thousand feet up, far lower than Antonovs dared fly in the south, Michael murmured. The pilots knew that the rebels in the Nuba had no antiaircraft guns or missiles. He shaded his eyes with a hand and observed that the rear cargo doors were closed. At least they appeared to be. He hoped so.
“They push the bombs out the back, you know. There is no aiming. There is no address for the bombs. They are addressed, To Whom It May Concern.”
The drone faded, then grew louder. A second plane? No, the same one, circling around. Michael told everyone to lie still. Fitzhugh pressed himself into the earth, so that he felt every pebble. From the sound of it, the Antonov was going to come in right over them. Fitzhugh listened with his whole body, with his skin, each pore becoming a microscopic ear, opened for the whirr of a tail rotor, spinning downward, though he knew that if he heard the sound now, with the plane directly above, it would be not a warning but merely an announcement that his death was seconds away. What did it feel like to be blown apart?
He wasn’t aware that the Antonov had flown on until Michael shook him. He stood up. If he’d ever felt this relieved before, he couldn’t remember it. How splendid the clear sky looked, how beautiful the vivid tulla trees. He had an almost overpowering urge to laugh, to clap each man on the back and shake his hand, as though they’d accomplished some difficult task together. He didn’t know the name of even one, yet a rush of affection flooded through him, and of something more than affection, of solidarity. An old man, white-robed, shuffled up to him and spoke with angry shakes of the cane. He said his cotton field had been bombed and burned several months before and that he wished to inform His Excellency of a particular need he had. He stated what it was. After the rest made their petitions Fitzhugh and the nazir remounted the donkeys and rode back to the village.
He returned to Suleiman’s compound, where an underfed goat greeted him in the little courtyard formed by a ring of five tukuls. Everything seemed oddly normal and domestic. Two of Suleiman’s wives were preparing a pot of doura in the cooking hut. The third wife, a beauty of eighteen or nineteen, her plaited hair trailing to her waist, stood in the doorway of the women’s quarters, nursing a baby. She offered Fitzhugh a dazzling smile.
In the hut that was Suleiman’s exclusive domain, Douglas sat stripped to the waist on a worn leopard skin while Suleiman attempted to tweeze out a tick embedded in his side. Their quest had been unsuccessful, Douglas said. They’d found plenty of good level ground, but a few pokes with Suleiman’s stick revealed that it was all soft black-cotton soil under a fragile crust incapable of bearing an airplane’s weight.
“Speaking of planes . . .”
“Saw it,” Douglas said.
“A wonder it didn’t bomb the town.”
“Oh, they do not try to destroy us,” Suleiman remarked airily. “Only to make our lives a misery so we come over to their side.”
How unnaturally pale the American’s skin looked, contrasted with the black of Suleiman’s hand, carefully manipulating the tweezers. Fitzhugh took a seat on a crudely carved chair, against the wall on which the curved sword of Suleiman’s great-grandfather hung in a cracked leather scabbard.
“They told me the thing they need the most is for the war to end,” he said. “It’s what one old man said to me. We can bring in all the tools and seed and clothes we want, but it will mean nothing if the war goes on.”
“What did you say?” Douglas asked.
“Nothing. What can you say to that?”
“I have got him, all of him, and the head, too,” Suleiman exclaimed, his left eye twitching as he held up the tweezers to display the blood-gorged trophy.
Fitzhugh opened his notebook on his lap and began to rough out the report he would present to Barrett. Figures for the number of malnourished children, for this year’s crop yield. He drew up columns for the items and commodities that were in short supply and jotted a reminder to tell Barrett that a shipment of Unimix would be needed to supplement the children’s diets. The feeling that had dogged him since before leaving Loki, of being a twig in a current, was dissolving. He felt strong, purposeful. This was his work, the