Acts of faith (48 page)

Dare sopped up egg yolk with a piece of toast. “That makes a helluva lot of sense. The woman hands you a blank check and you want to give it back.”

“There’s a quarter of a million people out there starving to death. I think that takes precedence.” Douglas let a faint sigh slip, as if relieved to discover that he could still make a statement like that without a false note. “With only three airplanes, we can’t handle the volume.”

Asking Fitzhugh to come along, Douglas met Tara at her tukul in the Pathways compound, that sanctuary of floral-scented order. She was in her garden, pruning a rosebush with the single-minded concentration people devote to simple physical tasks to distract themselves from emotional turmoil. Her hair was unkempt, her makeup was off, and she was wearing, instead of her usual starched captain’s shirt and creased trousers, a dirty T-shirt and a pair of shorts that exposed her varicose veins. They judged her appearance a measure of her grief. Cordial as always, she offered tea, which they declined, and then listened attentively as Douglas pleaded with her to change her mind. He was unable to resist touching her arm as she stood there, holding the pruning shears in one gloved hand.

Tara let him know that she didn’t care for the physical contact by drawing back about a yard, to lean against the bicycle she pedaled to and from the terminal each day to keep fit. “Not one of my planes is going into Bahr el Ghazal until I get assurances from Garang himself that he’s going to crack down on those bloody renegades.”

Denied contact with another’s flesh, Douglas’s hands seemed not to know what to do with themselves. “Tara, people, thousands of people, are going to—”

“Do you suppose I haven’t considered that?” Her lips stretched and her jaw tightened. “But I have just spent the past two days arranging for George’s body to be shipped back to Ethiopia. I have written a letter to his wife. I do not wish to repeat that experience. I’ve got twenty other people flying for me, and my first responsibility is to them. And to their families.”

“But they know the risks, same as we all do.”

“Which are quite enough without the SPLA adding to them. The people who are supposed to be on our side.” She shook her head. “No, I would no more send one of my crews out there than I’d let them take off in a faulty airplane. Not until I get those assurances, and I will get them.” She seemed to close the discussion by stepping forward to clip an unruly stem. “George was with me from the very beginning. He and I flew the first relief missions out of here together. He wasn’t just an employee but a friend. When his daughter was born, he asked me to be her godmother.”

“Can I say something?”

“If you’re asking for forgiveness in advance for whatever it is you want to say, you don’t necessarily have it.”

“Okay, fine. I think the best way for you to pay tribute to George would be to keep your planes in the air. I think that’s what he’d want. I think you’re letting one bad incident get the better of you.”

“Douglas,” she said with a cold smile, “the day you see one of your pilots with half his head blown off and his brains splattered all over the cockpit is the day when you shall have earned the right to make a comment like that. Thanks very much, but I’d like to get on with my roses.”

“I guess that means I’m not forgiven,” Douglas muttered as they drove out of the compound. “Can you believe her? One guy gets killed, and she throws in the towel.”

“She’s not exactly throwing in the towel. I don’t think we’re in a position to judge her.”

“The hell we’re not.” Turning onto the main road, he popped the clutch, jammed the accelerator, and made gravel fly. “What does she expect? This is a war, for fuck’s sake.”

Fitzhugh kept silent. In his delight with its return, he’d forgotten that the old-model Douglas came equipped with some unattractive features.

His prettier parts were on display that night, when he and Dare convened a meeting of Knight Air’s staff. Along with Fitzhugh, Tony, Mary, Rachel, Nimrod, and the flight mechanic, VanRensberg, the Antonov’s crew—whose roster read like the cast of characters in a Russian novel, Alexei, Sergei, Leonid, Vladimir, and Mikhail—shoehorned themselves into the tiny office. Dedicated smokers, the Russians joined with Fitzhugh to turn the room into a gas chamber. Whether it was to escape the smoke or to make himself appear more commanding, Douglas stood on the desk and, while Dare leaned back in the chair and pretended to be studying the shine in his snakeskin boots, presented his idea, summed up his meeting with Tara, and made his a-quarter-of-a-million-people-will-starve-to-death-if-someone-doesn’t-do-something speech.

“And right now, that’s us. It’s up to us.” He brushed a lock of hair from his eye, with a casual diffidence that offset his imposing stance. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t want what happened to George Tafari to happen to any of you. I can’t ask you to risk your necks any more than you are already. So it’s your call. We’ve got other places that need us, like the Nuba, although you know that’s no piece of cake either.”

“Me and Mary sure do,” Dare muttered, referring to their narrow escape, which had become legend in Loki.

Douglas then turned to Tony Bollichek, who said,”If you’re asking for volunteers, mate, I’m one.”

“Great. That’s great. Mary, what about you?”

“I’d rather be here than in Manitoba.”

“All right! So we’ve heard from Australia and Canada. Alexei,” he said to the Antonov’s captain, “what’s the word from Russia?”

There was a murmuring of Slavic consonants as Alexei, a short apple-cheeked man, conferred with his crew.

“Sure. Why not?” he answered with a fatalistic shrug.

“All right! All right! Old Fly-by-Knight is a team! So listen up, we’ll all be working our butts to the bone. Not just the aircrews but all of you. Wes and I decided that everyone gets a bonus at the end of the month. How much depends on how much we take in, but if we have to, we’ll forgo what we pay ourselves to make that promise good. I’ll see everyone at the bar. Drinks are on us.”

“And y’all can bet that last part was Dougie’s idea, not mine,” Wesley drawled to laughter.

As Douglas climbed down, Alexei applauded. Half a second later everyone but Dare joined in, and Fitzhugh could tell by the enthusiasm of the ovation that they were going to do whatever they had to not for the sake of a bonus, or even for the sake of the suffering multitudes hundreds of miles away, but for Douglas Braithwaite’s sake. No one wanted to let him down.

The Antonov made food drops, sometimes two a day, leaving Loki at dawn, returning by noon to refuel and take on another shipment, then departing once more and coming back at dusk. Wes and Mary in the Hawker, Doug and Tony in the G1C, flew daily for twenty-two days straight. They were often dangerously overloaded, and, the lifting of the embargo notwithstanding, there was the ever-present menace of ground fire or an encounter with a Sudanese MIG or helicopter gunship. Each flight was an act of faith, in Providence, in luck, in the
rightness
of the mission, and because self-dramatization is necessary if one is to continue taking such risks, the exhausted crews began to look upon themselves as embodiments of the company’s logo: airborne knights, rescuing the peasants from the twin dragons of starvation and war.

Fitzhugh, busy with flight schedules, invoices, and other minutiae, wasn’t able to cast any such chivalric light upon himself. The distasteful part of his job—taking care of the ten percenters—made him feel like a bagman, which brought on a relapse of the sensation that he was coated in a sticky substance swarming with ants.

The incantation “We do what we have to so we can keep doing what we came here to do” no longer was sufficient to exorcise this feeling. He needed to break out of the isolation imposed by his administrative duties and reconnect himself with the wretched humanity in whose name the pilots gambled with their lives and he compromised his principles. On two occasions he flew with Alexei and the Russians on airdrops over the parched immensities beyond the Jur. With Dare and Mary he landed at a place called Atukuel, where what looked like the population of a small concentration camp greeted them. All he saw was sharp angles—protruding ribs and collarbones, shoulder blades like wings, cheekbones, knee bones, thigh bones with a mere appliqué of flesh. Gangs of the living dead approached the plane, dragging plastic sheets and canvas tarps. Fitzhugh pitched in with the off-load. It felt good to sweat honest sweat, to use his muscles again, and to see a light switch on in the glassy eyes looking up at him. What was it but the light of hope? Hope in a twenty-five-kilo bag of sorghum. Hope. The human capacity for it astonished him. Hope and the will to go on, even when going on seemed pointless. If those people could have seen their futures as clearly as they did their present circumstances, they probably would have laid down on the spot and allowed themselves to starve to death. He watched the men on the ground drag the sacks into the sheets and tarps, which were fashioned into carriers by twisting each end into a makeshift rope. Two men would sling the ends over their shoulders and lug the loads to the edge of the airstrip. It amazed him that those skeletons, who looked barely capable of carrying their own shadows, could haul a hundred pounds any distance at all. He and the tall Norwegian working alongside him heaved out bag upon bag, and jerry cans of water and boxes of evaporated milk. More than five tons’ worth. He got careless once, giving one sack too hard a toss. It split open, its contents spilled out, and a vision from his mental split-screen became a reality as a crowd of kids, their hair hennaed by starvation, rushed forward to scoop the sorghum into wooden calabashes. They picked each grain up, like a flock of birds. Relief work—what a bland phrase, as if it were merely another form of labor. But it wasn’t. It reaffirmed the human bond. It was the marshaling of resources to organize compassion into effective action, for without action, compassion degenerated into a useless pity. It was what he’d come to do, and if to do it he had to trim a few moral corners, then he would trim them. In the face of so much misery, self-recrimination seemed a self-indulgence. Guilt was a worthless currency out here.

Toward the end of that month Tara received a message asking her to come to the Nairobi office of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, the rebellion’s political arm. There she was shown a copy of an order issued to all commands promising swift punishment to anyone who hijacked a relief plane’s cargo. Also documents recording the court-martial of the soldiers who’d shot at George Tafari’s Andover. Also photographs of the execution by firing squad of their commanding officer. She returned to Loki shaken by the photographs. She hadn’t expected an execution. It was a case of, Beware of what you ask for, you may get it.

But she had the assurances she’d sought, and she put her planes back into the operation. By that time many of her former customers, satisfied with its performance as well as with its under-the-table fringe benefits, decided to stick with Knight Air. If the company had had a larger fleet, it would have taken more of her business.

“We need to expand, big-time,” Douglas said one evening, drinking with Dare and Fitzhugh in the compound bar. “We need at least one more airplane, three or four if we can get them.”

“Maybe I got a solution,” Dare said. He had just returned from Nairobi, where he’d conferred with his lawyer about his lawsuit, in the hopes of breaking the legal deadlock and reclaiming his G1, still in mothballs at Wilson Field. “My hearing is way back on the docket, and even if the judge rules in my favor, he’s got to let Nakima have his day in court and rule on his countersuit, and then maybe, maybe the plane’s all mine again. Trouble is, the judge is in Nakima’s pocket, the idea being to keep delayin’ the thing till I wear out and quit. So I figured, as long as I was down there, to pay me a call on Hassan. He knows half the MPs and judges in this sorry-ass excuse of a country. Reckoned he might take the one on my case out to lunch, say a few words on old Wesley’s behalf.”

“Who the hell is Hassan?” Douglas asked.

Dare blew the foam off his beer. “I used to fly mirra for him.”

“What about helping you out with the G1? We could use that airplane, Wes.”

“Watch the ‘we,’ rafiki. I get the plane, we have the same arrangement with it as we got with my Hawker. I lease it to the company.”

Douglas frowned. “About time for you to develop a little trust, isn’t it?”

“Don’t take it personal. Half the time I don’t even trust myself. Anyhow, me and Hassan got to shootin’ the shit, he asked me what I was up to these days. I told him, and he said he’d like to talk to us.”

Fitzhugh swiped a finger across his damp forehead. “What does your court case have to do with us?”

“Not a damned thing, but I got the idea he might like to put some money into Knight Air. Kind of a venture capital thing.”

Douglas, who’d been bird-watching the hour before dinner, fanned the pages of the book lying on the table,
Birds of East Africa
—a show of disinterest that meant he was interested. “And he’s got the capital?”

“I think that Somali would need one of them supercomputers to count his money.”

“He’s a Somali?”

Dare’s glance made one of its sidelong, downward casts, as if he were embarrassed, though it was hard to imagine him embarrassed by anything. “I wouldn’t call a man a Somali if he wasn’t one. He’s not from Somalia. He’s what they call here an ethnic Somali, from eastern Kenya. Same difference, but he’s about the only Somali I care to deal with.”