Acts of faith (14 page)

This morning, after taking a long shower, shaving, and combing his hair, he decided he could not appear in the same shirt he’d worn yesterday, as if anyone would notice or care. Finding the one he wanted—a pale blue denim—involved unpacking and then repacking his rucksack and wasted a good ten minutes. In the mess, he lingered over his eggs and bacon and was pouring himself a third cup of coffee when Fitzhugh, patience at an end, tapped his watch and reminded him that they were to have met Tara’s driver five minutes ago. Douglas shrugged and said that no one was going anywhere without them.

A Turkana askari swung open the gate to the airfield, where a PanAfrik Hercules was taxiing for takeoff on the morning run. Tara’s aviation company was headquartered near the western end of the landing strip. Four white Cessna Caravans and two Andovers, each with a maroon stripe and the word
PATHWAYS
above it in back-slanting letters, were parked on the apron. A wave of reassurance washed over Fitzhugh, calming his fears of flying in small planes. One look at Tara’s, so immaculate they appeared to be made of bone china, told him they weren’t going to suffer engine failure because of careless maintenance. She was in the small terminal, conferring with one of her pilots, an Ethiopian with a chiseled burnt-umber face. Static and distant voices crackled through the high-frequency radio on the varnished counter against which she leaned on her freckled forearms. Flight plans on clipboards hung from the wall behind her, between a tapestry of aviation maps and a chalkboard containing remarks on conditions at various airstrips. All the order and cleanliness of her domain spoke of something deeper than mere efficiency. She herself looked as put-together as her surroundings—khaki trousers with a military crease, starched white shirt set off by captain’s epaulets, hair brushed and makeup on just so.

“I suppose I should be cross,” she said when she finished up with the pilot. “Wheels up at eight, and here you are at ten past.”

Douglas apologized, but some devil in him did not allow him to leave it at that. He explained that they had taken extra time to give their gear a last-minute check, and with a look he asked Fitzhugh not to betray the outright lie.

“No harm done,” said Tara. “I had to go over a flight plan with the chap who just left, George, my senior pilot.”

“Your
senior
pilot? How many have you got?”

“Twenty.”

Douglas whistled appreciatively.

She packed an insulated cloth case with sandwiches, a Thermos of coffee, bottled water. “Shall we, then?” she said, and slung the case over a shoulder and tucked her sleeping bag under the opposite arm, declining Douglas’s offer to carry one or the other for her.

They crossed the apron to one of the Caravans, Douglas lagging a little, studying the other planes as he had the grounds and buildings in the compound yesterday afternoon—with a covetous, appraising look. Noticing his interest, Tara volunteered that Pathways flew fourteen airplanes, ten out of here, two in Somalia, and two more out of Nairobi.

“I own the Caravans. Lease the rest,” she said, and opened the baggage compartment under the rear door.

Another whistle from Douglas as he stowed his rucksack. What was she going to do if things were ever settled in Sudan? Not that that was likely anytime soon, but what if?

She was standing under a wing, her hand on the strut. “Are you implying something?”

“Nope.”

“That I hope the mess is never settled because it keeps me in business?”

A ground crewman kicked the blocks from under the wheels. There was a silence several seconds long; then Douglas, with outspread hands, appealed to her to believe that his question had been innocent curiosity, nothing more. She opened the door and, with a jerk of her head, told him to climb in.

He strapped into the copilot’s seat, Fitzhugh into the seat behind him.

“Sorry for snapping at you,” Tara said, donning her sunglasses and headset.

“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 smears of somber green relieved the arid desolation with a desolate lushness. Primeval cradles of malaria haunted by venomous snakes and crocodiles. Miles and miles of bloody Africa—the hackneyed phrase seemed apt. Such emptiness.

Looking at it, Tara became nostalgic. She turned on the autopilot, unpacked the sandwiches and Thermos, and over lunch reminisced about her early days, when she flew hunters into Sudan and stayed in their camps, listening to lions call in the darkness. She described an Africa recent in history yet as remote as the continent of Stanley and Livingston: antelope migrating in dust-shrouded rivers of flesh, hooves, and horn, elephants journeying by the hundreds across their native range. Almost all gone now, she said, as much the victims of war and famine as the people who’d slaughtered the antelope for meat, the elephants for the ivory that bought guns and bullets.
That
Africa ended her idyll. Ever since all she’d done was fly on the light side for the UN, on the dark side for renegade relief agencies. Food here, medical supplies there, priests to beleaguered mission stations. Answering summonses to pick up the victims of snakebite, of malaria, of an accidental blow from a panga or mattock, or any one of the thousand and one mishaps the southern Sudanese suffered whether there was peace or war. Often a few wounded guerrillas would be waiting at the airstrip with the sick or injured civilians. She would take them on board and deliver them to the Red Cross hospital near Loki, her nostrils stuffed with Vick’s camphor rub against the reek of gangrene.

“I’m not really supposed to do that, evacuate rebel casualties, but it would be damned difficult to leave them there.”

“Yeah?” Douglas said. “Well then maybe you understand why I—”

“Oh, I do, Doug. Believe me.” She scanned the skies, glanced at the instruments, and said: “The one thing I haven’t done is run guns for the SPLA. Been asked to, but I won’t.”

“Too risky?”

“In more ways than one. There’s a—how shall I put it? A moral risk. And I know what you’re thinking, the both of you. How much moral difference is there between putting a gun in a man’s hands and flying him to hospital when he’s been wounded so he’ll be patched up to fight and kill again?”

Douglas was silent. Fitzhugh said that a thought like that had passed through his mind.

“The difference might not be all that great,” she said, “but it’s there all the same. Not to sound high and mighty, but I want to have as much to do as I can with saving lives, nothing to do with taking them.”

“We all want that,” said Douglas. He was looking at her, she at him, the expressions in their eyes cloaked by their sunglasses. “Wouldn’t be in this business if we didn’t. But I don’t know that it’s so easy to split things that fine.”

“Directly or indirectly, you’ll get some blood on your hands? Perhaps. But that shouldn’t give you the green light to dip your hands into it.” A keenness had entered her voice. “You have to draw the line somewhere. How did you get into this business, by the way?”

He replied that he would have to give it some thought. Apparently a lot of thought, Fitzhugh surmised after a couple of minutes passed in silence. Tara asked if he’d like to take the controls, to get a feel for the plane.

“Been waiting to hear that, “ Douglas said.

She switched off the autopilot, and he gripped the yoke.

“Three one zero and no loop the loops or chandelles.”

“Hey, there’s old pilots and bold pilots—”

“But no old bold pilots,” she said, finishing the hoary adage. “And I am an old pilot, dammit.”

The Nile appeared ahead, the great umbilical of the continent, the giver-taker, provider of flood and fertility, of commerce and bilharzia. It looked only a yard wide from this height, its banks stitched by slender threads of grass and marsh. Beyond it lay a sea of clay plains. Tara spread a chart on her lap, checked the GPS and compass, and declared they were dead on course, cutting the river midway between Kodok and Malakal.

“I don’t know how to put it without sounding like I’m, you know, a Joe Goodguy,” Douglas said abruptly, and they realized in a moment that he was answering the question put to him a quarter of an hour ago.

“Don’t be shy,” Tara teased. “We’ll forgive you.”

“After I got out of the air force, I thought I wanted to 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.