Acts of faith (8 page)

At twenty-five hundred feet he turned, picked up his easterly bearing, and climbed over the highlands before leveling off at twenty-one thousand, where faint ribbons of vapor trailed from the wingtips and the bright sun, mitigated slightly by his polarized glasses, sliced through the windshield. Airspeed two hundred twenty-five knots. He throttled back to conserve fuel and crossed into the eastern savannahs and over the Tana river, shimmering golden brown between its gallery forests, the plains beyond a mottle of red and khaki that vanished into the haze at the horizon. Barely a cloud in the sky, a dry-season sky. The radar screen was blank, as if they were flying into a vacuum, which in one sense they were. From here on, control towers and beacons would be as rare as whiskey in a Shiite’s living room. No ground radar to cross-check his altimeter reading, and not a soul to tell him about the weather and wind conditions at his destination, a small airstrip on the beach south of Mogadishu. Except for the GPS, he would have nothing more to guide him there than Finch-Hatton and Markham had had. All dead reckoning, and pray you reckon right, the penalty for being wrong pretty severe in Somalia. Fly into the wrong fiefdom, and you risked a shoulder-fired missile or some hothead shooting at you with a 12.7-millimeter antiaircraft gun.

“Fly the unfriendly skies of Somalia,” he said, thinking aloud.

“Tony was saying.”

Mary craned her head forward between the seats, an anticipatory look on her face. Tell me a story, Daddy.

“Airdrops got to be right boring, right, Marie?”

“Mary. Maaa-reee.”

“Wesley’s got a sure-fire cure for the airdrop blues.” Dare switched on the autopilot and turned partway around, feeling the warmth from her cheek radiating into the cool cabin air. “Once upon a time I had to go to Djbouti for an Eyetalian NGO that was drillin’ water wells over on the Somali side. That country used to be called the Territory of the Afars and Issas, but then they changed it to the name of the capital, so it’s Djbouti, Djbouti, the place so nice they named it twice. Flew in some hardware, then over into Somalia to pick up one of their drillin’ teams. Landed on a patch of dirt, and what do I see but three white guys runnin’ for the plane like hell wouldn’t have it and a mob of clansmen runnin’ after ’em. Shootin’ at ’em. I had both engines still runnin’, which was damned fortunate. Got the Eyetalians on board, and weren’t they just one squeeze away from shittin’ their britches, which I don’t blame them, because those clansmen were still firin’ away with their AKs and I was about to shit mine. Cranked up and took off, but not before they shot my right prop all to hell, as I was climbin’. Now Djbouti, Djbouti, ain’t so nice that it’s got anyplace where you can fix the prop to a Hawker-Siddley. Had to go all the way to Cairo to get it fixed, and on the way, after the Eyetalians got settled down, I asked them, ‘Who in the hell did you piss off and why?’ ”

“ ‘Wrong clan,’ one of ’em says to me. ‘Wrong clan work for us.’ What he meant was, the boys shootin’ at him and his buddies was a rival clan to the one they’d hired to do their well-diggin’. I asked him why they did that, and he said that if they’d hired
that
clan, then the one they
had
hired would’ve been the ones doin’ the shootin’. That’s when I realized how things are in Somalia. No matter which clan they’d hired, it would’ve been the wrong one. That was my first dealin’ with the Somalis, and let me tell you, Margo, they’re the meanest, baddest sonsabitches in East Africa. Just ask them Army Rangers they dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. It’s how come I like flyin’ mirra to the Somalis so much.”

“All right, I give up,” Mary said after a brief silence.

“Mirra does this to the libido”—Dare lowered a palm toward the floor—“so I figure the more of it I can bring in for them to chew, the less Somalis there’s gonna be, and the world will be a better place. See, I’m a do-gooder, too.”

She started to laugh but checked herself. A woman with a liberal social and political conscience, he could see that plainly, and as was his habit when he outraged someone’s sensibilities, he decided to push the outrageousness a little further.

“Well, that’s a lot more humane than nuking the black bastards, which is what we should of done after they dragged those Rangers through the streets in front of the TV cameras.”

“Jesus, Wes—”

“Aw, you ain’t thinkin’ I’m a racist, are you?”

“You do have a reputation,” she remarked guardedly. Her conscience notwithstanding, there was no percentage in getting into an argument with the man she hoped to ask for a job.

“Don’t listen to my fan club,” he said. “They like to flatter me, tellin’ everyone that Wesley Dare is a cowboy pilot and a racist and a sexist and every other kind of ‘ist.’ In all humility, I gotta admit ain’t none of it is true. Take the Masai, the Turkana, the Samburu. They’re not exactly
white,
are they? But if it was up to me, I’d be flyin’ aphrodisiacs into them so there would be more of them. And you’ve got to admit, the Somalis didn’t put their best foot forward when me and them first met. They haven’t done a thing since to change my first impression, but I’ll be sure to keep an open mind.”

A short time later he switched off the autopilot and dropped to twelve thousand, cruising at that altitude until he crossed the coastline, where he descended further, banking sharply as he did to fly due north, parallel to the shore and about three miles out. The Gulfstream cast a shadow on the Indian Ocean, which looked like a vast bolt of ruffled satin in the light southerly breeze. His principal concern now was to make sure he stayed well clear of Mogadishu; the clans in control of the city were especially trigger-happy and jealous of their airspace.

“We’re lookin’ for an abandoned oil refinery,” he informed Mary. “That’s where we’ll turn inland on our base leg.”

They flew on, and then it appeared, its rusty stacks rising from behind the barrier of coastal dunes and bluffs. He made a tight turn, over the breakers rolling ashore, the dunes, and the refinery, then brought the plane in on final, winging above expanses of scrub-speckled sand. Flaps down, gear down and locked. Flocks of goats, mud-walled huts, shacks built of corrugated iron appeared and disappeared. Altitude five hundred feet, airspeed one hundred twenty knots. The starboard wing’s shadow passed over a group of black-clad women clustered around a well. A right biblical scene, women at the well, Dare thought as a Sunday school lesson came back to him, blurred by the distance of four decades. Four and then some. Rachel, wasn’t it? No, Rebecca. Airspeed one hundred and five. Dead level. The G1 touched down, rubber softly biting hard-packed sand. Dare reached behind the throttles for the fine-pitch lever, tilting the prop blades to create drag to slow the plane. She rolled as smoothly as if he’d landed her on a freshly paved runway in L.A. or Chicago instead of a beach airstrip at the edge of Africa.

“Slick,” Mary said. Buttering me up, thought Dare as she added jauntily, “Couldn’t have done better myself.”

“There’s not many could have.” He spun the plane around to idle toward the opposite end of the airstrip. “Put wings and a prop on it, darlin’, and I’ll fly you a brick shithouse anywhere you want to go.”

“Mary,” she said. “Not Margo, not Marie, and definitely not ‘darlin’.’ Or ‘honey.’ I’m a pilot, not a waitress. You don’t mind, Wes.”

“Not atall,” he muttered, and spun the plane again, putting her nose into the wind in case he had to take off in a hurry.

After shutting the engines down, he pulled his holstered Beretta from under his seat, loaded a clip, and strapped it on.

“What’s that for?” Mary looked, well, not alarmed exactly. Concerned.

“For show mostly. Somalis respect a man with a gun, but the truth is, if it came to a fight, the only thing this would be good for is committin’ suicide.”

Nimrod opened the forward door and dropped the ladder. Dare, Tony, and Mary climbed out into the midmorning heat. Dare was dismayed to see a mini-Minolta hanging from Mary’s wrist by a cord. He took off the windbreaker he’d worn in flight—the heat had been turned off to keep the mirra fresh—and watched a convoy of Technicals bump down the dirt road leading from the town to the airstrip, each vehicle mounting a machine gun on the cab and carrying its complement of gunmen: boys who were boys in age only, assault rifles strapped across their backs and a menace in their expressionless faces and dead eyes. Shoot you down point-blank with no more feeling than if they’d squashed a bug. The trucks wheeled up and the gunmen jumped out, while Nimrod opened the rear door and porters began to off-load amid a lot of yelling and shouting. Hawkers and peddlers materialized out of thin air and turned the place into an open-air bazaar, barking offers for watches, jewelry, TVs, VCRs, cassette players, CD players, kitchen blenders—name it and they were likely to have it in one of their makeshift warehouses, brand-new stuff still in the shipping boxes that had been pilfered off the docks in Aden and Dubai and smuggled to Somalia on dhows.

“Take a look at this,” Dare said to Mary. “Pure Somalia, a Wall Street stockbroker’s wet dream, capitalism completely off the leash, and you got a license to shoot the competition. Y’all want to buy somethin’ cheap and duty-free, now’s the time and here’s the place to do it.”

“Not in a shopping mood, thanks.”

The noisy jostle appeared to make her wary, and he didn’t blame her. A current of instability and incipient violence buzzed through the carnivallike atmosphere like the hum from high-voltage power lines. The scene could turn ugly at any moment. Dare sensed it—he always did—and was pleased with Mary for sensing it as well. Her receptiveness to that hum of danger, a hum felt rather than heard, compensated for the camera, telling him that she wasn’t some goddamned tourist, like a lot of the kids who came out to Africa with their pilot’s licenses and the hope of obtaining adventure and a paycheck at the same time, never believing anything could happen to them because they were young, because Africa was theater to them and they were the audience. They didn’t realize that the spectacle could spill off the stage right into their laps before they had a chance to run for the exit.

“Like to try some of what we brought in?” he asked her.

“Tastes like dried horseshit mixed with sour limes and rotten spinach,” Tony said. “And you can get more of a jolt off a six-pack of Diet Coke.”

“What a sales pitch,” said Mary brightly. “I’d love some.”

Ambling past a tribal elder carrying a bronze-bladed spear, Dare went to one of the trucks and plucked a handful of the dark green leaves from a bag.

“Damn! This old airplane once upon a time flew executive big-wigs for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and now it’s flyin’ this shit into Somalia,” he said, passing the leaves to Mary. “Kinda like me. Once upon a time I was the official pilot for the governor of Texas. Did you know that?”

She shook her head.

“Wad it up and chew it like bubble gum,” he instructed.

She did this, grimaced, and spat the wad in disgust.

“Told you, love,” said Tony.

The elder, a traditionalist in apparel as well as armament—he wore sandals instead of sneakers, a robe instead of jeans—grinned and told her that she should have brewed it as tea.

“Khat make a very fine tea, lady,” he said.

“I can’t believe these people like this stuff.”

“Like it?” Dare said. “Hell, Mary, they love it. I’ve seen a roomful of guys chewin’ on it like bunnies in a cabbage patch. When your religion won’t allow you a taste of whiskey, you got to have somethin’ to get you through the day.”

She laughed very hard, and he said he didn’t think he had been
that
funny.

“No. It was the way you said, ‘Hell, Mary.’
Hail,
Mary. Like Wesley Dare, the big bad cowboy pilot was addressing the Virgin.”

“I take it that wouldn’t of been the case?”

“I’ll bet Mary wasn’t either,” Mary said, with a provocative flip of her honey-blond hair. The kind of woman not to permit a man much sleep, oh, my, no.

“Good thing there’s Muslims here, you’re talkin’ that blasphemeous trash.”

She raised her arm and wriggled the wrist with the dangling Minolta. “All right?”

“Don’t go too far and stick close to Tony, and if some guy says you got to pay to take his picture, don’t do it,” Dare advised.

Looking at them walk off side by side, Mary’s bottom curving sweetly under her snug khakis, he felt an emotion he did not want to call desire or jealousy; a longing, rather. He tried to banish the feeling by reminding himself that she was twenty-odd years younger and would not have been interested in him even if he weren’t as ugly as home-grown sin. The attempt wasn’t successful. Another reason they’re bad luck, he thought. Just when you think you’ve got yourself on an even keel, you meet one like her and realize you’ve been kidding yourself.

“Now finish.”

It was the dealer, gesturing at the trucks, the last one of which was being loaded.

“Shukran, my friend,” said Dare as he was handed three bundles of hundred-dollar bills, bound with rubber bands. They made him feel a little better about things, and stuffing them into his windbreaker pocket, he reflected on the odd ways that governed life in this part of the world. You could get killed here for no reason whatever, yet you could also stand in a crowd of heavily armed thugs with thirty-five hundred in cash in your pocket and feel as safe as if you were in the vault at Chase Manhattan. It was greed that protected you. Rip off the pilot who flew the stuff in, and there went your profitable trade. Thank the Lord for implanting greed in the hearts of men; if these clansmen were fighting for their faith instead of loot, it would be a different story altogether.