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Page 56.

By evening, Walther was up. He stretched, bent, did pushups and other exercises. He made coffee and brought out the last bread, and chilled vegetable-mutton, from the Néma airstrip. As dusk fell, amid a still-thick dry heat, the plane leisurely took off in a long, slow glide. No bullets, no rush.

Walther looked refreshed, though his expression and the darkness around his eyes testified to his grief. He said little, and Tim respectfully stayed quiet in his co-pilot seat.

Walther touched down twice during the night to rest and refuel. On the first stop, the air smelled of aviation fuel and spicy African food. The sand still emanated that mummy-smell of heat and dust and dead, dehumidified organic matter.

On the second stop, there was more of a fetid jungle smell, and the atmosphere seemed more humid. Tim sensed a change as they flew into Equatorial Africa. He slept exhaustedly in fits and snatches.

Tim awoke from a deep, sound sleep many hours later, as the plane’s engine pitch changed noticeably. “We are landing soon!” Walther said.

Tim sat up rubbing his eyes. He yawned and stretched.

“Good morning!” Walther said. “You have been asleep since yesterday.”

“My God, I was in another world. Are we in the Congo yet?” He walked forward and sat in the co-pilot’s seat. Below was a solid canopy of jungle as far as the eye could see. A tropical haze enveloped the horizon on all sides. Flashes of light blinked occasionally below as they flew over some wide river, perhaps a tributary of the great Congo River.

Walther pointed to a thermos. “There is fresh hot coffee in there, black.” He pointed to a package wrapped in a blanket. “That is cold saucisse and baguette from Douala. You must be hungry.”

“Starving,” Tim said. He found a knife with SS markings and made himself a butter sandwich with the fresh bread, adding Alsatian style hard salami and a kind of Gouda-like cheese. He washed big chewy mouthfuls down with hot black coffee.

“About three hours we land in Leopoldville,” Walther said. “You have to understand that nominally it’s German controlled but the Belgian exile government runs the place, and there are Americans and other Allies swarming all over the place. Must be strategically very important, but all of that is beyond me.”

“What will you do now without your cousin?”

Walther shrugged. “What choice do I have? He was my helper and my good friend. I miss him terribly, but what I dread most is writing to his mother to tell her the news.” He sighed. “I lost many friends in this war.” He pulled the navigation board close and raised his aviator sunglasses to stare at the map. “This is the Dja, my friend. Very big river. Flows together with the Sangha and the Likouala and then into the Congo, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean between Boma and Soyo.”

It was an enormous land, Tim saw, staring down from a mile high as the continuous strip of jungle stretched from horizon to horizon.

Walther said, “Meanwhile, I will continue to haul bananas, typewriters, auto parts, whatever I can, to get by.”

In the early afternoon, the Ju-52 dropped down, slowing, and landed at a large macadam airfield on the outskirts of the Belgian Congo capital. Tropical heat rose from the concrete apron at the edge of a peripheral commercial hangar where Walther parked the Ju-52.

Tim stepped from the plane into the blinding tropical heat, which was like a steam bath, and looked across the runway to a small circle of U.S., British, Belgian, Soviet, and Free French flags fluttering in a small breeze.