It was a perfect day for flying; the sky was blue and cloudless from horizon to horizon, a welcome change from the overcast weather of the previous night. The sea beneath us was like an unruffled blue carpet.
Helga took me forward to the cockpit to meet the pilot, Captain Dirk Aubrey, and the copilot, Douglas Roberts. Aubrey was a tall, heavyset fellow with a pencil-slim black moustache. Roberts was a slim younger man — probably in his early twenties — with light-colored hair and a freckled moon face.
“She’s right on course,” Aubrey said, nodding toward the instrument panel, “and the weathers clear straight into Orly, where we’ll refuel.”
For the next several hours, Helga and I amused ourselves with a movie that she showed by simply pressing a couple of buttons and later, with a game of backgammon. Helga seemed much more subdued than she’d been the evening before, but she was still good company, and the time passed swiftly.
We must have been less than fifty miles off the coast of France when, without warning, the plane abruptly plunged with its nose down toward the sea. Helga screamed. Everything in the cabin that wasn’t nailed down — including Helga and me— skidded over the canted floor of the cabin and slammed hard against the closed door of the cockpit.
Helga was still screaming while I tried to twist around on my side to push the door of the cockpit open. It was locked. I yanked out Wilhelmina, my Luger, from my shoulder holster and blasted the lock off. The door swung open, exposing the cockpit that was now below me.
As I looked into the cockpit, I could see that Captain Aubrey was still at the controls, but his posture appeared to be frozen. Copilot Roberts was sprawled on the floor, either dead or unconscious. The plane was still plummeting toward the ocean.
I yelled at Aubrey, who turned his head briefly to look up at me. Then he turned back to the controls, both hands clenching the wheel. Looking at his face, I recognized the same blank expression I had observed on the face of the AXE agent when he had tried to kill me in Helga’s apartment. His eyes were glazed as if he were hypnotized or drugged.
Until that moment, I had been hanging onto the side of the cockpit door with my fingers. Now I released my grip and came hurtling forward into the cockpit. I reached for the pilot at the controls. Somehow I managed to hook one arm around his neck and pry him partially loose from the wheel, but he still clung stubbornly to the controls until I yanked at him with all of my strength and threw him backward into the rear cabin.
The plane continued its drop toward the sea.
I fell into the pilots seat and pulled back hard on the wheel. A great shudder ran through the jet from nose to tail, but then slowly the nose began to come up. I continued pulling back on die wheel, straining every muscle in my body in my effort to defeat the pull of gravity. Finally, the plane leveled off — only a few feet from the Atlantic. It was lucky I’d put in enough flying time in jets to be able to. handle that plane, but it had still been a near catastrophe.
During the next few minutes I was busy checking the instruments while the jet skimmed evenly along the surface of the ocean. Everything seemed to be working, so I shoved the wheel forward, and we began to climb again. Then Helga screamed my name from the rear cabin.
I turned just in time to see Aubrey coming at me with a wrench. While I steadied the wheel with one hand, I whipped out Wilhelmina again with the other and shot him in the right shoulder. He staggered backwards and fell, letting the wrench slip from his numb fingers. As I tried to hold the jet in a climb, I glanced back at the pilot. He had pulled himself to his feet again, but was reeling back into the rear cabin. I could see Helga in the background, huddled up in a corner of the cabin. I still held Wilhelmina in my hand, but I didn’t want to shoot again unless Aubrey made a move toward either Helga or me.
He didn’t. Instead, he staggered drunkenly to-ward the cabin door, which he managed to shove open despite the tremendous pressure on it. There was no way to stop him except to shoot — and if I missed, I would endanger the whole plane. Aubrey hung briefly in the open doorway and then tumbled out head first. I swung the plane up and around so that the door slammed shut. Beneath the starboard wing, I could see Aubrey’s body falling almost in slow motion, his arms and legs spread apart, until he hit the water and disappeared beneath the choppy surface.
Helga joined me in die cockpit while I focused my attention on flying the jet. She tried to revive Roberts, the copilot, who was still lying unconscious on the floor. It took her a long time to bring him around, but eventually he mumbled, sat up groggily, and looked around. He was shaking his head. “What happened? What’s going on?”
His behavior confirmed my suspicion that he had been drugged. When he had recovered enough to speak coherently, he told me that the last thing he remembered was drinking a cup of coffee that Aubrey had handed to him. He was still too dazed to ask about the missing captain, so I didn’t tell him anything about Aubrey’s fate. I would concoct some kind of explanation later.
By that time, I had radioed the control tower at Orly, which we were now approaching, and we had been cleared for landing. A little later we touched down, and I brought the jet to a standstill. T couldn’t say I wasn’t relieved.
As we left the plane, Helga looked at me with puzzlement in her eyes. “What happened back there?”
I shook my head. “Hard to say. Looks like your captain froze to the controls and went berserk with fear when the plane started to fall. He was probably half-mad when he attacked me and then jumped out. Roberts, die copilot, must have passed out from the pull of gravity. Those things aren’t uncommon in flying. But let me do the talking to the authorities so we don’t get caught up in a lot of red tape.”
There was no way to tell if she had really accepted my explanation, but she didn’t press me further.
When “we reached the airport terminal building — accompanied by Roberts, who was still shaky on his feet — I located the head of Orly’s security police and asked him to send me an AXE agent, a fellow I knew as Dummlier, and the local chief of Interpol. When both men arrived, I told them exactly what had happened, indicating that I suspected the incident was tied in with my assignment. I stressed that it was urgent for Helga and me to continue to Monte Carlo immediately.
“Let me take care of this,” the man from Interpol said when I had finished. “There will be no trouble. Perhaps your associate here,” he turned to Dummlier, “can locate a trustworthy pilot and copilot to fly you on to your destination.”
Dummlier nodded, and the meeting ended. In less than an hour Helga and I were on our way to Nice, the closest landing field to Monte Carlo. We had two Americans — probably part of the French AXE staff or the CIA-to pilot the jet. Dummlier had made arrangements to return Roberts to the States, and Helga herself had reassured him that he would continue in her employ and would be paid while he was recuperating from his unfortunate experience. As far as I could determine, my explanation — that Roberts had suffered a blackout — had been accepted by both Helga and the authorities.
The flight to Nice was without incident. We landed in late afternoon, and Helga and I took a limousine to the Hotel de Paris, near the casino in Monte Carlo. Helga had arranged to have the limousine waiting to meet our plane and had reserved adjoining suites at the hotel as well. We were lucky that Helga was well known; we were guaranteed rooms even though Monte Carlo was packed with curious tourists from all over the world. The streets were swarming with sightseers, giving the town an intoxicating carnival air, and there wasn’t an empty hotel room to be had.