Acts of Faith

The Partnership

FITZHUGH PRODUCED THE needs assessment for John Barrett, who declared it excellent and paid him his five-thousand-dollar fee. A man of moderate habits could have made the sum last a long time in Kenya, but Fitzhugh’s inner tyrant regained power and renewed its demands, I want, I want, I want, and he rid himself of more than half of it within two months. One of the things he wanted—to see Diana Briggs again—would not have cost him anything in monetary terms; it would, however, strain his emotional resources. She often infiltrated his thoughts, the picture of her in her loose, flowing linen trousers teasing him. Her voice, crisp yet musical, had impressed itself into the grooves of his memory. He considered calling on her but could not think of a plausible excuse and was glad he could not, sensing that if he spent an hour alone with her, his would become a captive soul. This attraction to a woman who was at least sixteen years older baffled and frightened him. Differences in age aside, there was the question of her marital status, and there were the barriers of race and class, which counted for a great deal in Kenya. No rich white woman was going to surrender herself to an unemployed brown-skinned man.

Staring into a future vacant of all prospects except the doorman job his father had offered, which appalled him as much as ever, he visited several soccer clubs, asking if they needed an assistant coach. A few years ago they would have hired the Ambler on the spot; his athletic stardom, however, was now as faded as the newspaper clips in his scrapbook, and he was turned down. Despite his dwindling bank account, he was relieved, no more able to picture himself as a coach than as a hotel doorman. The intensity of his experiences in the Nuba, he realized, had rendered him incapable of adjusting to the routine of a regular job or to anything resembling ordinary life. When Tara’s Cessna had picked him and Douglas up at the Zulu One airstrip, he’d been delighted to get out of the bush; now he found himself missing those distant mountains, their hardships, their dangers, the communion with the Nubans he’d felt that night of the dance in Kologi. Above all else, he missed having a sense of purpose and relevance. He was one more jobless, superfluous human being among Nairobi’s millions.

Douglas rescued him. The American tracked him down to the flat he was sharing with an old university classmate to tell him that Knight Air Services would soon be in business. Douglas had an airplane, a Gulfstream One-C, under lease with an option to buy, and had hired an out-of-work pilot as his first officer, an Australian named Tony Bollichek. Barrett’s report on the situation in the Nuba mountains had been favorably received by the board of International People’s Aid. The first shipments would be arriving within a month, and Barrett had contracted Knight Air to be IPA’s exclusive carrier.

“I think you should throw in with us,” Douglas announced. “You’ll be our operations manager.”

Fitzhugh protested that he knew nothing about managing airline operations. Douglas dismissed his reservations with an airy, “There’s nothing to it.”

Two weeks later they took off for Loki from Wilson Field with office furniture, a high-frequency radio, a satellite phone, a Cretaceous-era desktop, a generator, and two boxes of T-shirts and baseball caps in the Gulfstream’s cargo bay. The shirts and hats, in Knight Air’s colors of green and white, with the company logo affixed—a lance-wielding knight astride an airplane—were to be worn by present and future employees. The G1C also had been repainted, a bold green stripe streaking down the center of the fuselage, the company’s name above it, the flying knight emblazoned on the nose. “When she sees this plane, Tara Whitcomb is going to realize that she’s got competition,” Douglas proclaimed as Nairobi’s skyscrapers fell below.

Barrett had a lorry waiting for them at the airfield. They unloaded the furniture and moved into Knight Air’s new office, a bungalow in a compound that some fan of classic American rock had named Hotel California. There was nothing of California in its five dusty acres. It resembled an army camp wed to an African village: tukuls, mud-brick cottages, green wall tents pitched on concrete slabs under makuti-roofed shelters. It was headquarters for International People’s Aid and several other agencies that operated independently of the UN. Fitzhugh’s first task as operations manager was to find a secretary and a flight mechanic; until he did, he would do the clerical work and Tony Bollichek, who had been to aircraft mechanics school, would be in charge of maintaining the plane.

The presence of a competitor did not trouble Tara. She even seemed to welcome it, generously allowing Fitzhugh to lean on her manager, a white Kenyan named Pamela Smyth, to teach him about flight operations. There was considerably more than nothing to it.

Another two weeks passed before IPA’s first shipment was ready: sheet-metal roofing for Manfred’s hospital, drums of drinking water, boxes of salt, all manner of medical supplies. Some ten tons altogether. As the G1C could carry only four tons, three trips, at eight thousand dollars per flight, would be required to deliver it all. “My man, if we can keep this up, we’ll gross a hundred grand in our first month,” said Douglas, in a way that made the conditional sound more like a prediction. He invited Fitzhugh to come along on the inaugural flight—“a historic occasion,” he called it.

Two uneventful hours later they landed at Zulu Two, one of the new airstrips built on a site Douglas and Suleiman had discovered during the trek through the Nuba. A mass of female porters and SPLA guerrillas surged onto the runway. The unloading began, Douglas, Tony, and Fitzhugh pitching the boxes and the roofing panels out the aft cargo door, the porters packing the lighter stuff into baskets, the soldiers lashing the tin panels to the backs of camels. When the offload was finished, Fitzhugh’s heart attached itself to the column of people and pack animals, filing off, in radiant dust, across the undulating yellow hills toward the hospital, twenty kilometers away. “Dudes, there it is,” Douglas said, jaw cocked, raptor’s nose raised, a distance in the gray eyes, as if they beheld something beyond the swaying camels, the women trudging under their laden baskets. “There you see what we’re here for.”

Inspired by a renewed sense of purpose, Fitzhugh worked hard to convince the other independent agencies to join in the effort. The need in the Nuba was too great to be met by IPA alone. He called on the Irish, the Belgians, and the Dutch and was turned down by all except one: the Friends of the Frontline, a band of evangelical American military veterans whose speciality was ministering to beleaguered Christians in war zones. Along with the usual material aid, they delivered Bibles and schoolbooks. They sent in missionary teams to help local preachers spread the gospel. They made documentaries and distributed them to their membership to raise funds to rebuild churches and schools.

Fitzhugh, a confirmed secularist, was comfortable in the company of worldly clerics like Malachy Delaney, but people of intense religious convictions, whether Christian or Muslim or something else, always made him ill at ease. So it was with the Friends of the Frontline’s two representatives in Loki. Garbed in quasi-military outfits—trousers with cargo pockets, shirts with button-down shoulder flaps, starched and pressed as if for an inspection—they were exceedingly polite and soft-spoken and wore an air of disquieting serenity that Fitzhugh had come to recognize as the calm of people absolutely sure they are on the side of the angels. One was a Vietnam veteran, Tim Fancher, a dark-haired man of fifty-odd with a long, grave face; the other, Rob Handy, had served in the Persian Gulf War and had a boxer’s physique and clear, steady green eyes that one could imagine squinting through the scope of a sniper’s rifle.

To them, Fitzhugh made his appeal. They were interested in what he had to say, particularly in John Barrett’s plans to restore St. Andrew’s mission. Like Barrett, Fancher had been ordained as a minister of the Evangelical Episcopal Church of Sudan. He mentioned that he and Handy had often discussed establishing a ministry in the Nuba mountains—“an island of Christianity in a sea of Islam” was how he described it. Perhaps Fitzhugh’s proposal was a sign that they should stop talking and start doing. They promised to get back to him.

Which they did, more quickly than Fitzhugh had expected. Appearing at Knight Air’s office one morning, they announced that they had spoken to Barrett and agreed to work with International People’s Aid, and yes, they would be pleased to sign a contract with Knight Air. This inclined Fitzhugh to think that the pair of Christian soldiers weren’t such strange fellows after all, and it delighted Douglas. “My man, you’ve really come through,” he said, and offered to make Fitzhugh a junior partner, entitling him to a five percent share of the company’s net profits in addition to his salary. Fitzhugh Martin had become something he’d never imagined: an entrepreneur.

Knight Air’s business doubled. It could now afford additional employees. Fitzhugh lured a flight mechanic away from the UN, a black-bearded South African named VanRensberg, and hired a Kikuyu woman, Rachel Njiru, as secretary and bookkeeper. But Douglas and Tony were flying five to six missions a week, a schedule that put a strain on them and on the airplane. “What we need,” Douglas declared, “is another airplane and the crew to fly it.”

 

WESLEY DARE’S CAMPAIGN to stop Joe Nakima from seizing—stealing—his old Gulfstream One had succeeded, though the price for that triumph was the loss of the plane to a legal limbo. The day after he was visited by the man from the Department of Civil Aviation, Dare hired a lawyer and filed suit against Nakima, alleging fraud. Nakima countersued. The judge hearing the case slapped an injunction on both litigants, prohibiting each from claiming the aircraft until its ownership could be decided. There followed a perfect carnival of delays and postponements, some requested by Dare’s attorneys, some by Nakima’s.

The day after he filed suit, Dare began a desperate hunt for another airplane so he could fulfill his contract with Laurent Kabila, on the march against Mobuto Sese Seko in the Congo. After two weeks of scouring aviation trade publications and contacting airplane brokers, he ran into Keith Cheswick at the Aero Club in Nairobi. Cheswick, a pilot of fortune, was an old friend; they’d flown together in Sierra Leone for Blackbridge Services, a mercenary outfit that provided security forces for diamond and copper mines, weapons for warlords who wanted to seize the mines, bodyguards for African dictators, and military advisers to rebels trying to overthrow the dictators—a perfect closed loop. Over lunch he told Cheswick about his dilemma. Cheswick, who was still with Blackbridge, replied that maybe they could help each other out, because he was looking to unload one of the firm’s aircraft, a Hawker-Siddley 748. She was a bit long in the tooth but in good shape overall. How much? Dare asked. Three hundred thousand U.S. He didn’t have that kind of money, but Cheswick said he might be able to come up with an alternative—in the spirit of friendship, eh, old boy?

Three days later he phoned and asked Dare to meet him for dinner at the New Stanley. When Dare arrived, Cheswick handed him a slender sheaf of papers, faxed from Blackbridge’s Cape Town headquarters.

“Here’s the deal, and it’s take it or leave it, Wes. We lease the plane to you for a dollar a month, but you assign your contract to us. We own net profits. At the end of the job, the Hawker’s yours. She’s your bonus.”

“That contract is worth at least seven hundred fifty. So you make a total of twice what it’s worth, leavin’ me plane rich and money poor. Do I get gas money to fly her out of the Congo? Who picks up the salary for my first officer?”

Cheswick had been an RAF fighter pilot, and he looked like one: a martial gray mustache, thin lips that smiled thinly.

“You are going to be my first officer,” he said. He did some things with his face, trying to give it a warm, affectionate expression. “You can’t expect the firm to let an airplane go on trust, can you?”

Dare’s glance sidestepped across the dining room. White linen, soft lights, wainscot buffed to a gloss, tourists babbling about their photo safaris to the Masai-Mara. “I’d be tempted to leave the airplane there, take the money and run. You’re going to be my adult supervision.”

Six months later, after ferrying Kabila and his staff from one jungle redoubt to another, Dare was back in Nairobi, owner of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane with not much more than walking-around money in his pocket. There had been no progress in his lawsuit. The G1, its engines and cockpit windows covered in canvas, sat orphaned in a part of Wilson Field reserved for derelict planes. Looking at it amid those stripped hulks gave Dare an almost physical pain, but he derived a compensatory satisfaction from knowing that he’d kept it out of Nakima’s larcenous hands, and he hoped the bastard ground his teeth in frustration every time he saw it, parked out there beyond his grasp.

He dipped into his piggy bank to present the director of civil aviation with her favorite American cookies; she returned the kindness by issuing him a valid air operator’s certificate. He then sought to hire out his services but found no takers. One Saturday afternoon, on the advice of a logistician he knew at Catholic Relief Services, he called on a small aid agency he’d never heard of before, International People’s Aid. It sounded like a Communist front. It was based in Lokichokio, but the guy in charge lived in Nairobi, out on the Langata road—an intense, talkative little Irishman married to a towering Sudanese. Dare could not picture the pallid, undersize man making love to that statuesque woman, but it must have happened: three brown brats were running noisily around the small stone-walled house when she let Dare in.

Barrett was sitting in a vinyl chair with tape over the rips in its arms. Dare declined the offer of a soft drink and stated his business, but the little man didn’t want to talk business. As a breeze passed through the jalousie windows behind him, teasing the fine hair banded above his ears, he made a long, impassioned speech about the plight of the southern Sudanese, the cruelty of the Khartoum government, the obligation of the world’s privileged nations to help, but not as the UN was helping, oh no, make no mistake about it, we cannot be neutral, for the southerners were fighting our battle against militant Islam, so the hand we lend them must be the hand of an ally.

To Dare, this was all bullshit, but his pressing need to help himself opened up reserves of patience he hadn’t known were in him. He listened without a peep. Likewise, he suspended his policy of zero tolerance for children, forbearing the brats’ shrieks as they ran into and out of the room, paying absolutely no attention to their mother’s commands, delivered in a lazy, unconvincing voice, to settle down. A size ten in the ass is what they need, he thought, pretending to be delighted by their rumpus-room antics, which had at least one beneficial effect: They caused Barrett to lose his train of thought, and while he fumbled around for it, Dare was able to get in a word. He made the sales pitch that he now could just about recite in his sleep. With his Hawker-Siddley, he would deliver people, cargo, or both anywhere in Sudan or Somalia for less than anyone else Barrett cared to name. The Irish shrimp replied that his agency was pleased with the company they had under contract, Knight Air. What kind of planes did they fly? Dare asked. They had only one airplane, a Gulfstream One-C.

Dare put on an expression of disbelief and distress. “Have y’all ever considered the possibility that that G2 might have mechanical problems? Or that it might prang up somewheres? What do you do then?”

“We would—”

“Never mind,” Dare interrupted. “Listen, a G1C cruises at two-eighty. That’s forty knots faster than a Hawker, but the Gulfstream has a capacity of four and a quarter tons. I oughta know, I flew a Gulfstream for years, got one in mothballs right now. So that airplane is gonna make a thousand miles about forty-five minutes faster’n my Hawker. It’ll save you a little over twelve hundred bucks. But I want you to think about the difference in cargo capacity. The Hawker carries five and a half tons, round figures. For twelve hundred bucks more, or”—he took a notepad and calculator out of his briefcase, scribble, scribble, press, press—“sixteen percent more money, I’m deliverin’ you one and a quarter tons, or thirty percent more cargo. Still with me, Mr. Barrett? So let’s say, for the sake of argument, y’all need to send twenty-five tons of cargo. The G1C will cost you, round figures again, thirty-four grand. The Hawker does it for twenty-nine thousand five hundred, a total savings of”—scribble, press—“forty-five hundred. Hell, you can’t argue with those numbers.”

Dare flashed the figure-blackened notepad, thinking, Christ almighty, I sound like some telemarketer, plugging a great new long-distance plan.

“And a wizard with numbers you are, and I’ll not be arguin’ with them or with you.” Dare’s pulse rate rose, like a telemarketer when he’s closed a sale. “But I will ask you to put ’em all in writing and fax me a proposal, and I’ll ring you up soon.”

The call came a little over a week later, but it wasn’t from Barrett. Dare was lying on the sofabed in his apartment on Milimani Road, reading a month-old copy of Shotgun News, when the phone rang. The voice announced a name that sounded kind of British, but it was a distinctly American voice, in which Dare detected southwestern inflections subtler, softer than the steel-guitar wa-wa of his own West Texas. Douglas Braithwaite further identified himself as managing director of Knight Air, and Dare asked if that was supposed to mean something to him.

“You were talking to John Barrett not too long ago, right? He mentioned us.”

Braithwaite sounded peeved, so Dare decided to strike first.

“Yeah, the name of your outfit slipped my mind. So what about it? Y’all gonna tell me to lay off tryin’ to steal your business? Got news for you, buddy boy. That’s how free enterprise works.”

“I don’t need lessons on capitalism,” Braithwaite said after a silence. “I think we can work together. We’re in town the next couple of days. If you’re interested, let’s talk.”

At Dare’s suggestion, they met at the Red Bull in central Nairobi. It was done up like some Swiss chalet, but it served steaks that didn’t taste like warmed-over racehorse. He deliberately showed up ten minutes late. The restaurant wasn’t crowded, and the two men were easy to spot: a big Kenyan guy going prematurely bald and a slim young American wearing a starched khaki shirt, pressed Levi’s, and brown western boots—cheap Tony Lama’s, Dare noticed when he sat down. Shoving his chair away from the table, he flung one leg over the other to better display his own pair of Rio of Mercedes, custom made in Fort Worth of python skin.

There was the usual let’s-get-acquainted small talk, and then they ate, the Kenyan devouring his steak like a starving lion. Halfway through the meal, he said in a stage whisper that he and Braithwaite would appreciate it if Dare kept their conversation to himself. Flying aid into the Nuba was a risky business.

“What we’re doing is not for public consumption, yes?” he added.

Braithwaite said, “We’ve been at it a few months. The Nuba is really hurting. Fitz and I saw for ourselves. Spent nearly three weeks on the ground in those hills. We saw guys making hoes out of bomb fragments, rubbing sticks together to light their cigarettes—”

“Listen,” Dare interrupted, “I’ve got a bleeding heart too, and it mostly bleeds for myself. I’d be obliged if y’all would come to the point, if you’ve got one.”

Braithwaite, clasping his hands on the tablecloth, looked at him with such attentiveness that Dare temporarily lost awareness of everyone else in the room.

“We need you,” he said with an undertone of entreaty.

“What for?”

“We need another pilot and another plane, and if everything we’ve heard is accurate, you’re it.”

“Barrett showed you that stuff I faxed him?”

“Yeah. But it was a couple of people who’ve flown with you who convinced us. Tony Bollichek and Mary English. Tony’s been with us from day one, and we hired Mary last week. They’ve been alternating as my first officer.”

“Yeah. I guess where Tony goes, Mary is sure to follow,” Dare said.

“They told us you’re one helluva pilot,” Braithwaite said. “Last month we did twenty-one turnarounds. It’s hard on the airplane and on us, so here we are, talking to you.”

“Y’all gonna offer me fringe benefits? A good dental plan? Hey, I run my own show. I don’t wage-ape for anyone.” Dare censored himself from adding, Especially for a kid who hadn’t got his first hard-on when I was flying gooney birds over Laos.

“I’m talking partnership, Mr. Dare. We run the show together, split the net down the middle.”

“I like the sound of that a whole lot better. Okay, facts and figures.”

Braithwaite took a moment to compose himself, or rather, to transform himself from bleeding heart into managing director.

“Bottom line is, thirty to thirty-five net. Fifteen to seventeen-five per month for each of us.”

“I just finished up a contract in the Congo. Seven hundred fifty thousand in six months,” Dare said, shading the truth. “You’re talkin’ chump change, you’ll excuse my sayin’ so.”

“We’re planning to step up operations, planning to expand.”

“Planning or hoping?”

“Planning, Mr. Dare. Planning to start flying routes into southern Sudan beside the Nuba. I’m talking the no-go zones, for independent NGOs.”

“You’ve got contracts with these NGOs or are you betting on the come?”

“We’re going to get them,” Braithwaite said in the tone of card-counter who knew, just knew, he was going to hit blackjack on the next deal.

“Lemme have one of those,” Dare said to the Kenyan, who’d pulled out a pack of Embassies.

“I was about to offer,” he said, shaking a cigarette loose.

“You were bein’ too leisurely about it.” Then, turning back to Braithwaite, Dare said, “Still sounds like it’s on the come.”

“Mr. Dare”—Dare considered telling Braithwaite to call him by his first name but decided he preferred the deferential sound of Mr.—“in two years, Knight Air is going to be as big as Pathways and maybe bigger.”

“What’s Pathways?”

“Our competition. It’s run by a woman named Tara Whitcomb.”

“Yeah. Think I’ve heard her name around.”

“We’re offering you a shot at getting in on the ground floor, and in the process, you’d be doing a helluva lot of good for a helluva lot of people.”

To avoid wincing, which might have offended Braithwaite’s sensibilities, Dare canted his head back and blew smoke at the ceiling.

“The part I like best is thumbin’ your nose at Khartoum. I like that part. I never did care for askin’ for permission.”

“I can’t say we like it,” Braithwaite said solemnly. “It’s something that has to be done. I expect you’ll want to think things over?”

“Sure will,” Dare declared.

“We’ll be at Barrett’s place till noon tomorrow. It’s hard to get hold of us in Loki, so—”

“Let you know tomorrow morning.”

Double Trouble was singing to him as he pulled through the gate into his apartment compound and parked under a bottlebrush tree, between a rust-pitted van and a hibiscus bush whose blossoms looked plastic in the parking-lot lights. Double Trouble—“DeeTee” for short—was Dare’s pet canary; he’d named it after Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band. DeeTee lived in his head, and it warbled infallible warnings whenever something or someone did not look, sound, smell, or feel quite right. Its senses were capable of detecting the faintest trace elements of falsehood or fraud, the slimmest cracks in a man or woman’s character, the smallest potential for danger or disaster in any given situation. DeeTee’s acuity, coupled to its absolute loyalty to its master—it never, ever lied to him—had made it indispensable. It was the partner of Dare’s luck. Without DeeTee, he reckoned he would now be dead, languishing in some third-world prison or putting up his feet in a homeless shelter. Conversely, if he’d listened to DeeTee every time it sang a premonitory song, he would now be living out his dream as a gentleman rancher in the sweet Texas hill country, driving around in a new Cadillac convertible, as LBJ used to do along the Perdenales, and basking in the warm assurance of a peaceful and prosperous old age. He listened most times, but now and then one of his many vices or flaws caused him to pay no heed to the faithful bird.

Lust. DeeTee had tipped him off that his first wife was going to make him miserable before he married her, but Margo’s tits, which approached Dolly Parton’s in shape and volume and were besides the first pair of white tits he’d set eyes on after years of gazing at tits of color in Laos, flipped his canary override switch. Over the next three years Dare was stunned by the accuracy of the bird’s forecast, and a very traditional divorce toted up the cost of ignoring it.

Greed. When Joe Nakima had asked for the papers for the G1, DeeTee chittered loudly, “Don’t let him get his hands on them!” But with a contract to run mirra into Somalia at stake—nine to ten grand gross a week!—Dare plugged his ears. He was still living with the consequences of that willful deafness, and they had produced other consequences, in a kind of ripple effect, and the ripples had washed him into the Red Bull tonight.

So what was the vice this time? Pride. He hated the position he now found himself in, peddling his services door to door like an encyclopedia salesman, begging his lawyer to give him another week or another month to pay his fees, suffering bouts of acid reflux when he looked at his bank statements. It was undignified, it offended his sense of who and what he was. Becoming partners with a Gen-X crusader didn’t exactly fit his self-image either, but he couldn’t see an alternative.

The problem was, DeeTee was sending negative signals about the fair-haired managing director of Knight Air Services Limited: “There’s something wrong with the guy, and no good will come from getting mixed up with him.”

“So what’s wrong with him?” Dare asked, crossing the lot to his door. Sometimes, when he was alone, he spoke out loud to the canary. “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

He entered his apartment—it was furnished in the minimalist style of a man used to clearing out of places in a hurry—pulled a Tusker out of the refrigerator, and sat on the sofabed, staring at a blank wall like a nursing-home patient at a TV during a power blackout.

“Start with the way he was dressed,” DeeTee said. “That starched shirt, those creased Levi’s. You gotta watch out for guys who put creases into their blue jeans.”

“Still ain’t good enough. Nowhere near.”

“If it comes to a choice between leaving somebody in the lurch and saving his own ass, guess which way he’ll jump?” DeeTee twittered. “And how about that look he gave us? So frank, so open, so empathetic. And that high-flown speech he made, that crap about you doing a whole lot of good for a whole lot of people.”

“You’re sayin’ he didn’t believe a word of it. He’s a phony.”

“I’m saying he believed every word.”

“Gotcha.” He gulped the can dry and went to the fridge for another. “How about the business end of things? Bullshit too? He sure can talk the talk, sure sounds like he knows what he’s doin’.”

“He was giving you the straight skinny, that’s my judgment. If we could take him out of the picture, look at this purely as a business venture, it’s okay, the best you’re likely to find under present circumstances. But we can’t take him out of the picture, can we? He does know what he’s doing. A true believer and a smart businessman at the same time. Double Trouble says that’s double trouble.”

Dare crunched the empty, shot a three-pointer into the wastebasket, opened the new can, and leaned against the refrigerator, looking at the floor with the same expression he’d fixed on the wall.

“Think Pat Robertson,” chirped DeeTee. “Think Jim Bakker and any other televangelist you can name. Just oozing sanctimonious sincerity, one eye on the Bible and the other on the bottom line, and twenty-twenty vision in both. Praise the Lord and pass the collection plate, brothers and sisters!”

“I’ll be sure to have everything in writing, every i dotted, every t crossed.”

“You know what paper is good for over here.”

“Goddamn it, you said yourself it’s the best I’m likely to find.”

“All right,” DeeTee warbled wearily. “Your mind’s made up. But do me one favor? Keep the Hawker in your name. Don’t go fifty-fifty on that. You know what happens when you don’t listen, so listen to me on this one little point, please?”

When Dare phoned the next morning to accept the offer, Braithwaite sounded like an excited boy. “That’s great!” he said, and in short order offered to buy a half share in the Hawker and to incorporate it into what he grandiosely called Knight Air’s “fleet.” Dare kept his promise to DeeTee and replied, “No deal. I lease the plane to the company.”

“But Wes,” said his new partner, dropping the Mr., “we’re supposed to be equal partners.”

“Y’all want that plane and me, those are the terms,” Dare said.

“All right,” Braithwaite said, disappointment in his voice. “I’ll have a contract drawn up.”

“Another part of the deal. There’s a loadmaster worked for me, name of Nimrod, Kenyan fella. He comes with me, ’cause I don’t trust anybody else to load my planes.”

“Okay again. Expect to see you and the Hawker in Loki—when?”

“Give me a week.”

In fact, it took only five days for him to clear out of his apartment with his meager belongings, to inform his lawyer of his new address, to sell his clapped-out Mercedes and buy a used motorcycle—more practical than a car for getting around in Lokichokio—and to ferry the plane and Nimrod to their new place of work.

The disturbing emotions that Mary English stirred in him were fresh in his memory. After he got settled in, he told Braithwaite that he wanted Tony to be his first officer, but his partner insisted on keeping the Australian. Mary would be Dare’s copilot, and that was that.

She didn’t know the first thing about a Hawker-Siddley, so his first order of business was familiarizing her with the plane. He began the day after his arrival. After she harnessed herself into the second seat, he briefed her on the controls and the instrument cluster. Arranged in a classic T, free of most electronic frills, it possessed the simplicity of a true workhorse aircraft, the kind he was used to. Looking at the array of clean analog gauges was like looking at the dashboard of a well-kept 1956 Chevy pickup: it stirred a feeling of cozy familiarity marbled with nostalgia.

“I love this old airplane,” he said. “A Hawker seven-four-eight is kinda like me, it’s a child of the sixties.”

Mary laughed. “I don’t see you as a child of the sixties. Can’t imagine you in bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed shirt, smoking a bong and groovin’ on the Beatles.”

“I did smoke, and unlike the a*shole currently occupying the Oval Office, I did inhale, but I was a Rolling Stones man. I had sympathy for the Devil.”

“Oh yeah, I’ll bet you did,” she said, with a teasing flip of her honey-colored hair. He knew then that he was in for more trouble than he’d imagined.