scouting today for a place we can turn into an airstrip, closer to here than Zulu One, so it won’t take a day to get the stuff here.”
“Not too close. An airfield would be a tempting target also.” Manfred looked off into the middle distance. “It will be a risk for me, to be supplied without Khartoum’s sanction.”
Douglas clutched the doctor’s shoulders, and he didn’t object to the familiarity; he was under the Braithwaite spell.
“You already took that risk.”
“This one time, yes, but flights coming in here, once, twice a week, every week—”
“If you want the stuff, I don’t see that you’ve got much choice,” Douglas said, tucking into the statement a tone of regret, as though he wished Manfred had more options. “Got a favor to ask. Okay if I send one of the porters over to the village to ask Michael for a couple of his men to come back here? That wouldn’t be breaking your rule too much, would it? Suleiman and I are going to need some security.”
“I suppose that would be—”
“Hey, thanks. We’ll be out of here in no time. While we’re gone, it would be good if you sat down with Fitz, drew up a detailed shopping list. What you need, how much, what’s priority.”
Manfred nodded and said Fitzhugh could join him on his morning rounds; they could make the list then.
“Okay, I’ll get rolling.” Douglas strode off to speak to Suleiman, who woke one of the sleeping porters. In a moment the man was on his feet, loping toward the village.
Looking at the American, the doctor pronounced him “an interesting fellow,” a statement Fitzhugh interpreted as a tribute to the masterful way the younger man had subdued him and taken control without trying to do either.
UNDER SPUTTERING FLUORESCENTS and bare bulbs of middling wattage, the ward looked like a dimly lit cavern. A fine dust blew through the wire window grates and powdered the beds, the night tables, and the steel poles from which IV bags hung like transparent cocoons, plastic tubes trailing from their undersides into the veins of the famished, the fevered, the wounded. With his eyes shut, Fitzhugh would have known he was in a bush hospital by the smell—the indefinable odor of sickness crowded in with the musk of unwashed bodies lying on unwashed linen in unwashed clothes. Manfred said, apologetically, that circumstances had forced him to compromise his standards of hygiene. He wished he could keep the infernal dust out with proper windows, but one might as well try to import ice cream as panes of glass into the Nuba; they could never survive the journey over the rough roads. He would prefer a tin roof to the one he had. Snakes and spiders nested in the thatch, and what trouble it was, keeping them out. Yes, corrugated tin—he could use that. Franco, his logistics man, could tell Fitzhugh how many square meters were needed. And the bed linen! Of course it should be laundered and changed daily; of course that was impossible. In the Nuban dry season, there was nothing so rare as water, and Khartoum’s recent military activities had made it rarer still. Arab raiders had destroyed a lot of wells. Poisoning a well was forbidden by the Koran, but the holy book was silent about plastic explosive, so that was what the murahaleen used. A charming distinction. There was only one well for the hospital, and it didn’t produce near what was needed. The rest was delivered by lorry in fifty-liter drums during the dry season when the track to Abu Gubeiha was passable; but this year, the deliveries had become sporadic.
Manfred paused to study the chart of a middle-aged patient, fabulously tall, his feet thrust between the bedstead’s metal posts. “This is the game. This hospital has for Khartoum a propaganda value. Somebody like Amnesty International reports that the government denies aid to the Nuba, the government points to us and says, ‘Wrong, and there is the proof, a fine one-hundred-twenty-bed hospital run by the most efficient Germans.’ But we are also a little problem. The government wants the Nubans to go to its so-called peace camps for medical attention. Once they are in, very hard to get out.”
“And you’re a problem because you give them someplace else to go,” Fitzhugh said.
“Precisely. We are here a little sanctuary. So Khartoum needs us on the one hand, but we on the other hand make it more difficult for them to subdue the Nubans. Therefore it