“Do it, sport!” Bluey bellowed. “Now, point us at the beer. I want to get outside a pint or two in a hurry.”
A few minutes later they were settled into a small, comfortable cabin with a supply of Swann’s Lager, an Australian beer. “Spike was down under a few years back,” Bluey chortled, “and now he won’t drink anything else. Christ knows where he gets it.”
Shortly, Spike joined them. “Where you bound for, Bluey?”
“I need a window at Idlewild the day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll make the call after dark,” Spike said, sucking on a beer. “Jesus, Bluey, I thought you got hard time for that last one. What you doing running around loose?”
“Parole, mate. Model prisoner, and all that,” Bluey laughed.
Spike turned to Cat. “Hell, Bob,” he said, “this crazy old digger put down a DC-3 in a farmer’s field up at Valdosta, Georgia, a couple years back. No engines! At night!”
“Didn’t put a scratch on her, either,” Bluey added, graciously accepting the praise.
“Shit, they should of give him a medal!” Spike crowed.
Cat looked at Bluey. “A DC-3? You mean a C-47? With no engines?”
Bluey nodded. “Worst piece of luck I ever had,” he said. “Little miscalculation on the fuel.”
Cat winced at the idea of putting the big twin-engine airplane down dead-stick in a field at night. He hoped Bluey would do a better job of calculating fuel the following night.
Spike left the cabin, and Cat turned to Bluey. “What’s this about a ‘window at Idlewild’? You talking about Kennedy Airport in New York?”
Bluey shook his head. “Nah. Now Idlewild is an airfield in the Guajira Peninsula of Colombia, a sort of aeronautical Grand Central Station for blokes in the business.” He took a long swig of the Swann’s. “Spike’ll call down there tonight on his handy little high-frequency radio and get us a window, half an hour or so when we can land. It’s the sort of place where it’s best to be expected.”
Cat nodded. “I think I’ll take a little run around the clearing out there. That okay?”
Bluey nodded. “Stay near the trees, though. If you hear an aircraft, get yourself under some cover. Spike would like for folks to continue to think of this place as a deserted chunk of the Everglades.”
Cat changed into some shorts and running shoes and left the cabin. He walked past an open-sided hangar where a twin Piper was being worked on by a man. There were already two men working on 1 2 3 Tango. He reached the clearing and started to jog. It was high noon, hot and sticky, but Cat wanted the exercise. He didn’t like running — he had done too much of it in the Marines — but there was no pool here, and the nearest water had unfriendly creatures in it.
He wanted to run, too, because he felt the paralysis of fear sneaking up on him, and it was best to move around when that happened. He tried to think of the last time he had felt that feeling coming over him and realized it must have been at boot camp, a long time ago. For Cat, exercise had always been an antidote for fear, and fortunately, as a shavetail ROTC lieutenant, there had been plenty of exercise available, because there had been plenty of fear to go around, too: fear of the drill instructors; fear of not being able to do what they wanted him to do; fear of humiliation before the rest of his company; fear of dying of what they had done to him — done to everybody — at Quantico.
Now he felt the fear he had associated with Colombia since the yacht had been sunk. He didn’t want to go back there, and he especially didn’t want to go back there in a single-engine airplane with a convicted drug smuggler. He had to go, he knew that, but now he was thinking of getting himself to Miami and taking Eastern Airlines to Bogotá. He could meet Bluey later. But what would Bluey do if he was left here with ten thousand dollars and an airplane with new numbers and papers? Jim had told him not to give the man a passport until necessary. Wasn’t money and an airplane even more tempting than a passport?
After two laps around the clearing in the heat and humidity, Cat was dragging. He went back to the cabin, took a cold shower, and lay down on his bunk for a few minutes, wrestling with this one, last decision. Bluey sipped a Swann’s and read a paperback spy novel.
Finally, Cat got up, went to his luggage, and got the brown paper bag. “Here,” he said, tossing the .357 magnum to Bluey.
Bluey caught it and nodded with approval.
Cat tossed him the shoulder holster and ammunition, then sat down at the table in the middle of the room with the 9-millimeter automatic. He took a deep breath, opened the manual, and started to fieldstrip the weapon.
Bluey watched him appraisingly from across the room. “You’ve done that before, have you, mate?”
Cat nodded. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far away.”
He hadn’t thought he would ever have to do it again.
10
It was just after eleven, and with no moon the darkness weighed heavily upon them. Cat looked nervously about him as Bluey, strapped into the left seat for the first time, did his run-up of the airplane. In the dim light from the instrument panel, Cat could see the bulky, fifty-gallon fuel tank in the rear compartment, where the luggage usually went, and the luggage piled into the back seat. On top of the luggage was the life raft, surprisingly compact, but heavy. Cat reckoned they were at least ten percent over the rated maximum gross weight for the airplane.
Both men wore deflated yellow life jackets and shoulder holsters with their respective weapons. (“Don’t wear that thing under your jacket,” Bluey had said. “Where we’re going, you want everybody to know you’re carrying.”) Under his right arm Cat wore another kind of shoulder holster, a large, soft, leather wallet containing a hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, this in addition to the two million dollars in the aluminum case lying next to the life raft, at the top of the pile of luggage. If they had to ditch this airplane, Cat intended to be sure that case went into the life raft with them. On the floor between the seats lay an Ithaca riot gun — a short, 12-gauge shotgun holding eight double-ought buckshot shells — that Bluey had bought from Spike. (“Scarier than a machine gun,” Bluey had declared.)
In the shoulder holster with the money was Cat’s Robert Ellis passport; the matching wallet was in his hip pocket. His own passport and wallet were in the aluminum case with the money. Cat now possessed a forged FAA Temporary Airman’s Certificate, in each of his two names, declaring him to have recently passed his instrument rating. That was a joke, Cat thought, since he hadn’t even earned his private pilot’s license. (Spike had explained that the certificate was what a newly qualified airman was issued on completion of his examination. It was good for six months, and a hell of a lot easier to forge than a permanent certificate.)
They were loaded for bear, Cat thought, and that gave him some reassurance, but the airplane was loaded, too, and that was making him very nervous. He watched as Bluey switched on the taxi and landing lights, flipped in twenty degrees of flaps, trimmed for takeoff, and shoved the throttle in. They sat with the brakes on, vibrating, until the engine reached full power, then Bluey released the brakes.
Cat was appalled at how slowly the airplane seemed to be gathering speed. The clearing couldn’t be much more than a thousand feet long, and they were using up ground fast. Ahead, in the beams of the airplane’s lights, the trees were growing alarmingly close. Then, at fifty-five knots, Bluey hauled back on the yoke, and the airplane staggered into the air at what seemed to Cat an impossible angle of ascent. Surely the aircraft would stall. Bluey brought the landing gear up and the angle increased even farther, and suddenly they were over the trees, and the Australian was pushing the yoke forward, letting the airplane gather speed.