Ellen unclipped the three mooring ropes, and opened the Cessna’s only door, on its left side. Climbing up into the pilot’s seat, leaving the door ajar, she touched the controls in the dark, reacquainting herself with a breed of plane she hadn’t flown in about three years.
How long would it take the engines to turn over? Ellen remembered Mike’s boast—“I keep her gassed up and ready to go”—as though the plane were a lucky talisman, as though his attentions to it were a kind of offertory to the gods to guarantee his safety. Would that attitude have included careful engine maintenance? It would be ignominious to be caught on the ground here by her friend the nervous guard as she fruitlessly ground the starter, over and over.
It would be worse than ignominious. Much worse.
Were Lew and his doxy in position yet? (Ellen didn’t feel like being fair. On the other hand, Lew’s reason for being here in the first place was certainly a credit to him. Already safe, he’d come back in a vain attempt to find the missing Bathar, not wanting to have to face Mr. Balim without the boy. Poor Mr. Balim. And poor Bathar, come to that. And very noble and heroic of Lew, which Ellen found very irritating to have to admit.)
She sat there, touching the controls, until she realized she was merely stalling, she was reluctant to make that step beyond the point of no return. All right; taking a deep breath, she punched her thumb to the left starter.
Good Mike. That engine turned over at once, and a few seconds later so did the right. Easing off on the ground brake, she rolled forward onto the taxiway, swung left, and trundled rapidly toward the nearest north-south runway. Tonight’s breeze was slight and fitful, but its general trend was from the lake, south of here.
They were supposed to be waiting in the bushes along the right side here, near the chain link fence. Her engines would already have alerted whatever sentries were nearby; she flicked on her landing lights, and in the white glare she saw Lew running over the coarse grass from the shrubbery, Ellen’s flight bag clutched in his right hand, pulling Patricia Kamin along with his left. They’re holding hands; isn’t that nice.
They had to run across the taxiway in front of the plane to get to the door. Ellen stopped, moved to the right into the other seat, and folded down the pilot’s seatback so they could climb aboard. They’d both have to ride in back, which Ellen didn’t much care for, but the only way to get Lew into the front seat beside her would be to deplane, let him board, then clamber back in herself, which would take too long.
The woman came in first, out of breath but smiling, gasping, “Thank you.”
“Please don’t mention it,” Ellen said. “I’ll get the door, Lew.”
“Right.” He stopped his contortions, trying to board the plane and shut the door behind himself at the same time, cleared her seat, and thumped into the other space in back. Ellen flipped the seat up, got again behind the wheel, and accelerated.
“They’re shooting at us back there,” Lew said conversationally. “I can see the flashes.”
Why did I have to meet this man? Shoulders hunched, Ellen steered the plane to the beginning of the runway, braked hard, turned hard, and accelerated before she was really set. The earphones hanging from a hook in front of her squawked away, but she paid no attention. Glancing to her left, she saw headlights—two pairs of headlights—racing toward her across the grass, bouncing on the uneven terrain.
Leaning forward near her head, his voice a bit more urgent, Lew said, “They’re trying to cut us off, Ellen.”
“I see them.”
The plane had its own speed, its own system, its own way of doing things. She must simply roll forward, accelerating, watch the tarmac flash by under her wheels, and wait for the plane to be ready to lift.
A British-style jeep was over there on the grass to her left, running at a very long angle to the plane, almost parallel but not quite, as though the driver intended to meet them just this side of infinity. Quick bright spots of light from the interior of the jeep must be the flashes Lew had been talking about; they’re shooting at us!
It was hard to hold the wheel steady, hard not to pull back too soon or too much. A botched takeoff, leaving them on the ground with too little runway left, would be the end. They would get no second chance.
Patricia Kamin said something Ellen didn’t catch, her voice uneven with tension. Good, Ellen thought, she’s more scared than I am. “No,” Lew answered her, “I think they’re probably shooting at the wheels. It’s what I’d do.”
The plane lifted fractionally; its tires still ran on the tarmac but carried less weight. “Come on,” Ellen whispered, remembering how far Mike had had to run this plane to get it airborne. “Come on, come on.”
The wheels, still spinning, lost contact with the ground. Turning lazily, they skimmed along just above the surface of the runway, two fat black doughnuts riding so low a two-by-four couldn’t have been slipped in beneath them. Ellen, every muscle tense in her arms and chest and neck and back, drew the wheel minutely toward herself, and the plane, though still looking at the ground, inched higher into the air.
The end of the runway was ahead. The jeep, having lost the race, veered sharply to get onto the runway and chase from behind. The plane nosed up, like a sleepy horse finished with its oats; it seemed to see the sky, to take a sudden interest, at last to understand. Wings out, nose rising, tail canted at a jaunty angle, the plane soared up over the end of the runway, over the scrub, over the muddy coast, over water glinting with shattered reflections of the quarter-moon.
Ellen switched off every light except the small green ones illuminating the control panel. She’d never flown in such darkness before. The altitude meter read three hundred feet; angling downward, she banked sharply to the left.
Lew said, “Ellen? You’re going back?”
“I can’t get any control-tower guidance,” she told him. “They’re sure to scramble other planes after us. Out over the lake we’d simply get lost, so I’m going down on the deck so their radar can’t see me, find that highway that goes to Kenya, and run along beside it.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Lew said. “That’s terrific.”
“Thank you.”
He was leaning forward again, his right hand on her right shoulder. Sincerity dripping from his voice, he said, “I really appreciate this, Ellen. I want you to know that.”
She shrugged, bouncing his hand off. “I’d do it for anybody,” she said. She was really very angry.
75
Charlie waited for Mguu to do it, but Mguu just stomped around in his usual style, being angry and accomplishing nothing. Charlie waited for Isaac to order somebody to do it, or for Mr. Balim to hire somebody to do it, but Isaac was spending all his time in fruitless frustrating conversation with the two slippery government men from Nairobi, while Mr. Balim remained seated on the chair of concrete blocks and planks that Charlie had made for him, sighing and gazing unhappily out at the lake.
Mr. Balim was sad about his son. Wasn’t that reason enough to do it?
This Baron Chase from Uganda was a very bad man. He sat there against that dead tree, smiling, happy about himself, but he was a very bad man who had done many bad things. He was the one who had sent the ship to murder them and rob from them. And now he was stealing the coffee again, with the help of those government men from Nairobi.