Revolt of the Sergeants

By Philip Garlington

From the Editor's Preface: Revolt of the Sergeants: An American Insurgency in Sudan,” as the blowzy title may suggest, is a roman a clef based on an amateurish and ill-fated paramilitary scheme carried out in the impoverished Darfur region of Sudan in the spring of (date deleted). In a word, five retired US Army soldiers, animated by quixotic fantasy and in my view by some sort of overt pathology, entered southwestern Sudan in stolen aircraft and routed the ragtag government garrison from the provincial capital of Rembec. Sharking up a militia, they became for a few months the de facto government of the province, repelling government counterattacks and briefly curbing some of the endemic banditry. Inevitably and quickly, their unsupported insurrection collapsed and the province returned to its usual anarchy
Apparently these balding ex-rankers were not soldiers of fortune. There is no fortune in Darfur, which then and now is an arid, isolated, disease-ridden, economically prostrate running sore of misery. The superannuated quintet had not been hired, nor did they expect to find compensation for their risky enterprise. The Americans financed their low-budget rebellion solely through the sale of captured weapons. Consistently describing themselves (satirically, one hopes) as “students,” they claimed they were merely undertaking “an experiment” that looked into methods for stabilizing anarchistic societies. The charismatic leader (the “McDonald” of the book), alleges the sole motive for annexing a remote and forbidding African basket case, at gunpoint and at great trouble, was to test “management ideas” discussed earlier at a book club meeting at Fort Benning, Georgia. One’s eyebrow must rise. At the same time, no other motive is apparent.
According to this account, the sergeants briefly achieved a measure of security in lawless Darfur, and altruistically provided some basic services. But if by their own lights they were not self-interested mercenaries, neither were they missionaries. Their methods as described here were Draconian and sadistic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Garlington
• Release date: Apr 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452413419

Philip Garlington

Phil Garlington has been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, San Diego Evening Tribune, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Washington Times, National Enquirer and a dozen obscure sheets. He has also been a commercial pilot, teen squid, and college student body president.

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Chapter 1

The Jebel Marra plateau in southwestern Sudan doesn't see many visitors. A US State Department advisory in effect for two decades cites the civil war as a disincentive to travel. In any season banditry and clan strife are normal on the plateau. Even absent the chronic turmoil, the rigors of the terrain and a pestilential climate would limit the Jebel to the more nonchalant of wanderers.

East of the plateau stretches parched savanna, a shimmering road-less Sahel of stunted acacia trees. It escapes being classified as desert on a technicality: the annual three or four inches of rain, which falls all at once during the September monsoon. For eleven months the wasteland east of the plateau presents nothing but sand, rock and a parched throat to the presumptuous nomad who lacks tribal connections. The few known seeps are guarded by reed-slim gunmen in caftans. To a kinsman, they grudgingly dole out a liter of living green fluid in gourds or a goatskin bag. Strangers are never welcome.

This arid savanna, sparsely populated by the cattle-raising Dinka, the Fau, the ferocious Nuer, is hemmed on the north by the Sudd, a vast, weed-choked bog through which the White Nile meanders between ill-defined banks. Inside the Sudd’s malarial embrace it is impossible to leave the main course of the river except on flimsy reed boats, shaped like saucers, that, when poled by expert Murrini, can skim like beetles over the undulating wet mass of water hyacinth. For such a passage the native traveler must encase himself in a crust of mud, to thwart the fog of mosquitoes that envelop any warm-blooded creature like a living mantle.

Descending from the plateau's western escarpment is true desert. The westering monsoon has been squeezed dry, and the scorching breath of the hatmatta, blowing off the Red Sea, brings no relief to an empty waste. Here rise the rounded volcanic plugs of the Jebel Marra Mountains, the highest ground in the Sudan. No usable pass divides the range, whose slopes are indented by steep ravines choked with jumbled rock.

This mountain chain forms a sort of boundary with two other benighted states, Chad and the Central African Republic, although the actual frontiers have never been surveyed. Lawlessness and violence have always prevailed here. Renegade Arabs, the janjaweed, surviving in the infertile heights on goat milk and the slave trade, raid against the more settled Nilotic tribes. In the foothills, roving gangs of bandits, often mutineers or the residue of defeated tribal armies, plunder the wayfarer with impunity.

Across the hypothetical border, in the capitals of N'djamena and Bangui, a semblance of order is enforced by the presence of several battalions of French Legionnaires. But the desert country west of the plateau has known naught but anarchy.

To the south of the plateau lie the forested plains of Zaire. Once a free and easy commerce flowed between Oguooma and the principal southern Sudanese city of Juba. Traders pushed their bicycles laden with cheap radios, flashlight batteries and khat across a porous border.

But beginning with the rise of the maniacal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, a long night of terror settled over the south. The border with Zaire closed. Sudanese traders who ventured south of Juba were murdered or robbed. Even with Amin deposed, the borders remained sealed, since none of the succeeding chieftains wielded sufficient power to quell the violence raging among competing files of teenage thugs.

To add one more disincentive to Zairian travel, another killer reappeared. Tsetse fly, temporarily controlled during British rule in Uganda, took advantage of the chaos to reemerge. Once again trypanosomiasis began depopulating the villages skirting the southern forests.

Thus, fenced about by mountain, desert, swamp, pestilence and amok bandits, the Jebel Marra plateau remains sealed to the world.

This cannot be completely true. A competent pilot at the controls of a reliable machine could reach the plateau in a day's flight from the Kenyan border. No established airfield exists on the plateau, and gasoline is scarce. It is illegal to enter Sudan this way. Then again, much of the land atop the plateau is flat. Gasoline can be found for a price. No troops patrol the frontier.

An attempt to reach the Jebel plateau overland would be dangerous and very arduous. The traveler would have to reach Juba somehow, even though this ancient city is garrisoned by fanatical, ill-disciplined mujhadeen on permanent jihad. These ill-sorted levies, in turn, are surrounded by roving files of khat-intoxicated rebels, who have learned to treat travelers as their commissary. If successful in reaching Juba, the would-be visitor to the Jebel must join one of the bicycle caravans sent out periodically by the city's Chinese merchants. The traders push sturdy Chinese-made bicycles, draped with wicker baskets, across 200 miles of bush. Following waddies and climbing knobs, the clunky, heavily-laden bicycles slowly wend from one village to the next, dispensing flashlight batteries, needles, lamp wicks, candy, aspirin, knives and tinny radios.

Sometimes, if a rebel column finds them, or if the janjaweed are raiding, the Juba merchants lose everything. Other times the caravan guards, armed with antique Enfields, manage to beat off an attack. Then the Chinese bicycles roll through Bat and Al Ovan and Kash and a dozen other squalid settlements of mud huts along the rim of the plateau.

Travel to the Jebel Marra is difficult. Few wish to go. The climate is unpleasant. Although a thousand feet above sea level, the equatorial plateau is an inferno during the ten-month summer. Afternoon temperatures can reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Drought and famine are normal. Disease is epidemic, varied, and horrific. Medical facilities hardly exist.

Once there had been a doctor at the Rembec Christian mission on the plateau. But he had been murdered many months before.

Chapter 2

Returning to the Rembec mission late in the afternoon the mechanic Brevold had tumbled into his cot exhausted. That morning a highland Dinka had come in, a herdsman from one of the outlying camps. The nomad was tall, emaciated, jet-black. Like all of them, he wore mission castoffs: a green pair of swim trunks and a bright red tee shirt with the Nike logo. Cocked on his head was a beaded taboosh. An assegi and a bundle of toy-like spears were slung across his shoulder. He had come from Government Well Five. It was the usual story. A child was sick and the Dinka wanted the white doctor.

Brevold had explained. The doctor was dead. The nearest medical help was in Wau, a hundred miles to the north. Brevold knew it was vain. The herdsman squatted on his heels and smiled serenely. Imauy. The nomad pointed his finger. You. You must come.

Already the word was spreading in the bush. Following the murder of Dr. Reisenflaus, Brevold had been seen working in the clinic. It didn’t matter that Brevold had no medical training, that he was merely a mechanic temporarily assigned by the synod to repair water pumps and gasoline engines. He had been seen setting bones and taking temperatures, re-hydrating babies and probing bullet wounds. It didn’t matter what he said. He was d’maa dacta. The white doctor.

From what the Dinka had been saying, in the clicking hill dialect that Bevold still had trouble understanding, the child back at Well Five already had lapsed into a coma. It was his throat. The Dinka man pulled at the folds of skin on his neck and gasped loudly.

Wearily, sickened by the hopelessness of it, Brevold had followed the man for five miles on a narrow trail through the scrubby, goat-bitten thorn trees to the old well sunk by Chinese engineers back in the Socialist days. The well had silted in from neglect. But the Dinka, by assiduous priming and tinkering, managed to coax a trickle from the iron pipe that emerged from the concrete sump cover. The trickle was just enough to water several hundred cattle and a patch or two of yams and scraggly tobacco.

From a mile away Brevold could pick out the camp. A pall of yellow smoke drifted over the huts and brush corrals from smoldering dung fires, lit to temper the attacks of mosquitoes and biting flies. The narrow track took them through a small copse of Doleib palms and baboob trees, planted by enthusiastic troops of Solidarity Cadre in the Socialist heyday. Ruefully, Brevold saw that all the trees were dying, the bark gnawed away by goats. For the nomadic Dinka, the cattle herds, if kept in check, were their staff of life. The goats were unalloyed evil.

In the encampment Brevold saw that the families had set up the usual flimsy huts, a skeleton of twigs and branches covered over with cow hides and a motley of rags from the mission rag bag. Some calves, still too young to make the trek to grass, were tethered near the fires, watched over by prepubescent boys with fly whisks. Women, thin-armed, with drooping dugs, bent in the scant shade of the huts, grinding the daily manioc. Brevold noticed to his dismay that many of the women were coughing, spitting the collected phlegm into the stone mortars. Tuberculosis already had turned up at the clinic among the lowland refugees. It wouldn’t be long before it swept through the hill tribes.

Brevold followed the man into a hut and saluted his wife, who was squatting over a small bundle of rags. The woman, still young, wore the usual copper bracelets. The usual pounded copper saucers dangled from her ear lobes. She gazed at the bundle of rags with a stoic mask but her body slumped despondently.

Peeling away a strip of rag, Brevold could see the child was unconscious. The tiny creature didn’t seem to be breathing at all. But fingering the tiny wrist he detected a faint pulse. The delineation of the child’s neck had disappeared under a collar of spongy flesh. It was nothing unusual. A typical viral respiratory infection gone amok because of malnutrition and an immune system compromised by malaria. It was hopeless. Thousands of kids were dying like this all over the Jebel Marra plateau. It was the drought. There was nothing he could do about it.

The parents had squatted on their heels and were waiting patiently. Brevold opened the canvas bag, the legacy of the late Dr. Reisenflaus, and rummaged through the contents. He had the doctor's instrument case, a bottle of carbolic, a few sutures. Of course he hadn’t any anesthesia, no antibiotics, not even an aspirin. There hadn’t been anything like that in Rembec for months. It was hopeless. The infant was gong to slowly strangle from the edema. The only chance would be a tracheotomy to open the windpipe, then a prayer that the kid had enough fight left to throw off the inevitable infections.

Brevold knew it would be better to let the baby die. He should say to the parents, It’s in God’s hands now. But the parents, rocking on their heels, watched his every move intently, expectantly, for the miracle that would come out of the cheap canvas bag. What did God want of him? Brevold used to think he knew what God wanted of him. He didn’t anymore. The chance of a successful operation in this filth, with no antibiotic, no anesthesia, approached the vanishing point. Yet, in truth, he had seen among these resilient people amazing recoveries. It was wrong to underestimate the toughness of these hill tribesmen. Perhaps it was no accident that he was here now. Perhaps God wished him to try everything to preserve this human life.

Brevold had decided to open the trachea. Two other Dinka men came in to help the father hold the child while Brevold cut into the swollen throat. Suddenly the infant’s eyes shot open, the mouth yawned in a silent scream, revealing an engorged mass of red tissue. Pus squirted everywhere, all over Brevold’s shirt, and he had to twist to avoid getting fluid in his eyes.

The child was gasping, breathing again, through the hole in his windpipe, making strangling noises as he choked on the pus and blood. Fully conscious now, the child began a horrible gagging kind of screaming, writhing under the hard hands of the Dinka men. Brevold then had crudely cauterized the incision with a heavy needle turned red hot with the flame of a butane cigarette lighter. He had no tubing of course. At least he knew the Dinka words for bird and bone. He had cut a two inch quill, dipped it in carbolic, and then pushed it into the incision. Maybe the hollow bone would keep the incision open. The father would have to bind the child’s hands and take turns with the other men holding him. But Brevold knew it was hopeless.

In the darkness of his shuttered room Brevold twisted on his narrow cot, leaden with fatigue but wide awake. He had no business doing this. He had never even taken first aid. This had all been forced on him, when Obo’s men had killed Dr. Reisenflaus, and he had been abandoned. Every space at the mission clinic had been filled with victims of the famine. There was no one else. He had looked at the books in the cabinet, he had tried to learn.

The boy would soon die, that was certain. The infection had been too advanced. So what purpose, then, the numbing ten-mile walk in the flaming sun, the clumsy surgery, the child’s horrible pain? The child would suffer a few more hours or days. The grass around Government Five was exhausted. The Dinka and their cattle had to move. Tomorrow the child and his family would be miles out on the plateau. If he had left the child alone it would have died quietly tonight. Now everyone would go on suffering

Brevold hadn’t expected to sleep, but as he lay in semi-consciousness in the stifling room, he gradually perceived that the screaming was not coming from a dream. He wasn’t replaying in his head the gagging shrieks of an infant boy. This was high-pitched, feminine. A screaming woman.

Groggily, Brevold swung his legs over the side of the cot and listened. The screaming had stopped, but now from far away he heard shouting voices and then, unmistakably, the staccato tap of gunfire.

Brevold cracked open the shutter. The late-afternoon sun, palpable with dust, slanted across the room and illuminated the small writing desk in a corner. Brevold, aware of the putrid odor form his soiled shirt, found his hat where he’d flung it, and ducked out the doorway.

He could sense immediately that something had stirred the village. The shaded meeting area under the acacia trees, where the women usually gathered at this hour to pound sorghum, was empty, although bowls and wooden pestles, and mounds of grain, were set in rows along the fire pit.

To his right Brevold heard another gun go off. Tucking his shirt as he walked, Brevold headed toward the sound of voices, along the narrow, hard-packed earthen path that separated the wattle huts. Obviously taking fright at something, the people had scuttled inside, and from an oval-shaped doorway he could see faces peeping at him.

Rounding a turn in the path between the huts Brevold almost stumbled over the corpse of a young woman. She lay sprawled in the path with her skirt pulled over her head. Clotted blood matted her pubic hair. Her thighs, spread wide, had been slashed so deeply that Brevold could see the yellow layers of fat inside the wounds.

Brevold kneeled and pulled her skirt down from her face. She had been shot once through the temple. The entrance wound was neat and round, surrounded by granulated powder burns. But the impact had blown a gaping hole in the back of her skull, creating behind her head an alluvial fan of bloody cortex and bone fragments.

Despite the woman’s contorted face, Brevold recognized her as one of the aides at the school. He had seen her daily pounding sorghum under the frond awning across from his room, her infant children capering around her knees. Brevold thought about replacing the skirt over her head. But instead he roughly pulled it down over her hips, before rolling her over on her face.

At the corner of a hut Brevold stopped. Across an open patch of ground he could see teenage boys in khaki shirts and baggy parachute pants clustered on the steps of the mission hospital. Peals of childish laughter reached him as one of the boys methodically knocked out the front window panes with the butt of his rifle. Brevold, putting his hand against the side of a daub and wattle hut, tried to compose himself. He was shivering violently, and felt dizzy. My father in heaven, hallowed be thy name….

Aware of his sharp intakes of breath, Brevold made an effort to control his shaking. He stood up straight. There was another crash and the tinkling of broken glass. As Brevold walked toward the hospital, the teenagers on the steps kicked open the door and rushed inside. Brevold heard shouts and a rifle shot.

Inside, Mr. Murchin, the mission’s elderly caretaker, lay dead in the aisle, blood still welling into an expanding pool under his body. The ineffectual bamboo cane he had raised in defense of the hospital lay by his elbow. A handful of patients, all children, cowered on their cots; others lay too sick with fever to be roused

At the end of the aisle the teenage vandals had gathered around the steel cabinet that contained the clinic’s meager supply of medicines. One of the youths, glancing around, saw Brevold standing in the doorway. At first his mouth dropped, but then, grinning, he prodded his fellows, who turned and pointed their Chinese rifles, with the ungainly banana-shaped cartridge clips. "D'maa dacta, " shouted the boys. The white doctor.

Chapter 3

Doc awoke in a strange bedroom. Already he could remember some stuff. Later he'd probably remember more.

He might as well start by counting the drinks. After he'd left his room at the Ajax he'd gone downstairs to that toilet, the Tropicana Lounge. He'd sat there, had four drafts, twelve-ouncers, happy hour, buck a pop. That'd been before dark. He'd got restless finally, sitting alone at the gloomy bar, staring at the endlessly revolving neon waterfall, some kind of beer ad. He'd got up, mumbled to the Sheila, walked downtown aimlessly.

He'd stopped in front of that joint that didn’t look that ritzy from the street. It was...what? Africa something. But then in the window he'd seen the picture of the grenade-and-skull insignia of the Legion's parachute regiment. Their fucking dumb motto, like, "Guerre et Mort, " or some shit.

He hadn't figured the place for a fern joint until he was inside. But he'd figured: what the fuck, over: one drink. He was just about tapped out on severance, and it looked posh. What the fuck, over. His ticket was punched.

Until he totaled the drinks he wouldn't know how big the cross. He shouldn't risk moving his head. Even so, he raised himself slightly to peer across his shoulder at the slick next to him.

She was on her side. All that Doc could see was the top of her head. Dyed blonde hair, with the white streaky lines the city Sheila did. Doc slid down a few inches. Full lips. Average pretty. The sheet pulled around her hip made a white bell. Doc remembered that with her dress off she’d been kind of thick in the leg. Basically okay, though. Good heavy tits, a little droopy and lined with soft creases. But pretty good.

The woman was still sleeping. And not faking either, because she was snoring. Not obnoxiously, but not like a slick would by choice.

He'd only had one beer at the fern joint when he’d started hitting on her. Her name began with S. Sharon? No. Maybe Sue. Sue didn't sound right either. Anyhow, whatever. He'd also had a second beer, because now he remembered, four bucks a pop. Fucking outrage. And to himself he'd been all, for that tariff, switch onto whisky. What the fuck, over. Pissing away the last of his coin in a fern bar.

Considering his low money situation, Doc hadn't really been scamming for poon. But Sue or whatever was an instigator, all laughing and going along with the program. And it was all that don't-I-know-you kind of lame bullshit. He had followed her to her table.

She was sitting with some other slick and a couple of poofter-looking gym muffins. The guys were junior to her, a couple of five-jump-Johnnies in tight pants and sleeveless pullovers, showing off some gym beef. They gave him a look. But they were nothing. Short-twitch wannabes. Besides, they'd figured he'd self-destruct. An old dude, short final for forty, buzzed haircut, dumb luau shirt.

The woman next to Doc stirred, and her breathing stopped with a sudden intake of breath. Then the snoring resumed. Doc held still. He didn't want her waking up until he at least got her name.

Alright. What'd he had? Four, maybe five shooters, plus the two pints, plus the four twelve-ouncers at the toilet... Henry Africa's. That was the name of the fern joint. Okay, probably five shooters, actually hella generous, with maybe four eight-ounce beer chasers... It was starting to look bad.

Experimentally, Doc moved his head. Movement was painful. But not Force Ten. It probably meant he was still drunk.

By this time, daylight was filtering through the frilly curtains and his eyes could make out features in the room. The dresser topped by a clutter of perfume bottles. The chair, with his clothes slung anyhow. The usual posters on the wall, a castle in Germany, another of some palms on a beach, probably meant to fire up the working girl for the big vacation.

The window suddenly let in a bar of sunlight that fell across the wooden floor. It must be seven. Doc usually was up at oh-five. Sometimes not, if he'd been boozing. The woman's warm body was resting on his right arm so he couldn't see his watch. Actually, he hadn't been up at oh-five in awhile. He'd been on the bottle, lately. Since separating, the cross was getting regular.

When he was still in, he'd liked breaking out with the horn. By this time he'd have been through mess and on the way back to barracks with his Thermos.

Very slowly, careful not to wake the slick, Doc began to edge his arm away.

Maybe he could just slip out. Leave a note. Except he couldn't remember the slick's name. Dear Nameless Poon... Fuck the note. He wasn't gonna see her again anyway.

Doc held his breath and began wriggling obliquely toward the side of the bed.

Chapter 4

The boys were Murrini, from the Sudd, with the tribe's peculiar diamond-shaped tattoos, carved on their jaws during the puberty ritual. One of the boys raised his assault rifle, taking aim at Brevold, but another youth held up his hand, saying something in the sibilant Murrini dialect.

Your fathers would be ashamed, Brevold said, in the pidgin Arabic used by the Nilotic tribes as a lingua franca.

The boys burst into laughter. One of them, sneering, returned to his rummaging of the meager offerings of the medicine cabinet, but soon gave it up. All the codeine and morphine had long since been used or stolen.

Two of the boys—Brevold estimated their age at fifteen or sixteen—sauntered over and began pushing him back, prodding him with their rifle muzzles.

Laughing and chatting, the boys drove him along the path leading from the hospital up the hill toward the reservoir. As they walked a loud explosion sent a column of black smoke gushing up over the huts.

At the top of the rise Brevold could see a cluster of men in ragtag uniforms, baggy camouflage pants, brown shirts, red or blue berets, standing by the wooden shed that contained the diesel engine and pump. Two young soldiers were wiring what Brevold assumed to be explosives to the pump house. Across the pond he could see that an explosion already had demolished the stone sluice gates that impounded the water, and now water was rushing down the parched hillside where it would be uselessly absorbed before it reached the irrigation ditches.

The gates had taken Brevold and a succession of work parties more than four months to complete; that it had taken two fistfuls of plastic to wreak the project attested to the workmanship. Several soldiers on the bank were amusing themselves by tossing grenades into the reservoir. With every muffled explosion, huge bubbles roiled the water. Already the surface was glistening with the bellies of hundreds of carp and tilapia that Brevold had been raising to supplement the protein-deficient diet of the refugees at the lower camp.

As Brevold was hustled up to the little group by the pump house he realized for the first time that the boys were not soldiery of the Sudanese army. In the Southern department's bastion at Juba, Brevold knew, most of the conscripts were Nilotic blacks serving under Arab officers. Now he saw that these men, officers from the metallic insignia on their collars, were black also. This meant that they were probably part of the southern secessionist movement. Or they might simply be a pickup collection of bandits, taking advantage of the prevailing anarchy on the Jeba.

In the midst of the laughing officers Brevold saw the familiar squat figure of the witch Kareni Kisi, naked except for a filthy loin cloth, and utterly repugnant, with her withered dugs and huge splayed feet, toes sticking in every direction. As usual, she smelled of grease and onions, and smoked a short, tar-fouled clay pipe, which she removed every other puff to either spit or laugh. With her laughter, she revealed a toothless purple mouth, and her eyes completely disappeared inside a mesh of wrinkles.

She was beaming with satisfaction as Brevold approached under the prodding of his two teenage guards.

And here is the white father, she said in lowland Dinka, emphasizing the last word in sarcastic allusion to Brevold's youth. Then, switching to pidgin Arabic, she said to the officers, I told you he would find us.

One of the officers, a tall stout man of forty with close-cropped hair and a bulbous shining forehead, turned and smiled at Brevold.

Ah, the missionary, the officer said in careful schoolbook English. I am General Obo, and here...are my staff. Or is? I don't know. Staff…are more than one.

Brevold was startled. He hadn't expected Obo himself to be among the marauders. The last time Obo's men were in Rembec, some lesser officer had been in charge. The one who had killed Reisenflaus.

I'm not a missionary, Brevold said in English, trying to control his voice. I'm a technician.

Okay sorry, said Obo. Word I don't have.

Brevold racked his brain for something like mechanic in pidgin. I work for the mission...I fix things.

The general shrugged his shoulders. White man, mission, missionary, I think so.

Another muffled explosion brought more dead carp floating to the surface, to the delight of the teenage grenadiers.

Is this an attack on fish? Brevold said.

Ha, ha. Fact. No, said the general. "The witch want it. We are here to punish the hajji."

There are no Arabs in this village, Brevold said carefully. Strictly speaking that was true. There was, however, a contingent of Arab mullahs, representatives of Khartoum, in the refugee camp on the river below the town. And of course there were hundreds of Nilotic Moslems in Rembec, and hundreds more Islamic refugees in the lower camp. The civil war had pitted the southern black tribes against the Semitic rulers in Khartoum. But many blacks in the south long ago had accepted Islam.

The general airily waved his cane. "Oh well, we stop now get cargo. We punish hajji…some day later."

Brevold relaxed a little. Apparently the general and his rapacious children were out entirely for pillage. If they were only bandits, it would be unlikely that they would see a need to massacre the Islamic blacks. Certainly none of the refugees in the lower camp had anything worth stealing.

Brevold saw that Obo had folded his arms and was scrutinizing him. You know something pretty funny, the general said. "The witch here say