people and cattle, sandbagged against flooding. I knew that when the GOS understood what was happening in our country they would send the full force of their military against us, for quite aside from the strategic position we occupied, it would be intolerable for them that the despisedabd could defeat them, and under the banner of the church at that. I thought we had perhaps half a year, for they would want the land to be perfectly dry and for our supplies (as they would imagine) to be at their lowest.
About a month after I placed my arms order, an ancient Hercules landed on our strip and I was not entirely knocked off my chair to find Skeeter himself at the controls. He hopped out of the cockpit carrying a flat box, crowing, anybody order a pepperoni pizza? I let him kiss me. He said, why pay for a pilot and besides I wanted to see Emmylou of Sudan for myself. Peter despised him from instant one and the same back and I pissed away a lot of energy I couldn’t really spare just keeping them from killing each other. One night I caught Skeeter in the oil company RV going through drawers. He grinned at me, with that charming psychopath grin he had, and held up an empty CD case. Lots of cases no data disks, sweetie, why is that? I said I’d given out all the CDs as gifts, the people liked to cut them into spirals and use them to ornament the horns of the cattle, and what was it to him? Information is money, he said, lotsa folks would like to know what Richardson found out there. You know he’s dead. I didn’t I said, and he told me that the burnt-out shell of their pickup had been found just north of Pibor, w/charred skeletons. Looked like they hit a mine, but they weren’t in any mine field, you wouldn’t know anything about that would you, sweetie?
At that moment I knew of a certainty, I can’t explain how, that Skeeter had been the one who ratted Orne out to the feds, all kinds of stuff clicked in, like how come he was still in business when half a dozen survivors would’ve been glad to testify that he’d supplied most of the heavy weaponry on Bailey’s Knob, and also the look on his face when I blurted it out. He laughed then and grabbed me, his hands crawling up onto my neck and I think he might’ve killed me right then if Peter hadn’t barged in. Skeeter left the next day, good riddance to bad rubbish said Peter what a fucking plague those people are, and added that he thought he might take up a sideline assassinating arms merchants.
Now we came into the season called Mai, late winter to early spring on the planet, a bad time for the Dinka, when the rivers go dry and the heat is greatest and the cattle must be driven to outlying camps because the grass around the settlements is all gone. But we had so much fodder that we could keep the herds closer in, which was a good thing, because then the Sudanese attacked and we first heard the name of Jabir Akran al-Muwalid.
I guess there are people like him in every country, or in any case it doesn’t seem that leaders interested in doing genocidal atrocities ever have a staffing problem. The attack came from the north at a place called Ring Baai, a village of about fifty families near the Sobat River. We had no warning at all. Later we found that they’d come at night, which was very unusual for the GOS forces. They had tanks and armored personnel carriers, which we could tell from the tracks and also because they had bound nearly the entire population hand and foot, 658 men women children and lined them up and run a tank down the line crushing all of them and that was the worst thing I saw in Africa. They’d also knocked over the signal tower and crucified the clan elders on the supporting logs. The cattle they’d burned alive in their byres. Two days later they struck at Malual Baai, near the Pibor way to the south of Ring Baai, the same destruction, only this time some boys had escaped with their cattle, having been in a distant camp with them. They spoke of many tanks, many soldiers, a whole army. In fact, we discovered that it was an armored battalion, obviously, this being Sudan, not areal armored battalion, but bad enough: two dozen tanks, about half of them American M-60s and the rest Type 62 Chinese lites, plus a dozen or so M-113 APCs, self-propelled mortars, and an assortment of trucks and service vehicles. Troop strength was estimated at about 500. This was an unusually formidable force for that crappy little war, and I suppose we should have been proud that they had thrown it against us rather than the SPLA. I did feel pride God forgive me.
We set up a night watch and distributed pyrotechnics to the villages, and Peter organized a commando out of our Somersets and took them across the Pibor, where they lay in wait for the fuel convoy that had to be supplying the armor and blew it up with charges we’d made from our unexploded bomb. A very satisfying operation, which meant that the enemy no longer had enough mobility to go picking off settlements and I see I have about eight pages left in this notebook. All small wars are more or less the same and it’s about as interesting to read the details as to read the report of a soccer game. We kept contact with them and sniped. Wibok got bombed, but all our people took shelter in the deep tunnels and my gun knocked a Sukhoi bomber out of the sky with the new proximity ammo. I led the Somerset Light Infantry off to attack their squadron of light tanks, which were tearing up villages some forty miles distant. They sniped enough to keep the commanders’ heads down, nothing blinder and dumber than a buttoned-up tank, and then they ran away at the usual Dinka fifteen mph lope, pursued by twelve tanks in a row and led them onto my gun, which was nicely camouflaged in a thicket. We blew the first two tanks and the last tank with concealed charges and then it was a matter of flinging out a lot of APFSDS until they were all burning. The Afrika Korps used to do this a lot with their 88s, and it took the Brits a remarkably long time to figure it out. Our forces were now divided and al-Muwalid chose this moment to launch his attack on Wibok. I raced back to the town in the command car and arrived just before he surrounded it.
There was no hope of defending the town of course, they blasted the place to rubble and blew up our vehicles and chased us into our tunnels. And their armor entered our ruins and their infantry followed us into the earth. Then came the close and hideous work in the dark, lit only by the flashes of rifles and the glare of grenades. They pushed us back of course they were so many more than we, until only the headquarters and the hospital bunkers remained together with short stubs of tunnel and a few strong points still ours.
I saw my brave boys and girls casting fearful glances at me waiting for the miracle, but there was no miracle something had gone wrong with my plan I thought and so I crawled through a collapsed tunnel and arrived at the surface where I hid and waited and prayed until I heard the sound of my gun again, I saw a tank go up in flames as the tungsten darts tore into its stern and then the Somerset Light Infantry came trotting through the smoke having run forty miles with full gear in a little over ten hours.
Jammed among the ruins they had made, the GOS armor could not maneuver so our people destroyed it all with RPGs and satchel charges, and then our people poured into the tunnels catching the enemy between us inside and safety and we hunted them through the dark, with bayonets and machetes and shovels at the very end, when we had all run out of ammunition.
So that was my little Stalingrad, my miniature ketelschlacht. My last battle. We had ninety-one killed, and two hundred wounded, and counted 488 of them killed, although Colonel al-Muwalid and his guards escaped.
The tunnels had drains down the center of their floors and these ran overflowing with blood I waded in their blood above my ankles it flowed over the tops of my French ammunition boots. As soon as I knew we were safe, I went to the hospital to see the wounded, me covered in blood, squelching it in my boots, and there Trini attacked me with vehement language, calling me monster traitor murderer maniac, and what hurt most, that Nora would have despised me for what I’d done and I said I knew but I hoped to explain it to her in heaven and she laughed hysterically saying look at you, you look like Attila the Hun. Heaven, don’t make me laugh! Now get out of my hospital!
I don’t know who betrayed me. Someone did, though, someone who knew that in the balmy days of peace I used to ride north out of Wibok along the Kongkong in the early morning and that I started doing it again after the battle. I suppose even after all the victory I had enemies among the people, what prophet doesn’t? I imagine they will weave the traitor into their songs and so he will live forever like Judas Iscariot. It happened in high Mai, just past dawn, the sky with that fragile glassy look it gets in the dry season, hardly any green showing at all and the river shrunk to a stream you could practically leap across. Dol always wanted to send some people with me, but the whole point was to be alone for a precious hour or so.
They shot my horse from the cover of a burnt forest. I twisted my ankle when we fell, and the fall knocked the wind out of me, so I was just waiting for them when they came out, guns pointing, cautious, as if I were a bomb.
I was quite harmless now, although they didn’t know that. A moment earlier I had been what I had been since the night in the smoky room, a prophet full of God’s presence, and when I hit the ground I was just Emmylou Dideroff again. He tossed me out without a word of warning like you tumble a sleeping kitten out of a sewing basket. I wonder if that happened to the real prophets after they’d done their mission maybe Jonah sold insurance in Nineveh for the rest of his life Jeremiah went into camel saddles and
Shit so little space left and here I am going on
Well of course they did the usual, bag over the head, beatings, abuse, gang rape and who really gives a shit
