Douglas remains in the pod, face pressed to the glass, heart banging against the floor. He wants to see it all again. He doesn’t want it to be over.
BOOK TWO
Flights to the Dark Side
PART ONE
Nuba Day!
WHEN HE WAS asked, the next morning at breakfast, how his date with the old girlfriend had gone, Fitzhugh replied that he wasn’t the kind to kiss and tell. Douglas didn’t press him—he had bigger things on his mind. He was ebullient to the point of giddiness and barely touched his bacon and eggs, hands flying with Mediterranean abandon as he described the outstanding results of last night’s dinner with Adid. The one-man conglomerate had pledged to rescue Dare’s G1 from legal no-man’s-land—it would take no more than a phone call or two—and to make an initial investment of five hundred thousand dollars, with another half million to come. “A mil, Fitz! A cool mil!” Douglas gushed. “With that kind of money, we can buy two more planes, maybe three!” Adid had demanded quids for those quos—he was to participate in any major business decisions; he would not venture the second half of his investment until he saw a return on the first, along with a sound plan for expanding operations; finally, Dare could retain ownership of the Hawker 748 and continue leasing it to the company, but that cozy arrangement would not apply to the Gulfstream. If Dare wanted it out of hock, he had to agree to sell it to Knight Air, receiving in exchange company stock equal to its market value. Dare resisted at first, said he wanted twenty tons of cold metal in his hands, not pieces of paper. Adid argued that he couldn’t be expected to risk his assets when one of the partners wasn’t willing to risk his. If Dare was that skeptical about Knight Air’s future, then perhaps he, Adid, would need to rethink his offer. With no alternative except to continue waging a hopeless court battle, Dare gave in.
Fitzhugh couldn’t quite focus on the conversation or, rather, monologue; thoughts of the previous night distracted him. He’d been as nervous as a boy. Undressing her slowly, tentatively, he was fearful that Diana naked would not be half so attractive as she was clothed. He’d told himself that appearances shouldn’t matter, if he truly loved her; nevertheless, they did matter. Fortunately, his concerns along those lines proved unfounded. He knew women his age who would have traded bodies with her; and he was happy to discover that the marks the years had made on it possessed a kind of charm, like a warrior’s scars. He kissed the lines etched into her hands, the little belt of flab around her abdomen, the cellulite puckers on her thighs and hips; and he blessed her and loved her the more for the humor that overcame his awkwardness. Laughter in her eyes, she stroked his erection and said, “So glad I did this, Fitz. It would have been a waste of a natural resource if I didn’t.”
She’d left his room at six this morning, to make sure she wasn’t discovered by Fitzhugh’s companions. That bothered him—a woman like her ought not to be stealing out of a hotel in the predawn twilight. As Douglas rattled on—“Hassan suggested we market ourselves more aggressively, and that’s what we’re going to start doing the minute we’re back in Loki”—he felt almost breathless. He was caught up in a love affair that had gone from zero to a hundred overnight, and he wondered where it was headed, if it was headed anywhere. Then Dare, unshaven and smacking his lips, came down and joined them for breakfast.
ADID WORKED HIS MAGIC, and the G1 was soon in service, in a new coat of green and white. Two more pilots were hired, another two to fly a used twin Beechcraft bought with a portion of Adid’s investment to ferry aid workers to and from their assignments in Sudan. The company now had five aircraft—the two Gulfstreams, the Hawker, the Antonov, and the Beechcraft—and seventeen people on its payroll. Grow or die! Adid had proclaimed, but while Knight Air’s fleet and payroll had grown, its revenues had moved in the opposite direction. The rule that what was bad for the southern Sudanese was good for the company and vice versa had taken effect, with the advent of a new wet season as generous as the previous one had been penurious. Bahr el Ghazal was delivered from famine, and with the