Acts of faith (12 page)

“I can make a good guess. That Dutchman in flight operations, Timmerman. That’s the kind of thing he’d say. Fact is, he did say it to me after I got sacked. A hijacking. Jesus H. Christ. I was the first officer. How can anyone say that I hijacked my own flight?”

“Doug, if I’d known it was going to upset you—”

“Hey, Tara, if you found out a story like that was going around about you, it wouldn’t upset you?”

“Of course it would. But if you will allow me to . . . I mean to say, if you were first officer, then it wasn’t
your
flight, strictly speaking.”

Douglas frowned, half-cocking one ear toward her. “I don’t believe you said that.”

He came out of his chair, suddenly enough to startle her and Fitzhugh. His lips parted, but he appeared to have second thoughts about whatever he intended to say and, muttering that he had better give his gear one last check, walked off.

“Oh dear, I’m afraid that wasn’t very diplomatic of me.” Tara turned to watch him, striding down the path toward his tukul. “Now I shall have to make amends.”

Fitzhugh asked, “What happened? What is this about a hijacking?”

Tara shook her head. “I had better apologize straight away.” But she hadn’t gotten across the pool terrace before Douglas returned, chin tucked in, eyes level, arms swinging at his sides. He seized her elbow and towed her back to her chair, then dropped into his.

“It
was
my flight,” he said. “Estrada got sick. Dysentery. He couldn’t fly. Turned the plane over to me. T. J. Estrada, stocky Filipino guy, forty-five, maybe fifty? Crew cut? Flew Hercs for the Filipino Air Force?”

“I—I may have seen him around,” she said, a little stunned by the way he’d manhandled her.

“He got sick. It was a check-out flight for me, and he was the captain and my check pilot. Routine airdrop out near Ayod. Sixteen tons of maize. Poor guy was on the deck behind the flight engineer, doubled up, shitting all over himself. He’d been complaining about a bad stomach, but it really hit him right before we got the call to divert and pick up those people in Ajiep. He gave me the con, so it was my flight, if that makes any difference.”

“Yes, you said that, but I think you’re going a bit fast.” She nodded in Fitzhugh’s direction. “He doesn’t know any of it.”

The American stopped and rewound his narrative, beginning it again at the moment of the drop. Having told Fitzhugh nothing, he now seemed intent on telling him everything, his tongue loosened by the need to defend his reputation. He didn’t discriminate between relevant and irrelevant facts, informing his listeners that the cockpit was decorated with photos of bare-breasted Filipina pinup girls, that the weather over Sudan was unsettled that day, the sky dotted with compact squalls, and that he remembered the smell of rain coming in through the auxiliary vents as the engineer depressurized the cabin on the descent toward the drop zone. Estrada had flown the plane from Loki, but as it neared the DZ, the captain turned the controls over to him.

“This is when he got sick?” Fitzhugh asked.

“No!” Douglas answered with a swat of his hand. “Told you, it was a check-out flight. He was checking me out, evaluating me. He gave me the controls but not command of the plane. That came later.”

He passed his test. The captain gave him a B-plus and said he’d make it an A-minus if Douglas took the plane back to Loki. “Musta caught a bug. Feels like termites are eating my guts.”

Douglas climbed toward cruising altitude. The plane wasn’t halfway there when the captain got out of his seat and went for the head, bent at the waist, sweating. He didn’t make it. A stench filled the cabin, and he fell onto the deck, knees drawn into his chest.

“A Herc is fairly easy to fly, but I wasn’t wild about the idea of taking it back to Loki single-handed, with a captain in the shape he was in. How about another beer?”

Tara signaled a waiter and told him to bring two Tuskers and a Coke. Douglas picked up the thread of his story, saying that only minutes after Estrada was stricken, an urgent call came in from flight operations Loki, ordering the Hercules to change course for Ajiep, almost two hundred miles to the west; the town was under threat of attack by government militia; the supervisor of the UN compound there had requested an emergency evacuation for him and his staff, fifty-odd people all together.

The waiter came and set the bottles, sweating in the afternoon heat, on the table. Douglas wiped his with the tail of his shirt, took a drink, and sat silently for a few moments, holding the bottle by the neck.

“I plugged Ajiep’s numbers into the GPS and did a one-eighty and told the engineer to clue Estrada in—Estrada had his headset off, remember, and hadn’t heard any of it. Had to hand it to the old guy. Pulled himself together. Got into his seat, said he’d do what he could. The plane was mine, but he’d do whatever he could. Yeah, had to hand it to him. He was feverish and stinking like hell, Jesus, the whole cabin smelled like a horse stall. One of the loadmasters got the first-aid kit and gave him a bunch of pills, Imodium, I think, which was pretty much like putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.”

They flew on for an hour, crossing vast swamps, then descended over arid scrub stretched to the horizon. The Jur river lay ahead, a glinting cord in the stark landscape. Beyond it pillars of smoke leaned in the wind, and Douglas knew by the looks of them that they were not from seasonal fires set by slash-and-burn farmers. He raised the UN outpost on the radio. The supervisor—Douglas recalled that he spoke with a French or Belgian accent—told him the town had been shelled half an hour ago.

“We are afraid there are Arab horsemen approaching,” the man said. “If they are here before you, I will shoot myself. Better to shoot myself.”

Like everyone else in Sudan, Douglas had heard stories about the mounted warriors who served as the government’s irregular cavalry. They called themselves by their tribal names, Messiriya, Humr, Hawazma, Rizeygat, but were collectively known as
murahaleen,
holy warriors. The stuff of nightmares for white man and black man alike, they attacked without warning, materializing out of the desert like the jinns of their own mythology, five hundred to a thousand men robed in white, Koranic talismans fluttering from saddle blankets, a reincarnate terror from another time, with only their assault rifles to testify that they were coming on in the here and now.

Douglas followed the Jur like a radio beacon, coming in over the town and the dust-reddened tents of the aid agency compounds.

“The runway there is metaled and long enough for a Herc, but just long enough,” he said and, like every pilot in history, illustrated with his hands. “I wanted to give myself every foot of roll I could.” He skimmed a palm over the tabletop, then slammed it down. “Dropped her, like you do on a wet runway. Bang! We stopped with maybe a hundred and fifty feet to spare. I turned her around for takeoff. Keep the engines running, get the people aboard, and the hell out.”

A pickup truck and a couple of Land Rovers were parked beside the runway. The loadmasters went to the rear, the ramp was lowered. The aid workers, men and women bent under hastily packed rucksacks, piled out of the vehicles and jogged toward the plane. That was when Douglas saw the townspeople, sitting or standing in the grass and thornbush groves nearby: women in pink and white pinafores, children, a few old people. A fountain of brown smoke rose through the trees a kilometer or two away; a sound like a heavy steel door slamming shut, muted by the engines. The crowd did not stir. They were all very still, staring at the Hercules, their only hope for deliverance from the evil gathering itself, out there in the desert.

“What got to me was how calm they were. Some of them were standing in line, like they were at an airport. I don’t mean resigned. Accepting, I guess. That’s what got to me. It was tough to see them, waiting like that. Waiting to find out if we’d take them or not.”

The loadmaster called him on the intercom. The aid workers were on board. And then: “There’s a Sudanese guy here says he needs to talk to the captain.”

Douglas turned to Estrada, who told him to see what the man wanted, but to be quick about it.

The Sudanese was nearly seven feet tall and immensely dignified. With a formality out of phase with the circumstances, he introduced himself as Gabriel, the chairman, but did not say what he was chairman of. A handful of SPLA guerrillas stood behind him, Kalashnikovs slung across their backs, and a girl lay on a litter at their feet, wild-eyed, breathing heavily. She looked to be fifteen or sixteen and was naked from the waist up, her belly enormous. An older woman in an orange smock—mother? midwife?—was beside her, holding a reed basket and skin waterbag in either hand.

“Do you suppose you could take her, captain?” asked Gabriel. “I know your regulations, but she is very close to her time.”

“What was I supposed to tell the guy?” Douglas asked his listeners rhetorically. “ ‘If you know the regs, dude, then you know that we’re authorized only to evacuate civilians who’ve been wounded in the fighting. And snakebite, that’s okay, too. Otherwise, tough shit.’ Was I supposed to tell him that?”

Two rebel soldiers lifted the litter and carried the girl into the plane, the older woman following. Another shell exploded, near to where the first had struck. With a languid movement of one huge hand, Gabriel gestured at the people waiting in the distance and pleaded with Douglas to take them as well.

“
All
of them?”

“It’s a very big plane and they are not many,” Gabriel said, speaking with great composure. “If the murahaleen come, you know what will happen—” Another shell, bursting somewhat closer, interrupted him. Douglas noticed a movement in the crowd, a rippling as of grass in the wind, and he thought or imagined the people made a sound, a kind of collective sigh, as of wind moving through grass.

He took a headset from one of the loadmasters and told Estrada what was going on.

“I’m hurting, man, really hurting” was all the captain said. “C’mon, get up here and let’s go.”

“Call Loki. Ask them to authorize.”

“Forget it! They’re not going to let us bring half the town into Kenya. Get on up here before we get blown off this runway!”

“Is it still my plane or what?”

“Get your ass up here now.”

Douglas felt a flashing envy for people who dwelled in the peaceful nooks of the world, where there was time to ponder before making difficult moral choices.

“All right, but get them aboard in a hurry,” he said to Gabriel, then returned to the cockpit, stepping over the pregnant girl, while the aid workers, strapped into their web jumpseats, looked at him, bewildered.

If Estrada had not been so sick, he might have taken a swing at his copilot. He called the loadmasters on the intercom and ordered them to raise the ramp. They said they couldn’t; there were people on it. Then kick ’em off, Estrada said. The loadmasters couldn’t do that either because there were too many, sixty, seventy at least, and what was more, men with guns standing outside the door.

“All right, Yankee boy, you caused the problem, you fix it. Turn those people around. Tell ’em big mistake. This isn’t American Airlines.”

At Douglas’s refusal, the captain rose from his seat and turned to go to the rear of the plane. Just then, another wave of dysentery bound his guts, and he doubled over again. Seeing his chance, Douglas strapped himself in and told the loadmasters to continue boarding the refugees. A few moments later, when the
DOOR OPEN
light went dark, he pushed the throttles, let go the brakes, and started his roll.

“Good thing there weren’t any weapons on board. I think Estrada would’ve put a pistol to my head.”

“Yes, I think I might have, too,” Tara said with a sternness that chipped the armor of Douglas’s self-assurance.

His gaze wandered for a moment; he drummed the table with his fingers.”Listen, I found out later that what the French or Belgian guy was afraid would happen did happen. Five, six hundred Arabs on horseback overran the airfield less than half an hour after we got out of there. The big guy, Gabriel, got killed, I heard, and whoever was left in town either got killed or was hauled off into slave camp.”

“Yes. I think you did the wrong thing for all the right reasons.”

He drew back, as if Tara had raised a hand to slap him.

“You
did
commandeer the aircraft. And I say that in the spirit of constructive criticism.”

But he did not take it that way. He looked insulted and incredulous, as if he were convinced that his actions had been so manifestly right that only a blind, stupid, or morally corrupt person could think they’d been otherwise.

“All right, I’ve heard the criticism, what’s the construction? Clue me in.”

The combination of petulance and flippancy made her wince. For his part, Fitzhugh had fallen in love. The American was a spiritual brother, with a zeal and daring he could only wish were his own. He decided to give Douglas a little support. To put everything on the line to save a few strangers of no importance to anyone, he told Tara, had been a triumph of conscience over self-interest.

“I did say it was for the best of reasons, didn’t I?” An adamantine varnish seemed to flood her eyes, and their hard blue glare unsettled him. “But from what I heard, the story didn’t have a happy ending. Immigration incarcerated those people, then packed them off, back to where they’d come from.”