Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [3]
"By any chance could we have company up here, coming our way?"
"Doubt it. Not at this altitude."
"You're sure?"
"Actually, no."
The pilot swung up, peered ahead, didn't see anything. But his eyes weren't accustomed to the dark. He flipped on the plane's landing lights. And in response, coming at us, another set of landing lights lit up the sky, the beams diffused by the petro-haze that hovers miles high over Arabia. The two planes streaked past each other. Dave, who'd been back in the cargo hold checking on the oryxes, poked his head through the cockpit doorway.
"You guys okay?"
"Just fine," the pilot said.
And we were. A few minutes later the copilot spotted the burning flares marking Saudi Arabia's major north-south pipeline. "Flying the pipeline" took us to within an hour of our destination: Muscat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman, where His Majesty Sultan Qaboos ibn Said had become intrigued by the plight of the oryx and had established a program to reintroduce the species into the wild.
At three A.M. we banked to the right just short of the silvery Arabian Sea and were on final approach to what the pilot was pretty sure was Muscat's Seeb Airport. We landed and barely had time for a catnap before three winged boxes emerged from a hangar and whirred toward us. They were Skyvans, small Irish-made military planes that could carry a small vehicle—or a crated oryx—and land it almost anywhere. The pilot in charge, Muldoon, Irish like his plane, supervised the loading with inordinate cheerfulness, considering the hour. Muldoon was a mercenary for Oman's fledgling air force. He was a good mercenary, he took pains to explain, busy with worthy missions (food drops, medical flights, and so on) in a time of peace.
We boarded Muldoon's plane. He flashed a thumbs-up and hit the throttle. Despite being loaded down with oryxes and fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel for the return flight, our three planes were quickly airborne. We circled over the sea to gain altitude and greeted the dawn as we headed toward the Jebel Akdar, the rugged "Green Mountains" that rise abruptly from Oman's coast. The greenery at first was limited to tiny terraced cornfields and vineyards. But then we flew into a long, winding valley and over grove after grove of palm trees.
Beside me, Kay had her face pressed to the window, taking all this in. Neither of us had ever been east of Europe, much less flown a barely charted desert in a tiny, mercenary-piloted plane. This didn't faze Kay a bit; she loved it. In everyday life, though, some things did faze her. Raised in the South, she could become distraught upon discovering that her navy shoes didn't match her new navy skirt or, worse yet, that her hair had become "a mop, with simply nothing to be done about it." Big things, like a crazed teenager trying to knife her or an international dope dealer threatening to have her "disappeared," didn't bother her at all. Our documentary filmmaking jaunts were breaks from her job as an in-the-trenches federal probation and parole officer. I remember her coming home one day all black and blue.
"Mom, what happened to you?" inquired first-born daughter Cristina.
"More aikido training with the FBI," she said nonchalantly. "This morning it was how to slow bad people down by, um, doing things to their kneecaps."
Always chipper, immensely capable, Kay is a good partner in strange places. We unbuckled our seat belts and squeezed by a crated oryx for a view from the cockpit. "The way to the interior," Muldoon the (beneficent) mercenary gestured, as our three Skyvans buzzed a crumbling old watchtower and cleared a narrow pass.
Ahead now was a vast, rocky plain dotted with mud-brick villages. But soon the villages were behind us, all but one, set in a lonely cluster of palms. "Adam, the oasis of Adam," Muldoon said, then mused, "Suppose that's where he and the missus got the gate?"
The oasis was a last landmark. Oman's interior, desolate and featureless, rolled off to the horizon. We droned on for an hour. The Skyvan couldn't go very fast and, with no pressurization,