Acts of faith (64 page)

They heard then a distant droning in the sky. Alexei’s green and white Antonov was approaching on its base leg. They quickly walked back to the Gulfstream. Quinette was standing under its nose, a question on her face. Michael nodded to her.

“Balm for Gilead,” she said.

Mustang

D
ARE HAD COME
to a conclusion about his partner: Doug was willing to do almost anything, but only after he persuaded himself that it was for the greater good of the human race. He was the kind of guy who would smuggle heroin, then tell you that heroin was a beneficial drug and expect you to believe that because he did. On the night of the day they returned to Loki, full of war stories, boiling over with moral outrage, Doug and Fitz huddled with Dare in Knight Air’s office and filled him in on Michael Goraende’s request. Marching from one end of the room to the other, Doug declared, in so many words, that running guns into the Nuba was a sacred duty. Humanitarian aid was no longer the solution to humanitarian problems. Antiaircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles would transform the Nubans from victims into a people in full command of their destiny. He soared right into the rhetorical ionosphere, comparing them to free wild Indians and the people who hung around the UN feeding centers in the south to tame reservation Indians. “If I’d been around in the Old West,” he said, “I would have armed Crazy Horse!”

Fitz, whom Dare had credited as being more sensible, was just as carried away. No doubt he would have been less inspired if the bombs had fallen on a military target instead of on a hospital. To Dare’s mind, that didn’t add up. Imposing rules on war—the Geneva Conventions and all that bullshit—was as silly as posting traffic signs at the Daytona Speedway. Once the bars were down, human beings were capable of any crime, and it was a waste of time to expect them to behave themselves. That was why the bars had been put up in the first place.

So he didn’t share in his colleagues’ indignation. The closest he could come to it was the feeling that he owed the Nubans something, for leaving them that day when the murahaleen attacked the airfield at Zulu Two. He said, “Enough of this shit. Let’s get down to fundamentals. First off, who pays us and how much?”

“We’ve worked that out with Michael,” Fitz answered, hooded in cigarette smoke. “The SPLA is the client, eighteen thousand per flight, that’s twice what we get for flying nonlethal stuff.”

“Okay, second off, where do we pick up the hardware?”

“It’s funneled through the Ugandan Defense Ministry. Ugandans bring it to the border, then it’s smuggled over to SPLA airstrips on the Sudan side. That’s where we pick it up.”

Doug opened the door and, waving his ball cap, tried to shoo the smoke outside. “Wes, we aren’t telling you all this out of courtesy,” he said. “We need you. Michael needs you.”

“Well, ain’t that nice. How so?”

“Garang just gives him leftovers. He needs his own suppliers. We thought you could help in that department.”

“Reckon I could. There’s a guy I flew with in Blackbridge Services. He could get Michael the heavy weapons he wants, and get them quicker, cheaper than anybody else.”

“Outstanding!” Doug said, shutting the door. “That is
outstanding.
”

Before going any further, Dare was compelled to apprise his colleagues of certain realities. Number one—“and beg your pardon for talkin’ to you like y’all are children, but when it comes to this, that’s what you are”—both the UN and the Kenyan government winked at flying humanitarian aid into Sudan’s no-go zones because it wasn’t really “flying on the dark side but kind of the gray side.” But smuggling weapons—now that was serious contraband, and if the UN found out about it, Knight Air would be banned from Loki in a heartbeat. As for the Kenyan government, well, it was sensitive about its relations with Khartoum. It would have to take action to prove its good intentions, and that would mean revoking the company’s certificate and prohibiting it from flying anywhere in the country. “That’s the best that could happen,” Dare went on. “Worst case is, Kenya arrests us to make an example of us, confiscates the company’s assets, and then boots us out of the country, and we end up with the hole in the doughnut.”

“We’ve considered that, we’re not that dumb,” Doug said, and pushed away from the door to stand face to face with Dare. “So do we tell Adid about this? This qualifies as a major business decision.”

“He won’t go for it,” Dare said.

“The guy was an ivory smuggler. Why would he object?”

“He wouldn’t have any moral objections, on account of he doesn’t have any morals. This would be too risky, business-wise. For all the reasons I just now told you.”

“Right,” Doug said. “There’s another reason we need you. How do we minimize the risks? You’ve done this kind of thing. The Contras in Nicaragua, other places I’d suppose.”

“You’d suppose right,” Dare replied, and took a step back, giving himself room to breathe and to think. Running guns appealed to the outlaw in his nature, but he also saw how such an operation could win him financial independence and a ticket out of Africa. “First thing we’d have to do is form a shell company,” he said, and paused, twirling his sunglasses, collecting his ideas. “Let’s call it Yellowbird Air. We incorporate it in Uganda. President is me, the plane is my Hawker. It’s in my name, doesn’t belong to the company. That way, in case things go wrong and this operation gets found out, Knight Air’s hands are clean. It’s a way of providing y’all with what the CIA calls ‘plausible deniability.’ ”

Doug asked, “What about you?”

“I would take the fall.”

“Out of your devotion to the cause?”

“I’ll be comin’ to that.”

“All right, so this Yellowbird would be flying out of Kampala?”

Dare shook his head. The Ugandan capital was twice as far from the Nuba as Loki. “We would leave from here with, let’s say, a half load or a quarter load of nonlethal aid. You don’t want an empty plane flying out of here, somebody’s bound to notice and wonder what’s going on. Then we pick up the hardware on the Uganda border and head for the Nuba.”

And what about invoicing? Fitz wanted to know. How was that to be handled?

“Simple. Me and Mary keep half the eighteen thousand, deposit the other half in a bank account in Kampala, then that bank wire-transfers it to Knight Air’s account in Nairobi.”

“You and Mary,” Doug said.

“Only two people will make the gun runs. Me and her, and only five are gonna know what Yellowbird is up to—me and her and Nimrod. Y’all and Fitz make it five.”

As Dare had anticipated, Doug protested the first part of this provision. His partner wanted to fly the arms himself, maybe for the thrill of it, probably for other reasons.

“You don’t want a direct hand in this operation,” he cautioned. “You’re too emotional about this. All that crap about it being your obligation, and the Nubans like wild Indians off the reservation, Christ almighty. No room in a thing like this for that. Anyhow, y’all want me in it, that’s the deal, most of it.”

“Most? What’s the rest?”

“I’ll fly these runs for a set period, say, no less than six months. When I’m done, I’m gonna quit. Quit it all. Quit Africa. I cash in those company shares I got for sellin’ my old G1 to the company. Half a million bucks.”

“Fair enough, you’re entitled to—”

“Hold on,” Dare interrupted. “Remember when I said I’d rather have twenty tons of cold metal in my hands than pieces of paper? There’s always the chance those shares won’t make good ass-wipe in six months’ time. In case that happens, the company agrees to transfer ownership of the airplane back to me.”

Doug went pale. “What are you talking about?”

“No matter what happens, I get one of two things when I’m done—half a million in cash or the G1. That’s the rest of the deal. You and me are gonna see my lawyer and sign a contract to that effect, and that contract is gonna say that in case the Gulfstream cracks up between now and then, you pay me with the insurance money.”

“What about Adid?” Doug asked. “How do we explain why the company is handing over an airplane to you?”

“Y’all are a creative guy,” Dare said, smirking. “You’ve got six months to think of an explanation.”

“I can’t agree to that,” Doug said.

“Then I can’t either. Think it over, Dougie boy.”

Two days later he appeared at Dare’s tent and said, “Okay to everything.” But he added a codicil—as an added layer of protection, Dare was to resign as co–managing director. He would retain his shares but would not be affiliated with Knight Air’s management. That would make a plausible deniability more plausible, if one were needed. After mulling the proposal over, Dare agreed to submit his resignation.

“T
HERE
’
S WHY
I love flying. Groundhogs don’t see things like that.”

The rainbow that would have presented itself as a conventional arch to someone on the ground appeared to Dare and Mary as a full circle in the sky. She was still young enough to be wonder-struck by such unusual sights, a girlish luster in her eyes, a breathlessness in her voice. He’d thought the days when a woman could make his heart do athletic tricks were well behind him; like an aging quarterback after one too many sacks, its joints were too stiff. She’d restored its agility. Loving her, he felt younger and more hopeful and found himself seeing things as she saw them. Without her he would have noticed the rainbow, but he would not have appreciated the glory of it, shimmering above Uganda’s cloud-shrouded forests.

Dare had rediscovered happiness, and this felicitous state of mind had overcome his aversion to a fifth marriage. It had also moved him to change the ad hoc ways that had governed, or rather, misgoverned, his nomadic life for the past thirty years. He was finished with improvising, finished with the slapdash structuring of his days; he was making plans for the future, clear, concrete plans, and the vision of the life he and Mary were going to lead together was as much a source as it was a product of his happiness.

He hadn’t proposed yet. That would come in due time, when she’d gotten her fill of living dangerously, and he reckoned a few months of arms smuggling ought to accomplish that. He wasn’t so besotted that he considered her acceptance a sure thing. On the other hand, it would not be as unlikely as drawing an inside straight. Not too long ago she had gone on a riff about having children. She wasn’t, it was true, talking about having children with
him,
she was speaking in a general way, but it would take a lot to convince Dare that she wasn’t dropping hints. He’d been tempted to blurt, “I’ll be the daddy!” but that sort of frankness wasn’t his style. He played it cautiously and talked back to her in the same general way, telling her that she had plenty of time yet, hell, an aunt of his had given birth at forty-six, back in the days when most country women that age were thinking about grandchildren, if they didn’t have them already. Anyway, he figured that when he said, “Let’s you and me get married and have kids,” the odds of a yes would be in his favor. That would mean he’d have to follow through, and following through would mean he’d have to learn to like children, or at least not hate them.

The private contract between him and Doug had been drawn up and signed. In six months he would have either five hundred thousand cash or an airplane worth that much. If it turned out to be the airplane, he would sell it and the Hawker, which would bring in a total of seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred thousand. Pooling that with whatever sum he and Mary earned with Yellowbird would give them enough to buy a corporate jet. Then he would tap his old contacts in the music business and go back to flying name acts on tour. He would give himself three years as a pop-music chauffeur of the air. By that time he would be approaching sixty, but Mary would still be young enough to have a kid. They could open a flight school together, or maybe retire to a ranch he’d always wanted in the Texas hill country—he wasn’t too clear on that part, it was too far in the future.

His main concern now was not to let his newfound happiness fog his judgment, that was to say, not let it blur the keen vision of his cynical eye, nor dull the keen ear that picked up Double Trouble’s warning chirps and tweets. He’d been in love before, or thought he was—it amounted to the same thing—and knew that when you were in love with one person, you tended to love everybody. If you loved them, you naturally trusted them, a bad idea in Africa. He would need to keep his rule of thumb in mind: people did the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself. In this part of the world, the wrong thing never failed to present itself, and to complicate matters, it usually came disguised as the right thing.

Entebbe tower gave him the okay to start his descent. The Nile, under an armada of clouds sailing at ten thousand feet, made a fragmented serpentine of brassy brown amid green hills. It was said to have had a redder color when Idi Amin was feeding his real and imagined enemies to the crocodiles—another glorious moment in modern African history. Half a year, give or take, and I’ll be the hell out of here with about a million. Dare’s mind leaped ahead again, painting a picture of him and Mary at the controls of a state-of-the-art airplane, jet engines whispering in the cold, incorruptible realms of high altitude. Flipping on the autopilot, sharing a drink in a lushly appointed cabin with celebrity passengers. Staying at the best hotels instead of some makuti-roofed hut or a tent with a cement-slab floor. Landing at fine airports instead of on dirt strips scratched out of the bush. Front-row complimentary seats at the concerts. Lost in these images, he flinched when the tower cleared him for final approach. He eased into his turn. The Hawker’s shadow flowed over the boat-specked, wave-ribbed glitter of Lake Victoria.