pair of eyes.”
Wesley shook his head. “This one could get dicey. Best thing for you is, park yourself by a radio and wait to hear from us. Pam, what’s your frequency?”
She gave it to him, and he and Mary walked out. Fitzhugh followed them to the plane, asking Dare to reconsider.
“Listen, we’ve got to search at low altitude. If she was shot down, the troops who did it could still be in the area. We’ll risk our butts, no one else’s. Y’all monitor the radio.”
IN THE HANGAR, Nimrod filled a duffel bag with tins of food, granola bars, a first-aid kit, and plastic water bottles stuffed in fertilizer bags to prevent breakage, then lugged it to the plane. He also volunteered to help them look.
“Damn, sure are a lot people wantin’ to live dangerously today.” Dare crunched the small man’s shoulders. “No way, y’all got a wife and kids.”
He and Mary were airborne a quarter of an hour later and, after making their turn, soared over the Mogilla range into Sudan. He called Pamela for a radio check, punched his waypoint into the GPS, and climbed toward twenty-one thousand feet, the savannahs and cattle pastures of eastern Equatoria falling away and away, until they showed as a sheet of wet-season green stretched to a horizon lost in haze. He went on autopilot and gave Mary his plan: descend to five thousand at the point where he thought Tara had gone down, decrease airspeed, conduct a box search, the plane flying in ever-widening squares.
“We’ll be there in two hours. It’ll be gettin’ late, and at that level we’ll be suckin’ up the fuel, so I figure we’ll have ninety minutes max search time before we’ve got to call it a day.”
“And if we do spot something?”
“If it’s a muzzle flash, we get the hell out of there. Looks like a wreck, we go down for a closer look. We see signs of life, we give ’em a wing-wag, then you take the con. Y’all are my airdrop expert, since you flew ’em for the UN. Make a pass at seven hundred, five if you can, I harness myself in at the aft cargo door and kick out the survival gear.” That there were survivors, Dare thought, was like the existence of unicorns: more a conceivability than a real possibility; but for him the conceivability was sufficient. It was a matter of keeping the one faith he believed in. “If we don’t see any Sudan army in the area,” he went on, “we radio the location to the Archangel and hope the wrong people ain’t listenin’ in. We tell him to send some people to evacuate the casualties to Zulu Three. We land and medevac ’em to Loki. It’ll take a while for the troopers to get ’em to the airstrip, so count on an overnight stay.”
“And there goes our customer and a quarter of a million dollars. We’re so goddamned noble, I can hardly stand it.”
“Time comes, I’ll radio Pam and ask her to pass the word to him that we’ll be delayed twenty-four hours. Figure he won’t find another Hawker that quick.”
They flew on. Cruising altitude, his natural habitat, the clear, cold realm where he thought clearly, where he was in control, where he knew what to do next. Not ten minutes after this smug thought passed through his mind, the left engine started to run rough; moments later, the fuel pressure began to drop drastically. Warning lights flashed on the control panel.
“Son of a bitch! Quick, get out the emergency checklist,” Dare said.
Moments after they began the check, the engine quit cold.
“Wes! What the hell is happening?”
“Got no idea,” Dare said, his heartbeat springing into the triple digits. He willed it back down to a normal rate, then tried to restart the engine. Nothing. A sentimentalist might have kept trying, a sentimentalist might have hoped that the gods of the air, moved by the compassion that had moved him and Mary to undertake this mission, would show him what the problem was and how to fix it. The unsentimental Wesley Dare put the plane into a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, then radioed his situation to Pamela and told her that he had to abort the search. He called Loki tower. “This is Yankee Bravo Three Yankee Zulu. I’ve got engine problems and I’m coming in on one engine. Have the crash trucks standin’ by.”
“Roger that,” replied the disembodied voice.
Mary reached across the pedestal and touched his arm, her fingers damp against