Acts of faith (9 page)

As the trucks drove off, trailing funnels of dust and sand, a dozen people queued alongside the airplane: two kids, three men, and seven women, clutching cloth valises and cardboard suitcases lashed with rope. Dare sometimes took paying passengers on the return legs of his mirra runs; dead-heading home with an empty, unprofitable aircraft was against his principles. While Nimrod collected the modest fare and checked passports—Kenya immigration could come down real hard if you flew in undocumented aliens—two Somalis topped off the G1’s tanks with the drums of gratis fuel. One stood by the blue plastic barrels, cranking by hand; the other stood by the wing on a folding ladder and held the hose, which was patched with duct and electrical tape. They had emptied half the drums and had just begun the fourth when the man on the ladder yelled to his companion, who stopped cranking; under pressure, one of the patches had burst and several gallons of Jet-A1 splashed over the wing. The man climbed onto it, pulled off his T-shirt, and commenced to wipe up the spillage.

“Hey, y’all!” Dare shouted. “Don’t walk on it! It’s a wing, not a welcome mat!”

The Somali stood looking down at him, puzzled.

“Get the hell off there with those dirty boots!” Dare motioned at the ladder.

The Somali climbed down, muttering in Arabic. Cussing, apologizing, Dare couldn’t tell which and didn’t care.

After fetching rags and a roll of duct tape from a storage locker aft of the cockpit, he took off his shoes, climbed onto the wing and, on his knees, cleaned the footprints, the film of fuel, stinking of paraffin. That done, he repaired the ruptured hose with the duct tape, then turned and told the man beside the drums to start cranking again. From the top of the ladder, his eyes twelve feet off the ground, he spotted a thin, reddish-beige pall some distance off, in the direction of Mogadishu. At first he thought it was the tail end of the departing convoy, until he remembered that it had driven to the west, not the north. Besides, the dust cloud was moving
toward
the airstrip. Squinting into the glare, he saw a dark object top a high ridge-crest a mile away. In a moment, magnified by the mirage shimmering on the horizon, it revealed itself as a truck or a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and the heavy machine gun mounted on the roof was silhouetted against the pale sky. The truck went on down the ridge, another behind it, a third behind that, then a fourth, all moving fast, or as fast as they could, off road in the rock-strewn desert.

In a crisis, Wes Dare had the capacity for quick, effective action most often found in people lacking reflective minds and vivid imaginations. In the span of half a minute, he got the Somali to stop pumping, pulled the hose from the fuel-fill, screwed the cap down tight, ordered Nimrod to move the passengers clear of the propellers because he was going to start the engines, then stood atop the wing and called to Tony and Mary to run back and get aboard. They were only fifty, sixty yards away, across a swath of bare ground between the airstrip and the town, but they were surrounded by people and did not hear him. Mary was intent on posing Tony with the spear-carrying elder. Dare called again, waving his arms like a football ref signaling a missed field goal. His copilot turned to face him. In the same instant, the crowd knotted around the couple unraveled; people scattered in all directions as a squad of clansmen, assault rifles in hand, dashed across the field to take up firing positions. Evidently someone in town had also seen the approaching column and sounded the alarm. For a fraction of a second, Tony looked around in bewilderment; then he seized Mary’s hand and broke for the plane.

“Nimrod! Get in, now!” Dare hollered, and leaped to the ground. His knees almost cracked from the shock. “The second they’re aboard, secure the door!”

He scrambled into the cockpit without his shoes—no time to retrieve them now—and fired up the right engine, opposite the side the forward door was on. Bollichek, who was built like a rugby wing, boosted Mary onto the boarding ladder, all but threw her into the plane, and then got into his seat and began to flip switches—radios, pumps, hydraulic controls. Dare started the second engine, rammed the throttles to full, and released the brake. The G1 bolted forward and gathered speed. Ahead, near the end of the runway, geysers of sand and dirt flew up—big rounds, probably from a twelve-seven. Another three-round burst struck within yards of the nose, spattering bits of gravel into the windshield with a sound like hailstones. Tony ducked, but Dare, who had been here before, held his eyes on the runway. As soon as he felt the gear leave the ground, he put the plane into a steep climb, then into a tight turn, the wingtip clearing the high barrier dunes by a few yards at most. He leveled off and skimmed over the water, masked from the cannon fire, and flew out to sea, the blue swells racing less than a hundred feet below. When he figured they were out of range, he pulled back and climbed to five thousand feet. No damage that he or Tony could see; the controls were responding well. Nevertheless he sent Nimrod aft to check for bullet holes. None, Nimrod reported. A miracle. Dare silently gave the miraculous powers their due and awarded the rest to himself. The altimeter turned. Ten thousand, fifteen, twenty—he felt that he could not get high enough, that he would fly her into orbit if only she were capable. He pictured himself up there, isolated and self-contained in the airless black of space, a human star untouched by the lunatic world he circled without end. Altitude twenty-one thousand feet. Airspeed two four zero. A tail wind aloft. He banked and set a westward course for Nairobi.

T
HE SKY WAS
clear all around, an eggshell of blue.

“Well now, that was like what that Yogi Berra guy said—déjà vu all over again. At least they didn’t get my prop this time. Pair of shoes is all.” Switching to autopilot, Dare lit a cigarette. He figured recent events entitled him to increase his ration.”Goddamn! If I could figure a way to refuel in midair every day, I’d stay up here.”

“What happened?” Mary’s face was flushed, her voice a little breathless, but not in a way that suggested fear. She belonged to the breed who was stimulated by being shot at and missed. There was a quickness about her, a tense alertness in her eyes that he recognized; he had seen both in the crack special operations teams he had dropped over Laos, way back when Mary English was a toddler.

“Got no idea what that was all about,” he said in answer to her question. “Some clan feud. Maybe a few thugs from Mogadishu out for a Sunday drive in their Technicals. Got bored, decided to raise a little hell.”

“Abdul cheated Abdullah on a business deal, that’s my guess,” Tony said. “Or Abdullah cheated Abdul. Or Abdul caught Abdullah making eyes at one of his three hundred sheilas. Or was it Abdullah’s sheilas Abdul was making eyes at? Crazy Somali bastards.”

He motioned at the pockmarked windshield, and because the unsteadiness in his hand was obvious, Dare could not help but observe the difference between his copilot’s reaction to the experience and Mary’s. Tony had done damned well, and he made the observation without judgment, though the mere making of it might have been a kind of judgment in itself.

“So you guys don’t think it was us they were after?” Mary asked.

“Ever roll a ball in front of a cat and see what it does?” Dare said. “One of those firefights gets to goin’, and they’ll shoot at anything that moves just ’cause it’s movin’, and we were the biggest thing in motion out there. Four legs and claws, two legs with a gun, a predator is a predator.”

A puzzled frown from Mary, as if she wasn’t sure what to think about this bleak assessment of the human animal. She changed the subject slightly, complimenting him on his flying. Pretty fancy work, the way he’d cleared the dunes, then dropped down below them.

“Defilade, it’s called,” Dare explained, surprised to discover that he enjoyed being flattered by her. “Learned it contour flyin’ in Laos. Clip the treetops, put a ridge, a hill, anything you can between you and the bad guys.”

“Bum one?” She gestured at his cigarette.

“Didn’t know you smoked.”

“I decided just this second to say yes to nicotine.”

“After today I’ll bet you’re gonna sign up for another hitch of milk-run airdrops.”

He turned partway around to give her a light. She held the cigarette awkwardly between puckered lips, blew out the smoke without inhaling, her mouth a perfect little O.

“Not likely. Not
bloody
likely, as Tony would say. If I wanted to play it safe, I would have stayed in Canada, flying sportsmen to wilderness lodges.”

“Aw hell, don’t tell me y’all came here for the adventure.”

“Sure. Partly. Mostly it’s the money. I can make three times what I could back home.”

“That’s a whole lot better. I trust folks who do things for the money. “

“And we’ll be making a pile in less than a month,” Tony said, referring to the six-month contract Dare had signed recently to fly Laurent Kabila and his people in the Congo. “Can’t come soon enough, far as I’m concerned.”

“Yup, African Charter Services is gonna be the official airline of the Congolese rebels.”

“The Congo’s pretty dicey,” Mary said.

“Right. Not like good old safe Somalia.”

Dare conducted a brief debate with himself. Had she brought them bad luck or good this morning? Bad they had been shot at, good they hadn’t been hit. Maybe the god of fortune had been neutral about her presence. He’d started the argument because he was considering hiring her. She and Tony could fly the G1 on some runs, giving him a break. Mary’s nerves were certainly right for working the Congo. That left three things to be resolved: her flying abilities, his ability to afford her, and his troubling attraction to her, which could, under the right circumstances, undermine his loyalty to his copilot and lead him to do something he would regret. Taking the last problem first, he recalled that he had worked closely with a woman only once in his career, the year he flew deliveries for Federal Express. His first officer, Sally McCabe, had been smart, fairly good-looking, and single, but he discovered that the closeness of their association and the routine practicalities of flying a 727 together dissolved her feminine mystery, which had the same effect on his romantic impulses as he hoped khat did on the Somalis’ sex drive. Sally became one of the boys in a female body. It could go the same way with Mary; of course it also could go the other way; was it worth the risk?

Tabling that question for the moment, he calculated that he could pay her seven thousand a month for the six months. It was only a bite out of the seven hundred thousand he figured to gross. Then he decided to test her skills. He took his headset off, got out of his seat, and maneuvered his bulky frame out of the cockpit, telling Tony to take over as captain.

“Mary, you’re first officer. Let’s see how well you do.”

And she did fairly well, considering her unfamiliarity with the plane. The G1 being a more supple, responsive aircraft than the Buffalos she was accustomed to, she tended to horse it a bit, a little too much rudder here, a little too much yoke there. They reached the Tana river and commenced their descent, encountering turbulence. Mary handled it with ease. Approaching Nairobi, Dare cautioned her to steer clear of the hills to the south, far beyond which he caught the faint white blaze of Kilimanjaro’s peaks. That old legend about the dead leopard found up there—what was it doing, nineteen thousand feet above sea level, in the ice and snow? Getting away from the bullshit on the ground, that’s what.

Tony took over for the landing. Overall Mary’s performance wasn’t stylish—workmanlike, he judged—but workmanlike would do for now. He would have to sit down with Nimrod, go over the books and the numbers before making any commitments. And then sit down with himself and argue that other business through.

Tony parked in front of the hangar and shut down. Nimrod took his clipboard and flight reports and went to the office in back, Dare to his car for the old pair of sneakers that had been lying in the trunk for weeks. Reshod, he took Tony and Mary to the Aero Club for lunch. She had never seen the inside of that shrine to early African aviation, and the venerable atmosphere captivated her. Old wood, wainscot, varnish. She dawdled by the antique Spitfire engine mounted on a pedestal in the hall as if it were a museum exhibit and gazed at the black-and-white photos of long-dead fliers standing beside long obsolete planes, at the wooden propeller hung over the bar, and was it the same bar where Beryl Markham had drunk her gin?

“Think so,” Dare said. “She died only about ten years ago. Eighty-odd years old. Probably still be alive, if she didn’t like that gin so much.”

He was charmed by Mary’s wonder, like she was a kid at Disneyland, but her sightseeing annoyed Tony.

“C’mon, love, we’ll do the tour later,” he said. “We’re hungry, and we’ve got another trip this afternoon.”

They passed through the serving line, Kenyan girls in starched dresses dishing out spicy beef stew from chafing dishes, and sat next to a table occupied by a Russian crew, one of whom saluted Dare with a raised beer glass.

“Vesley! How are you? Good trip?”

“A daisy, comrade.”

“Think I’ve seen him out at Loki,” Mary said, and blew on a spoonful of stew. “Know him?”

“Name’s Alexei somethin’ or other. Antonov pilot.”

“Bloke blasted us with prop wash couple of months ago,” said Tony. “Wes gave him what for, he walked over to our plane, I guess to make something out of it. Wes told him, ‘You all step under the wing of my airplane, I’ll hit you so hard it’ll hurt your mama in Moscow.’ ” Tony had done his best to mimic Dare’s accent. “Bloke didn’t understand Texas English, stepped under the wing. Wes decked him. They’ve been best of mates ever since.”