you never mentioned you were a Hog jockey.” It was also the first time Fitzhugh had heard anything specific about Douglas’s military career.
Responding to Adid’s puzzled frown and looking pleased to display his technical knowledge, Dare explained that a Warthog was a ground attack plane. “It’s used mostly to bust up tanks and armored vehicles.”
Adid turned back to Douglas. “And did you, ah, ‘bust up’ any tanks?”
“Yeah. In the Persian Gulf. Iraqi convoys, too. The last day of the war, when the Iraqis were pulling out of Kuwait—they were in commandeered taxis, city buses, dump trucks, private cars, anything that had wheels and gas in the tank, making off with the stuff they’d looted—my squadron blew the shit out of them. There were guys on fire running out of the vehicles, and we strafed them with cannon fire. They never had a chance. Sometimes I think that’s why I got into what I’m doing now, flying humanitarian aid. We weren’t shooting up an army but a rabble, and it wasn’t war, it was bloody murder. It made me sick.”
This speech—which sounded more like something that would be said in a bar after one too many, and which was so off the point and so unlike Douglas, who hardly ever revealed anything about his past—left everyone speechless.
Leaning over to slap Douglas’s knee, Dare broke the silence. “My partner’s got him a bleeding heart, Hassan. It had been me, I’d have shot the shit out of those Eye-raqis and gone lookin’ for more.”
Adid said nothing, perplexed by the outburst. So was Fitzhugh. Why pick such an inappropriate moment and setting to tell a stranger what you’d withheld from your friends? He thought Douglas had disclosed more about himself than he should have, for all the while, Adid was subjecting the American to his CAT scan gaze, as if he were making exposures of his psychic interior, pinpointing his strengths and weaknesses, the places where he was sound, the places where he was unsound, soft, vulnerable. Douglas too was being sized up. Someone who’d cut his baby teeth in the world of commerce by selling contraband ivory must have learned how to make quick judgments about other people, and make them accurately.
“Perhaps we should turn to what you’re doing now,” Adid said finally. “I have a few questions.”
“This ought to tell you what you need to know.”
Douglas removed from his briefcase a financial statement that Rachel had typed up on the desktop. The one-man conglomerate read it carefully, a finger moving down the columns of assets and liabilities, and said that he hadn’t expected so thorough an accounting of Knight Air’s condition.
“I guess I learned a few things from my father,” Douglas said with a shrug of modesty. “I worked for him a couple of summers in college. He was my business school.”
“So was mine. What does your father do, Mr. Braithwaite?”
“It’s what he did, and make that Douglas or Doug. He died when I was in college. Heart attack. He was a developer. Golf courses, condominiums, that kind of thing.”
“Did your father teach you about business plans?” Adid asked. “One thing I don’t find in here is a business plan. I assume you have one?”
“Sure. It’s to stay in business.”
A pause.
“If that’s it, you won’t,” Adid warned, sharply. “Grow or die, the fundamental axiom. The most valuable lesson I took from there.” He motioned at his degree. “So you could perhaps tell me the prospects for growing, the impediments? Do you have competition, and who are they, and what’s their share of the market, and what’s yours? Do you have a vision of where you’d like your company to be in two or three years? My thought is to invest in it, but naturally I need some idea of what the prospects for a return are. I’m not a charity.”
“We aren’t either.”
“Yes. You fly for charitable organizations.”
“I wouldn’t call it that. We’re not just any old cargo haulers. There’s a point to what we’re doing. Beyond just making a few bucks is what I’m saying.”
“Of course. Of course. But could you tell me please something about the making of the few bucks?”
Business plans. Grow or die. Market share. Whatever Hassan Adid had learned from his ivory-poaching father, it wasn’t this. This argot had come straight from his graduate school days in the United States. Fitzhugh, feeling that he and Dare were more eavesdroppers than participants, listened to Douglas describe Knight Air’s prospects for growth, its present share of the market, and his