"I thought you were in the bush," Portet said, as he kissed the woman's offered cheek. And then he made the introductions.

M'sieu et Madame Nininger, who. were not only charming and witty, but new customers of Air Simba.

"I'll go. tomorrow," Nininger said as he sat dawn. "You'll came far dinner?"

"Thank you, but no. We have a little business tonight." At that moment Enrica de la Santiago realized that Jack Portet was going to be unlucky. His friend's husband was not going to be out of town. He had just invited them to dinner.

The Niningers had a drink-Orange Blossoms-and then left. Enrica de la Santiago, wandering if his ego and/or his imagination had run wild, had the idea that Madame Nininger had more in mind than simple courtesy when she asked him to. call whenever he returned to Bukavu.

They sat drinking the beer (which like the airline was also called Simba and which was astonishingly good) until it was time to eat. In the bar, and later in the restaurant (where at Portet's suggestion they both had the broiled filet of a fish that Portet said was found only in Lake Kivu), Portet pointed out which European women were available and which were forbidden.

They went to bed early, leaving a call for half past four in the morning. The call was delivered by a Congolese carrying a tray with a coffeepot, orange juice, and a croissant.

They left the hotel a few minutes after five, and at 5:25 were at the airport. Nininger was there, leaning on the fender of a Mercedes, and so was a Mercedes truck with a refrigerated body.

Its air-conditioning diesel engine was idling, but it roared into action when cooling was needed.

The previous evening Portet had explained why there would be a refrigerated truck here: Nininger had a cattle operation in the hills above Bukavu. What he was trying to do now with Air Simba was deliver fresh meat to Stanleyville and (most importantly) to Leopoldville cheaper than it could be obtained elsewhere. Most of the fresh meat-all of the quality fresh meat-now obtainable in Leopoldville came from South Africa.

Some of the meat was flown in and some was sent by train; but all of it came to the capital alive, where it was then butchered. It was a seller's market, and the South Africans took full advantage of it.

Nininger's idea now was to butcher and chill his beef, lamb, and swine at his own plantation, and then air-freight it to Stanleyville, Leopoldville, and ultimately elsewhere. The problem was refrigeration, which was to say the temperature of the Congo, which lay on the Equator.

The meat could not be frozen because there was already an adequate supply of South African, European, and even Argentinean frozen meat in Leopoldville. Nor could it be iced down or shipped in insulated containers by air, because of the weight.

The solution they had found was to chill the meat to several degrees above freezing, transport it to the Kamembe airport in a refrigerated truck, and quickly load it aboard an Air Simba Curtiss cargo plane. For the past three weeks this solution had worked. The plane would quickly take off, and then climb quickly to an altitude which would keep the meat chilled en route.

If there was a delay, the meat would of course be ruined. And a close watch had to be maintained on outside temperature to make sure the meat didn't become frozen en route, either.

Before Nininger's workmen loaded the airplane with the contents of the truck, Jack and Enrico made very sure to check that the airplane was ready to go. They even fired up the engines and put the needles in the green, then shut down only the port engine.

The cheesecloth-wrapped meat, some of it roughly butchered into loins and large parts and some of it in sides, was quickly laid on a sheet of plastic on the cabin floor, then strapped in place.

As soon as the door was closed, even before the port engine had been restarted, the plane moved to the threshold of the runway. It paused at the end of the runway only long enough to start the engine and check the mags; and then it roared off, heading northwest toward Stanleyville in a steep climb.

Stanleyville (estimated 1963 population 150,000) is 350 miles from Bukavu at the head of navigation for the middle portion of the Congo River. It is also very close to the exact center of Africa, equidistant from the Indian and Atlantic oceans" and from Cairo, Egypt, and Cape Town, South Africa.

The city sits surrounded by hundreds of miles of jungle-an island of apartment houses on wide boulevards, office buildings, hotels, warehouses, large villas, and shops. In Stanleyville in 1964, it was possible to buy Buick automobiles; Swiss watches; couturier clothing from Paris; and oysters, lamb chops, and newspapers (including the Times of London and the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune) flown in daily from Brussels.

When arriving passengers descended from Sabena or KLM or UTA jets at Stanleyville, they were greeted with a multicolored neon sign urging them to FUMEZ LUCKY STRIKE!

The United States of America maintained a consulate general in Stanleyville, a large, white, red-roofed villa with a lovely swimming pool, as well as a splendid view of the white-water rapids of Stanley Falls (named, like the town itself, after the intrepid "Doctor Livingston, I presume" journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley).

Stanleyville proved to have what Enrico de la Santiago thought of as a real airport. For one thing, the moment he tuned in the ADF, there was a strong STN signal. And when Portet called the Stanleyville tower an hour and fifteen minutes into the flight, there was an immediate response, in English, from a tower operator who left no question that he knew what he was doing. "Simba One Oh Four, Stanleyville. We have you on radar.

You are cleared to descend to two thousand five hundred on your present heading. The winds are five to ten from the north. The altimeter is two niner niner four. You are cleared as number one to land on runway zero five. There is no commercial traffic in the area, but please be on the lookout for light aircraft operating under visual flight rules. Report at flight level two five hundred and when over the outer marker." And a minute later he was back.

"Simba One Oh Four, Stanleyville." Portet, who was flying, nodded at Enrico to work the radio.

"Stanleyville, Simba One Oh Four-go ahead."

"Simba One Oh Four, Stanleyville, in flight advisory. You will be met by a refrigerated truck and a fuel truck."

"Roger, Stanleyville, thank you very much," Enrico replied.

"I have to figure out some way to RON here," Portet said: Remain Over Night. "Nice town. And we rented an apartment in the Immoquateur that's just going to waste."

"In the what?"

"The Immoquateur," Jack Portet explained. "It's a new apartment building, ten, twelve stories, on the river. Very classy."

"And you have friends here, no doubt?" de fa Santiago asked.

"Two. Neither of whose husbands can be called stay-at homes."

The radio came to life.

"Stanleyville, Sabena Six Oh Five, sixty miles north of your station for approaching and landing."

"Stanleyville gave Sabena 605 essentially the same information he had given Air Simba 104, except of course that he had told them that "Air Simba, a Curtiss C-46 aircraft is number one to land."

Sabena 605, a Douglas DC-8, swooped in to land as Jack and Enrico were being driven to the terminal in a Peugeot station wagon. They picked up coffee and jelly doughnuts in the coffee shop, carried them to Weather for a briefing on en route and destination conditions to Leopoldville, filed their flight plan, visited the gentleman's rest facility, and started back across the terminal to where the Peugeot waited for them.

As they passed' the newsstand, stacks of newspapers and magazines fresh from the belly of the morning Sabena flight from Brussels were dropped on it and cut open. Jack Portet stopped and bought the Paris Edition of the New York Herald Tribune and Playboy.

And then a woman rushed up to him, kissed him on both cheeks, and in an accent Enrico de la Santiago found enchanting called him "Jacques, mon amour." After that she expressed apparently genuine delight to find Jacques in Stanleyville, especially since her husband had been delayed in Brussels. This woman was younger than the blonde in Bukavu, and French, Enrico decided, rather than Belgian.

And she seemed disconsolate when Portet told her he had a planeload of fresh meat he had to get back in the air in the next five minutes. And so, vicariously, was Enrico disconsolate for Jack Portet. It was not at all hard to imagine what pleasures with the French blonde the planeload of fresh meat would cause him to miss.

After they were in the air again and approaching twelve thousand, when it would become necessary to go on oxygen, Enrico asked the question that had quite naturally come to him.

"What's the secret of your success?"

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, sure, seriously. If it's some kind of cologne, I want to know what kind."

"Aside from my charm, good looks, and all-around overwhelming masculinity," Jack said, joking, and then grew serious, "the greatest risk a woman having an affair here runs is that the guy will get serious. There's a great shortage of European women here, of course, especially in the bush-the deeper in the bush, the greater the shortage of women-and after they diddle some guy and then go home, the guy sits around alone in his house, or his apartment, and decides that his quick piece of ass is the greatest love affair since Romeo and Juliet, and that he has to have her permanently. People go crazy here anyway, and it gets messy.

They know that I'm safe, that I'm not going to appear wide-eyed at their door and tell their husband I can't live without them. If you play your cards right. . ."

"I'm married," Enrico said. "My wife and my kids are still in Cuba."

"My father told me," Jack said.

"I'm working on getting them out."

"You are Catholic, Enrico?"

"Yeah, sure."

"When Catholic priests come to work down here, they are relieved of their vow of celibacy." Enrico looked at him in astonishment. He saw that Portet was again quite serious. He was unable to accept that a priest would be allowed to have sex-with the approval of the Church, but it was evident that Jack Portet believed what he was saying.

"A piece a day keeps the madman away," Jack Portet said solemnly, and then tapping the altimeter, which showed they were still climbing at 13 ,000 feet, he pulled a black rubber oxygen mask over his mouth.

It was almost eight hundred miles from Stanleyville to Leopoldville. The flight took a little more than three hours and fifteen minutes. Frequently there was no sign of civilization beneath them at all, not even the trace of a road. Even at 25,000 feet, Enrico reasoned, there should be some sign of civilization down there, but there wasn't, just green, broken every once in a while by a river.

A refrigerated truck pulled up to the airplane as soon as they landed. Jack felt the meat through the cheesecloth. It was cold but not frozen. Air Simba had done it again, which meant a profit and not the loss they would have had if the meat had been spoiled or frozen.

He got in his Volkswagen Bug and drove home.

He parked his car in the garage and entered the house via the kitchen. His stepmother, a statuesque blonde, was checking the bill from the grocery store against the groceries themselves. She suspected the grocery store of charging her for imaginary goods.

"You have a letter from the government in St. Louis," Hanni Portet said. She spoke in English with a strong but not unpleasant German accent.

"Oh, shit!"

"Cursing won't change anything," Hanni said, and went to him and kissed his cheek. "Your father's out by the pool. I think he would like to play tennis." Jack looked out the kitchen window. His father was sitting at one of three umbrella-shaded tables by the side of the pool. On the table beside him were two tennis racquets and two cans of balls.

When the Second World War had broken out, Jean-Philippe Portet had been the age Jacques was now and had been in America with his father. His father, Jacques' grandfather, an official of the Societe Anonyme Belge d'Exploitation de Navigation Aerienne (Sabena, the Belgian State Airline), had been sent to the United States on a purchasing mission. Sabena wanted to replace its Lockheed transports with Douglas DC-3s, and to issue orders for the not-yet-in-production four-engine Douglas DC-4.

When Belgium fell to the Germans, Grandfather Portet made himself available to the Belgian government-in-exile in England.

He was ordered to stay where he was and to continue doing what he was doing. Which he did. But Jean-Philippe Portet announced he was going to join the Royal Canadian Air Force and become a fighter pilot.

Grandfather Portet, who believed that most of the young fighter pilots being raised in Canada would soon be dead, reasoned with him to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. So did Patricia Ellen Detwiler, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Douglas engineer who had decided to marry Jean-Philippe Portet the moment she laid eyes on him. If Jean-Philippe went off to the RCAF, God only knew when she would see him again. If ever.

Jean-Philippe Portet saw her-though not his father's-reasoning, and he was graduated from the U.S. Army Corps Flight Training School at Randolph Field, Texas, on August I, 1941, and married Patricia Ellen Detwiler the next day. Their first child was born ten months later, by which time Lieutenant Portet was flying C-46- Commandos Over the Hump in the China-Burma India Theater of Operations.

In early 1944 Captain Portet was discharged from the U.S. Army Air Corps to accept a commission in the armed forces of a friendly foreign power. The Royal Belgian Air Force commissioned him a commandant (major) and he was given command of a group (two squadrons) of C-47 aircraft in time to participate in the Normandy Invasion.

He ended the war a lieutenant colonel and afterward found immediate employment with Sabena. His wife and child remained in the Unites States until 1947 because of the conditions in Europe. They rented a small house in Burnt Mills, New Jersey, and Captain Portet got to see them three or four times a month when he was laying over between flights between Brussels and New York.

In November 1947, shortly after she had joined her husband in Brussels, Mme. Portet, nee Detwiler, was struck by a truck while crossing the Boulevard de Waterloo en route to the 11:00 A.M. service at the Eglise Americaine on the Rue Cap Crespel. She died the next afternoon without regaining consciousness.

It was decided-it was the only thing to do-that Jacques!

Jack Portet would be raised in St. Louis by his maternal grandparents, with the understanding that as soon as he was old enough, he would come to live with his father in Europe and be educated there.

In March of 1951, Jean-Philippe Portet flew to California to accept delivery of the first Lockheed 1049D Constellation in the Sabena fleet. Developed largely through the efforts of Howard Hughes, the four-engine, triple-tailed transport had a range of approximately 5000 miles at a speed of about 360 mph and was ideal for Sabena's African routes.

On the way over from Europe- for no other reason than convenience-he took a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt am Main.

When the Lufthansa DC-4 was forced by weather to remain overnight at Gander, Newfoundland, as a matter of professional courtesy he was asked to dine with the Lufthansa crew, and met Fraulein Hannelore "Hanni" Grusterberg, a Lufthansa stewardess.

No one at Sabena said anything when Captain Portet married, in August 1951, the tall blonde Hamburgerin, but the German occupation of Belgium had been brutal, and Belgians have long memories. Rocks were thrown through the windows of the Portet apartment and Hanni was once spat on while shopping.

It was arranged for Captain Portet to remove his bride from an unpleasant situation. He was taken off the Atlantic routes and assigned to the African, where he flew Lockheed's on the routes Sabena operated within Africa and between Africa and Europe.

The Portets moved into a roomy apartment on a high floor of a new building in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Their daughter, Jeanine, was born in Johannesburg in February 1953. The next month Captain Portet was offered the position of Chief Pilot of Air Congo, a joint venture then of Belgian and Congo Belge investors (including Sabena). He was offered a substantial increase in salary, transfer of his retirement and seniority credits, and a written guarantee that if things didn't work out, he could return to Sabena.

As an inducement the job offer carried with it the offer of a mortgage loan at very attractive terms. Jean-Philippe had used it to buy a large villa on three hectares overlooking the Stanley Basin of the Congo River in Leopoldville. Jacques/Jack Portet, then ten years old, first saw his new half sister in June 1953, when he flew to Leopoldville to spend the summer with his father.

Hanni Portet promptly fell in love with him, and the first serious argument she had with her husband was over his refusal to insist that the boy be allowed to live with them. It would not, he said, be fair to his grandparents, for one thing, and for another he would rather have his son grow up as an American and not as an over privileged colonialist. There would be time for his "Europification" later.

Hanni got her way the next year, though not as she would have wished. Jack's Grandmother Detwiler died suddenly. Thus it was either turn the boy over to his uncle (whom Jack despised) or his aunt (whom his father thought had the brains of a gnat) or bring him home to the Belgian Congo.

Jack finished the equivalent of elementary school in Leopoldville, attended Culver Military School in the United States .for two years, and then finished his secondary education at the lycee in Brussels from which his father had graduated. After that he had gone on to the Free University in Brussels.

One of Captain Portet's responsibilities as Chief Pilot of Air Congo was the establishment of new service. In other words, he located places in the Congo Beige which Air Congo could service profitably and saw to it that they had the necessary navigation aids and ground-service equipment, and that they were adequately staffed.

Air Congo added three light, twin-engine Beechcraft airplanes to its fleet. Although Captain Portet was careful to remain current in the long-range passenger and cargo aircraft, he spent most of his time in the air in one of the little Twin-Beeches. He took a father's natural pride when his eleven-year-old son, sitting on a pillow, could keep it. straight and level. By the time he was twelve, the boy could take it off and land it.

And then he discovered an interesting omission in the Rules of the Ministry for Air of the Belgian Government, which governed air operations in the Congo Beige. No minimum age for a pilot's license was specified, presumably because it had never occurred to anyone that a fourteen-year-old would present himself for the written and flight examination for a private pilot's license.

Jack Portet's private pilot license was his reward for a 3.6 grade average during his two years at Culver. As a legally licensed pilot, he could go on the flight manifest as pilot-in-command. And he did, whenever he went anywhere with his father in the Twin-Beech. Captain Portet was long past the point where he was concerned with building hours, especially in Twin-Beech, and no one at Air Congo was going to question his authority, or his wisdom, in letting the kid fly.

Before he was sixteen, Jack Portet earned his commercial pilot's license, with twin-engine and instrument endorsements. It was his intention to become the youngest airline pilot in the world, and he studied hard and long for the written examination, only to find out that the Belgian Airline Pilot's Rating (ATR) was governed by the International Airline Agreement, and the IOO said that you had to be twenty-one to get your ATR.

He took and passed the examination the week he graduated from college. He didn't need the rating to fly Air Simba's Curtiss aircraft, because they would not be flying passengers on a scheduled basis. But if they couldn't make a go of Air Simba, he would have to get a job elsewhere, most likely with Air Congo, and that would require the ATR.

Jack Portet went to his room, actually a three-room suite, opened the letter from the government in St. Louis, read it, and then changed into tennis clothes and walked down the wide stairs to the pool.

His father raised his eyebrows at him quizzically. Jack handed him the letter.

It said that his friends and neighbors had selected him for induction into the Armed Forces of the Unites States of America, and that he was to present himself at the Armed Forces Induction Center, St. Louis, Missouri, on Thursday, January 2, 1964, at 9:00 A.M., bringing with him such personal items as he would need for three days.

"You knew it was coming," his father said.

"Shit," Jack said. "If I had the courage, I would put mascara on my eyelashes, swish in, and kiss the doctor."

His father chuckled.

"Then the Belgians would get you," his father said. "They don't care about fairies. One way or another, you're going in uniform."

III.

(One) 277 Melody Lane Ozark, Alabama 1305 Hours 24 December 1963 "Don't argue with me, Porter," Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell said to Porter Craig, Chairman of the Board of Craig, Powell, Kenyon & Dawes, Investment Bankers. "I'm a Norwich University graduate now, and don't you forget it."

"Oh, Jesus," Porter Craig said. He stopped himself just in time from demanding what the hell being a college graduate had to do with the question of where to set up a just delivered folding table (intended for use as a bar) in the living room of the house.

Lieutenant Colonel Lowell, who was a tall, muscular, handsome man with a mustache, and Porter Craig, who was shorter, a bit overweight, and balding, were cousins. Between them they owned just about equally 84 percent of the stock in the investment banking firm. Porter Craig did the actual running of it, although for tax purposes Lowell was carried on the books as Vice Chairman of the Board. Lowell was a career Army officer.

He was now in civilian clothing: a tweed sports coat, a red cashmere sleeveless sweater, gray flannel slacks, loafers. In civilian clothing, Porter Craig often thought, Craig Lowell looked like a model in one of the ads for twenty-four-year-old Scotch whiskey in Town & Country magazine. In uniform, Porter thought, especially when he elected to wear his decorations, Craig Lowell looked like every man's dream: handsome, heroic, dashing, and just a bit wicked.

Craig Lowell had been expelled from Harvard as an eighteen year old from college. He didn't need the rating to fly Air Simba's Curtiss aircraft, because they would not be flying passengers on a scheduled basis. But if they couldn't make a go of Air Simba, he would have to get a job elsewhere, most likely with Air Congo, and that would require the ATR.