night, alerted him to a threat without revealing its precise nature.
In the cargo bay, he dragged two sacks of sorghum across the floor and dumped them outside.
The dust cloud.
He’d noticed that it hadn’t moved when he turned to take a final drag of his smoke. If it had been raised by a high wind, it would have blown away, but it was hovering right where he’d glimpsed it a minute earlier, off to the south and low over the trees, which is what dust would do if it were stirred up, on a day of light airs, by movement on the ground. A lot of movement, judging from the amount of dust. And what was moving? Whatever it was he’d glimpsed when they were coming in for a landing, and he now realized what that was. He leaped from the plane and told the men unloading it, “Finished now! All done!” He waved his arms like a referee, then like someone shooing unruly kids out of a house. “You people have got to get going, now. Go on. Get going. Get a move on.”
He jogged to the side of the airstrip where the cargo was piled and grabbed a young woman by the arm and shoved her, pointing in the direction he wanted her to go, then back over his shoulder. “Get moving! Arabs!”
She gave him a fierce look. A couple of SPLA interposed themselves between her and Dare, and one pushed him backward with the flat of his rifle.
“You assholes! I ain’t your problem! Set up a firing line over there! Give these people a chance to get the hell out of here!” He snatched the soldier’s collar and spun him around, motioning at the dust in the distance. “Arabs! See!”
The scowling soldier poked him in the chest with the gun barrel. What a time for a failure in communication! He wished Suleiman and Manfred had stuck around a little longer. The Arabs are coming, the Arabs are coming. He was Paul Revere in the Nuba mountains, and no one could understand what he was trying to tell them.
“YA, IBRAHIM! YOU didn’t need to hit him. It’s worked out for the best. Allah ma’ana.”
The captain of militia carefully folded his scarf and retied it to his forehead. Behind him, atop the gentle rise on which he and Ibrahim Idris sat, the captain’s artillerymen were setting up the mortars, three of them, each leaning on two metal legs, the bombs stacked neatly on the ground.
Bombs, like the kind that killed Ganis.
“The trees here are not so many as in there,” the captain said, gesturing at the acacia forest they had passed through. “It would have been hard to find a place in there to fire the mortars, but here, not so many trees to get in the way, and from this little hill, I can see the target and adjust my fire immediately.” He pointed at the airfield, two, perhaps three kilometers to the north. The foreigners’ airplane was clearly visible to the unaided eye. “So you see,” the captain continued, “it has been for the best that these niggers got us lost. Perhaps God directed them to do that.”
One of the two Nuban guides sat nearby in sullen silence; the other, lying on his back and looking as though he had a large mango stuck in the side of his mouth, would be silent for a few days to come. A couple of minutes ago Ibrahim had broken his jaw with the butt of his Kalashnikov. The savages had cost them a great deal of time, stumbling in the woodlands. Instead of leading them straight to the airfield, the two had brought them here, well south of it, and as the country south of the airfield was more open than that to the west, it would be more difficult to achieve surprise. A look through the binoculars had also revealed a great many women leaving with things that had been unloaded from the plane. Far ahead of them, Ibrahim had observed the rolling dust of what he assumed was a motorcar or a lorry, and it was doubtlessly taking more things away. He concluded that the guides had got lost on purpose, delaying the murahaleen so their fellow Nubans could make off with the booty he regarded as belonging to him and the Brothers, while at the same time forcing him to attack from a disadvantageous direction. In a flare of temper, he ordered them to be executed as