that if they’d hired that clan, then the one they had hired would’ve been the ones doin’ the shootin’. That’s when I realized how things are in Somalia. No matter which clan they’d hired, it would’ve been the wrong one. That was my first dealin’ with the Somalis, and let me tell you, Margo, they’re the meanest, baddest sonsabitches in East Africa. Just ask them Army Rangers they dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. It’s how come I like flyin’ mirra to the Somalis so much.”
“All right, I give up,” Mary said after a brief silence.
“Mirra does this to the libido”—Dare lowered a palm toward the floor—“so I figure the more of it I can bring in for them to chew, the less Somalis there’s gonna be, and the world will be a better place. See, I’m a do-gooder, too.”
She started to laugh but checked herself. A woman with a liberal social and political conscience, he could see that plainly, and as was his habit when he outraged someone’s sensibilities, he decided to push the outrageousness a little further.
“Well, that’s a lot more humane than nuking the black bastards, which is what we should of done after they dragged those Rangers through the streets in front of the TV cameras.”
“Jesus, Wes—”
“Aw, you ain’t thinkin’ I’m a racist, are you?”
“You do have a reputation,” she remarked guardedly. Her conscience notwithstanding, there was no percentage in getting into an argument with the man she hoped to ask for a job.
“Don’t listen to my fan club,” he said. “They like to flatter me, tellin’ everyone that Wesley Dare is a cowboy pilot and a racist and a sexist and every other kind of ‘ist.’ In all humility, I gotta admit ain’t none of it is true. Take the Masai, the Turkana, the Samburu. They’re not exactly white, are they? But if it was up to me, I’d be flyin’ aphrodisiacs into them so there would be more of them. And you’ve got to admit, the Somalis didn’t put their best foot forward when me and them first met. They haven’t done a thing since to change my first impression, but I’ll be sure to keep an open mind.”
A short time later he switched off the autopilot and dropped to twelve thousand, cruising at that altitude until he crossed the coastline, where he descended further, banking sharply as he did to fly due north, parallel to the shore and about three miles out. The Gulfstream cast a shadow on the Indian Ocean, which looked like a vast bolt of ruffled satin in the light southerly breeze. His principal concern now was to make sure he stayed well clear of Mogadishu; the clans in control of the city were especially trigger-happy and jealous of their airspace.
“We’re lookin’ for an abandoned oil refinery,” he informed Mary. “That’s where we’ll turn inland on our base leg.”
They flew on, and then it appeared, its rusty stacks rising from behind the barrier of coastal dunes and bluffs. He made a tight turn, over the breakers rolling ashore, the dunes, and the refinery, then brought the plane in on final, winging above expanses of scrub-speckled sand. Flaps down, gear down and locked. Flocks of goats, mud-walled huts, shacks built of corrugated iron appeared and disappeared. Altitude five hundred feet, airspeed one hundred twenty knots. The starboard wing’s shadow passed over a group of black-clad women clustered around a well. A right biblical scene, women at the well, Dare thought as a Sunday school lesson came back to him, blurred by the distance of four decades. Four and then some. Rachel, wasn’t it? No, Rebecca. Airspeed one hundred and five. Dead level. The G1 touched down, rubber softly biting hard-packed sand. Dare reached behind the throttles for the fine-pitch lever, tilting the prop blades to create drag to slow the plane. She rolled as smoothly as if he’d landed her on a freshly paved runway in L.A. or Chicago instead of a beach airstrip at the edge of Africa.
“Slick,” Mary said. Buttering me up, thought Dare as she added jauntily, “Couldn’t have done better myself.”
“There’s not many could have.” He spun the plane around to idle toward the opposite end of the airstrip. “Put wings and a prop on it, darlin’, and I’ll fly you a brick shithouse anywhere you want to go.”
“Mary,” she said. “Not Margo, not Marie, and definitely not ‘darlin’.’ Or ‘honey.’ I’m a pilot, not a waitress. You don’t mind, Wes.”