Acts of faith (11 page)

“Been one helluva day so far, and it’s hardly half over.”

Nimrod said nothing.

“Stop lookin’ like that,” Dare told him.

“Like what?”

“Like someone just shot you with a stun gun. It’s making me more depressed than I already am. It ain’t your fault.”

He was being diplomatic because he felt sorry for Nimrod, who prided himself on his talent for getting things done, solving problems, removing or finding ways around obstacles; a talent owed to his keen eye for spotting the straightest, quickest, and least expensive paths through Kenya’s larcenous bureaucracies and kleptocratic ministries, in particular the Department of Civil Aviation. Nimrod was smart that way, but he wasn’t clever. He thought that the deals he cut were solemn contracts to be honored, instead of shady provisional arrangements that could be discarded in an instant. His weakness was an inability to see all the treacherous moves on the board, and so he could not defend against them.

“Way back when, Joe took all the paperwork—maintenance records, airworthiness certificate, all of it—including the bill of sale and the registration. Said he needed it for the incorporation papers, and I said go ahead,” Dare continued. “So it’s my fault. Should of seen that he was thinkin’ way ahead. All right, Joe knows we’re gonna be takin’ the airplane out of the country in a little while, so what he must of done was make copies of all that documentation, then took it to an airplane broker. Any broker in the world will de-register a plane for you in one country and register it in another one. Costs you about thirty grand. A crook might charge another ten for forging the registration. Then I reckon he cut the DCA in on what he was doin’, he’d want her on his side in case of a problem. Figure he paid her a thousand, and what he’s paying William wouldn’t even be walkin’-around money. Half-a-million-dollar airplane, four-fifty pure profit. Pretty good for a day’s work.”

“You think he wants it to sell it?” Nimrod asked. “Not take over our business?”

“Our business ain’t worth it. Hell yes, he’s gonna sell it. Probably needs to raise cash quick, and this is the quickest way he can think of. Sellin’ assets, even if they ain’t his.”

“And so he sent Gichui, number one, to put you on official notice and make sure the plane goes nowhere. Number two—”

“A fishin’ expedition,” said Dare, completing the thought, “to see if we’ve got anything, any damn thing at all, to make a case in case we go to court. He’s got to figure on that contingency. And that’s what we’re gonna do, rafiki.”

“Go to court?” Nimrod scoffed, as if that were the most ridiculous course of action possible. “He will have the judge paid.”

“I know that. I just want to get into the courts to tie things up for a while, buy a little time for us to come up with a better idea. I’ll shoot that son of a bitch before I let him walk away with my airplane. It’s all I’ve got.”

Man of All Races

T
HEY WERE BY
the pool, drinking beer and talking while Turkana women passed down the dry riverbed in front of them, beyond the barbed-wire fence. The tribeswomen wore long skirts of brown cloth or cowhide and bead necklaces stacked to their chins. Fitzhugh enjoyed watching them, striding boldly, balancing bundled sticks on their shaved heads, their backs so straight they looked like exclamation points in motion, their gazes fixed on the path ahead, as if they couldn’t stand to look at the tents, warehouses, and bungalows sprawling alongside the riverbed. An eyesore crowded with pink-faced strangers.

Tara Whitcomb’s compound, where Fitzhugh and Douglas were staying, occupied one small corner of the vast encampment, and a cushy neighborhood it was, its guest tukuls built to resemble Turkana dwellings, with amenities no Turkana could have dreamed of, like electricity and running water and concrete floors swept daily by maids in starched outfits. The place looked like a luxury safari camp. Its occupants were doctors from Médicins sans Frontières, aircrews from Douglas’s former employer, PanAfrik, volunteer aid workers from religious NGOs, most of whom were American evangelicals whose homogenous wholesomeness made them look more or less identical, like soldiers in uniform. Last night, sitting outside the tukul he shared with Douglas, Fitzhugh overheard a few of these pilgrims reading scripture aloud in the neighboring hut, after which they beseeched God to bless and protect their Sudanese brethren. He was touched by their fervor, their heartfelt expressions of solidarity.

It seemed to him that he needed some of what they had—the calm of an abiding conviction. He wasn’t getting cold feet, but he felt a slight chill down there in his soles. Lacking religious impulses, he knew he couldn’t undergo a sudden conversion. If not faith, then what? An outlook? A philosophy? An attitude? At any rate, some sort of inner resource that he could draw on. He had gotten out ahead of himself, enlisting in Barrett’s cause in a moment of enthusiasm before he’d had time to prepare himself, psychologically and emotionally, for the trial ahead. Tara had painted a picture of the Nuba for Douglas and him at least as grim as Diana and Barrett’s. The war had made it a wilderness once more or, more accurately, a wasteland, as near a thing to a terra incognita as you were likely to find this late in the twentieth century.

“I’m actually hoping for bad weather, though we’re not likely to get it this time of year,” she was saying now, sitting erectly at the head of the table, sunglasses cocked over her forehead, reading glasses, hung from a cord around her neck, resting on the top button of her white captain’s shirt. “Tail end of the wet when I flew John in. Better that than this”—she motioned at the cloudless sky—“and it’s like this now in the Nuba.”

Douglas questioned her with a look.

“There’s a government garrison here, and another here,” she answered, pointing at the map spread in front of her. “And here’s Zulu One, the airstrip.”

An understanding nod from Douglas. There was between him and Tara the special bond that made bush pilots seem like members of a secret society who could speak volumes to each other with a few words.

“Do you mind explaining why you want the weather to be bad?” Fitzhugh asked. To him, small planes and thunderstorms weren’t a desirable combination.

“Our course takes us between the garrisons.” Tara gave him the indulgent smile a kindly teacher bestows on a slow learner. “In clear weather, it will be easier for the troops to . . .”

“Shoot at us?”

“I’m not too worried about that. We’ll be flying out of small arms range. I’m more worried they’ll send patrols to find out where we’ve landed. If that happens, Zulu One will be compromised, and then I shall have a jolly time coming in to pick you up, won’t I? Zulu One is it for the Nuba, although by the time you’re ready to be taken out, I hope Douglas will have found a couple of alternatives.”

She looked at Douglas expectantly, but he only turned his head, his attention drawn by the birds flitting in the branches of a nearby tree. Flashes of dark blue, iridescent blue, russet.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” he remarked, with an irritating irrelevance and a seeming indifference to what Tara had said. An indifference underscored by his posture: slumped low in his chair, ankles crossed, fingers clasped behind his head. “As common as robins back in the States, but I never get tired of looking at them.”

“Which? The superb starlings or the rollers?”

“Both.”

“Are you a birder? You don’t look like one.”

“How is a birder supposed to look?”

“Oh, owlish, I guess.” Tara grimaced as if in disapproval of her own pun. Like Diana Briggs, she was a woman of a certain age who looked much younger. The same clear English complexion, somehow preserved from the effects of time and African suns; the same startling blue eyes, the same blond hair, though hers was a darker blond and cut shorter than Diana’s. The two women could have been sisters. Close cousins anyway. Tara was taller at five-eight or -nine, and broader boned, with a strong, square face and an aloof, self-contained air that came from years of flying solo over wild and dangerous country. Not unfriendly, but certainly a woman who would prefer a handshake to a kiss on the cheek, no matter how long she’d known you. “I flew lots of birders into Tsavo in the old days, and they all looked owlish to me. Glasses like this”—circling her eyes with thumbs and forefingers—“thick in the middle, skinny legs. They were always in a sweat to see carmine bee-eaters.”

“That’s an incredible bird!” Douglas popped out of his slouch in a burst of enthusiasm, the first time Fitzhugh had seen him shuck off his cloak of studied cool. “I saw a few down there myself last year. Got pictures of them.”

“Ah! So you
are
a birder.”

“Not the one my mother is. If it’s got feathers and it flies, she can identify it, tell you where it winters and summers, and maybe imitate its call. She came over to go to Tsavo with me. Maybe I ought to say I went with her. She’s been around half the world with her binoculars and bird books, and when she isn’t gallivanting, she’s out on the San Pedro or Sonoita Creek. Nature preserves near Tucson.”

“That’s in the West, correct?” asked Tara as Fitzhugh thought,
A mother who can afford to come all the way to Africa just to look at birds?

“Arizona,” Douglas informed her. “And that’s north of Mexico, south of Colorado, east of California.”

“A geography lesson. Splendid. Now I shall give one. As far as anyone in Loki is concerned, we’re flying to Kakuma tomorrow,” she said, referring to a mission station and refugee camp a short hop south of Loki. “And in fact we will be going there, to give ourselves a cover in case anyone gets nosy. We will pick up supplies for a hospital in the Nuba. It’s run by German Emergency Doctors, the only NGO Khartoum allows to operate up there. Of course, the hospital is not supposed to be receiving supplies from outside Sudan, but it’s been in a fix lately, short of everything. We will leave for the Nuba, and when I get back, I will tell everyone I was delayed in Kakuma by mechanical trouble. I cannot stress enough the need for discretion. I prefer that to ‘secrecy,’ don’t you? After all, we’re not spies.”

Douglas shrugged to say that he was neutral about semantics.

“But Khartoum has its spies around here,” Tara went on. “Let’s say they have a controller or two at Loki tower on the payroll. He finds out where we’re bound, we are in a fix.”

“But we’re flying with Tara Whitcomb, the legend, the modern-day Beryl Markham,” Douglas said with utmost sincerity. His eyes fastened onto her, and Fitzhugh suddenly felt shut out of the conversation; felt moreover that he had disappeared as far as Douglas was concerned.

“I am fifty-five years old.” Tara, with a laugh, gave her head a stiff, controlled toss backward. “Quite beyond flattery.”

“I wasn’t flattering. I heard about you almost from the day I got here. How some missionary was sick in a no-fly area. The mission radioed Loki for an evac. UN flight ops told them they would have to wait until they negotiated with Khartoum for clearance to land.”

Tara nodded, adding that someone in flight operations sent a message to the mission, urging them to evacuate the dying man by road, a ridiculous idea, as it was the middle of the rainy season and the road to Loki impassable, or nearly so, not to mention the chance of ambush by Turkana or Tuposa bandits.

“So you got him. You said, ‘Fuck all this chickenshit red tape,’ and went in and got him.”

“I didn’t use that sort of language, Doug.”

“You had to fly through a helluva storm, I heard. You called the mission and told them to have the guy at the airstrip at such-and-such a time and you’d be there.”

“Three twenty-five,” she said.

“And they were there at three twenty-five and so were you. Right on the money.”

“Oh, really.” With a small movement of her head and a quick shrug, she signaled that the accolades were beginning to embarrass her. Then, pushing back from the table, she clasped her hands over her crossed knees and gave Douglas the same direct, penetrating look he was giving her. “There’s quite a lot of stories floating around here about you, you know. You’ve gotten quite the reputation.”

The remark appeared to catch him off guard. His back stiffened.

“What sort of reputation?”

“Depends on who you’re speaking to. To some people, you’re a hero. Others . . . to them you’re an air pirate, or the next thing to it.”

“What?”

“They say that what you did came this close”—holding her forefinger next to her thumb—“to a hijacking.”

He said nothing and, with a shift of his glance, invited Fitzhugh back into the conversation, though Fitzhugh had no idea what to say. Ever since meeting him, he’d been eager to learn what had caused Douglas’s departure from PanAfrik and put him on the UN’s shit list; but when he had asked, on the flight to Loki yesterday, the American had answered with a blank-faced silence, as if he liked playing the mystery man. In the past forty-eight hours, all he’d revealed about himself was that he was thirty-one years old, hailed from Tucson, Arizona, and had flown for the U.S. Air Force in the Persian Gulf War, a spare autobiography that was the source of some anxiety for Fitzhugh. He didn’t relish the notion of tramping through the Nuba mountains with a man about whom he knew almost nothing.

“Who in the hell accused me of hijacking?” Douglas asked, in a tone more wounded than angry.

“No one’s really accused you,” answered Tara.