"Yeah, and whose army," Sandy said. Crossing the lines would be like admitting the Biafrans were wrong. She couldn't imagine Gilman doing that at this late date.

Chapter 30: Gilman.

November 1967 Near Orlu, Biafra The dry season found Gilman and Sister Catherine betwixt and between towns at a crossroads. They established their clinic in one end of an old hotel. At least the hotel had screening for their small bedroom and study to keep out the mosquitoes.

One evening Gilman sat trying to read the tiny print of the text on falciparum malaria in the uneven light of the gas lantern, all too aware of Sister Catherine's blessed and unreal stillness. Guess they beat that into nuns in the convent. Gilman would never have made it. Having the nun for a roommate in this tiny refugee-crowded Biafran town wasn't a choice, but it sure was humbling.

A faint noise startled her. Something at the window, like a white kerchief, moving. Gilman turned in her chair, her notes sliding off her lap. Sister Catherine stared at the window. A pale hand appeared, then a face. Wilton.

"Don't come to the window," Wilton said, her voice pitched to carry only to them. "I'm breaking curfew tonight and must be on my way. You need to move on-go further into Biafra or leave the country. Move tomorrow. Try Uli or Umuahia. All's well with Lindsey and Sandy. Look by your side door for the gifts they sent."

Gilman began to protest.

"Hush," Wilton said. "It's not safe. Wait a little before you try the door. Ten minutes. Let me get away first."

Wilton was gone.

"That was a bit of a shock," Sister Catherine said, the evenness of her voice like a remark on the weather.

"Wilton," Gilman said. Her heart thudded with unspent adrenaline. She wanted to make an excuse for Wilton, but couldn't find the words for it.

"Kate Wilton," Sister Catherine said. "Ah."

"You remember?"

"How could I ever forget. I've heard a lot about her," Sister Catherine said. "One of the orphans her father raised at his school told me stories."

"What did he say?"

"You went to college with her-I'm sure I know nothing new to you, except..."

"What?"

"They say she's a snake charmer. And that she performs exorcisms. It didn't half tick off some of the priests."

"You're kidding." Gilman had to laugh. "I saw her do it once, and all she scared was a batch of honking hornbills."

By the side door they found a sack of medicines, mostly antimalarials and antibiotics, and tucked between the little boxes, a wad of Nigerian pound notes.

"Angels guard her," Sister Catherine said, crossing herself after her first pleasure over the medicines subsided. "The situation's changing. It's going to be harder for her to play these tricks."

"We keep saying that, don't we. I hear Ojukwu hired mercenaries. A German and a guy from England and another maybe from the Netherlands. It doesn't look good. As if he didn't trust his own people to defend the country. Yeah, no kidding things are changing."

Chapter 31: Wilton.

December 1967 Biafra, Nigeria After leaving Lagos, Wilton traveled a familiar route heading first North then following the roadways East using mammy wagons for transport. Peace Corps volunteers and adventuring Europeans did such things every so often, so while a novelty, she could pass for nothing worse than a crazy white. She had a chain of people she contacted along her way who gave her food and shelter, grateful to return old favors her father or she had sown in past years. She listened more than she talked, as if she took in this laborious way, the temperature of the sprawling giant Nigeria.

Winding her way south, she'd given her last hoarded supplies to Gilman and Sister Catherine before moving on along side roads. Now Wilton walked among the shanties between towns. Though face after face turned in her direction, she looked too poor to be a good target for begging. A hand touched her elbow.

"Do I know you?" Wilton said. These days no one moved as fast as they had, and everywhere wanderers tried to trace the familiar in faces, so there was no offense.

"You are the woman who talks with God," the young woman said. A curiously set face as if she had a mask on. Worn and dirty clothing, like so many these days. "Come and bless the place where I sleep so that my child will return to me."

Wilton opened her mouth to explain that she no longer could do such things then closed it again. Maybe it wouldn't matter. Prayer was prayer and she tried to walk with God every day. She followed the young woman who kept pulling her cloth closer around her with repeated backwards looks that spoke of past fears come true. Each time Wilton looked back to see what the woman saw, there was nothing unusual for such a place and time. Slapped together shelters of wood and corrugated aluminium, plastic moving in the slight wind.

The woman stopped at the door of a cardboard and sheet metal shelter, moving her bony arm in a gesture of welcome.

"Here is my place. I smell evil. If you frighten it my son will come back to me."

"How was he lost?"

Wilton knew she didn't want to go in through the crooked opening. The woman was right. The smell was bad. Sweet and sticky and putrescent. Wilton reached for God with her mind like a child reaching for a comforting hand, and felt that her grasp brushed but could not hold. She stumbled and stopped. The woman's nostrils widened.

"It was the bombing, thunder in the sky," the woman said. "I ran. I ran so fast and when I stopped he was no longer on my back where I had carried him, though I had knotted my cloth so well. The tie is still in the cloth. But this spirit in my room keeps him from returning to me."

"I will see what I can do," Wilton said, "God willing."

"God willing." The woman crossed herself like one who has seen nuns make the gesture but never performed it before herself. She backed away and left Wilton staring into the partial darkness.

She bent her mind to prayer before she ducked her head and squeezed into the tiny space. She kept custody of her eyes, looking down only at her feet as nuns did who relied upon the eyes of God, praying without words. Then she saw something move, drift toward her like a piece of gauze caught on a breeze. A sound, not human nor animal but similar to a tight string plucked. Wilton took three fast steps backwards out of that place, looking for any trace to prove what she had seen was real. Nothing around her but the late sunlight on shacks and glittering bits of tin. Nothing in her but her fear.

First the eyes of the mask at Ibadan. What did seeing that movement and sound mean?

"I have done what I can," she said, and it sounded like a lie.

She left without a word more from the woman, who remained at the opening of her shelter. Post-shock delusions, Wilton told herself. Tragic loss of her infant in the confusion of flight. Probably happened all the time. The woman needed medical aid. If there were any comfort in exorcism, Wilton had done all she could.

She'd head for Biafra, back to see Gilman. Back to the road. She felt the woman behind her like a bruise in her mind. The memory sped Wilton on her way.

Chapter 32: Gilman.

February 1968 Uli Area, Biafra At least living in Biafra in the middle of a war didn't keep her from getting a shower. Gilman toweled her mass of dripping hair with a torn piece of towel, giving a sigh of sheer pleasure. With the sweat and red silt gone she felt surprisingly renewed. She pulled on her clothes, well worn, overwashed, showing the threat of holes at the shoulders of the shirt and sagging about the knees of the pants. So long as the fabric wasn't too thin in the butt, she could still wear them.

Like nomads she and the remaining nursing staff moved from town to town. They'd joined a Red Cross unit several weeks ago, not in any official capacity, but working as associates. Side by side, even if there were some, like that Dr. Allingham, she could scarcely bear.

No more doubts about the reality of this war. After the Mid-West Region invasion, Federal bombing of Biafra intensified. The Nigerian Federal Government said it only targeted military units, but everyone said so long as it killed Biafrans, any bomb was a good one to the Feds. Now settled at the hospital in a village called Uli, Gilman patched casualties from the front and bombing victims, and tried to feed and tend the unending flow of refugees. Kwashiorkor every day. God, just think what a crate of peanut butter would be worth.

Gilman often wondered if Wilton knew where they'd gone. She'd suggested Umuahia and that was a few miles down the road. But she had faith in Wilton's contacts, and the incredible efficacy of the passed word. She'd tried to write, but didn't know if mail got through.

Sister Catherine pulled back the canvas drop from the door and entered.

"Flights coming in tonight. Rumor says two."

Gilman turned, her hair still hanging in front of her eyes. Uli had a stretch of asphalted road that the Biafrans converted into a landing strip. The Red Cross, Caritas and other charitable organizations landed supplies there whenever possible, and always at night because the Federal pilots circled the area like jackals, waiting to take down any planes inbound to Biafra, even if all the flight carried was tons of dried fish and milk powder. Some day the Feds would figure out exactly where Uli was located and bomb it into a crater. But not yet.

"What's coming in? Anyone say?" Sister Catherine seemed to think Gilman might know more than she did.

"Top secret. That means no food, just ammunition and weapons, damn them," Gilman said and brushed her hair. "Bloody bastards can't get it through their heads there's more to this war than killing."

She'd said this a great number of times already over the past weeks. Sister Catherine didn't trouble to answer, picked up the tin she wanted and went back out into the overcast day.

Gilman pulled her hair back from her face. She wondered who might be coming in from the bush to collect the army's share of tonight's shipments. Ojukwu's new "golden boys," mercenaries, veterans of the Congo and God knew what other sordid wars. Her turn to take graveyard duty, and hope the Uli airstrip would claim no lives tonight.

Gilman stepped into the ward, into the stench of the afternoon. Hot and humid days thickened the reek of humans with their rotting sores in these rooms. Well-fed flies hummed while she surveyed the rag-piled cots and beds made of boxes in the shadow and gold of the late sun. The light fell in great rectangles from the unscreened windows, emphasizing fragile arms and legs. A picture from Belsen, touched up with tropical color. It was much better in color, wasn't it? Gilman started down one row of the makeshift beds, touching hands like crumpled leaves, lifting an eyelid, or simply forcing a smile of reassurance when she met brown eyes staring at her out of a skull-like head.

She knew enough not to care about the children. They presented a set of problems, laboratory exercises. Something she would spend her time and all her wit upon, but no feelings. The children died whether in coming to the hospital, while in it, or after they left. She gave them what gestures of kindness she could spare, but it had little to do with her heart.

She wondered if they thought anymore. They seemed to give up so easily, almost eagerly sometimes. How much did they feel? Did they even care for the comforts she offered, or was the brain damage from starvation too great? Or could it be that some kinds of emotional punishment took away the core that moved them onwards through the days that came?

So many kwashiorkor victims, patients she could have saved with no more than an alteration of diet. But lacking protein, the children's upper bodies skeletonized, their bellies bloated to an obscene degree, the black fuzz of their hair yellowed and rusted, while the skin of the swelling legs split. Once upon a time, in the years before the war, Gilman traveled to remote villages to find and cure such children, bumping madly along in her jeep like a crusader armed with protein powders, yeast and dried milk. Now the starving people came to her, drifting ghosts along the roads, orphaned or parents missing, most of the children past cure.

Stopping at one crate, she touched the shrunken arm of the body on it. Dead, no need to check the pulse in that shriveled throat. She tried to close the eyes, then pulled a corner of cloth over the face and picked up the body. Perhaps three years old, though one could be deceived. So light to carry. Another open bed.

Chapter 33: Gilman.

February 1968 Uli Area, Biafra Late afternoon, Gilman knelt in the doorway of the children's ward securing a bandage on a Biafran girl's spindly arm. She felt someone watching her. Gilman looked around from her halting conversation. The naked little girl gave one appalled glance and ran back into the shady ward. Gilman stared in disbelief at the man who had scared the girl away. A strange white man.

An oh-my-God-handsome white guy. He fixed on her as if he assessed a possible enemy. The face was deeply browned by sun, craggy featured. So inappropriate to notice the good jaw, the impression of assertive male. Gilman's startled gaze took in broad shoulders crossed with a belt of ammunition, the submachine gun tucked comfortably in one arm, narrow hips and the holster strapped on one leg. The man's garb reminded her of a paratrooper's, but there were some original touches and he carried a bush hat in one hand.

"Doctor Gilman, I presume."

Unmistakably American, Gilman decided. She found herself smiling back.

"Yes. Welcome to Uli." She'd picked up the habit of unnecessary and sometimes silly courtesies from the Biafrans. "How'd you know my name?"

"Asked."

Damned good to hear another American voice. What else but a mercenary...the most attractive man she'd seen in years and he had to be a goddamned merc. All the other white men around were priests or missionaries or the dregs. Just her luck. Think of greasy-haired Allingham, for example.

"Where's the graveyard? The Uli airstrip burial ground?" he said.

"Down the road. I can show you." She struggled between the impulse to make him welcome as a fellow American, and the dismaying understanding that he was scum, and don't forget it. But maybe having good diplomatic relations with a hired killer would prove useful.

He nodded his thanks. No critical work waiting for her now and she was off duty anyway....

They walked along for ten minutes in the red dust, Gilman trying to think of something appropriate to say and failing. They reached the burial ground in silence, both pausing at the wooden gateway of crisscrossed poles and whitewashed crosses.

He strode over to one of the graves and bowed his head. Gilman watched, piqued. A sentimental religious merc, what an oxymoron. Loyalty for hire, what a shame. She let herself examine him with appreciation, safe while he was preoccupied with the dead. The slanting sunlight touched his brown hair with red, and his shadow stretched black across the leveled field striped with shadows and broken by the clean white of crosses. He walked back toward her.

"Who was it?" she said and they started away.

"God only knows."

She glanced at him.

"What?"

"Going to pray in a graveyard's good business," he said, laughing at her. She noticed how remote the gray eyes could be. "Like kissing babies. I always pick a 'Known but to God,' since I figure they get fewer prayers."

She didn't answer, anger kindling. Gilman knew some of the pilots and crew who lay buried here. She glanced away from him toward the horizon where the convoluted trees stood in sharp silhouette.

"A bit of a hypocrite, I see," she said.

He gave a small surprised sound, then laughed.

"I'll see you around," he said.

Gilman headed toward the mess hall. She'd heard that Ojukwu gave these mercs anything they wanted, from cigarettes to women. A harem apiece. Suppose it was true, she'd probably end up treating dozens of new cases of clap.

Chapter 34: Sandy.

March 1968 Lagos, Nigeria Sandy stepped back barely in time when the door of Lindsey's office banged open. A large heavy-set man stumbled out, his hand half cupped over the lower part of his face. She saw the wet of tears on a black cheek, heard a sob. Her gut wrenched with immediate pity. No grown man should weep like that, like a child bereft. His pin-striped suit made the spectacle worse in some way she didn't understand. She put out her hand. His brown eyes met hers, the whites bloodshot, a wounded look of terror.

"Don't." Lindsey's voice bit, startled Sandy into dropping her hand and taking another step back.

The man stumbled to the door of the waiting room and out.

Sandy looked from Lindsey to Oroko and then the receptionist.