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, So Tome, Ivory Coast, Gabon. Just a list of names. Anywhere but Nigeria. In a few hours the last flights 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.

Chapter 88: Oroko.

January 1970 Lagos, Western Region,Nigeria Oroko spent the evening in the raucous room filled with perfumes and bright colors, his formal suit giving him automatic passage to this event. He looked an old-fashioned guest, not a servant, among the shining silver and brilliant crystal on lavender linens.

At a pause in Lindsey's conversations he oversaw the mixing of her usual drink from a freshly opened bottle at the bar and carried it to her. Some small risks like these she insisted he allow. She acknowledged him when he intruded on her momentary solitude. He looked down at her, taking in her aloofness and restraint.

She stood very straight and calm, dressed as usual in understated style, the soft cream of her dress accenting the light gold hue the sun had given to her skin. She looked lovely but unsexed, despite the curve of her breasts.

"Here, madam," he said.

Lindsey accepted the vermouth and twist that he handed over, a smile moving her thin mouth. He watched a group of well-dressed and jeweled women approach, listened to their greetings.

Lindsey answered. Oroko admired both her restraint and the courtesy. He didn't comment after they had gone, for it was not his place. She hid so much, so well.

She put her barely tasted glass on the table under the window and looked directly up at him, as if asking why he stood there.

"Is it time yet?" he said. "Time to bring Gilman in?"

She took a moment to answer.

"Gilman will find Wilton. Let her have her prize. Let her enjoy her safety before we take it. Maybe she can help Wilton. We'll wait."

"Yes, Madam," he said, and bowed once more.

He wondered idly if she would ever notice his death. Never as she had Sandy's, but as an American missed a pet, perhaps, or a guard dog. He wasn't tame, but he didn't think that mattered to Lindsey.

Sandy was fun. He'd wanted to spend time in her company, even in the beginning when he'd thought she was a girl lover and Lindsey might be too. He'd killed one man when the fool blathered of such matters at a bar. Waited until they all went out the door in a group, slipped his favorite blade in between the ribs and back out so fast in the dark it seemed he'd only given a friendly punch in the chest. The drunk staggered off toward home with a grumbling complaint about being hit so hard, then died a block away. Assault by person or persons unknown. A common event in a city like Lagos.

Oroko would never forget the night Sandy died. He couldn't call it a failure, because Lindsey survived. He'd been away on orders. He did his job. But he'd lost his friend, the one friend who had known what he was and did not seem to care. Sandy was nothing like the pleasant fools he drank with at the bar or played football with on the university grounds. He knew if you asked them, they would never remember where or when they first met Oroko. Only that he knew how to share his luck and a laugh. They enjoyed the drinks he bought and the jokes he told. For a moment he felt as if Sandy stood near, waiting to tell him something funny.

Chapter 89: Gilman.

January 1970 In Transit and New York, New Hampshire, USA Gilman gazed through the rounded window of the jet at the clouded land below. Speed and distance seemed imaginary. The muted engine roar lulled and she pressed her fingers against each other in her lap. Naked without surgical gloves. Unnaturally idle. In this sterile self-reflecting cylinder, her hands lay useless.

She craned to see the landscape dulled by thick windows, so far down beyond her reach. Around her, rows of clean fuzzy seats and strange people in nice clothes. Like dolls, all of them in identical peace. No one asking who or what she was or how she had come to sit here. As if there had never been a question whether or not she could or should. She stared at the dim yellows and gray greens and the tortuous rivers of Africa as though she could memorize it all. As if Africa could be so tamed, and memories of blood and blasts and loss could be bled of color and impact to be fitted into an airplane seat and the single small suitcase at her feet.

They were out. She and Sister Catherine and Allingham had escaped. It was over. And nothing she felt seemed important enough to be real. Even saying goodbye to Sister Catherine on her way back to her convent in Ireland, blurred.

Gilman remembered screams in the dark, the flare of petrol fires, the frenzy of wounded she couldn't quiet, much less heal. Biafra died last night, and she had fled, deserted her post. Now she imagined how the flaring sunlight of early morning grew bright on the pitted red dirt and shattered asphalt of Airstip Annabelle in that tangled woodland somewhere in a dead country.

When she first stepped off the plane into the warm soft hand of Nigeria, how wonderful it had seemed, a place where she was desperately needed, rapturously welcomed, where her touch worked magic, her spells of healing stitched by catgut and salved with medicines, all pushing back the night.

Nigeria would deal with the remnants of Biafra's desperate army as it pleased, and no international witnesses remained to act as conscience for the winners. For Gilman it was done, and there was nothing left to see. Nothing to do.

She turned to her seat companion, noting the lines that exhaustion and tension had forced into Allingham's face. His mouth hung open, his unshaven cheeks stubbled with black bristle, and his stale breath stank. She knew nothing and everything about this annoying man. So much to dislike in him, but he'd stayed too. She hadn't outlasted him, and she looked away, shamed by the thought.

She glanced around at the faces of the other passengers, feeling branded, not by her worn and faded garb, both stained and crumpled, but by some mark of difference. A deep worn rut of sustained fear. She looked again at Allingham's sleeping shape, then turned back to the window. The plane rose above a bank of bright cloud, and she could no longer see the land.

New York received the refugees with indifference. The airport dazed Gilman. She saw a bright-lit fantasy, filled with bland faces, rich, fleshy, so pale. Faces preoccupied, hastening about their business, no one looking back at her when she searched their expressions. None of the cheerful greetings the Nigerians always had for strangers and foreigners. No flashing smiles.

So cold outside, a cold that cut through and bit her bones. She shivered waiting for the airport bus. She remembered meeting Wilton here once, years ago, but of course no one had come for her, nor for Allingham. The bus drew up nearby, she clambered on board and dropped the heavy American coins into the slot. After the aluminum coins of Biafra, this money felt strange in her hand.

"Gilman," Allingham said, "I'm getting off next stop. American Airlines."

"I thought you'd..."

"Go with you to find your friend Wilton? Why? She's not my friend. You have her address. You don't need me to hold your hand. I'm going home."

"What home? Where will you go?" Gilman said in surprise. "What will you do?"

She felt the anchor slipping, her lungs closing with fear at Allingham's departure. What was wrong with her? She had a destination-Wilton's house and Wilton's welcome. But Allingham? Where would he find anyone who would understand who he had been for the past few years? An ugly guy who'd once been fat, or at least soft in the body. She looked at him and wondered what he was.

"As I said, I'm going home. Did you know I have a family? You never asked. I have a wife. Not that she misses me, but I have one. My parents are alive, Gilman. I wrote home almost every week. I have a real life here."

Unlike you, she heard.

"I haven't been gone that many years. I'll get back into practice in Illinois. I can outgrow the bad habits of combat medicine."

He balanced in the bus's sway when it pulled over to the curb.

"Good luck, Gilman."

He grabbed his bags and pushed his way down the aisle.

Rounding the corner, her weary eyes searching for the familiar square house, Gilman paused. She became aware all at once of her tangled hair and smudged cheeks, her newly purchased winter coat and boots. She'd been in such a hurry to escape all the crowds and strangers in New York City.

She smiled at the old brown house. She shook off the snow from her aching feet and started slogging, her eyes anxious for some sign of life within. Surely Wilton was here. Where else would she have gone, but here? Gilman caught sight of a Volkswagen beetle in the front yard and she relaxed. Typical Wiltonesque economy.

Gilman rang the front doorbell. Damned cold out. She stamped her feet. She was beginning to feel good about being back, about having made it in one piece. Against all expectation. Maybe she would go back into practice in the States, maybe there was a place for her. Maybe she could at last accept the inheritance from her long-dead parents. She'd earned it by now.

The door opened and Gilman froze in dread. A small blonde woman smiled at her, reserved and puzzled.

"Yes? Can I help you?"

"I was looking for a friend of mine," Gilman said, her words pleading. She hated the sound. "Kate Wilton."

The woman looked at her, holding onto the doorknob as if Gilman might be crazy. Gilman brushed a stray bit of hair out of her eyes.

"I'm sorry. She doesn't live here. You have the wrong address."

"But she has to.

The woman looked worried at Gilman's protest, a frown pulling her eyebrows together. She reassessed Gilman from head to brand-new boots, shivering a bit herself from the cold draft.

"This is her house." Gilman found herself babbling. "It belonged to her family, her father's grandparents built it over a hundred years ago and she was headed home."

"Here," the woman in the doorway said. "Come in."

Leading the way through the remembered entry into the living room, the blonde woman gave Gilman another curious but not unkind look.

"We're renting the place through a lawyer named Sullivan down in Topsfield and sharing it with another couple," she said. "I don't know as I've heard of anyone named Kate Wilton who's involved."

They entered the living room, all chintz and shabby antiques. A tall skinny man in blue jeans and a plaid blue flannel shirt turned from the bookcase. He had a soft brown beard and pale eyes that examined Gilman without much surprise while the small woman explained. He shook his head.

"No, never heard that name."

Gilman discovered that she was shivering.