Sudan: A Novel (20 page)

When Ron sat up, he moved slowly. He was stiff and sore from another uncomfortable night sleeping—well, at least lying down—in the back of the jeep. The likelihood that he had actually slept more than an hour or two was pretty slim.

“Two days, Masapha, and still no game. You don’t suppose we heard those fellows wrong, do you?”

The Arab did not get up. He lay flat on his back for a moment and rubbed his eyes with his fists, just like Ron’s nephews did when they woke up.

“Perhaps our hearing of the words was not right.” Masapha squinted into the sun as it cleared the horizon. “But still is this the most excellent spot for the slave traders to meet. They proved that by coming here two days ago. Even if we did not hear the words we thought we heard, it is still a good spending of time to wait here. The slave auction pictures we took are the first ever anybody has taken, and we took the pictures here.”

Masapha rolled out his prayer rug, knelt and began to pray
shurug,
the sunrise prayer. He seldom managed all five daily prayers, but he did the best he could.

Ron climbed out of the jeep and put his shoes on after he shook out each one to make sure it contained no multi-legged stowaways. He folded his sleeping bag and tossed it into the back of the jeep. Then he leaned against the vehicle and waited quietly for Masapha to finish his prayer before he spoke.

“Well, if we don’t see something soon, we’re going to have to head back,” he said as Masapha rolled up his prayer rug. “We’ve got enough water for three more days. Enough food for the same, though we can maybe grub up some stuff to stretch it.”

Masapha nodded. “Three days it is.”

They set up their equipment on the hilltop, then seated themselves a few feet behind and below its crest, constantly shifting to keep up with the small umbrella of shade provided by the handful of skinny, almost leafless acacia trees that grew there.

The two observers scanned the horizon, dispensed hourly rations of water and waited. For entertainment, they tossed the crumbs from the morning’s roll into the air to be snatched by the circling sparrow larks.

A sand grouse that had a large chunk of bread clasped in its beak flew a few feet into the air and then dropped it on the sand at the top of the hill. Ron reached out to pick it up and froze. A moving column of dust was progressing slowly across the desert, headed straight at them.

The two men flattened themselves on the ground and hastily made one last check to ensure that everything was operating properly. There were no problems with the equipment, but there was a problem of a different sort. A floating advertising billboard of larks and sand grouse gyrated up and down a few feet above their heads, announcing their presence to the world.

Ron couldn’t very well stand up and shoo the annoying birds away. But he could remove the food supply so the birds would tire of hovering and go somewhere else for lunch. He picked up the bread, tucked it into his carry pouch and tossed the pouch onto the sand beside him. Then he turned to watch the swirling clouds of dust.

Five...six...seven...nine...eleven...twelve trucks! A dozen trucks! And maybe a couple more obscured by the dust. His heart raced. This was it, really it, this time. This was what he had been waiting for.

The undulating heat waves on the horizon warped and fractured the image, slicing the vehicles into shimmering, horizontal layers so the convoy emerged from the swirling whirlpool of dust in sections.

As they neared the area where the other trucks, jeeps and camels had parked several days earlier, the vehicles moved into position to form a large semicircle with an open area in the center. Because there were so many more vehicles, the line of them stretched all the way across the hollow, with the nearest one directly below Ron and Masapha’s hilltop perch.

Each truck carried captives from a particular tribe who spoke only their own dialect. When the trucks unloaded their wares in the open-air market, buyers could select a few slaves from each tribe. It was easier to train and dominate the slaves if they were isolated, unable to communicate with their fellow captives. Absent a common language, the slaves could not plot with each other, could not band together for revenge or escape.

Once the trucks rumbled into position on the desert floor and stopped, their trailing dust clouds overtook them and shrouded the area in an impenetrable haze. Though they could see nothing through the veil of dust, Ron and Masapha could hear the Arabs shout orders, truck doors bang and tailgates slam open. Gradually, the dust dissipated, and the transports and their cargo materialized.

Ron swallowed hard. His fingers were sweaty as he focused his camera, and it had nothing to do with the heat.

“It’s as bad as people have been telling us.” He was awed at the immensity of the evil. “There must be three hundred of them, maybe more.”

The soldiers herded the captives out of the backs of the trucks as the dust cleared. Boys, girls and women were tied together by lengths of rope, and the soldiers tethered them to the trucks or to stakes driven into the ground, much like the villagers tethered their cattle outside their huts at night.

Masapha felt a small stir behind him. He turned and spotted two hungry grebes. Bolder than the others, the birds were only a few feet away, pecking at the remaining crumbs of bread left from lunch. He waved them off, much to the satisfaction of the crew of smaller larks waiting hopefully in the tree above him.

Ron concentrated on a group of captives in front of the last truck that had just pulled to a stop directly below them. As a guard pounded a stake into the ground, he pulled the focus in tight and captured the face of one little girl—frightened, bewildered, like a lost rabbit. She turned toward the morning sun, squinted and crinkled up her pixie face. When she did, Ron could see that she had dimples.

Akin looked up and squinted into the sun as the guard drove a wooden stake into the ground in front of the truck. Akin, Mbarka, Omina and Shontal had been batched as a package deal, tied together with a rope the guard looped around the stake. Once the rope was secure, the guard walked back to the puddle of shade beside the truck, leaving the girls to broil under the sun.

Better here than in the truck, where the girls had struggled to breathe in the cloud of dust that had swirled for hours around the last truck in the convoy. Still dizzy and disoriented, her wrists raw from the rough rope that tied her hands together, Akin was totally and utterly miserable. But in the noisy world that ebbed and flowed around her, nobody noticed one hungry, thirsty, frightened little girl, sitting despondent in the sand.

Except Ron. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click.

The auction unfolded faster than Ron or Masapha expected. They photographed, videotaped and recorded the action, amazed at how quickly the buyers selected their wares, paid for them, loaded them up and left. There was a steady stream of arriving and departing vehicles, and the number of captives quickly dwindled.

When only about 50 or 60 remained, Ron slid down behind the crest of the hill to load a fresh roll of film into his camera. Masapha scooted down beside him to adjust a setting on the camcorder. They couldn’t have been away from their observation posts more than a couple of minutes, but that was long enough for them to miss the departure of three soldiers.

The soldiers were guards for the captive villagers in the truck next to the one parked directly below the crest where Ron and Masapha were filming. When the last of their prisoners had been purchased and hauled away, they set their rifles aside to take a break, laughing and talking as they walked together toward the base of the hill. Then they separated, moved about 50 feet apart for privacy and began relieving themselves in the bushes.

When the soldier nearest the hill finished and turned to head back to the truck, he noticed something odd nearby. At least a dozen larks and grouse circling in the air above the hill were diving at something on the ground there. He straightened his robe and headed around the side of the hill to see what so interested the birds.

Something in the squawking and chirping caught Ron’s attention. He glanced over his shoulder and realized he had knocked his pouch of bread down the embankment when he’d loaded the last roll of film. The pouch had opened and spilled its contents onto the dirt.

He set his camera aside and scooted down until he could stand without being seen from the other side of the hill. He stepped to the sack and shooed the birds away. Then he reached down to pick it up.

They saw each other at the same instant: Ron as he leaned over to pick up the sack of crumbs, the Arab as he rounded the corner of the hill. Ron froze in midreach; the Arab froze in midstride.

Eyes wide, their gazes fastened on each other.

The frozen moment lasted only a heartbeat before the soldier started to back away. He took two steps, then turned and ran, shouting as he stumbled around the corner of the hill toward the trucks.

Ron leapt up the hillside, grabbed his equipment and hissed at Masapha, “Outta here, now!”

He slung the strap of the camera over one shoulder, the camera bag strap over the other, snatched up the camcorder and was running full-out toward the jeep within seconds. Masapha grabbed the sound equipment. His short legs pumped frantically as he tore out for the jeep only a couple of steps behind Ron.

Ron and Masapha reached the stand of scraggly trees and bushes that hid the jeep just as the Arabs started shooting. The guns sounded like cannons, and bullets sang through the air above their heads. The soldiers couldn’t see them; they were shooting wildly. But they were shooting in the right direction!

The two men chucked their equipment into the back of the jeep, pushed away the branches of camouflage in one quick sweep and dove into the front seats. Ron turned the key in the ignition, and there was a second of silence during which both men aged 10 years before the engine caught and hummed to life. Ron jammed the gearshift into first, smashed the accelerator to the floor and popped the clutch all in one movement. The back tires kicked out a jet stream of small rocks as the jeep lurched forward, fishtailed slightly in the sand and then took off like a jackrabbit, bounding and bumping over the rutted trail.

In less than a minute, they were out of range of the soldiers’ rifles. But the Arabs kept firing anyway. Ron and Masapha could hear the gunshots until they faded to distant popping sounds, like fireworks in the sky a long way off.

Idris lay in the dark in the tukul, fighting the despair in his heart, struggling to banish the haunting memories so he could rest.

He didn’t know that at that moment, he was the only man in all of Mondala who was trying to go to sleep. In fact, he was the only man in the village who was even lying down.

What had happened to Idris had been the lone topic of conversation in the village from the moment the men in the millet field spotted him trudging down the mountain path.

Shortly after the evening meal, Durak and several other men had gone from tukul to tukul throughout Mondala and announced that the village elders had called a special meeting—not just of elders, but of the heads of every remaining family in the village. The meeting would convene after sunset around a fire in the open space in front of the two large rocks that marked the entrance to the village.

The men began to arrive as the pink glow of sunset faded from the western sky, walking alone or by twos and threes out of the village into the flickering firelight. They squatted on the ground or leaned against the rocks and murmured quietly among themselves. Every family in the village was represented. Except one. Idris Apot, whose hut was on the back side of Mondala overlooking the river, had not been invited to the meeting and knew nothing about it.

Many of the men knew, or had figured out, why the meeting had been called. Others could not even have guessed. When everyone was present, Durak stood and addressed the group. There were no preliminaries; he got right to the point.

“We all know that our neighbor Idris is back and that he did not find his daughter,” he said. “We know the story, that a man took his money and cheated him.”