to kill you and your dog. Throttles and control levers are set. Ditto hydraulics.”
“It didn’t convince her. She’s smarter than she looks. Fuel quantity—”
“I can see we’re topped off,” he said, gesturing at the fuel gauges.
“The sheet says that it’s the FO’s responsibility to check fuel quantity. I thought we agreed to do things by the book.”
“This ain’t a goddamned library. You think she looks dumb?”
Mary shook her head—a flow of blond waves that broke his heart. “A little wonder-struck, kind of how I looked when I first got here. An innocent abroad.”
“That one ain’t all that innocent.”
“That dress!” Mary did one of her patented eye rolls. “Who does she think she is? The honky princess of Zanzibar? Wish I had her legs, though. They don’t stop.”
“She’s a long drink of water, all right, but your legs look just fine,” he said, and patted a denim-sheathed thigh and allowed his hand to linger a little longer than he should have, to see how she’d react. She didn’t react one way or the other, as if it weren’t there. “We’re done with pre-start, Marian the Librarian, unless you want me to verify that the parking brake is set, which as you can see for your own self it is.” He motioned at the brake status light on the upper panel, then slid the side window open and looked at Nimrod, standing beyond the wingtip, a wheel block in each honest hand. “All clear down there, rafiki?”
Nimrod gave him a thumbs-up. Starter-motor whine, the prop making a couple of slow turns before the engine fired. He revved it up, checking the gauges, listening for flaws in the smooth turboprop snarl, then fired the other engine. A pair of Rolls-Royce Darts, each delivering eighteen hundred and eighty horsepower, and every one of those would be needed on this run. The plane was fully loaded with eleven thousand eight hundred pounds of cargo destined for the Nuba mountains. Here comes Santa in his Hawker-Siddley sleigh.
He got his clearance from Loki tower and eased down the taxiway toward the airfield’s western edge, where heat shimmers danced off the asphalt.
Forklifts were stuffing two UN Buffalos full of sorghum. The flight crews stood around in their corporate jumpsuits. Dare couldn’t make up his mind what they looked like: garage mechanics, janitors, or delivery truck drivers. Employees whatever the case, wage-apes. He laughed silently—contempt always gave his spirits a lift—and thanked the fates for sparing him the disgrace of ending up on someone’s payroll. He hadn’t warmed up to Douglas and knew he never would—besides being a bleeding heart and a humorless workaholic, Douglas came from a millionaire family with a social pedigree to go with the money, and the self-assurance that was a legacy of his privilege sometimes stirred in Dare’s hardscrabble heart a desire to bust his nose for no reason except to watch him bleed. But he had to admit that his partner so far had done nothing to support DeeTee’s fears and reservations. He appeared to be a straight shooter, raising the unsettling possibility that the canary had been wrong for the first time in its existence.
He tested the flaps, rudder, and elevators and called that he was ready to go. The tower gave the barometric reading. Mary adjusted the altimeter.
“Clear for takeoff, standard point delta departure,” the voice in his earphones continued. “Temperature three zero Celsius. Be advised Pathways Four Bravo tracking inbound, bearing oh niner five at level seven, forty miles out.”
That would be Tara Whitcomb, returning from one of her solitary runs. Dare aligned the nose, advanced the power levers, and took off. He switched to Knight Air’s company frequency and called Fitz.
“Read you loud and clear,” answered his cheerful voice. Even when he was miserable, that guy sounded like it was Christmas morning.
“We’re on the way. Estimate arrival in two hours. Call you then.” If the tower was monitoring the company radio frequency—which Dare trusted they were not—they would know from that last transmission that his flight plan was a work of fiction. The listed destination, Chukudum, was seventy-five miles away, a distance the Hawker could cover in a little over twenty minutes.
“You can take it from here, darlin’,” he said to Mary.
She gave the exaggerated shrug, shoulders almost touching her ears, that signaled anger or exasperation. Flying with her four to five days a week for the past three months had given him a marital familiarity with her tics and mannerisms. “Wes,” she said, “your social skills are way