sorghum seed in sacks stamped CANADA or USA, boxes of pencils and school notebooks and one crate of Arabic-language Bibles. Four Nuban Land Rovers—camels—knelt down with flapping lips amid the boys with the guns and spears and the women and the listless, orange-haired children clinging to their mothers’ hips, tiny heads wobbling like the heads of puppets. Near Douglas’s plane stood a detachment of SPLA guerrillas who presented a sharp contrast to their tattered adolescent comrades. They wore canvas boots instead of flip-flops or sandals cut from truck tires. Their weapons were in top shape, their uniforms uniform, and they had the look and carriage of crack troops: veterans of the southern battlefields who now served as Michael Goraende’s bodyguard, although their job today would be to guard the tender bodies of the aid workers on the walk from the airstrip to New Tourom. It would be bad publicity for the cause if one or two of them were to get killed.
Douglas came up, his face sunburned, his jaw roughened by a three-day growth of sandy beard. “It’s coming off, almost can’t believe it myself.”
“Yeah. If somebody ever wants to restage Woodstock, I’ll give y’all a recommendation.” Dare motioned at the G1C. “Know what that looked like when we were comin’ in? Like a camouflaged airplane. You should get a few of these boys to stick some branches in that netting—that white fuselage shows up like bare tits in church.”
Douglas turned to look at the plane. “Why don’t you take care of that?” he asked in the harried voice of someone with more important things to do. “I’d better get everyone on the road. It’s a two-hour hike.”
Dare put the airfield sentries to work, and in about twenty minutes the plane was festooned with palm and acacia branches. By that time, the crowds had cleared out. A silence as oppressive as the heat fell over the airstrip. There was no sound except the wind, the rattle of palm leaves, and an occasional murmur from the pubescent sentries, lolling about in a manner that didn’t inspire confidence. One tore a page out of a pilfered Bible and used it as rolling paper for a cigarette, which Dare figured would do the kid more good than reading it would have done. Standing at the back of the airplane, cleaning his fingernails with the blade of his Leatherman, he watched the processional of aid workers, guards, porters, and laden camels winding up the ridge, around slabs of rock leaning like abandoned idols. Mary, who’d begun to add video footage to her photographic archives, was filming their departure with her new camcorder.
“Ever wonder where the hell they go with all that stuff?” he said. “I mean look at this place. Where is it? It’s nowhere. They pick it up in a nowhere place and take it to some other nowhere.”
“Is something bothering you, baby?” He loved it when she called him that. “You don’t seem quite yourself today.”
“Bothering me? I don’t know. Here’s what I’m thinking right now. As far as the people at Loki tower know, this airplane isn’t here. It’s three hundred miles away—I’m gettin’ right creative with those phony flight plans. And all that cargo those folks are carryin’ off from no place to no place, none of it was registered with Kenya customs. That midget Barrett pays the customs people off to avoid the duties. In so many words, we fly cargo that doesn’t officially exist on flights that don’t officially exist to places that don’t officially exist on anybody’s map. If you and me pranged up and got killed, nobody would know we were dead because we don’t officially exist. We’re phantoms, we’re the Flying Dutchman.”
She rubbed his arm up and down sweetly. “You’re thinking about flying those rock bands again, or the governor of Texas.”
“This kinda work, it doesn’t seem dignified for a man of my age and talents.”
“Love you, Wes, but I’m sticking with it. I’m not your age.”
“Stick with this, and you’ll catch up in no time.”
QUINETTE HAD NEVER FELT as far from home and all things familiar as she did out here, and this feeling pleased her. Resting with the others atop a promontory, she looked back at the way they’d come, the stony track winding downhill past a baobab, across a valley where huge rocks leaned into one another to form arches and tunnels, then up the western side of the ridge whose opposite slope faced the airstrip, the track vanishing in the flame-yellow