phone, and once he got here, well now, I thought it best he heard it from you.”
“Oh dear, Fitz, we’re awfully sorry.”
The clear, steady blue eyes, the smashing smile, the face that belonged in a garden party in the London suburbs. She started to say more but stopped herself at some vague sign from Douglas.
“You won’t be by yourself,” he said. “I’ll be going with you.”
“A tough business, and risky, I know,” Barrett chimed in. “You won’t, of course, be expected to cover all the Nuba, just as much as you can in a fortnight. That would give us a picture of the whole. The board’s given me the okay to offer you five thousand U.S.”
Fitzhugh shook his head.
“Not enough?” asked Diana, frowning.
“Oh, no. Fine and dandy. Much more than the UN would have paid for a fortnight’s work. But you see—” He broke off, silently questioning Malachy’s assessment of Diana as a woman whose head wasn’t a hatchery for mad schemes. Maybe she didn’t hatch this one, but she sure was part of it. His glance moving to the window and the trellis outside, with its cascades of red and purple bougainvillea, he recalled that he’d read or heard somewhere that the air in the Kenyan highlands had caused the early European settlers to lose their senses, filling them up with grandiose visions. Evidently it had not lost its power to addle the white mind.
“The Nuba is a thousand kilometers from Loki,” he said, starting over. “How do we get in there, and what’s more, out?”
Diana gave him a quizzical look. “We’ve chartered Tara Whitcomb. She’s not averse, if the occasion demands it, to fly on the dark side. And she knows Sudan better than any pilot in Africa. She’ll fly you and Douglas in, same as she did John. You know Tara, don’t you? At least heard of her?”
He nodded.
“To reduce the risk of the wrong people finding out where you’re going, she will file a false flight plan,” Diana continued, a sudden chill in her voice. “As she did with John.”
“And we didn’t have a wink of trouble,” Barrett added by way of assuring him. “Khartoum makes a lot of threats, but they haven’t got the means to carry the half of them out.”
Fitzhugh wanted to say that it was the other half that concerned him, but he kept silent on that point, going straight to the crux of the issue and of his confusion. As far as he knew, there were no landing fields in the Nuba mountains capable of handling cargo planes. How, then, did the well-meaning Canadians of International People’s Aid propose to deliver tons of aid to the Nuban people? Were they going to build airstrips? Use airdrops? With Arab raiders on the ground and government planes in the sky? He asked these questions one after the other, bim, bam, boom, not so much to elicit answers as to show how crazy and impossible the entire enterprise sounded to him.
“It’s going to work this way,” Douglas answered. “I’ve incorporated an air charter company, Knight Air Services. All the red tape’s been taken care of. Like I said, all I need is an airplane.”
“An essential piece of equipment, I’d say,” Fitzhugh remarked drily.
“I’ll get one, and once I do, IPA is going to be my first client. I won’t be playing Mother May I? with Khartoum. It’ll be nothing but flying on the dark side.”
“Running the blockade,” Fitzhugh murmured. An excitement, tinged with fear, spread through his chest.
The American’s eyebrows lifted and dropped, quickly.
“While you’re doing what you’ve got to do, I’ll be looking for drop zones for airdrops, I’ll be looking for suitable sites for landing strips. We’re going to need more than the one Tara landed at. Good hard ground, room for bigger planes to land and take off. And yeah, we’ll get them built. I know we can do this. It’s a place where a few people can make a big difference.”
Fitzhugh didn’t share his confidence; he was all but certain that they could not do it. The plan had the quality of a behind-enemy-lines operation that seemed to call for commandos, not a cargo pilot and an aid worker with a bum knee. Astonishing himself, he stuck out his hand and told Douglas and the others that they could count him in. He wondered if the heady highlands atmosphere had affected the vulnerable Caucasian part of his brain, for at that moment he had a sensation of being split in