The hard pull up required to level the 737 just above the surface of the English Channel had profoundly frightened Alastair.
“Good Lord, Craig!”
“There’s one hundred! I’m level. Easy, Alastair! I’m trained to do this.”
“Yes, in a blinking fighter! Not a seven thirty-seven! I thought we were dead.”
“Altitude?”
“Back to a hundred.”
“Heading?”
“Ah… zero six zero degrees.”
“Okay… look at the GPS display and give me headings that will keep us moving just about up the center of the channel and way clear of the coast, then north up the north sea. We’ll round the shoulder of Scotland and come in from seaside to Inverness. Keep your eyes on the radar altimeter. Not an inch under a hundred feet, and, unless we get into fog, keep an eye out for any ships that might be sporting a mast over that height.”
“Oh, too right! I can do all that! Do you have any idea what you’re planning? That’s hundreds of miles trying to evade radar!”
“What? I’m stressing you out, old buddy?”
The copilot sighed and shook his head, his expression deadly serious.
“You are bloody crazy, Dayton!”
“Maybe, but while I’m losing it, we need to get Reinhart on the phone,” Craig Dayton said as he took his right hand off the throttles long enough to rub his right eye. The task of holding the Boeing precisely one hundred feet above the water – a distance less than the wingspan of the jet – had already become tedious, making him seriously consider climbing back up a few hundred feet even if they did risk being seen by air traffic radar.
“This is very dangerous, Craig!” Alastair reminded him.
“When we’re another ten miles or so, we can come up a bit.”
“There are ships with superstructures taller than this, you know.”
“But we’ve got a cloud ceiling far enough above us to see ahead, Alastair. We spotted that other boat.”
“Still steady at one hundred,” Alastair said, his hand firmly on his copilot’s control yoke, shadowing Craig’s every movement.
“You think we’ve fooled them?” Craig asked.
“Probably. For a while. Until they find no wreckage. You know this is liable to reach our respective families with devastating results?”
“I know it. I figure you should call home as soon as we get on the ground,” Craig said.
“I’ll wager even at one hundred feet we’re being tracked by at least one military radar.”
“As long as Air Traffic Control can’t see us and we’re not streaking toward a British city…” Craig said.
“… we should be all right.” Alastair finished. “I ran a quick fuel calculation, and we’re okay at this fuel consumption rate to Inverness. We’ll land with an hour’s fuel remaining.”
Lights loomed in the distance directly ahead, seeming to close on them rapidly in the gloom.
“What’s that?” Craig asked, his eyes moving constantly from the attitude display to the radar altimeter to the vertical velocity indicator and back to the ADI with an occasional glance out of the windscreen ahead.
“Probably a ship.”
“I see a lot of lights,” President Harris chimed in, startling Alastair, who’d almost forgotten they had a guest on the cockpit jumpseat. “It’s tall, fellows, whatever it is.”
“Craig, let’s climb.”
“Just a second,” he replied.
“No, dammit! Not just a second, I mean now!” Alastair barked.
“Look…”
“Craig, you’re going too far! You’re into reckless flying and I’ll have no more of it!”
“I know what I’m doing,” Craig snapped.
“No, you bloody well don’t! You’re tunneling in on a single objective. That trait kills even testosterone-soaked fighter pilots like you! This is foolhardy.”
Craig studied Alastair with a quick glance and began easing the yoke back to start a shallow climb.
“Five hundred okay?”
“For now, yes.”
“All right,” Craig said quietly.
“All right,” Alastair echoed, watching the radar altitude increase until Craig leveled at five hundred.
“Sorry,” Craig said as the lights of the ship ahead swam safely beneath their nose.
Craig looked at Alastair, noting the alarm still in his eyes.
“You still with me, man?” Craig asked.
“Barely,” was the reply.
Jay found a small bench just outside the door of the private terminal before punching in the first of several numbers. The reassuring voice of Michael Garrity answered on the third ring.
“This is Jay Reinhart again.”
“Hello! A bit early to have answers for you, Mr. Reinhart, but…” Garrity said.
“I need just one,” Jay said, interrupting. “If I bring the President’s plane into Dublin tonight, and if the opposition arrives with their warrant, how quickly could they have the warrant perfected and arrest him?”
“Tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day here in the Republic of Ireland, and no one will be working at the Four Courts. Mind you, we don’t get as carried away as you Americans do celebrating, but St. Patrick’s Day is a grand excuse for an official holiday. So, unless your President commits an act heinous enough to attract the Garda’s attention, I’d say he’s a free man until the following day, Thursday. Certainly no one in the judiciary’s going to pay any attention until then.
“Really?”
“It’s the district court that would handle such an Interpol warrant, Mr. Reinhart, and Scotland Yard couldn’t ferret out one of our district judges on a national holiday. Especially not St. Paddy’s Day. They go in hiding, I’m all but convinced.”
“So… we could safely get the President a hotel room?”
“I don’t see why not. But wouldn’t he prefer to stay at your American Ambassador’s residence here? It’s really quite large, and I know they have quarters fit for a U.S. president.”
“No,” Jay said. “Better to have no official involvement, I think. Besides, that could be misinterpreted as an attempt at asylum and create a diplomatic mess.”
“Very well, a hotel it shall be. Do you have a credit card number I can use?”
“Ah… yes.” Jay struggled to pull out his American Express and read the number and expiration date.
“Very good, Mr. Reinhart. I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll call you back, then,” Jay said. “I’m going to change the plan.”
He rang off and dialed the 737’s satellite phone, relieved to get a rapid answer. “Captain Dayton? Good job! Whatever you did out there fooled everyone. Campbell and Byer think you’ve crashed.”
“This is the copilot, Mr. Reinhart… and as the old saw goes, rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
“They certainly have,” Jay said. “This buys us time, but I’ve got a different plan.”
Jay could hear deep concern and tension on the other end. “Go ahead.”
“First, where are you?”
“Heading up the north sea at barely five hundred feet in an insane attempt to sneak into Scotland.”
“We need to change the destination.”
Alastair looked over at Craig, then back over his shoulder at John Harris, and repeated Jay’s words, adding: “And where would you like us to go now, Mr. Reinhart?”
“Dublin, Ireland. Can you make it?”
“Certainly we can, but how we get there is the question.”
Craig turned to Alastair, mouthing the word, “Where?”
“Now he wants us in Dublin,” Alastair replied, turning back to the receiver. “Look, Mr. Reinhart, Dublin’s a big, controlled airport. We can’t sneak in there. A little airport like Inverness, Scotland, doesn’t have a control tower to worry with us, but Dublin’s impossible. We’d be as subtle as a battleship in a bathtub.”
“I don’t really care how you do it, as long as you’re safe,” Jay said. “The fiction that you’ve crashed was to give you time to get to Scotland and refuel to go on to Iceland or Canada before they could show up with the arrest warrant. But that’s no good now. We can’t have President Harris land anywhere in Great Britain.”