more quickly than Fitzhugh had expected. Appearing at Knight Air’s office one morning, they announced that they had spoken to Barrett and agreed to work with International People’s Aid, and yes, they would be pleased to sign a contract with Knight Air. This inclined Fitzhugh to think that the pair of Christian soldiers weren’t such strange fellows after all, and it delighted Douglas. “My man, you’ve really come through,” he said, and offered to make Fitzhugh a junior partner, entitling him to a five percent share of the company’s net profits in addition to his salary. Fitzhugh Martin had become something he’d never imagined: an entrepreneur.
Knight Air’s business doubled. It could now afford additional employees. Fitzhugh lured a flight mechanic away from the UN, a black-bearded South African named VanRensberg, and hired a Kikuyu woman, Rachel Njiru, as secretary and bookkeeper. But Douglas and Tony were flying five to six missions a week, a schedule that put a strain on them and on the airplane. “What we need,” Douglas declared, “is another airplane and the crew to fly it.”
WESLEY DARE’S CAMPAIGN to stop Joe Nakima from seizing—stealing—his old Gulfstream One had succeeded, though the price for that triumph was the loss of the plane to a legal limbo. The day after he was visited by the man from the Department of Civil Aviation, Dare hired a lawyer and filed suit against Nakima, alleging fraud. Nakima countersued. The judge hearing the case slapped an injunction on both litigants, prohibiting each from claiming the aircraft until its ownership could be decided. There followed a perfect carnival of delays and postponements, some requested by Dare’s attorneys, some by Nakima’s.
The day after he filed suit, Dare began a desperate hunt for another airplane so he could fulfill his contract with Laurent Kabila, on the march against Mobuto Sese Seko in the Congo. After two weeks of scouring aviation trade publications and contacting airplane brokers, he ran into Keith Cheswick at the Aero Club in Nairobi. Cheswick, a pilot of fortune, was an old friend; they’d flown together in Sierra Leone for Blackbridge Services, a mercenary outfit that provided security forces for diamond and copper mines, weapons for warlords who wanted to seize the mines, bodyguards for African dictators, and military advisers to rebels trying to overthrow the dictators—a perfect closed loop. Over lunch he told Cheswick about his dilemma. Cheswick, who was still with Blackbridge, replied that maybe they could help each other out, because he was looking to unload one of the firm’s aircraft, a Hawker-Siddley 748. She was a bit long in the tooth but in good shape overall. How much? Dare asked. Three hundred thousand U.S. He didn’t have that kind of money, but Cheswick said he might be able to come up with an alternative—in the spirit of friendship, eh, old boy?
Three days later he phoned and asked Dare to meet him for dinner at the New Stanley. When Dare arrived, Cheswick handed him a slender sheaf of papers, faxed from Blackbridge’s Cape Town headquarters.
“Here’s the deal, and it’s take it or leave it, Wes. We lease the plane to you for a dollar a month, but you assign your contract to us. We own net profits. At the end of the job, the Hawker’s yours. She’s your bonus.”
“That contract is worth at least seven hundred fifty. So you make a total of twice what it’s worth, leavin’ me plane rich and money poor. Do I get gas money to fly her out of the Congo? Who picks up the salary for my first officer?”
Cheswick had been an RAF fighter pilot, and he looked like one: a martial gray mustache, thin lips that smiled thinly.
“You are going to be my first officer,” he said. He did some things with his face, trying to give it a warm, affectionate expression. “You can’t expect the firm to let an airplane go on trust, can you?”
Dare’s glance sidestepped across the dining room. White linen, soft lights, wainscot buffed to a gloss, tourists babbling about their photo safaris to the Masai-Mara. “I’d be tempted to leave the airplane there, take the money and run. You’re going to be my adult supervision.”
Six months later, after ferrying Kabila and his staff from one jungle redoubt to another, Dare was back in Nairobi, owner of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane with not much more than walking-around money in his pocket. There had been no progress in his lawsuit. The G1, its engines and cockpit windows covered in canvas, sat