Authors: Philip Caputo
For the next couple of days Dare commuted on foot between the Speke Hotel, the central post office, and the government ministries he’d been directed to on Parliament Avenue. Within a week he had a postal box address for Yellowbird Air Services and the papers, with all seals and stamps affixed, attesting that it was a Uganda corporation. He took another walk down to the Barclay’s on Kampala Avenue, where he opened a confidential account and left instructions for wire-transferring funds to Knight Air’s bank in Nairobi. His final step was a meeting with the SPLA agents in Kampala. Michael had transmitted their names in a coded radio message. Payment arrangements were made, signals worked out. It almost made him nervous for things to go so smoothly.
In between business errands, he and Mary played tourist, she accosting strangers to take snapshots or videos of them in front of the Nakasero market or at the Kasubi Tombs. In the cool evening air, they drank on the rooftop bar at the Afrique, strolled to Fang Fang’s to eat Chinese or to the City Bar and Grill for tandoori, and then made love on the big bed in their room overlooking Jubilee Park. Lying beside her, he decided not to ask himself what he’d done to be so lucky, because there was no answer.
On their last night in the city, after another vigorous tumble, Mary jumped out of bed and got dressed, declaring that she wanted to party at the two hottest spots in town, Al’s Bar and a disco called the Half London. Dare wasn’t about to drag his spent body on a tour of nightclubs; they had a big day tomorrow. After a lot of back and forth, Mary, with an angry pout and some comment about him being an old fart, went out alone. He couldn’t believe she was being so rash. He knew about those two places, hangouts for Kampala’s working girls. Any woman, white or black, who went in there unescorted was advertising. He lay in bed for half an hour. Finally, feeling a need to assert some masculine power, he got dressed and taxied to the Half London, where an Afro-pop band was entertaining a boisterous crowd of local yuppies, hookers, and expats. Mary was dancing on the open-air dance floor with a slim young guy. Watching her sensual movements in the smoke-veiled lights, Dare was hurt that she could be having such a good time without him. When the number ended, she went to the bar with her partner, who put an arm around her waist. Dare was pleased to see her pull it off, but that gesture did nothing to calm his jealousy. He approached them from behind, heard the guy say, “Oh, come on, sweet,” in a British or Australian or South African accent, and then tapped him on the shoulder and said, “That’s it, Nigel, last dance.” The Brit, Aussie, or South African said, “Who the hell are you?” Mary let out a squeal of inebriated delight. “He’s my boss!” Dare added that he was a helluva lot more than that. “Like what?” said the guy, squaring off. This was ridiculous! It wasn’t dignified, a middle-aged man about to get into a bar fight over a woman. That was avoided when the band started up again and Mary pulled him onto the dance floor, where he felt awkward and out of place. “I just knew I’d get you out! ” she said with a wicked sparkle in her eyes.
She wanted to stay until the set was over. He insisted they go back to the hotel and in the end practically carried her out to the taxi park down the street. They argued during the ride, the argument continuing in the lobby, in the corridor, and into their room, where it degenerated into a shouting match, Mary slapping him when he told her that she’d been behaving like a tramp. He said, “Lucky you’re a woman, or you’d be taking an eight-count right now.” With a fierce, challenging look, she said, “Don’t let that stop you!” That scared him because it reminded him of Margo, who expected men to be violent and, when they failed to meet her expectations, egged them on until they were. Dare had never laid a hand on her, and he wasn’t about to break that precedent now.
Things took their natural course. He and Mary resolved their differences with their bodies—the old fight-and-fuck syndrome. In the morning, as they packed for the trip to Murchison Falls, she was remorseful. He responded with his own apologies, though he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. His happiness returned, but absent its former purity. A slender vein of doubt had come into it. There were drawbacks to love with a much younger woman.
They had one major mission at Murchison—to touch base with Dare’s old associate from Blackbridge, Keith Cheswick—and one minor mission—to photograph, for Doug’s benefit, a rare bird called the shoebill stork. Cheswick had chosen Murchison for their meeting place because he was doing business just over the border, in the Congo. They checked in at a lodge in Paraa, where a fax from Cheswick was waiting for them: “Enjoy the view and the pool. Meet me tomorrow eight-thirty sharp at the dock. A launch reserved for us exclusively. We can talk shop and you’ll have a good chance of spotting your bird. Cheers, K.C.”
Over two years had passed since he and Cheswick had flown together in the Congo. Cheswick still had the look of the RAF fighter-pilot who was aging well: the trim gray mustache, the flat stomach, the dry iron eyes squinting out of a tanned face; but the peculiar stresses of the mercenary’s calling had begun to extract a toll. His movements weren’t as supple as before, and his shoulders were slightly stooped, not so much from the weight of years as from the weight of too many unpleasant experiences.
The launch, piloted by a skinny Ugandan in shorts and a cast-off park ranger’s shirt, was a wooden craft with an awning that aspired to the decrepitude of the
African Queen.
As it chugged upriver, Mary, a laminated photo of a shoebill stork that Doug had given her on her lap, swept the shores with her binoculars, and the two men sat in the stern and discussed the subject at hand.
“I made a promise that I could get the client the stuff he wanted faster, cheaper than anybody else,” Dare said. “SAM-sevens or Stingers, fourteen-point-seven- or twenty-millimeter triple-A guns.”
Cheswick leaned back against his clasped hands. “Who’s the client?”
“The SPLA.”
“They’re the end user?”
“End user certificate should be made out to the Uganda Defense Ministry. They transfer the goodies to the SPLA.”
“I’ve got some Israelis, private dealers but with solid channels to the government, who have an interest in doing what they can to make life difficult for the Muslim brethren in Khartoum.” Cheswick glanced at a hippo, its yawning mouth a garage for a Volkswagen. “I can do the SAMs for ten thousand, the Stingers would be twelve. The triple-A five to seven and a half. The client is good for the money?”
“They are. They’ve got an arrangement with the Defense Ministry.”
“Quantity?”
“Half a dozen missiles to start with, launchers and projectiles. Triple-A—”
He was interrupted by the launch pilot, who exclaimed, “Elephant!” and pointed at a solitary bull standing on a ridge above the shore marshes. Cheswick signaled his thanks for the excellent guide work.
“Figure one dozen triple-A.”
Like a clerk filling out an order blank, Cheswick wrote down the items and their quantities in a notebook. Whirlpools spun in the current and convex lenses of smooth water swelled as the great river pushed over rocks and humps on the bottom. The falls ahead made a sound like a high wind blowing through tall pine trees.
Mary came back from the bow, the camera with its long lens swinging at her side. “If you’re interested, there one is,” she said, raising her arm at a large bird standing vigil in the shallows against a backdrop of papyrus reeds. It had a big ugly head and a bill that looked as wide as a water ski.”I got the picture. Mission accomplished. Won’t Doug be happy.”
“Doug is—” Cheswick started to ask.
“My partner,” Dare said. “He’s a bird nut.”
“I see. So, anything else? Cut flowers and canned sardines?”
Dare shook his head. “For now, the missiles and triple-A are priority.”
“Cut flowers?” Mary asked. “Canned sardines?”
“Assault rifles and ammunition,” Dare explained.
“We call them cut flowers,” Cheswick elaborated, jotting in his notebook, “because cut flowers are the gift that keeps on giving. If you’ve ever seen a steel small arms ammunition box, you’ll understand why canned sardines. Did you know that your shoebill stork eats baby crocodiles?”
Mary shook her head.
“It does, but not if Mummy croc is around.”
“Big things eat little things, the whole story of Africa right there,” Dare proclaimed with a kind of rueful glee.
As the launch swept around a bend, they saw the falls before them, crashing through a narrow gorge, thundering into a cauldron of frothing water and mists. Raising his voice, Cheswick said, “The whole story everywhere. The Africans just aren’t as good at hiding it.”
Redeemer
S
HE
’
D BECOME SOMETHING
of a celebrity, a minor-league heroine, what with her media friends interviewing her about what happened in the Nuba mountains and relief workers from every agency in Lokichokio asking to hear the story firsthand. Quinette didn’t think she’d done anything heroic—she’d survived, nothing more—but she obliged them. After a while she had the tale down to a routine, like a stump speech or a nightclub act, the narrative flowing seamlessly, with dramatic pauses thrown in at the right moments, until she could go through it without feeling a thing except hatred for the criminals who’d murdered her friend and dozens of people in their hospital beds. She asked Jesus to forgive her for disobeying His commandment to love her enemy (and those Muslims were her enemy, the bombing had made her a naturalized citizen of this war); she prayed to Him to show her if there was anything more she could do, for she felt a keen desire to do more than she was. Her work didn’t seem to be enough. She wished to be called to take bold, direct action, as Doug and Fitz had been. If she could fly a plane, she would have joined them tomorrow and soared to the Nuba with rifles and rockets for Michael Goraende’s army.
Her thoughts often turned toward him. How gallant he had been, throwing his body over hers as the bombs fell. She recalled little things as well, like the way his head leaned a little to one side when he smiled, and the memory of their kiss flooded her mind at random moments, with such vividness that it wasn’t a memory but a reliving, a kind of poignant flashback. She didn’t know what to make of that kiss. Was it nothing more than the brief cleaving together of two people in desperate conditions? Two people, from places and cultures so alien to each other that they might as well come from different planets. We are literally black and white, she thought, then heard her friends back home questioning her in the crudest terms.
You kissed a nigger?
She was appalled to feel a flash of shame, and to realize that she was really asking that question of herself. Quinette did not like to think she was narrow-minded, but you could not grow up as she had without absorbing some of the prejudices that still prevailed in the rural Midwest. To overcome that part of herself, to repudiate it and the world from which she’d come, she determined to nurture her nascent attraction to Michael.
One night she tried to communicate with him telepathically. Those mental transmissions proving unsatisfactory, she wrote him a letter by flashlight, confessing that she wanted to see him again. It would be difficult, she wrote, and suggested he could help by sending an official request for her presence. She could show it to her boss, who was coming to Kenya soon in preparation for another redemption mission to Sudan. There was no mail service to rebel-held territory. Her intention was to have the letter hand-delivered by the next Knight Air pilot flying to the New Tourom airstrip; but on the way to the airline’s offices the next day, she had second thoughts, tore the letter up, and went to her office.
The compound where she worked, an oasis of cleanliness and order amid Loki’s squalor, was a mile and a half down an unpaved road from the one where she lived. Behind a thornbush fence, under the green umbrellas of tamarind trees, two stone bungalows faced each other across a dirt yard brightened by rosebushes and raked daily by an old Turkana gardener who looked as thin as his implement. She rode there on a one-gear bike she’d bought from Tara Whitcomb for ten dollars. The tall mzunga who dressed like an African had become a familiar sight to the shopkeepers and townspeople.
“Jambo, missy!”
they called to her, and she called back,
“Jambo sana! Habari ya asubuhi?”
pleased to hear herself speaking Swahili so fluently.
The compound housed the offices of logisticians for several Catholic dioceses in Sudan and of the South Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. From the latter, Ken had sublet a small room for Quinette’s use. With its wooden schoolteacher’s desk, its wood swivel chair, its dented metal file drawers, black desk fan, and straw mats covering the cement floor, it possessed the chaste, ascetic appeal of a convent cell. The attraction that Africa had awakened in her, to the spare, the austere, the basic, had deepened, and so had her abhorrence for the world she’d left behind, consumed by consumption, choking on its own excesses. The only object from that world to invade her cloister was the IBM desktop Ken had furnished. Brand-new twenty months ago, it was probably now as obsolete as the manual typewriter she used when the generator conked out.
Ken had told her that the next mission would be “all-important to the continuation of our efforts.” He was coming with an entourage worthy of a heavyweight champ: besides the usual team—Jim Prewitt and the two Canadians, Jean and Mike—there would be TV crews from the BBC, French Television, and PBS, as well as reporters and photographers from the
L.A. Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
, and the
Guardian.
The reason Ken was bringing so much media had to do with the bad press he’d suffered several weeks ago, when the United Nations Children’s Fund produced a report condemning the buying back of slaves as “absolutely intolerable” and demanded an end to it. The report said that slavery in Sudan wasn’t nearly the big deal he made it out to be, and that only a comparative handful of people were seized in traditional tribal clashes, not thousands in government-sponsored terror raids. What made Ken livid was the implication, voiced by a UNICEF bureaucrat in an interview, that the WorldWide Christian Union was exaggerating the problem as a fundraising gimmick. He fought back, and the upcoming trip was part of his battle plan. Quinette had been kept busy obtaining travel permits for the correspondents and cameramen, arranging for accommodations in Loki and for flights into and out of Sudan. She’d chartered Knight Air, which had upset Tara, but Doug and Fitz had performed so courageously in the Nuba that Quinette felt she owed it to them to give them some business.