the company had netted two hundred thousand. The next day Fitzhugh flew to Nairobi to personally present a check to the South African from whom the G1C was being leased. Knight Air now owned the airplane free and clear.
In the meantime UN officials in Kenya pleaded with Khartoum to lift the embargo. After resisting for a time, the fanatics relented. UN Hercules and Buffalos began to make daily airdrops. Tara’s company was contracted to deliver smaller shipments, but Knight Air was left out because of an obscure regulation: to carry UN cargoes, an independent airline had to possess a UN radio call-sign. Douglas got a meeting with base officials and, deploying his persuasive charms, convinced them that in the present emergency, one should be issued to Knight Air.
Fitzhugh, Douglas, and Dare waited for a rush of new clients, but none came. The UN agencies continued to send their business to Pathways.
“Don’t have to think too hard to figure out what’s going on there,” Douglas declared one morning, after he’d returned from a flight. He and Fitzhugh were in the office. Douglas, polishing off a six-pack of Coke, seemed drawn to a high, fine edge, each gray eye cupped by a shadowy crescent as he twisted a pencil through his fingers. “She’s not sleeping with agency logisticians, so that leaves the alternative. She’s got them on her payroll. Ten percent of each flight’s charges goes back to them.”
“You don’t have any proof, and besides, I can’t picture Tara giving kickbacks to anyone.”
Douglas braced the pencil over his two middle fingers, hooking one around each end, as if he meant to break it in two. “That woman’s got everybody sold on the idea that she’s some sort of nun. The flying nun, but hey, you don’t get where she’s gotten without marking a few cards in the deck.” He pulled off his baseball cap and gave it a Frisbee toss across the room. “Talk to those people. You know them. Talk to ’em, see if you can get them to throw some business our way. Give ’em the sales pitch. Tara can’t do it all, and what she can do for nine thousand, we can do for eight.”
“I’ll try,” Fitzhugh said. “But you know, we don’t have the aircraft to handle much more than we do now.”
“Tony and I will do two turnarounds a day if we have to, and so will Wes and Mary.”
This was a different Douglas Braithwaite from the one Fitzhugh had met in Diana Briggs’s house last year. He was harder somehow, annealed by the pressures that had been on him, transforming Knight Air from an idea into a going concern, flying mission after mission in dangerous skies. In the process the old Douglas had not so much vanished as been overshadowed by another side to his personality, which displayed the defects of his virtues. Lately his resolve, passion, and drive manifested themselves in an obsessive quest to surpass Tara Whitcomb. “We’re playing Avis to her Hertz, but not forever,” he’d said, and more than once. Reversing that equation had become the focus of his energies. Tara had done nothing to earn the animosity he’d worked up for her. Was there some strand of hostile competitiveness woven into his American DNA that wouldn’t allow him to be content with second place?
“As far as equipment goes, I’m working on that,” he said now. “There’s a Russian guy in Nairobi looking to lease an Antonov-thirty-two. Tony found out about him. The deal comes complete with a five-man crew. Five-fifty an hour, with a sixty-hour-per-month minimum. The Russian pays the crew and insurance, we pay the rest.”
“So”—Fitzhugh took a calculator out of the desk drawer—“if it does just twenty turnarounds a month, we—”
“Gross about one-sixty,” Douglas cut in. He’d already done the arithmetic. “After lease fees, fuel, and operating costs, net seventy and change. But here’s the sweet thing. An Antonov carries seven and a half tons and cruises at two-twenty. That’s three tons more than one of Pathways’ Andovers and reduces block time by a factor of forty miles an hour. We deliver seven-odd tons, at a buck-thirty a kilo, she delivers four at a little over two bucks. Less for more. We’d be irresistible to any logistics guy trying to stay in budget. I’ll be talking to this Russian or whatever he is in a couple of days.” Douglas spread his arms out wide. “We’ve got the big mo, and if I learned anything from my dad, it’s that