responsibility to pray for all. Don’t let any lightning hit us, Lord. Hold us in the hollow of your hand. She couldn’t imagine that a merciful God would send them on this mission, only to have them die pointlessly in a crash.
“HOW’S EVERYTHING BACK THERE?”
“Much longer in this shit, and we’ll run out of barf bags,” Mary answered, looking a little peaked herself. “Good thing I thought to bring them.”
“Nuthin’ like a woman’s touch.”
“Right. Next thing I’ll hang curtains.”
Dare laughed, keeping both hands firmly on the yoke. He never felt so at one with an aircraft as in a thunderstorm, a unity he compared to a champion rodeo-rider’s with a bronc, anticipating each buck, jump, and twist so that he knew what the horse was going to do before the horse knew. Dropping his glance from the rain-webbed windshield to the altimeter and radar screen, he said, “A few more minutes, we’ll be there.”
“Wonder what our passengers would say if they knew they were guinea pigs in an experiment.”
“This ain’t an experiment.”
“Wes, you’ve got a college degree, why do you insist on speaking like a rube?”
Mary, he’d come to find out, was big on proper grammar and syntax. “It’s my way of stayin’ in touch with my roots. Like I said, this ain’t an experiment. I’ve done it dozens of times. What this is, it’s part of your postgraduate education, darlin’.” Now that they were officially lovers, she’d ceased her objections to that term of endearment. “We don’t waste fuel goin’ around thunderstorms, we fly into ’em and use ’em to get a free ride up. There’s good pilots and then there’s really good pilots, and really good pilots know how to get the most out of every drop of gas. Gas is money.”
“Okay, professor.”
His skills and knowledge—as long as he held on to them, he would hold on to her. The plane jumped, as if yanked by a string; then the string parted, and it fell. A few moments later it was out of the turbulence and in the aerial equivalent of a millpond. The altimeter began to tick upward without a change in altitude.
“We’re in the elevator now,” Dare said, meaning the shaft of warm air rising in the heart of the storm. The Hawker rose with it toward the anvil as effortlessly as a soaring bird riding a thermal. “No stops till the penthouse. It’s rough goin’ in, and it can be rough goin’ out if the storm’s big enough—y’all want a big storm because then the column of hot air is big enough for you to stay inside the shaft—but it sure is smooth once you’re inside. Now we ease up on the gas pedal.” He pulled the throttle levers back. “See? It’s as easy as losin’ your kid’s child support money in Vegas.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. Heard from yours lately?”
“Me and Bobby mostly communicate by rumor,” Dare quipped, masking a hurt that had never healed completely. “Last I heard—it was a year ago—he’d started University of Texas at Austin.”
“How much do you reduce power?” Mary asked, returning to her lesson.
“Depends. One time—this was in Honduras—I rode one of these, and it spit us out at thirty-two thousand with both engines damned near on idle.”
“My hero!” she said in a falsetto to make sure he didn’t take her seriously. In case he didn’t get the message, she turned to him and stuck out her tongue. A little innocent razzing mixed in, he judged, with some genuine resentment.
In the weeks following their romp in Malakal, she’d managed to duck the consequences by sleeping with both him and Tony; with Tony in the tent they shared in Loki, with Dare on a sleeping bag in the Hawker after they were finished with an offload—the aviator’s version of getting laid in the backseat of a car, but with more room. He was surprised at Mary’s capacity for compartmentalizing her emotions. They would finish up, she would dress and climb into her first officer’s seat and be all business; and at the Hotel California mess, she would sit next to Tony and feign that everything was as it had been, feign so well that Dare began to entertain serious doubts about her. Her ability to pretend suggested a sociopathic personality, though he was doing a credible job of pretending himself. Sometimes he felt sorry for his former copilot, which made him all the more uneasy about his present copilot—if she could lie so convincingly to Tony, then she could