by Robin Winter
Chapter 84: Lindsey
April 1969
Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria
Lindsey came to see Wilton. In a few minutes the nurse would sedate her for the journey to the airport. Wilton looked a little more composed. She stood free in the room. Lindsey, pinned by the blank frightening gaze, didn't know what to say.
"It's all right, Wilton," she said. "You're going home."
The door behind Wilton opened and Lindsey saw her friend shrink in terror at the abrupt sound. Lindsey's anger subsided at the bland calm in the face of the nurse.
Lindsey looked once more at Wilton—was there a wrenching loneliness in the unnatural eyes? We say good-bye for the long run, here. Now. She remembered much, words and acts of the past came unsummoned.
She took Wilton's shuddering hands in hers and stilled them. She looked at Wilton as though the intensity of her emotions could communicate through all barriers. Lindsey's voice came thin. Words should have been unnecessary between them.
"Of what I owe you," she said, "there can be no reckoning…There is no measure."
She noted that a flicker of curiosity surprised the impassivity of the nurse's face, but no response in Wilton. Lindsey released Wilton's hands and stepped back.
"We're ready to take her now," the nurse said. She opened her carrying case, brought out alcohol and cotton, put down a syringe box and tiny bottle of clear fluid.
"Yes," Lindsey said. "Take her away."
Chapter 85: Gilman
April 1969
Uli, Biafra
The incandescent light glowed in this small hot room with sparse wooden furnishings, shadows black on the uneven floor. Low-watt bulb in a heavy brown shade. The air hardly moved, thick with humidity after the rain,
Gilman turned at Jantor's voice and read bad news in his stance. He was looking at her too hard.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm sorry. Gilman, the crazy note you got…Your friend Sandy's dead. It's true. She died in Ibadan."
Gilman drew in her breath and sat down, staring at the chart in her hands. Jantor clasped her shoulders, steady hands. Always there, stabilizing her.
"How," she said. "Tell me please."
"An assassin, Masters says. That's what's going round in rumors."
"An assassin? Why would anyone kill Sandy?"
She wouldn't cry. It would be unfair to Jantor if she cried. Maybe her tears had all dried up, anyway. Maybe she'd seen too many deaths she couldn't stop, too much suffering she hadn't helped.
"Someone slipped a snake into Lindsey Kinner's bedroom, only she wasn't there. It took out Sandy. Big spitting cobra, sounds like the sacs were almost full. The antivenin must not have worked..."
"When did this all happen?"
"Couple days after you left her and Lindsey in Lagos to come back here."
"Christ fucking Jesus," Gilman said. "They couldn't use antivenin—Sandy's allergic to the stuff. It must have taken hours for her to die. Not hours. Days."
The tears she thought absent stung her eyes and she dropped the chart on her chair, hid her face in his flak jacket.
"It shouldn't have been Sandy," she said. What a fool thing to say.
"They found some bastard, Paul, the guy you traveled with to take the fall. That Biafran politico you took when you flew Wilton to Lindsey. He confessed."
She swallowed tears, trying to make sense of that.
"Oh," she said. "That idiot. God. That's why someone unloaded him on me for the trip? I can't believe he'd kill Sandy—he's got to have been after Lindsey."
She pushed free of Jantor, horrified.
"Paul. I helped him. Damn his rotten soul to hell. He used me for cover. So that's why Lindsey thinks it was me. The poor stupid bitch. She was already pissed at me.
"But she'll figure it out—don't you think she's gotta figure it out? Paul wouldn't tell them it's me who made him kill Sandy—it's only Lindsey's grief talking. I'll get a chance to settle with her after this is all over. We'll sort it out. Poor dear Sandy. Damn him, damn him."
After this is all over. She thought about the phrase later and wondered what she had meant by that.
Chapter 86: Gilman
May 1969
On the Western Front, Biafra
Gilman hated to see the rains. Everything would be more difficult, new fungal infections among the malnourished, fecal contamination of the water supplies and all the diseases that would result. Cholera, dysentery.
Clouds spread in torn sheets across the sky, releasing only fitful gleams of colorless light. Depressing. The rain pounded for hours, and all along the crumbling raw edges of the rivers the thick orange clods tumbled and melted into the thick milky fluid. Heavy with clay, the water twisted and gurgled in its courses like serpents writhing through the jungle. Maybe she could hope that floods would slow the Nigerian advance against Biafra.
Gilman, Allingham and Sister Catherine joined the medical unit with Jantor's troops. Neutrality—Gilman didn't dare think the word. Using the weather as cover, their unit picked its way through the mud westward to ambush the Nigerians.
Gilman felt grateful to be going along. She always imagined bad things when she waited at Uli for Tom's return. Sister Catherine came grumbling, but on leaving Uli behind, cheered up. Sometimes any change helped. Even Allingham irritated Gilman less than usual, maybe because he knew he shouldn't be following the Biafran troops and hoped no one would mention that.
In the evening Masters, Jantor, Gilman, Sister Catherine and Allingham sat in the low-slung shelter of the tent and drank the whiskey Masters had brought. It warmed them in the dank night while they listened to each other's boasting and the slow rhythms of the rain. Susie, a German expatriate and Masters' girlfriend, showed up halfway through the evening with a fresh jug.
"Hey, Doctor," Masters said to Gilman. "Did you get to talk with that pilot, Skip Turner?"
"No," she said in surprise. Why would she?
"Aw, hell. I told him you'd be interested. Had a drink with him and got all the news. Your crazy friend Wilton, poor bird, she's gone back Stateside."
"Good God!" Gilman sat up straight. "Is she okay?"
"Hell, I guess." Masters waved off all responsibility. "All I know's what I've been told."
Gilman leaned back. In the pleasant golden haze of whiskey, all things seemed possible. Masters's sources usually came up with the real goods. So Wilton had been cleared for a trip home. She met Sister Catherine's eyes across the room and shared a smile of glorious relief.
Allingham and Susie argued the politics of war with Sister Catherine, while Masters and Jantor exchanged combat stories. Gilman had the peculiar feeling that she retreated from it all, as if she viewed the revelers in the tent through the lens of a camera. In the lamp's glimmer her companions had the look of strangers, actors in their parts, and she fell silent and watched until Jantor pulled her against his side, challenging her into the talk with a question about concussions.
They joined forces with another unit and Jantor conferred with Masters and the new commander. Gilman couldn't eavesdrop, though she kept an eye on the trio, wondering what they were planning and why they laughed. This was Jantor's version of surgery and she had to stay out of it with her mouth shut. When he gave the order to move he grinned coming back to give her a kiss on the mouth before he walked off with his men.
Rumor came from the troops that they'd engaged the Federal Nigerian Army on the banks of one of the rivers. Gilman asked the aides, but since they all said Biafra was winning, she couldn't tell what to think. It seemed to her that the noise of battle came closer and closer, but was it her inexperience or fear talking? She busied herself with setting up operating rooms and wards in a set of buildings that had once been a secondary school. All over eastern Nigeria these schools had sprung up after Independence, little loaf shapes of buildings all alike, fueled by the insatiable greed for knowledge that the Igbos possessed. Now the schools served as battle prizes and shelters and hospitals.
&n
bsp; "The fighting's at least an hour away," Allingham said.
How could he be so sure? After a while a trickle of wounded began. Maybe Allingham had it right—the wounds looked about an hour old. The arrivals became a steady stream. Man after man brought to her only to die under her hands from blood loss or the fragments of some exploded grenade in his guts.
"Gilman." Sister Catherine's voice cut through the fear and babble of voices. Gilman turned her head. The nun's face seemed set like a mask. Oh no, were they going to retreat? Moving patients was a nightmare. Gilman stared up from where she knelt over a dead Igbo on a stretcher, looking into the nun's unreadable eyes.
"Come, Gilman. Now."
"What?" Gilman straightened to her feet, stepping around the man who had bled over the stained white sheets of the stretcher and the crushed grass under it.
"He's over there," Sister Catherine said, gesturing.
For one insane moment, Gilman could not imagine what she meant. When the realization hit, Sister Catherine seemed to see it, winced and stepped out of Gilman's way.
She forced herself not to run, brushing past her aides, determinedly pushing through the heavy lamenting crowd. A doctor should never run. Never. Faces flashed by her, fresh wet wounds, pain-stretched eyes. None held her. She had no time.
The sight of white skin, whiter by contrast among the black sweating hands and arms, brought her to a trembling halt. The thought passed through her that she'd have to stop shaking like this if she had to operate on him.
"Tom?"
He did try to move his head, but the effort simply sent his head lolling more to one side. Her eyes searched, found the deep ragged crease of a bullet along the side of his throat. Her hands discovered the soft torn flesh of his back, a gaping exit wound. She eased him out of the clinging gentle hands of his commandos, letting him down on the red and slippery grass, turning his weighty body to see the extent of the violation, and cried out.
She closed her eyes tight, then steeled herself to look again, the clinical terms running loose in her head. Then for the first time, she turned her face down for a moment, wrung with an immense disbelief and protest that she couldn't speak. She settled Tom upon the earth and took his face in her smeared hands, wanting him to look at her, wanting that fading mouth to move in answer to her.
Still there was nothing. So alive, the gladness, the rich mockery of his mouth and eyes as she remembered them. Was he already gone? The corded forearms felt unresisting, slack and soft under her inquiring fingers. He was limp, the hazel eyes glazed with gray, pupils dilated. Too much blood. If there were a way, any way to piece the ruin back together.
She took hold of the broad shoulders, flinching when his head fell heavily back, loose lax jaw, the sight of his half-lidded eyes making her stomach twist. His hair was matted with both mud and blackening blood. She attempted to settle him and the eager black hands came back again, helping with a babble of condolence and pity.
She knelt for what seemed a long time with him, holding him as though it mattered. She felt the shudder of his death, but speechless, waited on. The eyes sunk half open in the cold face told her nothing, nor did the slack mouth. A hand upon her shoulder woke her.
"Doctor."
She lifted her head with an effort and saw one of the lieutenants, Peter. His furrowed visage looked sorry, worn with death.
"We need you, Doctor."
He extended his hand. She saw his salmon palm, smeared with someone's blood. She shook her head.
"He'll wait for you. Ben and Ebbe will take him to a safe place."
He let his hand drop maybe at some expression on her face—she didn't know what was there. She started to her feet, trying to heft Jantor's cumbrous body in her arms. It felt still a little warm. Ben and Ebbe took some of the burden into their own arms, telling her to let go and leave them to carry him. She refused. She resented any other hands on him, but she had no choice. A dead body is hard to drag.
Ben and Ebbe headed for an empty room in her makeshift hospital. They struggled into a classroom and laid Jantor on the teacher's desk. When they left Gilman with him, she closed his eyes, feeling the soft prickle of his eyelashes against her palm, and lifted the heavy arms to his sides before she covered him with a sheet.
Gilman had to force herself to pull the tattered cloth over his bloodless face. She turned away and in dull amazement saw Allingham standing in the doorway watching her. She walked up to him and he stared. She couldn't bear to look at him.
"Don't you dare touch him. Don't you dare get anyone else to touch him either."
He backed away.
Gilman walked back out to the groaning yard full of casualties. She went to work. Sister Catherine stepped up, responding to her every move. Sutures, gauze, clamps, hypodermics. All appeared before she could ask, as if for once there was enough to go around.
Night crept out from under the trees and buildings. Gilman returned to the room in the school, pulled up a stool by the desk and sat down. She lit no lamp, but leaned on the sheeted edge of the wood to watch the last of the light drain from the sky. He was cold now. She could feel that coldness through the patched material barely covering him.
Eventually a small bobbing lantern, followed at a distance by others, came through the night toward her open door. They halted outside.
"Oh, bloody hell."
It was Masters's uneasy voice.
She looked down at the erratic shadows cast upon the floor.
"We've come for Tom," Masters said.
Gilman got up. She pulled back the sheet, caressed the cold set face with her fingers. The chill made her shudder. No, he wasn't there.
She touched her own face, feeling the soft skin he had kissed as if touching it once more for him, and wondered to find her cheeks dry.
"Masters," she heard her own voice say. "Let's go. Let's take him now."
Gilman heard the rumble of voices in the adjoining room. No words, only voices. Lying on her side, her body curled in a half circle on a blanket laid upon the floor, she looked at the empty room. The shapes of chair and desk, boxes and shelves loomed around her. Gilman moved a little on the hard surface, feeling the heat settle, seeming even more intense in the middle of darkness.
Far away the sounds of shelling continued, mingling with a restless moaning and weeping from the wards. No way to stop the noises, no place to go where she could stop hearing.
Chapter 87: Gilman
December 1969
Uli Area, Biafra
"Masters shipped out last night," Sister Catherine said.
"Yes," Gilman said.
"He stayed longer than I expected." Allingham glanced over at Gilman.
Did Allingham remember keeping anesthetic from the mercenary so many months ago? Such a stupid trick. It seemed years, another lifetime past. Gilman looked out through the doorway of the dispensary. Empty and dry, even the trodden red soil seemed to have faded out there. Like the children huddled without play under the leafless trees and the silent people who stood about, as if waiting for something to do, all the color washed out of them. Everything faded.
While they worked through December's dragging days, Gilman knew that Biafra had hours to live. An end, any kind of end, seemed welcome. She hadn't the energy to care about anything else.
No supplies left, everyone staggering with famine. Anger was their energy, but it didn't last. The sound of guns swelled to a constant background of thunder and lightning. Refugees crowding closer, no room even for a prayer, Sister Catherine said.
Suddenly there was no time left. Crouched on the edge of a box in the faint light of a candle, Gilman let her hands drop to her lap with weariness. She saw the end written in Allingham's panicked eyes, in the drawn faces of the last white expatriates, and the dulled despair of the Biafrans.
She felt none of the anxiety or fear that she should. No concern about where they all would go. Fernando Po, São Tomé, Ivory Coast, Gabon. Just a list of names. Anywhere but Nigeria. In a few hours the last f
lights would come and go. Perhaps she and the others gathered here would make it onto one of the battered relief planes. Perhaps not.
She closed her eyes and saw children, the children she'd learned not to care about. Dusty faces, bony fingers…it was too late for those children.
Still, she didn't want to go. She only wanted an end. She saw no difference between going and staying here with the tired people. She lifted her head when Allingham forced a cup of steaming hot fake coffee into her hands. She nearly pushed it back then hesitated. Suicidal, she imagined Sister Catherine chiding her. Gilman drank. God, it was awful.
Allingham shook her, dragged at her shoulder. Gilman lurched to her feet, her eyes snapping open. Everything around her seemed in motion, people thrusting their way past her, voices in a confused staccato in the air. She responded dumbly to Allingham's painful grip.
The world swung and spun. Had she been drugged? What had Allingham given her?
There was the hazy form of the plane. Gilman swiped with one hand at her eyes, as if she could clear her vision of the obscuring night. What had Allingham...? she wondered again, but the thought reeled away.
She pulled back against the harsh helping hands that yanked her into the black cave of the aircraft. She knew she cried out in befuddled protest, but already she was aboard. Someone pushed in on top of her when she tried to get back to the door. Then hands grasped her wrists, someone sat on her legs and Allingham's furious voice hissed words she did not understand, but the tone bordered on hate.
The plane jolted off the runway and then Gilman stilled in the darkness, seeing oh so clearly in her mind the lonely little road in the bush with the field of whitewashed crosses at its side.
