Donald Westlake - Kahawa

“They’re shooting at us back there,” Lew said conversationally. “I can see the flashes.”

Why did I have to meet this man? Shoulders hunched, Ellen steered the plane to the beginning of the runway, braked hard, turned hard, and accelerated before she was really set. The earphones hanging from a hook in front of her squawked away, but she paid no attention. Glancing to her left, she saw headlights—two pairs of headlights—racing toward her across the grass, bouncing on the uneven terrain.

Leaning forward near her head, his voice a bit more urgent, Lew said, “They’re trying to cut us off, Ellen.”

“I see them.”

The plane had its own speed, its own system, its own way of doing things. She must simply roll forward, accelerating, watch the tarmac flash by under her wheels, and wait for the plane to be ready to lift.

A British-style jeep was over there on the grass to her left, running at a very long angle to the plane, almost parallel but not quite, as though the driver intended to meet them just this side of infinity. Quick bright spots of light from the interior of the jeep must be the flashes Lew had been talking about; they’re shooting at us!

It was hard to hold the wheel steady, hard not to pull back too soon or too much. A botched takeoff, leaving them on the ground with too little runway left, would be the end. They would get no second chance.

Patricia Kamin said something Ellen didn’t catch, her voice uneven with tension. Good, Ellen thought, she’s more scared than I am. “No,” Lew answered her, “I think they’re probably shooting at the wheels. It’s what I’d do.”

The plane lifted fractionally; its tires still ran on the tarmac but carried less weight. “Come on,” Ellen whispered, remembering how far Mike had had to run this plane to get it airborne. “Come on, come on .”

The wheels, still spinning, lost contact with the ground. Turning lazily, they skimmed along just above the surface of the runway, two fat black doughnuts riding so low a two-by-four couldn’t have been slipped in beneath them. Ellen, every muscle tense in her arms and chest and neck and back, drew the wheel minutely toward herself, and the plane, though still looking at the ground, inched higher into the air.

The end of the runway was ahead. The jeep, having lost the race, veered sharply to get onto the runway and chase from behind. The plane nosed up, like a sleepy horse finished with its oats; it seemed to see the sky, to take a sudden interest, at last to understand. Wings out, nose rising, tail canted at a jaunty angle, the plane soared up over the end of the runway, over the scrub, over the muddy coast, over water glinting with shattered reflections of the quarter-moon.

Ellen switched off every light except the small green ones illuminating the control panel. She’d never flown in such darkness before. The altitude meter read three hundred feet; angling downward, she banked sharply to the left.

Lew said, “Ellen? You’re going back?”

“I can’t get any control-tower guidance,” she told him. “They’re sure to scramble other planes after us. Out over the lake we’d simply get lost, so I’m going down on the deck so their radar can’t see me, find that highway that goes to Kenya, and run along beside it.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Lew said. “That’s terrific.”

“Thank you.”

He was leaning forward again, his right hand on her right shoulder. Sincerity dripping from his voice, he said, “I really appreciate this, Ellen. I want you to know that.”

She shrugged, bouncing his hand off. “I’d do it for anybody,” she said. She was really very angry.

Charlie waited for Mguu to do it, but Mguu just stomped around in his usual style, being angry and accomplishing nothing. Charlie waited for Isaac to order somebody to do it, or for Mr. Balim to hire somebody to do it, but Isaac was spending all his time in fruitless frustrating conversation with the two slippery government men from Nairobi, while Mr. Balim remained seated on the chair of concrete blocks and planks that Charlie had made for him, sighing and gazing unhappily out at the lake.

Mr. Balim was sad about his son. Wasn’t that reason enough to do it?

This Baron Chase from Uganda was a very bad man. He sat there against that dead tree, smiling, happy about himself, but he was a very bad man who had done many bad things. He was the one who had sent the ship to murder them and rob from them. And now he was stealing the coffee again, with the help of those government men from Nairobi.

But that wasn’t the reason. The reason was that this man Chase had robbed Mr. Balim of his son. He had made Mr. Balim unhappy in a way that no robbery of money or power could do. He had stolen the light from Mr. Balim’s eyes. Charlie could see it, if none of the others could; and Charlie loved Mr. Balim above all human beings; and that was why.

He walked over to where Baron Chase was seated, and bent over him as though solicitously, in a posture he knew Chase would like to see. “Sir?” he said.

Chase glanced up with casual recognition. “Yes?”

“Look,” Charlie said, and withdrew from his sleeve the long narrow extremely sharp blade. As Chase opened his mouth, his hands beginning to move, Charlie inserted the blade between the man’s ribs and pressed it home, directly through the heart.

It hit Chase like a drug. First there came the rush, the jolt, the shock; his eyes bulged, his neck muscles tensed, his hands curved like talons, his feet kicked out. Then the drug took hold; his eyes lost their luster, his mouth sagged open, his hands lay peacefully at his sides. The drug was death.

Charlie watched the death rise like mist, until it covered Chase to the eyes, and above the eyes. Then he drew out the blade and slipped it back under his sleeve. The heart was not beating, so there was almost no blood. Charlie strolled away into the darkness behind the floodlights.

Lew wished Patricia wouldn’t persist in holding his hand. He understood she was only doing it because she was frightened; he was certain Ellen couldn’t see it; and under the circumstances he wasn’t likely to become aroused by it; still, he wished she wouldn’t do it.

He also wished Ellen would get over her mad. But more than anything else, he wished he’d been able to find Bathar. (Since the poor guy was probably dead by now, or soon would be, he deserved his own name, not that dismissive Young Mr. Balim .)

“Here they come again,” Ellen said.

Patricia squeezed Lew’s hand even tighter as he said, “Where?”

“Ten o’clock high.”

Leaning forward, ducking low so he could look up past Ellen’s left ear, Lew was just in time to watch the two jets flash across the black sky from left to right, blazing with noise and light and speed and their own significance. For the last fifteen minutes these two had been skating back and forth up there, like kids who didn’t realize they were late for supper. At first Lew had been convinced they would spot the Cessna with no trouble and would simply shell them into abrupt oblivion—the golden-red instant fireball would be beautiful against the night sky, too bad he wouldn’t be around to see it—but as the jets kept flashing back and forth, nervous hunting dogs who had lost the scent, he realized their very speed and power worked against them. A poky little Cessna, running without lights, skimming the treetops just south of the A109, was beneath the range of their vision.

Which didn’t mean they couldn’t get lucky. Ellen was doing her best to avoid all ground lights, but the jets’ angle of view constantly changed; if one of those pilots looked in just the right place at just the right time, and if he saw a little black object pass between himself and some streetlamp or lit-up house, he’d be on them in a second.