above red plains polka-dotted with trees and cracked by dry riverbeds, the plains surrendering to the wild As-Sudd, a swamp so vast it took the better part of an hour to cross it by air, the Bahr el Ghazal and the Mountain Nile appearing to lie upon the marshes like golden serpents on a dark green mat, and then over the savannahs beyond, fading to yellow in this, the transitional month between wet season and dry, the landscape’s small details erased by altitude until, west of the Jur, the plane descended through broken clouds, and the beehive roofs of Dinka homesteads appeared, and cattle could be seen plodding out of smoky cattle camps, the animals scared into a trot by the plane’s shadow breaking over a palm grove moments before the wheels thumped against the runway and the propellers raised dusty cyclones that made the people waiting on the ground crouch and cover their faces with their cloaks.
“Kinnet! Kinnet!” teenage girls cried out as she stepped off the plane into the hot sun. “White Dinka Woman!” She basked in their adulation and couldn’t resist embracing them for the benefit of the television cameras. Ken got his entourage organized, and then they trooped down the same rutted road on which Matthew had given Quinette a bike ride on her first journey into these immense spaces. She wondered how he was faring. Was he nearby, hobbling on his artificial limb, singing praises to his song-ox while its bell collar chimed and buffalo-hair tassels waved from the tips of its curved horns? Was he happy, now that he didn’t have to fight? Sudan’s uncongenial soil didn’t yield great harvests of happiness. As for herself, Quinette felt vital rather than happy, with the aromas of an African early morning in her nostrils, her eyes alertly scanning the sky for danger, her ears pricked for the sound of an approaching Antonov, and her train of young admirers capering alongside, giggling, rubbing her arms to bring out the black they were sure lay beneath the white.
The mission did not go well. As a means of vindicating Ken and the WorldWide Christian Union, it was a disaster. The day before leaving Loki, he’d spoken by radio with his liaison man, Manute, who told him that four hundred and twenty slaves would be assembled—the largest number freed in a single day in the campaign’s history. Ken knew the media—get them to think they were in on something special—but he should have kept his mouth shut.
The first sign that things weren’t right came when the sweating foreigners were introduced to Manute and several local councilmen. The men had trouble making eye contact. One took Ken, Jim Prewitt, and Quinette aside and whispered, “I am afraid we have only forty-eight captives for you to redeem.” He sounded like a grocer apologizing to a customer for a shortage of bananas. Ken blinked behind his schoolmaster glasses. What had happened to the other three hundred and seventy-two? The councilman’s glance slipped sideways, then up, then down, as if the absent people had merely been misplaced. He shrugged and said he didn’t know.
Ken was furious, Ken was embarrassed, but in the end, all Ken could do was try to put the best face on things. Quinette cringed sympathetically, listening to him tell the correspondents that there had been a mix-up. He tried to buy a little time, speculating that the captives had been delayed—it happened sometimes, what with the distances they had to cover on foot. Maybe they would show up later in the day or tomorrow morning. Meanwhile there were forty-eight people to be given their freedom, and the press were welcome to observe the ceremony.
In many ways redemptions had become routine, more a scripted process than a ceremony. First a count was made; then Ken, Jim, and Quinette addressed the slaves, Jim doing a little proselytizing, Quinette delivering her set speech quoting Isaiah: “I have come to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” She had never tired of giving it, nor of the reaction it always elicited: the joyful clicking of tongues that was the Dinka way of applauding. This time was an exception. The four dozen people seated in the dust before her didn’t make a sound.
In step four, Ken’s “banker,” Santino, brought out his airline bag full of money and exchanged it for Sudanese pounds. For this trip, the twenty-one thousand dollars that was to have purchased liberty for