lie to him, too. Still, he found the arrangement convenient if not altogether satisfactory. Like an affair with a married woman, it spared him from making a commitment that could draw him into another marriage. As much as he loved her, he didn’t think he could take that drastic step ever again. He’d once heard a second marriage called “the triumph of hope over experience.” By that standard, a fifth would be considered the triumph of sheer insanity. So he was content to let things go along in their sordid, furtive way. But Mary wasn’t.
Whether her conscience got the better of her, or the tension got to her, he couldn’t say. Whatever, she told him, one day on a short hop into eastern Sudan, that she was “sick of living a lie.” She was going to break it off with Tony, as gently as she could. Dare’s feelings were mixed. He was gratified she had found a bottom to her reservoir of pretense, but he was anxious. “Y’all don’t have to tell him everything,” he’d advised. “Just say your feelings have changed, you want to move out.” That isn’t what she told Tony. She didn’t tell him anything. Her nerve failed her, and all she did was to stop making love to him, pleading the standard excuses from the female playbook. That he fell for this, not for a few days but for two full weeks, caused Dare’s pity to sour into contempt. If the Aussie was that lunk-headed, he deserved to lose her. Finally, Tony confronted her, asking what the hell was going on, and she broke down and confessed. Confessed to it all and took the brunt of his anger, which included a backhanded crack that knocked her down and blackened her eye. She said she didn’t mind the blow, she’d earned it and felt that it paid her debt in one installment. Dare wasn’t so tolerant. He went to Tony’s tent. “I’m the worst pig there is,” he said, “but I ain’t never laid a hand on a woman. You had best not even think of hurting her again.” Tony was silent but not intimidated. “Y’all need to hit someone, here I am.” Tony said, “In my own time, mate. You’ll hear from me in my own time, my own way,” and gave a look that Dare wouldn’t forget soon, hurt, betrayal, and wrath congealing into a glare that could have frozen meat.
Mary was at first ecstatic with relief—as if she’d beaten cancer, she’d said—but after a time the reaction set in. She got to feeling guilty and remorseful, and through some kind of twisty feminine logic (an oxymoron if ever there was one, Dare thought) she decided that Dare was to blame for the whole sorry mess, as if he were a matinee idol who’d stolen her from the boy next door.
So here they were, lovers flying cargo together, like those boy-girl teams of long-haul truckers. The thermal lifted them into the anvil, where lightning flickered, then popped them out into the bright ultraviolet at twenty-eight-five, and there abandoned them. Dare nudged the throttles forward. They didn’t need much to maintain cruising speed in the slender air.
He raised Douglas on the radio and asked for a report about conditions at Zulu Three, the airstrip nearest to the SPLA’s Nuban headquarters and the town of New Tourom. Skies clear, light wind out of the southeast, visibility couldn’t be better. A heavy rain last night had rendered the first fifty meters of the runway unusable, but the remaining eight hundred were in good shape. A rare pleasure, having a reliable source of information on the ground. In most cases he had to rely on local rebel commanders for assessments of landing conditions, and they inevitably exaggerated. Runways were always at least a hundred meters longer in their sunny reports than in reality, visibility infinite; strong crosswinds never blew, nor was there ever any fighting within fifty miles.
“How’s the security situation?”
“No worries,” came Douglas’s disembodied voice. “The Archangel has men posted on all the high ground and around the landing field. Haven’t seen a sign of the bad guys since we got here.”
“They’re all bad guys, rafiki, it’s just that some are worse than others,” Dare replied, and signed off.
Doug and Fitz had been in the mountains the past three days, shuttling tribal dignitaries to the mission from far-flung villages and setting up the stage and sound equipment for their extravaganza like a couple of rock concert impresarios. A