Read Online Acts of faith by Philip Caputo - Free Book Online

one.”
    The other engine barked and revved up to a throbbing whine, and the plane shuddered as if she were excited, anticipating her release.
    Dare got his taxi clearance from the tower—a UN-chartered Antonov would be ahead of them for takeoff.
    “Let’s roll,” he said, feeling a mild impatience. “There’s money to be made.”
    Mary asked how much, and he told her: thirty-five hundred U.S., plus six free drums of fuel, donated by the warlord in whose territory they would be doing business. The money had come not from the small fry in back but from his boss, a guy named Hassan Adid. He released the brakes and trailed the AN-28 toward the runway, past rows of idle aircraft, most beyond their prime. Sometimes Wilson Field looked like an airshow for used-up planes.
    “Busy place, ain’t it, Margo?”
    “Mary.”
    “I mean Mary.” He gestured out his side window. “Yeah, one busy airport, and all do-gooders, too. See that Cessna yonder? The red and white one? Those folks are goin’ to save the elephant. And that other one, the old Fokker—they’re goin’ to save the rhino. And that Polish Let out at the end is another UN plane, so I reckon they’re goin’ to save people. Winston Churchill said that the UN isn’t here to bring paradise on earth, but to prevent everything from goin’ to hell entirely. But I ain’t sure it’s doin’ even that.”
    “When did Churchill say that?”
    “Hell, I don’t know, but he said it.”
    Ahead, the Antonov swung off the taxiway, stood poised for a moment while her skipper throttled up, then lurched forward, an overbuilt assembly of collective-factory steel riveted together in the now-extinct Soviet Union. Dare turned into position and pushed the throttle levers forward and watched the RPM needles wind up, the engines protesting the restraint of the brakes. Tony’s voice crackled in his earpieces. Flaps and rudders set . . . RPM normal . . .
    “No light on the pumps,” Bollichek added. “Reckon the blokes did what they said, miracle of miracles.”
    “You can bet Nimrod got on their asses.”
    “The hope of Africa, Nimrod.”
    “There ain’t any hope.”
    “Wilson Tower, this is Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra, ready for takeoff,” Dare said.
    “Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra, you are clear,” the controller said in his accented English, then gave the wind speed and direction and temperature. A fine cool morning. Fast takeoff, use up less fuel.
    “Thanks. See y’all for lunch.”
    He took his feet off the brakes again and went to full throttle. The Gulfstream lunged down the lumpy asphalt. The unkempt meadows alongside, vestiges from the days when Wilson was the grassy platform from which Beryl Markham flew west with the night and Finch-Hatton soared off for Tsavo and its elephant herds, sped by at sixty knots, eighty, ninety, one oh five . . . Dare pulled back on the yoke and the plane gathered herself like a high jumper, lurched, and was airborne, a free thing now, and he was free with her, liberated from gravity and the sordid earth. Gear up. Nairobi shrank below, the skyscrapers of the city center, the tidy red rooftops of Karen and Langata, the sheet-metal slums metastasizing on the outskirts. How many times had he done this since the first time with his father in a Steerman crop-duster, sagebrush and mesquite plains falling away and only sky ahead, where cloud flotillas sailed the stratosphere? How many? Four thousand? Five, six? He wondered if he would ever tire of it, the thrill of takeoff, the joy of flight. Aloft, he felt at home and somehow complete, as if in the exile of terrestrial life he were estranged from himself, a divided man.
    At twenty-five hundred feet he turned, picked up his easterly bearing, and climbed over the highlands before leveling off at twenty-one thousand, where faint ribbons of vapor trailed from the wingtips and the bright sun, mitigated slightly by his polarized glasses, sliced through the windshield. Airspeed two