Cross Country Page 13

  Emmanuel secured me an older model M16, which had been retrofitted with a decent scope.

  “Don’t hesitate to fire,” he told me. “Because, I promise you, the Janjaweed will not. They are skilled fighters, even while riding on horses or camels.”

  “I won’t hesitate,” I promised, and I felt Adanne grab hold of my elbow, then let go.

  “You’re sure about this, Alex?” she asked. “You want to get involved?”

  “I’m sure.”

  An hour or so later, we set out with an intrepid group of two dozen women wood gatherers.

  Several had swaddled babies on their backs. One had brought a donkey with an old fork-shaped cart for carrying wood.

  I needed to do this, to help in some way if I could. I knew this about myself: It was my nature. Adanne came too because, she said, “I feel responsible for you now. I brought you here, didn’t I?”

  Chapter 84

  YEARS OF WOOD foraging, moving farther and farther from the camp, had turned this into a long and scary walk.

  I used the time to talk with as many of the women as possible. Only one, it turned out, had any information about the missing boys and possibly the Tiger.

  “She says there is a hut in her sector,” Emmanuel told me. “Three boys were sharing it. But now they are gone.”

  “I thought that wasn’t unusual,” I said.

  “Yes, except they left their things behind. She says a large man in fatigues was sighted in the camp. She was told he was the Tiger.”

  “Did any of the missing boys have parents in the camp?” I asked.

  “No parents.”

  “And did anyone see the boys leave?”

  “They left with the enormous man.”

  After two hours of walking, we finally came to a long line of low, skeletal brush. The women spread gathering cloths on the ground and set to breaking down the brush. Adanne and I pitched in while Emmanuel kept watch for Janjaweed patrols on the horizon.

  Without translation, we were mostly reduced to eye contact and gestures as we worked side by side with the gatherers. The women seemed oblivious to the scratches that appeared up and down their arms. They easily outpaced us newcomers and tried not to laugh at our clumsiness.

  One young mother and I fell into a kind of unspoken communication, making faces at each other like little kids. She stuck out her blue-tattooed lip. I held up two sticks like antlers. That one got a real laugh out of her. She put her hand up to her mouth, not quite hiding a brilliant white smile.

  But then the mother stopped short.

  Her hand came down slowly as her eyes fixed on something in the distance.

  I turned around—but all I could see was a far-off dust cloud.

  And then Emmanuel started shouting for everyone to run!

  “Go quickly! Now! Get out of here! Go back to camp!”

  Chapter 85

  JANJAWEED!

  I could see them now. Maybe a dozen armed killers were riding toward us on horseback.

  There was a vapor, a kind of mirage that made it hard to tell the exact number. Either way, their pace didn’t leave much to the imagination. They were coming for us—fast.

  Two of the women, one with a child fiercely holding on to her blouse, were still unhitching the communal donkey.

  “Get them out of here!” I shouted at Adanne. “You go with them. Please, Adanne.”

  “Is there another weapon?” she yelled back.

  “No,” Emmanuel answered. “Distance is your weapon right now. Go! For God’s sake, go! Take them back to camp.”

  Emmanuel and I had to make a stand.

  We took up a position behind the abandoned donkey cart. I was using it as a brace for the rifle more than as cover.

  Our best hope was that we were on the ground—while they would be firing from horseback.

  I could see them through my scope now, eleven killers, bearded males in baggy fatigues, waving Kalashnikov rifles.

  Just coming into range.

  The first shots came from them.

  Sand kicked up on either side of us. They rode a little wide of the mark, but still too close. They weren’t amateurs. They were already yelling threats at us, confident about the final result. Why not? They outnumbered us eleven to two.

  “Now?” I finally said to Emmanuel.

  “Now!” he shouted.

  We fired back four shots, and two were hits. The killers slumped on their horses—like someone had dropped their puppet strings—then fell to the ground. One of them was trampled under his own horse. It looked like his neck had snapped.

  Even as I pulled the trigger again, it registered with me: Everything changes now. First kill in Africa.

  I heard a scream behind me, and my gut seized. One of the fleeing women had been hit, either by a stray shot or on purpose.

  Not Adanne, I saw with a quick check over my shoulder.

  She was keeping low, trying to get to the wounded woman, who was writhing on the ground. She’d only been shot in the arm. Only.

  When I turned toward the Janjaweed again, two of the riders had stopped. They were jumping down off their horses, not to help their brothers but to get off a better shot at us.

  The others kept coming fast. They were maybe fifty to sixty yards away now.

  Emmanuel and I had the same instinct. We fired on the lead riders, quick shot after shot. Then at the two who were on flat ground. Three more of the Janjaweed went down in the next half minute or so.

  Then Emmanuel screamed, dropped, and began twisting in pain on the ground.

  And the rest of the Janjaweed were on us.

  Chapter 86

  DUST WAS KICKED up everywhere. That was probably a good thing. They had to fire blindly—but so did I. The gunfire from all the rifles was deafening at this range.

  One of the riders tore through the dust cloud and swept right past me. On instinct, I grabbed at his leg and held on. The momentum took me off my feet. I got dragged along for a second or two, and then the rider spun off his horse and crashed heavily to the ground.

  I grabbed his rifle and kept it at my feet. I fired and wounded another of the riders. And then another, in the stomach. They had been cocky—because the wood gatherers usually couldn’t fight back—but they weren’t well trained, and not many men can fire accurately from horseback, despite what Emmanuel had said.

  I saw three of the riders break ranks and retreat. It gave me some hope—not a lot, but some.

  I rushed to the fallen rider I’d pulled from his horse. I pushed his head down into the ground, then got off a hard punch that struck the hollow of his throat.

  “Don’t move!” I yelled. He didn’t need English to know what I was saying. He stayed very still where he was.

  “Alex!”

  A voice came from behind me.

  It was Adanne.

  She and another woman stood swinging pieces of firewood at the last rider’s horse to keep him away. Several of the women were on the ground, hands over their heads. I’m sure they still thought they were going to die.

  Adanne swung again, and the horse reared up onto its hind legs. The rider lost his grip and fell.

  “Alex, go!”

  I looked and saw Emmanuel had propped himself up. He was covering the Janjaweed from his place on the ground.

  I took off at a sprint.

  The downed rider near the women was just getting up again. I yanked my rifle around as I came up on him. He looked at me in time to take the stock in the face. His nose exploded.

  “Adanne, take his gun. Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “I will be.”

  Emmanuel was calling to me, screaming. “Let them go, Alex! Let them go!”

  I didn’t hold back. “What are you talking about? We have to bring them in.”

  Even as I spoke, the truth of the situation settled over me. Same game, different rules.

  “No use arresting the Janjaweed,” Adanne said. “They know the government. The government knows the
m. It only brings more trouble to the camps. The UN can’t help. No one can.”

  I kept the Janjaweed’s rifle, but motioned for him to get on his horse.

  And then the strangest thing happened. He laughed at me. He rode away laughing.

  Chapter 87

  THE UN CAN’T help. No one can. This was what the refugees in the camp at Kalma believed, what they knew to be true, and now I knew it too.

  But the survivors at the camp also knew how to be thankful for small favors and good intentions.

  That night, several of the women used their precious firewood to make a meal for the three of us, as thanks for helping them. I couldn’t imagine taking food from these people, but Emmanuel told me it was the only proper response.

  He shocked me by showing up for the supper, bandaged and smiling, with a bag of onions he’d nicked for the occasion.

  Then we all shared kisra and vegetable stew around the cookfire, eating right-handed only from a common bowl. It felt like the right thing to do, almost like a religious experience, special in so many ways.

  These were good people, caught in a terrible situation not of their making.

  And yet, even they talked freely of frontier justice, the violent kind. A woman proudly told us how criminals were dealt with by the people in her village. They would all rush forward, stab the offending person, put a tire filled with gasoline around his neck, and then light it. No trials, no DNA testing, apparently no guilt from the vigilantes either.

  Adanne and I were treated like guests of honor at dinner. There was a steady stream of visitors and a lot of laying on of hands.

  When Emmanuel wasn’t around to translate, I got the gist of the Dinka or Arabic from the warmth in the voices and the body language.

  Several times, I heard something that sounded like Ali in the middle of sentences. Adanne picked up on it too.

  She leaned near me at one point and said, “They think you look like Muhammad Ali.”

  “That’s what they’re saying?”

  “It’s true, Alex. You do look like him, when he was world champion. He’s still very well loved here, you know.” She nodded with her chin and smiled at a group of younger women hovering nearby. “I think you’ve made a few girlfriends in the bargain.”

  “Does that make you jealous?” I asked, grinning, happier and more relaxed than I’d been in many days.

  A little girl crawled uninvited onto her lap and curled up. “The word’s not in my vocabulary,” she said. Then she smiled. “Maybe a little bit. For tonight anyway.”

  I was finding that I liked Adanne very much. She was courageous and resourceful, and Father Bombata was right about her: She was a good person. I had seen her risk her life for the wood gatherers today, and maybe because she felt responsible for me.

  We stayed late into the evening, as the crowd got steadily bigger. Actually, the adults came and went, but the kids pooled all around us. It was an audience I couldn’t resist, and neither could Adanne. She was very free and easy around children.

  With Emmanuel’s help, I got up and told an improvised version of one of my own kids’ favorite bedtime stories.

  It was about a little boy who wanted nothing more than to learn to whistle. This time, I named him Deng.

  “And Deng tried—” I puffed out my cheeks and blew, and the kids rolled all over one another as though it were the funniest thing they had ever heard. They probably liked that I could be silly and laugh at myself.

  “And he tried—” I bugged my eyes and blew right in their faces, and when they continued to laugh, it was more than a little gratifying, like an oasis in the middle of everything that had gone on since I’d come to Africa.

  “You like children, don’t you?” Adanne asked after I’d finished the story and come back to sit beside her. She had tears in her eyes from the laughing.

  “I do. Do you have children, Adanne?”

  She shook her head and stared into my eyes. Finally she spoke. “I can’t have children, Alex. I was . . . when I was very young . . . I was raped. They used the handle of a shovel. It’s not important. Not to me, not anymore.” Adanne smiled then. “I can still enjoy children, though. I love the way you were with them.”

  Chapter 88

  THE NEXT MINUTE or so seemed like they couldn’t be happening. Not that night. Not any night.

  The Janjaweed had come back. They seemed to appear out of nowhere, like ghosts out of the darkness. The ambush was brazen and sudden; they had come right into the camp.

  It was hard to tell their number, but there must have been a couple of dozen of them. I thought I recognized one, the man I had released, the one who’d laughed at me.

  These Janjaweed were on foot—they had no horses or camels. They had guns and also knives and camel whips; a couple of them wielded spears.

  One man waved the flag of Sudan as if they were here on the state’s business, and possibly they were. Another carried a flag with a white fierce horseman on a dark blue background, the symbol of the Janjaweed.

  The women and children of the camp, who had been laughing and playing just a minute before, were screaming and trying to scatter out of harm’s way now.

  The attack was satanic in its viciousness; it was pure evil, like the murder scenes I’d visited in Washington. Grown men slashed away at defenseless refugees or shot them down. The thatched roofs of huts were set on fire not twenty feet away from me. An elderly man was lit on fire.

  Then more Janjaweed arrived, with camels, horses, and two Land Cruisers mounted with machine guns. There was nothing but killing, cutting, slashing, screaming to heaven—no other purpose to this attack.

  I fought off a few of the bastards, but there wasn’t anything I could do to stop so many. I understood the way the people of this camp, of this country, understand: No one can help us.

  But that night someone did. Finally, Sudanese regulars and a few UN troops arrived in jeeps and vans. The Janjaweed began to leave. They took a few women and animals with them.

  Their last senseless and vengeful act: They burned down a grain shed used for storing millet.

  I finally found Adanne, and she was cradling a child who had watched her mother die.

  Then everything was strangely quiet except for the people’s sobbing and the low winds of the harmattan.

  Chapter 89

  IT WAS GETTING close to morning when I finally laid myself down in a tent with a straw mat on the floor. It had been provided to me by the Red Cross workers, and I was too tired to argue that I didn’t need a roof over my head.

  The flap of the tent opened suddenly and I got up on one elbow to see who it was.

  “It’s me, Alex. Adanne. May I come in?”

  “Of course you can.” My heart pumped in my chest.

  She stepped inside and sat down beside me on the mat.

  “Terrible day,” I said in a hoarse whisper.

  “It’s not always this bad,” she said. “But it can be worse. The Sudanese soldiers knew a reporter was in the camp. And an American. That’s why they came to chase away the Janjaweed. They don’t want bad press if they can possibly avoid it.”

  I shook my head and started to smile. So did Adanne. They weren’t happy smiles. I knew that what she had said was true, but it was also ridiculous and absurd.

  “We’re supposed to share the tent, Alex,” Adanne finally said. “Do you mind?”

  “Share a tent with you? No, I think I can handle that. I’ll do my best.”

  Adanne stretched herself out on the mat. She reached out and patted my hand. Then I took her hand in mine.

  “You have someone—back in America?” she asked.

  “I do. Her name is Bree. She’s a detective too.”

  “She’s your wife?”

  “No, we’re not married. I was—once. My first wife was killed. It was a long time ago, Adanne.”

  “I’m sorry to ask so many questions, Alex. We should sleep now.”

  Yes, we should sleep.

  We held hands
until we drifted off. Only that—hand-holding.

  Chapter 90

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, we left the camp at Kalma. Nine refugees had died during the nighttime attack; another four were still missing. If this had happened in Washington, the entire city would be in an uproar now.

  Emmanuel was one of the dead, and they had cut off his head, probably because of his participation when we’d fought back earlier.

  A mutual hunch took Adanne and me to the Abu Shouk camp, the next-largest settlement in the region. The reception there was more ambivalent than we’d gotten at Kalma.

  A big fire the night before had made personnel scarce, and we were told to wait at the main administrative tent until we could be processed.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Adanne after we’d waited nearly an hour and a half.

  She had to run to catch up with me. I was already headed up a row of what looked like shelters. Abu Shouk was much more uniform and dismal than Kalma. Nearly all of the buildings were of the same mud-brick construction.

  “Go where?” Adanne said when she came up even with me.

  “Where the people are.”

  “All right, Alex. I’ll be a detective with you today.”

  Three hours later, Adanne and I had managed half a dozen almost completely unproductive conversations, with Adanne attempting to serve as translator. The residents were at first as friendly as those in Kalma, but as soon as I mentioned the Tiger, they shut down or just walked away from us. He had been here before, but that was all the people would tell us.

  We finally came to an edge of the camp, where the sand plain continued on toward a range of low tan mountains in the distance, and probably bands of Janjaweed.

  “Alex, we need to go back,” Adanne said. She had the tone of a person putting her foot down. “Unfortunately, this has been unproductive, don’t you think? We’re nearly dehydrated, and we don’t even know where we’re sleeping tonight. We’ll be lucky to get a ride into town”—she stopped and looked around—“if we can even find our way back to the admin tent before dark.”