“Thanks very much,” one of the girls said drily. “We appreciate the thought, we really do.”
Reaching down, he touched her face gently. “So pretty. Keep your money.”
He continued into the galley and bawled out loudly, “Everybody straight ahead. Look around once and I promise you—”
He dropped the sack and dried his hand on his pants. Gradually he lowered the gun until it was pointing at the floor. Shayne slid the panel open, seized the bandit’s gun hand in both his own and dragged down hard.
For that first instant, he used his full strength. The hard jerk got the movement started, and then Shayne was able to apply leverage to twist the arm. He completed the pull by releasing the wrist and delivering a short, punishing blow to the unprotected skull behind the right ear. The bandit sagged to the floor.
Moss, on the public address, was denouncing American imperialism. As far as Shayne could tell, the little flurry of movement in the galley had gone unnoticed. He ripped off the rubber mask and pulled it over his own head. Freeing the mail bag, he pulled it around to cover the Brazilian’s head and shoulders. He stood up with the forty-five.
“Got everything, Jaime?” the voice on the public address said. “You must have by now. We’ll be over Aruba in a minute. Can’t you find the buzzer? I’m worrying up here. The captain’s worrying.”
Shayne found a button labeled Cockpit and pushed it quickly. But apparently the hijackers had arranged a more elaborate signal. Moss backed into view through the curtain at the end of the passageway to the cockpit. Shayne, in his monster mask, gave him the OK signal with thumb and forefinger. Moss nodded and disappeared.
Going down the aisle, Shayne tapped Ward on the shoulder. The Negro started violently. Shayne took him back to the galley. Here he pressed the Brazilian’s thirty-eight into his hand, made a quick silencing motion, and started back up the aisle.
As he was passing Mary Ocain’s seat, the plane seemed to crash into a wall. Everything not strapped down went flying, including Mary and Shayne. He landed painfully. Mary caromed off the back of the seat in front of her and ended in the aisle beside him. She had a twenty-two automatic in one fist. He clamped his big hand over it and whispered, “Cut it out. I’m Shayne.”
“Oh, God. I was going to—”
Moss’s voice called, “Nothing to worry about. Ran into a little turbulence. Jaime, let the stews take orders for drinks. The captain wants Scotch, I’m certain. I think I’ll have the same.”
Shayne picked his way along the aisle, which was littered with bags and glasses and boxes of Kleenex. He entered the cockpit.
Moss, as he had announced, was holding a gun to the back of Lassiter’s neck. The co-pilot and flight engineer, both looking pale and scared, glanced at Shayne, then turned their heads quickly.
Moss saw the reflected mask in the windshield. “It’s OK. It’s OK. No sweat. Do you know what this madman tried to do? Kick us downstairs. I saw it coming, and luckily there’s nothing wrong with my reflexes. Get back there and tell the girls to hustle up with the Scotch.”
Shayne touched the nape of Moss’s neck with the forty-five. “Drop the gun.”
Moss’s head jerked around, then held steady. “Is that you, Shayne? Where the hell did you fall from, you son of a bitch?”
Shayne said patiently. “Open your hand and let it go.”
Moss shook his head. “Too many charges against me. Don’t be in such a hurry!” he said sharply as Shayne’s hand came up to take the gun. “I’ve got a bad rap waiting in the Congo, and I’ll be damned if I go back there quietly. You’ll do me a favor by shooting me. I’ll kill Joe to make you shoot. Shoot first if you want to, I’ll get him with the twitch.”
“We’ve got a co-pilot,” Shayne said. “He can take the plane down.”
“Mike!” Lassiter protested, his hands frozen on the controls. “Listen to what you’re saying, for God’s sake.”
Moss said hurriedly, “Make a deal, Shayne. No tricks. You’ve got your airplane back. Let me parachute over the oilfields. It’s only a fifty-fifty chance, but I generally do OK at even money—Stay where you are!” he told the copilot, who had slipped out of his seat. “Whatever you do, don’t slug me. That’s a sure bullet in Joe’s head.”
“Clancy,” Lassiter said pleadingly. “We don’t want to be vindictive with this guy. Hell, it’s politics, and who cares?”
“You don’t believe that,” Moss said with a white, crooked grin. “I never heard of the National Liberation Front before yesterday.”
“Did you take that gold at LaGuardia, Moss?” Shayne said.
“Don’t talk about gold. We’re talking about life and death.”
Clancy, the co-pilot reached around Shayne and touched Moss lightly on the neck. Moss jerked away.
“What was that?” he said sharply. “What are you trying to pull? Clancy, break out a chute. Fair’s fair. Nobody lost anything. They’ll all have a good story to tell when they get back home.”
Clancy said, “I think he’s got us by the short hairs, Joe. Why don’t we let him jump? The chances are they’ll pick him up before he can get out of the country. And the big thing is, you’ll be alive.”
“Something in that,” Lassiter agreed.
All at once, Moss’s shoulders lost their tension. He lowered the gun, turned around and smiled at Shayne.
“Mike Shayne. You look great in that mask, baby. It does something for you.”
Shayne picked the gun out of his fingers. Lassiter breathed out in relief.
“You won’t give us any more trouble now, will you, Jimmy? You’re going to put your hands out for the handcuffs.”
“Absolutely,” Moss agreed. “But it was a good try. We lost a man last night, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t think we could make it with just the two.” He leaned back against the wall. “Somebody say something about a drink?”
Shayne sent the co-pilot a questioning glance.
“A tranquilizer,” Clancy explained. He showed Shayne a small disposable syringe. “When somebody went out of his head in the old days, he could break up the plane. Now you hit him with a needle and he starts agreeing with you.”
“You’re so right,” Moss said pleasantly. “Why shorten your life by fighting and hustling? Look at that.”
He waved out the window. They were flying above the cloud deck, and the fleecy cumulus beneath them was piled up in fantastic storybook formations. They passed a break in the clouds and saw the sea far below.
“Lovely,” Moss said. “But after the first couple of years in the business, we never look at it, do we, Joe?”
CHAPTER 16
Shayne tried questioning Moss about who had organized the hijacking, but Moss turned the questions with a vague smile.
“It’s not like a truth drug,” the co-pilot explained. “It just takes off their edge.”
“Sit down, Moss,” Shayne said.
Smiling engagingly, Moss slipped down the wall to a sitting position on the floor.
“It seems to work,” Shayne said dubiously. “How long until it wears off?”
Clancy shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. I only had to use it once, and the guy was still behaving himself an hour later. We hit Maiquetía in fifteen minutes, which gives us plenty of leeway.”
“Get me a couple more of those syringes. I’ve got another problem out in the cabin.”
Clancy stepped into the crew compartment. Shayne turned back to Lassiter.
“Joe, remember the girl you had drinks with last night?”
“Vaguely. Why?”
“Who made the first move? Her roommate had visitors later. They knew they’d find her alone.”
Lassiter’s shoulders lifted. “I believe in mixing with the passengers. It’s not part of the charter, but I do what I can to make the trip memorable. I’m a slob that way—after a given amount of Scotch, they all look like Elizabeth Taylor. Last night there was quite a bit of coming and going.” Sue Cornelius, the stewardess, entered nerv
ously with a silver tray. She shied back from Shayne in his grotesque mask and looked in surprise at Jimmy Moss relaxing on the floor.
Moss grinned up at her. “Honey, from this angle you’ve got the nicest pair of stilts on this airline. Is one of those drinks for me?”
“No,” Shayne said.
He emptied the two bottles over the ice and handed a glass to Lassiter.
“Captain, are you sure you ought to—” the stewardess began.
“I’ve had a lunatic holding a gun to the back of my neck for the last ten minutes,” Lassiter said, “and I’m vibrating more than the Goddamned airplane.” He drained the glass in one long swallow. “Which is vibrating more than usual, it seems to me. What’s it like in the galley? Are you feeling a kind of drag?”
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“A sort of downward yank to the left.” He took a quarter turn on the stabilizer. “There it is again.”
Clancy, returning to the cockpit, handed Shayne two syringes. “Captain, shouldn’t we take another look through the drift meter? If one of those baggage hatches has sprung open—”
Lassiter set the autopilot button. The drift meter was a periscope-like device which snapped into position between the seats when a catch was released. Lassiter brought the eyepiece up into position and squinted into it. He grunted.
“Open?” Clancy said quickly.
“Ease back on the throttles. More. A bit more. The Goddamned pod is three-quarters out of the compartment. I’m going to try something.”
He snapped off the auto pilot, peering out the windshield, down and to the right. During the last few minutes the clouds had thinned into ragged ribbons of mist. Shayne saw a low-lying coastline and the mouth of a big river.
He tore off his mask. Crouching, he applied his eye to the drift meter. The long coffin-shaped container protruding from the plane’s belly was the one that had held the gold.
“Why not dump it, Joe?” the co-pilot said. “The insurance will cover. If it kicks out over land we may kill somebody.”
“No, there’s something funny about this. I mean that explosion back there. Tell me what happens, Mike.”
He gave the engines a sudden goose, kicked the pedals, and banked sharply. But the pod had already moved to its exact point of balance, and the sudden twist, instead of sending it back safely into the plane, shot it out and away.
Shayne watched it fall, tumbling end over end until it splashed into the water some fifty yards offshore.
“Lost it,” he said, lifting his head. “Clancy, I want a fix on where it went in, as close as you can get it.”
“That’s like seventy-five or a hundred feet of water,” Lassiter said. “Do you really want to bother?”
“I really do,” Shayne said.
The stewardess breathed, “Mike Shayne!”
“Don’t spread it around.” He pulled the mask over his head. “Didn’t somebody tell me you think I’m sexy?”
“Not in that,” the girl retorted, and left the cockpit.
Shayne leaned past Lassiter to look down as the dense tropical foliage of northern Venezuela ran past beneath them.
“Where did he tell you to land?”
“An airstrip in the oilfields,” Lassiter told him, “but I know that strip. It wasn’t built for this big a plane. I see the way your mind is working, but let’s not, huh? I’ll put down at Maiquetía, where they expect us, and we can tell our story. Much safer. Much better all around.”
“Clancy, get another couple of Scotches up here for Joe. We’re going to land on that airstrip.”
“Like hell we are,” Lassiter said. “I’m captain of this airplane, and we’re landing in comfort and safety at a modern airfield with up-to-date radar and good communications. I’m not that interested in rounding up a few guerrillas. If it comes to that, I sympathize with them. This government’s Godawful.”
Shayne broke off the plastic tip of one of the syringes. “Jimmy Moss is no guerrilla.”
“I am, in a way,” Moss said from the floor. “But I’ve got my own methods.”
Darting the needle at the side of Lassiter’s neck, Shayne depressed the plunger. Lassiter started up.
“I know what you’re trying to do! But you won’t get away with it!”
The anger drained out of his face and he concluded, sitting back, “Well, it’s going to be a tight landing, but just as you say, Mike.”
“Can you raise the Maiquetía tower?” Shayne said to Clancy. “Tell them we’re making an emergency landing and to get a company of infantry up here as fast as they can because we’ve been hijacked by the National Liberation Front. Then break off and don’t answer any questions.”
They passed over a huddle of derricks on the bank of a river. Lassiter put the plane into a slow bank to the left.
“See that little ribbon of Scotch tape down there?” he said happily. “It’s a real challenge.”
Picking up the PA microphone, he called, “Going in for a landing. You’re about to see a picturesque portion of Venezuela that’s not on the regular tour. We are now in oil country. Never mind fastening your seat belts, because, if we don’t make it on the first pass, we won’t make it at all. But we’ll make it. If I can keep from hitting those derricks, I think we’ll be fine.” Clicking off the mike, he told Clancy, “Drop the gear. Then give me the flaps. Gradually.”
“We’ll still be going one-seventy, Skipper—”
“So we’ll lose a few doors. You said a very deep thing a couple of minutes ago—let the insurance company worry.”
Shayne left the cockpit. The passengers seemed rigid with fear. When he passed Naomi Savage, she said bitterly, “You know you’ll be shot for this.”
He didn’t reply. The Brazilian in the galley was conscious, leaning on his elbows staring up balefully at Ward.
The Negro said quietly, “Are we in control of the plane, or are they?”
“I still don’t know,” Shayne said, stripping the plastic guard from the syringe. “We’ll find out when we land.”
The Brazilian, seeing what was coming, tried to shield his face from the needle, and Shayne injected him in the back of the wrist.
“We’re all friends,” Shayne told him. “Follow me and don’t say anything. Do as I tell you. Ten minutes from now we’ll be having a drink to celebrate.”
The Brazilian asked a puzzled question in Portuguese. Shayne repeated his instructions, but the man still didn’t understand. One effect of the drug had been to knock all the English language out of his head.
“Send Christa back here,” Shayne told Ward. “Then, for God’s sake, get rid of that clerical collar.”
Christa hurried down the aisle.
“Do you speak Portuguese?” Shayne demanded without preliminary.
“Mike!” she exclaimed. “You know—I wondered when I saw those shoulders. Portuguese, yes. Well enough.”
“Tell this guy I want him to do exactly what I say. To stick close to me and keep his mouth shut. When I want him to do something, I’ll use sign language.”
She nodded. “But I don’t want to make any mistakes. I’d better understand what you’re doing.”
“Making it up as I go along, as usual,” he said abrasively. “We’re being met. I want to find out where they take us. He’s tranquilized, but I want him to understand that I’m the boss. And ask him if he has another mask. He must have brought one for Thompson.”
She nodded again, thought for a moment, and broke into a stream of Portuguese. The Brazilian, looking up at Shayne, beamed with pleasure. “Sim, sim.” He pulled another monster mask out of his pocket. “Thompson. Pois sim.”
Shayne tossed it to Ward when he came back, wearing a black turtleneck.
“Hang on, boys and girls!” Lassiter yelled over the public address.
Shayne saw Naomi Savage watching him, her eyes narrowed. The plane touched down, bounced high in the air, and came down again. Shayne gestured to the Brazilian, who leaped to his feet, eager to start
cooperating. Shayne took a loop in the neck of the mail bag and brought it with him.
The plane skidded the last fifty feet with locked wheels, slewing around and coming to a stop less than half a length from the end of the asphalt. Lassiter met Shayne at the head of the aisle.
“You may not know it, but that was a pretty piece of flying.”
“Not bad at all,” Moss agreed, behind him.
Shayne pushed the door open. A battered pickup was racing down the strip.
“Moss,” Shayne said crisply. “Everything’s going to go just the way you planned it. Who’s in charge of the truck?”
“Guy named Nikko. A Greek. And talk about wild men.”
The truck skidded under the wing and pulled up below the open door. Three men burst out of the front seat. All three were dressed in splotched green-and-brown coveralls, with full beards and wraparound dark glasses. One of them began unloading a ladder.
“Viva the NLF!” one of the others yelled, waving his submachine gun, a battered German Schmeisser.
Ward said in a low voice, “That’s a lot of fire power there, Mike. I think we ought to stop it.”
“Too late,” Shayne said as the ladder dropped into place.
He motioned to Moss. After an instant’s hesitation, Ward followed Moss out the door. Naomi Savage, running up the aisle, stumbled against Shayne before there was room for him on the ladder. As he thrust her off, she pressed a crumpled piece of paper into his hand.
Two of the bearded men were unloading luggage containers while the third, a big, smelly man with a broad chest and powerful bare forearms, hurried them along with sweeps of his submachine gun. Shayne threw the mail sack into the back of the truck.”
“That you, Nikko?” he said. “We had a little trouble. I think they got off a radio message before I smashed the set.”
“Christ,” Nikko said hoarsely. “Then we hurry, eh?”
Shayne’s men, Ward and the two tranquilized hijackers, jumped in the back of the truck to load the pods as they came out of the plane. One of the guerrillas yelled something in a language Shayne didn’t understand, certainly not Spanish.
“Only two containers?” Nikko said. “There were to be three.”
Violence Is Golden Page 12
