time? If he were conceived out here tonight, under that star?”
He didn’t answer, sitting upright at an ominous sound, like a herd of charging buffalo. Michael snatched his sidearm from the pile of clothes and stood outside the outcrop, Quinette beside him. Except for the pistol, they might have been their own remote ancestors, naked and fearful in the African night. One ridge over, they made out a dust cloud and hundreds of huge, dark shapes flowing over it, but the darkness and trees and tall grass made it impossible to see what manner of creatures they were. A distance away the men were awake, shouting over the racket made by the stampeding animals. Then, fifty yards directly in front of her, the grass parted and a prehistoric beast appeared, six or seven feet tall, running on two long legs with clawed feet, its stalk of a neck sprouting from a body the size and shape of a bathtub. Michael gripped his pistol with both hands, then thought better of it, grabbed her by the wrist, and pulled her back under the outcrop. The surging mass broke around the koppie, the dust filling the small space where the two people huddled. Ostrich. The thunderous noise grew fainter. In a moment all was silence again. Quinette heard Negev calling for her. Dressing quickly, breathless, she called back that she was all right. She and Michael looked at each other and laughed with relief. Thank God they had had the outcrop to hide under, Michael said. The giant birds, fleeing in such blind fright, would have trampled them, and an ostrich’s talons could tear a human being open like a paper sack.
“Fleeing from what?” Quinette asked. “We heard hyenas earlier. Was it hyenas?”
Michael looked toward the ridges, where a swath of flattened grass marked the path of the ostriches’ flight. “It could have been. Or lions. Or a leopard. Or something else. Or they were like a mob in a riot, running for no reason. I don’t know.”
The wind soughed through the acacia and rippled the long grass that concealed whatever had menaced the ostrich. Hyena, lion, leopard, or nothing at all, some figment of ostrich imagination. She asked no more questions. This was the land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, where a lot of things lacked explanation.
AFTER THEIR RETURN she discovered that she was, for all her exotic circumstances, in an essentially prosaic role—the officer’s wife. She endured one of its trials, and that was her husband’s absence. Michael was there physically, but in all other ways he was gone, immersed in staff conferences, poring over maps and operational plans, overseeing military exercises to hone his troops to a fighting edge. New recruits, arriving from nearby villages and from as far as a hundred miles away, had to be trained. Radio messages from Garang’s headquarters had to be decoded and answered. Quinette was grateful for the moment they’d shared under the star at the river’s end. Her heart and body lived off the memory of it, as one would live off stored fat in a time of hunger, for in matters of sexual passion, if not of love, she was suffering a famine. At day’s end Michael was too tired and preoccupied to pay much attention to her. She joked that he’d broken his habit of not being able to keep his hands off her, but he didn’t think it particularly funny. Nor did he laugh when, one night, she remarked that here they were, married such a short time, and he’d already taken a mistress.
“What are you talking about?” he snapped.
“The war. The war’s your mistress.”
“What nonsense. I do not love this war, and you know that.”
“Darling,” she said, “you’re losing your sense of humor.”
He massaged his forehead with the heels of both hands. “You are right. And it is that damned second in command of mine causing me to lose it.”
“More nonsense about me being a CIA spy?”
“No,” he said wearily. “He argues with me all the time about this offensive. He thinks it will be a big mistake. I assign him a task, and either he drags his feet or he does not do it at all, to show me how much he objects. If I had someone to replace him, I would sack him.”
He revealed then that the operation was going to be more ambitious than she had thought. The raid on the oil-field airbase was to be the main act in a whole concert of destruction.