“Splendid suggestion.” Diana, rising, moved in a whisper of cotton and linen to a desk, one of those old campaign things with brass handles and corner brackets, and withdrew a large map, folded up with its printed side out. “Stuffy in here,” she murmured, and cranked a window open. Immediately the intoxicating scent from her gardens filled the room.
Diana spread the map over a table: a pilot’s chart, Fitzhugh saw by the black vector lines fanned across the green of equatorial swamps, the reddish browns and yellows of highlands and arid plains.
He shook a cigarette from his pack and asked Diana if she minded.
“Not at all, now that the window’s open. You are familiar with this neck of the woods?”
A lacquered fingernail fell on one of the brown patches toward the upper edge of the map, marked Jebel al-Nubah in transliterated Arabic, the Nuba mountains. The years that did not show in Diana’s face, Fitzhugh observed, were revealed in the fissured skin of her hands. They disappointed him somehow.
“Never been there,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has, oh, not for some time. No one from the outside.”
“Fitz, I’m gettin’ to be fond of your voice. There’s a smile in it.”
He looked at Barrett, leaning into the table, both sets of knuckles resting on the map, like a general planning a campaign.
“A smile?”
“Your voice smiles, even when you don’t. I believe it’s the cheeriest voice I’ve ever heard.”
“I’m told it’s boyish.”
“I delight in the sound of it.”
“Does that mean I’m hired?”
Barrett made an impatient gesture. “We know you could not have been in the Nuba mountains. We’re wonderin’ if you’re familiar with the situation up there.”
“Not much news comes out of there. Very isolated, very backward. I’m told the Nubans go about naked as Adam and Eve, some of them.”
“And not entirely by choice,” Barrett said.
“I did hear the government’s been bombing up there.”
“And two reasons for it.” His fingers spread into a V. “One ideological, the second more down to earth, under the earth in fact.” He folded one finger and with the other traced a road leading southward from the mountains to a town near the confluence of the Bahr el Ghazal river and the White Nile.
“Bentiu,” Fitzhugh said. “There’s oil there.”
“And lots of it,” said Barrett.
Then there was something about an international consortium, in partnership with the Sudanese state petroleum company, something more about building a thousand-mile pipeline all the way to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea.
“Construction’s well under way,” Barrett went on. “That gets done, and Sudan joins the club of big-time oil-exporting countries.”
“And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the government plans to buy with the revenues,” Douglas added.
Barrett said, “For years, Khartoum has been trying to clear people out of Bahr el Ghazal and other places in the south, as you well know. But now they’ve redoubled their efforts. You know, dryin’ up the sea of people the guerrilla fish swim in. And why? Amulet Energy—that’s what the consortium calls itself—wants to make sure the pipeline route is secure, and of course, so does the Sudanese government.”
Fitzhugh was momentarily distracted by his cigarette ash, about to fall on the map. He tapped it into his cupped hand, then went to the window and brushed it into a hibiscus shrub outside.
“I feel like I’ve walked into a military briefing. What does all this high-flown strategy have to do with me?”
“Part of the pipeline will pass near the Nuba,” Barrett said, his finger now tracking along the western border of the mountains. “Khartoum wants to make sure the area is firmly under its control. And so, yes, they’ve bombed. And also stirred up Arab tribes to raid Nuban villages. Those who weren’t killed outright were driven out of their homes, and those who didn’t die of starvation or disease were herded into internment camps and forced to convert to Islam. Would that jibe with what you’ve heard?”
Fitzhugh nodded, then thought to qualify his answer: What he’d heard about the Nuba wasn’t any different or worse than what he’d seen elsewhere in Sudan.
“But it could well get worse. This is where the first reason, the political and religious one, comes in.” Barrett, his face gone florid again, flattened one hand to cover the reddish-brown swath on the map. “What you’ve got up here are brown Arab tribes and black Nuban tribes livin’ more or less cheek by jowl. Some of the Arabs support the government, some don’t, some