“A better ending than the one that could have been,” Douglas observed.
“I can’t argue with that, but—”
“You will anyway.”
“Sudan being what it is,” Tara said, “one has to wonder if you spared them from their fate or merely postponed it.”
“Hey, I made my call. I stood by it. I stand by it now. Okay?”
“Fair enough. Do you know what happened to the pregnant girl?”
“You just said it. Sudan being what it is. The things that happen there break your heart when they don’t turn your stomach.”
“Either she died or the baby or both.”
“The kid.” Douglas nodded. “It happened on the plane, when we were only an hour from Loki. The loadmasters told me about it after we landed. I saw the girl holding the kid in a blanket, a piece of cowhide really. She wasn’t crying. Like she expected it.” He paused just long enough to highlight the next statement: “Maybe I should have, too.”
A lilt in his voice turned it into a question, and Tara, her expression softening, told him he could not have possibly expected any such thing and shouldn’t blame himself. Biting his lip, Douglas nodded to accept her reassurance, which could have been what he sought; the appeal for solace implicit in the way he’d spoken those final five words seemed intentionally to draw her sympathies toward him and his feelings, as if they and not the girl’s tragedy were what mattered in the end. That was Fitzhugh’s impression, but being in love, he immediately dismissed it as a figment of his imagination, telling himself he was making too much of a mere phrase, a tone of voice.
“Didn’t mean to sound like such a scold,” Tara was saying. They were getting used to her quirk of being brutally candid, then apologizing for it. “You already got your paddling in the headmaster’s office. You don’t need another from the likes of me.”
“Two paddlings,” said Douglas. “First PanAfrik’s boss told me that if he had anything to say about it, I’d never fly anything for anybody ever again. And then the flight coordinator, that Dutchman, told me I was no better than a common hijacker. That son of a bitch. Can you imagine that coming from him? Every day he has to fax Khartoum a list of every destination the UN is flying to and ask permission to land. How can he look at himself in the mirror? So I told him he was on the wrong side, he was on Khartoum’s side, and he said the UN wasn’t on anyone’s side, that the situation was so complicated that if it did take sides, it would quote turn a disaster into a calamity unquote.”
“You don’t think he had a point?” Tara asked, meaning that she thought so.
“C’mon, Tara.” He presented his most engaging smile and leaned over to lay his palm lightly on her wrist. He had an instinct for knowing where and how to touch someone he wanted to win over, but the instinct failed him in this instance, Tara sitting with cool rigidity, demanding that he respond, and not with pretty smiles and intimate touches. His hand rose to her elbow, then lighted on her shoulder, and finally dropped in defeat. “All right, here’s what I think. I told that dude that sometimes people make things more complicated than they have to be so they don’t have to get off their asses and take a stand. Sometimes neutrality is just another word for cowardice.”
“And how did he react to that?”
“Oh, he got cute and said that ‘neutrality is another word for cowardice’ sounded like one of those bumper stickers Americans are so fond of.”
Tara laughed. “Well, it does, doesn’t it? Let me tell you about something that happened a couple of years before you got to this part of the world.”
Tara then related the tale, with which Fitzhugh was familiar, about the conflict that arose between Riek Machar, second in command of the SPLA, and John Garang, the commander in chief. Machar and one of his deputies attempted a coup to remove Garang from power. Irreconcilable differences over war aims were the stated reasons—Machar wanted an independent southern Sudan, Garang a united, secular Sudan.
“But that was rubbish,” Tara went on. “It was tribal. You do know, don’t you, that Machar is a Nuer and Garang a Dinka?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Douglas muttered.
“So the Nuer and the Dinka are rather like the Serbs and the Croats. Hated each other ever since, oh, the big