From here on in, she would be totally chaste. The desires would be there, but those were perhaps God’s price for her power and mobility. She would wait, at least until this terrible curse would be broken and she was restored to herself once more. She was certain that such a thing would happen; either that, or she would die in the assault on evil and join the spirit realm herself, beyond such things.
They came for them on the fourth night, shortly after midnight. It was a low profile jet helicopter with security-type engine mufflers that really damped, although they did not eliminate, the telltale sound of the whirlybird. The pilot was good; he landed atop the platform without lights. He was also apparently part of the organization, for although Greg and Maria had re-donned their clothes, such as they were, he didn’t bat an eyelash at the sight of Angelique.
Maria in particular had worried that the helicopter might not be in friendly hands, but Greg had no problems. He apparently knew the pilot and the timing was right on the dot.
The only problem they found was in getting Angelique comfortable. The seats were upholstered in fabric, and it stung her after a while. Greg finally figured out a solution by taking a fair number of papers from the cabin—some old newspapers, sheets from the pilot’s clipboard, anything— and lining the seat. It seemed to work, and then they were away as fast as possible, the pilot skimming the surface of the sea at or below the level of the oil rigs to avoid any hostile radar.
Greg took the seat next to the pilot, and as he flew they talked.
“Sorry it took so long, but it’s been damned complicated, or so they tell me,” the pilot told him. “You all are hotter’n a firecracker in this part of the world. Then they had to figure out a meeting place everybody could get to that was far enough away from here that they’d find it hard to figure, and still met the little lady’s special needs.”
They were soon over the Venezuelan mainland but still flying, in just about pitch darkness, at close to treetop level.
“How are they going to get us out of here?” Greg asked him.
“Old private airstrip up ahead a few miles. It ain’t much and it’s mostly dirt. These days it’s used for smuggling. Drugs, that kind of thing, you know. The local authorities can be persuaded to look the other way on it once in a while, if you know what I mean. We got an old crate in there waiting. No seven forty-seven, mind, just a hunk of junk, but it’ll get you where you got to go.”
Within minutes, they set down at the field, a dark and forbidding strip hacked out of the jungle and lying between nasty looking hills.
The plane waiting was what some folks would call an antique flying boat. A war surplus HU-16 seaplane, it was impossible to say during just which war it had seen active duty. Able to land on both land and sea and get in and out of places with short, tight runways, it had the large boat-like body and overhead wings with pontoons so familiar to navy war movies, and its two great prop-driven engines were almost as loud inside the plane as outside, but it was surprisingly roomy inside, if militarily spartan.
The two pilots were both middle aged and looked like retired military, but they were long enough out of it and jaded enough to look like they slept in their clothes and peeled them off anually for showers.
The older and grayer of the two shook hands with Greg. “I’m Mitch Corwin, and that’s Bob Romeriz. Welcome aboard Air Nowhere.”
“Glad to see anybody,” MacDonald assured them. “You know the score?”
“All the way. That her? Wow… O.K., no more comments now. Pile in and let’s get the hell out of here. We’re cleared from Caracas to Kingston, where we’ll take on fuel but nothing else. Then we go up the coast with fuel stops every six hours. There’s water in the cask in back and Dixie cups next to it, and there’s cold box lunches and beer in the coolers there, and if you got to go there’s a porta-potty in the back. Assuming no problems, the whole thing should take forty-four hours give or take, allowing for the fuel stops. These babies don’t go real fast and they’re not designed for comfort but they’ll get you there in one piece.”
They got in, but the old fabric seats proved impossible for Angelique, and she wound up sitting on the floor of the aircraft, simply hanging on to the metal seat bases as they took off.
There was, in fact, a great deal of noise and vibration, but the ride itself was fairly smooth and stable. They munched cold chicken, drank a little beer, and mostly otherwise kept to themselves during the trip.
They landed at a general aviation strip outside Kingston while it was still dark, but aside from staying down low inside the plane there was no trouble. The plane had a manifest and flight plan that was proper and provided a stop for refueling but no other purpose in Jamaica. The lone, bored looking customs man was there only to make certain nothing unauthorized got in or out of the plane; he couldn’t have cared less what it carried and did not try to look inside.
It was past dawn on a gray, overcast day when they made their second stop, this one in Cancun, on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Again, with just a refueling and a refiling of some paperwork, there was no hassle. From that point they used small, private airfields, heading northwest across Mexico. For something planned in a hurry, it was certainly well organized.
“Oh, we do this all the time,” Corwin told them. “It’s the way you make money with a small outfit like this. You prepay the bribes and have a lot of options to move.”
“What do you usually carry?” Greg asked him.
“A little bit of everything. Dope of all types, of course, and sometimes wetbacks and other times it might be political refugees from Latin America. We had two trips getting phar-maceuticals to Cuba, if you believe that. Those are hairier than the drug stuff but they pay best of all.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t gotten caught and strung up by now no matter what your contacts,” Greg noted. “You’re not in a long-life type of trade here.”
“Well, hell, we’re equal opportunity, see? I mean, we’ve run stuff for the CIA, so the U.S. stays off our back or covers for us. We’ve run stuff for the Reds, so we don’t get no flack from the Cubans or Nicaraguans or anybody like that. Almost every government’s used us at one time or another, and we’re a special favorite of certain Mexican politicians.”
“Seems to me you could afford better airplanes,” Maria noted.
“Oh, hell, honey, we got any kind of plane you want for anything, and old pilots to fly ’em. This was the best overall for this job, considering that turkey airstrip we started at and where we got to wind up.”
“Just where are we winding up?” MacDonald asked.
“Well, sir, near as I can tell, they got to thinking. They needed a place with a big international airport so’s everybody who needed could get in and out, and they wanted a kind of place folks might go anyway. Now, add to that someplace where they wouldn’t give a second glance to your little tattooed lady there, beg pardon—no offense meant. If she was dressed at all, that is.”
They flew the entire distance up the California coast well out from shore and low enough to be out of most of the air traffic control radar. They landed on the water for the first time over a hundred and fifty miles out in the Pacific off the California coast, but near a small chartered tanker that was there to give them more gas. From that point, they disappeared from anyone’s clear trace, landing in the water again, this time about twenty miles off the coast and in daylight. There they unstowed and assembled and inflated a large orange life raft complete with outboard motor, and all, including the pilots, transferred into it.