Congo Dawn Page 28

  “You want to know why we quit the Green Berets to go freelance? Bottom line: after Vietnam, the tactics we utilized—tactics that could have won that war—were no longer politically correct back home. Frank and I went Agency for a while. CIA for you greenhorns. We put our particular skills on the line for our country plenty of times in Central America and other places. But eventually what we had to offer no longer fit the ethos of American foreign policy. So we ended up down here fighting for pay.

  “Don’t get me wrong. We’re not butchers or monsters like some we’ve worked with. We’ve got our own rules of engagement we don’t cross. But in the end, finishing a mission quickly can be the best way to save lives. Or have you forgotten how much civilian blood Jini’s insurgency has left behind here already? Maybe it does seem harsh. And sure, the local villagers aren’t happy right now. But if we can empty this zone of civilians, plaster it with firepower, catch this guy, then those same villagers will finally be free to rebuild in peace.

  “And I’m sure Earth Resources will offer some kind of compensation for damages. It’s not like they can’t afford it. If you’re so concerned, make that your mission when this is over. You seem to be good at talking favors out of Trevor Mulroney. In the meantime, collateral damage comes with the territory of making war. Having compassion on the enemy, even a civilian enemy, is a luxury you can afford only after the war is won. And if you can’t deal with that, Krueger’s right. You’re a liability to this operation.”

  Robin felt as though she’d been slapped. Why had she assumed Ernie would see things her way? Because he was a countryman? And any countryman of hers wouldn’t do things that Third World mercenaries like Samuel Makuga or even Pieter Krueger might do without blinking an eye?

  With dignity, she responded, “I’ve never found showing compassion a liability to doing my job either as a Marine or an Ares Solutions operative. And rest assured you won’t find me a liability on this mission. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get this up to Taraja and start carrying out my orders.”

  Robin kept a smile on her face as she climbed behind the jeep’s steering wheel. But inside she was rebelling. They keep saying this is war! But it isn’t! At least not as defined by any government or military I know. When the Marines went into Afghanistan, someone in authority sent us there. And watched to make sure we followed rules of engagement. Maybe Ernie’s right that this is the best and even safest way to finish off Jini and his insurgency.

  But Michael’s right too. Where is our accountability to make absolutely sure we’re doing the right thing?

  And for the right reasons?

  It took the rest of the afternoon to get tents pitched, volunteers digging trenches to drain away rainwater before spreading the canvas floors. Robin ferried up two more loads of supplies in the jeep. On the final load, Ernie Miller accompanied her to drive back the jeep for camp use while Robin stayed on to make inquiries among the refugees. Miriam and the Taraja staff were everywhere, separating those needing medical care, setting up communal kitchens, mixing evaporated milk and boiled water for infants and toddlers without mothers to breast-feed. But Robin didn’t catch sight of Michael or Ephraim until dusk, when the two doctors emerged from the clinic to walk around the encampment, stepping into each tent to speak to refugees who’d staked out sleeping spots on the canvas floors.

  Robin had already completed one such round, satisfying herself no one among the refugees matched Jini’s description or scar. But more refugees continued to filter in throughout the afternoon, so her original estimate had doubled. For which reason she’d begun a second round. She’d checked a male newcomer’s left arm for scars and was showing him Jini’s photo when Michael and Ephraim entered the tent with Miriam at their heels. The refugee held an infant in his arms, and a small boy clung to his side. He shook his head at the photo as he explained unhappily that his wife had been taken to the clinic. Did Robin know if the docteur was finished with her yet?

  “Robin!” Michael crossed the tent with quick strides. “Miriam’s told me you’re responsible for supplying all this. So Mulroney did come through. Maybe I had the wrong idea about the man. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this.”

  “It was the least we owed you,” Robin answered, then lowered her voice. “I—your sister seems to think this is Jini’s doing. Why didn’t you tell Miriam and Ephraim how these people ended up here?”

  Michael made a dismissive gesture. “What would be the point? The damage is already done. The only purpose served by telling them who’s really at fault here would be . . .”

  As he trailed off, Robin finished quietly for him. “To make them think even worse of me than they already do. That wasn’t necessary, but it was kind of you.”

  Michael’s jaw tightened. “I wasn’t thinking of you, but of Miriam. She’s been through enough. She doesn’t need any more disappointment. Above all from you.”

  But Michael’s glance had now dropped to the photo in Robin’s hand. Stunned realization banished any appreciation from his face as he snatched it from her grip. “So this is why you were checking that man’s arm when we walked in? And why Mulroney’s suddenly shown himself so generous! Not out of altruism, but to get a spy in here to poke around. Do you guys never let up? You really think your ghost is dumb enough to walk into this little trap?”

  “No, I don’t!” Robin hissed back. “But poking around, as you put it, was the only grounds on which Krueger would sign off for supplies and tents. And your choice was me or Makuga! I assumed you’d rather have me up here making discreet inquiries than a bunch of armed soldiers. And that you cared more about getting these people under cover and fed than your stupid little feud against Ares Solutions.”

  Michael didn’t answer but strode away to speak to another refugee family. Hurrying up, Miriam slipped an arm around Robin’s shoulder. “Don’t mind my brother. Michael’s normally pretty easygoing. But he’s been in surgery all afternoon, and they just lost the final patient. Another gunshot wound. A young mother who’s left two children. It’s always hard to lose a patient, especially one who shouldn’t have died. But she’d lost too much blood by the time Michael got to her. When he calms down, he’ll be willing to recognize how much you’ve done for these people. I don’t know what we’d have done without you today. Especially considering these people aren’t your responsibility.”

  Yes, they are! We did this! Stop being so nice to me! Guilt and shame churned in Robin. Could it be the woman who’d died was the wife of that young refugee father, mother to that infant and small boy?

  Then her turmoil hardened to anger. No, we didn’t do this. At least not alone! If there’s a Creator of all this mess up there listening and watching, then he’s allowed Jini to terrorize this jungle. Allowed today’s events to happen. So where’s the real responsibility? God, do you weep when you watch a mother dying on a jungle clinic operating table? A little girl having to shoulder her baby brother because her mother was taken away? A four-year-old living in and out of a hospital? Or do you just shrug and say, “Too bad, those humans got what they deserved”?

  “Come on, Robin.” Miriam had a firm hold of Robin’s elbow. “Everyone’s fed and sheltered now. And you’ve been working hard all day. So how about we let the men finish their rounds and see what we can do about a cup of tea.”

  Like some irresistible whirlwind, Miriam swept Robin out of the tent. “And your niece—Kristi, right? How’s she doing? My kids have added her to their bedtime prayers. They’ll be asking for an update.”

  “Actually, I’m not sure. I got a voice message saying my sister has taken her to the hospital. But I couldn’t reach them to get any details.” Robin swallowed hard to keep her worry, frustration, anger, and exhaustion of the last hours from her even tone. But Miriam’s searching look indicated she was not successful.

  With the moon not yet risen and rain clouds still pregnant overhead, the only illumination as the two women headed toward the mission house was from the dying embers of a cook fire an
d a single lantern hanging from a rafter of the thatched community shelter. Near the front of the shelter, two men had begun a soft staccato on hollowed-out sections of wood. Robin recognized the drummers as Taraja residents who’d helped unload the jeep and set up tents.

  The refugees had already finished a simple meal of rice and lentils, the cleanup easy since sections of banana frond had served as plates. But several women were pounding out cassava flour in a pair of waist-high wooden mortars to make kwanga bread for tomorrow’s breakfast. In an open area between tents and mission house, children ran circles in some unidentifiable game. Among them Robin spotted Miriam’s boys and small daughter along with the refugee children she’d directed to Taraja. Laughter rose from the scampering band, so it was hard to believe a few hours ago these playing children had been lost, terrified, hungry, and thirsty. A resilience of human nature to which Robin had also been witness in too many war zones.

  A drifting of adults had emerged as well from tents and thatched huts to squat down under the thatched shelter. As the drummers shifted rhythm, voices rose in a chorus Robin had heard before from the Taraja residents. “Yesu, nuru ya ulimwengu.”

  “Jesus, Light of the World.” An odd image in such a dark place.

  The song switched to one familiar not just in Swahili, its simple words among the earliest songs learned by children in every corner of the planet. “Yesu anipenda.”

  “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

  In the midst of their game, the shrill soprano of children picked up the refrain. “Yes, Jesus loves me. . . .”

  The song spread from thatched shelter to tents, so the drummers increased the volume of their syncopated staccato, its simple melody taking on bass, tenor, alto harmonies so rich and complex any additional musical instruments would be superfluous. “Yesu anipenda.”

  Robin should not have been astonished. The Congolese were a churchgoing people, Christianity deeply rooted in village life after generations of missionaries like the Stewarts. But after all these people had endured over recent days, over the space of their lives, the miserable history of their land, after all the contrary evidence offered up to them, how were those confident, optimistic lyrics possible?

  The two women had now entered the mission house. Miriam reached to turn on a light whose power came from those solar panels on the roof. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll get the tea started.”

  As Miriam crossed the room, she sang along softly, not in the Swahili filtering through open windows, but the English of her own and Robin’s childhood heritage. “Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!”

  Robin’s reaction was as instinctive as it was harsh. “Don’t! Stop! How can you sing that? How can they sing that? How . . . how can you let them believe such a terrible, cruel lie?”

  Miriam ceased her singing, and though she did not lose her smile, there was astonishment in her stare. Then, more irritatingly, pity as she turned to nudge the teakettle onto glowing coals. “Oh, Robin, it isn’t a lie. Far from it! It’s their hope, our hope, that no matter what’s happened today out there, no matter what will happen tomorrow, the almighty Creator of the universe loves us so much he came to earth to walk among us in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, to show us the way out of this world’s darkness into his light.”

  “Hope!” Robin slid into a chair at the table. But she sat rigidly, hands clenched in her lap. This was not a discussion she wanted to have with a virtual stranger whose cheerful Pollyanna attitude despite the distortion of that badly healed scar was as incompatible with this setting as it was downright exasperating. But she’d held back for too long the words now spilling out in a stumbling, furious stream.

  “What a joke! So do you believe in Santa Claus too? Oh, sure, I used to buy God’s love. I sang ‘Jesus loves me’ as a kid in Swahili as well as English before my mother—” Robin choked off the rest of the memory. “I’ve always basically accepted the Bible. Even in Afghanistan with all I witnessed—well, going to chaplain services there, I . . . I started to buy it all again.”

  Robin stopped, blinking hard, until Miriam prompted gently, “Yes, Michael mentioned when he wrote that you and your brother attended services with him. So what happened to make you doubt God’s love? You’re so angry. I thought it was Michael you were angry at. But it’s not Michael. It’s God, isn’t it?”

  The absurdity of her words gave Robin voice again. “How can you ask what happened? I stopped believing in a God of love the same time I stopped believing in your brother. Okay, so I was wrong about Michael. But—God? What kind of God lets a twenty-one-year-old genius with so much to offer bleed out his life while he just watches it happen? What kind of God takes away your family and your dreams one after another until you can’t bear to dream again? And you’re afraid to love again because you know it’s only a matter of time until God takes that away too! And you keep fighting because you can’t just give up. But there’s no point in that fight because there’s no way you can win out against God.”

  Robin broke off again. She’d given away far more than she’d intended in that answer. Easing into a chair across the table, Miriam responded quietly, “You’re thinking of Kristi. You’re assuming because you lost your mother, your father, your brother, that you’re going to lose her, too. That you have to fight for her life because God won’t. And maybe you’re right. Maybe you will lose Kristi, too. I can’t pretend to know God’s plan for your niece’s life or yours. If you do lose another loved one, you’re hardly unique in that.”

  Robin stared at the other woman. Soft though they were, Miriam’s words carried an implacability at sharp odds with the unmistakable sympathy in amber eyes. “What you’re really saying is you believed in God’s love so long as your own life was going fine. And now that you’ve had to endure loss and suffering, now that your own dreams haven’t all come true, that must mean God doesn’t truly love.”

  Gently, kindly, but still implacably, Miriam went on. “So just who do you think you are to write off God because your own life hasn’t turned out as you feel it should? Take a look around you! Take a look outside! You’ve hardly had a monopoly on human suffering. At worst, you’ve had food in your belly, a roof over your head, medical attention. Plenty of people in those tents have lost loved ones to sickness, war, famine, even before everything they’ve endured today. Or do you somehow think you should be exempt because you’re a rich mzungu from a rich, comfortable country where parents don’t have to watch their children starve to death and families don’t have to watch loved ones cut down by war?”

  The accusation stung—above all because it held some merit. Robin shook her head, again wanting to end this discussion but unexpectedly reluctant to leave her companion with such a poor and inaccurate opinion of her. Why do you care what she thinks of you?

  “You have it all wrong. It’s because I don’t think I’m exempt, because I know I’m not unique, that I find all this . . . optimism of yours so untenable. Believe me, I never once asked, ‘Why me?’ when my mother died in that embassy bombing. After all, hundreds of Kenyans lost family members that day too. Nor when my father dropped us off like abandoned packages with a relative and we lost our dad, too. Nor even when Chris died, which seemed so much worse because we were so close. Nor when Kristi was born so sick. Like you said, what right would I ever have to complain? I’ve still had food to eat, a roof over my head, medical care for Kristi.

  “If I’m angry, it’s because I have seen so much worse suffering than my own. Haiti. Sierra Leone. Sudan. So many refugee camps. So many kids so malnourished they’ll never be normal no matter how many nutrients we pour into their mouths. Women, little girls, and boys, too, who’ve been . . . wounded so badly they’ll never be able to enjoy normal marriage and kids of their own. And those are the lucky ones we can reach. Or maybe it’s the dead ones who are lucky.”

  The tears that had threatened all day pressed at the backs of Robin’s eyelids, stung in her sinuses. But the very anger of which Miriam had accused her st
iffened her shoulders, steadied her voice to dispassionate, analytical inquiry.

  “You see, that’s what I don’t get. I’m not the heathen you seem to think. I believe what my mother taught me, what I learned in Sunday school. God created this world. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present. God sent his Son to die on a cross for those lucky few who live somewhere in the world where they’ve been taught to believe in Jesus so they can be saved. Maybe ‘Jesus loves me’ is true for those few too. But what does that make the rest of humanity? Expendable crewmen?

  “And that’s where I have a problem. I would give my own life to stop the pain I’ve seen. To stop little girls and boys from being raped. Or just as bad, forced into armies where they’re turned into killers like Wamba’s militia. To keep families from being torn apart by war. Children dying of preventable diseases for lack of a dollar’s worth of medicine. I don’t have the power to do all that. But the Creator of this universe sure does!”

  Robin’s gesture encompassed the huddled refugees outside night-darkened screens and an entire world beyond. “So am I more compassionate than the God who created all these people, created all this beauty? There’s the question, and I’ve never yet found anyone who can give me a credible answer. How can an all-powerful God who claims to love humanity look down on our planet and watch such un­speakable things happening, innocent people hurting and dying, bad guys winning over and over again, so much suffering, without it breaking his heart? And not just multiplied thousands, no, millions of times all over our world. But year after year, generation after generation, century after century without ever reaching down and putting a stop to it?