Last fall, when the two Libyan assassins had broken into the apartment and Peter Caldwell needed to run away, she had not wanted to go with him. He was a killer. But once he had kidnapped her from the house and she had time to think, she realized that she had to leave that night too, and she could never go back. If there was a police investigation of the two Libyans’ deaths, how could the police not find her fingerprints? They were on every surface, every object in the apartment. The long-unsolved shotgun murders of two men outside Rapid City, South Dakota, would be solved. So she had gone with Peter, hoping that when he said the intelligence people would clean the apartment completely, he was right.
She’d had sympathy for Peter, and gained even more as she ran with him and he became Hank, and then Alan. It had never occurred to him that he wasn’t the only one who was being hunted for murder. She had often been tempted to tell him, but that wouldn’t have helped him. It might even have made him think being with her threatened his life. It was just as well that she had not taken on the task of explaining it all to him. She had loved being with him, but now he was gone and he was going to die.
32
It was 2:00 a.m. when the charter flight touched down on the runway in Tripoli. The pilot had come in slow, giving it just enough speed to keep from being swept sideways by any sudden wind, and then he hit the brakes hard. Tripoli’s runway had been part of a major battlefield at least twice in the past couple of years, and Alan Spencer didn’t blame the pilot for his caution. Mortar and tank rounds had undoubtedly hit the pavement, and there was no way to predict how well the holes had been patched.
Spencer knew that when their plane had taken off from Toronto, this airport had been in the hands of the opposition government army and the Misrata pro-Libya Dawn Militia, but in twenty-four hours anything could have happened. There had been air attacks from the Tobruk-based government in the spring, and the Zintan militia had held the airport for a couple of years before that.
As the plane shuddered and rattled to a halt at the end of the runway and began to taxi, Spencer looked over at the dark silhouette of the main terminal. As they taxied closer, headlights came on and he could see that the building that had once served three million passengers a year was now pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel scars. Some of the windows were still broken.
The plane didn’t pull up to the terminal, just stopped a hundred feet or so away, the nose turned toward the end of the runway for the return trip. The male flight attendant opened the hatch and lowered the stairs to the ground. Stepping out of the hatch to the steps was like walking into a furnace. Spencer had judged that it would be too late in the season for the Ghibli, the hot wind from the southern desert that raised the temperature a couple of times a summer. But here it was.
The aid workers had been sitting for so long that they felt desperate to get out the door. Then it seemed to occur to them, one at a time, that it might be a long time before they were in air-conditioning again. Glen McKnight, one of the volunteer doctors, said, “What do you think the temperature is?”
Spencer translated his thought into centigrade. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were forty,” he said. “It happens here sometimes.” He smiled. “It doesn’t last, usually.”
As they walked away from the plane toward the terminal, several men wearing combinations of military battle dress and civilian clothes loitered nearby. All were carrying AK-47 rifles and a variety of other gear. Most wore the kaffiyeh, but a few were bareheaded and others wore baseball caps or camouflage-print fatigue hats.
Alan was relieved to see that they paid little attention to the passengers, which meant they weren’t hostile, and they were mostly occupied in watching the middle distance around the airport.
The navigator and the flight attendant opened the bay beneath the plane and the aid workers began to unload the cartons of food, medicine, and supplies. There were no airport workers to handle baggage, and the sentries showed no inclination to help, so the Canadians worked at it themselves. They piled their cargo about fifty yards away from the plane near the terminal building. When they had removed all of the small boxes and cartons, they were able to reach the larger heavy wooden crates that had been loaded first.
Many hands lowered each large crate to the ground. Some were heavy, and others were full of medical equipment that was delicate and expensive, donated by companies or bought by contributors. The unloading took about twenty minutes of hard labor, and while that was proceeding, the fuel truck that had been parked in the shelter provided by two large buildings pulled up on the other side of the plane and a man began refueling it.
The men with guns had their eyes turned away until the plane was unloaded, and the fuel truck pulled away and went back to its sheltered space. Then the driver got out and parked a car in front of the fuel truck so the truck would be harder to hit with small arms from a distance.