Star of Africa

Chapter 49

The droning, clattering flight went on and on. Even if it had been physically possible, there wouldn’t have been a lot of scope for conversation. An hour passed. With no window to see out of, and with the overwhelming noise of the Dakota’s engines and the whistling blast of cold wind rushing through the draughty, unpressurised interior, Ben could only wonder whether the choppers were managing to keep pace with them, or whether the Dakota had already left them far behind.

For the same reason, Ben could only imagine the landscape passing by below, gradually changing as they progressed westwards for another interminable hour, and then another again. They must have covered at least six hundred miles by now. Almost certainly avoiding major centres of civilisation, which wasn’t a hard thing to do in Africa. From the dust bowl of Somalia to the great plains of Kenya, overflying shanty towns and thatch-hut villages and rivers and the tail end of the great migrations of teeming herds of wildebeest and zebra as they drifted towards the Serengeti in Tanzania before the worst of the rainy season began. Then further westwards and southwards, over sweeping savannas and into thickening forest so dense that a man could wander lost for days, weeks, and barely ever see daylight squinting through the canopy of trees far overhead. Then further still, scraping the high western plateaus that soared over three thousand metres before they sloped down to the vastness of Lake Victoria, like an inland sea the size of Ireland, the source of the White Nile River, where giant herons and eagles glided over the water, and shore villagers fished the way they had been fishing for a thousand years, and hippos bobbed and basked in the water, and Nile crocodiles as huge and ancient as dragons lurked in the reeds and hunted through the depths. Then onwards, and onwards, heading inexorably towards the verdant heart of what the early colonial explorers had dubbed ‘the Dark Continent’. Much of it still as dark and dangerous, in some parts infinitely more dangerous, than in the time of Livingstone and Stanley.

A whole different world.

Khosa’s world.

As Ben watched the hours tick by on the face of his watch, he was working out the logistics of the journey in his mind. Fully fuelled and not exceeding its cruise speed too recklessly, the DC-3 Dakota was good for a range of maybe fifteen hundred miles, perhaps longer if it had been fitted with the extra-large tanks that many of the old workhorses had. Those could extend their range by as much as another five hundred miles or more, enough to take them all the way to their final destination. If indeed the three choppers had followed them from Somalia, there was no way they could make even a third of the ultimate distance without taking on more fuel. They would have already had to land long before now. Which implied that Khosa would already have everything set up waiting for them in advance, planning for the choppers to make the journey in several well-orchestrated hops. The more Ben learned about the man, the more disconcertingly aware he became of how much smarter and more organised he was than Ben had first reckoned on. That wasn’t a reassuring thought to hold in your mind when where was nothing else to think about and nothing you could do to make a difference.

Another hour dragged by, then another. Going by the Dakota’s typical cruise speed, that meant anything up to two hundred more miles travelled for each full rotation of the minute hand on Ben’s watch. They must have covered something like a thousand miles by now. Ben closed his eyes and revisited his mental map of Africa. If his idea of Khosa’s flight plan was anything close to accurate, that distance would have taken them over Lake Victoria. Beyond Kenya into Uganda, as Khosa had intended, taking a line approximately midway between the Ugandan capital of Kampala, to the north, and the Rwandan capital of Kigali, to the south. The journey must be nearly three-quarters over by now. Ben wasn’t looking forward to its end.

He opened his eyes and gazed across the aisle between the rows of seats. Jude, sitting facing him, was fast asleep. Good for him. Gerber and Hercules, the same. Jeff was sitting staring into space, apparently lost in whatever thoughts were knitting his brows into deep corrugated ridges of anxiety. Tuesday’s eyes were closed, but judging by his posture he was awake, conserving his energy, staying calm.

To the left and right of them, many of Khosa’s soldiers were managing to remain much more alert even after all these hours in the air, and Ben knew why. They all had dilated pupils and were as jumpy as a hardcore caffeine addict after four pints of Turkish coffee. They were chewing khat, an amphetamine-like stimulant derived from a flowering plant widely found across the Horn of Africa and even more widely used to stay mentally zoned in at times of great stress or boredom. Ben had tried it once in Sudan, didn’t get on with it, and resorted back to his time-honoured tobacco. Along with tremors and constipation, its side effects could include manic or even psychotic behaviour.

Shut in a flying coffin with thirty potential psychopaths armed with loaded assault rifles. Things just kept getting better.

But only a few short minutes after that, even those not chewing khat suddenly had a much better reason to become wide-eyed and alert.

The steady monotonous drone resonating through the Dakota had abruptly changed in pitch. First there was a wheeze, followed by a strange kind of death rattle, both clearly audible over the roar of the wind. Then came a peculiar sensation as if someone had turned the balance knob on a sound system all the way to one side, directing all the signal through only one speaker. Like going suddenly deaf in one ear. At the same moment, the aircraft started juddering and shuddering as though it had hit air turbulence.

Ben knew from experience that air turbulence was unlikely to be a problem below the high troposphere, between about 23,000 and about 39,000 feet up. Which in the former case was right on the Dakota’s maximum service ceiling, and in the latter case far exceeded it.

And that, along with the strange and sudden change in sound pitch that had coincided precisely with the jerky motion that was making the aircraft lurch like a drunkard through the air, was enough to tell Ben they hadn’t hit turbulence at all.

He wasn’t the only one thinking it. Tuesday had opened his eyes, and he and Jeff were staring right at him. They knew it, too.

The old Dakota had just lost one of its engines.

It wasn’t cause for total panic. Not yet. A Dakota could still fly on a single engine, like the one that had made the eleven hundred miles from Pearl Harbor to San Diego back in 1945 with one propeller out of action. Even on one wing, like the one that had collided mid-air with a Lockheed bomber and still made it safely home. The loss of an engine didn’t seem to worry the soldiers unduly. Maybe the old machine had played this trick on them before. Maybe this happened all the time.

But when a second wheezing rattle was followed moments later by eerie silence except for the roaring, howling rush of wind streaming past the fuselage, it was clear that the situation had just changed dramatically for the worse.

Because there wasn’t a Dakota yet built that could fly on no engines at all.