a veteran’s saunter—not entirely a contrivance, as he had flown alongside his father since he was eleven and had landed planes before he’d learned to parallel park a car. Jack McIntyre, Dad’s partner in the little flight school outside Fort Stockton, pumped his hand and said, “Damn near a greaser, Wes. You’re rolled of the same makin’s as the old man.” It had been all Dare could do to keep his composure.
Now, taking a deep breath, he transferred some of his gut to his chest, where all of it had been not too many years ago, and ambled across the tarmac, greeting truck drivers and ground crew with a broad but synthetic grin. (He didn’t much care for these city-bred Africans, saving his admiration for the regal Masai and Turkana.) “Hi, y’all! Good mornin’! One helluva fine day for movin’ a little dope, ain’t it?” Those who knew him grinned back and said, “Jambo, Bwana Wes.” (He got a chuckle out of that, Bwana Wes.) Those who did not know him merely looked with silent curiosity at the beefy, cheerful mzungu with lamb’s-wool hair like theirs, except that it was rusty red instead of black, big ears that stuck out, and a pug nose spread between narrow brown eyes and a wide mouth.
“Hey, Nimrod. Hujambo.”
“Sijambo, asante, Captain Wes,” the small Kikuyu said, focusing on his calculations. Dare was an even six-one, but standing beside Nimrod always made him feel like a center for the L.A. Lakers. He glanced at the calculator, its numbers aglow in the dim light, and then at the sacks still to be weighed. Here and there, sprigs of mirra poked shyly through the throats of poorly tied bags or through the burlap weave.
“Not so good today.” Nimrod tapped the “plus” key.
Twelve hundred and twenty-five kilos so far. The Somalis paid a bonus for any load of two tons or more. Dare would need around six hundred kilos more to make that, and he did not see six hundred remaining on the trucks. Nowhere near. Four at best.
“Well,” he said with a philosophical shrug, “win some, lose some.”
“And some are rained on,” Nimrod said, finishing one of Dare’s favorite sayings.
“Out, rafiki. Some are rained out.” He turned to Tony, who was murmuring relevant facts about the G1 to Anne-Marie. Cruising speed and altitude, fuel capacity and range. Did that pass as romantic conversation between two fliers? “How about that pump?”
“No ruckin’ furries, or so I’m told,” Bollichek said, indicating the hangar with a movement of his head. “We’ll see.”
He meant that the mechanics said they had repaired the pump, a claim whose veracity would be impeached if the amber warning light flashed during preflight. It had gone on yesterday, as he and Tony were taxiing to the runway for their afternoon run. Although Dare relished and even cultivated his reputation as an aerial cowboy, he turned around immediately, not about to take off with a malfunctioning pump. It fed a water-methanol mixture to the Rolls-Royce engine, increasing horsepower. Wilson Field was a mile high, and the plane needed the extra boost in the thinner air.
“So did they say what was wrong?”
“Buggered rotor. They replaced it.”
Dare nodded, pulled his baseball cap from his hip pocket, put it on, and watched a chain of workers passing the sacks into the aircraft, its seats removed long ago and replaced with folding web jumpseats to make cargo space.
“Looks like we’ll be ready for boarding right quick. Passengers needing assistance and with small children will board first by row numbers. How are you doin’, Anne-Marie? Y’all ready to smuggle drugs into deepest, darkest Somalia?”
A doubtful smile fluttered across her lips, then faded.
“I was just kiddin’,” he said, laughing. “Mirra, also known as khat, ain’t really a drug. Like coke or grass, I mean. And we ain’t really smugglin’, because it’s legal here. Grown like coffee on Mount Kenya’s fer-tile slopes. Legal in Somalia, too. Of course, everything’s legal in Somalia, since there ain’t any law there.”
“I know that,” she said, bristling at the assumption that she was naÏve about such matters. “It’s Mary.”
He hesitated for a beat, gazing at her. With her wavy, dark blond hair and hazel eyes, she reminded him a little of his first wife, Margo, mother of his only child and the only one of his spouses his mother had ever cared for. “You would do well to hang on to her, Wesley. You got your daddy’s looks, y’know. Ugly as home-grown sin.” That was Mom, not a