Acts of faith (67 page)

“I thought about that. Here’s a possible scenario. They got word from a legitimate retriever that he was coming in with three hundred and seventy-two people, real captives, but all along they’d planned to salt the mine. They knew you wanted a lot of people, so they’d recruited forty-eight folks from nearby towns to pad the numbers and make themselves some money. Then for some reason, maybe a delay en route like you said, the real slaves didn’t show up. That’s what made Manute nervous. They must’ve figured it would be easier to hide their actors and actresses in a big crowd.”

“And you’re saying this happened because I put pressure on them?”

“No!” she replied with vigorous shakes of her head. She had to watch how she put things.

“Okay, Nancy Drew, what else have you got?”

She decided to ignore the Nancy Drew remark. “The other day I was catching up on our last mission. Thirty people whose names don’t match. So there’s another fifteen hundred dollars.”

“I’d be careful, Quinette, about turning your speculations into fact,” Ken said. “You’re making an indictment on some very thin evidence. You’re not being paid to be some kind of auditor, you know. Or a private eye.”

This wasn’t going at all as she’d expected. “Well, excuse me all to hell!” she said in a flash of temper. “Excuse me for taking the time to see if we’re getting ripped off! If I’m right, don’t you think it’s pretty damned disgusting? Don’t you want to do something about it?”

“I’ll look into it.” He stood there, while above his head, as bright as a jewel in the barred sunlight piercing the window grate, an orange lizard clung to the wall. “Have you mentioned this to anyone else?”

She shook her head.

“Someone at the UN or in the press could blow a thing like this way out of proportion,” Ken said. “Like that bitch from CNN, Phyllis.”

“I’ve got a reputation around here for being discreet.”

“Don’t do anything to ruin it. The possibility that there are a few cases of fraud out of thousands doesn’t deny that there’s a huge human rights issue here and that we’re the only ones doing anything about it.”

“Right.”

“I know it’s the principle of the thing, but the amounts that we might be talking about are really small.”

The lizard had crept a couple of inches higher, its imperceptible movement creating the illusion that Ken had grown shorter.

“It would be terrible,
terrible,
” he went on, “if someone like Phyllis Rappaport were to blow a small problem out of proportion and damage a program that’s doing so much good.”

The bitter seed of her disappointment in him flowered into contempt, a contempt she couldn’t allow herself to show. She did need him, after all. “I’d never breathe a word to her or anyone. I’m a little surprised you think I would.”

“I don’t,” he protested, then paused. “But I can see how I gave you that impression. Sorry.”

Ken and contrition were a rare combination, which she could turn to her advantage, provided she didn’t overdo things. “I wasn’t looking for an apology,” she said, and gave him some time to think about the comment. She could almost see his mental gears turning, notch by notch. After several silent moments she realized he needed a nudge, and striving for a tone half an octave below the resentful, she said, “I put a lot of effort into this that I didn’t have to. I wasn’t playing Nancy Drew because I was bored. I thought I was looking out for your interests, the organization’s interests.”

He got it, finally, and to cover up his chagrin, he made a comic show, hunching his shoulders, wincing, turning up his palms. “Okay. I get the same complaint in Geneva. I don’t give my staff the credit they deserve. I stand corrected. You showed a lot of initiative and concern, and I’m grateful. I’ll put you in for a bonus.”

“You don’t have to go that far,” she stated, and while he was still feeling that he owed her something, she handed him Michael’s letter.

“What’s this?”

“It’s in the initiative department.”

“You don’t have enough on your plate already?” he asked when he’d read it.

“Ken, this is a whole new area we could call attention to. I’d like to go up there and make an assessment.”

“We sent you up there once to make an assessment and you damned near got yourself killed.”

“I can’t imagine anything like that would happen again. And the last time I was with a whole bunch of people. I hardly had a chance to talk to him. Didn’t even scratch the surface.”

“What would you get if you went back?”

“Facts, figures, an overview. What problems we’d have setting up a program there.”

He set the letter down on the desk and looked at it pensively. “All right, but make it a brief visit. You’ve got plenty to do back here.”

Brothers and Sisters in Arms

T
HEY MADE THREE
flights in the first week, departing Loki at dawn with light loads of innocuous cargo, landing at an SPLA airstrip on the border to take on military hardware smuggled through Uganda in crates labeled “sewer pipes” (antiaircraft missiles), “insecticide” (triple-A machine guns), “fertilizer” (mortar shells), “typewriters” (mortar fuses), and “bulldozer parts” (mortar tubes), then flying on to the Nuba mountains for a quick off-load and a return to Loki in time for a late lunch. The second week was much the same. Mary videotaped and photographed these flights to the dark side. Dare indulged her hobby at first, then suggested that she leave her cameras behind in the future; keeping a pictorial record of their activities wasn’t a smart idea. “The wrong eyes see that stuff, we’ve got big problems.” And what about the videos she’d already shot? Did he want her to burn them? No, but it would be wise to buy a safe and lock them up. “All right,” she said agreeably. “I don’t need any more pictures. One mission is pretty much like another. Funny, isn’t it, how even running guns can get to be routine.”

Dare’s canary warned him that a comment like that would not go unpunished. On their next mission, minutes before they were to take off from an airfield near Nimule, a deluge washed out the runway, stranding them for over two days. They drank river water filtered through a hand pump, painted themselves in Deet against the swarms of mosquitoes, and breathed through bandanna masks against the stench of the corpses littering the bush nearby. The bodies belonged to soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army, an exceedingly violent band of crackpot Christians in rebellion against the Ugandan government. To retaliate for Uganda’s support of the Sudanese rebels, Khartoum had overcome its abhorrence of infidels and armed the Lord’s Resistance Army. A detachment of these lunatics, either on their own initiative or on orders from their Muslim allies, had crossed the border to seize the airfield. The SPLA defenders wiped them out and left them unburied to discourage further attempts.

“Africa sure is an interesting place,” Dare said as they sat inside the airplane to get away from the stink. “Had enough of it yet?”

On the second day he figured the smell was more endurable than the Hawker’s saunalike interior and went outside to check the runway’s condition. After his inspection, he sat down for a smoke—and felt a dagger pierce his calf. In seconds an excruciating pain bolted up his leg. He hobbled back to the plane, flopped onto a cargo pallet, and groaned. Mary rolled up his pant leg, exposing a bulging red welt.

“Scorpion,” she said. “You take it easy, baby. Mary will take care of it.” She sharpened her jackknife, sterilized it with a cigarette lighter, and sliced the wound to bleed out the poison, then rubbed it with crystals of potassium permanganate from the first-aid kit.

Hours of throbbing misery followed. Dare’s leg swelled up to the thigh. By morning the runway was usable, but he couldn’t operate the rudder pedals well enough to fly. Mary said she would skipper the plane back to Loki—he needed a doctor. It was too risky to land there with a planeload of weapons, so she hustled some of the SPLA guards to take them off. With their roles reversed—she as captain, he as first officer—they made the trip without incident. She drove him to the Red Cross hospital, and as she helped him walk to admissions, he said, “I don’t know what the hell I’ve done to deserve you, but I must of done it.”

She kissed his cheek. “Nobody deserves what they get, good or bad.”

While he recovered, Mary was summoned back to Canada by news that her father had pancreatic cancer and wasn’t expected to make it through the month. Her departure forced Dare to revise his operational scheme and take Doug as copilot on the next flight. There were two others on Knight Air’s roster more qualified to fly Hawkers, but he couldn’t chance expanding the circle of the clued-in. Which was the reason why he was incredulous when Doug, before leaving on their second mission together, announced that they would be carrying a passenger—Quinette Hardin. She needed a lift to their final destination, Zulu Three. Before flying there, they were to put down at New Cush and pick up the latest shipment for Michael’s forces—four eighty-two-millimeter tubes, two SAM-7 missiles, and three tons of ammunition.

“Are you nuts?” Dare said. “The slave queen? We can’t let her see what we were doin’.”

“Wes, she’s known about it since the beginning. Before the beginning, when Michael first brought it up to Fitz and me. She’ll keep her mouth shut.”

Dare wasn’t reassured. He recalled Mary’s description of Quinette as “an innocent abroad” and his reply that he didn’t think she was all that innocent. What if he was wrong? In his experience, an innocent caused trouble without meaning to, like a four-year-old playing with Dad’s revolver.

“Dire Straits, a golden oldie from the eighties,” she said from the jumpseat behind him and Doug. “Mary told me your in-flight entertainment is always Stevie Ray Vaughan.”

Dare ignored her.

I’m a soldier of freedom in the army of man
We are the chosen, we’re the partisan.

“It’s my tape,” Douglas said. “A guy I flew with in the Gulf War said the problem with real war is that there isn’t any background music. So we provide our own.”

The cause it is noble and the cause it is just
We are ready to pay with our lives if we must.

“Well, I guess it’s appropriate,” Quinette said.

“Sure, if y’all are ready to pay with your life, which I’m not with mine.”

Nothing gonna stop them as day follows night
Right becomes wrong, the left becomes the right.

The song intruded on his thoughts of Mary. She’d been gone nine days and six hours to keep vigil at her dying father’s bedside. She had never talked much about her family, and he hadn’t asked her to. You didn’t think of the nomad aviators in Loki as having families, or roots, or lives other than the ones they were living now. Cut off from their origins, it seemed as if, through some process of spontaneous creation, they’d sprung full grown into existence right here in Africa.

Quinette unbuckled her belt and stretched forward to look out the cockpit window. “This part looks so different. Like Africa the way I pictured it before I came here. Jungly.”

“How about sittin’ back down and strappin’ in,” Dare said in a rare display of safety consciousness. In the distance a thunderstorm was making up, a tightly wrapped, nasty-looking sucker, the cloud resting on a blue-black shaft of rain like a golf ball on a tee. He switched on the intercom and said, “Nimrod, wheels down in ten. Let’s try for a quick load. Might rain, and I do not intend to get stuck again.”

His loadmaster rogered him from the rear, in which a half ton of medical supplies were piled up under the cargo nets, destined for delivery to the clinic Ulrika had cobbled together in New Tourom, out of the stuff she’d salvaged from the hospital’s wreckage.

Doug’s tape wound on.

“Y’all like this shit?”

“Sure,” Doug said, but offered to turn the cassette player off.

“That’s okay. I like to keep my first officers happy. It’s a fringe benefit of flyin’ with Captain Wesley Dare. Flaps.”

Doug lowered them, and they descended over bright green hills and valleys, laced with glittering streams. The New Cush airstrip, lying between two low ridgelines, resembled a fairway in need of serious maintenance. Dare radioed the SPLA on the ground, asking if the field was secure. Someone said it was, but there was tension in the voice, and DeeTee chirped an alert. Dare pulled his Beretta from under the seat and jammed it into his belt.

A strand of black smoke rose from one end of the runway, indicating a crosswind. He quartered into it, then touched down. As Nimrod opened the aft cargo door, a squad of SPLA soldiers popped out of the surrounding brush, led by an officer who looked ready for a parade: clean boots, a clean uniform, a polished shoulder-holster, and a silver-knobbed swagger stick, which he brought to the brim of his beret in jaunty salute.

“Good day, captain!” he called, standing below the cockpit.

Dare opened the side window. “And good day to you, rafiki. How y’all?”

“Quite well, thank you. May I have a word with you, sir?”

“Polite as hell, ain’t he,” Dare said in an undertone. “C’mon, Doug. I think we’ve got problems. Quinette, you stay inside.”

“What kind of problems?” she asked.

“Soon as I find out, you’ll be the first to know.”