Acts of faith (30 page)

Douglas rescued him. The American tracked him down to the flat he was sharing with an old university classmate to tell him that Knight Air Services would soon be in business. Douglas had an airplane, a Gulfstream One-C, under lease with an option to buy, and had hired an out-of-work pilot as his first officer, an Australian named Tony Bollichek. Barrett’s report on the situation in the Nuba mountains had been favorably received by the board of International People’s Aid. The first shipments would be arriving within a month, and Barrett had contracted Knight Air to be IPA’s exclusive carrier.

“I think you should throw in with us,” Douglas announced. “You’ll be our operations manager.”

Fitzhugh protested that he knew nothing about managing airline operations. Douglas dismissed his reservations with an airy, “There’s nothing to it.”

Two weeks later they took off for Loki from Wilson Field with office furniture, a high-frequency radio, a satellite phone, a Cretaceous-era desktop, a generator, and two boxes of T-shirts and baseball caps in the Gulfstream’s cargo bay. The shirts and hats, in Knight Air’s colors of green and white, with the company logo affixed—a lance-wielding knight astride an airplane—were to be worn by present and future employees. The G1C also had been repainted, a bold green stripe streaking down the center of the fuselage, the company’s name above it, the flying knight emblazoned on the nose. “When she sees this plane, Tara Whitcomb is going to realize that she’s got competition,” Douglas proclaimed as Nairobi’s skyscrapers fell below.

Barrett had a lorry waiting for them at the airfield. They unloaded the furniture and moved into Knight Air’s new office, a bungalow in a compound that some fan of classic American rock had named Hotel California. There was nothing of California in its five dusty acres. It resembled an army camp wed to an African village: tukuls, mud-brick cottages, green wall tents pitched on concrete slabs under makuti-roofed shelters. It was headquarters for International People’s Aid and several other agencies that operated independently of the UN. Fitzhugh’s first task as operations manager was to find a secretary and a flight mechanic; until he did, he would do the clerical work and Tony Bollichek, who had been to aircraft mechanics school, would be in charge of maintaining the plane.

The presence of a competitor did not trouble Tara. She even seemed to welcome it, generously allowing Fitzhugh to lean on her manager, a white Kenyan named Pamela Smyth, to teach him about flight operations. There was considerably more than nothing to it.

Another two weeks passed before IPA’s first shipment was ready: sheet-metal roofing for Manfred’s hospital, drums of drinking water, boxes of salt, all manner of medical supplies. Some ten tons altogether. As the G1C could carry only four tons, three trips, at eight thousand dollars per flight, would be required to deliver it all. “My man, if we can keep this up, we’ll gross a hundred grand in our first month,” said Douglas, in a way that made the conditional sound more like a prediction. He invited Fitzhugh to come along on the inaugural flight—“a historic occasion,” he called it.

Two uneventful hours later they landed at Zulu Two, one of the new airstrips built on a site Douglas and Suleiman had discovered during the trek through the Nuba. A mass of female porters and SPLA guerrillas surged onto the runway. The unloading began, Douglas, Tony, and Fitzhugh pitching the boxes and the roofing panels out the aft cargo door, the porters packing the lighter stuff into baskets, the soldiers lashing the tin panels to the backs of camels. When the offload was finished, Fitzhugh’s heart attached itself to the column of people and pack animals, filing off, in radiant dust, across the undulating yellow hills toward the hospital, twenty kilometers away. “Dudes, there it is,” Douglas said, jaw cocked, raptor’s nose raised, a distance in the gray eyes, as if they beheld something beyond the swaying camels, the women trudging under their laden baskets. “There you see what we’re here for.”

Inspired by a renewed sense of purpose, Fitzhugh worked hard to convince the other independent agencies to join in the effort. The need in the Nuba was too great to be met by IPA alone. He called on the Irish, the Belgians, and the Dutch and was turned down by all except one: the Friends of the Frontline, a band of evangelical American military veterans whose speciality was ministering to beleaguered Christians in war zones. Along with the usual material aid, they delivered Bibles and schoolbooks. They sent in missionary teams to help local preachers spread the gospel. They made documentaries and distributed them to their membership to raise funds to rebuild churches and schools.

Fitzhugh, a confirmed secularist, was comfortable in the company of worldly clerics like Malachy Delaney, but people of intense religious convictions, whether Christian or Muslim or something else, always made him ill at ease. So it was with the Friends of the Frontline’s two representatives in Loki. Garbed in quasi-military outfits—trousers with cargo pockets, shirts with button-down shoulder flaps, starched and pressed as if for an inspection—they were exceedingly polite and soft-spoken and wore an air of disquieting serenity that Fitzhugh had come to recognize as the calm of people absolutely sure they are on the side of the angels. One was a Vietnam veteran, Tim Fancher, a dark-haired man of fifty-odd with a long, grave face; the other, Rob Handy, had served in the Persian Gulf War and had a boxer’s physique and clear, steady green eyes that one could imagine squinting through the scope of a sniper’s rifle.

To them, Fitzhugh made his appeal. They were interested in what he had to say, particularly in John Barrett’s plans to restore St. Andrew’s mission. Like Barrett, Fancher had been ordained as a minister of the Evangelical Episcopal Church of Sudan. He mentioned that he and Handy had often discussed establishing a ministry in the Nuba mountains—“an island of Christianity in a sea of Islam” was how he described it. Perhaps Fitzhugh’s proposal was a sign that they should stop talking and start doing. They promised to get back to him.

Which they did, more quickly than Fitzhugh had expected. Appearing at Knight Air’s office one morning, they announced that they had spoken to Barrett and agreed to work with International People’s Aid, and yes, they would be pleased to sign a contract with Knight Air. This inclined Fitzhugh to think that the pair of Christian soldiers weren’t such strange fellows after all, and it delighted Douglas. “My man, you’ve really come through,” he said, and offered to make Fitzhugh a junior partner, entitling him to a five percent share of the company’s net profits in addition to his salary. Fitzhugh Martin had become something he’d never imagined: an entrepreneur.

Knight Air’s business doubled. It could now afford additional employees. Fitzhugh lured a flight mechanic away from the UN, a black-bearded South African named VanRensberg, and hired a Kikuyu woman, Rachel Njiru, as secretary and bookkeeper. But Douglas and Tony were flying five to six missions a week, a schedule that put a strain on them and on the airplane. “What we need,” Douglas declared, “is another airplane and the crew to fly it.”

W
ESLEY DARE
’
S CAMPAIGN
to stop Joe Nakima from seizing—stealing—his old Gulfstream One had succeeded, though the price for that triumph was the loss of the plane to a legal limbo. The day after he was visited by the man from the Department of Civil Aviation, Dare hired a lawyer and filed suit against Nakima, alleging fraud. Nakima countersued. The judge hearing the case slapped an injunction on both litigants, prohibiting each from claiming the aircraft until its ownership could be decided. There followed a perfect carnival of delays and postponements, some requested by Dare’s attorneys, some by Nakima’s.

The day after he filed suit, Dare began a desperate hunt for another airplane so he could fulfill his contract with Laurent Kabila, on the march against Mobuto Sese Seko in the Congo. After two weeks of scouring aviation trade publications and contacting airplane brokers, he ran into Keith Cheswick at the Aero Club in Nairobi. Cheswick, a pilot of fortune, was an old friend; they’d flown together in Sierra Leone for Blackbridge Services, a mercenary outfit that provided security forces for diamond and copper mines, weapons for warlords who wanted to seize the mines, bodyguards for African dictators, and military advisers to rebels trying to overthrow the dictators—a perfect closed loop. Over lunch he told Cheswick about his dilemma. Cheswick, who was still with Blackbridge, replied that maybe they could help each other out, because he was looking to unload one of the firm’s aircraft, a Hawker-Siddley 748. She was a bit long in the tooth but in good shape overall. How much? Dare asked. Three hundred thousand U.S. He didn’t have that kind of money, but Cheswick said he might be able to come up with an alternative—in the spirit of friendship, eh, old boy?

Three days later he phoned and asked Dare to meet him for dinner at the New Stanley. When Dare arrived, Cheswick handed him a slender sheaf of papers, faxed from Blackbridge’s Cape Town headquarters.

“Here’s the deal, and it’s take it or leave it, Wes. We lease the plane to you for a dollar a month, but you assign your contract to us. We own net profits. At the end of the job, the Hawker’s yours. She’s your bonus.”

“That contract is worth at least seven hundred fifty. So you make a total of twice what it’s worth, leavin’ me plane rich and money poor. Do I get gas money to fly her out of the Congo? Who picks up the salary for my first officer?”

Cheswick had been an RAF fighter pilot, and he looked like one: a martial gray mustache, thin lips that smiled thinly.

“
You
are going to be
my
first officer,” he said. He did some things with his face, trying to give it a warm, affectionate expression. “You can’t expect the firm to let an airplane go on trust, can you?”

Dare’s glance sidestepped across the dining room. White linen, soft lights, wainscot buffed to a gloss, tourists babbling about their photo safaris to the Masai-Mara. “I’d be tempted to leave the airplane there, take the money and run. You’re going to be my adult supervision.”

Six months later, after ferrying Kabila and his staff from one jungle redoubt to another, Dare was back in Nairobi, owner of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane with not much more than walking-around money in his pocket. There had been no progress in his lawsuit. The G1, its engines and cockpit windows covered in canvas, sat orphaned in a part of Wilson Field reserved for derelict planes. Looking at it amid those stripped hulks gave Dare an almost physical pain, but he derived a compensatory satisfaction from knowing that he’d kept it out of Nakima’s larcenous hands, and he hoped the bastard ground his teeth in frustration every time he saw it, parked out there beyond his grasp.

He dipped into his piggy bank to present the director of civil aviation with her favorite American cookies; she returned the kindness by issuing him a valid air operator’s certificate. He then sought to hire out his services but found no takers. One Saturday afternoon, on the advice of a logistician he knew at Catholic Relief Services, he called on a small aid agency he’d never heard of before, International People’s Aid. It sounded like a Communist front. It was based in Lokichokio, but the guy in charge lived in Nairobi, out on the Langata road—an intense, talkative little Irishman married to a towering Sudanese. Dare could not picture the pallid, undersize man making love to that statuesque woman, but it must have happened: three brown brats were running noisily around the small stone-walled house when she let Dare in.

Barrett was sitting in a vinyl chair with tape over the rips in its arms. Dare declined the offer of a soft drink and stated his business, but the little man didn’t want to talk business. As a breeze passed through the jalousie windows behind him, teasing the fine hair banded above his ears, he made a long, impassioned speech about the plight of the southern Sudanese, the cruelty of the Khartoum government, the obligation of the world’s privileged nations to help, but not as the UN was helping, oh no, make no mistake about it, we cannot be neutral, for the southerners were fighting
our
battle against militant Islam, so the hand we lend them must be the hand of an
ally.

To Dare, this was all bullshit, but his pressing need to help himself opened up reserves of patience he hadn’t known were in him. He listened without a peep. Likewise, he suspended his policy of zero tolerance for children, forbearing the brats’ shrieks as they ran into and out of the room, paying absolutely no attention to their mother’s commands, delivered in a lazy, unconvincing voice, to settle down. A size ten in the ass is what they need, he thought, pretending to be delighted by their rumpus-room antics, which had at least one beneficial effect: They caused Barrett to lose his train of thought, and while he fumbled around for it, Dare was able to get in a word. He made the sales pitch that he now could just about recite in his sleep. With his Hawker-Siddley, he would deliver people, cargo, or both anywhere in Sudan or Somalia for less than anyone else Barrett cared to name. The Irish shrimp replied that his agency was pleased with the company they had under contract, Knight Air. What kind of planes did they fly? Dare asked. They had only one airplane, a Gulfstream One-C.

Dare put on an expression of disbelief and distress. “Have y’all ever considered the possibility that that G2 might have mechanical problems? Or that it might prang up somewheres? What do you do then?”

“We would—”

“Never mind,” Dare interrupted. “Listen, a G1C cruises at two-eighty. That’s forty knots faster than a Hawker, but the Gulfstream has a capacity of four and a quarter tons. I oughta know, I flew a Gulfstream for years, got one in mothballs right now. So that airplane is gonna make a thousand miles about forty-five minutes faster’n my Hawker. It’ll save you a little over twelve hundred bucks. But I want you to think about the difference in cargo capacity. The Hawker carries five and a half tons, round figures. For twelve hundred bucks more, or”—he took a notepad and calculator out of his briefcase, scribble, scribble, press, press—“sixteen percent more money, I’m deliverin’ you one and a quarter tons, or
thirty percent
more cargo. Still with me, Mr. Barrett? So let’s say, for the sake of argument, y’all need to send twenty-five tons of cargo. The G1C will cost you, round figures again, thirty-four grand. The Hawker does it for twenty-nine thousand five hundred, a total savings of”—scribble, press—“forty-five hundred. Hell, you can’t argue with those numbers.”