“Michael must be a man of many facets,” he said. “I didn’t know he read Shakespeare.”
“I don’t think he does,” she said.
“ ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.’ It’s from—I don’t remember. From somewhere in Shakespeare.”
He went to work. Once more she watched him compose scrambled words into a coherent message. So many tons of 14.5-millimeter ammunition, so many shoulder-fired missiles.
“So we’ve got the order,” Doug said, “but no delivery truck. I’m sorry, Quinette. I really am.”
She gave him a puzzled look.
“Wes and I have come to a parting of the ways. There’s no way we can fly this stuff in. Not till we work out a new system.”
After absorbing this disturbing news, she said, “What do I tell my husband? He needs it right away. Without it, the government will have a field day. They’ll bomb and bomb and bomb.”
“I know, “ he said under his breath.
“Can’t you or someone else fly it in? The Antonov we came in on—”
“Quinette, it’s complicated, but we can’t carry military stuff in Knight Air planes, and Knight Air can’t take direct payment from the SPLA. The operation has to be covered. And like I said, we’re working out a new system. We’re not going to leave you people in the lurch. That’s a solemn promise, but it’s going to take a few weeks to set things up.”
Fitz gave her the decoded message. “Perhaps you could talk to Wes yourself. He might make one more trip. I doubt it, but maybe.”
She found him at a part of the Loki airfield known as Dogpatch, a graveyard for derelict planes and home to a few one-pilot, one-plane air operators. Tara Whitcomb’s Cessna was parked there, near Dare’s Hawker-Siddley. A ground crewman was spray-painting the canary under the cockpit window, and the word YELLOWBIRD bled through a thin undercoat on the fuselage. Inside the shabby hangar, with Mary looking over his shoulder, Wes was hunched over a desk, laboriously typing on a laptop with one finger. They looked up as Quinette walked in with Negev.
“Well, don’t y’all look stunning in that jumpsuit,” Wes quipped in his grating accent.
“You might try, ‘Hello, Quinette, it’s good to see you.’ ”
“Sure. Hello, Quinette, it’s good to see you.” He glanced at Negev. “Who’s this?”
“My bodyguard.”
“Y’all rate a bodyguard?”
“Actually, I rate six.”
“What brings you here from Ugga-Buggaland?”
When it came to provoking Quinette’s dislike, he was Phyllis Rappaport’s equal. She showed him the message. He gave it a quick look and said, “Guess you didn’t hear. We’re out of business.”
“I heard you and Doug aren’t working together anymore, not that you’re out of business.”
He folded his hands on his belly and tilted back in his squeaky chair. “So you’ve seen my ex-partner.”
“Half an hour ago.”
“It was me that broke his nose.”
“I won’t ask why.”
“Good. I wouldn’t of given you an answer. Know anyone interested in a right good airplane?” He indicated the laptop, on which he was writing an ad: FOR SALE—1967 HAWKER-SIDDLEY 748. Then some technical data and the price. “That’s reduced as of today,” he said. “A bargain.”
“Wes, we’ve been hit hard. If they start bombing again and we don’t have anything to shoot back with, I hate to think what will happen.”
“We?” was all he said, twirling his sunglasses, his glance sidling away. She looked at Mary, who shrugged and said, “Like the boss said, out of business. At least the business we were in.”
“You’re here, and your plane is out there. Why can’t you make one more run?”
“Y’all want an explanation, I’ll give you two for your trouble. First off, my plan was to fly the hardware for six months. We did seven and change on account of I couldn’t get that Hawker sold for my original askin’ price. Second off, you people are a day late and eighteen thousand dollars short.”
“I thought that got settled weeks ago.”
“It did. What you might call a benefactor paid the SPLA’s debt, but the man can’t make a career out of that. What happened was, the glorious rebel army stiffed us again, the last flight we made. That makes this many times”—Fanning three fingers—“and that many times means out.”
“You owe it to the people up there!” Quinette said, her voice ricocheting off the hangar’s walls of corrugated iron.
“Don’t lecture me, girl. We’re the ones that are owed, me and Mary. I was you, I’d walk out right goddamned now, unless you want