in some sticky substance that had drawn ants to his body. Watching him squirm and grimace, it was apparent to the logisticians that he was disgusted with himself and with them and the whole business. Fitzhugh could tell that they could tell he was acting contrary to his scruples, which caused them to wonder if he would be stricken with an attack of those scruples later on and renege on his promises. They sent him on his way. He found that success came when he told himself that he was doing a small wrong thing in order to do a big right thing—a version of Douglas’s statement “We’re doing what we have to do so we can keep doing what we came here to do.” Those words banished the sticky, crawly sensation, and he would feel more confident and sound more convincing when he proposed to his customers that they would personally benefit from an association with Knight Air Limited.
He reported the outcome to Douglas that night in the Hotel California bar. It was the beginning of their transformation into co-conspirators, for they spoke in conspiratorial tones—three other customers were sitting at a nearby table, Quinette and her Irish roommates.
“You came through, knew you would,” Douglas said.
The compliment brought a delight that momentarily overcame Fitzhugh’s doubts about his actions, while the delight, like a pretty yacht towing a garbage barge, dragged into the harbor of his self-esteem a mortifying awareness that his friend’s opinion of him had a direct effect on his opinion of himself.
“I had to offer incentives,” he confessed reluctantly. “I tried to think of it as a marketing tool, yes?”
“That’s exactly what it is.”
“I’m not sure how to tell Rachel how to handle these arrangements on the books.”
“I’ll take care of that.” With his Coke glass, he clinked Fitzhugh’s can of Tusker. “To the big mo.”
Three days later Douglas concluded the lease agreement with the owner of the Antonov-32. Soon afterward, with a decal of a green knight straddling an airplane pasted to her nose, she flew her first delivery into Bahr el Ghazal.
As that cruel dry season advanced, misfortune continued to be Knight Air’s ally. A very bad piece of bad luck was suffered by the crew of a Pathways Andover, flying sorghum and Unimix to a village near the Jur river. SPLA guerrillas surrounded the plane at the airstrip and began to offload its cargo onto lorries while the villagers watched helplessly. It was the third or fourth incident of rebel army theft since the famine struck, and the Andover’s captain—it was Tara’s senior pilot, the Ethiopian named George Tafari—was fed up. He told the rebel officer in charge that if his men didn’t turn over the food to the civilians, he was going to report the banditry to UN authorities. In the account that would later be given by the copilot, the officer replied that his troops were starving too and couldn’t be expected to fight on empty bellies. George persisted. The overstrung commander then drew his pistol and instructed George to speak not one word more and to clear out immediately.
The Andover wasn’t five hundred feet off the ground when the guerrillas opened fire with assault rifles and machine guns. A bullet through the head killed George instantly, and a Kenyan relief worker on board was wounded in the arm. The copilot, a devout Somali, would later say that the hand of Allah saved the plane from crashing; the hand of Allah kept his hands on the controls and gave him the strength and presence of mind to fly the crippled aircraft a thousand kilometers back to Loki, with the relief worker screaming in the back, the pilot-side windows blown out (making it impossible to pressurize the cockpit so that he had to fly the entire distance at six thousand feet), and with blood and brain matter sprayed all over the instrument panel.
Fitzhugh had monitored the distress calls on his own radio, and when he heard the Andover coming in, he went to the Pathways terminal to see if he could be of any help. He was inclined to believe the story of divine intervention after the Somali, bleeding from the fragments of George’s skull embedded in his cheek and temple, described what had happened. It also seemed miraculous that the man hadn’t taken leave of his senses.
Tara lost her composure when a Red Cross ambulance crew pulled George’s body from the cockpit. To see that iron woman fall to both knees beside