Acts of Faith

Mustang

DARE HAD COME to a conclusion about his partner: Doug was willing to do almost anything, but only after he persuaded himself that it was for the greater good of the human race. He was the kind of guy who would smuggle heroin, then tell you that heroin was a beneficial drug and expect you to believe that because he did. On the night of the day they returned to Loki, full of war stories, boiling over with moral outrage, Doug and Fitz huddled with Dare in Knight Air’s office and filled him in on Michael Goraende’s request. Marching from one end of the room to the other, Doug declared, in so many words, that running guns into the Nuba was a sacred duty. Humanitarian aid was no longer the solution to humanitarian problems. Antiaircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles would transform the Nubans from victims into a people in full command of their destiny. He soared right into the rhetorical ionosphere, comparing them to free wild Indians and the people who hung around the UN feeding centers in the south to tame reservation Indians. “If I’d been around in the Old West,” he said, “I would have armed Crazy Horse!”

Fitz, whom Dare had credited as being more sensible, was just as carried away. No doubt he would have been less inspired if the bombs had fallen on a military target instead of on a hospital. To Dare’s mind, that didn’t add up. Imposing rules on war—the Geneva Conventions and all that bullshit—was as silly as posting traffic signs at the Daytona Speedway. Once the bars were down, human beings were capable of any crime, and it was a waste of time to expect them to behave themselves. That was why the bars had been put up in the first place.

So he didn’t share in his colleagues’ indignation. The closest he could come to it was the feeling that he owed the Nubans something, for leaving them that day when the murahaleen attacked the airfield at Zulu Two. He said, “Enough of this shit. Let’s get down to fundamentals. First off, who pays us and how much?”

“We’ve worked that out with Michael,” Fitz answered, hooded in cigarette smoke. “The SPLA is the client, eighteen thousand per flight, that’s twice what we get for flying nonlethal stuff.”

“Okay, second off, where do we pick up the hardware?”

“It’s funneled through the Ugandan Defense Ministry. Ugandans bring it to the border, then it’s smuggled over to SPLA airstrips on the Sudan side. That’s where we pick it up.”

Doug opened the door and, waving his ball cap, tried to shoo the smoke outside. “Wes, we aren’t telling you all this out of courtesy,” he said. “We need you. Michael needs you.”

“Well, ain’t that nice. How so?”

“Garang just gives him leftovers. He needs his own suppliers. We thought you could help in that department.”

“Reckon I could. There’s a guy I flew with in Blackbridge Services. He could get Michael the heavy weapons he wants, and get them quicker, cheaper than anybody else.”

“Outstanding!” Doug said, shutting the door. “That is outstanding.”

Before going any further, Dare was compelled to apprise his colleagues of certain realities. Number one—“and beg your pardon for talkin’ to you like y’all are children, but when it comes to this, that’s what you are”—both the UN and the Kenyan government winked at flying humanitarian aid into Sudan’s no-go zones because it wasn’t really “flying on the dark side but kind of the gray side.” But smuggling weapons—now that was serious contraband, and if the UN found out about it, Knight Air would be banned from Loki in a heartbeat. As for the Kenyan government, well, it was sensitive about its relations with Khartoum. It would have to take action to prove its good intentions, and that would mean revoking the company’s certificate and prohibiting it from flying anywhere in the country. “That’s the best that could happen,” Dare went on. “Worst case is, Kenya arrests us to make an example of us, confiscates the company’s assets, and then boots us out of the country, and we end up with the hole in the doughnut.”

“We’ve considered that, we’re not that dumb,” Doug said, and pushed away from the door to stand face to face with Dare. “So do we tell Adid about this? This qualifies as a major business decision.”

“He won’t go for it,” Dare said.

“The guy was an ivory smuggler. Why would he object?”

“He wouldn’t have any moral objections, on account of he doesn’t have any morals. This would be too risky, business-wise. For all the reasons I just now told you.”

“Right,” Doug said. “There’s another reason we need you. How do we minimize the risks? You’ve done this kind of thing. The Contras in Nicaragua, other places I’d suppose.”

“You’d suppose right,” Dare replied, and took a step back, giving himself room to breathe and to think. Running guns appealed to the outlaw in his nature, but he also saw how such an operation could win him financial independence and a ticket out of Africa. “First thing we’d have to do is form a shell company,” he said, and paused, twirling his sunglasses, collecting his ideas. “Let’s call it Yellowbird Air. We incorporate it in Uganda. President is me, the plane is my Hawker. It’s in my name, doesn’t belong to the company. That way, in case things go wrong and this operation gets found out, Knight Air’s hands are clean. It’s a way of providing y’all with what the CIA calls ‘plausible deniability.’ ”

Doug asked, “What about you?”

“I would take the fall.”

“Out of your devotion to the cause?”

“I’ll be comin’ to that.”

“All right, so this Yellowbird would be flying out of Kampala?”

Dare shook his head. The Ugandan capital was twice as far from the Nuba as Loki. “We would leave from here with, let’s say, a half load or a quarter load of nonlethal aid. You don’t want an empty plane flying out of here, somebody’s bound to notice and wonder what’s going on. Then we pick up the hardware on the Uganda border and head for the Nuba.”

And what about invoicing? Fitz wanted to know. How was that to be handled?

“Simple. Me and Mary keep half the eighteen thousand, deposit the other half in a bank account in Kampala, then that bank wire-transfers it to Knight Air’s account in Nairobi.”

“You and Mary,” Doug said.

“Only two people will make the gun runs. Me and her, and only five are gonna know what Yellowbird is up to—me and her and Nimrod. Y’all and Fitz make it five.”

As Dare had anticipated, Doug protested the first part of this provision. His partner wanted to fly the arms himself, maybe for the thrill of it, probably for other reasons.

“You don’t want a direct hand in this operation,” he cautioned. “You’re too emotional about this. All that crap about it being your obligation, and the Nubans like wild Indians off the reservation, Christ almighty. No room in a thing like this for that. Anyhow, y’all want me in it, that’s the deal, most of it.”

“Most? What’s the rest?”

“I’ll fly these runs for a set period, say, no less than six months. When I’m done, I’m gonna quit. Quit it all. Quit Africa. I cash in those company shares I got for sellin’ my old G1 to the company. Half a million bucks.”

“Fair enough, you’re entitled to—”

“Hold on,” Dare interrupted. “Remember when I said I’d rather have twenty tons of cold metal in my hands than pieces of paper? There’s always the chance those shares won’t make good ass-wipe in six months’ time. In case that happens, the company agrees to transfer ownership of the airplane back to me.”

Doug went pale. “What are you talking about?”

“No matter what happens, I get one of two things when I’m done—half a million in cash or the G1. That’s the rest of the deal. You and me are gonna see my lawyer and sign a contract to that effect, and that contract is gonna say that in case the Gulfstream cracks up between now and then, you pay me with the insurance money.”

“What about Adid?” Doug asked. “How do we explain why the company is handing over an airplane to you?”

“Y’all are a creative guy,” Dare said, smirking. “You’ve got six months to think of an explanation.”

“I can’t agree to that,” Doug said.

“Then I can’t either. Think it over, Dougie boy.”

Two days later he appeared at Dare’s tent and said, “Okay to everything.” But he added a codicil—as an added layer of protection, Dare was to resign as co–managing director. He would retain his shares but would not be affiliated with Knight Air’s management. That would make a plausible deniability more plausible, if one were needed. After mulling the proposal over, Dare agreed to submit his resignation.

 

“THERE’S WHY I love flying. Groundhogs don’t see things like that.”

The rainbow that would have presented itself as a conventional arch to someone on the ground appeared to Dare and Mary as a full circle in the sky. She was still young enough to be wonder-struck by such unusual sights, a girlish luster in her eyes, a breathlessness in her voice. He’d thought the days when a woman could make his heart do athletic tricks were well behind him; like an aging quarterback after one too many sacks, its joints were too stiff. She’d restored its agility. Loving her, he felt younger and more hopeful and found himself seeing things as she saw them. Without her he would have noticed the rainbow, but he would not have appreciated the glory of it, shimmering above Uganda’s cloud-shrouded forests.

Dare had rediscovered happiness, and this felicitous state of mind had overcome his aversion to a fifth marriage. It had also moved him to change the ad hoc ways that had governed, or rather, misgoverned, his nomadic life for the past thirty years. He was finished with improvising, finished with the slapdash structuring of his days; he was making plans for the future, clear, concrete plans, and the vision of the life he and Mary were going to lead together was as much a source as it was a product of his happiness.

He hadn’t proposed yet. That would come in due time, when she’d gotten her fill of living dangerously, and he reckoned a few months of arms smuggling ought to accomplish that. He wasn’t so besotted that he considered her acceptance a sure thing. On the other hand, it would not be as unlikely as drawing an inside straight. Not too long ago she had gone on a riff about having children. She wasn’t, it was true, talking about having children with him, she was speaking in a general way, but it would take a lot to convince Dare that she wasn’t dropping hints. He’d been tempted to blurt, “I’ll be the daddy!” but that sort of frankness wasn’t his style. He played it cautiously and talked back to her in the same general way, telling her that she had plenty of time yet, hell, an aunt of his had given birth at forty-six, back in the days when most country women that age were thinking about grandchildren, if they didn’t have them already. Anyway, he figured that when he said, “Let’s you and me get married and have kids,” the odds of a yes would be in his favor. That would mean he’d have to follow through, and following through would mean he’d have to learn to like children, or at least not hate them.

The private contract between him and Doug had been drawn up and signed. In six months he would have either five hundred thousand cash or an airplane worth that much. If it turned out to be the airplane, he would sell it and the Hawker, which would bring in a total of seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred thousand. Pooling that with whatever sum he and Mary earned with Yellowbird would give them enough to buy a corporate jet. Then he would tap his old contacts in the music business and go back to flying name acts on tour. He would give himself three years as a pop-music chauffeur of the air. By that time he would be approaching sixty, but Mary would still be young enough to have a kid. They could open a flight school together, or maybe retire to a ranch he’d always wanted in the Texas hill country—he wasn’t too clear on that part, it was too far in the future.

His main concern now was not to let his newfound happiness fog his judgment, that was to say, not let it blur the keen vision of his cynical eye, nor dull the keen ear that picked up Double Trouble’s warning chirps and tweets. He’d been in love before, or thought he was—it amounted to the same thing—and knew that when you were in love with one person, you tended to love everybody. If you loved them, you naturally trusted them, a bad idea in Africa. He would need to keep his rule of thumb in mind: people did the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself. In this part of the world, the wrong thing never failed to present itself, and to complicate matters, it usually came disguised as the right thing.

Entebbe tower gave him the okay to start his descent. The Nile, under an armada of clouds sailing at ten thousand feet, made a fragmented serpentine of brassy brown amid green hills. It was said to have had a redder color when Idi Amin was feeding his real and imagined enemies to the crocodiles—another glorious moment in modern African history. Half a year, give or take, and I’ll be the hell out of here with about a million. Dare’s mind leaped ahead again, painting a picture of him and Mary at the controls of a state-of-the-art airplane, jet engines whispering in the cold, incorruptible realms of high altitude. Flipping on the autopilot, sharing a drink in a lushly appointed cabin with celebrity passengers. Staying at the best hotels instead of some makuti-roofed hut or a tent with a cement-slab floor. Landing at fine airports instead of on dirt strips scratched out of the bush. Front-row complimentary seats at the concerts. Lost in these images, he flinched when the tower cleared him for final approach. He eased into his turn. The Hawker’s shadow flowed over the boat-specked, wave-ribbed glitter of Lake Victoria.

For the next couple of days Dare commuted on foot between the Speke Hotel, the central post office, and the government ministries he’d been directed to on Parliament Avenue. Within a week he had a postal box address for Yellowbird Air Services and the papers, with all seals and stamps affixed, attesting that it was a Uganda corporation. He took another walk down to the Barclay’s on Kampala Avenue, where he opened a confidential account and left instructions for wire-transferring funds to Knight Air’s bank in Nairobi. His final step was a meeting with the SPLA agents in Kampala. Michael had transmitted their names in a coded radio message. Payment arrangements were made, signals worked out. It almost made him nervous for things to go so smoothly.

In between business errands, he and Mary played tourist, she accosting strangers to take snapshots or videos of them in front of the Nakasero market or at the Kasubi Tombs. In the cool evening air, they drank on the rooftop bar at the Afrique, strolled to Fang Fang’s to eat Chinese or to the City Bar and Grill for tandoori, and then made love on the big bed in their room overlooking Jubilee Park. Lying beside her, he decided not to ask himself what he’d done to be so lucky, because there was no answer.

On their last night in the city, after another vigorous tumble, Mary jumped out of bed and got dressed, declaring that she wanted to party at the two hottest spots in town, Al’s Bar and a disco called the Half London. Dare wasn’t about to drag his spent body on a tour of nightclubs; they had a big day tomorrow. After a lot of back and forth, Mary, with an angry pout and some comment about him being an old fart, went out alone. He couldn’t believe she was being so rash. He knew about those two places, hangouts for Kampala’s working girls. Any woman, white or black, who went in there unescorted was advertising. He lay in bed for half an hour. Finally, feeling a need to assert some masculine power, he got dressed and taxied to the Half London, where an Afro-pop band was entertaining a boisterous crowd of local yuppies, hookers, and expats. Mary was dancing on the open-air dance floor with a slim young guy. Watching her sensual movements in the smoke-veiled lights, Dare was hurt that she could be having such a good time without him. When the number ended, she went to the bar with her partner, who put an arm around her waist. Dare was pleased to see her pull it off, but that gesture did nothing to calm his jealousy. He approached them from behind, heard the guy say, “Oh, come on, sweet,” in a British or Australian or South African accent, and then tapped him on the shoulder and said, “That’s it, Nigel, last dance.” The Brit, Aussie, or South African said, “Who the hell are you?” Mary let out a squeal of inebriated delight. “He’s my boss!” Dare added that he was a helluva lot more than that. “Like what?” said the guy, squaring off. This was ridiculous! It wasn’t dignified, a middle-aged man about to get into a bar fight over a woman. That was avoided when the band started up again and Mary pulled him onto the dance floor, where he felt awkward and out of place. “I just knew I’d get you out! ” she said with a wicked sparkle in her eyes.

She wanted to stay until the set was over. He insisted they go back to the hotel and in the end practically carried her out to the taxi park down the street. They argued during the ride, the argument continuing in the lobby, in the corridor, and into their room, where it degenerated into a shouting match, Mary slapping him when he told her that she’d been behaving like a tramp. He said, “Lucky you’re a woman, or you’d be taking an eight-count right now.” With a fierce, challenging look, she said, “Don’t let that stop you!” That scared him because it reminded him of Margo, who expected men to be violent and, when they failed to meet her expectations, egged them on until they were. Dare had never laid a hand on her, and he wasn’t about to break that precedent now.

Things took their natural course. He and Mary resolved their differences with their bodies—the old fight-and-f*ck syndrome. In the morning, as they packed for the trip to Murchison Falls, she was remorseful. He responded with his own apologies, though he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. His happiness returned, but absent its former purity. A slender vein of doubt had come into it. There were drawbacks to love with a much younger woman.

They had one major mission at Murchison—to touch base with Dare’s old associate from Blackbridge, Keith Cheswick—and one minor mission—to photograph, for Doug’s benefit, a rare bird called the shoebill stork. Cheswick had chosen Murchison for their meeting place because he was doing business just over the border, in the Congo. They checked in at a lodge in Paraa, where a fax from Cheswick was waiting for them: “Enjoy the view and the pool. Meet me tomorrow eight-thirty sharp at the dock. A launch reserved for us exclusively. We can talk shop and you’ll have a good chance of spotting your bird. Cheers, K.C.”

Over two years had passed since he and Cheswick had flown together in the Congo. Cheswick still had the look of the RAF fighter-pilot who was aging well: the trim gray mustache, the flat stomach, the dry iron eyes squinting out of a tanned face; but the peculiar stresses of the mercenary’s calling had begun to extract a toll. His movements weren’t as supple as before, and his shoulders were slightly stooped, not so much from the weight of years as from the weight of too many unpleasant experiences.

The launch, piloted by a skinny Ugandan in shorts and a cast-off park ranger’s shirt, was a wooden craft with an awning that aspired to the decrepitude of the African Queen. As it chugged upriver, Mary, a laminated photo of a shoebill stork that Doug had given her on her lap, swept the shores with her binoculars, and the two men sat in the stern and discussed the subject at hand.

“I made a promise that I could get the client the stuff he wanted faster, cheaper than anybody else,” Dare said. “SAM-sevens or Stingers, fourteen-point-seven- or twenty-millimeter triple-A guns.”

Cheswick leaned back against his clasped hands. “Who’s the client?”

“The SPLA.”

“They’re the end user?”

“End user certificate should be made out to the Uganda Defense Ministry. They transfer the goodies to the SPLA.”

“I’ve got some Israelis, private dealers but with solid channels to the government, who have an interest in doing what they can to make life difficult for the Muslim brethren in Khartoum.” Cheswick glanced at a hippo, its yawning mouth a garage for a Volkswagen. “I can do the SAMs for ten thousand, the Stingers would be twelve. The triple-A five to seven and a half. The client is good for the money?”

“They are. They’ve got an arrangement with the Defense Ministry.”

“Quantity?”

“Half a dozen missiles to start with, launchers and projectiles. Triple-A—”

He was interrupted by the launch pilot, who exclaimed, “Elephant!” and pointed at a solitary bull standing on a ridge above the shore marshes. Cheswick signaled his thanks for the excellent guide work.

“Figure one dozen triple-A.”

Like a clerk filling out an order blank, Cheswick wrote down the items and their quantities in a notebook. Whirlpools spun in the current and convex lenses of smooth water swelled as the great river pushed over rocks and humps on the bottom. The falls ahead made a sound like a high wind blowing through tall pine trees.

Mary came back from the bow, the camera with its long lens swinging at her side. “If you’re interested, there one is,” she said, raising her arm at a large bird standing vigil in the shallows against a backdrop of papyrus reeds. It had a big ugly head and a bill that looked as wide as a water ski.”I got the picture. Mission accomplished. Won’t Doug be happy.”

“Doug is—” Cheswick started to ask.

“My partner,” Dare said. “He’s a bird nut.”

“I see. So, anything else? Cut flowers and canned sardines?”

Dare shook his head. “For now, the missiles and triple-A are priority.”

“Cut flowers?” Mary asked. “Canned sardines?”

“Assault rifles and ammunition,” Dare explained.

“We call them cut flowers,” Cheswick elaborated, jotting in his notebook, “because cut flowers are the gift that keeps on giving. If you’ve ever seen a steel small arms ammunition box, you’ll understand why canned sardines. Did you know that your shoebill stork eats baby crocodiles?”

Mary shook her head.

“It does, but not if Mummy croc is around.”

“Big things eat little things, the whole story of Africa right there,” Dare proclaimed with a kind of rueful glee.

As the launch swept around a bend, they saw the falls before them, crashing through a narrow gorge, thundering into a cauldron of frothing water and mists. Raising his voice, Cheswick said, “The whole story everywhere. The Africans just aren’t as good at hiding it.”