Jones opened her door. “You stay here,” she said—as much to the driver as to us, I thought. “Don’t leave this car.”
So we sat in the car with the afternoon sun beating down on us and the air conditioner laboring to keep the interior cool. Our driver was old enough to be gray at the temples, solidly built, and I guessed that he was carrying a nine-millimeter automatic in a shoulder holster under his dark suit jacket. He looked perfectly comfortable and prepared to sit and watch over us for hours and hours.
I was bursting to find out what was going on. There were more technicians clambering over the ladders and scaffolds surrounding the piggy-back planes than I had ever seen in Sam’s employ. Most of them must be Jones’ people, I thought. Something very special is being cooked up here.
Jones stood out in the blazing sunshine, trying to look cool and relaxed behind a pair of elegantly stylish sunglasses. Yet I sensed she was wired tight with anticipation.
Then a fleet of limousines drove into view, coming slowly across the concrete rampway until they stopped in front of the hangar. Eleven limos, I counted. One of them had stiff little flags attached to its front fenders: blue with some kind of shield or seal in the middle, surrounded by six five-pointed white stars.
Dozens of men jumped out of the limos, about half of them in olive-green army fatigues. They didn’t look like Americans. Each soldier carried a wicked-looking assault rifle with a curved magazine. The rest of the men wore business suits that bulged beneath their armpits and the kind of dark sunglasses that just screamed “bodyguard.”
They spread out, poking their noses—and rifle muzzles—into every corner of the hangar. A couple of the suits came up to our car, where the glamorous Ms. Jones greeted them with a big toothy smile. I couldn’t make out what she was saying to them, but it sounded like she was speaking in Spanish.
Sam came bubbling over, practically drooling once he feasted his eyes on Jones. He didn’t notice us inside the car, behind the heavily-tinted windows.
At last, the leader of the suits turned to the team of soldiers surrounding the limo and gave a curt nod. They opened the rear door and out stepped a little girl, with big dark eyes and long hair that just had to be naturally curly. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She smiled at the soldiers, as if she knew them by name. She was very nicely dressed in a one-piece jumpsuit of butter yellow.
She turned back and said something to someone who was still inside the limo. She reached her hand in to whoever it was. A tall, lean man of about fifty came out of the limo and stretched to his full height. He was wearing army fatigues and smoking an immense cigar.
My jaw fell open. “That’s the president of Cuba!” I gasped. “The man who took over when Castro retired.”
“No,” Hector corrected me. “He’s the man who took over after the bloodbath in Havana when Castro retired.”
“That must be his daughter.”
“What’re they doing here?” Hector wondered.
“Taking one of Sam’s phony rides into space,” I said. “I wonder if they know it’s a phony.”
Hector turned to face me. “Maybe it’s not.”
“Not what?”
“Not a phony,” he said grimly. “Maybe they’re going to have an accident up there. On purpose.”
It hit me like a shot of pure heroin. “They’re going to assassinate the president of Cuba!”
“And make it look like an accident.”
“Oh my god!”
The driver turned slightly to tell us, “Don’t get any crazy ideas—”
He never got any further. I jammed my thumbs into his carotids and held on. In a few seconds he was unconscious.
“Where’d you learn that?” Hector asked, his tone somewhere between amazement and admiration.
“South Philadelphia,” I answered as I yanked the nine-millimeter from the driver’s holster. “Come on.”
Hector grasped my shoulder. “You’re not going to get far in a shoot-out.”
He was right, dammit. I had to think fast. Outside, I could see Jones leading the president of Cuba and his daughter toward the plane. Half the Cuban security force walked a respectful distance behind them; the other half was deployed on either side of them.
“Most of those ground crew personnel must be security guys from the States,” Hector pointed out. “Must be enough firepower out there to start World War III.”
My eye lit on Sam. He was still standing in the sunshine of the ramp, outside the hangar, hardly more than ten meters from our car.
“Come on,” I said, leaning past the unconscious driver to pop the door lock.
I stuffed the pistol in my belly bag; kept the bag unzippered so I could grab the gun quickly if I needed to.
Sam turned as we approached him. He looked surprised, then delighted.
“Ramona!” he said with a big grin. “I thought you two had gone back to the States.”
“Not yet,” I said grimly. “We’re taking this flight with you.”
For an instant Sam looked puzzled, but then he said, “Great. Come on, you can ride in the 747 with me.”
“You’re not going aboard the orbiter?”
“Not this flight,” Sam said easily.
Of course not, I thought. On this flight the orbiter’s really going to be released from the 747. Instead of going into space, as Sam promised, it was going to crash into the Caribbean. With the president of Cuba aboard, and his ten-year-old daughter.
“Sam, how could you do this?” I asked as we walked into the hangar.
“Listen, I was just as surprised as you would be when the State Department asked me to do it.”
“With his little daughter, too.”
We reached the ladder. “It was his daughter’s idea,” Sam said. “She wanted to take the space ride. Poppa’s only doing this to please his little girl—and for the international publicity, of course.”
With Sam leading the way we climbed up the ladder into the 747. Its interior was strictly utilitarian; no fancy decor. Most of the cavernous passenger cabin was empty. There were only seats up in the first-class section, below the cockpit. Sam, Hector, and I went up the spiral stairs and entered the cockpit, where a young woman in a pilot’s uniform was already sitting in the right-hand seat.
“Can you fly this plane?” I asked Hector.
He stared at the control panels; the gauges and buttons and keypads seemed to stretch for miles. Looking out the windshield, I saw we were already so high up we might as well have been on oxygen.
“I’ve got a multi-engine license,” Hector muttered.
“But can you fly this plane?” I insisted.
He nodded tightly. “I can fly anything.”
Sam put on a quizzical look. “Why should he have to fly? I’m going to pilot this mission myself and I’ve got a qualified co-pilot here.”
I pulled the pistol from my belly bag and pointed it at the co-pilot. “Get out,” I said. “Hector, you take her place.”
She stared at me, wide-eyed, frozen.
“Vamos,” Sam said, in the most un-Spanish accent I’d ever heard. The woman slipped out of the co-pilot’s chair.
“What’s this all about?” Sam asked, more intrigued than scared. “Why the toy cannon?”
I pointed the gun at him. “Sam, you’re going to fly this plane just the way you would for any of your tourist flights. No more and no less.”
He gave me one of his lopsided grins. “Sure. What else?”
There were two jumpseats behind the pilots’ chairs. I took one and Sam’s erstwhile co-pilot the other. I kept the pistol in my hand as we rolled out of the hangar, lit up the engines, and taxied to the runway.
“What do you think is going on here,” Sam asked, “that makes you need a gun?”
“You know perfectly well what’s going on,” I said.