the Hawker’s interior into a microwave, and the doctor was hemorrhaging sweat as he pawed through the stuff piled up in the forward end like a frantic shopper at a rummage sale.
“Should be right where you’re lookin’,” Dare said from the rear, where he was working up a dense sweat of his own, helping a couple of Nubans with the offloading. Cartons of surgical masks, surgical gloves, surgical instruments, syringes, and pills, plastic jerry cans of water, white sacks of sorghum and seed, farm and garden implements bound together with duct tape, bags of salt, boxes of soap and cooking oil, pots and pans in net bags, bundled T-shirts, shorts, and dresses collected by small-town church groups out on the Canadian steppes, wheelbarrows, and several bales of snow fence (Dare would love to see what use they would be put to) were tossed out the rear door into the hands of strapping SPLA guys, who hauled it across the runway and stacked it up and then came back for more while the female porters wrapped the supplies in shawls and blankets or stuffed them into baskets that they would transport on their heads, some to their villages, some to the hospital, half a day’s march away. Men seldom served as porters in these hills. Dare reckoned that would make a swell feminist issue if these people ever got enough of a break from war and hunger to think about feminist issues.
“Hey, y’all,” he called to a six-foot-six-inch bruiser carrying one small box. “This would go a lot faster if you put a bunch of those in one of those wheelbarrows and made one trip instead of a dozen.”
The man walked on.
“Hey! The wheelbarrow!”
“They don’t understand English, you fool!” Manfred snapped. His face was the scarlet of imminent stroke. “Why can’t I find this film? You are sure you brought it? I have three patients in urgent need of X-ray!”
Fucking kraut.
Dare went forward, caught his foot on a corner of the cargo net, and almost fell face-down onto a steel-banded box stenciled with a description of its contents.
“Here you go, Adolf Eichmann. Reckon you can’t read English.”
Manfred gazed down at the container reproachfully, as if it were a dog that hadn’t come when called. “That was a crude and insensitive remark you made just now to me.”
“Callin’ a man a fool ain’t my idea of sensitive.” On their first meeting, about two months ago, Dare had taken a deep and instantaneous dislike to the doctor, which Manfred never failed to nurture.
“But in your case, ‘fool’ is more accurate than referring to me as Adolf Eichmann,” he said.
“Hey, rafiki. I ain’t clever with my mouth, so I’ll tell you what. Call me a fool once more, and I’ll drop-kick you straight back to your butcher shop.”
Manfred regarded him for a moment, assessing the seriousness of Dare’s words. A warning or a promise? “You must understand how much stress I am having. More fighting now, and so more patients than ever. My logistics man Franco is sick with the diarrhea, so I had to leave my patients to drive myself to here.”
It wasn’t an apology, but the tone was less belligerent, confirming Dare’s belief that physical violence, or the threat of it, remained a useful tool in promoting civil behavior.
“My life of course is stress free,” he said, not yet willing to let things go. “Yup. One fun thing after another, like flyin’ five hundred miles across a war zone just to bring this stuff to you.”
“And I do thank you for it,” Manfred said, though with difficulty.
“Thank you? Did you say thank you? Well, holy shit. You’re welcome. So to show my appreciation, I’m gonna bring in some camo netting for you next trip, so y’all can cover up those solar panels and that shiny roof if you need to. You can see ’em for about a hundred miles.”
“The government continues to respect the hospital’s neutrality,” the doctor affirmed, sounding as if he were responding to a question at a press conference.
“I’ll bring it anyway. In case they get a change of heart.”
In Nuban, Manfred summoned one of the men from the rear of the plane, then climbed down the boarding stairs and crossed the runway to his Land Rover with the motions of a windup toy wound too tight, the Nuban following with the box of X-ray plates on his shoulder.
Dare noticed Suleiman stacking more of the medical supplies on the vehicle’s roof-rack. Mary, in the snug khakis that so flattered