Acts of faith (104 page)

“Not quite. If Hassan agrees to take us back on after things cool off, that problem will be solved. Otherwise we’ll just have to think of something.”

“How about the Nuba? What do those people do? Go back to chucking spears at gunships and bombers?”

“You know, for all your fine sentiments,” Fitzhugh said, “I believe that deep down in your white boy’s heart you think Michael Goraende is a dumb African nigger who cannot wage his war without you. He is a resourceful man. I am confident he’ll get on all on his own.”

“Happy to hear you’re so sure. The Nubans’ lives are at stake, too.”

Fitzhugh sighed. This redoubt of the American’s altruism, this crusader who dwelt inside the entrepreneur, could be the hardest to overcome. “I have given you my ideas. Maybe Hassan has some better ones. In any event, you must go to him and clear things up now. If you don’t, I have no choice but to quit. I’m prepared to do it immediately.”

After pondering the ultimatum, Douglas said, “There’s an old saying—when the decks are awash, follow the rats.”

This comment was predictable, Fitzhugh had expected something like it, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

“Sorry, Fitz,” Douglas said into his silence. “Sorry for that. I’m a little—I’m not myself right now.”

“Whoever you are, take my advice.”

Douglas sat in thought. A breeze sneaked through the shutters and stirred a tuft of his light brown hair; it rose shining in the slatted light and fell obediently back into place. “All right. I’ll talk to Tony right away, tell him to stand down, then I’ll fly myself to Nairobi.”

“I would prefer to go with you,” Fitzhugh said.

“Hassan is a busy guy, I might not get to see him today. I need somebody to mind the store.”

“You might need the moral support more.”

Douglas went to the mirror and brushed off his collar. In the reflection, Fitzhugh saw his knowing smile. “What you mean is, you don’t trust me to go through with it when I’m sitting there, eyeball to eyeball with him.”

“Very well. Yes, that’s what I meant.”

He turned around, the smile fading. “I got myself into this, I’ll get myself out.”

Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia

T
HE
U
KRAINIAN
, a dark-haired man with coal dust on his jaws, arrived Sunday night, on the same Kenya Airways commuter that carried Phyllis Rappaport. The next morning Mary brought him to Dogpatch, where Dare waited with the Hawker’s records tucked under an arm. He steered his customer to the plane, which the ground crew had finished cleaning, inside and out, an hour ago. It looked so good that Dare was almost sincere when he said he hated to part with it. The Ukranian examined the interior, from the cockpit to the rear of the cargo bay, then did a thorough walk-around outside, tugging the flaps, inspecting the props, the undersides of the wings, the wheel wells. He frowned at a water jug and a few plastic bags that some sloppy ground crewman had left lying beneath the left wing, but the plane was in perfect condition. Going into the hangar, Dare presented the folder containing the aircraft’s maintenance records and documentation. The Ukrainian studied them as if he were cramming for a test.

“A lot of hours on these engines,” he remarked at one point.

“Completely overhauled—hell, damned near
rebuilt.
Mechanics finished up only yesterday. New O-rings, new props, the works.” Dare heard the overeagerness in his own voice and cautioned himself to sound a little less motivated. “Here’s the record of the overhaul,” he added, tugging at some papers, “but the best thing is to take her up for a little test drive. Take the controls, get a feel for her yourself.”

“I am not aviator. Businessman,” he declared. “But I will make offer now, then tomorrow, you fly me to Nairobi. Everything is okay, I will buy, we take care of paperwork, registration.”

“And the offer is—?”

“Two hundred fifty thousand.”

Dare bowed his head and let out a long, regretful sigh.

“Good price for Hawker-Siddley this old, this many hours,” the Ukrainian said.

Dare regarded the man’s face, with its three-day growth, its sharp, slightly Asiatic cheekbones, its black eyes like buttons, and knew he had no hope of getting his asking price, three hundred. He tried for it nonetheless. The Ukrainian dipped into his briefcase, pulled out a three-ring book of oversize checks, and asked Dare how to spell his name.

“Take or leave,” he said, handing over a check, dated for the following day. It was an old tactic, but the sight of the number
250
,
000
had the desired effect. They shook on it, then the man took the check back, saying he would hold on to it until tomorrow. If the plane performed as advertised, the money was Dare’s.

“We could fly to Nairobi right now,” Dare said. “Why wait?”

“I have here more business for today. Tomorrow.”

“So how do I do as a used-plane salesman?” he asked Mary after dropping their buyer off at the old Pathways camp, where he was staying.

“Better than you did as an airline executive.”

“Sweet thing! Honey bunch!” he said, clowning it up, bending his twang into curly-cues of sound.
Sah-weeet thang! Hawnee buuunch!
“That’s over and done. Come tomorrow, we’re gonna have us seven hundred grand in the bank. You ought to look a lot happier than you do.”

“The point is, I am now completely dependent on you,” Mary declared. “You’re my sugar daddy.”

“We’re gonna be man and wife. Property in common.”

“And that reporter—that doesn’t make me real happy.”

“Well, it does me. Wish I could be here to see Dougie boy’s face when that shit hits the fan.”

“Talking about her, do we still fly her today?”

“Hell, no. I ain’t riskin’ our investment, not for no lousy six thousand.”

“Not for
any,
” Mary corrected. “We’d best tell her. I think Tara is free, and she could use the money.”

“All right, and then we celebrate. I’ll get the bartender to open early.”

“No celebrating until tomorrow,” Mary said. “When we deposit the check, that’s when we’ll celebrate. And do you know what you’re going to do?”

Dare started toward the Hotel California compound to see Phyllis. “Not a clue, but I know you’ll tell me.”

“You are going to buy me a new dress. Then you’re going to get a suite at the Norfolk or the New Stanley and order a bottle of Dom Perignon from room service. You are going to take me to dinner—your choice, but it had better be four stars. And finally, you are going to take me dancing, and no Texas two-step. You want to play sugar daddy, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

“I’m not any sugar daddy, I’m your goddamned fiancé,” Dare said.

F
ITZHUGH LAID HIS HEAD
on the desk. Having “minded the store” for five days on his own, he was tired. Now, in the muggy heat of a rainy-season afternoon, he had to juggle tomorrow’s and Wednesday’s flight schedules because Alexei’s Antonov was grounded in Sudan, mired in a runway that was supposed to have been serviceable but turned out to be eight hundred meters of muck. Dealing with such problems—ordinary in the context of African bush aviation—took his mind off more serious issues. There had been no word from Douglas until Saturday afternoon, when he called on the satellite phone. His message was guarded and, at eight dollars a minute, brief. He had met with Hassan, it had been an ugly scene, but Hassan had come up with some “fresh ideas” on resolving their predicament that wouldn’t require any resignations. They were working things out, and that would keep him in Nairobi until the middle of next week. Fitzhugh was to keep him informed of any new developments.

There had been none, except that Phyllis had returned to Loki last night. He assumed she was now in the air with Wesley, heading for the Nuba. Douglas’s call had given him cautious hope for a clean resolution of the current mess. He would have liked to hear Adid’s “fresh ideas” firsthand but was glad he’d been spared the scene that preceded their presentation.

He went to the coffee urn to fortify himself for the rest of the afternoon. A liquid resembling melted asphalt leaked from the spigot.

“Rachel,” he said, “I have got to get these schedules finished, and I can’t do it on this.”

“I will make a fresh pot. But you know you have to be at the UN flight office in just ten minutes.”

She raised her appointment book.

“I completely forgot.
Asante.
”

Distracted, I am too distracted
, he said to himself, driving to the UN compound for a meeting with the flight coordinator about changes in the airstrips where UN-authorized flights were permitted to land. A pickup appeared behind him, lights flicking, horn honking. He waved to the driver to pass. The vehicle swung out and came alongside, a woman at the wheel signaling to pull over. This he did, the pickup parking in front of him. Pamela Smyth sprang out and ran toward him through the mist of laterite dust.

“Fitz! I have been looking for you! Do you have a plane and crew available? It’s Tara!”

“Trouble?”

“She called in a Mayday half an hour ago, and I haven’t been able to raise her since.” Leaning into the window, Pamela clutched his arm. “She’s gone down somewhere. We need a plane for a search.”

“Gone down?” Somehow he could not imagine Tara Whitcomb crashing. “Gone down where? Did you get coordinates?”

“Only part . . . wrote it down—At the office. Please follow me.”

He almost said, “But I am late for a meeting,” and then made a U-turn.

Tara’s office was a tin shack near the Dogpatch hangar, in front of which a twin-engine plane was parked. Fitzhugh entered the shack, and then it registered on him that the plane was Dare’s Hawker. Freshly painted and washed, he hadn’t recognized it at first glance. Dare’s trip must have been delayed or called off.

Pamela was more collected now, though her voice quavered as she said, “This is all I got from her,” and showed him a scrap of paper on which she’d written one set of GPS coordinates, which wasn’t very useful without the other set.

“Tell me what you heard,” Fitzhugh said, looking at the wall map.

“She called in the Mayday at”—Pamela went to her radio log—“at twelve-oh-five. She sounded quite scared, and you know Tara—she never sounds that way. There was something about fire, and then she repeated the Mayday and gave that set of numbers and then the radio went dead. All I got was static, and another noise, like a screech, a split-second screech, and then nothing.”

A morbid silence pervaded the room. Fitzhugh knew what that screeching noise must have been—the sound of impact. He was semiliterate in map reading, but he stared at the map regardless, trying to divine where Tara might have crashed.

“Where is her flight plan?” he asked.

“Won’t do you any good. It’s false. She was headed for a no-go zone. The Nuba mountains, Zulu Three.”

“Zulu Three?” His question sounded more like an exclamation.

“Yes.”

“What was she taking there?”

“What bloody difference does that make?” Pamela said. “Besides, it was who, not what. Three passengers. A woman and two men. Journalists. They’d chartered her just this morning, a last-minute thing.”

Fitzhugh felt slightly nauseous.

A firm look gathered on Pamela’s face. “It’s Knight’s responsibility to look for her. If you don’t have a plane available, divert one. You people are responsible for this. In the old days she never would have taken a charter like this, at the very last minute, if—”

“We’re responsible,” Wesley said, swinging through the door with Mary. “It was our charter.” Fitzhugh and Pamela stared at him. “Loki tower picked up the Mayday. It’s all over town. Okay, Pam, give us what you’ve got.”

She repeated the information she’d given Fitzhugh. Dare asked for Tara’s takeoff time. Nine forty-five, Pamela replied.

Taking the paper with the coordinates, Dare went to the map. “If she was flying the standard route,” he murmured, tracing a course with a pencil, “at a Caravan’s cruising speed—one eighty-five, right Pam?” Pamela confirmed the speed, and Wesley took out a pocket calculator. “That would have put her somewhere in here when she called the Mayday.” He drew a small square on the map. “Fits with the coordinates she gave you—that line runs right through here. It’s a valley, pretty flat. If she still had control, she might have been able to make an emergency landing.”