“But they are after you?” He half turned in the seat. “Those men?”
“They are,” Chavez said. “Eyes on the road, Deddy.”
“Okay,” the pilot said. “But to be honest, I think you may have killed us all. I am much more frightened of the man who owns what you are sitting on than I am of you.”
Adara peered out the back window, and then stooped in the aisle to duck-walk back to Chavez between the plastic and duct-taped bales. She leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Anytime now,” she said. “The guys with guns are coming back.”
Chavez gestured down the taxiway with the Smith & Wesson. “Get us in the air. No headsets. Keep the radio on speaker so I can hear.”
The pilot had already filed a flight plan, and the Cheyenne received rapid clearance to taxi the length of the single runway. They took off to the south, heavy with drugs, wallowing into the humid air. Climbing into the wind, the pilot followed Departure’s instructions and banked to the east. The lights of the runway and the island of Sulawesi fell away quickly, giving way to the blackness. Chavez felt the disconcerting clunk under his feet as the landing gear folded into place.
The copilot, a rumpled young man with longish, unevenly cut hair over the collar of his white uniform shirt, began to chuckle.
Chavez nudged the back of the right seat. “Something funny I don’t know about?”
The pilot shot a glance at his copilot and rattled off something in Bahasa Indonesian.
“Speak English!” Chavez gave the pilot’s headrest another smack.
“I am sorry.” Deddy craned his neck around to look over his shoulder at Chavez, as if he wanted to spare the copilot what he was about to say. “Men like you and me, we have been doing dangerous things like this for a while. My copilot is new. He laughs when he gets nervous. That is all. He took this job to feed his family. He did not even know what we were flying tonight.”
“Nice story,” Chavez said. “But a little hard to believe.”
The copilot was young, perhaps in his late twenties. Chin quivering like he might burst into tears at any moment, he maintained a white-knuckle grip on the yoke — though the autopilot was flying the airplane.
The pilot shrugged. “Believe it, don’t believe it. Neither makes it any less true. I only hope to calm his nerves. I told him that you had no reason to harm us, as long as we fly you to where you want to go.”
“That is true,” Chavez said.
Halfway between the cockpit and the door, Adara leaned over the plastic bales. She pressed her face against the side window to get a better look at anyone behind them. They had no headsets and the drone of the Pratt & Whitney engines forced her to shout.
“They’re not behind us.”
“They will be soon enough,” the copilot said, chuckling again, then catching himself and biting his bottom lip.
“My friend is right,” the pilot said. “Those men, they would not want to cause problems with authorities at the airport, not with the cargo we have on board. But there is another pilot in the group. I do not know if you noticed, but there was a fat little business jet parked on the tarmac beside us.”
“A Hawker,” Chavez said, not liking where this was headed. “I saw it.”
“That is right.” The pilot nodded, his eyes gazed beyond his instruments at the darkness ahead. “A Hawker 800 has a range of almost three thousand miles and a top speed of over five hundred miles per hour. Even at cruise speed it can outpace this Cheyenne by a hundred knots — and that’s if we weren’t loaded down with cargo. What’s more, it can fly almost as slow as we can, which will make it very difficult to evade.” The pilot leaned into the aisle between the two cockpit seats so he could make eye contact with Adara. “If you keep watching long enough, Habib will be there.”
The copilot’s face twitched. He chuckled, and then put a knuckle to his teeth.
Chavez gave the instruments a quick scan. They were flying almost due east at ten thousand feet above the ocean surface. Altitude above you was useless in an emergency, but Chavez wanted to keep them relatively low. The Cheyenne’s cabin was pressurized to around eight thousand feet, so a sudden loss in pressure at ten thousand would not pose a problem. If they went too high, the pilots might be tempted to reduce cabin pressure and oxygen to try and regain control of the aircraft. He snapped his fingers next to the pilot’s ears. “Give me those charts.”
The pilot complied, grabbing a stack of folded paper aeronautical maps from the upholstered pocket next to his left knee. Chavez passed them back to Adara. “You mind finding us a safe place to land?”
Adara gave him a thumbs-up. Chavez still found himself startled when he turned and saw her with dark hair instead of blond.
“On it,” she said.
“Pass me the mic,” Chavez said, snapping his fingers again.
The pilot did as he was told. “We must land soon,” he said. “The Hawker is probably already in the air. Habib is on his way. He knows people in the tower who will give him our position on radar.”
“Now set the frequency to Guard,” Chavez said. Guard was 243.0 MHz, an emergency frequency that was monitored by military aircraft.
Deddy glanced over his shoulder. “I tell you, Habib will find us. He will force us down and he will shoot you both. After that, he will kill me and my friend because we allowed you to steal this airplane.”
The copilot began to giggle uncontrollably.
“Nobody’s going to die today,” Chavez said, a little too grimly to believe. “Well, maybe this Habib guy, if he’s not careful.”
47
The flight from the South Lawn to Andrews Air Force Base on the VH-3D Sea King — designated Marine One when the President was on board — took just over six minutes, depending on the route taken. Three identical helicopters switched positions constantly along the way in an aerial shell game meant to confuse any would-be attackers on the ground. Each bird was equipped with an impressive and highly classified array of protective measures — not the least of which were a couple of Noble Eagle F-16 fighters patrolling the D.C. area high overhead. The many sophisticated weapons systems used to protect him had embarrassed Ryan at first, until he came to grips with the fact that the Secret Service, the Capitol Police, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and all the rest were protecting not just him as a man but the institution of the presidency.
Not one to waste precious minutes, Ryan was on the phone for the entire flight, talking to the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. He guarded his words at first, his mind in overdrive, considering the possible outcomes of his words. A president had to be extremely careful about what he said or it would be construed to mean something totally different than what he’d planned. For instance, Ryan had wanted to ask this crew chief a question about Sergeant Scott, the crew chief who he saw most often. He knew Scott had already shipped out for Jakarta with the presidential-lift package of HMX-1, and asking one crew chief about another could easily be misinterpreted as “Hey, where’s the guy I like?” So Ryan had saluted and kept his mouth shut, saving his question for Sergeant Scott when next they met beside the White Top in Jakarta.
That was, however, about the limit of Jack Ryan’s patience. He could feel his temperature rising as he discussed Father West’s conditions of confinement with Ambassador Cowley. The ambassador assured Jack that he had an appointment to see Father West once the transfer to Nusa Kambangan was complete. Citing security reasons, the Indonesian authorities advised that prisoners could have no visitors while in transit.
Ryan barely suppressed the urge to curse. Ambassador Cowley was a gentle soul, bred for diplomacy, not the frontal assault Ryan craved at the moment. It was evident in the ambassador’s voice that he felt he was living in a house of cards. He went so far as to ask if Ryan had something “grand” planned upon arrival.