was the way you said, ‘Hell, Mary.’ Hail, Mary. Like Wesley Dare, the big bad cowboy pilot was addressing the Virgin.”
“I take it that wouldn’t of been the case?”
“I’ll bet Mary wasn’t either,” Mary said, with a provocative flip of her honey-blond hair. The kind of woman not to permit a man much sleep, oh, my, no.
“Good thing there’s Muslims here, you’re talkin’ that blasphemeous trash.”
She raised her arm and wriggled the wrist with the dangling Minolta. “All right?”
“Don’t go too far and stick close to Tony, and if some guy says you got to pay to take his picture, don’t do it,” Dare advised.
Looking at them walk off side by side, Mary’s bottom curving sweetly under her snug khakis, he felt an emotion he did not want to call desire or jealousy; a longing, rather. He tried to banish the feeling by reminding himself that she was twenty-odd years younger and would not have been interested in him even if he weren’t as ugly as home-grown sin. The attempt wasn’t successful. Another reason they’re bad luck, he thought. Just when you think you’ve got yourself on an even keel, you meet one like her and realize you’ve been kidding yourself.
“Now finish.”
It was the dealer, gesturing at the trucks, the last one of which was being loaded.
“Shukran, my friend,” said Dare as he was handed three bundles of hundred-dollar bills, bound with rubber bands. They made him feel a little better about things, and stuffing them into his windbreaker pocket, he reflected on the odd ways that governed life in this part of the world. You could get killed here for no reason whatever, yet you could also stand in a crowd of heavily armed thugs with thirty-five hundred in cash in your pocket and feel as safe as if you were in the vault at Chase Manhattan. It was greed that protected you. Rip off the pilot who flew the stuff in, and there went your profitable trade. Thank the Lord for implanting greed in the hearts of men; if these clansmen were fighting for their faith instead of loot, it would be a different story altogether.
As the trucks drove off, trailing funnels of dust and sand, a dozen people queued alongside the airplane: two kids, three men, and seven women, clutching cloth valises and cardboard suitcases lashed with rope. Dare sometimes took paying passengers on the return legs of his mirra runs; dead-heading home with an empty, unprofitable aircraft was against his principles. While Nimrod collected the modest fare and checked passports—Kenya immigration could come down real hard if you flew in undocumented aliens—two Somalis topped off the G1’s tanks with the drums of gratis fuel. One stood by the blue plastic barrels, cranking by hand; the other stood by the wing on a folding ladder and held the hose, which was patched with duct and electrical tape. They had emptied half the drums and had just begun the fourth when the man on the ladder yelled to his companion, who stopped cranking; under pressure, one of the patches had burst and several gallons of Jet-A1 splashed over the wing. The man climbed onto it, pulled off his T-shirt, and commenced to wipe up the spillage.
“Hey, y’all!” Dare shouted. “Don’t walk on it! It’s a wing, not a welcome mat!”
The Somali stood looking down at him, puzzled.
“Get the hell off there with those dirty boots!” Dare motioned at the ladder.
The Somali climbed down, muttering in Arabic. Cussing, apologizing, Dare couldn’t tell which and didn’t care.
After fetching rags and a roll of duct tape from a storage locker aft of the cockpit, he took off his shoes, climbed onto the wing and, on his knees, cleaned the footprints, the film of fuel, stinking of paraffin. That done, he repaired the ruptured hose with the duct tape, then turned and told the man beside the drums to start cranking again. From the top of the ladder, his eyes twelve feet off the ground, he spotted a thin, reddish-beige pall some distance off, in the direction of Mogadishu. At first he thought it was the tail end of the departing convoy, until he remembered that it had driven to the west, not the north. Besides, the dust cloud was moving toward the airstrip. Squinting into the glare, he saw a dark object top a high ridge-crest a mile away. In a moment, magnified by the mirage shimmering on the horizon, it revealed itself as a truck or a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and