Lily whole again, even if it’s make-believe. ” ‘There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.’ ” God will overlook the deception when on that great gettin’ up morning He shall raise Lily and all the righteous dead to walk, souls and bodies reunited, in perfect beauty.
“How are the patient’s vital signs?”
She pretended to look at a monitor and replied that the vital signs were normal.
“Excellent. I am almost finished with this leg.”
And singing again, “ ‘Sometimes I get discouraged and think my work’s in vain,’ ” Quinette rose and gripped Manfred under one arm. “ ‘But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.’ ” She pulled easily and, feeling no resistance from him, pulled with more force. He straightened his back and looked down at his patient.
“So you’re finished with that one, Dr. Manfred?”
“Yes, I believe I am.”
“You’ll need a break before starting the next one. You don’t want to make a mistake.”
“Yes, of course. A little rest. In surgery like this, one must be very precise.”
At a nod from Quinette, Ulrika took the doctor under his opposite arm. Together they lifted him to his feet and led him outside.
FITZHUGH SAT IN the cockpit, the voiceless wind in his earphones ominous and irritating. He looked fixedly at the radio as if through sheer concentration he could force it to give the response that Douglas’s incantations had so far failed to produce. “Zulu Two Hotel, this is Foxtrot Twelve, do you read me, over.” Pause and repeat the call. Switch from the hospital’s frequency to Michael’s. “Archangel, Archangel, this is Foxtrot Twelve, do you read me, over.” Pause and repeat, but the answer was the same sibilant static.
It was seven-fifty, half an hour since the air strike. With his habitual pessimism, Fitzhugh feared no one was left alive to answer their calls.
Douglas pulled his headset off and said, “Okay, that’s it. We go in for a look.”
Fitzhugh was relieved; any form of action was preferable to waiting. He stuck his head out the window, calling down to Suleiman to remove the camouflage netting. Suleiman and the soldiers went to work while Douglas, with movements that reminded Fitzhugh of a pianist playing a complicated score, readied the plane for takeoff. Then came the jarring roll, the sensation of lightness as the wheels left the ground.
“I’ll make the pass from the north, into the wind,” Douglas said, pulling into a climb. “Two hundred feet at stall plus twenty, like an airdrop. You’ll be my eyes. That low and that slow, I’ll want to keep mine on the road.”
On the approach, Douglas dipped the right wing to give Fitzhugh a better view. The destruction was worse than he’d feared. Through a thin canopy of smoke, bomb craters, pulverized buildings, and puddles of fire passed below. He caught the glint of twisted tin roof. The new tin Knight Air had delivered months ago to replace the makuti in which snakes and spiders nested. The shiny metal, combined with the solar panels, must have made highly visible targets. That would explain the air strike’s accuracy. Thus the tin that had eliminated the danger of the patients suffering a bite had drawn the bombs that obliterated them in their beds. The law of unforeseen consequences was still in effect.
“See anybody moving around down there?” Douglas asked.
“Yes, but I couldn’t tell how many or who.”
“I’ll come around lower.”
They were above the savannah south of the hospital, the very one they had crossed on foot, in what seemed like another lifetime. Fitzhugh remembered that grueling night march and the festivities in Kowahla the following night. He remembered the bewitching moment when Suleiman’s youngest wife had flung her braids over his face and how, after he’d danced with her, he felt that he’d made a commitment to her and, through her, to all the people in these war-stricken mountains.
Coming in at a hundred feet and straight on, he could make out bodies strewn everywhere, like so much blown trash. Douglas cursed the fanatics who’d committed this atrocity; Fitzhugh cursed right along with him. The two men were in tune once again. Climbing away, banking tightly, descending again, they buzzed the compound a third time and spotted someone near a cluster of intact buildings, waving his arms at the oncoming plane. It was Michael.
Douglas wagged the wings. A moment later the radio came to life: “Foxtrot Twelve, this is Archangel.”
“You are loud and clear, Archangel! We’ve been trying to contact you. What’s the situation?”
Ghastly was what