He turned slightly in his sleep, dreaming about driving down a dirt road backward in his brother’s van.
***
Ten minutes after Hanley tried to wake the nun, he spotted the White Nile and followed it north. He estimated he was about twenty minutes from the airport at Kosti. The airport was just west of the river. Hanley would fly up the river and then turn east. The Kosti airstrip ran almost directly east-west. He wanted to land with the rising sun behind him and in the eyes of anyone watching the plane. There were several large buildings on the south side of the airstrip. There was also a terminal building to the left at that end of the strip, which he hoped would not be open when they landed. Hanley learned what little commercial traffic traveled in and out of Kosti did so at mid to late morning. The truck with the children would be parked to the west of the terminal behind a smaller storage building. He felt certain he could land and take off without incident, once the children were on board.
As the sun rose, the sky turned from a deep red to a pink haze with no clouds. The river moved in gentle curves, flowing north through a land that barely noticed, having been arid too long to care much anymore. Having flown this route several times on his way north to Khartoum, Hanley now recognized the landmarks he established. They were close and Hanley began his descent, banking slightly while turning east.
“We’re just about there, so let’s get ready,” Hanley told the nun and the young African.
“Yes, Mr Martin,” Jumma said. Hanley could hear the exhilaration and perhaps some fear in Jumma’s voice. He was reading a book on hiking in Europe which he placed in his wornout backpack and then secured between his seat and the plane’s outer wall.
Turning to look at Jumma, Hanley was satisfied that all was ready and there was enough room for him and the children. How scared they must be right now, he thought; how scared, but how hopeful. He wished he was.
***
He was sitting up before he realized he was awake. Shaking his head, Assad tried to reconstruct his dream to explain what just happened, but couldn’t. A noise in his head sounded like the drone of a bug, a dragonfly maybe, but no, it wasn’t. In seconds, it registered that a plane was approaching in the distance. Another sound also came to him, voices from men talking nearby.
Shaky, Assad slipped off the desk and went to the door of the office to listen. The men were talking about finding somewhere to eat breakfast. He had to piss, but was afraid to step outside. Damn these men, he thought. Their conversation stopped suddenly and one man said, “Listen!” to the others. He said he believed the plane was landing. Assad knew this was unusual as flights to and from the airport happened in late morning at the earliest. Maybe it’s an emergency. He opened the door and stepped outside to see members of the Sudanese army nearby. They were smoking beside a UAZ-469, an old Russian military jeep. Its gray-green paint was faded and there were two small holes in the rear quarter panel that he could see. Someone shot the thing in the ass, Assad thought.
Turning, Assad went around the corner and began to urinate on the building and in the dust next to it. Once done, he looked around the corner at the soldiers while struggling to zip up his pants. The men were looking south toward the river. The sound of the plane was getting closer. Hoping to not draw attention to himself, Assad stayed behind the corner where he looked south for the plane. In the haze, just above the large gray warehouse near the east end of the airstrip, he saw a plane flying east, but with its left wing dipped, turning toward them. “Where are you going?” he asked the plane.
***
As he banked and began his turn, the new sun passed across the bottom of the plane’s windshield, like a bright ball rolling along a table’s edge, and then disappeared behind the nun’s head. Completing the arc, from the river to about two miles east of the airstrip, Hanley was now heading west at a bearing of 260°. At an altitude of sixteen hunderd feet, he began his final approach to the small airport, the unpaved runway looking more like a service road in an industrial park, which, in fact, it was. He added a bit of right rudder and lowered his flaps incrementally, cutting his airspeed to one hundred and twenty miles per hour for his final approach. The Beech was never an easy plane to land and his procedure was to be at near stall speed when he reached the runway. The sun was now above the horizon behind him and the area was well lit, with the white and pale gray buildings glowing slightly in the morning sunlight. Hanley brought the nose of the Beech up as the buildings beneath him blurred a bit and the ground rose quickly to meet the airplane. Just before the wheels touched the surface, the tail of the plane twitched, causing Sister Marie Claire’s head to shake, as if she disagreed with the whole affair. There was a bump and the Beech hopped once and then settled on the runway, the large warehouses on Hanley’s left coming up quickly. He was now applying the brakes as hard as
