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, thick 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.