Mark Lee - The Canal House

“Sounds wonderful. But we’ve got to go to Kosana.”

Winston reached forward and touched the black Virgin Mary. “When I dreamed last night, I saw Mr. McFarland lying dead on the ground. Someone had shot him.”

I hesitated for a few seconds, almost convinced of the danger. “I’m sorry, Winston. Daniel is flying north and somebody’s bad dream won’t stop him. If he goes alone, he’ll probably do something crazy. If we travel together, I can hold him back a little.”

Tobias walked over to the Mercedes and tapped on the window. “Wake up, Nicky! It’s time to go!”

The Cessna was a modified four-seater with a large storage area in the back. They’d loaded several boxes of food and I counted fourteen plastic jerricans of gasoline for the ranger vehicles at Kidepo. It was a flying Molotov cocktail, yet Paul didn’t look worried. He was rearranging the gear when I approached him.

“How much do you weigh, Nicky?”

“About two hundred pounds. Maybe a little more.”

“That puts us over the weight limitations, but it’s not a big problem.”

“Get rid of some gasoline.”

“They really need it. Truckers don’t want to carry supplies to the park because of the Lord’s Righteous Army. Every since the kidnappings, we’ve had problems getting supplies.”

“So the plane’s too heavy?”

“Technically, yes. But we’ve done it before. After we take off, everything will be all right.”

I studied Paul’s confident smile and silently cursed my own stupidity. For some reason, I kept putting my life in the hands of optimists. Paul tied down everything in the storage area and we squeezed in. One of the jerricans must have been leaking because I could smell gasoline. Paul told jokes over the radio to a Ugandan in the control tower named Boniface, then taxied the Cessna to a patch of gravel at the end of the main runway.

Hot, humid air pushed through the little windows. I was sweating. Tobias sat in the front passenger seat, next to Paul. He glanced back at me and grinned. “Don’t worry, Nicky. We had more weight last year taking off from Mombasa.”

“But it’s hotter today,” Paul said. “So the density altitude is higher.”

“What’s that mean?”

“If we were in Iceland, this would be easy.”

The Cessna began moving slowly down the runway. Daniel rolled up his shirtsleeve and scratched a mosquito bite. He looked like he was sitting on a bus in London. “You take your chloroquine, Nicky?”

“No.”

“I thought you did.”

“I mean, yes. I took it. Yes.”

Paul watched the air speed indicator and began calling out numbers to Tobias. “Thirty-three, forty, fifty. Damn.”

We were already halfway down the runway and not even close to taking off. My stomach grumbled. Shouldn’t have eaten all those bananas. Faster. A little faster. Then, about ten feet from the end of the runway, Paul pulled back the yoke and the plane rose into the air. Within seconds, we dropped back down about twenty feet and I heard the landing gear ripping through the tops of the tall reeds at the edge of the lake. Before I could panic, the Cessna glided back up again. We made a slow, wide turn, like a barge in sluggish water, and headed north.

Paul’s mother had sent him a package of kosher food for Passover. When we reached two thousand feet, Tobias handed us a box of macaroons, then spread peanut butter on matzo crackers. It was loud inside the Cessna. Whenever we hit turbulence, the plane bounced a little, as if we were driving over a low hill.

Below us were small farms and coffee plantations. I could see the light green fields of plantain and cassava surrounded by the forest. A plume of smoke rose from a solitary fire as we passed over a small village, its metal roofs glimmering in the sun.

I brushed the matzo crumbs off my lap. We cut across the western edge of Lake Kwania and the landscape changed into a vast savanna, dotted with red termite hills and acacia trees. You could see the bare red lines of earth from cow tracks that split apart like capillaries and recombined at water holes. The cattle milled around the muddy water: white bulls and brindle cows, their long horns jabbing up at the sky. Dust boiled up from the back wheels of a truck racing down a dirt road.

When we began to see wild animals, Paul and Tobias argued about the population of various species. Paul swooped down to check out large herds of spiral-horned kudu and Grant’s gazelles. Frightened by the plane, the animals fled through the tall grass. The herd seemed to flow like a stream of water, rippling and changing course with every obstacle.

Red volcanic hills appeared near the boundary of Kidepo park. Surrounded by the flat savanna, they looked vaguely artificial. It was a harsh region with large areas of bushland thicket that could easily hide a guerrilla army.

We flew over the little white cottages of Apoka Lodge, where the six tourists had stayed before their kidnapping, and Paul zigzagged across the massive game park looking for signs of Sudanese poachers. As we headed northeast and approached Kosana, Tobias began to tease his friend about an Irish nurse named Ellen who worked at the camp. Apparently, Paul had flown her around the park a few weeks ago. They had landed in some isolated area and had had a picnic in the middle of Eden. It wasn’t quite clear what happened after that.

“Did she get a sunburn?” Tobias asked. “I’ve heard that red-haired women are very sensitive to the sun.”

“We put on sunblock.”

“Any mosquito bites, Paul? I hope they weren’t in sensitive parts of the body.”

“We were there to see the flora and fauna.”

“Yes. Of course. Her flora and your fauna.”

Paul reduced power and the plane descended a few hundred feet. “There’s Kosana,” he said.

When I looked down, I saw more than two hundred tents in the middle of a grassy plain. There were bright blue plastic tents and olive green military tents, all of them arranged in little clusters that were linked by a spiderweb of footpaths. A dirt landing strip had been set up about a half mile from the camp and a silver airplane was parked near a clump of thornbushes.

“That’s Erik Viltner’s Super Cub,” Paul told us. “I guess Richard Seaton hired Erik to fly him up from Nairobi.”

“And Seaton is the doctor’s boyfriend?” Daniel asked.

“You mean Julia? Yes. She’s in charge of the camp.”

We roared over the tents. Paul banked the plane to the left and for a few seconds the sun blinded me. Trains and planes and taxi rides had brought us to this place, but I still had no idea how we were going to find the Lord’s Righteous Army.

The night beforeI left for Africa, Richard asked me to meet him at Sage, a new restaurant in South Kensington. He was late, but I’d come to expect that. Richard generally ignored the constraints of time. He had become so successful in his twenties that for the last fifteen years people had waited for him, waited so patiently that he had become used to their forbearance. Lateness added urgency and drama to his daily schedule; it pushed him forward into each new situation.

I had brought along two books in my bag, Langewiesche’s Sahara Unveiled and the new edition of Harcourt’s Tropical Diseases . While the waiter brought a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, I looked around the restaurant. That night I realized that all of Richard’s favorite restaurants had certain similarities. He liked new places, open for one or two years, with lots of light and glass, and young food servers wearing long white aprons. The food itself wasn’t that important, something light and low fat, presented attractively. He hated any place with dark rooms, heavy chairs, marrow bones, and elaborate desserts.