A BLOSSOM OF smoke and a hard, flat, crunching explosion became Dare’s translator. The SPLA soldiers swung their weapons off their shoulders and ran for cover, hollering to one another. Crying out, the women sprinted away, a human herd in a blind animal panic. Lots of places to run out here, nowhere to hide, and there was nothing he could do for them now. The shell had burst toward the far end of the airstrip, but a good hundred yards to the east of it, a ranging round. He dashed for the plane and heard the whine and growl of the starboard engine starting up, then the port. Bless her, I’d fly to Mars with her. He ran up the steps and dogged the cargo door shut. Ca-rump. A second shell struck somewhere west of the airfield. The next would split the difference between the first two, and if the mortarmen knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t need another to have the runway zeroed in. His capacity for fast thinking and effective action in a crisis, the gift of his unreflective, pragmatic brain, went to work, bits and bytes of information flashing through his mental microcircuitry. Mortars firing from the south, that end of the runway pointing right at them, or almost. They’re going to walk their fire down the runway to try to hit the plane. Roll now, we’ll be moving into their fire, and it’s always harder for mortarmen to shorten their range than to lengthen it, so if we time it right, if we’re real fucking lucky, they’ll be elevating their tubes and we’ll be airborne. He rammed the throttles forward, praying to the God he didn’t believe in. The Hawker bounced and squealed and rattled down the rough strip. She seemed, this insentient piece of metal, rubber, and rivets, to be conscious of the danger she was in. Dare didn’t say a word. Mary didn’t say a word. A gray-black flower bloomed fifty yards ahead and a little to the left. Plane and shrapnel sped toward each other, colliding in a splattering like the crackle of hail on a tin roof. One piece, or a rock thrown up the blast, struck a glancing blow at the side window behind Dare’s head. He couldn’t turn around to see if it had shattered. One-fifteen now. Rotation speed. He pulled back hard, the Hawker’s prop blades dug into the air, her nose tilted, and she was aloft, two shells exploding not far in front of her and fifty feet below, close enough for her to buck and shudder in the blast waves, as she would in a wind shear. Dare was sure her undercarriage had gotten peppered, how badly there was no way to know. She skimmed the trees beyond the runway’s end. Dead ahead was a sight that he knew would be engraved in his memory for as long as he had one. It looked like a rodeo stampede with all the cowboys dressed in bedsheets: a horde of robed horsemen galloping across the tree-spotted plateau. They were going to go through the scattered SPLA defenders like a semi-trailer through a snake-rail fence. The women wouldn’t have a chance.
At five hundred feet he made a hard left turn and saw riders swarming all over the plateau; saw, with the acuity that comes to human vision in situations of extreme stress, that several horsemen had halted and were firing at the Hawker. Trusting they would miss, shooting as they were from the saddle at a high, fast-flying target, he climbed away and called for the flaps. Mary acknowledged, and he called for gear, and Mary uttered the aviator’s favorite four-letter word, as useful in moments of mere annoyance as it is in moments of mortal danger, and quite often the last word recorded on the black box when a pilot runs out of altitude and ideas at the same time: “Shit!”
The gear light was still green, indicating that the wheels remained down and locked.
She pulled the knobbed lever once more, but the light stayed green. The absence of the thunk and thud of retracting gear and the Hawker’s vibrations declared that the problem wasn’t a faulty light switch.
“Shrapnel must have severed a hydraulic hose.”
She pointed at the annunciator light for leaking fluid; it was dark.
“Maybe we got a damaged circuit, too.”
They were making a hundred and sixty knots a thousand feet above the plain that lay like a waterless sea between the hospital and