by Ward Larsen
Boudreau nodded in agreement. “There’s not an office in the world with a better view.” He pointed to the right seat, and said, “Want some stick time?”
Achmed was still in the head. “You sure your first officer won’t mind?”
“Who cares?”
Davis took the copilot’s position. The seat was uncomfortable and had a distinct list to the right. At least he hoped it was the seat, hoped they weren’t flying through the air crookedly, say, in a ten degree right bank. Davis knew airplanes got to be like that over time, bent and cantankerous. A lot like people.
“Here,” Boudreau offered, “I’ll turn off the autopilot.” He snapped off a switch. “Get the feel of it. I doubt you’ll ever get a chance to fly one of these pterodactyls again.”
“Probably not,” Davis said. He took the controls and made a few turns, felt the airplane respond.
“How does she handle?” Boudreau asked.
Davis thought, Like a brick with wings. He said, “Great.”
He hadn’t flown much in the last year, and at times Davis felt like an alcoholic deprived of drink. The old beast wasn’t nimble like an F-16, yet there was a directness, an honesty in how it flew. The yoke in his hands was connected directly to the control surfaces without any computer interfaces. He liked that—a basic, no-nonsense airplane that would require basic, no-nonsense flying skills. After a few minutes, Davis was feeling comfortable.
He said, “You know, I can’t figure your copilot.”
“Me neither,” Boudreau agreed.
“And you’ve got other Sudanese kids at FBN?”
“Yeah, a few, and they’re all just like him. Religious, way too serious—definitely not the type to wear you out with idle conversation. But Achmed, he’s the least proficient of the bunch. I guess that’s why I got him.”
“He doesn’t know squat about how this airplane works.”
“I know. I’ve tried to teach him a few things, but nothing sticks. He could land if I had a heart attack, I suppose, keep the right side up on a clear day. But once he’d learned that much, he seemed to lose interest. The kid just shows up day after day to go along for the ride.”
Davis said nothing. He had bad vibes about the kid. Maybe it wasn’t just incompetence or lack of interest. Maybe Achmed had been put in Boudreau’s right seat for a reason—to keep an eye on things for Khoury.
“All right, Jammer,” Boudreau said as he tilted his seat back and closed his eyes, “you’ve got the con. Fly it like you stole it.”
“Right.”
“Nudge me in an hour. And don’t let me wake up and find you sleeping!”
It was nearly noon when they reached the landing zone.
Outside, Davis saw nothing but jungle, a verdant canopy that carried every imaginable shade of green. It looked thick and impenetrable. There were no section lines on the ground like you saw in the States, no well-surveyed roads or power lines or rail tracks. Even the rivers looked different. In the developed world, nearly all flows of water were manipulated in some way—dams, navigation channels, levees. But here the rivers wandered, looping and arcing in time-honed paths, their very presence defined by no more than subtle variances in the hue of the foliage.
Everyone had returned to their formal stations—Achmed in the right seat, Davis on the jumpseat, and Boudreau flying on the left. Davis was here, ostensibly, to observe FBN’s flight operations. Achmed’s attitude aside, so far things had looked solid. But that was largely due to Boudreau, whose confidence was no product of FBN’s training regimen, but rather sourced in twenty thousand hours of hardscrabble experience. Twenty thousand hours of sweat and storms and profanity. There was simply no substitute.
Boudreau ignored the airplane’s indigenous navigation instruments as they neared their destination, relying instead on a handheld GPS receiver. The antenna was stuck to the side window with a suction cup and connected by a cable, a simplistic but effective rigging. A clearing came into view, and Boudreau said confidently, “Yep, this is the spot.”
He nosed the airplane over to an altitude of a thousand feet, leveled out, and buzzed the landing strip. On the overflight, Boudreau commented on the surface. “Looks a little muddy down there, but it ought to be okay. That’s why I let some pressure out of them tires before we took off. Gives a wider footprint for better traction.”
Davis nodded as he looked outside. There was clearly no asphalt below, just a strip of brown dirt pocked with splotches of mud. All along the sides of the runway—if it could be called that—were mounds of rotting timber and brush, probably a full square mile of equatorial rain forest that had been sacrificed for the landing zone.
“It looks a little short,” Davis remarked. “How much runway is that?”
“They advertise four thousand feet,” Boudreau said.
“Sounds optimistic.”
Boudreau laughed. “Hell, gettin’ in is easy. It’s the takeoff that’ll kill you.”
If Boudreau was worried, he didn’t show it. As if gliding into a short jungle airstrip was no different than gliding into a Baton Rouge bar for a longneck. He banked the airplane steeply to the left to begin his traffic pattern. The airplane slowed, and Achmed put out the landing gear and flaps on the skipper’s commands. When Boudreau rolled out on final approach, he set a slightly steeper than usual glidepath.
“Three hundred feet,” Achmed said, remembering his callouts. “Two hundred feet.”
The strip of brown mud seemed even smaller as a green wall of jungle rose up on either side to swallow them.
“One hundred feet,” Achmed mumbled. “Fifty, thirty—”
“Shee-it!” Boudreau shouted. “Go around!” He slammed the throttles forward, and the big engines coughed and rattled, straining for full power.
Then Davis saw it right in front of them, wandering out from the bush. The biggest damn cow he’d seen in his life.
“Pull up!” Achmed yelled.
The thrust took hold, but the DC-3 seemed to hesitate. Boudreau had arrested the descent, but they were hanging in limbo just a few feet above the runway, frozen in the aerodynamic transition from down to up. The huge beast stopped right in the middle of the strip and stared at them stupidly—two thousand pounds of horns and sinew and bovine lethargy. Not what you wanted to hit at a hundred miles an hour.
Davis watched it all unfold in what seemed like slow motion, the massive animal a hundred feet from their nosecone, Boudreau fighting the controls with both hands.
“More flaps!” he shouted.
Achmed froze.
Davis lunged forward and yanked back on what he hoped was the flap lever—the one with the wing-shaped handle. The airplane seemed to levitate, rise as if on a bubble of air. Davis saw the cow’s disinterested face slip below, and he braced for impact.
It didn’t come. Slowly, the airplane started to climb. Boudreau’s hands eased on the controls.
“African forest buffalo,” he said. “Biggest damn one I’ve ever seen.”
Davis let out a long, slow breath. “Me too.”
Achmed said nothing. He was rigid in his seat, grabbing the armrests like he was having a cavity filled.
When they reached a thousand feet, Boudreau circled the airport twice, waiting for the huge beast to wander back into the bush. When it finally did, he made a second approach, this time carrying the insurance of an extra ten knots. Davis sensed the skipper’s hands tight on the controls, ready for another go-around. It wasn’t necessary. The big machine touched down, bounced jauntily over ruts in the dirt strip, and came to rest five hundred feet from the departure end. Boudreau tapped the left brake, bumped up the starboard engine to pirouette, and began taxiing toward the spot where he’d touched down.
When Boudreau shut the engines down, everything fell quiet. Fell still. There was no sound at all except the hum of a gyro losing its spin somewhere in the instrument panel, and a faint ticking from the big radial engines as they began to cool. The jungle around them looked impenetrable, thic
k fronds of jade and emerald, waxen leaves the size of umbrellas. It was calm, almost serene. And that was when it struck Davis.
There was nobody here to meet them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Davis was wrong. There were a lot of people.
They came out of nowhere, led by a tall beefy man whose ebony skin glinted in the equatorial sun. A half dozen others followed behind in a formless gaggle, trailing like a prizefighter’s entourage. They reminded Davis of the soldiers who had commandeered Dr. Antonelli’s aid shipment back in Khartoum, everyone decked out in the latest Third World militia couture. Their fatigues were a mix, some pale green and others a jungle camouflage design, like they’d shopped at different Army-Navy stores. Mismatched berets were all cocked at swashbuckling angles, and everyone sported wraparound sunglasses. Of course, there were also weapons—each man carried either a holstered sidearm or a casually slung rifle.
“Customs?” Davis asked.
Boudreau said, “Don’t worry. Nobody shoots the mailman.”
“Even after he’s delivered?”
Boudreau chuckled, but without his usual gusto. He went to the cargo hold, threw down the stairs, and met the guy in charge. After a short conversation, the cargo door was popped open. More people came out of nowhere, and before long the place was crawling with activity. Men in uniform snapped orders to skinny boys wearing laceless Nike sneakers and faded T-shirts with sports logos. They unstrapped deck tie-downs like they’d done it before, and moved the load outside in a human chain. Davis stood under a wing and watched it all unfold. A truck appeared out of the jungle, some kind of bastardized troop carrier. It had iron rails welded to the sides of the rear bed, and tires that looked like they belonged on a 747. The bigger crates were put on the truck, the smaller ones simply muled down a dirt path on strong, sweaty backs.
At the tailgate of the truck two crates were cracked open, and a soldier—the acting quartermaster, no doubt—began issuing ammunition to a line of Kalashnikov-toting kids. Davis watched them jam magazines into empty weapons like they knew what they were doing, watched them stuff extra mags away until their pockets were bulging. Everybody was sweating, sweltering. The heat here was every bit as oppressive as Sudan, only thicker and heavier, weighed down by a sky that was darkening as thick clouds percolated in the midday blaze. Any calendar would tell you it was autumn, but this close to the equator the seasons became meaningless. It was like this every day of the year. It was like this for Christmas and Ramadan, for every birthday and funeral. Always hot, always wet.
Davis hoped the urgency being shown was a function of proficiency and not nerves—there was a reason these guys needed weapons. The uniformed men had formed a perimeter of sorts, all eyes locked on the encircling curtain of vegetation. They looked tense, the way soldiers did when they expected action. Somewhere in this malarial jungle, there was an enemy. Maybe two or three enemies. A neighboring army, a rival tribe, some opposing force that had their own weapons, their own kid soldiers in Air Jordan T-shirts, pockets crammed full of 7.62-mm projectiles. It was a sad story, but one that had been playing out here for generations.
Davis spotted Boudreau at a small alcove in the mesh of green. He was standing next to a hut that Davis hadn’t even noticed before, an almost comical administrative center. It had a thatched roof and walls, and was sided by a water buffalo—not the kind that wandered onto runways, but the kind that had wheels and a big metal cylinder that held four hundred gallons of potable water. Davis walked over.
“These guys work fast,” he said.
Boudreau was eyeing the clouds overhead. “They’d better, this weather is building.”
Davis did his own meteorological survey and saw stacks of cumulus clouds growing, bubbling vertically like a pot on boil.
“You seen Achmed?” Boudreau asked. “He’s got some work to do before we go.”
“No, I don’t know where he went.”
“I can’t imagine he just ran off into the woods. Even he’s not that stupid.”
Davis shrugged.
“Well, he’d better show soon,” Boudreau said, “because as soon as these guys are done with the unload, we’re outta here.”
Fadi Jibril’s eyes were locked to the wing in front of him as he worked a joystick furiously. The control surface should be moving, but nothing was happening.
He cursed under his breath.
The engineer shut everything down, removed power from the computers, and disconnected the battery in the aircraft. He let it all sit for a full minute—perhaps not as much for the electronics as to keep his own fuse from blowing—then powered everything back up. One minute later, he tried again. Still dead, no motion at all.
“Dirty whore!” He threw a screwdriver at the dull black craft and it pinged off, leaving a noticeable dent in the radar absorbent coating. Jibril cupped his head in his hands.
The new modules from Hamburg were his best chance. They were definitely the wrong model, but Jibril had hoped he could still make them work. He’d been forced to rewire the output cable and power supply, and then reconfigure a number of circuits and relays. The work was time consuming and tedious, but without these modifications the units were no more use than the shoddy Chinese devices they’d replaced.
Jibril forced his eyes to a wiring diagram on the bench in front of him. He tried to remember which connections he had already altered. His mind was getting fuzzy, a blur of schematics and diodes and wiring. He was tracing a current flow with a pencil when he sensed shuffling behind him. Jibril turned and saw Muhammed the mechanic.
“I need a three-eighths-inch spanner,” the Jordanian said.
Jibril pointed to a rack of wrenches, and Muhammed took the one he needed.
“Are you progressing?” asked the unsmiling mechanic. It was nearer an accusation than a question.
Jibril knew his technical troubles had become common knowledge. When he’d arrived last spring, the others here treated him with respect, knowing, he supposed, the importance of his work. All summer they had offered notes and prayers of encouragement, sent small pieces of cake and gashaato. Jibril had been a hero to the imam’s followers, even if few had the education, the technical knowhow to appreciate his genius. Now, however, the mood had changed. The gashaato no longer came, and Jibril often felt eyes on his back as he came and went.
“We will be ready, if Allah wills it,” Jibril replied.
Muhammed frowned. “The sheik is concerned.”
“The sheik is always concerned. Everything will be ready.”
The mechanic slapped the wrench idly in his palm, then turned and went back to the other airplane.
Jibril stood and stretched. He wandered to the entrance of his work space and watched Muhammed fight the wrench. It took him three minutes to pull the drain plug on the underside of the left engine of the DC-3. When it popped free, oil gushed out in a torrent, thick and black, and the first gallon splashed over the concrete floor and his shoe before Muhammed slid a bucket underneath to catch it. Typical, Jibril thought. The man had certainly not been brought here for his skills as a mechanic. Jibril even suspected that Muhammed’s credentials might not be completely legitimate. Come Monday, he would take a look at the old airplane himself to ensure it was ready. More to do, he thought.
Jibril turned away. He retreated to his working area, drawing the curtain closed behind him. The curtain was designed to allow no one a glimpse of his work, but at this moment served better to screen his tattered psyche. Jibril’s unease went deeper than technical issues or run-ins with Muhammed. As he closed in on success, he was kept awake at night by that last overriding question. What was the target? For weeks now he had been asking the imam, yet Khoury put forward no more than a rough geographic path to the final launching point. Security, Jibril supposed. But if I cannot be trusted, who can?
He sat heavily on his work stool, and forced his eyes to the wiring diagrams on the bench. With a pencil, he began to trace the flow of current. The imam had been firm. Only
seventy-two hours remained. This implied a deadline that was out of his control. A public meeting? A clandestine rendezvous? A private tryst? Not knowing who or what was being targeted, Jibril could only guess. But guess he did. And the most logical answer—who they were targeting—made his pencil run over the diagram that much faster.
It took twenty minutes to complete the unload. The man with the entourage started walking away, and the load crew bailed out and followed. Soon they would all disappear, Davis reckoned, vaporizing back into the jungle.
“Looks like they’re done,” Boudreau said, checking his watch. “Not bad, only thirty minutes on the ground. I’m gonna go look for Achmed. Why don’t you start the preflight, Jammer.”
“Sure.”
A preflight was a walk-around inspection undertaken before every flight. All airplanes had peculiarities, but most of the things you looked for were standard. Leaky hydraulic lines, bald tires, birdstrikes from the previous flight. Or maybe the horn of a forest buffalo gored into the belly, Davis mused. He went to the nose of the airplane and started a clockwise inspection. At the right main landing gear he heard thunder. At the tail he felt the first raindrop.
He was on the port side, running a hand over the propeller, when something whizzed by his ear and smacked into the wing.
An instant later the sound of the shot caught up with the bullet. Davis hit the dirt.
The nearest cover was the left main landing gear assembly, and he crawled behind it on knees and elbows. There was shouting in the distance, and he saw soldiers scrambling. Those with weapons were poised for action, sweeping muzzles left and right across the jungle in search of targets. A short burst spewed from a machine pistol, then another, and soon a battalion of light weapons on full automatic were sweeping the foliage at hip height. Palm fronds and giant leaves shredded in a vapor of green.
Davis spotted Boudreau running for the boarding ladder. “Come on, Jammer! We’re gettin’ the hell out of here!”
Davis kicked to his feet and ran for the stairs. Another shot smacked in and ricocheted off steel. He went to ground again, jamming his left wrist as he hit. He sensed direction from this shot and looked toward the hut. He saw a man crouched near the water tank with a rifle pointed at him. No, not a man—Achmed. The gun at his shoulder kicked, and a puddle of mud exploded to Davis’ right.
