He glanced at the instruments, ready to slam on brakes, but he knew they would never be able to stop. They would drive straight ahead into the low shrubs off the end of the runway. Then he noticed that the manifold pressure was low, and suddenly he realized what was wrong. “Oh, shit!” he yelled, startling Meg. Quickly, he put in twenty degrees of flaps, and as the runway came to an end, the heavily loaded airplane lifted sluggishly a few feet into the air. It seemed to take forever to get to two hundred feet, then he reduced the flaps to ten degrees, and the airplane began to climb faster.
“What was that?” Meg asked, a little breathless.
“My fault,” Cat replied, mopping his brow. “I forgot we are at about nine thousand feet of elevation here. The air is thin and the engine won’t develop full power this high up, so the airplane needs more runway to get off. If I had put in flaps at the beginning, it would have worked a lot better.”
He took out the last ten degrees of flaps, started his turn toward the Eldorado VOR beacon, and called Bogotá departure. The accent was thick, but the controller gave him his departure instructions. Soon they were out of the mountains and over the Magdalena Valley. Cat switched on the autopilot and relaxed, checking his position with the distance-measuring equipment. They would soon be out of range for that, and there was no loran this far south. There were enough other navaids to get them to Leticia, though.
“Okay,” he said finally, “what have you been doing for the last couple of days?”
“I had some people to see,” she replied. “Once I knew you were all right, I had time on my hands, and I’m always looking for a story.”
“I thought you had a story,” he said, a little miffed.
“Now, now,” she said, “don’t get jealous of my time. I had nothing else to do. Could I have come to all those meetings with you if I had been around?”
“No,” he said. “Barry Hedger thinks you’re a Communist agent, or something.”
She gave a short, derisive laugh. “Of course. He told you about my father, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I remembered the incident.”
“It was a hell of a lot more than an incident, let me tell you. Father never recovered. He was only fifty-one when he died. They broke his heart.”
“Hedger says most of the reporting you’ve done is about various Communist revolutionary movements.”
“A lot of it has been,” she agreed. “My father’s name got used by all sorts of left-wing groups; he was a real hero to them. I suppose it was a sort of entrée for me.”
Cat was silent.
“Oh, I see, you want to know if I’m a Communist spy, right?”
“Well?” he asked. “I mean, I don’t really give a damn, but I would like to know.”
She unclipped her shoulder harness and turned to face him. “Yes you do care, bless your heart,” she said. “You’re afraid you’ve gotten involved with a regular Red Menace, aren’t you?”
“Look...”
“Well, I suppose I’m glad you care. No, I’m not a Communist spy, or even a Communist. I despise what a lot of the guerrilla movements are doing — or at least the way they’re doing it. On the other hand, I despise the way the United States does a lot of what it does, too. Politically, I suppose I’m a stateless person. I mean, I’m glad that part of me is an American, and I’m glad that the other part is a South American — I feel just as comfortable here as I do in the States. The United States has a right-wing administration that I abhor, and Colombia has a left-wing guerrilla movement that I hate, too. There’s no political home for me unless it’s a place like Sweden, and I couldn’t live there, because I’m not a Socialist, and half of me is a hot-blooded Latin.”
Cat laughed. “I’ll vouch for that.”
Now they were over jungle. There was nothing else as far as the eye could see. It was so thick, Cat thought he could land the airplane on the treetops. Every couple of minutes, he scanned the instrument panel, looking for reassurance. The needles held steady, and the engine drummed monotonously along. Fuel flow was a bit more than he had planned, but he had a much bigger reserve than he and Bluey had had on the flight from Florida.
Meg had cranked her seat back and was sound asleep. He looked at her face, innocent and childlike in repose. He knew there was nothing he could say to talk her out of going to the Trapezoid with him, and he was glad. He remembered the terrible moment that morning, when he had thought he was alone.
They had sandwiches a little later, then, early in the afternoon, Cat looked out ahead of them and saw a strip of brown cutting across the green of the jungle. Cat felt a thrill of anticipation and of fear. The Amazon — the biggest river in the world, dwarfing the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi. It was a good thirty miles away, but down here there was no air pollution, only a haze rising from the rain forest. As they flew closer the river widened, until it became apparent what a huge body of water they were approaching. It stretched, east and west, as far as the eye could see. Twenty miles out, when Leticia was a smudge beside the Amazon, Cat called the tower and was instructed to start his descent. A few minutes later they were entering the traffic pattern, and as Cat turned onto the base leg for landing, a large helicopter rose from the airport and headed away north at a low altitude.
The heat was apparent long before they landed, and as soon as they were on the ground Cat and Meg opened the airplane’s windows. They were waved into a tie-down area by a teenage boy, and Cat switched off all the electrics and the avionics power switch, then cut the engine. He was sweating already, and he wasn’t sure it was the heat.
While the boy got their bags onto a hand trolley, Cat made arrangements for tie-down and refueling, then they got a taxi to Parador Ticuña. As the cab pulled up at the hotel, a crowd was gathered out front. Meg asked the driver what was happening, but the driver didn’t know. He got out and went to the trunk for their bags, ignoring the commotion.
Cat and Meg got out of the cab and approached the edges of the crowd. As they did so a policeman pushed past them, shouting at the crowd. The group parted to let him through, and Cat was able to see what was at the crowd’s center. A man, a gringo, dressed in an American seersucker suit, lay stretched out on the ground, faceup. His head lay in a pool of bright red blood, and his lips and teeth were a mess. He had been shot in the back of the head, and the bullet had exited through his mouth, but he was still recognizable. Cat’s eyes remained locked on the sandy hair and badly pockmarked face until the crowd closed in again and blocked his view.
He turned away, feeling ill. The man had joined Bluey Holland as a casualty in the effort to protect Cat Catledge. Who else would Cat get killed before this was over?
27
Cat looked at his watch again. It was a little past six, and they had been sitting in the bar since midafternoon. He had not told Meg who the murdered man was. He didn’t intend to. At first, they had had the place to themselves, then, around five, the bar had started to fill with people, locals and a group of German tourists. He had begun to worry.
A tall, blond man wearing bush clothes entered the bar, glanced at something in the palm of his hand, then approached Cat. “Mr. Ellis?”
Cat stood up. “That’s right.”
“My name is Hank. Will you come with me, please?”
Cat and Meg began gathering their bags.