from which Beryl Markham flew west with the night and Finch-Hatton soared off for Tsavo and its elephant herds, sped by at sixty knots, eighty, ninety, one oh five . . . Dare pulled back on the yoke and the plane gathered herself like a high jumper, lurched, and was airborne, a free thing now, and he was free with her, liberated from gravity and the sordid earth. Gear up. Nairobi shrank below, the skyscrapers of the city center, the tidy red rooftops of Karen and Langata, the sheet-metal slums metastasizing on the outskirts. How many times had he done this since the first time with his father in a Steerman crop-duster, sagebrush and mesquite plains falling away and only sky ahead, where cloud flotillas sailed the stratosphere? How many? Four thousand? Five, six? He wondered if he would ever tire of it, the thrill of takeoff, the joy of flight. Aloft, he felt at home and somehow complete, as if in the exile of terrestrial life he were estranged from himself, a divided man.
At twenty-five hundred feet he turned, picked up his easterly bearing, and climbed over the highlands before leveling off at twenty-one thousand, where faint ribbons of vapor trailed from the wingtips and the bright sun, mitigated slightly by his polarized glasses, sliced through the windshield. Airspeed two hundred twenty-five knots. He throttled back to conserve fuel and crossed into the eastern savannahs and over the Tana river, shimmering golden brown between its gallery forests, the plains beyond a mottle of red and khaki that vanished into the haze at the horizon. Barely a cloud in the sky, a dry-season sky. The radar screen was blank, as if they were flying into a vacuum, which in one sense they were. From here on, control towers and beacons would be as rare as whiskey in a Shiite’s living room. No ground radar to cross-check his altimeter reading, and not a soul to tell him about the weather and wind conditions at his destination, a small airstrip on the beach south of Mogadishu. Except for the GPS, he would have nothing more to guide him there than Finch-Hatton and Markham had had. All dead reckoning, and pray you reckon right, the penalty for being wrong pretty severe in Somalia. Fly into the wrong fiefdom, and you risked a shoulder-fired missile or some hothead shooting at you with a 12.7-millimeter antiaircraft gun.
“Fly the unfriendly skies of Somalia,” he said, thinking aloud.
“Tony was saying.”
Mary craned her head forward between the seats, an anticipatory look on her face. Tell me a story, Daddy.
“Airdrops got to be right boring, right, Marie?”
“Mary. Maaa-reee.”
“Wesley’s got a sure-fire cure for the airdrop blues.” Dare switched on the autopilot and turned partway around, feeling the warmth from her cheek radiating into the cool cabin air. “Once upon a time I had to go to Djbouti for an Eyetalian NGO that was drillin’ water wells over on the Somali side. That country used to be called the Territory of the Afars and Issas, but then they changed it to the name of the capital, so it’s Djbouti, Djbouti, the place so nice they named it twice. Flew in some hardware, then over into Somalia to pick up one of their drillin’ teams. Landed on a patch of dirt, and what do I see but three white guys runnin’ for the plane like hell wouldn’t have it and a mob of clansmen runnin’ after ’em. Shootin’ at ’em. I had both engines still runnin’, which was damned fortunate. Got the Eyetalians on board, and weren’t they just one squeeze away from shittin’ their britches, which I don’t blame them, because those clansmen were still firin’ away with their AKs and I was about to shit mine. Cranked up and took off, but not before they shot my right prop all to hell, as I was climbin’. Now Djbouti, Djbouti, ain’t so nice that it’s got anyplace where you can fix the prop to a Hawker-Siddley. Had to go all the way to Cairo to get it fixed, and on the way, after the Eyetalians got settled down, I asked them, ‘Who in the hell did you piss off and why?’ ”
“ ‘Wrong clan,’ one of ’em says to me. ‘Wrong clan work for us.’ What he meant was, the boys shootin’ at him and his buddies was a rival clan to the one they’d hired to do their well-diggin’. I asked him why they did that, and he said