Fly by Night

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The sky was as empty as sky could be.

They were cruising at twelve thousand feet, two nautical miles of smooth night air below. The eastern horizon was beginning to glow, but the night had yet to relinquish its grip. The ground below looked like a black hole. The few lights Davis could discern did nothing to define the earth. On the contrary, they created confusion, blurring the separation of up and down by mimicking stars on a matte black sky.

As the airplane droned southward, Davis recognized another amplifier of their isolation. The radios were silent. Most flying was performed under a constant barrage of chatter between air traffic controllers and pilots. But here, the overhead speaker on the cockpit ceiling was ominously silent.

“It’s awfully quiet out here,” Davis remarked.

Boudreau said, “It’s like that sometimes, but you’ll get used to it. Right Achmed?”

The ill-tempered Sudanese kid said nothing.

Boudreau shrugged. “Don’t make no never mind nohow.”

Davis made a brief stab at calculating the negatives in that sentence. He considered writing it down, maybe making Jen diagram it for extra credit in English class. That is, if he ever heard from her again.

“My cup is empty,” Boudreau declared. He looked at Davis. “As third-in-command, Jammer, you are hereby designated coffee boy. You ever been checked out on an airplane with a coffeepot?”

“Nope.”

“Well, it’s easy enough. Just toss in a fresh bag and hit the brew button.”

“Okay, but I’ve got to warn you — my daughter gave me a new coffee machine for Christmas. What came out looked more like it came from La Brea than Starbucks.”

Boudreau chuckled. “Well, give it a try anyway, cream and sugar for me. There’s a fire extinguisher on the aft bulkhead if you need it.”

Davis went to the back and did his best to get things going. While the machine was gurgling, Achmed came back and gave him a gruff look as he edged by toward the lavatory. The kid was surly beyond his years.

When he reached for the lavatory door handle, Davis said, “Hey, Achmed.”

The young man paused.

Davis nodded toward the pile of crates in the cargo hold. “I was wondering — how much weight does one of these birds carry? You know, the maximum usable load?”

The kid shrugged immediately, not even considering a reply. “I do not know such things. It is not my job.” He reached for the handle again.

“You can flush here,” Davis said helpfully.

Achmed looked dumbstruck.

“You know, the toilet. If you flush that thing over a city it can be pretty messy for the people below.” Davis pointed down. “But out here over the jungle, a little yellow rain — who’s going to know?”

The young Sudanese man looked completely befuddled, like he was picturing some kind of valve in the bottom of the airplane that would open up like a bomb bay door and drop sewage from the sky. The kid didn’t have a clue. But there was more in his expression. He seemed edgy, nervous. Davis remembered once getting a briefing on airport security measures. He learned about behavior profiling, and how people who were up to no good tended to highlight themselves. They perspired, fidgeted, didn’t make eye contact. That’s what Davis was seeing right now. Too many things about this kid didn’t add up. He didn’t know the basic things any pilot would know. And his base personality was all wrong. Most of the pilots Davis had ever known were like Boudreau, crack full of good humor. Achmed had the bonhomie of an out-of-work funeral director.

He disappeared into the lavatory, and Davis shrugged it all off.

He found the coffee cups and started looking for sugar. As he was rifling through a drawer in the galley, he heard Achmed in the lavatory. He was talking in Arabic, words that meant nothing to Davis. The kid might have been cursing him, or maybe issuing a pox on all pilots. But then he recognized a chanting, almost mechanical meter, and Davis understood.

Achmed was praying.

Davis went back up front with two cups of coffee, and handed one to the skipper. Over Boudreau’s shoulder, sunrise was breaking in the east, reds and oranges fusing over a stark landscape, the brilliant rays reaching upward to play on a stratus cloud deck.

Davis said reflectively, “You know, there are times when I hope my daughter will take up flying so she can see sights like this.”

Boudreau nodded in agreement. “There’s not an office in the world with a better view.” He pointed to the right seat, and said, “Want some stick time?”

Achmed was still in the head. “You sure your first officer won’t mind?”

“Who cares?”

Davis took the copilot’s position. The seat was uncomfortable and had a distinct list to the right. At least he hoped it was the seat, hoped they weren’t flying through the air crookedly, say, in a ten degree right bank. Davis knew airplanes got to be like that over time, bent and cantankerous. A lot like people.

“Here,” Boudreau offered, “I’ll turn off the autopilot.” He snapped off a switch. “Get the feel of it. I doubt you’ll ever get a chance to fly one of these pterodactyls again.”

“Probably not,” Davis said. He took the controls and made a few turns, felt the airplane respond.

“How does she handle?” Boudreau asked.

Davis thought, Like a brick with wings. He said, “Great.”

He hadn’t flown much in the last year, and at times Davis felt like an alcoholic deprived of drink. The old beast wasn’t nimble like an F-16, yet there was a directness, an honesty in how it flew. The yoke in his hands was connected directly to the control surfaces without any computer interfaces. He liked that — a basic, no-nonsense airplane that would require basic, no-nonsense flying skills. After a few minutes, Davis was feeling comfortable.

He said, “You know, I can’t figure your copilot.”

“Me neither,” Boudreau agreed.

“And you’ve got other Sudanese kids at FBN?”

“Yeah, a few, and they’re all just like him. Religious, way too serious — definitely not the type to wear you out with idle conversation. But Achmed, he’s the least proficient of the bunch. I guess that’s why I got him.”

“He doesn’t know squat about how this airplane works.”

“I know. I’ve tried to teach him a few things, but nothing sticks. He could land if I had a heart attack, I suppose, keep the right side up on a clear day. But once he’d learned that much, he seemed to lose interest. The kid just shows up day after day to go along for the ride.”

Davis said nothing. He had bad vibes about the kid. Maybe it wasn’t just incompetence or lack of interest. Maybe Achmed had been put in Boudreau’s right seat for a reason — to keep an eye on things for Khoury.

“All right, Jammer,” Boudreau said as he tilted his seat back and closed his eyes, “you’ve got the con. Fly it like you stole it.”

“Right.”

“Nudge me in an hour. And don’t let me wake up and find you sleeping!”

It was nearly noon when they reached the landing zone.

Outside, Davis saw nothing but jungle, a verdant canopy that carried every imaginable shade of green. It looked thick and impenetrable. There were no section lines on the ground like you saw in the States, no well-surveyed roads or power lines or rail tracks. Even the rivers looked different. In the developed world, nearly all flows of water were manipulated in some way — dams, navigation channels, levees. But here the rivers wandered, looping and arcing in time-honed paths, their very presence defined by no more than subtle variances in the hue of the foliage.

Everyone had returned to their formal stations — Achmed in the right seat, Davis on the jumpseat, and Boudreau flying on the left. Davis was here, ostensibly, to observe FBN’s flight operations. Achmed’s attitude aside, so far things had looked solid. But that was largely due to Boudreau, whose confidence was no product of FBN’s training regimen, but rather sourced in twenty thousand hours of hardscrabble experience. Twenty thousand hours of sweat and storms and profanity. There was simply no substitute.

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.