by Phil Bowie
20
DURING THE FLIGHT BACK TO TETERBORO STRAKE ONCE again came up to take the copilot’s seat. There had been no further mention of the incident with Strake’s wife.
Strake said, “I’ve been giving you a gradual education in my business, of course. I need someone to handle some aspects of it routinely. You have demonstrated an aptitude for it. What I have in mind will mean an eventual increase in salary. You will continue to fly, and will schedule your other new responsibilities as you can. Do you have any problems with that?”
He thought for a moment, scanning ahead for any traffic, and then said, “The flying has been exceptional. I don’t think this plane could be in much better shape, and my salary is already generous. I have no complaints. The business intrigues me, I have to admit, but I have some reservations about selling weapons. I do believe basically that people kill people, but it seems to me that guns make it a whole lot easier for them.”
“I thought we’d had this conversation,” Strake said evenly, his eyes dark and brooding. He stared off into the hazy sky and went on, “Humans persist in the pretense that they are somehow inherently noble. The reality is we are predators to our cores. The most effective, most efficient predators ever to inhabit this planet. Killers of every other species on the planet and of each other by the millions. Our own government is responsible for Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki and the deaths of uncounted innocent people. Why are we so reluctant to admit what we are? It’s the reason we admire other rival predators—the lion, the wolf, and the eagle. Sports teams are not named for rabbits or doves. Violence runs in us like a current just under our skins. With the right provocation any one of us can become violently enraged in an instant, with or without a weapon at hand. You have certainly experienced flashes of it. Everyone has. Conflict is at the dark heart of all our drama—our vicarious other lives—and the more intense that conflict the more fascinating we find it to be.
“How many riots, how many indiscriminate homemade bombings and lead-pipe kneecappings and piano-wire garrotings and bare-knuckle beatings have been perpetrated in the name of one political or religious belief or another? Gather a group of humans and infuse them properly with religious or ideological zeal and what they can accomplish in the way of devastation can be awe-inspiring. There’s no better modern example than Nine-Eleven.
“In World War Two the Allies were continually confronted by rabidly suicidal Japanese who were willing to fight hand-to-hand to the last man just to defend one worthless jungle outpost or another.
“In the 1860s Paraguay fought against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay simultaneously in a senseless and utterly hopeless contest. The entire country fought to the bitter end, often with nothing more than razors lashed to poles. Before the war the population was 450,000. At the war’s end there were only 221,000 left alive, and only 14,000 of those were men. The availability of or lack of weaponry had nothing to do with their desire to kill as many of their neighbors as possible by any means, at any cost.
“Weapons have been with us since the first prehistoric human picked up a thigh bone to settle an argument, and our police still carry clubs. There is nothing inherently lethal in a length of hickory. The lethality lies coiled within us. Every last one of us. Weapons can, in fact, serve well as deterrents to violence. The cold war was a protracted nuclear and conventional weapons stand-off, after all, with enough destructive power stockpiled to erase all life from the planet several times over, yet it has ended almost amicably for all concerned. Our own government has doled out heavy and light weapons for decades with the intent of deterring conflicts.
“If you could rid the world of gunpowder tomorrow humans would merely revert to using spears and crossbows and maces. Less efficient, of course, but no less lethal, and they would soon devise better weapons. Witness the relatively recent development of chemical and biological weapons, or tactical nuclear weapons. There are ingenious people working industriously right now to perfect caseless ammunition that will be lighter, cheaper, and more deadly, and on sound suppression through new bullet design, and on compact optical low-light sighting devices.
“I have not invented or refined any weapons. I do not campaign to perpetuate them. I am merely a broker engaged in a trade that will flourish with or without me. What I do is simply conduct business, and there have been more than a few instances when various high-level people in your government have been thankful that Worldarms has existed to carry out transactions they have preferred not to carry out themselves. I do not claim to be a patriot. My motive is profit. That is certainly not unusual. Money allows me to maintain a life style, to sustain my business, and to sign your paychecks. Decide once and for all whether you want to continue receiving those paychecks. Let me know in one week.”
With that he got up and went back into the cabin.
Seven days later Strake summoned him to a morning meeting in his office. Seated behind his massive ornate desk, he said, “What have you decided?”
With only his modest living expenses his savings account had been growing nicely and it would not be too far in the future before he would be able to think about striking out on his own with a small charter operation or some other venture. He was not likely to earn this kind of money elsewhere, and flying the immaculate, well-equipped King Air to exotic places had been a keen pleasure. The conversation with Rader in Vancouver had receded into a murky realm of doubtful and unproven events that in any case need not concern him. He had done no real wrong working for Worldarms and intended to do none. He said, “I appreciate the job, and I’m willing to do whatever else I can for the company.”
“No more moralistic probings?”
“No.”
Strake appraised him for a long moment. He said, “Then I want you to go to Atlanta for a month. Take a commercial flight. Oversee the installation of my new manager in the Walther plant and assist him in any ways you can. I want you to make your own assessment of what needs to be done to lean out that operation. I’ll want your opinions on the new manager and on the remaining top executives. While you’re in Atlanta the backup pilot can fly the King Air for me as necessary. Alert him before you leave. That will be all for now.”
He enjoyed the assignment in Atlanta, immersing himself in it, looking for ways to cut costs and improve efficiency with an objective outsider’s eye. The new manager, a portly CEO in his mid-fifties who had been hired away from a small Connecticut company that made hunting rifles, did not seem to resent the presence of an emissary from Strake, and took over the rusty operation affably but firmly, making his leadership felt beneficially within the first week, letting the department heads and employees know exactly what was expected of them and injecting a fresh energy that seemed to be welcomed. The two of them got along well and the CEO was attentive to any suggestions.
At the end of the month Cowboy returned to meet with Strake and give him a detailed written report. Strake immediately sat behind his desk and read through the report, stopping frequently to ask pointed and perceptive questions, not satisfied until he had received exhaustive answers.
Strake gave no indication that he was either pleased or displeased, but he delegated more and more responsibilities over the following weeks.
Three months after the Atlanta assignment, Davis called him at his apartment late one Sunday night and said, “Get the King Air ready for a flight to Venezuela at dawn.”
Strake and Davis met him at the all-night FBO, Strake dressed in a neat gray suit and muted tie and Davis looking bear-like in slacks and a black windbreaker. In addition to the usual light traveling luggage, Strake carried a large thick metal briefcase that appeared to be weighty.
Strake handed him a spiral-bound pad and said, “We’re going directly to a private ranch about two hundred miles inland, southeast of Caracas near the Orinoco River. There is a narrow but adequate paved three-thousand-foot strip with pilot-controlled lighting. If the weather is bad there is a non-directional-beacon approach that you can back up with the GPS.
The coordinates are listed in that notepad, along with the elevation and other details about the strip. The ranch belongs to a former government official, a business associate, so you do not need anyone’s permission. We will stop in San Juan for fuel. Make the final destination for your flight plan Ciudad Bolivar, but we will not stop there. Twenty miles from the coast set the transponder code to the one listed in the notepad and press the ident button. Press the ident button again in exactly three minutes, and again exactly three minutes later, then keep the transponder on that code the rest of the way. Do not talk to anyone.”
“But I’ll need to get clearances and weather advisories from Venezuelan ATC, and what about customs?”
“We are fully cleared already and will be recognized by the transponder code. Any conflicting traffic will be made aware of us. You can monitor the automated weather station at Caracas. The official is ex-military and is high level, and he wishes this visit to be discreet for reasons of his own.”
“This is…unusual.”
“This is an unusual business, as I’m sure you have been discovering.”
The man they were visiting could be a retired Venezuelan military officer who was involved in an arms deal on some kind of commission basis from Strake, a cash commission that could be in that metal briefcase, and the official might not want the government to know about it. Cowboy didn’t like the idea of flying into the country semi-covertly, but dealings were decidedly different in South America. If Strake was tendering some kind of bribe to this Venezuelan it would only be considered business as usual by most Latin American standards.
After they boarded, Cowboy called ATC to change the final destination on his flight plan from Simon Bolivar to San Juan, Puerto Rico. He would file again from there, listing Ciudad Bolivar as his destination. This Venezuelan must really have some clout if he could persuade somebody in ATC down there to quietly monitor the flight and to cover up a non-landing at Ciudad Bolivar. There were several ways that could be done, he thought. One way would be to convince the civilian controllers that this was some kind of covert Venezuelan military flight.
When they took off from Teterboro in a dingy dawn there was a spaced-out line of heavy thunderstorms, some topping out at 45,000 feet, advancing threateningly northward across Tennessee and the Carolinas and Cowboy was soon busy picking a way among them, relying on the King Air’s sophisticated color radar, which showed the huge cells as menacing scarlet otherworldly amoeba-like organisms, and on helpful vectoring from ATC.
The turbulence was on the bad side of moderate and occasionally somewhat worse and he slowed the plane to contend with it. There were frequent joltingly bright flashes not far away embedded in the heavy rain squalls and swirling dirty mists. The air was much less corrugated by the time they crossed the Florida line, and the rest of the flight, including the refueling stop in Puerto Rico, went smoothly. Strake did not come up to the cockpit.
The weather over the Caribbean was good, with only a high thin cloud layer blurring a three-quarter moon as they passed over the Venezuelan coast in silky late evening air between Caracas and Barcelona above the Pan American Highway, which was marked by widely-spaced vehicle headlights crawling along. They were squawking the specified transponder code, the infrequent chatter from Caracas approach giving no hint of their presence. The chart showed the rugged terrain of the Guyana Highlands ahead. Not far away to the southeast somewhere was Angel Falls and ten-thousand foot Mt. Roraima. The provided coordinates placed the private ranch alongside the Rio Caura, one of the Orinoco’s main tributaries. The nearest towns were Cabruta and Caicara about fifty miles west on opposite banks of the snaking Orinoco.
He flew directly to the coordinates and keyed the transmitter five times on the given frequency. Twin rows of dim lights winked alive down in the blackness, looking impossibly short from eight thousand feet up. He spiraled down and slowed the King Air to pass a thousand feet above the strip. There was a dimly-lit wind sock that pointed out a light breeze favoring the western approach. The runway was clear but very narrow, no more than sixty feet wide. Trees and brush had been cut back at both ends to provide reasonably unobstructed glide paths. It was not a strip he would have wanted to approach in IFR conditions, with mountains uncomfortably close and a lot of hostile-looking tangled jungle all around. He spotted a complex of buildings among trees on a hillside a half mile from the strip, with lights on here and there.
He set up for a close-in downwind leg, slowing the King Air to a minimum on the base and final legs, the powerful landing lights probing a light ground fog that hung above the jungle, and dropping it in steeply to take advantage of as much of the runway length as possible, ready to pour the power back on for a go-around if necessary. The mains touched down less than a hundred feet beyond the threshold and he immediately reversed the props. There were rough places in the blacktop that looked like they had been patched with tarred gravel. He stopped the plane with just two hundred feet to spare, realizing how tense he had been as he released his tight grip on the yoke.
The hard part was over now. Taking off out of here would pose no particular problem with only the two passengers and a good deal of the fuel weight burned off. In the wan moonlight he had noted that climbing away to the northeast would keep him clear of the highest terrain. He taxied slowly to a small apron where a Beech Duchess was tied down under an open-walled T-hangar and a white Land Rover was waiting with its parking lights on. He swung it around and shut the engines down, setting the parking brake.
Strake came to the cockpit door and said, “Stay here with the plane. We shouldn’t be gone more than two hours. Keep the air-stair closed against the insects.” He had the metal briefcase in hand. Davis could be heard back at the left rear of the cabin opening the door that hinged down to create a boarding stairway.
From the darkened cockpit Cowboy watched the two men walk over to the Rover and get into the back seat, Davis carrying a small soft sports bag and Strake carrying the metal briefcase. The driver stayed at the wheel. The Rover started up and moved away around a curve on a narrow gravel road that climbed up in S-turns through dense jungle. He went back through the cabin and closed the air-stair, getting a pleasant wafting of the warmly humid tropical air.
After opening the cockpit vents to refresh the air, he busied himself for an hour updating his instrument approach binders, neatening up the cabin and cockpit, and re-reading a section of the King Air manual to commit some more of the systems details to memory. The darkness outside was heavy, despite the gibbous moon, the runway marker lights having shut down automatically fifteen minutes after they had landed to leave only a few dim landscape lights along the apron and spaced out alongside the gravel track that wound up the hillside to the buildings.
Thinking of the patched places in the runway, he decided to go out and walk the length of the rough pavement to be sure there were no loose stones or other debris that might damage a prop or the turbines on what he was beginning to think of as his airplane. He had a five-cell flashlight which he took outside, closing the air-stair door behind him. He started walking the runway, sweeping the powerful beam from side to side. The jungle was loudly alive with the sounds of night birds and uncountable other creatures, and tendrils of light ground fog hung in the still air between the walls of solid-looking vegetation that were encroaching on the narrow cleared areas bordering the strip.
He had walked no more than a third of the length before the mosquitoes found him. They were like hot needles on the backs of his hands and the flesh of his face that was not protected by his beard, but he brushed at them and walked on, inspecting the pavement, thinking about the possibility of some big creature tracking him hungrily from the darkness.
The sounds of gunshots froze him. Two very quick reports followed by a single heavier shot. Muffled, but coming from one of the buildings up the hill. If he had been inside the plane he never would have heard them. Strake or Davis demonstrating a pistol? But there was something ominous in the series of shots. The tw
o light reports were in haste, followed instantly by the heavier report, then stillness. It had been an exchange of fire, he knew instinctively, and he broke into a run along the pavement, across the apron and up the hill along the gravel track.
When he could make out the buildings through the trees he switched off the flashlight and slowed to a walk, stepping carefully on the washboarded gravel. As he rounded the last curve he stopped, still well within the shadows, to look over the scene, the flashlight ready as a club if he should need it.
There was no sign of anyone near the buildings, the largest of which was a long low ranch house with a wide porch all along its front. The Land Rover was parked to one side of the circular drive. Another gravel track led away up the hill. There was a dim light in one of the outbuildings, and there were two area lights mounted high up on poles to beat back the oppressive jungle darkness. Somewhere farther up the hill a generator hammered in a steady rhythm.
There were two more startling sharp reports from within the house. No other sounds then except for the jungle creatures and the muted generator.
He was about to sprint for the shadows at the side of the house, intending to get a glimpse inside through one of the windows, when the double screen doors burst open and a man was pushed stumbling out onto the porch. Davis had the man’s arms pinned tightly behind him. The man had a full head of white hair and was almost as large as Davis. He looked to be in his late fifties. He was struggling strongly and spluttering in rapid Spanish.
Davis spun him around and clubbed him full in the face with a massive fist and the man went down as though he had been struck with a baseball bat. He writhed on the porch floor and groaned weakly. Something flashed in Davis’s right hand as he strode over to a rope hammock. With a few strokes he cut the hammock down and sliced off lengths of rope. He went back and roughly tied the limp older man in the porch entry, one arm out to each side, hauling him up onto his feet between the entry posts by sheer strength, so the man was finally spread-eagled facing the house, his head lolling on his chest, his legs splayed.
