into this that I didn’t have to. I wasn’t playing Nancy Drew because I was bored. I thought I was looking out for your interests, the organization’s interests.”
He got it, finally, and to cover up his chagrin, he made a comic show, hunching his shoulders, wincing, turning up his palms. “Okay. I get the same complaint in Geneva. I don’t give my staff the credit they deserve. I stand corrected. You showed a lot of initiative and concern, and I’m grateful. I’ll put you in for a bonus.”
“You don’t have to go that far,” she stated, and while he was still feeling that he owed her something, she handed him Michael’s letter.
“What’s this?”
“It’s in the initiative department.”
“You don’t have enough on your plate already?” he asked when he’d read it.
“Ken, this is a whole new area we could call attention to. I’d like to go up there and make an assessment.”
“We sent you up there once to make an assessment and you damned near got yourself killed.”
“I can’t imagine anything like that would happen again. And the last time I was with a whole bunch of people. I hardly had a chance to talk to him. Didn’t even scratch the surface.”
“What would you get if you went back?”
“Facts, figures, an overview. What problems we’d have setting up a program there.”
He set the letter down on the desk and looked at it pensively. “All right, but make it a brief visit. You’ve got plenty to do back here.”
Brothers and Sisters in Arms
THEY MADE THREE flights in the first week, departing Loki at dawn with light loads of innocuous cargo, landing at an SPLA airstrip on the border to take on military hardware smuggled through Uganda in crates labeled “sewer pipes” (antiaircraft missiles), “insecticide” (triple-A machine guns), “fertilizer” (mortar shells), “typewriters” (mortar fuses), and “bulldozer parts” (mortar tubes), then flying on to the Nuba mountains for a quick off-load and a return to Loki in time for a late lunch. The second week was much the same. Mary videotaped and photographed these flights to the dark side. Dare indulged her hobby at first, then suggested that she leave her cameras behind in the future; keeping a pictorial record of their activities wasn’t a smart idea. “The wrong eyes see that stuff, we’ve got big problems.” And what about the videos she’d already shot? Did he want her to burn them? No, but it would be wise to buy a safe and lock them up. “All right,” she said agreeably. “I don’t need any more pictures. One mission is pretty much like another. Funny, isn’t it, how even running guns can get to be routine.”
Dare’s canary warned him that a comment like that would not go unpunished. On their next mission, minutes before they were to take off from an airfield near Nimule, a deluge washed out the runway, stranding them for over two days. They drank river water filtered through a hand pump, painted themselves in Deet against the swarms of mosquitoes, and breathed through bandanna masks against the stench of the corpses littering the bush nearby. The bodies belonged to soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army, an exceedingly violent band of crackpot Christians in rebellion against the Ugandan government. To retaliate for Uganda’s support of the Sudanese rebels, Khartoum had overcome its abhorrence of infidels and armed the Lord’s Resistance Army. A detachment of these lunatics, either on their own initiative or on orders from their Muslim allies, had crossed the border to seize the airfield. The SPLA defenders wiped them out and left them unburied to discourage further attempts.
“Africa sure is an interesting place,” Dare said as they sat inside the airplane to get away from the stink. “Had enough of it yet?”
On the second day he figured the smell was more endurable than the Hawker’s saunalike interior and went outside to check the runway’s condition. After his inspection, he sat down for a smoke—and felt a dagger pierce his calf. In seconds an excruciating pain bolted up his leg. He hobbled back to the plane, flopped onto a cargo pallet, and groaned. Mary rolled up his pant leg, exposing a bulging red welt.
“Scorpion,” she said. “You take it easy, baby. Mary will take care of it.” She sharpened her jackknife, sterilized it with a cigarette lighter, and sliced the wound to bleed out the poison, then rubbed it with crystals of potassium permanganate from the first-aid kit.
Hours of throbbing misery followed. Dare’s leg swelled up to the thigh. By