the base of her finger, then tried to twist it off. “See? It’s stuck.” She rose partway from her chair and, leaning across the table, kissed him on the forehead. “I love taking chances, and this will be the biggest one yet.”
Dare, his heart soaring, experienced one of his rare moments of speechlessness. As Mary sat down, the men nearby broke out in cheers and applause. She blew them all a kiss and then spread her hand to show off the diamond.
“You had us in suspense,” said one, a stocky, middle-aged guy with carbon-black hair. “Sorry, but we couldn’t help overhearing.”
“Oh, I reckon y’all could have if you wanted to,” Dare said congenially. His happiness had put him in an expansive mood. “Don’t know a one of you, but since you’re the first to know, I’ll buy you a round in the bar.”
“Thanks, and congratulations,” the other man said, and stood to offer his hand. “Bob Mendoza. Soft drinks for us. We’re flying this afternoon.”
With their newfound friends, Dare and Mary moved into the bar for an impromptu engagement celebration. Mendoza said it was great to run into “fellow Americans.” Dare pointed out that Mary was Canadian, which Mendoza, erasing four thousand miles of border with a swipe of his hand, dismissed as a distinction without a difference.
“Y’all said you were flying this afternoon. Flying what?”
They were an Air National Guard crew on a KC-135 tanker, doing their annual tour of active duty. Their usual assignment was to the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, but this year they’d been sent to Kenya to practice maneuvers with the Kenyan air force.
“We’re out of Tucson,” Mendoza said. “Y’know, I thought I heard you mention the name of Doug Braithwaite. I knew a guy by the same name.”
“He’s my business partner. We’ve got a small airline, flyin’ aid out of Loki. I reckon this is one of those it’s-a-small-world stories, on account of he’s from Tucson and there can’t be two guys with a name like that from the same town.”
“I’ll be damned. So this is where Doug fetched up. When you see him, be sure to tell him you ran into his old captain in the hundred-seventy-sixth.”
“How do you mean, his old captain?”
“Doug was in my crew,” Mendoza said. “He was our refueling operator.”
Dare exchanged glances with Mary. “Maybe we are talkin’ about two different guys. The Doug Braithwaite we know was with the regular air force, not the guard. Flew A-tens in the Gulf War.”
“Anyway, that’s what he told us,” Mary said.
Mendoza paused, half-closing an eye. “He’d be early to mid-thirties by now. Six-one or -two? Slim build? Light brown hair? Good-looking guy?”
“If you like the catalog model type,” Mary quipped. “But that’s him.”
Mendoza said, “He was in commercial flight school when I knew him. Why the hell would he say he flew A-tens in the war?”
“Got no idea,” Dare said.
That was the topic of conversation between him and Mary on the flight to Lokichokio. Instead of talking about their future, they speculated about Doug’s motives for revising his past. Dare brought up the story he’d told at their first meeting with Hassan Adid—how he’d strafed a column of retreating Iraqis and was horrified by what he’d done, calling it murder. What did he stand to gain from an invention like that?
“Maybe he was just trying to make himself more than he is,” Mary conjectured. “We’d have to ask him, but I don’t imagine he’d say.” She placed her ring hand atop Dare’s. “Should it make any difference to us?”
“It could,” he replied. “Makes you wonder what else he’s lyin’ about.”
Star at the River’s End
THEIR HONEYMOON WAS a walking tour of the Nuba. Having met with his senior officers, Michael now had to confer with his subordinate commanders before the coming offensive. He wanted Quinette to join him so she could meet the inhabitants of his military domain and they meet her. It was going to be a celibate honeymoon; his full bodyguard accompanied them, and to their thirty-odd, Fancher, Handy, and a parade of porters carrying gear and supplies on foot or on bicycles added twenty more. As usual, Negev shadowed Quinette everywhere, a diligent guardian who had to be told not to traipse after her when she went to relieve herself.
Trekking mostly at night to avoid enemy aircraft and ambushes as well as the sun—temperatures now hit one hundred and twenty-five degrees—negotiating trails that twisted among tumbledown slopes where tall pinnacles jabbed at the stars and tree roots clutched