Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  Masapha had called it, X marks the spot.

  Weeks of searching, asking questions and searching some more had come up snake-eyes until the Arab happened upon a woman whose brother worked in a remote oil field. She’d told Masapha about the day her brother had been high up on a rig and saw in the distance an odd assortment of vehicles, transport trucks, jeeps, a car or two, horses and camels. That was odd enough, she’d said. What was stranger still was where the caravan was headed. They were going nowhere! There was absolutely nothing in the direction they were traveling but emptiness.

  In that emptiness, Ron and Masapha found the final piece of Masapha’s puzzle.

  About five miles from the lone oil well in Block 8A on the Licensed Oil and Gas map’s grid, a half-mile outcrop of rock jutted up out of the desert floor like a shark fin. Among the barren hills on the undulating plain, it was the only secluded piece of real estate for 50 miles in any direction.

  Acacia thickets, brush and groves of stunted trees clung tenaciously to the sand on its boulder-strewn sides; on the desert floor at its base, syringe-needle thorn bushes and brambles grew in tangles so dense even Br'er Rabbit couldn’t have made his way through. Its highest point was on the northern end, and below that 150-foot crest, the outcrop curved inward to form a hollow about 300 yards wide that was enclosed on three sides. That was the stage where the drama of the slave sale would be played out; on top of that hill, Ron and Masapha had the best seats in the house.

  “You scored, pal,” Ron whispered.

  “It was not I who made the score,” the Arab whispered back. “Mostly, I believe it was stupid luck...”

  “Dumb luck.”

  “That we found this place.”

  It wasn’t the time or place to argue, but Ron was certain that without Masapha’s help, he would have wandered around southern Sudan until he traded his jeep in on an aluminum walker without ever locating a slave auction.

  “You’re sure everything is OK?” Ron’s voice was tense. “You did a trial run with the equipment, right?”

  Masapha looked at him patiently and nodded his head deliberately up and down.

  “Then we’re good to go.” Suddenly, Ron’s mouth turned to cotton.

  Nobody had to tell the two men they were playing in a high-stakes game. Get caught, and you lose. Lose, and you die. He looked into Masapha’s eyes and saw the same fear he was sure the Arab could see in his. They held each other’s gaze for a heartbeat, an unspoken salute. It was showtime. Below them on the desert floor, the gavel was about to come down on the first-ever filmed and photographed Sudanese slave auction.

  When he thought of the nerdy geek he’d befriended at Yale who’d made much of this adventure possible, Ron smiled. His name—no kidding—was Earl Putzler. “The Putz” had built a small company into one of the giants in the aerospace industry. Guys like that either hit it big or became serial killers. When Ron described the state-of-the-art video and sound technology he hoped to lay hands on for this project, Earl had smiled knowingly and said, “You just leave everything to me.”

  The Putz had come through. The camera and recording equipment Masapha would be using wasn’t even on the market yet.

  Ron gave Masapha a thumbs-up, and they began to inch their way into position at the top of the hill. Masapha placed the infrared/laser transmitter of the optical audio surveillance system—Ron called it the “corndog thingy”—into a slot in the pile of rocks and pointed it toward the desert floor. Then he checked the radar screen’s position where he’d hidden it among the branches of a bush, and put the headphone stoppers into his ears. Flattened out on his belly, he commando-crawled the final few feet to the spot where he and Ron had scooped out side-by-side minifoxholes in the sand. He put the camcorder to his eye and focused tight on the scene below. Ron crawled on his belly into his slot beside Masapha, dug his elbows into the sand to steady himself, and made his arms into a tripod. He drew the camera up to his face—the metal was hot on his cheek—and began to frame images in his viewfinder.

  On the hard-packed ground below was a consortium of buyers and sellers. Most of the buyers, wealthy Arabs, had arrived in a small fleet of jeeps, trucks and cars that were parked off to one side of the big army transport trucks that were the center of activity. Ron counted five buyers. Two of them were in white robes and shora scarves; the other three were dressed in Western clothing. Each of the buyers was accompanied by an entourage, mostly rough-looking, bearded, bodyguard types who wore sunglasses.

  Each of the two sellers had brought a covered transport truck with captives loaded in the back. Both were dressed Western-style, but one wore an elaborately wrapped turban, the kind the Bedouins wore to protect them from haboobs. The other, an extremely fat, bearded man with a huge belly that hung over the belt of his pants, wore a floppy Indiana Jones hat. Each of them had a troop of hired guns as well, a motley collection of mercenaries, soldiers and Murahaleen.

  The sellers had unloaded their wares out of two khaki-covered, canvas-topped transports. About a dozen women and children were on display beside one large truck. Another group of three women and several little boys was tied to the back bumper of the other truck.

  As soon as they zeroed in for a close look at the collection of trucks and people clustered on the sand, Ron and Masapha were surprised by two things—the large number of Arabs gathered and the small number of slaves for sale. The Arabs outnumbered the tribals two to one.

  The conversations 250 yards away filled Masapha’s ears as if the men stood beside him. The Arabs had looked over the offerings, made their choices, and now it was time to do business.

  Even though Ron couldn’t hear or understand the Arabic Masapha monitored, he understood the haggling, bartering body language he could see, and it reminded him of the cattle auctions he’d attended with his father as a boy. These guys were buying livestock.

  There was a lull in the haggling and buying while the raiders worked to get purchased slaves safely stowed away.

  Suddenly, something flashed across Ron’s viewfinder, and he looked up over his camera. A boy about 14 or 15 years old sprinted across the sand. His dark, black skin stood out against the yellow-white sand as he flew across it like a high school 800-meter champion.

  “What are you doing, son?” Ron moaned under his breath.

  He put his eye back to his viewfinder and zoomed in on the men around the trucks. None of them had spotted the boy. They were engaged in conversations, talking and laughing. He panned the camera to the boy, who was still running, partly hidden from the view of the others by the canvas covering on a tall transport truck. He already had covered a hundred yards and only had another fifty or sixty to go. He had a chance.

  Then Ron heard a frantic shout. Several more followed.

  He quickly panned back to the group of Arabs and refocused. The trader had turned to put the money in his truck and spotted the boy. He shouted something in Arabic, and armed men sprinted past the group of slaves toward the boy.

  One more shout, then the sharp crack of rifles.

  Masapha focused the camcorder on the live action beyond the cluster of trucks. A heartbeat after he captured the boy in focus, he saw the boy spin forward, slammed in the back by a rifle shot. Ron caught the action and froze frame after frame in his Nikon at a thousandth of a second. The force of the bullet hammered the boy so hard he did an automatic double somersault as his body skipped across the hard-packed sand. But to Ron and Masapha’s amazement, as the boy completed his second tumble, he was back on his feet running. He left a crimson smear where his torn shoulder had hit the ground, but he didn’t even appear to slow down as he crossed the remaining sand and disappeared into the tangle of brambles and thorn bushes at the base of the rock outcrop.

  The surprised soldiers, who’d assumed they’d bagged their prey, ran to the edge of the brush, but no farther. None of them was willing to dig through thorn-covered vines as close-knit as steel wool to find the boy, so they finished him off from where they stood. A su
dden rat-tat-tat roar, amplified by high-tech sound equipment, stabbed twin ice picks into Masapha’s head through his earphones. From point-blank range, the soldiers riddled the brush with bullets, firing round after round from their automatic rifles. With nothing to shield him but a stand of bushes, the boy didn’t have a chance. Then the soldiers returned to their leader, who stood screaming at them in a venomous tirade.

  Masapha listened through the throbbing in his ears to staccato Arabic voices chattering frantically. It was amazing how quickly the whole lot of them—buyers, sellers and slaves—loaded up and were gone in a cloud of dust.

  When the dust settled, the crisscrossed tire tracks and a smear of blood on the sand were all that remained to mark the spot.

  Ron slid down the back side of the hill and rolled over next to Masapha. Neither spoke for a time. They’d just seen human beings sold into bondage and watched a boy die rather than submit. Ron felt sick, fouled by the evil. The images in the Arab’s head of a little boy named Masapha were private; he would share them with no one.

  Ron finally broke the silence. “I thought there would be more.”

  “More?”

  “More slaves. Some of the reports I’ve gotten said sometimes two hundred or three hundred slaves are sold at these auctions.”

  “There may be more.”

  “More slaves? Here?”

  “When there was not so much activity, after the ugly man bought the four women, I pointed the mike at the different groups, thinking to hear, perhaps, some conversations. There was much windblowing sound and noise behind, but I believe one of them said they would return to this place in some days for more captives from other raids to be selling here.”

  Ron tensed.

  “I believe we should hang up here--”

  “Hang around here, or hang out here, but not--”

  “For some days and see do they return.”

  Ron liked the sound of that. He smiled. Yeah, they’d hang here for a while—up, out and around—and see what else might crawl out from under a rock.

  The big man named Leo, with battle scars on his arms and a twisted, broken nose, was dangerous. He was evil, too. Idris knew that as soon as he got near him. He could sense it the way he could sometimes feel the presence of a black mamba or a puff adder in the grass. And he would back away slowly, carefully. He never turned and ran away. You never turned your back on danger; you faced it head on. That’s what he was doing now as he approached the man in the wide-brimmed safari hat.

  Idris never found out exactly how Leo had heard he wanted to hire a mercenary. In the two days since he had arrived in Bentiu, Idris had told many people his story, and he clung desperately to the belief that out of one of those conversations would come the answer to his prayers.

  Apparently, that’s what had happened. As Idris walked down a dusty street the morning of his third day in Bentiu, a voice behind him called out to him in heavily accented Dinkan.

  He turned and encountered one of the oddest men he’d ever seen. The fellow’s skin was the color of the night sky, the whites of his eyes as yellow as cornmeal. Though he didn’t appear to be much older than Idris, he had no teeth. He wore bright-green pants, a way-too-big-for-him Western shirt covered with orange-and-red flowers, and battered, tied-together-with-string tennis shoes, and he hobbled toward Idris with a pronounced limp.

  “I have been sent to find you,” he said when he caught up with Idris. His Dinkan was hard to follow. “You are to come with me.”

  “Come with you where?”

  In the few days he had been in Bentiu, he had met more strange people than in all the other days of his life. But this man was by far the strangest of them all.

  “You are looking for someone to help you, yes?” the man replied. “Then come with me, and I will take you to such a man.”

  Idris had turned and followed the toothless man to an alleyway behind a bar, where his guide approached a man who sat in a chair in the shade of an awning that stretched out over the back door of the bar. The man was an Arab. He didn’t appear to be tall, but he was big, with muscled arms and a considerable belly. He had his chair leaned back on two legs, balanced against the building, as he sharpened a knife.

  Though his black beard was thick and well groomed, the man’s nose was the most commanding feature on his face. It didn’t seem to fit properly. It bent sharply to the right at the top, then twisted back to the left, and was wide and bulbous on the end. Something had hit that nose, Idris thought, and hit it very, very hard. Probably more than once.

  Using a gray whetstone, the man was sharpening a large, double-edged knife, and he seemed to be so engrossed in his work that he hardly noticed Idris and his companion approach.

  That was an illusion. From the moment the two men had turned into the alleyway, Leo Danheir had been watching Idris, sizing him up, taking his measure. When Idris’s guide bent and said something softly into his ear, the man stopped sharpening the knife and tipped the chair off the wall to place all four legs on the ground. He looked at Idris for a long time without speaking, then reached over and grabbed an empty oilcan next to the wall, slid it out and motioned for Idris to sit on it.

  “I’m Leo.” The man’s voice was cold. “Joak tells me you’re looking for somebody to help you; that right?”

  Idris said nothing because he could not understand Arabic. Leo gestured toward Idris with the point of his knife and addressed the guide.

  “Is this the farmer you were telling me about or not?”

  “I guess he only speaks Dinkan,” the go-between said, then he turned to Idris and translated the question Leo had asked.

  Idris shook his head vigorously up and down, and briefly told the toothless man the story of the attack on his village when his little girl, Akin, had been kidnapped. One of the raiders, a big man on a white horse, was called Hamir, Idris added. He hoped that detail might be helpful.

  During his long walk to Bentiu, Idris had played and replayed the events of that day in his mind. His spear had plunged into the chest of the first mounted raider, and he remembered how an arrow aimed at the black-robed figure beside him had missed its mark. A soldier shouted, “Hamir!” and the man on the white horse ducked seconds before the sharp, bone point of Idris’s arrow would have torn out his throat.

  The odd-looking man turned to the Arab and began to translate what Idris had said. As he spoke, Idris noticed the scars on the bearded man’s forearms. They were not the symmetrical, decorative tribal marking of many of the Dinkas in southern Sudan. These were random marks, jagged ridges that crisscrossed each other, some still pink, others shadows of former injuries years ago. Knife wounds.

  Leo continued to point the end of the blade toward Idris, but he directed his words to the interpreter.

  “How long has she—this little girl of his, Akin—been gone?”

  The interpreter relayed the question to Idris.

  “She has been gone twelve days, nine before I came to Bentiu and another three since I’ve been here.”

  When Leo heard the translation, he swore softly under his breath, picked up the whetstone and went back to work on the blade, which shone viciously.

  “Tell him finding one girl gone that long is like trying to locate one ant on a mountain. It’s impossible.” Then he paused, cocked his head toward Idris and continued. “Tell him for the impossible I will need lots of pay—cash—no cows or sorghum.”

  Idris and the interpreter spoke back and forth, and often gestured to ensure that the translation was accurate.

  “He has almost a hundred Sudanese pounds there in his traveling bag from last year’s millet crop,” the interpreter said. “And he has the price of two cows as well, but he does not have that money with him. He would have to go and get it and bring it back.”

  Leo held the shiny, sharp knife in front of him, inspected it and said offhandedly to the translator, “Tell him I will try to find his girl. I’m a professional and must be paid like a professional. Tell him to go and ge
t his money and bring it to me here tonight. Tell him if he does that, I will meet him in the morning on the dock next to the shipping company office—the big building that hangs out over the river—and the two of us will head north together. Tell him he must be ready to travel and travel light. I move quickly.”

  The interpreter began the translation, and Leo interrupted him.

  “And tell him there are no guarantees. Make sure he understands that. No promises. I have some contacts. I will ask some questions. I know some places to look. We will see what comes of that.”

  The interpreter began again, and Leo interrupted him a second time.

  “And tell him if I find his girl, it’s another two hundred pounds before he’ll get her back.”

  As the interpreter relayed all the information to Idris, Leo watched emotions play across the African’s face. Somewhere along the way, the African must have decided he believed Leo could pull it off because when the interpreter stopped talking, Idris’s face beamed.

  In truth, Idris did not at first want to have anything to do with this man. There was a chilling emptiness in his eyes and the gathering darkness of evil all around him. But then it occurred to Idris that the monsters who had kidnapped his daughter were wicked men, too. Who better to look for evil men than a man just like them, a man who understood them, who thought their thoughts and could predict their behavior.

  Idris reached into his travel pouch and pulled out the money he had packed there—all the cash his family had, and pressed it into Leo’s hand. Then he leaned on his spear and bowed low in the dirt at the tip of the Arab’s boots.

  Leo didn’t appear to notice. He fingered through the wadded-up bills, smoothed them in his palm and counted them.

  “I will meet him back here at sunset to get the rest of it,” Leo said when he was finished counting. “Tell him he must go and get his money and be back here by then. If he does not show up with the money, I will keep what he has already given me. If he does, we have a deal, and I will purchase the supplies I need—he must purchase his own—and I will meet him at first light on the dock to board the river launch north.”