“Jay hates flying. He’d take Amtrak to London if they served the market.”
“I got that impression.”
“Where are General Glueck and his folks?”
“Inside, sir. Captain Swanson’s having a dinner catered for them in the terminal, and sending food out to us, too.”
“Did you see what those fellows did, Sherry?”
She nodded. “I did. I didn’t hear everything that went on…”
“I mean, you talk about something to make you humble, that level of…of…”
“Honor?”
“Just love of country, Sherry. General Glueck talked all of them into turning down that charter back to Rome.”
“Sir, they’re having fun with this in a manner of speaking. I imagine it’s been a long time since some of them have felt really needed.”
He nodded slowly. “Good insight. That’s something I have to consider. I was concerned about their wanting to come with us.”
Sherry looked startled. “Wait a minute. They’re coming with us?”
“Their next stop was Rome, but, according to Glueck, the whole group… including their tour director, Annie Ford… want to stay with us. They even had their baggage put back on the plane when the others left. You… have a problem with that?”
She smiled. “Your call, sir, but I would rethink that. Once we leave here, I really don’t think they can help.”
“Well, as far as I’m concerned, I’m honored to have them along if they want to go, and if it makes sense. Yeah, I’ll reconsider. What I do have a problem with is why we need to wait here until tomorrow afternoon.”
“Jay Reinhart’s insisting he needs to get to London ahead of us and make arrangements.”
“But what arrangements?” the President asked. “Campbell will have already presented the warrant to a judge somewhere in London. There’s almost no question they’ll be waiting wherever we touch down.”
She shook her head. “He just wants to get there first, and that’s eleven hours from now.”
“How long for us to fly to London?” he asked.
“An hour and a half, about,” she replied. “He said he expects we should take off about four P.M. tomorrow. That will give him most of the day to get things arranged.”
“To surrender to the British authorities?”
“That’s… what he’s thinking.”
“It’s always possible,” John Harris began, tapping his fingers on the side of his face, “that the British Foreign Office may decide to find a way to slow Stuart down just long enough for us to gas up and go.”
“Yes, sir, but where do we go?” Sherry asked, easing into the seat next to him. “Captain Dayton tells me we can make Iceland or maybe Canada, but we can’t make it all the way home from London without refueling, because this model seven thirty-seven doesn’t have long-range fuel tanks. Campbell would surely know that. One of his henchmen will be waiting in Iceland too, and London’s probably a far better place to battle this.”
“Words of wisdom, Sherry,” he said, falling silent for a few moments. “Unless Jay has some fantastic brainstorm to pluck us out of here, London it is.”
“The British PM would never send you to Lima, right?”
“I knew Maggie Thatcher, John Major, and even Tony Blair. I don’t know the current occupant. So I can’t be sure. All we can depend on is that the fight would take at least as long as Pinochet’s battle, which was more than a year. Hell, I’ll probably turn as senile as Pinochet before they get to that point.”
David Carmichael stood in the doorway of the Signature Flight Service private terminal and watched a United Airlines 777 begin its takeoff roll on runway 17R. It accelerated slowly, pulled by two giant engines straining against the considerable weight of a planeload of passengers and baggage and a fuel load sufficient to power them through the 4,700 nautical miles separating Denver and London.
He glanced at his little Cessna 172, safely chocked in front of the private terminal, the ice now gone from its wings and windshield. He thought of the incredible difference in weight between the two metallic birds. The one approaching liftoff would leave the ground at a hundred fifty knots, weighing nearly three quarters of a million pounds. The 172 could barely hit a hundred fifty knots in cruise flight or lift more than twelve hundred pounds.
The triple seven’s nose rose majestically, the bulk of the aircraft lifting effortlessly into the air and almost immediately disappearing into the fog as the muted sound of the engines rolled over him.
He knew it was Professor Reinhart’s flight. He’d checked and monitored the tower’s takeoff clearance on his portable aviation scanner once his rubber legs had stopped shaking long enough to walk.
David turned and reentered the lounge.
I need another few minutes to wind down, he told himself. Then he’d ask for a ride to the nearby hotel he’d called and get a much needed night of sleep. Tomorrow he’d rent a car to get back to Laramie, unless the sky was crystal clear.
He looked back at his bird, feeling a strong determination to ferret out all he’d done wrong and make certain it never happened again.
And he would undoubtedly hear from the FAA, if they weren’t already on their way to talk to him.
Jay Reinhart turned off his computer and ended the modem connection with the seat phone.
Thank God for modern communications and computers and databases, he thought. A little more than two hours of paging through the Pinochet decisions in Britain and studying British civil procedure, and the Treaty on Torture itself had led to a quick and dirty conclusion: Britain was the right venue.
Jay took a deep breath and leaned back in his seat, feeling relaxed at having made that decision. He glanced out the window to his right and suddenly the fact they were in flight and he wasn’t afraid in the least became a jolting realization.
The departure from Denver had triggered a beginning of the usual gut-wrenching fears as they taxied to the end of the runway, but amazingly enough, his apprehension had evaporated on the takeoff roll. The contrasts between the gentle motions of the flying living room he was occupying and what had occurred a short while before in David Carmichael’s tiny Cessna had tamed the terror, reducing it to a numbed acceptance, a psychological acquiescence and knowledge that nothing about being airborne could ever scare him quite as profoundly again, especially in the benign environment of a luxury jetliner.
Amazing! he thought. All these years all I needed to cure my fear of flying was a near-death experience in a single-engine kite.
He looked around the plush first-class cabin of the Boeing 777, taking in the alluring feminine form of a young flight attendant handing a drink to an aging British rock star he’d recognized two rows ahead.
But he had work to do and calls to make. He tore his concentration away from an instantaneous daydream involving the raven-haired flight attendant and focused instead on the first call he was about to make.
I say it here and it happens there! he thought to himself, any feeling of power overwhelmed by the sense of urgency and responsibility and risk of getting it wrong. He was, after all, up against perhaps the smartest international lawyer on the planet, a man who’d lived and breathed little else besides international law and treaty law for the past thirty years.
Stuart Campbell’s confident, smiling face swam into his mind’s eye, sending a jolt of adrenaline through his bloodstream. The close encounter with the fog-shrouded surface of northeastern Colorado had numbed his fears somewhat, but the thought of Campbell honed the sharp edge of his apprehension once again. Was London a naive choice? Worse, was it a stupid choice, playing right into Campbell’s plans?