A female voice somewhere behind him failed to register at first, but its familiarity persisted at the margins of his memory until he turned to see the smiling face of Janice Johnson, her shoulder-length black hair pulled into a small pony tail riding behind her Pangia uniform hat.
“Hey there, fellow misfit,” she said, giving voice to their shared outlier reputation: she for simply flying while female, he for having, as she teased him, more money than God.
Dan smiled in return as unbidden memories of their brief dating history flashed like a slightly dated movie trailer through his mind—a recent anthology that included a hedonistic week in Maui which had been as glorious for the companionship and intellectual ferment as it had been for the rather unbridled sex.
“Janice! Did you just fly this bird in?”
“Yep. And I hear you’ve been drafted to fly her back with our resident self-appointed diety. Captain Skygod.”
“Captain who?”
“Breem. Bill Breem. God’s gift to aviation. A legend in his own mind.”
“Oh! I thought I was flying with Jerry Tollefson.”
“Tollefson is your captain. You guys are the relief crew, but el supremo Breem is the primary captain.”
“He’s that bad?”
“To start with… spoiler alert… he and Jerry Tollefson hate each other. I mean, frothing at the mouth homicidal hate!”
“The old North Star Airlines versus Pangia Airways rivalry again?”
“No, no, Danny. Worse. Breem was a longtime captain with Stratos Air. He lost his 747 captaincy when Stratos Air was bought by Pangia, before Pangia bought us at North Star. Breem’s been madder than hell about everything ever since.”
“Is Breem still a training captain?”
“Oh, God, no! Not for years,” Janice replied. “But he still looks down his nose at anyone who wasn’t hired by the original Stratos Air, and he complains about North Star captains constantly. Breem’s pushing sixty-three now, and we’re all counting the days till he’s gone.”
“Sounds like a wonderful evening.”
“Good luck, dude,” she said with a smile as she leaned in and brushed his cheek with a kiss. “Miss you!”
“Why did we stop dating, by the way?” Dan asked, smiling in return“Because we could never get together on the same continent,” she said, waving as she pivoted with her bags and headed for the exit.
Dan stood for a few moments in thought, amazed at the ridiculousness of the constant internecine warfare among angry pilots from the different airlines that had been cobbled together to form Pangia.
It was less of a war within the flight attendant ranks, but there were bruised feelings, lost seniority, and simmering upsets there as well—such as the famous thirty-year war between Pangia’s two most senior flight attendants stemming from a stolen boyfriend in the late seventies. Now at ages seventy-six and seventy-eight respectively, the two were the oldest flight attendants still flying, but neither would retire before the other.
A Pangia captain was approaching the gate with a fistful of papers, his eyes on the paperwork as he passed by. Mid-thirties, Dan judged, and with a squarish, friendly face framed by sandy hair that he remembered all too well. Jerry Tollefson hadn’t noticed him yet, but before Dan could snag his attention, another captain in full four-stripe regalia strode into Tollefson’s face without offering his hand.
“So you’re my relief crew tonight.”
“If you’re flying Flight 10, Bill, that would be correct,” Tollefson replied, his voice cautious and all but icy.
“I thought you were still on your initial operating experience trip. What’d you do, son, scare off the check pilot?” Breem chuckled.
“Actually, I think what did the trick was finding out you were coming along,” Jerry replied, his eyes boring into Breem, who wasn’t about to flinch.
“Well, they warned me a boy captain from North Slope was playing relief crew.”
“North STAR, Bill,” Tollefson corrected, rolling his eyes. “Our airline was quite profitable and had a name.”
“Oh, sorry. It’s hard to remember the name of the different little operations we’ve bought over the years. No disrespect intended.”
“Right, like calling me ‘boy captain?’”
Bill Breem responded with a snort. “Well, how old are you, Jerry?”
“Thirty-five.”
“I rest my case. You’ve done damn well getting to four stripes in a major international airline by age thirty-five. I’ve just been around a lot longer and so, sometimes, I’ll admit, it seems like I’m surrounded by boy wonders. I apologize if the term offended you.”
“It did, but I accept your apology.”
“Good. See you aboard.”
CHAPTER THREE
Gate B5, Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv, Israel (4:40 p.m. local / 1540 Zulu)
Two black sedans with heavily tinted windows slid to a stop in a scene so familiar that few of the ramp workers took anything but passing notice. Two men with dark glasses, dead serious expressions, and equally serious automatic weaponry emerged from the lead car and in a fluid and practiced routine, scanned the surrounding tarmac for threats. Satisfied, the two moved to the second vehicle and opened the rear door, ushering a short, bald, older man and a stunning younger woman to the jetway stairs. In less than two minutes, the lead driver was back behind the wheel, escorting the second car from the airport and disappearing into the busy streets of Tel Aviv, their presence on the ramp nothing more than a whispered myth.
The rapid entrance of Moishe Lavi and the woman to the forward-most seats in the unoccupied first class cabin of Pangia Flight 10 had been witnessed by no one but the flight attendants. Not even the pilots had been briefed that a former prime minister of Israel was joining them, and the lead flight attendant had been warned to collect all her crew’s cell phones until after takeoff, assuring that no one who noticed could report Lavi’s presence.
Still grieving the loss of the trappings of great power, Moishe Lavi settled uncomfortably into the elaborate sleeper seat, motioning immediately for his companion to lean close and take a new round of notes in the non-stop soliloquy of action items and ideas he’d been firing at her since arising at 5:00 a.m. Instead of complying, Ashira Dyan settled into her own seat and smiled, shaking her head slightly as she mouthed a warning in Hebrew to wait. Lavi started to protest but thought better of it and smiled back with a nod, his mind replaying the delicious memory of her naked form gliding across the hotel room a few hours earlier after she’d pulled away from his embrace.
Ah, sweet Ashira! he thought. Only thirty-four years old with a perfect body and shoulder-length black hair. She was like so many accomplished Israeli women who could melt you with their femininity, or effortlessly break your neck with their military training.
Especially Ashira, whose prowess as a power-hungry she-wolf entranced him even more. She was a decorated major in the Israeli Defense Force, well trained in intelligence, and a perfect secretary when she needed to be. He was well aware that the only reason she was playing the role of his mistress was the eternal seduction of great political power.
Of course, now that he’d been thrown out of office, how long would that last?
He thought of the long flight and what lay ahead. He could probably depend on her loyalty for a few more months before she jumped ship—before she realized he was never going to regain power. He understood that power was the aphrodisiac. If Moishe Lavi had ever been a physical prize to any woman, those days were ancient history.