Woman of God

South Sudan, Africa

Chapter 1

JEMILLA WAS beside my bed, yelling into my face, “Come, Doctor. They’re calling for you. Didn’t you hear?”

No, I hadn’t heard the squeal of the P.A. calling doctors to the O.R. I had only just fallen asleep. I pulled on my scrubs and splashed cold water on my face, saying, “What’s happening? Who else is on duty? Got coffee?”

Jemilla answered my questions. “Got new wounded, of course. You’re the last one up. How do you want your coffee? Cream? Sugar? Or the usual, we have no coffee at all?”

“You’re tough,” I said to the young girl standing right there.

She grinned and kept me in her sights while I stepped into my shoes. Then she ran out in front of me, yelling, “She’s coming, she’s coming now,” as I trotted down the dusty dirt path to the O.R.

We were in South Sudan in the drought season, in a hospital outpost in a settlement camp in the middle of a senseless and bloody civil war. The hospital was the product of an NGO organization called Kind Hands, and we were doing what we could in a desperate situation to keep bucking the tide of hopelessness.

The hospital compound was made up of eight shoddy concrete buildings roofed with corrugated tin or tarps or hay. The female staff lived in one building, the men in another. We ate and showered in the third when it wasn’t filled with the wounded and dying. We had the most primitive operating theater possible, a laughable closet of a lab, and three wards: Isolation, Maternity, and Recovery.

The professional staff was constantly changing as doctors went home and new ones came, and we were assisted by local volunteers, many of whom were internally displaced persons, IDPs, themselves.

Our current roster consisted of six doctors, a dozen nurses, and a dozen aides responsible for the emergency care of the eighty thousand residents of this camp. Yes, eight zero, followed by three more zeros.

All the doctors here had had to compete for an assignment with Kind Hands. We wanted to do good in the world, and yet very few doctors signed up for a second tour. It took only a couple of weeks for the enormity and the futility of the job to set in.

Ten minutes after being roused by Jemilla, I was in the operating room, scrubbed in and gloved up. The sole light source was a halogen lamp hanging from chains over the operating table, powered by the battery in Colin’s Land Rover.

The boy on the table was a very small four-year-old who, according to his mother, had wandered too close to the chain-link boundary and had been struck by a bullet to his chest.

Sabeena, our irascible and irreplaceable head nurse, her long braids tied up in a colorful head scarf, was wearing scrubs and pink Skechers left to her by a doctor who’d gone back to Rio.

By the time I arrived, she had efficiently swabbed the child down, anesthetized him, and laid out clean instruments for me in a tray. As I looked him over, Sabeena gave me a rundown on his vitals.

The child was bleeding like crazy, and, given his small size, he could barely afford blood loss at all. I saw that the bullet had gone in under his right nipple and had exited through his back, just under his right shoulder blade. The boy’s mother was standing there with a tiny new baby in her arms, her tears plopping onto the contractor’s garbage bag she wore as a sterilized poncho over her rags.

English was the official language here, and, although probably sixty tribal languages were in use, plain English was understood.

I asked, “Mother, what’s his name? Tell me his name.”

“Nuru,” the woman said. “My God. My little son.”

I said to the unconscious child, “Nuru, I’m your doctor. My name is Brigid. Your mommy is here, too. Hang tough, little guy.”

Sabeena wrote Nuru’s name on a strip of tape, wrapped it around the boy’s wrist while I did a FAST exam with our portable ultrasound. There was so much blood still coming from this small boy, I had to find out if the bullet had gone through only his chest or if he also had an intra-abdominal injury.

I looked at the ultrasound.

“There’s no blood in his stomach. That’s one good thing, anyway,” I said to our head nurse. “Maybe the only good thing.”

Sabeena clucked her tongue and shook her head. Then she hung a bag of blood and threaded an IV needle into the boy’s vein while I considered what to do.

It was my call. It was all up to me.

I had recently finished my residency at Johns Hopkins and had volunteered with Kind Hands thinking, like almost everyone here, that I knew what to expect. But the books and documentaries that had inspired me to come here had given me only the slightest inkling of the reality of South Sudan.

Since 1983, the normally dire, antithetical-to-life conditions had gotten worse, with the country now divided and its people and their villages, families, and livelihoods shredded by genocide.

The number of displaced persons in South Sudan continued to swell. Food shortages, a lack of potable water and medicine, contagious disease, killing floods, and droughts had been compounded by gangs of murderous teenage boys and actual army militias doling out unspeakable violence.

And now I stood in an operating room that was bare to the bone. We had two standard operating tables, six beds, a few shelves of expired medical supplies. Instruments were sterilized in pots of boiling water hanging from bicycle handlebars positioned over the fire pit outside the back door. Along with the car battery, we had a small, noisy generator.

We made medical equipment with tire pumps, duct tape, and cotton jersey. I could do a lot with an empty coffee can and a length of plastic tubing.

This was it, the real hell on earth.

Everything here was desperate and chaotic. Except that right now, the radio was plugged into the generator. The Red Sox and Yankees were playing at Fenway. David Ortiz was stepping to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The score was tied, 3-3. If Ortiz could somehow get hold of one, maybe Nuru, too, could go deep.

I had hope.

Chapter 2

ONLY MINUTES had passed since I met my young patient, Nuru. Sabeena was bagging the child, and I had determined my course of action, when my colleague, Colin, came up from behind, saying, “Step aside, Brigid. This kid could drown in his blood.”

Dr. Colin Whitehead was a late thirty-something, tireless, bright, frequently cranky surgeon who had left his practice in Manchester, England, to come here.

Why? It was commonly believed that we were all running away from something, whether we knew it or not.

Colin had ten years on me and was in his fourth month of doing what he called meatball surgery. Nuru was my patient, but I handed the scalpel to Colin. It was always exciting to learn from this man.

Colin held a penlight between his teeth and made his incision on the right side of Nuru’s chest. He followed up the incision by using a hand retractor to spread open a space between the boy’s ribs. Then he put in a tube to drain the blood that just kept coming.

I saw what Colin saw: plenty of blood and no clear source of the bleeding. And so Colin reached into Nuru’s chest and twisted the child’s lung, a brilliant move that I understood might temporarily stanch the flow.

I had clamps in hand and was ready to take Colin’s direction when we were interrupted by the awful clamor of people charging into the O.R.

Our settlement was poorly guarded, and outlaw gangs constantly roamed outside the fences. Everyone on the medical staff had been given a death sentence by the outlaws. Our pictures were posted in the nearby villages. Colin wore a T-shirt under his gown with a target on the front and back.

He had a very black sense of humor, my mentor, Colin Whitehead.

Maybe that darkness in him was what brought him here, and maybe it was why he stayed. Colin didn’t look up. He shouted over his shoulder at the intruders.

“If you’re here to kill us, get it over with. Otherwise, get the hell out of my surgery!”

A man called out, “Help, Doctor. My daughter is dying.”

Just then, Nuru’s mother tugged on my arm. To her, I was still her son’s doctor. I was the one in charge.

I said to her, “Mother, please. Nuru is getting the best care. He’ll be okay.”

I turned back to little Nuru as Colin threw his scalpel into a metal bowl and stripped off his gloves.

That quickly, Nuru had stopped breathing.

The little boy was gone.

Chapter 3

COLIN SAID, “Well, that’s it, then,” and headed off to the new patient on the second table.

Nuru’s mother screamed, “Noooooooooo!”

Her days-old infant wailed. Her little boy was dead, and already flies were circling. Sabeena started to cover him with a scrap of a sheet, but I just couldn’t stand to lose another child.

I said, “Nope, stop right there, Sabeena. I’m not done here. I’m opening his left side.”

Sabeena looked at me like, Yeah, right.

I said, “Can’t hurt, could help, get me?”

“Yes, I do, Doctor, dear. Better hurry.”

“Berna, Rafi. Someone take care of Mommy and the baby. Please.”

The procedure Colin had performed is called a limited or anterior lateral thoracotomy, a cut into the chest cavity through the side of the rib cage. Colin had opened Nuru’s right side. And now, although it was highly unlikely that I would find a torn artery in the side of the chest opposite the bullet hole, we hadn’t found the leak. And there had to be one.

Meanwhile, Nuru wasn’t breathing, and his heart had stopped. The technical term for this is “dead.”

But in my mind, he wasn’t too dead.

“Stay with me, Nuru. I know you can hear me.”

I made my incision on his left side and used the hand retractor, and as Sabeena held a penlight for me, I peered inside. The heart wasn’t beating, but blood was still filling the chest cavity from the force of gravity.

Where was the leak? Where?

Sabeena wasn’t looking at me, and I knew why.

One of the things that you started to get after a week or two in this place was that you could not save everyone. Not even close. Fifty percent was a good score, and then half those patients died in recovery.

Still, Nuru was my patient.

My responsibility.

As the flies descended on her child’s face, Nuru’s mother howled and crowded back up to the table, crying out, “No, no, you said, Doctor. You said.”

Normally, it would be insane to have parents in the O.R., but here, it was necessary for the closest kin to see what we did, the decisions we made, even to help us make the decisions. So Nuru’s mom had to be here, but I needed every one of the seconds that were racing by.

“Please give me room, Mother,” I said. “I’m sorry, but you’re in my light.”

She did what I asked. She stepped back but stood at my right arm, crying and praying, the sound of her voice cutting into my ability to concentrate like a machete to my forehead. Other people were screaming, too. Colin yelled at his patient, who was shrieking in agony. He blasted the patient’s father and cursed at our poor orderly, who had been working for a day and a half straight. I had to block it all out.

I focused my attention on the little boy and began sponging down his still-oozing left lung.

“Where is your leak, little man? Help me out.”

And that was when I felt something with my fingertips. Something hard. I pinched and extracted a scrap of metal from the child’s lung-and now it made sense. The bullet must have hit the fence and fractured before it ricocheted into Nuru. The core of the bullet had gone through and through, but a bit of the copper jacket had taken a hard left once inside Nuru’s chest.

Sabeena said, “Well done, Brigid. Damned good catch.”

If only. If only we had found it ten minutes before. Nuru’s mother was pleading, “You must save him. You must.”

The heart wasn’t beating, but I wasn’t letting that stop me. I sutured the tear in the lung, opened the pericardium, and began direct cardiac massage. And then, I felt it-the flutter of Nuru’s heart as it started to catch. Oh, God, thank you.

But what can a pump do when there’s no fuel in the tank?

I had an idea, a desperate one.

The IV drip was still in Nuru’s arm. I took the needle and inserted it directly into his ventricle. Blood was now filling his empty heart, priming the pump.

Sabeena was whispering in her native Hindi. I was talking to God in my mind. Nuru’s mother had her hands on her son’s forehead, and she was speaking to him, asking him to come back.

And then, the little boy moved. He tried to speak.

“Mother” screamed. And Colin was back at the table.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Amen,” I said, giving him a sidelong grin.

Nuru’s mother grabbed for me, and then she simply swooned. Sabeena caught her and her baby before they hit the floor. When they were lying safely on a bed, Sabeena gave me the highest of fives.

“Oh, my God, Brigid. That was kind of a miracle, you know?”

“Meatball-surgery-variety miracle,” Colin growled as he finished closing Nuru’s wounds. “But, still. Very good job.”

That was another high five, but even without the actual hand slap, it felt good. I respected the hell out of Colin and was a little bit crazy about him, too. Sometimes I thought he might be a little bit crazy about me.

I said, “Thanks, Doc.”

I ripped off my mask and cap, handmade out of a T-shirt, and tuned back into the radio. All I could hear was a staticky roar many thousands of miles away.

Then, the voice of the announcer: “Well, he did it, Red Sox fans. David Ortiz just launched an Andrew Miller slider into the stunned Yankee bull pen. The Sox have just swept the series, and the Yankees are retreating to the Bronx.”

Jemilla, my little gal pal, grabbed me around the waist, and we did a funny little dance, part native to Sudan, part cha-cha slide-which was sharply interrupted by the loud chatter of automatic gunfire at the gates.

Oh, God. It was starting again.

Chapter 4

ATTACKS OFTEN happened at this time, just before dawn, when people were sleeping, when the marauders still had the cover of night.

Now the call to battle stations came as a wordless siren over the P.A. system. The men and boys with weapons went to the walls, the fences, the front gates. At the same time, a handful of boys, none older than twelve, took up posts outside the hospital compound.

Jemilla pushed a handgun at me, and I took it reluctantly, stuck it into the waistband of my trousers.

This little darling was twelve. She’d been gang-raped, had had an ear sliced off by an attacker, and she’d seen her parents murdered when her village had fallen to the gang of thugs. She walked for a week to get here, by herself, and we “adopted” her at Kind Hands. She would live here for as long as we remained, but the thing was, this was not a permanent hospital. We survived here on charity, and we were vulnerable to terror attacks. We could get orders to pack up and leave at any time.

What would happen to Jemilla then? How would she survive?

“I’m not going to be able to kill anyone,” I said to this brave and irrepressible young girl. She grabbed my hands and said quite seriously, “You can, Dr. Brigid. If you have to, you can. There’s no such a thing as a warning shot.”

Outside the O.R., men were shouting as they raced up the dirt track that ran between our compound and the tukuls, the round, thatched huts where the refugees lived.

Colin clicked off his walkie-talkie, saying to all of us, “We’re needed at the gate.”

Surgeons Pete Bailey, Jimmy “Flyboy” Wuster, and Jup Vander armed themselves and followed Colin out to his vehicle and into the lethal, crackling predawn.

With help from nurses Sabeena and Toni, I shoved the patients in their beds into the center of the floor, stubbing the wheels on the buckling planks, and I tucked little Nuru, now bandaged in clean cloth and duct tape, into a laundry basket. Nurse Berna administered knockout anesthesia to the patient who’d been moaning since she came in, and gave a gun to the patient’s father. Nurse Toni chucked our instruments into boiling water, and I shut down the generator.

And then we sat in the dark with our backs against the beds. And some of us prayed.

I visualized our attackers. They were known as the Gray Army because when those men were cattle herders, they rubbed gray clay into their skin to ward off insects. Now, as a rampaging militia, they dressed in camouflage with bloodred head scarves. Their ghostly skin added another layer of terror to their attacks.

We were in the massacre zone of a long-standing dispute in Sudan and South Sudan that had roots along ethnic, geographic, and religious lines. After the autonomy of South Sudan was official, internal fighting began between the Gamba and the Gray Army rebels. The fighting defined the expression “take no prisoners.”

The Grays, as they were also known, re-formed into a rogue militia avenging those deaths, the work of the Gamba. And within weeks, thousands more were dead, and the living had fled. Now, 1.8 million people were displaced, and, although the Gamba had been decimated, the Gray Army, twenty-five to fifty-thousand strong, and drunk with bloodlust and power, kept crossing and recrossing the country, their only objective to destroy it in wave after murderous wave.

Colonel Dage Zuberi was the head of the Grays.

The atrocities this evil man had left behind him in Darfur have all been documented. The mass killing of the men and rape of the women, the torture and looting, the kidnapping of young girls, and the total obliteration of villages all form part of his legacy. And now he had turned to South Sudan.

Throughout this period, IDPs had only one option, the Kind Hands settlement located outside Nimule, though by now, our hands were full. Ironically, just when it seemed completely hopeless, as we were weighing scrapping our mission, a message was relayed by an ambulance driver. He said that twenty thousand volunteer soldiers-all military veterans-were on the way to protect us.

Was this true? And, if true, would they arrive in time?

As I sat against a bed pondering all of this, Aziza, another of our little orphan runners, burst breathlessly into the O.R.

“They’re here, Dr. Brigid. Our army has arrived, and they’re shooting at the Grays.”

“You’re sure, darling?”

“Oh, yes. It’s true.”

Oh, thank you, God.

But Aziza hadn’t finished her report.

“The Grays have so many. Our new army is too…too small.”

“How many?” I asked, although I knew full well that Aziza could not count.

“Like, three cups full of pebbles. The Grays are shooting them as they try to save us.”

Chapter 5

SABEENA FLEW through the operating-room door, running directly to me as my patient was being removed from my table.

“We’ve got incoming. Some of our new fighters have been shot. Brigid. They’re all black.”

“Say that again?”

“Our new army. They’re all black. Men and women. Europeans and Americans, too. Dr. Jimmy is bringing in a boy from New Jersey. He’s conscious but bleeding profusely from a head wound.”

The ambulance and other vehicles roared up to the O.R., and as our volunteers unloaded the patients, I did triage, sending those with bullets that could be dug out with a knife tip to Maternity.

We kept the rest.

Our instruments had been sterilized before the shooting began, but we had no place for the wounded except on empty grain sacks laid out on the floor.

We had to work faster and more efficiently than ever. The generator was back on, charging up our mini X-ray and ultrasound machines. Runners carried blood samples to our so-called lab for typing. Sabeena and I marked treatment notes on dressings and directly on the patients’ bodies. And throughout it all, the gunfire continued.

Dr. Jimmy Wuster was working feverishly on the volunteer soldier from New Jersey. As Sabeena had said, the young man was bleeding profusely. He had gunshot wounds to his head and chest, and we didn’t have enough blood to perfuse him. Of course, Dr. Jimmy still tried to keep the boy alive, until Jup pulled him away from the body.

Jimmy yelled, “Fuck! Get away from me.”

Jup persisted until Jimmy stormed out of the O.R. I followed him and found the reed-thin thoracic surgeon leaning against a parched tree, his chest heaving.

He said to me, “That kid is from West Orange. I grew up there. I told him I would keep him alive.”

“We all do that, Jimmy. What else can you do?”

“He’s wearing a dog tag. His name is Henry Webb. His unit is called BLM.”

“What does it mean?”

“Black Like Me. A solidarity movement, I suppose. Damn it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

I shook my head no.

He said, “I stink like rat shit in a meatpacking plant, but I need a hug.”

I needed one, too. I took him into my arms.

He was sobbing when Colin’s Land Rover returned from the gates and our aides unloaded the freshly wounded. I squeezed Jimmy’s hand, and then we went back to the O.R. I helped Colin do a bloody leg amputation with a Gigli saw, but after our patient endured the surgery, he died from cardiac arrest.

Colin walked to the sink and put his head under the trickle of cold water. I handed him a dry rag, and when he looked at me, he saw the blank shock on my face.

“Brigid. Surgery here is life-or-death. We’re not going to have miracles every day. Get used to it.”

“I won’t. I’m not like you.”

Colin reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a nut-and-grain bar laced with chocolate. He handed it to me.

“Take this before I change my mind. And don’t give it to anyone. Stand right there so I can watch you.”

My hands were shaking so hard, I couldn’t tear the wrapper. Colin pulled the cellophane apart and watched me eat and cry at the same time.

Then he went to the next table and started a new life-or-death surgery on a patient he was seeing for the first time.

That this was a desperately bad place was indisputable, and the badness never stopped. I’d fought for a position and won it over hundreds of applicants. I was twenty-seven, idealistic, and also an optimist. Two years into this mission, I was asking myself how much more I could take. Another week? Another day?

I imagined dressing in street clothes, returning to Boston, where I could have had a bedroom with a real bed and a window, a bathroom with hot water, a kitchen with a refrigerator and, inside it, bottles of cold drinks.

But I couldn’t imagine leaving these people. I loved them. And the idea of not working with Colin-I couldn’t bear the thought.

Two teenage boys entered the O.R. and wrangled a writhing soldier onto the surgical table. It was a safe bet that she was from a clean, sane place and had come here with an aspiration and a plan. Now that she’d been shot to pieces, there were fresh odds on her surviving another hour. Fifty-fifty.

Colin yelled in my general direction, “Break’s over!”

I wanted to scream, loudly and for a long time.

I went back to work.

Chapter 6

I FELL asleep in my sliver of a room as the midday sun beat down oppressively on the roofs and the parched, dusty camp and the people filling buckets from the slow, muddy tributary of the White Nile.

Time must have passed, because I awoke to dark skies and the lovely, lilting sound of children singing in the little L-shaped enclosure between the women’s house and the maternity ward.

Nurse Berna had gathered a dozen girls and boys together. They sat in a line on a split log balanced on two rocks, and Berna stood in front of them, leading them in a song about the gbodi, or bushbuck, a kind of antelope that lives in sub-Saharan Africa.

Berna sang, “Gbodi mangi were.”

And the kids answered, “Gbodi mangi were, gbodi o!”

I’d learned from Berna that this means, “See what the bushbuck does, the bushbuck, oh!”

It was Berna’s turn again. This time she sang, “Gbodi wo ti turn.” The children stuck up their forefingers along the sides of their heads and waggled them, singing, “Gbodi wo ti turn, gbodi o!”

Translated: “The bushbuck turns her ears. The bushbuck, oh!”

The children laughed and clapped their hands as they sang. Even the donkeys braying outside the enclosure seemed to join in.

I was struck by the resilience of the orphaned, displaced children, and of Berna, too. She had loved so many, tended to their wounds, buried the dead, and repeated it day after day for four years running. While God had not forsaken this place, He was clearly expecting us to hold up our end, as it appeared He was needed elsewhere.

I left the singing children to do rounds and went first to Nuru and his family, lying in a bed together in Recovery. I clasped Nuru’s mother’s hand and bent over the little boy, who was sleeping under a scrap of cloth.

“How’s little brave-hearted Nuru today?” I asked. He opened his eyes, looked right into mine-and wailed.

I laughed, and so did his mom.

“Better, yes?” she asked.

“Way better. He’s mad.”

After checking Nuru’s vitals and changing his dressings, I struck out for the O.R. and dove back into the bloody work. I set bones, cleaned infected wounds, stitched together the ragged edges of injuries, until late into the night. I was grateful that there was no shooting and that our brave contingent of volunteers was armed and at the perimeter.

By the time all surgical patients were in the recovery ward and the operating tables were empty, my back was stooped like that of a little old lady, and my joints ached, too. Jup yelled, “Bar the door!” and we were all too tired to laugh.

I was seeing double, and I was starting to talk to myself.

“That’s it, Brigid. Put down the knife. Take off your mask. Day is over. You’ve done good.”

I sang out to Jup and Colin-well, croaked out, to be accurate: “I’m leaving now. Don’t anyone try to stop me. I can’t do anything else. I’m used up, worn out, past dead on my feet.”

“Good night, Brigid,” Jup called.

“Go,” said Colin. “You don’t need to explain.”

I went. I walked along the dusty track to the ladies’ dorm. I waved to the people who called my name, and minutes later, I was in my little room. I wolfed down the crackers and tinned, porklike meat and slurped up the delicious bowl of canned peaches that Toni had left on the table by my bed.

After stripping off my scrubs and kicking off my shoes, I showered in cold water, and it was good. I wrapped myself in a wet sheet and got into the creaking, sagging cot, which was the best and most welcome spot in all of South Sudan.

I had a few words with God, asking Him to please try a little harder to protect the people whose lives were entwined with mine, and dropped into a dead sleep.

I awoke to someone calling me. It was Colin.

“No, no, no,” I said, rolling over, facing the wall. “Leave me alone. I have to sleep. I have to…”

But he didn’t go. He pulled a chair over to my bedside and told me that it had been a good day. “We saved more than we lost. New tally. Fifty-one percent to the good.”

Why was Colin in my room, talking to me in the dark? I rolled over and asked him, “What’s going on, Colin? You okay?”

He reached out and put his hand behind my neck and gently brought my face to his. And he kissed me.

He kissed me. I opened my eyes, and in that moment, he was gone-but I was wide-awake.

What had come over Colin? What a strange, strange man he was, but I had to admit to the only person I could talk to about this-me-that I liked the kiss.

I liked Colin, too. Seriously liked him. It was stupid to have a crush on this abrasive and combative and often thoughtless man. But there I was-instead of sleeping, I was staring up at the ridges in the corrugated tin roof, dreamily replaying a brief, whiskery kiss from Dr. Colin Whitehead.

Chapter 7

AZIZA AND Jemilla were waiting for me in the staff dining hall when I got there for my morning cup of tea.

It was a real stretch to call this room a hall, but it was a pleasant space, with a hand-hewn slab table and two benches, three windows, and a ceiling fan. An old Philips radio rested on top of the fridge, and when there was no one eating here, the medical staff had been known to dance.

But there would be no dancing this morning. The girls had come for their math class, along with a whole-grainy cereal with goat’s milk and bananas, their paycheck for running errands around the hospital compound.

I hugged them both at once, and the giggling cracked me up. I braided Aziza’s hair while Jemilla braided mine, and after breakfast and tidying up, class began.

Math is far from my strongest subject, but I manage basic arithmetic with dried beans. This morning, math devolved from bean counting to bean jumping on a kalah board, a game something like checkers, which Aziza took seriously but which made Jemilla literally fall off the bench laughing.

Breakfast and beans over, the girls and I hurried to the O.R. I was gowning up in the scrub room when young Rafi flew through the door and grabbed me around the waist, screaming, “They killed them! It’s Zuberi’s work, Doctor. It’s a massacre!”

I’d seen pictures of Zuberi’s work. It was beyond hellish. In another realm altogether. I felt faint, but I fought it off, dug in my feet, and grabbed Rafi’s shoulders. I yelled down into his terrified, upturned face.

“What happened, Rafi?”

“They killed so many.”

I disengaged from the little boy and shouted to my colleagues in the O.R., who were up to their wrists in blood.

“There’s been-I don’t know. Something bad. I’ll go.”

Sabeena came with me. We climbed into the donkey cart we use as an ambulance, Sabeena taking the reins. We caught up with Rafi as he ran down the road, and slowed to let him into the cart. I put my arm around him and held him tightly as the donkey pulled us to the front gate.

I didn’t say this out loud, but in my mind, I was asking God, What now? What bloody horror now?

The gate is made of hinged chain-link fencing anchored to concrete posts and walls that are topped with barbed wire. There were more than a hundred people bunched up at the gate, and I couldn’t see around them. Someone helped me down from the cart, I don’t know who. The crowd parted to let me through, and I remember the terrible wailing.

I stepped outside the settlement walls alone and saw something so gruesome, so inhuman, that at first, I couldn’t make myself believe what I saw. The hacked and shot-up bodies, stacked like firewood and covered with a moving blanket of flies, were real.

Chapter 8

THAT NIGHT, Jemilla and Aziza came to my open door and crowded into my room. They’d slept with me before, but I didn’t want this to become a habit. The room was hardly bigger than the narrow bed, and tonight, I was so done, I had nothing left, even for the two girls.

“Not tonight, kids, okay? I need the whole bed. I have to sleep. I’m on call, you know?”

Jemilla was persistent, and Aziza looked terrified, and I relented, of course. When Aziza was lying on my left side, tight up against the wall, and Jemilla, with her gun clutched in both hands, had pinned me in on my right side, Rafi came in and shut the door.

A great cloud of suffocating heat had collected under the tin roof and went all the way down to the dirt floor. We needed any small movement of air in this windowless room. Needed it. Rafi leaned hard against the door with his shoulder to make sure that the latch was closed, then he said, “I’ll be right here.”

I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I heard him settle down on the floor between the bed and the door. I had thought that the children wanted me to keep them company. Now I understood. They were there protecting me.

We sweated together in the dark, and I tried to think. After the bodies of the twelve soldiers had been buried, and while I was doing an appendectomy, there had been meetings. Senior staff, meaning not me, had gotten together in the dining hall. Then the staff had called the home office in Cleveland.

As Colin explained it to me, the two-thousand-person contingent of Black Like Me soldiers hadn’t planned to stay at Kind Hands. That had been a wishful interpretation of what was meant to be a stop on their way to help in a larger battle against the Grays in the ongoing, unofficial civil war.

Colin had told me, “They’re leaving within a few days. All we can do is wish them luck.”

Lying in this oven with the children, I began to shake. The attacks were increasing. We had limited means to hold off the militia, and now we were losing our last hope.

I had come here without a clue. Now I had one hell of a clue. We could all die. I could die.

Aziza squeezed my hand.

I knew a lot about Jemilla, but Aziza had kept the horrors she’d lived through to herself. She looked to be about thirteen, but even she didn’t know her age. I loved these orphans. I was pretty much an orphan myself.

Aziza asked now, “Do you believe in God, Dr. Brigid?”

“Yes. I do.”

“What is His idea for us? Why must we suffer so?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart. But I know He has a reason.”

She sighed deeply, truly breaking my heart, and got a tighter grip on me. She held on, fiercely.

I didn’t want to cry, but the tears were coming anyway, and I couldn’t get my hands free to wipe them away. I wished I could answer Aziza’s question to my own satisfaction, but sometimes, while failing to save yet another wounded or starving or disease-ridden child, I had the same doubts.

Jemilla whispered, “Try to sleep, Dr. Brigid.”

“You too.”

“I love you, Doctor.”

“Shhhh. Shhhhh. I love you, too.”

What would happen to the people in this place if we were sent home? What would God do?

Chapter 9

THAT MORNING, patients lined the benches outside the operating room. Our beds, our operating tables, and the spaces between them were fully occupied.

The medical staff were working like machines-maximum efficiency, no time for rethinking or consulting-and none of us had been trained for this.

I was assisting Colin, whose patient, a twenty-three-year-old BLM soldier named Neil Farley, had refused anesthesia for the infected bullet wound in his thigh. He was gripping the table, thrashing his head from side to side, and groaning, trying not to move his leg but not really managing it.

Farley’s C.O., Captain Bernard Odom, stood at the table, his arms crossed behind his back, feet shoulders’ length apart, at ease as he watched Colin dig for the bullet that had made a roadway for the infection that had traveled far and deep.

“What are you trying to prove, Neil?” Colin asked his writhing patient.

“Just keeping you on your toes, sir,” said the young vet through clenched teeth. Clearly, this show of bravery was to impress his C.O. and was completely counterproductive.

“Neil, you’re wheezing,” I said. “I’m going to give you a shot of Benadryl. It won’t affect your reflexes or anything.”

“You’re sure?”

“Uh-huh. If I learned one thing in my six years in med school, this was it.”

The soldier laughed through his pain. I shot him up with Benadryl, which is not just an antihistamine but also a mild anesthetic. Colin poked around in the wound and finally extracted the bullet. I mopped up.

“When will Farley be good to walk with his backpack?” the captain asked.

“In a few days,” said Colin.

I injected Farley with antibiotics, then gripped his forearm and helped him up into a sitting position.

The captain asked Colin again, “He can walk tomorrow, right?”

“What’s the rush?” Colin asked, peering over his mask at the young officer.

“The rush is that we’re leaving tomorrow at oh six hundred. If he can’t carry his gear, he stays behind.”

“What do you mean, ‘leaving’?” Colin asked.

“Leaving, like, we’re pulling out.”

For the past week, the Black Like Me volunteers had camped inside the settlement walls and patrolled the perimeter in shifts. Now, four days after the massacre of twelve of their troops, their plans to withdraw had firmed up.

Odom had Colin’s full, highly disturbed attention.

“You can’t leave us here,” Colin said stiffly. “Do you know what that would mean? You’re leaving us to die.”

Odom replied, just as stiffly, “I have my orders, Doctor.”

Farley eased his legs off the table and said to Odom, “I’ll be ready, Captain, just need a good sleep tonight-”

Colin ripped off his mask and said, “Captain. You didn’t hear me. You can’t leave us right now. Zuberi’s goons will come in and kill everyone. We’re relying on you.”

“You didn’t hear me, Doctor. It’s not my call-”

Colin went around the table and grabbed Odom, pulled him up to his toes, then violently shoved him backward. Odom fell against Berna, who stepped away, and a very surprised-looking Odom went down. Colin leapt at the opportunity to straddle Odom and press a length of PVC pipe across his throat. He then shouted into his face, “Get your orders changed. Buy us some time.”

By then, Jimmy Wuster was yelling at Colin, “Hey, hey, Colin, disengage, buddy!” and he tried to pull him off Odom’s body. Farley had also joined the fray, and I screamed, “Stop, everyone, just stop!”

Colin got up with a disgusted look on his face and threw the pipe down hard. Farley helped his captain to his feet, limped over to Colin, and extended a hand. As Colin was about to extend his arm, Odom punched Colin in the face.

Colin staggered back, sputtering “Bloody hell,” and clapped a hand over his eye. He was gathering himself to get in a good return punch when Rafi and Ahmed got between Odom and Colin with a stretcher, then swung a new patient onto the table. The patient was old, barely clinging to consciousness.

I bent over him and ripped open his bloody shirt, and Berna tried to take his blood pressure.

I said, “Mister, I’m Dr. Fitzgerald. What’s your name? Tell me what happened.”

The patient couldn’t speak. While I assessed his injuries, Colin paced and vented behind me. He cursed about our situation: the fighting a quarter mile from this room, the lack of even basic supplies, the inability to fix what could be fixed easily anywhere but here.

He was in a crazed state, but he wasn’t crazy.

We were treading water in the center of a full-blown tsunami. I admired Colin for taking a stand, for speaking up, and because he was right.

If BLM left, we were all doomed.

Chapter 10

HELL ON earth continued to dominate the O.R. all day, as the sick and injured flew from vicious attacks on their villages and found their way to Kind Hands.

I was verging on heat exhaustion and physical collapse when Dr. Victoria Khalil took the scalpel out of my shaking hand, put her hand on my back, and just kept it there until I looked into her eyes.

“I’ve got it,” she said. “Get out of here.”

I went outside with a bottle of water and a chocolate bar and sat down with my back against a tree.

I was blinking into the setting sun when Colin came outside and sat down with me.

“I would buy you a steak if I could.”

“With fries?”

“Fries and bourbon.”

“Sounds good.” I looked at him. “I should buy you a steak for your eye.”

“That guy,” he said, not laughing. “He sucker punched me.”

“You got your licks in, in your way,” I said.

Colin patted the puffiness around his eye, then said, “Let’s take a walk.”

“Where to?” I asked him.

“Big city. Dancing. Pretty people in nice clothes. All kinds of excitement.”

I laughed, gave him my hand, and he helped me up.

Surprise.

We strolled past our prepubescent guards, holding long guns, and stepped through the gates and outside, into the flat, monochromatic landscape.

To the right of the gates was a thin copse of dead trees that had been stripped of bark, which had been used as firewood. Beyond the trees was the sluggish tributary with steep banks during the drought, a trap for the women and girls who went for water and were cornered there, raped, and sometimes killed, more often than we could track or remember.

Colin and I turned left and walked parallel to the bullet-pocked concrete wall. There was a road out there, which flooded during the rainy season. Now it was a dusty, rutted track that connected the next-closest village, a hundred miles away, with the gates to our settlement.

Colin put his hand lightly to the small of my back. He said, “I must apologize, Brigid.”

I turned to look at him. He looked beat-up and out of gas. Still, I loved looking at his handsome face. I loved the way he was looking at me.

“Apologize for what?”

“For being such a rude bastard. For losing my temper today. For being inconsiderate to you.”

“Colin, you’re not that bad.”

“Nice of you to say, but I’m trying to apologize, for Christ’s sake. I need to.”

“Well, all right, then. I accept. You bastard.”

He laughed. I did, too. I forgot how achy and hungry and fatigued I was. Laughing with Colin was a new experience, and I liked it. A lot. I stepped in a little closer, and Colin put his arm around me, rested his hand at my waist. My arm went around him too.

And Colin kept talking.

“I want you to know something about me, Brigid. About ten years ago, when my daughter, Rebecca, was nine, something went wrong. We took her to our family doctor and then to the best neurologist around. And then to another neurologist in London. That was where we got an explanation for her headaches and seizures.

“Rebecca had a brain tumor in a very bad place. We were told it was inoperable, but I didn’t accept that. Well, why would I? I loved her, dearly. And I had this genius brain and my very talented hands.”

I nodded, and we kept walking north, our own path between the wall and the road. The streaked sky was like sundown over an ocean, or so I imagined it. The waning sun mirrored the sadness in Colin’s voice.

“I looked at her films,” he said. “I consulted with the cowards who refused to do the operation, then I signed the disclaimers and did the operation myself.”

He said, “Rebecca died on the table. It was horrible. I couldn’t bring her back, and, trust me, I did everything imaginable. After that, my wife divorced me. And from that point on, I divorced myself-from feeling anything.”

And then he stepped away from me, shook his head, wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands.

“No excuse for bad manners, Brigid. But there’s the backstory,” he said.

I was looking for the right words to thank him for trusting me, to tell him that I was sorry for what he’d been through. I was forming some questions, too, but I never got the chance to ask them.

Chapter 11

ONE MINUTE, Colin and I were walking along the wall, toward the village. A moment later, trouble sped out of the dark. Tires squealed, and high beams bounced and flashed over the ground. The sound of whooping male voices and bursts of gunfire got louder as the all-terrain vehicle headed directly toward the gate to our settlement.

Which meant that it would drive right past us.

My feet wouldn’t move. I was utterly frozen in the headlights, but Colin, thank God, had wits enough for us both. He pushed me down and fell on top of me so that we were against the wall, faces to the ground. The deadly chattering of gunfire, the war whoops, and the roar of the motor were too close, and too real.

I didn’t think to pray. I was remembering the stacked bodies outside our gates, and then, while bullets pinged into the wall right above my head, my mind was flooded with vivid images of people I would never see again.

The gunfire amped up and seemed to come from all directions. Shouts turned into screams, and then the racing motor struggled, as though the vehicle was trying to get traction in the dirt. Wheels spun furiously, and then, finally, the wheels grabbed the ground, and the vehicle sped back the way it had come.

There was total silence. My eyes were still covered. I was still pinned by Colin’s body, and now I was aware of his breath on my cheek, his elbows in my back, the whole weight of him.

And then he rolled off me.

“Brigid. Say something. Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

He helped me up, and boys from our camp flowed around us, all of them bright eyed and exhilarated.

The one grabbing at my arms was Andrew.

“Did you see? We stopped them. I shot one of them. I shot out the tires, too.”

“Thank you, young men,” Colin said. “You saved us. You saved our arses.”

I was still panting from adrenaline overload, and blood was hammering against my eardrums. Colin was talking to me, but I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying.

I looked into his eyes, and he said it again.

“I’m sorry, Brigid. I’m a damned fool for taking you out here. You should get the hell away from me.”

And then he put his arms around me and held me against him from hip to toe and back up to where my cheek rested against his collarbone.

He said, “I’ve wanted to do this from the moment I first saw you.”

I didn’t say it, but I’d had the same thought since the moment I first saw him.

Chapter 12

THE YOUNG men and boys circled back, jumped up and down around us, laughing, one of them, Nadir, shouting out, “Ba-bam. Ba-bam-bam. I got you. I killed you, dead.”

Nadir was about fourteen, spunky and irrepressible, even in a place as hopeless as this. He had befriended the doctors and often went on supply runs to the village with Colin and Jimmy. Now he volunteered to escort us back to the gates.

“Doctors. Stay close to me. Please pick up your feet and keep up.”

“Right behind you, Nadir,” Colin said. “Lead the way.”

Nadir said, “Dr. Whitehead. Next time we go for a run, I sit in the front seat. Shotgun, right?”

“Okay.”

“You fixed my arm. You remember?”

“I’ve fixed a lot of broken arms,” said Colin.

“Look at it again.”

Nadir pulled up his sleeve to show off a shiny scar. Then he made the scar jump when he flexed his muscle.

“Nice,” said Colin. “I did a pretty good job.”

By the time we had walked through the gates, my heart rate had slowed. Nadir waved good-bye and drifted into a pack of other young men. Colin took my hand, which caused my heart to pick up speed again.

We walked the dirt track toward our compound, acknowledging the waves and hellos from people crouched outside the tukuls at the edge of the track. But I couldn’t think of anything to say to Colin that wouldn’t sound forced or lame.

When we got to the women’s dorm, Colin took both my hands and looked at me as though he was looking into me. I thought maybe he would kiss me again. Maybe he’d come up with an awkward excuse to come inside my toaster oven of a room.

But, no.

He released my hands and said, “See you in the morning, Brigid. Sleep well.”

“You too, Colin.”

I watched the target on his back recede, and when Colin had rounded the corner of the building, I went inside. I washed and prepared for sleep, and I pushed thoughts of Colin Whitehead out of my mind. I prayed.

Thank you, Lord, for giving me another day, for saving Colin and me and all of those brave little boys. Please bless this camp and give us the strength to care for these good people. And please speak a little more plainly. I’m not sure what I’m meant to do.

I had just said amen when there was an urgent knock on my door.

Was it Colin?

I cracked the door. It was a little girl in a thin dress, her hair in braids, a very worried look on her face. Jemilla.

“Honey, I’ve told you. I need to sleep, and I really can’t rest when you are in bed with me.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “The BLM soldiers have pulled up their tents and left, Dr. Brigid. I found this stuck between the links in the fence. I don’t know who to give it to.”

On a sheet of plain paper was written the letter Z. This was the signature of Colonel Dage Zuberi, the leader of the Grays, the man who had directed massacres across sub-Saharan Africa and the one who was behind the recent slaughter of our BLM soldiers.

The note was stark and unambiguous. We were marked for death. I opened the door wider, grabbed Jemilla by the arm, pulled her into my room, and shut the door.

Chapter 13

IN THE morning, Jemilla was standing by the door frame, and Sabeena was shaking me awake. There was an expression on her face that I’d never seen before.

It was horror.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“They killed him,” she said. “They shot Nadir and hung him over the barbed wire.”

“No,” I said.

Sabeena handed me a bit of paper, telling me that it was in the chain-link fence under Nadir’s body. On the paper was the zigzag mark of the devil himself, Colonel Zuberi.

What was it that we were supposed to do?

How could eighty thousand people move out of what Zuberi considered his territory? There was no place to run or hide. Would he really shoot us all?

I told Jemilla, “Stay here.”

“I’ve seen this before,” she told me. “I’ve seen worse.”

Sabeena, Jemilla, and I walked to the gates, and there, horribly, the boy who had been so happy last night had been thrown across the top of the wall. His eyes were open, but he was gone.

“Please,” I said to a few of the taller boys. “Get him down. Right now.”

Nadir had no family, and so Sabeena, Berna, and I washed and wrapped his body for burial in the spot we used as a rough cemetery, not far from the hospital.

I was raging at the brutal death of this sweet, funny boy. I silently raged at God as I handled Nadir’s body with my shaking hands. I think a kind God, a loving God, would forgive me for being furious. Why had this boy been killed? Had Nadir been too brave? Taken too much of a risk? Or was his death as senseless as it would have been if he had died of starvation or disease?

Later, as we were dressing in our surgical gowns, I spoke to Berna, a clever and kind and tremendously competent nurse who was twenty years older than me.

“My God, Berna. How can you endure this day after day?”

“What choice do I have, Brigid? You will leave, and I will stay. These are my people. This is my home.”

Inside the dining hall, outside of my hearing, calls went back and forth to Cleveland, and discussions were held. I did my job, but I was jumpy. I pulled a chest line out of a young man without inverting his bed. Sabeena heard the air sucking and, thank God, sealed the wound with Vaseline before harm was done.

Colin was back in the O.R. by then. He saw what I had done. I expected him to shout at me, to call me an imbecile.

He said, “Get some water, Brigid. Take a little break and come back.”

I walked toward the dining hall, passing so many starving people, now under threat of being murdered for no reason by a primitive despot with nothing but time, money, and raging young men to do his dirty work.

It was a sin. It was all sinful.

And there was no end to it.

Chapter 14

THROUGHOUT THE day of Nadir’s death, thousands of displaced people arrived at the gates to the settlement. I could see them coming to us by way of the long road, with bundles on their heads, children in their arms. When they reached the gate, they spread out along the base of the wall where a strip of shade provided some relief from the hundred-and-fifteen-degree heat.

These people had walked for weeks, even months, to get to us, and, tragically, we had no room. The tukuls were crammed. Tarps had been strung between them as tents, and the refugees who lived there camped and slept outdoors.

We had no room, we didn’t have enough food, and we had to turn people away.

At day’s end, Colin, Jimmy, Jup, Victoria, Sabeena, and I walked the line outside the gates. We looked at the kids in particular, trying to pick out the ones who had any chance of survival at all.

Mothers quickly saw what we were doing and pushed their children toward us. Dear God, could anything be sadder than this?

I said to one of them, “Mother, please, I can take the little boy. Keep your baby with you.”

I put a dot of clay on the back of the little boy’s hand and led him through the gates and lifted him into the donkey cart. Half his face was swollen and inflamed. If he had an abscessed tooth, I could pull it. And that was all I could offer, some relief from some pain.

But there was no relief from the hunger and thirst and hopelessness.

When the cart was full, we drove our patients to the compound. But we couldn’t keep them longer than overnight.

I remember this day in particular because when it couldn’t have been bleaker, a caravan of military personnel arrived in open trucks. We could see their shiny, blue helmets from far away. Cheers went up and flowed through the camp like a wave.

For as long as the UN soldiers stayed, Kind Hands and the settlement would have protection.

“Thanks,” I whispered to God. “Thanks very much. And now, if you don’t mind, could you make it rain?”

Chapter 15

WHEN SABEENA and I went out of the gates the next morning, I was surprised to see a portly white man among the hundreds of starving African people massed around the foot of the wall.

He was wearing black pants, a short-sleeved black shirt with a white collar, and a panama hat.

“You’re one of the doctors?” he asked me.

“Yes. I’m Brigid Fitzgerald. You’re joining us?”

“I hope to. I’m Father Delahanty. William. Nice to meet you, Brigid.”

I asked Father Delahanty to wait for me as Sabeena and I selected a handful of people we might be able to help. Once the donkey cart was fully loaded and Father Delahanty was on board, we trotted back to the hospital.

“I heard what you folks are doing, and I hitched a ride with the UN,” Delahanty said. “Do you have a chapel here?”

“Actually, that’s just one of a thousand things we don’t have. You could do outdoor services, maybe.”

“That would do quite well, Brigid.”

“I speak to God whenever I get a chance,” I said. “But it’s been a long time since my last confession.”

“We can address that.”

We had just pulled up to the hospital when Colin walked over to the cart with Rafi and Ahmed and began to help people down.

Colin said to Father Delahanty, “You must be the priest from Chicago. Here to save some souls, perhaps?”

“I may try.”

“Father, we need less talking to God and more helping the sick and dying. Do you have the stomach for that?”

Colin lifted out the boy with the bad tooth and headed with him toward the operating room.

I said to the priest, “Sorry, Father. Dr. Whitehead is very angry about how little we have to work with and how many people we lose. But he is a good doctor. A good man.”

“I’m sure he is. I can understand why he might lash out. I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty.”

“Come with me to the operating room.”

Father Delahanty was willing to do everything, and that included changing beds, sweeping floors, and boiling sheets. He worked alongside our volunteer aides, doing laundry, rolling bandages, scouring the sink, and doing it all over again.

At the end of the day, I found Father Delahanty sitting on the floor in a corner of the maternity ward, consoling a woman whose baby had just died. He was telling her, “We don’t know why God does what He does. But we have faith that He loves us. Right now, your child is with Him.”

I slipped out before he saw me, and a few minutes later, Colin and I were taking turns washing up at the scrub sink.

“I’m inviting him to join us at dinner, Colin. Please find him a bunk in the men’s quarters.”

“He should go back to Chicago before he gets hurt.”

I scowled. “Stop it. Be nice. You might like it.”

Colin handed me a towel. And he smiled.

It was out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

“I can’t imagine what will happen to us after we leave Africa.”

“I can,” Colin said. “You’ll have an extraordinary, exemplary life, and I’ll drink myself to death.”

“You’re not going to do that.”

He gave me a dazzling smile.

No doubt about it. As bad as Colin Whitehead was or tried to be, I was falling for him.

Chapter 16

A DRIVER from the village stopped in the dining hall to drop off mail and medical supplies. I was worried about the BLM forces and asked Mosi if he’d heard any news of them since they left Kind Hands.

Mosi shrugged and said, “I haven’t heard anything. I think you should say to yourself that they went back to America.”

After a guilty breakfast of cereal and fruit, Jemilla, Aziza, Sabeena, and I took the donkey cart to the gates. Another large group of refugees had arrived at the settlement, and soon, Sabeena and I would pick through them, looking for people we could save for a day before turning them out to be slaughtered.

Father Delahanty had gotten a head start on us this morning, and I saw him at the gates, praying quietly, looking about as sad as anyone could be.

When he opened his eyes, I said, “How can God allow this?”

He said, “We do what we can and leave the big picture to Him.”

That afternoon, I had a young girl on the table. She had a bacterial infection that had run through her body like wildfire and had begun to shut her organs down. In order to save her, limbs would have to be amputated. Several limbs. And then what would happen to her?

Colin said, “Brigid, you’re wanted in Recovery.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your patient with the head wound. If I were you, I’d go take a look.”

I went. The boy with the wound was alive. I knew that when I went back to the O.R., the girl who was dying on the table would be lying in a bed, intact and dead.

I dropped to my knees outside the hospital, and once again, I prayed. “Please, help me understand. Am I helping? Is this good for anyone? Are you testing me? And if so, why, dear God, why?”

I finished by asking Him to bless everyone, and then I went back to work. I spoke to all my patients. I held their hands, told them that they would be okay, and I closed the eyes of the ones that died.

That afternoon, I walked over to the radio and shut off the Red Sox game. I had no idea if my team was winning or losing, and for the first time in my memory, I didn’t care.

Chapter 17

THE LOUDSPEAKER crackled and squealed, and then Jup’s amplified voice boomed, “Wounded at the gates. We’ve got incoming wounded.”

Sabeena and I had been making beds, but we dropped everything and ran for the donkey cart where Jemilla and Aziza had already grabbed places in the back.

I knew this donkey. Colin had named him Bollocks, and he was wicked stubborn. Sabeena took the reins, clucked her tongue, slapped the reins against his back, saying, “Come on, Bollocks, you old goat. Let’s go.”

But, while he brayed, twitched his tail, and stomped his feet, he wouldn’t move forward, not an inch. And we didn’t have time to waste.

I got out of the cart and went around to his head, where I scratched his forehead, wiped some dirt out of his eyes, palmed his muzzle. And I said, “Bollocks, please, no funny business. Be good. I’ll make it up to you. Do we have a deal?”

When I got back to the cart, I saw that Father Delahanty was sitting in back with the girls. Colin started up his Land Rover, and Victoria and two boys got in.

We followed Colin, choking on his dust, and when we reached the gates, they were wide open.

Gunshot victims had been dropped right there, where they waited for help outside our gates. Some were alive; all of them were a warning. The moans and cries of the wounded were horrific and almost unbelievable. It was as if a Breughel painting, The Triumph of Death, had come to life between the gateposts of our settlement.

I scrambled out of the cart and ran with my bag, passing wounded UN workers as well as our own downed people. Father Delahanty was right behind me, and Sabeena was bringing up the rear. My eyes were on the wounded, lying in the dust, many of them writhing in agony. I never noticed the Grays, boiling up over the riverbank on foot, until they were spraying bullets at us with their AKs.

Nothing about my life in Boston could have prepared me for an attack like this. Father Delahanty grabbed me by the arm, and we ran back through our useless chain-link gates. Everyone who could flee was doing so, and I saw the young men, our self-appointed volunteer militia, along with UN workers, staging a defense.

Sabeena had been racing ahead of me and was now standing at the cart. I ran toward her. And then I felt a sudden weight on my arm, Father Delahanty pulling me down. I knew he had stumbled, and I whipped around to help him to his feet. But he hadn’t simply fallen. He’d been hit. I dropped to the ground beside him.

“William. Father. Hang on. Help is coming. We’ve got you.”

He rolled to his side and coughed up blood. I looked around for help. Colin was leaning across the hood of his Land Rover, firing on the Grays, who were now coming through the gates.

I yelled, “Sabeena! Help me!”

She had her hands full. The girls were with her. Bullets were flying. I wasn’t sure that she had even heard me.

I said to Father Delahanty, “I’m going to help you up. You have to help me get you to your feet. Grip my forearm.”

But he didn’t do it.

He was losing so much blood. He was going into shock.

And then he said in a whisper, “It’s been two weeks since my last confession.”

“You have to get up,” I said. I was frantic.

“I must confess.”

I sat back down beside him and held his hand. I wanted to fall on his chest and cry, but I contained my sobs and tried to keep my voice even.

“Tell me,” I said.

Chapter 18

COLIN SWORE all the way back to the hospital. Victoria sat in the backseat with me, held me while I sobbed. Behind us, in the rear section, was the dead body of my new, late friend, Father William Delahanty.

I knew so little about him, but enough to know how good he was, enough to be able to speak over his grave, enough to be able to tell his parishioners and friends in Chicago how kind he was and how bravely he had died.

If only I could.

I stared out the window at the dust flying up from our tires, turning everything outside the car an opaque ocher-brown.

I was picturing the devastation we had just left at the gates. I didn’t know how many people had just died, but I thought all of our attackers had been shot or had run away. Still, I was sure that this skirmish was not the full force of Zuberi’s army.

The young Gray murderers were scouts or recent recruits, wearing the rebel group’s colors and leaving bodies and the letter Z before the real onslaught began.

We parked outside the hospital. Eyes followed me from the waiting benches to the O.R., but I was single-mindedly looking for Ahmed and Rafi. I found them stoking the fire for boiling water and asked them to take Father Delahanty’s body out of Colin’s car and put him in the O.R. until I could tend to him.

I went back through the O.R., and I got a bottle of water from the shelf over the sink. Half the water was for me. I went out to the cart and poured the other half into Bollocks’s mouth. I patted his shoulder. I talked to him about what a horrible day this had been.

“It’s not over yet, Mr. B.”

Sabeena came outside and stood next to me.

“I can’t find Jemilla.”

“But…she was with you. I saw her in the cart.”

“I turned my back to help a woman into the cart, and she disappeared. I shouted, I looked, but we had to go. And now I can’t find her anywhere.”

“And Aziza?”

“She doesn’t know where Jemilla is.”

Jemilla didn’t come back to the hospital, and I was pulled into so many pieces, I couldn’t look for her. No one could. I worked with Victoria. I assisted Jup. Jimmy assisted me. By the time Colin came back on duty, we had a collection of extracted shells in a quart-sized pickle jar, and patients sleeping against the outer walls of the building, all the way around.

I went to bed knowing that I had to find a beloved child and bury a friend in the morning.

Chapter 19

WHEN I woke up in the heat of my room, I was immediately flooded with dread. Where was Jemilla?

I dressed quickly and jogged to the O.R. Father Delahanty’s body had been wrapped in a sheet marked with a cross and was lying in the back of the donkey cart. More bodies were being carried into the cart, all to be buried in a single, large grave, as there was no other way to do it.

But I would be there for Father Delahanty.

Or so I planned.

Colin came over to the wagon and said, “Brigid. We found Jemilla. She was shot-no. No. She’s alive. But she’s asking for you. She won’t let anyone else examine her.”

“I’m coming. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Colin turned his back to me, but he didn’t leave.

I sat beside the priest who had spoken his last words to me. I prayed, “Dear Lord, please look after this good man, Your servant, whom I came to love so quickly. I promised him I would tell his friends what happened to him. And that he was in Your care when he died. Thank You, God. Amen.”

I wiped my cheeks, and when Colin turned back to me, he helped me down from the cart.

Jemilla was lying on top of the bedding in one of the iron-frame beds in the O.R. She pulled her shirt away and showed me the bullet wound in her right arm, just above the elbow.

“Oh, darling,” I said. “This really hurts, doesn’t it?”

“I wrapped a piece of cloth around it tightly until the wound stopped bleeding,” she said.

I grinned at her. “That was exactly the right thing to do.”

I examined the wound. The bullet had gone through the back of her skinny biceps and had exited in the front. I asked her, “Where were you? Why didn’t you come to me or anyone here?”

“I passed out,” she said, shrugging. “How bad is it?”

“I’m going to look at this with an X-ray. But I think that shot missed the bone. That’s pretty amazing.”

“I can still shoot with my right hand?”

“Hold out your arm. Make a fist.”

She did it.

“You’re good,” I said.

“Okay,” Jemilla said. “I’d like to go to sleep now.”

I cleaned and closed the wound, and when I was finished, I asked Colin to carry Jemilla to my room.

After we’d tucked Jemilla into my bed, Colin said, “I need to talk to you, Brigid. And I don’t want you to fight me. Please. Just do what I say.”

“What, Colin? What are you talking about?”

“You must go home. There’s nowhere to hide. This hospital, this camp, is going to be overrun by Zuberi, and you know it.”

I switched my eyes to the girl in my bed, but Colin kept speaking. “It’s inevitable, Brigid. This place, what we’re doing here. It’s turned into a bloody suicide mission. You have to get out. And better a few days early than one minute too late.”

I took in a ragged breath and tried to absorb what he was telling me.

I asked him, “And you?”

“I’m going back to England as soon as I can arrange it. I’ve made calls. I’ll make calls for you.”

The breath went out of me. I looked down at the dirt floor of my room, feeling bereft. My heart was broken in more ways than I knew a heart could break.

Colin reached out and gripped my shoulders. I looked up, of course, and he pulled me close. And he kissed me. I kissed him, too. I never wanted the kiss to end, but for those few moments, I felt that nothing else was real.

And then the kiss did end. Colin dropped his arms and said to me, “I’ve tried so desperately hard to just be your friend, Brigid. I just couldn’t bear to care about you and to lose you.

“Please do what I say, dear. Please go home.”

Chapter 20

I WAS having a very vivid dream.

In it, Father Delahanty was alive. He was seated inside the confessional, and I was on the other side of the screen. I couldn’t see his face, but it was definitely him, and he was earnestly explaining something, possibly arguing with me, but whatever he was saying, it was important.

And then his words were flushed out of my head by someone shaking my shoulder.

“Brigid,” said Sabeena. “They found the BLM soldiers.” I had been sleeping in the buff. I grabbed the sheet up around me and said, “What? Where?”

“There was a massacre about fifty miles north of here. There may be survivors.”

I blinked at her, open mouthed.

“Snap out of it, Doctor,” she said. She tousled my hair. “We have to go.”

“We’re leaving?”

“Correct. Please clothe yourself and hurry to the O.R.”

She put a bottle of water and an energy bar on the stump of wood next to my bed and fled.

A massacre? Please, God, let that be a gross exaggeration. I talked to myself as I dressed, swore like mad until I found my left shoe. Then I pocketed the energy bar, grabbed my kit, and headed out.

Sabeena was waiting for me on a bench outside the operating room. She had her kit, and a canteen was strapped across her chest. I ducked into the O.R., filled a canteen, and snatched up the mini X-ray machine. After that, we climbed aboard the donkey cart, and Sabeena took the helm.

Sabeena had well-developed intuition and was right more often than anyone I knew. She had been known to anticipate incoming wounded before trucks, carts, or helicopters arrived, and-more than I could do-predict whether a patient was going to survive or die. She was superb at reading moods, too.

Now she said, “I had a very bad feeling when those soldiers left the settlement. Sometimes I hate to be right.”

Our cart rolled out down the dirt track that passed between our compound and the tukuls. We passed families clustered around cooking fires and children playing in the dirt, and by the time we reached the gates, the whacka-whacka din of a descending helicopter made me cover my ears.

Colin was already there, waiting for the chopper to land. He and Bailey got out of the Land Rover, followed by Jimmy and Vander. Colin walked toward me, scowling as he said, “Brigid, Sabeena, no. You can’t come with us. Don’t even think of arguing with me.”

Sabeena jumped down from our cart, pulled her satchel after her, and said, “I don’t work for you, Dr. Whitehead. I go where I’m needed. And if you don’t like it, you can go to hell.”

I grabbed my kit and got out of the cart after Sabeena.

I yelled over the racket, “I don’t work for you, either, Doctor!”

Colin was exasperated, but he was clearly trying to control his temper. He stepped in front of me, blocking my way.

“Brigid,” he said at full volume, a foot from my face, “the intelligence on this so-called military action is sketchy. We don’t know what we’re going to find. The four of us,” he said, sweeping his hand to take in the three other male doctors, “will assess the damage and transport survivors back to hospital. The best thing you can do is be ready for us, get it?”

I shouted back, “Colin, we’re coming! We’ll make ourselves useful, I promise.”

“Why are you so stubborn?”

I glared at him. “Are you stubborn?”

The helicopter landed. It was a large Mi-8, a Russian-made aircraft, common in South Sudan. This one had the blue UN logo on its tail section. The rotors sent up a blinding dust storm.

Sabeena and I ran toward the chopper, her incongruous pink Skechers slapping the dirt.

I wondered what her intuition was telling her now.

Chapter 21

SABEENA AND I sat next to each other in the cargo bay of the huge helicopter. We took turns peering through a scratched Plexiglas window as the helicopter flew over the battlefield, the engine and the rotors providing the sound track to the hellish sight below.

I saw hundreds of bodies. Some were in heaps, and others lay like far-flung sticks as far as I could see.

As the helicopter descended, I identified the uniforms of the dead. Many wore the camouflage and red scarves of the Gray Army, but the BLM, in gray-and-green fatigues, outnumbered the Grays two to one.

I didn’t know many of the BLM soldiers personally, but I felt that I knew them all. Most were Americans my age, from small-town USA and from cities like Boston. They had come here to help these savagely victimized and disadvantaged people whose roots they shared.

Because of their selflessness, these brave kids had died not only terribly but anonymously. Not even their bodies would go home. There were no refrigerated trucks in South Sudan. The BLM dead might be photographed for later identification, or not. But for certain, the corpses of both armies would be bulldozed into mass graves.

Our helicopter touched down, rocking on its struts. The engine whined, and the pilot shut it down. Colin helped me out of the cargo bay, and for a moment, he held me above him and looked into my eyes.

I wanted to say something meaningful, but I was still annoyed with him. I couldn’t find the right words-and then, the moment was gone. My feet pounded the ground as I ran across the flat and stinking field, sending up flights of vultures as my colleagues and I looked among the bloated bodies for signs of life.

The immense number of bodies finally stopped me cold.

I stood on the flat, brown field that stretched from nowhere to nowhere else and took in a panoramic view. My first estimate had been wrong. There weren’t hundreds of corpses. There were thousands. The BLM soldiers had been shot, and many had also been hacked with machetes and decapitated.

A hot wind blew the stench of decomposition across the field. Tears sheeted down my face. No healing would be done today.

And then I heard Sabeena shout, “Over here!”

She was hunched over a body that seemed to be twitching. I ran with my kit in hand, sliding the last few yards on my knees to where the wounded soldier lay. His breathing was ragged, and I counted six bullet holes punched into his bloody uniform. Somehow, he still held on to his life.

“We need a stretcher!” Sabeena shouted out through cupped hands. “Stay here,” she said to me, and then she ran toward our chopper.

I lifted the young man’s head into my lap and gave him a sip of water from my canteen. He coughed and asked for more.

I gave him another sip, and I pinched his thigh.

“Did you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“Can you move your feet?”

His expression told me he thought that he had moved them, but I was sure he was paralyzed from the waist down.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Nick,” he said. “Givens. My parents live in Biloxi.” He gasped. He grabbed at the chain around his neck, pulled it over his head, and pushed it and his dog tags into my hands.

“Givens. Melba and Roy. They work. At the high school.”

I said, “Nick, you have to keep your ID with you,” but he shook his head and looked at me with huge, pleading eyes. He knew that he had very little time left.

I said, “I’ll find them.”

I was holding the young man’s hand when automatic gunfire sounded behind me.

I jerked around and saw one of the Gray soldiers weaving around the obstacle course of bodies, running erratically toward us. He had been injured. Blood soaked his uniform, but he wasn’t down and clearly had more killing in mind. He saw me staring at him, and he lifted his gun and screamed, “Zu-ber-i!”

Givens strong-armed me out of his way and raised his weapon, but before he could squeeze the trigger, he grunted and rolled onto his side.

I had no choice.

I seized the gun from Givens’s hand, sat with my back to him, and used my folded knees as a gun brace. I pointed the AK at the Gray soldier, who was closing in. I was looking him squarely in the eyes when I fired.

The burst of bullets was shockingly loud, and the kick of the gun threw me back onto Givens. I caught my balance even as the soldier staggered backward and dropped.

I didn’t need to check his pulse to know what I’d done.

Dear God. This is me. Brigid Fitzgerald.

I’ve just killed a man.

Chapter 22

THE ENTIRE field was in chaos. The helicopter chopped shouted words into strings of nonsense, and the whirling dust storms colored everyone and everything a dull yellow-brown.

Colin had been standing between the helicopter and where I sat with Givens. Now he was heading toward me, waving his hands wildly, frantically calling out to me, something like, “Brigid. Come to the helicopter. Come now.”

“I need help!” I shouted back.

Nick Givens was still alive, and as long as he was breathing, I was determined to save him.

I leaned close to the young man’s ear and said, “Nick, you hang on, okay? I’m getting help for you. You’re going home.”

A new sound washed over the field.

There was another helicopter high overhead. I felt a flash of hope. More help was coming in, and surely there were other people on this field who might be alive and, with medical assistance, could be saved.

I prayed for that.

And then another shock blasted the hope right out of me. As the helicopter descended we were sprayed with gunfire. We were under fire.

Our own helicopter was rocking and beginning to lift off, and now Colin was running toward me.

“Leave him,” he shouted over the roar of the engines. “Brigid, come with me, or I’m going to throw you over my shoulder and carry you.”

I still didn’t understand-and then I did.

The logo on the tail section of the second aircraft was not the blue UN letters with the image of the globe.

The logo was the letter Z in black.

Other helicopters appeared overhead, joining this one. We were being attacked by Zuberi’s army.

Colin was only yards away. I shouted, “Colin, he can’t walk. But we’re taking him back with us. We must.”

Colin’s face contorted as bullets flew and the enemy helicopter landed a hundred feet away, sending up thick, stinging waves of dust.

I could hardly see, but I grabbed hold of Givens’s feet, and Colin, following my lead, lifted up the young man from under his arms. He was heavy, but I was damned well going to keep a grip on him. More bullets pinged into the dirt. We were making progress toward the UN airship-it was so close, I could see the pilot’s face-when Colin let go of Givens.

I screamed, “Colin! Pick him up!” when I saw the look of shock come over his face. He clutched at the bull’s-eye on the front of his T-shirt. I yelled his name, but he looked confused as he stared at his bloody palm.

He started to speak, but he couldn’t get air. His knees buckled, and he collapsed, falling onto his side.

I released Givens’s feet and ran over to Colin. A bullet had gone through the center of the target on his back and out the front. Maybe it missed his heart.

I rolled Colin onto his back, put an arm under his neck, and grabbed his dear face with my hand. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be looking past my shoulder.

“Colin, I’ll get you out of here. Please, don’t leave me.”

I pressed my lips to his and kissed him. I felt him respond, and for a moment I was filled with relief. But then he went slack. I needed help desperately, but I couldn’t leave Colin alone, even for a second.

I stood up to look for Sabeena as fusillades of gunfire sprayed around me. I felt a hard thump to my rib cage. My vision blurred and slid sideways. I was screaming inside my head when all that I’d known went black.

NO. PLEASE, GOD. NO.