Acts of faith (116 page)

Adid squeezed his eyes half shut. “What are you proposing?”

And there, far out in a wilderness, while looking at the grasslands reaching away and away toward the high white fire of Kilimanjaro, Fitzhugh presented his plan. When he was finished, Adid looked stunned.

“
That
is going to spare me trouble?” he asked with incredulous laughter. “It will cause me nothing but trouble.”

“But not near so much trouble as a story on CNN will cause. Think of the attention that will focus on you. But this—can we call it the lesser of two evils? By the time Douglas and Tony are in safe hands, you will have already done the preliminary work for dissolving Knight Relief Services and forming a new company. Let’s call it SkyTrain Relief Services. You will announce that you discovered that your managing director was engaged in gunrunning and had pulled the mask over your eyes and that you were about to dismiss him when, how amazing, he and his copilot were caught in the act. I don’t doubt that CNN will move very quickly to say that their reporter was working on just such a story when she met her untimely death. They will raise the question, Was she murdered? But by that time you and the company will be in the clear.”

Adid rubbed his forehead and said nothing.

“For someone who made millions selling poached ivory, this should not be a big problem.”

“I regret that day the three of you appeared in my office, you, Wesley Dare, and that fool,” Adid said.

“I am trying to make it less regretful.”

Adid presented a faint, rueful smile. “I am going to require you to teach my son to play soccer. I wish him to be the star of his club.”

“It would be a pleasure, Hassan.”

“Back to the lodge, please. I would like a swim before dinner.”

F
ITZHUGH BELIEVED HIS
threat wasn’t all that had moved Adid to join in his plot. He wanted his own justice as well: to show Douglas that the cost of deceiving him could be very high indeed.

“My friends await your news,” read Adid’s fax from Khartoum. For the next several days Fitzhugh checked the flight plans filed with Loki tower—as assistant flight coordinator, he was authorized to see them. Finally he spotted the one he was looking for. The name
BUSY BEAVER
was written in the block where the air operator was identified. That and the crew’s names—D. Braithwaite, T. Bollichek—were the only accurate information on the form.

Returning to the flight office, he sent a fax to the same number in Khartoum to which he transmitted the UN’s daily flight plans. If Adid’s “friends” had done their job, the people at the other end of the line would be on the lookout for a special message from Fitzhugh. Suffering a bout of anxiousness and guilt—for all practical purposes, he was now an agent of the government of Sudan—he sent the identification numbers of Douglas’s plane, the type of aircraft, and what he knew would be its true destination—New Tourom—then tore up his copy of the fax.

Someone somewhere in Khartoum slipped up—Douglas and Tony returned safely that afternoon. A week later they took off at eight in the morning on another mission. Fitzhugh again alerted Khartoum, and this time succeeded. By noon, the news had been flashed all over Loki: The control tower had received an emergency call from Busy Beaver flight number such and such. It had been intercepted by Sudanese MIGs and was being escorted to an air force base. How desperate Douglas must have been to send the Mayday. Fitzhugh could only imagine what had gone through his mind when he saw the fighter planes appear outside his cockpit window.

The official announcement came within forty-eight hours. SUNA, the government news agency, reported that a plane carrying mortars and shoulder-fired missiles had been captured after it violated Sudanese airspace over the Nuba mountains. The two-man crew, one American and one Australian, had been taken prisoner and admitted to authorities they were delivering the weapons to the SPLA. Furthermore, they confessed they had been shipping arms to the rebels for several months, using the delivery of humanitarian aid to conceal their “criminal activities.” Khartoum distributed films and photographs of the aircraft as it landed at the air force base, of the cargo as it was off-loaded by Sudanese security men, and of Douglas and Tony being led away at gunpoint to a waiting police van. With a throng of aid workers and pilots, Fitzhugh watched the footage on satellite TV. A mob of emotions rioted inside him, but he didn’t feel the vindication he’d expected.

Khartoum did its utmost to exploit its propaganda coup. The seizure of the plane and its contraband proved that the United Nations relief operation was merely a front to channel aid to the rebels, et cetera, et cetera. The government summoned the UN’s assistant secretary of humanitarian affairs and demanded that the UN move its operations into Sudan from Lokichokio. He refused. Khartoum retaliated by expanding its aid embargo, forbidding UN planes to land at previously authorized airfields. After a month of difficult negotiations, the government relented, but Fitzhugh wondered how many innocent people had suffered during that month. Another unintended consequence in the Land of Unintended Consequences. In Sudan, no matter what you did in the name of right, wrong inevitably resulted.

The Sudanese turned their criticisms toward Kenya, for allowing “criminals and bandits” to operate from its territory. In the interests of maintaining good relations with its neighbor, Kenya ordered the Department of Civil Aviation to revoke Knight Relief Services’ air operator’s certificate. This was a purely cosmetic gesture. Adid, after calling a press conference to express his profound shock upon discovering that his managing director was smuggling arms, had already dissolved the company. SkyTrain Relief Services had come into being.

Nothing was heard of Douglas and Tony until, four months after their capture, SUNA announced that they had been tried by an Islamic court and sentenced to death. The American State Department and the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had little sympathy for the plight of their reckless citizens, made pro forma appeals for clemency. These were answered. Sharia, the Islamic legal code, was not incapable of mercy. The death sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment, and the prison sentence suspended. Douglas and Tony were set free and expelled from the country.

That, however, was not the end of their ordeal, for while they were locked up, Phyllis Rappaport’s successor, the man named Peacock, had been pursuing his investigation into the circumstances surrounding her death. Having learned from Pamela Smyth that Wesley was supposed to have been Phyllis’s pilot, he paid Fitzhugh another call. Things were looking curiouser and curiouser, he said. Fitzhugh agreed and, released from his pledge to Adid not to speak to the press, filled in the blanks—with facts, not his suppositions. The story that aired on CNN, complete with excerpts from the videotapes, made no accusations, but it raised the question of whether Phyllis’s death was accidental.

The network called on the U.S. Embassy to pressure the “proper authorities” to look into the matter. Thus the story was kept alive—
KENYA TO INVESTIGATE U
.
S
.
JOURNALIST
’
S DEATH
, read the headline in the
Nation.
It wasn’t a case that CID was eager to get involved in, but the media and the Americans had to be mollified. Two CID men visited Fitzhugh in Loki. As in his interview with Peacock, he told them all he knew but nothing of what he believed. What he knew was sufficient. When Sudan announced that Douglas and Tony were being thrown out of the country, Kenya requested their extradition to Nairobi for questioning in a possible case of multiple homicide.

Accordingly, CID met them at Jomo Kenyatta, along with the American and Australian consuls, and brought them to Central Police Headquarters. In the meantime, however, the air crash investigators issued their report. It contained a number of findings and opinions, but only two mattered. Finding: analysis of fuel samples had disclosed the presence of water, but how it had gotten into the fuel system had not been ascertained. Opinion: the crew had performed their preflight checks improperly, failing to drain the tanks before takeoff. In so many words, the crash could be blamed on pilot error. Douglas and Tony were home free. To Fitzhugh, who had been following the case in the papers and on TV, the rest of the script was obvious. The two men would be put through a casual interrogation; the police would conclude that there was insufficient evidence to make a case and let them go. Douglas, however, did not follow the script. He did a remarkable and wholly unexpected thing—he confessed. Confessed to everything.

This created an awkward situation that no one wanted but that they could not avoid. The case had to be referred to the courts. Fitzhugh, relieved to hear his suspicions confirmed at last but also mystified as to what had moved a compulsive liar to speak a self-incriminating truth, attended the hearing. Before a robed magistrate, Douglas and Tony stood in the dock, wearing grimy jailbird dungarees. Tony’s lawyer stated that his client pled not guilty and asked that the charges be dropped. The sole evidence against him was Mr. Braithwaite’s statement that he had instructed Mr. Bollichek to sabotage the aircraft. The accused categorically denied that he had ever received any such instructions and would have refused to carry them out if he had. The only other evidence in the case, said the lawyer, was the air crash investigation report—he waved it at the magistrate—and blamed the crash on the crew’s sloppy preflight procedures. The magistrate turned to the prosecutor. Did he intend to produce any witnesses who had seen the accused tampering with the plane in question? No. Did he intend to produce any physical evidence to show the same? No. Then, said the Man of Justice from his bench, he saw no point in proceeding any further. The charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder against Mr. Bollichek are dismissed.

Douglas’s lawyer was next. He said that his client had endured a great deal in the Sudanese prison and had not been in full command of his senses when he made the confession. Does he wish to withdraw it? asked the magistrate. No. Does he wish to amend it? No. In other words, your client is not willing to say he had instructed someone other than Mr. Bollichek to sabotage the aircraft? Correct. And he is not willing to state that he had done the dirty work himself? Correct. The Man of Justice: In his statement, your client said that he and one Michael Goraende, an officer in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, made a plan to shoot down the plane in the event the alleged sabotage failed to accomplish its purpose. Did any of these conversations take place in Kenya? No. The magistrate returned to the prosecutor. Any witnesses to be called, any evidence to be produced contradicting what was just said? None whatsoever. Then, declared the magistrate, he could see no point in proceeding in the case against Mr. Braithwaite, his confession notwithstanding. It was, ruled the magistrate, an invalid extra-judicial confession, unsupported by witnesses or evidence in the matter of the alleged sabotage of the Hawker-Siddley aircraft and in the alleged conspiracy between Mr. Braithwaite and Colonel Goraende. Moreover, any conversations the accused had with Colonel Goraende, if they took place at all, occurred in Sudan, as did the downing of the Cessna aircraft. Kenya had no jurisdiction.

It was over in thirty minutes. The two defendants were released from custody. CNN would howl “Whitewash!” Kenya would say it had done its duty. As he limped from the courtroom—he had been beaten on the soles of his feet during his incarceration in Sudan—Douglas noticed Fitzhugh sitting in the courtroom. The American’s face and body were testaments to what he’d been through: famine-thin, his shoulders slumped, his sockets bruised caverns for those pearlescent eyes with their gleam of an artificial sincerity. They fastened on Fitzhugh for an instant, an instant and no more, as if he were the only person in the room. He could not read what was in them. Douglas hobbled through the door. It was the last Fitzhugh ever saw of him. The next day the Ministry of Interior, taking note that he had smuggled arms from Kenyan soil, ordered him out of the country. Douglas Braithwaite left Africa with little more than the clothes he wore, the failure he had always dreaded becoming.

That and his torments in prison would have to do for justice, Fitzhugh thought. An African justice. He wondered if the arraignment had been a rigged game. If so, why the confession? What purpose could it have served? He knew only what he wanted to believe: that four months in a Khartoum “ghost house” had concentrated, not the American’s mind, but his soul. He wanted to believe that Douglas had been visited in his prison cell. The demon-deity of Africa had come to him, shredded the costumes he wore, held a mirror to his naked self, and said,
“Behold! This is what you are!”
The image appalled him, and he’d acknowledged his crime; and in that lay a redemption of sorts.

Dismissal

T
HE BULB GLOWS
undimmed by the cloak of insects—the katydids have fled the dawn.
Like belief,
Fitzhugh thinks. Conviction will blind you if it is not shaded by doubt.

He feels surprisingly alert for someone who hasn’t slept all night. That good-looking writer was responsible for his insomnia, asking questions that prodded his memories. Two years ago Adid hired him to be managing director of SkyTrain Relief Services; in half an hour he will fly to Natinga to see what can be done about his crippled aircraft. It’s part of his job as an entrepreneur of aid. For how much longer he will remain one is open to question. His comment to the writer—that the war promised to go on forever, had not been entirely accurate. There are rumors that the cease-fire that has prevailed in the Nuba for some time will be extended to southern Sudan. An American diplomat is now in the country, attempting to broker a peace. The unthinkable, the unimaginable, is on the horizon of possibility: the war could end.