go commercial,” he said, his wrists resting on the yoke. “But pretty quick I realized I wanted to do something more with it, with flying, I mean. Something more than . . . well . . . went to Alaska, flew there for a while. A twin Otter. Delivered mail and stuff to Eskimo settlements hundreds of miles from any road. A lot of school supplies. Computers. It was something to see the look on the teachers’ faces, the kids’ faces when I brought the first computers in. Like I was Santa Claus or an angel. So when I found out the UN was looking for people to fly in Sudan . . . so here I am.”
He left off at that, palpably uncomfortable with talking about himself in this way. Fitzhugh, who’d expected a further insight into what made Douglas Douglas, felt a little let down. Later, he would learn that his friend belonged to the breed of American male who dislikes revealing his innermost self, not because he’s shy or ashamed of what’s there but because he abhors introspection and prefers to act, without giving much thought as to why.
Soon Tara took the controls again, descended to ten thousand, and leveled off above a Mars-scape with trees. She pointed to a long line of distant mountains, shimmering blue-gray in the noonday haze. The Nuba.
“Keep your eyes open for Antonovs. They patrol here fairly regularly.”
“They could shoot at us?” Fitzhugh heard the rise in his voice and wished he’d done a better job of masking his alarm.
“No,” said Tara. “They’re either bombers or recce aircraft. But they could track us and radio their chums on the ground.”
“This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to feel neutral. Okay, I’ll watch the right. Fitz, take the left.”
Douglas did not sound alarmed or tense or anything but stimulated. Fitzhugh shifted to the left-hand seat and looked out the window, alert for any movement in the bright heavens. His imagination got the better of him, transforming a speck on the Plexiglas into a far-off plane. Later he was about to call Tara’s attention to a dark object, soaring between them and the ground, when he realized it was a large bird. They were over the mountains now. The Caravan leaped and fell suddenly, his heart with it. An updraft, Tara explained. Hot air gyring off the mountains. The altimeter needle wound downward, the plane shuddering and bouncing. Fitzhugh was distracted from his observational duties by the terror turbulence always induced in him, and by the wild architecture reeling below. Finger pinnacles, rocky spires and pyramids, boulders and ravines and scree-covered slopes. They swooped over a plateau where the cylindrical huts of a Nuban village clustered between two baobab trees as old as time. Beyond was a valley of dead yellow grass. Tara flew down the length of it, toward a serpentine of scraggly trees that defined a watercourse, winding at the foot of a low, bare escarpment, golden rocks scattered across it like immense nuggets.
Craning her neck, she pointed and said, “There it is, Zulu One,” but Fitzhugh saw nothing that looked like a landing field, only the trees and the riverbed and the meadows. She flew over the escarpment, made a wide turn, and cautioned her passengers to be sure they were buckled up. Fitzhugh tightened his seatbelt. A second later his organs slid into his throat as the plane dived steeply, spiraling as it plunged so that he caught alternating glimpses of ground and sky. He was almost sure that something had gone horribly wrong, that Tara had lost control, but everything was happening too quickly for him to feel anything but nausea. He choked, turned aside, and vomited on the seat beside him, the plane pulling out of the corkscrewing dive at the same instant to shoot over the trees, nearly clipping their flat tops. The landing gear hit the ground. The Caravan bounced, rocked to one side, straightened, touched down again, and made a bumpy roll. A stack of fuel drums went by. Tara braked to a stop and killed the engine.
The silence was eerie after the wind-rushing roar of the dive, but Fitzhugh thanked God that he was alive and on earth again and no longer in motion. Tara turned around and wrinkled her nose at his mess.
“Good thing I’ve got my Vicks with me.” She pulled a rag from under her seat and handed it to him, and he wiped the seat. “Fault’s all