Acts of faith (107 page)

Journeying mostly at night to avoid government troops and slavers and hostile tribes like the Nuer, they crossed swamps and great marshes where some died of disease, crossed rivers where some drowned or were devoured by crocodiles, savannahs where the weak and the sick who fell behind were taken by lions, deserts where some perished from thirst. They were bombed by government planes. They continued on, and still more died of malaria or thirst or hunger, still more were taken by crocs and lions, and once Matthew and his two spearmen deliberately fell behind and killed a lioness that was stalking the column.

“This is all that is left of us,” Matthew said. “We are going to Kenya. The SPLA told us there is a camp in Kenya, at a place called Kakuma, where we will be fed and sleep in houses. I was to Kenya one time a long time ago. It is where I was given this white leg. Tell me, mister, how far is it to Kenya?”

“I’d reckon two hundred kilometers,” Dare said, understanding the look in Matthew’s eyes: it was the ruthlessness not of cruelty but of survival; and he also understood that Matthew would kill him if he had to. “Kakuma’s got to be another hundred from the border.”

“Okay,” Matthew said, as though three hundred kilometers were a day hike. “Tell me, mister, what are you doing here?”

“Waiting for a plane. I’m waiting for an aeroplane to come from Kenya and pick me up.”

“When does this aeroplane come?”

“It’s never gonna come.”

Matthew contemplated this statement for a minute. “Then you should come with us.”

The offer astonished Dare. “I’d never make it. My ribs are broken, and I’m old. I’d only slow you down. Y’all are gonna have a hard enough time makin’ it as it is.”

“But we are going to take what is left of your food and water, all of it, and your shoes also,” Matthew said, without apology or malice but as a declaration of fact.

Dare said nothing. This kid had tramped a thousand miles on an artificial leg, he’d led a band of orphaned boys on a march that would have turned U.S. Marines into a mob of blubbering babies, he’d killed a lion, and for what? To get to an overcrowded refugee camp, where they would have a grass roof over their heads and maybe two bowls of porridge a day. And then what? An indefinite stay with no homes or families to return to if and when they got out. To go through so much for so little required either complete stupidity or a powerful belief that the future would somehow be better. That any African, even a kid, could have faith in the future baffled him. His own future, without Mary in it, was no future at all. The human capacity for hope when no hope was visible, the human will to live, to blindly, dumbly
go on
, were riddles that he would never solve—and didn’t want to solve. Yet there was one last thing he could do.

“I could stop you from takin’ the rest of my food and water,” he said, surprising Matthew when he pulled the Beretta from his back pocket and pointed it at his belly. “Before you could get that AK off your shoulder or one of those boys could chuck his spear, I’d have a bullet in your guts. So you ain’t takin’ a thing. I’m
givin’
it to you. Same goes for my shoes.” Pocketing the pistol, he sat down, took off his shoes and socks and tied the laces together and set them on the ground. The movements made him grimace, but this was what he could do, make a contribution to the boys’ welfare, to the future they believed in, and in the process abbreviate his own. His one fear was that, even facing slow death by thirst or starvation, he would not be able to take the quicker way out.

Matthew mutely stared at the shoes.

“Well,” Dare said, “there you be. That kid with the torn-up feet will need them more than me. They might be too big, but—”

But the boy with the torn feet had discovered a pair closer to his size. Squatting by Mary’s shallow grave, he was tugging at one of her buff desert boots. Because her body had bloated in the day’s heat, it would not come off. The result was that he pulled her partway out of the grave.

“Get your hands off her!” Dare raged. “Y’all got mine! Don’t you touch her!”

The boy looked at him, then continued to tug. Dare rose and half-ran, half-stumbled to him and jerked him away. Mary’s bandaged face, puffed up and yellowing, had come out of the dirt. “You little son of a bitch, I said nobody touches her.”

“Who is this?” Matthew asked.

“She was my—nobody touches her.”

“But mister, she is died. She has no need of shoes.”

In the anger born of his love and grief, Dare was impervious to this logic. Matthew gave him a good hard shove—he was very strong for one so thin—and, holding Dare at bay with both hands, told the boy to go ahead. He tugged again and, after dragging Mary’s body halfway out, succeeded at removing the boot. As he started on the other, Dare took two quick hops backward and drew the pistol again. If love was worth living for, it was worth dying for. It was the only thing worth dying for.

“Now get the hell away from her.”

The boy turned to him, more with curiosity than fear, and then to Matthew, and then back to Dare.

“Mister,” Matthew said quietly, and slipped the Kalashnikov off his shoulder, “you don’t know what you are doing.”

But he did. As he moved the barrel to fire a yard wide of the boy, he knew exactly what he was doing. He heard the pistol go off—but not the crack of Matthew’s rifle.

“R
EADY IN A
minute, mate,” said Tony, smacking his sleep-dried mouth. “Come on in.”

His hut was the opposite of Douglas’s, an offense to anyone with a minimal sense of cleanliness and order. A bed that looked as if it hadn’t been made in days. Dirty laundry mounded two feet high in a corner, giving off a musty odor that mingled with the smells of grease, gasoline, and dried sweat emitted by a pair of coveralls flung over a chair. Manuals and papers strewn on the floor.

“Doing your own maintenance these days?” Fitzhugh asked. He gestured at the coveralls, crinkling his nose.

Tony snatched them off the chair and tossed them onto the laundry pile. He pulled a clean shirt from a duffel bag, sniffed it, and put it on. “Let’s get this done.”

Venus was still glimmering in the west when they took off, Fitzhugh in the copilot’s seat of the Beechcraft, the company’s smallest plane. They were prepared for the only two possible outcomes, in the event Dare and Mary were found: in the back were a box of food, a jerry can of water, and a medical kit; also two rubber body bags and latex gloves supplied by the Red Cross hospital. Another crew, Alexei’s, was searching for Tara’s downed Cessna.

They flew for an hour, bearing a little east of north. Through his side window, Fitzhugh saw the arid uplands of Ethiopia and the fragmented sparkle of an intermittent river.

“That would be the Akobo,” Tony said. “We’ll be over the airstrip in a few minutes.” Those minutes passed, and he declared, “Here we are,” motioning at the GPS.

He banked, descending a little. Fitzhugh scanned with his binoculars and said to go lower.

“Low as I go, mate.”

“Tony, we are going to
land
if we find anything. Less altitude, yes? I can’t see anything from up here.”

With the cessation of Busy Beaver’s operations, Tony was an idle pilot, but he’d refused to take on this mission when Fitzhugh asked him last night. You’re not the boss, he’d said, so Fitz had called the boss in Nairobi on the sat-phone. Douglas’s return message had ordered Tony to go.

Alexei’s crew had not exactly been eager to look for Tara. Two planes down in a single afternoon was an unusual occurrence that had spooked all the aid pilots in Loki. Yesterday Fitzhugh had made the mistake of repeating Dare’s speculation that she might have been shot down. Rumors ran through the compounds and expat bars, transforming the possibility into established fact. Khartoum had taken the gloves off. Any plane in a no-go zone was going to be blown out of the sky. For years that specter had ridden with every crew flying on the dark side; but no plane had fallen to enemy fire, which had fostered a belief among the pilots, flight engineers, and loadmasters that they were charmed, immune,
blessed
; if the blessing had been withdrawn from Tara, who by virtue of her integrity seemed the most deserving of it, then it had been withdrawn from all.

“Five thousand,” Tony said. “How’s this?”

“Damn you, they might be alive down there. Maybe you don’t care what happens to Wesley, but I would think you’d care about her.”

“The both of them can rot in hell for all I care.”

“A thousand feet,” Fitzhugh demanded.

Muttering an expletive, Tony pitched the plane over into a steep dive before pulling back hard to describe a tight parabolic curve in the air. He laughed harshly. “Bloody hell if you don’t look like a white man now.”

“Was that necessary?” Fitzhugh said, his stomach settling back into its rightful place.

“You wanted lower, you got it.”

At eight hundred feet they flew over a road. It ended at the old airstrip, a rough lane with tall trees on one side. Through the trees Fitzhugh glimpsed the Hawker’s fuselage. In its new coat of white paint, it looked like some huge discarded appliance. Tony circled to give him a better view. The plane lay broadside to the trees, her right wing sheared off near the root, her nose cone crushed. A short distance away, amid low, scattered shrubs, a flock of vultures clustered, feeding on something.

“Another pass, Tony. As low and slow as you can.”

They skimmed the runway. Frightened off, the vultures rose toward the trees with a slow flapping of dark wings. Fitzhugh saw a body lying on its back, one arm flung out wide. It might have been Wesley.

“Land,” he said.

“They’re dead,” Tony said, gaining altitude.

“I saw only one. The other one could be in the plane.”

“Well, I don’t like the looks of that runway.”

“Stop arguing with me. We took this plane so we could land on a short strip. Now do it, land.”

Tony turned and touched down.

Fitzhugh recognized Wesley only by his clothes and his curly reddish hair, disturbingly lifelike as a breeze moved through it. Mary’s body lay half buried a little distance away. The vultures had not gone to work on her; presumably they would have once they were finished with Wesley. Sorrow and disgust moved through him at once. Two people he’d known for three years, sentient beings who had spoken to him only twenty-four hours ago, reduced to this, to carrion.

“Tony, what do you think happened?”

“Not enough usable runway for a Hawker,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Wes ran out of runway and ideas at the same time.”

“Someone tried to bury her. It must have been Wes.”

There might have been a tremor in Tony’s jaw as he looked down at his former lover; then he turned away and said, “Who else?”

“But if he had the strength to drag her this far and to dig a grave, you would think he wasn’t injured that badly. You would think he’d still be alive. And look, they’re both barefoot. Why’s that?”

“Wouldn’t know. What difference does it make?”

“Maybe nothing. There is a lot here that doesn’t make sense. Wes said something very strange in one of his last transmissions. There was something about his fuel pumps, something about a water jug and plastic bags in a trash barrel. What do you make of that?”

Tony jammed his hands into his back pockets and looked at the ground. “Sounds to me like he was daft. Let’s get them and ourselves out of here.”

They got the body bags from the Beechcraft and put on the latex gloves and the surgical masks that the Red Cross, in its foresight, had also provided. They loaded Mary’s corpse first. As they struggled with Wesley’s bulk, the rigid body rolled over, revealing a brown smear on the grass and three holes in its back.

“Holy shit!” Tony said. “He was shot. Those are exit wounds, you can tell by the size.”

“They can’t be. There was nothing in front.”

“The vultures, mate.”

“But who would have shot him out here? It’s a wilderness, there isn’t a village within fifty kilometers. Who and why? Bandits? Is that who took their shoes?”

“What are you, a fuckin’ detective? Let’s get it done and out of here.”

The blood-browned grass, the three ragged holes, the vultures roosting in the trees, and the trees hissing in the wind that blew out of the east, out of Ethiopia—Fitzhugh felt a chill from within and didn’t stop feeling it until they were a mile in the air.

“I am going to try to talk the UN into sending a crash investigation team out here,” he declared suddenly.

Tony gave him a quick glance. “What the hell for? What’s the point?”

“There are too many riddles for me. I want to find out what happened, and I’ll start with what forced Wesley to land in that godforsaken place.”

After returning to Loki and delivering the bodies to the Red Cross morgue, where the logisticians of death would take care of the details—collecting personal effects, shipping the remains to their families—Fitzhugh received a radio call from Alexei: He had located the wreck of the Cessna, a mere ten miles from Zulu Three. SPLA troops were on their way to search for survivors, but he was sure there weren’t any. That was confirmed the next day, when the Antonov landed in Loki with five more corpses. It would take dental records to sort out who was who. The rumors were likewise confirmed: Alexei said Michael’s troops had found a piece of one wing, perforated with bullet holes. Tara must have flown over a government patrol from one of the two nearby garrisons. The terrifying specter had come to life.