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Page 55.
 “How long?” he asked, sitting casually in the co-pilot seat, rubbing salve on his still angry looking ankles. He felt rested, though spiritually exhausted from the struggles in his dreams. He stepped forward amid the clamor of the engines and the rattling of metal surfaces. A mile below, Tim saw tawny desert stretching from horizon to horizon. The dawn sky was aflame with colors, and Tim was glad to be escaping from the hell in which he’d spent the past two weeks. “How much longer?”
“About twenty hours,” Walther said. He wore a headset and looked relaxed and comfortable at the controls of the plane. His eyes were dark with shadows, but other than that he betrayed no sign of his loss yesterday. “We make a stopover for fuel and to trade goods at Lomé, Togo. Without Willi, I don’t have a second pilot, so I have to sleep. Then we travel on from there one more stop in Douala, French Cameroon, and then the last leg directly to the Belgian Congo.”
“Will you carry on alone?”
Walther shrugged. “What choice do I have? I cannot go back to Germany. You want to fly this Afrika route with me?”
Tim shook his head. “Thanks, but I need to connect with an American Embassy as soon as possible.”
“You stay with me until Leopoldville, is my advice. Togo might be tricky. Next door are Ghana on the left, and Nigeria on the right, both British, but we don’t go there.”
“You can’t stop in Accra?” Tim asked looking at the map.
“Sticky for me,” Walther said. “Nazi plane. You understand.”
“Ah yes” Tim said. “Why can’t things be simple here?”
“They just were for poor Willi,” Walther said.
Tim nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” Walther said. He pointed down at a smallish city of mud buildings baking in the desert. “Timbuktu,” he said. “Famous center of Islamic learning. Terminus of caravans from all Africa.”
Tim let his gaze linger on the fabled city until it had passed beyond the horizon. Then he went back to sack out again in the Wehrmacht ambulance stretcher, for lack of anything else to do. The desert heat reached even this high, and made his eyes sore and dry with a sandy wind that smelled almost of mummy dust. But he was a free man.
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