two. His dark-skinned half, skeptical, sober, wise, stood off to the side, as it were, and frowned at his light-skinned half, shaking hands and announcing that he could be counted in. Sleep on it, think it over, you might regret this, the dark warned the light, but the light had the upper hand. Much later the clarifying beam of hindsight would show that it wasn’t any hundred-proof air that had undermined his better judgment; it was Douglas and Douglas’s remark: “It’s a place where a few people can make a big difference.” Fitzhugh wasn’t immune to the desire that’s in most people to spray graffiti on the cold rock of the world and say “I was here and what I did counted for something.” For someone of his temperament, the mere notion of undertaking a dangerous endeavor on behalf of a desperate people held an irresistible appeal. But there was still more to it: He felt that he would have disappointed Douglas if he’d said no. He could have said it to Barrett or Diana but not to him. He didn’t know why. There was something about the American that made you not want to let him down.
He wasn’t, however, so drunk on the idea that he was ready to pack his bags then and there and fly off blindly into the unknown. “You are sure that this lieutenant colonel—what was his name?”
“Goraende. Michael Archangelo Goraende.”
“You are sure he will provide us with security?”
“He’ll have a detachment of his best lads to look out for you,” Barrett assured him. “Should give you some comfort. Michael the Archangel is the patron saint of warriors, the Roman Catholic version of Mars.”
Fitzhugh said he would be grateful for any help he and Douglas could get.
“Would you be a Catholic yourself?” asked Barrett, in as friendly a manner as he’d shown all afternoon. “Malachy tells me you’ve a bit of Irish in you.”
“Only a bit.”
“But enough to put the smile in that voice of yours. Comes from the Irish, make no mistake about it.”
Mustang
“GOOD MORNIN’ AND jambo, rafiki.”
He showed his pass with a quick flip of his wallet, a pointless formality; none of the askaris at Wilson Field ever looked at the damned thing. That one was no exception, waving him through without a glance, his bored expression as fixed as a mask.
The ancient Volvo’s engine rattled as he eased the clutch and followed the line of pickup trucks through the gate. He parked beside his copilot’s car while the trucks proceeded across the tarmac toward the Gulfstream. In the morning twilight its dingy white fuselage reminded him of a seagull in need of a bath. Must’ve been a right smart thing in her day, when she ferried CEOs to big important meetings. No frequent-flyer first-class-upgrade bullshit for those boys, no sir, no way.
Feeling a bit old—a resistance in his joints not alarming in itself so much as in its portent—Wesley Dare got out of the car, leaned against the door, and finished the lukewarm coffee in his Thermos. He swallowed half, spit out the rest. How in the hell can it be, he asked himself, that in a country where such fine coffee gets grown, no one can brew a pot that doesn’t taste like it’s been filtered through a secretary’s pantyhose after a ten-hour day? Out on the tarmac the boys were unloading the trucks. A tally-man, a big guy, heaved the fifty-pound bags off the asphalt and held them up by the hook of a hand scale, squinting to read the weights. He called them out to Nimrod, who was Dare’s loadmaster, bookkeeper, and fixer, all wrapped up in a squat package of somber conscientiousness and honesty, or what served as a reasonable facsimile of honesty in Kenya. “Twenty kilos . . . twenty-one . . . twenty-two . . .” chanted the tally-man, while Nimrod totaled up on a pocket calculator.
Dare lit a cigarette, one of the five he allowed himself each day, and watched Tony Bollichek, his Australian first officer, do his walk-around, checking the belly of the aircraft, the landing gear, the props for dings and pings. A fine, careful pilot, in contrast to Dare, who was a fine pilot but not a particularly careful one—the casualness of his maintenance and preflight checks were legendary in the bush pilot fraternity. Tony’s girlfriend walked beside him, the Canadian, Something-Anne, or Anne-Something. Anne-Louise? Anne-Marie? Jane-Anne? In addition to her name, Dare had forgotten that she would be flying with them