the corner bunkers. The mortar’s marking round, spurting white as surf, fell between the riverbed and the garrison. “One hundred meters more!” Michael stood and ranged up and ran down the firing line, whacking the machine-gunners with his stick. “The bunkers! Damn you! Concentrate your fire on the bunkers!” The next fusillade was closer to the mark, the bullets kicking up dust around the sandbagged emplacements, but the second marking round exploded amid the vehicles. Lucky it was smoke instead of high explosive, or the trucks that were the whole point of this exercise would have been wrecked. “Shorter! Shorter by fifty meters!” The tube cracked again. Twenty seconds later the shell burst on the tents. “You have it! All guns, three rounds each! Fire!” Dare plugged his ears against the reports of the eighty-two millimeters. The salvos blasted the tents flat. A hut’s grass roof caught fire. The garrison had been caught completely off guard. In the light of the risen sun, tiny figures could just be made out, running out of the tents and the stone building, from which a Sudanese flag flew, or rather hung—there was no wind. “Repeat fire for effect!” The projectiles made a dull, crunching sound that echoed across the clay plain below while Kasli’s men, advancing by rushes, dodged and darted among the trees and boulders.
Waving his walking stick, Michael might have been a director, choreographing a war movie. Doug was the cinematographer, now filming close-ups of the gun crews, now zooming on the attack below. His face shone. He was in hog heaven. Rocket-propelled grenades crashed into the bunkers, dirt and debris flying out from the blasts. Government troops had taken up positions on the berm and were firing down on the attacking SPLA. Several men dropped, but it was difficult to tell if they’d been hit or were taking cover. The twelve-sevens, dum-dum-dum, raked the berm. Under their covering fire, half the assault force made a frontal attack on the eastern side; the other half peeled off in a flanking maneuver to charge the south side. Puffs of smoke squirted out of the ground. Dare thought he saw a few men fall. The advancing troops wavered, stopped, then turned and fled behind some rocks. The radio crackled again. Kasli, in a voice registering strain and panic, reported that they’d run into minefields.
“Calm down!” Michael bellowed into the handset, none too calm himself. “I will clear a lane for you with the mortars. You must rush behind them!” He dropped the handset and looked at Dare with a weak smile. “Let us hope my boys are good enough.”
The defenders were trading sporadic bursts with Kasli’s men. The twelve-sevens poured plunging fire on them and once again swept them off the berm. A garrison mortar went into action—the shell crunched into the hillside, about a hundred yards down. A second struck half that distance closer. Shrapnel pinged overhead, a sound like piano wires snapping in two.
“Got us spotted, Doug, walkin’ it in, sixty-ones,” he said, as if identifying the caliber made a difference.
While Michael’s mortars ranged in on the minefield, the enemy’s (Dare had to think of them as the enemy because it was his war now because he needed water and the trucks captured intact because he needed to ride back because another march like this morning’s would kill him if he didn’t die of thirst before then) dropped a shell on the machine gun at the far end of the line. The weapon clattered down the hill, and someone screamed.
The shrieks cued Doug to live out some fantasy of combat heroism. He dropped the camera and started to run to the wounded man’s aid. Dare tackled him from behind, pinning him. “Dude, get off me!” Dare held him down. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, you goddamned idiot!” SPLA mortars fired, the shells exploding in a series of rapid ka-rumps. With Doug squirming under him, Dare raised his head and saw the bug-size specks that were Kasli’s troops sprinting into a pall of smoke. It enveloped them for a moment; then they reappeared, scrambling up the berm, with more men charging behind them, through the breach in the minefield opened by the barrage.
“Cease fire!” Michael called, and now the only sound, aside from the wounded man’s cries, was the distant stammer of semiautomatic rifles. The assault force was shooting into the defenders, caught within their own four walls. It had to be like shooting cattle in a pen, although Kasli’s troops had not