Free Acts of faith by Philip Caputo Page B

Mogadishu. At first he thought it was the tail end of the departing convoy, until he remembered that it had driven to the west, not the north. Besides, the dust cloud was moving toward the airstrip. Squinting into the glare, he saw a dark object top a high ridge-crest a mile away. In a moment, magnified by the mirage shimmering on the horizon, it revealed itself as a truck or a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and the heavy machine gun mounted on the roof was silhouetted against the pale sky. The truck went on down the ridge, another behind it, a third behind that, then a fourth, all moving fast, or as fast as they could, off road in the rock-strewn desert.
    In a crisis, Wes Dare had the capacity for quick, effective action most often found in people lacking reflective minds and vivid imaginations. In the span of half a minute, he got the Somali to stop pumping, pulled the hose from the fuel-fill, screwed the cap down tight, ordered Nimrod to move the passengers clear of the propellers because he was going to start the engines, then stood atop the wing and called to Tony and Mary to run back and get aboard. They were only fifty, sixty yards away, across a swath of bare ground between the airstrip and the town, but they were surrounded by people and did not hear him. Mary was intent on posing Tony with the spear-carrying elder. Dare called again, waving his arms like a football ref signaling a missed field goal. His copilot turned to face him. In the same instant, the crowd knotted around the couple unraveled; people scattered in all directions as a squad of clansmen, assault rifles in hand, dashed across the field to take up firing positions. Evidently someone in town had also seen the approaching column and sounded the alarm. For a fraction of a second, Tony looked around in bewilderment; then he seized Mary’s hand and broke for the plane.
    “Nimrod! Get in, now!” Dare hollered, and leaped to the ground. His knees almost cracked from the shock. “The second they’re aboard, secure the door!”
    He scrambled into the cockpit without his shoes—no time to retrieve them now—and fired up the right engine, opposite the side the forward door was on. Bollichek, who was built like a rugby wing, boosted Mary onto the boarding ladder, all but threw her into the plane, and then got into his seat and began to flip switches—radios, pumps, hydraulic controls. Dare started the second engine, rammed the throttles to full, and released the brake. The G1 bolted forward and gathered speed. Ahead, near the end of the runway, geysers of sand and dirt flew up—big rounds, probably from a twelve-seven. Another three-round burst struck within yards of the nose, spattering bits of gravel into the windshield with a sound like hailstones. Tony ducked, but Dare, who had been here before, held his eyes on the runway. As soon as he felt the gear leave the ground, he put the plane into a steep climb, then into a tight turn, the wingtip clearing the high barrier dunes by a few yards at most. He leveled off and skimmed over the water, masked from the cannon fire, and flew out to sea, the blue swells racing less than a hundred feet below. When he figured they were out of range, he pulled back and climbed to five thousand feet. No damage that he or Tony could see; the controls were responding well. Nevertheless he sent Nimrod aft to check for bullet holes. None, Nimrod reported. A miracle. Dare silently gave the miraculous powers their due and awarded the rest to himself. The altimeter turned. Ten thousand, fifteen, twenty—he felt that he could not get high enough, that he would fly her into orbit if only she were capable. He pictured himself up there, isolated and self-contained in the airless black of space, a human star untouched by the lunatic world he circled without end. Altitude twenty-one thousand feet. Airspeed two four zero. A tail wind aloft. He banked and set a westward course for Nairobi.
     

    T HE SKY WAS clear all around, an eggshell of