the only NGO Khartoum allows to operate up there. Of course, the hospital is not supposed to be receiving supplies from outside Sudan, but it’s been in a fix lately, short of everything. We will leave for the Nuba, and when I get back, I will tell everyone I was delayed in Kakuma by mechanical trouble. I cannot stress enough the need for discretion. I prefer that to ‘secrecy,’ don’t you? After all, we’re not spies.”
Douglas shrugged to say that he was neutral about semantics.
“But Khartoum has its spies around here,” Tara went on. “Let’s say they have a controller or two at Loki tower on the payroll. He finds out where we’re bound, we are in a fix.”
“But we’re flying with Tara Whitcomb, the legend, the modern-day Beryl Markham,” Douglas said with utmost sincerity. His eyes fastened onto her, and Fitzhugh suddenly felt shut out of the conversation; felt moreover that he had disappeared as far as Douglas was concerned.
“I am fifty-five years old.” Tara, with a laugh, gave her head a stiff, controlled toss backward. “Quite beyond flattery.”
“I wasn’t flattering. I heard about you almost from the day I got here. How some missionary was sick in a no-fly area. The mission radioed Loki for an evac. UN flight ops told them they would have to wait until they negotiated with Khartoum for clearance to land.”
Tara nodded, adding that someone in flight operations sent a message to the mission, urging them to evacuate the dying man by road, a ridiculous idea, as it was the middle of the rainy season and the road to Loki impassable, or nearly so, not to mention the chance of ambush by Turkana or Tuposa bandits.
“So you got him. You said, ‘Fuck all this chickenshit red tape,’ and went in and got him.”
“I didn’t use that sort of language, Doug.”
“You had to fly through a helluva storm, I heard. You called the mission and told them to have the guy at the airstrip at such-and-such a time and you’d be there.”
“Three twenty-five,” she said.
“And they were there at three twenty-five and so were you. Right on the money.”
“Oh, really.” With a small movement of her head and a quick shrug, she signaled that the accolades were beginning to embarrass her. Then, pushing back from the table, she clasped her hands over her crossed knees and gave Douglas the same direct, penetrating look he was giving her. “There’s quite a lot of stories floating around here about you, you know. You’ve gotten quite the reputation.”
The remark appeared to catch him off guard. His back stiffened.
“What sort of reputation?”
“Depends on who you’re speaking to. To some people, you’re a hero. Others . . . to them you’re an air pirate, or the next thing to it.”
“What?”
“They say that what you did came this close”—holding her forefinger next to her thumb—“to a hijacking.”
He said nothing and, with a shift of his glance, invited Fitzhugh back into the conversation, though Fitzhugh had no idea what to say. Ever since meeting him, he’d been eager to learn what had caused Douglas’s departure from PanAfrik and put him on the UN’s shit list; but when he had asked, on the flight to Loki yesterday, the American had answered with a blank-faced silence, as if he liked playing the mystery man. In the past forty-eight hours, all he’d revealed about himself was that he was thirty-one years old, hailed from Tucson, Arizona, and had flown for the U.S. Air Force in the Persian Gulf War, a spare autobiography that was the source of some anxiety for Fitzhugh. He didn’t relish the notion of tramping through the Nuba mountains with a man about whom he knew almost nothing.
“Who in the hell accused me of hijacking?” Douglas asked, in a tone more wounded than angry.
“No one’s really accused you,” answered Tara.
“I can make a good guess. That Dutchman in flight operations, Timmerman. That’s the kind of thing he’d say. Fact is, he did say it to me after I got sacked. A hijacking. Jesus H. Christ. I was the first officer. How can anyone say that I hijacked my own flight?”
“Doug, if I’d known it was going to upset you—”
“Hey, Tara, if you found out a story like that was going around about you, it wouldn’t upset you?”
“Of course it would. But if you will allow me to . . . I mean to say, if you were first officer, then it wasn’t your flight, strictly speaking.”