I did it! I’m doing it! I’m really scouting!
ATLS readings widened the grin on Margo’s face. “Wow!” The first stars twinkling in the darkening sky allowed her to pinpoint their location. At thirty-two degrees east longitude and twenty-six degrees south latitude, Margo was standing on the southeastern coast of Mozambique in the year A.D. 1542.
The descending African night was soft, the breeze stiff from offshore. They were very near the coast. Margo easily identified a broad stretch of water nearby from geographical records: Delagoa Bay. Around the curving bay from their position huddled a tiny settlement of ramshackle board houses and a wooden fortress, ail surrounded by a wooden wall. Not a single light burned in the settlement Margo grinned. Like thieves in the night…
She signaled her two assistants to follow, moving down the curve of the bay until they were out of sight of the primitive little town of Lourengo Marques. Then they unpacked their load and got busy. Margo took charge of the Floating Wing. It was the largest commercially available, a high-tech balloon of transparent, gas-tight Filmar, shaped like a pennant flag laid flat Margo hadn’t been able to bring enough helium to inflate it, but she’d studied how to crack hydrogen from water and discovered it was dead easy. She set up the portable generator to power the equipment and got busy.
While she worked on the balloon, her two assistants worked on the gondola. She wasn’t sure she approved of Goldie’s choices for these two. The big Afrikaner was all right, she supposed, although he was pushing fifty-six, but she was worried about that damned Welshman. He’d tried to disembowel Margo a few weeks ago, mistaking her for Joan of Arc. Now he worked quietly under the Afrikaner’s directions, which consisted mostly of hand signals punctuated by grunts and the occasional word in English. Kynan Rhys Gower had learned a few words of English, thank God, since his arrival from Orleans, but his temperament hadn’t improved all that much from a month working in the garbage pits while the ribs Kit had broken healed up.