knotted end of the blanket, his radio operator the other. With great care, they passed him head first through the plane’s door and lugged him toward a waiting Land Rover. The vehicle had been converted into an ambulance, the rear seats removed and a steel rack bolted halfway between the roof and the floor so six people could be carried at once, three on top, three on the bottom. A German nurse named Ulrika determined which six of the fifteen casualties were to be taken first. Wearing a blood-smeared smock, she made a quick examination of each one. “This one ja, this one also, this one nein,” she said. The fateful litany went on. Ja . . . ja . . . ja . . . nein. The captain received a “ja,” and Michael and the radiooperator laid him inside, wedging him alongside two others on the top rack.
The sun was low on the serrate horizon. Doug said he couldn’t make Loki before dark, even with luck and a tailwind, and elected to delay the return flight till morning.
“You and Lily might want some privacy, so you can sleep inside,” he said while soldiers began erecting a tent of camouflage netting over the plane. “Fitz and I can bag out under a wing.”
“Oh, I like the idea of sleeping out under the stars,” Lily declared. She gave her dingy brown hair a coquettish flip.
“Might rain again tonight.”
“I’ll take the chance,” she said. It appeared that the idea of spending one more night in the Nuba had suddenly become more agreeable to her.
Lily had just started to build her little nest under the wing when Ulrika bustled up, her bosom thrust forward, her rear end thrust backward for ballast. “You are the girl with nurse’s training?”
“Nurse’s?” Lily rolled out her air mattress. “I was a paramedic.”
“Ach! Nurse. Paramedic. You think we care about such distinctions here? You must come.”
“Come? Where?”
“With us to hospital, where do you think? Gerhard instructed me to bring you. We have so many, we need all the help we can find.”
“You’ll pardon me, sure, but I don’t get paid for that, and I’ve got to be back in Loki by tomorrow to do what I do get paid for.”
Ulrika drew back, as if she’d been insulted. “For what you get paid or not paid makes no difference! We have already lost three people and will lose more with your help or without it but more without than with.” She collected herself and tried a less strident approach. “I appeal to you. I am not making a big opera, but this is life and death.”
“Well, hell and bloody hell,” Lily said, kicking the air mattress. “Never fucking volunteer.” She glanced at Douglas and Fitz.
“Up to you,” Doug said, “as long as you’re back here between eight and nine. We want to take off before it gets too hot.”
Quinette looked toward the Land Rover and saw Michael standing on the running board, looking back toward them. “I’ll go with you, Lily, since they need help,” she said.
They had to sit on the roof, enclosed by the roof-rack, which they clung to as the Land Rover rocked side to side or leaned at precarious angles when one set of wheels rolled along a ridge in the center of the road. On the running boards, clutching the braces of the sideview mirrors, Michael and his radio operator had the look of charioteers. The road was so badly ditched and potholed that the driver couldn’t go much faster than ten miles an hour. In some places it became a series of evenly spaced heaves and dips, and Quinette watched the hood rise and fall like a boat’s bow in a storm.
Up on her unstable perch, she felt daring and adventurous and reveled in the roughness of the ride, the dust blowing into her face. They possessed the glamour of hardship. She flew out of herself and pictured the scene as if it were a movie: the sky behind a shimmering rose, dusk gathering in the sky ahead, and the two vehicles filled with casualties of war plunging on through a strange landscape where rocky needles stabbed out of acacia forests and wind-carved boulders stood like fantastic sculptures. The image poured its drama into her, nourishing the conviction that she was where she belonged, living with the intensity that had always been meant for her.
At the hospital Lily was issued a surgical smock, mask, and latex gloves and shanghaied into the operating room,