“Garang just gives him leftovers. He needs his own suppliers. We thought you could help in that department.”
“Reckon I could. There’s a guy I flew with in Blackbridge Services. He could get Michael the heavy weapons he wants, and get them quicker, cheaper than anybody else.”
“Outstanding!” Doug said, shutting the door. “That is outstanding.”
Before going any further, Dare was compelled to apprise his colleagues of certain realities. Number one—“and beg your pardon for talkin’ to you like y’all are children, but when it comes to this, that’s what you are”—both the UN and the Kenyan government winked at flying humanitarian aid into Sudan’s no-go zones because it wasn’t really “flying on the dark side but kind of the gray side.” But smuggling weapons—now that was serious contraband, and if the UN found out about it, Knight Air would be banned from Loki in a heartbeat. As for the Kenyan government, well, it was sensitive about its relations with Khartoum. It would have to take action to prove its good intentions, and that would mean revoking the company’s certificate and prohibiting it from flying anywhere in the country. “That’s the best that could happen,” Dare went on. “Worst case is, Kenya arrests us to make an example of us, confiscates the company’s assets, and then boots us out of the country, and we end up with the hole in the doughnut.”
“We’ve considered that, we’re not that dumb,” Doug said, and pushed away from the door to stand face to face with Dare. “So do we tell Adid about this? This qualifies as a major business decision.”
“He won’t go for it,” Dare said.
“The guy was an ivory smuggler. Why would he object?”
“He wouldn’t have any moral objections, on account of he doesn’t have any morals. This would be too risky, business-wise. For all the reasons I just now told you.”
“Right,” Doug said. “There’s another reason we need you. How do we minimize the risks? You’ve done this kind of thing. The Contras in Nicaragua, other places I’d suppose.”
“You’d suppose right,” Dare replied, and took a step back, giving himself room to breathe and to think. Running guns appealed to the outlaw in his nature, but he also saw how such an operation could win him financial independence and a ticket out of Africa. “First thing we’d have to do is form a shell company,” he said, and paused, twirling his sunglasses, collecting his ideas. “Let’s call it Yellowbird Air. We incorporate it in Uganda. President is me, the plane is my Hawker. It’s in my name, doesn’t belong to the company. That way, in case things go wrong and this operation gets found out, Knight Air’s hands are clean. It’s a way of providing y’all with what the CIA calls ‘plausible deniability.’ ”
Doug asked, “What about you?”
“I would take the fall.”
“Out of your devotion to the cause?”
“I’ll be comin’ to that.”
“All right, so this Yellowbird would be flying out of Kampala?”
Dare shook his head. The Ugandan capital was twice as far from the Nuba as Loki. “We would leave from here with, let’s say, a half load or a quarter load of nonlethal aid. You don’t want an empty plane flying out of here, somebody’s bound to notice and wonder what’s going on. Then we pick up the hardware on the Uganda border and head for the Nuba.”
And what about invoicing? Fitz wanted to know. How was that to be handled?
“Simple. Me and Mary keep half the eighteen thousand, deposit the other half in a bank account in Kampala, then that bank wire-transfers it to Knight Air’s account in Nairobi.”
“You and Mary,” Doug said.
“Only two people will make the gun runs. Me and her, and only five are gonna know what Yellowbird is up to—me and her and Nimrod. Y’all and Fitz make it five.”
As Dare had anticipated, Doug protested the first part of this provision. His partner wanted to fly the arms himself, maybe for the thrill of it, probably for other reasons.
“You don’t want a direct hand in this operation,” he cautioned. “You’re too emotional about this. All that crap about it being your obligation, and the Nubans like wild Indians off the reservation, Christ almighty. No room in a thing like this for that. Anyhow, y’all want me in it, that’s the deal, most of it.”
“Most? What’s the rest?”
“I’ll fly these runs for a set period, say, no less than six months. When I’m done, I’m gonna quit. Quit it all. Quit Africa. I cash in those