by Ben Bova
She didn’t hesitate a moment, just walked right up to our table and sat down, as if she’d been studying photographs of us for the past week or two.
“Adrienne Jones,” she said, opening her black leather shoulder bag and pulling out a leather-encased laminated ID card. It said she was with the U.S. Department of State.
She didn’t look like a diplomat. Adrienne Jones—if that was really her name—was a tall, sleek, leggy African-American whose skin was the color of polished ebony. She had a fashion model’s figure and face: high cheekbones, almond eyes, and a tousled, careless hairdo that must have cost a fortune. Her clothes were expensive, too.
Hector stared at her, too stunned to speak. I felt dismal and threadbare beside her in my shapeless slacks and blouse, with a belly bag strapped around my middle.
I hated her immediately.
“If you’re really with the State Department.” I said as she snapped her ID closed and put it back in her capacious shoulder bag, “then I’m from Disney World.”
She smiled at me the way a snake does. “That’s the one in Florida, isn’t it?”
Hector found his voice. “CIA, right? You’ve got to be with the CIA.”
Jones ignored his guess. “You both have been informed that you are to cooperate with me, correct?”
“I was told to listen to what you have to say,” I said.
“Me too,” said Hector.
“Very well, then. Here’s what I have to say: Leave Sam Gunn alone. Let him continue to operate. Do not interfere with him in any way.”
What kind of strings had Sam pulled? He had come across to me as the little guy struggling against the big boys, but here was the State Department or the CIA—or some federal agency—ordering me to keep my hands off.
“Why?” I asked.
“You don’t have to know,” said Jones. “Just leave Sam be. No interference with his operation.”
Hector scratched his head and glanced at me. He was an Air Force officer, I realized, and had to follow orders. His career depended on it. Me, I had a career, too. But I wasn’t going to let this fashion model stranger order me around, no matter what my boss said.
“Okay,” I told her, “I’ve listened to what you have to say. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do what you’re asking me to do.”
Jones smiled again, venomously. “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”
“You can tell me whatever you like. I’m not going to go along with it unless I know the whys and wherefores.”
Her smile faded into grimness. “Look, Ms. Perkins, your superior at DEA has been briefed and he agreed to cooperate. He’s told you to cooperate, and that’s what you’d better do, if you know what’s good for you.”
“You briefed him? Then brief me.”
She snorted through her finely chiseled nostrils. “All I can tell you is
that this is a high-priority matter, and it has the backing of the highest levels of authority.”
“Highest levels?” I asked. “Like the White House?”
She didn’t answer.
“The Oval Office? The President himself?”
Jones remained as silent and still as the Sphinx.
I heard myself say, “Not good enough, Ms. Jones. Anybody can claim they’re working on orders from the White House. I’ve heard even fancier stories, in my line of work. What’s going on?”
She merely shook her head, just the slightest of motions but clearly a negative.
“Okay then.” I got up from my chair. “I’m catching the next flight to Miami and going straight to the news media. They’ll be really interested to hear that the CIA is backing a fraudulent tourist operation in Panama.”
“I wouldn’t try that if I were you,” Jones said.
Hector stood up beside me. “You threaten her, you’ve got to go through me.”
I gaped at him. “You don’t have to protect me. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m in this, too,” he insisted. “We’re partners.”
Jones threw her head back and laughed. “What you two are,” she said, “is a couple of babes in the woods. And if you don’t start behaving yourselves, you’re going to end up as babes in a swamp, feeding alligators.”
I unzipped my belly bag and pulled out my cellphone. “CNN, Atlanta, USA,” I said to the phone system’s computer. “News desk.”
“Put it down,” Jones said.
I kept the phone pressed against my ear, listening to the computer chatter as the system made the connection.
“Put it down,” she repeated. Her voice was flat, calm, yet menacing. I realized that her black leather shoulder bag was big enough to hold a small arsenal.
“News,” I heard a tired voice answer.
Jones said, “We can cut a deal, if you’re reasonable.”
“News desk,” the voice repeated, a little irked.
I put the phone down and clicked it off. “What kind of a deal?”
Jones gestured with both her hands; she had long, graceful fingers, I noticed. I sat down, then Hector took his seat beside me.
“God spare me the righteous amateurs,” Jones muttered. “You two have no idea of what you’re messing with.”
“Then tell us,” I said.
“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “But if you want to, you can come back to Colon with me and watch it happen.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Jones misinterpreted my silence as reluctance, so she went on, “You give me your word you won’t go blowing off to the media or anybody else and you can come with me and see what this is all about. After it’s over you can go back home, safe and sound. Deal?”
I’d seen enough drug deals to know that she was showing us only the tip of the iceberg. But I was curious, and—to tell the absolute truth—I was wondering how Sam got himself mixed up with the CIA and whether he was in danger or not.
So I glanced at Hector, who remained silent, suspicious. But he looked at me and his expression said that he’d back whatever move I made. So I said, “Deal.”
We couldn’t squeeze a third body into Hector’s training jet, and Jones didn’t trust us out of her sight, so we flew back to Col6n again in her plane: a twin-engined executive jet. I was beginning to feel like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing from Colon to Panama city and back again.
Hector was impressed with the plane’s luxurious interior. “Like a movie,” he said, awed. Instead of sitting beside me, he asked to go up into the cockpit. Jones gave him a friendly smile and said okay. I didn’t see him again until we landed.
An unmarked Mercedes four-door sedan was waiting for us at the runway ramp, the kind of luxury car the drug dealers call a “cocaine Ford.” Two men in dark suits bustled Hector and me into the rear seat. Jones sat up front with the driver. The other man followed us in another unmarked Mercedes. I felt distinctly nervous.
But all we did is drive across the airport to Sam’s converted blimp hangar.
“Mr. Gunn is doing a special flight this afternoon,” Jones told us cryptically, half turned in her seat to face us. “Once it’s finished, you two can go back to the States—if you promise not to blow the whistle on Space Adventure Tours.”
“And if we don’t promise?” I asked. Instead of strong and forceful, my voice came out as a little girl’s squeak, which made me disgusted with myself.
Jones didn’t answer; she merely reverted to her cobra-type smile.
We pulled up outside the hangar. Inside, I could see the big 747 with the orbiter clamped atop it. Technicians were swarming all over it.
“Sam had his regular flight this morning,” I muttered to Hector. “Now they’re getting the plane ready for another flight.”
Hector nodded. “Looks like.”
We sat and watched, while our Mercedes’s engine purred away so the car’s air conditioning could stay on. Sam came out of an office up on the catwalk above the hangar floor, with two slick-looking lawyerly types flanking him. He was grinning and gabbing away a m
ile a minute, happy as a kid in a candy store. Or so it seemed from this distance.
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 piggyback planes than I had ever seen in Sam’s employ. Most of them must be Jones’s people, I thought. Something very special is being cooked up here.
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 beflagged 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 died.”
“No,” Hector corrected me. “He’s the man who took over after the bloodbath in Havana when Castro died.”
“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, keeping 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 multiengine 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 copilot here.”
I pulled the pistol from my belly bag and pointed it at the copilot. “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 copilot’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 jump seats behind the pilots’ chairs. I took one and Sam’s erstwhile copilot 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.
“Yeah,” he answered ruefully. “But I don’t know what you know.”
“Who’s in the orbiter’s cockpit?” I asked.
“Some guy the State Department insisted on. They wanted their own people up t
here with El Presidente and his daughter.”
“Do they have parachutes?”
“Parachutes? What for?”
“They’re all going down with the president and his daughter?”
“Whither he goest,” Sam replied.
We took off smoothly and headed out over the Caribbean. Is this part of the Bermuda Triangle? I asked myself. Will this fatal accident be chalked up as another mystical happening, or the work of aliens from outer space?
“How could you let them use you like this, Sam?” I blurted.
He glanced over his shoulder at me, saw how miserable I felt, and quickly turned back to the plane’s controls.
“Ramona, honey, when people that high up in the federal government want to make you jump, you really don’t have all that much of a choice.”
“You could have said no.”
“And miss the chance of a lifetime! No way!”
So despite all his blather about hating bureaucracies and wanting to help ordinary people, the little guy, against the big shots of government and industry, Sam sold out when they put the pressure on him. He probably didn’t have much of a choice, at that. Do what they tell you or you’re out of business. Maybe they threatened his life. I’d heard stories about the CIA and how they worked both sides of the street. They’d even been involved in the drug traffic, according to rumors around headquarters.
We flew in dismal silence across a sparkling clear sea. At least, I grew silent. Sam spent the time acquainting Hector with the plane’s controls and particular handling characteristics.
“Gotta remember we’ve got a ninety-nine-ton brick on our backs,” he chattered cheerfully, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Hector nodded and listened, listened and nodded. Sam jabbered away, one pilot to another, oblivious to everything else except flying.
Me, I was starting to worry about what was going to happen when we returned to Col6n with the orbiter still intact and the Cuban president very much alive. Jones and her people would probably put the best face they could on it, like that’s what they had intended all along: a goodwill flight to help cement friendly relations between Cuba and the U.S. But I knew that if the CIA didn’t get me, some fanatical old anti-Castro nutcake in Miami would come after me.
