adulation were his birthright. “Dug-lass Negarra!”
“Negarra,” said Michael, “is like brother but more than brother. When a man is your negarra, it means you will lay down your life for him.”
“Him, too!” Doug hollered from his perch, pointing at Dare. “He told me how to shoot it!” He broke out laughing. “Taught me all I know!”
So Michael raised Dare’s arms and conferred the title on him. The soldiers lifted him up. His bulk proved more challenging, but they managed it. He felt a little silly, bouncing like a kid riding on Dad’s shoulders, a mass of dark, ecstatic faces beneath him, a forest of arms, pumping their rifles up and down in time to the chants. “Dug-lass Negarra! Wes-lee Negarra!”
“Our war, dude! Like it or not, it’s ours.”
“Till I’m gone,” Dare said. “Then it’s all yours.”
The soldiers carrying him changed direction, so he faced the wreckage of the helicopter, its blackened hulk showing through a wall of flames. The smoke joined the plume from the still-burning Land Rover to form a flat cloud dark as a crow’s wing and dense enough to cast a shadow over the charred corpses of the crew, the trees, the riverbed, the triumphant men.
SHE FOLLOWED ULRIKA’S advice, and looked to herself but could find no answer there. Returning to her tukul, she forced herself to concentrate on her work, roughing out in her notebook a report she would submit to Ken. It took up most of the day, and when dusk fell without Michael’s return, she was filled with worry, and more than worry—a creeping dread that emboldened her to go his headquarters and ask a radio operator if he’d gotten any news. An officer told her to leave—an operation was in progress and she was not permitted inside.
“I only want to know if Michael’s all right,” she said.
“The operation is going well,” he replied. “Please to go, missy.”
She went back and pressed Pearl if she’d learned anything. Pearl assured her that her father would return.
“You’ve heard then? He wasn’t hurt?”
“My father always comes back,” she said, and gave her a long, penetrating look of uncertain meaning.
THEY GOT LOST for a while, night fell, and afraid that taking the vehicles cross-country in darkness would result in a broken axle or some other mishap, Michael halted the march a few miles short of the airfield. His troops dropped where they stood and went to sleep. Dare and Douglas found a tarpaulin between the seats and the rear of the cab and stretched it out beside their truck as a ground sheet. Two of the wounded men died during the night, and their bodies were transferred to the other truck in the morning, so now nine corpses were interred under the captured rifles and mortars, and the odor leaking through the mound of metal reminded Dare of road-killed skunk mixed with marsh gas. Sooner we get them into the ground, the better, he thought, feeling every rock and pebble he lay on.
They reached the airfield in less than two hours the next morning. It was as far as the vehicles could go. Their cargo, human and inanimate, was unloaded, and Michael sent runners to announce the victory and assemble porters to haul the weapons and carry the wounded to the clinic, the dead to their graves.
Still worn out, the troops sprawled under the doum palms before beginning the last leg to their base. One man took off his shoes and poured blood out of them. Doug had flopped down under a tree, hands folded contentedly on his stomach, the video camera at his side.
Dare delicately pulled his last sweat-browned cigarette from the pack. “It ain’t my intention to haul my potbellied, middle-aged ass all that way to headquarters. I’m stayin’ here. I’m gonna radio Fitz from the plane and tell him to beg, borrow, or steal some fuel on account of it is my intention to take a hot shower and shave no later than tomorrow night, and change out of these clothes and eat somethin’ other than the ration of shit these folks call food and have pleasant dreams between clean sheets. It’s gonna be your job to haul your young, in-shape ass back there and see how Handy’s comin’ along. This is what your blood brother wants you to do. There’s still some water in the jerry can. Fill your canteen, leave some for me.”
“That’s the longest speech I ever heard you make,” said Doug.
“The thought of gettin’ the fuck out of here makes me