by Ninie Hammon
But she understood that when Abuong was baptized today, he and her father would be joined in a unique bond. All those who had been baptized seemed to draw together in an intimacy that she didn’t understand. Now, Abuong would share something with her father that she did not.
She watched her father drape his arm around her brother’s shoulder, and the two of them bowed their heads in prayer.
Idris had spent hours telling Abuong the stories of Jesus, and patiently explained how the boy could be in a relationship with the God of the universe. Like every Christian father in the world, he had been delighted when his son understood, believed and asked to be baptized. He sincerely believed that Christianity was the most important gift he could give to his children, and he longed for the day Akin would be willing to sit still long enough for him to have the kind of deep, intimate discussions he had had with her brother. As he and Abuong sat together by the morning campfire, they prayed for Akin. And as she watched them pray, she felt a sudden pang of emptiness. For the first time in her life, Akin had been left out.
She popped up off her sleeping mat and darted out of the tukul.
“Good morning, Papa!” she squealed in delight, and plopped down in his lap.
Idris was so taken off guard that he had to fight to keep his balance on the log where he sat. But his greeting was as warm and loving as it had ever been. He hugged her close and kissed her dimpled cheeks. And the bubbly little girl’s jealousy evaporated like dew in the morning sunshine.
The Arab mercenary noted the little girl’s dimples as he watched her through the binoculars he had trained on Mondala. Lying with two comrades in the tall grass by the river, the advance scout paused to look at the child briefly before he returned to his surveillance of the village. She was a pretty little thing, he thought—and surely still a virgin. She would bring a handsome price at the auction.
Chapter 5
U.S. Representative Dan Wolfson stood in front of a small group of fellow legislators in a conference room deep in the bowels of the Cannon Office Building connected to the Capitol by an underground passageway.
“I just don’t know what else I can say to make this any plainer than I already have,” Dan said. A hint of exasperation sneaked into his tone, uninvited.
He had loosened his red “power tie,” and a lock of his dark hair had fallen over his forehead in what Sherry called a “sexy widow’s peak.” He leaned on the lectern and looked each of the seated men in the eye, one at a time, all the way around the big conference table. “If I’m missing something here, you need to tell me what it is, because for the life of me I can’t understand why this bill isn’t a slam-dunk.”
Dan would know about slam-dunks. Even at “only” six feet, six inches, he had jammed many a ball during the four years he started as a forward for the Purdue University Boilermakers. It was his basketball career, as a matter of fact, that had launched him into politics. Or rather, the lack of a basketball career. He’d grown up only 30 miles from the home of Boston Celtics superstar Larry Bird in French Lick, Indiana. But Dan was no Larry Bird. He played smart, though, had quick hands and an uncanny ability to see the whole court at once. He always found an open man, and his high, arching, nothing-but-net three-point shot had sealed the Boilermakers’ Big Ten Conference Championship title when he was a junior.
NBA scouts had been checking him out before a torn rotator cuff early in his senior year put him on the bench for the remainder of the season, and as it turned out, for the rest of his life. At graduation, he found himself with a diploma in political science that he would actually have to use to support himself. That led to Stanford University Law School. A brief but impressive law career led to a term and a half in the Indiana state Senate. And that led to Washington.
Now beginning his fourth term representing the southern Indiana district around New Albany, the son of crusading minister Paul Wolfson was considered something of a maverick and certainly a political anomaly. As anyone who’d been on the Hill more than 10 minutes could tell you, it was virtually impossible to forecast where U.S. Representative Dan Wolfson would come down on any given issue. He wasn’t predictable because he wasn’t in anybody’s pocket. He’d ridden a landslide victory up to the steps of Congress and didn’t owe the price of the ticket to any big contributors. He was his own man. That made him popular, sought-after and a loose cannon.
Dan had invited to the meeting a handful of colleagues who represented a cross-section of the House. With disparate views, constituencies and backgrounds, they were a tough sell. But that’s what Dan had been looking for. If he was going to get shot down, this was a better place to take the hit than on the House floor. Better to find out the weaknesses of his argument now than to be blindsided later.
Dan was a convincing speaker—his accent pure “middle America” and his voice pure orator. Even toned down for the small room, its rumble was commanding and impressive. For an hour, he’d presented information and answered questions about his proposed Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill, an unadorned, straightforward piece of legislation that called on the Sudanese government to cease human rights violations against its own people or face a series of stiffer and stiffer sanctions from the U.S. He described what he hoped the bill would accomplish and why it was so desperately needed, and he issued an impassioned plea for support.
Though he had tried to prepare himself, he was still surprised that the presentation provoked such a remarkable lack of enthusiasm from his colleagues. It was as if he had leapt to his feet and shouted: “Hip, hip...” and was waiting for a resounding “hurray!” that never came. There was only silence.
That was not a good sign. He told Sherry later that the meeting had started to go south as soon as he stopped talking.
“Roger Calvin, that little guy from Florida who actually wears a plastic pocket protector, was the first one who bailed,” he said, as Sherry poured him a second cup of after-supper coffee. “He said to count him out because eighty percent of Sudan’s gum exports come to the U.S., and the gum lobbies and soft drink companies just about own his district.”
“Was Raleigh Sutherland there?”
Dan made a humph sound in his throat. “Are you kidding? You know he wouldn’t miss an opportunity to come down on the other side of whatever I support!”
Then he launched into a perfect imitation of the white-haired legislator’s southern drawl. “Ah represent the citizens of the great state of South Car-o-li-na, and far as I know, ah didn’t git a single vote from Africa. Much as I’d like to hep ya out, Daniel, ah don’t have a dog in that fight.”
Sherry began to clear away the dishes as Ron talked. It was Jonathan’s turn to help tonight, but he was nowhere to be found.
“Surely, Greg Alexander was on your side. I’d think you could count on a man like him to support a bill to prevent persecution of Christians.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”
Besides bearing a striking resemblance to Brad Pitt, Greg Alexander was an outspoken evangelical who conducted a Bible study in his office every Friday. The young Idaho congressman also was the chair of the Christian Legislators Association, which, oh by the way, had a mailing list of more than 400,000 names.
“I thought I had him when he started out saying he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if he didn’t stand up against genocide.” Dan sighed. “But he ended by saying the bill’s timing was bad and maybe we could try to push it through next spring after we get the budget approved.”
Dan suddenly noticed his youngest son’s absence.
“Wasn’t Jonathan supposed to...?”
“Help clean up after supper? Uh-huh.” Sherry looked tired and exasperated. “Sometimes it’s easier to just do it myself.”
Dan drained his cup, stood and began to gather up dishes.
“Calvin even brought up Ron, implied that because my brother was investigating Sudan, my judgment was somehow impaired, that maybe I didn’t see what was going on as clearly as I should.”
>
The big man turned toward the kitchen with a stack of plates.
“My brother is the one who does see it all clearly.” Dan shook his head. “Ron was right. Maybe I ought to just deck somebody.”
The itinerate preacher, Pastor Maluong, stood on the riverbank, surrounded by a crowd that probably numbered more than 200. Most of them were from Mondala, with a handful from two other villages upstream where he had preached at services last night. The pastor wore Western-style khaki shorts with sandals and a bright, African-print shirt loose at the waist.
The crowd was predominantly women and children. The women were not dressed in their “church clothes,” but in the shapeless shifts they wore as they went about their chores in the village. Many of the women, particularly the younger ones, were bare-breasted; all the children under age five were naked. Most of the men had stayed behind to work in the sorghum fields, planting millet until sundown. But once the workday was over, the men would join the celebration, eating mullaah bamyah, okra stew, wild water lilies and the game—gazelle, reedbuck or bushbuck—the hunters brought back, roasted on a spit over an open fire in the center of the village.
He glanced up to see if there were any stragglers before he began the service, and the pastor spotted Akin barreling down the hill, all arms and legs, her perpetual smile snug on her pixie face. The child wormed her way through the people gathered at the river’s edge and popped like a cork out of the crowd. She wore her faded smiley-face T-shirt and a stained goatskin skirt, and she was panting. Obviously, she had run all the way from the village.
“Be careful a crocodile doesn’t get you!” Akin called to her younger brother, who stood a short distance away, already up to his knees in the brown river water.
There were, of course, no crocodiles on this particular stretch of water. The river and adjacent sandbar were, in fact, a perfect setting to accommodate the villagers’ needs, and Akin was certain the elders who built Mondala on the hilltop had positioned it there for just that reason.
The forest on the village side of the river had been removed so long ago not even the old ones remembered when, forming a bowl that gave the women easy access to the wide, sandbar riverbank to draw water they carried back to their tukuls in clay jars balanced on their heads and to wash their families’ clothes and spread them on the river rocks to dry.
Directly across from the bowl, a huge gray cliff rose out of the water and towered 50 feet into the air. The river bent sharply around the cliff face and cut a deep trough in front of it that created the sandbar on the village side and deposited gravel on the river bottom. Though the cliff face appeared to be perfectly smooth, it offered enough handholds for generations of boys to climb to the top and leap from the rocks into the deep pool below. But other than climbing the rock wall, there was no access to the top of the cliff from the river. A narrow, winding trail led up a steep slope on the back side of the cliff, but the entrance to that trail was more than a mile upstream. It was the spot where the hunters had crossed the river earlier that morning in search of game for the evening meal.
The road, such as it was, came from the south and split at the crest of the hill. One part continued a quarter of a mile into the village and ended in a labyrinth of interconnecting passageways that wound among the 100 tukuls. Worn by the traffic of bare feet for generations, the trails had been beaten down six inches into the hard clay. The other fork of the road led around a 20-foot stand of bamboo, a wall of sticks that grew so close together even a small child couldn’t have squeezed between them. The road ended at the riverbank across from the cliff, where yellow-billed storks, snowy herons and egrets waded on their long legs in the shallow water downstream, feeding among the reeds next to the bank.
The pastor addressed the crowd. “We are here for a very special occasion.”
The rock wall and river formed a natural amphitheater that magnified his voice. The sudden sound startled a trio of herons in the nearby reeds. They instantly took flight, protesting loudly before settling back down into the river farther downstream and prancing herky-jerky on their stick legs in the water.
“We’re here to stand as witnesses to the faith of our brothers and sisters. Their baptism is an act of obedience that symbolizes the death of their old selves and their birth into a clean, new life.”
Even the villagers who opted not to attend the ceremony on the riverbank were welcome to join in the celebration afterward. Only about a third of the 275 residents of Mondala counted themselves Christians. The rest were animists or had no particular religious beliefs of any kind. But the whole village embraced the festivities as a break from the monotony of their everyday lives, and those who weren’t at the riverbank looked forward to the evening’s feast.
Most who remained behind were men and older boys who worked in the sorghum fields or looked after the cattle that grazed on the grassy slopes southwest of the tribal compound. The women still in the village cared for small children, finished morning chores or made preparations for the evening celebration.
One villager who’d declined the invitation to join in the Christian baptism service had obligingly agreed to stay behind and help with his neighbors’ cattle. Living by himself, Gatluak often traded chores with his neighbors in exchange for meals. It was a useful symbiotic arrangement. For the price of another mouth at the table, his neighbors purchased a hired hand to help them work their crops.
He had taken one of his neighbor’s zebu out to the pasture and was on his way back to get the second. As he walked along the path, Gatluak hummed an ancient melody his grandmother had sung to him when he was a boy.
The robed figure who hid behind the hut of Gatluak’s neighbor flattened against the wall when he heard Gatluak’s voice and the dirt crunching under his approaching feet. The intruder gripped the wooden handles on each end of a strand of thin wire, held his breath and waited. Gatluak came around the corner of the hut, and for an instant that seemed to last forever, the two men faced each other. Then the Arab grabbed Gatluak, threw him to the ground and straddled his back. Before Gatluak had time to cry out, the wire was around his neck, and within seconds, a thin, red line of blood appeared where the wire had dug into his flesh. Gatluak struggled soundlessly, thrashed on the ground as his face turned a deep purple. Then blood gushed from his neck around the wire, and he went limp.
The Arab pulled the gory wire free and joined his companions, who had appeared so quickly they might have popped magically out of the ground. The men, dressed in white ankle-length robes with white shora scarves covering their heads, slipped like ghosts into Mondala. They darted from hut to hut and signaled each other with hand motions as they silently infiltrated the village. They killed anyone who got in their way—man, woman or child—using knives, garrotes or machetes so their victims could not sound an alarm that would alert the rest of the villagers before the raiders were ready to pull the noose tight.
Once the advance party was in position, the attackers signaled for the second wave. With a suddenness calculated to stun and surprise, Arabs mounted on horses crashed out of the woods to the south and thundered down the road into Mondala. In seconds, the village went from quiet and peaceful to screaming nightmare madness. Like a pack of wild dogs, the ragtag band of Murahaleen, soldiers and mercenaries dispensed indiscriminate death in a savage feeding frenzy of blood and destruction. The terrified villagers had no time to react before their attackers were on top of them, swords and machetes drawn, slashing everyone who crossed their path. Shrieking in terror, mothers grabbed their children and tried to escape, but the attacking Arabs yanked babies and small children out of their mothers’ arms and sliced them open with shiny silver swords and razor-sharp machetes. Men who tried to protect their families were brutally hacked to death. The pathways of the village soon were flowing streams of blood.
The mounted members of the slave trader Faoud al Bashara’s hired militia carried torches and held the sticks of fire to the thatched roofs of the huts. One after another the buildings burs
t into flames. The raiders on foot who had hidden in the village went from hut to hut and dragged out any occupants. A handful of women and girls were seized and shoved toward the center of the village. But not a shot had been fired. It was not yet time.
Pastor Maluong talked briefly about the morning’s service, that it was the beginning of a journey for those about to be baptized. He described the significance of baptism as an outward symbol of an inward commitment each had made to the God of the universe.
Then he waded into the river until he was waist deep and motioned for Abuong to join him. The boy was already in the water up to his knees, and he made a splashing dash to the pastor that wasn’t exactly representative of the solemnity of the occasion. With great effort, Maluong managed not to smile. The others who were about to be baptized, two men, three women and a little girl, waited patiently on shore. When the boy reached the pastor, Maluong showed him how to position his hands in front of his chest so he could hold his nose when he went under the water. Bouncing up and down on his tiptoes in the chest-high water, Abuong did as he was instructed.
Maluong put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Abuong, because you have placed your trust in Jesus Christ, I now baptize…”
Suddenly, a piercing scream shattered the reverent silence. Everyone turned toward the sound, which came from the road that led around the stand of bamboo trees that blocked the view of the village from the riverbank. Against a background of rising black smoke, a woman sprinted down the hill, screaming hysterically, and pointed back toward the village. No one paused to listen to her words; the danger was obvious. The village was on fire!
There was a moment or two of stunned shock. Then, as if on cue, the men raced up the hill toward the village that now belched boiling black smoke into the morning sky.
