Sudan: A Novel (50 page)

Ron watched the never-ending line of starving villagers file into the largest of five buildings at the Chumwe Feeding Center. Faoud’s jeep was hidden in a shed behind it.

Omar had returned the rental to Kosti. He’d nosed around while he was there and returned with a smile that highlighted his shiny gold tooth. He said the slave trader had pulled out all the stops to find the American,
and the mercenary, Leo,
who had helped the infidel and his friends escape.

“Faoud thinks Leo orchestrated the escape, and I am happy to let him keep right on thinking it,” Omar said.

Masapha came out and sat down on the porch beside Ron, and the two watched the flowing crowd. They sat in silence for a time. Five days after their beating, the bruises on their backs had gradually changed color, from angry red and purple to green and yellow. Only a few lacerations were still open wounds. The others had left puffy, red ridges that would one day shrink to white scars, permanent tattoos, a lifetime souvenir from Faoud the slave trader. “You are thinking about your brother, yes?”

Ron knew that on the other side of the planet, it was the morning of the House vote on Dan’s Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill.

“Just wondering if our stories will do any good, that’s all.” 

“Your BBC friend said they splashed large.”

Ron turned to his Arab friend with a smile. “Yeah, they splashed large. I just hope the water got the right people wet.”

Dan stared at the picture of the little girl, big eyes, dimples, her ankle tied to a stake in the ground. He couldn’t wrench his eyes away from the image. He had to force himself to put the newspaper down on his desk. Then he turned in his swivel chair and looked out the window.

Chad Mattingly knocked gently on the oak door, opened it a crack and stuck his head into Dan’s office.

“Sir,” he said tentatively, “I think you really need to see this.”

Dan turned back from the window.

“What is it, son?” he asked absently. He couldn’t get the story—a teenage girl walked into a river and let crocodiles rip her apart!—out of his mind.

“This, sir,” Chad said.

He crossed to Dan, set his laptop down on an acre of cherry desktop, opened it so his boss could see the screen and clicked play.

While the intro credits for the CBS Evening News rolled across the screen, Chad told Dan, “This story ran all day yesterday. It was on in the morning, the noon news, 6:00 and 11:00 p.m.”

Dan stared at the screen, at trucks in a semi-circle on the desert floor. Groups of people, mostly women and children, were tied to each other and to the trucks or to stakes in the ground.

Dan watched in fascinated horror as a teenage boy raced away from the trucks, watched a bullet slam into him, watched him hit the ground, roll over, get up and continue to run. Koto. At the meeting that never happened, the members of the Black Caucus had heard that boy tell his story. Yesterday, they saw his words come to life.

Dan’s secretary peeked in, saw Dan and Chad at the computer screen and seized the moment to speak.

“Sir, a man named Rupert Olford with the BBC wants to talk to you before you leave for the vote,” she said breathlessly, in a rush to get it all out before Dan cut her off. “I know you said no media, but he said that your brother...”

“I’ll take the call.”

He nodded a thanks to Chad and lifted the receiver off the phone on his desk as the aide picked up his laptop, left the office and closed the door softly behind him.

When Dan replaced the receiver in the cradle a few minutes later, he dug through the newspapers on his desk until he came to one with the picture of a man on the front—the ugliest man Dan had ever seen. It was a tight shot of the man’s face, and the caption warned that the pictures on the jump page inside were not suitable for children to see.

Dan read the story all the way through twice. In the past decade, just one slave trader had sold more than 20,000 people into slavery and pocketed millions of dollars. He looked at the picture of the vacant-eyed twin boys. He thought about what this man with the beady eyes and the pockmarked face had done to his brother and what he had threatened to do.

Dan felt a sudden blind fury rise in his chest, a rage so raw and fierce it stunned him. Dan knew in that moment, with absolute certainty, that he could kill another human being. If that slave trader had been within his grasp, Dan would have fastened his huge hands around the fat man’s neck and choked him until there was no breath left in his body.

Chad stepped into Dan’s office again and pointed to his watch. “You have fifteen minutes, sir.”

Dan put the newspaper down and swiveled back toward the window. He stared out into nothingness for perhaps a minute, then stood and crossed to the coat rack beside Chad.

“My little brother is...” His voice was too full of emotion to continue. He picked up his suit jacket, slipped his arms into the sleeves, then patted his pockets and looked around. Chad went to the desk.

“Looking for this, sir?” He handed Dan his Palm Pilot.

“I sure hope it doesn’t take me as long to get the job done in America as it did Wilberforce in England.” Dan looked in the mirror and straightened his tie.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Wilberforce. William Wilberforce. He worked his whole political career to get Parliament to ban the slave trade in the British colonies.”

Dan picked up a folder from his desk and headed to the door. “That was almost two hundred years ago, and it’s still not over.”

A gang of reporters pounced on him as soon as he stepped out of the elevator.

“How do you think the vote will go today?”

“Will it be close?”

“How did your brother manage to get the networks to run his slavery series right before the vote on your bill?”

Dan took that question.

“My brother didn’t have anything to say about the timing of the series, and neither did I!” There was a hard edge to his voice the reporters couldn’t miss. “Ron has been a little too busy lately to micromanage the release of his series. This time five days ago, my brother had been whipped until he was unconscious and was lying in a slave trader’s dungeon waiting to have his head chopped off.”

Dan’s words exploded like a howitzer and sparked a mighty roar of excited follow-up questions. Dan ignored them and used his size to snowplow through the journalists and into the House Chamber. As he walked to his desk, he noticed that the chamber was as full as he had ever seen it, and the normal bank of radio and television microphones, cameras and monitors, was more crowded, too.

Good! The legislators would have to answer to more than their consciences for how they voted. There was nowhere to hide.

Dan noticed something else a little unusual, too. Several black congressmen looked up when he walked onto the floor. A couple acknowledged him with a slight nod as he took a seat at his desk.

What happened between the time he sat down at his desk and when the vote was called on the Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill blew by Dan in a blur. Pinned in the center of the bulletin board of his mind was a newspaper clipping with a picture of Faoud the slave trader. Dan tried very hard not to think about Olford’s description of what had happened to Ron. Not now. There would be time for that later. Even so, words popped like firecrackers into his consciousness.

Dungeon. Shackles. Whipped.
Beheaded.

The speaker’s voice suddenly penetrated his consciousness in midsentence, and Dan’s pulse kicked into a gallop.

“...all those in favor of PL 99-057 please say aye.”

He had time to think, “This is it!” before he joined his grand orator’s voice to a mighty rumble of other voices.

“Aye!”

“Those opposed, please say “no.”

An equally loud roar filled the chambers.

“No!”

The volume of ayes and nays had been so similar Dan couldn’t tell which had been louder. And volume was how the Speaker would determine which way the vote had gone. Unless...

Dan pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.

“Mr. Speaker, I respectfully request a standing vote.”

A wave of murmurs washed across the chamber like ripples from a stone skipped across a still pond.

Dan didn’t sit back down. He wanted to be the first to stand up against the evil of slavery in Sudan.

“As many as are in favor of PL 99-057 will rise and remain standing until counted,” the Speaker said.

He’d asked the members of the Black Caucus at the meeting that never happened who among them would stand with him. Now, he was about to find out.

All over the chamber, his colleagues began to get to their feet. Dan knew each of them, knew their stories, understood what this was costing them.

He watched the television cameras pan the room, stopping to focus on first one face and then another:

Alonzo Washington from Michigan
.
Alonzo fairly leapt to his feet. He had obviously decided Dan didn’t stink, or he didn’t care anymore if Dan’s stink rubbed off on him.

Margaret Bryan from Missouri.
Margaret had pointed out the American Gum/TriCola elephant in the room when Dan first met with the Black Caucus. She knew which side her political bread was buttered on, but she was as tough as boot leather when she needed to be.

Charles Dubois from Louisiana.
Dan recalled the elderly black Congressmen’s concern that when the big companies started to lay off workers in his district, that bird would come home to roost in his front yard. The old fellow must have decided to make fried chicken.

Dorothy Warden from Ohio.
Dottie was Dan’s “neighbor” from Cincinnati who had questioned why Dan had gone on this crusade in the first place.

Raleigh Sutherland from South Carolina!
Dan was floored. He tried to make eye contact with the old man who had opposed him on every bill he’d ever proposed, but Sutherland resolutely stared straight ahead.

Avery Thompson from Virginia.
The oldest and the most influential member of the Black Caucus was the only one of the group who had asked no questions of Dan at either meeting. His stony silence had been deafening.

Lamont Walters from New York.
The Muslim. Walters turned toward Dan, looked him in the eye, and gave a small nod, in clear view of the other delegates on the floor.

A simple glance around the room displayed the obvious: the Black Caucus had united around this issue, had stood together to make a decisive, powerful statement.

After the ayes had been counted, the Speaker called for the nay votes. Only one of those was any real surprise to Dan. Greg Alexander from Idaho stood beside his desk and refused to look at him. When the Speaker stepped to the microphone to announce the results, the chamber grew instantly quiet and still.

“By a vote of two-nineteen to two-oh-three, PL 99-057, which calls for economic, and if necessary, military sanctions against the government of Sudan, shall be enacted, and shall remain in force until proof is supplied by U.S.-approved U.N. inspectors that all forms of human slavery there have been abolished.”

Alonzo Washington rose to his feet and slowly clapped his hands. Dorothy Warden followed suit. Others joined them. And then others. The wave of applause spread to the gallery, where it became a thunderous roar. CNN and all the major network cameras pulled in tight shots of Dan. They captured the smile on his face and the tears in his eyes.

Colleagues seated nearby reached out to him, shook his hand or patted him on the back. Washington actually hugged him. But much of that response was a blur. Overwhelmed, Dan’s mind was still in replay mode: the little girl with dimples, the teenage boy slammed to the ground with a rifle shot, and the ugly face of the evil slave trader, Faoud.

When Dan filed out of the chamber with other members of the House, reporters and photographers swarmed over him, pushed microphones at him, snapped pictures, babbled a cacophony of questions. He was about to make a statement when he noticed a group of his black colleagues just beyond the journalists.

“Excuse me, please,” Dan’s booming voice was loud enough to get everybody’s attention. “I’ll answer any question you have, tell you anything you want to know, give you as much time as you’d like, if you’ll give me just a moment first. Deal?”