the sensation that he was coated in a sticky substance swarming with ants.
The incantation “We do what we have to so we can keep doing what we came here to do” no longer was sufficient to exorcise this feeling. He needed to break out of the isolation imposed by his administrative duties and reconnect himself with the wretched humanity in whose name the pilots gambled with their lives and he compromised his principles. On two occasions he flew with Alexei and the Russians on airdrops over the parched immensities beyond the Jur. With Dare and Mary he landed at a place called Atukuel, where what looked like the population of a small concentration camp greeted them. All he saw was sharp angles—protruding ribs and collarbones, shoulder blades like wings, cheekbones, knee bones, thigh bones with a mere appliqué of flesh. Gangs of the living dead approached the plane, dragging plastic sheets and canvas tarps. Fitzhugh pitched in with the off-load. It felt good to sweat honest sweat, to use his muscles again, and to see a light switch on in the glassy eyes looking up at him. What was it but the light of hope? Hope in a twenty-five-kilo bag of sorghum. Hope. The human capacity for it astonished him. Hope and the will to go on, even when going on seemed pointless. If those people could have seen their futures as clearly as they did their present circumstances, they probably would have laid down on the spot and allowed themselves to starve to death. He watched the men on the ground drag the sacks into the sheets and tarps, which were fashioned into carriers by twisting each end into a makeshift rope. Two men would sling the ends over their shoulders and lug the loads to the edge of the airstrip. It amazed him that those skeletons, who looked barely capable of carrying their own shadows, could haul a hundred pounds any distance at all. He and the tall Norwegian working alongside him heaved out bag upon bag, and jerry cans of water and boxes of evaporated milk. More than five tons’ worth. He got careless once, giving one sack too hard a toss. It split open, its contents spilled out, and a vision from his mental split-screen became a reality as a crowd of kids, their hair hennaed by starvation, rushed forward to scoop the sorghum into wooden calabashes. They picked each grain up, like a flock of birds. Relief work—what a bland phrase, as if it were merely another form of labor. But it wasn’t. It reaffirmed the human bond. It was the marshaling of resources to organize compassion into effective action, for without action, compassion degenerated into a useless pity. It was what he’d come to do, and if to do it he had to trim a few moral corners, then he would trim them. In the face of so much misery, self-recrimination seemed a self-indulgence. Guilt was a worthless currency out here.
Toward the end of that month Tara received a message asking her to come to the Nairobi office of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, the rebellion’s political arm. There she was shown a copy of an order issued to all commands promising swift punishment to anyone who hijacked a relief plane’s cargo. Also documents recording the court-martial of the soldiers who’d shot at George Tafari’s Andover. Also photographs of the execution by firing squad of their commanding officer. She returned to Loki shaken by the photographs. She hadn’t expected an execution. It was a case of, Beware of what you ask for, you may get it.
But she had the assurances she’d sought, and she put her planes back into the operation. By that time many of her former customers, satisfied with its performance as well as with its under-the-table fringe benefits, decided to stick with Knight Air. If the company had had a larger fleet, it would have taken more of her business.
“We need to expand, big-time,” Douglas said one evening, drinking with Dare and Fitzhugh in the compound bar. “We need at least one more airplane, three or four if we can get them.”
“Maybe I got a solution,” Dare said. He had just returned from Nairobi, where he’d conferred with his lawyer about his lawsuit, in the hopes of breaking the legal deadlock and reclaiming his G1, still in mothballs at Wilson Field. “My hearing is way back on the docket, and even if the judge rules in my favor, he’s got to