You’re not the boss, he’d said, so Fitz had called the boss in Nairobi on the sat-phone. Douglas’s return message had ordered Tony to go.
Alexei’s crew had not exactly been eager to look for Tara. Two planes down in a single afternoon was an unusual occurrence that had spooked all the aid pilots in Loki. Yesterday Fitzhugh had made the mistake of repeating Dare’s speculation that she might have been shot down. Rumors ran through the compounds and expat bars, transforming the possibility into established fact. Khartoum had taken the gloves off. Any plane in a no-go zone was going to be blown out of the sky. For years that specter had ridden with every crew flying on the dark side; but no plane had fallen to enemy fire, which had fostered a belief among the pilots, flight engineers, and loadmasters that they were charmed, immune, blessed; if the blessing had been withdrawn from Tara, who by virtue of her integrity seemed the most deserving of it, then it had been withdrawn from all.
“Five thousand,” Tony said. “How’s this?”
“Damn you, they might be alive down there. Maybe you don’t care what happens to Wesley, but I would think you’d care about her.”
“The both of them can rot in hell for all I care.”
“A thousand feet,” Fitzhugh demanded.
Muttering an expletive, Tony pitched the plane over into a steep dive before pulling back hard to describe a tight parabolic curve in the air. He laughed harshly. “Bloody hell if you don’t look like a white man now.”
“Was that necessary?” Fitzhugh said, his stomach settling back into its rightful place.
“You wanted lower, you got it.”
At eight hundred feet they flew over a road. It ended at the old airstrip, a rough lane with tall trees on one side. Through the trees Fitzhugh glimpsed the Hawker’s fuselage. In its new coat of white paint, it looked like some huge discarded appliance. Tony circled to give him a better view. The plane lay broadside to the trees, her right wing sheared off near the root, her nose cone crushed. A short distance away, amid low, scattered shrubs, a flock of vultures clustered, feeding on something.
“Another pass, Tony. As low and slow as you can.”
They skimmed the runway. Frightened off, the vultures rose toward the trees with a slow flapping of dark wings. Fitzhugh saw a body lying on its back, one arm flung out wide. It might have been Wesley.
“Land,” he said.
“They’re dead,” Tony said, gaining altitude.
“I saw only one. The other one could be in the plane.”
“Well, I don’t like the looks of that runway.”
“Stop arguing with me. We took this plane so we could land on a short strip. Now do it, land.”
Tony turned and touched down.
Fitzhugh recognized Wesley only by his clothes and his curly reddish hair, disturbingly lifelike as a breeze moved through it. Mary’s body lay half buried a little distance away. The vultures had not gone to work on her; presumably they would have once they were finished with Wesley. Sorrow and disgust moved through him at once. Two people he’d known for three years, sentient beings who had spoken to him only twenty-four hours ago, reduced to this, to carrion.
“Tony, what do you think happened?”
“Not enough usable runway for a Hawker,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Wes ran out of runway and ideas at the same time.”
“Someone tried to bury her. It must have been Wes.”
There might have been a tremor in Tony’s jaw as he looked down at his former lover; then he turned away and said, “Who else?”
“But if he had the strength to drag her this far and to dig a grave, you would think he wasn’t injured that badly. You would think he’d still be alive. And look, they’re both barefoot. Why’s that?”
“Wouldn’t know. What difference does it make?”
“Maybe nothing. There is a lot here that doesn’t make sense. Wes said something very strange in one of his last transmissions. There was something about his fuel pumps, something about a water jug and plastic bags in a trash barrel. What do you make of that?”
Tony jammed his hands into his back pockets and looked at the ground. “Sounds to me like he was daft. Let’s get them and ourselves out of here.”
They got the body bags from the Beechcraft and put on the latex gloves and the surgical masks that the Red Cross, in its foresight, had also provided. They loaded Mary’s corpse first. As they struggled with Wesley’s bulk, the rigid body rolled over, revealing