White Cargo (10 page)

“Two grand for the tank, three for the raft and jackets, five for the paperwork and numbers, and ten bucks a gallon for the fuel. I got to bus it in here on an airboat. I'll throw in a bed and a steak.”

“How quick?”

“I'm not too busy. You can take off tomorrow night.”

“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.

I
T 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.

Bluey grinned at him. “That's your actual short-field-takeoff-over-an-obstacle,” he said, pleased with himself. “You want to remember how that felt, the angle and all. Might come in handy one of these days.”

“Thanks for the demonstration,” Cat replied, mopping his brow with his sleeve. The real thing had been quite different from practicing on a nice, long runway.

Bluey turned sharply toward Everglades City and kept the airplane flying low. A few minutes later, with the airport in sight, he began an ascent, simultaneously calling Flight Services on the radio. They had just departed Everglades City, he explained, and would like to file for Marathon, in the Florida Keys. The flight plan filed, Bluey relaxed.

“I told you it would lift anything you could put in it,” he grinned at Cat.

“I believe you,” Cat replied. “Why are we landing at Marathon?”

“We're not,” Bluey said.

Silly question, Cat thought. He should be getting used to this by now. Bluey had pretended to take off from Everglades City, and now he would pretend to land at Marathon. His flight plan was on record. Their next stop would be the Guajira Peninsula of Colombia.

An hour later Bluey set up a landing at Marathon, called Flight Services and canceled his flight plan, then roared down the runway, ten feet above the ground. He switched off the rotating beacon, the navigation lights, the landing light, and the wingtip strobes, climbed to two hundred feet, and turned steeply to the southeast, flashing over the narrow island. Immediately, clear of the land, he
pushed the yoke forward and dived at the water, causing Cat to close his eyes and grit his teeth in anticipation of the impact.

'When nothing happened, he opened his eyes. “What's our altitude?” he asked shakily.

“About fifteen feet, I reckon,” Bluey drawled.

Suddenly they blew past a sailing yacht, no more than a hundred feet from the wingtip on Cat's side.

“Watch out for boats,” Bluey said, tardily.

“Sure thing,” Cat said. “How long are we going to maintain this altitude?”

“All the way past Cuba to Hispaniola,” Bluey said. “Take the airplane.”

Cat lunged for the yoke as Bluey turned his attention to the loran, punching in another set of coordinates.

“Don't let her climb!” Bluey commanded.

Cat realized he had been unconsciously pulling the yoke back. He tried to settle down.

“Watch the water, not the altimeter,” Bluey said. A moment later he took the controls back from a relieved Cat.

Bluey had told Cat they would be flying around Cuba, down the Windward Passage between that island and Haiti, but he had not told him they would be doing it at fifteen feet. Cat found it impossible to relax.

“There's a balloon back in the Keys on a fourteen-thousand-foot cable,” Bluey said. “They run it up and use it to look down with radar. It's not up tonight, but we've got to stay under both the American and Cuban radar until we're in the clear. I don't want a couple of Fidel's MIGs using us for target practice.”

For nearly two hours the airplane skimmed the sea, while Cat's eyes roamed the dim horizon looking for ships and small craft. At one point he saw some lights off
to the right. He assumed they were Cuba, but he didn't want to distract Bluey by asking. Later, lights appeared dead ahead.

“There's Haiti,” Bluey said. “We'll be climbing shortly.”

The lights drew closer, and Bluey climbed a couple of hundred feet, Then a beach flashed beneath them, and the airplane began to climb in earnest.

“There's a nine-thousand-foot mountain out there,” Bluey explained.

“Is nobody going to notice a strange airplane over Haiti?” Cat asked.

“Oh, sure,” Bluey said. “We're on American defense radar now. They'll think we're a Haitian airplane taking off. We're on Haitian radar, too, if they're awake, which I doubt, but Haiti doesn't have an air force, so what the hell?”

Clear of the island, Bluey set the autopilot's altitude hold at nine thousand feet, leaned out the engine, and tapped in a new longitude and latitude. “That's Idlewild,” he said. “We'll be there in about six hours. Our window is between seven-thirty and eight o'clock. I built us an extra half hour into the flight plan for safety.”

“Safety?”

“If you arrive early or late at Idlewild, they shoot you down when you try to land,” Bluey explained cheerfully. “Touchy lot.”

“I see,” Cat said. “Have you flown in there often?”

“I guess I've made a couple dozen round trips.”

“How will they know who we are?”

“We've got a code. Idlewild is Bravo One, we're Bravo Two. How'd you meet Carlos, Cat?”

“We had a mutual friend. How'd you meet him, Bluey?”

Bluey laughed. “I was dusting crops in Cuba in '59. Batista was still in power, but Fidel and his merry band of men were pressing hard. A lot of foreigners—a lot of Cubans too—were leaving the country, but I stuck around. There was money to be made, and I was young and foolish. One day, I was gassing up the airplane, and this Cuban peasant sidles over to me and asks me if I want to make some extra money. Asks me in an American accent. I do a double take, then I say, sure, I'd like to make some extra money. He gives me a camera and says he wants some pictures of a beach near the cane field I was spraying, wants 'em from less than a hundred feet, a couple hundred yards offshore. I made two or three passes, got the pictures, got paid. We had a few beers, got along. The beach was at a place called Bahia de Cochinos. Bay of Pigs.”

Bluey poured himself some soup from a thermos Spike had given them, then continued. “When Castro broke out, I flew the crop duster to Key West—liberated it, you might say—and started a little business in Florida. Couple years later, when I'm pretty sick of crop dusting, I get a call from Carlos. God knows how he found me. Next thing I know, I'm in Guatemala, where they're training Cubans for the party at the Bay of Pigs. During the invasion I dropped supplies onto the beach from a DC-3, not the most fun I ever had, and I took a little shrapnel in the ass doing it. I ditched in the ocean and got picked up by a landing craft. Carlos was waiting for me when they took me aboard ship. Over the years since, he's popped up now and then with a job, always for good money.”