embraced Africa to its heart. Their first enterprise had been a ship’s chandlery, but the sons had hop scotched to the outskirts of Nairobi, and then gradually spread outward, to one teeming slum after another.
As a family, they were clannish and insular, but as merchants they presented a tolerant face to all customers, whether Moslems looking for Kalashnikovs and rhino horn daggers, Nilotic animists, needing plastic bowls and salt, Hindus wanting incense and sugar, Chinese buying tea and ground deer antler, or even young European wanderers, with their more esoteric wants.
They were wise traders and prospered. They never marked beyond the clientele’s ability to pay, they gave credit in exceptional cases, they dashed the police and customs promptly and without the usual surly reluctance. They had taken pains to learn and follow the African business mores concerning licenses, franchises, duties and taxes.
The only recurring problem was the question of how to settle the large crop of younger sons. The first born succeeded the father, and perhaps the second could find a place too. After that, difficulties arose, since it would be unfitting to have brothers in direct competition in the same neighborhoods. Younger sons had to be removed. A third or forth son, then, generally received a modest capital, the good wishes of his family, and the tacit understating that if the distant enterprise failed there would be no second chance.
When a third or forth son approached majority, the father anxiously consulted with the boy’s uncles. Where might the boy find a foothold? What about Egypt, above the fourth cataract where the English subsidized that new cotton scheme? But, ay, the dash you would need in Cairo. A license would take five years.
Jaybut Shaybin was a fifth son, and when the time came, the best his father and uncles could arrange was the Jebel Marra. They knew it was not promising, but at the same time, not hopeless. The population was scattered, the people destitute. But consequently he would not be bothered with competitors. Thrift, industry, a 200 percent markup. If he didn’t prosper, at least he wouldn’t be a burden to his parents.
Shaybin and his wife had been living on the Jebel for three years. The first time he had seen his wife was the day they married in Nairobi, and he still felt cheated. His father had been told by the broker that she was of equal caste. But she was very dark, and even though young, with good teeth, she appeared ugly in Shaybin’s eyes. She knew how he felt, hardly spoke, and avoided if she could the conjugal embrace. She sobbed in her room and forever prayed to Krishna to work a cure that would deliver her from the horrors of Africa and this fat storekeeper.
But Jaybut Shaybin did not have time for the foolish complaints of a woman. Trade in Jebel Marra had never been good, and now it was worse. And it was because of the meddling of the Union Carbide Company.
Shaybin prided himself on offering a wide line, considering the trouble that attached to bringing merchandise of any kind to the plateau. He had many rolls of cheap cotton cloth, printed in all the fantastic hues the Dinka women favored. He had knives, hatchets, screwdrivers and pliers. He had war surplus wool blankets, stolen new from the warehouses of the Egyptian army. He had pencils and chalk, in case the missionary school ever reopened. He had a few alarm clocks (when a family was ready for that momentous purchase), and a line of patent medicines, including (sometimes) penicillin and hypodermic needles. For a very select clientele among his Moslem customers, he kept, discretely tucked way, a few tattered copies of Playboy and Hustler. And he had several 40-year-old AK47s, along with a box or two of moldering ammunition.
But the main item that Shaybin sold, day in and out, was the flashlight battery. Everybody needed batteries. Inside a dark and smoky hut at night, a daughter held the flashlight while the mother searched the mats for scorpions; the father picked it up at night to reach around the floor groggily for his pee gourd; and most importantly, the youngest son used the flashlight every midnight when he went out to check the corral. Everybody on the Jebel Marra needed batteries, and until recently, the only reliable source was the Shaybin emporium.
Suddenly the Union Carbide Company had changed that. For hundreds of years, peddlers had roamed the plateau carrying packs of small items, mostly trinkets, needles, hard candy, chunks of pink soap, perfume, bullets. For years they had offered batteries. But batteries were a tricky item. Often the intense heat to which the batteries were subjected during weeks on the trail caused them to leak or to lose their potency.
In the past, the bicycle peddlers from Juba and Wau who sold flashlight batteries in the village markets never had been serious competition. Most of the batteries were ruined by the time they reached the plateau. Shaybin, however, could afford the expense of ordering batteries by the gross, in sealed boxes. And he guarded them in the dark recesses of his storeroom. In the old days, the people had to come to Shaybin to get a reliable battery.
No more. Jabut Shaybin’s principle source of income had been torn from his hands by a whim of the Union Carbide Company. Some faceless demon in Godless America had changed the package, encasing every individual battery in a plastic blister, and he was ruined. First, an unsuitable wife. Now the collapse of his business.
And he had no escape. His father expected him to pay back every shilling and every dinar. Nor could he expect help from his smug brothers. Nor from the hard-faced Chinese at the Juba Mercantile Bank.
Shaybin heard a scrapping at the door. Looking up, he hoped it might be the Dinka elder who had shown some initial interest in an AK47. But it was just fat old Puhni, the lecherous sergeant in charge of the army barracks, carrying a battered tin demijohn slung across his shoulder.
With a sigh, Shaybin went to refill the jug. In the storeroom he saw he was down to the last 55 gallons of peach brandy. When the brandy gave out, how long could Shaybin count on the continued protection of the gang of callow thugs under Puhni’s questionable command? Truly, it was as if all of heaven wished to visit mischief on him.
Puhni hoisted the filled demijohn and licked the neck of some spilled treacle.
“And storekeeper,” Puhni said, in pidgin Arabic, “We would also like to see some of your cigarettes.”
It was the wrath of Shiva.


Chapter 10



Professor Bashir Nasr was not only seriously frightened, he was in imminent danger of being sick. The little two-seat Cessna trainer in which he was an unwilling passenger bucked and gyrated violently in the darkness. As Bashir Nasr fingered the white paper bag in his lap, the tiny airplane rushed upward, was checked with a heart-stopping jolt, the wings squeaking in protest, and then was batted down with a sickening yaw to the left.
Bashir Nasr's stomach heaved, and hot vomit surged up into his throat. If at all possible, however, he would deny his abductor, the lanky buffoon crammed into the seat beside him, the satisfaction of seeing him sick.
Bashir Nasr still couldn't believe the incredible set of circumstances that had set him, a full professor of languages at a major university, inside this madly rocking, ludicrously minuscule aircraft, somewhere over the frigid Sierra Nevada, in the dead of night, bound for God knows where, at the behest of an armed madman.
Kidnapped at gunpoint on the street! Well, strictly speaking, that was not accurate. But Bashir Nasir was positive the kidnapper had said something about having a pistol available if necessary. No one would dare imply anything. He would have been foolhardy to resist.
In the left seat, the kidnapper sat, apparently serene, one hand resting lightly on the oval steering yoke, humming tunelessly as he scanned the four or five meaningless red-lit gauges on the panel. How would Nasr have been expected to guess that the innocuous-appearing middle-aged student from Arabic 201 would turn out to be a deranged gunman? Potentially a gunman.
Certainly Bashir Nasr had had no inkling when the superannuated student accosted him in front of Wetzleman's apartment. Bashir Nasr easily forgive himself for not being fully alert, having just been milked of two love spasms by the hydraulic if slightly plump Miss Wetzleman. His mind was just coming to grips with the problem of how to explain his tardiness to the Viking when out of the shadows loomed the tall, slightly stooped and balding Arabic 201 with a hesitantly raised finger.
Preoccupied with the previous hour's rout, Bashir Nasr had needed a moment to place the student. Yes, the military retiree with the egregious Southern twang, who made such a hash of the soft Arabic sibilants. An aging son of one of America's third world fiefdoms, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or some such place. At first Bashir Nasr had been irritated by the interruption, until he realized that that the cornpone yokel might furnish the excuse he needed for Janet nee Thorton. Yes. He had had to take a moment to help one of his more slow-witted charges.
"You're coming with me," said the student.
Bashir Nasr stared at the stoop-shouldered deferential figure before him with incredulity. What was he saying? This didn't seem to be a question on the next day's assignment on the intransitive.
"MacDonald?" Bashir Nasr said.
"Get in that car," MacDonald said. "I'm in kind of a hurry."
Bashir Nasr had turned to walk away. The next second he felt incredible pain behind his knee, and his hand was wrenched behind his back.
"That really...hurts," Bashir Nasr managed to say.
"There's the hard way or the easy way," MacDonald said. "Remember me? I was an infantry sergeant for twenty years."
Bashir Nasr looked wildly up and down the deserted street. He opened his mouth, but before the first vocal, severe pain shot into his shoulder.
"Please," said MacDonald.
"Oh, very well," Bashir Nasr had said. What could he possibly do? The man was breaking his arm.
In the next moment Bashir Nasr was seated in the front of a car. They had driven to an airfield of some kind. During the ride his abductor had been mumbling something. Sudan, Dinkas, civil wars. Bashir Nasr was too upset to comprehend anything.
_


The loose sand made for slow going. By nightfall Doc estimated he’d gone eight or nine miles. Since he didn’t want to blunder into anybody’s camp in the dark, Doc found a hollow in the sand that partially blocked the wind, where he could unroll his bag. He drank the remaining water in his canteen. If this turned out to be fuckall, he’d have to beeline back to the road before the heat came on again.
The stars came out and the wind piped up with a chill edge that forced him deep in the bag. It was always a knockout, after the city, the crowded stars overhead. Only a couple thousand, really, but seemed hella more. Doc settled into the sand, pulling the bag around his chin and adjusting the wool watch cap over his ears.
Now matter what came down, this was better. The city would never be right, even if he did hook on as a paramedic or something like. Lying in the soft sand, the wind whistling, his eyes blurry with tears, the white smear of stars, it was the first time he felt right since separating.
Doc awoke once in the night to pee in his pee bottle. The next time he woke it was gray light. The sun was still under the eastern mountains, and frigid wind whipped the sagebrush. Since he had no food or water, no reason to tarry. He shoved the rolled bag into his pack and set out again southward.
He’d been afoot about a mile when the sun peeped up, sending striking yellow shafts across the desert floor. He had trudged no more than another hundred meters when he saw the sunlight glinting on a gossamer thread, like a spider web, stretching at ankle length across the sand.
Doc immediately sat down, shrugged off his pack, and wheeled on one hand to lie flat on the ground.
Slowly Doc inched forward. The sun, a little higher, no longer revealed the trip wire. Doc could feel himself grinning as he snaked forward, his eyes at ankle height. It was some kind of perimeter wire. The low angle of the sun had picked it out. Otherwise, he’d have stumbled over it in a few more steps.
He finally saw the wire, a meter ahead. It wasn’t wire, but plastic fishing line, anchored to scrub brush by almost transparent plastic twists. Doc lay prone, perfectly quiet, his chin propped on the haversack. He could see nothing in front. Yet he had to be within a few yards of a dug-in camp. Tripping the wire would set off some kind of alarm ahead.
The sun was climbing above the mountains. No point in delay. Doc hooked an arm through the pack, stood and quickly hopped the wire, then lay flat again. He had a couple of ways to play this. Maybe it would be best to just walk in. It had to be a dug-in camp. It had to be Sgt. Keyes and some buddies. Nobody but Army mopes would be stringing wire. Still, it might not be a bad idea to do a little recon. Doc left the pack and crawled forward toward a slight rise in terrain. Maybe he could get a glimpse from there.


Chapter 11

The sergeants were eating breakfast when Doc came in. Their mess, like the other bunkers in the encampment, had been dug out and roofed with creosote-soaked railroad ties, plywood sheets and a layer of sand. As Doc warily moved through the camp he counted five such revetments. A small two-seat trainer, probably the plane he’d seen the day before, was under netting. Only a sharp eye would spot this outfit from the air, Doc figured.
Hearing voices and the clatter of plates, Doc warily circled one of the dugouts. Wisps of smoke or steam were rising from a vent. Approaching quietly and looking down through the hatchway, Doc saw the back of a man bending over a propane camp stove. Doc could see a table strewn with dishes, and part of a cupboard filled with plastic canisters. Moving to the other side of the entranceway, he could see two others seated at the table, drinking coffee from heavy china mugs. Doc recognized all three men.
“I could use a cup of that,” Doc said, as he descended the three steps into the mess.
The men didn’t start, or show any particular emotion. Two of the men gazed at Doc silently. Sgt. Keyes, his hands shoved in his pockets, continued to stare straight ahead.
Doc knew the other two men from the straight leg Army. Sgt. Reyes had been in Korea with the 7th Infantry, in Doc’s battalion. Sgt. Breen he knew slightly from Zone days. Breen had been some kind of Smoky Hat at the jungle school.
Nobody offered Doc any coffee. Nobody smiled, and Doc didn’t either. Breen, who’d been stirring some kind of gruel, finally tossed the spoon on a plate.
“So, Keyes?” he said mildly.
Sgt. Breen, then, evidently regarded Doc’s unannounced arrival at 7 a.m. as some little breech of security. Keyes was just back from the city. Now here was Doc, standing uninvited in their mess, ten miles from the nearest road.
Keyes shrugged. “Well, Doc’s a nurse type. You know, he did the trop med cycle. It makes sense to me. I was gonna put it to Mac. I didn’t think he’d turn up this fast.”
“You told him?” said Reyes.
“Negative,” said Keyes.
Breen turned to Doc. “So...”
Doc shrugged. “I don’t know nothin...”
It was funny seeing these retired lifers getting so tight-jawed. As if any deal of theirs would amount to jack shit. Three middle-aged lifers in cheap cotton T-shirts, out in the boonies in a home-made cave. What the fuck, over? Breen and Reyes weren’t that happy with his intruding into whatever deal they were cooking. But Doc also could see they weren’t that pissed either. They were thinking now, just as Keyes had been thinking at the fed caf. Something about the trop med cycle they liked. At first Doc had felt hinky about dropping in on them. Now he felt okay.
“Well,” Breen said finally. “Mac should be back pretty soon.” The two other sergeants nodded. To Doc he said: “Coffee’s in the Thermos. Some leftover oatmeal if you want it.”
As Doc pumped coffee into one of the china mugs, he checked out the place. The beams were so low that a six-footer like Doc almost scrapped his head. The dugout also had a chalk board in one corner, a couple of battered patio chairs, a bookcase loaded with paperbacks. Pine boards raised off the dirt on ties made the floor; plywood panels the walls. The low wattage neon light overhead was powered by golf cart battery.
“I guess you got the impression you might be needed,” Reyes said.
“Not really,” Doc said.
“Anyway, Mac’ll be back real soon.”
“That’s fine,” Doc said.


If Mac was surprised it didn’t register. He came right over to shake hands. Doc had never been one of Mac’s followers at Fort Benning. But, years ago, he had gone to a meeting of the Sergeants’ Book Club. They’d been discussing a book called The Great Fear in Latin America, something about peasant mopes in basket case countries being kicked around by landowners and the military. It was the same old shit, as far as Doc could see. Talking it over didn’t help. Mac looked the same now as he had then, tall, bald, gaunt and noticeably stooped, with big red bone-y knuckles, a hick grin, and Uncle Wiggly spectacles pushed down over a big sun-blistered nose.
“You coming with us?”
“No idea,” Doc said.
Doc was starting to have doubts again about his impromptu decision to visit the sergeants. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it hadn’t been kidnapping. When Mac had landed at the controls of another tiny plane he’d had a passenger with him. Doc had soldiered long enough to know a prisoner when he saw one. Some cowering little brown-skinned civilian in a tweed coat, completely scared shitless. Breen had hustled the guy into one of the dugouts. It didn’t show on anybody’s face. But Doc got the feeling the sergeants weren’t too happy he’d been around to see this.
When Mac excused himself to talk to Breen, Keyes showed Doc the camp. Keyes said the sergeants had used their pension money to option about 200 acres of road-less desert. Their supplies came in by plane, including water. They’d smoothed a half-ass airstrip with hand tools. The dugouts had been shoveled out by hand too. Most of them were sleeping cells, eight-by-eight, each furnished with a spindly cot, folding chair and some kind of fold-up table. The walls were plastic sheeting and waxed cardboard. Buried in the ground and covered by two feet of sand, the cells made a cool retreat from the afternoon furnace.
“The two trainers we got from a flight school that went belly-up,” Keyes said. “Engines are pretty run out. Breen’s been givin’ us lessons. Probably too late for you.”
Keyes opened the padlock of another dugout by the rifle pit. Inside Doc could see a plank workbench with a shot-shell reloading die. Lined up on a rack were a couple of M1s, an M14, and a 12-gauge automatic.
“Magazine,” Keyes said, pointing inside. “Out here’s the range.”
Squinting downrange, Doc could pick out square white targets peeking up from the dunes, at about five hundred meters.
“You guys don’t make it easy on yourself," Doc said.
“Extreme ranges right now," Keyes said.
They walked along for awhile in silence.
Finally Doc said: “What’s for grease?”
“It’s okay,” Keyes said. “You had the breakfast. Lunch, usually soup and crackers. No fridge out here. Spaghetti for dinner a lot.”
Doc glanced at his companion. Keyes stared straight ahead, his simple moon face betraying no sign of humor. Someone else Doc would have suspected. But this was plain dumb-ass Keyes. He didn’t know how to joke.
Of course, fucking Keyes. Like all the butt-in-the-air sergeants in the Benning book club, he was a total believer. Reyes and Breen too. Total ankle-grabbers. Born slaves, glad as hell for the chance to bake bricks for the Pharaoh. What else did they have to do but follow Mac like a bunch of puppies.
They all worshipped his ass. Doc remembered them all sitting around at the book club, almost in a fucking trance, listening to Mac jabber. They’d sign on for any goofy bullshit. Why not? They had nothing. No prospects. What’s up for a forty-five-year-old ex-lifer? School crossing guard? Brinks’ driver? Eke out the pension getting fucked up every day in Mexico?
Mac had sold them some goofy bullshit. Doublewide, Nevada? Rifle range? Flying lessons? Soup and crackers for lunch? And they had some civilian mope under guard in a revetment.
Doc could see that his barging in might not have been such a hot idea. He’d eyeballed the PUC, the Mex or whatever the fuck he was. Hard to say how Mac would take it if Doc decided to bail.
Breen popped out of the mess and began waving his arm. Doc didn’t know Breen too good. He’s been one of the snake-eaters at the jungle school. But that wasn’t his MOS. Doc remembered him saying he came out of the arty. Spotter or forward observer type. Adjusting fires on the horn, or maybe the new laser bullshit. Seconded to the Zone from some arty battery.
Breen kept waving his arm. “Get some lunch.”
Reyes was already inside, pumping coffee into a china mug. Mac sat at the table, a huge brown and yellow topo spread out in front of him. He smiled at Doc, the Uncle Wiggly glasses pushed low on his burned nose.
“Grab a chair,” Mac said. “I got something to show you.”




Chapter 12


Sgt. MacDonald had grown up outside the village of Castor, Arkansas, the son of a truck farmer. The father was representative of his caste, ignorant, dirty, wrathful, penniless, bigoted, devoid of imagination, and prey to every superstition. Grand Ol' Opry and its imitators were allowed, grudgingly, on the family TV, but sit-coms, "New York" crime dramas, soaps, quiz shows and preachers were forbidden.
If the four MacDonald boys risked tuning in to Top 40, they did so with the radio muffled under blankets while the old man snored in his chair. And they shivered over the enormity of the offense and the consequences of getting caught.
In the eyes of the world, the elder MacDonald figured hardly at all; another insignificant peasant with a few acres of denuded, played out dirt. But to four skinny, pimply boys who seldom saw other adults and who seldom were released from chores to attend Merrick County Elementary, the old man was an omnipotent dictator whose every whim had to be appeased. Ruling completely over a cowed and usually speechless wife, the father was a harsh arbitrary master who dealt out cuffs and kicks to the dirty-faced children who rolled around the kitchen floor in the pale halo of a Tiffany lamp.
But on summer evenings, before dark closed in on the weathered farmhouse, he sometimes sat on the porch, his chair tilted back against the clapboard, and delivered rambling monologues that his children knew better than to ever interrupt. In the dusky stillness, the father grumbled about the dishonesty of his neighbors, about the graft, top-to-bottom, in the Merrick County courthouse, or about the myriad injustices visited upon the small landowner by government high and low.
The boys stirred restlessly on the splintery boards, waiting for him to get to the interesting part, about the time he had soldiered in the Army, in a world far removed from Castor, Arkansas. The boys loved the stories; about how vicious sergeants had made everybody walk around all day like a duck; how the soldiers had to crawl on their bellies in the mud while real bullets from a machine gun came crackling overhead; how the army let you eat all you wanted three times a day in a kitchen the size of a blimp hanger.
To the oldest MacDonald boy, lying on the hard planks, Army was a word that came to stand for the world itself and everything in it. In fact, the Army was all the father had every learned of the outside world, the three uneventful years of peacetime garrison duty in Kansas being the only time he had ever been out of Merrick County.
Despite his shortcomings as a father, Tom MacDonald did pass along the skills he had. Like all the Merrick County MacDonalds, he was a crack shot. He was so good he'd made the regimental rifle team at Fort Riley, and in the place of prominence on the family mantle sat a small bronze trophy topped by a toy soldier aiming a rifle. All his boys could hunt and shoot. The family always had meat, sometimes just possum, but usually rabbit or deer. The dad, gun under his arm, could walk for miles through the scrub Arkansas brush, and he expected his sons to scramble along at his heels without making a lot of noise or any kind of complaint.
By example more than talk, he showed his boys how to be comfortable in the woods with nothing in their pockets but a jackknife. He even showed them how to whittle a hook to use in all the surrounding ponds or basins to snag perch or catfish. Under his silent tutelage, they became efficient foragers, and, while they were little at least, they always seemed to have enough, even though the farm, by anybody's account, was nothing.
To raise cash for store-bought, the kerosene, nails, wire, bullets, tobacco, the father sold a few hogs he'd personally fed up on table scraps. The mother's blueberry patch brought in two or three hundred. If the dad was hard-pressed to replace tires or a transmission on the sorry old pickup, he'd work day labor for the county. But that wasn't often, because he was a man who hated to take orders.
Castor thought little of MacDonald, rightly, because he was broke, lazy, unreliable; he was surly when he came to town; he didn't say howdy at the post office, and he didn't laugh at the fat deputy's jokes. Castor said Tom MacDonald was mean to the bone, and the town was right.
For most of their boyhood, the sons were unaware of the town's opinion. It appeared to them that the dad was arbitrary, imperious, unpredictable, dangerous, sometimes approachable, but in any case the absolute ruler of his own domain. He bowed to no one and did exactly as he pleased.
Although he was cruel and violent, he had, from a child's viewpoint, his good side, which was that he didn't insist very hard about school: the children went if it was convenient and if Tom didn't have better things for them to do. Chores were divvied out evenly and weren't particularly onerous. And if the boys got on the right side of him, they'd find themselves going squirrel hunting instead, or up to Lubuck's Pond.
Later, when the oldest boy began bringing books home from the county library, Tom shrugged and let it go. If the boy wanted to waste his time after dinner Tom didn't care. The Merrick County Library was free. But he'd better not come running to Tom if he ruined his eyes and needed specs.
Of course, once the oldest boy began attending school irregularly at Merrick County High, his view of home life changed. Now he could measure his dad against other adults. He overheard what people said in town, and he knew they looked down on his father, and that there was reason for it. It made him prickly and aloof at school, and dangerous to ridicule, since he was lanky and hard-knuckled, and in a fight had his father's meanness.
If one of his teachers had noticed him, and seen through the crust, it might have been different. But that didn't happen. He was just another one, a peckerwood with raw hands, and clothes that reeked of the barn. On his seventeenth birthday MacDonald's oldest son left home and enlisted in the Army.


Chapter 13

Bashir Nasr's stomach was still queasy. He hadn't been right since the ridiculous confrontation on Spencer St. with his gangling abductor, who had turned out to be a retired soldier with criminal delusions. First there had been the sickening violence when his arm had been twisted; then the nauseating night airplane ride over the mountains; then the brackish water at the barbaric desert encampment, tasting equally of salt and chlorine. And the food he'd been offered: gruel and paste and some kind of vegetable sediment. He’d been sick ever since; and his bowels ran like a faucet.
And the malady had gotten progressively worse. Why shouldn’t it? The unnerving, fantastic hopscotch sojourn across the continent, Europe and North Africa; a frantic week that had destabilized his entire alimentary system; and his diaphragm, always delicate, always subject to palpitations, was now in spasm, twitching constantly. The nervous strain would disorganize anyone’s digestion, and Bashir Nasr always had been inordinately susceptible, not only to palpitations but also to a flighty pyloric sphincter, and to acidic reflux that could force up his throat a burning bolus of molten cud. At every airport security checkpoint he had scanned the bustling crowds for the alert policeman he could signal; at every airport, Mac had showed him the sharpened wooden stick that he threatened to jam into Bashir's heart if he let out a peep. Nobody could fault Bashir Nasr. There had been no opportunity. And he always had been bound to one of the sergeant's with nylon fishing line.
At the primitive desert redoubt, Bashir had seen the methodical way these men practiced with weapons. Military men. Retired infantry sergeants. He didn't think they were bluffing. They were practiced killers (although somewhat over the hill) who it appeared had embarked themselves (and now the unwilling Basir Nasr!) on some desperate escapade. Bashir Nasr had no doubts. They would have killed him if he had tried anything.
The worst had been stealing the airplanes. Bashir Nasr couldn't believe it: that they could debark from a taxi, saunter onto the greensward at the Nairobi flying club, in daylight, nobody stopping them or posing a question; and then the cool smiling MacDonald brandishing a knife before some poor mechanic's face.
In a rush, in a blur, they were inside the planes, bumping wildly over the turf field, and then they were aloft, while beneath them some miniature, dwindling figures were running below waving their arms.
Then followed the endless droning flight across the featureless Kenyan plain, punctuated at last by the hair-raising landing at the forlorn abandoned corral to pick up weapons. It had all been a dyspeptic nightmare, and Bashir Nasr's susceptible colon had not recovered. Every moment he squirmed in his seat, trying to stave off an embarrassing accident. At every stop he repeated the humiliation of having to squat in the dirt while his rectum rumbled in agony.
He had the right to be frightened and to be sick. He was in the company of lunatics. One, the so-called Doc, a bona fide psychotic. His ape-like physique and Rasputin eyes betrayed him. Admittedly the others (if one hadn't witnessed firsthand their behavior) looked to be more the buffoon than the desperado. Their leader, the inscrutable MacDonald, appeared a gaping rustic. With his sloping shoulders and absurd granny spectacles he seemed some doddering bumpkin, grinning like a hyena and sucking his teeth. But behind the glinting wire-rimmed spectacles the blank eyes revealed nothing.
His other confederates, on the surface, could hardly have looked more pedestrian. The man Keyes was completely nondescript, short of stature, spare, elderly in comportment, a vacant moon face with one beaky promontory, where his two emotions, anger or not anger, exchanged places periodically. The taciturn, thuggish Reyes, an impassive Hispanic, or Amer-Indian, more likely, with aquiline nose and dark features, his sinewy arms a denim blur of ancient gang tattoos, and above his forehead a tight-fitting helmet of shiny black hair annealed to the skull with pomade. Less intimidating was the man Breen, who seemed to be MacDonald's special confidant. Bashir thought he detected an affable quality. A reassuringly husky man, tall, and heavy-boned, but lacking the imposing muscularity of the unhinged medic.
To be completely factual, Bashir’s stomach had improved a little since London. He had been in such distress at Heathrow from stomach cramps that, despite his trepidation, he had approached the demented medic. The way Doc's eyes studied him had made Bashir Nasr's heart quaver. It was the reptilian stare of the predator. "Traveler's diarrhea," Doc had muttered. "Where we're going, that’s where you can get fucked up." The man had enjoyed taunting him, even in view of Bashir Nasr’s excruciating pain. But to be fair, the belladonna had helped.
But how could Bashir Nasr have a quiet stomach when he finally learned from his captors their final destination? The Jebel? What did these aging buffoons hope to do in the lost outback of the southern Sudan? Bashir Nasr could have told them the entire truth about the south of Sudan without the bother of leaving Berkeley. There is nothing. His father had always told him since boyhood: "Sudan is the anus of Africa. There is nothing but shit." Filthy cities, unchecked disease, no arable land, except along the fringes of the Nile. A desert peopled by Stone-Age barbarians that would slit your throat for a blanket. Did they expect some Ryder Haggard Temple of Gold, some Conrad-ian graveyard of the elephants? No wealth existed in the south. There were no resources. That's why nobody went there. It was a barren hot empty waste where the natives died in droves because of a Pandora's Box of misfortunes. Typhoid, meningitis, yaws, hookworm, bilharzias, tuberculosis, blinding worm onchoerciasis, Ebola. They had nothing there but sickness.
It was impossible to read MacDonald's mind, and he had been noncommittal with Bashir Nasr, except to imply that Bashir Nasr's part was to be the linguist, since all the tribes, despite a bewildering hodge-podge of languages, spoke a kind of pidgin Arabic brought into the country by slavers. The other sergeants were in on the scheme but they too were mute. The only hint came from the moronic Keyes. During the droning Atlantic crossing Keyes had said their mission in Sudan was…to conduct a test. Bashir swabbed his burning forehead. What possible kind of diagnostic proctology could there be for the anus of Africa? A test of what? “Oh, we just wanna try a few things,” Keyes had said vaguely.
Keyes did say that the sergeants, save the psychotic medic, had belonged to a sergeant's book club at an army base. Bashir Nasr previously had not known Army enlisted men had an interest in literature. “More like politics,” Keyes said. They had read some books about Africa. And MacDonald had then suggested that upon retirement they ought to try “some management ideas.”
“It’s like an experiment,” Keyes had said. “We need a basket case. Someplace really fucked.”
That would be the Jebel, Bashir admitted. FUBAR. No, FUBAH. Beyond all hope. Keyes brought out a small atlas from his tote and poked his finger at a well-thumbed page. The sergeants’ laboratory (Bashir had to squint at the miniscule typeface) was to be… the southern province of Jebel, selected, said Keyes, for its remoteness, for its intractable refusal to bend to the central government, for its truly appalling panoply of ills. Keyes had neglected to mention the inhabitants. Bashir had heard from his father about the tribes of the Jebel: the Fau, the Neur, the Murrini. The people were either thieves and murderers, or their victims, and all suffered unending pestilence, drought, hunger and grinding poverty.
“Yup.” Keyes moon face smiled non-anger. “Mac’s got some ideas for bringin’ those folks up to speed.” Bashir Nasr, tied by fishing line to this oval-faced, gibbering moron, nodded submissively. He didn’t have the strength to argue. He needed Keyes to take him to the bathroom again.
The flight to Nairobi had been equally miserable, but the worst episode had been in the stolen planes, when the dizzying corkscrew motion had caused him to vomit in a paper sack. Even after the planes finally landed at the corral, and his feet were on the ground, Bashir Nasr's stomach still churned. It was cholera from the water pitcher at the Nairobi hotel. The so-called Doc was no real doctor. What could a former ranker know about serious disease? He had misdiagnosed Bashir's ailment. The continued cramps, the jabbing pain, spoke bluntly of looming dissolution. As the plane came to a stop in a cloud of blowing dust, Bashir looked around for a sign of any building that might have a lavatory. He hated squatting on the ground, and dreaded the horrible squirting evacuations that burned his rectum like fire. Clots of jellyfish-like mucus were in the runny stool. And every time his wretched stomach managed to liberate another foul pat of vomit, Bashir's whole body shuddered and his face turned icy with sweat. He was on the verge of death. The lunatic only laughed, said everybody got the bug sometimes, that it would pass. Take this little pill; put some Vaseline on the asshole. Bashir was dying, and his treatment was in the hands of a scoffing quack.


Chapter 14

It had been a four-hour flight to the corral. Doc had used his pee bottle once. He got the impression Reyes and Keyes looked down on him for not being able to hold his water. Doc could have told them it wasn't healthy to keep piss in the bladder too long. It was like the Army’s new rule for drinking water on patrol. Forget water discipline. Re-hydrate every chance, piss clear, and often. But Reyes and Keyes were Old Army and still believed in water discipline.
The two little planes had droned across featureless desert, bobbing up and down in the rising air currents off the scorched plain. At least at altitude the air was cooler. Off to the left loomed the hazy outline of mountains. But otherwise, no landmarks. Reyes at the controls kept the gyro needle pegged on 230, while the magnetic compass over the windscreen jiggled madly.
How Reyes and Breen found the corral Doc didn't know. As far as he could see there was nothing to pick it out from the surroundings. Ahead, Doc could see Breen wagging the wings of the leading plane. Then Breen's Cessna began descending in a steep left turn. A moment later, as Reyes began retarding the throttle, Doc could see an empty thorn bush corral, and beside it, a truck.
The plane floated over the desert, Reyes easing the yoke back to bleed off airspeed as the wheels felt for the ground. It reminded Doc of an old lady going wading, the way Reyes gingerly felt for the bottom, floating over the rock-strewn ground, trying to set down gently on the unprepared surface. Finally, with the stall horn screaming, the little plane touched with a hard bump and rolled to a stop.
The other plane already had landed, and Mac and Breen were out talking to a tall, ginger-haired man standing beside a battered Land Rover. An African stood atop the vehicle handing down red jerry cans to a helper on the ground. The Saudi, meanwhile, was hanging onto the strut of the Cessna, looking like he was about to collapse. Breen came over.
"Doc, the fucking professor upchucked in the back seat. Can you give him some more dope or something?"
As Doc began opening his med pack, he saw the truck driver approaching. He was ruddy, middle-aged, bearded, with a shock of ginger hair just going gray at the temples. His short-sleeved safari shirt revealed clusters of watery tattoos on both arms. He was carrying two M1s and an automatic shotgun.
"'Ello, mate. Have you some nice gear in your kip for me? No? I thought not. Well, find a place for these, darling, and the boys will be along with the petrol."
Doc smiled. Typical Brit lifer. They called everybody darling. Now, retired from the grenadiers or the house guards or what-the-fuck, here he was on the Sudanese frontier, running guns and gasoline for Tusker money. All told, the Brit had forty weapons, mostly shotguns, but also three M1s and an M14. How he got hold of ‘em was anybody's guess. For sure Mac had arranged it. Mac preferred the M1 and had told Doc he considered the M16 little more than a varmint rifle.
The Brit's helpers also unloaded two heavy wooden boxes, which Doc figured contained maybe a couple thousand rounds. The gasoline in the jerry cans topped off both planes. Other than that, he'd brought sandwiches and beer in a cooler for a lunch.
The Brit didn't join them. "Kiss, kiss, darlings. Must be off. Good hunting, tootles, and all that."
"Don't like our company," Mac said, grinning.
"Darling, I'm thinking of other blokes who don't want your company."
"See ya," Mac said.
"I shouldn’t think so very much darling."
A moment later only a wedge of dust showed the progress of the Land Rover’s retreat toward the east.
Doc looked down to see the swarthy little prisoner at his elbow. He was still whining about stomach cramps.

"Here's what I'm gonna do for you," Doc said. "This is atropine, 20 milligrams, for your tum. What it does is control a spastic colon so you're not cramping and shitting all the time."
Doc had found out from Keyes that the civilian wasn’t Mex, but a Saudi named Bashir Nasr. It sounded funny. Sounded like, Ba-aazer Naaz-er. Breen called him Basher. Like calling the smallest guy in the platoon Brute.
The little Saudi took the pill, examined it skeptically, and finally put it in his mouth.
"You don't look like you trust me," Doc said.
"Perhaps I'm not entirely confident about your medical credentials,” Bashir said. “You say traveler’s diarrhea. I suspect amoebic dysentery. Or cholera"
Doc laughed. "If you had cholera, you'd be shitting rice milk, instead of that green slime that's coming out of your butt now."
"It is…excruciating none the less."
“Ha,” said Doc, “And you'd be running a temp of one-oh-three. You're not even spiking a hundred."
"Thank you," Bashir said. "Thank you. Perhaps we should get the opinion of a doctor. One with a medical degree."
"Sure," said Doc. "Get a second opinion."
The little Saudi looked at Doc morosely. "We're in Sudan now, aren't we? My father always told me, Sudan is the latrine of Africa."
"Hmm," said Doc.
"How can this happen? I'm walking down the street. An elderly madman appears out of nowhere..."
"Mac?"
"Yes...and I'm abducted. Forced into a car at gun point."
"He had a gun?" Doc said.
"I'm sure he had," Bashir said. "Somewhere. He twisted my arm. How could I not go? I thought he wanted help with his grammar..."
"You were his language instructor?"
Doc saw that Bashir Nasr recoiled slightly at the word.. "Full professor. Tenured." The little Saudi made a ghastly smile. “Oh, God. How long does this pill take?"
"It should kick in petty soon. So I guess they want you to be translator."
"Yes. Wonderful. I'm torn away from my career…my family… by, you'll pardon me...aging criminals, possessed of some sort of mad scheme...that I may interpret the grunts of cow herders..."
Doc could see the little Saudi was actually making an effort to be polite, probably in gratitude for the meds. He acted like it was a big effort, though.
"The black dudes speak Arabic?" Doc said, just to say something.
"It's to Arabic what Ebonics is to English. I'm kidding. They use pidgin Arabic in this part of the world, as a kind of inter-tribal…trading language. Sudan has a hundred native languages, all of different stock and mutually incomprehensible... Do you think there might be a hospital in this town we’re going to?”
Doc could see that the little Saudi's legs were trembling. Probably the dumb shit was blown out of his fucking mind, thrown cold into this deal. At least Doc pretty much knew the life. This guy was clueless; scared of things he didn't need to be scared of, like his puny case of the trots, and too dumb to see the shit storm around the corner. And much too ready to mouth off. He needed to lose that right now.
"I'm gonna give you another little pill," Doc said.
"What?"
"Valium," Doc said. "Make you sleepy."_

After interminable hours, they were on the ground again. They were on hard-packed red earth alongside a clutter of conical huts with thatched roofs. It was obviously a large village. Perhaps they were near a hospital where some real care was possible. Bashir would require a stretcher; he couldn't possibly walk; the cramps incapacitated him.
MacDonald came over and put his head inside the plane. Under his arm he carried a huge rifle, and his absurd glasses were pushed up over his forehead.
"This is Rembec," MacDonald said. "We got the welcome wagon."
Bashir Nasr looked over MacDonald's shoulder. In the background, behind the huts, he saw a moving line, an undulating wave of black bodies of every size, but mostly little children, slowly oozing toward the planes. Hundreds of them, black as coal, some of them carrying what looked like handfuls of sticks.
"Get your sorry ass out here," MacDonald said. "It's time for you to earn your keep.
Chapter 15

Business could not have been worse. It must be punishment from Heaven. Or a sign. Ordinarily, Jaybut Shaybin did not trouble himself about signs, or about other supernatural manifestations. But it was almost uncanny how trade had deteriorated. Not just batteries in the unnamable plastic package. Everything
The only hope on the horizon was the Armenian half-caste from Dineippe who had taken a first interest in the almost mint-condition Lee-Enfield. Unlike the rusting Kalashnikovs (the only other weapons Shaybin currently had for sale) the Enfield undoubtedly was workable. It was still wrapped in its original Cosmoline and paper. And Shaybin had 500 rounds of .303 ball ammunition for it.
But did the half-Berber Armenian qualify? Did he really have the ten quintals of placer gold? Shaybin had asked twenty and the Armenian had counter-offered five. They both knew the price. But where would that worthless vagabond bastard son of a whore get that much gold?
Jaybut Shaybin sat cross-legged on a pile of rugs atop a wooden platform at the rear of the corrugated iron shed that housed his emporium. Lately he had taken to pulling khat. It was a filthy African habit, but what was a man to do in this filthy backwater. The narcotic mildly dulled his brain and eased his worries. And it was a thousand times easier on his head than the vile peach brandy he had used during the excruciating pain of the boil on his thigh.
The boil had been so terrible he hadn't slept for two weeks. But what was he to do? How could he have the boil lanced by the barber when the last patient to try Amaton's surgery had died screaming? It had not been a good advertisement for Amaton, who lived next door. Nobody in the village went to him anymore for surgery. An alternative was the clinic in the refugee camp. But to queue up with naked savages would cause him to lose face entirely with his customers.
Jaybut rubbed his shiny round face, brown as a walnut, and set with large lachrymose eyes that grew wet with tears when he curled his tongue around a leaf of the barber's pungent khat.
Perhaps he had gotten the boil from a woman. He knew it was dangerous to fornicate with the Dinka whores. They had every disease. But what was a man to do when his own wife was both ugly and uncooperative? Now (and this time he meant it) he was through with that. No more would he visit the Doleib-thatched huts across the river and endanger his health with the smiling laundry women.
From his position atop the rugs Shaybin could easily keep an eye on his store. Not that there was much to watch. Rough-hewn boards, set across trestles, held the merchandise: plastic buckets, machetes, tin ware, flashlight batteries (in the unnamable blister packs), rapeseed oil, shriveled, almost inedible dates. His only customers were two Nilotic Dinka, a husband and his principle wife, the man heavily cicatrized across his naked chest; and on his forehead, the six horizontal ritual scars. The two conversed in low clicking tones, weighing for the thousandth time the wisdom of purchasing a shallow tin dish. This was their third visit, each time to stand for hours in front of the trestle that held the tin ware.
The Dinka were useless. They had no money, and nothing to barter except cones of rank tobacco. Some of the men had ebony sticks, elaborately carved and inlaid with brass. But the men wouldn't give them up, even for a transistor radio.
The Arabs, on the other hand, understood trade. And many of them had sequestered away many fine items pilfered from the countryside. When the Bedui came in for flashlight batteries and radios there was always a drawn-out, rancorous exchange, mutually satisfying and profitable. But what the Bedui really wanted was guns. Kalashnikovs. The chiefs already had examined his pitiful relics and slapped their elbows in disdain. A rifle like that might be sufficient to fire a few moldy rounds to celebrate a son's marriage. But the unnamable thing wasn't a weapon.
Outside the hum of cicadas continued unabated. The sun beat mercilessly on the whitewashed iron roof. From far across the river came the faint peals of laughter of the laundry women.
Just outside the door, Shaybin could see a tiny patch of the barber's garden, where the khat was grown, fertilized with night soil, untempered and undiluted, from his fecund household.
Rembec boasted only one commercial street, and the Shaybin emporium was the hub. The building was unmarked. It didn't need a sign. Next door the barber dispensed herbs, potions, magic amulets, and surgery for those willing to try it. He would come straight in from weeding his garden to lance boils or to remove filial worms from the foot with the edge of an old razorblade.
Across the lane was the garrison, a row of thatched and mud-plastered huts surrounded by a bramble fence, and manned by a squad of teenage thugs from Khartoum, under the command of the wily old sergeant. The soldiers were harmless, slept mostly, except when foraging for food from the villagers. The theft was tolerable and understandable: they received no pay. Still, there was perpetual ill feeling among the Dinka because the louts made free with any woman they surprised alone in a field or beside the river. And when they got drunk on peach brandy in the afternoon they would fire off their rifles to scare the children.
Jaybut didn't mind the noise: he had a good arrangement with the sergeant to protect the store, although lately Puhni had been demanding extra rations of beach brandy. And when Shaybin balked, the old thief had hinted darkly that the bloodthirsty Dinka would loot the emporium in a minute, if it weren't for the alert troop of bed warmers under Puhni's command. Jaybut had given the brandy. What else could he do?
Sulkily, Shaybin picked through the remaining leaves from his pile beside him on the rug. Bribery was the price of doing business. Or of not doing business, at the moment.
With his head down over the khat, Shaybin suddenly became aware of a great stillness. The cicadas had stopped their hum. The clicking whispers of the Dinka couple had ceased. Shaybin slowly raised his eyes and confronted what could only be a khat-induced hallucination.
Three strangers stood in the doorway. The Dinkas at the dish table stood rigidly still, looking straight ahead, without a flicker of expression. Strangers in Rembec were not necessarily a welcome event.
The fog of narcotic dissipated instantly and Shaybin's pulses beat stronger. It wasn't fear. If these were thieves, so be it; they'd get little enough. If they meant to kill him, so be it; his life was heavy. It was not fear that made Shaybin's pulse beat; it was his hope that these newcomers might be customers.
The three men paused silently in the doorway. One of them, a brawny giant, held back in the shadow, just inside the doorway, the better to watch the street. The other two stepped forward into the sunlight filtering through the dingy pane over Shaybin's head. One was plump, delicate, dark-skinned, with the aquiline nose that pronounced him a Semite. Perhaps a Saudi or an Egyptian. The other was a European, abnormally tall and thin, dressed in un-tucked blue shirt and cotton trousers. He wore an American billed baseball cap (very valuable), and on his feet were heavy boots, worth 25 pounds Egyptian, easily.
It was the Semite who spoke, in pidgin Arabic, asking Shabin which languages he used. The storekeeper, along with Hindi, knew Arabic, a few of the Dinka dialects, a little English, some Swahili, and even an Algerian French patois.
“Je voudrais ecouter ca fois quelque,” the Semite said, but then switched to formal Arabic, which he spoke with the fruity, sibilant accents, the initial drawn vocal, the rising terminal inflection, that stamped him as an aristocrat, and as an educated man.
"The God that is the all-powerful God, the only God, may his countless blessings and merciful justice fall on your house today and always..."
The Semite was reciting the time-hallowed opening stanzas of the Koranic formula for the greeting of strangers.
"The all-knowing God that is the only God has brought you to my house, and your presence is his blessing..." Shaybin said.
Deliberately and in turn, Shaybin recited his half of the formula greeting. He noticed the Semite's eyes wrinkled slightly, probably at the coarseness of his foreign pronunciation. That didn't matter, in fact, it was better. The supercilious often are less wary.
After the indispensable Koranic exchange, the Semite turned to his hopes that all of Shaybin's family, including cousins and nieces, continued to be attended by excellent health. Jaybut Shaybin, while alertly supplying his half of the opening dialog, had relaxed. He sat smiling, perfectly at ease on his pile of rugs. Whoever these strange men might be, they were not thieves.
They were customers.

Chapter 16

Once down in Rembec, Mac lost no time. He began recruiting forty men for a light platoon of gendarmes. The recruiting needed patience, since men usually resist turning over their volition to unsanctioned strangers. Mac had the one advantage useful to salesmen and demagogues. He had a plan for Rembec, and nobody else did. The village, sunk in squalor, was a cesspool of disease and random violence. In that it was like hundreds of other hapless villes the sergeants had come across during twenty-year careers in half-a-dozen wars. In the Army, there had been no help for it. Usually they came as advisors to the venal army of some sad basket case run by corrupt politicos for the benefit of a few top-dog families. Greed rode and force ruled. Drunken local troops shook down their own people. The top dogs looted or squandered the foreign aid and bungled the program. Avarice and stupidity won out over any kind of common sense; self-interest and bickering in the capital kayoed any chance for the mopes in the boondocks. Haiti, El Salvador, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan. The sergeants had been there.
As advisors, Mac and Breen and later Keyes and Reyes would get the task of teaching small unit tactics to illiterate boys, in a usually forlorn effort to turn rabble into soldiers, or at least militia. Part of the course work formulated by US Army book writers at the Pentagon called upon them to suggest standards of behavior that didn’t include theft, rape and torture. But the realty was, a handful of American infantry sergeants, usually not fluent in the local language, could do little to curb the maniacal excitement when boy gunmen eventually got turned loose on their own people.
It was during the meetings of the Sergeants' Book Club at Fort Benning that Mac began talking about shit holes like Port au Prince or Kabul. "You'd think these assholes would be able to manage things a little better," Mac would say. Some of the sergeants had said: why the fuck bother? Tegucigalpa or Tirana? Hopeless. The mopes (and particularly the fanatic khat-chewing raghead mopes) are hopeless. They don’t appreciate help. They'll turn on you and cut your heart out. A basket case is a basket case for a reason. Everything’s rotten, the people are garbage.
Mac pretty much went along with that. In shit holes like the Jebel, even the mopes who might benefit from good management eventually would turn on anybody who tried to help them. The people suffering the most were the same ones who resisted. Everybody wanted clean jeans. Nobody wanted to do the wash.
But for some reason Mac and Breen and a few others had kept talking at the book club. Management, Mac kept saying. No matter how shitty it looks, there were ways. Natural human laziness and resistance to discipline could be overcome. Garbage piled in the streets? Rats running everywhere? Turn the citizens into garbage collectors. Nobody wants to do it? They’d rather sip coffee and blab in cafes? Fucking make them do it. Press the muzzle to the temple and explain the choice. This worked pretty well in the Army, generally. Mac planned to apply that same principle to a fucked-up mess like the village of Rembec. You fucking will do it.
Still, Mac knew the first big step would be the toughest, recruiting a local militia to back him up.
In contrast, disarming and disbanding the Rembec garrison had taken only a couple of minutes.
The Indian storekeeper, after selling them some gas and other supplies, pointed across the dirt road. Leaving Doc to watch the street, Mac, Breen and Keyes left the torrid heat of the road and stepped into the gloomy, low-pitched barracks room to find everybody asleep. The room stank of farts, unwashed bodies and the sweetish odor of brandy. After letting their eyes adjust to the gloom, the sergeants collected the weapons, some half dozen ancient Enfields, rusty and crusted with mud. A fat sergeant lay supine on his cot, his khaki shirt open to reveal an enormous paunch. A tin demijohn lay on its side on the dirt floor nearby. The gasping snores of the obese sergeant shook the wattles under his chin, and even seemed to shiver the reed thatch that covered the stifling barracks room.
Mac, standing back several feet, pointed the muzzle of his Garand at the old man's head.
The gunshot, preternaturally loud in the cramped room, failed to arouse the slumbering boys. Breen and Keyes had to shake them awake. They aroused groggily and stared in amazement at the inexplicable appearance of armed white men standing over them. They sniffed out loud at the heavy smell of cordite in the room. They gawked stupidly at the mud-plastered white wall, where the back of Puhni's skull hung in stringy black clumps.
After stripping them of their uniforms and ammunition, the sergeants had sent the boys packing. It was a long waterless trek back to Wau. They might die of thirst or be murdered by Bedui. But at least their brains weren't spattered in hanging strings of yellow blood-smeared dura on the whitewashed barracks wall. The boys hurried down the road without looking back, until all that could be seen of them was a moving cloud of white dust.

After disarming the garrison, Mac had needed to explain the new setup to the villagers and to begin the immediate recruitment of a militia. Bashir Nasr, still complaining about his drizzling behind, had demurred at first, telling Mac he was too ill to fulfill his duties as a translator. But he had had a change of heart, after seeing the carcass of fat Puhni dragged into the street by a throng of happy urchins.
The children had dragged their heavy load under the large acacia tree in the center of the village where the elders collected in the afternoon to play the bean game. Some of the young men warily began appearing on the outskirts of the circle of children to examine the corpse of the despised official who regularly had berated and insulted them, cuffed and kicked them, since their childhood. When a big enough group had gathered Bashir Nasr began translating Mac's pitch. The recruiting began.
It was touchy. The only social cohesion in Rembec existed because of ingrained tribal tradition. The Jebel had no law other than usage. The authority of the Khartoum government, as represented by the late Rembec garrison, had been entirely illusory, overthrown in a moment. The young men of Rembec could see now with their own eyes that the gang of government thugs who had lorded over them in the village streets could be dispersed effortlessly by a few men. The more discerning and honest among them also saw that it had been only their own cowardice, and the weight of custom, that had held them in thrall so many years. Understandably, with the visible symbols of authority removed, the more ardent spirits began to feel restive.
But Mac understood the first rule of any social upheaval. When a weak or illusory power topples, the underdogs suddenly realize how easily authority can be unhorsed. The usurpers therefore must show an iron fist. Otherwise, chaos. Free of sanctioned coercion, the unshackled slave always will seek revenge against his former oppressors, an understandable impulse that immediately degenerates into general violence.
Mac knew that the phony rule of the government thugs in Rembec had to be replaced instantly by an order that was real and disciplined and able to deal out painful consequences: a police force run by the sergeants. Mac wanted no power vacuum during the transition. All obstacles to the takeover must be removed.


The witch Kareni Kishi stood in the middle of the dirt path, arms akimbo, a short clay pipe clenched between the gums, her huge splayed feet pointing out at forty-five degrees. She wore her usual filthy sack, and around her neck hung half a dozen small leather bags containing her powders and amulets.
As the sergeants approached she removed her pipe and began to make a short barking laugh, her eyes disappearing in a mesh of winkles. Doc felt a chill on his neck, although the air was breathless, the heat intense. The old woman was laughing at them. In her time, how many armed men had come trudging along this same path into this raggedly sorry-ass ville of conical huts slapped together with mud and cow shit. The men came, one gang after another; they ransacked the baskets and pulled down the girls. When they left, the village mopes came to Kareni Kishi for a poultice or for the healing wipe of an amulet. As the witch watched the approach of the sergeants she laughed to herself at the futility of men with guns.
Mac stopped in front of the witch and smiled back. Doc wished he had a camera to get a snap of the tall grinning gangling stoop-shouldered rube Yank with the big rifle slung under his arm grinning down at the tiny prune-faced African sorceress, all four-foot-five of her, puffing her filthy pipe and cackling like a jackal.
Mac turned to Brevold, the mission handyman. “Is this here the one?”
“Kareni Kishi,” Brevold, said, smiling ruefully at the cackling little witch.
“Well howdy, howdy,” Mac said. And then to Brevold: “She got Obo to do the fish pond?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Brevold. “Everyone’s afraid of her.”
“Gosh darn it,” Mac said, still smiling. “Sounds to me like she could be a real obstacle to progress around here.”
Doc didn’t know if she knew. He thought she did know. Because for an instant he saw her eyes, the yellow iris, just a glimpse of blood-shot vitreous fluid, peeping from the mesh of wrinkles. She must have known for maybe a fraction of a second, although probably not long enough to get off a curse.
Doc and Brevold both jumped. The witch lay flat on her back, her withered arms thrown out, her gray cracked toes wiggling. The sound of the gun shot slowly reverberated down the river, and Doc got a sudden whiff of cordite. The witch’s cerebrum had exfoliated out of her brain pan like a grilled shrimp bulging from the shell. Doc took a step closer. Interestingly enough, the trail of cortex in the mud had a distinct yellowish hue. A piece of the cheesy-looking temporal lobe looked like it was scored and pitted. Doc wanted a closer look, but Mac already had motioned for Keyes and Breen to come up. Between them, they hefted the 80-pound carcass and tossed it into the sluggish stream. The current gradually took hold of Kareni, turned her twice around like a compass needle, and drifted her downstream until she disappeared in the floating clumps of reeds. Mac, shouldering his M1, kicked her clay pipe off the footpath and continued into the village.
The young Brevold seemed stunned. He turned to Doc, who was still staring at the mat of floating reeds where the witch had disappeared.
“That’s not what I wanted,” Brevold said.
Doc shrugged, and picked up the footsteps of the other sergeants. It was almost like one of those tertiary syphilitic infections pictured in the books back at the hospital. The dark pitting, the lateral scoring along the anterior slope. To bad he hadn’t the chance for a closer look. The handyman said everybody in the ville believed in the old cunt’s visions. Hella funny if it was just syphilis dementia. Except the books showed a more splotchy kind of necrosis, and the cortal membrane looked dry. Maybe somewhere along the line she’d got a hit of streptomycin or something to slow up the damage. Interesting to do a section. Too late now. The fish had her.


Chapter 17

From his office in regimental headquarters Lt. Col. Ibn Ali Zayd had a sweeping view of the parade ground. It gave him pleasure in the morning to interrupt his work by striding across his spacious foyer to the casement where he would stand for a moment watching one of the companies from his battalion at drill. From the height and distance of the headquarters building the soldiers often seemed to be performing their evolutions flawlessly. It was an illusion. But it was pleasant.
Standing silently by the damask curtains, Ali Zayd idly picked up one of the polished ebony figurines from atop a bookcase. The figurines were mostly female, busty nude fertility goddesses. But there also were several lithe priapic warriors. The figurines, some of them inlaid with gold and pearl, had been stolen by slavers long before, from the Nilotic peoples of the south. The figures had passed from hand to hand in the bazaars until now (at considerable price) they resided on his bookcase above the military school tomes by Claustwitz, Mahon and Redmond-Archer.
From his vantage point high above the grinder Ali Zayd could see that the columns of soldiers almost seemed to be in straight lines. The jungle camouflage uniforms (an incongruous gift from the American military cornucopia, given the predominately desert terrain of Sudan) seemed clean and pressed.
Of course if one actually were down on the grinder, one would notice the rough edges. Instead of watching a silent tableau, one would hear the barked obscenities of the sergeants, and the muffled slap of rifles against shoulder blades. One would be unable to escape the impression that many of the young rankers were confused periodically about left from right. One would see the dark circles of sweat under the armpits of the unwashed and ill-fitting uniforms.
In a word, one would see Ali Zayd’s battalion as it was: not as animated dolls on a faraway stage, but as a ragtag collection of slum boys, swept up from the gutters and back alleys of Khartoum, and just now being molded into the beginnings of order by routine and harsh discipline.
The “men” in his companies were all slum urchins in their teens. At least they were all volunteers. Sudan had no problem filling the ranks. For though the pay was small and irregular, and though the recruits slept in dirty, stifling barracks, army life doubtless was in improvement over the sidewalks and alleys they came from.
Best of all, each man filled his plastic bowl with rice and watery vegetable broth twice a day. And in the afternoon, he received a glass of the admittedly execrable army coffee. It was preferable to chronic hunger. By joining the army some of the surplus young thugs and rascals coating the back streets of Khartoum and Obderman had bettered their lot.
The army had not. The boys who came to the army were depraved and vicious, and as ignorant as bricks. Their souls had been blasted in the root by life-long want and neglect. All the street alphabet had taught them was how to complain and wheedle and shirk. Ali Zayd knew they would never make good soldiers.
The battalion commander smiled as he thought about the human material he had to work with. It was very fortunate that there was little chance these urchins would ever be needed in real battle. God be merciful. A well-drilled girls’ soccer team would chase his teenage troops all the way to the fourth cataract. His charges could be turned into policemen of sorts. Their natural viciousness was an asset for swinging the truncheon against unarmed, docile civilians. But they would never make soldiers.
A tall, prepossessing man with the flaring aquiline nose of the Arab aristocrat, Ali Zayd wore a neatly trimmed beard, carefully oiled and henna-ed. His tailored uniform was faultless and unlike some of the parvenu junior officers in the regiment he did not affect civilian footwear. He insisted on the regulation black jump boots, stropped to glossy perfection. To Ali Zayd, nothing looked more unprofessional, more Third World, than civilian shoes worn with a uniform. Yet many of his brother officers appeared everyplace in nothing but expensive calf-hide loafers. On parade it was an embarrassment, shameful in fact, to see the regimental colonel himself, in the presence of foreign dignitaries...wearing Gucci loafers with tassels.
On paper, Lt. Col Ali Zayd commanded a battalion composed of 750 men. In fact, the battalion at the moment numbered only 397 effective, formed into three rifle companies and a mortar platoon (with antique tubes but no rockets.) The abbreviated strength was the result of his colonel’s feeling that a full complement wasn’t needed for garrison duty in Khartoum. After all, the regiment’s true mission aimed at discouraging demonstrations or other civil disturbances. Now, with the newly imposed Draconian strictures of Islamic law, disorder in the streets had been stifled. Hence, the colonel felt, it wasn’t necessary for the regiment to be at strength.
Of course, the treasury continued to issue vouchers for 750 men per battalion. Ali Zahd’s colonel had entire discretion. It was well known that the regimental commander kept a villa in Kepti and an apartment on the Rue de Dourgoyne in Paris.
The Lt. Col. turned his gaze away from the parade ground and examined instead his buffed and polished nails. After 14 years in the Army he knew the value of patience. Within a year or so, his colonel undoubtedly would receive the diplomatic posting in Europe he coveted so nakedly. And then Lt. Col. Ali Zayd would assume command of the regiment. Then there would be time: time to bring the battalions up to strength, time to recruit good men to replace these illiterate children, time to turn them into soldiers, instead of police thugs.
Then the step would be to get the regiment posted, not to malarial Rembec in the strategically insignificant southwest, but to the south, to Juba, and into action against the secessionist tribes led by John Garang and his henchmen, Facuel and Obo. The civil war had been sputtering indecisively for 20 years. There would be great rewards at the palace for the energetic officer who showed he knew how to fight and win.
In the meantime nothing was accomplished by agitating for reform. The colonel had as many connections at the palace as Ali Zayd himself, and would resent any interference with his arrangements. Besides, it was a ticklish and unsettled time, and nobody could know yet which of the generals would triumph.
Ali Zayd reflected that in some ways the political situation resembled that of a decade before, when Soviet influence had been at its peak. Ali Zayd had been assigned for training to an ice-bound fortress in Volstock. Many officers at the time had resigned rather than submit to Russian meddling. But all that had passed. The Russians had been sent packing. The Americans had returned during a brief thaw with the West. And the next year, the Lt. Col. had found himself in Fort Benning, Georgia, which had been altogether delightful.
Ali Zayd had much preferred the open-handed naiveté of the Yankees to the grim suspiciousness of the Slavs. Ordinarily something of an ascetic, Ali Zayd had indulged himself in America. It had been a little dangerous. His morale might have been undermined by the voluptuous ease of Yankee life. But Allah had been compassionate.
In reality, the only danger in America was taking any of it seriously. The yearlong visit had been merely boy’s fun in the souk, something to put aside after it was done, except when reminiscing over a pipe with friends.
And, extracurricular pursuits aside, the course in counterinsurgency had been interesting and well done. Some aspects might even have relevance in his own country, one day.
All such interesting foreign postings were now a memory. His fundamentalist superiors in Obderman were pulling around themselves a cloak of insularity. They glared at any foreigner who came courting. There were no more postings abroad for regimental officers. Still, from a career standpoint, it hurt nothing to be able to speak both Russian and English. Linguistic ability was an asset in the capital, helpful at embassy parties, and for communicating with military attaches, particularly the Americans, who couldn’t even speak French.
Of course, Ali Zayd wasn’t supposed to be attending embassy parties, just as his regiment wasn’t supposed to be in the capital. According to the army’s table of organization, the 20th Mechanized was to be split between Wau and Rembec, with responsibility for the provinces of Darfur and the Jebel Marra. In practice, the responsibility was completely ignored. The regiment had never been in Wau or Rembec.
Even so, Ali Zayd troubled himself to remain informed of events in his regiment’s putative area of responsibility. On his own account he had sent agents to Wau, the Jebel, and its environs. It was hardly a perfect arrangement, but it had borne some fruits. He had eyes in Wau, and he received a trickle of information, mostly dubious, regarding the southwestern provinces.
One of his most reliable correspondents, an Indian merchant with a shop in Rembec, on the Jebel plateau itself, sent a letter every month with one of the bicycle caravans. In very poor English, the Indian gossiped endlessly about which policeman had been drunk, when, with whom. He carped endlessly about the outrageous dash demanded from honest merchants. The shopkeeper knew, of course, that all soldiers and officials had to take bribes, since pay was irregular or non-existent. Yet he complained anyway.
The gossip was of no significance. Ali Zayd retained the man, paying him $20 American per month, out of a sense that although nothing important had ever happened on the plateau, still, the informant was attentive and faithful, and perhaps in some unforeseen way, his eyes might someday prove valuable.
And now the man had sent a puzzling letter. He was saying that armed Arabic-speaking white men, five or six of them, Europeans or perhaps even Americans, were roaming about the plateau. This the merchant recognized as highly unusual, but he could offer no explanation. The merchant claimed he had seen them himself in Rembec, and had been told they had also been at the Dinka camps at Amarack, Pacong and Bailo.
Back at his desk, Ali Zayd opened the letter again. Not only did the Indian write in a crabbed spidery hand that was almost impossible to decipher, but also he was maddeningly imprecise about details. What did he mean, exactly, by armed? Pistols? Hunting rifles? Military weapons? If Ali Zayd knew the weaponry he might be able to divine a purpose. Were they poachers, willing to risk sleeping sickness for the chance of bagging tusk for Singapore’s fading libidos? It was much more likely that they were prospectors, searching for uranium deposits in the Air Mountains. A recent account in a Cairo newspaper had said German geologists, analyzing satellite returns, believed there might be recoverable uranium south of Geneina. Several European consortiums already had applied for and been refused franchises.
The flaw in this premise was that the plateau was 200 miles south of the Air Mountains. Still, perhaps prospectors. Of course, they were not Americans. The Americans were being very particular these days about keeping up appearances of amiability with Sudan, given the ever-volatile situation with the irredentist Zionists. The Yankee had a strong desire to keep Khartoum neutral. Washington would never risk a flap by authorizing any kind of operation in the south.
In fact, the more that Ali Zayd thought about it, the more he was sure they were Frenchmen. The whites were part of the French survey party, trying to plot the actual border with the C.A.R. The area had never been mapped, and the frontier was highly theoretical. It was known in Khartoum that a team of French cartographers and surveyors was in the field someplace. The trouble here was that the Jebel was well within Sudan’s known borders. The survey party would have to be seriously disoriented. Of course, they were French.
Lt. Col. Ali Zayd reflectively tapped his finger on the cheap lined paper, torn from a school notebook, the page almost black with the merchant’s closely written scribble. The rising pressure of Islamic fundamentalism made it very difficult for any government ministry in Khartoum to countenance foreign intrusion. If Frenchmen had wandered onto the plateau, the ambassador, Chambliss, would need a stern rebuke from the ministry. General Ahmed would enjoy that. The French were almost as universally hated as the Americans.
Given the virulent xenophobia in Khartoum, it was always a surprise to visitors that the English, the former colonial master, remained fairly well tolerated, and had even been allowed to push some of their commercial schemes. Ali Zahd still had trouble believing that Khartoum had consented to the English cotton scheme, a few kilometers east of the plateau. Was in possible that some of those people might have wandered up to Rembec for some reason? No, it was out of the question. The English mangers were under strict orders not to leave the vicinity of the plantation. They wouldn’t jeopardize their favored status by disobeying.
The lieutenant colonel opened his desk drawer and tossed the paper inside. It would be interesting to learn the identity of the mysterious Europeans. But as a practical matter it was on no importance. If it did turn out to be the French survey ream, Ali Zayd would inform the general. Otherwise, no action was called for. An appalling climate, even by Sudan’s standards, was more effective than troops in keeping unwanted visitors out of the Jebel. The hellish place always had been a sink of terrible pestilence. Overpowering heat and debilitating diseases could be counted on to sap human energy and to make any effort futile. Nothing of importance, certainly nothing jeopardizing the safety of the nation, had ever occurred in Jebel Marra. Nor was it ever likely to.
Yet a teasing thought briefly tempted the lieutenant colonel. What if he used the merchant’s report as an excuse to send Major al-Qayrawani into the Jebel? The inept little major and a platoon or so made up of the more troublesome rankers could be assigned to track down the alleged interlopers. It would be reasonable, one would think, given the malaria, sleeping sickness, cholera, river blindness, dengue fever, yaws, dysentery and meningitis to choose from, that the odious little major would never come back, or only as an invalid.
Ali Zayd quickly dismissed this tempting notion. The thought of the absurd, dim-witted major blundering through the south entirely on his own evoked too many specters of disaster. It would be perfectly in accord with the major’s ineptitude if he kindled some outrage against Dinka propriety. Then there might be concerted trouble where before had been only slumbering apathy.
There was only one sensible military plan for the Jebel. That was to leave it alone.


Chapter 18


If the Dinka who watered their stock at Government Five had any inkling that Bedui janjaweed were prowling on the plateau they quickly gathered their cattle and goats, loaded their women and possessions, and hurried westward toward the border with the Central African Republic. There the high savanna meets the upland forest. As an inevitable result of population pressure, and the consequent need for wood and charcoal, the forest had receded over the decades.
But the rampant deforestation denuding Northern Africa had been checked here by a uncompromising ally of wildness. Woodcutters could only work on the perimeter of the forest; humans and cattle could never settle permanently. For the forest was infested with tsetse fly, carrier of sleeping sickness, the loathsome and usually fatal degenerative disease universally feared on the plateau. The vast gloomy highland forest marching along part of the border with the C.A.R. had never been colonized or exploited; it remained untouched, visited only by desperadoes whose lives were forfeit among men.
When the Bedui were on the move, the Dinka villagers sought protection on the verge of the great forest, knowing that the Bedui fear of the disease overmatched his greed for cattle and women. The black fly was dangerous, but the Dinka had lived with the fly, and guarded himself, by coating his entire body in a thick armor of ash and cow dung, and by always living within the pale of a smoky fire. The fly was manageable. Not the Bedui.
The Bedui outlaws who scoured the desert badlands in the southwest, foraging at times into Chad and C.A.R., did not answer to Khartoum or to any government. No army or police could punish them, for after a raid they disappeared effortlessly into the waterless Kawahla, confident nobody would be foolhardy enough to follow. Only the Bedui knew the hidden seeps and catchments, and the information was safe, even under torture.
Mounted on donkeys and sometimes camels, roaming over a thousand square miles of desert with their flocks of scruffy goats, the Bedui tribesmen were merciless raiders against the scattered Dinka on the plateau, carrying off cattle, cones of pounded tobacco, but most importantly, young girls, whose value (as slaves in Arab households) exceeded even that of a young bullock.
The black girls were so valuable that they never stayed among the raiders, who disdained them, but were always sold to the oasis towns along the Kashi Plateau on the border with Chad. A comely Dinka girl would fetch perhaps 20 AK47s and 1,000 rounds, making her far too valuable to waste as an unwieldy ornament in a goat-hide tent.
The girls' fathers were well aware of the market. The bride price from a successful suitor enriched the father's herd with scores of cows. The thought of his losing his 16-year investment to a thieving Arab was enough to drive him to furious action. Thus, when the Dinka got wind of Arabs on the plateau they lost no time loading their baskets, harnessing the oxen, rounding up the cattle, and starting the march to the highlands.
It was for this reason, the rumor of Bedui raiding parties, that the village was almost empty when the two planes landed on the dirt road between the sorghum fields. Only ancients and toddlers remained. The two Cessnas had flown low over the village, circled twice, then set down on the hard-packed road. The old people in the village, the ones for whom the trek north would be too arduous, assumed the planes must be from the mission at Wau. The doctors had come before, when outbreaks of schstiomiasis or cholera were troubling the village. Or sometimes they would try to scratch the children's' arms with needles, or put medicine on the open sores on their lips.
"Here are the white doctors from Wau," the old people told each other.
The Whizzer didn't think so. In five years bumming around Africa, the Whizzer had seen plenty of missionaries, and these weren't. He took the white clay Dinka pipe from his mouth and ejected a juicy stream into the dust. Not missionaries, not government men, not archeologists, not tourists. They were white guys with guns. In a country that didn't allow white guys with guns. So here was a new category in Sudan that even the Whizzer, certified world traveler, didn't know about.
Twenty years before the Whizzer had dropped out of a California junior college for a summer in Europe. He had never gone back. Originally he had been lured into wandering by drugs and easy sex. Now he didn't know what was behind the restless urge to keep moving across the face of the planet, deeper and deeper into alien cultures, despite sickness and poverty, the abuse and malevolence of officials, boredom and loneliness; but he couldn't stop. He was one of thousands of certified world travelers rattling through the endless poverty-wracked countries of Asia and Africa and Latin America. He had never had a home, never rented a bed for more than a few nights. He worked only if absolutely necessary.
But he had learned the great secret: that if the CWT is willing to eat native food, ride third-class trains packed with reeking humanity, hitch with truck drivers, sleep against a dung wall or in a nasty hut; if the CWT can smile and be patient in the face of all manner of deceit, chicanery and maliciousness at the hands of Third World officialdom; then it is possible to travel the world on practically nothing, relying mostly on the hospitality of strangers.
The Whizzer had been part of the slow-moving human tide of certified world travelers that had moved from Spain to Marrakech to Istanbul to Bombay to Katmandu to Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur and back across the ocean again to Africa, to Antanananua and Dar es Salaam. He had swept floors, crushed rapeseeds, loaded wagons, taught English, smuggled hashish, butchered shoats, while all the time constantly manipulating a welter of currencies for profit in the markets and back streets.
Now he had come to the plateau to live with the Dinka. In a student flop in Nairobi he had heard about the Dinka's' free-and-easy cattle culture. He'd heard about the cattle fetish, the love songs sung to favorite cows, the ritual bloodletting, the diet of fresh blood and milk, the painful rite of penile subcision, which was the introduction into Dinka manhood. These were customs from the Stone Age.
But the Whizzer had been more interested in the high marks given the Dinka for generosity to strangers. The Dinka reportedly were friendly, hospitable animists who operated outside the money economy. The Whizzer, at that moment, had been outside the money economy himself, not even having a coin left for another night on a wood bench in the open compound. And here was the flophouse informant swearing it was likely, given the open-handed Dinka temperament, to sponge off the tribal larder for maybe six months, if a guest didn't mind a diet made up mostly of sorghum porridge and boiled pumpkin.
After two decades on the road, mostly out of funds and often in lands of the left-handed wipe, the Whizzer was not deterred by the advertised board of fare. Nor was he put off by a people who customarily washed in cow urine, or who regularly pushed their faces into a cow's vagina to encourage milk. He had immediately begun the arduous trek, on foot, to the plateau, begging food as he went.
It had all turned out to be true. The Dinka, although suffering severe shortages because of a five-year drought, still clung to their old ways, which included no-questions-asked hospitality for travelers. The villagers around Rembec had taken the lean red-bearded white man right into their midst, without a surly look or suspicious word, helped him build the reed framework for a wattle hut, showed him how to plaster it with dung and mud. And he was encouraged, without anything being asked in return, to draw from the communal store of sorghum, pumpkins and the rank homegrown tobacco. It was what the village offered to any wandering stranger.
The Whizzer took to the Dinka. They were friendly and peaceful. And he didn't have any trouble communicating. Having knocked around Africa, the Whizzer already had a working knowledge of the pidgin Arabic the tribes use to talk to one another. Like many CWT, he was facile with languages, carrying in memory a smattering of a dozen or so, including the trade language of Hindi. In last class travel, with the need every day to find a new place to sleep for no money, and being constantly thrown into the company of all sorts, the inhibitions that hold back the student of a new language had all but dried up. He absorbed new words like a child, without ever consulting a dictionary or a grammar. He didn't care if native speakers had a laugh at his expense. After one day in the cattle camp outside Rembec the Whizzer knew a dozen Dinka words. Within a few weeks he was starting to pick up the rudiments of the clicking dialect.
When the planes landed, the Whizzer was sitting on a bench with old Tor in front of Tor's hut. They were smoking and spitting while conversing in a mélange of Dinka, pidgin, English and French. Tor himself was a traveler, having visited Khartoum, Cairo and Nairobi. The Whizzer had elected to stay behind in the village because he was not anxious to smear his body with dung and ash. And in Lagos he'd seen what happened to people who got the trypanosome. Since he had neither money nor cattle nor daughters he'd decided to take his chances with the Bedui, if they turned up.
"They have strong guns," the Whizzer said.
"Legion d'strange?" said Tor.
"Not the right kit," the Whizzer said.
"Huh, huh" said Tor, slowly shaking his head. He had never known anything like this either._




The new arrivals dismounted from the planes and turned toward the village. Five men. Four of them, the Whizzer calculated, were pretty sure to be Americans. Something about them, their carriage, their looks, made them not Brit and not Frog. The four were wearing white T-shirts, baseball caps, dark cotton pants -- Dockers -- not available in Sudan. And they carried American rifles, Garands. They were soldiers for sure. The Whizzer could tell from the way they immediately fanned out in a skirmish line. Civilians bunched up in clusters.
The fifth arrival was an odd-man-out. Short, fattish, dark-skinned Semite. Maybe an Egyptian. He was dressed in a soiled white dress shirt, loose linen trousers and black loafers. Inappropriate attire for the dirt, smoke and unremitting heat of a seasonal cattle camp. The little man also appeared agitated, rubbing his hands and casting nervous glances in every direction. And he wasn’t armed.
As the group approached, two of the men veered off to left and right. A third stopped about fifty yards short of Tor’s hut, while the fourth American, tall and spare, came forward, the M-1 held loosely in his right hand, dragging the Semite along as if by an invisible thread
The tall American had a pair of reading spectacles pushed up on his sunburned forehead. He was smiling a toothy smile but the Whizzer saw he was also scanning the village with narrowed eyes. And sizing up Tor and the Whizzer at the same time.
“English?” the man said.
“It works for us,” said the Whizzer.
The Whizzer immediately realized he had made a social gaffe. He was in the presence of an elder. Before anything was said, Tor should first pronounce the traditional welcome to strangers, just as he had when the Whizzer, half dead with thirst, had turned up many months before. But he could feel that Tor was completely flabbergasted. The silence lengthened. The Whizzer steadfastly kept his mouth shut, despite his embarrassment for the elder’s seeming lack of manners.
The lanky American however did not seem to take the silence amiss, and used the time to continue studying the camp. He glanced over at the two Americans who had walked in among the huts. Both of them shook their heads. Finally, the tall American turned to Tor and said:
“I hope we didn’t drop in at a bad time.”
Tor suddenly awoke from his paralysis. “I am very sorry, sirs. Please be welcome. We are not expecting visitors...” Tor caught himself. “Or not like you...”
The American smiled. “But you were expecting visitors.”
“Alas, sirs. That is why we do not welcome you properly,” Tor said. “Everybody has gone. It is the Bedui. They are seen. At Majk they took three girls and twenty cows.”
“Yes,” said the American, his grin widening, “We heard about that in Rembec. Maybe you should tell the authorities. They can catch the Bedui and punish them.”
Tor and the Whizzer looked at each other in disbelief. It was as if these fantastic men in American baseball caps had fallen from a different dimension in their tiny aluminum airplanes.
“Forgive me, sirs,” Tor said. “Unhappily, there are no authorities.”
“Things have changed,” said the American.



Chapter 19

The cockpits in the tiny Cessnas they had stolen from the Lotuku flying school were too small to be comfortable. Doc's knees were jammed against the firewall, and he and Reyes were pressed together shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip. Doc had to remember to keep his boots clear of the rudder pedals, and his arms crossed on his chest, so as not to interfere with Reyes' manipulation of the yoke. The four-place Cessna weighed only a few thousand pounds, light as a tin can, held up by an outsized wing that floated the aircraft through the air like a cork bobbing on the swells. The desert thermals lifted the plane with a loud "whump," and the plane would be tossed upward like a tennis ball until the bucketing nose plowed into a settling current, and "whump," the plane would seem to halt suddenly, before mushing downward.
The constant twisting and gyrating had made Doc a little uneasy in his stomach. He tried to keep his eyes on the jagged horizon, the saw-toothed mountains of the Jebel Marra, which sloped back and forth with the plane's motion. To avoid stressing the airframe, Reyes was trying to keep the airspeed down to 90 knots, riding the thermals and not worrying much about maintaining a constant altitude, although, on average, they were about 1,000 feet over the terrain.
Although the turbulence made him slightly queasy, Doc preferred desert to jungle. Reyes and Breen had shown they could land these little planes almost anywhere that was flat. If the puny engine conked out, there were plenty places to put down on the desert or open savanna. Over triple canopy jungle you were fucked.
"Cholo," crackled the radio. "No alegre. No podemos ver nadie."
When transmitting in the clear, Mac and Reyes spoke in calo, border Spanish, heavily accented and slangy, hoping to confuse any listener, although it wasn't likely the Sudanese military would be alert enough to monitor low wattage VHF in southern Sudan.
Reyes keyed the mike. "Mismo, pendejo."
Mac and Breen, in the 206, were about five miles to the east, on the other side of the barely perceptible track the Dinka followed for their escape north. Reyes and Doc were pretty much over the path, looking for the Dinka caravan, while Mac was trying to intercept the Bedui raiders who, unhampered by cattle or baggage, could cut some time by climbing straight over the massif that separated the village from the highland forest.
"Vamos mas a oeste." Mac's high-pitched voice crackled with static.
Doc glanced down at the crude, hand-drawn map spread across his lap. Turning east would put Mac over the massif proper. Mac probably wanted a better look into some of the canyons debouching onto the plain.
"Son of a bitch." Reyes had to shout to be heard over the engine racket, "I got 'em. Right on the road, five klicks. There's a fuckin' lot of dust, too." Reyes keyed the mike. "Estan alla, vacas y gente, en el sendero. Mucho pulvo."
Reyes dropped the Cessna's nose, and the airspeed indictor swung right, pegging on 110. The tiny plane began to buck and yaw, the wing struts creaking as the leading edges slammed through the thermals.
"I'm goin' down on the deck," shouted Reyes.
A burble of static came across the radio, followed by the unintelligible conclusion of a sentence.
"We're too low," shouted Reyes. "We'll pop back up and talk to 'em after we find out what's doin'"
At first Doc could only see a swirl of dust along the road. But then he began to see pods of cattle, a dozen or so at time, being driven in every direction by tiny stick figures.
"I guess the ragheads caught up with ‘em," Doc shouted. To his own ear, his voice sounded strained and unnatural, and he regretted opening his mouth. All at once Doc was aware that his heart was thumping in his throat. He saw Reyes glancing over at him, before easing back on the yoke and leveling the plane at about 50 feet over the track.
The Bedui raiders had charged, riding their donkeys right into the center of the Dinka column. Within the whirlpools of dust, the cattle were milling madly, with Dinka chasing behind, or pulling on the halters of panicked animals. As the plane flashed overhead Doc got a glimpse of several figures clad in white galabiehas and turbans, pointing rifles at a dozen kneeling Dinka who seemed to be holding their hands up in supplication. A little further down the path two Dinka were laying on the ground amid a litter of baggage.
Reyes whipped the Cessna into what Doc already knew was the crop duster roll, a sudden 90 degree steep bank to the right followed by a steep 270 degree turn to the left that would put them on a reciprocal course down the line of baggage oxen.
"I'll try to give 'em a scare," shouted Reyes.
Doc didn't believe that anybody would be too frightened by a tiny unarmed Cessna. But maybe the Bedui thought all planes came with machine-guns and rockets.
This time Doc got a better look at the ground. The two still figures hadn't moved; they'd probably been shot. Several donkeys, loaded with loot and carrying several people each, were cantering toward the line of hills to the west. By the baggage oxen, two Arabs with leveled rifles stood guard over the cowed Dinka while other Bedui loaded bags onto donkeys. The road was littered with broken baskets, blankets, clothing, pots, gourds and other truck stripped from the baggage animals. Most of the Dinka had retreated into the milling heard of panicky cattle, trying to get halters on some of the animals. Nobody seemed to take any notice of the little plane that came out of nowhere and passed a few feet overhead.
Doc shifted in the seat and tried to relieve some of the pressure on his chest by pulling the harness straps. While Reyes was maneuvering close to the ground Doc had to be aware not to accidentally step on the rudder pedals. He tried to wrap his ankles around each other.
"Look like they rob the store," Reyes shouted. "We better climb out and talk to Mac."
At 1,000 feet the scene on the ground returned to an innocuous picture of a billowing dust cloud with toy cows running around the edges.
Keying the mike, Reyes explained the situation to Mac in rapid-fire Spanish that Doc couldn't follow. Doc had a little get-along Spanish, picked up during a year's tour in the Zone, but Reyes and Mac spoke a fast border Spanglish. While he talked, Reyes pointed the nose of the plane west to keep on eye on the retreating Arabs. By now, other donkeys, loaded with a hodgepodge of loot, kidnapped girls, and rifle-waving Bedui, were leaving a tail of dust toward the safety of the nearby hills.
"Biene, biene," Reyes said, in response to a rapid burst of staccato orders from Mac. Reyes turned to Doc and smiled wanly.
"Mac wants us to mosey ahead of the camel jocks, see if we can figure where they're headed."
A low line of hills stretched across the plain to the west, cut by dozens of canyons that spread out in alluvial fans on the desert floor. Reyes dropped down to 500 feet. In the nearest group of Bedui, three camels were in the lead followed by a string of donkeys, all top-heavy with baggage and human figures. Doc could see that one rider in a dun-colored caftan clutched a Dinka girl before him on the saddle. Other Dinka prisoners were being herded alongside the donkeys.
"They got some Dinka gals." Reyes shielded his eyes against the lowering sun. "See that notch in the hills above the fan. Must be some kind of pass."
Reyes was right. A dry creek bed snaked up through the fan-shaped rock debris into the hills. The first two riders, followed by baggage donkeys, already were headed toward the entrance.
"They get up in them rocks we ain't gonna touch 'em," Reyes shouted. "I'm going up again."
Doc realized his hands were slick with sweat. The fearsickness had started in his guts. It didn't take a genius to figure out what Mac was going to want. To avoid hyperventilating, Doc started watching his breathing. He didn't want to go dizzy and have to puke.
On the radio there was another exchange of rapid-fire Spanish. Doc thought he picked up the word "miedo," but he wasn't sure. After the final burst from the radio, Reyes shrugged his shoulders.
"Mac wants me to drop you off," Reyes shouted.
"I figured," Doc shouted, trying to keep his voice flat.
"Ain't no other way. I'm gonna set down on the flat piece in front of the fan. You got to hump up into the rocks an' keep the ragheads from usin' the pass."
The Cessna had dipped below the hill line. Reyes circled low over the gravel fan, searching out the flattest spot, made his choice, and started the letdown. At 100 feet he cut the throttle, cranked in 40 degrees of flaps, and let the plane mush toward earth, the stall horn screaming. The Cessna bounced twice, rolled 60 feet and stopped, slowed up by the friction of the gravel.
Doc clambered out, barking his knee sharply on the wing strut. Reyes handed out the M1, an ammo pouch and belt, a haversack with the medical kit, rations, and four full canteens.
"Gotta split," Reyes said. "Good luck."
Doc cleared the wing before stopping to buckle on the gear. Reyes spun the Cessna around, gunned the tinny engine, and the little plane began rolling downhill. An instant later it was airborne and climbing out.
Obviously, Reyes couldn't chance having the plane caught on the ground. It was the only ticket out, and one bullet in the ridiculous six-cylinder engine would finish it. They had to have the plane. Still, Doc resented being left on the ground while Reyes could retreat upward, beyond the range of gunfire.


Doc trudged up to check out the wash leading into the defile. The cleft in the rock was wide enough for three men walking abreast. If the defile went all the way through it made an easy escape route through the hills. Shading his eyes, squinting, wiping away the dribbling sweat with his sleeve, Doc tried to peer into the canyon recess, into a shimmering glassy cafe-au-lait haze. He could feel the canyon’s exhalation of superheated air against his face. It was a fucking furnace in there. Against the bottom of the wash he could make out a faint stripe of greenish-brown. Maybe a seam of copper. Or maybe even a trickle of water coming from someplace, conferring tenuous life to a ribbon of slime.
Shouldering the Garand, Doc began to clamber up into the rocks. He needed high ground and cover. The rocks were blistering to the touch, and Doc was panting hard and soaking by the time he found a good outcropping that commanded the entrance to the wash. Doc stripped off the drenched haversack and ammo belt, throwing them in a heap behind the rock. He sunk down exhausted the tiny circle of shade.
He couldn’t see the aircraft or hear it either. Reyes had disappeared. He was up there someplace, two, three thousand feet, nice and cool, jabbering with Mac in Tex Mex. Had Mac really said “meido?” As Doc struggled for breath in the unrelenting inferno, he became aware of a throbbing headache, right behind the eyes. And as sat with his back pressed against the slab of rock he also began to feel familiar sharp stabs of pain from lumbar two and three. He’d been stupid. There’d been no need to hurry, and he’d sprinted up the rock like a rookie. Now maybe he’d re-injured his back.
Doc found the white plastic bottle of ibuprofen. When he shook the bottle his hands trembled so badly that some pills fell out and rolled under a crevice beyond reach. That would be the last straw, to run out of ibuprofen. Doc tipped the bottle to his lips, and carefully, using his tongue, counted out four bills, swallowing them with a couple of gulps of water.
With a grunt, he got to his knees and strained his eyes toward the desert. He could see several black specks hastening toward the wash. He clasped his hands together to hold them steady while he tried to sort out what to do. The heat made it just about impossible to think. Did Mac want him to kill the hajji, or just turn them around? Doc knew damn well he wasn’t the best shot in the world. He hadn’t been practicing at extreme ranges like these other guys. In fact, he hadn’t been on a range in years.
It had been pretty damn obvious that Mac and Reyes had their doubts about putting him on the ground. Mac must have figured he had no choice. But why the shit couldn’t they make a few suggestions?
Probably the best thing would be to crank off a few rounds to hold up the camel jocks until Mac arrived. The 206 couldn’t be far away. Reyes probably had gone to give Mac a steer. Doc pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead to try to relieve the pain. By now he could make out a line of donkeys and their muffled riders. He slipped down lower behind the outcropping and picked up the rifle. A clip was in. Doc cocked the bolt with the edge of his left hand, then inserted his thumb in the breech to release the catch. Sitting or prone? Prone would be better but would obscure his view. He’d have to sit or kneel. Very still. No movement.
The donkey caravan had stopped. Then two burnoosed Arabs prodded their beasts with sticks and moved forward to about 500 meters short of his position, and stopped again. They seemed to be arguing. One of the riders, his loose caftan billowing around him, flailed the air with his stick. Doc imagined he could even hear an angry voice. Behind the two Arabs Doc could see three or four more small donkeys loaded with baggage.
Okay. This might be the best time for a warning shot to chase them off. But now Doc saw a problem with that. His position could be flanked on either side. The jumble of rocks and fissures gave good cover on both sides of the wash. If the two ragheads didn’t scare easy, they might dismount and start working behind him.
One of the Bedui wheeled his donkey away, and tugging on the reins, led off a string of three baggage animals, back toward the plain. The other Arab, still angrily waving his stick, turned his animal’s head toward the defile. With two downward strikes, he urged the donkey forward, the remaining pack animal behind him.
They were splitting up. The one, after retreating a few hundred yards, stopped and waited, while the hothead trotted forward, raining more blows on the donkey’s flanks. Doc’s heart began beating heavily. With numb fingers he clicked the elevation knob from 500 to 100 meters. Maybe he should start firing now, before the Arab got too close. But now Doc could see that a bound prisoner was tied across the back of the second animal. He could see a pair of kicking feet. The raghead and the pack donkey were almost in enfilade, and a bad shot might hit the swaying captive.
Doc knew that to have any real chance of hitting a moving target on the first shot he’d have to wait for the Bedui to close to fifty meters. Thirty would be better. But the Arab carried an AK-47 across the pommel. At close range the bastard might get lucky with a burst, even with Doc crouched in the rocks.
With the wild gyrations of the donkey, the Arab’s burnoose had fallen back. At 100 meters Doc could see the Bedui was very dark and slim, with a black spade beard. From the man’s bearing, from the ferocity of his flailing attack with the stick, he seemed possessed. Doc imagined he could read the determination in the man’s features. The Bedui seemed intent on getting into the ravine quickly. He wasn’t taking precautions. He wasn’t even looking around. Doc decided to shoot him at close range.
Drawing back slightly so that no part of his body was visible, Doc waited until he could hear the donkey’s hooves and the thwack of the crop. Then, with a deep intake of breath, he rose to one knee. The Arab was looking straight ahead as Doc aimed, but the Dinka prisoner on the second donkey was looking right at him, her eyes round with horror. Thirty meters. Doc squeezed. Although Doc had aimed at the chest cavity, the .30 caliber bullet struck the Arab in the hip, at the iliac crest. Doc winced at the meaty smack of the bullet smashing bone.
With a scream of pain the Bedui rolled off to the left and went sprawling on the rocks. The donkey, making a horrible screeching, began rearing, tossing baggage. Then the second donkey threw its load, spilling the Dinka girl. The girl, whose hands were bound, went tumbling down the wash, amid little puffs of white dust. As the report of the first shot went echoing up the canyon, Doc aimed at the Arab again, squeezed, and missed. With the crack and recoil, a spurt of dust rose beside the man’s shoulder as he writhed on the ground, trying valiantly to gain his feet. The third shot smashed the ulna of the Arab’s right arm. The man screamed and collapsed, his out flung arm grotesquely twisted. Dock raised himself higher and fired again.
This time the bullet struck within the chest cavity. The Arab, his dun-colored caftan splotched with blood, instantly fell silent.
Doc took several deep breathes as the reverberations echoed up and down the canyon walls. Then he sat down hard. He’d forgotten about the second Arab. His whole upper body had been exposed, it seemed like for minutes. He’d foolishly given the other raghead plenty of time to take a bead of him.
But there was no firing. Gingerly peering around the outcropping, Doc saw the other Bedui hightailing the way he’d come. He and his loot-heavy donkeys were no bigger than black beetles on the shimmering plain.
Down in the wash, the Arab lay absolutely still. Some truck from the caravan, sheaves of spears, baskets of beads and necklaces and bracelets, lay scattered everywhere. At first Doc couldn’t spot the girl. Then he saw her, lying on her side like a rolled rug, against a stunted flame-colored tamarisk tree. She wasn’t moving either. Probably broken her neck. Mac wasn’t going to like that.
Doc started to get up, then remembered to load a fresh clip. Mac had said he wanted to save the brass for reloading, but fuck it; it was too much trouble to find the casings. Doc wearily got to his feet, feeling light-headed. The headache miraculously was gone. So was the pain in his back. Endorphins, natural pain killers, going through him like rockets. But his knees were shaking as he went down to check the Bedui.
After he made sure the Arab’s eyes were fully dilated, he began to relax. The forth shot had been good. It had punched in a thoracic four, probably exploding the heart. Doc was amazed to see how small the Bedui was, only a little over five feet. Probably 110 pounds dripping wet. Very narrow pinched face, lips as thin as a birds;’ a hawk nose. And hands as fine as a girl’s. He didn’t look like much, crumpled in his blood-soaked gown. Yet this was one of the men who terrorized the Dinka nation.
The donkeys, still braying, were at a fast trot down the wash, flying to rejoin their stable mates. Doc slung the M1 and went over to see about the girl. She was lying motionless, but she wasn’t dead, since he could hear her rasping, frightened breathing. She had turned over flat on her stomach, looking straight down at the ground, her widened nostrils taking in great snuffs of air. She looked fourteen or fifteen, but might be a little older because she had the spiral scars on her cheeks made during the initiation into womanhood.
“You okay?” Doc said, patting himself in pantomime. “Bust any bones?”
The girl was scared out of her fucking wits. Dock unslung his rifle and set it aside so she could see he didn’t plan to harm her. Then, very slowly, he reached down and untied the strips of hide that bound her hands. The girl trembled violently at this touch. It was funny. For some reason Doc had sort of half expected this African teenager to be able to absorb a day of terror, abduction and murder without getting upset. Like everybody else, he stereotyped people. He figured people living in this kind of basket case shit hole must be used to anything. But that wasn’t necessarily true at all. The Basher said the Dinka basically were peaceful nomads who seldom fought each other. Most of their domestic beefs were noisy but bloodless. So why should he be surprised that this kid was in shock. She didn’t get kidnapped every day. She’d probably never seen anybody murdered before.
Doc hunkered down a few feet away to have a look at her. She gave off a pungent odor, a combination of sweat, fear, donkey, unwashed Arab (from the blanket she was wrapped in), plus the usual Dinka smell of cow urine and wood ash. She shied away when he tried to touch her head.
“It’s okay, honey. Just want to make sure your neck ain’t broke.”
The girl stiffened as Doc gently turned her chin from side to side. She didn’t seem to be in any pain. Aside from a lot of abrasions on her arms and legs, she might be okay. Other than being scared silly. First the Bedui, the bogey of every Dinka girl’s nightmares. And now a white devil popping out of a rock. She was lucky the blanket had cushioned her fall. She was also wearing a dark blue and green stripped cotton shift. Very sedate by Dinka standards. Doc wanted to lift the dress to check for damage, but the girl recoiled so violently that he drew back. Probably nothing broken if she could move that fast.
“It’s cool,” Doc said. “I’m a doctor. Doctor. Doctor.”
“Doc-tar,” the girl said hesitantly. It was possible she knew the word. He had heard the missions had been sending do-good docs out to fuss with the Dinka.
“Yeah. Doctor.” Doc pantomimed listing to a chest with a stethoscope.
“Medy-sin,” the girl said, unsure. Doc knew he didn’t look very much like the severe, bespectacled men in white frocks who used to fly into the Dinka camps to inoculate for measles.
“Yeah, you bet,” Doc said. “I got medicine. In my pack.”
Doc left the girl and climbed back into the rocks to get his haversack. It might be a good idea to slip the Dinka babe a valium to settle her down. Another new experience for her.
And since they might be stuck here awhile, it might also be interesting to take a look at the dead raghead. Doc had some instruments in his kit. Maybe he could learn something by opening the guy. Doc was curious about what that last round had done. Anyway, pathology was interesting. It was the only thing Doc had liked about the hospital.


Chapter 20

At a thousand feet the Cessna 206 orbited the herd of cattle milling inside the pall of slowly drifting dust. The white dust cloud had drifted away from the track, revealing the debris from the raid: a swath of litter, pack fames, clothing, hut poles, cooking pots. Several dozen Dinka women were sorting through the mess, while the men were trying to regain control of the panicked animals. Several bodies were sprawled in a line, with more Dinka kneeling beside them.
Breen put the plane in a steep right bank so that Mac could study the ground. Mac regretted he didn’t have Doc to put down on the road to help with the wounded. It would have been better to use Keyes at the draw to turn back the retreating Bedui. But Keyes was in Rembec training militia. Breen banked to the left, and Mac abruptly was looking at blue sky.
“Let’s see how Doc did,” Mac said.
Breen leveled the wings and headed west. The main group of retreating Bedui had now turned northwest, away from the draw. Another small trail of dust on an interception course testified that the advance party of Bedui headed for the draw had turned back. Doc must have scared them off. Not surprising. Any rifleman should be able to hold that defile. Particularly since the Bedui were encumbered with loot and prisoners.
Mac, craning around, could see that the 182 had formed up on his wing. Then, turning back, Mac studied the terrain ahead. The Bedui were a good two miles from the safety of the hills. The only closer cover on the plain was a fortress-like formation of rock to the Bedui right, poking up from the desert floor. But the Bedui weren’t turning.
As long as the Bedui were moving they were vulnerable. If they dismounted they could aim fire at the planes with their AK47s, effective to a thousand feet. Mac couldn’t risk ground fire. He’d have to break off. But as long as they were moving he might be able to kill a few. It would be a good for the program too, to get back the prisoners and maybe some of the loot. It also might be a good idea to kill some of the donkeys. They were precious and hard to come by, and killing them would underscore the new cost of raiding Dinka territory.
“We’re gonna make a firing pass, 500 feet, eighty knots,” Mac said.
Breen dropped the nose, descended to 500 feet, then retarded the throttle and brought back the yoke to slow the plane.
Mac cracked the right door, letting the wind whistle through the cockpit. Then he removed the quick release hinge pins, and carefully worked loose the door panel, handing it back to Bashir. Even with the plane slowed to 80 knots, the wind roared over the opening, sending some papers sailing to the overhead.
“Secure that loose stuff,” Mac told Bashir, “and pass forward that rifle.”
Mac scanned the rapidly approaching Bedui column. The riders were spread out, with the back animals in the center. Most of the trussed-up prisoners and been thrown across the pack animals, but a few were riding behind their Bedui captors. Mac would have to let those go and concentrate on the single riders in front.
Bashir clumsily pushed forward the stock of the M1. Mac grasped it, pulled the rifle through the separation in the seats, and turned the weapon to put the muzzle in the slipstream.
“What about Reyes?” Breen said.
“Have him follow us through, but down on the deck, to buzz the rear guard. I don’t want them plinkin’ at us.”
As Mac chambered a round, Breen picked up the microphone.
“They’re not slowin’ up,” Mac shouted. “You can drop down to two hundred.”
Riding at full trot, the Bedui wouldn’t be able to aim fire at the planes. Mac could afford to get close.
The rear guard, caftan-wearing Bedui wildly flaying their mounts with sticks, flashed by under the plane. Then the trotting donkeys loaded with baggage and captives. As the leaders came up, Mac slapped the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and smoothly emptied the clip, the hot brass flying into the backseat.
“You fuckin’ nailed ‘em.” It was Reyes’ metallic voice on the radio.
Breen had the plane heeled in a tight left turn, neither he nor Mac being able to see the column.
“Anybody shootin’?” Mack said into the microphone.
“Negative,” Reyes said. “Two guys down, three animals. Oops. One guy’s on his feet and gettin’ on another donkey.”
After a 180 degree climbing turn, Breen leveled off at 800 feet and flew the reciprocal course on the flank of the column. Mac had loaded a new clip but didn’t fire.
The rear riders were now in the midst of the pack animals, which were rapidly overtaking the collection of brown lumps lying on the sand. Mac was on the radio to Reyes.
“See those rocks to your right. See if there’s any safe place to set down. I might have to put you up in those rocks if they decide to cut over that way.”
“Roger that,” Reyes said.
On the second firing pass Mac only had one target, the Arab who previously had escaped, and who now, having jettisoned the baggage from a pack animal, was making a dash. All the other Bedui had closed up with the prisoners. Bashir again covered his face as brass casings flew into the backseat.
“Good job.” It was Reyes’ tinny voice on the radio.
When they pulled out this time, they found the column had halted. The Bedui had dismounted, and were taking firing positions behind the pack animals.
“Two thousand,” Mac said. “Bashir. Get your pen out.”
A few minutes later, a streamer from the circling plane dropped a weighted can into the midst of the Bedui. Green tracers came up from the AK47s and arched away, hopelessly out of range.
“I hope the bastards can read,” Breen said.
The terms were simple, in simple language. Leave the prisoners and depart the territory unharmed. Or we’ll shoot the animals.
Mac hoped the Bedui had been rattled enough by this entirely unexpected event, an air attack, to wonder what further surprises might be in store. Their assumption would have to be that they were being attacked by the government. If the government had aircraft on the plateau, they might have troops in the vicinity as well. The Bedui instinct would be to get into the sheltering hills. Of course they might try to wait for nightfall and make a run for the hills with the captives.
“But I have a feeling they’re gonna be reasonable,” Mac said.




Bashir Nasr hadn’t had a good day. The worst had been that he had accidentally soiled himself. His dysentery, coupled with the stomach-wrenching gyrations of the mini-airplane, had been too much for his exhausted sphincter. The accident had happened during the horrifying low-level strafing run, when the toy-like wheels of the plane practically grazed the heads of the horsemen below, and when Bashir Nasr’s face had been burned by flying shell casings. The treachery of his sphincter had been accompanied by a loud noise, audible even over the hammer of gunfire and the racket of the engine. And a discernable smell. Both Breen and Mac had turned, their grinning faces completely unsympathetic. Sadists! They knew he was sick, perhaps mortally.
It was Doc’s fault. When it came to medicine, they all listened to Doc. Doc said everybody had the drizzles and it wasn’t serious. Bashir Nasr knew differently. His illness was different, morbid and pathogenic. Cholera or typhoid. Perhaps brucellosis, from the unpasturized goat milk they had used for coffee cream in Rembec, when Mac was trying to cozy up to the chiefs. It wasn’t just “the runs,” as the bogus medic kept insisting.
Medic? Bashir suspected all along that he was a bona fide psychopath. His eyes had the wolfish stare of the certifiable. And events had proven Bashir right.
When they stopped to pick up Doc at the ravine they found him up to his elbows in gore, digging in the entrails of a defunct Bedui. The stench in the 120 degree heat could not have been more horrendous. And blood and body parts everywhere. And next to him, a pathetic wounded young Dinka girl (very comely), lying bruised on the ground, her eyes glazed, obviously in profound shock.
A day of horror from start to finish. If Bashir Nasr hadn’t been so ill, he would have protested Mac’s methodical killing of the little donkeys. Even then, with Mac systematically shooting the animals from the airplane, the Bedui hadn’t surrendered. It took a ruse before they finally gave up the prisoners and retreated into the safety of the hills.
Bashir admitted it had been a good trick, the inspiration of the Hispanic Reyes, who perhaps was less a sadist than the others. He had landed his plane a mile away, then taxi-ed along the dirt track, raising a long trail of white dust. From the Bedui viewpoint, it looked like it might be a column of mechanized infantry. That had made them give up the prisoners, and decamp for the hills.
When they had returned the injured Dinka girl to her father they fell in with a scene of chaos of biblical proportions. Bodies everywhere, prostrate women wailing and pouring dust on their heads, cattle stampeding in all directions. In a twinkling the insatiable medic threw himself into fresh blood as he probed a herdsman’s thigh for a bullet. Bashir Nasr thought he was going mad, except for the cramping in his intestines gave him no respite from reality. He had squatted behind a little clump of scrub while his bottom drizzled slimy mucous. It would be impossible for human flesh to suffer more than Bashir Nasr had suffered.
And yet the implacable sergeants hadn’t finished with him.
“When you get through with your potty, I want you to give a spiel for me,” Mac said. “I want to recruit some of these guys for the militia. Tell ‘em this is the chance to sign on with the winners.”
Bashir Nasr dabbed at his raw fundament with a handful of Kleenex. It was fiery agony. It just wasn’t possible that human flesh had ever suffered more.




Chapter 21


From the air Khartoum certainly had a seductive if illusory charm, Reese thought. Situated on a plain where the two Niles converge, the city’s white flanks shimmered in the afternoon inferno. From the air-conditioned vantage of the KenAir Boeing 727 making its final approach over Obdurman, the whitewashed boxy flat-roofed buildings below were laid out in appealing symmetry, and were pleasingly seamed along the narrow boulevards with lines of dusty green date palms. Adding movement and interest, the toy cars, swarming like angry beetles, crawled along the congested streets until forward progress as arrested by the chaos of a Khartoum intersection. In Reese’s opinion, the only thing worse than Khartoum traffic was the go-slows of Lagos.
Below him, along the muddy shoreline of the Blue Nile, Reese could see what appeared to be thousands of white egrets fluttering over the water. But Reese knew better. They were actually flimsy white plastic bags, the modern bane of the Third World, discarded by shoppers in the souk and blown by the hatmara all over North Africa.
In a few minutes, the lumbering aircraft, shuddering in the thermal updrafts, would cross the airport’s threshold, and then Reese would be plunged into African reality at ground-level. It was pleasant, in the last moments of the approach, to enjoy the fitful air conditioning (battling against an outside air temperature of 120 degrees) and to admire from his Olympian perspective the minarets of the Mafdi’s Palace, the sprawling central mosque, with its scintillating square tiles, the bright green fig gardens of the government house, and, far to the west, the blotch of blue which represented the foreign compound with its winking swimming pools, at the edge of which Reese cold just make out the stark white colonnaded fortress that housed the American Embassy.
The false charm of Khartoum immediately evaporated in the blast of heat as the plane’s door swung open at the disembarkation gate. Even after twenty years in Africa, Reese was never prepared mentally for the shock of the afternoon furnace in the Sudanese capital. It didn’t seem possible to breath in this burning air without scorching the lungs. Reese lived in the hills outside Nairobi, in a year-long temperate climate, in a beautiful old colonial house owned by the Union Carbide Company. Khartoum was an entirely different Africa.
At the ramshackle shed by the gate, some of the passengers were having the usual troubles with customs, mostly the Indians and Chinese, loaded down with huge wicker bundles of dubious trade goods fobbed off as personal belongings. A few Europeans, Germans by the look, already were becoming red-faced trying to explain some lacuna on their entrance visas to a gaggle of smiling but inflexible officials. The individual Sudanese was the friendliest person in the world. But put him in uniform and he became like an authoritarian official anywhere.
Reese himself was whisked through customs with smiles and little bows and repeated good wishes for Allah’s beneficence. His passport already bore dozens of Sudanese entry stamps, for he was in Khartoum on business two or three times a year. He always got deferential treatment when he presented his business card: “Phillip Reese, General Sales Manager, Union Carbide Company, Battery Division.”
Union Carbide was one of the few international companies that the Arabs genuinely liked. The company made the batteries that were indispensable for the two items of Western technology owned by every Sudanese: his flashlight and his Japanese transistor radio. In a country like this, either with no electricity, or with very unpredictable and spasmodic service (the case in Khartoum), every resident had to rely on Union Carbide and its well-organized and absolutely dependable distribution network that guaranteed, by truck, camel, bicycle train or human back, a supply of low-priced batteries to every village, no matter how remote.
“I use your battery,” the customs official said in passable English, his face beaming.
“We have a new package now,” Reese said in Arabic, handing the man a roll of four double-A batteries encased in a plastic blister. “They’ll always be strong.”
The official examined the air-tight plastic package with obvious satisfaction. He saw instantly that the plastic blister meant that the batteries could be stored indefinitely. It had been Reese who had suggested to New York that Africa was ready for modern packaging, and already the sales figures were bearing out the wisdom of investing the fraction of a cent more in production costs.
It was probably just timing. He had sent his memo, and bingo, the company had got aboard. The Chairman himself had sent Reese a note. There was satisfaction in that, although Reese had no illusions. Back in New York, he was just another face. That was why, despite the appalling discomfort of some of the travel, Reese would never go home. Here, he could make a difference. He was valued not only by his superiors but by the man in the street, as represented by this customs official, who not only benefited from technical innovation, but, more, from the tremendous logistical effort involved in marshaling thousands of petty entrepreneurs to flog flashlight batteries across a continent.
Despite the molten lead pouring from the sky and the lung-searing dust, Reese felt almost content as the ancient Toyota taxi inched through the tumult of blaring horns and high-pitched Arabic invective. “You are the wretched spittle of something from the yawning cunt of something...” Reese idly tried to pick out the staccato Arabic rising above the din of horns in the chocked intersection. By European standards, Reese was fluent; but he knew he would never have the linguistic versatility of a Khartoum taxi driver.
In the backseat Reese huddled in the one strip of shade, his hands carefully folded in his lap so as not to touch the door handle or the scorching upholstery. Most of the sunroof had disappeared long with two of the fenders and the right front door. The vehicle offered no protection against the swirling dust that was redolent of human feces. Generally speaking, Sudanese were culturally evolved, but the people thought nothing of relieving themselves wherever the urge arrived; on doorsteps, next to walls, beside parked cars, they daintily lifted their white caftans and evacuated, wiping themselves with the fingers of their left hand. It was not a country suitable for Vibram soles, and the reek of shit was everywhere.
Reese supposed that the dust that coated the inside of the cab, and which floated thickly in the shaft of sunlight, contained entire cosmos of pathogens. He hoped not. A WHO doctor once told him that provided that one never drank the water or ate anything, desert Sudan was fairly healthy. The heat overwhelmed the germs.
The driver, grinning as he propped an elbow over the seat, shrugged at the seeming impossibility of proceeding into the next intersection
“Easier mountains than traffic,” Reese said in Arabic, and immediately regretted it. Referring to the difficulty of moving mountains might be considered just a bit close to being disrespectful to the Prophet. And Khartoum was in the grip of a fundamentalist renaissance. Every week the government beheaded scores of alleged apostates found guilty by merciless Star Chambers composed of zealous clerics. Almost as many prisoners were being executed for violations of Koranic law as were usually executed for petty crime or for political subversion. But the driver didn’t seem to take offense.
“Ja, ja, ja,” cried the grinning driver, as he rhythmically pressed the heel of his hand against the horn.
Reese was very glad that New York had never hinted that it might be convenient for him to spend more time in Khartoum, or even to open an office. Union Carbide sold more flashlight batteries in Sudan than in any other African nation except Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Sudan, Chad and the Central African Republic, combined sales last year had reached 46 million flashlight batteries. With that sort of market, the company might have insisted on his being a little closer to the territory.
Instead, they allowed him to live in the company villa outside Nairobi, a cool rambling estate, formerly a tea planter’s house, the grounds kept preened by Masai tribesmen turned gardeners, the walls tumbling with violet bougainvillea, and ranks of fragrant boom boom trees shading the porch.
Reese’s main job in Khartoum was recruiting the traders who in turn hired the peddlers needed too undertake the risks of carrying batteries into the interior. He needed tough, resourceful men who could deal with the crushing heat, privation, brigands, corrupt officials; men who knew how to bargain in the marketplace, squatting in the white dust among their khat-chewing customers. That was his main business, but he had to make an obligatory call first.
His stop at the embassy was merely a courtesy. He would have a Coca Cola with Avery, the commercial rep. And there was always a new batch of juniors, fresh form the States, for him to meet. They always tried to look interested when he explained what he did, and Reese supposed it was understandable they seldom grasped the overwhelming importance of flashlight batteries to a pre-industrial agrarian society. It didn’t matter. They came, they went, leaving no imprint.
Reese’s eyes eased as the cab suddenly plunged into a shadowy tunnel of trees leading up to the foreign compound. The screech of horns and shrill voices became muted and ceased. Angular men in white burnooses were replaced by squat men in shirts and pants. In another moment the taxi came to a standstill in front of the martial gates of the American Embassy.
Reese emerged and pulled his damp trousers away from his rump. He handed the driver the requisite money, fare, tip, and with a smile, the tacit foreigner tax, that extra amount appropriate because Reese was neither Sudanese nor Islamic. He hoped that God would grant the driver prosperity, health and a hundred years.
The young Marine took the proffered passport and stepped inside the guard house for the obligatory phone call. Reese, for the hundredth time, wondered how the Marines managed to keep their uniforms so crisply immaculate in the wilting heat. Did they change every hour? The sentry pressed the button opening the gate, then snapped to attention, delivering one of those Praetorian Guard across-the-chest salutes that always struck Reese as somewhat inappropriate for the soldiery of a democracy.
As Reese walked along the cool colonnaded passage he took out his notebook to remind himself that Avery’s secretary was named Fran. The commercial attaché had a medium-sized office in the rear of the fortress. The chairs and couch were government issue; the Stars and Stripes drooped from a staff set in a metal tripod; glossy color photos of the current set of politicians adorned the walls. Avery’s secretary was thirty-ish, of the pert, blonde, small-town variety, cheerful at all costs, grimly optimistic in a country where nothing worked and the natives were impossible. Being an embassy secretary was her life’s big adventure.
“Hiya, Mr. Reese. Haven’t seen you in awhile.”
“Hello, Fran. I was over in the C.A.R.”
“I hear it’s even worse than here.”
“Much worse.”
“They still eating people?”
“No. A battalion of French Foreign Legion is in Djibouti. Thing are pretty quiet since the Emperor left.”
Fran kept smiling but Reese could see that her interest in the alleged cannibalism of the former emperor of the Central African Republic had staged and was ebbing. She sighed and fiddled with her ball-point pen. “Mr. Avery isn’t here right now. He’s with the ambassador. He was wondering if you’d mind talking with his assistant, Mr. Cunningham.”
“I don’t believe I know him.”
“A new boy,” Fran said, arching an eyebrow. She lowered her voice. “They’re so young now.”
In Avery’s office Reese found a young man who seemed to be an ordinary replacement part: tall, lean, twenty-five or so, light hair neat but longish, athletic without being overtly muscular, obviously well-bred but slightly bent and deferential, as if consciously warding off any outward appearance of patrician arrogance; in all, a self-possessed young man cannily aware that it doesn’t play well to seem brash or cocky. In all, a completely normal foreign service hire.
Avery’s office was exactly as Reese remembered. The gray government furniture, the huge window air conditioner sputtering angrily but giving off just a breath of coolness, the huge map of Sudan behind the desk, with the two long legs of the White and Blue Niles converging at Khartoum.
The map always fascinated Reese. It had many colors and was covered with place names. All over the vast expanse of the south were little stars with names like Wau, Douba, Wadi Khafla. The names evidently gave the bureaucrats the comforting impression that out there existed something substantial, a town or village, rather than what the names really represented, a collection of mud huts and tents occupied half the year by wandering tribes of Iron-age cow herders.
By far the most amazing feature of Avery’s map was the skein of red lines tying together all the alleged towns. These were putative roads that existed solely in the imagination of the government cartographer. But the red lines on the map were a joy to planners, since they gave the heartening impression that the means actually existed for Khartoum to project its schemes (or its authority) into the southern provinces. In fact, they were no passable year-round roads in southern Sudan.
“I’m Lloyd Cunningham.”
Reese shook hands. It could have been Berkeley or Donaldson, or any of the half dozen assistant commercial attaches Reese had met over the years.
“How are you liking it?” Reese said, sinking down in a chair and accepting a lukewarm glass of Coca Cola.
“Actually, I’m liking it quite a bit. There’s so much that needs doing. It’s very challenging.”
Reese vaguely nodded his head. So much needs doing. He’d heard that one before from bright-eyed youngsters. Reese knew the drill these people got in grad school. Lower the trade barriers, open the borders, improve internal communications, establish com-links, get the railroad to work, the peanut farms to produce, the cotton schemes irrigated, the deep-water port cleared of derelict ships. It was painfully obvious what had to be done.
But after their two-year stint, the bright-eyed young men saw everything still in the same mess. This one would soon come up against the same reality that frustrated any change; the touchy, trigger-happy generals, the sluggish corrupt bureaucracy, the implacable resistance of Islam fundamentalism, the superstition of an unlettered underclass, the grinding poverty, the morbid disease everywhere, the runaway population growth that absorbed any gain. In the end this tyro would come to the same conclusion as everyone else had: Sudan’s problems cannot be solved.
“Mr. Avery tells me you have considerable knowledge of the south,” Cunningham said.
“Well, it’s where we sell a lot of batteries. We have about 400 agents who distribute for us in just about every area where there isn’t an active outbreak of war, tsetse or typhoid.”
“Do they drive out there?” said Cunningham, pointing vaguely to the southern portion of the all map.
“Trucks go as far as Wau. After that, it’s donkey, bicycle, or Shank’s mare.”
“Bicycle?”
“Actually, our agents push the bikes,” Reese explained. “Each one is loaded with a hundred-fifty pounds of batteries. Caravans of them.”
Cunningham went over to the map and made a pretense of searching. “Let’s see. Jebel Marra province, capital Rembec.” Reese could see the young man was perfectly familiar with the town’s location.
“I suppose your men report to you,” Cunningham said. “I mean, about their doings, what’s going on...”
“We have a warehouse in Juba,” Reese said. “Some times I see them there.”
Cunningham turned from the map to face Reese. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything unusual....from out on the Jebel? I mean, political activity. Unrest?”
The line of questioning startled Reese. The subject of politics lay outside the particular bailiwick of a junior commercial attaché. And generally, in Sudan, it wasn’t a good idea to talk politics with anybody.
Cunningham noticed Reese’ hesitation. “Just idle curiosity. I was having dinner with one of the political men…he happened to mention some rumor…some kind of trouble. Have you ever been out to the Jebel?”
“No,” Reese said. “Travel there is very difficult.”
And that wasn’t the half of it. The Jebel bordered both Chad and the Central African Republic, with no clear frontiers. The climate was pestilential. Brigandage a way of life. Khartoum’s writ had never run out there. Reese had heard from his men that the Bedui tribes still raided for slaves on the Jebel. The Dinkas who ran their cattle on the plateau were creatures from the Iron Age. Anyway, the province was cut off from the rest of the country. Not somewhere anyone would willingly visit.
Besides, up there, it was a barter economy. His traders often had to make half a dozen transactions, from hides, to tobacco, to placer gold and so on before they got the cash needed to buy a stock of batteries from Union Carbide. In Reese’s opinion, the Jebel was far more trouble than it was worth, and from a business view, it should have been written off long before.
But the Union Carbide policy in Africa always had been to provide batteries everywhere it found a willing purchaser, regardless of difficulties.
“Some more cola?” Cunningham said. “I’m sorry there isn’t ice. The electricity, you know.”
Reese smiled and held out his glass. Another fifteen minutes of this and he could take his leave. He just hoped the young man would have the sense to stay out of politics. The war in the south had been dragging on for ten years. But nobody every talked about it. It was never mentioned in the capital’s rigidly controlled newspaper.
“Does the embassy still field a soccer team?” Reese said. “I know Avery was awfully keen on it.”
“Yes,” said Cunningham, smiling as he carefully propped himself atop the commercial attaché’s desktop. “He is very keen…on soccer.”



Chapter 22


After Reese had gone, Lloyd Cunningham closed the door securely and went back to the map. Despite Reese's very narrow interests in the Jebel plateau, he still could be useful. Not as useful, of course, as the Indian storekeeper, who was already a mole in place. The storekeeper was invaluable; and he had actually seen them, the American mercenaries who had overthrown the government garrison at Rembec.
Undoubtedly the storekeeper was correct in thinking the mercenaries were in the pay of John Garang, the charismatic leader of the Southern resistance. But what did it mean? It probably meant that somehow Garang, or his henchman Obo, had acquired sophisticated weaponry, possibly even shoulder-launched Stinger missiles, and needed technical training.
Maybe the rebels had acquired recoilless rifles or artillery. Certainly, with mercenaries now involved, the level of violence in the south would ratchet upward appreciably. Cunningham stared at the map and rubbed his fingers together. It was very, very interesting.
Of course it was no use talking about any of this to Avery, or to any of the others, for that matter. They were all scared to death of it. The counsel himself was always harping on how State didn't want even the faintest suspicion that the mission was meddling in the civil war. Well, what would happen when Khartoum tumbled to the presence of Americans in Garang's army? Then the egg would fly.
It had been the wildest good luck that Cunningham happened to intercept the letter from the Rembec storekeeper. Poor Fran couldn't read the crabbed handwriting, and had handed it to Cunningham to see if he could decipher it. What a find! A mole, right in the midst of everything, willing to keep the embassy in the picture. For a price of course, but a very modest price. It was so modest, in fact, that Cunningham decided he could pay it out of pocket himself. He had his own money. And that way, he would have his own primary source, which put him out in front, really, of even the diplomatic side, where he should have been assigned to start with.
Cunningham in truth was still miffed the counsel hadn't seen fit to put him on the other side of the corridor. Being relegated to the netherworld posting of an assistant commercial attaché was not what Cunningham had in mind when he was burning the midnight oil getting his masters in international relations. His talents were being squandered on piffling interviews with seedy agents seeking a few paltry franchises and concessions. Avery took all the interesting stuff for himself.
Still, quite a lot could be done, if a man had spirit. Cunningham reached up and placed a finger on Rembec. The government really ought to relieve and reinforce the garrison that had been neutralized by Garang's hired Americans. A motorized infantry battalion from Khartoum could do the trick by pushing straight up the highway. Now, if it was true, as Reese claimed, that the highway petered out and became difficult for trucks, then...the men could go forward on bicycles. That's what Reese's people did. He had said bicycles. In fact, now to think about it, didn't the North Vietnamese use bicycles to transport entire divisions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail? Cunningham thought he could remember reading about that in school.
The government infantry undoubtedly did not have bicycles, but that was something that America could remedy. Lightweight titanium mountain bikes. A friend in college had had one, and it weighed only, what, twenty pounds. It would make perfect transport for infantry in rough country. Cunningham today would write a letter to an American supplier suggesting there might be a market here. Why, a few nights before, Cunningham had overheard Avery say that the U.S. Military Assistance Command/Sudan was thinking of slipping Khartoum a few million to beef up and re-equip certain units. The money really wasn't for arms, of course. Everybody knew the favored generals would skim most of it. But it was always possible some might be pried free for equipment purchases. And why shouldn't the money go to an American manufacturer of mountain bicycles.
There was so much to do. The relief of Rembec. The bicycles. It would be wonderful, for instance, if some good publicity made the press, for once. All one ever saw were little squibs in the back pages about drought and famine and the government murdering refugees and torturing political prisoners. Nobody cared about Sudan. And the only name you ever saw in the paper was Garang’s or Obo's, principally because they had been educated in the States. What the government needed was a military hero, a MacArthur, someone to galvanize attention and be counterpoint to the rebel chiefs.
That was another thing that could happen if ever the army would get off its fat behind and move out of Khartoum. There couldn't be any heroes if the army refused to fight. Unhappily, the fundamentalist government was so faction-ridden and suspicious of one another that nobody wanted army units operating independently outside the capital, even with a war of succession raging in the south.
Somehow there had to be a sweetener. For instance, it would be wonderful if the military assistance were tied to a few conditions. To get the money, the army had to carry out missions in the south. And of course they had to buy a certain amount of equipment from an approved shopping list. The bicycles could be part of that. Cunningham actually knew a few of the army types in MAC/S downtown. What would be the harm in talking to them? Of course the consul would go ballistic if he ever found out. But why should he find out? Particularly if Cunningham couched it to the brass hats this way: that there might be Stingers out on the plateau. That drove the brass crazy. A whole bunch of Stingers had got away from them in Afghanistan due to overzealous disbursement by the CIA. Now multi-million dollar helicopters were being shot down all over the place. MAC/S would be highly interested in any operation that might result in reclaiming stray Stingers. And it could be true. Why else would there be Americans up there?
Cunningham rubbed his hands together as he stared at the garish map with its skein of red highways. Congressman Jester. That was another idea. The congressman was head of the House Subcommittee on African Affairs, which had some kind of oversight role with MAC/S. The congressman was slated to visit the embassy in a few weeks. There might be the chance to slip a word to him about the sweetener, if Avery and the other time-servers didn't monopolize him. Dog-paddlers, all of them, paddling just enough to keep afloat until they could get transferred to some plumy assignment in Europe. They didn't see the opportunities for doing something in Sudan, the way that Cunningham did.
From the provincial capital of Rembec, a large blue circle with a white star inside it, the red lines radiated in every direction, to Juba, to Korfur, to Ft. Lamy, to Kampala. Rembec was the strategic key. It had to be retaken. Cunningham stood musing in front of his map. There was so much to do.


Chapter 23

`
Lt. Col. Ibn Ali Zayd had halted the column at waddi Debbi to allow his hapless second, Major al-Qayrawani, to untangle his company. Every time the trucks under the major’s command slowed or came to a hill, men were spilling out and running in every direction, to piss, to squat, to run off on God only knew what fool’s errand. The major exercised no control at any level. Obviously he was unfit to command anything, not even a squad.
But what was Ali Zayd to do. He had no other officers, other than two newly fledged lieutenants, one an insufferable young prig who felt his birth insulated him from mundane details, the other a clumsy and inexperienced provincial, a one-time cleric elevated to his rank solely for his religious zeal. But even they – tyros -- managed to instill some kind of discipline. Unlike the inept al-Qayrawani.
During the last two weeks, Ali Zayd had tried everything with the major, putting him in the rear, in the van, on the flanks. Nothing helped. The major’s company either straggled, with the men dropping their equipment in heaps anywhere, or they hopped out of the trucks and wandered away from the column. Twice in the last week, the advance had to be halted for hours while search parties went out to rescue several of al-Qayrawani’s teenage ruffians who had disappeared in the sand dunes. Complete disorganization and indiscipline.
Happily, it mattered little. Ali Zayd opened the door of the Mercedes staff car and stepped out into the burning, sand-laden wind. He might as well stretch a bit while waiting. Only God knew how long it would take the major to shepherd his wandering troopers back toward the motionless trucks lined up along the track.
One would be too generous to call it a road. The barely discernible tire ruts stretched off in either direction into limitless nothingness. The terrain had been the same ever since they left Kosti on the White Nile: endless tedious expanses of dun hills cut by dry waddis choked with sand. The trucks were always getting stuck like fat beetles, spinning their tires hopelessly. The Saladin’s engine broke down constantly, its filters clogged with fine grit. And when the column stopped for a meal, sand blew into every morsel and into every drop of water.
Morale had hit rock bottom. The teenage gutter scum making up the two companies were plainly frightened. None of the ranks had ever been outside of walls of Khartoum in their young lives. And now they found themselves in an un-peopled desolate waste, grinding day after sun-smitten day farther into a land where, reputedly, the black tribesmen relished Arab testicles as war prizes.
Ali Zayd had no worry on that score. He had no intention of taking this inept assemblage onto the Jebel plateau. It was all a farce, to cozen the Americans out of aid money. Ali Zayd had overheard the ridiculous major spluttering to his men about bringing punishment to the unbeliever. He had put a stop to that talk instantly. The colonel merely wanted a reconnaissance in force into the region as a sop to American naiveté. Bahr el Ghazal would be sufficient. Perhaps, as an exercise, he would detach the lieutenants and a few platoons to push a few miles further for a quick look at some of the Dinka cow camps below the rim. Then Ali Zayd would turn this bunch around and take them back to the river.
It was all inanity anyway, this futile exercise. The generals at the palace coveted the American military assistance. They needed money to pay for their villas and their French mistresses. But, with touching innocence, the Yankees refused to release the largesse unless the generals showed some palpable interest in prosecuting the war against Garang. One could never expect consistency from the Americans. Washington this week wanted a united Sudan; next week a new bunch would be backing the secessionists. It hardly mattered; the secessionist ragtag mobs spent more time ravaging the other Nile tribes than they did fighting the government.
And so, to mulct the Yankees, this so-called reconnaissance: two of Ali Zahd’s depleted companies and an antiquated British scout car mounted with an after-market American .50 caliber. Certainly no one at the ministry expected him to undertake a serious probe.
In time, the battalion would be different. The first improvement, to be done immediately upon return to barracks, would be the removal of the impossible major. In the last two weeks Ali Zayd had come to detest the very sight of him. He detested his thick wet lips, the gray pouches of flesh hanging under those lusterless eyes, eyes cunning and stupid at the same time. How had this nonentity ever been commissioned? Ali Zayd blamed the times, of course. The fervor of the Islamic renaissance, which had catapulted these new men out of the mosque and into the army. The major was happiest on his knees on a prayer rug. As an officer, he was farcical.
Ali Zayd had another sound reason to rid the battalion of the odious major. No doubt he was in league with the regimental colonel, another pious poseur, in skimming the men’s pay vouchers and uniform allotments. The battalion quartermaster, while complaining yet again about pilfering, had said half the money allocated for uniforms and supplies couldn’t be unaccounted for. Ali Zahd had reported his suspicions, yet the colonel insisted that Major al-Qayrawani remain as paymaster. Ali Zayd already had informed the peculating major that on return to barracks there would be a thorough examination of the books.
Suddenly, Ali Zayd cocked his head to one side and flung an arm in the air. Then with remarkable alacrity he scrambled on top of the staff car.
“Silence,” shouted Ali Zayd. “You men there, silence.”
The troopers, gathered in the meager shade of the two-and-a-half-ton trucks, looked up at their commander in amazement. Ali Zayd was standing atop his Mercedes staff car with his head bent to the wind.
Ali Zayd slowly lowered his arms. It was very strange. Just for a moment he thought he had heard, carried on the wind, the sound of an airplane motor. But that was impossible. The Sudanese Air Force had no machines operating west of the Nile.
Ali Zayd climbed down from the staff car, and the men soon resumed their chattering.


Chapter 24


At first light Mac told Breen to go up in the Cessna. Some of the Dinkas removed the mottled netting that covered the wings and fuselage, while Breen brought up one of the battered red jerry cans and began straining gasoline through chamois into a wing tank.
Most of the Dinka were still lying on the sand, wrapped tightly in their orange shawls. They were so used to the airplane by now that they didn't even blink. They huddled together for warmth, Mac's “platoon" of forty or so, a few of them already beginning to pull the first khat of the day, poking the leaves expertly into their mouths. They knew there would be no fires this morning for heating cassava gruel, and the khat took away the first hunger.
The Cessna's engine coughed and took hold. Breen waved away the boys, wedged himself into the cockpit. The tiny plane bounced over the rough surface of the waddi and lifted off. Breen cocked the wing into a tight climbing turn. The suffused pink light of dawn had illuminated the western ridge of the waddi, but the sun wasn't yet above the horizon. The dust raised by the takeoff wouldn't be visible to any observers on the plain.
In the waddi, Mac squatted down and opened his notebook. The first page showed a rough sketch of the ground. The waddi they were using for an airstrip ran roughly north and south at Mac's position, but turned abruptly east half a mile away, where the road crossed. A few of the Dinka squinted at the droning plane twisting upward overhead. Breen was still climbing at full throttle but the high-pitched whine was quickly diminishing. Then the Dinka boys idly lowered their eyes and stared across at Mac, squatting in the white powdery dust, absorbed with the map.
The Dinka villagers at the cow camp had been beat up, frightened, and hard to debrief. But Mac felt he had got the drift from Ali and the Whizzer. After terrorizing the camp and shooting up the squalid collection of huts at the old government well, the platoon of Khartoum regulars, laden with cooking pots, brass jewelry and other meager loot had fallen back a mile or so into the desert to paw over the spoils. After several hours of angry shouting and confusion the soldiers then had regrouped back at the now-abandoned cattle camp, about 20 klicks from Mac's present position. That was logical, since the seep from a rusted iron pipe was the only water in the vicinity. This trifling oasis was almost in Neur territory. Maybe the Khartoum regulars already felt they were safe from the small chance of Dinka retaliation. Still, they'd be anxious to leave the broken waddi country and get out on the plain, where they wouldn't have to sweat an ambush.
Mac looked up again at the plane. In the cool morning air, Breen should be able to coax the tiny ship up to nine grand easy. With the sun behind him, he'd be able to see the column's dust, when the trucks started moving. The intervening ground was cut by a series of shallow waddis. Even so the column would be able to move pretty fast, fifteen miles an hour, maybe. The deep waddi where Mac was crouched would be the first chance for an ambush. Mac figured the Khartoum officers would think it unlikely. The raghead platoon leader, probably a captain or first lieutenant, would assume that after the mauling at the camp the surviving Dinka cow herders would have skedaddled in every direction. He wouldn’t figure the Dinka could jump ahead of him overnight, particularly without transport. He wouldn't know about the Cessnas, which had shuttled the Dinka platoon into the waddi late the previous afternoon, six at a time.
Okay. In the raghead commander's mind, Dinka retaliation was safely in the rear; the only threat to him in this part of the world came from small bands of Bedouin. The Bedui, opportunistic marauders, had no particular love for Khartoum or for any soldier. They'd attack if they thought they had a chance for loot. But the Bedui feared the Saladin’s mounted fifty. The captain wouldn't think a Bedui attack likely. Even so, a commissioned officer, even in Sudan’s pathetic army, might have had some kind of training someplace. He could be assumed to take standard precautions. He'd halt two thousand meters short of the waddi crossing and send forward a squad to secure the high ground over the road. He'd probably detail a couple of grunts up each side of the waddi for a couple of hundred yards. They wouldn't come this far.
When Mac heard giggling he turned and shot a reproving glance at the children. They were gathered in a squirming clump around the new school master, Harim. Noticing Mac's glance, Harim began chastising the gigglers with his flywhisk. All seven of the children were present however. Mac didn't want any of them wandering up toward the road and leaving footprints.
Okay. So after the captain had put men on the ridges he would bring the trucks across, led by the Saladin armored car. When all the vehicles had climbed safely out of the waddi, he would probably pause at the crest to survey the terrain ahead. He would see the tire ruts of the half-assed road descending and gradually veering left. He would see the tracks crossing a shallow depression and then climbing straight for open country. The camel-backed dun hills were smooth and treeless, offering no concealment. The only irregularity would be the ancient watercourse cut through the shale at the bottom of the depression. But that was only a few feet deep and several yards wide, making it poor cover. And it was below the road. No ambusher would choose the low ground.
What else? A quarter mile to his left, the captain would see the jumble of rocks on the southern face of the ridge. Any sniper in there, he would assume, was beyond effective range. In all, it should appear that the next 20 miles to Waddi Hdaz posed no threat.
What were the chances that the captain might know about the two-foot-wide fissure in the rock, paralleling the road on the high side? Even the Jeba traders who had crossed this section for years hadn't known about it. Breen had found it when he reconned the road from a hundred feet. From the air it was a thin scar on an otherwise smooth face. It was a crevice in the rock, seventy meters from the road. From ground level you couldn't see it. After digging out the sand and rock debris, there had been room for two squads, packed shoulder to shoulder.
Mac looked up as Breen cleared the Continental engine with a burst of power. Breen had been spiraling down with the throttle back and now had straightened up on final over the waddi. The wheels deftly searched out the ground, bounced twice, and the plane rolled to a stop at the tie-down, where some Dinkas already had unfurled the netting.
Breen grinned as he sauntered over.
"Fifteen miles and closing."
Mac nodded. Breen had been right to land immediately. The tiny Cessna would be almost impossible to spot from the ground at that distance with the sun behind it. But why tempt fate.
The Dinka were sitting up and looking more alert. They knew Breen's return meant the soldiers were on the move. It was too soon to order them into position, though. That would mean they'd be jammed in the crevice on their haunches for at least an hour. One of them might get jumpy and lift his head just at the wrong moment. Mac motioned Abdul over.
"Go over the whistles again," Mac said.
"Again?" Abdul had made the Dinkas repeat the signals a dozen times. One short, fire; two short, fire and advance; one long, cease firing; two long, fall back and disperse.
"This is the last time," Mac said.
The Dinkas grumbled a little but quickly formed a circle around Abdul and stood patiently, most of them balanced on one foot, dreamily chewing khat. None of them seemed animated in the least by the prospect of imminent fighting.
But the children were excited. They were chattering and hopping up and down despite the energetic dusting Harim was giving their shoulders with his flywhisk. Mac decided he would hold them far down the lee of the ridge until the last possible moment, to lessen the risk of any premature firing.
Doc came scrambling down from the lookout he'd been assigned on the ridge crest, the binoculars still dangling from his neck, rather than secured in their case, as they should have been.
"I can see 'em, about twenty klicks out," Doc said. "They're raising plenty of dust," he added unnecessarily.
Mac didn't answer. He wanted to give Doc a moment to calm down. The grin slowly faded from Doc's face, and he yawned and stretched, the way people do to disguise nervousness. Mac was glad he could afford to keep the medic in reserve.
"Okay," Mac said finally. The time had come for the disposition of the small force. Mac signaled Harim to take the seven excited children halfway up the slope and hold them in a declivity in the rock. Harim now had substituted a rattan stick for the flywhisk, and could be counted on to flay the child who anticipated the whistle.
The Dinkas lined up behind Abdul to be issued shells. Keyes gave them each ten rounds, nine buckshot, one slug. The first deliberately aimed volley, from the trench at 70 meters, would be slugs. Any hits would put the victims out of the fight immediately. Then the company would make the rush, firing and reloading as rapidly as possible.
Along with the shotgun, each man carried his curved knife in his belt, and a short assegi dangling on a loop over his back. Still smiling dreamily and chewing khat, the Dinkas easily loped up the hill and quickly made for the trench. Mac then sent Breen south a few hundred meters along the ridge with glasses, to make sure all the Dinkas were out of sight. The Dinkas had practiced, and knew how to squeeze down, with their faces pressed against the rock. Breen would give Keyes a mirror flash if anybody was visible.
On a flat space behind a rock outcrop, Mac had set up the rifles. The range finder showed just a tad under 500 meters to the road in front of the trench. Mac followed Breen into the rocks, and sitting down behind the M1 on its tripod, trained his glasses just in time to see Sgt. Keyes herding the Dinkas into the tiny fissure. Keyes was pushing down on their shoulders with the butt of his automatic shotgun. Then he turned to look up toward Breen on the ridge. The Dinkas were invisible. No mirror flash. Keyes levered his own compact body into the crevice and disappeared like a mole.
Even in the very unlikely event that the Khartoum captain put out flankers on foot, they could walk within ten yards of the fissure without seeing the hidden Dinkas.
Before going with the Dinkas, Abdul had laid out the seven cheap semiautomatic .22s behind good rock cover atop the crest. At the whistle the boys would scramble up to their places and take part by firing the .22s from extreme range. Mac wanted to get the boys accustomed to working an ambush, without letting their thoughtlessness jeopardize success.
"Be silent now," Doc had told them as he had walked by. The children usually giggled at his pidgin Arabic but this time an immediate hush fell over the group.
Doc came panting up the slope under the eighty-pound weight of the medical pack. In Mac's plan, Doc was the reserve. After the firing started he was to move north along the crest toward the road and fire on any vehicles that managed to turn around. Then he would join them on the road to treat wounded.
Breen also came loping up to stand beside Mac. Breen, as the second-best marksman, would join Mac in covering the rush.
"Here they come," Breen said.
Since they were around the bend in the waddi, they couldn't see the road. But a slight haze of dust was rising over the adjacent ridgeline. And then they heard the faint growling of engines in low gear.
"I wonder if they'll stay under canvas," Breen said.
Although canvas covers made desert travel in two-and-a-half ton trucks more bearable, the covers also made it impossible for the men inside to fire back in an ambush. No commander would keep canvas on if he felt the slightest danger.
"They'll probably pull it off when they stop," Mac said.
As the three men stood together, balancing themselves on the steep grade, the distant mechanical growling suddenly ceased.
"See ya later," said Doc. He hefted the med pack and began working his way through the rocks to his position. Mac had debated to himself the wisdom of putting Doc within a quarter mile of the road crossing. It was just possible the enemy recon might come up that far. Doc at least was good with cover and could hold still. If soldiers stumbled on him, Doc would have to kill them, if he could, but surprise would be lost. The children would be okay. Mac would send them scampering through the rocks to the south; nobody would ever catch them.
The problem would be for the men in the ravine; if the opposing captain turned out to be aggressive, if he dismounted his company, took the heights over the road, and started nosing around with the Saladin... In that case, the Dinkas would have to haul ass back to the ridge, then retreat to the water cache. Breen would have to get airborne immediately. But even if they got away with no casualties, a failure would cause a loss of face with the Dinkas. That was why he really needed to be 110 percent before he tried something. Mac figured he was about 90 percent.
"Ready?" said Breen.
Mac joined him in the improvised rifle pit and settled down on the foam pad. It still might be another half-hour before the raghead column crossed the waddi._


Doc had picked a good spot right near the bend in the waddi, where a rock ledge over a slight dent in the ground formed a small cave. He dropped his pack in the hole, then laid out his ensolite pad. From his cover he could see the road where it emerged from the far ridge and crossed the wash. Although it was only ten or so, already the air near the ground had started to shimmer. The sides of the waddi were dull brown, but the sand in the center of the wash shown brilliant yellow, like trim paint on a boat. And the spanking yellow sand vibrated and shimmered in the heat, making Doc squint and blink. Otherwise, he lay motionless. Movement gave away position.
It was the movement of a figure on the opposite side that caught Doc's eye. For a split second, somebody's head had protruded above a rock. A moment later, down in the wash, Doc saw two Sudanese soldiers quickly dog-trot across to a cluster of rocks on his side. Their khaki uniforms were white with the powdery dust.
A moment later, he spotted another soldier who was covering the pair from behind a boulder near the road.
Doc inched backward and tried to find a comfortable spot for his hip on the ground pad. The scouts wouldn't come down this far, and if they did, they'd never find him. The ground was too broken and rocky. It'd take a squad an hour to search his side of the ridge.
Ten minutes later Doc heard the truck engines rumbling to life. It was starting to get pretty damn hot. Just lying still in the sweltering heat, his armpits had soaked through and his crotch was wet and sticky. At least he had shade. The poor Dinks jammed into the fissure had the sun beating right on their heads. They were probably glad to hear the trucks start. They were hella fools like everybody else and impatient to get it on, even though some of them might be dead or hurt in a few minutes.
Doc shifted his hip on the ground pad. Maybe he was too pessimistic. If the Dink shotgun platoon carried the road fast, maybe none of them would get hurt. It would be a big help if the trucks kept their canvas on.
Doc could hear the trucks growling in low gear across the waddi. Very faintly, he heard some tiny voices shouting to one another. It'd be shit if the trucks got stuck in the sand. Had Mac thought of that? The fed grunts on the heights, the trucks stuck, and the Dinks crammed in a crack with the noon sun blasting them? But the low grinding of the truck motors continued. They weren't stuck. In which case, the armored car should be climbing out of the waddi by this time.
Doc reversed his position in the hole and gingerly stuck his head out. Below he could see where the road came out through the near ridge and debouched on the plain. And there it was, slowly moving down the rutted track like a big beetle, the antique English-built RK15 Saladin, with a .50 caliber mounted on its turret, and a miniature helmet sticking up behind it. Somebody, probably the captain or another officer, was walking beside, pointing at something.
The figure beside the Saladin clambered aboard, the engine revved, and then, after a lurch, the car sped several hundred yards ahead, stopped, and the machine-gun pivoted around to cover the defile. Two of the trucks came through the pass and caught up to the Saladin. No luck; the trucks had their canvas off, and between the metal ribs Doc could see a line of helmets, dusty shoulders, rifle barrels.
The third truck had stopped at the mouth of the defile, evidently to pick up the recon squad.
Doc very slowly moved his head to the left, searching for the fissure where the dinks were hidden. Even though he knew where to look, he couldn't spot it. He looked across the road toward the lower creek bed, which concealed Sgt. Reyes and his squad. No sign of them either. Moving his head still farther left he scanned the jumble of rocks where Mac and Breen were lying with the rifles. Nice and innocent. It could be this might work.
Half a dozen figures, spectral in their coating of white dust, emerged from the defile and quickly boarded the last truck, which then closed up with the others. The tiny officer atop the RK15 waved his arm. The column began to move. Doc suddenly remembered that he might turn out to be more than a spectator. Reaching back into the cave he grasped the MI. He was too far away to do any good, unless for some reason a truck turned around and started back for the defile. Even then he'd be firing at 500 meters. At that range he might be able to hit a moving truck, but he wouldn't want to bet on it.


Down in the narrow crevice Sgt. Keyes was beginning to have his doubts about the plan. The fissure was only four feet deep at most, and the Dinks had their knees up to their chins and their faces tightly pressed to their legs. They were fine, all of them quiet, with the shotguns clasped close to their chests. Sgt. Keyes had positioned himself so he could keep an eye on everybody without moving his head. Now he could hear the mutter of the trucks as they came up the hill from the waddi.
The trouble was, from the sound of the engines, they seemed to be moving too fast. Sgt. Keyes couldn't see the trucks, but they sounded like they were going faster than the 15 mph they'd figured on.
Mac's plan depended on two things, and both had to work. The column had to be stopped directly in front of the fissure; and the .50 caliber had to be taken down immediately. Sgt. Keyes felt confident that Mac and Breen would ether kill the gunner or force him down. It was the device to stop the column that Keyes had his doubts about. It was no proper mine; it was just black powder they'd found in the storeroom at the Rembec garrison, which they’d packed in four evenly spaced kegs, wired, and rigged to detonate on command by the circuit breaker at Keyes feet.
The cheap, coarse-grained powder was meant for God knows what kind of quarry work. The entire supply wasn’t enough to defeat the steel sides of a Saladin. But Mac figured the jerry-built mine would blow a hole in the track big enough to stop the lead car. What was wanted after the explosion was a deep gully across the road. But what they might get, in this sand, was an oval depression that the Saladin could negotiate. If the car got past, it could hightail down the road a thousand meters or so, out of range of Mac's M1, and then leisurely work them over. Anyway, when the gunpowder went up, there'd be a big noise and lots of dust, and maybe that'd be enough for them to carry the trucks.
The trucks had slowed a little on the grade. Keyes lifted the breaker handle. In another second the Saladin should be in position. But the firing started instantly. One shot, followed by a succession of others from the M1s on the hill. Sgt. Keyes tripped the breaker and the ground shook with an earsplitting detonation. He was instantly on his feet and saw the armored car had disappeared in a white pall of dust. It was impossible to know if the gunner was dead or not. And the trucks weren't in the right position, but twenty yards back to the right. He could hear .30 caliber bullets from the hill ricocheting off metal and then the cab window of the first truck defoliated and the soldier on the passenger side was slammed against the door. The Dinkas had clambered out of the crevice and were standing there gaping stupidly at the trucks.
"Fire," screamed Keyes. Fuck the whistle; it had got twisted around behind his neck. "Fire you fuckin' bastards."
The Dinkas pointed their shotguns in the general direction of the trucks and let loose a ragged volley. Keyes didn't have time to watch the effect because it was crucial to pivot the line. The Dinkas had come out and taken their positions in line at the proper intervals as instructed, but were hesitating, bewildered, because the trucks weren't right in front of them. The skirmish line had to turn like the hand of a clock or they'd all be bunched up and shooting each other.
"Pivot on me, you fuckin' black bastards," screamed Keyes, swinging his left arm to show his meaning. "Now let's go get ‘em."
The movement certainly wasn't crisp, but it remained a skirmish line of sorts and the important point was they now they were all running full tilt at the trucks, the grinning Dinkas reloading and firing as they ran. Sgt. Keyes began laughing himself. He had eight rounds in the automatic shotgun but the idea was to hold that in reserve until they reached the road.
In the back of his consciousness, behind his breathing, Sgt. Keyes could hear the .30 caliber rounds impacting on the trucks, and behind that a faint pop-popping of the kids' .22s. The white dust cloud had drifted back over the trucks, but Keyes could see the occupants bailing out. People were jumping over the tailgates into the billowing dust on the road. The Dinkas had started their horrendous ululating war cry, which alone was enough to scare the shit out of anybody. The nomadic Dinka, when their blood was up, were known to make unpleasant use of their razor-sharp assegais.
Keyes glanced left at the armored car. The dust had gone down, enough so he could see that, thank God, Mac had killed the gunner. The gunner's head was at a crazy angle, looking skyward, one arm thrown up awkwardly.
Even with the trucks stopped out of position, they'd been only 70 meters away. Yet it was taking forever to get there. The sand sucked at Keyes' feet, although the Dinkas next to him seemed to be flying. Halfway there, Keyes saw a muzzle flash from between the stakes of the second truck. Despite his earlier resolve, he lifted the automatic to eye level and pumped off three quick rounds. They must have seen the muzzle flash on the hill too, because simultaneously the truck began winking with the impacts of .30 caliber slugs.
"Follow me," screamed Keyes, wind milling his left arm.
The important thing now was to flank the trucks on the right and then force everybody toward the wash where Sgt. Reyes and his blocking squad were waiting. About half the shotgun platoon had plunged in between the trucks and was firing wildly in all directions, completely out of their minds. But eight or ten of the Dinka saw Sgt. Keyes waving and followed him to the right.
Most of the tires on the trucks were flat, which probably meant the Dinkas had been firing from hip level instead of pointing from the eye. Sgt. Keyes swung himself up onto the last truck and jammed the shotgun through the stakes. The inside was a jumble of packs, rifles, webbing and scattered canteens, ammo boxes, and helmets. One wide-eyed and thoroughly frightened teenage soldier was huddled in a corner.
"Out, out, out," screamed Sgt. Keyes.
Since the boy didn't budge, Keyes leaped into the back, grabbed the boy by the shirt and pulled and kicked him over the tailgate. As Sgt. Keyes jumped back to the road he noticed that several of the packs had been ripped by pellets and small amounts of blood had pooled on the wooden benches. Some of the fucking Dinka had pointed their weapons properly anyhow.
The boy from the truck was squatting by a tire, evidently in shock. Sgt. Keyes kicked him savagely, and when the boy rose shoved him toward the wash.
Passing the middle truck, Sgt. Keyes saw inside the body of a teenager, lying on his back amid the litter of equipment, his face scored by pellets, a mask of blood. That was another proof of the good effect of pointing from the eye, even on a dead run. Keyes figured he must have been firing from at least 30 meters. If he had a chance, he'd pace off the distance later.
Most of the soldiers from the trucks had ducked down the wash, and since there wasn't any more firing, Sgt. Reyes must have rounded them up without too much trouble. Several yards to the side, one of the Dinkas was standing over a soldier sitting on the sand with his face in his hands. The Dinka had slung his shotgun, and was gently nudging the soldier with the flat end of has assegai blade. That was exactly right. Guard the prisoners, don't torment them.
"Very good," Keyes shouted to the Dinka.
A blood-chilling shriek came from between the middle and first trucks. In a few more steps, Keyes could see that one of the Dinka had forced a wounded soldier to the ground, pulled down the boy's pants, and neatly castrated him with the blade of his spear. The kneeling Dinka, with a huge smile of happiness, was displaying the dripping trophy to another Dinka who was holding down the mutilated boy's shoulder with his foot.
Keyes took a shuffling one-two step and smashed the stock of his shotgun against the kneeling Dinka's face, crushing the flat bridge of his nose. The Dinka rocked back on the spring of his spine, dropped the blood-soaked genitals, then pitched forward onto the mutilated soldier. The other Dinka wisely turned and fled. The mutilated government soldier, Keyes could see, also had a bubbling chest wound, and was violently gasping for breath, except that every few seconds he let out a piercing scream. Doc would have to clean up this mess; Keyes didn't have time. He had to see about the Saladin.
A couple of Dinkas were capering on top of the armored car waving their shotguns. Tor was supposed to be in charge of the left flank but was nowhere in sight. He couldn't be in the car because the gunner was still wedged in the hatch, and the side door was closed. Suddenly the engine roared and black exhaust belched from beneath the car. The Saladin lurched forward a few feet, sending the capering Dinkas sprawling on the ground. But then the car's forward progress was arrested when a wheel dropped into one of the holes made by the charges.
Keyes could see the mines hadn't scooped out a ditch as expected; instead the charges had made four evenly spaced holes, each about three feet deep. The driver inside the car was gunning the engine madly while the spinning rear wheels threw fountains of sand in the air.
Keyes leaped on the vehicle, forced the muzzle of his gun past the inert shoulder of the gunner and fired one round through the hatch. There was a yelp of pain. The side door swung open and a young Sudanese officer stumbled out clutching a bleeding arm.
"Hey, you two," Keyes shouted at the two Dinka still sitting on the ground. "Get a hold of these people."
Two boys had followed the lieutenant out of the car, both out of their wits with fear and one of them also bloodied by a ricochet. Sgt. Keyes gingerly poked his head in the door. There should have been more hits than that. Yes, he had killed the driver, the back of the man's head absorbing most of the blast, with only a few pellets escaping to go caroming around the interior.
_



Sgt. Keyes set his weapon against the car while he showed the prisoners how to clasp their hands behind their heads. The two teenagers where casting furtive glances toward the trucks; they could hear the screams and see the castrated boy's writhing legs. The Sudanese lieutenant, his jaw clenched, his dark, jutting patrician face inscrutable, was clutching his wounded arm against his body, his gaze frozen on the horizon.
With a few pokes of the gun barrel, Keyes herded the trio down the wash. Tor had reappeared from somewhere and was yelling at some Dinka to pull the corpses from the armored car.
"Don't let them touch nothing on that car," Keyes yelled at Tor, who nodded his head vigorously in apparent understanding. Undoubtedly there would be munitions inside the car that might be dangerous to the always curious Dinka.
The shooting had stopped. Except for the periodic scream from the mutilated soldier, the desert was returning to its usual torpor. As he pushed the prisoners into a dogtrot, Sgt. Keyes could see on every hand the evidence of a hasty retreat. The wash was strewn with helmets, canteens, harness, ammo clips. A couple of Dinka already had been detailed by someone to start picking up the debris.
Rounding the bend in the wash, Sgt. Keyes could see that Sgt. Reyes had rounded up the fleeing soldiers. Some thirty of them, disarmed and squatting on their haunches, were penned together in a half-moon-shaped hollow where the wall of the wash had caved in. Sgt. Reyes, his M1 cradled in his arms, stood a few yards away by a stack of AK47s. Two Dinka with shotguns stood guard on the bank overlooking the prisoners.
"Piece of cake," said Reyes.
"This the lot?"
"I put the wounded down the gully under a tree," Reyes said, jerking his thumb toward the sparse foliage of a couple of thorn trees. "Any of our guys get it?"
"I probably kilt one of the Dinks I found cutting the nuts of a prisoner," Keyes said.
"Jesus. I heard the hollering," Reyes said. "Well, some of these boys who come in got peppered pretty good. Seen any sign of the nurse?"
"He should be comin' along," Keyes said.


Chapter 25


As soon as the fight ended and it was obvious no trucks would be turning back, Doc hefted the pack to his knee and swung it onto his shoulder. From his vantage it looked like the Dinkas had carried the trucks with no casualties. Nobody had gone down. But as he picked his way down through the rocks he began to hear a high-pitched scream along with the occasional pop-pop of shotguns. Doc had to restrain his impulse to hurry. He had to watch his step until he got out of the loose shale. He'd be completely useless with a turned ankle.
Amazing how fast it had all happened. Doc had heard the crack of Mac's rifle and simultaneously seen the gunner on the armored car throw up his hands. Instantly a silent cloud of dust enveloped the front car, followed a moment later by the dull thud of the explosion. Even though Doc knew the exact location of the hidden Dinkas he was still startled when they suddenly popped up in a line, fired a volley, and rushed the trucks. The faraway pop-pop of the shotguns was almost drowned out by the din of almost continuous firing from the rifle pits to Doc's left. The soldiers in the trucks were jumping over the sides and out the tailgates like mad dolls, and a second later the Dinka were in among the trucks, chasing the panic-stricken soldiers down the wash. Doc could pick out the tiny figure of Sgt. Keyes, climbing onto the last truck and throwing a body onto the sand.
By the time Doc reached the desert floor all the shooting had stopped. To the left he saw Mac and Sgt. Breen coming down the slope, their rifles at port. Further back, among the rocks, he saw a dozen tiny heads bobbing up and down. Poor Harim must have his hands full keeping his nursery under control. But he was under orders to hold the children until he got a flag.
Doc found that he was laboring under the pack. It weighed 80 pounds, mostly meds, but his breathing probably was more from excitement than from the weight. As he approached he could still her intermittent screaming coming from between the first two trucks.
Doc had a premonition; he'd heard the stories; and he'd seen some withered, smoke-dried genitals dangling from ceremonial shields. He had mentally prepared himself, remembering some of the autopsies at Fort Benning where the surgeon had sectioned the testicles. So he wasn't surprised by the deal at the trucks: some skinny Arab kid sprawled on a patch of bloody sand, still alive, writhing in agony. Beside him lay a Dinka, out cold, eyes rolled back, mouth agape and drooling, the spear and bloody trophy still at his side.
Doc dropped the pack just as the boy let out another piercing scream. As Doc knelt down he noticed his legs were wobbling and his hands trembling. Doc positioned himself solidly on his haunches and pressed his sweating palms against his thighs before he examined the wound.
The boy presented an interesting problem. The Dinka spears were like razors. The genitals had been lopped off cleanly. Doc could see the testicular arteries had closed by themselves, the blood coagulating nicely. The boy had a chest wound, which oozed bubbles into the syrupy blood sliding down his heaving stomach. But the wound didn't seem to be sucking. It looked like the pleura had been bruised rather than the lung pierced; maybe the pellet had been deflected by a rib. There were only a few bubbles oozing out now, and no suppuration. The lung didn't seem punctured; it was almost certain the bubbles were from a bruise on the pleura. If the lung was intact, and the body cavity not ruptured, the boy almost had a chance.
As for the mutilation, it was surgically clean. The Dink must have pulled the scrotum and penis away from the body before making the stroke. That the boy was still conscious and not in shock spoke for a naturally strong constitution. He might survive, if treated promptly with sulfa and an antibiotic. He ought to have morphine, too, but that was impossible. Doc only had 60 syringes, and this guy needed two right now.
Mac and Breen trotted up while Doc was mulling it over.
"Oh, great," said Sgt. Breen, glancing at the unconscious Dinka with the bloody genitals by his hand. "Just exactly what we told the assholes not to do."
"Better check the wash," Mac said to Breen.
Breen nodded curtly and disappeared between the trucks.
"What's the verdict here," said Mac.
Doc looked up. "The Dink has had it. There's a bone splinter in his brain. This kid might make it but we'd have to use up some antibiotic and at least one hit of morphine to keep him out of shock.
Mac rubbed his forehead and then readjusted his glasses.
"I'm going to have to say no," Mac said. "If he hadn't been cut it might be different. There's no place for him now. Might as well save the morphine."
The Arab boy, maybe sixteen years old, was looking up at them, uncomprehending, his chest heaving and his eyes wild with pain.
Mac shot the boy point-blank between the eyes. The impact made the child's whole body jump and put a hole the size of a quarter where the bridge of his nose had been. A thick halo of blood and cheesy cortex flooded out around the back of his head. Doc, who had jumped too, realized how tense he was. He began coughing as the air around him filled with the acrid smell of cordite.
"How long for him?" said Mac, indicating the Dinka.
It took Doc a moment to shake off the ringing in his ears and concentrate on what Mac was saying.
"A couple of hours. Maybe a day. It depends on his heart."
"That's too long," Mac said. "I can't shoot him, and I don't want to deny him meds in front of the other Dink."
Doc shrugged. He was starting to feel the familiar trembling of fearsickness in his gut. "An embolism?" he said.
Mac nodded. "Okay. The sooner the better."
Mac carefully stepped over the face of the dead boy and followed Sgt. Breen into the wash.
It was tough, but Doc had to admit Mac was right about the boy. It wasn't just the morphine, although he'd hate to run short if any of the sergeants, himself included, got hurt. But no doubt, it would be impossible for the kid, an Arab castrated by a Dinka. He'd be a pariah. Eventually, he'd probably have to kill himself. It was better this way. Doc was just hella glad he didn't have to make the call himself.
Doc rummaged in the pack for needles. In this case it didn't need to be sterile. He found the outsized Kimleman #3 syringe. Two pumps of air into the aorta, and the embolus would cause the laboring heart to arrest. It was probably the best deal. The Dinkas would see the justice in the man being struck down for disobeying orders. But if he were still alive, they'd want him returned to the village to stand before the elders. They'd expect the Doc Sergeant to administer some of the precious meds. It would mean taking him back on a litter, an extra flight, an extra twenty gallons of gas that was hard to come by. If he did survive he'd wind up getting his head chopped off by his own folks.
Doc, smoothing the skin over the Dinka's swollen chest, firmly pushed in the needle. It was better this way.



By Doc's watch 25 minutes had elapsed since the first shot. Doc was trying to communicate in signs with one of the wounded Arab boys lying in the dappled shade of the thorn tree. The wounded kid was a bright-eyed, shyly smiling teenager, thin and delicate, who held a folded bloodstained khaki shirt against his stomach. The leaden heat of midmorning pressed down relentlessly from the unbroken sky. Overhead the tiny Cessna droned in slow circles; Breen had been ordered back up to recon. The sky was so clear that if Doc held a hand to block the sun's dazzle he could actually see the cobalt beginnings of space.
It was a little before eleven, and the temp already had to be around 110. Doc's eyes were smarting with rivulets of salt. Of course the acclimatized Sudanese thought these mornings pleasant, and didn't even break a sweat until the pitiless afternoon inferno raised the mercury to 120.
The smiling boy, head propped against the tree trunk, had a bullet in his gut. Somehow, impossibly, one of the .22s had managed to reach him, maybe as he was jumping out of a truck. The bullet had struck a few inches above his navel, with just enough velocity remaining to punch through the muscle wall; the wound had closed itself and had stopped bleeding.
The boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen, was smiling because he was alive, because the wound didn't hurt much, and didn't look serious, and the white doctor was friendly. Doc, in signs, was trying to show him to drink water slowly, in sips. The boy didn't care; he was so happy to be alive; and he was smiling too at Doc's hopeless struggle with the few Arabic words he knew.
Doc smiled back and patted the boy on the head as he tried to pronounce, azzaar, az-zaar, a little, a little. But it didn't matter. The kid was finished. The wound's harmless appearance was deceptive. The boy would be dead in a few days. In this cesspool of pathogens any internal puncture wound was fatal unless the victim received IV antibiotics immediately. Infections were virulent and inevitable. Doc had seen the urchins loading the banana clips the night before, using the same left hand to feed in the greasy little bullets that they had used that morning to wipe themselves. Each bullet was a planet populated with deadly microbes, already proliferating in the welcoming environment of the boy's blood.
By evening the boy would have a headache and a terrible thirst. Tomorrow night he'd be delirious with fever. There might be drugs at the government clinic at Feo, but it wasn't likely. It would be too late anyway. All medicines were scarce, and they wouldn't be wasted on a patient already comatose. Doc had decided to hold the oral antibiotics in his pack for more promising cases.
The boy was shivering as he sipped water from a plastic canteen, continuing to smile confidently at Doc. The little hole in his stomach seemed insignificant, it didn't hurt, and the white men were friendly. They weren't going to hang him or let the Dinkas use their knives.
With a groan Doc got to his feet. He was stiff and his legs ached from lying in the cave up on the ridge. The Dinkas had pushed the condemned prisoners beneath the strongest tree, where Tor was preparing the ropes. None of the sergeants knew how to tie a true hangman's knot, so Tor had made simple slip knots. It would be a hell of a lot easier to shoot these people. But Mac had the notion that hangings went over better with the Dinka, because of their collective memory of British colonialism, which their grandfathers had liked. They still associated the rope with lawful justice. Arab bandits and the Khartoum army shot innocent Dinka cow herders. The British hanged criminals.

Doc had heard from the little professor that the Dinkas generally had liked British rule under the Condominium. The Brits enforced peace between the tribes but otherwise left everybody alone. They weren't like the Arabs, who were always raiding for slaves, or forcing Islam on everybody.
Tor came over. "Do you have rope? We only have for three.”
Doc gave him a 50-foot length of three-quarter inch rappelling line.
"Can cut?" Tor said.
"No," said Doc.
"Okay," said Tor doubtfully. "We do them, then them.”
"Okay by me," Doc said. He just wanted it over. His guts still fluttered with fearsickness.
But soon one of the Dinks came along with a few yards of manila tow rope he'd found in a truck. After a lot of jostling under the tree, Tor and Harlim and Ablad and some others had the lines over three limbs and the nooses around the necks of the condemned soldiers. The younger lieutenant, who had been the first one captured in the gully, was trembling and glaring around malevolently. The elder lieutenant beside him retained his aloof icy calm. The other condemned men stood quietly, sullenly looking at the ground or biting their lips. Only the young kid was squirming around, tears coursing down his cheeks, trying to pull away from the grip of the placid Dinka beside him.
"K'slaam djinioum" said the Dinka, over and over. Be still, fool.
Doc wondered if this spindly little acacia was going to hold the weight of six bodies. If Mac insisted on hanging these poor bastards, at least he ought to set up some kind of gallows with a drop, so the victims would die instantly from a broken neck. This way, dangling a few inches off the ground, they'd strangle, perhaps remaining conscious for a minute or two. And it might take five or ten minutes for their hearts to stop beating.
Doc, feeling kind of ashamed, studied the faces of the condemned. What the fuck could they be thinking? They'd be looking at the same cobalt sky, the same camel-colored plain, the same shimmering yellow sand stretching away. They would see their comrades gathered to one side, the ones spared. They would see their enemies, the chatting and laughing Dinka, standing stork-like on one leg, braced against their spears. What could it be like for these poor bastards? The little boy, bawling, struggling with his laughing captors, looked at him, and Doc turned away._





Chapter 26


Bashir Nasr had been waiting with the witnesses from the cattle camp and so had missed seeing the attack. He could hear the shooting, but by the time he clambered to the top of the ridge, it was over. A pall of chalk-colored smoke lay over the tiny, aborted convoy, and several figures were gesticulating from atop the lead vehicle. The Dinka herders, more agile then he and more anxious to see the happy results of the skirmish, had skipped down through the rocks and already were halfway across the plain.
Bashir Nasir moved slowly. It would be easy to hurt oneself, and that was to be avoided above at all cost in this frightful country. A turned ankle on a tennis court was an indisposition. Here it was almost a death warrant. He had heard the sergeants discussing the chances of being strafed by the Mig-15s that the Libyans flew for Sudanese government. That would be precisely his luck, caught far from cover with a twisted ankle. Bashir Nasr watched every step very closely.
As he approached the convoy Bashar Nasr saw two bodies crumpled on the ground between the trucks. He assiduously detoured around them. Already he felt ill and tremulous about what might be in the offing.
But nothing much seemed to be happening. Everybody was milling around randomly within a small copse of desiccated, spindly trees. The villagers were jabbering in Dinka at several of the young men, who appeared to have been driven mad with joy at their victory, romping about like children, and waving their short vicious spears
Bashar Nasr already had picked up a few words of Dinka. But he was too light-headed from exertion and nausea to be able to concentrate on the shouted explanations. He couldn't shake the awareness that straight behind him were two corpses. Bashir Nasr never really had looked at a dead person, except his grandfather, and that had been twenty-five years before.
Sgt. MacDonald, rubbing his knobby frontal bone with one outsized and gnarled hand, was examining a scrap of paper he held in front of his Uncle Wiggly reading spectacles.
"Oh, professor." MacDonald as usual was grinning like an imbecile. "Glad you caught up. I want you to give a little spiel to the prisoners."
Nonchalantly posed in the midst of the Dinka hubbub, MacDonald seemed completely at ease, as if this was nothing more than organizing the sack race at a child's birthday. Bashir Nasr had to admit that the sergeant's off-hand manner, including the silly grin, had a sedating effect on a person's nerves Everybody in his presence seemed to calm down, even the voluble Dinka villagers.
"I'm going to cut most of these people loose," MacDonald said. "But before I do I think we oughta give 'em a talk. Most of these kids come from Khartoum, so they should savvy okay."
It took Bashir Nasr a moment to realize he was expected to answer.
"I'd, ah, assume so." His own voice sounded high-pitched and unnatural. It was irritating that the sergeant's imbecilic grin was spreading wider over his sunburned cheeks. The man was a hick, a turkey-necked cracker whose place was lifting the hood at a rural gas station; instead he was snapping off orders to a tenured professor from the University of California.
"Nothing too fancy," MacDonald said. "Just tell 'em that this time we let 'em slide, sparing their lives, blah, blah; we won't even lift their personal goods. But from now on they got to behave themselves. They want to come out here, fine, act like gentlemen. But if they fuck any more with these people, rape the gals or fire the hooches or that kind of shit, like yesterday, we're gonna stretch ‘em just like the officers."
Behind MacDonald's shoulder, Bashir Nasr saw several of the Dinka ringleaders, Tor, Harim and Ablat, older men, tribal elders from among the hard-bitten wandering cowherds, who for some reason had elected to throw in with the sergeants. They were looping the ends of ropes over the thickest branches of the least stunted of the scrawny trees.
For the first time Bashar Nasr realized that some half dozen of the prisoners had been set to one side, hands bound, under close guard. Two of them, by their uniforms, were obviously officers. The older-looking officer, still barely out of his teens, was badly wounded in the arm, his tunic soaked with blood. But he stood stoically, chin raised, eyes gazing toward the horizon, his face expressionless and noble. The other officer was in abject terror, trembling in every limb, his lips quivering. Judging from this officer’s soiled trousers, Bashir Nasr got the impression the man might have had an embarrassing accident.
One of the other prisoners, a ranker apparently, was a mere child of 12 or 13, wailing pitifully, tears streaming from his eyes like twin cataracts, his slender little body convulsed with sobs. Bashir Nasr felt his heart begin to thud alarmingly in his throat. What was this? They couldn't be contemplating the murder of that child? That would be too brutal even for...
MacDonald stopped talking and followed Bashir Nasr's gaze toward the condemned prisoners. His voice lowered and seemed suddenly menacing.
"Tell ‘em we know they were following the illegal orders of their officers. These officers have to pay the price. So do those others, no matter how little they are, who did crimes on their own. Tell ‘em we'll leave the trucks, water and enough food and gas to get them into Feo."
Bashir Nasr knew perfectly he should refuse any part in this. Certainly these soldiers had committed outrages; Bashir Nasr himself had seen the destroyed collection of miserable huts, seen the distraught and outraged women blubbering in front of the heaps of ashes, all that remained of their pathetic homes. According to Tor, who spoke a sort of English, the soldiers had raped and killed some women. Bashir Nasr couldn't confirm that from his own observation. Still, it was obvious the government soldiers had exceeded any reasonable mandate.
But that was the nub. The soldiers, despite their excesses, were the representatives of lawful authority. MacDonald and his sharked-up assemblage of psychotic misfits and cranks didn't represent anything that was legally sanctioned. Besides, the government in Khartoum was not going to stand for its soldiers being attacked and its officers summarily executed by a gang of antique has-beens who, at this stage in their lives, ought to be ushering school children across intersections.
The Sudanese Army would hunt down the perpetrators of a cold-blooded lynching. If some of the soldiers had overreached their writ, as clearly they had, then the Army should convene courts-martial to mete out justice.
Of course there was another side to it, Bashir Nasr reflected, as he regarded MacDonald's seemingly hick but in fact brutally homicidal countenance. Khartoum was far away. And the sergeants, who had displayed, only moments before, an eager propensity for violence, were close at hand. And he, Bashir Nasr, was friendless and at their mercy. Given that, it might be rash to cross MacDonald overtly. If there were later repercussions he could say with truth that he had been forced to play an unwilling part.
Bashir Nasr glanced again at MacDonald, who had gone back to the slip of paper in his hand and was whistling through his teeth. Somehow, this man, despite his bumpkin appearance, made himself obeyed. It was because he was ruthless. If Bashir Nasr refused to translate, what would happen? What if, for instance, MacDonald decided to leave him with the soldiers? Might it not be likely, though patently unfair, that they would make him the scapegoat for their humiliating defeat?
Bashir Nasr bowed his head in submission. Walking over to the seated prisoners penned inside a semicircular indentation in the waddi wall, he placed himself so he wouldn't have to watch what was happening at the big tree.
"There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet," Bashir Nasr said in Arabic. He continued with a stock opening which included several standard salutations, and a verse or two from the Koran that seemed to him apt, concerning patience in adversity. He kept going until he was certain MacDonald had wandered out of earshot. MacDonald's spoken Arabic was execrable, but Bashir Nasr wasn't sure how much the sergeant understood.
"I want you to mark that I am not one of these people," Bashir Nasr said. "I have been abducted from my home. I am in a strange house. These burdens are not mine. But listen, for this is the message I must carry to you."

Mac had wandered over to the boss acacia, where the forlorn group of condemned huddled under the guard of several Dinka, standing stork-like on one leg.
"Hang the boy first," Mac said.
Sgt. Reyes curled his lip in distaste. Before the wailing youngster could flinch, Reyes had pinioned him against the tree, where Harim quickly slipped a noose over his head. The boy, wide-eyed with terror, opened his mouth in a huge "O", but the Dinkas immediately hoisted, lifting him off the ground. His feet kicked wildly for a moment and then mercifully he lost consciousness, although his small body still writhed with convulsions.
The other condemned prisoners shifted restlessly. Sgt. Keyes and Tor, both with shotguns, came over to back up the half dozen armed Dinkas. One Arab officer, unable to ignore the macabre dance taking place under the tree limb, had lost control of his legs, and had to be supported by two guards. The wounded lieutenant gazed at the horizon with indifference. The non-com rankers shrugged and returned their gaze to the earth. There was no escape and they were resigned. It was His will.
Mac felt bad about having to kill the boy and wanted it over fast. The others, the officers and non-coms who had allowed the sack of the camp, all deserved to swing. Mac had seen the bodies, wrapped in dirty rags, of the women who'd been abused and murdered. He felt no sympathy for the rankers who killed them or for the officers who had let it happen. But the little kid had made a terrible dumb mistake, probably egged on by some of his bunkies, none of whom considered the rape of a prepubescent black girl to be much of a crime. Mac realized, too, that the villagers who had identified the kid were not incensed as much about the harm done the girl as about the harm done her father, who would suffer financially, since his ten-year-old daughter's public deflowering by an Arab pretty much annihilated any bride price.
Considering the loss involved, perhaps thirty cows, the comparative youth of the rapist meant nothing. The kid's life was up. It had always bothered Mac, just like it did everyone else, that war is indiscriminate, and youth suffers disproportionately, simply because armies are made up of boys. At least today he'd had the chance to discriminate somewhat.
Because the ambush had been successful in taking prisoners, Mac now had the luxury of culling the few who needed killing from the majority who could be spared. It was more humane than leaving it all to chance.
The boy, quiet now, was pulled down and the noose removed.
"You can raise the others," Mac said.
Prodded by assegais, the condemned shuffled toward the tree. As the noosed dropped around his neck, the patrician lieutenant stared off into the cloudless blue, as if mulling some lofty theme, entirely unconcerned by his surroundings. The other officer’s teeth were chattering audibly, and he had to be supported by the giggling Dinkas. The middle-aged non-coms fidgeted with embarrassment, their eyes on the ground like errant schoolboys caught in some mischief.
The five men simultaneously lifted a few inches and began their indecorous thrashing. The nurse had said strangulation wasn't as quick as a drop but that it wasn't as bad as it looked, since the victims usually blacked out after a few seconds, even though the struggles might continue for minutes. As soon as the prisoners' feet were off the ground, the Dinkas took up their ululating chant, formed a line and began some happy shuffling across the plunging shadows. They were happy because the sergeants, like the British, had brought them justice. _


Chapter 27





(Date deleted)

Lloyd Cunningham
Assistant Commercial Attaché
US Embassy
Khartoum, Republic of Sudan

The Honorable Thomas Jester
Chairman, House Subcommittee on African Affairs
Rayburn Building,
Washington, DC

Dear Congressman Jester,
Your visit to Khartoum was a signal event for the embassy. It allowed all of us to re-focus on concerns of national interest. I am in complete agreement with you that too often localized eruptions, which may seem of great moment for those of us in country, are mere "blips on the screen" at home.
You asked particularly however to be kept up to date on the stubborn insurrection in the south. This, as you said, has the sad potential for impacting American interests in Sudan, and perhaps elsewhere.
Your concerns about arms running from the Islamic governments of North and Central Africa to terrorist groups headquartered in Pakistan of course are apt. While our relationship with the current fundamentalist government here is difficult, characterized by mutual suspicion, we do maintain at this time a back diplomatic channel, in the commercial sub-ministry, which does provide us valuable intelligence on Sudanese intentions.
This lumen, however, may occlude if it becomes widely know that American citizens are involved illegally and clandestinely with the southern insurrection. The sooner this unwelcome presence is nipped, the less likely are we to suffer unfortunate diplomatic embarrassments and the consequent drying up of intelligence.
Through commercial sources I have established a line of communication to the Jebel Marra plateau and its capital city of Rembec, the city which at the moment seems the locus of the rebellion. My informant believes there is do doubt that American mercenaries have found their way into the leadership of the disaffected.
I hope you concur with my opinion that a timely strike at the Rembec stronghold is needed to disperse these unwelcome elements, before an insurgency is more firmly established. Knowing your feeling on this matter and in recollection of your particular urging (and in full appreciation that I may be overreaching my actual authority) I have attempted to encourage such a strike. I have used an opportune acquaintance with middle echelon officers of the Army of Sudan to broach the concept of staging a reconnaissance in force onto the plateau. The idea was well received. Subsequently, at the urging of these officers, the Sudanese ministry of defense authorized a limited-scope operation that I believe will gain the approval both of MAC/S and of its congressional overseers.
The 20th Mechanized Infantry, one of the few Sudanese regiments up to strength and at training peak, was dispatched Thursday last. Although officially seconded to the Juba garrison for reconnaissance duties, it was envisioned that, opportunities arising, the formation would close with guerrilla units on the plateau with the view of exacting from them the maximum possible manpower penalty.
This already has been accomplished. A detached company of the 20th was blooded immediately upon arrival at Waddi id Debbi during a sharp engagement with guerrilla formations. Government forces dislodged the rebels from their strongholds and set their depleted units staggering in disarray.
I want to particularly mention in this dispatch the performance of Major al Qayawani, the executive officer, who assumed command of the battalion after the loss in battle of the commanding officer, Lt. Col. Ali Zahd. After assuming command, Major al Qayawani and his subordinates drove home the successful counter-attack. I mention this officer not only because he is well-regarded at the highest levels of the ministry but also because I believe he possesses natural leadership powers and the potential to achieve national prominence. He is also well disposed to US objectives, and may be of service to us....
Chapter 28




Doc was getting a tour of the Rembec clinic from the handyman, a kid named Brevold. The Christers had brought him in to fix an irrigation pump. Then some kind of beef went down, the mission doctor got murdered, and the Christers booked for Khartoum. Apparently no room for the kid in the mission Cessna. The kid had wound up doing some first aid in the clinic. Nobody came back for him, and here he was, still petty much in charge.
The clinic building had been looted and trashed, the windows knocked out, the furniture kicked apart. There was human shit on the porch only a couple of days old. Gathered around the steps were a bunch of beaten-up-looking women, all moms with sick urches on the hip.
Doc held up a skosh to check the urches. All of them were typical basket case refugee kids. They had the usual bloated, wormy bellies, the gaping mouths, the wrinkled old-man faces, the listless stare. Some of the swollen tummies showed the outline of the liver under the taut skin. Doc had never actually seen this in kids. It was probably either hep or liver flukes. Some of the moms turned on him pleading looks as he followed Brevold into the clinic.
Inside the suffocating room, Doc was almost bowled over by the stench of vomit and diarrhea. The heat didn't make it any better. It had to be 100 degrees inside the stifling wood-frame building. Doc halted in the threshold and took a good sniff. He smelled sour milk. That couldn't be right. The moms on the porch weren't lactating. They were dehydrated, and their dugs were flat and leathery.
"How are these little guys getting milk?" Doc said.
"We still have some powdered supplement. Used to. I'm pretty sure Obo got most of it," Brevold said.
Powdered milk was the sour milky smell in the vomit. Doc had heard that these bush kids stayed on the pap until five or six. These women in the clinic were played out. Probably the supplement was the only protein the urches were getting.
The shit had the usual sour vegetable odor. There was something else, though, kind of metallic.
"Are these kids shitting blood?"
"About half of them," Brevold said.
Amoebic dysentery, probably. Or ascaris worm. Doc stopped to pick up the wrist of one of the children and studied for a moment the embedded curlicue of a filarial worm.
"Have you seen any cholera?" Doc said.
"Yes," Brevold said. "Lots of it in the refugee camp."
"Typhoid?"
"Yes," Brevold said.
Doc was standing over two small boys, probably brothers, lying on a filthy khaki blanket. Their eyes were the color of lemons.
"These guys have malaria," Doc said.
"Yes," said Brevold.

Doc walked back out into the relatively fresh air of the porch. A hundred meters away, in the center of the village, a group of young men were gathered around the sergeants, under the goat-gnawed acacia tree. Doc could see the heads and shoulders of Mac and Breen, and the top of Keyes' red baseball cap. He knew Bashir Nasr was there too, although he was too short to be visible.
More recruiting, to capitalize on the success of the attack on the Saladin. No trouble now raising a company. The Dinks who had taken part in the fight had been strutting all over the village. Down by the tree it looked like one of the young prospects was showing off the contents of his basket. The Dinka men carried round plaited baskets instead of packs when they traveled. Doc could imagine how Mac, using Bashir as a translator, was flattering the kid. Nice fish hooks, kid. Nice flints. Nice leather water bottle. You've got everything you need right here. To be infantry.
The Dinka would turn out to be sheep, just like everybody else. It amazed Doc had easily the average mope gave it up to rank. In the army, the sergeants always carried clipboards when they met a new batch of rookies. The paper was blank. But a man with a clipboard had authority, and the mopes went along with it. Disorganized mopes never had any power, and never felt they had any choice but to obey stronger men. The weight of a mob could overwhelm any skirmish line. But it never did. The mopes were too intimidated.
Here they were, five lightly armed white guys in an African village in the asshole of bumfuck. There had to be four or five thousand people. If these mopes were willing to take the loss of twenty or thirty, they could run over the sergeants in ten seconds. The sticker was that the mope leading the charge would be the first down.
So it was the usual deal. The mopes cowed and deferential, bowing their heads and moving aside, all the time hoping somebody else would pick up the ball. These people were so used to being pushed around, they never even ask what the fuck the sergeants were doing in Rembec. Born fucking slaves.
Mac understood the mentality. As soon as they touched down, Mac swaggered like he owned the place. Total confidence. Even though he looked like some stringy beanpole, he was one of those guys that radiated the assumption that everybody would obey him. Right of the bat he made an example, by killing the garrison sergeant and the witch, the two symbols of the old authority. Same rule with new troops. You pick out the strongest puke and intimidate him. Then you flatter the crowd, like Mac was doing now under the big acacia tree. This bunchy would wind up taking the program; everybody was the same way. Born fucking slaves.


Chapter 28


“Tell ‘em,” Mac said, “that we want a contest. Mullah against mullah.”
Disgusted, Bashir Nasr contemplated the scene before him. It was late afternoon. The twenty new recruits for Mac’s militia already had been led away by Keyes for the first bout of indoctrination. Now Bashir had been summoned down to the refugee camp and was standing with Mac at the entrance of the sick house that sprawled along the fetid river below the village of Rembec. To Bashir it was a nightmarish horror. The building was a mere shed, with gaping holes in the walls. Inside on the hard-packed ground teemed dying children: bloated, ghastly babies; sunken-eyed, emaciated babies; all of them lying anyhow on a tangle on surplus army blankets stiff with excrement: all of them wailing their hearts out in one long cry of misery.
Bashir Nasr doubted he could say anything. The stench in the motionless air under the shed was overpowering. It was all he could do to keep from retching.
“Pardon me,” Bashir Nasr said finally.
The overseer of this pest house, a young World Health Organization nurse, had just been introduced to Bashir, but had ignored him. Darcy Bean was totally involved in glaring at Mac, her pinched little face thrust upward, beet-red with anger. Apparently she was acclimated to the smells of shit and death in her charnel house. But she still wasn’t resigned to the seemingly endless parade of armed men who were always pushing through her camp, ransacking the refugees’ baskets in search of loot.
Bashir Nasr watched her trying to master her rage. Anybody could see she had an impossible task. She had no staff or help. And everyday the drought and the unchecked violence in the countryside pushed more hoards of the uprooted toward Rembec and the adjoining refugee camp.
And these gaunt hapless creatures that straggled in from the bush, with nothing left to them but a bundle of rags and their spindly children. All of them were expiring from hunger and disease. It was with their last breath that they managed to drag themselves out of the drought-scoured hinterlands to the banks of this sluggish, foul-smelling river.
And then, as if this weren’t dire enough, along came gangs of insanely-violent thugs, rampaging back and forth, stealing everything, terrorizing everybody. Bashir Nasr could understand why the young WHO nurse assumed the sergeants represented more of the same.
“A contest,” Mac repeated.
“Contest?” Bashir Nasr, despite the hellish scene in front of him, found himself wondering what the WHO girl might look like under the shapeless ankle-length shift that she wore, one supposed, in deference to Moslem sensibilities. Clearly she had no breasts. There wasn’t the slightest swelling above the midriff. And she seemed to have that freckled skin that might mean black moles on her back, which Bashir Nasr didn’t like. She was a do-gooder nurse in a wretched camp at the bitter end of the world; it almost certainly meant that her ankles were too thick. Inevitably, that was the way it was with humanitarian nurses, some of whom Bashir Nasr had come across in the Middle East.
Worse, responding to some misguided feminist impulse, she might neglect to shave her legs and armpits, and there was hardly anything more disgusting than a hairy female. On the plus side, Bashir Nasr could see that the short tufts of hair poking from beneath her baseball cap were blonde. If her nether hair was blonde as well, a little downy peach fuzz on her thighs could be attractive. Of course dark hair on the shin was repellent. Yet, if she shaved her calves, while letting the soft down grow on the inside of her thighs that could be very nice.
Bashir Nasr noticed that Mac was not concealing his impatience as he stood, arms akimbo, awaiting a reply.
“What I mean,” Mac said, an edge of anger sharpening his voice, “is that you should explain to these folks that the camp mullahs here are giving the brats the wrong inscriptions. If the brats got the right inscriptions -- and you of course know what they are -- than all this sickness here would go away.”
Bashir Nasr had no idea what Mac was talking about. Yes, it was true. The mullahs’ idea of medicine, codified by the centuries, was to write verses from the Koran on little strips of paper, burn them, grind them up, and feed them to the sick with a swallow of water.
Mac narrowed his eyes in a way that Bashir Nasr had come to dislike. “You, a renowned scholar of the Koran, certainly know the best curative verses. That’s why yours are gonna work where theirs failed.”
Bashir Nasr’s mind, reluctantly turning away from Miss Bean’s fleshly possibilities, came to grips with Mac’s latest scheme. The kids in the camp were dying in droves. But the mullahs, put in charge of the camp by the fundamentalist government, didn’t approve of Miss Bean’s secular methods. In the usual myopic way of fanatics, they had thwarted all her efforts to introduce basic hygiene. There was filth everywhere (and one needed to be very careful where one trod).
In some of the medieval villages surrounding Bashir Nasr’s birthplace, the Wahabbi were exactly the same way. They insisted on miraculous cures based on Koranic verses. Anything else insulted God’s mercy. As always, the unlettered masses (and here in Africa only a patina of Islam coated millennia of paganism) happily went along with the mullahs. The refugees ate verses, washing down the powdery charcoal with polluted river water.
“We’ll split this bunch of urchins right down the middle,” Mac said. “We’ll treat half with our verses, they treat the other with their verses. Folks can see for themselves who gets better.”
Bashir Nasr by now knew better than to argue with Mac. He had seen what had happened to the old Arab sergeant, and to the witch woman.
Slowly, with attention to every formality, he began to translate this insulting proposal into Arabic. The mullahs, predictably, began to look very grim. Even Bashir Nasr, who had nothing but contempt for this pack of dirty-necked backwoods mullahs, stumbled over the words, so ingrained in him were the from-the-cradle traditions of what constituted fitting speech. This could only be construed by the mullahs as a monumental insult to Islam and to them. It was monstrous, hell-defying hubris to propose a contest with God.
For his own safety, Bashir Nasr worked in every formula of respect. There was still no way to sugarcoat the message. He was questioning not only the mullahs’ Koranic scholarship, but also their status as the channel of the received Word. These were intolerable insults.
“Speak up,” growled Mac in Bashir’s ear. “Stand tall. You’re in charge here, not this bunch of frauds. Read ‘em the riot act.”
The shed had become surrounded by Arab-ized highland Dinka, who had come to hear their revered camp mullahs denounced by the foreign mullah, who had arrived backed by his armed European bodyguard and a troop of heathens from the village. They gazed at the newcomers with interest. The Europeans wore strong boots and strong trousers. They carried unknown, exotic rifles, which were neither AK47s nor Enfields. They wore caps with inscriptions that every man there knew were the insignias of American baseball teams.
The foreign mullah was saying that the written Word taken from the Book, and selected by the mullahs themselves, would not return the children to health. Other verses, the foreign mullah said, would work better. But how could that be, since the entire Book was the eternal Word of God enliberated
Darcy Bean was still glaring at Mac. “You have no right to do this,” she hissed.
Her lower lip was trembling slightly but she was trying to keep her face hard and fierce. Obviously this tall, stooping, slope-shouldered gunman was the real boss. He was giving the orders to the graceful soft-spoken man whose nice clothes and refined appearance should have marked him as the leader, although he wasn’t.
In likelihood, however, for those with no grasp of English, it must appear that the dark-skinned Saudi or Egyptian was in charge. The real honcho’s bland face, his fidgeting hands, his rapid blinking, and the foolish grin, all made him look inconsequential. And with the dumb reading glasses pushed low on his nose, the bald pate, the beanpole body, he wasn’t physically intimidating either, even with the large rifle slung casually under his arm. None of these mild-looking middle-aged men seemed alarming, as they stood about swatting flies, and rubbing the sweat off their heads.
The one exception was the youngest one; a cat-eyed, edgy jock type, with knotted muscles, tattooed arms, military crew cut. He looked dangerously psychotic.
Mac brushed the hoard of flies from his forehead and grinned at her. “How many of these brats gonna be around next week on a diet of burned paper? What’s your plan, sister?”
Darcy Bean didn’t answer, and Mac turned to talk with Bashir.
“We got maybe a couple hundred kids here. We’ll split the ward right now. “We’ll move the mullahs’ half on that side. Doc, make sure the mullahs get all the losers. How many of these urches you think you can pull through?”
Doc unconsciously had been staring at Darcy Bean. But now he turned his attention to the jumbled ranks of misery in front of him. The kids had the usual refugee camp deal. They had diarrhea, cholera, malaria, worms, pinkeye, oral herpes, dehydration, persistent malnutrition. A few had rickets, elephantiasis, lots had kiwash. At least the girl nurse somehow had convinced the mullah committee to quarantine the measles cases. With measles loose and nobody immunized, probably every kid in the lot would go west.
“Well,” said Doc. “I think a lot of them should be okay. Those little guys over there with red hair and the big belly. Kiwash. They won’t make it.”
“Give ‘em to the mullahs,” Mac said.
“This one who’s asleep. You can see his goddamn spleen sticking up under the rib cage. Quatrain malaria. He’s gone.”
“The mullahs,” Mac said. “What about these urches? They look like shit.”
“You’re looking at typical starvation,” Doc said. “It ain’t that serious. Any kid who reaches age five in this shithole has gotta have a gangbuster immune system. A little food and rehy is gonna show a big improvement around here.”
“Okay.” Mac laughed. “Our kids get fed their verses mixed with powered milk and rehy fluid. Antibiotics?”
“For the eye infections and skin lesions, mostly,” Doc said. “Although a bath and some clean jeans, a lot of these lesions should clear up themselves. But all these people gotta be wormed right away.”
“Okay,” Mac said. “I want a fast turnaround here.”



Chapter 29


There was a fast turnaround.
Doc had split the ward in two, giving the mullahs the losers: the hopeless kiwash cases; the kids so dopey and lethargic from malnutrition they couldn't keep their eyes open; the gasping pneumonia victims already making the "Q" with their tongue; the tiny fatless babies whose mothers dugs had run dry; the little babes constantly wailing because they were being devoured inside by parasites.
At first Doc thought the mullahs would reject such an obvious setup. But they didn't. That was what was wrong with them. They were fanatics. They believed in the efficacy of their scribbled scraps of paper. They prayed five times a day; they argued incessantly about the verses to scribble out; they glared across the compound at the rival mullah.
Meanwhile, Bashir Nasr had seated himself conspicuously at a little camp table outside the tin-roofed chopping shed that served as the children's ward, and began writing out his verses in his elegant, practiced hand. He was at perfect ease with the task, knowing much of the sonorous ineffable book by heart. He often didn't need to consult the page.
The contest had caught on with the Dinkas, who crowded near Bashir to watch in quiet awe as he formed the characters. It was hard for Doc to believe that all those crescents, apostrophes and slashes actually meant anything. And as for the illiterate Dinka, it could have been algebra. But they were entranced. These were the living enliberate words of God.
Doc had to laugh at the spectacle of Bashir within the circle of bobbing heads and craning necks. The Saudi (or whatever he was) had a flair for showmanship. He’d finish a verse, wave the scrap of paper in his hand is if drying the ink from his ball-point, and then raise it high for the crowd to see. Slowly, portentously, he’d recite the verse. Blah, blah, God is great, or whatever, and the crowd fell back as if hit by a pulse.
On the other side of the compound, the mullahs squatted in a patch of shade, poring over their holy books. When they finished an inscription, they brought it in a tarnished brass plate to the shade of a flapping canvas awning where the women always kept a fire going. The half dozen mullahs, fat and sleek and fiercely bearded, draped in dirty ankle-length caftans, their foreheads wrapped in filthy turbans, set fire to the paper in the metal plate. One of them ground the ashes with a tiny ceramic pestle, and with a long yellow fingernail nudged the lumps of charcoal into plastic cups filled with water. The mullahs’ water came straight from the river.
Bashir Nasr prepared his verses for consumption in much the same way, except his water has been run through the sergeants’ Katydin filter.
On Bashir’s side of the ward, Doc had put the kids on re-hydration mix. Half of the kids got streptomycin for eye infections. He wormed them all with piperzine, and put tincture of sulfa on the worst of the open sores. They all got a vitamin pill, and powdered milk. They all got aspirin. If a kid still cried or got fussy, Doc slipped him a grain or two of Demerol.
“I don’t think you should be giving them that,” Darcy Bean said severely.
“What the hell,” Doc said. “Makes ‘em feel good.”
Darcy Bean was intense and serious, watching his every move with the children. She was the only one who understood what he was doing. But she wouldn’t help, fearing that any collaboration with this new bunch of usurpers would only harm her chances of staying at the camp, once government control was reestablished.
She watched Doc’s every move with her myopic gray eyes. Even though she was no beauty Doc liked having her there. She made it obvious she didn’t like him. But she was young. She smelled like a woman, which was something, working in the constant stink of shit and puke.
Within two days, the Dinka heard something entirely unexpected on Doc’s side of the ward: children’s’ voices laughing, or even singing with their mothers. On the mullahs’ side the children labored for breath, wailed incessantly, coughed for hours. The hard-hit Kiwash victims had died right after receiving the mullahs’ Koranic infusion. A few other hopeless cases went the same way. The gaunt, dried-up moms stared in incomprehension at the lifeless bodies until some relative came to wrap the featherweight corpses in rags. After four years of drought, the ground was cement; it was impossible to dig graves. The relative walked down to the sluggish, fetid river and discretely pushed the bundle into the brown current. The bundle was soon lost to sight in the reeds.
The mullahs were uneasy and talked to one another in low voices. Despite the five prayers a day and the incorporation of the Word of God, the children of their side of the stifling shed had not improved. The babies shit out all the wheat gruel in rivulets of green slime that ran down their pipe-stem legs. They howled with abdominal cramps from the lumpy surplus powdered milk. Drained by unremitting diarrhea, the babies finally took two or three huge rattling breaths, and died, wide-eyed bony-headed monstrosities caked with slime.
Doc, when he glanced over toward the mullahs’ side of the shed, could see it was the combo of diarrhea and malaria that was killing most of the kids. They got diarrhea because their starved, plasmodium-fucked immune systems couldn’t beat off the legions of pathogens that ambushed them in a drink of river water. Filter the amoebas out of the water, re-hydrate the little fuckers with some mix, give them clean food for a change, and the tough little fuckers bounced right back, almost overnight. Since Doc topped off the regimen with a grain or two of Demerol, half of his kids were hopping around on their blankets like a bunch of monkeys.
The Dinka looked at the results of the contest and cast furtive glances at the mullahs. To the animal worshiping lowland cow herders, the majority in the refugee camp, the results were clear; the mullahs were bogus. But the lowland Dinka had suspected that. The Arab-ized Islamic highland Dinka didn’t know what to think. Surely all mullahs could tap into the curative powers of God’s revealed Word.
Yet, the foreign mullah seemed to have found exactly the right Word among the seven thousand verses. The children had swallowed the Word, and now they were chattering on their blankets like little birds, and jumping so that their mothers could hardly hold them.
“I think folks got the idea here,” Mac said, after the third day. “Now we’ll fix the mullahs.


Chapter 30


There were many mediums of exchange in the south of Sudan. Among the Dinka, true wealth, hence position and prestige, was based on the ownership of cattle. For any major transaction, for marriage, indemnity, initiation, no other currency would do, not even placer gold or increasingly rare Black Rhino tusk.
For lesser exchanges, goats could be bartered. Or a transaction might involve pounded cones of tobacco, baskets of yams, or manioc flour. In the bigger villages, such as Wau or Rembec, sometimes in Dowda, currency could be used: diners, Egyptian pounds, piles of almost worthless C.A.R. francs. Sometimes dollars appeared in the wake of missionaries or the WHO epidemiologists.
The worth of cows and other bartered goods fluctuated according to the season, and with the severity of the drought; it was influenced also of course by availability and the innate perishability of animal stock. The value of currency was even more unstable, depending a great deal on the political fortunes of the issuing nations. An inflated currency could become worthless overnight, as in the case of the C.A.R. franc. With no fixed, published exchange, most of the haggling in the marketplace focused on differing opinions of a currency’s immediate prospects.
A Certified World Traveler, such as the Whizzer, whose precarious existence depended totally on a comprehensive knowledge of exchange rates, could often turn a quick profit by being better informed about currency values than the stay-at-home merchant.
In the marketplace, however, even the most inveterate haggler agreed on the intrinsic and almost unvarying value of one trade item. No matter what the climate, political or meteorological, the item’s price remained stable, and never fell. Even on the rare occasions when the market was flooded, the price remained surprisingly steady, steadier in fact than a gold Kruegerand.
In southern Sudan, as in most of Africa, the Chinese-made Kalashnikov assault rifle, the AK47, stood for what the US dollar once did in the global currency market: the yardstick against which everything else is measured.
For a Dinka chieftain or for a Bedui sheik ensconced within his thorn wicket, ownership of an AK47 meant that he had arrived at the pinnacle of worldly success. It always kept its value, could be easily liquidated in hard times, and in the meantime was eminently practical for keeping intruders at bay. If thieves knew the village chief had an AK47 they were very likely to move on to someplace where the headman had only an Enfield, or a clutch of spears.
“Right at this minute, I could provide you with a Kalashnikov, excellent condition, two hundred US,” said Jaybut Shaybin.
Mac stood at the counter in the dim recesses of the tin-roofed Shaybin Emporium peering down over the rims of his spectacles at the sleek little Indian storekeeper. Breen and Reyes were wandering the cluttered aisles picking up and turning over wicker baskets, enameled pots, or plastic sandals. The Whizzer, his lean body enfolded in a much-patched blue cotton shirt several sizes too large for him, had propped his elbows nonchalantly on the counter and was examining Shaybin with benign good humor.
“It’s the other way around,” Mac said.
“You are selling?”
“That’s right,” Mac said. “Now, are you saying you’d be willing to give me 200 bucks for every AK47 I brought in?”
“Not exactly,” said Shaybin smiling slightly at the innocence of the proposal. “One thing I must say, we do not have dollars here...”
“I don’t want money,” Mac said. “I want to trade guns for goods. It’d be stuff you’d have to send for. Window screening, for instance...”
Jaybut Shaybin had grown up in a merchant family whose paternalistic chiefs had harped, every mealtime, on the importance of seizing opportunity. Do not be afraid of opportunity, Shaybin’s father had said. Don’t close the door on it, no matter how strange its appearance.
Now, as in a fairy tale, an American mercenary inexplicably had walked through his door, in Rembec, Jebel Marra province, and wanted to trade AK47s for window screening. Jaybut Shaybin’s whole body shivered with the thrill of recognition.
“Excuse me,” the Whizzer said. “Mac. Can I have a word.” Gently tugging on Mac’s sleeve, the Whizzer led him a few paces down the counter and put his head as close as he could to Mac’s ear.
“Mac. Please. Let me do this. Give me a list. PVC pipe, cement, rebar, earth rams, brick molds, rehy mix, vaccines. You name it. This guy will get you anything you want for rifles. But for God’s sake, let me do the deal.”
“You think I just fell off the turnip truck.”
“Yes,” said the Whizzer.
“Okay,” Mac said. “It’s gonna be about a hundred weapons.”
“This guy will go fuckin' bugnuts in his greedy little heart,” the Whizzer said.


Chapter 31


Darcy Bean grudgingly had to admit that Doc, despite his brute appearance, made an excellent nurse. His hands appeared ungainly. Thick gnarled fingers. But when he slipped on the latex gloves he had a touch for suturing that the WHO nurse found impressive. He could distract the often agonized victim with a stream of gibberish, while simultaneously deftly hooking the curved needle through the un-anaesthetized flesh, pulling the lips of the wound neatly together, and then without a moment’s fumbling tying off the thread in a tight surgeon’s knot that never slipped.
She could see he knew his meds, knew his procedures. He usually came up with a pretty quick, accurate diagnosis. Darcy had even seen him predict tubercular meningitis in a kid before the catatonic symptoms presented. And he was methodical, Draconian, about controlling sepsis. In the primitive conditions of the Rembec clinic secondary infections usually body slammed the patient following any kind of surgery. But Doc was fanatic, insisting that every wound be treated according to Arn’s procedure. Since the hospital had no antiseptics, he disinfected with sulfur packs. He boiled every rag in the ward. And patient follow-up had to be exactly right, sutures disinfected, bandages changed daily.
Darcy knew the sergeants only had a limited stash of antibiotics. Doc hoarded them. He wasn’t indiscriminate like the mission doctors. If he figured some young stud could throw off an infection, he left him alone to try it. He only went for the needle if somebody faded.
Of course the medic had one advantage over the mission doctors. On their increasingly rare visits, they had flown in, performed a few surgeries, and left the same day. Too many mission doctors had been murdered in Sudan. None of them lingered for a night in the bush if he could help it. But half their surgery patients succumbed to secondary infections. Darcy hadn’t been able to do much about it. She never had time to break away from the demands of the refugee camp, with the endless epidemics of cholera and typhoid, to nurse individual post-op cases up in the Rembec clinic.
Now the post-op infections had disappeared. Well, sure. For one thing the ape-like medic obsessed about hand washing. Darcy understood perfectly; dirty hands were the main vectors for microbes. Getting the Dinka to understand that was something else. But Doc made them all wash: the Dinka moms, the conscripted orderlies, everybody who touched a patient. The Dinka were pretty darn clean, considering they primped in cow urine, but the average Dinka had never been too particular about hand washing. Now, at the shed entrance, a special table with jugs of water laced with bleach, yellow soap, boiled rags for towels.
Not only did Doc enforce personal hygiene on the uncomprehending Dinka in the clinic, but he insisted on field sanitation, despite the almost universal reluctance of the village residents. He ordered the women to keep cauldrons of water boiling under thatch awnings next to the ward, even with outside air temps approaching 120 degrees. Everything got boiled, bedding, clothing, and bandages. Every day he made the grumbling orderlies shovel up the shit-dribble in the children’s ward and burn it in a drum. Darcy could see that the sullen orderlies, pretty much press-ganged at gunpoint, resented cleaning up after incontinent toddlers. But by this time everybody had seen what happened to people who objected to the sergeants’ little eccentricities.
Darcy had expected some kind of uprising. The government garrison had been a bunch of thieves and rapists. But they hadn’t tried to change life-long bathroom habits. Rembec wasn’t used to stringent rules. Yet, so far she’d seen nothing more among the orderlies than some grumbling and sour looks. Mostly because the medic didn’t throw his weight around too much. In fact, he was really a big laugh; the least dangerous of this latest gang of gunmen. Although the man clearly was deranged, some kind of renegade wacko nutcase, he turned out to be harmless, despite his looks. He sort of reminded Darcy of an ocher version of the guy who used to play the Incredible Hulk on TV. Except his outsized arms were criss-crossed with as many scars as a Dinka’s, although not artistically arranged.
That’s what made it so funny, to see this Caliban sitting on a stool and sewing flesh as daintily as a seamstress. And smiling, and gabbing nonsense, and wagging his head all day like a manic puppet. And at the same time pointing and pushing everybody into following an infection-control régime stricter than anything a public health nurse could get away with at a teaching hospital.
Of course the deal only worked because it was backed by the threat of thug violence. Sure, secondary infections were history. Yeah, no more measles running wild through the lower camps, now that every outbreak got sequestered. Darcy had been telling the idiot mullahs for two years that measles had to be isolated. Those same clerics whose decapitated bodies were now feeding the fish somewhere down river.
People in Rembec had had the holy shit scared out of them by that one. After the sarges lopped the heads off the mullahs. Folks were intimidated, and that’s when more of the local studs started signing on with the sergeants as cops. That whole deal with chopping the noggins off the mullahs should have made it crystal clear to everybody that the tall skinny Sarge was the boss. He gave the orders. It sure as hell wasn’t the cultivated-looking Arab they’d set up as front man. Certainly not this Looney-Tunes ape boy who had taken over at the clinic. Yeah, he turned out to be a good nurse. But he was just another flunky. For some reason, though, other people, like the Whizzer for instance, couldn’t see what was obvious to Darcy: that the medic was Looney-Tunes. It was in his face. The wolf eyes. The guy was bonkers.
Yet, in just a few weeks, he had become the most popular sergeant. The maddening thing to Darcy was to see how the rank-and-file villagers had taken to Doc. The little kids tagged after him all over the village. Particularly amazing because…Doc was hairy. The Dinka, smooth-skinned themselves, disdained body hair. They thought the hairy man must be near relative to the baboon. Doc’s chest and arms and legs were covered with thick tufts of red hair. He actually did resemble an orangutan. Yet the laughing village children crowded around and idolized him.
It was probably the fucking Demerol. Doc dealt out far too much Demerol to the children. Probably not enough to be clinically dangerous. But too much. Darcy strongly disapproved of the use of psychoactive drugs for any other reason than anesthesia. Doc used Demerol, she felt, for what amounted to political reasons, to make the kids perk up, and to reassure the parents.
Of course it worked. The Dinka moms gave Doc all the credit for the turnaround in the ward. They thought it was fucking magic, when it was just simple efficiency and hygiene. But the Dinka thought it was juju. He’d take a kid obviously checking out. Star ee-fucking-tee. Fucked. Eyes rolled up, thready pulse. And with some electrolytes, an antibiotic, piperazine, some powdered milk, a couple of vitamin pills (and a few grains of Demerol) he’d have the kid up and running overnight. The mom would get down and practically kiss his big clunky boot. Of course the kid would come around. Anybody could do it. But the Dinka thought it was some kind of juju.
Yeah, Doc was a good nurse. But so was Darcy Bean a good nurse, certainly as good as or better than some nut bar Army goon. And Doc wasn’t responsible for the turnaround anyway. It was the tall skinny sergeant who cut off people’s heads. He was the dangerous motherfucker, because he didn’t look crazy. He looked like a doddering old fart. But Sergeant Mac was tricky, and his terror methods admittedly achieved a short run effect. In the long run Darcy knew it just meant more disaster. Khartoum wasn’t going to allow a bunch of senior citizens, white dudes at that, to waltz in and oust the legit authority. Khartoum would send in the army. And Darcy already knew what the Sudanese soldiers were like. With that gang of thugs on the rampage, Rembec would be worse off than before.
Darcy shivered as she looked around the ward. Maybe she was getting her attack of fever. She was about due. Stress brought it on, same as with her herpes. She went over to the wall, pulled out a cane chair, and sat down. She had time to rest for a minute. Although all the beds in the ward were filled, the typhoid and dysentery cases that used to crowd the courtyard had dwindled since the arrival of the sergeants. Of course. The sergeants wouldn’t let anybody drink out of the river. Filtered water only, and the village women had to line up endlessly at the pump to fill a bucket. Some of the ridiculous wannabe cops the sergeants had sharked up were even patrolling the river bank, confiscating the plastic bucket from any woman who dared ignore the dictate.
The day before Darcy had heard horrible screaming coming from the acacia grove where the men played their bean game. The sadist McDonald had cut the hand off some poor Dinka his goons had found shitting near the river. The poor bastard had been warned not to shit on the ground anymore, and to use the latrines outside the village like everybody else. The guy had disobeyed, and the top sarge had lopped the guy’s hand. Maybe the sergeants’ intentions were good -- the dysentery and typhoid came from the river -- but they were fighting ingrained habit. The Dinka liked to shit anywhere. And at the same time they were fastidious about privacy. They hated doing their business with other people around. And they hated standing in line
So now the new rule in the Rembec lower camp: use the latrine or get your right hand cut off. Which meant the victim could never eat in polite company again.
They had brought the howling Dinka up to the hospital. He was in shock, not so much from the amputation and blood loss, as from his complete incomprehension. One minute he’s taking a quiet dump, like he always had. The next he’s trussed up like a goat with his right hand on a wooden block. The Dinka just didn’t get the fine points of sanitation. They needed it explained...many times. Instead, the sergeants meted out brutal summary punishment for an infraction the folks couldn’t possibly understand.
And of course then the final irony. There was Doc, sitting on a little stool, holding the man’s stump while he meticulously cauterized the vessels with a heated iron. How could the Dinka get this? One sarge lops off the hand, another sews up the wound. Too fucking absurd.
Darcy felt her forehead. It was the malaria, alright. He head would be bursting within an hour. Darcy was glad now for the fan. Another change. Doc had put in large fans overhead made of cardboard panels stiffened with manioc paste. Shifts of kids, ex-patients, sat on the floor pulling leather thongs that caused the panels to swish back and forth.
Darcy held her flushed face upward to catch the air current. At least the ward was quiet. The kids lay quietly on the cots or makeshift beds, the moms sitting on tiny wooden stools beside them. At noon they had been fed, yam porridge, fortified with powdered milk. Already the bowls and spoons had been whisked away to be boiled. Military fucking precision. A fucking bunch of Junkers. Darcy leaned back in her chair. It was the malaria alright. She might as well head for her room and go to bed. She was in for her weekly six hours of hell.
As she left the clinic she glimpsed Doc through the newly installed screens. He was draining pus from the foot of a kid who’d been bitten by a mamba. She’d be glad when he came down with malaria. He’d find out what Africa was really like.




Chapter 32


The Jebel cotton scheme had been designed by the British and thus was popular generally among the local Sudanese. Through intelligent engineering, the hired technicians from Glasgow and Dublin and managed to divert part of the Wau into concrete catchments for year-round irrigation. The seasonal Wau dried up to a trickle of sporadic puddles three-fourths of the year. But while in spate following the brief monsoon in the highlands it delivered a respectable volume of water into the sluggish, grass-choked Sudd.
The engineers had taken advantage of a natural underground cavity, ingeniously lining it with concrete, and covering over the basin with thick, dark-smoke plastic sheeting. The catchment stored 600,000 cubic meters of water and prevented its evaporation during the summer inferno. The water, parsimoniously metered out through drip lines to the roots of a tough, resilient strain of scrub cotton, succeeded in bringing to quasi-commercial life some 4,000 acres, which produced 250,000 bushels of coarse but market-grade bolls.
The scheme, run efficiently by British technocrats working outside the stifling Khartoum bureaucracy, gave some employment to several thousand displaced Sudanese who otherwise would be sliding closer to starvation. The cotton, however, had yet to turn a profit, a fact due entirely to the difficulty of transporting the bolls to government gins at the upper cataract. The only feasible method was to barge the cotton down the Wau during high water and then on through the Sudd to the White Nile. The first year it had been tried, the costs of freight and graft had exceeded by twice the value of the crop.
The scheme’s British managers in Khartoum thought they saw the answer: British seamanship. What was needed was a sturdy vessel akin to an icebreaker, in fact, a “reed breaker,” that could plow through the Sudd’s matted vegetation, with the cotton barges in tow. With such a vessel and with the scheme running its own shipping, the exorbitant demands of the Nile captains could be avoided.
At the moment, however, Peter Dunbarton, the 39-year-old manager of the Jebba station, had other things on his mind besides British seamanship. Sandy-haired and ruddy, Dunbarton was entirely typical of the sort of Brit who winds up in Africa. Of working class roots, he’d attended a technical institute on a scholarship, and then immigrated for exactly the same reasons that motivated so many of his countrymen. Along with a sufficient if mediocre training, Dunbarton also had acquired at the university a silent but palpable resentment of his homeland’s rigid class-conscious superstructure. It was obvious that his accent, upbringing, and modest abilities would never carry him far in overpopulated Berkshire. Yet he had enough technical proficiency to make him eminently employable in the Third World. And he knew that within his limits he was competent, organized, and attentive to detail.
For Dunbarton, the cotton scheme had been a blessing. He hugely enjoyed the work, the marshaling of the meager resources, the levying of the gangs of navvies to quarry stone for the catch basin terraces, the preparation of the soil, the nursing of the scrub seedlings to life on the harsh alkaline plain. It suited him to the ground.
It was even better that the Sudanese were very polite and friendly, obedient and industrious. They seemed to harbor no grudges at all against the English, their erstwhile colonial masters. He had never felt in the least threatened by his workers, or by the highland Dinka nomads who sometimes herded their cattle toward the government wells. At first he had worried these nomads would resent that the cotton scheme had closed off some of the accustomed routes to the wells. In the instance, the nomads had been accommodating, keeping their cattle and goats well clear of the mile-long rows of plants, even though this forced them on an indirect march under thirsty conditions.
Dunbarton’s concern about the Arab raiders who plagued the plateau also had turned out to be unfounded. True, they sometimes harried the outlying plantation workers and even carried off young women. But they never ventured near the scheme. Dunbarton assumed they’d no desire to do anything that might cause government troops to interfere with their random depredations.
Some of the roving thugs belonging to a loose-knit revolutionary coalition had been another matter. Their objection to the scheme probably was ideological, that is, the specter of once again seeing the white man set up over blacks. Through third parties Dunbarton had received not-at-all veiled death threats from somebody calling himself General Obo.
Reluctantly and almost despite himself Dunbarton had taken a few precautions. He had fixed the locks on his house. He didn’t visit the workers’ village anymore on his morning walk. And with many unvoiced reservations he had hired Clarence Dunn as a bodyguard.
Dunn was an American who had turned up unannounced, reeling off scare stories of the dangers faced by a lone white man in a backward country “run by niggers.” He was of a model that Dunbarton did not like: the street tough of the kind depicted too often in the American cinema. He was loud, self-important, obsessed with weapons, and disparaging of the people in whose country he was a guest. Dunbarton thought it might have been a mistake hiring him. But he was talked around by Dunn’s brash self-assurance. “Nobody’s gonna fuck with you now,” Dunn had said. “You got yourself a white merc.”
The white merc was now trussed up like a lamb and lying in the dust near the border of the flower garden, in the full blaze of the sun. The white merc did not seem very brash, and he was remarkably quiet. Apparently the new lot had plucked him out of some girl’s hut in the village without any resistance.
Sitting in the shady gloom of the verandah, Dunbarton stared off into the dazzling afternoon glare beyond the roof, across the dun plain, toward the green smear of the Sudd, barely discernible on the horizon fifty miles away.
“Some more tea?” Dunbarton said. “I’m afraid I’m just out of biscuits.”
“Not right now,” said the man sitting opposite him in the white wicker chair.
Dunbarton nodded slightly and folded his hands politely in his lap. The fellow on the verandah with him was tall, angular and spoke in a jarring American accent that until now Dunbarton had assumed was put on solely for the “hillbilly” characters on the American television. The man had a prominent Adam’s apple, watery blue eyes corrected by Ebenezer Scrooge spectacles, a close-cropped grizzled tonsure, and skin burnt walnut by the sun. He had introduced himself as Sergeant MacDonald. Sergeant? Sergeant of what? Dunbarton had not thought it an appropriate time to ask.
A few minutes before, this so-called sergeant and three other white men, accompanied by several dozen Sudanese that Dunbarton didn’t recognize, had arrived at the station house with the trussed-up Dunn, whom they unceremoniously tossed in the dust. Now the gardener’s little children were poking the white merc with sticks, while village women hooted at him from the other side of the wicket. The two other white men, rifles slung, were wandering around the compound, while their Sudanese followers had squatted in a line along the shady side of the building and apparently had gone to sleep.
“How may I help you,” Dunbarton said.
“That’s exactly the right question,” said the visitor. “I’m gonna make the answer brief. You may know already, there’s a refugee camp outside of Rembec. It’s overcrowded and people are still pouring in. I’m gonna start sending you some of the overflow, those that can walk. You’ll need to find room for them, set up some shelter and get a kitchen going. I’ll send a medical type down to help you with the health care. I expect to start sending people down to you by the end of the week, so you’ll need to get started right away, digging latrines, finding cooking pots, so on....”
“Umm,” said Dunbarton.
MacDonald smiled, took off his tiny glasses, and stared good-naturedly at his host. “You have a question?”
“Actually, yes,” said Dunbarton. “If you don’t mind, um, under whose auspices...”
MacDonald held up his hand. Then he signaled to one of the other whites in the compound, a short elderly bald man. “Keyes.”
The small man called Keyes strode over to the prostrate Dunn, raised his rifle a foot from the ground, and shot Dunn in the back. The impact of the bullet lifted Dunn off the ground; the loud crack sent the children scampering under the house; and with a collective scream, the heads of the village women disappeared behind the wicket. The stricken Dunn, groaning, oh, oh, was roiling like a caterpillar. The short man aimed at Dunn’s head, fired again, and a plate-shaped black spot appeared on the white ground.
MacDonald and Dunbarton sat for a moment in silence on the verandah as the reverberations of the gunshots echoed away against the low hills. The man named Keyes shoo-ed away the children who had come out from under the house to peer at the body of the dead white man.
“Look at it this way,” said MacDonald, in a soft voice. “In a place like this, there’re gonna be all kinds of assessments. Mostly it’s just extortion. But I don’t want your dough, or your company’s dough. I don’t want to shut you down. But you are required, starting today, to take care of some of these folks who’ve been run out of their homes by the drought. It’s mandatory.”
“Yes,” said Dunbarton. He glanced away, over the verandah. Already some of the Sudanese had gathered up the limp figure of Dunn and were lugging him through the gate, leaving nothing behind but a black stain on the white earth.
“Square this with your bosses any way you want. It ain’t a big ticket. Tents, pots, sorghum, filtered water, latrines. Believe me, the cheapest way is just do it. If somebody decides to argue the argument, it’ll cost more. I’ll wreak the whole outfit.”
“How many people are we talking about,” Dunbarton said.
“I’m gonna start you with a couple hundred. Later, there’ll be more. To feed ‘em all, you’re probably gonna have to put some of your acres into beans and pumpkins. It looks to me like some of this is pretty marginal anyway, for cotton. It’ll work better for legumes.”
MacDonald got to his feet and replaced the baseball cap on his balding head. He grinned at Dunbarton. “Where I come from, we know cotton. You’re doin’ the best you can here. I see that. You can do good on this other thing too.”
A few days later the first refugees from Rembec began trickling in to the new camp at the station. The emaciated women and rickety children collapsed in the shade of canvas awnings. Upon their arrivals, some of the tillers left the field to begin pumping water through the new ceramic filters. Dunbarton was in the village buying sorghum and cooking pots. When he came out of the village store, he saw one of the young women in the street wearing Dunn’s bloodstained shirt.


Chapter 33



"These bozos are on some kind of weird power trip," said Darcy Bean, the 24-year-old WHO nurse. "This is whacked out, Loony-Tune, The Man Who Would Be King bullshit."
The young nurse was sitting on the steps of the Rembec refugee clinic talking with the Whizzer, the certified world traveler. The Whizzer, dressed as usual in his baggy multi-patched mission castoffs, was still pale and trembling. He was recovering from a bout of vivax malaria.
"What we're dealing with here are sadistic lunatics," Darcy said.
It was an hour past dawn, and the camp was awake. The dung fires were lit under the huge cauldrons in the courtyard. Several Dinka women were piling mounds of soiled sheets and clothing that later would be boiled. Lower down, a snaking line of emaciated refugees had formed in front of the warehouse. Each spectral figure carried a pot or gourd to receive the daily ration of sorghum. Several of the sergeants' militiamen, armed with shotguns, patrolled the riverbank. A quarter of a mile away, more lines already were forming in front of the new latrines.
It was a pleasant morning on the plateau. A light breeze stirred the tamarisk trees, shaking loose silvery showers of white dust. In a few hours it would be scorching, and the air in the clinic compound would reek with the smell of shit and unwashed bodies. Soon waves of human misery would well up from the hundreds of ragged tents dotting the plain. Wretched starvelings would inundate the courtyard. But now there was a moment's respite, before the coming onslaught, a brief cool serenity, with the temperature barely at 90 degrees.
Despite the comparative coolness, the Whizzer was bathed in sweat. It was the recrudescent plasmodium in his red blood cells that made him shiver and sweat at the same time. The Whizzer had had outbreaks of malaria for so long that he now regarded them as normal. And in Rembec refugee camp, malaria was normal. Almost the entire population carried the disease. The Whizzer knew the latest bout with vivax would soon pass. In the meantime, after several tries, the Whizzer managed to light his clay pipe. He hand was trembling so severely he had trouble concentrating the flame.
"And as for you," the nurse continued. "You better watch out. You know? Dealing guns for those bozos. You think that fucking Indian bastard will keep your name out of it? When the army comes up here?"
The Whizzer shakily removed the clay pipe and directed a steam of spit toward a skeletal mongrel lying in the shade of the porch.
"Vaccines, Darcy. The Indian is getting me 500 doses of DPT for one AK47. Yesterday I scored 60 liters of piperazine so you can worm all your little darlings. I got lindane and some gentian violet for the Doc. I'm pretty damn sure the Indian can get us lyophilized tetanus antitoxin from Kampala. And maybe thiabendazole for the hookworm. The folks can use this stuff, Darcy."
"Sure. Fine. You scored some meds. You think that's gonna cut any ice when the government comes up here. And Whizzbag. The government will come up here. What's going down is not okay. It was not okay to kill Puhni. Or even Kareni Kishi."
"The world is better off," the Whizzer said.
"No. It’s not okay to murder people." Darcy nodded toward the two militiamen patrolling along the river. "It is not okay to start your own army in somebody else's country."
"You got to admit, Darcy, there's been a certain improvement. It doesn't smell so much like a funeral around here..."
"It smells plenty like a funeral," Darcy said. "There's been murder. There's been usurpation of authority..."
"What authority?" The certified traveler's laugh turned into a racking cough. "Darce. This is the Whizz. I've been around the block. The Jebel is the asshole. It's as close to anarchy is it gets. What I'm saying is, I think I see what these guys are trying to do..."
"I'm so glad." Darcy made an effort to imitate a southern American accent. I jus' moseyed over from Texarkana to give you niggers a helpin' han'... It's fuckin' bullshit. Something's going on."
"Well, it ain't about money. All my trades have been for gear. Meds, all that impregnated mosquito netting you're handing out, window screens, plastic pipe, shovels, the water filters. The Indian wanted to trade gold for guns. Would'a been a lot easier. Mac didn't want it."
"Whizzer. Sweetheart. You think this is altruism? You think they're here to deliver ice cream? These are professional mercenaries. Somebody is paying their freight."
The Whizzer shook his head. His teeth had stopped chattering and the trembling in his muscles had mostly subsided. "I don't think so. Back in the States, I studied a little bean counting. This is a barebones, no-money operation."
"Yeah, with airplanes."
"Boosted from a Nairobi flight school, Darce. The school logo is still on the fuselage. The sergeants don't have a pot to piss in. Nobody's behind these guys."
"Bullshit."
"You been here, what, almost two years? You gotta know. Nothing happens in this shithole from the bottom. The Christers, the do-gooders, what can they do? It's bailing the ocean with a teacup. No offense, Darce, but look at you. How long were you buttin' heads with the mullahs..."
"Real nice."
"Sorry." The Whizzer had forgotten for a moment what had happened to the mullahs after they had lost the contest with the sergeants. The screaming clerics had been dragged into this very courtyard where the water now was boiling in vats. And Mac had beheaded them with a machete while Doc and Keyes held them down. Although his malaria attack had passed, the Whizzer still shuddered involuntarily when he recalled the way the mullahs' neck bones had protruded, spouting blood, after each stroke.
"More murder," Darcy said.
"I'm just pointing out. The mullahs were a big obstacle. Darce, Khartoum is far away and doesn't give a shit what happens here."
"I'd rather have sadistic butchers there than in my front yard."
"There's a fait accompli here, Darce, like it or not. Top Sarge is running the province. With the bogus Saudi face as front man for the Moslems. Think about it. It just could be that Khartoum might accept some kind of de facto satrapy, provided all the Islamic appearances were kept up. There's nothin' on the plateau worth scrapping over. It'd be cheap to accept the status quo. Sending troops costs money."
Darcy Bean shook her head in disbelief. "You still don't get it, Whizzerboy. Sudan is not run by rational guys. They're hard-core religious fanatics. They'd never swallow a bunch of foreign white guys running around with guns. Never. Period. Star, end transmission."
Darcy smoothed her ankle-length skirt, and her voice softened.
"Besides, I talked to the Saudi. At least he's rational. He's not in with these clowns. He don’t want to front for them. He was kidnapped right out of his classroom. Wants no fuckin' part. He's been doing the linguist thing at gunpoint."
The Whizzer nodded. "Yeah. I think they're planning to cut him loose pretty soon. I don't think any of this is long term. Get the locals up to speed. Blow out."
"I can't believe you're fallin' for their bullshit," Darcy said. "Another total fool. Just like those Dinks they rounded up for Top Sarge's private goon squad."
The Whizzer laughed again. "Real thugs, huh. They make people shit in latrines. I'm sorta glad myself. I haven't stepped in a pie in weeks."
In the camp people were now starting to move toward the clinic, a moving line of wretchedness, kwashiorkor-ridden, rickety children hobbling on sticks, mothers with half-dead infants wrapped in rags. The latest arrivals from countryside blasted by drought and war.
Darcy got to her feet. "Look, I'm not blind. Sure, if you're Hitler the trains run on time. Make me dictator, let me murder anybody I want, I'll fix the trains too."
Darcy looked through the new mosquito screens into the children's' ward, where a couple of the Dinka moms, dragooned as orderlies, were de-worming yesterday's arrivals with spoonfuls of piperazine. The new children in the ward all had been vaccinated for polio and measles, and swaddled in clean rags. Most of them were now licking their bowls after a breakfast of yam porridge and powdered milk.
"I'll tell you another thing," Darcy said. "It rankles my ass the way everybody around here fawns over that crazy son-of-a-bitch..."
"Doc?"
"The guy is completely looney. Giving Demerol to little babies..."
"A little envy there, Darce."
"Fuck you. He ain't no Albert Schweitzer. You're in a fool's paradise, Whizzball. Maybe the train's on time, but the bridge is out..."
"Choo, choo. I'm on board," the Whizzer said.
Darcy looked at the certified world traveler and smiled. "I prefer to walk."



Chapter 34



Union Carbide’s sales manager for its battery division in East Africa, Phillip Reese, was sitting on a wicker lounge chair on the verandah of the company house in the Wellington Preserve on the outskirts of Nairobi. He was enjoying the brief sunset, spectacular in its lurid oranges and reds, and breathing in the heavy scent of jasmine and bougainvillea that wafted across his face with the dying breeze.
Below him, on the flagged walk, two Masai gardeners inched along their knees plucking at the ever-prolific weeds that competed for nutrients with the (here in Africa, very exotic) herbaceous borders. Behind him, inside the screened dining room, he heard the rustlings of his wife and the maid, busy with preparations for dinner.
The mosquitoes would be rising in a few minutes, and Reese, quite reluctantly, would have to retire inside. But right now he was a happy man, luxuriating in the pleasure of the Gauguin-like palette of color that was firing the green Loma hills with gaudy, lacquered pinks and magentas.
He shook his glass. The ice in his drink had melted away, leaving the gin rather flat. But as this was the one drink allowed, he would stay for the last drop.
Sitting quietly, his fingers pleasantly wet from the moisture on the glass, Reese had been reflecting idly over some news from his agent in Juba, southern Sudan. One of the agent’s traders, a man who carried goods loaded on bicycles deep into the Sudanese interior, also worked at times for other companies. Thus the agent had heard, by grapevine, that in recent months a spurt of material had been moving north, mostly out of Kampala, through the ridiculously porous Ugandan border, on through the tsetse-infested forests of Moba, and up onto the Jebel Marra plateau.
“Arms,” Reese had asked, remembering suddenly his conversation with the young commercial attaché in Khartoum.
“No,” the agent had said. “Re-hydration powder.” Also, mosquito netting. DPT vaccines. Coils of vinyl irrigation tubing. Piperazine. Aluminum foil. Civa rams. Surgical needles.
Reese considered this news rather strange. If, as the hotshot young attaché surmised, a Dinka uprising, pay rolled by outsiders, was brewing on the Jebel plateau, then traffic in arms and munitions would make sense. Re-hydration powder did not make sense. Certainly, there was a need. But just as certainly, no market. The Dinka on their own barely could scrape up enough spare tobacco to barter for flashlight batteries. It was just barely worthwhile for the Juba agent to dispatch a few bicycle caravans a year to the plateau. Too much trouble for too little profit.
“Who is ordering?” Reese had asked. An Indian storekeeper in Rembec. And he is paying on a letter of credit backed by convertible currencies, dinars, rands, francs, Egyptian pounds, Kenyan shillings. And he is ordering continuously. Already half a dozen bicycle caravans had started for the plateau.
Was this something Reese should pass along to the hotshot commercial attaché at the embassy in Khartoum? Reese thought not. Better to stay out of it. It was impossible to guess what was going on in that remote, lost, benighted region.
But it did mean one thing. For some reason, a surge of unexpected demand backed by cash. With that in mind, Reese had issued quick orders to the Juba agent. First, ready a caravan for the plateau immediately. If the Dinka had cash for things like re-hy powder, they had money to buy more batteries. The agent should also include a shipment of flashlights and Chinese radios. Secondly, the agent needed to open a line with the Indian storekeeper. If that Rembec merchant was hiring people to transit goods through Uganda, it might as well be Union Carbide people.
In fact, Reese had heard of a way he could help in that line. Bicycles sturdy enough for caravan work always were in short supply. The Chinese models generally used were ponderous and unwieldy. Through his agent in Mombassa, Reese had heard that a supply of lightweight all-terrain American bicycles would soon be available for purchase, at reasonable cost. Fifty or sixty new bikes would mean Reese would be able to mount a sizeable caravan, if the Rembec merchant had sufficient credit in Juba to warrant it. Of course, the bikes mentioned by the Mombassa agent undoubtedly were smuggled or stolen. But in Africa, one didn’t examine the pedigree of proffered merchandise too closely...
From inside the house, his wife’s voice. It was time for dinner.
With a sigh, Reese levered his spare frame out of the lounge chair. No, it didn’t really sound like an intensified war on the Jebel plateau. War there was normal anyway. What was abnormal was any demand for trade. What was abnormal was the availability of money. Reese would have to keep an eye on it.
“I’m just coming in,” he said.


Chapter 35


There couldn't be good sex in the tent. It was stifling, and smelled of carbolic and the lingering propane odor of putrefaction. Despite the repeated washings of the operating tables and the walls, the smells of pus and blood welled up against the face with the waves of oppressive heat.
The outer door of the surgical tent was double-screened. Still, hoards of tiny black flies had managed to penetrate inside and were buzzing maddeningly around Doc's face. He regretted bringing her here. He wasn't interested in having her. He only wanted to leave, to return to his own cot, to sleep.
It was night. They'd been in the chronic ward changing dressings. Most of the chronics had incurable purulent skin lesions caused by some virulent fungus endemic on the plateau. Even with antibiotics the ulcers were hopeless, would never heal. The limbs and torsos of the victims were being eaten away by long purple swaths of suppurating tapioca-like pustules.
Somehow in the dark they had collided, and to Doc it seemed as if Darcy had held herself against him. He had roughly taken her shoulders and pulled her close. When she hadn't resisted he had tried to kiss her, but missed her mouth in the darkness. She had pushed back. But then Doc had found her hand and began pulling her toward the surgical tent. She faltered, hesitated. But she hadn't tried to pull her hand away. Neither of them had said a word.
They were sitting together on the iron bed, darkly visible to each other in the soft moon glow entering the screened windows. Doc had pulled off his singlet. The sweat ran in rivulets through his itchy mat of chest hair. He was aware, even in the concealing half-light, of his depressing physical ugliness, his ape-ishness, the hairiness of his arms, covered with tufts of red hair, the smeared red-and-green tattoos, the crazy-quilt white lines of scars, the exploded veins. He said on the edge of the iron bed, working off his shorts, feeling tired, depressed, and bored.
By his side, Darcy was silently undressing. Her frowning lips were like the slot of a mailbox. In the gloom of the oven-like tent, Doc could make out nothing exciting about her body. Her breasts were small and drooping. Her chest was narrow, with the clavicle visible under stretched freckled skin. On her back were large black moles. Insect bites had raised welts along her belt line. And she was too thick in her thighs and calves, out of proportion with her pinched torso, giving her an avian look. With her clothes off, she reminded Doc of one of the cartoon ostriches in a Disney film.
Darcy turned to him, pushing back her damp hair, looking up with an expression that Doc couldn't fathom: semi-defiant, angry, but something else too: resigned maybe. With her sitting so close to him, Doc could smell the pink soap she used. She wasn't afraid, but she was breathing enough so her rib cage visibly rose beneath her taut skin.
Doc put his arm around her damp shoulders, and Darcy lowered her cheek against his breast. Doc felt complete erotic numbness, a leaden weight in his groin. His penis had shriveled to nothing atop his scrotum.
Darcy slowly moved her hand down his chest and rested it on his leg, her fingers touching the inside of his thigh. Doc had felt totally impotent, but now a couple of unexpected surges moved his penis, a tentative half-hearted stirring. Darcy touched his rising penis, and more wavelets of blood began swelling the tissue.
Darcy gently kissed him on the nipple, then sank down between his knees, put his half-erect penis in her mouth, and in a minute or two brought up his milk. Then she silently dressed and left the tent.
Neither of them had spoken, and they never spoke of it afterward.


Chapter 36


The titular head of the de facto government of Jebel Marra had been installed in the mission house, which was situated on a slight rise behind the clinic. Although by far the best habitation in the village, the building had suffered considerable damage, having been ransacked by General Obo's teenage marauders.
Not a window remained intact. The doors had been smashed or pulled off their hinges by the impatient looters. The furniture was broken, the upholstery slashed and the horsehair stuffing strewn everywhere in the mad search for hidden coins. When the sergeants first surveyed the building, the floors were a litter of broken crockery, scattered papers and destroyed books. Piles of human shit were in every corner, and pages of the Bible had been torn out and used for wipes by the humorous boy soldiers.
But the indefatigable Breen had organized a work party and within a few days the mission was habitable again. All the debris had been carted out and burned; the floors had been scrubbed with boiling water; and the bullet holes in the walls patched with clay. Of course the smashed windowpanes couldn’t be replaced. But Breen found a roll of brown wrapping paper, and this he coated with grease and tacked up over the window openings, letting in a soft warm light.
The bedding and clothing left in the house was beyond rehabilitation and had to be burned. Even so, Breen managed to make the main bedroom comfortable, with a large camp bed, a reassembled table, and the chair or two that had escaped destruction.
The house was for the sole use of Bashir Nasr. The sergeants preferred to sleep outside, where they could better keep an eye on things. More to the point, they were keeping up the appearance, for the sake of Islamic sensibilities, that the new mullah, Bashir Nasr, was in fact the spiritual leader of the new regime now installed in the provincial capital of Rembec, and that his temporal self was being treated accordingly.
Bashir Nasr therefore had a certain amount of privacy. To be sure, Breen checked on him regularly, to transmit Mac's latest batch of orders and to monitor the progress of the simplified Dinka dictionary and grammar that Basir was preparing. The other principle duty was translating Mac's endless list of new rules into Arabic and into pidgin, for posting around the village and in the lower refugee camp. Mac had a tedious, didactic style, and most of his new regulations were mundane and very boring, having to do with things such as water filtration and insect abatement.
Yet Basir Nasr could see the utility of these homilies, and tried his best to impart the heart of the text without being quite so preachy and dull.
His life, he now found, even in the midst of this fantastic turn of events, had subsided for the moment into staid normalcy. Sometimes he was trotted out to explain the new rules to a group of recalcitrant Dinka. Although he had had only a few months to work, already he had a rudimentary grasp of the language, and had learned by now to mimic the strange clicks and glottal stops the Dinka used for conjugation. Of course the Man of Patches, the Whizzer, the sub-economy-class globetrotter, had been something of a help. He had lived with the Dinka for almost a year and was nearly fluent. With the Whizzer's help, Bashir would soon have a grammar completed, which would mean that the Dinka, if they chose, could become literate in their own language. Bashir Nasr took a justified pride in the accomplishment. He didn't know anybody who could have done it so quickly and so well.
The normalcy, the quiet days, the peaceful rounds of the villagers outside the veranda, had caused his fears to evaporate. The terror that had griped his colon for weeks had gone away. So had the stomach cramps and the diarrhea. His bowels no longer ran like a faucet. The simple diet of millet, yams, pounded manioc, was insipid. But at least now it was clean. And for the first time in twenty years he lived without alcohol or coffee. His body felt cleansed and healthy, his muscles elastic, and he was infused with a long-forgotten energy, despite the long day's stifling heat.
Bashir Nasr had to say that he even felt a little bored. Not that he was complaining. He preferred boredom to terror. But it was the ennui, along with some faint stirrings of erotic blood, which convinced him he should open a campaign on the WHO nurse, Darcy Bean.
She was certainly not a female that, under normal circumstances, would attract his eye. She was plain, freckled, and thick in the calf. On the other hand, she was the only white woman on the Jebel, she spoke English, and she was young.
Of course the Dinka girls, physically, possessed far more sensuous appeal, particularly the firm roundness of their buttered haunches, and the insolent heliotropic thrusting of their cone-shaped breasts. But their cosmetic use of beef lard was too much. Besides, all of them had received cliterectomies at puberty. The fathers of Rembec had no romantic illusions. Women were chattel, raised like veal, stripped of their libido, and sold to the highest bidder. Pleasure was reserved for the husband, and his wife's cruel girlhood mutilation excused him the chore of giving satisfaction. It also allayed the husband's anxiety about potential cuckoldry, mitigating any anxiety that his wife's champing loins might guide her to another's bed. Little chance of that, after some hideous crone did her work with a thumbnail.
In any case, the Dinka girls hardly seemed interesting. So much of the thrill of seduction depended on arousing in the prospective conquest a reciprocal state of desire.
On the few occasions when he had chatted with the tough-talking refugee camp nurse, Bashir Nasr thought he had detected in her a glimmer of sexual yearning. And why not? She had been out here an eternity with few carnal opportunities. Her only visitors were aged white men from the epidemiological service. She was young. Sometimes when she looked at Bashir Nasr he was sure the blood glowed in her cheeks.
Bashir Nasr of course was perfectly familiar with her type. The Young American Idealist, shielding her soft vulnerability and naiveté behind a sprinkling of gutter vocals. Here she was, up to her chaste hips in blood and death, disease and unspeakable smells, and yet still an innocent waif. What she longed for was empathy, an understanding mind, a pleasing flow of mellifluous words; yes, some graceful talk. In short, she wanted intelligent male companionship. She wanted someone who could speak to her womanhood, someone who could address her essential insistent female promptings toward the union elemental. She wanted to hear from a man that she was desirable, that her body was lush and fragrant, her lips soft and compelling. She wanted to yield herself up to the notion that her body parts resembled milky damask or fiery gemstones, along with a more erotic inventory. The dowdy WHO nurse Darcy Bean was no different from any other member of her tribe.
Just to make a bet with himself, Bashir Nasr calculated that he would have his penis inside her vagina within a week. The opening day of the assault might as well be today. A week from today he would have her vulva in his hand. Quite likely, sooner. She was probably very needy. He would begin this afternoon on the veranda. Some banter first. An irreverent rapier thrust against the sergeants, whom she detested. Then an easy segue to intimate conversation (not a lecture), lambent in tone, intelligent and sincere, about something.... Maybe culture. Art or literature, if she'd been to school. Music, otherwise. Or film, if she turned out to be a complete dunce.
The only overtly sexual thing he'd do would be to moisten his full lower lip, and puff it forward, just a little. End with the hope of speaking with her again, implying the same time and place of rendezvous the following day. A hopeful gaze, a sincere half-smile, at once boyish and worldly.
She'd be there all right. And the patent gladness in his eye when she appeared. Then some desultory languid talk of indifferent topics that skirt the real topic in two communing minds. He would allow her to initiate the only subject capable of truly holding female attention: sexual liaisons. Whatever she said would remind him of two lovers he had seen in a play, thus sublimating the real images of sweating, panting, skin-to-skin friction of two bodies writhing and wriggling with sensuous pleasure. The teasing, the tingling...
But soft at first. Bring her around to it slowly. He would have to feign an interest in the story of her broken off engagement in the States (or whatever). It would probably be the boy-next-door or next-dorm. They thought they were in love. But he feared commitment. Blah, blah. Then there probably would be a mentor, an older bureaucrat. A do-gooder, a saint, really. But he was searching for his mother. Blah, blah. It was always the same, the same one-note pipe.
In reply to these self-revelations, she would get the slow nodding of his head, indicating his complete empathy. That would be followed by the slow shaking of the same handsome dark-haired head, signifying this time an incomprehension of the perfidy (or blindness) of the autopsied male on the specimen table. And throughout her catalog of woe and betrayal, he would pinion her eyes with the steady welded gaze bespeaking the interlocking communion of two kindred souls.
Day Three. Physical touch. Very carefully and tentatively, as if the imposition of his hand was almost an outrage at a shrine, he would essay a trembling caress of her fingertips. If she didn't balk, he could then brush the outside of her arm, just enough to make the hairs rise. As Bashir Nasr thought about this part he felt the current stirring in his own loins, the accustomed satisfactory expansion of tissue. Yes, by now both of them would be breathing a little harder. Both of them would shift in their seats. She might even feel the first suggestion of lubricity, the warm secretions...
"What the fuck are you doin', over?"
It was Breen, standing in the doorway.
"We're not payin' for wool-gathering, you now." Breen clunked his rifle against the wall and dropped his haversack on the floor.
"I forget," Bashir said, smiling. Of all the sergeants, Breen had been the easiest to get along with. Although he was as tall as Mac, he was the least intimidating. He lacked Mac's steely close-mouthed impenetrability. He wasn't simple-minded like Keyes, or surly, like Reyes. And he wasn't psychotic, like the other one. Breen was just a big smiling bumpkin, comfortable with himself and the world, who got his work done more by humorous prodding than by push and threat.
Since the sergeants' arrival in Rembec two months before, Breen had done the yeoman's work. Even Bashir Nasr admitted that. Breen's singing work parties had cleared the rubble from the village pathways, rebuilt the clinic and the school, patched the fences in the communal corral, and (the only unpopular measure) hacked out all the latrines that the previously free-and-easy villagers were now required to employ.
His high-school-coach enthusiasm seemed to have infected some of the indolent residents, despite their physical depletion by chronic malaria. Although the crushing heat made any effort impossible in the afternoon, the cheery Breen rousted his crews at dawn, for another day's struggle against sloth and neglect.
"How's the new poster coming along? We need something with more punch. People are still shitting all over the place."
Bashir Nasr almost liked Breen. But he was like all do-gooders. He thought all it took with humans was to post the new rules. Then the light would be seen, and happiness and good sense would prevail. And that cheery hope in Rembec, where 90 percent of the residents were illiterate.
"I was just working on it," Bashir Nasr said.
"Oh sure," said Breen.
Usually, Bashir Nasr would have welcomed a few minutes respite from the grammar. But now he wished the big sergeant would be on his way. For over the rail of the shaded veranda, across the iron-hard courtyard shimming in a haze of palpable heat, he had just seen Darcy Bean emerge from the clinic.
And now she was walking toward the mission house….







Chapter 37


Doc became aware that he was awake and checked his watch. It was morning but still dark in the hut. The first gray light wouldn't begin filtering in through the thatch for another hour. On the sleeping mat next to him the Dinka girl Bari was breathing evenly. He could smell her in the darkness, the pungent musky smell of her sex, the ammonia odor of the cow urine in her hair, acrid but not strong, the earthy smell of the clay smeared on her body to ward off mosquitoes.
Doc carefully rolled on his side. His lower back ached from lying on the ground and he knew he couldn't go back to sleep. The Dinks were used to this, sleeping on thin reed mats on the pounded, cement-like floor. And they had no spare flesh to cushion them either; they were all protruding bone, the spiny processes poking out of their backs like serrated dorsals. Seeing them clumped together in a hut reminded Doc of the history book photos of concentration camps, the clots of emaciated victims in mass graves. But most of the Dinks had never seen a mattress, and the hard ground didn't bother them.
This time it was more than the usual dull ache in L2 and 3. His legs were in pain too. Muscle pain, though, not sciatic nerve, thank God. Here, if a disc blew, it was over; he might as well put a bullet in his head.
Slowly, Doc moved his sleep-numb fingers upward and removed the plastic bottle of ibuprofen from his shirt pocket. Four tabs, 800 milligrams, should kick in by dawn. Doc tried to work up enough spit to swallow the tablets, lying on his side, but the first caught in his throat, forcing him to gag it down. He chewed the others, grimacing at the bitterness. Maybe an antihistamine would be good too. All the mold in the hut, animal hair, atomized bug parts, God knows what detritus. But one nostril was still open; and the antihistamine made him spacey.
Doc's shirt was damp. It wasn't the temperature; this time of morning, before dawn, was the only time Sudan wasn't steaming. No, he'd broken a sweat during the night because of a dream. It was so fucking strange, always, how lame a dream was upon awakening, so frightening asleep. It wasn't scary when he ran it through his mind now.
He’d had this one before. He'd just reported in to the replacement depot. But it wasn't like the real replacement depot, which had been tents inside wire. It was in barracks, in the dream, and there'd been a cement path and a flower border, and the ground cover had been dark Northern green, pines and moss, not pale jungle. And the temp had been cool, like now in the hut, instead of stifling. The replacements had gathered there, in the barracks. But nobody seemed to realize there was no perimeter security. And the area crawled with Luke, just waiting for nightfall.
In fact, Luke already had started infiltrating along the cement walkways, although Doc couldn't see them. But he knew he couldn't let himself fall asleep. The horrible part was, he knew he was asleep.
The ibuprofen wouldn't kick in for at least half an hour, and he couldn't lie that long on his side, with his back throbbing. Gradually, he eased over on his back again, propping the haversack under his head. Bari stirred but her even breathing continued. No, the real replacement depot at Long Trae had had security up the gazoo: razor concertina, trip wire, mikes, heat sensors, dog patrols, and plenty of dug-in grunts. The huge amount of fearsickness in the dream wasn't from that; the fearsickness in the dream reminded Doc more of the fuck up at Bong Son, during that surprise contact, when the point had run into, shit, who knows, maybe a couple of squads of gooks.
What a fuck up that had been! The captain went Loony Tunes. He'd had everybody fall back on that clearing they'd used as an LZ, and called in dustoff for Carrillo, Taylor, and some other guy, and somehow everybody got bunched up on the clearing, the whole fucking company practically, with nobody on the flanks or in front to keep the little fuckers at a distance.
What the fuck had they expected? Pretty soon, muzzle flashes right out of the bushes, and fire eight inches off the ground. Everybody was face down and shit-for-brains, guys screaming at each other. Probably not more than a dozen gooks out there, but twenty-three casualties in two minutes, and would have been lots more if two Huey gunships hadn't come over and chewed up the grass around the LZ.
Doc had replayed that afternoon a thousand times. It should have been so fucking simple. Reinforce the pinned-down point with the reserve squad and pass the wounded back. Second platoon's other two squads should have started working around the snipers' flanks. Squads from the first and third should have flared out on both sides of the trail, protecting the corridor to the LZ.
Instead, there had been a pell-mell, pushing, stumbling, ass-over-teakettle mindless uncoordinated rout, ending in the whole company caught in an exposed clearing surrounded by thick cover. It was amazing to Doc how quickly the company had fallen apart. Everybody was in shock. One of the wounded guys, Taylor, was screaming for his mother. Some black guy was yelling, "Don' move mah laig..." His femur had been snapped and was protruding from his soaked trousers. Four guys trying to move him back, blood squirting everyplace, "Don' move mah laig..." And then muzzle flashes from the brush and Corporal Hayes down in a mist of blood, most of his jaw gone.
The captain needed to do something right then. He needed to push some squads up the trail, into the bush, scatter the snipers before they could concentrate on the clearing. Instead, he was screaming into the radio, completely out of his mind.
Well, probably nobody would have gone back into the bush anyway. Doc knew he didn't want to go. He was in shock too, his limbs like lead, his brain numb. "Go away, go away." That's actually what he'd been thinking. He'd been like everybody else, hugging the ground, not even looking. A hundred men in the clearing and maybe three had fired back. And they weren't aiming; just lifting their pieces and shooting blindly.
Doc couldn't remember if his legs had hurt him this much before. He couldn't remember this kind of pain. At least he thought he detected the first glimmer from the coming dawn. He'd get up pretty soon and walk it off. The 800 milligrams ibuprofen, some exercise, and the pain would ease. It meant something, though, that his legs hurt this much. Please God not a bulging disc. Now that he was thinking about it, the dream he'd had, it did seem the fearsickness really came from Bong Son. Somehow it had spilled over into the non-existent replacement depot with the pine trees. After Bong Son he hadn't slept through for a whole year.
And when he got back to the world, the first months, he'd spent hours haunting the aisles at Safeway, pushing an empty shopping cart, until finally the checkout people told him to go home. That was funny. Safeway. It hadn't even occurred to him at the time.
Well, it went to show, most people just aren't clutch players. People think they can be the hero, but fact is, only a few can think clearly and do right in the clutch. Doc wasn't one of them. The truth was, he didn't have it. Mac had it. That was why these old fart sergeants deferred to him. Mac looked like a complete joke, with his bobbing Adam’s apple, turkey-skin neck, chipmunk cheeks and those stupid granny glasses. But the sergeants went along with him because they knew his brain didn’t turn to shit.
Doc could see, for instance, that the fuck up at Bong Son would not have happened if Mac had been there. The officers totally lost it; that didn't matter; because Mac was the kind of noncom who could give orders without making it look like he was taking over. He would never have allowed the ass-over-teakettle fallback on the LZ; or even if it had happened, he would have pushed squads right back into the bush. There was something in Mac that could get people up and moving. If Mac had been there, they wouldn't have felt so fucking helpless.
Lying on the cement-hard floor in the thatch hut next to the girl Bari, Doc realized that he was going to have to submit. That is, truly submit in his heart, to Mac's authority. In the Army, he had always taken the program; he had never disobeyed an order; but he always resisted too; he had never submitted in his heart to another guy’s authority over him. He'd been that way here too. He'd gone along with Mac's program, sort of; but inwardly, he’d resisted. He wasn't a believer in whatever the fuck they were trying to do in this armpit. He still didn't believe in it. But now he was going to get on board. He was going to be an honest-to-Christ loyal subordinate. A hundred and ten percent. Because it was too fucking dangerous to be out here alone.
He needed to hang with someone who could keep his head in the shit storm; and that was Mac. Doc hated caving in. But he had to. Maybe the fucking fearsickness in his gut would ease up. When he got back to Rembec, he'd find a way to let Mac know. Doc was on board, one hundred and ten. He’d been fighting the program, but no more.
Probably that was why Doc was here now, in a mud hut with a 16-year-old Dinka girl. Mac specifically had ordered him to stay clear of this side of the river, where the laundrywomen had their huts, and where the girl Bari was staying after the sergeants rescued her from the Bedui. Mac specifically had told him to stay away from Bari, and from any of the other women. It can only lead to trouble, blap, blap.
But then Doc had run across the girl in the ville, and she smiled at him. She was hella fine, too. Clean and oiled, with bare, cone-shaped breasts, long smooth flanks buttered with grease, and a narrow waist circled by links of copper wire. Hella fine, although she still had the cuts on her knees from the fall off the donkey.
And she didn't conceal her thoughts, either. Doc could tell right off the bat from her eyes. Then she pointed across the river and then at herself.
Maybe she was grateful Doc had saved her from the Bedui. Or maybe she liked the Valium, and wanted some more. Whatever, Doc had borrowed a log canoe and crossed the river.
It had been a good thing he had given her a little Val out there at the draw. It made her so spaced she didn't even blink when he'd sectioned the dead raghead practically under her nose. What the hell had she made out of that? Doc had just been curious to see what the guy's gut looked like, but the girl didn't know that. Maybe she thought he was a cannibal.
Actually, that autopsy had been pretty strange. The guy had been a 98-pound mess. He must have lived in screaming hell. Doc had found about a mile of acaris in his stomach. That wasn't so weird; everybody had worms. But Doc also had found the transverse colon jammed up by a shiny blue lump of tumor the size of a golf ball. The raghead must have been completely blocked. In the small intestine the shit had compacted into lumps, hard as marbles. The guy was maybe thirty, and he had advanced colon cancer, a huge pile of worms, and, as if that weren't enough, ulcers. What were these fucking people eating? It had to be diet.
Mac hadn't liked that either, Doc's sectioning the raghead. It was okay for Mac to lop off guys' heads, but not okay for Doc to do a simple field autopsy. At least Doc had had the pleasure of seeing that little brown shit heel Bashir Nasr almost keel over.
Okay, no more. While Doc was in this shithole, Mac could make the calls. From now on, one hundred and ten percent. Bari was a hella fine girl, slippery with grease, and totally quiet and obedient. But if Mac said no, it was no. If Mac wanted him to hold down the whole village while he cut off its head, fine. A hundred and ten percent.
When he got back to Rembec, he'd find a way to let Mac know.
Doc was on board._






Chapter 38


“I had to see you.”
Darcy Bean’s shadowy figure was silhouetted in the doorway, backlit by a low moon, big and orange and resting on the artificial horizon created by the veranda rail.
Bashir Nasr rose in bed and batted away the mosquito netting from his face.
“Darcy? Is that you?”
Who else would it be but the lonely, confused nurse, the same young creature who a few hours before had been sitting outside while Bashir in low murmurs, in hesitant catches followed by tumbling rushes of eloquence, had confessed all. Yes, he had blurted out to the drab, pathetic humanitarian nurse. Yes, he, the cosmopolitan Bashir Nasr, harbored in his secret bosom an outlaw passion, impossibly out of place, a passion (he realized bitterly) that must remain unrequited. Absolutely understandably unrequited, this mutinous yearning. And consequently…this was so difficult…perhaps it would be better if they didn’t meet anymore, since a communion that had once been so innocent and playful, had become, on Bashir Nasr’s side, an occasion of painful, unexpected feelings, blah, blah and so on.
And now, after ruminating the requisite hour, she was back for the culminating scene.
“Bashir Nasr.” Darcy was on her knees by the side of the bed. “Oh, Bashir Nasr. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Bashir Nasr surreptitiously used his handkerchief to wipe away a rivulet of sweat that was running down his breastbone. Oh, she knew all right. A woman doesn’t come to a man’s bedroom at midnight unless she knows exactly what she’s doing.
The gleaming shaft of moonlight fell across the floor, and in the near corner, a candle spluttered, sprinkling shadows across the plastered wall and revealing Darcy’s suppliant bowed back, her hair now fallen forward and covering her cheek.
“The mosquitoes are biting.” Bashir Nasr opened the fold of the net, and without hesitation Darcy climbed into the big cot and was in Bashir’s arms. He slid his hands under her cotton shift and nuzzled her hair. She was a clean, well-scrubbed girl, smelling of soap. Her small wet lips were jumping across his face, searching for his mouth. Bashir Nasr held her brows still. She didn’t know how to kiss, of course; they might as well start there. Her mouth was wide open in an “O” with her tongue evidently swallowed. Darcy trembled violently and gooseflesh stood up on her bare arm despite the stultifying heat.
Bashir Nasr settled himself comfortably beside the shaking girl and made soothing noises. He was beginning to think this might be enjoyable. For one thing, the lighting: the square of golden moonlight in the doorway lifted some of the darkness, and the candle threw just enough light to illuminate the texture of the girl’s flesh without being sufficient to reveal any blemish or defect.
And his own body looked so nice, solid and smooth, his stomach (while he was on his back) hardly rising above the rib cage. And he felt the first pleasant throb of tumescence, the first gentle squeezing of blood, signaling the awakening of appetite in his loins. He could see his shapely brown yam stretching itself languorously until it was lying along the white sheet, smooth and unwrinkled, and breathing softly, like a quiet fish on the reef.
“Shh. Shh. It’s okay.” Bashir said. “You’ve made me so happy. I’m so happy. Shh.” Bashir used the nape of the sheet to pat away the perspiration pooled in the small of her back, and then ran his fingers lightly over her thighs and hips. These were going to be her best feature, since he could confirm now that she had a narrow chest, and her breasts were small. But at least they didn’t hang flat against her ribs; they had, in fact a cuppable rotundity at the base. The nipples small and pink, mere buds, yet the erectile tissue obediently responded perkily under Bashir’s thumb.
Now, by demonstration, he had coaxed her tongue out of hiding, and began showing her that to kiss is to lick and to suck and yes, to boldly taste the other mouth, and smell the breath.
She had grasped him around the neck like a vice and now Bashir had to loosen her hold and bring her hands to his chest so that she could begin to caress his hairless body, just as he was now exploring hers. One of Bashir's principle worries had proved baseless: the hair on her calves was not stubbly or coarse but soft and fine and became even silkier as he traced the inside of her thigh. He slowed, because she began to shudder and buck as his fingers approached the first dewy secretions of her succulent bivalve.
Bashir Nasr was agreeably surprised. The little nurse twisted and squirmed under his fingertips like a struggling fish. Could it be that this plain unremarkable girl would turn out to be explosively orgasmic? What an amazing treat that would be in this comfortless hinterland, if she should be discovered to own an easily aroused lubricious vagina of uncontrollable paroxysms. Such a female was one in a hundred.
Still, she kept her thighs pressed together, so far denying him full communication. There was no hurry. Bashir Nasr detoured around the flank to the ample rump. It was disproportionately large, but smooth and nicely cleft. Later (Bashir had seen it only too often) the posterior of women of her build would spread and devolve. An inevitability, but not her fault, simply a genetic predisposition.
For the nonce, however, her rump was youthful and firm, and the fitful candle placed an appealing shadow in the hollow of her back.
The squeezing of his own interest began to increase. Bashir finished unbuttoning his skivvy shorts and allowed his fully inflated penis to lie along her thigh. Hiking up Darcy’s shift, he placed their genitals side by side and brought Darcy’s slightly reluctant fingers over to touch the cheeky intruder.
Then he kissed her neck and chin, his left thumb orbiting her nipple, his right hand caressing the smooth curve of her backside, his mouth all the time breathing soothing drivel, about how this was a supreme moment, the highest possible expression, blah, blah, while his ears listened with keen pleasure to the unfeigned catching of her breath, the soft ohhs, like bubbles from a wand, completely unstudied, and very refreshing, in comparison to the artifice and dissembling of some of his more experienced student protégés.
Suddenly Darcy rolled on her back and opened her legs, not ajar, but a-gap. Bashir, after discreetly wetting his finger, took advantage of the breech. So. All this time she’d been stimulating herself with her inner thighs. She was entirely lubricated, and Bashir’s alert nostrils even scented the muskiness of heated oil.
“I want you, Bashir. I want you inside me.”
So trite (how many times had he heard such breathy begging) but she was sincere. Bashir Nasr’s fire had sunk a few degrees while he’d been waiting out her pro forma resistance. He turned his mind, as he often had in the past months of enforced chastity, to the sultry Japanese student, Delphine Hiramata, and to that time in his office she’d been standing by his desk, discussing some twaddle of hers, when she began slowly to lift her skirt. She was angling for a better grade, but…the perfection of it! when the curtain rose on those dusky thighs. He had never had such an instant and rabid erection, like a mad dog straining at its chain. Now, recollecting that scrambling, panting episode, the blood began squeezing again, recharging his interest.
“Bashir, Bashir, Bashir.”
While he was thinking about Miss Hiramata, Bashir had knelt between Darcy’s legs, brought his face to her soap-smelling silken beard, spread the moist lips of her anxious sex with his thumb, and then touched her oily bead with his gentle tongue.
“Bashir. Please.”
And now for the finale. Nothing too fancy this first time, or she might suspect that her arrival was not totally unexpected. A straightforward expression of phallic lordship.
Although she already was very wet, Bashir moistened his tip with a wad of saliva, to ensure an easy penetration. He grasped her left thigh to steady her bucking hips, and then went home.
Immediately her arms and legs enwrapped him like writhing eels. Her hips lurched madly against his pubic bones. She shook her body like a wet dog, yelled something unintelligible, arched her back, went catatonic, gasped a huge “O” and subsided suddenly on the bed like a pile of rags.
At her crisis Bashir felt a warm gush of fluid along his shaft. Bashir couldn’t stop himself from laughing a little. This girl, despite her unprepossessing appearance, had remarkable orgasms. They were fun. Bashir held her and petted her and kissed her brow and talked gibberish while her hips rocked slowly on his phallus. He hadn’t planned to be quite this straightforward. He had planned to show her a few esoteric variations. But now she was utterly spent. He might as well take care of himself.
Bashir embraced her firmly and began the rhythmic tattoo, drawing back dangerously to rub against the vulvae, the diving to the stops again. When Darcy realized what was happening, she threw her legs wide apart, feet pointed toward the ceiling, and said, “Yes. Yes,” the way they all did, until finally Bashir reached the very threshold of bliss, the exact instant before the ecstatic splash of seed.
“Oh my God,” Bashir remarked, and then painted the round top of the nurse’s cervix with a patina of pearly translucent adhesive in four or five convulsive squirts.
As they lay quietly together in the aftermath, Bashir taught the nurse to lick and nuzzle the sinking tuber, until she was grooming it like a cat. He felt comfortable and sated, although he knew that by summoning up the mental image of Miss Hiramata he would have to masturbate later. But now he was sleepy and hoped Darcy wouldn’t stay too long. But he still had to spend a few minutes on the talk.
“This is insanity, Darcy. This can never be.”
“I don’t know, Bashir, I don’t know.”
“These feelings. So strong. They’re dangerous.”
“Oh, Bashir, Bashir. I don’t know.”
A half hour of this was the price one paid for the glory. He had said a week. It had turned out to be only three days. He would decide tomorrow whether he cared to continue awhile or to pick her off his sleeve. But it might be fun to experiment with this female’s thermonuclear orgasm. Although, really, he had small patience for the boring little melodrama being played out now.
“I don’t know, Bashir, I don’t know.”
Bashir patted her on the shoulder and stifled a yawn. With women, it was all tradeoffs.


Chapter 39


Foreword by Lt. Col. Gatling Fellows (USA-Ret)

Having served with the U.S. Army Military Advisory Group-Sudan (MAG-S) attached to the embassy in Khartoum during the period covered in this disturbing roman a clef, "Revolt in Sudan," I am indebted for the author’s explication of events occurring on the Jebel plateau that at the time seemed unfathomable. Because of intelligence we were receiving from an informant in the provincial capital of Rembec we at MAG-S knew that American mercenaries were operating on the plateau. From the outset we discounted the theory, held at the embassy, that the Americans had been imported to train the secessionists in sophisticated weaponry. Particularly unlikely, we felt, was the notion that the disorganized partisans of the SLF somehow had acquired Stingers. Simply put, the Jebel plateau, a burning disease-ridden waste of squalid villages and non-existent infrastructure, has no purpose for such weapons. Sudanese air, which at the time amounted to a few MiG 15s flown by Libyans, never sortied that far south, and the ROS helicopter squadron was not operational. There were no targets for Stingers on the plateau. Nor was there any other purpose for advanced weapons. At no time during this period did the Sudanese army ever venture onto the heights except (as covered in the book) when led by French officers.
In the decades-long struggle with the southern secessionists, Khartoum quite correctly had written off the Jebel as being of no strategic significance. I admit we at MAG-S were baffled by the appearance of American mercenaries in that unappetizing corner. As it turns out, their goals were chimerical. Now, thanks to this book, they are understandable.
Since MAG-S worked closely with both SEDEC and with the Legionnaire paratroop battalion in Bangui, C.A.R, I think I can be of service in elucidating French motives on the plateau, which I feel the book does not make sufficiently clear. The French at that time had several survey parties in the field attempting to map the actual frontier between Central African Republic and Sudan. When one of these parties went missing, the garrison at Bangui received information from an informant that a French-speaking prisoner was being held in Rembec.
The French at first made a misguided unilateral effort to find and extract this prisoner. That failing, the French envoy approached the Sudanese government. Although diplomatic relations between Paris and Khartoum were distinctly cool the two governments at times cooperated in their mutual interest. Khartoum, while having no strategic or commercial stake in the Jebel, preferred any foreign mercenaries extirpated, if done cheaply; the French wished to search for their nationals (and, I might add, to avenge a Legionnaire killed in the initial aborted extraction attempt). For that reason Khartoum allowed French soldiers to enter Sudan at the head of a small body of government troops, ferried to the plateau by the Legion’s C47s based in Bangui. The government troops, undisciplined, poorly led, and lacking their own air lift, would not have been able to reach the plateau without the help of the French. Once there, the troops would have been ineffective without the leadership of French officers. It appears that the failure to anticipate this Franco-Sudanese cooperation was the major tactical shortcoming of the “sergeants” during their abortive rebellion on the Jebel…

Lt. Col Gatling Fellows (USA-Ret)


Chapter 40


Doc woke up again. He must have dozed off, because now it was fully light. He’d been dreaming he’d been riding a slick, the pale green jungle below, the leisurely whop-whop-whop of the rotors… In fact, he could still hear it, somewhere outside, the decelerating whine of a rotor blade.
Wide awake instantly, Doc rolled to his feet, his heart pounding under his ribs. The haversack. The .45. With fumbling hands Doc found the weapon and chambered a round. Stooping at the hut opening, he carefully parted the thatch and peered out.
On the clearing atop the hill overlooking the huts a French helio sat next to the long shady palapa where the women pounded manioc. The machine’s blades were slowly spinning to a stop. Doc could see several soldiers in camos hopping out the open bay.
Doc brought his hands together to keep the pistol from shaking. The soldiers were French Legionnaires, wearing the red berets of parachute troops. A soft noise behind him made Doc whirl, the gun pointed. Bari was awake, kneeling on her mat, absolutely motionless and staring straight ahead alike a frightened doe. “Down,” hissed Doc, making a low sweeping gesture. Bari obediently lay flat, like a rigid ebony statue.
This was extremely bad! Doc’s whole body had started trembling, and his gut was in spasm. What the fuck was this? They had to be part of the 2nd Parachute, garrisoned at Fort Lamy. Dock had heard they were in the Chadian capital to help the fuckup government put down the usual Islamic nut cases. The Legion wasn’t supposed to be in Sudan. The Sudanese government hated the fucking Frogs.
To Doc’s right, at the far end of the lane between the huts, he could hear raised voices, speaking a language that sounded a fucking lot like French. Turning his body ninety degrees, he looked out, exposing only a small triangle of eye and forehead.
Two legionnaires, in field camos and baggy parachute pants, advanced up the lane, one on each side, poking the snouts of their FLNs into the hut openings. Doc pulled his head inside and released the pistol’s safety, the soft click magnified a hundred times in the breathless hut. The wide-eyed unblinking Dinka girl was lying so still on the mat that she looked like she must be dead.
Doc took another quick peek. The two Frogs were still coming on slowly. Doc caught a better glimpse of the one of the far side of the lane, a youngster, maybe 19. Doc could see blond hair under the beret. Actually, the kid looked more like a Kraut, square, broad face, very fair skin. Probably Hamburg gutter scum adventuring in Africa with the last of the colonial armies.
Okay, here were the choices. He could stash the piece and be taken. They’d definitely make him talk. The Legion wasn’t squeamish about that. He would tell everything right away and maybe avoid torture. Doc didn’t even know if the Frogs cared that a bunch of unauthorized yanks were fucking around in Sudan. They wouldn’t let him go, though. He’d wind up in some stinking lockup in Fort Lamy until the Frogs talked to the Americans. Or the Frogs might turn him over the Khartoum, in which case his number was up.
Doc realized his chest was drenched; he could feel sweat running down his legs, and his face burned. Okay, he couldn’t surrender. Bari’s hut was one-way, no back door. If he ditched out the front the two legionnaires were close enough to drop him instantly. Carefully, Doc edged the triangular corner of his head outside the hut. At first he saw only one legionnaire, a middle-aged guy, on Doc’s side of the lane. With the barrel of his rifle the Frog held aside the rag covering a hut entrance, twenty meters to Doc’s right. Suddenly the grinning German kid emerged from a hut across the lane, only a few meters away. Doc jerked his head back; the Kraut hadn’t seen him. The German kid was laughing, shouting something in fractured French to his partner. This must be fun for him, the kid, searching this crazy African ville, getting a good gander at these silent docile blackamoors, the bare-breasted moms drawing back in fright, their large-eyed brats at the pap. And these long skinny so-called warriors, with their dicks wrapped in bark, and their toy-like spears. This would be something for his barroom mates one day back in Hamburg or Frankfort.
The kid was screwing up though. The first rule, house-to-house searches, the guys on each side of the street need to support each other by keeping roughly abreast. The Kraut already was twenty meters in front of his partner; and instead of waiting for his partner to catch up, the kid sauntered on to the hut directly across from Bari’s. The other legionnaire, who had stopped down the lane, checking out a hut, now ducked down and went inside.
Doc straightened up and wiped the stinging sweat from his eyes. He brought the pistol up, the grip in both hands. The kid would never go back to Hamburg or Dresden. He’d never brag about his exploits in Africa to admiring stay-at-homes. The young legionnaire had stopped at the hooch directly opposite. Doc got a quick glimpse of blue eyes before the youth turned to lift the cloth door cover with his rifle barrel. The Kraut would never regale his old chums along the polished bar of some rathskeller, the thick air redolent of hops. Doc willed his hands to be still. Make this good; blow his heart to rags, so he won’t even have a second to think.
Doc stepped through the hut opening, stood square-footed in the lane, aimed and fired at the kid’s back at three meters. In slowtime, Doc saw the bullet smash the right shoulder blade, then in fast time the youth pitched violently against the hut and fell. Bad shot. Even at almost pointblank, he’s missed thoracic four, missed the heart. But the stopping power of the heavy slug had brought him down in shock, dying as he fell. Doc hoped the kid had gone blank instantly, that there hadn’t been a split second to think, to know that he was never going home, that he’d never see his old chums along the polished bar in the dark room fragrant with hops; and that there’d never be another milk-skinned girl with braided hair. Not now.
Even as the report of the .45 echoed through the huts, Doc was sprinting around the corner of Bari’s hooch. He rolled over the low thorn fence enclosing the cattle compound and scrambled along on his hands and knees toward a gate he knew let in water from the irrigation ditch. He could hear shouting in the lane. The shout was followed by a short burst of automatic fire. Doc could tell it wasn’t aimed at him. The Kraut kid had bounced off the springy side of the hut and fallen on his side. It might look to his partner like he’d been shot from inside the hut the kid had been looking into.
Doc slid over the wooden slab gate and into the slimy mud of the ditch. He’d thought about this, how to exit from the lane if any kind of shit came down, although he’d been thinking Bedui or Obo’s bunch. The irrigation ditch entered the village from a seep on the hillside across the main road. Both sides of the ditch were thick with weeds and overhanging fronds that gave three or four feet of concealment. If he could get across the road and into double canopy bush, he knew the way and the Frogs probably didn’t. A straight line from the ditch into the jungle would cut a tiny path the village kids used when out collecting comfy nuts. The head of the trail was on the far side of the ville, near the clearing where the chopper set down. At the other end it branched out into a maze of hunting trails.
Behind him he could hear more shouting, and then the sound of a rotor turning over. That was smart; they were going to put the machine in the air, with its door-mounted 7.62. As he sloshed bent-over through the clinging slime his heart throbbed painfully in his throat. He had to calm down; it’d be stupid to miss a bullet and die of a seizure. As he splashed through the muck, clouds of mosquitoes rose off the floating scum. If ever he had a chance to get malaria or schistosomiosis, this was it. And the pain in his lumbar now shot down his legs. This crouched shambling gait had to be perfect for blowing out a disc.
To his front doc heard the tinny revving of a small motor, and above it, more Frog voices. Gasping and blowing his nose, he stopped long enough to part the fronds to look. Two legionnaires had dismounted from a small fold up motorbike and were standing, rifles ready, at the bend which commanded a view of the road in both directions.
Okay, they hadn’t figured out the ditch yet. But they would in another few seconds. The helicopter was aloft; the pilot would spot the ditch instantly from the air. No time to think about it. Doc clambered out of the ditch and began running toward the road. Thirty meters and he’d be covered by the jungle verge. He could hear the whop-whop of the chopper hovering someplace behind him.

The two troopers were at the bend, looking both ways on the road. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a second machine in the clearing, its blade just starting to turn over. Two machines. A light platoon, 30 men. No officer in his right mind, in an unknown hostile situation, would let his men go chasing into the jungle, where they couldn’t be extracted from the air. If he could just get into the bush.
Doc reached the road and leaped up the bank without looking toward the two Frogs. Too far for the .45 anyway.
“Merd. Que ceque c’est cette….”
As soon as he heard merd, one of the few Frog words Doc knew, he dove for the ground and began crawling into the underbrush. He had to move. It was amazing how fast a human could craw over stickers and thorns if he stopped thinking about pain. His hands were bloody; if he survived, the pain would come later; now his whole body was charged with hormone.
The soldiers were firing, short bursts, as they’d been taught, but too high. He already must be out of sight. They were shooting waist high. Above the ville, the pitch of the rotor dramatically increased. Okay. It would take the two troopers another second to come abreast of him; the chopper overhead about the same. But the rotor noise would drown out his movements in the grass. Okay. The hidden path lay directly ahead, but he must cut left on a diagonal to get out of the line of fire from the road. He had to move.
He could hear the Frogs and then more bursts. One burst close enough overhead for him to hear the crackling of the bullets. But most were too far right. The rotor noise had reached a crescendo, with the rotor wash whipping the brush all around. Any second the gunner would light up the whole area.
No time for crawling. Get up and run. The 7.62 could thrash 50 square meters, 1,000 rounds a minute. Doc fought through another tangle of creepers and emerged on a thread of a trail, hardly a foot wide. The village kids, baskets on their heads, giggling, filed along here every day to a grove of comfy nuts. The gunner should have opened up by now.
Then behind him Doc heard men crashing through the underbrush. Despite the painful throb of his heart in his throat, Doc began to laugh. They’d fucked up! The troopers on the road had come in after him. The chopper overhead couldn’t strafe, with their own guys stumbling around in double-canopy. It’d probably take two, three minutes for the officer to get the idiots back on the road; meanwhile, the chopper’s door gunner had to hold off, poised overhead but impotent.
Doc suddenly felt good. He hurt everywhere, but he felt good. His wide-open mouth took in great lung bags of air, his strong perfect heart settled back comfortably in his chest, his leg muscles hard as oak moved him in huge strides down the trail. The firing had stopped, the voices had diminished. Even the racket of the machine overhead had diminished. Doc felt like he could sprint like this for a hundred miles. They’d fucked up; they couldn’t get him. And he was gone.


Chapter 41


“Scored some meds,” said the Whizzer, appearing at the clinic doorway with a wooden box in his arms. “Doxycycline, chloroquine, permethrin, and a bunch of DEET.”
Doc nodded, pointing to the corner. In the last month the ragged Whizzer’s hard-fisted trading with the Indian storekeeper had produced a steady trickle of meds to the mission hospital. The shipment of piperzine had caused the most dramatic results, overnight knocking back the epidemic of ascari and roundworm. What really got Doc though was the sudden drop in malaria cases. The chloroquine had helped, but the real reason was Brevold, the energetic young mechanic, who had volunteered to take on the bugs.
In Rembec at dusk the air was thick with smoke from dung fires lit throughout the village to discourage mosquitoes. It didn't work that great. Half the cases in the clinic were malaria, many of them "death fever" caused by Plasmodium falciparum. For quatrain fever, meloquinine was the only answer, and until now Doc didn't have it. Or rather, only a small supply, which he’d been holding back in case any of the sergeants came down.
The pudgy little storekeeper had brought in on bicycles five hundred mosquito nets, and another big order of plastic screening. Some of the mud and dung buildings could be screened. But the thatch hooches were impossible. Some of the Dinka used bed netting but most of them didn't. In the suffocating heat and breathless air, lying under the net was torture. For Doc and the other sergeants it was probably the worst thing about the plateau. It was impossible to breathe, and it took a huge act of will not to throw the damn netting aside.
But the consequences of inattention were plain. Two of the missionaries, Brevold said, had died of quatrain. Brevold, Darcy and the Whizzer all had tertian. So did most of the villagers.
Brevold, before the coming of the sergeants, already had identified some of the water sources that bred mosquito larva. The first place he'd found, to his horror, had been in his own irrigation ditches. The sluggish water winding toward the dura fields had been black with wriggling larva. Brevold had no way of knowing whether the wrigglers were anopholine, the genus that carries the malaria plasmodium. But what if they were? He had a terrifying vision of the entire village succumbing to malaria as a result of his do-good water project.
Of course the village didn’t have pesticide. But Brevold knew that oil suffocated mosquito larva. Somehow he had talked the mullahs into giving him ten gallons of diesel, which he cut with a couple of gallons of light lubricating oil as an emulsifier. Using a garden can from the mission, he sprinkled the ditches. It worked. The larva died.
But the Dinka farmers went bugnuts. A film of oily rainbow-hued water circulated through their dura fields. They were worried it would make the grain taste like oil. And it did. That had been a setback for the irrigation project until Brevold started breaking up the mosquito cycle by drying out the ditches every other week.
That incident, however, had reminded Brevold that the mosquitoes that plagued the ville and killed off a quarter of the children had to be coming from a water source. By searching along the river he had started finding the shallow pools hidden in brush that filled when the river rose, and were left isolated as it fell. But before the sergeants arrived, the Dinka wouldn’t let him spray, because the pools were the watering holes for the coots the Dinka liked to hunt. The diesel hadn't been a good choice, and there wasn't any left anyway after Obo's visit. Doc suggested mineral oil. The storekeeper Shaybin got twenty gallons from Kampala.
In another effort, the hustling young mechanic, using a hand can, had sprayed a cloud of permethrin over a lot of the village. He’d put up screening on the windows of the few frame buildings. No doubt about it, fewer mosquitoes now after dusk. Brevold continued to dry out the ponds and irrigation ditches to break up the larva cycles. Now, with the sergeants’ blessing, he’d sprayed the stagnant water in the marshy ground along the river. Then he’d figured out that anopholes also bred along the bank in the algae blooms, which had become thick on a nourishing diet of human shit. Brevold sprayed the blooms with mineral oil. And now with everybody shitting in the latrines the algae was starting to thin and break up anyway.
“Going to the tree?” Whizzer said.
“I”ll be down in a sec,” Doc said.
It was time for the meeting under the big acacia tree. Doc faithfully attended no matter what he was doing. It was one way to show Mac he was on board. A sign of deference. Ever since that deal with the Frogs, Doc had done everything he could to show he could take the program. The deal with the Frogs had scared the shit out of everybody. Even Mac had showed the strain. Doc had never seen him look worried before.
Happily the Frogs didn’t cross the river, and pulled out as suddenly as they came. Even so, the Frog visit wasn’t good PR and didn’t help the prestige of the sergeants. It was plain to the village. Just as Mac had brushed aside the boy soldiers of the Rembec garrison, the French parachute stick dropping out of the sky could have brushed aside the sergeants.
Mac had done what he had to do. As soon as one of Breen’s little spies had reported aircraft on the horizon, Mac had sent Breen and Reyes down to the Cessnas. When the choppers settled below the trees across the river, Mac had lowered his binoculars and picked up the cheap Radio Shack handheld. Breen and Reyes immediately got airborne and at 50 feet over terrain shifted the planes to the cattle corral at Government Well Five, where they could be camouflaged under brush. The Whizzer said nobody in the village could remember the Frogs every coming up on the plateau like this. Khartoum hated the French. Neither he nor Mac could see any way the Sudanese could have authorized this deal.
Mac had been pretty tight-jawed when Doc finally came back across the river, after the French left. He’d already told Doc not to fuck with the Dinka women across the river, and now there was a dead Legionnaire. What good could come out of that? Mac was pretty pissed, but at the same time Doc cold see he also was kind of glad to find out what happened.
When the sound of firing came from across the river, and when the two Viragos lifted above the tree tops, Mac had ordered Keyes to grab the professor. If the French came into the village, the sergeants had no choice but to make a quick retreat on the river path. There was no way they could hold the village against a French platoon with two choppers. Obviously, if the Dinka had seen the sergeants’ pulling out of the ville, the image of the sergeants’ invincibility would get the big mud feet.
But instead, for no apparent reason, the French booked.
“They had to be looking for somebody,” the Whizzer said.
Mac had agreed. Not enough troopers to be anything other than an extraction attempt, swooping in with the minimum number of guys, making the snatch, getting the fuck out of Dodge. Obviously, there had to be a fuel dump down below. The Viragos didn’t have the range to fly direct from Bangui. And the next day, Breen, flying a recon, found empty av gas drums on the salt plain below the plateau, next to the tire tracks of a C47. It was disconcerting. Neither Mac nor the Whizzer had been able to think of any reason why the Frogs would want to come up on the plateau. Later, Doc heard from Keyes that Mac figured it had to be a one-shot deal. The Frogs had gambled on a covert snatch, missed whatever guy they wanted, and weren’t likely to risk a diplomatic flap by trying it again.



"Well, we're starting to get organized," Mac said, as Doc pulled up a stool.
Mac had borrowed half a dozen wooden stools from the Rembec mission and set them out under the big acacia across from the souk. It was the same spreading, shady acacia the old men used in the afternoon when they played beenji, the bean game. They still used it. But now Mac used it as well.
In the weeks since they'd moved much of the refugee camp down to the cotton scheme, Mac's staff had taken form. Doc of course handled the clinic, public health and sanitation. The Whizzer had become the de facto minister of finance, the brunt of which was to oversee the exchange of captured weapons for goods, with the Rembec storekeeper Jabut Shaybin acting as intermediary. Whizzer was also responsible for making sure the manager of the cotton scheme, Peter Benson, delivered on the promised material for an overflow refugee camp.
Sgt. Keyes commanded the garrison, which consisted of two rifle platoons, a police militia, and the infantry school. The platoons, each led by a Dinka corporal, were set up with three squads of 12, all picked graduates of the two-week school. First platoon was an assault platoon, armed with a few AK47s and the antique Enfields the sergeants had collected from the Rembec arsenal. Second platoon was for police work, the men armed with shotguns Keyes' infantry school, which was held every day in a fallow cassava field outside the village, taught the basics of the raid and the ambush. Anybody with an eye got marksmanship, starting with the half dozen .22s. The rest checked out on the shotguns. Some soldierly attributes the Dinka picked up naturally: being quiet and still, waiting patiently, and walking long distances carrying burdens. Other things they had to learn: group discipline, the importance of not bunching up, instant obedience to orders.
Anybody who got through the school but didn't get picked for a full-time job in a platoon became part of the militia, responsible for enforcing the new rules in the village.
Reyes was needed almost constantly to work on the airplanes. One of the Cessna Lycomings needed an overhaul, and a nose wheel oleo had been sprung in a hard landing. Even more time consuming (since the work had to be done by hand), the props on both planes needed grinding, having become heavily pitted by sand kicked up in countless dirt field takeoffs.
Sgt. Breen, Mac's old friend from Fort Benning, acted as exec. He also organized the corps of teenage messengers and spies. And he kept a watchful eye on Basir Nasir, the Jebel's new mullah.
Breen had just come back from blowing the bridges over Wadi Frar, deep in Korfur. With the bridges down it would be very difficult for armored vehicles to approach the plateau again.
Carefully positioning himself on the tiny stool, Breen began rubbing his large red hands together as he reported to Mac on the bridges.
"No soldiers, no guards, no folks at all," Breen said. He had landed the 182 near the deserted guardhouse, set the charges (fashioned from some munitions captured from the Saladin) and a moment later, with a boom and a puff of smoke, the two ramshackle wooden bridges fell in a heap to the bottom of the chasm.
Mac nodded, glancing at Doc. "Well, we know not to get complacent."
Still, it was a huge relief. With the bridges out, an approach overland by motor would be extremely difficult for the Sudanese, and for armor, impossible. It also helped that the Nile was staging, which meant that the steamboat wouldn't be able to fight its way upriver any farther than Kim. The Jebel was cut off by ground from Khartoum. It gave the sergeants time to work.
So far the situation in Rembec (now the Jebel capital with its acacia tree the seat of government) was shaping up nicely. Looking around from his vantage point on the wooden stool, Mac saw a village at peace. Groups of laughing, chatting women were pounding manioc under the awnings and in the sheds along the mud wall. Dinka boys drove their long-horned cattle through the narrow byways between the conical huts. Outside one hut, a tall perfectly formed ebony girl held out a plastic bucket behind a cow to catch the stream of urine, which she would use to wash her hair.
(The sergeants at first had been a little shocked at the Dinka habit of using fresh cow urine for bathing. But Doc had said: "It's sterile when it comes out of the cow.")
Mac glanced over at the clinic, the mud walls shining in the morning sun under a new coat of whitewash. Inside a baby was crying, a long continuous wail. Children were still sick. But it was a big improvement over the wretched scene of death and misery the sergeants had found on their arrival. No argument, Doc had done a job. In just a few weeks he'd got results. And the Dinks were crazy about him; the kids tumbled after him like puppies. The children were still afraid of the other sergeants; they backed up and hid between their mothers' legs when Mac or Keyes walked through the village, staring up with large, frightened eyes. Mac shrugged inwardly. That was to be expected. Mac and Keyes had done the killing. Doc was doing the fixing.
It wasn't clear yet how Bashir Nasir was going down with the Dinks.
The Whizzer was the only one who spoke Dink well enough to get a reading. He said the Christian and animist Dinks, the majority, didn't care who was mullah, as long as he left them alone.
But the Arab-ized Dinks still had their doubts about Bashir's clerical credentials, even after the demo at the clinic. They believed he was a good Moslem; they believed he was a scholar of the book; but had God really...anointed him as their mullah? Even so, the Whizzer said the Moslem Dinks seemed to approve of having Bashir Nasir as putative leader, making it easier for them in conscience to take the program.
The Nilotic Dinks, the tough nomadic tribesmen who only came to Rembec to trade, seemed to be on board. Keyes had all the volunteers for his infantry school that he could handle. And from among the Nilotics Breen and Whizzer had a corps of some fifty or sixty kids they were shaping up as messengers and spies. Some of the kids had even learned the rudiments of the alphabet at the mission school before the missionaries had been scared off. Pretty soon they might be able to read and write a little bit of English.
“Isn’t it hard to learn English?” Mac said.
“It’s easy to learn to speak English badly,” the Whizzer said.
In Sudan, pairs of teenage boys were always traipsing around the countryside, visiting relatives, hunting bandicoots, looking over the marital prospects in different encampments. Having these kids wandering around didn't excite anybody's suspicions. With a little training, some of these boys could help keep tabs. Mac wanted to know fast about marauders, bandit gangs like the one under Obo which had trashed Rembec, or the thieving Bedui, coming up onto the plateau from the western desert.
In a country with no communications, the messenger was still the fastest way. Some of the young boys could cover forty miles in 24 hours, barefoot. That was twice as fast as Bedui on their donkeys, and three times as fast as Obo's ragtag army of bandits.
"I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of Khaki shirts and shorts for the police," Mac was saying to the Whizzer. "How about putting that on Jaybut's shopping list? Maybe web belts, and some kind of cap."
The second platoon patrolled the village, the refugee camp, and the outlying encampments, enforcing the new rules on sanitation and the preparation of drinking water, sorting out domestic beefs and gambling disputes, calming the wife beater, apprehending the rare thief of personal belongings, and, most importantly from the Dinka' standpoint, guarding against cattle rustling. Even though Mac’s policemen enforced rules some found onerous, the Dinka liked the police a lot better than the garrison soldiers sent from Khartoum, who had never ventured into the village on duty except to extort goods or to harass the women. They had guarded Shaybin's store, true, but the storekeeper had paid a heavy bribe for the service.
The Whizzer was thinking about the shirts. "Shaybin can get ‘em in Uganda. Big market in uniforms there."
"Okay," said Mac.
The Certified World Traveler grinned as he pumped more of the coarse homegrown tobacco into his filthy pipe. "You know you can't trust the bastard. Right? When he sees you're ordering uniforms and how many..."
Mac smiled and nodded. Shaybin already knew a lot, and it was probably true he wasn't keeping it to himself. Through a skein of trading arrangements the storekeeper was in touch with people in three or four countries. Mac, possessing no commercial talent, gladly turned over details of business to the Whizzer, who understood bean counting, currencies, and exchange rates. But even though no bean counter, Mac understood perfectly that intel was a commodity, bought and sold.
"Don't we need his contacts," Mac said. "Is there an alternative?"
"Not right now," the Whizzer admitted, "not if you want your shopping list any time soon. He's the only one with credit. Nobody will risk trading up here except with him. They know Shaybin's good for it."
"We take our chances, I guess," Mac said. "We need the stuff."
"Okay. But I tell ya, as soon as you can, you should kill him."
Mac looked at the Whizzer in mild surprise. It was an uncharacteristically martial comment for the mild and easy-going world traveler. The Whizzer didn't like to leave anything on the table in a trade. But even in the midst of hard bargaining with Shaybin, he maintained a saintly calm, never got bad tempered, never uttered a harsh word. And he came across as a gentle soul, nothing about him swaggering or bloodthirsty.
"Here's the deal," Mac said slowly. "The policy here is to spare the rod, if possible. Besides, I like to make those kinds of decisions myself."
It was a mild rebuke, and the Whizzer took it that way. "Fine," he said. "Just my two cents."
"Well," Mac said, slapping his knees, "maybe we forget the uniforms for now. No use making it too obvious what we're doing." Too bad, though. Mac knew from experience that police work went smoother when the officers wore simple, unostentatious uniforms, as a tangible symbol of authority. Maybe later, when Shaybin was gone.


Chapter 42


Since taking over the clinic, Doc had struck up a friendship with Brevold. For one thing, Doc recognized how much the guy had accomplished with pretty much nothing. Brevold obviously hadn’t known shit. He had no meds, no equipment, no help. He'd taught himself from square one out of a couple of antique textbooks. He had set bones and sutured knife wounds. Doc had seen a couple ex-patients; the work wasn't beautiful; but it was hella more than anybody would expect: the bones had knit more or less straight; somehow Brevold had managed to get a dislocated shoulder back in its socket; the suturing had been ham-fisted but held together (largely due to Brevold being meticulous about cleansing wounds).
And Brevold had been doing this for a year in the middle of fucking chaos, with gangs of thugs rampaging through the clinic, swiping the baskets right out from under patients too sick to move.
With Doc now in charge, and with the refugee camp nurse to help some, Brevold, with a sigh of relief, had been glad to turn his attention elsewhere. Doc had seen him under the council tree huddling with Mac and Breen. They were going to rebuild the fishpond and the irrigation canals. They were going to demonstrate how to make solar ovens, so the Dinka wouldn't need to cut down every tree in sight just to cook their gruel.
Brevold said Mac agreed to try to get hold of some pumps, shovels, picks, maybe some kind of hydraulic ram for making mud bricks. Mac had put Brevold in charge of the building projects and already the kid had cobbled together a crew to lug back all the rock that had been blown all over the compound by General Obo's thugs.
That was another thing that Doc had got wind of, from Brevold. Mac contemplated retaliating against the general. He and Breen had rounded up some of the young Dinka studs who had been in the ville during Obo's rampage. Now he was sending some of them out scouting. According to Brevold, Mac figured that with the drought the general probably would be raiding the Nuer fishing villages along the Wau River, somewhere near Korfur. But when Obo turned back toward Jebel, Mac wanted to know about it.
Brevold's other job was to restart the mission school. Even though a devout Christer himself, Brevold said the mission curriculum, based on Bible scripture, seemed pretty much useless. Apparently (from Brevold again) there’d been a big powwow under council tree on what they should teach the urches, and in what languages. The kids of course all spoke Dinka, for which there was no written language, except that the professor supposedly was working up some kind of a dictionary. Brevold saw no point in teaching them to read a language for which they were no books. So maybe they should learn Arabic. Or even English.
"There ain't gonna be a perfect answer for this," Mac had said.
Mac had decided that the primary school would be conducted in Dinka. Brevold was more or less fluent, and the bag 'o' bones Whizzer was pretty good. They'd start the village kids for a few hours in the morning. The curriculum would be practical stuff first, a lot on hygiene and sanitation, then a little history and geography, all delivered in the kind of story-telling style that Brevold said the brats got at home.
Then, Brevold would make a cut, siphoning off some of the bright apples into a reading class in Swahili. There were books in the village. This was the Bantu-derived East African trade language, and all the adults spoke a little pidgin already. So it would be useful. But as Brevold said, nobody actually knew Swahili, not even the professor. Teacher and pupil would have to wrestle with it together.
Doc also learned that Mac wanted an Arabic class for the sons of the Islamic Dinks. That would be another good way to ingratiate the new rule with the Moslems, who were desperate to get their sons up to speed on the Koran.
Finally, if any kid proved a standout, he'd be funneled into an English class, again taught by Brevold, with the idea that the kid eventually would be able to get into a real school someplace off the plateau.
Doc had to smile as he watched Brevold, under a floppy straw gardener's hat, rushing from one project to the next, a whirlwind of unquenchable energy. Despite the malaria in his blood, despite all the setbacks caused by Obo's teenage hoodlums, Brevold seemed incapable of depression or fatigue.
Brevold said he now felt hope for the first time since coming to Rembec. Everything had got better since the arrival of the sergeants. At first, Doc thought Brevold might be blowing sunshine. No. Brevold was a butt-up believer. Now he could do things, without meeting constant objections and resistance. Any reasonable project got a quick okay from Mac, along with the tacit understanding that the militia backed up the okay.
Well, the rains hadn’t come back because of the sergeants. Skeletal refugees still poured in from the bush and squatted in desolate hopelessness in Darcy Bean's refugee camp. But, taken all around, Doc had to admit, things looked brighter. Infant mortality in the refugee camp had dropped to about 20 percent, where it had been about 50 percent before. Before they'd put in the latrines and the water filter, fucking typhoid and dysentery had mowed down the brats like a big scythe.
Now Doc was getting static from Mac that maybe the mortality rate was getting too low.
"Don't knock yourself out too much with the weak sisters," Mac had said, during one of the morning meets under the big acacia.
After the close call with the Frogs, Doc didn’t argue anymore. So he hadn’t said anything but he must have looked funny, because Mac said:
"You're doin too good, Doc. We're running out of meal and rehy and antibiotic, and we're running out of AK47s to trade for it. Even with kids dyin' like flies up here, there’s still too damn many people. Now you're givin' us more mouths to feed on the bubble. You need to tighten the triage. I don't think clinic mortality needs to go much lower than it is right now. Otherwise, we'll have too much material tied up at the low end."
Doc nodded his head, and Mac passed on to something else. But Doc knew that Darcy Bean, the young WHO nurse, wouldn't much like the idea of tightening the triage, which meant cutting off food and meds to the 'low end' in the kids’ ward, the brats who didn't have much of a chance. But that was too damn bad. Darcy Bean wasn't running the show. Mac was running the show.
And Doc was on board, one hundred and ten percent._



The boy Sekki had come back with news of Obo. Sitting on one of the green-painted wooden stools, Mac had listened while the Whizzer translated the boy's narrative, nodding, pulling his chin, looking back from Whizzer to the boy. Sekki had the makings of a scout. He had traveled alone and moved fast, following the river trails, stopping along the way to quiz the farmers trudging by with their yam sticks over their shoulders. Sometimes he dropped down to the river, and wandered along the bank to interview fishermen or small traders in their dugouts.
It had been a woman in a dugout, coming back from selling fish upriver, who told Sekki that the Nuer village of Dunnka, at the bight of the river between Korfur and Jebel, had been sacked.
The boy then had had to decide whether to come back with that, or go on. Sekki had continued downriver with a Nuer fisherman, a dangerous undertaking, the Nuer and the Dinka being age-old rivals. The Nuer had taken him to a fishing camp at dusk, where other Nuer waited on the bank to rob him of his basket.
But the boy, sensing the ambush, had ordered the fisherman to keep to the river. When the fisherman refused, Sekki struck the man on the arm with his assegi, and forced him over the side.
During this part of the story, Mac took a closer look at the boy. He remembered him now as being one of the excited children under Abdul's charge at the ambush of the Saladin. Already he seemed bigger, more self-possessed, although he couldn't be much older than fourteen. But he was a sinewy youth who met Mac's gaze with the right balance of deference and rugged self-regard.
A few miles above Dunnka, the boy had run the canoe into an overhanging thicket, waited until dark, then approached the Nuer encampment by a circuitous route. He could see that the huts were still smoldering. A small Nuer boy, tardily bringing home the family cows, almost fainted when an armed Dinka appeared on the cattle path. But he had told Sekki, in stuttering pidgin, all he knew about the attack. As usual, Obo had pounced on the village at first light and subjected the villagers to twenty-four hours of murder, rape, and looting.
Sekki had been careful to mark a scrap of paper to remind him of the details. And, sketching a face with tribal scars for the boy to look at, he had ascertained that the attackers were indeed Obo's Murrini. The Nuer herder estimated there were from 60 to 80 in the Obo's band.
After letting the boy continue, Sekki had carefully erased his footprints as he circled into the brush. An hour later a group of Nuer warriors came looking for him, but by that time he was miles away.
Mac had been very pleased with the way Sekki had conducted himself. He had done a careful scout in enemy country. He had kept his head and brought back useful intelligence. He had marked a paper to help him remember the terrain. (In the mission school, apparently, he had picked up some of the English alphabet and he understood numbers.) And he had the rarest gift for a scout, the ability to carry out the spirit of his mission on his own, without elaborate instructions.

_
Chapter 43


The Keyes infantry school for Dinka had graduated 90 young men. As far as anybody could remember this was the first disciplined group of soldiery on the plateau. Nobody counted the Khartoum thugs, the Arab slave raiders, or the Garang rabble. Originally, the graduates had been split into two light companies, one combat, one police. But for the raid on Obo, Mac had reformed the troops into three platoons, each under command of a sergeant (Breen, Keyes and Reyes).
The platoons in turn were broken down into five-man squads, each formed around either a sniper or an AK47. The rest of the Dinka were armed with shotguns or the operable Enfields.
Mac's ambush plan dedicated one platoon for marksmanship, four men in each squad providing cover for a marksman who would fire at middle ranges. Then an assault platoon built around the firepower of the automatic rifles. And a blocking platoon armed with shotguns. As always in bargain war, Mac's emphasized sharp attack and aggressive assault. If that didn’t work, a quick retreat, dispersal, regrouping at a pre-designated spot, then renewed attack when opportunity arose.
Mac sat on a little wooden stool under the council tree studying his home-made maps. The kid Sekki had brought back good drawings on the possible whereabouts of Obo's marauders. Mac was chewing over a scheme to intercept Obo somewhere along his apparent route.
It was appealing to think of all the benefits accruing from a successful strike against Obo. Certainly a morale booster for the Rembec villagers, who'd had their asses kicked repeatedly by the ersatz general. And kayoing Obo would cement the primacy of sergeants in the region.
Best of all it would blood Alpha and instill the confidence that only came from a winning fight. It would validate the importance of discipline and show the Dinka the practical payoff for tedious drill.
According to Sekki's informants, Obo had no wheeled transport, no carts or wagons to carry supplies. That meant he could move fast, but it also meant he had to stay within a couple of klicks of water. Thanks to Sekki, Mac knew which tributary of the Wau Obo was moving along. Tomorrow Breen could start an aerial recon.
Mac measured a few inches with his finger along the smudgy blue line representing the Wau. Eighty klicks. The Dinka could cover that distance in two days, traveling light. All the weapons and ammo could be ferried ahead by air and stashed.
Obo's unvarying tactic seemed to be the dawn attack. That meant he must camp far enough from a potential target to avoid detection by early morning goat herders. At least six or seven klicks, for sure. Then Obo would roust his boys at 0400 and double-time them into the sleeping ville at sunup.
According to the Sekki, an obvious next victim would be the village of Prama. Another Neur fishing village. Sekki, through the Whizzer, had called it beat-up, low-class, mostly cowless, the small population enervated by malaria, most of the adults blind with schistomiasis. Hardly worth the trouble for Obo. But the traders on the river said there'd been a good season, and the villages were enjoying unusual prosperity. Not only enough to eat, for once, but a surplus.
That damn Sekki had done good work. After concluding on his own that Prama might be a target, he had doubled around for a quick look at the terrain. He had drawn his crude map on a scrap of paper, which Mac now had unfolded beside his own hand-drawn map.
Mac thus could visualize the possibilities. The boy had shown where a trace followed the waddi into the village. He had drawn a ridge line and some debouching dry waddis. Logically, Obo would leave the river, circle behind the village until he cut the trace. Then he would camp in one of the dry waddis debouching from the ridge. And wait for morning.
That damn Sekki impressed Mac. Most armies are made up of teenagers, but despite their pliability teenagers usually don’t make good guerrillas. In bargain war, kids were best used as messengers or spies. They could be worked into the sidelines to watch and learn. But they lacked patience; they fidgeted and whispered; they got bored and wanted to go home.
In irregular war, older mopes were better. They didn’t expect miracles; they didn’t get sulky if the food stank, or if it rained. Sometimes they could think on their own. Sometimes they had an idea of the reasons behind the conflict, which made accepting the hazards easier. Generally, an older mope, twenty-five or thirty, ideally, could hump the extra mile, eat the crud, sleep in the mud, lie still in a ditch for hours, take the steady bead, and not get too rattled about the incoming
The kids in Rembec didn’t get it that the threat didn’t come from the barrel of an automatic rifle. Every fucking kid in town wanted his own AK47. That was the real deal. But a gaggle of boys with Kalashnikovs wasn’t much of a threat, except pointblank against civilians. The threat to Khartoum came solely from the fact of a disciplined formation moving freely. It didn’t matter much how they were armed. When a guerrilla column saunters into a ville unchallenged, the government suffers; when a government patrol can’t find the guerillas, the government suffers. Success in guerrilla war demanded mobility and good intel. Arms and fighting were secondary.
Mac knew that his insistence on marksmanship over firepower bucked the received wisdom, but in his experience the best use of automatic fire came during an emplaced ambush against grouped targets, such as a convoy, or a company afoot along a road. Wide-ranging guerrilla units usually didn’t need crew weapons, especially since machine guns were heavy, temperamental, and difficult to keep clean. Most of the planned contact would be at extreme range, where marksmanship mattered. Keye’s infantry school taught the use of the AK47 as a semi-automatic. Placed shots at middle ranges, bursts of three up close.
On the defensive, it was the sergeants’ doctrine to melt away. When irregulars got jumped at close range, everybody was too shit-for-brains to be effective anyway. Haul ass and disperse. With ammo scarce, the prospect of some panicky teen standing his ground and squeezing off thirty precious rounds in a wink (and probably all high) didn’t appeal to MacDonald. If ambushed (the school taught), fall back in good order on cover. Turn and fight only if hard pressed; otherwise, fade and regroup later.
Mac knew there had been a lot of unhappiness among the Dinka about the AK47s. The Dinka men thought they had earned the Kalashnikovs as rewards for the successful assault on the Saladin. But his decision to trade the rifles for meds and other needs had been the only way. It was all Mac had for barter. Anyway, he’d already spent too much of his life trying to get indigenous mopes up to speed with automatic weapons. Without a common language, it was nearly impossible. All these mopes, no matter how backward, somehow had seen the movies. The movies ruined them. Too many clips-from-the-hip. They could never seem to learn to bring the piece to the eye and lean into the stock. All their fire on full auto went high, even if they managed to keep their eyes open.
Teaching marksmanship with a bolt action like the Enfield was hard too, particularly the squeeze. But it could be shown without talk. At medium ranges, it was eighty percent the hold. Hold the rifle right, and anybody could start hitting man-sized targets out to 100 meters. Not everybody needed to be a marksman anyway. If each squad had one shooter, good enough. Particularly here, patrolling in rough country, with no fortified positions to think about.
Mac already had sent off Sekki and four of his young pals to lurk around the outskirts of Prama. He had entrusted the Dinka boy with one of the irreplaceable Radio Shack handhelds to carry in his basket. Tomorrow, he could put the Whizzer in the plane with Breen, so Whiz could talk with Sekki on the ground. As soon as they found Obo, Mac would strike.


Chapter 43


After caching the weapons and ammo, Breen flew back in the Cessna to pick up Doc and Mac. The Dinka company had left the day before, full of laughter and horseplay as they trotted down the beaten red laetrile path cutting through the scrub and the stunted acacias. Each man carried on his back his wicker basket containing a leather water bottle, meager kit, and a day’s ration of dura cake. They carried their assegais, and their cheap plastic thongs on cords around their necks. Mac’s light infantry on the march.
Doc didn’t want to leave the clinic. He was too busy to be traipsing around in the boonies. Besides, he’d caught a slight fever himself. Well, inevitably he’d pick up something. Too many sick mopes with too many bugs. But at least in the clinic he could see some order and cleanliness. It didn’t smell like shit and death anymore.
Brevold had been a huge help. Somehow he got that piece-of-shit Handy Billy running to pump water up into the 500 gallon concrete cistern on the roof. So the clinic had a dependable chlorinated water supply.
The day before he had released the last of the gunshot wounds left over from Obo’s attack. Malaria cases were dribbling in, five or six a day from the bush. He and the nurse Bean had set up a screened ward to keep the plasmodium from being swapped around in the village. Some of the tykes weren’t going to make it unless a surprise arrival of meloquine turned up from Kampala. All the tertiaries would be fine on cholorquine, which thank God they had. A snake bite had come in that had gone to gas gangrene, and amputation couldn’t wait. Bean said she knew how to take off a foot, but Doc didn’t believe she had ever done it before.
And now he was supposed to drop everything and play soldier with the other sergeants. Doc felt his forehead. It wasn’t malaria; the headache wasn’t that bad. He didn’t have dengue; his muscles always hurt but this wasn’t the wracking pain of breakbone. Some virus. And his bowels were drizzling again like a faucet. What the hell could he expect, over? Every kid who bowled through the door had the drizzling shits. And worms. They must have gone through a barrel of piperazine already.
Doc didn’t want to leave the clinic. He liked the crazy Dinka. He admired their amazing stoicism. They could bear pain that would drive a wuss Yank bug nuts. He liked their smiles and their submissive courtesy and resignation in the face of truly cosmic indifference. He liked all the friendly jumpy little urches. It made him feel good to use his ordinary skills to turn around some listless, match stick urch into a bright-eyed jumping bean, literally overnight.
And the fucking Dinka liked him. The urches followed him like the Pied Piper. When he walked to the shitter, a hundred kids followed in line. It made sense in a way. All their short miserable lives they’d seen a Conga line of their buds going West. Doc changed that. They probably thought he had some kind of magic for kids.
To Doc’s own amazement he found one day that he actually could speak some Dinka. Not a hella lot. But for a mope who had never learned any Spanish, even after a year in the Zone, it seemed hella strange that in a few months he could half-ass communicate with some Dinka mom with a brat at her pap and nothing on her buns but a string of beads.
Doc felt like he was doing something in the clinic, and now Mac wanted him to run off and play soldier. Okay, fine. Doc was aboard, one hundred and ten percent.


Chapter 44


General Obo had camped in a waddi five kilometers above the Neur village. His young followers had settled in among the crevices in the rock, lazily pulling khat, smoking, throwing dice for cigarettes. Earlier a couple of the older boys had gone down the waddi to scout the village, but now they were back in the camp. When dusk fell, Obo detailed two boys to climb the ridge and find lookout points a couple of hundred yards in either direction.
Sekki, sitting in an acacia thicket, watched one of the sentries lethargically picking his way through the jumble of rocks. He had also watched as the older Murrini boys scouted the village. So far, Sekki was pleased. Undoubtedly, to the Murrini scouts, everything in the unsuspecting village appeared normal: the cooking fires glimmering in front of the huts; a smudge of smoke hanging in the gathering dusk, as the only defense against the onslaught of mosquitoes that would soon rise from the river.
Sekki nodded to himself as he picked at his callused toes with the point of a knife. The Murrini scouts had seen the figures of the old women squatting over their pots. They had seen boys herding the few goats into thorn corrals. They had probably nudged each other when they saw the lithe figures of girls taking dried fish from the wooden racks. The Murrini had watched the dusky scene for a few minutes, then quietly backed down the rise, turned and disappeared into the waddi.
Sekki waited a while longer, until the listless sentry had settled himself on a rock, then slowly rose to his feet and went to find the sergeants.
Keyes and Breen already had sized up Obo's camp. When Sekki came in they were squatting on the sand with Mac, who was sketching a large map, depicting the waddi, the river, the approaches, and the disposition of Obo's young followers. With Sekki’s arrival, the Whizzer, seated cross-legged to one side, rose expectantly, ready to translate. But the boy shook his head, went straight up to Mac, and made his report in halting English.
"Obo man. Three. Look town. Go back."
Mac and Breen grinned at each other. The precocious young Dinka was becoming the sergeants' pet.
"Let's get the corporals over here," Mac said. "I want them to get something out of this."
With the two Dinka noncoms from each platoon gathered around, Mac began to explain the plan, with the Whizzer translating.
Since Obo had been lax in his security, Mac's plan could be a simple hammer and anvil. The Dinka noncoms would understand immediately, since it involved the same beating technique they used to trap ‘coots. First platoon, armed with the shotguns, would be the blocking force, cutting off Obo's retreat up the waddi. Second platoon would occupy the part of the ridge directly above the camp. Third platoon would strike straight up the waddi from the river.
"Second platoon will cover the entire kill zone," Mac explained. "They'll have good cover and will be able to place their shots. The third platoon will flush anybody who digs in, and push them, see, against first platoon here."
Mac pointed his stick at the squiggly line representing the ridge. "This here is the only sentry we got to worry about. If it's done quiet, the other sentry, here, won't hear nothin' until it's too late. Sergeant Breen and I will take care of this."
"I go too," Sekki said.
Mac shrugged. "Okay." The work was ugly. But if the boy wanted to learn the trade, this would be a good lesson.
As soon as the last light faded, the shotgun platoon, led by Keyes, filed off to circle behind the waddi. Keyes would click the Radio Shack handheld when he was in place. Or, if for some reason that failed, he would send a runner. The rest of the arms had been brought from the cache and distributed. The platoon corporals, using their own drawing sticks, were going over the details for the assault. The Dinka in the assault platoon were to advance as fire teams, with the AK47s firing at targets in bursts of three. Those with the Enfields would concentrate on protecting the team leader from counter fire. The blocking platoon would be using only buckshot, ineffective beyond fifty meters. Even so, the men in the assault platoon were to halt as soon as they heard the shotguns. That way, the Dinka wouldn't be shooting each other.
With the first glimmer of moonrise, Mac, Breen and the boy went up the ridge to kill the sentry. Mac and Breen took off their boots. The boy already was barefoot. Keeping in the shadows of the rocks, they moved halfway up the hill when Mac made the signal for the other two to stop and lie down. Then Mac, on hands and knees, went forward by himself.
He moved absolutely silently. The secret was patience. He set down one palm or knee firmly before moving the next. Mac easily spotted the sentry. The boy was seated on a rock, in clear silhouette, chewing khat, apparently half asleep. Mac decided it was safe to bring up Breen and Seki. Seki already had shown that he knew how to move.
When Breen and Sekki had a view, Mac signaled, finger to eye, watch me. From inside his shirt he brought out the garrote, a piece of thin wire attached at each end to a wooden toggle. The final stalk took almost five minutes, as Mac inched into position behind the sentry. When Mac was a few feet away the moonlight suffusing above the horizon was sufficient for him to see that the sentry was a thin youth, probably fifteen or sixteen, with a shaved head, a long sloping skull and large protruding lip. A rifle, a Chinese AK47, was lying on the ground at his feet. With slow fumbling fingers, the youth picked his khat and wadded it into his mouth.
Mac rose up, stepped forward one pace, and with his right hand flipped the wire around the boy's neck and gave a sharp yank. The only noise was a slight hiss, something like a bicycle tire puncture. A six-foot fan of aerosolized blood spewed from the two severed carotid arteries. The boy's body bucked violently. His bare feet scuffled on the gravel. Mac pushed his knee against the boy's back and continued sawing with the wire until he was sure he had cut all the way through the throat and vocal cords. Then he lay down to get out of silhouette, and motioned Breen and the boy to come forward.
The moon was just rising, bathing the top of the white rocks along the ridge with silvery light. The rocks nearby were black with spattered blood. Sekki, lying flat, stared at the almost severed head a few feet away with interest, until Mac motioned for him to sit on the rock where the sentry had been, and to pick up his rifle. Breen slipped back to bring up the second platoon.
Mac had decided to let the Dinka noncoms lead the assault themselves, to gain the experience. They were to move at the first sound of gunfire. Mac could hear the second platoon coming up the hill. Some rocks went clattering, followed by a whispered curse. That needed work. But it wasn't enough to alert Obo. Below him, Mac could see black clumps with arms and legs sprawled out against the gleaming white rocks, now bathed in moonlight. This was a good beginning exercise. Nothing much could go wrong. But he would make sure everybody understood. It wasn't always this easy.
Breen spread the platoon along the ridge, dividing the kill zone into five sections, corresponding to the AK47s. The Enfields were to take careful aim for a good first shot, since it would be their only chance of hitting anything. Doc, along with his ungainly medical pack, had brought up the M1s. Mac and Breen each took one and found positions. Doc and the Whizzer then began to break down the pack, setting aside dressings, splints and the homemade suture kits. Doc checked the supply of styrettes. But he would use none of the precious morphine for the enemy wounded.
From the ridge, several hundred meters above the waddi floor, it was impossible to distinguish Obo and his staff from his young followers. People seemed to by lying anyhow among the rocks and on the sand by the dry watercourse. It seemed to Mac that Obo might favor the middle. He would start there.
Mac signaled get ready. He flicked off the safety and fired. With the report, one of the black figures on the sand jumped half a foot in the air. A scream punctured the stillness before being drowned in a crash of gunfire, sounding like lumber being dropped on a cement floor. The waddi floor came to life. Some figures were not moving. But most were on their feet and running down the waddi toward the river. In another second came a second crash of fire as the waddi lit up with the sparks of muzzle flashes from the assault platoon. Half a dozen running figures pitched forward. The rest turned about face. The assault platoon, in hot pursuit, muzzles sparkling in the darkness, already were inside the kill zone.
"Cease fire up here," Mac said. And the Whizzer began yelling, "Binka din, binka din."
Breen was up and kicking at the few Dinka who had not immediately stopped shooting. The danger now was that the Dinka, their blood up, might accidentally kill each other.
The other end of the waddi suddenly lit up with a rolling volley. The fleeing Murrini had run into the concealed shotgun platoon. The Murrini, utterly surprised, had yet to fire a shot, and it was evident there would be no resistance. Now Mac had to get down into the waddi to assure that surrendering prisoners weren't slaughtered out of hand.
"Doc. Set the perimeter," Mac said. There wouldn't be a counterattack. But it made sense in a training exercise to go through the whole drill. Doc could handle this, get some pickets around the waddi, get a patrol moving. There was just no excuse for being jumped as easily as Obo had been. There'd be plenty of time for Doc to clean up the mess below after he'd taken care of security.
Mac and Breen zigzagged down through the rocks. The wounded were screaming. It looked like a dozen or so bodies were sprawled on the ground. Remarkably, the Dinkas seemed under control: no wild firing, like there'd been at the Saladin. A lone shotgun went off somewhere up the waddi. Then a mass of people trotted into view, their hands straight up in the air. They were all yelling something, probably the Murrini for, "Don't shoot." Some of the Dinka were laughing. Then Keyes appeared out of the gloom, his huge automatic shotgun, almost as long as he was, at port.
"I think this is the lot,” Keyes said. “I didn't see anybody get by."
"Any of our guys hurt?"
"That's negative," Keyes said.
"Breen," Mac said. "Make sure nobody in second platoon got hit." With so much firing, it was always possible a stray bullet had found its way up the ridge.
"Aye," Breen said.
To Keyes Mac said" "Let's bring your prisoners down here and sort them out."
Dinkas from the shotgun platoon were pushing a mass of arms and legs, some forty prisoners, toward the middle of the waddi.
"Noncoms forward," Mac said. "I want them to see the right way to disarm and search prisoners. Let's get the wounded over here, too. Why is that guy howling?"
"He's gutshot," Keyes said.
"Any hope?"
"No."
"Get rid of him," Mac said.
Keyes disappeared behind the group of prisoners. There was a bang and an orange muzzle flash. The howling stopped.
"That'll save Doc some trouble," Mac said.
A tall plump figure took a tentative step away from the throng of prisoners.
"I am speaking English," General Obo said.
"That's fine," Mac said. "Please tell everybody they must keep their hands on top of their heads."
"Yes. I do that."
"And they must now drop to their knees at one meter intervals," Mac said. "Anybody who resists will be shot dead instantly."
"I say that."
By the time Doc got back to the waddi, the prisoners had been searched and sorted out.
"Yes?" said Mac.
"I got pickets spaced at a hundred meters around the perimeter, and a five-man roving patrol at each end of the waddi," Doc said.
Mac nodded his head. That was good enough.
"I'm gonna need Whizz. Doc, triage the wounded. Don't waste too much time on anybody who can't walk."
"Aye," said Doc. Aye was Marine Corps bullshit. But that's what the other sergeants said, and Doc had picked it up. Nobody was going to say sir. And during an action okay wasn't quite enough.
Obo and his staff of five adults, the evil scoutmasters, had been set to one side. The child brigands, those who weren't wounded, were squatting on their heels in rows, their hands clasped on their heads, some stoic, some trembling with anticipation.
"Whizz. I'm gonna spiel to our guys," Mac said. "Keep up best you can. Stop me if somethin' ain't clear. Okay, everybody, listen up. This went pretty good tonight. But I want to run over it real quick. Sergeant Keyes says we were up against a force of 87. We killed 33, and 12 are wounded. That's very, very good. This was called the hammer and anvil. You force the enemy against a fixed position.
"Now listen up. We did good tonight because Obo here was very dumb. First, he didn't know we were around, and didn't even believe there existed something like you, a disciplined Dinka army."
Mac turned to General Obo, squatting behind the noncoms, his hands clasped on his scarlet beret, obsequiously nodding his head as he tried to keep up with Mac's spiel.
"Did you know about us?" Mac asked him.
"I am not," Obo said.
Mac turned back to the noncoms. "He didn't know about us. But that's no excuse for being lax. Always assume you are operating against a capable enemy. Always, always, mind your perimeter..."
Whizzer shook his head.
"What? Perimeter? Okay, always keep a guard all around, just like you do with your cows. That's were Obo messed up. And now look what's gonna happen to him..."
"What is that?" said Obo, his voice squeaking.
"He's gonna be shot," Mac said. "Along with his officers."
After the Whizzer translated, the noncoms raised their weapons and cheered. Obo's officers, who didn't understand either Dinka or English, looked quizzically at Obo. But the general was trembling so violently that no explanation was necessary.
"Trenton, New Jersey," Obo managed to say.


Chapter 45


Doc unbuckled the harness and slipped the dead weight of the pack from his shoulder. Half a dozen wounded boys were sprawled in the dirt before him, lying quietly, trying not to make any noise. Doc was ticked that Mac had executed the boy with the abdominal gunshot before Doc could look at him. Sure, the kid would have died anyway. Nobody pulled through in this cesspool of pathogens with an internal wound. Still, Doc was the Doc; he should have made the call, even if, to tell the truth, he didn't want to make that kind of call. He hated triage: he wished there was enough morphine to go around; he wished he could evac these kids to some clean place, where a gutshot could be opened in a sterile field; he wished he didn't have to give up on the hopeless, who were only hopeless because they happened to get hurt in this shithole.
The thing that secretly pissed him off right now was that he was glad Mac made these calls. Even if they were bullshit, still, Mac was willing to take the responsibility. Sometimes Doc didn't like what he saw in himself: that he was just another one; another guy who bitches but doesn't want to take the strain himself. But it was hella easier. Fact of it, Mac generally made good calls. Doc half the time didn't know what the fuck to do. In a fucked up situation like this, better to tag after somebody who knew at least halfass what he was doing. When he got back to the world again, Doc would make his own calls. Until then, he was butt-up for the program.
That didn't mean he gave up his opinion. His opinion was that the whole deal on the plateau was a fucking waste of time. What? Nothing could be done for these fucking people. Nothing that would last. Sure, some basics, the clinic, the water supply. But turn away for a minute and everything would fall to shit. The clinic, the school, old Keyes’ light infantry company? When the sergeants left, they'd be gone like a puff of smoke. Things would go right back to shit.
Yeah, Doc took some pride in getting the Rembec clinic up to speed. That was what he did, primary care in the field, and he was pretty damn certain he got it right. But by himself he was nothing; he'd be about as effective as nurse Bean had been. The clinic worked because his orders were backed up by Mac's militia. And how long would that last?
Doc squatted on his haunches looking over the latest mess. All bullet wounds this time. Pretty simple to sort out: a bullet through the arm equals life; a bullet inside the body cavity equals death. After witnessing the example of the boy who yelled too much, all his patients were trying to shut up at least. They were biting their tongues no matter how much they hurt. Mac didn't want any interruptions while he debriefed the Dinka. Doc began probing for a bullet fragment lodged against a kid's ulna. The boy was almost out of his mind with fear and pain, but he kept his yap shut. Meanwhile, Mac had stopped asking questions and was now delivering one of his boring and long-winded monologues on infantry tactics.
Mac would drone on for a minute or two, then stop while the Whizzer translated. Every so often the translation would bog down: enfilade, the Whizzer didn't know the word; interlocking fires, the Whizzer stumbled around. Then he and Mac would huddle to think of some other way to get it across.
Doc slathered on his home-made antiseptic potion (plenty of that anyway), and began closing the incision. Not even a topical for this kid; it was amazing he didn't go off his head, not being able to yell. Meanwhile, Mac droned on. Basically, it was pretty damn simple. Obo was too cocky, didn't think he needed to bother with patrols, or the perimeter, and he got jumped. Of course Mac had set the thing up as a textbook example, for the benefit of the Dinka. Mac was still trying to get across the basic idea of soldiering: see, guys, discipline works, organization works. Get it, you men of Rembec? You were timid, helpless, and easily kicked around by bullies like Obo. Then you went to school. And see? You're the same goddamn people, still faint-hearted cowards, but now you've been organized into a disciplined group. Now you easily knocked this bully on his ass. Was Obo so terrifying? No. You see now he was nothing. You think it's because you have weapons. It isn't the rifles. Don't think it's the rifles. The weapons without the school are worthless. It's the school that defeated Obo.
Were the Dinka getting any of this spiel? Doc couldn't tell. They stood there in their grimy orange robes, balanced on one foot like a bunch of storks, grinning happily at the carnage. It was impossible to know what they thought. By the time Mac and the Whizzer concluded the lecture, Doc had also finished with the wounded. Two of the little boys would die overnight. No morphine, of course; they'd have to gut it out. Three of the others should make it no problem. The gray area was the last kid, about fifteen maybe, with a shattered forearm. Doc would have to take it off, a very iffy deal, since it was fifty-fifty the kid'd go ahead and die of blood poisoning or some other infection. But the kid looked strong.
Doc groaned and lurched to his feet. No use feeling sorry for these punks. These same pathetic children were the ones who had trashed the ville, raping and killing as they went. Yesterday they had been swaggering around in their tiger camos, fierce and unrepentant. Now they were frightened little boys, with tears running down their cheeks. Doc turned to find Mac at his elbow.
"What have we got," Mac said.
"Those guys just scratches, those two goners, these three okay to move, that one other needs amputation."
"Here's the deal," Mac said. "We're outta here right now. I'm sure that ville down the road is apeshit." Mac nodded toward the wounded. "It's gonna be nasty for any of these Murrini they catch alive."
"Three can travel no prob. This one, the radial is pulverized. But I think he can make it."
"No morphine," Mac said.
"I'll take it off no anesthesia. But he's gonna yell."
Doc could see Mac was taking that as a criticism.
"He can yell his fuckin head off," Mac said. Doc was starting to get uncomfortable. Mac was looking at him too long. "Tell you what, you decide on the two goners. You can either finish 'em yourself or leave 'em for the village."
Doc found himself looking at the ground. This was just exactly what he didn't want.
"After we move our people away from the area, we'll stop long enough for you to take this guy's arm off. That okay?"
"Yes," Doc said.
"I'm going to deal with Obo," Mac said, turned abruptly, and walked away.
Doc knew what that meant. By now, Doc knew how Mac operated. Hit hard and take prisoners. Execute the officers, non-coms and any other special bad guys. Cut everybody else loose. Doc agreed in theory; it was a lot less useless killing. But it was also hella cold-blooded.
All of a sudden, Doc felt weary. The pack lying on the ground seemed huge and heavy. Doc didn't want to kill these two kids. The fact was, he couldn't do it on his own. If Mac had ordered him to do it, he would, of course, grudgingly, and then blame Mac. But Doc knew there was no way he could shoot these two little boys without an order. And the fact was, Mac was certainly right; when the villagers found the two wounded Murrini they'd gladly torture the hell out of them. Doc squatted and began working the harness around his shoulders. Abdul, probably sent back by Mac, had herded the walking wounded away with the other prisoners. The two Murrini goners, panting, their tongues lolling in the Q, watched Doc struggling with the straps. Both of the kids were groaning, and drooling blood. Doc hoped he was out of hearing range when the villagers arrived.
Doc stopped struggling with the pack, slipped out of the harness and stood up. Everybody else had already started out along the footpath. On the bluff he caught sight of a five-man Dinka patrol working through the boulders. Fuck it! Fuck it! Mac started unbuckling one of the flaps on the pack. He was with the program one hundred and ten percent. But Jesus fucking Christ. Gently, moving quickly, he injected each teenager with a 50 cc morphine styrette. Then he hefted the pack and followed the others down the trail. It was a cardinal sin, wasting morphine on goners. Someday the sergeants might desperately need it themselves. But sometimes... Doc just hadn't been able to think of any other way he could leave._


Chapter 46

(Date deleted)

Lloyd Cunningham
Assistant Commercial Attaché
United States Embassy
Khartoum, Republic of Sudan

The Honorable Thomas Jester
Chairman, House Subcommittee on African Affairs
Sam Rayburn Building
Washington, D.C.

Dear Congressman Jester,

Per your request, I’m continuing to keep you apprised of the very fluid and developing situation in Jebel Marra Province. Unhappily (as you aptly perceived) staff here, checked by department policy and by intense pressure from the current regime, has not been able, fully, to attend to or allay the insurrectionary danger which I know both of us recognize as threatening regional stability, and consequently the strategic interest of the United States.
This, as you pointed out, implies no criticism but merely reflects reality. You were kind enough to encourage my initial efforts, and these efforts now, I believe, are bearing fruit. As you noted, reliable intelligence is the key. The “moles” to which I referred during your inspection have been in frequent communication, providing a very accurate assessment of what increasingly appears to be an alarming turn of events.
I regret to inform you that the province, in essence, has been lost. Rebel formations, led by American mercenaries, have swept government forces from Rembec, Wau, Dormic, Pacong, effectively cutting off the province from the rest of the republic. Of course the remoteness of the province makes in an ideal staging area for further incursions. Sadly, however, Khartoum seems in paralysis, the army not having taken the immediate steps needed to counter the spreading menace.
You solicited my candor, and now I venture to take advantage of your courageous invitation. The embassy is powerless. I am convinced the only alleviating mechanism will be congressional influence on MAC/S funding. Military assistance is a potent lever here. The MAC/S monies slated for Army/Sudan should NOT be released until certain essential conditions are met.
(A.) The 20th Mechanized, under the brevet command of Major al-Qayrawani (the victor at Waddi Bahr) must be detailed to the Jebel immediately. Major al-Qayrawani is Army/Sudan’s only blooded field officer, one who rose on merit rather than patronage. My interviews with the major convince me he is of the stuff needed to crush the uprising before it metastasizes. In past, the efficacy of the 20th ahs been compromised by incompetence, lethargy, and corruption; this the major has corrected. And the ranks swell with scrappy fighters enthusiastic to campaign under the new leadership.
(B.) The consignment of All-Terrain Bicycles (ATB) has been held up at Mombassa by red tape, even though the mortars for the 20th (shipped simultaneously) have reached the regiment. For a protracted campaign in the Jebel (where some roads are in poor repair) the ATBs will be vital for enhancing troop mobility. Intelligence indicates that enemy transport relies on Chinese ATBs; Khartoum requires an equal capability. It should be a top priority for embassy Nairobi to secure the release of this material.
(C.) Liaison with SEDEC is of paramount importance. I took the liberty of arranging a clandestine meeting with Col. Jacques Montesqui, of the French legation. He reports Paris is alarmed. He worries of course that conflict in the Jebel might spill over into C.A.R. One Legionnaire already has died in a sharp exchange with Jebel insurgents, during a probe in search of a French survey par y that has disappeared along the frontier. The Colonel is at pains to emphasize the Legion parachute regiment based in Bangui could be made available to cooperate (discretely) with operations in the Jebel.

These are observations and comments for your consideration. I share your deep concern regarding the deteriorating situation in the southern province. I will continue to keep you updated in this matter should you wish it, and as long as you share my feelings that this arrangement serves our country’s interests.

Very truly yours,

Lloyd Cunningham


Chapter 47


Philip Reese, the general sales manager for the Union Carbide Company in East Africa, needed to call upon all his resources of stoic patience for the taxi ride to the American embassy. The heat in Khartoum was crushing. The cloudless cobalt sky poured down molten lead. Reese could barely gasp for breath, his chest was under such suffocating pressure, and the sweat poured off his forehead. The noontime glare at the airport had been so blinding that Reese had a headache the moment he stepped off the plane. Now, inside the burning metal confines of the Toyota cab, it was literally like being roasted alive. If he hadn't been assured of being within the embrace of the embassy's air conditioning within a few minutes he felt he might actually go mad.
With an almost physical effort, Reese tried to lever his mind away from the torture of his sodden business suit and from his agonized breathing and to concentrate instead on the scene around him.
Khartoum in summer. Despite the hellish inferno, the decaying streets were thronged with pedestrians wrapped in their brilliant white galabiehas, their turbans wrapped tightly against the nose and mouth as protection from the gritty wind. When the taxi slowed for the internecine struggle at an intersection the stink of human shit was overpowering, wafted into the car by the scouring hatamarra.
Reese did manage to note that there seemed to be a lot more of the new bicycles being ridden in the streets. They were the new American bikes, all the same model, sleek, freshly painted, with thick fat tires, gears and derailleur. Very unusual for Khartoum, and very different from the clunky, Chinese one-speeds that provided the normal transport for the middle-class Sudanese.
Reese was sensitive to the bicycles because he had just purchased fifty similar ones himself for his Juba agent. The bikes easily were worth $500 US apiece. But Reese had paid only $50 per. They were outstanding bargains to be had in Africa if one knew the right people.
For once, Reese didn't resent the obligatory call at the embassy and the purposeless chit-chat with Avery, the commercial rep. Anything to get out of this heat. And for once he looked forward to the tepid glass of Coca Cola that was always offered. His throat was so parched he could barely summon sufficient moisture to swallow.
Reaching inside his coat pocket, Reese found his notebook. Who was the new secretary? Nora. Fran, the thin-lipped Midwesterner, had completed her contract and gone home. Nora hailed from Hartford, and had a grown son who was a junior at Penn State. Reese flipped the page. And who was that ambitious young assistant rep? Lloyd Cunningham. Reese knew he would be doing Avery a favor by telling him to keep an eye on that one. But of course he wouldn't. In Sudan, it didn't pay to mix in any kind of politics.
More and more it was becoming obvious that the regime was clamping down hard on even the faintest suspicion of dissent. While in Juba, he had heard gossip that the generals were weeding the officer corps of "secularists," which probably meant anyone not cleaving slavishly to the fundamentalist line. From the same source, Reese had heard that even experienced field grade officers were being ticketed for oblivion.
Reese had even heard hushed rumors of open mutiny in the field, including the murder of a commanding officer by his fundamentalist subordinates. To the fanatics now ruling in Khartoum, competence meant nothing. Loyalty and patriotism were not sufficient. To hold high army rank one had to be insular, xenophobic, and infused with myopic religious zeal.
At last, the embassy gates. Reese stepped out under the awning, his clothing as sodden as if he'd just emerged from the swimming pool. In front of him, one of the amazing Marines, in a crisp, pressed uniform, waited at rigid attention for him to present his passport.
"Mr. Reese for Mr. Avery," Reese said. If Avery wasn't immediately available it didn't matter. Reese would gladly chit-chat with Nora, or even that cub Cunningham for an hour. Anything for some air conditioning.



Lloyd Cunningham lifted the phone and heard the chirpy voice of Nora, Avery's new secretary. It was someone to see him. Old Reese, the battery man, making his semi-annual homage. Cunningham sighed. He already had a full plate. But there wasn't any way by it. Avery was keen on having all the American reps drop by the embassy. "Keep on top that way." Right. Poor old Avery wouldn't keep on top if his head inflated like a beach ball.
"Send him right in," Cunningham said, with the faintest edge of sarcasm. Nora laughed. She was twenty years older than Cunningham. But not bad looking at all for a woman her age.
Cunningham glanced at his watch. Maybe he could have old Reese in an out in ten minutes. He wouldn't offer him a Coke. That would save time. The ice machine was broken anyway.
Of course, it was just possible that Cunningham might extract something useful from the battery salesman. Didn't Reese have some business dealings on the Jebel Marra, flogging flashlights or something? Of course he was out of the loop on the politics. Actually, it would be better not to mention the Jebba at all. It was a critical time. Any moment Cunningham expected word from his man on the plateau about developments that had been initiated by Cunningham himself, developments that could change decisively the course of the southern war.
Already this morning he had heard from the 20th. Major al-Qayrawani was on the move at last. It was damnably frustrating that he didn't have the all-terrain bicycles with him. It would be the perfect campaign to test the ATBs in field conditions. But apparently African red tape still had them bottled up in Mombassa.
Everything else seemed going to plan, although it had taken another letter to Congressman Jester to get MAC-S finally to release the funds to underwrite the campaign. Major al-Qayrawani rightly insisted on fielding an up-to-strength battalion. Cunningham could congratulate himself that he had cut a mile of red tape by having the pay vouchers and uniform allotments assigned directly to al-Qayrawani. The battalion never would have left Khartoum otherwise. Now the major (undoubtedly soon to be lieutenant colonel) was on the march. Congressman Jester would be very pleased.
This afternoon, after he had gotten rid of the tiresome Reese, Cunningham would meet again with SEDEC's Col. Montesqui, about coordinating his elements. The colonel had told him yesterday that Paris was fully in the picture and in entire agreement. Discretion remained paramount. The French geologists, masquerading as a mapping party, had disappeared in the vicinity of the Air Mountains, fifty miles inside Sudan, and the colonel insisted on an impenetrable cordon sanitaire. Montesqui had authorized Legion search parties to probe the perimeter of the survey team’s last reported position. The colonel was very concerned that any unchecked movements from the Jebba plateau might lead to someone else stumbling onto the French prospectors. That would make it very ticklish indeed for the French legation. Obviously, Col. Montesqui had every reason to want the political turbidity on the plateau cleared up with utmost dispatch.
The door opened and Reese, the frail old battery man, stumbled inside, the meager gray strands of his coif plastered against his skull.
"I can't believe the heat," Reese said.
Cunningham smiled and waved him toward a chair. The weather, naturally. And then they'd talk about the prospects of the soccer team. And then the battery man was out the door.
Cunningham had a big day ahead of him. He wanted to get back to his plate._


Chapter 48


Doc was kneeling on a hemispherical mound of red clay, probably the remains of a collapsed termite colony, his carbine balanced across his knee. Below him in the eroded gully cowered a knot of terrified Dinka. They were jammed together, shoulder to shoulder, some of the women clasping wailing brats. The men stared up at him open mouths and saucer eyes, probably gauging whether he’d shoot them if they made a break down the waddi. Doc didn’t know what he’d do.
What a fuckup! Tor’s platoon, supposedly guarding the left flank of the refugee column headed for the Brit’s plantation, had got jumped down in the tree line like a bunch of rookies. Surprised and ambushed like a bunch of fucking five-jump Johnnies. When the firing broke out, Mac immediately ordered Doc to hold the hundred or so Dinka charity cases in the gully. Now they were all rounded up, crouched in the dirt, docile, but scared shitless. Doc was scared too, but he knew the Dinka needed to stay put until Mac got a defense organized. What the fuck had happened? They’d been running the usual overflow from the refugee camp down to the cotton scheme. Ordinarily, the sergeants wouldn’t even have mounted a guard. But the Rembec storekeeper had told Mac the Bedui were out raiding.
Tor’s platoon hadn’t been jumped by any raggedy-ass Bedui. They’d been jumped by soldiers, and there’d been a panicky ass-over-teakettle rout, completely shit-for-brains. What the hell could you expect? A soldier couldn’t be made in a couple of months.
The main thing now, the panic of the overrun platoon couldn’t be allowed to infect everybody else. Doc had just seen Mac and Keyes kill two Dinka kids who ignored Mac’s order to hold up. The two kids, part of the ambushed platoon, totally out of their minds, had wanted to keep on hauling after the reached the cover of the reverse slope of the hill. All of Tor’s bunch who survived the first volley came barreling up the hill and would have kept right on hauling ass for home if Mac hadn’t been right there, below the brow of the hill, to hold them up.
One Dink kid, absolutely bug nuts with fear, had brushed by Mac. Mac wheeled and shot him in the side, at about T4. The kid jumped like he was rebounding at the net, tumbled head over heels, then somehow got up and staggered a few feet, vomiting blood. That struck Doc as unusual. Probably a bullet fragment had been deflected into his stomach. Mac, hardly looking had fired again point blank, and the boy’s head disappeared in a puff of red fog.
Keyes killed Awan, who, ironically, had been the first kid that Keyes had recruited so many months before. He fell dead instantly from a blast in the chest from Keyes’ pump. Awan had been out in front, leading the rout, insane with fear. Doc wondered if the boy had a chance to realize it was Keyes, the friendly sergeant who had admired his basket on that blazing afternoon. Probably not. The kid had been out of his mind. Anyway, the buckshot at close range had blown his heart to rags.
` The example of Awan and the other mope had brought the rest of the fleeing platoon to their senses. Now Keyes and Mac were pushing and shoving them down, into prone positions, in a line along the rim of the hill. Naturally most of the assholes had thrown down their weapons in the pell-mell retreat. But now Breen had scrounged up a few spare Enfields and shotguns that Keyes was forcing into the Dinkas' reluctant hands.
Doc had nothing but sympathy for the Dinkas. There was nothing worse, nothing more hella terrifying, than to get jumped and overrun. All anybody wanted was to get the fuck away. But that meant everybody got slaughtered. Mac said Sudanese regulars in the trees, not Bedui. That meant, sure as shit, they’d have a blocking unit somewhere down the waddi to pick off the runaways.
Doc, crouched on the termite mound, trembled in every limb, the usual fearsickness knotting his guts. Anybody would feel like running. But he could see what Mac had to do; it was the only way. Mac and Keyes had been tough, but they’d halted the retreat. They’d got the remnants of the platoon turned around and facing the fight. Meanwhile, Abdul’s platoon, still in good order, had formed up somewhere on the other side of the waddi to cover that side.
It looked like Tor’s Dinks lying along the brow of the hill might have steadied a little. They were lying quietly and didn’t seem so shit-for-brains. Maybe they’d realized by now that they were trapped and gonna have to fight.
From his crouched position Doc couldn’t see if anything was happening on the other side of the hill. He’d heard some firing from the tree line to the left (he could just make out the scrawny tops of the acacias) but that had petered out, except for occasional short bursts from a machine gun. He assumed that if these really were Sudanese regulars they’d by now be in a skirmish line approaching the hill. The machine gun was someplace on the right. The short bursts kicked up dust along the brow of the hill, and some of the strays crackled a few feet over Doc’s head. White dust thrown up by the impacts already had turned the faces and shoulders of some of the Dinka clay white. They couldn’t rise up to fire back.
Something had happened. The sporadic bursts ceased, and Mac and Keyes immediately rose up and began firing, yelling at the Dinks to do likewise. Doc also heard the sharp bark of an AK47 somewhere on the other side of the hill. Mac dropped below the rim and waved Doc over.
“That goddamn Sekki’s taken the gun” Mac said. “He can’t work a heavy; you better get your butt over there.”
With one quick glance Doc understood. The gutsy little half-pint Sekki. All by himself, without orders, he’s zigzagged through the rocks and aced the gunners, who had set up their piece inside a shallow depression a top a knob two hundreds meters on the right. Sekki, atop the knob, was firing at the approaching skirmishers one shot at a time, which probably meant he was about out of BBs. The skirmishers were army, all right, dressed in khaki, moving forward in a loose line along the front of the hill.
Already the Khartoum regulars had dodged around the flanks of the knob. The little brat couldn’t cover both sides. He didn’t know how to work the machinegun. Doc hated it, but it was pretty damn obvious. One of the sergeants had to get over there.
It had to be Doc. The other sergeants were marksmen and could give cover. More than that, Doc was younger and faster. Anyway, no time for arguing. Mac wouldn’t listen anyway.
Doc rolled over the hillside and began to zigzag through the rock and termite mounds toward the knob, his carbine at port. He expected fire and winced at the first shots. But the bullets flew high and to the right, and Mac and Keyes immediately suppressed the firing, zeroing on the muzzle flashes in the grass.
On top of the knob Doc found two dead Khartoum regulars and the exhilarated 14-year-old Sekki. Doc toppled a body off the piece, face down, so he wouldn’t have to look at it. The piece turned out to be an old .30 caliber Browning, belt-fed, air-cooled, lever trigger. Doc sat down behind the handles and swiveled the barrel ninety degrees. The grips were sticky with blood. Doc hated to touch blood without a latex barrier, but it was too late, and he had nothing to wipe it with anyway.
The web belt had got all tangled around the arm of one of the dead soldiers. He’d been feeding the weapon when Sekki killed him, and the webbing also was wet with blood. Doc draped the belt over his right leg. He'd have to try to keep the belt feeding with is knee, and just hope the breech didn’t jam.
Behind him, Sekki suddenly let off a short burst. The boy pointed wildly down the slope directly behind Doc. Doc couldn’t see anything but he knew what was up: the Sudanese were working around on that flank.
“Good boy,” shouted Doc, patting the kid on the shoulder. “Keep those fuckers off my back.”
The main skirmish line, facing the hill and to Doc’s left, had halted, apparently waiting for the knob to be retaken. Most of the soldiers were partially hidden among the rocks and scrub brush. But some were visible and in enfilade. Half a dozen khaki-clad soldiers knelt behind boulders about two hundred meters off, bunched up like a bunch of fools, peering up at the knob and wondering what to do next.
Then, another 100 meters further out, a white man suddenly popped up. Beret, red patches. A fucking Frog Legionnaire. The Frog began blowing a whistle and rotating his arm, trying to get the soldiers’ attention. Probably wanted them to fall back on his position.
But the Frog was a fool too. Or maybe, even though a professional, he didn’t fully appreciate the effective range of the Browning, even this ancient piece of shit.
Doc’s first burst twirled the Legionnaire out from behind cover like and doll and he sprawled comically, both legs flying up. The Sudanese regulars cautiously had started to pull back but it was too fucking late for them. Doc cut them down with short bursts, one after another. He was too far away to hear anything.
As Doc straightened out the web belt he suddenly realized the boy Sekki was peering over his shoulder, studying Doc's operation of the piece. Doc grabbed the boy’s arm and roughly pushed him to the side, then emphatically pointed to the flank. The kid nodded vigorously, and then, chastised for his dereliction, cautiously inched his head up to look out for the inevitable counterattack from that side. Sure, it was natural for a kid to be curious. But Sekki had to understand: watch the flank.
Doc admitted, though, that the kid had done a great job, taking the knob. He was a good kid. A hella lot ballsier than Doc had ever been. But he’d have to learn to serve crew weapons some other time.
Peering low over the sights, Doc couldn’t see any other targets. Everybody had gone to earth. Now, no firing at all, which should give Mac some time to organize a sensible withdrawal. Crouched behind the ancient piece, Doc suddenly realized that he wasn’t fearsick. He should be; because this was no joy, hemmed in or maybe surrounded by a superior force that turned out to be led by professional soldiers. It defied logic that he wasn’t fearsick. His guts were okay. It must be that he felt had had some kind of control. A tough spot, but they weren’t helpless.
Two sharp whistles from the hill. Mac signaling withdrawal. Then Doc heard another sound, the distant whop, whop, whop of rotors.
The kid got it, and immediately glanced to the west. They both saw it, a black speck steadily growing, just above the horizon. Doc jerked his thumb. The kid rolled over the lip of the knob, disappeared, then reappeared a second later hinking like a rabbit through the rocks.
Doc opened fire, raking the grass where he knew the Sudanese must be hunkered down Might as well keep their heads down and blow off the remaining ammo. When the breech finally jammed, Doc pushed the weapon aside, rolled out of the depression and began his run for the top of the hill. A gun went off on the rim, which meant that at least one sergeant had stayed to cover his retreat.
When Doc was safely over the hilltop he found Mac waiting for him, kneeling, his M1 in the crook of his arm.
“They got us pretty much boxed,” Mac said. “With that fucking chopper overhead it won’t be easy.” Mac nodded curtly toward the pack of refugees still huddled in the waddi. “I plan to take this mob out to the south, over the ridge.”
Doc nodded. But he didn’t see how that was going to happen. The southern slope of the ridge, treeless and barren, offered no cover. And it was still hours until dark.
“As soon as that bird is overhead, these assholes are gong to push us hard,” Mac continued, “I want you and the kid to hang back here, up in those rocks. Keep ‘em off our backs as long as you can, being prudent. Then book after us.”
Doc noticed that Sekki stood patiently in a cluster of boulders above the gully.
“It ain’t nice but I gotta do it,” Mac said. “You two are the quickest of what I got.”
“Well, the kid is good,” Doc said.
“Yeah,” Mac smiled. “The kid is good. At least somebody was paying attention.”
Mac reached into his haversack and brought out four clips of 7.62. “For the kid,” Mac said.



After Mac disappeared down the waddi, Doc scrambled up into the rocks to find cover. Behind and overhead, the pitch of the rotor changed, and when Doc glanced back he saw the helio veering right, evidently after a target. Kneeling next to Sekki, Doc tried to catch his breath and control the trembling of his legs. He wasn’t fearsick; the shaking was just from hormones and exertion. Sekki, his intelligent face cocked to one side, his rifle propped against his skinny shoulder, seemed completely calm, squatting nonchalantly among the rocks, by appearance not the least agitated by the violence of the last hour.
“Okay.” The battle fog in Doc’s mind had lifted. He knew exactly what had to be done. He just had to get it across to Sekki, with pantomime and his little bit of pidgin Dink. The raghead soldiers now would storm the hill. He and Seki had to keep them out of the waddi while Mac found some kind of cover for the refugee mopes and prepared a breakout. At the same time he and Sekki had to avoid being turned on the right.
Okay. Doc had to work up the hill to protect the flank. Sekki would get the more dangerous job of staying down closer to the waddi on the left. It had to be that way. Even though Doc was a piss-poor marksman, he was hella better than the kid. If the kid was going to hit anything he needed to be close.
Sekki nodded his head sagely at Doc’s stumbling directions, his clear brown eyes serene. Doc gave him the clips. One shot at a time Doc explained in pantomime. He didn’t want him to blow off all the rounds at once. Sekki nodded again. Doc saw he understood. The kid was hella smart.
Firing had started on the left. The helio (Doc recognized it now as a French Virago, armed with rocket pods and door mounts) banked sharply, dived, and a stream of red tracers from the door-mounted 7.62 started lashing the ground. He couldn’t see much from his crouching position but the machine seemed to be hovering over a kind of ledge or outcropping on the far side of the waddi. The helicopter descended another hundred feet to be able to fire deeper into the cave-like depression. Anybody caught in there would be …
Suddenly green tracers leaped up from the ground on either side of the chopper. The door gunner in his harness pitched back and forth like a doll, the gun barrel tilting crazily; the downward rotor wash blew streaks of blood back across the fuselage.
The machine pulled up sharply. It had been hit, and lazy arcs of green tracers followed the machine’s slanting progress as it veered back toward the tree line. Then the machine began to auto-rotate and disappeared behind the hill. No smoke, no flame. But it had landed hard.
Doc wiped the sweat and spittle from his face. He could only guess at what had happened. Probably Mac had stuck some of the refugees under the ledge to draw the machine low enough for the sergeants to hit it with AK47s. A French helio was out of the fight. But very tough shit for the fish bait under the ledge.
Over the tree line another Virago appeared but it headed toward the downed machine. The second pilot might turn out to be shy about getting too close to the waddi. At least this bought Mac some time. Now Doc could hear more gunfire from farther away, down by the head of the waddi. Probably Abdul’s platoon, with Breen, engaging the blocking unit.
Directly in front Doc could see some of the skirmisher peering over the lip of the hill. He could see other soldiers moving into the depression atop the knob where Sekki had killed the gunners. He didn’t see anybody on the right. He was going to have to work up higher to make sure they didn’t get flanked along the ridgeline.
Sekki had disappeared in the rocks below to his left. The shadows of the outcroppings were getting longer, but still at least two hours until sunset, and the copper sun beat down mercilessly from the cloudless cobalt sky. No breeze stirred, and the far away line of acacias was cloaked in white dust. And on the plain the termite mounds, with their tiny alluvial fans of glossy yellow mud, shimmered in the unrelenting heat.
Okay. What the fuck had happened? Somehow raghead soldiers had got up on the plateau. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Not by truck. Breen had blown the bridges at Muglao and Waddi Kawanla. They had to be lifted. The Sudanese didn’t have any assets. So it had to be the fucking Frogs. For some fucking reason, the Legion parachute regiment, either at Bangui or Fort Lamy, must have lifted the ragheads up in Dakotas. But where? Maybe they could have landed the Dakotas on the salt pan west of Geneina.
According to Mac, Khartoum hated the Frogs with a passion, almost as much as the fundamentalist generals hated the Yanks. But here it was, French officers leading Sudanese soldiers. It didn’t fucking matter now anyway. What mattered was, how many? Doc figured a full platoon in front of him. God knew how many in the blocking unit, but figure another platoon. A Frog gunship still up. One good thing, though. If the C47s had been rigged to carry troops, they probably wouldn’t have door mounts.
Doc could see good cover farther up the hill and he gingerly started to move. Well, with the skirmishers on top of the hill, now both ends of the waddi were stopped, like corks in a pipe. No matter what happened, Mac wouldn’t be able to sugarcoat the fact that they had had their ass kicked today. They’d been jumped like a bunch of rookies, outfoxed, and Tor, the most popular of the Dinka non-coms, and a bunch of other mopes, had got greased. Killing the two Dinka kids might not go down too smooth back in Rembec either. And whatever it was that Mac had to do under that ledge. And the intel fuckup. What happened to all these kid spies that Breen supposedly had running around…?
Doc caught movement to his right. Two soldiers had started up through the rocks. At the same time a dozen skirmishers jumped up and started running across the waddi toward the rocks. Out of the corner of his eye Doc saw one of them go down as he heard the methodical bang-bang of Sekki’s rifle. The kid had cool. Doing it exactly right.
Doc couldn’t pay any more attention to Sekki, because he had to move up the hill to cut off the flanking attack. No sugarcoating it, the sergeants were getting their ass whipped today. They’d been fucking jumped. It meant Breen’s Boy Scout spy ring wasn’t worth shit. It also meant that somebody up on the plateau had collaborated with the Frogs, told them about the refugee transfer to the Brit cotton farm. Dinka confidence in Mac was gonna have a nosebleed.
Sekki had stopped firing, after chasing the first wave of skirmishers back over the rise. Two rag heads were down and one was howling his brains out. Smashed femur probably. He wouldn’t be able to yell like that if he’d got it in the chest or the guts.
Doc noticed that his hands had stopped trembling. He found a spot in the last bit of jumbled debris before the hillside smoothed out. Even if the rag heads doubled back over the ridgeline they’d still have to cross a hundred yards of open ground to get at him. More likely, they’d stay in the cover of the rocks. Doc chambered a round and thumbed off the safety.
Okay. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. He had good position. Sekki had his left covered. Doc might be a piss-poor shot but he was better than any of these ragheads. He just had to hope the Frogs didn’t come up after him. Legionnaires could shoot.
Okay. They just had to hold out awhile, until Mac got organized. The survivors from Tor’s platoon had been too shaken up to be much use. Maybe Mac had put them under the ledge. But Abdul’s guys were intact somewhere. Mac had knocked down a chopper, which would make the Frogs more cautious…
From far down the waddi came a long burst of automatic fire, followed by the regular banging of an M1. Over by the tree line a rotor began turning over. Sekki‘s gun went off twice. And then more movement in the rocks to his right. Visitors arriving. One of them was in Legion battledress. Doc quickly raised the stock of the M1 carbine to his cheek and fired in synchronization with the muzzle flashes that winked from the rocks. A bullet crackled overhead and another went ricocheting off a rock, stinging his face with dust. Sekki was firing continuously and Doc could hear the wailing battle cry of the Arab skirmishers as they made another rush over the waddi. And even over the sound of the gunfire and the rotor whine he could hear the screaming of the wounded man.
And still two hours before sundown.





Chapter 49


Jaybut Shaybin's Emporium had never been more prosperous. The owner, seated serenely, cross-legged, on his rugs atop the platform overlooking the floor smiled in satisfaction. Customers of every stripe thronged the isles: Nilotic Dinka, hill Dinka, a few traveling Neurs. Of course no Bedui showed their turbaned heads by day; but at night there was a steady traffic at the back door.
The Dinka, infamous hoarders of their family wealth, finally were loosening their grip on the inlaid throwing sticks, the copper bracelets and the gold earrings. They were digging up long-buried ivory tusks and at last opening hidden pouches of placer gold.
They had to. They needed to buy flashlight batteries. Of course, while it was the indispensable flashlight battery that brought them in, they were like consumers anywhere. Once the bill was broken, it was soon gone.
Jaybut rubbed his hands together with happiness. It had taken months of delicate negotiation to resolve the flashlight battery problem. But he had succeeded. Jaybut Shaybin was the exclusive representative for the Union Carbide Company on the plateau. Shaybin had a letter from the head agent in Nairobi authorizing him to organize the distribution network on the plateau and to set prices. Henceforward, all batteries would be shipped directly to Shaybin's store in Rembec.
Well, it was better for everybody. With the blister packs, the batteries would last indefinitely in Shaybin's thief-proof storeroom. Union Carbide only had to make one shipment with one invoice. The Nairobi agent had given Shaybin complete discretion to arrange a sensible market, with supply and demand in harmony.
Of course, it was left to Shaybin alone to protect his franchise from the greed of other traders. This was going to be another instance for which the boy Sekki would be useful. If interloping merchants from Kampala or Juba ignored Shaybin's authorized monopoly, by assuming that, as in the past, they could send caravans anywhere they pleased with impunity, they were in for a rude awakening.
The Khartoum soldiers might be useless in the countryside. But Sekki and his friends knew how to roam the plateau. They would make a very unpleasant time for any unauthorized commercial travelers.
Jaybut languidly rotated the fly whisk before his face, as, with bemusement, he noted the reaction of the latest arrivals to the new prices. Sekki already had proven his value by driving some of the parasites out of the Rembec squatters' camp. The squatters were not needed, and Sekki had strongly discouraged them. Already half the beggarly nomads in Jebel and Korfur had flooded into Rembec seeking handouts. They were like locusts, with no money and nothing to trade.
The sergeants (may their memory be obliterated in fire) had allowed the hoards of starvelings to squat along the river right on the very outskirts of the village. It was an unproductive use of potentially arable land, and Jaybut had a much better plan for it. Tobacco. Not the rank week the Dinka cultivated in their straggling plots. But European tobacco, grown on a well irrigated, intelligently managed farm, right on the fertile site of the present squatters' camp. Perhaps the farm could be tended by the more tractable of the displaced squatters. Shaybin was certain there would be a market for quality product, in place of the bitter Dinka homegrown, not only among blacks but among the Bedui as well.
Sekki had acquitted himself well in Shaybin's opening campaign to oust the squatters. So far however he had not succeeded in a second task, that of ridding Shaybin of the wandering American known as the Whizzer. At first Shaybin stupidly had sent soldiers to arrest the sergeants' factotum. Shaybin should have known better. Intimidation, theft and extortion were the soldiers' trade. Stealth and guile were unknown to them. Of course they had missed picking up the vagabond. And Sekki hadn't found him either, once the fast-moving American had been alerted by Army bungling. But he wouldn't be free for long. Sekki had his scouts out. A lone white man could not hide on the plateau. He'd soon by flushed from cover like a bandicoot.
The Whizzer's continued existence was only a minor annoyance, and only because the Whizzer knew about the cache of guns. Khartoum didn't need to know about that, and neither did anyone else. Shaybin had plans for those weapons. The sergeants had been right about one thing. There needed to be order. But any private police force needed to answer to Jaybut Shaybin.
For that, Sekki and his young friends might just serve. They were pliable and they liked presents. Sekki was a fast learner, and the other boys looked up to him. Sekki might prove the ideal tool for ridding the village of rabble, and for keeping Shaybin's competitors off the plateau.
Picking up a choice morsel of khat from the pile of leaves beside him, Shaybin indeed had to congratulate himself for how well everything had turned out. Without any boasting, he deserved complete credit for salvaging a seemingly impossible situation. He had kept communications open on all sides, with the Khartoum army, with the Americans, with the French, and with Union Carbide.
It had been luck, of course, that the disgruntled Dinka with the missing hand had come to see him. The Dinka had been upset by his mutilation (the result of some trifling offense), and it hadn't taken much peach brandy to show him they way to revenge. He had proved an excellent spy. And when the time came, he had watered the gasoline in the airplanes, making the sergeants' escape by air impossible.
Shaybin also had to admit that it was luck that the Legion harbored a grudge against the sergeants, for killing one of their own at the village across the river. But it had been Shaybin who had the vision to take happenstance and forge it to his own design.
Even his wife looked at him with respect now. But it was too late for her. She had spurned him during his hour of trial. She would find out that the Jebel plateau was very dangerous for her health. In such a pestilential climate, a thousand ills could surprise a person. Shaybin already had written his father, preparing him for the coming necessity of arranging to find a new wife. This time however Shaybin himself would oversee the correspondence with the marriage broker. He didn't want a repeat of the last fiasco.
In the meantime, there were several comely dark girls he had seen lately in Rembec that could solace his nights until a suitable matrimonial replacement made her way to the plateau. Shaybin already had spoken to Sekki about one he had seen. Sekki had said he was sure the girl would be glad to receive presents from the village's most successful citizen.
Sekki was after more presents himself. But what Sekki said was true nonetheless. Shaybin was successful. And he could savor this success all the more because he had earned it by taking tremendous risks. How clearly he remembered. He had trembled in every limb the night he had met the Bedui who was the French agent. If Shaybin had been found out, the tall sergeant would not have hesitated. But the hooded Bedui safely disappeared into the night, bearing the crucial message. The trap had sprung. And the hated sergeants were gone, nothing but evil memory.
As soon as Shaybin was certain about the outcome of the French ambush, he had sent to cancel all his orders in Kampala for rehydration fluid, window screening and the rest of the worthless truck the sergeants had ordered. There would be no further need to waste precious space in the caravans for items nobody was willing to buy. The rehydration fluid, however, had given Shaybin an idea. There might be a market for sweetened fruit flavorings to cut the fetid taste of river water. And some of the Bedui said they had heard of a manufactured chemical that made coffee twice as sweet. Shaybin would inquire with his agents.
In reality, of course, Shaybin had never sold off the Kalashnikovs to purchase ridiculous rehydration fluid or window screening. He had made all such purchases with a letter of credit based on his account at the Juba Mercantile Bank. Now, to return the favor, he would take in his banker friends as silent partners in the tobacco scheme. The bank could find investors to underwrite the venture, once Shaybin gave assurances that the land was cleared of squatters. Sekki and the Kalashnikovs would see to that.
Jaybut knew his parents would be proud of him when they learned what he had accomplished single-handedly in this desert. He had made it bloom for commerce after a long night of idleness. Six months profit from the battery franchise along would repay his father's entire investment in him. It had taken the second brother ten years.
Everywhere Shaybin looked there was the prospect of happiness and prosperity. Even the army had come around. The Khartoum major who had been with the French had ordered the Rembec garrison to follow Shaybin's word in everything, and to accept without complaint whatever dash he chose to give them.
The destructive Obo was gone. The odious and inscrutable white sergeants were gone. And Jaybut Shabin at last had come into his own. Shaybin contentedly munched the savory khat. The plateau was now free to enjoy peace and plenty.
_

Chapter 50


Although Sekki’s new boots pinched his feet, they still pleased him. Strong black leather boots with black cords. No snake could harm him. No matter how thick the brush he could walk fearlessly, even through the shade of the tamarind grove where the puff adder huddled in the afternoon. No snake could bit his foot and make his leg swell up like a yam.
Since the sergeants had gone, he was the only one in Rembec to wear strong boots. The boots had been his first present from the Indian, a reward for chasing the dirty Neur people from the river. The present was good, so why shouldn’t he do this for the Indian. The Neur were bad men, dirty, and too interested in Dinka girls. Some had said words to the laundry women that should not have been spoken. Sekki and his comrades had chased them back into the desert where they came from. The river was for Dinka. Let the Neur go elsewhere for water.
Most of the Neur dogs had scattered like cowards, taking their children and wives. A few fools had resisted, refused to leave the camp, pleading that they were too weary for travel. Sekki had filled the holes in the ground with their blood. Around his neck he now wore in a leather pouch the smoked testicles of one Neur dog he had killed with his Kalashnikov. The dog had screamed and rolled on the ground, like a goat being tugged to the souk. Sekki had pointed the rifle, elbow tight, cheek tight against the stock. The bullets had thrown the dog flat, like a child’s stick. The holes in the ground filled with his blood.
Since that day Sekki had received other presents from the merchant. He had a bottle of peach brandy in his hut. He had a strong radio as big as a pumpkin that could talk loud (not one of the yams that whispered). The Indian had offered him a metal flute if he would kill the yellow-bearded wanderer. But Sekki did not think that a suitable present for killing a white. Sekki had taken the yellow-bearded wanderer to the old well. His cousin would keep him. He had no worry about the army finding the yellow-bearded dog. The soldiers were gourds who didn’t dare leave the path. Sekki would kill the yellow-bearded wanderer when the Indian offered a suitable present: another Kalashnikov, or a wooden box of bullets, or a curved knife with the tusk handle such as the Bedui had.
The Indian dog knew a trick for getting many such rich presents from the other side of the Moba forest. Strangers, Feo or Bandi from distant tribes, appeared with strong bicycles laden with baskets that held all the gifts that came from beyond the tsetse forest. Some day Sekki would learn the trick that brought the bicycles to Rembec. In the meantime, he would take the presents offered by the fat merchant.
Sekki knew a way to get more presents. After the sergeants lost the fight with the French dogs at the waddi, the people had celebrated with pum and peach brandy. They had danced and chanted their thanks. The Indian had seen the girl Bari in the dance. Now he desired her for his house. Bari lived with the laundry women across the river, and her mother was a washerwoman whose vulva was red from fornicating with strange men. The father was in cattle camp. But the father had told Abdul that Bari was so pleasing he wanted fifty cows, even though the people knew she had fornicated with the red ape.
Now the Indian dog desired to lick her vulva too. The father was nothing. But Bari had strong brothers and cousins. If he took her to the merchant, he would have to kill the brothers and cousins. He could set a trap, like the one the sergeant dogs had set for Obo, and kill them all at once.
If he did that, he would demand an important present. Perhaps a bicycle. It would be the only bicycle in Rembec.
To carry out his plans, Sekki needed to find power. Sekki had been told that Anju, who herded his father’s cattle downriver, had found the half-consumed carcass of the witch Kinshi in the rushes below the taboo tamarind grove. The witch had been eaten by fish, but Anju said her heart remained inside her ribs. Anju had removed the heart, burned it in a copper bowl, and ground it to powder. He said he had visions after swallowing a pinch. Sekki would see Anju and trade for the heart powder. Or if Anju wouldn’t trade, he would find out where he hid his basket.
Many of the old women in Rembec had seen Kinshi’s spirit walking the river path where the tall dog had killed her. One night Sekki thought he heard her whispering outside his hut, telling him to remember her voice. The next day Sekki had gone to the secret place where the sergeant dogs had kept the bombs. Sekki and Muba, who had learned the bombs at the small dog’s school, destroyed the rock wall of the pond and released the water. They destroyed the machine in the little house that made the water rise. They destroyed the holes in the ground where the sergeants had made them squat. The people were glad and rejoiced. The white nurse dog had tried to interfere and Sekki had beaten her. The white whore’s vulva was red from fornicating with dogs.
Sekki knew he had received some of Kinshi’s power. The next day the women said they had seen the spirit of Kinshi on the river path and that she was satisfied and her soul would not trouble the village. The people were glad and had slapped their elbows.
Since he had been receiving gifts from the Indian dog, Sekki had heard important things. The merchant told Sekki that the sergeants received presents from the English dog that lived at the cotton farm. The Indian said that Sekki and his comrades should go to the English dog and demand presents too, which Sekki would share with the Indian. The fat Indian was very greedy. Sekki would demand gifts but not to share with the Indian, unless he gave up Kalashnikovs and bullets.
With fifty strong rifles Sekki could drive all the Murrini dogs off the plateau and away from Dinka wells. He could attack the Neur, who were dirty and smelled of fish. He had seen good things in their villages. He would give all his comrades presents, and they would rejoice and say his name.
Sekki had learned there were many things to have. To have them, he needed to be like Hami the Jackal, strong and full of tricks. Sekki had some power from Kinshi’s voice, and he would have more when he ate her heart. He had learned tricks from the white dogs. He would learn more from the Indian. Then the Indian would go too, and Sekki would make the bicycles come to Rembec. And it would be Sekki in his own strong house who would lick Bari’s vulva.


Chapter 51


Darcy Bean had no choice but to let Brevold suture her forehead. When the Dinka boys had gone on their rampage, one of them (she knew it was Sekki, once the sergeants’ pet) had struck her a glancing blow with a rifle butt. Now she needed twenty stitches.
In almost every way, she was glad the sergeants were gone. They had made some temporary gains in Rembec, she admitted. But they were outlaws and too dangerous. At the moment however she wished Doc was around for about fifteen minutes to handle the suturing. Brevold was doing the best he could, and, like Doc, he meticulously followed asepsis. But he didn’t have Doc’s deft hand. The wound would heal, but she’d be left with an ugly scar.
To his credit, Brevold had taken the destruction of his prized fish pond with amazing fortitude. He and his crews had labored on the rock walls for months after Obo wreaked them the first time. Now this gang of teenagers, for God knows what crazy reason, had blown it up again. Brevold already talked about rebuilding. The pond was vital to the refugees. The tilapia provided important extra protein, and without the impounded water the yams and pumpkins in the camp garden would soon wither in the summer blast. Then the refugees would have only the nutritionally deficient cassava.
A new group of mullahs had come from Wau to oversee the camp. Neither they, nor the two or three young soldiers with them, had raised a hand when the Dinka boys beat the Neur refugees with sticks and forced them to retreat into the desert. Lying on the ground, semi-conscious and blinded with blood, Darcy had heard gunfire. Later she heard that some of the Neur had been shot.
Although Darcy had a well developed anti-colonial stance, she knew it would have been better if the French had stayed longer. Darcy had felt safe while the French soldiers were in the village, waiting for parts to be flown in from Fort Lamy to repair their helicopter. The French officers were cultured, courteous, convivial, very attractive men. It had been fun to sit with them over the lengthy dinners, although, when they first arrived, they had not been in a pleasant mood. Understandably. They brought on stretchers the bodies of two of their fellow Legionnaires, killed in the fight with the sergeants. Darcy had seen the naked corpses stretched out on plank tables in the mission hospital. One of the dead men had a cluster of punctures on his chest; the other a gaping bullet wound between the eyes. The body of a third Legionnaire had been flown back to Ft. Lamy.
Although Darcy only understood schoolbook French, she took pleasure in listening to Bashir Nasr conversing effortlessly with the French commander. Later, in the post-coital warmth of his embrace, Bashir told her that the sudden and highly unusual appearance of the Legion on the plateau had nothing to do with rescuing him, but had been the result of a fortunate (for Bashir) misunderstanding. The officers had been under the impression the sergeants were holding a French mapping party. That had been the reason for the abortive reconnaissance a month earlier across the river. Another Legionnaire fell then, and Bashir said the officers had welcomed the chance to revisit Rembec to hunt the killer. Of course Darcy knew Doc had killed the French soldier. He’d been over there fooling with the laundry women. But she decided not to tell Bashir, or the officers. She didn’t want to discuss the sergeants at all.
Darcy was glad the sergeants had been defeated and chased away, but during their last intimate night together, Bashir told her the cost. Not only three dead Frenchmen and a damaged helicopter, but a dozen Sudanese soldiers killed. Six more were in her hospital, and in Darcy’s opinion, three of them had a poor prognosis. The Legionnaires, on their side, had killed twenty local Dinka, some of them foolish men beguiled by the sergeants into the militia, and some innocent refugees who apparently had sought cover in a cave. Bashir said the patrician French officers spent many hours over their wine bemoaning the ineptitude and cowardice of the Sudanese soldiers. Apparently, when the sergeants had rallied, the government soldiers refused orders to attack.
One of the handsome French officers had questioned her about the whereabouts of “the other white man,” the Whizzer. Darcy honestly didn’t know. The Whizzer had disappeared as soon as word came back to the village of the sergeants’ defeat. Darcy worried for him. But she had warned him not to get involved. He should have listened.
Bashir of course had been overjoyed to be rescued by the Legionnaires. After his ordeal with the sergeants, he’d been anxious to return to his university post and to his former life. Darcy knew he left with one regret. Before boarding the French helicopter he obliquely hinted that she, Darcy, might want to someday join him in the States. She’d had to dash those hopes. What they’d had for a few weeks had been beautiful. They’d had moments of intense joy that Darcy always would treasure. But it was over. Darcy was committed to her work in Africa.
When the French had left, the Khartoum soldiers confiscated all the sergeants’ medical supplies. Later she found swaths of bandages strewn among the brambles of the cow corrals. One of the young soldiers had died from drinking a bottle of piperazine. The soldiers also had ransacked the baskets of all the clinic patients and stolen anything of value. Loaded with loot, they had finally shambled off to their barracks across from Shaybin’s Emporium to finish off the evening with a binge of peach brandy.
Well, a lot of the typhoid patients in the clinic wouldn’t need their baskets anyway. The people had stopped drinking the filtered water. Somehow they had the idea that filtered water took away their strength, made women barren and men impotent. The clinic bulged at the seams with typhoid and dysentery cases. Darcy planned to speak with the elders. Maybe if they didn’t want to use the filter, they’d be willing to boil the drinking water.
Brevold did his best not to hurt her while he looped the stitches. No anesthesia, of course. He had numbed the skin as best he could with rubbing alcohol. Brevold’s hands shook as he clumsily tied the knots. Darcy had watched him suture before and his hands hadn’t trembled.
Darcy smiled up at Brevold and he blushed scarlet. She had never really looked at the man before. She had no use for Christers, and she had hated Brevold’s late boss, the officious missionary doctor. Brevold always had been somewhere in the background, scurrying around with wheelbarrow and shovel. And she certainly had not approved of his collaboration with the sergeants.
Still, his body was nicely made and he wasn’t that bad looking. No Adonis. But nice plain features. He didn’t really seem like that much of a Christer either. At least he wasn’t always proselytizing. Darcy wondered if he was a virgin. Probably. He was young, about Darcy’s age. He didn’t have a wife; he didn’t fool with the Dinka girls.
To take her mind off the pain, Darcy found herself thinking about initiating Brevold into sex. Maybe he had religious scruples. But maybe he just never had the right opportunity. Darcy knew she was no femme fatal. She didn’t want the role anyway. Maybe she should just ask him. Or would that scare him? He seemed shy. But maybe he’d like to anyway.
Now that she thought about it, he wasn’t a bad guy. He had run the mission hospital after the obnoxious Reisenflaus had been murdered. Darcy had never had time to help him; she’d been swamped with measles and cholera down in the camp. He had built that reservoir for the camp garden. He’d tried to get a school started, although now the mullahs had burned all the books.
Maybe he’d enjoy some comfort at night. If he did, Darcy could ease him into it. She could please him. Darcy looked up and their eyes met. She smiled. It just might be this man could use some comfort. Darcy would ask him.




Chapter 52


After stirring the syrupy dregs silting the bottom of his demitasse Bashir Nasr began to clink the tiny spoon against the rim of the saucer. He was sitting alone, on the pavilion of the ersatz Mediterranean cafe on Telegraph Ave., moodily watching the treacle-y flow innocents passing on the sidewalk beneath him.
Under sleepy lids, Bashir's eyes followed the sinuous flashing limbs of the parading females, their taut ripened torsos practically unclothed, their every cleft and protuberance lasciviously delineated, from oleaginous pudendum to glutei-like décolletage. Bashir could say, honestly, that their brazen, lubricious provocation moved him not. Moved him not.
Perhaps he wasn't being strictly honest. One body-flaunting female, a statuesque Nubian of polished ebony texture, her pendulant mammae synchronously echoing her swaying layers of glittering necklace, had caused in Bashir's tissues a slight congestion. But the blood ebbed quickly without a trace. As for the other wantons, they moved him not.
In fact, Bashir's penis was sated. It lay across his thigh, languorous and indolent, calm as Socrates. In the two months since his plane had deposited him at Kennedy, amazed to be alive, he had been only with his wife.
Janet had been at the airport, crying, laughing, near-hysterical with joy. And since that emotional hour she had monopolized his output, morning and night. His account was so depleted that even after returning to the university he had found it easy to avoid all vixen, even hot little Miss Wetzlemen, the tempestuous gleaner, who in class every Monday and Wednesday turned on him molten, imploring glances.
He had nothing for her. He was drained of all viscosity, his seed blotted up in the insatiable womb and mouth of Janet Bashir Nasr. Her passion had been Vesuvian on the first night, and the lava still flowed. They coupled like freight cars everywhere, in the hallway, on the apartment floor, the table overturning and the dinner dishes crashing around their ears. And with the alarm clock her mouth was on him before his eyes unsealed.
And Bashir Nasr had found himself, in a sense, strangely passive. He did not covet the fragile, porcelain-limbed Asiatics flaunted by his colleagues. He wasn't beckoned by their jet tresses, nor did he yearn for the soft mossy welkin cradled in their creamy thighs. No. Instead, he found himself strangely overcome and touched by his wife's loyalty and devotion. She had cried for him, prayed to her dour Methodist God for him, haunted the police stations and did everything to find him.
While he was in the wilderness facing countless perils alone, she had waited patiently in her grief, steadfast as Penelope. And when he returned she had thrown her arms around his neck and wept with gladness: her prayers heard, her husband safe, her gratitude boundless.
At the end of what already had become a monotonous daily ordeal of classes and students, Bashir Nasr went home expectantly. She bathed him like a child, marveled at his taut body and the white scars on his arm. She smiled and laughed as she mischievously bobbed peek-a-boo in the bathwater, petted and kissed him. And tears were on her cheek at night.
She was his wife, and even though an American, trained from the cradle to abandon her man at the first jolt, somehow she had risen above her caste, and been able to act the part of a true mate. And in their bed, lying in her embrace, Bashir Nasr had found peace.
She no longer talked, no longer scolded, no longer ventured opinions. She knew that he had changed profoundly, had become powerfully tempered in some crucible, the intensity of which she could never comprehend. Desdemona! Ophelia! She subjugated her lesser self to her husband's sway, forged in trial, and held him in submissive awe, as befitted a good wife.
The hours of contentment in their bed were all the more sweet because during his tedious round at the university Bashir Nasr was not at peace. He was short-tempered and restless. He despised his students, and hated his colleagues more. Oh, how it sickened him, their endless barren quibbles, the Scholastic wranglings of these etiolated husks, the inanity of their bloodless precious lint-pulling, which was in concert only with the paucity of their understanding.
Of course by now the faculty had got wind of his success. They knew about his grammar and of his monograph in preparation for the Society of Applied Linguistics. At various gatherings, they crowded around like nimble schoolboys, clamoring to shoot a question. Then, incredibly, the small-minded jealousy of academe reasserted itself. They would cease listening and (it was beyond belief) start telling him, Bashir Nasr, the man who had been on the ground and done the work, about the intrinsic meaning of his own experience. It was the collapse of Pan-Africanism, the Balkanization of tribe, the economic fallout of neo-colonial this, or multi-national that.
The fools wouldn’t listen to facts acquired first-hand. Rather they wanted to foist on him a hodgepodge of their own regurgitated, thrice-removed chimeras, all lifted bodily from the agate of obscure journals and stinking of the lamp.
Sinew-less, bloated, garrulous gasbags. What would they ever know about what it meant to be a ruler, to wield a scepter of life and death, as Bashir Nasr had over unruly savage peoples. How could their sterile gossamer meanderings have any weight with a man who had seen severed human heads, and squirts of smoking blood wetting the white dust? How could these stale myopic blanched nematodes ever know what it meant to be absolute?
At least his wife could appreciate the change in him and had the sense to fall silent, except during the moaning crush of her embrace. Janet's ululating crisis at the term of his thrusts was even more expressive than the vociferous petit mort of that drab little refugee nurse whom he had brought to life back on the plateau. Janet was like a drought-stricken root struggling to soak up every glistening drop.
She had been so amazed, when they tore off their clothes in the airport hotel room, to find his body as chiseled and lean as a crucifix (or, at least, had been; already his flesh was waxing, the result of the heart-attack suet of the American diet).
Yes, his wife felt the change, was sensible that he had seen and done unspeakable things, acts, Kurtz-like, beyond the imagining. She accepted his sway without questions, was gentle, docile, awe-struck, and only interested in pleasing him. For he was profoundly changed. For the first time in his life, Bashir felt that his father would approve him. He had been thrown into a perilous maelstrom of anarchy and violence and not only survived, but had come to rule, to snatch order from chaos, and to deal out even-handed justice, just as his father had. Bashir Nasr was no longer a pampered scion hidden away in the women’s' tent. He was fit to take his hereditary seat in the first rank.
How shocked Dr. Shapiro and his other colleagues had been when Bashir had told them the truth about rule. They looked at him as if he were some Machiavellian throwback, some Kissinger-esque realpolitik-spouting rightwing atavist. But Bashir Nasr knew the truth from his own eyes. When he had ruled in the Jebba there had been justice. Yes, he had taken strong measures. Yes, men had been executed ex-judiciously. His milky colleagues recoiled at his words. What if they had been there to hear the screams and to smell the blood? Their milky hearts would have curdled at the propane stench of corpses.
When Bashir Nasr had ruled in Jebba, the people had prospered, disease had been vanquished, bandits overcome. Yes, in bloody fights. Education appeared for the first time, learning was honored, superstition banished. Disparate peoples lived together in harmony, and yes, it all had been done with the edge of a sword.
At least Dr. Shapiro recognized some of Bashir Nasr's accomplishments. For one thing the department chairman had been an enthusiastic supporter of the monograph, assuring publication by the university press. And he was keen on the grammar as well. On that point Shapiro was quite correct. It was hugely important. No Dinka grammar existed, and, yes, it would give huge luster to the university and to Shapiro's department.
All this was very satisfactory. Learned journals were intrigued by his insights into Nilotic linguistics. Societies were deluging him with invitations.
Still, Bashir Nasr was restless. Getting through his classes was a hellish ordeal. His colleagues were as children to him. They had no comprehension of what he had been through. Their cocktail parties, their seminars, all chatter and empty wind. Bashir Nasr had known steel and blood; he was no longer a tepid academic; he was cordite.
Clearly, it was time to play a more active role, closer to the springs of power. He could no longer squander his abilities in a backwater, among lotus eaters. Perhaps Harvard or Cornell. Or perhaps higher service. The United Nations might have a place for a man who had both impressive academic credentials and the irreplaceable experience of being (he might as well say it) a regent, absolute, over barbarian peoples.
Bashir Nasr put down his spoon and reached into his coat pocket to bring out a newspaper clipping.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)...Legislation that would pave the way for increased military aid to the embattled government of Sudan cleared the House foreign relations committee today.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Jester (D. Ca.), would authorize an additional $5 million in military assistance for the Sudanese army, engaged in a decade-long civil war against secessionists in the Southern half of the East African nation.
According to committee spokesman Lloyd Cunningham, the money would be used to allow the Sudanese army to purchase military hardware from American suppliers.
"The recent victory of government forces against insurgents near Rembec has demonstrated that the long stalemate is over," Cunningham said. "Khartoum is regaining control in the south. But a final effort is necessary."
Jester, who chairs the house subcommittee on African affairs, has long been an advocate of fostering stability in Africa though military assistance to friendly regimes...


Bashir Nasr refolded the clipping and replaced it in his coat pocket. It was obvious that the stumbling behemoth on the Potomac was at last awakening to the importance of Africa. It meant that experts would be in demand. Compensation, one would suppose, would be commensurate with expertise. Bashir set aside the spoon, smoothed the shirt over his still lean stomach, and carefully rose from the chair.
Janet might like Washington. Now that she was tamed and bridled, he wouldn't mind showing her voluptuous endowments at an embassy party. The fact that she wasn't fluent in any language including her own was a plus. Bashir would do the speaking. Janet would stand quietly behind him. Later, in the suite, enshrouded in her musky warmth, he would tell her a little of what had happened, who were what, and what he had said to the Ambassador.
Bashir Nasr, now feeling happy and satisfied, stepped onto the sidewalk and joined the homeward-wending throng of innocents. Washington D.C. The seat of a raw but virile world power. Bashir Nasr liked the idea. It was probably where he really belonged._


Chapter 53


The ring was not in good taste; it was too massive, the gold too encrusted with minor stones setting off the large chunk of diamond. It didn’t matter; it was very expensive, and it was on her finger, and it meant that she was Mrs. Donald MacAteer. She couldn’t help stealing another glance at her left hand. She had done it; now she was safe, no matter what happened.
Sally pressed a little closer against her new husband; slowly, she brought up the ring, the highlights flashing, and placed her hand behind her husband’s neck, to twist the longish strands of graying hair that came down over his ears. From the corner of her eye she could see the huge diamond winking like Venus in the evening twilight. She couldn’t help herself; she gave Donald a peck on the ear, even though she knew he hated affection when he was stuck in rush hour traffic.
Sally could have told him not to take Seventh Street at this hour. All the cross-town commuter traffic backed up Seventh for miles. And now they were caught, inching along. But one thing she had promised herself, she was never going to be one of those know-it-all nagging wives. The traffic didn’t matter. She wouldn’t undercut her marriage by nagging or by giving unsolicited advice. Men hated it.
She’d pulled it off, and she wasn’t going to screw up. For a lowly clerk in personnel to land a corporate vice president was a miracle, an amazing feat of luck and skill; and Sally was going to do everything to keep him feeling secure. Certainly she would never suggest a faster route. Anyway, there was no hurry. The reservations were for eight, and Donald had known the maitre d' at the Flor d’Italia practically forever.
Once again, Sally assessed her new dress and found it satisfactory. It was beige textured Chinese silk, form-clinging to show off her ass but not too Suzie Wong-ish. Not slutty at all, in fact. A Max Coulteur. Parisian. Four hundred bucks at Neiman’s and Donald hadn’t said a word. Not a fucking word. That was because when the dress came off at night he got everything he wanted, no matter how she felt. Sally was a realist about that. When a very successful business guy marries a woman 15 years younger, it isn’t for her conversation. That was okay. She understood the deal and it was okay.
When they entertained at home, she kept her mouth shut, laughed at everybody’s jokes, and got everyone plastered except herself. All Donald’s friends raved about her, told Donald that she was a great hostess and looked like a million bucks. Donald liked his business pals to comment on her looks. And why deny the truth. It helped Donald in business that his colleagues knew he was being fucked at home by a good looking young wife.
Sally could still call herself young. Thirty-three, but holding, what with the spa every day and the tennis lessons. Donald was paying for it; he might as well enjoy it. She made sure he got his money’s worth in the sack. Not that there was any hassle, she’d found out. Married sex could be no bother at all, really. Sometimes, if he’d been drinking, Donald’s cock was a little wobbly; she’d just give him a good hummer to fire him up; then she’d sly on a little oil, so she’d feel wet when she put him inside. He could root and pant to his heart’s content, while she made the encouraging murmurs that he liked. A few minutes later he’d be snoring. Then she could lie back, relax, and leisurely masturbate.
The traffic had come to a dead halt in front of the Greyhound station, and Donald was drumming his fingers on the wheel. He was always impatient, even when he was in no particularly hurry. That was what made him so successful; the constant drive to get some place. Of course, the doctor had warned him about this Type A stuff and his cholesterol and blood pressure and all that crap. It could be (she didn’t want to think about it too directly) that, in ten years or so, she might be pretty well off in her own right. If she were, she’d have nothing to feel guilty about.
Sally’s gaze drifted outside the Mercedes to the lanes of other stationary cars, to the dingy sidewalk, to the scruffy people going and coming in the Greyhound station, with their paper bag luggage and their squalling brats. The sidewalk was a milling procession of losers, bums and winos. Sick-looking men with bottles in brown sacks leaned against the bus building. In front of them, a little gray gnome in a slouch hat hawked newspapers from a plywood stall.
For some reason Sally’s gaze paused on a tableaux of men standing by the news vendor’s stall. Six down-and-outers hunched against the wind, dressed in lumpy, shit-brown jackets. One of the bums, thin and tall, looked like he was reading a newspaper out loud to the others. There was something…
Suddenly a chill went down Sally’s back, and she almost said, “Oh my God,” out loud, although she caught herself in time. She recognized one of the bums. Christ Almighty, it was disgusting. She’d fucked one of those guys, one of the bums standing on the sidewalk listening to the newspaper reader.
She recognized him, that square-shaped pug-looking bum, even though now his face was covered with gray stubble and his buzz haircut had grown out. Sally stared at the man in horrified fascination.
It had been a year ago, just before she got her act together. She’d been hanging out at Henry Africa’s a lot with Marlene back then, and fucking a lot of strange dudes. She’d got shit-faced and picked up that guy, some wallet-and-keys nobody who’d just got out of the Army. Good Christ, he looked like shit. He was as yellow as a Goddamn lemon. She remembered now, she’d fucked him because he was a big tough-looking dude and had big muscled arms with ropey veins, and a body as hard as a sack of cement. Now he was just as skinny and dirty as the other bums. Did he have AIDS? Thank God she knew she was negative or she’d worry. Donald had made her take the test.
Slowly, the traffic began to inch forward. The tableaux of bums disappeared behind a slowly moving Muni bus.
Christ, the risks she took in those days. It was a miracle that Donald had never found out about all the strange dudes she’d fucked out of Africa’s. But she had never fucked a guy from the office, except once, and he was a married guy who never blabbed it around. What a slut she’d been. But at least she’d had the sense to always look goody two-shoes around the office.
Sally shuddered inwardly, then snuggled closer against Donald’s side. God, she had come so close to screwing up her life. What if she’d got knocked up by some wallet-and-keys loser and wound up with a smelly brat and no figure? Or what if Donald hadn’t wanted her? She’d still be in a nowhere job, drinking too much, jumping in the sack with all sorts of…
“You catching a cold?” said her husband, shifting his shoulder away. Donald hated germs.
“I just felt a chill,” Sally said.
Her husband stared belligerently at the Mercedes’ climate control array, which was supposed to keep the interior at an unvarying 70 degrees.
She’d been so lucky. She hadn’t turned out to be a loser like all those bleak sad people on the sidewall. She lived in a great house in Larkspur; she had her own Grand Cherokee, her own credit cards; her husband was an important guy; she was making nice friends at the tennis club. Her life had worked out, which was amazing, because she never thought it would. She was safe now. She’d made it.
Pretty soon, despite the snarl, they’d be at Flor d’Italia. An attendant would take care of the car for them, so they could go right in, stepping under an awning. The headwaiter, Donald’s old pal, would be all smiles as he escorted them through the room. And it was so nice inside, dark walnut panels, polished railings, and the old paintings of old wops on the wall. A wimpy guy in a tux played a piano unobtrusively. And the waiters, fluttering around the table, looked great with the white napkins over their arms and their spotless white aprons. Donald would have his usual double; she’d have a white wine. Just one. People probably would come over, nice well-dressed people, who Donald knew from business, usually old guys who liked to flatter the shit out of her, pretending they wanted to run off with her. Everybody would laugh.
It was so fun, so wonderful. It felt warm and safe in the restaurant, with everybody catering to them, everybody polite and good-looking. And happy. Everybody was happy. And why shouldn’t they be? There was nothing you could do about the losers on the sidewalk, all the bulky faceless nobodies that skulked under lampposts or receded into the darkness of alleys. There were always losers, the people who fucked up, who wouldn’t do what they needed to do. They couldn’t be saved. The main thing was not to be one of them. The main thing was not to fuck up the chance to be happy.
“Finally,” her husband said.
The attendant opened the car door. And Sally, taking her husband’s arm, walked into the restaurant.