Sudan: A Novel (10 page)

But Masapha was confident that if he shook enough trees, some fruit was bound to fall out somewhere.

So where was he? Without a Sudanese guide, Ron might as well flip a coin to determine which way to go from here.

He reached into the pocket of his pants and drew out an American quarter. Let‘s see, he thought, I’d say north is probably not a good idea. That’s where the bad guys live. Southwest is probably out, too. Nothing down there but a swamp the size of Belgium. East? Nope, that’s Ethiopia. Sooo, it’s heads for west toward the oil fields, or tails for south toward Kenya.

Ron placed the coin on the top of his thumbnail, flipped it into the air...
and a hand reached out and snatched it quicker than a frog’s tongue capturing a fly.

“Yo, Yankee, do not toss the money around,” Masapha scolded him. “Soon, we will need every nickel we can lay on our hands.”

Ron turned to face the grinning Arab and was so glad to see him he almost threw his arms around him in a bear-hug greeting, even though Masapha’s worn chambray shirt and khaki pants did smell a little like he’d rolled around in zebu dung.

But male-hugging was a Western greeting that wasn’t a culturally sensitive thing to do in Africa, and Ron always felt silly performing the shoulder shake that was the formal Sudanese equivalent. So he grabbed Masapha’s hand and shook it frantically up and down like he was pumping water into a bucket.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you!” Ron’s jubilant greeting was wrapped around a sigh of relief. “I was beginning to think...”

Ron let the sentence trail off, and Masapha finished it for him, extracting his crushed fingers from Ron’s death grip as he did so.

“That I had taken your money and spent the whole of it on wild women? I do not have dealings with wild women. Besides, you did not give to me so much money.”

Ron looked into Masapha’s face and smiled. The man’s uncanny resemblance to one of Ron’s favorite actors was spooky. Masapha was the living image of Omar Sharif as a young man, the way he looked in
Dr. Zhivago
. Their features were strikingly similar— Masapha had the same mustache, the same intense dark eyes, and a lock of hair that always fell down on his forehead. He even had a little space between his shiny white front teeth!

He was drop-dead good looking!

But Masapha was a small man, maybe five-foot-eight, with a slight frame. He wouldn’t have weighed 140 pounds with rocks in his pockets and looked even shorter beside Ron, who, at a slender six-foot-four was still two inches shorter and 75 pounds lighter than his brother, Dan.

“I don’t know what wild women cost around here, but the money I gave you would have bought a whole herd of them where I come from.”

“I did not buy a herd of women, my infidel friend, but I did spend the whole of the money.”

Ron looked both surprised and alarmed. “All of it? But...”

Masapha put his hand up to stop Ron’s questions.

“I think it will please you, the purchases made by your money.” He lowered his voice. There were too many people within earshot. “But it is not to be talked about now. I know a place where so many people are not there. Follow me.”

The little Arab didn’t wait for Ron’s response, just wheeled around and headed back down the dock, past the stinking fish, to a small block building on the far end that hung over the river’s edge. The bare block walls, unpainted door and rusty tin roof reminded Ron of the huts that housed the latrines in some of the Boy Scout camps he and Dan attended when they were kids. Dan had been way more into Scouting than Ron, whose only claim to fame was his skill at lighting farts. While Ron was perfecting the art of not setting his underwear on fire, his older brother was racking up badges. Dan made Eagle Scout before he turned 16.

What’s wrong with this picture? Ron thought as he followed Masapha into the darkness on the other side of the rough-hewn door. My brother could survive in the wilderness for a month with nothing but a Swiss Army knife. Now he spends his days behind a desk in a posh office, while I’m out here in the boondocks with no matches trying to figure out how to start a fire with flint and the fuzz out of my navel.

Once his eyes adjusted to the dim light, Ron could make out a dozen or so wood-slat chairs around a handful of rickety tables near the back wall and another few scattered in the center of the room. This, he suspected, was probably the finest drinking establishment in the whole town. A group of five or six men huddled in the corner, glasses in hand, and rattled dice in a shot cup. Ron found a couple of seats at a table by a window, away from the other patrons, and set his travel and equipment bags and camera case on the filthy floor at his feet.

Masapha stepped to a counter made from two rough splintered planks straddling box crates and ordered drinks from the paunchy proprietor, then brought the glasses to the table and sat down opposite Ron. The window let in a breeze that carried with it the smell of decaying vegetation from the river mixed with the fish stench and miscellaneous olfactory delights from the marketplace.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time in bars since my fraternity days,” Ron said. “But I’d have to say that what this little watering hole lacks in atmosphere and classy clientele it more than makes up for in ugly and stinks.”

Masapha didn’t catch everything Ron said. Even though he was a language sponge, he never tracked perfectly with the tall blond American’s version of English. Besides his native Arabic, Masapha was fluent in a dozen tribal dialects and could manage basic communication in at least that many others. But English—so many words, strung together in such an odd, illogical fashion. And so many phrases that didn’t relate in any way to his world or experience. He just did the best he could, smiled, and tried to act like he understood more than he did.

Ron lifted the glass Masapha had set in front of him to his lips and took a big gulp. A sip would probably have been smarter; then he wouldn’t have had quite so much liquid to spew back out of his mouth onto the floor and his shoes.

“What
is
this stuff?” he gasped.

“It is aragi, the local beer.”

Ron noticed that Masapha drank only water. “You knew this stuff tasted like paint stripper, didn’t you? That’s why you didn’t order any.”

“I did not have the beer because I am Muslim. I do not drink alcohol,” Masapha pointed out. “But yes, I have heard it has the flavor of goat urine.”

“I don’t know about goat pee, but it definitely tastes worse than moonshine!” Ron sputtered, and spit on the floor to get the last remnants of the foul liquid out of his mouth. Then he saw the blank look on Masapha’s face. “You don’t get moonshine, huh. Never mind. I just hope I don’t go blind.”

Masapha wouldn’t have understood that reference either, even if he had been listening, which he wasn’t. He was scanning the room to make sure the novelty of a white man in their midst had worn off and the bar’s patrons were occupied with their own business and not inclined to eavesdrop.

He finished his glass of water in one long gulp, then leaned closer to Ron. He paused for effect and then spoke quietly.

“I think I have found it.” He enjoyed the impression his words made on the big man who sat across from him. “Oh, I do not have a mark X on the spot of a map, but I believe I have found the big space.”

“The area?” Ron’s heart began to pound.

“Yes, area where inside there is most of the slave trading.”

“What makes you think that’s the spot?” Ron tried to hang onto his soaring elation. He wanted so badly to believe that Masapha was right, that he had done the impossible. But he knew he must be prudently skeptical. If Masapha really had found the site of a slave sale, the little Arab with the gap-toothed smile had performed a feat akin to magic. And when something sounds too good to be true...

Masapha glanced cautiously around the room again and lowered his voice. “Many are the wounded people in the south who are being taken to Lokichoggio.”

“To the Red Cross hospital?”

The Arab nodded.

“When we left CARA, you went to Khartoum, and I went first to Lokichoggio,” Masapha continued. “I thought in my head—the wounded there would have very soon information about the guerrillas, where they attacked and when, and how many captives they took away with them.”

He picked up his glass, then remembered it was empty and set it back down again. “The information I got was sketching.”

Ron stopped him. “Sketchy?”

“Yes, that too.” Masapha tried to sound like he understood the difference. “And all of it was pointed to the same thing. If you study hard where there were raids and when, you can see a”--he searched for the word--“a blueprint--”

“Pattern?”

“Yes, a pattern. It would be logical that the Murahaleens, Fedayeens, mercenaries, soldiers—whoever—want to be rid of their captives soon, and the slavers want to bring together so many slaves as they can find at one time—right?”

“Right.”

“But they must find a place that is safe, a private place where villagers are no longer there. So I thought, where is such a place? Would it not make sensible for the place to be not far north—so the slavers must not have to travel so big a distance with their captives—and not far south so the SPLA does not stumble on top of them?”

The Sudanese People’s Liberation Army was the south’s only real resistance force against the Khartoum government. Though poorly trained and totally outgunned by the government soldiers, the SPLA had proven to be formidable adversaries who had racked up a surprising number of military victories—particularly in recent months.

“Makes sensible to me,” Ron said.

“Of course, this collecting place would be a target that moves, but if we figure out the area that is best for them to hand off their captives, that is stepping the first time.”

“The first step,” Ron put in.

“And the second step is that we are to follow the trail of the slavers in that area to the collecting place where the buyers come, and there is the slave auction you want to photograph.”

Masapha finished with a flourish
.
Ron looked at him as if he had completely lost his mind.

“Follow the trail?” he asked. “That makes you Tonto and me the Lone Ranger, pal, ’cause I couldn’t track a herd of elephants through a wine glass factory.”

Masapha was a big fan of vintage American television westerns; finally a reference he understood!

“Oh no, Kimo Sabe,” he replied with a broad smile. “I do not mean you and I will follow hoofprints in the sand. I mean we will go to the right places and ask the right people the right questions.”

“And where are those right places, where we find the right people for all our right questions? Let’s go back to step one. This ‘area’ that we have to search, where is it?”

Masapha spoke the next three words quietly, with an intensity that shouted. “The oil fields.”

“The oil fields?” Ron had tracked with the Arab up to that point, but now he was lost.

“You do not see?” Masapha was disappointed; the conclusion seemed absolutely self-evident to him.

“Where is the place that is not so far north and not so far south? The oil fields! The Heglig and Unity fields sit almost on top of the line that divides northern and southern Sudan.”

And exactly where that line was located mattered tremendously because it determined how much of the oil revenues Khartoum was supposed to share with the south.

“Where is the place that for certain no villagers are there?” Masapha continued. “The oil fields! The government got rid of all the tribals there long ago, so soon as Khartoum found out it was under the ground oil to be found on their land.”

“And where is the place in all of Sudan that the SPLA will for sure not ever be found? The oil fields! The government would not let the resistance army even to get near to them.”

Masapha had Ron’s concentrated attention as he continued. “And Khartoum would surely turn its eye looking the other direction if southern tribals are sold to northern Arabs in a government place. In fact, it would be making a good guess that Sudanese officials have certain knowledge of slave sales in the oil fields, and the government is—how is it you Americans say?—smiling on the way to the bank.”

“The oil fields,” Ron said, and this time it wasn’t a question. Ron had to admit Masapha made a good case; his logic made sensible. That didn’t mean he was right, of course, but his step-by-step theory was a vast improvement over the investigative technique Ron had employed so far. He called it the RGM—Random Guess Method. It had not served him well. But was he convinced enough by Masapha’s plan to go for it?

Suddenly, he almost laughed out loud.
I need serious psychiatric care if I’m so delusional that I think I’ve actually got a choice here,
he thought. Without his Arab guide’s help, the possibility of finding a slave auction downshifted from a “slim chance” to “pack your bags, pal, and head back home to Poughkeepsie.”

Ron flashed Masapha a broad grin and said the two words the Arab most wanted to hear. “I’m in.”

Masapha beamed, and Ron asked, “So where do we go from here?”

“We go toward Bentiu, by a route that is not straight.” Masapha already had it all planned out. They would travel northwest on the road, such as it was, that led out of Malakai through Talodi to Kadugli, then turn south toward Bentiu. The route would take them through the heart of the Heglig and Unity oil fields, the two biggest oil fields in Sudan.

As Masapha described where he intended to conduct his search, he picked up a coin off the rough tabletop and began “walking it” across his knuckles. “What everywhere I am hearing is that more and more it is government troops who are attacking the villages,” he said, “and not just the Murahaleen guerillas and the Fedayeens loyal to Khartoum.”

“That’s nothing new. They’ve done that for fifteen years.”

“True. But the SPLA has been making victories in battle in the past few months, and the north is sending out even more soldiers.”

“Goody.” Ron pulled back the dirty muslin that served as a curtain and looked at the river.

“My contact in the Ministry of State told me that it has been counted, like a census, and seven from every ten people in northern Sudan are Sunni Muslim.”