Sudan: A Novel (45 page)

Without another word, Ahkmad reached up and took the key from the peg on the wall. He opened the door to the Arab and the tribal, picked up the lantern off the table and led them down the hallway. It was not totally dark; two small lamps cast dancing yellow puddles of light separated by stretches of darkness.

“He can sleep in here with the others,” Ahkmad said as he got to the last cell.

He set the lantern and his rifle down on the stone bench beside the door and fit the key on his key ring into the lock.

“They’ll all be gone tomor--”

A thin wire pulled tight around his neck. Before he could make a sound, the wire sliced through two layers of muscle and his carotid artery. With only a slight gurgle, his life spewed out on the front of his shirt.

Leo pushed his chair back from the table, stood and let out a loud burp. Joak had just sat down to eat, with his plate on his lap on the veranda steps. Tribals didn’t eat at the table with Arabs. They had to wait until all the Arabs had eaten their fill, and then they were given the leftovers. Leo wondered if it had ever occurred to Joak that he could just as easily be a slave as any of the unfortunates they had sold over the years. No, probably not; the toothless cripple was too stupid to make the connection.

Leo picked chicken out of his teeth as he wandered over to where Joak was seated.

“I’m going to get the jeep we left parked by the jail and take it back to Faoud’s garage,” he said.

Faoud kept several personal vehicles parked in a building next to his house. All his other vehicles—trucks and the jeep—were housed in a garage at the soldiers’ compound down the road. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

He turned and headed around the side of the house toward the stone pathway leading to the gate in the back wall. When he passed a table where the soldiers had been eating, he spotted a half empty bottle of rice wine. He picked it up and took it with him.

The prisoners had heard the sound of footsteps in the hallway and Ahkmad’s voice. It was totally dark in the cell, and they could see the glow of a lantern through the window in the cell door.

Ron was nauseous with a fear that had grabbed hold of his guts when Faoud said the word, “beheaded,” and had gripped tighter and tighter as the minutes of his life ticked away in the darkness of the cell. Now, terror clenched so hard he couldn’t breathe. Had the slave trader’s techie friend arrived early? Was it showtime already?

Lantern light spilled into the cell as the door opened and into the light stepped Koto.

Ron would not have been more surprised if Elvis had hip-twisted his way into the dungeon singing
Blue Suede Shoes.
Masapha could only whisper, almost reverently, “Koto!”

The hulking form of Omar appeared one step behind the boy. Idris’ face, expressionless from the moment Leo and Joak had left hours ago, came back to life. Ron and Masapha instantly made the connection; this muscular man was “somebody else”—a really
big
somebody else!

Omar set the lantern on the floor and began to untie Koto’s hands. He looked at Idris and motioned toward the door. “Let’s go. We don’t have much time. We’re getting out of here.”

He knew Idris couldn’t understand the words, but was certain the tribal could figure out what he meant.

Ron’s voice came from just outside the lantern’s light. “Is this party invitation-only, or can anybody come?”

“The door’s open,” Omar said off-handedly. “All I’ve got’s a two-man jeep, and there’s only room for...”

He stopped. As Idris struggled to his feet, he moved into the glow of the lantern, and Omar saw his shredded back for the first time. An unexpected wave of pure rage drilled through Omar’s body like a comet slicing open the night sky.

“Who...?” he began.

Omar had watched the guards take Ron to Faoud and then return him to the jail; he could see the American had been savagely beaten. But Idris? He’d sat right outside the jail, so close he could hear the kidnappers’ voices when they stopped to talk. He would have heard the screams of a man being whipped.

“The jailer whipped him this morning when they brought him in,” Masapha answered Omar’s half-asked question. “He hit him again and again to make Idris tell him about you, where to find you so the rat-eyed man could hunt you down and kill you. But Idris made no answer. He made no sound at all.”

Idris had refused to identify Omar, had taken the beating in silence. Omar was shocked, sickened. But why was he surprised? They could have beaten Idris to death, and he’d have remained silent! Nothing could have forced the Dinka farmer to betray his daughter’s only hope. Omar reached out and took Idris’ arm to steady him, a surprisingly gentle gesture for such a big man. 

“Speaking of scar-face, where is he?” Ron asked.

“Dead,” Omar said. Oh, how he wished he’d let the man live so he could have killed him slowly! He stepped to the door, bent down and began to drag Ahkmad’s body into the cell. “We’ll lock the place up-- ”

Suddenly, there was a knock on the front door of the jail. Everyone froze.

“Get over there!” Omar hissed at the three injured men and pointed to the far corner of the cell. “Cover the lantern!”

He pulled the jailer’s body back out of the cell and hefted it into a sitting position on the stone bench outside the cell door. He yanked the door closed, whispered something to Koto in Lokuta and shoved the boy into the open door of the next empty cell. Then he vanished in the shadows of the dark cell across the hall.

The rapping continued, followed by Leo’s voice. “Ahkmad, come on, open up. I’ve got wine, have a drink with me.”

He knocked again. No response.
Well, fine,
Leo thought irritably,
I’ll drink it all myself.
He dealt the jail door one final frustrated blow, and the door moved slightly. It wasn’t locked.

Leo knew the condition of Ahkmad’s only prisoners, so he had no concern that they’d overpowered the big man and staged a jail break. But he was curious. Why wasn’t the door locked?

He pushed the door open and called out, “Ahkmad?”

There was no response. But there was somebody...He could just make out a figure seated on the bench outside the last cell. He took a few steps down the hallway and saw that it was the jailer.

“You idiot,” he muttered under his breath and marched toward the slumped figure at the end of the hall. “Do you have any idea what Faoud will do to you if he catches you asleep or drunk on guard duty?”

As he passed the last set of empty cells, Koto stepped out of the darkness into the hallway in front of him.

“Where did you come from?” Leo sputtered. Koto began to back slowly toward the body of the jailer, and Leo took the bait. When he lurched to grab the boy, Omar came up behind him from the other side of the hallway. He shoved the barrel of Ahkmad’s automatic into Leo’s back, and the “click!” when Omar cocked it echoed in the stone hallway like a gunshot.

“Breathe, and you’re dead,” Omar whispered.

Leo froze.

Koto went ahead of the two men and opened the cell door, and Omar shoved Leo toward it. He planned to kill the man when he got him into the cell and could use his knife or garrote; a gunshot in here would boom like a cannon.

As soon as Ron uncovered the lantern and Idris saw Leo, he started to babble at Omar frantically in Dinka. When Masapha realized Omar didn’t understand, he translated. “This man knows where Idris’s daughter is,” he told Omar. “He was with her only ago a few hours.”

Omar looked at Leo and a genuine smile lit his face under his black mustache. His gold tooth sparkled. “Well, well, well. Aren’t we lucky our friend here decided to drop by!”

He spoke his next words to Leo. “Let’s take a little jeep ride in the moonlight together—what do you say? I’m sure you’re eager to show us where to find this little girl.”

“And what makes you think...?” Leo began brashly.

With the speed of a cobra, the huge mercenary clamped his arm around Leo’s neck and shoved the barrel of the gun under his chin.

“You know where the girl is, so I will not kill you. But I can make you wish you were dead.”

All the defiance drained out of Leo like water through a hole in a bucket. “I’ll tell you, OK. I’ll take you there. Whatever you want. Just don’t hurt me.”

Omar wasn’t surprised at the man’s reaction. He had yet to meet a bully who wasn’t a coward.

“I thought you’d see things our way,” Omar said. He turned to Ron, who had moved to the door, handed him the jailer’s gun and told him, “If this guy blinks, shoot him in the crotch.”

He quickly frisked Leo, took the quaking mercenary’s knife and revolver and tossed them into the far corner of the cell. He picked up the garrote he had dropped on the floor after killing the jailer and wiped the gore onto his pants.

Then he looked at Ron and Masapha. “I’ve only got a two-man jeep...”

“He’s got a jeep,” Ron said, and nodded at Leo. “It’s parked outside.”

Omar felt Leo’s pockets and found the keys. He turned back to Ron, who had dropped the jailer’s gun in the straw and now leaned against the wall for support. “Can you drive?”

“My choices are drive or stay here? Yeah, I can drive!”

“Our friend will drive his jeep, and I will sit behind him with a knife at his back,” Omar said. “You will drive my jeep. It’s parked down the road. Let’s go!”

Without any teeth, eating was a challenge, but Joak ate just about anything he wanted anyway. It took him a little longer to gum his food enough to swallow it, that’s all.

He had finished his dinner at Faoud’s and waited by the veranda steps for Leo to return from the garage where he’d taken Faoud’s jeep. The servants had already cleaned up after dinner, and Joak was the only person still there. What was taking Leo so long? Had he forgotten that they still had to walk all the way back into town to spend the night in that chigger-ridden flophouse?

Finally, the little man got tired of waiting and decided to go down the road to the garage and see if Leo had stayed there to have a drink with the soldiers after he turned in the jeep. If he couldn’t find him there, Joak would go back to the jail. Maybe Leo and Ahkmad had gotten into a card game.

When the servant knocked on Faoud’s bedroom door, the slave trader was furious. He did not want to be disturbed.