Donald Westlake - Kahawa

Ellen said, “Surprise? Why surprise?”

Frank led the way around the wing once more and toward the cargo door aft on the fuselage. “I just fired him about twenty minutes ago.”

“Twenty minutes!”

He paused in unlocking the cargo door to grin at her. “I wanted him to fly me and the plane down here, didn’t I?”

Ellen looked again after the previous pilot, but he had gone through the gate and disappeared. “Not much notice,” she said. “And no severance pay either, I suppose.”

“I can see you’ve got a soft heart,” Frank said. “But don’t worry about Roger, he shouldn’t be a pilot anymore at all.”

“He drinks too much,” she suggested.

“He drinks at the wrong time.” Frank slammed the cargo door and moved forward to open the passenger door and tilt the front seat forward. “I’ll ride in the front to show the way. Lew, you get in back.”

“Right.”

While Lew climbed aboard, Frank gave Ellen a quizzical grin, saying, “I hope you know how to fly this thing.”

“At least I don’t drink,” she told him. “Not at the wrong time.”

Frank laughed, clipped the front seat into place, and climbed up into the copilot’s seat. Ellen followed, and took a moment to familiarize herself with the instrument layout. She had never in fact flown this exact model before, but it wasn’t much more complicated than getting behind the wheel of a strange automobile.

Frank said, “We’ve filed a flight plan to Kisumu. Charts oughta be in your door pocket there.”

“In a minute.” She found the control checklist in the pocket and studied it, then pulled half a dozen aerial charts from the pocket. They were old and flimsy, marked here and there with a variety of pens and pencils in several colors, and most of them were starting to tear at the fold lines. She found Nairobi on one, and asked, “Which way do we head?”

“West-northwest.”

“To Kisumu, you said?”

That was on the next chart westward. Very high ground, the Mau Escarpment, nosed down into the direct line between Nairobi and Kisumu, but by heading directly west she could skirt the southern edge of the mountains. There was a small airfield shown at Ewaso Ngiro, eighty miles out, another at Mara River, forty miles farther on. From there she would turn north-northwest, passing between the airports at Kisii and Kericho as the land sloped gradually downward toward the shores of Lake Victoria, three hundred miles away. The airport at Kisumu, at the inmost point of Winam Gulf, was, surprisingly, marked for international flights. But of course the countries here were so small that international travel meant something very different from what it did in the States. Again she was reminded of the Caribbean.

Frank said, “Everything okay?”

“Just fine.” Unclipping the earphones from the stick, she put them on and spoke to the control tower. Meantime, Lew leaned forward in his seat to start a conversation with Frank. Catching a word here and there, Ellen understood they were gossiping about old friends: where are they now, what have you heard from So-and-So. Except that with men it wasn’t called gossip.

She started the port and then the starboard engine, ran through the items on the checklist, and rolled out of the line of parked planes toward the asphalt taxiway. The wind was fairly strong and out of the west, so she drove to the east end of the runway, waited while a British Airways VC-10 took off and a Kenya Air DC-9 landed, checked again with the tower, then lifted into the air.

She loved it. This part she always loved: the lifting, the soaring, the sudden diminution of the Earth slowly turning beneath her. The plane responded well, and already her hands and eyes moved automatically among the switches and indicators. Sliding the right earphone back onto her hair so she could hear conversation in the plane while still listening to the radio through her left ear, she settled more comfortably in the seat and watched the brown land slowly unroll beneath her.

“That’s the new airport,” Frank said, yelling over the engine drone, pointing ahead and to the left. “Supposed to be done next year.” He grinned at her. “Guess its name.”

She looked down at the white-and-tan construction scars, seeing that the new airport would be something like three times the size of the old one. “Its name?”

“Jomo Kenyatta!” Frank shouted. “President of the country! Heap big chief!” Laughing, he gestured upward with his thumb, as though the president of the country were in Heaven, or seated on some fishbone cloud.

Lew leaned forward, his forearms on Ellen’s and Frank’s seat backs, his head just visible between them. He said, “Tell me more about the job, Frank. Guerrillas, is it?”

“Kind of.” Frank seemed still amused by Jomo Kenyatta. “In a kind of a way it’s guerrillas.”

“Going in against Uganda?”

“It’s a raid,” Frank said.

“Just one raid?”

“Ah, but what a raid.” Frank’s big happy manly smile encompassed them both. “We’re taking a train, Lew. We’re putting the arm on a whole train.”

“A train? Not a passenger train.”

“No no no,” Frank said, waving his arms around in a negative gesture too large for the confined space inside the plane.

“Hostages,” Lew said, shaking his head. “I don’t like that kind of thing.”

“Don’t worry, Lew,” Frank told him. “This is clean as anything. You’ll love it.”

“A goods train,” Lew suggested. “Weapons.”

“Coffee,” Frank said.

Glancing over at Frank, Ellen suddenly understood that something was wrong. Lew hadn’t been hired for the job he had expected. It was something entirely different.

She saw that Lew had also guessed that, and was trying not to know it. His forearms rested on the seat backs; his curled hands hung down between the seats; his face was stretched forward above his hands. Now, gently cuffing himself on the bottom of the jaw with his half-clenched fist, an unconscious nervous gesture, he said, “Coffee, Frank? I don’t get it.”

“Six million dollars,” Frank told him. “A huge motherfucking coffee train. Oh,” he said to Ellen. “Excuse me.”

“Blow it out your ass,” she said, looking downward toward the ground.

Lew said, “Frank, what’s going on? Is this a Ugandan guerrilla operation, or what is it?”

“It’s a little different,” Frank said. “Our bunch isn’t exactly guerrillas.”

“But Amin,” Lew said. “There’s got to be anti-Amin forces somewhere.”

“Down in Tanzania. Nyerere keeps ’em in cakes and cookies, but they’re mostly all fucked up.”

Ellen glanced at Frank and found him grinning at her. He winked with the eye Lew couldn’t see.

Lew was saying, “In that case, who are we ?”

“A couple white boys working for some people gonna steal six million dollars from Idi Amin.”

“It’s his personal coffee?”

“Everything in that fucking country is his personal property.”

The tower was directing Ellen farther north, away from east-west air traffic. The usual urban sprawl spread out below her: Nairobi, capital of Kenya, business center of East Africa. The slums were bright colored and crowded, while richer homes lazed on the hillsides amid greenery. A railway line crossed their path, north to south, glinting in the sun like an ornamental chain. Frank said, “There’s your railway now. Eighth fucking wonder of the world.”

Ellen said, “Why does it shine like that?”

“The ties aren’t wood. They’re steel.”

“Steel?”

“Seventy pounds apiece, two thousand per mile, seven hundred miles from the coast of Kampala.” He reeled this off with apparent satisfaction, as though he’d personally carried and placed every steel tie himself.