flights into and out of Sudan. She’d chartered Knight Air, which had upset Tara, but Doug and Fitz had performed so courageously in the Nuba that Quinette felt she owed it to them to give them some business.
The day before Ken’s arrival, her logistical work done, she turned to her main task—compiling the massive database of manumitted slaves that would provide the raw material for Ken’s monumental tome, The Record of a Crime Against Humanity. Although it had been in the works long before UNICEF made its report public, he’d decided to use it to rebut that organization’s claims. He intended to present it to the UN Commission on Human Rights and to the U.S. Congress, overwhelming them with proof that slavery in Sudan was as enormous as he claimed, and he instructed Quinette to get it done as quickly as possible. Her job, often the purest form of clerical drudgery, was to create a dossier for every person liberated since the program began: name, age, sex, tribe, home village, date of capture, and photograph, along with the captivity narratives collected on each field mission. Sometimes she was amazed that so much pain, suffering, and degradation could be compressed onto data disks the size of her palm; she half-expected them to melt from the outrages they contained. When she returned from the field, she transferred the narratives from the laptop to her desktop and later edited the tales down to manageable length. Ken said each one should be no more than two hundred fifty words. As if it were a contest—in two hundred fifty words or less, please tell us what it was like to be enslaved.
So far the WorldWide Christian Union’s campaign had freed more than eleven thousand people. Quinette had completed dossiers for exactly eight thousand six hundred twenty-two. Once the database was finished, she hoped Ken would keep her on. The idea of going home was beyond depressing. She couldn’t imagine it, not now.
She worked most of the day, compiling twenty more dossiers, and spent the last two hours on another task: keeping the rolls of captured people up to date. Their names were submitted regularly by the local authorities in southern Sudan to the SRRA, which then passed them on to her. After each mission the identities of the freed slaves were cross-checked against the register, and their names struck from the list. When she was finished, she noticed something odd: of the one hundred and sixty captives liberated on the last mission, the names of more than thirty had never been reported as captured. True, the identity of every single person wasn’t known; often three or four in a particular group would not be listed on the register. But thirty? That was unheard of. She was pondering what could have caused the discrepancy when she was interrupted by a knock. At the door was the stocky red-cheeked Russian who flew for Knight Air, Alexei.
“I was asked to bring this to you,” he said, passing her an envelope with the emblem of the SPLA in the left-hand corner.
She thanked him, shut the door, and tore the envelope open.
HEADQUARTERS, WAR ZONE TWO
SUDANESE PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY
5TH NOVEMBER.
Miss Quinette Hardin
WORLDWIDE CHRISTIAN UNION
LOKICHOKIO, KENYA
1. During your previous visit here, you told me about the work your organization does in redeeming and repatriating abducted persons in south Sudan.
2. I would be grateful if you could fly here at a time of your convenience to discuss establishing a similar program in this zone. As you know, large numbers of Nuba citizens have been seized in government raids and have been sold into slavery or are being held in internment camps.
3. Upon your favorable reply to this request, I will contact the SPLA liaison officer in Nairobi to issue you the necessary travel documents.
LT. COL. MICHAEL A. GORAENDE
OFFICER COMMANDING
An excitement beat in her chest. This was astonishing. Michael had done the very thing she’d suggested in the letter she’d never sent; it was as though her telepathy had worked, her thoughts flying through invisible wires across hundreds of miles. She read his summons again, then stuffed it into her dress and pedaled back to the Hotel California before it got dark. That’s when the bandits came out, like bats.
TWO MILK-FED Canadians with hair the color of the boundless wheatlands where they’d learned to fly took Ken’s party on a route that Quinette now knew by heart, out over the brown Mogilla range into Sudan, skirting Kapoeta and the Didinga hills to bear northwestward