The Exile

by Andrew Britton

  She lay there for several minutes, listening in her stillness. But while she heard nothing out of the ordinary, she could not shake the sense of lingering dread.

  She tugged her arms out of her sleeping bag, flopped onto her left side, and pressed a button on her wristwatch—a sturdy Alpina her uncle had given her as a going-away present. The LED display told her it was just after 4:00 a.m., which meant she had been out for three hours. After making her rounds in the hospital, she’d walked straight back to her tent, which was located less than 100 feet from the building’s main entrance. She could have had a bed inside the hospital, like the camp’s doctor and the two other nurses, but had chosen instead to sleep in a tent, not wanting to take away from the refugees the already scant space inside the building.

  Lily turned onto her stomach, covered her head with her pillow, and tried to drown out the thoughts buzzing through her mind. Literally buzzing like a hornet’s nest. There was so much to worry about. As always, the chronic lack of food and supplies, and now the troubling height and weight data from the feeding center. Earlier that evening she had learned that Faisel, a one-year-old boy from the nearby village of Sirba, was still losing weight despite extra rations of milk and close personal attention from the camp’s medical staff. Given his current rate of decline, Lily feared he would not see the end of the week, and she still didn’t know how she would explain his death to his parents. Two weeks earlier they’d lost his older sister, their only daughter, to dysentery. How were they supposed to understand it? What words of comfort would she find? Did a vocabulary even exist that could mitigate the sort of pain and grief she believed was in store for them?

  These were the types of thoughts she could not block out no matter how hard she tried. And meanwhile the buzzing in her ears wouldn’t stop, making her back so stiff, it ached from tension…keeping her awake, wide awake, on her narrow, springy cot inside the darkened tent.

  And then, suddenly, she realized that the buzzing wasn’t some kind of weird internal manifestation of nerves and fatigue, after all. When the awareness hit her, she instinctively rejected it, as the alternative just wasn’t possible. The camps were supposed to be safe ground. She had been told as much the day she arrived. But the noise didn’t fade. Instead, it grew steadily louder.

  Struggling to suppress her rising unease, Lily climbed out of her sleeping bag, pulled on a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and a thick woolen sweater, and threw back the flaps of her tent. Easing her way through the narrow opening, she got to her feet and looked around in disbelief. She immediately realized that her earlier dread was completely justified. Dozens of refugees were struggling out of their makeshift shelters, and they were all staring upward, eyes wide with fear.

  She tracked her own gaze in the direction they were looking and saw the plane at once, a black, slow-moving fleck against the starlit sky. For a second, she allowed herself to believe it was just a transport plane—a small Cessna ferrying aid workers back to Abéché, perhaps. Or a medical-supply flight making the daily run to Al-Geneina. Even as she considered these possibilities, though, she could hear—and sense—the panic rising around her.

  The refugees had no room in their psyches for denial. It had been scoured from their inner landscapes by hard experience, leaving them with a keen, stark acceptance of reality. They knew what kind of plane this was. More to the point, they knew what was coming, and they had reacted with incredible speed. Hundreds were pouring out of their makeshift shelters, and some were already running toward the rear of the camp, their children and a few meager possessions caught up in their arms.

  Frozen with dread and horror, Lily saw Beckett, the camp’s doctor, stumble out of the building, a backpack slung over his right shoulder. As he looked up at the plane circling overhead, he did a slow, strange kind of pirouette, his mouth agape. Then his eyes came back to ground level, and he looked around wildly. For a second Lily didn’t understand what he was doing. Then, as she looked on in sheer disbelief, he took off running, sprinting ahead of the steady stream of people running for the back side of the camp. The two nurses were just a few steps behind him.

  “Hey!” she screamed, fighting to be heard over the general panic. “Hey, where are you going?”

  She chased after the three fleeing aid workers, but there were too many people moving in the same direction, and she couldn’t break through the crowd. The screams were deafening: parents shouting for their children to hurry, children howling for parents they had lost in the crowd, and Lily’s own cries of outrage, all directed at the fleeing Americans. “Where are you going?” she shouted again. “Where are you…What are you doing? Come back!”

  But she was wasting her breath—they had already moved out of earshot. Lily swore in an undertone, then turned and started toward the hospital, dodging the few people in her way. No one was moving in this direction. She could not believe what she had just seen. Beckett and the two nurses had abandoned their patients without a moment’s hesitation. The full measure of their cowardice was staggering, but the worst part was that they knew the consequences of their actions. By running, they were leaving the refugees behind to be slaughtered.

  The first bomb hit when she was 10 feet from the building’s entrance. Even though she had been waiting for it, the impact still came as a shock and nearly threw her off her feet. A cloud of flames erupted somewhere off to her left, and she turned in time to see a pair of bodies hurled into the air. The sound came a split second later, a hollow boom that reverberated in her chest, and she heard the screams rise into the smoke-filled air as she sprinted the last few feet, flinging herself through the open door and into the hospital.

  Once inside, she steadied herself and looked around desperately, trying to impose a measure of sense on the chaotic scene. Some of the patients had tried to flee, but most did not have the strength. The moment they’d climbed out of bed, they had collapsed to the floor…and that was where they were lying now. A number of them were completely motionless, while others were writhing around and crying out for help.

  She went to the nearest, an elderly Fur man trying to claw his way free of the mosquito netting wrapped round his body. She quickly pulled it away from his flailing limbs, murmuring words of reassurance the whole time. Then she lifted him off the floor, shocked as always by how easy it was. All skin and bones, he couldn’t have weighed more than 80 pounds.

  Gently getting him onto the empty bed, Lily moved on to the next person. As she attended to each patient, she was all too aware of the terrible, earsplitting sounds outside—the crump of the falling bombs was loud enough to cover the screams of the wounded, but she could still hear their cries in the short, ominous gaps between concussive blasts. And despite the horror of the aerial assault, she knew that the worst was yet to come. When the bombs stopped falling, the Janjaweed would move in, burning everything in their path, killing anyone left alive.

  Part of her knew that her efforts were futile—that everything she was doing to help these people would be wasted in the end. But even as these thoughts entered her mind, she kept working steadily. She didn’t know for how long. Five minutes, ten, time was a measureless thing for her, distilled to a charged, frantic now.

  Lost as she was in what she was doing, it took Lily a while to realize that something had changed. She stopped and looked up, listening hard. A quiet, quavering voice to her left startled her back to an awareness of her situation, and she turned to the person who’d spoken the words.

  Limya Sanoasi was sitting upright in her bed, her small hands folded in her lap. Her broken left leg, one of the many injuries she’d sustained in the recent raid on her village, was hidden beneath a threadbare blanket. The blanket was still smooth and tucked in at the corners. Lily was struck by the fact that she hadn’t even tried to run.

  “It’s the bombs,” Limya repeated in English. Her solemn face was unnaturally calm; only her voice hinted at the true level of fear she was feeling. “That is what you are listening for.”

  “T
hey’ve stopped,” Lily whispered.

  “Yes. The plane is gone, but the men will follow. You must go now.”

  Lily stared back at the girl for a long moment, intensely aware of the sounds outside the building. She could hear the militiamen’s laughter and occasional bursts of gunfire mingled with the blood-curdling screams of the refugees who hadn’t escaped in time.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she finally said. She did her best to sound calm and assured, but her eyes slipped away when she spoke again. “Al-Bashir is afraid of my country, Limya. He is afraid of our army. They won’t hurt you if I stand in their way, I promise. They wouldn’t dare to—”

  “You’re wrong,” the girl said. Her voice was quiet but certain, and Lily felt a sudden tremor of doubt. “They will kill you. They will kill everyone, and there is nothing more you can do. You should leave now.”

  Lily didn’t shift her gaze from the girl, but her eyes glazed over as she struggled to take sane, logical stock of her choices—or some approximation of it amid the fundamentally insane circumstances confronting her. On one level, she felt a primitive, almost overpowering urge to run, and she hated herself for it. At the same time, what more could she do?

  Fair enough question, she thought. She had stayed behind at this crucial moment, stayed true to her principles, and she had tried to help them. Wasn’t that enough? Could she really stop what was going to happen here? Even delay it? Or would she just be another lamb to the slaughter?

  Limya seemed to sense what was running through her head. “Go,” she repeated. Her voice was little more than a whisper, her brown eyes damp, wide, and imploring. “Please.”

  Lily Durant cast one last desperate glance at the door, but she had already made her decision.

  “I can’t,” she said quietly. She locked eyes with the girl again, and this time her gaze was steady. “I won’t leave you.”

  A look of profound sadness crossed the teenager’s face. She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and murmured a few words in Zaghawa. At that moment the first of several figures appeared in the door, blocking the last remaining route of escape. When she heard them enter, Lily took a deep breath, stood, and turned to face them. She had just set her feet when the first one reached her on the run.

  She didn’t see the punch coming. It simply arrived, landing high on her right cheek, splitting the skin to the bone. Stunned by the sheer force of the blow, she stumbled back and raised her hands in self-defense. But it was no use; they were just too strong.

  The beating that followed was both methodical and completely merciless. They slapped her face, pulled her hair, and tore the clothes from her body. She felt a pair of hands groping her bare breasts and pried them loose with all her strength, or tried getting them off her, crying out in rage and revulsion. Then they wrestled her to the floor—five of them, six, maybe more than that crowding over and around her, mobbing her, too many of them to fight. Somewhere in the distance she could hear Limya and a few others begging them to stop, but the assault continued, their fists raining down from above, their boots pounding relentlessly into her ribs. Even as the world seemed to fade around her, she forced herself to stay conscious. For what, she didn’t know. But some stubborn inner voice told her to keep fighting.

  She turned onto her right side and tightened into a ball, trying to make herself a smaller target. That only seemed to enrage them further. A particularly vicious kick to the base of her spine caused her back to arch, and her arms and legs sprung open, as if of their own accord. Her assailants were quick to take advantage. One man dropped down on top of her, pinning her splayed arms and legs to the floor, and the others moved in on either side to await their turn.

  At that moment a single shot penetrated the chaos. The hands moved away, and the men holding her down jumped up and stepped aside. They backed off slowly, and she managed to scramble away in turn, her feet kicking wildly at empty air, splinters from the rough wooden floor digging into the heels of her hands. She slid back until she hit a wall, but it wasn’t far enough, and she kept pushing against it like a trapped, helpless creature surrounded by a feral pack, irrationally willing her body to sink into the solid material.

  It took her a moment to realize that someone had followed the militiamen into the hospital. He was standing before her now, and even through the swelling around her eyes, she could recognize that his uniform was that of a lieutenant colonel in the Sudanese army. He murmured something over his right shoulder, and another man stepped forward, lifted a digital camera to eye level, and pointed the lens down at her face. When he was satisfied that it was recording properly, he said a few words in Arabic to the officer, who replied with a grunt.

  Lily had folded her arms over her exposed breasts the instant she saw the camera, but the officer didn’t seem to notice. He was holding a small square of glossy paper in his right hand. He stared at the paper for a long moment, as if committing its contents to memory. As her mind slowly adjusted to the unexpected turn of events, Lily realized he was looking at a photograph. His eyes moved to her battered, tear-streaked face, and he studied her carefully.

  “You are Lilith Durant?”

  She was still struggling to catch her breath. When she could speak, she said, “Yes.”

  “The niece of the American president?”

  For a second Lily did not think she had heard correctly. But then the full weight of the words hit her, and in that instant she knew why they had attacked the camp.

  Somehow, they had learned who she really was. She had done everything in her power to keep a low profile, but it was now clear that somewhere along the line, she—or somebody close to her—had made a critical mistake. It was the only possible explanation, and the officer’s words were enough to verify her worst fears. They had come for her, and in doing so, they had been willing to destroy anything and everyone that stood in their way.

  Everything that had just happened to the camp, the destruction that swept over it, killing so many of the refugees, leaving those innocent men, women, and children massacred…she had brought it all down on them.

  All of it, all of it, was her damned fault.

  She closed her eyes in anguish, crushed by her sudden revelation. She felt dizzy, sick with guilt, but she couldn’t change what had happened, and it wouldn’t help to dwell on it. The only thing she could do now was try to save as many lives as possible, starting with the people in the surrounding beds.

  She took a second to collect herself and then opened her eyes. The commander was watching her closely.

  “Please,” she whispered through bloodied lips. “Let it end here. With me.”

  The commander didn’t react, but he had spoken in fluent English before, and Lily knew he could understand.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she pressed. “These people are not a threat to you. The camp is destroyed, and the people who ran will not come back. You’ve made your point—”

  “And what do you believe that to be?” His eyes were fixed on her. “Look at me carefully, Ms. Durant. Is mine the face of a master or follower?”

  Lily stared in confused silence, her mind groping for a response. When it didn’t find one, she simply shook her head in futility. “You’ve got what you came for. You have me. Please, just let the rest of them live. Please.”

  The colonel seemed to consider her request for a long moment, and Lily felt a tiny spark of hope.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” The colonel held out his hand, palm up, and Lily watched in despair as a second man stepped forward to hand over a large black pistol. The colonel hefted it in his hand as he smiled down at her. “But don’t worry. Those you came to help won’t be without you for long.”

  He extended the pistol at arm’s length, and Lily closed her eyes, found herself counting down. She didn’t know why, maybe just to give herself something to focus on besides the pounding of her heart.

  The last thing Lily Durant heard was a young girl’s scream of rage and despair. Then her world ceased
to exist.

  CHAPTER 2

  CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND

  The sky was still dark over central Maryland as the Bell 206B Jet-Ranger cut a fast, steady path north, sweeping over the gentle rise of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although the helicopter had room for four passengers, just one was on board for the short hop from Langley, Virginia, to Camp David, in the northernmost reaches of Catoctin Mountain Park. He had buckled in just twenty minutes earlier, but checking his watch, the sole passenger saw that he was already close to his final destination. The private retreat of every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was just 70 miles from the White House, and not much farther from the passenger’s point of embarkation. When he realized how close they were to touching down, he swore softly under his breath. Everything was moving too fast, and the worst was still to come.

  Normally, he would have been gratified by the short travel time, as it wasn’t the usual state of things. As the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Jonathan Harper was used to working on the fly, whether it was in the backseat of a government car or in the air, on one of the Agency’s executive jets. On this occasion, however, he could not bring himself to focus on the upcoming meeting. It wasn’t even the lack of useful information on hand, although that certainly wasn’t helping matters. Simply stated, he was still trying to wrap his mind around the news he had been given just one hour earlier.

  The call had come in on his secure telephone at two minutes past midnight. Fifteen minutes later he had stumbled out of his three-story town house on Embassy Row to meet the black Lincoln Town Car that was already idling at the curb. His driver had taken him straight to Agency headquarters outside Langley, where the Jet-Ranger’s twin rotors were already turning. In his hurry to get in the air, Harper had not had the opportunity to fully absorb what he’d been told by the night duty officer trotting along with him on the tarmac.

  The news could not have been worse. The refugee camp at which the president’s niece had been working in Darfur had been burned to the ground, a fact that satellite imagery had confirmed just five minutes earlier. They had heard from at least one reliable witness that Lily Durant had been killed in the attack. That particular fact had yet to be verified, though there was little doubt in Harper’s mind that it was true.