Acts of faith (7 page)

Not much chance of that. He couldn’t afford another flier on the payroll. Besides, he was wary when it came to women; wary about them in general—a guardedness not surprising in a man who had survived four marital crashes—and especially about flying with them. It wasn’t that he thought women were less competent; it was the streak of superstitiousness in him, which all his experience and technical training had never eradicated. A female in the cockpit, like a female aboard ship, was bad luck, and Dare believed in luck. It was one of the three things he did believe in, the other two being his ability to fly any airplane anywhere in any kind of weather, and loyalty to his fellow aviators. Those were the pillars of the personal philosophy Dare had constructed: a jerry-built structure, he would be the first to admit, but it suited his vagrant life and had seen him safely through twenty thousand hours of flying in dodgy places from Laos to Nicaragua to the Persian Gulf to Yemen. A Pathet Lao bullet, piercing the skin of an Air America C-47 somewhere over the Meo highlands in 1970, had nipped off half his right big toe, and he’d suffered a broken collarbone after an emergency landing in Honduras carried his plane off the runway into the jungle. Aside from the financial and emotional wounds of four divorces, that was all the injury his career had done him, and he reckoned that was because he was damned good and damned lucky. Lucky because he was good. If someone ever built a temple dedicated to fortune and skill, he’d worship there every Sunday. He could not picture himself in any other sort of church, hadn’t set foot in one since he was thirteen. The past twenty-five years had taught him that it wasn’t avarice that filled the public squares with corpses; it wasn’t envy that pulled the triggers of the world’s firing squads, nor lust that set the timers to the terrorist’s bombs; it was faith in some particular creed, sect, ideology, cause, or crusade. Having seen what true believers were capable of, Wesley Dare had turned disbelief into a kind of belief in itself. It wasn’t an attitude he put on when circumstances required it, like a parka in winter; it was part of his nature, lodged in his cells, a built-in antibody against the virus that led to zealotry and fanaticism at the one extreme, to disillusionment at the other. His life, so much of which had been spent in places that ran on bribery, theft, and fraud, had likewise immunized him to the conviction, widely held by otherwise intelligent people, that human beings are fundamentally decent. As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself. Consequently he was seldom disgusted by corrupt officials who had their hands out; seldom did he feel angry, betrayed, or disappointed when someone tried to cheat or screw him in any way. To expect anything more of most people was as pointless as waiting for the lion to eat straw with the ox. This outlook had made Dare a jovial cynic. To his eye, the human comedy really was comical.

Her name was Anne-Marie.

He ground the cigarette underfoot, then did a deep-knee bend to reassure himself that the stiffness in his limbs was the benign variety natural to a man of fifty-three and not the beginning of the acute rheumatoid arthritis that had crippled his father, who’d closed out his life in a wheelchair, fingers curled like talons. A rotten end for a guy who had barnstormed on the West Texas plains before the big war, flown P-51 Mustangs during it, and done a little bit of everything after it—crop dusting, instructing, air mail deliveries. Mustang. The word came from the Mexicans,
mestengo,
stray. And that was the old man, a wild one. There was no one Dare had admired more. The proudest moment of his life came when he was sixteen and soloed for the first time. He landed the 1941 Piper Cub with barely a bump, climbed out, and did his best to affect a veteran’s saunter—not entirely a contrivance, as he had flown alongside his father since he was eleven and had landed planes before he’d learned to parallel park a car. Jack McIntyre, Dad’s partner in the little flight school outside Fort Stockton, pumped his hand and said, “Damn near a greaser, Wes. You’re rolled of the same makin’s as the old man.” It had been all Dare could do to keep his composure.

Now, taking a deep breath, he transferred some of his gut to his chest, where all of it had been not too many years ago, and ambled across the tarmac, greeting truck drivers and ground crew with a broad but synthetic grin. (He didn’t much care for these city-bred Africans, saving his admiration for the regal Masai and Turkana.) “Hi, y’all! Good mornin’! One helluva fine day for movin’ a little dope, ain’t it?” Those who knew him grinned back and said, “
Jambo, Bwana
Wes.” (He got a chuckle out of that,
Bwana
Wes.) Those who did not know him merely looked with silent curiosity at the beefy, cheerful
mzungu
with lamb’s-wool hair like theirs, except that it was rusty red instead of black, big ears that stuck out, and a pug nose spread between narrow brown eyes and a wide mouth.

“Hey, Nimrod.
Hujambo.
”

“
Sijambo, asante,
Captain Wes,” the small Kikuyu said, focusing on his calculations. Dare was an even six-one, but standing beside Nimrod always made him feel like a center for the L.A. Lakers. He glanced at the calculator, its numbers aglow in the dim light, and then at the sacks still to be weighed. Here and there, sprigs of
mirra
poked shyly through the throats of poorly tied bags or through the burlap weave.

“Not so good today.” Nimrod tapped the “plus” key.

Twelve hundred and twenty-five kilos so far. The Somalis paid a bonus for any load of two tons or more. Dare would need around six hundred kilos more to make that, and he did not see six hundred remaining on the trucks. Nowhere near. Four at best.

“Well,” he said with a philosophical shrug, “win some, lose some.”

“And some are rained on,” Nimrod said, finishing one of Dare’s favorite sayings.

“
Out,
rafiki. Some are rained
out.
” He turned to Tony, who was murmuring relevant facts about the G1 to Anne-Marie. Cruising speed and altitude, fuel capacity and range. Did that pass as romantic conversation between two fliers? “How about that pump?”

“No ruckin’ furries, or so I’m told,” Bollichek said, indicating the hangar with a movement of his head. “We’ll see.”

He meant that the mechanics
said
they had repaired the pump, a claim whose veracity would be impeached if the amber warning light flashed during preflight. It had gone on yesterday, as he and Tony were taxiing to the runway for their afternoon run. Although Dare relished and even cultivated his reputation as an aerial cowboy, he turned around immediately, not about to take off with a malfunctioning pump. It fed a water-methanol mixture to the Rolls-Royce engine, increasing horsepower. Wilson Field was a mile high, and the plane needed the extra boost in the thinner air.

“So did they say what was wrong?”

“Buggered rotor. They replaced it.”

Dare nodded, pulled his baseball cap from his hip pocket, put it on, and watched a chain of workers passing the sacks into the aircraft, its seats removed long ago and replaced with folding web jumpseats to make cargo space.

“Looks like we’ll be ready for boarding right quick. Passengers needing assistance and with small children will board first by row numbers. How are you doin’, Anne-Marie? Y’all ready to smuggle drugs into deepest, darkest Somalia?”

A doubtful smile fluttered across her lips, then faded.

“I was just kiddin’,” he said, laughing. “Mirra, also known as
khat,
ain’t really a drug. Like coke or grass, I mean. And we ain’t really smugglin’, because it’s legal here. Grown like coffee on Mount Kenya’s fer-tile slopes. Legal in Somalia, too. Of course, everything’s legal in Somalia, since there ain’t any law there.”

“I know that,” she said, bristling at the assumption that she was naÏve about such matters. “It’s Mary.”

He hesitated for a beat, gazing at her. With her wavy, dark blond hair and hazel eyes, she reminded him a little of his first wife, Margo, mother of his only child and the only one of his spouses his mother had ever cared for.
“You would do well to hang on to her, Wesley. You got your daddy’s looks, y’know. Ugly as home-grown sin.”
That was Mom, not a strong one when it came to building her offspring’s self-esteem.

“Well, shee-hit, and I could’ve sworn it was Anne-Marie,” Dare said. “Now where did I get that idea? Tell you where. Because you’re from Canada. Anne-Marie sounds sorta French, doesn’t it?”

“I’m from Manitoba, not Quebec. Mary English. Can’t get much more un-French than that, can you?”

“Hell, no! All right, Mary English”—dipping into his shirt pocket for a spare pair of gold-embossed epaulets—“wear these. We’ll be gettin’ off the aircraft while they off-load, and these’ll identify you as crew. Just in case.”

She unbuttoned the shoulder flaps on her khaki shirt, put the epaulets on, and asked, “In case of what?”

“In case of anything,” Dare said. “Somalia, darlin’.”

The sun rose without any gradual color-splashed ascent, just an abrupt burst of equatorial light. The ground crew finished loading, fifteen hundred and fifty kilos of bagged mirra piled on the floor secured with canvas straps tied to D-rings. Aside from Mary and Nimrod, the only passengers were the stockily built dealer, representing the big man behind the operation, and the dealer’s wife, gowned, veiled, her hands and arms displaying henna tattoos. Dare and Tony had flown together long enough to dispense with most preflight formalities; normally they gave the instruments, flaps, and rudder a quick check, fired the engines, and took off. This time, in the interests of providing Mary English with a proper introduction to the Gulfstream, they ran through the entire litany with the diligence of a commercial airline crew. She sat in the jumpseat directly behind the pedestal, looking earnest and attentive. Probably one of those girls who always listened in class and got her homework in on time.

“Generator on,” said Tony into his headset’s microphone. Dare started number-two engine, and they all three watched the prop blades paddle slowly for a couple of revolutions, then spin into invisibility except for the black tips that merged to draw a blurred, stationary circle in the air.

“Clear one.”

The other engine barked and revved up to a throbbing whine, and the plane shuddered as if she were excited, anticipating her release.

Dare got his taxi clearance from the tower—a UN-chartered Antonov would be ahead of them for takeoff.

“Let’s roll,” he said, feeling a mild impatience. “There’s money to be made.”

Mary asked how much, and he told her: thirty-five hundred U.S., plus six free drums of fuel, donated by the warlord in whose territory they would be doing business. The money had come not from the small fry in back but from his boss, a guy named Hassan Adid. He released the brakes and trailed the AN-28 toward the runway, past rows of idle aircraft, most beyond their prime. Sometimes Wilson Field looked like an airshow for used-up planes.

“Busy place, ain’t it, Margo?”

“Mary.”

“I mean Mary.” He gestured out his side window. “Yeah, one busy airport, and all do-gooders, too. See that Cessna yonder? The red and white one? Those folks are goin’ to save the elephant. And that other one, the old Fokker—they’re goin’ to save the rhino. And that Polish Let out at the end is another UN plane, so I reckon they’re goin’ to save people. Winston Churchill said that the UN isn’t here to bring paradise on earth, but to prevent everything from goin’ to hell entirely. But I ain’t sure it’s doin’ even that.”

“When did Churchill say that?”

“Hell, I don’t know, but he said it.”

Ahead, the Antonov swung off the taxiway, stood poised for a moment while her skipper throttled up, then lurched forward, an overbuilt assembly of collective-factory steel riveted together in the now-extinct Soviet Union. Dare turned into position and pushed the throttle levers forward and watched the RPM needles wind up, the engines protesting the restraint of the brakes. Tony’s voice crackled in his earpieces. Flaps and rudders set . . . RPM normal . . .

“No light on the pumps,” Bollichek added. “Reckon the blokes did what they said, miracle of miracles.”

“You can bet Nimrod got on their asses.”

“The hope of Africa, Nimrod.”

“There ain’t any hope.”

“Wilson Tower, this is Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra, ready for takeoff,” Dare said.

“Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra, you are clear,” the controller said in his accented English, then gave the wind speed and direction and temperature. A fine cool morning. Fast takeoff, use up less fuel.

“Thanks. See y’all for lunch.”

He took his feet off the brakes again and went to full throttle. The Gulfstream lunged down the lumpy asphalt. The unkempt meadows alongside, vestiges from the days when Wilson was the grassy platform from which Beryl Markham flew west with the night and Finch-Hatton soared off for Tsavo and its elephant herds, sped by at sixty knots, eighty, ninety, one oh five . . . Dare pulled back on the yoke and the plane gathered herself like a high jumper, lurched, and was airborne, a free thing now, and he was free with her, liberated from gravity and the sordid earth. Gear up. Nairobi shrank below, the skyscrapers of the city center, the tidy red rooftops of Karen and Langata, the sheet-metal slums metastasizing on the outskirts. How many times had he done this since the first time with his father in a Steerman crop-duster, sagebrush and mesquite plains falling away and only sky ahead, where cloud flotillas sailed the stratosphere? How many? Four thousand? Five, six? He wondered if he would ever tire of it, the thrill of takeoff, the joy of flight. Aloft, he felt at home and somehow complete, as if in the exile of terrestrial life he were estranged from himself, a divided man.