leg. Zulu Two appeared in the distance, a red scar showing through the acacia trees.
Dare lowered the wheels.
“Gear down and locked. No smoke yet, like I figured.”
“I’ll make a pass. We can assess the wind ourselves. We don’t need no stinking smoke.”
“Flaps down.”
She reduced power to approach range and decreased altitude to five hundred feet, then two hundred, and now they could see Manfred’s cream-colored Land Rover, a Red Cross painted on its roof. (Dare thought it would make a fine aiming point for a Sudanese pilot.) Women porters, scores of them, waited near the airstrip, their dresses a kaleidoscope of colors amid the pale green scrub. Mary flew along the right edge of the runway, allowing Dare to visually inspect its condition. He saw a long strip of white cloth flying from a pole as a windsock. Suleiman would have thought of that in lieu of the smoke. A good man was Sul-ee-man.
“Got a little bit of a crosswind out of the southeast. We’ll have to come in at the rough end,” Dare said, referring to the corrugations, like the washboards in a gravel road, at the north end of the runway.
Mary circled around to bring the Hawker in on final, and as the plane was halfway through the turn, Dare caught something in his peripheral vision—movement of some kind, flickers of white in the dense forests that covered the western side of the plateau all the way out to where it fell steeply to another plain. He tried for a better look, but then Mary completed her maneuver and his side window was facing the opposite direction and the view out of hers was blocked by her head.
WHEN IBRAHIM HEARD it in the distance, he thought it was an Air Force Antonov. The sound grew louder. He couldn’t see the airplane, the forest here being thick, the trees too high, but he knew it must be flying low; most times the Antonovs, which in his opinion were flown by cowards, stayed up so far they made barely a whisper. He reined up to listen. Louder still, then faint, then loud again. Suddenly he didn’t hear it at all. Thinking it must have flown on out of earshot, he nudged Barakat forward; an instant later, realizing that the plane had landed and shut down its motors, he stopped again.
“Allah karim!” he muttered under his breath, for God was presenting him with an opportunity. He told Hamdan and the militia captain that the plan had changed; he wasn’t going to split his force. They would attack the airfield as one.
Hamdan balked, baffled by this order, and asked the reason for it. That was the Brothers’ way. They weren’t disciplined soldiers, like the captain’s men, trained to obey without questioning. The Brothers preferred discussion, and so he took a few moments, precious moments, to explain that the village wasn’t important; it would be nearly empty because most of the abid, maybe all, would be at the airfield unloading the plane, which was not an Antonov but a smuggler’s plane. It was now on the ground. That was why the sound had stopped so suddenly.
“If we move fast, we can capture everything that’s in it and destroy it before it takes off!” he went on, underscoring his urgency with extravagant gestures. “And take many abid captive besides!”
Hamdan’s confusion vanished, and an excited expression came to his face. The government had posted a standing reward of five hundred thousand pounds to any murahaleen commander who destroyed a smuggler’s airplane, and Hamdan knew that Ibrahim, the generous one, would share the reward. He also knew that the contraband cargo could be sold at fine prices in the marketplaces, in addition to whatever the captives fetched. This could be a very lucrative expedition. As for Ibrahim himself, he hoped for profits beyond the material. So far no commander had seized a plane. He would present Colonel Ahmar with a piece of this one as proof of his achievement; luster would be added to his fame, and the nazirship could be his for the asking. He was feeling much better about the jihad now. He gave Barakat his heels and rode on at a trot—the crowded trees wouldn’t allow anything faster—and the mass of horsemen wheeled to follow him.
“WO IST ES?”
When he was agitated, which in Dare’s experience was pretty near all the time, Gerhard Manfred reverted to his native language.
“Wo is what?”
“X-ray film! Where?”
It had taken less than fifteen minutes on the ground to turn