Crowbar leaned off the fuel mixture control and trimmed up the little four-seater for level flight.
The take-off had been rough, Crowbar yawing the Cessna left and right across the airstrip as she gained speed and rotated into a light crosswind. Once airborne, he put the plane into a gentle climb and started a broad right-hand turn to the south. Clay looked back down at the airstrip; G and his men were already speeding away, their Land Rover just a toy throwing up a thin tendril of iron-oxide dust.
Not long later, Crowbar banked the Cessna sharply and ticked her through 180 degrees. Clay had already plotted a course that took them north towards the border with Ethiopia. Cruising at eight thousand feet, the Cessna’s manual estimated a range of well over eight hundred miles. The charts showed an airstrip with fuelling facilities in Marsabit, about ninety nautical miles south of the border. There they would refuel, and push north to Addis Ababa, then the Sudan border another four hundred miles north, and Khartoum as far again. From there, Cairo would be less than a day’s flying away.
Kilimanjaro’s dark, glacier-capped bulk loomed on their starboard wing, sixty kilometres away. And yet, in the rarefied troposphere, it seemed to tower over them. Clay could see the extinct volcano’s wide caldera and the broad horseshoe ridge, the filaments of ice dripping down its dolerite flanks. He thought of the book his father had given him one Christmas, Hemingway’s short stories.
‘I always wanted to climb it,’ said Clay. ‘Never got the chance.’
‘Take your son, when he’s older.’
‘How is he?’ Clay had never seen him.
Crowbar smiled, adjusted the headphones, pulled the mike closer to his mouth. ‘Poor little bastard looks like you. Thank God he seems to have got his mother’s brains.’
Clay smiled, couldn’t help himself. ‘Kypros,’ he said. ‘I like it.’ Clay thought it would be good if he could walk among these places with his son, one day. But he quickly pushed it away.
‘I don’t. Hope insisted.’
‘She’s the boss.’
Crowbar smiled again. His mouth opened very wide and his lips stretched back to reveal strong teeth as white as the mountain’s far-off spire. His eyes flashed high-altitude blue. ‘Ja, ja. And the boss is pregnant.’
Clay slapped Crowbar on the thick hump of ox muscle that was the man’s trapezoid. ‘That’s great, oom. Fantastic.’
‘Ja, ja.’ Crowbar beamed. ‘And this time, I get to name him.’
Clay smiled too, shot it out across the Serengeti.
Hours passed. Africa slipped away beneath them. Rift volcanoes, dormant and active, marked out deep scars in the earth’s crust. Herds of wildebeest and buffalo wandered the plains, congregated at drying waterholes, flowing pinpoints of cantor dust held to the slowly diverging plates.
But the worry was always there. Someone had come to her door. What had happened? Why had she given him a different number? And how in hell did Manheim know they were headed for Cairo?
By mid-afternoon they were approaching the airstrip at Marsabit. Crowbar throttled back into a slow descent. The airstrip was quiet, no other aircraft in the circuit. He lined the Cessna up for final approach.
‘Been a while since I’ve done this,’ said Crowbar, fighting to keep the aircraft on course in a strong crosswind.
Clay grabbed the edge of his seat, held tight as the dirt strip loomed in the windscreen. As they crossed the threshold, Crowbar cut power and flared, but instead of settling, the Cessna floated above the runway, ballooning in ground effect. They were chewing up runway fast, the scrub and trees at the far end racing towards them.
‘Hold on,’ said Crowbar, pushing down hard on the steering column.
The Cessna bounced once, hard, and then twice before sticking. Crowbar applied the brakes in a spray of gravel. They slid to a stop only a few feet from the end of the runway.
Crowbar took a deep breath, threw open his side window and taxied the aircraft over the red dirt towards a cluster of small buildings set at the midpoint of the runway. Heat poured from the hard-baked ground in shimmering updrafts.
‘Good landing,’ said Clay.
‘Like riding an elephant.’ Crowbar grinned. ‘I’ll check the landing gear once we stop.’
As they neared the small red-dirt apron they could see a couple of other aircraft set under a makeshift hangar – a turbo Pilates and what looked like a very old Piper Cub. Crowbar shut down the engine, ripped off his headphones, flung the door open, jumped to the ground and started pissing on the undercarriage.
Clay stepped to the ground, felt the solidity through his bones. He scanned the length of the runway, the apron, the low scrub beyond. The place appeared to be deserted. He couldn’t see any fuelling facilities.
Crowbar zipped up, checked his .45, pushed it into his belt, flipped his shirt over to cover the weapon. ‘I’m going to see if I can find any fuel in this shithole. Stay here. Keep alert.’
‘Yes, my Liutenant,’ Clay said before he could catch himself. It was an old habit, yet unbroken.
He stood in the dust and watched Crowbar trudge off across the apron and disappear behind the hangar. The plane’s engine ticked in the heat. A kite turned in the sky above. Clay could see its raptor head moving as it scanned the ground for prey. The biogeochemistry of the rift lands came to him, thick on the breeze: the burning grasses, the freshly extruded basalts, the fossilised, powdered bones of the oldest hominids. Nightfall was still four hours away. Enough time to cross over into Ethiopia. More than enough for a drowning, a murder, the slaughter of innocents. For things such as these, he knew, there was always time, eons even in minutes.
Crowbar returned about an hour later carrying two cold tins of Tusker lager and a plastic shopping bag. ‘No avgas,’ he said, tossing Clay a beer, ‘but at least they had something to drink in town.’ He pushed a wisp of titanium hair from his forehead and drank down half the tin.
They finished their beers then refuelled the Cessna using the jerry cans. Crowbar checked the engine oil, cleaned the windshield with a rag and some of the water.
‘Manheim knows we’re going to Cairo,’ said Clay, opening a second beer. He’d been turning it over in his head ever since leaving the airstrip.
‘Apparently.’
‘How the hell could he have known, oom? Until yesterday, I didn’t even know we were going to Cairo.’
‘He knows. The question is, what do we do about it?’
Clay crushed one of the empty beer tins under his boot. ‘If you were Manheim, what would you do?’
‘I’d go to the best surgeon I could find and get a nose job,’ said Crowbar. That big smile again.
Clay let it go. ‘Does he go straight to Cairo, intercept us there?’
‘I know the poes,’ said Crowbar. ‘He’s not going to wait to see if we might show up three thousand clicks away.’
‘Then it’s got to be Addis,’ said Clay, kicking a furrow into the crushed and powdered stone of the apron’s surface. ‘G probably told him what kind of aircraft we have, so he’ll know the range. It’s one of the only places in the whole country where we can be guaranteed of finding fuel.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Crowbar, retrieving another beer from the plastic bag. ‘We’re not going to wait to find out. We’re going to intercept him.’
‘How the hell are we going to do that?’
Crowbar tipped back his beer, drained it. ‘I made some calls from town,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘It’s all set up.’
‘Where?’
‘Sudan.’
‘Jesus.’
Crowbar opened the cockpit door. ‘Let’s go.’
Clay reached out, held the door closed. ‘Tell me, Koevoet. How did Manheim know that we were going to Cairo?’
Crowbar grabbed Clay’s arm, tried to push it away from the door. Clay held firm.
‘Let it go, Straker.’
‘Tell me, God damn it.’
‘You’re not going to like it, soutpiele.’
Something welled up inside him, fear and impatience and longing and a hundred things, bilious and forlorn beyond his ability to describe. ‘We’re not going anywhere until you tell me.’
‘I need you functioning, Straker. I can’t have you distracted. We have a job to do. Now fokken get out of the way.’
‘You think I can’t handle myself? Fok jou, Koevoet.’
‘I know you can’t handle yourself, soutpiele. I’ve always known it.’
Clay took a half-step back, let go the door and drove his forearm up under Crowbar’s neck, slamming him into the side of the aircraft’s fuselage. Crowbar’s beer fell to the ground, spilling foam.
‘I don’t need you to look after me,’ Clay shouted. ‘You hear me, old man? We get to Cairo, you fok off and leave me alone. For good. I never want to see—’
But before he could finish, Crowbar cut his legs out with a vicious ankle reap, sending him toppling to the ground in a cloud of dust.
Crowbar kicked the near-empty beer can, sent it spinning across the dirt. ‘What the fok, Straker. Think I’m the fokken enemy?’
Clay spat the silt from his mouth. ‘I don’t know, old man. You tell me.’
Crowbar straightened, looked down at Clay. ‘Manheim knows we’re going to Cairo,’ he said, ‘because the AB knows Rania is there. And they know we know.’
The words knocked the breath from Clay’s lungs. He slumped back to the ground.
‘That’s why we have to get Manheim,’ said Crowbar. ‘Before he gets to Rania. The AB doesn’t like her any more than they do you.’ He smoothed his hair back. ‘After that, you can fok the hell off, Straker. But until then, you’re mine.’ Crowbar opened the door and climbed into the cockpit.
Suddenly, Egypt seemed a lot farther away.