This was a rare exception.
Coffey and Penny arrived at the domestic cargo terminal. It was a vast, low-lying building that looked as if it had been built in the 1960s. It was situated away from the main terminal area. Penny parked the pickup among rows of semis with container rigs. They walked to the front office, which sat just inside the main hangar. There they were met by a petty officer from the MIC. He was a fresh-faced kid whose name tag said Lady. That name must have got him teased a lot more than Date. Coffey judged him to be about twenty-five. The petty officer checked Coffey's passport, thanked him for coming, and said he would show the attorney to the aircraft. He removed a small point-to-point radio from his belt. Lady was pleasant, efficient, and uninformative. Unacceptably so. Coffey refused to follow the young man into the hangar.
"Petty Officer Lady, before I board the aircraft, I would appreciate some information," Coffey said. "Specifically, I'd like to know why I'm going with you." He had to speak loudly to be heard over the forklifts that were moving barrels and containers.
"I'm sorry, sir," the young man replied. "I can't tell you that."
"Then I can't go with you," Coffey insisted.
"No, sir. I mean I can't tell you because I don't know," Lady said. "What I can do, sir, is put you in touch with my CO if you'd like. But I can assure you that he doesn't know anything more than I do. This is a Level Alpha operation. Information is on a need-to-know basis."
"Well, I need to know, and so do my superiors," Coffey said. He held up his cell phone and wiggled it back and forth. "What do I tell them?"
"Sir, I wish I could help you. But that information is at the other end of a two-hour flight," Lady said. He held up his own radio. "What shall I tell the pilot, sir? He is waiting to take off."
If the kid had wiggled the radio, the attorney would have turned around and left. But he did not. He was respectful. And he had effectively called Coffey's bluff.
The American turned to Penny.
"It looks like I'll be taking a two-hour flight," he said. "I'll let you know as soon as I have some idea what's going on."
"Don't worry about it," Penny said.
"I do," Coffey said. "I just hope this isn't an elaborate Ellsworth plot to keep me from giving a speech."
"He's a duck-shover," she said, "but if that turns out to be the case, just E-mail me the speech. I'll read it for you."
Coffey thanked her and indicated for Petty Officer Lady to lead him to the plane.
"Duck-shover?" he said, turning back to Penny.
"My dad drove a taxi," the woman shouted ahead. "That's what they used to call drivers who cut other taxis off or muscled them out of the way."
"I love it!" Coffey called back, waving as he headed toward the back of the hangar and the door that led to the field.
The Lockheed P-3C was a big, gray, cigar-shaped four-engine prop plane. It was 116 feet in length with a wing-span of nearly 100 feet. Coffey had only been in a prop plane once before, when he traveled with the regional Op-Center mobile office to the Middle East. He had not liked the noise and vibration then. He did not think he would like it now.
Because this was a transport mission, not travel to a combat zone, the P-3C had gone out without a tactical coordinator. The TACCO's station was located in the rear of the aircraft. After Petty Officer Lady turned Coffey over to the crew, the captain gave him the coordinator's seat. According to the pilot, it was the warmest, most comfortable place in the plane. The plane was taxiing before Coffey had even buckled himself in to the threadbare red seat.
The attorney faced the port side as the aircraft rumbled its way into the air. He was sitting in a cubicle shaped like half a pentagon. The sun-faded blue metal walls were covered with displays, buttons, and old-fashioned switches and dials. Coffey sat with his back to the open window as the sun burned across his neck and the equipment. An hour ago, if Coffey had to guess all the places he could conceivably have found himself this morning, the rear end of a Royal Australian Navy patrol craft would have been nowhere on the list.
The strangeness of it all was outweighed by Coffey's curiosity as to what he would find on the other end. The attorney was thrilled by the fact that he was in the right place to do something about whatever this was. He relished the opportunity and the challenge. It reinforced one of his strongest convictions: that an individual did not have to be in the big, bulging belly of politics to have a positive impact on society.
For the duration of the 116-minute flight, no one came back to check on the attorney or offer him coffee. Or a pillow. Nor was the flight all that comfortable. Coffey wondered if they had stuck him back there just so he would not bug anyone for answers. Sitting there, he found himself thinking about Paul Hood's managerial style.
Hood did not always have information that people wanted to hear. But he never kept them out of the loop. Sometimes he was not at liberty to say what he did know. But he always told people that. Stonewalling was dehumanizing. Hood had his flaws, but he always treated people like people.
The plane landed at Darwin International Airport. The airport consisted of one large central structure that looked like a shopping mall in Anytown, U.S.A. The building was all white. Coffey wondered if everything in Australia was white. Located less than four miles outside the city, DIA was both a commercial airport and a Department of Defence airfield. It was used primarily by the Royal Australian Air Force. However, the MIC also flew reconnaissance missions from here.
Coffey was not taken to the terminal. The plane pulled off onto an apron where several F-18s were parked. The pilot walked him down the aft staircase to a waiting black sedan.
"Tell me, Captain," Coffey said as they crossed the short, windy stretch of tarmac. "Did you folks strand me back there on purpose? An unadorned yes or no will suffice."
"Yes, sir, we did," the captain replied.
"Follow-up question," Coffey said. "Why did you leave me alone?"
"Because we were told to, sir," the pilot said.
Okay, Coffey thought. At least that was honest.
The pilot turned him over to the petty officer who stood beside the car. The men exchanged salutes, and then the pilot left. The petty officer opened the door, and Coffey got in. There was a glass partition between the front and back of the car. Obviously, they did not want him talking to the driver, either.
The car sped off, carrying Coffey past a forest of tall, colorful stone poles that stood in a small, green plot beside the building. Coffey recognized these from the tour book he had read during the flight to Australia. They were Tiwi Pukumani burial poles — a tribute to the Aboriginal peoples who dwelt in the Northern Territory. They were used as mourning totems during funeral ceremonies. Afterward, they remained standing above the grave as a memorial to the dead. These particular poles were carved to honor all native dead. Coffey thought about how moving it must be for a sculptor to work on interpretive likenesses of deceased individuals from his tribe or village. The process made more sense to Coffey than a marble worker impersonally hacking names into stone.
Also, the burial poles were not white. They were brightly painted, a celebration of life.
As the sedan headed toward downtown Darwin, Coffey looked out at the gleaming waters of the Timor Sea. He found it ironic that since leaving Sydney he had encountered a pilot, a driver, and a series of totems. All of them were mute, but only one of them had any eloquence.
The one that was made of stone.
Chapter Eight
If anyone had been watching the two vessels, it would have seemed like a chance encounter. A passing ship or plane, even a spy satellite, would see it as an offer by a decommissioned cutter to lend assistance to a yacht. The two ships stayed together briefly, less than fifteen minutes. Then the cutter pulled away, its captain waving grandly to a fellow seafarer.