Acts of Faith

Mustang

“GOOD MORNIN’ AND jambo, rafiki.”

He showed his pass with a quick flip of his wallet, a pointless formality; none of the askaris at Wilson Field ever looked at the damned thing. That one was no exception, waving him through without a glance, his bored expression as fixed as a mask.

The ancient Volvo’s engine rattled as he eased the clutch and followed the line of pickup trucks through the gate. He parked beside his copilot’s car while the trucks proceeded across the tarmac toward the Gulfstream. In the morning twilight its dingy white fuselage reminded him of a seagull in need of a bath. Must’ve been a right smart thing in her day, when she ferried CEOs to big important meetings. No frequent-flyer first-class-upgrade bullshit for those boys, no sir, no way.

Feeling a bit old—a resistance in his joints not alarming in itself so much as in its portent—Wesley Dare got out of the car, leaned against the door, and finished the lukewarm coffee in his Thermos. He swallowed half, spit out the rest. How in the hell can it be, he asked himself, that in a country where such fine coffee gets grown, no one can brew a pot that doesn’t taste like it’s been filtered through a secretary’s pantyhose after a ten-hour day? Out on the tarmac the boys were unloading the trucks. A tally-man, a big guy, heaved the fifty-pound bags off the asphalt and held them up by the hook of a hand scale, squinting to read the weights. He called them out to Nimrod, who was Dare’s loadmaster, bookkeeper, and fixer, all wrapped up in a squat package of somber conscientiousness and honesty, or what served as a reasonable facsimile of honesty in Kenya. “Twenty kilos . . . twenty-one . . . twenty-two . . .” chanted the tally-man, while Nimrod totaled up on a pocket calculator.

Dare lit a cigarette, one of the five he allowed himself each day, and watched Tony Bollichek, his Australian first officer, do his walk-around, checking the belly of the aircraft, the landing gear, the props for dings and pings. A fine, careful pilot, in contrast to Dare, who was a fine pilot but not a particularly careful one—the casualness of his maintenance and preflight checks were legendary in the bush pilot fraternity. Tony’s girlfriend walked beside him, the Canadian, Something-Anne, or Anne-Something. Anne-Louise? Anne-Marie? Jane-Anne? In addition to her name, Dare had forgotten that she would be flying with them today. She’d spent the last three months copiloting UN Buffalos on airdrops over Sudan, and now her contract had expired and she was looking to get checked out on the G1. He suspected that she and Tony hoped he would offer her a job.

Not much chance of that. He couldn’t afford another flier on the payroll. Besides, he was wary when it came to women; wary about them in general—a guardedness not surprising in a man who had survived four marital crashes—and especially about flying with them. It wasn’t that he thought women were less competent; it was the streak of superstitiousness in him, which all his experience and technical training had never eradicated. A female in the cockpit, like a female aboard ship, was bad luck, and Dare believed in luck. It was one of the three things he did believe in, the other two being his ability to fly any airplane anywhere in any kind of weather, and loyalty to his fellow aviators. Those were the pillars of the personal philosophy Dare had constructed: a jerry-built structure, he would be the first to admit, but it suited his vagrant life and had seen him safely through twenty thousand hours of flying in dodgy places from Laos to Nicaragua to the Persian Gulf to Yemen. A Pathet Lao bullet, piercing the skin of an Air America C-47 somewhere over the Meo highlands in 1970, had nipped off half his right big toe, and he’d suffered a broken collarbone after an emergency landing in Honduras carried his plane off the runway into the jungle. Aside from the financial and emotional wounds of four divorces, that was all the injury his career had done him, and he reckoned that was because he was damned good and damned lucky. Lucky because he was good. If someone ever built a temple dedicated to fortune and skill, he’d worship there every Sunday. He could not picture himself in any other sort of church, hadn’t set foot in one since he was thirteen. The past twenty-five years had taught him that it wasn’t avarice that filled the public squares with corpses; it wasn’t envy that pulled the triggers of the world’s firing squads, nor lust that set the timers to the terrorist’s bombs; it was faith in some particular creed, sect, ideology, cause, or crusade. Having seen what true believers were capable of, Wesley Dare had turned disbelief into a kind of belief in itself. It wasn’t an attitude he put on when circumstances required it, like a parka in winter; it was part of his nature, lodged in his cells, a built-in antibody against the virus that led to zealotry and fanaticism at the one extreme, to disillusionment at the other. His life, so much of which had been spent in places that ran on bribery, theft, and fraud, had likewise immunized him to the conviction, widely held by otherwise intelligent people, that human beings are fundamentally decent. As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself. Consequently he was seldom disgusted by corrupt officials who had their hands out; seldom did he feel angry, betrayed, or disappointed when someone tried to cheat or screw him in any way. To expect anything more of most people was as pointless as waiting for the lion to eat straw with the ox. This outlook had made Dare a jovial cynic. To his eye, the human comedy really was comical.

Her name was Anne-Marie.

He ground the cigarette underfoot, then did a deep-knee bend to reassure himself that the stiffness in his limbs was the benign variety natural to a man of fifty-three and not the beginning of the acute rheumatoid arthritis that had crippled his father, who’d closed out his life in a wheelchair, fingers curled like talons. A rotten end for a guy who had barnstormed on the West Texas plains before the big war, flown P-51 Mustangs during it, and done a little bit of everything after it—crop dusting, instructing, air mail deliveries. Mustang. The word came from the Mexicans, mestengo, stray. And that was the old man, a wild one. There was no one Dare had admired more. The proudest moment of his life came when he was sixteen and soloed for the first time. He landed the 1941 Piper Cub with barely a bump, climbed out, and did his best to affect a veteran’s saunter—not entirely a contrivance, as he had flown alongside his father since he was eleven and had landed planes before he’d learned to parallel park a car. Jack McIntyre, Dad’s partner in the little flight school outside Fort Stockton, pumped his hand and said, “Damn near a greaser, Wes. You’re rolled of the same makin’s as the old man.” It had been all Dare could do to keep his composure.

Now, taking a deep breath, he transferred some of his gut to his chest, where all of it had been not too many years ago, and ambled across the tarmac, greeting truck drivers and ground crew with a broad but synthetic grin. (He didn’t much care for these city-bred Africans, saving his admiration for the regal Masai and Turkana.) “Hi, y’all! Good mornin’! One helluva fine day for movin’ a little dope, ain’t it?” Those who knew him grinned back and said, “Jambo, Bwana Wes.” (He got a chuckle out of that, Bwana Wes.) Those who did not know him merely looked with silent curiosity at the beefy, cheerful mzungu with lamb’s-wool hair like theirs, except that it was rusty red instead of black, big ears that stuck out, and a pug nose spread between narrow brown eyes and a wide mouth.

“Hey, Nimrod. Hujambo.”

“Sijambo, asante, Captain Wes,” the small Kikuyu said, focusing on his calculations. Dare was an even six-one, but standing beside Nimrod always made him feel like a center for the L.A. Lakers. He glanced at the calculator, its numbers aglow in the dim light, and then at the sacks still to be weighed. Here and there, sprigs of mirra poked shyly through the throats of poorly tied bags or through the burlap weave.

“Not so good today.” Nimrod tapped the “plus” key.

Twelve hundred and twenty-five kilos so far. The Somalis paid a bonus for any load of two tons or more. Dare would need around six hundred kilos more to make that, and he did not see six hundred remaining on the trucks. Nowhere near. Four at best.

“Well,” he said with a philosophical shrug, “win some, lose some.”

“And some are rained on,” Nimrod said, finishing one of Dare’s favorite sayings.

“Out, rafiki. Some are rained out.” He turned to Tony, who was murmuring relevant facts about the G1 to Anne-Marie. Cruising speed and altitude, fuel capacity and range. Did that pass as romantic conversation between two fliers? “How about that pump?”

“No ruckin’ furries, or so I’m told,” Bollichek said, indicating the hangar with a movement of his head. “We’ll see.”

He meant that the mechanics said they had repaired the pump, a claim whose veracity would be impeached if the amber warning light flashed during preflight. It had gone on yesterday, as he and Tony were taxiing to the runway for their afternoon run. Although Dare relished and even cultivated his reputation as an aerial cowboy, he turned around immediately, not about to take off with a malfunctioning pump. It fed a water-methanol mixture to the Rolls-Royce engine, increasing horsepower. Wilson Field was a mile high, and the plane needed the extra boost in the thinner air.

“So did they say what was wrong?”

“Buggered rotor. They replaced it.”

Dare nodded, pulled his baseball cap from his hip pocket, put it on, and watched a chain of workers passing the sacks into the aircraft, its seats removed long ago and replaced with folding web jumpseats to make cargo space.

“Looks like we’ll be ready for boarding right quick. Passengers needing assistance and with small children will board first by row numbers. How are you doin’, Anne-Marie? Y’all ready to smuggle drugs into deepest, darkest Somalia?”

A doubtful smile fluttered across her lips, then faded.

“I was just kiddin’,” he said, laughing. “Mirra, also known as khat, ain’t really a drug. Like coke or grass, I mean. And we ain’t really smugglin’, because it’s legal here. Grown like coffee on Mount Kenya’s fer-tile slopes. Legal in Somalia, too. Of course, everything’s legal in Somalia, since there ain’t any law there.”

“I know that,” she said, bristling at the assumption that she was naÏve about such matters. “It’s Mary.”

He hesitated for a beat, gazing at her. With her wavy, dark blond hair and hazel eyes, she reminded him a little of his first wife, Margo, mother of his only child and the only one of his spouses his mother had ever cared for. “You would do well to hang on to her, Wesley. You got your daddy’s looks, y’know. Ugly as home-grown sin.” That was Mom, not a strong one when it came to building her offspring’s self-esteem.

“Well, shee-hit, and I could’ve sworn it was Anne-Marie,” Dare said. “Now where did I get that idea? Tell you where. Because you’re from Canada. Anne-Marie sounds sorta French, doesn’t it?”

“I’m from Manitoba, not Quebec. Mary English. Can’t get much more un-French than that, can you?”

“Hell, no! All right, Mary English”—dipping into his shirt pocket for a spare pair of gold-embossed epaulets—“wear these. We’ll be gettin’ off the aircraft while they off-load, and these’ll identify you as crew. Just in case.”

She unbuttoned the shoulder flaps on her khaki shirt, put the epaulets on, and asked, “In case of what?”

“In case of anything,” Dare said. “Somalia, darlin’.”

The sun rose without any gradual color-splashed ascent, just an abrupt burst of equatorial light. The ground crew finished loading, fifteen hundred and fifty kilos of bagged mirra piled on the floor secured with canvas straps tied to D-rings. Aside from Mary and Nimrod, the only passengers were the stockily built dealer, representing the big man behind the operation, and the dealer’s wife, gowned, veiled, her hands and arms displaying henna tattoos. Dare and Tony had flown together long enough to dispense with most preflight formalities; normally they gave the instruments, flaps, and rudder a quick check, fired the engines, and took off. This time, in the interests of providing Mary English with a proper introduction to the Gulfstream, they ran through the entire litany with the diligence of a commercial airline crew. She sat in the jumpseat directly behind the pedestal, looking earnest and attentive. Probably one of those girls who always listened in class and got her homework in on time.

“Generator on,” said Tony into his headset’s microphone. Dare started number-two engine, and they all three watched the prop blades paddle slowly for a couple of revolutions, then spin into invisibility except for the black tips that merged to draw a blurred, stationary circle in the air.

“Clear one.”

The other engine barked and revved up to a throbbing whine, and the plane shuddered as if she were excited, anticipating her release.

Dare got his taxi clearance from the tower—a UN-chartered Antonov would be ahead of them for takeoff.

“Let’s roll,” he said, feeling a mild impatience. “There’s money to be made.”

Mary asked how much, and he told her: thirty-five hundred U.S., plus six free drums of fuel, donated by the warlord in whose territory they would be doing business. The money had come not from the small fry in back but from his boss, a guy named Hassan Adid. He released the brakes and trailed the AN-28 toward the runway, past rows of idle aircraft, most beyond their prime. Sometimes Wilson Field looked like an airshow for used-up planes.

“Busy place, ain’t it, Margo?”

“Mary.”

“I mean Mary.” He gestured out his side window. “Yeah, one busy airport, and all do-gooders, too. See that Cessna yonder? The red and white one? Those folks are goin’ to save the elephant. And that other one, the old Fokker—they’re goin’ to save the rhino. And that Polish Let out at the end is another UN plane, so I reckon they’re goin’ to save people. Winston Churchill said that the UN isn’t here to bring paradise on earth, but to prevent everything from goin’ to hell entirely. But I ain’t sure it’s doin’ even that.”

“When did Churchill say that?”

“Hell, I don’t know, but he said it.”

Ahead, the Antonov swung off the taxiway, stood poised for a moment while her skipper throttled up, then lurched forward, an overbuilt assembly of collective-factory steel riveted together in the now-extinct Soviet Union. Dare turned into position and pushed the throttle levers forward and watched the RPM needles wind up, the engines protesting the restraint of the brakes. Tony’s voice crackled in his earpieces. Flaps and rudders set . . . RPM normal . . .

“No light on the pumps,” Bollichek added. “Reckon the blokes did what they said, miracle of miracles.”

“You can bet Nimrod got on their asses.”

“The hope of Africa, Nimrod.”

“There ain’t any hope.”

“Wilson Tower, this is Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra, ready for takeoff,” Dare said.

“Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra, you are clear,” the controller said in his accented English, then gave the wind speed and direction and temperature. A fine cool morning. Fast takeoff, use up less fuel.

“Thanks. See y’all for lunch.”

He took his feet off the brakes again and went to full throttle. The Gulfstream lunged down the lumpy asphalt. The unkempt meadows alongside, vestiges from the days when Wilson was the grassy platform from which Beryl Markham flew west with the night and Finch-Hatton soared off for Tsavo and its elephant herds, sped by at sixty knots, eighty, ninety, one oh five . . . Dare pulled back on the yoke and the plane gathered herself like a high jumper, lurched, and was airborne, a free thing now, and he was free with her, liberated from gravity and the sordid earth. Gear up. Nairobi shrank below, the skyscrapers of the city center, the tidy red rooftops of Karen and Langata, the sheet-metal slums metastasizing on the outskirts. How many times had he done this since the first time with his father in a Steerman crop-duster, sagebrush and mesquite plains falling away and only sky ahead, where cloud flotillas sailed the stratosphere? How many? Four thousand? Five, six? He wondered if he would ever tire of it, the thrill of takeoff, the joy of flight. Aloft, he felt at home and somehow complete, as if in the exile of terrestrial life he were estranged from himself, a divided man.

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.

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.