“You’re our pilot,” Frank told her over his shoulder as he led the way toward the exit, shoving aside the dozens of raggedy-dressed black men offering taxis. “No taxi!” he bellowed, and pushed through the door into the blinding sunlight of Africa.
Lew had been only one of the reasons Ellen had agreed to this iffy voyage. Africa was the other. She had worked in both North and South America as well as in Southeast Asia, she had seen Japan and parts of Europe as a tourist, but the entire African continent was new to her. She was fascinated by the thought of it, a fascination only slightly dampened by the cholera and yellow-fever and typhus shots they’d had to take before departure, and the supply of malaria pills they were supposed to take—one every Tuesday—not only during their entire stay in Africa but for two full months thereafter. It was beginning to seem that Africa was not only as exotic but also as hospitable to the human race as Mercury or Jupiter.
Her first ground-level view was disappointing. Flat dry scruffy fields under a huge baking sun. The taxis, small and rusty but with gleaming windows, were clustered helter-skelter near the terminal exit, drivers and hangers-on sitting on the fenders and hoods. The airport buildings, low and hot-looking, reminded her of smaller islands in the Caribbean.
“This way,” Frank shouted. Swinging Ellen’s flight bag at an importuning cabman, he marched off around the side of the building.
Ellen glanced at Lew, to see him smiling and beaming and gawking around as though he thought he was home. He loves this awful place, she thought, and her heart sank.
There was a brief business of showing documents at a gate in a chain link fence, and then they started off across the scrubby ground toward a double row of tied-down planes to one side of the main east-west runway.
Ellen walked close beside Lew, saying to him too softly for Frank to hear, “Does he expect me to fly something?”
“Beats me,” Lew said. “Maybe so.”
In the last sixty hours, they had flown by commercial airliner from Alaska to Seattle, and from there to New York, where they’d had a three-hour layover before the overnight Alitalia flight to Rome. In Rome they’d taken a hotel room near the airport for the day, followed by the final overnight flight to Nairobi, arriving at eight in the morning. They had crossed thirteen time zones and had spent twenty-three hours in the air. And now was Ellen expected to fly a plane she’d never operated before over land she’d never seen before in a country and a continent and with an air-traffic system that were all new to her?
She considered saying something to Lew, but hesitated. She hesitated, as she hated to admit to herself, partly because she was afraid any objection would be treated as special pleading, but it was also because she wanted to see just what Frank Lanigan had in mind.
“We’re here ahead of the rains,” Lew said.
She looked skyward, seeing only a few scattered high thin clouds. “Rains?”
“They’re due the end of March.” He grinned and said, “First drought, then flood.”
“There are better systems.”
They were about halfway to the planes when Frank, up ahead, suddenly let out a roar of rage, dropped Ellen’s bag onto the brown grass, and raced heavily away like an aroused bull toward a twin-engine Fairchild painted white with orange trim. Unlike the others parked here, it was not tied down. Lew and Ellen looked at one another, shrugged, and kept on walking. Ellen picked up her bag on the way.
Meantime, Frank was roughly yanking somebody out of the Fairchild, so roughly that the man tumbled onto the ground, landing on his shoulder and rolling forward under the wing. Frank ran around the length of the wing, like a dog playing a game, and reached the man again as he pulled himself to his feet between the port engine and the fuselage.
By this time, Ellen and Lew were close enough to hear what Frank was yelling. “What are you doing in that plane? I said to clear out of here!”
The man mumbled something, and Frank raised a threatening hand. “You got your money! That’s all you get!” Watching, Ellen thought Frank was putting on the anger, that he was much more in control of himself than he pretended.
“It’s only my gear,” the man said, in a north-of-England accent. He was thin, perhaps forty, moustached, with blotchy red skin and heavy bags under watery eyes. He had been drinking, and had shaved himself recently but erratically. His voice contained a whining he was obviously trying his best to conceal. “I only took what was mine,” he said.
Ellen and Lew had arrived at the plane. Lew said, “Frank? A problem?”
“Watch this bird,” Frank told him, “while I see what he was up to.”
“Personal possessions!” the man cried, as Frank went away around the wing again, apparently unwilling to risk his dignity by stooping low and scuttling under it.
Ellen, looking at the man, was surprised when he suddenly met her gaze and his expression turned sarcastic, his weak mouth trying for a sardonic smile. “So you’re the pilot,” he said, with heavy emphasis. “Frank’s new tramp.”
Lew dropped his flight bag, moved his left foot forward, and hit the man in the face with a straight overhand right. The man staggered back, his head banging the fuselage, and fell to the ground, not unconscious but stunned.
“Lew!” Ellen said.
He turned to her, saw the anger in her eyes, and immediately stepped back, embarrassed, opening his hands out of their fists. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not awake.”
Twice in their early days together, Lew had hit men under the mistaken impression he was defending her, reacting to provocation as he thought she would want him to react. Since he remained permanently unaware that the patronizing assumptions of a Frank Lanigan were a thousand times more offensive than any angry name-calling, he was hardly the protector of choice, even if she felt the need for such a medieval thing. She’d thought that argument had been resolved months ago, but now she saw that, if you got Lew Brady tired enough, jet-lagged enough, disoriented enough, the old incorrect basic responses were still alive and well and living in the middle of his wooden head. “I’ll fight my own battles, Lew,” she said.
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.”
The man had struggled to his feet, patting his nose and mouth with the back of his hand as though dabbing for blood. “Oh, you’ll have a good time,” he said to Ellen, his anger undiminished. “Yes, you will.”
“You aren’t hurt,” she told him.
He put his hand down at his side, almost standing at a kind of attention, apparently remembering the dignity he’d earlier been striving for. “I can tell your kind,” he said. “You’re as bad as they are. You can all rot in hell together.”
Frank had come back around the wing, this time carrying a clearglass pint whisky bottle, about a third full. Extending it to the man, he said, “Here’s your personal possessions.”
The man snatched the bottle, tucking it inside his shirt. “Thanks for nothing,” he said, and strode swiftly away toward the airport gate, walking with unnatural rigidity, to prove to them his sobriety in case they were watching.
Lew said, “What was that all about?”
“Didn’t recognize him, did you?” Frank said. “Timmins. Flew cargo when we worked for the Front. Angola.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Lew said. “What’s his problem now?”