Acts of Faith

Set during the Sudanese civil war of the 1990s, this novel follows a cast of aid workers, pilots, missionaries, and mercenaries whose idealism and ambition draw them into moral compromises with devastating consequences. The story is framed by Fitzhugh Martin, a mixed-race Kenyan managing an independent relief airline in Lokichokio, a remote Kenyan town near the Sudan border that serves as headquarters for international aid operations. Interviewed by a journalist years after the events he describes, Fitzhugh reflects on two Americans he once knew, Douglas and Quinette, whose faith in their own goodness blinded them to the treacherous moral currents of Africa.

Fitzhugh, a former professional soccer player turned UN relief worker, loses his job after leaking information about the UN's practice of destroying surplus food while the Turkana, a pastoral people living nearby, go hungry. Through his friend, the Irish missionary priest Malachy Delaney, he is recruited by John Barrett, a defrocked Catholic priest running International People's Aid (IPA), a Canadian nonprofit planning aid deliveries to Sudan's Nuba mountains. There he meets Douglas Braithwaite, an American pilot who has founded Knight Air Services, and Lady Diana Briggs, a wealthy Anglo-Kenyan philanthropist funding IPA's work. Douglas's charisma and conviction that "a few people can make a big difference" convince Fitzhugh to join a trek into the Nuba, where the Khartoum government has been bombing villages, inciting Arab militia raids, and herding survivors into internment camps. They meet Lieutenant Colonel Michael Goraende, the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) commander in the region. A dignified former officer, Michael deserted the Sudanese army rather than convert to Islam and now envisions the settlement of New Tourom as the seed of a new, unified Nuban society. Fitzhugh conducts a needs assessment, concluding the Nubans lack almost everything, and Knight Air begins flying aid into the mountains.

Wesley Dare, a fifty-three-year-old Texan bush pilot with decades of experience in conflicts from Laos to Nicaragua, joins Douglas as a partner. Dare has lost access to his own Gulfstream after his silent partner, Joe Nakima, secretly re-registered the plane in his own name and a corrupt judge froze it in legal limbo. Dare possesses an internal warning system he calls "Double Trouble," an imaginary canary that alerts him to danger. From the start, it sends negative signals about Douglas. His copilot is Mary English, a young Canadian pilot with whom Dare falls deeply in love.

Quinette Hardin, a twenty-four-year-old evangelical Christian from Iowa, enters the story through her church's campaign to buy freedom for enslaved Sudanese. Tall, restless, and convinced she is destined for an extraordinary life, she travels to Sudan with Ken Eismont, director of the WorldWide Christian Union, which redeems slaves by purchasing them from Arab middlemen. She delivers an impromptu speech quoting Isaiah that moves the freed captives to celebration, and Ken hires her as his field representative in Lokichokio.

Knight Air grows rapidly. Douglas's "Nuba Day" event, held at New Tourom, brings representatives from nongovernmental aid organizations into the mountains to witness conditions firsthand. Despite a mortar attack on the airstrip, the event succeeds: Douglas saves the plane and acts as an airborne forward observer, directing Michael's counterfire. The following morning, Antonov aircraft, repurposed by the government as bombers, devastate Dr. Gerhard Manfred's hospital, the only medical facility in the region. Quinette's friend Lily Hanrahan is killed, and Manfred has a complete psychological breakdown. Devastated, Michael asks Douglas and Fitzhugh to help him obtain antiaircraft weapons. Both agree, crossing the line from humanitarian aid to arms smuggling.

Dare creates a Ugandan shell company called Yellowbird Air Services to conceal the gun-running. He and Mary fly missions picking up weapons disguised in crates labeled "sewer pipes" and "insecticide" and delivering them to the Nuba. Barrett's IPA is listed as a phantom client to launder the income. The operation is kept secret from the UN, the Kenyan government, and Hassan Adid, a multimillionaire Kenyan businessman of Somali extraction who has invested heavily in Knight Air.

Quinette falls in love with Michael during her visits to the Nuba. He proposes; she agonizes but accepts, resigning from Ken's organization and writing to her family before flying to the Nuba for the wedding. Barrett performs the ceremony at St. Andrew's church. Quinette undergoes a Nuban women's initiation rite and has her abdomen tattooed with traditional scars, marking her commitment to a new identity. She carries coded arms requests between Michael and Knight Air and becomes an unofficial adviser to her husband.

Fitzhugh begins an affair with Diana, complicated by their seventeen-year age gap and her inability to have children. He proposes, and she accepts. Meanwhile, Douglas, obsessed with surpassing his rival Tara Whitcomb, has Adid's man Timmerman use UN connections to revoke the call sign of Tara's airline, Pathways Ltd., without which she cannot carry UN cargo. Pathways collapses within a month. Adid then engineers a hostile takeover of Knight Air through a staged bankruptcy, renaming it Knight Relief Services. Dare, cheated out of his contractual payout when Douglas and his copilot Tony Bollichek stage the fake destruction of Dare's old Gulfstream, punches Douglas and breaks his nose. Diana, furious at Fitzhugh's continued association with Douglas and stung by his calling her a "parasite" during an argument, breaks off the engagement.

Michael's dry-season offensive succeeds militarily but produces a catastrophe: His forces shoot down a civilian oil company plane, killing eight foreign workers. Michael confesses to Quinette that he ordered the attack deliberately, hoping to terrorize foreign companies out of Sudan. Quinette forgives him. Khartoum retaliates with devastating raids. Quinette organizes a massive relief operation and stages a fraudulent slave redemption, coaching refugees to pose as freed captives, to raise money to pay Dare for a final arms delivery.

When CNN correspondent Phyllis Rappaport investigates Knight Air's gun-running, Dare, furious at Douglas's betrayal over the airplane fraud, agrees to provide videotapes and records. Douglas learns of the threat. On the day Phyllis is to fly to the Nuba, two planes go down. Dare's Hawker suffers catastrophic engine failure from sabotaged fuel: Water sealed in plastic bags has been inserted into the fuel tanks, dissolving only after takeoff. He crash-lands at an abandoned airstrip, and Mary dies from her injuries that night. The next morning, a band of orphaned Dinka boys discovers the wreck, and the narrative implies that their leader, Matthew Deng, shoots and kills Dare. Tara's Cessna, which took Phyllis's charter after Dare's plane became unavailable, is shot down near New Tourom, killing Tara, Phyllis, and the camera crew.

Fitzhugh investigates, assembling evidence: Tony's mechanic's coveralls and aircraft manuals, a flight plan showing Douglas flew to the Nuba days before the crashes, and a bottle of Adid's brand of nasal spray found at the New Tourom airstrip. He confronts Douglas, who offers a severance check for his silence. Fitzhugh refuses and quits. Haunted by the voices of the dead, he reveals Douglas's embezzlement to Adid and arranges for Sudanese fighter jets to intercept Douglas's next arms flight. Douglas and Tony are captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death, later commuted. Upon their release, Douglas confesses to Kenyan authorities, but a magistrate dismisses the case for lack of jurisdiction and evidence. Both men are expelled from Kenya.

In the epilogue, Fitzhugh marries Diana, and they adopt two orphans. He manages Adid's reconstituted airline, content but not happy. Quinette's first son dies in infancy; she bears two more. Michael takes additional wives and becomes a portly politician as peace comes to the Nuba, marginalizing Quinette. The vision of New Tourom as a unified society fails: With peace, refugees return to their tribal homelands. In the final image, Fitzhugh encounters Quinette at a village well, scrubbing clothes, pregnant again at thirty-two but already looking middle-aged. She had asked Africa to redeem her from the commonplace and give her an extraordinary life. "It had, but now it was extracting the price. It was keeping her."