Michael, lying beside her, counted by thousands to time the interval between the flash and the sound. “Seven kilometers,” he said. “Six point eight exactly.” He clapped his hands twice, and the men stood and continued toward the mountains that made a jagged jet-black silhouette, as if a hole had been opened in the sky to reveal a starless void lying beyond the heavens. Michael composed a coherent narrative out of what had been, to Quinette, a lot of confusing noise and flashes. SPLA guerrillas had ambushed a convoy trying to sneak through to the garrison under cover of the predawn darkness. The government troops had called artillery fire on the ambush, but the garrison’s guns, shooting at such long range, had been off the mark and the shells had landed harmlessly. The explosion had been a truck or armored personnel carrier struck by rocket-propelled grenades, or perhaps by an artillary round, falling short of its intended target.
His version of events was dead on. Reaching the base of a jebel at first light, they came upon the bullet-sieved hulks of three Sudan army trucks. In one the driver had been welded to the charred remains of the cab, his body shrunk to half its normal size: a faceless blackened form. Corpses lay all around, and the stench was awful. A year ago Quinette would have been sickened, she might have even been moved to pity; but now her only thought was “They had it coming.”
The column climbed into the jebels. Even there the Masakin had not found much refuge. The people who emerged from the villages were emaciated, barely surviving on the spare crops scratched out of rocky hillsides, some of which had been transformed into moonscapes by Antonovs and helicopter gunships.
There was a reason the government was paying the Masakin so much attention. Michael showed it to her from a ridge overlooking a cauterized plain of sun-cracked clay and a road: the main supply route between two government-held towns, Talodi in the east, Kadugli in the west, where, he said, it turned northward to join the pipeline and another road that ran to the oil fields. He pointed to the south.
“That way, less than one hundred kilometers, is the oil company’s airfield. These hills will be our base when we attack it. From here, with the lorries, we can transport the heavy mortars. We will leave at dark and be in position by midnight. We will hit them and the pipeline hard and fast.” He balled his right hand into a fist and smacked the palm of his left. “Hard and fast.”
They went on, arriving at a town where the local SPLA battalion was headquartered. Its commander invited Quinette to stay with his wives, all three of them, while he and Michael worked out their battle plans. Negev lugged her rucksack into the tukul and rolled out her sleeping bag. She fell on it and didn’t wake up till early afternoon, when the youngest wife brought her a meal of mandazi cakes and stringy goat meat, the same fare she’d eaten throughout this trek. She could shove her arm into the waistband of her hiking shorts and figured she’d lost a pound for each of the ten days since she’d left New Tourom.
Fancher appeared at the door to tell her that it was time for her debut as a minister. She followed him to the church, a long bungalow just outside of town, with the usual makuti roof and a tall wooden crucifix planted in front. The men were already gathered inside, where she could hear Handy reading from the Psalms—” ‘He shall cover you with his feathers, and under his wings shall you trust. His truth shall be your shield and buckler . . .’ ”
“That’s our reading for today, the ninety-first,” Fancher said to her, offering a smile of reassurance. He handed her a Bible, marked at the Psalm. “I’d like you to start with it.” He motioned at a tree a short distance off. Under it stood one of the translators in Fancher’s retinue, with the flip chart on an easel and the tape recorder on a table, plugged into speakers and a solar panel. The news that the women and children were to be ministered to by a woman had drawn quite an assembly—more than a hundred, Quinette judged. “I’ll watch how you do and give you a critique afterward,” Fancher said. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
She had thought her experience with speaking to liberated slaves would