Gift of Revelation (22 page)

The building shook to its foundation under the first mortar round. It knocked me down on my face. There was a series of gunfire outside. A guard unfastened our chains, motioned to us to get down. I wiped the perspiration from my face as I huddled near the door. Another blast took off a part of the roof, sending bricks and boards flying down the hallway.

“Flatten yourself against a wall,” I shouted above the explosions. I didn't want to die here. I had to survive.

The attack had roused me from my sleep. Now, for the first time, I noticed that Gatgong had been maimed during my slumber. They had snipped off his fingers on both hands, but not his thumbs. Marcy had wrapped the bloody wounds with rags. He moaned and writhed from the pain of the mutilation.

Marcy held him, trying to soothe him. “We'll get out of here. Check the hall. See if the guards are out there.”

I stuck out my head, looking for the enemy. The bullets ripped along the ceiling and the wall. I crawled to the right, waving to Marcy so that she followed me, and Gatgong stood up and ran in the opposite direction. He was cut down immediately.

“Keep down!” I yelled at Marcy.

One of the rebels near the door was awarded with a red spot on his forehead, followed by a hissing sound, and he dropped to the floor. Dead. The other rebel near the door returned fire at the darkness in the street.

“When we get a chance, run for it,” I said to Marcy.

In an instant, several guns were firing at once, and there was total bedlam. The rebels were giving as good as they got. These were regulars, trained professionals, holy warriors. Still, they were getting picked off one by one.

“I'm scared, Reverend!” Marcy screamed. “Don't let me die.”

It was out of my hands. I couldn't guarantee her safety. All I could hope was that these were friendlies coming to our rescue. This was a well-coordinated attack with maybe some of the same soldiers Elsa had promised me.

Hesitating for a moment after the second big explosion, I dived to the floor, with Marcy right behind me. My ears rang from the boom of the blast. I looked into a series of rooms, some small and others larger, and none of them were occupied by the rebels. I tried to keep my feet under me as the room tilted. I heard more shots. One rebel shouted, “Death to the infidels!” and then another and another. The gunfire increased as the rebels had chosen to make one last stand.

A soldier stood near a shattered window, shooting at flashes of automatic fire, trying to pick off the men who were running from tree to tree. The remaining rebels refused to run away from the fight, and they stood stock-still, shooting, their weapons jerking with each shot. Some of them were drenched with blood.

“Look here,” I said, peeking out a window of one of the empty rooms as some of the rebels shot at our rescue team from the second story of a nearby building. The automatic fire bursts looked like the flashes of fireflies in the night. Marcy crawled to me and glanced at the eruption of violence.

Another explosion in the building knocked me down. I felt no pain.
Is this the way people die? Is this the end?
I thought.
I don't deserve to die like this.

A rebel leveled his weapon and fired a burst through the doorway. I jumped him in the thick, dark smoke and wrestled him to the floor, trying all the while to yank the gun away from him. He pounded on my chest, pushing his fists hard against my body, growling angrily. In Arabic he chanted, “God is great. God is great. God is great.” A shot sounded once, twice. I felt a stinging in my leg.

“Kill him! Kill him, Reverend!” Marcy shouted, leaping on the man, who had pinned me down. She bit his gun hand very hard.

For a moment, I thought of those holy warriors, the martyrs of their faith, whose dream was the reward of seventy-two virgins when they reached paradise.

The pistol rolled out of from his grasp. Marcy picked it up and fired a shot through the neck of the rebel. He shrieked and slumped to the floor on top of me.

I heard the rebels pushing furniture up to the windows, barricading themselves in place, determined to fight until the last man. From all accounts, these were men who would drop their weapons and surrender. The older man was pumping them up with tirades of battling the Great Satan and the worshippers of the infidel God. Sounds and smoke filled the air between the series of shots and explosions. I kept my head down. They started burning papers and documents and smashing a laptop computer with a hammer.

One of the men kept repeating, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet.”

Another true believer, one who had lectured me about how the Sudanese conflict resembled the Crusades, with the Christians against the Muslims, carried the stockpile of ammo and grenades to the basement. I heard his footsteps on the steps. The same man who had given me the history of Sudan's struggle, the religious and ethnic war, the civil wars between the North and the South, Arabs against Africans, Muslims against Christians. He had bragged to me about how brutal the rebels had been when they'd gone door to door in the village, searching for informers and Christians. I tensed up, fearing an explosion from below that would kill us all.

The smoke was getting very thick in the rooms. My lungs ached, and my legs ached. The friendlies had arrived, and they were pouring into the backyard, shooting everything in sight, coming into the building.

“Follow me,” I said, guiding the woman through the blinding air. A mercenary soldier found us and led us out into the open.

Three more shells were targeted at the main room of the building, and small blasts could be heard from where we lay in the yard. Gunfire sounded over and over. The survivors on the rebel side fled into the bush.

One of the mercenaries was talking on a radio. He was calling in a report. “The captives are safe. Repeat, the captives are safe,” he said.

It took me several weeks to locate Addie. An aide for the Sudanese government drove me to the local makeshift hospital where she was recovering. When I pulled up, she was sitting in the shade of a tree, surrounded by doctors and volunteers. Several photographers and reporters were gathered around her, too, and they were shouting questions and snapping her picture. Her face was strangely blank, her eyes were dead and lifeless, and she looked slightly frail. I stood there, just out of her sight.

Somebody had made her up, putting some eye shadow and bright red lipstick on her. Her hair was done in an odd fashion and was not in her usual style. She wore a plain hospital frock, and her feet were bare.

As I walked toward the group, I looked back at the collection of tents that provided emergency medical care at the hospital and saw the staffers hurrying in and out, the trucks pulling up with precious cargo.

“How soon will she be able to go home?” I asked a nurse.

She replied, “Any day now. As soon as the doctors think she can stand the long flight home.” She paused. “There are other things wrong with her, other than her physical ailments,” she added.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

The nurse spoke slowly. “While your friend was being held hostage, she was sexually assaulted. Five rebels held her hands and feet and took turns. They did this to her for over four hours. When we found her, she couldn't walk. She was hemorrhaging.”

“Oh, my God! I . . . I . . . I . . .” I was stunned.

“How well do you know her?” she asked me.

“I know her very well,” I answered. “What can I do?”

She folded her arms and put on a concerned face. “She doesn't remember a lot of her assault. We learned some of the facts from another captive who was there with her. You must see that she gets help when she gets stateside.”

I nodded, still reeling from the bad news.

After I asked her a dumb question, about why rape was a weapon in this war, she told me that rape was considered the spoils of conflict. Rape was used to dehumanize the enemy. In this case, rape was used to dehumanize a tomboyish country gal from Alabama who didn't know the score or the players over here. She was considered collateral damage, something that just happened.

“She keeps saying she wishes she had died that night,” the nurse said. “She feels guilty and ashamed.”

“I can understand that,” I replied.

“A bright spot is that she considers herself lucky because she tested negative for HIV,” she said. “That would have been a real problem, especially since she's expecting.”

“A baby?” I was totally shocked.

“She'll need a very good support network, along with some counseling for her emotional trauma,” she remarked.

I had prayed that Addie would return to life, that she would be alive. Nothing had prepared me for these circumstances. The nurse told me that a doctor had advised Addie to “forgive and forget” what had happened to her. How could she do that? I didn't know how she could do this, especially when she had the baby. The baby would serve as a reminder of the sexual violence committed against her.

“It's an outrage and a tragedy,” the nurse said, summing it up. “But this is what happens to thousands of African women every day. They have to live with the scourge of rape. Usually, they have nobody to turn to for counseling or advice.”

I waited for all the media to leave Addie's side. She sat there after they were gone, staring into space. Quietly, I moved down the slope to her. When I got within arm's reach, I touched her slightly. She flinched and turned to see that it was me. I knelt by her and talked softly.

“How are you, Addie?” I asked. “I missed you.”

“I'm alive,” she said solemnly.

“I'm glad you are,” I replied. “But how are you feeling?”

She took my hand tenderly in hers and pulled it to her. She leaned forward, her eyes suddenly shut, and was oddly still.

“You came back for me,” she said quietly. “You care, after all.” She was silent for a moment. “I gave you a hard time, didn't I?”

“Not really,” I lied.

Her voice was tight. “I told them I was a Christian, and they raped me.”

“I know, Addie.” A chill surged through me.

“I'm no longer afraid,” she said, the words low and strong. “I no longer doubt myself. I no longer feel like I failed. I no longer believe what people say about me. I've faced the most horrible thing that can happen to a woman, and I lived.”

“I'm glad about that,” I said. “But you'll need help.”

“I sure will,” she replied. “I'm having a baby. Two of the nurses advised me to abort it. They said it could make me only more depressed.”

“A baby is more than a notion,” I said. “You should be sure.”

That perked her up. “I was born a woman, black, and poor. All strikes against me, like most women in the black South. I've had to fight to get people to take me seriously.”

“You should take your time before you made that decision,” I said.

“I already know what I'll do, Reverend. Also, thank you for trying to rescue me. I heard how hard you tried.”

“A child is for life,” I replied, going back to her pregnancy. “You can't take it back and return it to the store. It's a big responsibility.”

“Are you trying to talk me out of this?”

“No, I'm not.”

She looked at me like she was trying to read my heart. I believed she wanted to know whether I was going to stick with her. She was the bravest woman I knew. For her courage, I was no longer afraid to take the plunge. It was not that I felt sorry for her. She would need my care, support, and love in the days to come. She was a broken soul, but she could heal.

I knew the Lord's mercy healed. I honored that miracles could happen. She was a warrior. I didn't know how right I was about her. But time would tell.

 

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