IF ROMAN HAD CONFINED himself to flying and gone home after he'd made his money, he could be sitting on a boat in the Caribbean with a cold beer, millions in the bank, and a bunch of good yarns to spin. But he wanted more. So when things settled down (more or less), Roman returned to his roots—the construction business. With his family building roads in the States, Roman thought, why not build some in Congo?

It's dawn when we head to the airport for a one-hour commercial flight to a place called Kikwit to see his biggest project. The moment we land—piling into a four-wheel-drive pickup and heading out—it all becomes clear. Building roads is nothing like flying. To fly is to be untethered, a privateer, an adventurer. To build roads is to be stuck.

We're into the bush in minutes, weaving around potholes and ditches and bicyclists and women carrying loads of charcoal and branches on their heads, into a world of sticks and mud and trees. The pavement ends and we slow to a crawl. The driver is grinding the gears, inching around holes, and Roman is growing apoplectic.

"Vite! Vite!" he yells. "Fucking monkey—he can't drive. Stop. Arrêtes. Pull over, you idiot." He kicks the driver into the backseat and takes over, roaring through the mud and dirt.

For this project, which is funded by the Congolese government and the World Bank to the tune of $21 million, Roman is building 150 miles of road and four bridges, the largest 1,200 feet long. He imported 150 pieces of heavy machinery that took six months to bring in by river and road. Now it's on the verge of falling apart, of spinning out of control, all for a road that some bureaucrat somewhere imagined would transform a country. Every one of Roman's 25 GM trucks has been destroyed by brutal roads and careless driving. He's using 75,000 gallons of fuel a month, and it takes 40 days to get it to the job site ... if it gets there at all.

"Can you imagine what that does to your cash flow?" he says. He erected a satellite dish at the camp, but it was ruined by lightning. His workers are siphoning off the hydraulic fluid and selling it as diesel; it rains constantly, a downpour that turns everything to gray peanut butter.

After three hours we reach the road he's been building, and it's worse than the one we were just on, nothing but canyons of ruts. We pass villages containing a handful of mud huts, an inscrutable world that makes Roman seem like a speck of dust. "The trucks are ten-ton trucks carrying 30 tons, and they destroy the road the day after we scrape 'em," he says. We inch and bump and then race along wildly where the road permits. People leap out of the way; Roman narrowly misses goats and dogs and children but aims for the chickens.

"Got that fucker," he yells as we hear a momentary thump. "No one builds roads in the middle of nowhere anymore. Man's work. People come out here and suddenly they're working for the Peace Corps or something. But I'm gonna scare 'em today. We gotta get this fucker done or I'm gonna run out of cash."

After eight hours we reach the head of the project, where his equipment has plowed a red-earth line through thick green bush. He's almost Kurtzian now, being driven mad by the place, caught in its web. "We're a thousand goddamned miles from anywhere, chief," he says, "and there ain't no Wal-Mart." In the cockpit of his airplane, Roman is necessary—only he can fly it. Out here he's subject to a thousand African vagaries that he can't control, and the frustration is driving him nuts.

He slides to a stop by a huge Caterpillar shovel that's silent. "Quel problem?" he shouts to a terrified Congolese driver. "Quel problem?" The driver's eyes are wide with fear; he tries to explain. Roman cuts him off. "Get in that fucking machine!" he screams. "Now. Start it up. Now."

The guy climbs in and tries to move the shovel. "Fuck, the seal is broken," Roman says. "That's brand-new. You're fired. Back to Kinshasa for you." Then he jumps in the car and careens away to the mission station where his camp is based to hunker down with his foreman.