The sky, in this longer-than-usual rainy season, bulged with immense gray-black clouds, pressing in on the plane like mountains, granite, solid matter. The pilot flew by sight, not instrument, squeezing the big transport through narrow slot canyons of light, slim spaces between cliff-clouds, as if the clouds might actually rip the wings off the plane.
Eddie answered from our tent lab, where, he said, he was analyzing blood taken from villagers from Thiet who had contracted leishmaniasis, an ulcerating disease caused by protozoa. The organism enters the human bloodstream in the bite of a sandfly. I told him to take a break and order up one of the base’s small planes, one equipped with the ability to conduct conference calls by satellite. The Gates Foundation had two. I told him to stock the plane with antibiotics, antivirals, biokits, biosuits, and neck-mike radios with multiple headsets.
“Somalia? Are you out of your mind? Call Washington.”
“I’ll do it from the air.”
Eddie turned sarcastic. “That’s a little late, isn’t it? And this Hassan guy listened in? Come on, Uno. Lionel called under duress. He’s a hostage. We go, we’re hostages. Call the admiral and find out about Hassan.”
“Later. In and out,” I said.
“Uno, I didn’t argue when you ordered that Hercules to keep going when the engine died, and I didn’t when you treated that potential Ebola case without protection last week.”
“It wasn’t Ebola and I could see that.”
“You didn’t know that for sure at the time.”
“He needed attention, Eddie.”
“One, since we got to Sudan, you’ve put yourself in every hazardous situation possible. It’s reckless.”
“Not now,” I said as the Hercules topped a rise, and the sprawling aid camp came into view, a mass of semipermanent dirt streets, a mile-square grid of compounds run by international aid groups… sleeping, warehouse and garage tents, prefab Quonsets, rising smoke from a hundred cooking fires and a dozen dining tents. There was a single paved runway and, camped a hundred yards away, a side camp of two thousand Turkana nomads, who had taken up residence near the now twenty-year-old aid city that had sprung up in the bush.
“Now is exactly the time,” Eddie said. “You didn’t kill her. You saved five thousand lives and even the President said so! I don’t care if you won’t talk about it. I’ll talk about it until you see a shrink, and deal with it instead of working your ass off, burying yourself in the woods, and leaping at every dangerous assignment that comes our way.”
“This is about Lionel, not me. One of our old guys!”
The pilot brought us down the runway past wrecked planes that had never been cleaned away — a sixty-year-old Air Manitoba Douglas that had dropped an engine, a vintage Fokker whose malaria-ridden pilot lost control during a shivering attack, a 1976 Tri-Star that had flown so long without maintenance that the port wing sheared off. The sides of the runway were a gauntlet of shattered steel, a mechanical graveyard, where planes went to die.
Eddie said, “Some guys get to your point, they put an M4 in their mouth. You hope someone else will do it.”
“The Hawiyes promised us a pass.”
“The Hawiyes promised? Black Hawk down? Copters blown up? Our guys… corpses… dragged through the streets, and crowds celebrating? Those guys promised?”
I snapped, “Then stay here, Dos.”
“Right. Like I’ll really do that.”
Private contractor soldiers with M16s patrolled the base to deter theft. The compounds were operated by Irish Relief, Red Crescent, Red Cross, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, World Without War, World for Christ.
The warehouse tents we rolled past contained tons of food, medicine, jerry cans for gasoline, clothing, soap, aspirin, and tax write-off donations from corporations: canned water from a Milwaukee beer company, crates of out-of-style trousers from a Minnesota clothing company, forty-year-old plastic eyeglass frames from Chicago, vegetarian cookbooks, donated baseball cards, toothpaste, art supplies, vitamin C pills, canned tuna fish, shoelaces. Antibiotics next to air fresheners. Syringes beside bathroom mats. One box filled with vital supplies, the next with something ridiculous.
“Eddie, this illness may be what we’re here to find. So get the plane. And don’t call Washington yet.”
Eddie and I have been buddies since college. He’s a savage fighter and a fiercely loyal friend and the annoying flip side of his faithfulness is his unshakable need to watch my back at all times.
“Yes, sir,” he snapped.
I hung up.
We powered down within view of hundreds of Turkana men and women around a bonfire, even during the day, jumping up and down and singing the same song that had kept me awake last night. The comely women wearing multicolored bead necklaces. The tall men holding long, thin, iron-barbed spears. Up and down, up and down, working themselves up. So many people that the piston-like pounding of bare feet raised a dust cloud.
The song, in my mind, served as an anthem for this upside-down place, revenge central, anarchy incarnate.
The four words were, Who stole my goat?
Big emergencies start small.
This has nothing to do with Karen, I’d insisted to Eddie. I know what I’m doing.
Sixty minutes later, we were in the air.
TWO
I grew up as far away from Africa as you can get, in the small Berkshire town of Smith Falls, Massachusetts, on a cracked two-lane rural road ten miles south of the Vermont line. We took for granted our small but well-stocked general store, our late-model cars that worked, and food so plentiful that health problems came from eating too much of it. We had solid roofs over our heads and schools that stayed open. We trusted the state cops who drove past each day, especially since some were our relatives. We resided in an area that magazines identified as a tourist destination, not a world trouble spot: the Berkshires, where you could take a road trip to see the bright red leaves in October, pick fresh apples, hear the Boston Symphony play outdoors at Tanglewood, dine in restaurants rated by the New York Times.
Not that I did that. I was a townie, and Smith Falls was an old mill town, where my ancestors — immigrant Welsh coal miner great-great-grandfather and his immigrant Norwegian peasant wife, who met on a steamer — worked at a textile mill. By World War Two, my family was making uniforms for the U.S. Army. By the Grenada invasion, the mills had closed, moved to Honduras, and Rush family members were the plumbers and carpenters for the second-home owners who showed up in the Berkshires each June, and went back to New York or Boston in September.
I found our calm life boring, our July Fourth parade, Christmas sing-alongs, and backyard barbeques stifling. Safety was for old people. The small homes, mowed lawns, and blink-of-an-eye main street felt suffocating. I thrilled to commercials showing U.S. Marines storming ashore to rescue Americans in trouble, guarding our nation against foreign attack. I wanted to be one of the few and the proud, so I studied hard and won an ROTC scholarship to the University of Massachusetts. After I left, I did not look back.