“There’s plenty of desert around.”
“No, no, no. This isn’t desert. This is the very nice part of the Sudan.”
“It’s lovely.”
“There is much water the further south we go. Swamps.”
“Just like New Jersey.”
She meant it as an insult, but since Abul had never been to New Jersey—and in fact didn’t know where it was—he took it as a compliment.
The rebel soldiers who guarded the village approach during the day flagged down the bus with the professional boredom of conductors taking tickets on a morning commuter train. One came aboard, glanced at Nuri and Hera, then told Abul that the tax was ten dollars American to pass.
“Ten dollars?” said Nuri in Arabic. “Why so much?”
The soldier glanced at him, reassessing his appearance. He was dressed like a European. More than likely he was one, but if he wasn’t, he should be taxed like one for trying to ape them.
And the woman was also foreign.
“Ten,” the soldier told Abul.
“Ten dollars is five times what most vehicles pay,” insisted Nuri.
At fifteen years old, the soldier had been with the rebels for nearly eight years. This made him a veteran and, by seniority, an NCO. He did not like to be questioned.
Abul, starting to get nervous, asked diplomatically if the tax had recently been raised.
“That is always what it is,” said the soldier.
“It was less a week ago,” said Nuri. “You think we are rich, so you can charge what you want.”
“You are to pay or turn around,” the soldier told Abul.
“Tell him if we pay ten dollars, we expect that to cover our return trip,” Nuri told Abul in English.
Doubtful that the deal would be accepted, Abul nonetheless made the offer. The soldier surprised him, saying that was acceptable.
“I doubt they’ll keep the deal,” said Abul.
“They’ll keep it,” said Nuri.
He pulled the bill from his pocket, held it up, then tore it in half.
“You will get the other half when we come back,” he said, passing the bill to Abul.
Abul took it and held it out toward the soldier the way a man might hold a steak out to a tiger. The soldier’s eyes flashed with anger, but then he smiled.
“You are very clever,” he told Nuri. “Very clever.”
“You’re pretty clever yourself, Captain.”
“Only a sergeant,” said the young man. He smiled at him—a broad smile that revealed he was missing two teeth—then left the bus.
“Why did you dicker with them?” Hera asked Nuri as Abul pushed the bus forward. “You were only pissing him off.”
“No, I was telling them not to screw with me.”
“They had the guns, we didn’t. If you made him too mad, they’d shoot us.”
“You don’t understand the psychology,” Nuri told her. “Ten dollars is a huge amount of money. When I came through on my motorcycle, they charged me the equivalent of a quarter, and in the local currency. If we gave in right away, then they would think we had a lot of money. And if we have a lot of money, then we should give them more. They feel if they are the stronger ones, they deserve it.”
“All you did was piss them off,” said Hera. “If you wanted to show them you were strong, you wouldn’t have paid anything.”
“That wouldn’t have been fair—and might have gotten us all killed.”
Hera rolled her eyes.
Roughly five thousand people lived in the village, their numbers swelling it in size to a small city. Most were crammed into ramshackle buildings made from scraps and gathered into distinct hamlets on either side of the highway, which ran through the center of town. About seventy percent were families of guerrillas, and most were related to each other. The faction was a small player in Sudan’s revolt, unable to project power much beyond the immediate area, though they had launched occasional forays against the army farther north. The villagers survived on subsistence farming, though their yields had faltered over the past few years, as the nutrients in the soil were not replaced. The situation was similar to that in western Sudan, where steady soil erosion encouraged desertification, which then made it impossible for the people to survive.
Tura Dpap, the village and rebel leader, was an elder in the tribe whose people made up the bulk of the population. He was well-liked, generally called “Uncle” by his followers—many of whom were, at different removes, his actual nieces and nephews. Unusual for the rebel movements, he was an older man, well into his fifties. He had also never married, equally unusual.
The village centered around a church building that had been founded and then abandoned by missionaries nearly a hundred years before. Uncle Dpap had taken over the building and repaired it, painting it bright yellow, a color that had come to be associated with his movement. There was no steeple, but the roof and the cross-shaped facade made its history clear.
The two buildings next to it were used by Dpap and his closest advisors as homes, sheltering not only them and their families, but bodyguards and younger soldiers with no families and nowhere else to stay. Directly across the street were three small stores and a restaurant. The buildings dated from roughly the same time as the church, and had suffered through several cycles of disregard and repair, but were the sturdiest structures around.
Rebel soldiers, most of them in their early teens, milled around the center of town. Every one of them had a rifle; many wore ropes around their neck with ammo magazines taped to them.
Though she’d seen boy soldiers and worse conditions in Somalia, Hera was appalled by how young the kids were. Some would have been in only third or fourth grade in the States.
“We’re taking our pistols with us,” she said, slipping her hand under the seat in front of her.
“We don’t need them,” insisted Nuri. But he didn’t stop her from taking one.
The video bugs Nuri was planting were bigger than the ones he normally used. About the size of a quarter in diameter and three quarters thick, the size was a function of the batteries they contained, which would allow them to transmit for as long as six days. They would transmit to a small booster unit a half mile away; the booster would send the signals to the Voice’s satellite system.
As he stepped from the bus, Nuri put a piece of gum in his mouth. The gum was the adhesive that held the bug in place. The size of the bugs made them relatively easy to spot, and thus harder to place than the ones he normally worked with. He walked over to the stores, then stopped, as if he couldn’t decide which one to go into first. He was actually looking over the facade to see if there was a place to hide the bugs.
He couldn’t find a good spot offhand, and with the soldiers watching, decided to move inside the middle building. Hera followed.
A year before, she had been assigned to visit a resistance movement in northern Tibet, living in the mountains for several months as she gauged the seriousness and strength of the movements that were opposed to the central Chinese government. She had not been impressed. The so-called rebels lacked focus and organization. The group here, with the ability to run its own stores, seemed light-years ahead.
Which wasn’t saying much.
There were only men in the store. All fixed their eyes on her as she came in, following her as she walked behind Nuri and glanced at the mostly empty shelves. A radio tuned to the government music station played a mix of European techno and African music, the beats changing violently from song to song. The floor vibrated lightly to the music.
Nuri went to the shopkeeper, who worked behind a counter with a small cash box as his register.
“Nuri Abaajmed,” he said enthusiastically in Arabic, reaching out his hand. “I am a professor of paleontology at the University of Wisconsin, America.”
The word “America” got everyone’s attention. The man’s smile showed he had about half his teeth. Nuri told him about the scientific expedition “up the road.” The shopkeeper told him he could speak English, which he promptly demonstrated.