The Immortality Factor (25 page)

I scrambled out of my cot and followed the Canadian out through the mosquito netting and the tent flap, wondering what the hell he wanted with me this early in the morning. A duel at sunrise, maybe?

Eberly was fully dressed. It was almost dawn, gray and chilly, no stars left in the pale sky.

“There may be some trouble,” he said. His youthful face was very serious. I saw that he had a pistol strapped to his hip.

“Shooting trouble?”

“I hope it doesn't come to that. A group of bandits has come down from the hills. They want our food supplies, I imagine. Poor devils must be desperate.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I've radioed to Massawa for support. They'll send helicopters.”

“How soon?”

Eberly looked off toward the hills, eyes narrowed. “A few hours, at best.”

“What do you do till then?”

“Talk to their chief, I suppose. Or fight. It's really up to them.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Hard to say. I suppose they've got RPGs. That's what worries me.”

“RPGs?”

“Rocket-propelled grenades. Antitank weapons, actually, but they make pretty effective short-range artillery.”

“Jesus!”

“I doubt that they'll do any shelling, though. If it's the food they're after they wouldn't want to blow it up.”

“What's going on?”

We both turned to see Julia stepping through the tent flap, still in the khaki fatigues she slept in, her face pale, her hair pulled back and tied into a ponytail, her eyes blinking sleep away.

“Trouble,” I said. I realized I was wearing striped boxer shorts and an undershirt. It made me feel slightly ridiculous.

“There may be some shooting,” Eberly said. “The two of you had better get into the church. It's the safest place.”

“What about the others?”

“We'll get the women and children into the church. As many as we can.”

“Perhaps we should set up a dressing station,” Julia said.

Eberly nodded. I was thinking that I didn't come here to be in the middle of a firefight.

The church was already jammed by the time we got to it. Women and children, and a good many men, too, I could see. Crippled, mutilated by earlier fighting. Huddled and silent, staring at their own fear with wide, frightened eyes. The smell of them was enough to turn my stomach, almost. I had never been bothered by their smell before, out in the open air. But packed inside the four thick walls of the church it was overpowering. Like being pushed inside an overripe garbage bag.

Human garbage, that's what they were. The unwanted leftovers of humanity. Black, poor, starved, maimed, sick, and now some band of thugs was going to start shooting up the place.

Not much of a shelter, I thought as I looked around the crumbling church. The walls were thick, true enough, but already cracked from earlier shellings. Half the roof was gone and the front wall, where the altar was, had a wide-open hole in it where a big window used to be. Sunlight streamed through, onto the altar that we were turning into a surgical table.

Julia and I and the six nurses set up a dressing station at the altar. The
silence in the church was eerie. More than a hundred people packed in here and nobody's saying a word. Like they're children; they think if they can be quiet nobody will know they're here. Pull the covers over your head and the night monsters won't know you're in the bed.

Some of them were moaning, of course. Couldn't help themselves. The UN soldiers had dragged the bedridden cases into the church. But even their groans and whimpering cries were muffled down to a soft background hum.

“Nothing to do but wait,” Julia said as we stood by the white-sheeted altar table. She spoke in a near-whisper.

“Maybe it'll all blow over,” I said. “Even starving bandits ought to know better than to mess around with the UN troops.”

A rattling sound, like the distant popping of firecrackers.

“Is that gunfire?”

An explosion off in the distance.

Julia ran to one of the empty windows. I raced after her and pulled her back. “Don't! Stay down.”

“It's too far away to be dangerous,” Julia said. But she didn't try to get out of my arms.

“Who made you an expert on battlefield matters?”

Then silence. Feeling kind of sheepish, I edged to the long narrow window and looked out. One of the white UN armored cars was moving across the barren landscape about a mile away, its diesel engine growling and sending up spurts of black sooty smoke. Another was moving, too, farther away, barely discernible except for the spray of dust it kicked up.

Julia pressed against my back and peeped over my shoulder. “Is it all over?”

“I hope—”

The nearer armored car exploded in a red fireball. I felt as if I'd been punched in the gut. All kinds of firing broke loose, guns popping everywhere, smoke and dust rising like a pall. Another explosion, smaller, farther away. And then a third, even more distant. The armored car was burning. I could see men staggering out of its rear hatch, stumbling and collapsing onto the ground. Even at this distance I could see that they were black with burns.

“My lord in heaven,” Julia murmured.

As abruptly as it had started the firing stopped. The other armored car chugged over a bare little rise and I could no longer see it.

Christ, what do we do if they kill Eberly and the other troops? Where the hell can we hide? What if those bastards come into the camp and they see Julia? What the hell can I do? There's no place to run to.

The people in the church were whispering now. I turned and saw that they were clutching fearfully at each other, whispering in hissing sibilances. Prayers, maybe. Or curses. Most of them had their eyes squeezed shut. They were just as scared as I was.

“Those men out there . . .” Julia was still staring out the window.

“Not yet. It's not safe out there.”

“But they're hurt.”

“It won't do them any good if we get our asses shot off.”

Julia started to reply, thought better of it.

The other armored car came back into view, thank god. It stopped at the wreck of its mate. Men hopped out and began to tenderly pick up their wounded comrades.

“Looks like it's over,” I said. “They're bringing the wounded in.”

The tension inside the church broke visibly. The crowd swayed, sat up straighter, released their death holds on one another. People began to talk. A baby squalled. I felt my own breath come back to me; I sucked in a big lungful of the fetid air. Nearly gagged on it. Julia smiled worriedly at me.

Within a few minutes the armored car clattered to the church door and the Pakistani soldiers gently carried their blackened, burned comrades through the crowd up to the altar. The Eritreans made a path for them like the Red Sea parting for Moses.

Then I fell into my work, the one thing I knew how to do, treating burns and shrapnel wounds, cutting away blackened flesh and digging out sharpedged chunks of metal, sewing up jagged torn meat, stapling arteries together, bandaging bloody arms and legs and chests and heads. I'm not much of a surgeon but I was all they had. I had to amputate one leg. Had to tell one of the soldiers, through his sergeant who spoke English, that he had lost one of his eyes permanently.

By the time I was finished, the sun was high overhead, blazing through the shattered roof of the church. My T-shirt and slacks were stiff with drying blood. My hands ached and the back of my neck throbbed painfully. Julia was also blood-spattered, somber.

Then we heard helicopters thrumming overhead, coming in low and fast, heading for the distant hills.

Stretching tiredly as the last of the wounded was carried off, I slid one arm around Julia's shoulders and we made our way out of the now-empty church. It was hard to tell who was propping up who.

Eberly was standing out there, binoculars to his eyes. I saw the helicopters off in the distance, angry white hornets buzzing through the blazing afternoon sky.

The Canadian put his field glasses down and said, “The choppers will pound them. They'll pay for what they did.”

The captain was quivering as if he had drunk six pots of coffee. “Bloodyminded bastards didn't want to talk, all they wanted was to fight. Well, we showed them some fighting. We showed them, all right. They got one of our cars but we shot the bloody hell out of them. And now the choppers will blast them but good.”

“Was anyone killed?” Julia asked quietly.

Eberly sobered a bit. “Two. The driver of the armored car that got hit and one of the riflemen.”

“What about their side?” I suddenly realized that we had treated no wounded Eritreans.

“We killed sixteen of them.”

“No wounded?”

Eberly looked away from us. “The Pakis don't take wounded, not once some of their own have been killed. Can't say I blame them.”

I just stared at the captain. This was the kind, courteous, charming young swain who had been so attentive to Julia. Fire a few shots and he's a homicidal maniac!

But Julia said, “I'm glad it wasn't your armored car that got hit.”

Eberly suddenly looked embarrassed. “I am, too,” he said softly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E
ritrea was a mistake. I had miscalculated terribly in my plans to raise Jesse's reputation. It changed Jesse. I doubt that anyone could see that except me, but I realized it within a few days of our landing at the UN station.

He seemed almost dazed by the poverty and hunger we found there. I wasn't very much help to him, at first, because I came down with a tropical fever almost the minute we landed there. He was so solicitous, so worried about me, it would have been touching if I hadn't felt guilty that he was spending more time with me than with his real patients.

He became very moody, tired all the time. He even seemed to lose interest in sex, which worried me terribly. Not that I was such a ravishing desirable love goddess; I lost more than ten pounds to the fever and must have looked rather bedraggled most of the time. But Jesse was simply too weary to be interested, and I became convinced that his weariness was in the soul, more than physical.

I realized that I had pushed him too far. He worked night and day with the poor in New York, and then I had urged him to go to Brazil as part of a
UNESCO team to teach the latest medical practices to young Indian men and women from the villages in the Mato Grosso. At least we had been quartered in Brasília then, a reasonable city, the national capital. The politicians and lawyers made certain that they lived in comfort.

But in that dusty flyblown UN camp in Eritrea my husband was driving himself to physical and emotional exhaustion with overwork and some strange illness of the soul that I couldn't fathom at first.

I thought it might be a more subtle form of the fever that had knocked me down, or perhaps some kind of parasite eating away inside him. But it was neither, as it turned out. Thank heavens.

I was actually almost glad when he began casting suspicious scowls at Captain Eberly. It showed that he still cared about me, but more importantly it showed that he still cared about himself. There was nothing going on between the captain and me, of course. Eberly was a solicitous young man, well behaved in every respect. He had an incredibly difficult job on his hands, protecting this field hospital with its wretched accumulation of human detritus from marauding bands of murderous thieves. I admired his courage and his coolness under fire.

But by the time I was feeling almost normal again, Jesse was virtually growling at Eberly whenever the captain came near me. We usually ate together at the end of the day, although Jesse was barely picking at his food and losing weight alarmingly.

“You're overworking yourself, darling,” I said to him one evening as we sat down to dinner. I must admit, the prepackaged rations the UN provided did not give much stimulation to one's appetite.

“Tell them,” Jesse mumbled, pointing with a plastic fork toward the tent village on the other side of the falling-down church.

Captain Eberly said earnestly, “It won't do them any good if you collapse from exhaustion, you know.”

Jesse glared at him. “I'm here to help those people. You do your job and let me do mine.”

Eberly looked rather shocked. We lapsed into an uncomfortable silence.

I decided to bring the matter to a more reasonable resolution. “Perhaps, darling, you could set regular hours for examining patients. Then you could have a little time to rest, get your strength back—”

“My office hours are from sunup to sundown,” he snapped at me. “As long as there's enough light to see by, I'll do what I can for them. If we had some decent electric lights I'd work nights, too.”

“But you can't work all the time,” I said.

“And what about them?” He pointed again, his voice shaking. “Do you expect me to take walks with you or sit down and listen to a BBC concert while they're standing there bleeding and dying?”

“Of course not,” I said. Eberly remained silent, watching us, his eyes shifting back and forth.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Jesse asked. “Just let them die?”

“You can't help all of them,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “It simply isn't possible, dear. I know you want to, but it's not physically possible to take care of them all.”

“Then I'll take care of as many of them as I can. As long as there's enough light to see by and I can stand on my two feet, I'll take care of as many of them as I can.”

I had been an utter fool, pushing Jesse into this horrible situation. It had sounded so noble and right, back in New York. Help the poor starving Africans. Volunteer to work for the UN. It was the right thing for the Humanitarian of the Year to do. It would look good in media interviews; it would help bring in donations to the hospital and medical center. But I realized that I didn't care about the Africans or the UN or anything else. What did they matter to me, compared to my husband? I had pushed Jesse too far; he was close to cracking.