real promoter, Doug was. If he laid off the high-minded speeches, Dare might begin to like him, but Doug the crusader lived side by side with Doug the promoter. He and Knight Air were going to be the Nubans’ saviors. Lately Dare found himself looking at his partner and all the do-gooders in Loki not with his usual cynicism but with anthropological curiosity. They were almost a distinct subspecies, possessing an ability to breathe in, to thrive on, the molds and pollens of altruism that caused him to suffer severe allergic reactions. What made them the way they were? His best guess—and he knew it wasn’t good enough—was that for one reason or another they needed to be needed.
He pushed the yoke, plunged back into the thunderstorm, and after another wild ride found smooth flying above fleets of stratocumulus that appeared motionless, as if tethered to the mat of grass and trees below. Silvery watercourses threaded the plain, and solitary massifs rose from it. Westward, distance merged two mountain ranges into one, creating the impression of a continental coastline. Dare turned toward it, descending as he turned until he could make out the old British road that led to the town of Kauda, which was held by the SPLA. There the road ended in a junction with another, running south toward Talodi and north toward Heiban, which were in government hands, with army garrisons in both. He never liked coming into Zulu Three. The distance between it and the garrisons—never more than twenty miles in either direction—was much less than he cared for.
“Sometimes I think you and me ought to quit this,” he said, his glance flitting from the windshield to the instruments and back to the windshield, boxing the plain and the road and the blue mountains, drawing closer.
“And do what?” Mary asked, looking out the side window.
“I don’t know. Something else.”
She said nothing, squinting at something below. She reached behind her seat for the binoculars. “I’ll be damned. A whole herd of ostrich. Is that right? Herd? A gaggle of ostrich? A flock?”
“How about a covey?” Dare said. “And how about some feedback? One thing I can always count on from you is feedback.”
She put the binoculars down and sat primly erect, in a way that reminded him of a witness in a jury box. “I kind of like this work, y’know?”
“Wonderin’ all the time if you’re gonna get shot out of the sky or get mortared on the ground. You like that?”
“The work, I said. I like the work, and I like the money, and that other stuff goes with the territory. Got to take the shit with the sugar. I think we’re there, Dad.”
She jerked her head at the windshield to indicate Kauda, a cluster of tukuls and trees a few miles ahead and more than a mile below. Dare called for the flaps, and they came in on their base leg, swooping over rocky cornices and a bowl valley ringed by terraced hillsides. Dare spotted the airstrip, a long hashmark on the valley floor, and then white patches glinted through the camouflage netting thrown over Doug’s G1C, parked in a clearing at the edge of the runway, near a grove of palm trees. Just in case his partner had been mistaken about the absence of bad guys, he put the plane into a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, losing altitude at the same time so the Hawker dropped as if caught in a whirlpool. He reckoned the maneuver had his passengers reaching for their barf bags again.
Ten minutes later they were disembarking on wobbly legs into the cloying heat of a wet-season morning. A few looked ready to kiss the ground in gratitude. Two plus hours without a bathroom break sent a few more, that tall Bible-bouncer among them, scurrying for the bushes. They weren’t likely to find much privacy; the usual mob greeted the Hawker’s arrival. There were teenage rebels in ragged uniforms or in just plain rags, a few armed with spears, the rest with used and abused AK-47s. Men in shorts and ratty jelibiyas clambered into the dark, still-frigid cargo hold. Women porters, clad in flowered dresses or wrapped in kangas topped by T-shirts bearing the names of famous beers, American football teams, and Canadian hockey teams, streamed down from the ridge and swarmed across the runway to descend like flies on the cargo the men were tossing onto the ground: South African sugar and Egyptian powdered milk, pharmaceuticals, soap, plastic jerry cans, washbasins, and