The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [145]
"Okay. Listen up," D.W. said when Askama and Anne were out of earshot. He was still pretty shaky, but it was important to reestablish command. "Plan A: As soon as the coast is clear, George puts the Ultra-Light back together and Mendes here takes Robichaux in for a look-see. We rely on Marc’s fear of untimely death to balance Mendes’s overconfidence as a pilot. If he thinks they can land okay, she gives it a shot. Their reward for not crashin’ is they get to clean up the runway. If Marc decides it’s crazy to land, you turn back, Mendes. No arguments."
"And then what?" Sofia asked.
"Then we’ll try Plan B."
"Which is?"
"I ain’t thought that one up yet. Shee-it," said Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, Father Superior of the Jesuit mission to the village of Kashan on Rakhat, amid cries of derision. "Get off my back! Hell, I’m a sick man."
RUNA DISCUSSIONS TENDED to drag on for days but once a decision was made, the village mobilized with impressive efficiency. George and Sofia hardly waited until the last tail had disappeared before setting out in the opposite direction for the Ultra-Light cache. The little plane was reassembled within the hour, and Sofia took it up for a quick test run. Jimmy, linked to systems aboard the Stella Maris, established that the weather was okay on both sides of the mountain range. There was about seven hours of useful light left.
With unsettling dispatch, Marc and Sofia climbed aboard, strapped in and made ready to leave, the others watching as Yarbrough leaned into the little cockpit, hands moving through the air, miming emergency maneuvers. When Sofia started the motor, D.W. stepped back and hollered with specious sternness, "Don’t crash, y’hear? That’s an order. We only got one damn Ultra-Light. Come back safe!"
Sofia laughed and shouted, "Be here safe when we get back!" And then they were gone, the little plane rising quickly into the sky, wings tipping twice in farewell.
"I hate this," Anne said, when they couldn’t hear the motor any longer.
"You are a worrywart," George said, but he put his arms around Anne from behind and kissed the top of her head.
Jimmy said nothing but he wished now that he’d had George take a look at the weather front coming in from the southwest before he okayed the flight.
"I think they will be fine," Emilio said. And D.W. added, "She’s a damn good pilot."
"All the same," Anne said stubbornly. "I hate it all the same."
SEVEN DAYS’ JOURNEY north of them, in his wharfside compound overlooking the high seawall that bordered his property, Supaari VaGayjur began that day with a similar sense of the precariousness of his existence. He was about to risk not life and limb but status and dignity. If he failed, it would put an end to dreams he hardly dared acknowledge. The stakes were very high, in that sense.
He broke his fast with a handsome meal, gorging carefully: enough so that he would not need to consider meat again that day but not so much as to slow his thoughts. He spent the morning attending to business with the single-minded intensity of a first-born military man and the plodding thoroughness of a second-born bureaucrat. The only time his concentration broke was when he passed through the courtyard on his way to a storage building. He could not keep himself from glancing upward toward Galatna Palace, set apart like its inhabitant: splendid and useless.
Around him, the city rang and vibrated and rumbled with the noise of manufacture and trade, the treble clang and shriek of metalworking momentarily dimmed by the bass of wooden wheels thundering over cobbles just outside his warehouse; the clamor of craft and commerce merging with the