Acts of faith (105 page)

“That’s very near New Tourom,” Fitzhugh said.

“Middle of the square would be about thirty miles southeast. Arab nomad country.”

“We could radio Michael. It’s near enough for him to send out a search party.”

“Too risky,” Dare said. “There’s an army garrison here, another one here”—he jabbed with the pencil—“if they intercept the message. We
do not
want them to know there’s a plane down in the area. They’ll have patrols crawlin’ all over. Y’all heard the word
fire,
” he said to Pamela. “She was on fire, she had a fire? What?”

“I don’t know. Fire, that’s what I heard.”

“How about ‘taking fire.’ ‘We’re taking fire,’ somethin’ like that.”

Pamela gnawed her lip. “It could have been, I don’t know.”

“See, you thread a kinda needle flyin’ into that airstrip, between those two garrisons. Don’t have to stray too far off course to get smack over one or the other. And that close to destination, Tara would of been into her descent, seven, eight thousand figure. In range.”

“But it was probably some mechanical failure,” Fitzhugh said, unwilling to entertain the possibility that Tara had been shot down; for if she had been, it meant that no one on that small aircraft had any chance of surviving.

“From what Pam said, it would of been a catastrophic failure,” Dare said. “But there’s not a pilot in Africa more careful about maintenance than Tara.”

“The UN has planes at Malakal, that’s close,” Pamela said. “We could ask them to send one to search the area.”

“They’ll tell y’all to wait till they get Khartoum’s okay to enter a no-go zone.”

“And you might as well wait for Khartoum to invite the pope for a visit,” Mary scoffed.

“You’re ready to fly?” Pamela asked.

“Ground crew fueled the plane early this morning,” Dare said. “How about it, Mary girl. I ain’t doin’ this without your say-so.”

“It was our flight, could have been us,” she said. “Only option I see is the one I couldn’t live with.”

Fitzhugh heard Wesley say in an undertone, “Picked a winner this time.” He was obviously proud of her. So was Fitzhugh—and ashamed of himself. He felt he had somehow willed this disaster to happen, as though a desire to be rid of Phyllis for good and all had taken refuge in his unconscious mind and petitioned the fates to make it happen. He asked Dare to go along—“another pair of eyes.”

Wesley shook his head. “This one could get dicey. Best thing for you is, park yourself by a radio and wait to hear from us. Pam, what’s your frequency?”

She gave it to him, and he and Mary walked out. Fitzhugh followed them to the plane, asking Dare to reconsider.

“Listen, we’ve got to search at low altitude. If she was shot down, the troops who did it could still be in the area. We’ll risk our butts, no one else’s. Y’all monitor the radio.”

I
N THE HANGAR
, Nimrod filled a duffel bag with tins of food, granola bars, a first-aid kit, and plastic water bottles stuffed in fertilizer bags to prevent breakage, then lugged it to the plane. He also volunteered to help them look.

“Damn, sure are a lot people wantin’ to live dangerously today.” Dare crunched the small man’s shoulders. “No way, y’all got a wife and kids.”

He and Mary were airborne a quarter of an hour later and, after making their turn, soared over the Mogilla range into Sudan. He called Pamela for a radio check, punched his waypoint into the GPS, and climbed toward twenty-one thousand feet, the savannahs and cattle pastures of eastern Equatoria falling away and away, until they showed as a sheet of wet-season green stretched to a horizon lost in haze. He went on autopilot and gave Mary his plan: descend to five thousand at the point where he thought Tara had gone down, decrease airspeed, conduct a box search, the plane flying in ever-widening squares.

“We’ll be there in two hours. It’ll be gettin’ late, and at that level we’ll be suckin’ up the fuel, so I figure we’ll have ninety minutes max search time before we’ve got to call it a day.”

“And if we do spot something?”

“If it’s a muzzle flash, we get the hell out of there. Looks like a wreck, we go down for a closer look. We see signs of life, we give ’em a wing-wag, then you take the con. Y’all are my airdrop expert, since you flew ’em for the UN. Make a pass at seven hundred, five if you can, I harness myself in at the aft cargo door and kick out the survival gear.” That there were survivors, Dare thought, was like the existence of unicorns: more a conceivability than a real possibility; but for him the conceivability was sufficient. It was a matter of keeping the one faith he believed in. “If we don’t see any Sudan army in the area,” he went on, “we radio the location to the Archangel and hope the wrong people ain’t listenin’ in. We tell him to send some people to evacuate the casualties to Zulu Three. We land and medevac ’em to Loki. It’ll take a while for the troopers to get ’em to the airstrip, so count on an overnight stay.”

“And there goes our customer and a quarter of a million dollars. We’re so goddamned noble, I can hardly stand it.”

“Time comes, I’ll radio Pam and ask her to pass the word to him that we’ll be delayed twenty-four hours. Figure he won’t find another Hawker that quick.”

They flew on. Cruising altitude, his natural habitat, the clear, cold realm where he thought clearly, where he was in control, where he knew what to do next. Not ten minutes after this smug thought passed through his mind, the left engine started to run rough; moments later, the fuel pressure began to drop drastically. Warning lights flashed on the control panel.

“Son of a bitch! Quick, get out the emergency checklist,” Dare said.

Moments after they began the check, the engine quit cold.

“Wes! What the hell is happening?”

“Got no idea,” Dare said, his heartbeat springing into the triple digits. He willed it back down to a normal rate, then tried to restart the engine. Nothing. A sentimentalist might have kept trying, a sentimentalist might have hoped that the gods of the air, moved by the compassion that had moved him and Mary to undertake this mission, would show him what the problem was and how to fix it. The unsentimental Wesley Dare put the plane into a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, then radioed his situation to Pamela and told her that he had to abort the search. He called Loki tower. “This is Yankee Bravo Three Yankee Zulu. I’ve got engine problems and I’m coming in on one engine. Have the crash trucks standin’ by.”

“Roger that,”
replied the disembodied voice.

Mary reached across the pedestal and touched his arm, her fingers damp against his skin.

“I’ve landed on one before, lots of times,” he said. “Nothin’ to worry about.”

They finished running the emergency check. It did not indicate a fuel leak. It did not tell them anything. All they knew was that fuel was not getting to the stalled engine.

“What do you think happened?” asked Mary, staring at the warning lights.

The gears of Dare’s efficient brain engaged and drew a mental schematic of the Hawker’s fuel system—tanks, fuel lines, pumps. He could think of only one explanation why the engine wasn’t running.

“Think we’ve got a malfunction in both pumps,” he said.

“Overhauled just last week and both pumps go?”

“Maybe African workmanship. A.W.A., darlin’, Africa Wins Again.”

A moment after he made that comment, Dare recalled the day he and Doug had landed at Zulu Three and discovered that the villagers had stolen fuel and put rainwater in the drums to conceal the theft.

“But maybe it’s somethin’ else,” he said. “Contaminated fuel. Maybe there’s muddy water in the starboard tank. That would cause the pumps to fail.”

Impossible, Mary replied, reminding him that they had drained the system before taking off. Any contaminants would have been expelled then.

Nevertheless, he was sure of his diagnosis, and as he flew southward, backtracking to Loki, he pondered how the contaminants could have gotten into the tank. Again, he made a mental sketch of the fuel system, but this time it wasn’t any technical analysis that gave him an answer; his mythic bird, DeeTee, gave it with four words: water jug, plastic bags. He switched from the tower’s frequency back to Pathway’s and asked Pamela to put Fitz on.

“Listen up, rafiki,” Dare said. “It’s my fuel pumps—”

“Yes, yes, your fuel pumps,” Fitz said. “What about them?”

“They ain’t workin’. I’ll explain later,” Dare said. “In the trash barrel by the hangar there’s a water jug, the kind you take on picnics, and some plastic bags. Take them out and hold them for me till I get in, and if there’s anything in the jug, don’t empty it.”

There was a static-filled pause before Fitz replied, “What is this about a picnic? I don’t understand you.”

Dare repeated the request and, thinking aloud, added, “Whoever left those things did it because he had to clear out in a hurry.”

That only confused Fitz further. “I read you loud and clear, Wesley, but what are you talking about?”

“Never mind. Just get that stuff out of the . . .”

A sudden sputtering in the left engine cut him short. Mary rapped his shoulder and pointed at the fuel pressure gauge—it was falling. Dare’s heart rate jumped back to three digits; this time, he could not lower it by force of will. He pulled the “Jungle Jepps” from between his seat and the pedestal and tossed the book into Mary’s lap.

“There’s an old airstrip east of here, Echo One. Find it. Give me the coordinates. We’re gonna have to put down there.”

As Mary flipped through the diagrams of Sudan airfields, he made a hard left turn, then pushed the yoke forward to lose altitude.

“Thirty miles out, bearing one five five,” Mary said, her voice strained.

Dare adjusted his course, descending sharply. “What else does it say?”

“ ‘Caution: No longer maintained. For emergencies only,’ ” she replied. “ ‘Tall grass, forty foot trees at both ends and both sides of runway. Very uneven. Treacherous at southeast end.’ ”

“Well, this sure is an emergency,” he said. “Dump fuel.”

While she did that, Dare called in to Loki tower, reporting that he was about to lose his second engine and was going to attempt an emergency landing at Echo One. He have the coordinates, in case the old airfield was no longer on the map. The engine was coughing, but it was still running, a fact he could attribute only to the intervention of the gods of the air or his luck. That happy situation wasn’t going to last, but the Hawker had a glide ratio of about ten to one and he was at seventy-five hundred feet. That would give him roughly fifteen miles of glide, just enough to make a dead-stick landing, which was something he had not done lots of times. In fact, outside of simulators in flight training, he’d never done it.

Altitude three thousand feet, airspeed one hundred and sixty knots, the plains and marshes between Nile tributaries and the Ethiopian border coming up. Dare made a shallow turn and picked up a road that led to the airstrip. He could land on the road if he had to, although it was barely more than a cattle trail. Altitude two thousand . . . Air speed one-fifty. Ten miles to go, then five.

The left engine’s propeller flopped to a standstill and the cockpit went silent, except for the muffled rush of wind outside. He was a glider pilot now.

“Oh my God, Wes! Oh my God!”

“Easy, easy,” he said, expelling every unnecessary thought and emotion, summoning up all he’d learned in a lifetime of flight. Find the balance between three vectors—the plane’s forward momentum, the friction of the air it passed through, and gravity. Deflect the flaps to increase lift, but not so much as to cause excessive drag, which could cause the plane to stall. A kind of physics problem, which, if he failed to solve it, would cost him and Mary their lives. Altitude one thousand . . . Airspeed one-thirty. The airstrip showed as a lane of grass and shrubs between the tall trees. He waited till the last possible second to call for the landing gear. Too soon and the increased resistance could add to the turbulence created by the deflected flaps and give the Hawker the flying characteristics of Isaac Newton’s apple.

“Gear down and locked!” Mary said.

Altitude five hundred . . . airspeed one-fifteen. The Hawker was wobbling, about to surrender to gravity. Fighting to keep the nose up, Dare now saw that what had appeared to be shrubs from higher altitude were in fact saplings ten feet high. From the northwest end, they encroached well out onto the runway. To make sure he cleared them, he had to put down almost in the middle of the strip, leaving a mere six hundred yards before he rolled into the treacherous southeast end. The Hawker swooped in, quiet as a bird, and bounced through the high grass at ninety miles an hour. Without power, he could not use the props for aerodynamic braking. All he had to slow his roll were friction and the hydraulic brakes. He pressed the brakes. Mary cried out, “We’ve done it! We’ve made it!” There was a fearsome bang and thud as the nose gear collapsed. He and Mary were wrenched forward against their harnesses. The plane skidded nose first, then slewed sideways, the main gear breaking. A shriek of tearing metal, rivets popping, glass shattering as the Hawker slammed broadside into a row of trees, spun part way around, and came to rest.

When he regained consciousness, he was shivering from shock, blood was running down the side of his head, and each breath brought a sharp pain, as though someone were stabbing his lungs with an icepick. The yoke had crunched against his ribs, fracturing them. The right side of the cockpit, Mary’s side, was stove in. She was slumped face-down across the pedestal, her back peppered with shattered glass. The stink of aviation fuel permeated the air—there hadn’t been enough time to dump it all—and smoke curled into the cabin from the mangled cargo compartment. The smell and the smoke gave him the necessary adrenal rush to overcome his shock, unbuckle his harness, free Mary from hers, and pull her out of the wreckage. Taking her by the wrists, he dragged her as far as he could. The effort exhausted him, and he nearly blacked out from the pain.