Sudan: A Novel (48 page)

“Dad, I don’t know how to do this!” he cried out.

He looked away then, leaned his head back and blinked, so tears wouldn’t run down his face.

A flock of birds fluttered overhead in the bright-blue sky. They reminded him of the geese he used to watch from the porch swing when he was a kid, big, gray birds that honked their achingly lonely melody as they flew south for the winter.

“I know how to succeed,” he whispered thickly, “but I’m about to fail. I don’t have the votes, Dad. Plain and simple. I’ve counted and recounted; they’re just not there.”

He turned his face into the breeze and felt the chill of tears on his cheeks.

“The Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill isn’t going to pass. And when it’s voted down, the big corporations will heave a gigantic sigh of relief, they’ll cut their political contribution checks right on schedule, and the American people will keep pretending it’s not happening.” His voice began to break. “And men in Sudan with guns and swords and machetes will continue to ride down into villages and kidnap little kids. Make them slaves.
Slaves!”

Dan let go then and put his head in his hands. For the first time since his father died, he cried. And some part of him he hadn’t heard from in a long time spoke.

God, don’t let this happen
, Dan said in his head.
Please.

God, don’t let this happen
, Ron said in his head.
Please.

He looked down in pity at the Dinka tribal.
Don’t let this guy lose his daughter after all he’s been through.

On his face in the sand, pleading with God to give him back his little girl, Idris suddenly heard the snap of a branch. They all did and froze, held their breath. Another crackle. Footsteps. Someone was coming. Idris rose to his knees and listened.

The others instinctively dropped to the sand and hunkered down behind the log. If it was a guard on sentry duty, maybe he would walk past them in the darkness. Or maybe he would change direction.

It’s only one person, Ron thought, and if we had to, we could handle one person. We’ve got Omar’s knife.

With everyone’s attention diverted, Leo began to squirm in the darkness. Masapha had tightened the gag in his mouth but not the ropes that tied his hands.

As the steps neared, Ron whispered to Masapha, “It sounds like the same footsteps that left. I think it’s Omar!”

The hearing of the two tribals, Idris and Koto, was much more refined and acute than the American’s or the Arab’s. Both figured out quickly that the footsteps that now approached had the same stride, rhythm and cadence as the footsteps that had left an hour earlier. But what struck Idris was not what he could hear; it was what he couldn’t hear. The steps were solitary; they were not accompanied by the lighter, leaf-rustling steps of a child. Ron saw Idris’s expression and suddenly understood what Idris already knew. Omar was on his way back, all right. Alone.

Ron couldn’t bear to look at Idris’s face. He had watched the man’s heart break in the jail cell when Leo taunted him with what was in store for his little girl tonight.

The lone set of footsteps crunched closer and closer.

On his knees in the sand, Idris began to cry silently. He felt the same bottomless hole open in his gut that he had felt the day he knelt in the sand and cradled the butchered body of his little boy in his arms.

But Akin was not dead! Barbed thoughts ripped open his heart with jagged, nightmare images. A man held his little girl down. Akin struggled to get away, screamed, cried, pleaded with him to stop. The man came down on top of her, forced her, raped his baby girl!

He wanted to cry out, to shriek, to wail, to jump up and run into that devil’s encampment and snatch his little girl into his arms and carry her away. But he could do none of those things. He had not the air to wail nor the strength to run. It was over. It was finished. He had given everything he had to save his child. And he had failed. At the moment his child needed him the most, he had let her down.

He knelt, staring with unseeing eyes into the darkness where Omar had disappeared, and sobbed, cried as he had suffered the lashes on his back—in silence. The footsteps crunched around the stand of bushes.

Suddenly, Idris froze. He sucked in a ragged gasp.

The footsteps stopped.

Ron lifted his eyes to Idris’s face. He couldn’t read the expression. He shifted his gaze to Omar.

Lying in Omar’s arms, cradled against his massive chest, was a frightened, terribly thin, scarred and beaten 11-year-old girl.

Akin saw her father at the same moment he saw her. Her face exploded in joy.

“Papa!” she gasped.

Idris continued to sob. A smile filled his face with such profound joy it was sacred. He couldn’t speak; he merely held out his arms. Omar set the child’s feet on the ground. She flung herself into her father’s embrace with such force she almost knocked him backward off his knees.

Idris held her tight to his chest. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He rocked her back and forth crooning, “Akin...Akin...Akin,” with broken, sobbing breaths.

The child cried, too, the relief and release so overwhelming—the terror gone, her Papa here. Here! It was over, over! She cried harder and harder, let it all out in heaving sobs, her arms wrapped so tight around her father’s neck he could hardly breathe.

The others rejoiced with Idris, their faces lit by the glow of his achingly tender reunion. Some of them had never felt the kind of happiness that warmed their hearts. It was so pure and sweet it was almost holy.

Masapha handed Omar back his knife just seconds before Leo seized the warm, poignant moment to escape. Leo had freed his hands, and he suddenly leapt up, yanked down his gag and yelled as he sprinted toward Sulleyman’s encampment.

Omar sprang like a cat. Within three steps, the big man caught up with Leo, grabbed him by the hair and jerked him backward off his feet—all in one fluid motion. Then the snake on Omar’s hand struck, sliced the knife across the front of Leo’s throat, and the flat-nosed mercenary settled to the sand in death.

“Out of here, now!” Omar whispered urgently.

They all jumped to their feet and raced for the jeeps, which they’d left parked on the other side of a small rise about 50 yards from where they’d hidden behind the bushes. As they ran, they heard the sound of voices in Sulleyman’s camp, but they piled into the jeeps and were speeding across the desert before the guards could determine who had shouted in the darkness.

The jeeps had bounced less than half a mile down the dirt path that served as a road before they saw headlights coming from the other direction. Four sets of headlights, coming fast. Omar was in the front jeep, and he slammed on the brakes. He hadn’t turned on his headlights yet for fear they could be seen from Sulleyman’s camp. Ron’s jeep was dark, too, as he screeched to a halt beside Omar.

Nobody had to tell them who would be traveling in the middle of the night to Sulleyman’s camp.

“They haven’t seen us,” Omar said. “But we have to get out of here and find somewhere to hide.”

“Chumwe!” Ron said.

“What?” Omar asked.

“Chumwe. Can you get us to Chumwe? There’s a place there we can hide, people there who will help us.”

Omar nodded, turned around, angled past Sulleyman’s camp and headed southwest across the desert.

Pasha Drulois was not about to allow her master to be disturbed again. Not now! When Faoud and his men roared into Sulleyman’s camp, she marched out to meet Faoud before he even had a chance to get out of his truck.

“Where is Sulleyman al Hadallah?” Faoud demanded to know. “I must talk to…”

Pasha didn’t allow him to finish. “He has retired for the night and he…”

Just then there was a scream from the big, striped tent in the center of the camp. Everyone turned to look. They all heard the sounds of a scuffle and then a loud
smack
and the screams dissolved into hysterical sobs.

“My master is initiating a virgin slave girl into his clan tonight,” Pasha said as she turned back to Faoud. “It is not the time now to disturb him.”

Faoud grinned broadly. The virgin girl. The daughter of the tribal.
Excellent!

Pasha had continued to talk, and he suddenly tuned in to what the woman was saying.

“…man came and purchased the other slave girl, the little one I had prepared for my master…”

“Someone bought a slave girl here tonight?” Faoud roared.

Sulleyman’s guards stood behind Pasha, ready to protect their master. When they heard Faoud’s angry tone, they stepped forward, guns drawn.

The raiders Faoud had brought with him in the truck could make short work of this Bedouin’s toy soldiers. But what was the point of such a fight? Faoud held onto his temper and asked coldly, “Who? Who purchased the girl?”

“I do not know his name, but he was a mercenary.”

Pasha wanted to be rid of the strangers.

“He came out of the darkness and offered to pay my master a lot of money for the virgin slave girl, and then he carried her away into the night.”

She didn’t tell the man in the truck about the shout the guards had heard, or about the dead man they had found just outside camp, his throat slit. She just wanted the stranger to leave. What was happening here in the camp tonight was private. Her master was doing what was
haram
—forbidden. He was taking the virginity of a child, a girl not yet a woman. After the mercenary left with the little slave girl she’d made ready for her master, Sulleyman sent her to bring to him the other virgin, Omina.

“How much?” Faoud demanded to know. “How much did the man pay for the slave girl?”

“A thousand pounds,” Pasha said.

Then she turned on her heel and marched back into the camp, Omina’s cries echoing in her ears.

It was almost noon before Faoud pulled under the stone archway and drove up the driveway to his house. Even though he was exhausted, his head still spun. Where did a Dinka farmer get that kind of money? And Faoud still marveled that the lying jackal Leo had been smart enough to come up with such a complicated, convoluted ruse to trick him into producing the slave girl Leo had been hired to find.

Well, Mr. Danheir wouldn’t get to spend whatever fortune he’d been paid by the Dinka to bring his little girl back. Or whatever the American had promised to get Leo to set him and the little Arab free, too. Faoud’s men would track Leo down. They would look under every rock in the desert until they found him! And he would pay—oh, my yes, the mercenary would pay dearly for his deceit! Faoud would catch the American and the Arab, too. They all would pay when he caught them.

He looked up as he climbed wearily out of the truck. There on the porch steps sat Joak, Leo’s loyal monkey, awaiting his master’s return—too stupid to figure out that he’d been left holding the bag. A remnant of anger boiled up in Faoud’s throat like acid.

He turned to his guard, “Kill him!” he said.

The guard had taken two steps toward Joak when Faoud commanded, “No, wait.”

He had thought of a more fitting punishment.

“Take him to Hamid at the carpet factory,” he said. “Tell Hamid the cripple is a gift, a free slave. Not a dime will I charge him. All I ask in return is that he chain this monkey to a loom and work him day and night, work him to death.”