Black Sun

CHAPTER 5

Three days after Hawker’s arrival, the African village was filled with life, like a garden after a long-awaited rain. With seed now available, the overgrown fields were being plowed and planted. Children were playing among the doctors as they administered vaccines, treated infections, and removed bullets or shrapnel from a surprising number of men and women.

To Hawker, the liveliness of the village was both a blessing and a curse. If another warlord set his sights on this place, the people who now laughed and danced would find a new subjugation more painful than having never being freed in the first place.

Weary with this knowledge, he found himself alone in the church, sitting in a simple wooden pew, one row from the front. He wasn’t praying or reading or meditating. He was just sitting there, bathed in the darkness and the silence.

A former pilot, Hawker had once been a member of the CIA, but after disobeying a direct order, he’d spent the past decade on the run, living as a pariah. He was a mercenary now, running weapons, fighting, flying.

And while the days were often filled with war, it was the nights that held the darkest alleys for him, dreams that twisted and bent back on themselves — mistakes, failings, friends who trusted him suffering and dying.

Neither awake nor asleep could Hawker escape death.

A sliver of light cut across the floor as someone opened the front door. The light widened and then shrank and he heard the footsteps on the crude wooden planks. A match flared and was touched to a candle.

“Are you troubled?” the priest asked him.

“Aren’t we all?” Hawker replied, only half joking.

The priest sat down opposite him. “Of course we are. It is the nature of our existence. But perhaps I can help you.”

Hawker considered the offer. He felt somewhere beyond help. “What happened to you?” he asked, touching his hair in a spot corresponding to the scar on the priest’s head.

“In the early days of Jumbuto, a man who worked for him attacked me with a machete.”

Hawker’s jaw clenched for a moment as he imagined the crime. “Well, perhaps he’s gone now.”

“Oh, no,” the priest said. “He’s quite well, thank God.”

Confused, Hawker narrowed his gaze.

“The man who attacked me was Devera,” the priest explained. “He was young and wanted the kind of life he saw the warlords having. But it was not in him, or, if it was, God took it from him. One day, months afterward, Devera came to me for forgiveness. His eyes were red with tears, his face stricken, his arms covered in blood where he’d gashed them over and over in some form of self-inflicted penance.”

The priest shook his head sadly. “Even after I forgave him, it was a long time before he chose to forgive himself. But he worked day and night to help this village and the people here. Eventually he was one of us again. Part of something more. Part of us, part of life instead of death. And then finally the darkness left him.”

Hawker stared at the priest.

“If he had not attacked me,” the priest said, “he would have killed others, perhaps many. He might not have found his way back to the narrow gate.”

“You could have died,” Hawker noted.

“God works in mysterious ways,” the priest replied. “Change is often arrived at only through enough pain.”

For the second time since meeting this man, Hawker was struck silent. He looked down at the floor and then away.

“I did not mean to disturb you,” the priest said, “but there is someone here to see you.

“To see me?”

“A white man. He says he flew into Dwananga and then drove up.”

“When did he get here?”

“An hour ago,” the priest said. “He insisted that he needed to see you right away, but I made him wait outside. This place is a sanctuary. Here one should not be disturbed.”

An hour. Had he really been in the church for that long?

“Did he give you his name?”

“He did not,” the priest replied. “He said that you would not speak with him if you knew who he was.”

It seemed like a strange admission from someone who’d come to see him.

Hawker stood. “Thank you, Father.”

He walked to the door and pushed through, leaving the darkened quiet of the church for the brightness of the outside world. Squinting across the courtyard, he saw a gray-haired white man wearing slacks and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The man stood with his back to Hawker, talking with Devera beside the water pump.

As Hawker walked up, Devera looked his way.

The white man turned with him. “By the pricking in my thumbs …,” he said, loud enough for Hawker to hear.

The man was Arnold Moore, director of the NRI.