“Hey, I’m cool if you are,” Douglas said. “Let’s fly.”
Loki tower—a frame cabin atop a wooden derrick—then hangars and forklifts feeding pallets of sorghum into a cargo plane’s innards shot by before the Caravan left the ground. It seemed to float effortlessly aloft, like a hot-air balloon. Holding her altitude to three thousand feet, Tara followed the Lokichokio-Lodwar highway. It was nearly devoid of traffic, so heavily ambushed by Turkana bandits that only armed convoys dared to travel it. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, she commenced her descent. The town appeared on the sun-blasted, khaki plain that stretched into eternity: a twin-spired mission church, huts fenced by thornbush bomas, the depressing geometry of the refugee camp, rank upon rank of tin-roofed barracks laid out on a grid of dusty streets.
“See the church?” Tara motioned as she made her approach. “Some time ago I fell madly in love with the priest, Father Tony O’Mara. Terrifically handsome in a dark Irish way, but true to his vows, and I know because I did my best to get him to break them. So every time I flew near Kakuma, I buzzed the church to say hello and remind him I was around. In case he had a change of heart.”
She let out a wicked laugh that rang like wind chimes, and her two passengers saw, as faint as a ghost on a negative, an image of the wild girl she must have been. It was hard to reconcile that picture with the contained, middle-aged woman she was now.
The former temptress of a priest, the daredevil who buzzed churches, was quickly all business again, working rudder pedals and flap levers to make a smooth landing on a strip that wasn’t much more than a graded gravel road. Without switching off the engine, she climbed out and directed a couple of Kenyans to begin loading the medical supplies—boxes of surgical gloves, antibiotics, syringes, bandages—into the back of the plane. Two people, faces turned from the whirling dust, approached the aircraft—a short white man and a white woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, which she held tightly to her head with one hand. She and Tara embraced and started talking. Diana. The man with her was Barrett. She stepped under the wing and gestured to open the door.
“Fitz! Doug! Hello!” she shouted over the engine. “John and I had business here, so we thought we’d meet the plane and wish you bon voyage!”
Fitzhugh nodded his thanks, his heart arrested by her smile, the bright hair as yellow as her hat. The Kenyan was loading the boxes into the cart.
“Do give our best to Gerhard,” Diana said.
“Gerhard?”
“All that stuff in back is for him,” Barrett said. “Sort of a sample to show him the things we could do for him once we get the operation rollin’.”
“Who is this Gerhard?”
“Gerhard Manfred.” Diana again. “The doctor who runs the hospital up there.”
“And a dedicated one he is. A bit daft and difficult, but be diplomatic with him. He could be of great help to us. He’ll be happy with those supplies.” Barrett extended his hand. “Best of luck to you. Michael the Archangel will meet you at Zulu One with an armed escort. Godspeed!”
Tara returned to her seat, Douglas latched the door, and Barrett and Diana stood back and waved as the plane taxied away, the cargo stacked under a cargo net. Fitzhugh pressed his face to the window, jumped by strange emotions. A titled lady almost old enough to be his mother, and here he was, wondering if she might be divorced from Mr. Briggs or his widow. He hadn’t noticed a wedding ring.
In a short while they were over the stark Lolikipi plain, veined with dry watercourses, then crossed the northern tip of the Mogillas, fissured and barren. Tara scribbled notes for her log on a pad strapped to her thigh. She spoke into her headset microphone, but Fitzhugh couldn’t hear, he could only see her lips moving. Ending the message, she pushed the mike aside and said they were now in Sudanese airspace and would observe radio silence from here on, emergencies excepted.
The uplands of Eastern Equatoria passed monotonously below in their drab dry-season colors. Seen from twelve thousand feet, the landscape looked as level as a football pitch. You could dribble a soccer ball for a hundred miles and not hit anything but a termite mound, Fitzhugh thought. Farther north, the immense marshes spreading away from the Nile tributaries in