do whatever he could. Yeah, had to hand it to him. He was feverish and stinking like hell, Jesus, the whole cabin smelled like a horse stall. One of the loadmasters got the first-aid kit and gave him a bunch of pills, Imodium, I think, which was pretty much like putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.”
They flew on for an hour, crossing vast swamps, then descended over arid scrub stretched to the horizon. The Jur river lay ahead, a glinting cord in the stark landscape. Beyond it pillars of smoke leaned in the wind, and Douglas knew by the looks of them that they were not from seasonal fires set by slash-and-burn farmers. He raised the UN outpost on the radio. The supervisor—Douglas recalled that he spoke with a French or Belgian accent—told him the town had been shelled half an hour ago.
“We are afraid there are Arab horsemen approaching,” the man said. “If they are here before you, I will shoot myself. Better to shoot myself.”
Like everyone else in Sudan, Douglas had heard stories about the mounted warriors who served as the government’s irregular cavalry. They called themselves by their tribal names, Messiriya, Humr, Hawazma, Rizeygat, but were collectively known as murahaleen, holy warriors. The stuff of nightmares for white man and black man alike, they attacked without warning, materializing out of the desert like the jinns of their own mythology, five hundred to a thousand men robed in white, Koranic talismans fluttering from saddle blankets, a reincarnate terror from another time, with only their assault rifles to testify that they were coming on in the here and now.
Douglas followed the Jur like a radio beacon, coming in over the town and the dust-reddened tents of the aid agency compounds.
“The runway there is metaled and long enough for a Herc, but just long enough,” he said and, like every pilot in history, illustrated with his hands. “I wanted to give myself every foot of roll I could.” He skimmed a palm over the tabletop, then slammed it down. “Dropped her, like you do on a wet runway. Bang! We stopped with maybe a hundred and fifty feet to spare. I turned her around for takeoff. Keep the engines running, get the people aboard, and the hell out.”
A pickup truck and a couple of Land Rovers were parked beside the runway. The loadmasters went to the rear, the ramp was lowered. The aid workers, men and women bent under hastily packed rucksacks, piled out of the vehicles and jogged toward the plane. That was when Douglas saw the townspeople, sitting or standing in the grass and thornbush groves nearby: women in pink and white pinafores, children, a few old people. A fountain of brown smoke rose through the trees a kilometer or two away; a sound like a heavy steel door slamming shut, muted by the engines. The crowd did not stir. They were all very still, staring at the Hercules, their only hope for deliverance from the evil gathering itself, out there in the desert.
“What got to me was how calm they were. Some of them were standing in line, like they were at an airport. I don’t mean resigned. Accepting, I guess. That’s what got to me. It was tough to see them, waiting like that. Waiting to find out if we’d take them or not.”
The loadmaster called him on the intercom. The aid workers were on board. And then: “There’s a Sudanese guy here says he needs to talk to the captain.”
Douglas turned to Estrada, who told him to see what the man wanted, but to be quick about it.
The Sudanese was nearly seven feet tall and immensely dignified. With a formality out of phase with the circumstances, he introduced himself as Gabriel, the chairman, but did not say what he was chairman of. A handful of SPLA guerrillas stood behind him, Kalashnikovs slung across their backs, and a girl lay on a litter at their feet, wild-eyed, breathing heavily. She looked to be fifteen or sixteen and was naked from the waist up, her belly enormous. An older woman in an orange smock—mother? midwife?—was beside her, holding a reed basket and skin waterbag in either hand.
“Do you suppose you could take her, captain?” asked Gabriel. “I know your regulations, but she is very close to her time.”
“What was I supposed to tell the guy?” Douglas asked his listeners rhetorically. “ ‘If you know the regs, dude, then you know that we’re authorized only to