really cool idea. I’m going to mention it to Hassan, see if he thinks it could fly. We open a coffee shop in Nairobi, kind of like a Starbucks back in the States. Serve cappuccino and espresso besides regular coffee. Cheap. If it goes over, we open another, build a local chain.”
This early in the morning it was difficult to keep up with Douglas’s inspirations.
“Diversify,” he added. “We’ve got to do something with Knight Air’s profits besides park them in a bank, so we put the money to work in another enterprise. Really good coffee at reasonable prices. Everyone benefits.”
“Only you could find something socially redeeming about a chain of coffee shops.”
“What is it, my man? You seem a little on edge. Look, I know you’re thinking about what happened yesterday—”
“Actually, I was thinking about something else.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Douglas carried on, not listening. “The NGOs will be scared of committing to the Nuba. Too dangerous. And that’s what Khartoum wants them to think. Somebody tipped off the bad guys about what we were doing, so they figured to send a message, and a few dead relief workers would have been the way to send it, loud and clear.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know it.” Then Douglas rested an encouraging hand on Fitzhugh’s shoulder. “But I gave it some more thought this morning, and it came to me that things could work out just the opposite. Those people could be back in Loki right now, saying, ‘We aren’t going to be intimidated, things are really rough up in the Nuba, it needs all the aid we can send.’ And if they’re not saying that, that’s how we should spin it when we get back. It’s possible, I’m saying, that that mortar attack was the best thing that could have happened.”
Pausing to absorb this remarkable statement, Fitzhugh lit a cigarette, his first of the day. “What you did yesterday impressed me, but you know, you make it hard for me or anyone to admire you completely. Because you have an unfortunate genius for saying things like you just now said.”
He received in response the patented gaze, the disarming smile. “Hey, you don’t really think I’m happy about these people getting killed and wounded, do you? All I’m saying is that some good might come out of it.”
“Let’s drop the subject. I was thinking about something else anyway. About Diana and me.”
Douglas frowned. “Diana and you?”
“Barrett knows, so you might as well, too. We’re involved.”
“You’re involved sex-wise?” Douglas asked, each word rising up the scale, the final one coming out in a high tenor of disbelief.
“I prefer love-wise. We’re in love, and I was wondering where it’ll lead to, if it can lead to anything.”
In a parody of astonishment, Douglas slapped his forehead. “First Wes and Mary, now you and Diana. What the hell am I running? An airline or an odd-couple dating service?”
“Think of it as diversification,” Fitzhugh remarked and, in an idle shift of his glance, noticed that Suleiman and the soldiers were standing in frozen postures, faces turned toward the sky. In a moment, Suleiman fell to his knees and scooped dirt onto the campfire to douse the smoke. He and Douglas heard it then—the low, uninflected growl of a high-flying Antonov.
The sound reduced everything else that was on their minds to triviality. They ran out from under the net and joined the soldiers in an apprehensive vigil, heads turning as they tracked the plane, a silvery cross in a powder-blue sky striated by cirrus clouds. It flew northward; then, with the leisured arrogance of an unchallenged bird of prey, it made a slow turn. The sound faded, but the plane was still visible as it overflew the hospital, several miles away, before turning again.
Douglas said, “I’m going to get Gerhard on the radio, tell him to start Michael and those girls back here right now.”
Fitzhugh heard the growling noise once again. The plane had dropped in altitude. He fetched binoculars from his rucksack and saw the big, over-wing engine cells, the tailfins spread above the rear cargo door. The cargo door that doubled as a bomb bay. It was open. The soldiers had taken cover in the woods edging the airstrip, except for two, who’d leaped into a pit dug last night for their 12.7-millimeter machine gun, a weapon that had purely symbolic value against an aircraft flying at ten thousand feet.
It commenced another circle, descending farther as it headed eastward.