plane again, putting her nose into the wind in case he had to take off in a hurry.
After shutting the engines down, he pulled his holstered Beretta from under his seat, loaded a clip, and strapped it on.
“What’s that for?” Mary looked, well, not alarmed exactly. Concerned.
“For show mostly. Somalis respect a man with a gun, but the truth is, if it came to a fight, the only thing this would be good for is committin’ suicide.”
Nimrod opened the forward door and dropped the ladder. Dare, Tony, and Mary climbed out into the midmorning heat. Dare was dismayed to see a mini-Minolta hanging from Mary’s wrist by a cord. He took off the windbreaker he’d worn in flight—the heat had been turned off to keep the mirra fresh—and watched a convoy of Technicals bump down the dirt road leading from the town to the airstrip, each vehicle mounting a machine gun on the cab and carrying its complement of gunmen: boys who were boys in age only, assault rifles strapped across their backs and a menace in their expressionless faces and dead eyes. Shoot you down point-blank with no more feeling than if they’d squashed a bug. The trucks wheeled up and the gunmen jumped out, while Nimrod opened the rear door and porters began to off-load amid a lot of yelling and shouting. Hawkers and peddlers materialized out of thin air and turned the place into an open-air bazaar, barking offers for watches, jewelry, TVs, VCRs, cassette players, CD players, kitchen blenders—name it and they were likely to have it in one of their makeshift warehouses, brand-new stuff still in the shipping boxes that had been pilfered off the docks in Aden and Dubai and smuggled to Somalia on dhows.
“Take a look at this,” Dare said to Mary. “Pure Somalia, a Wall Street stockbroker’s wet dream, capitalism completely off the leash, and you got a license to shoot the competition. Y’all want to buy somethin’ cheap and duty-free, now’s the time and here’s the place to do it.”
“Not in a shopping mood, thanks.”
The noisy jostle appeared to make her wary, and he didn’t blame her. A current of instability and incipient violence buzzed through the carnivallike atmosphere like the hum from high-voltage power lines. The scene could turn ugly at any moment. Dare sensed it—he always did—and was pleased with Mary for sensing it as well. Her receptiveness to that hum of danger, a hum felt rather than heard, compensated for the camera, telling him that she wasn’t some goddamned tourist, like a lot of the kids who came out to Africa with their pilot’s licenses and the hope of obtaining adventure and a paycheck at the same time, never believing anything could happen to them because they were young, because Africa was theater to them and they were the audience. They didn’t realize that the spectacle could spill off the stage right into their laps before they had a chance to run for the exit.
“Like to try some of what we brought in?” he asked her.
“Tastes like dried horseshit mixed with sour limes and rotten spinach,” Tony said. “And you can get more of a jolt off a six-pack of Diet Coke.”
“What a sales pitch,” said Mary brightly. “I’d love some.”
Ambling past a tribal elder carrying a bronze-bladed spear, Dare went to one of the trucks and plucked a handful of the dark green leaves from a bag.
“Damn! This old airplane once upon a time flew executive big-wigs for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and now it’s flyin’ this shit into Somalia,” he said, passing the leaves to Mary. “Kinda like me. Once upon a time I was the official pilot for the governor of Texas. Did you know that?”
She shook her head.
“Wad it up and chew it like bubble gum,” he instructed.
She did this, grimaced, and spat the wad in disgust.
“Told you, love,” said Tony.
The elder, a traditionalist in apparel as well as armament—he wore sandals instead of sneakers, a robe instead of jeans—grinned and told her that she should have brewed it as tea.
“Khat make a very fine tea, lady,” he said.
“I can’t believe these people like this stuff.”
“Like it?” Dare said. “Hell, Mary, they love it. I’ve seen a roomful of guys chewin’ on it like bunnies in a cabbage patch. When your religion won’t allow you a taste of whiskey, you got to have somethin’ to get you through the day.”
She laughed very hard, and he said he didn’t think he had been that funny.