TWO AND A HALF HOURS AFTER taking off from Kinshasa, we land in Abuja, Nigeria. After refueling—Roman pays with 31 $100 bills—we park the plane next to a brand-new Nigerian air force 737. A red carpet leads our group to a building filled with more red carpet, Oriental rugs, and clusters of cushy leather chairs. The minister and the ambassador sit in one group, we sit in another, and we wait. And wait. We drink tea out of bone china embossed with the presidential crest; we ogle the horseless presidential horse guard, dressed in knee-high black leather boots, red tunics with brass buttons, and white pith helmets topped with spear points.

Africa is about waiting, and Roman can sit like this for days, barely moving, barely speaking, an improbable figure in size 54 Levi's and white Nike sneakers. "Once I flew to Algiers for a ten-minute meeting and we waited for a week," he says, shrugging his massive shoulders.

But Watson is a talker, filling the dead air with tales of Stanley and Livingstone, Congo's beauty in colonial days, and the politics of dictators and minerals. "Mobutu in Congo, Pinochet in Chile," Watson says, leaning in close, the sound of conspiracy in his whisper. "Why'd the U.S. support them for so long? Uranium. It's right at the surface in both places. The minute they found uranium in Australia, Mobutu and Pinochet were gone. In the eighties, the Soviets were taking over Angola, and I made ten flights between Congo and Brussels in a DC-8 carrying 40 tons of uranium in kegs."

Late in the afternoon a cadre of generals arrive. We stand. In sweeps Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, decked out in flowing green robes and a little green Kewpie hat. He gives us a wave and a thousand-watt smile, shakes hands with the minister; the Africans disappear into an adjoining room. Ten minutes later it's over. Obasanjo glides down the red carpet into his jet and we pile into cars, racing down Bill Clinton Drive toward downtown Abuja.

"Nigeria is English, right?" says Roman, lighting a cigarette. "Maybe they've got bacon here. You can't get good bacon in Kinshasa."

"And lamb," says Watson, sucking on a cigar.

Compared with Kinshasa, Abuja looks like Paris. The Hilton is polished and vast. The lobby is packed. There are American oilmen in khakis and polos, Nigerians in diaphanous robes, Arabs in caftans. The minister needs to be in a suite, his guards need to be next door, and each of us needs a room. But the hotel is full, and one of the guards, a small, angular fellow with a gold police badge on his belt and an automatic on his hip, can't speak English. Roman—massive, gruff, sweating—bends down, props his belly on the desk, leans in, and turns on his mysterious charm. Suddenly he's a harmless boy, his little hands doing an innocent dance. The woman behind the desk is batting her eyes, laughing, flirting back. And then—poof!—the rooms are found. The guard counts out 35 hundreds from a two-inch-thick wad and we're set.

The next morning, when Roman tries to fire up the Sabreliner, it's dead. The starter on one of the engines is broken. In a flurry of phone calls he locates a spare in Kinshasa and finds a jet in Lagos. In all, he's told, it will cost $30,000 to have the jet come pick up the minister, fly him to Kinshasa, pick up the part, and take it to Lagos, where it can ship commercial to Abuja.

We pace, we drink tea, the minister frets, Roman works the phone, and late that afternoon the jet arrives. The bodyguard reaches for his banded stacks of hundreds, forks over two bricks of $10,000 each, the minister flies away, and we head back to the odd netherworld of the Abuja Hilton. We wait two more days, eating Mongolian barbecue and drinking in the bar as a Little Richard look-alike shimmies onstage. I hear Roman tell someone he's "the last warrior in Africa," and we make one foray into the city—to buy eight pounds of bacon and two large legs of lamb.

By the time we roar out of Abuja, it's three in the afternoon on day four. Soon we're at 39,000 feet and the continent unfolds like a carpet of green cut with shimmering blue rivers. This business of flying in your own plane in Africa is addictive. We're suddenly unstuck from the stickiest place on earth. As Roman is fond of saying, "What's not to like?"