Valley of Bones (40 page)

I see I am waxing prosy now though I said I would not, I can’t help it because the memories come that way and besides I am a prosy person, a rude mechanical as Shakespeare says I was never meant to be the person He made me in Dinkaland. Now I have relapsed into my generations, coming as I do from a people used to fixing clutches on old cars and scraping knuckles on rusted iron. So I loved my gun. Peter Mulvaney being SAS knew much about all the nearly infinite varieties of the machinery of death and together we Read the Fucking Manual and we learned how to use the dreadful thing. I assembled a gun crew, the Dinka Nation Automatic Cannon Gurls and Alto Choir, four of them all named Mary and I called them Marys Tok, Rou, Dyak, and Nguan, counting in Dinka, and very regulation for shouting orders. The gun was built in Sweden about twelve years before I was born and was a Bofors Type A L-70 with the generator over the axles. You
swiveled it with a little joystick, like in a video game. It had the standard NIFE SRS 5 close-range reflex sight with the integral predictor unit. The five-ton prime mover Bedford contained over a thousand rounds of HCHE multipurpose ammunition plus spare parts and tools and a box of twenty-four TPT practice rounds, and we shot them at long range against the wrecked pickup and at big kites we made, towed by running boys and then by our truck oh Christ Jesus running on running on so I don’t have to

SISTER PREFECT ALECRAN
came for a visit prepared to declare anathemas, but she could see that something strange was going on in Wibok. She looked at me differently than she had in Kenya. It helped that I was not about to lead a crusade on Khartoum. I don’t know whether she ever really got it, that it wasn’t just an unruly sister with a knack for small unit tactics, but really the Holy Spirit once again entering history as of old. She left to repair the ruins of Pibor Post, saying she would get back to me. Most of the helpers left too. Some were made nervous by real religion, God walking in the cool of the day, which I guess they had not seen before and others were made to feel unwelcome, like the nice folks who brought slaves back from the Baggara, so that they would be encouraged to take even more slaves and not have the trouble of marketing them. The only solution to slavery, as I had just demonstrated, was to kill lots of the slavers and terrify the rest into taking up some other business.

In fact we didn’t need much help anymore. The lands were fertile under the rains, and the durra grew lushly green in the flat acres, and the cattle were fat and bred generously. Trini and her people stayed of course, although she never gave me the time of day anymore. The Jamesons stayed too, a missionary couple who had come to start a mission but had turned instead to useful work, for the people were more interested in hanging out in church with Atiamabi than in points of Christian doctrine. Good sports, the
Jamesons. He was a big florid guy who really liked fixing cars and machinery; she was a blond birdie with a steel core who kind of liked how I was reforming gender relations among the Dinka. She ran our primary school and I made an arrangement with her to teach my officers and Dol, my boy-king, how to read. They used the OT as a text. It was like reading the daily paper for us. Nice people.

TWO WEEKS AFTER
we took the gun, the Antonov coasted silently down from the northwest. Warned by our watchers, we had just enough time to set up a mile or so north of Wibok, the four Marys and me in the commander’s seat. It was a dot when we first saw it, no sound of engines, trying that old trick again. It switched on at two thousand feet and came in for its run. I engaged at about four thousand yards, throwing a stream of hopeful red dots into the sky and kept on shooting as the plane came directly overhead. The tracers intersected with the plane and it moved past seemingly unhurt except for a thin stream of black smoke. As it passed overhead I saw that the cargo doors were open and then black tubes rolled out of the bay, one fell and exploded another fell almost on top of us and didn’t and then the Antonov seemed to roll to one side as if tired of flying and we saw thicker smoke with a heart of orange flame and then it went down, boom, and a black cloud somewhere to the west of Wibok.

We howled, we cheered, we waited to see if another plane would come, but nothing did, the GOS has few planes and its pilots are not used to taking flak. We walked over to where the dud had fallen. It seemed that the crew had tried to get rid of the bombs when their plane caught fire and had not armed this one. It lay broken and half-buried in clay and it meant that I now had nearly five hundred pounds of high explosives to play with. Later, looking at the smoking wreckage I felt no satisfaction in having killed, probably, the people who had killed Nora,
although I was full of joy in an impersonal way, victory is a thrill better than sex, why men leave their wives and go to war.

The shoe had dropped, the GOS had made its response, and so I had a little leisure to deal with my oil men, for the GOS runs on a slow tempo. Speed is of the devil, as the Arabs say, and a good thing for our side. Terry Richardson, the oil team’s leader, naturally demanded that I release him and his associates with all their equipment and I said I considered him a hireling of the government, with whom we were at war, and so all his goods were forfeit as spoils of battle. It was a civilized discussion, although he got a little pissed when I had all of them strip-searched and found he had a CD taped to his lower back, which I doubted was Joni Mitchell’s Greatest Hits. I gave them their clothes, food, water, their Toyota pickup truck, and safe passage out of our lands. They left a lot of nice swag: besides the customized RV, we now had a radio net with four mobile sets, a couple of ruggedized laptops, a nice HP Inkjet printer, all kinds of geological equipment, and the prize, a satellite phone hooked to a laptop all set up to squirt encrypted e-mails via satlink. I pulled out the old wrinkled, red-dusted card from The Gun Nut that Skeeter Sonnenborg had included with his fudge gift a hundred years ago and one night I tapped the number out on the keyboard.

Oil company encryption is very good, and Skeeter was much relieved when I told him via satlink e-mail what I was using, because the feds were still tapping his communications. Via e-mail I ordered four thousand rounds of 40 mm proximity-fused high-explosive antiaircraft rounds, in case they ever sent serious jet combat airplanes after us, and the same number of armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot rounds for use against tanks, also ammunition for all our rifles and machine guns plus more AK-47s, 82 mm mortars and rounds, a couple hundred RPG-7 antitank rockets, grenades, mines, other warlike stores and a thousand pairs of Malaysian tire-soled sandals, extra large. To pay for it all, I sent him the location of some of Orne
Foy’s golden hoards, with more to come on delivery. He said he would assemble all the stuff at Sharjah, in the Emirates, and fly it in, with a stop at Gore in Ethiopia. It came to a pretty penny including bribes, air freight, and commissions, very nearly all the money Orne had accumulated that I knew about, and so Nietzsche was funding a holy war by the slaves, yet another evidence if any was still needed that the Holy Spirit has a sense of humor.

BY THEN IT
was
anyoic
the end of the season of Ruel, when the rains cease and the second harvest is brought in. No one, not the oldest of Dinka, could recall such a harvest for abundance. We built round mud-wall silos to store the durra and other grains. Now began Rut, the start of the dry days, when the young men are available for labor. I had them build a landing strip and I had them dig bunkers and revetments and shelters under the earth, for people and cattle, sandbagged against flooding. I knew that when the GOS understood what was happening in our country they would send the full force of their military against us, for quite aside from the strategic position we occupied, it would be intolerable for them that the despised
abd
could defeat them, and under the banner of the church at that. I thought we had perhaps half a year, for they would want the land to be perfectly dry and for our supplies (as they would imagine) to be at their lowest.

About a month after I placed my arms order, an ancient Hercules landed on our strip and I was not entirely knocked off my chair to find Skeeter himself at the controls. He hopped out of the cockpit carrying a flat box, crowing, anybody order a pepperoni pizza? I let him kiss me. He said, why pay for a pilot and besides I wanted to see Emmylou of Sudan for myself. Peter despised him from instant one and the same back and I pissed away a lot of energy I couldn’t really spare just keeping them from killing each other. One night I caught Skeeter in the oil company RV going through drawers. He grinned at me, with that charming
psychopath grin he had, and held up an empty CD case. Lots of cases no data disks, sweetie, why is that? I said I’d given out all the CDs as gifts, the people liked to cut them into spirals and use them to ornament the horns of the cattle, and what was it to him? Information is money, he said, lotsa folks would like to know what Richardson found out there. You know he’s dead. I didn’t I said, and he told me that the burnt-out shell of their pickup had been found just north of Pibor, w/charred skeletons. Looked like they hit a mine, but they weren’t in any mine field, you wouldn’t know anything about that would you, sweetie?

At that moment I knew of a certainty, I can’t explain how, that Skeeter had been the one who ratted Orne out to the feds, all kinds of stuff clicked in, like how come he was still in business when half a dozen survivors would’ve been glad to testify that he’d supplied most of the heavy weaponry on Bailey’s Knob, and also the look on his face when I blurted it out. He laughed then and grabbed me, his hands crawling up onto my neck and I think he might’ve killed me right then if Peter hadn’t barged in. Skeeter left the next day, good riddance to bad rubbish said Peter what a fucking plague those people are, and added that he thought he might take up a sideline assassinating arms merchants.

Now we came into the season called Mai, late winter to early spring on the planet, a bad time for the Dinka, when the rivers go dry and the heat is greatest and the cattle must be driven to outlying camps because the grass around the settlements is all gone. But we had so much fodder that we could keep the herds closer in, which was a good thing, because then the Sudanese attacked and we first heard the name of Jabir Akran al-Muwalid.

I guess there are people like him in every country, or in any case it doesn’t seem that leaders interested in doing genocidal atrocities ever have a staffing problem. The attack came from the north at a place called Ring Baai, a village of about fifty families near the Sobat River. We had no warning at all. Later we found that they’d come at night, which was very unusual for the GOS
forces. They had tanks and armored personnel carriers, which we could tell from the tracks and also because they had bound nearly the entire population hand and foot, 658 men women children and lined them up and run a tank down the line crushing all of them and that was the worst thing I saw in Africa. They’d also knocked over the signal tower and crucified the clan elders on the supporting logs. The cattle they’d burned alive in their byres. Two days later they struck at Malual Baai, near the Pibor way to the south of Ring Baai, the same destruction, only this time some boys had escaped with their cattle, having been in a distant camp with them. They spoke of many tanks, many soldiers, a whole army. In fact, we discovered that it was an armored battalion, obviously, this being Sudan, not a
real
armored battalion, but bad enough: two dozen tanks, about half of them American M-60s and the rest Type 62 Chinese lites, plus a dozen or so M-113 APCs, self-propelled mortars, and an assortment of trucks and service vehicles. Troop strength was estimated at about 500. This was an unusually formidable force for that crappy little war, and I suppose we should have been proud that they had thrown it against us rather than the SPLA. I did feel pride God forgive me.

WE SET UP
a night watch and distributed pyrotechnics to the villages, and Peter organized a commando out of our Somersets and took them across the Pibor, where they lay in wait for the fuel convoy that had to be supplying the armor and blew it up with charges we’d made from our unexploded bomb. A very satisfying operation, which meant that the enemy no longer had enough mobility to go picking off settlements and I see I have about eight pages left in this notebook. All small wars are more or less the same and it’s about as interesting to read the details as to read the report of a soccer game. We kept contact with them and sniped. Wibok got bombed, but all our people took shelter in the deep tunnels and my gun knocked a Sukhoi bomber out of the sky
with the new proximity ammo. I led the Somerset Light Infantry off to attack their squadron of light tanks, which were tearing up villages some forty miles distant. They sniped enough to keep the commanders’ heads down, nothing blinder and dumber than a buttoned-up tank, and then they ran away at the usual Dinka fifteen mph lope, pursued by twelve tanks in a row and led them onto my gun, which was nicely camouflaged in a thicket. We blew the first two tanks and the last tank with concealed charges and then it was a matter of flinging out a lot of APFSDS until they were all burning. The Afrika Korps used to do this a lot with their 88s, and it took the Brits a remarkably long time to figure it out. Our forces were now divided and al-Muwalid chose this moment to launch his attack on Wibok. I raced back to the town in the command car and arrived just before he surrounded it.

There was no hope of defending the town of course, they blasted the place to rubble and blew up our vehicles and chased us into our tunnels. And their armor entered our ruins and their infantry followed us into the earth. Then came the close and hideous work in the dark, lit only by the flashes of rifles and the glare of grenades. They pushed us back of course they were so many more than we, until only the headquarters and the hospital bunkers remained together with short stubs of tunnel and a few strong points still ours.