Acts of faith (52 page)

“Triple A!” A voice screams into their headset. “Repeat! Triple A airburst!” A second voice: “You got ’em?” It was the fighter squadron they’d just refueled.”No! Whoa! SAM launch now. SAM missile launch!” Second voice: “Got ’em. Off to the right, right!”

“Holy shit, the real deal,” Bob says. “Doug, get on back, tell me if you see anything. This honey is a big flying target, a big ole X for Saddam’s boys.”

Douglas bounds out of the cockpit, too excited to be scared, and on through the crowded interior, nearly bowling over a lieutenant, and swings himself back into the pod, his window to the world. “Another SAM!” one of the voices shouts. “More triple A!” And he sees, miles to the south, a black cloud of flak appear in the clear heavens, and another, and a third, blooming like an evil flower. A bright ball streaks upward, trailing vapor that fades. Two more, and the bug-size specks of the F-
15
s peel off to dive. Their missiles flash.

“How’s it look, Doug?” Bob asks him.

He doesn’t answer right away. He’s captivated. It’s all somehow beautiful. The clear sky, the white mountains, the flashes and dark billows appearing and vanishing.

“Some flak, maybe three SAMs that I saw,” he answers, trying to sound laconic and calm. “Didn’t hit anything.”

“Firing blind. Won’t turn their radar on, or they’d get nailed before they pulled the triggers.”

The radio goes silent. The skies are empty once again. It’s over.

“Okay, folks,” Bob announces to the crew. “A little antiaircraft, maybe five SAMs, all out of range. We’re all right.”

Douglas remains in the pod, face pressed to the glass, heart banging against the floor. He wants to see it all again. He doesn’t want it to be over.

BOOK TWO

Flights to the Dark Side

PART ONE

Nuba Day!

W
HEN HE WAS
asked, the next morning at breakfast, how his date with the old girlfriend had gone, Fitzhugh replied that he wasn’t the kind to kiss and tell. Douglas didn’t press him—he had bigger things on his mind. He was ebullient to the point of giddiness and barely touched his bacon and eggs, hands flying with Mediterranean abandon as he described the
outstanding
results of last night’s dinner with Adid. The one-man conglomerate had pledged to rescue Dare’s G1 from legal no-man’s-land—it would take no more than a phone call or two—and to make an initial investment of five hundred thousand dollars, with another half million to come. “A mil, Fitz! A cool mil!” Douglas gushed. “With that kind of money, we can buy two more planes, maybe three!” Adid had demanded quids for those quos—he was to participate in any major business decisions; he would not venture the second half of his investment until he saw a return on the first, along with a sound plan for expanding operations; finally, Dare could retain ownership of the Hawker 748 and continue leasing it to the company, but that cozy arrangement would not apply to the Gulfstream. If Dare wanted it out of hock, he had to agree to sell it to Knight Air, receiving in exchange company stock equal to its market value. Dare resisted at first, said he wanted twenty tons of cold metal in his hands, not pieces of paper. Adid argued that he couldn’t be expected to risk his assets when one of the partners wasn’t willing to risk his. If Dare was that skeptical about Knight Air’s future, then perhaps he, Adid, would need to rethink his offer. With no alternative except to continue waging a hopeless court battle, Dare gave in.

Fitzhugh couldn’t quite focus on the conversation or, rather, monologue; thoughts of the previous night distracted him. He’d been as nervous as a boy. Undressing her slowly, tentatively, he was fearful that Diana naked would not be half so attractive as she was clothed. He’d told himself that appearances shouldn’t matter, if he truly loved her; nevertheless, they did matter. Fortunately, his concerns along those lines proved unfounded. He knew women his age who would have traded bodies with her; and he was happy to discover that the marks the years had made on it possessed a kind of charm, like a warrior’s scars. He kissed the lines etched into her hands, the little belt of flab around her abdomen, the cellulite puckers on her thighs and hips; and he blessed her and loved her the more for the humor that overcame his awkwardness. Laughter in her eyes, she stroked his erection and said, “So glad I did this, Fitz. It would have been a waste of a natural resource if I didn’t.”

She’d left his room at six this morning, to make sure she wasn’t discovered by Fitzhugh’s companions. That bothered him—a woman like her ought not to be stealing out of a hotel in the predawn twilight. As Douglas rattled on—“Hassan suggested we market ourselves more aggressively, and that’s what we’re going to start doing the minute we’re back in Loki”—he felt almost breathless. He was caught up in a love affair that had gone from zero to a hundred overnight, and he wondered where it was headed, if it was headed anywhere. Then Dare, unshaven and smacking his lips, came down and joined them for breakfast.

A
DID WORKED HIS MAGIC
, and the G1 was soon in service, in a new coat of green and white. Two more pilots were hired, another two to fly a used twin Beechcraft bought with a portion of Adid’s investment to ferry aid workers to and from their assignments in Sudan. The company now had five aircraft—the two Gulfstreams, the Hawker, the Antonov, and the Beechcraft—and seventeen people on its payroll. Grow or die! Adid had proclaimed, but while Knight Air’s fleet and payroll had grown, its revenues had moved in the opposite direction. The rule that what was bad for the southern Sudanese was good for the company and vice versa had taken effect, with the advent of a new wet season as generous as the previous one had been penurious. Bahr el Ghazal was delivered from famine, and with the easing of the crisis there, invoices declined sharply. Frantic to meet Adid’s targets, Douglas hustled a contract with World Vision to deliver aid to Somalia. The G1 was taken to Nairobi to fly those missions. The Hawker and the G1C, meanwhile, continued to make runs into the Nuba mountains for IPA and the Friends of the Frontline, but not frequently enough to compensate for the shortfall. Douglas then decided to attempt once more to get the other independent agencies to commit to the Nuba. He devoted his not-inconsiderable mental energies to figuring out how to sell them on the idea and asked Fitzhugh to help him, but Fitzhugh wasn’t of much help because he was preoccupied.

He was required to go to Nairobi once a month to deposit Knight Air’s receipts and contrived reasons to send himself to the capital more often. He would arrive at Diana’s Karen estate with a briefcase, pretending he was there on business, to avoid scandalizing her staff. They would talk and take tea in the room where he’d met Douglas and Barrett for the first time, the open windows admitting a perfume of frangipani, bougainvillea, and hibiscus that doubled the light-headed feeling her nearness induced in him. He was amazed and gratified, how comfortable they were in each other’s company, talking about her work and his, about Africa’s plight, about books and politics; but there was a tension in every conversation, for they were eager to touch and kiss but had to restrain themselves, what with the presence of the servant, the cook, the housekeeper, the gardener, the driver, the groom, the askaris at the gate, and the restraint heightened their need until it became almost unbearable. Diana got some relief by riding after their conversations. Poor Fitzhugh had no outlet as he stood by the steel fence and watched her, cantering around and around in boots and a jacket pinched at the waist, her legs sheathed in jodhpurs. It was more than he could stand, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, thrilled by her mastery. When she took a jump, leaning forward in the saddle, her thighs and hips forming a delicious curve, woman and horse looked like one mythic being, poised in midair.

She wouldn’t allow him into her bedroom, again in the interests of propriety, but put him up in the guest house. She came to him there after her staff had gone to bed. Diana made love with an intense but bridled passion, her legs flung over his shoulders, her back arching at her orgasm, her head thrown back and her gasps becoming one long, muted cry that fell off into a silence in which he swore he could hear his blood and hers, flowing through their veins. In the early morning, before dawn, she would leave him and creep back into her own room. He never felt so lonely and desolate as he did then, with her scent impregnated in the sheets and on the pillow. After his third visit he was sure they weren’t fooling anyone, but it seemed the housekeeper, the cook, etc., would tolerate their mistress’s liaison so long as she respected their sensibilities and kept up appearances. How he resented them, forcing him and Diana to sneak around like adulterers. He wanted to sleep beside her in a mutual bed and wake up with her in the morning. He wanted them to have dinner together without a lot of strained dissembling. The thought of marrying her had slipped into his mind, though he knew that was impossible; knew as well that not all the impediments to it arose from the conventions and prejudices of the society she lived in but from himself. He would like to be a father someday, and although Diana had not yet undergone the change, it couldn’t be far off. Nor could he picture what a future with her would be like. When he reached her age, she would be seventy. Seventy! How would that work out? They couldn’t give any serious thought to the future. Rowers in a tide too strong for their oars, they could only go where it took them, out to sea or to an unknown shore.

He returned from one of their trysts to discover that another odd love affair had caused a crisis. The day before, Tony had marched into the office to announce that if Douglas didn’t get rid of Dare and Mary, he was going to quit. Said he’d rather starve than suffer the humiliation of being around those two—“a whore and a fat wanker,” as he described them. After recovering from his shock, Douglas pointed out that he couldn’t fire his partner and asked the reason for Tony’s outburst. “Talk to your fucking partner” came the answer. Douglas did, and that provoked an argument between him and Dare. To the Texan’s remark that what he did with his personal life was of no concern to anyone, Douglas replied that it damned well was when it affected business. “Because of this high school shit, I’m going to lose a damn fine first officer!” In the end, a way was found to keep Tony on the payroll: Douglas transferred him to Nairobi to skipper the G1 on the Somalia runs, at an increase in salary, and brought the plane’s captain back to Loki to take Tony’s place as copilot on the G1C.

“So that little romantic intrigue is going to cost us another grand a month,” Douglas complained to Fitzhugh. “Dare and Mary, an item! Can you feature that? Talk about beauty and the beast. What the hell does she see in him?”

Involved as he was in his own intrigue, Fitzhugh elected not to speculate. The intricate equations that have bedeviled mathematicians for centuries were easier to solve than the riddles of the heart.

The problem in employee relations, combined with the financial stresses, made Douglas irritable and short-tempered. Once, in front of Fitzhugh and Rachel, he flung a pile of papers off the desk—they contained the business plan, which he was refining.

“I hate this!” he shouted. “You said it a while back, Fitz. Is this what we came here to do?”

“Yes, I did. But you see what’s causing this? It’s that wabenzi’s promise of more money. Forget that, and you’ll—”

“I’m not going to forget it, goddamn it! What the hell is the matter with you?” He paused and with a look directed the secretary to pick up the papers—Douglas wasn’t inclined to clean up the messes he made. “We have got to find some way to get those agencies on board. It’ll be good for us, it’ll be good for the people in the Nuba.”

“Win-win,” Fitzhugh murmured. “And the big mo.”

“There it is.”

Yes, there it was, Fitzhugh thought. Douglas was a soul split down the middle, the entrepreneur and the idealist. If he could enlist those agencies in his crusade, he could reconcile the halves of his divided self and serve God and Mammon at the same time.

A memoir written by a long-dead colonial official—Douglas had found it in a Nairobi bookshop—gave him an inspiration.

In the days when the British ruled Sudan, after Gatling guns and lyddite howitzer shells had opened the Native’s mind, disposing him to hear the missionary’s word and the lessons served up by apostles of Advancement and Justice—young men in topees and khaki drill who appeared in out-of-the-way places with vaccination kits or lists of crop production quotas or a contingent of Native policemen—a ceremony called Governor’s Day was held once a year. It provided a holiday for farmers and herdsmen, their chiefs with a venue to air their needs and gripes to His or Her Majesty’s representative, and him with a chance to tell His or Her Majesty’s subjects what the government would do for them and what it expected from them. The memoir contained a colorful account of a Governor’s Day celebration in the Nuba mountains, which Douglas read to Fitzhugh and Rachel one humid morning. It sounded like a real show, mingling aspects of imperial pomp with those of a tribal festival. A regimental band tooting the airs of empire; native soldiers presenting arms; turbaned dignitaries greeting the governor-general and his retinue of district officers; lofty speeches and exciting dances (the sort of dances that both shocked and captivated the Victorian mind, while reinforcing the conviction that it was the mind of a far superior civilization); and wrestling matches staged between champions cloaked in animal skins and plumed in ostrich feathers, grappling and tossing, bashing each other with iron bracelets that spilled as much blood as a bare-knuckle prizefight.