by Jake Needham
The man gestured toward a comfortable-looking padded seat and Tay settled himself there while the man slammed and locked the helicopter’s door. The man buckled the seat’s harness around Tay, lifted a pair of heavily padded earphones off a hook at the back, and placed them over Tay’s ears. He snapped off a salute, vanished into the cockpit, and almost at once the pitch of the engine rose sharply.
Tay glanced around. The interior of the helicopter was plush and comfortable. There were four big seats upholstered in soft, brown leather, although he was the only passenger. It certainly didn’t look like the sort of conveyance the military would use to haul prisoners.
The helicopter shuddered slightly and, with a high-pitched burst of noise so loud that Tay felt more than heard it, the helicopter lifted slowly off the pad. It hung there for a moment, a foot or two in the air, and Tay looked toward where the Mercedes was parked. The four soldiers who had rousted him out of his room were still there as well. They were right in front of it, standing at attention in a straight line, all of them holding crisp salutes.
Then all at once the helicopter shot straight up like an express elevator. The pilot pushed the nose over to gain speed and they rumbled away into the gray half light of the new day.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tay couldn’t imagine where they were going and he had no doubt that asking the pilots would be useless even if he could figure out how the headset worked and communicate with them over the engine noise.
And who was flying the helicopter anyway? The men who showed up at his hotel were all dressed in Thai army uniforms which made who they were plain enough, but the pilot who strapped him into the helicopter had been wearing plain khaki without any insignia at all. He had made Tay think of someone from the military who was on a covert mission, but the moment that thought crossed Tay’s mind he had quickly pushed it away again.
Tay looked out the windows on his side of the helicopter, craned his neck, and tried to locate the sun to figure out the direction they were flying. He couldn’t find it, but what difference did it really make? Other than being aware that Bangkok was somewhere north of Pattaya, his knowledge of Thai geography was pretty close to nonexistent. Even if he knew the direction they were traveling, he still wouldn’t have any idea where they were going.
Surely, Tay thought, there was something he could do rather than just sit there passively, but the more he thought about it the less of an idea he had as to what it might be. Admitting he was essentially helpless felt like an abject surrender, but what choice did he have? Just sitting there and waiting to find out what was to become of him felt like a lousy choice, but life was full of lousy choices, wasn’t it? So far Tay had managed to rise above them. He wanted to believe he could continue to do that, but he wasn’t so sure anymore.
After a little more than half an hour, Tay heard the pitch of the engine change and he felt the helicopter begin to descend. Outside the windows on his side he could see a few scattered buildings off in the distance, but none that looked even remotely familiar. He bent down and looked across the cabin through the windows on the other side and saw an even greater number of very tall buildings. He didn’t recognize any of those buildings either, but that had to mean they were somewhere near Bangkok. There certainly wasn’t anywhere else that looked anything like this that they could reach in a half hour of flying from the area around Pattaya.
The helicopter leveled off at what seemed to be about a thousand feet, swung around, and began a slow, elevator-like descent to the ground. Tay could see far off to the right an airport terminal building with several Thai Airways airplanes parked around it, and on the expanse of concrete toward which they were descending six sleek and lethal-looking military jet fighters were parked in a straight line. Most surreal of all, the space between what must have been a civilian airport and what looked like a military airport was occupied by a golf course.
The only airport he knew around Bangkok was Suvarnabhumi, the city’s major international airport, but this certainly wasn’t it. Did Bangkok have another airport he had never heard of? One with a military facility and a golf course? Apparently, it did.
The helicopter bumped against the concrete, swung slightly to one side, and then settled. The pilots cut the engine and the rotor blades whirred to a stop. The same young man who had buckled Tay in reappeared, removed the headset he wore, and helped him out of the shoulder harness.
“Where are we?” Tay asked.
The young man didn’t respond. He just smiled and opened the door. Tay stood up and the young man took his elbow to help him out. Tay shook him off. He wasn’t that old, at least not yet.
Tay jumped to the ground. It wasn’t that hard. It was no more than eighteen inches away. The young man collected Tay’s bag and jumped down right behind him.
They were parked in front of a building that appeared to be a private terminal facility of some kind. It didn’t look particularly busy, and through the windows Tay could see several men wearing what appeared to be military uniforms. Regardless of the pilot’s lack of insignia, it seemed that he was still firmly in the hands of the Thai military.
With a sigh, Tay started walking toward the building.
“Sir? Sir?”
Tay looked back at the pilot who was pointing away from the building and out onto the aircraft parking apron. Tay’s eyes went to where the kid was pointing and he saw a sleek private jet waiting. His mouth dropped open.
The kid walked toward the jet carrying Tay’s bag and gesturing with his free hand for Tay to follow.
It was a big plane, white with a red stripe that ran all the way down the fuselage and up the tail. There was a number and some letters painted on the tail under the stripe, but Tay could see no other identification or markings on it. The plane wasn’t as big as a commercial airliner, of course, but it was certainly bigger than most of the private planes Tay had seen parked at the airport in Singapore. Of course, he knew next to nothing about such things, but this looked like a serious airplane to him, one big enough to fly a dozen or more people almost anywhere in the world they wanted to go.
The forward door of the airplane was standing open and its boarding stairs were extended down to the parking apron. It looked almost as if it was just sitting there waiting for him, and he was beginning to understand that was exactly what it was doing.
At the foot of the plane’s steps, the kid handed Tay his bag. Then he drew himself to attention, slapped his heels together with a crack as sharp as a gunshot, and snapped off a salute.
Having no better idea what to do, Tay returned the salute. Then he dragged his bag up the boarding steps and into the airplane.
“Hey, man.” John August was sprawled on a leather sofa on the left side of the cabin chewing on a small cigar. “You certainly took your own fucking time getting here.”
It was one of the very few occasions in his entire life on which Sam Tay found himself absolutely speechless.
He stood in the doorway of the airplane and gaped at August, not able to summon up even a single coherent sentence. August looked back at him with something that was almost but not quite a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and quietly chewed on his cigar.
“You’d probably be more comfortable sitting down,” August said after a moment and pointed to a big chair opposite the couch where he was reclining.
Then he took the cigar out of his mouth, turned his head toward the half-open cockpit door, and shouted, “Let’s move it, Fritz! Get this thing in the air!”
Tay walked a few steps and sank slowly into the chair without taking his eyes off of August.
The cockpit door opened and a stocky man wearing black pants and a white shirt with epaulets emerged. He opened a panel next to the main boarding door and held down a big black button until the stairs retracted and the door closed. Without speaking or even glancing at anyone in the passenger cabin, the man shut the panel, returned to the cockpit, and closed the door.
Tay felt himself regaining the
power of speech. “I don’t know what to say, John. You never mentioned anything about owning an airplane.”
“I don’t. This one belongs to a Manila charter company we use a lot. They think they’re flying for the CIA, and we don’t tell them any different.”
August chuckled.
“I guess that makes us the first organization in the history of the world to use the CIA as a cover.”
Tay heard the sound of the plane’s engines starting. August raised his voice above the noise and pointed toward the back of the cabin.
“Say hello to the rest of the crew.”
Tay turned his head where August was pointing and realized for the first time that they weren’t alone on the plane. Near the back of the cabin, a man and a woman sat on opposite sides of the center aisle in seats similar to the one Tay was occupying. The woman raised her hand and gave Tay a wave with her fingers. The man sat perfectly still and just looked at him.
“I think you know Claire,” August continued. “The friendly-looking guy with the beard is Woods, but he’s not nearly as friendly as he appears.”
Tay recognized Claire, of course. She was one of August’s people who had been tracking a terrorist bent on staging an attack in Singapore a little while back, the same terrorist Tay had been tracking. She and Tay had become accidental partners in running the man to ground. Working together they got the job done and stopped an attack that might have killed hundreds or even thousands. The price for doing that had been high, and Tay wasn’t at all sure it had been a price worth paying.
Naturally Claire wasn’t her real name, at least Tay didn’t think it was, but it was the one she had used in Singapore and he had gotten used to it. The truth was he thought it was a rather nice name, and working with a woman as attractive as Claire had been… well, that part had been nice, too. She was tall, lean and fit looking, and she had long blond hair which she kept pulled back into a ponytail. When they worked together in Singapore she had generally dressed in a slightly masculine way, usually jeans and boots with a khaki shirt and aviator sunglasses. Tay thought the look was rather sexy, at least Claire made it look sexy. Did all American women dress to look a little masculine? Maybe they did. Thankfully, his experience with American women was limited, really limited since he’d had none at all, so he couldn’t say for sure, but he really wouldn’t be surprised.
He and Claire had gotten on well, and he had to admit the easy familiarity they had struck up had meant something to him. Still, it had never occurred to Tay that he would ever see Claire again after that, her being one of August’s crew of ghosts and all, so he had filed her away as just another entry in his long and disappointing catalog of missed opportunities.
Tay had no idea who Woods was. The man was big and obviously fit, but he looked gentle and friendly enough, like the fellow in the neighborhood who always took time to play with the kids. Still, if the guy was nearly as formidable as Claire, and Tay had no doubt that he was or he wouldn’t be here on this airplane with August, he was someone to be reckoned with.
The sound of the engines abruptly rose to a high-pitched whine and the airplane began to move. Tay glanced out the window and saw that they were rolling slowly toward the runways.
“I could have taken a commercial flight back to Singapore, John. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”
August chuckled. He propped his cigar up in an ashtray attached to the armrest of the couch, then he sat up and buckled a seatbelt around his waist.
“We’re not going to Singapore, Sam.”
Tay wasn’t exactly thrilled to hear that, but he wasn’t entirely astonished either. It had already begun to dawn on him that he wasn’t going to be on his way home anytime soon. He waited for August to tell him the rest. It came quickly.
“We’re going to Washington.”
“Washington D.C.?”
August nodded.
“In the United States?”
August nodded again. “The land of the free and the home of the brave.”
“I don’t want to go to the United States.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like Americans. You know that.”
“I’m an American. You like me.”
“Who told you that?”
“And Claire’s an American. You like her, don’t you?”
Tay knew he was just being baited so he ignored August’s question and asked one of his own.
“Why would I want to go to America?”
“Because you’re the kind of man who finishes what he starts. And that’s where you have to go to finish this.”
“You’ve identified the woman I found on the Hilton surveillance video.”
“We have. Naturally her name isn’t Susan Brandstetter, and she’s not Canadian. But I’m sure you’ve already assumed that.”
Tay had indeed assumed that. He also assumed August was about to tell him who the woman really was and so he waited for it.
“Her name is Rebecca Sternwood,” August said. “She’s an American.”
The pitch of the engines rose another notch and the airplane shuddered slightly as if it were impatient to get into the air.
“And this woman is in Washington D.C.?” Tay asked.
“That’s where she is,” August nodded.
“Why?”
“Why is she in Washington D.C.?”
Tay nodded.
“Because she works for the Agency.”
“What agency?” Tay asked, but almost immediately he realized how stupid that sounded.
“You mean the Agency?”
August nodded again.
“The CIA?”
This time August didn’t even bother to nod.
“Are you telling me, John, that it’s the fucking CIA that’s trying to kill you?”
“Well… probably not the whole CIA.”
August grinned and cut Tay an enormous wink.
“Fasten your seatbelt, Sam.”
Tay wondered in what sense August was offering him that advice. Was he simply issuing the usual warning given before takeoff on all airplanes, or was August engaging in an unlikely eruption of metaphorical fancy?
Both, Tay decided almost immediately.
I’m pretty sure it’s both.
Chapter Thirty
The airplane turned onto the end of the runway and accelerated into its takeoff roll without stopping. It climbed into the sky far more steeply than Tay ever remembered experiencing before on an airplane. It was almost as if their departure had been given priority by the airport over all the other traffic, and after everything else that had happened Tay wouldn’t have been surprised if it had.
Tay had never flown in a private jet before. It was far more comfortable than flying in a commercial aircraft, of course, and getting to skip all the security nonsense that airports put people through these days was a nice bonus, but he really wasn’t all that thrilled about being on a plane that was so small. He wasn’t particularly fond of flying in airplanes of any size, but in this one all the sensations of flight that Tay would rather not think about were exaggerated: the speed, the climb, the distance above the ground. It was the difference between speeding down the highway in a bus and then suddenly finally yourself doing it on a motorcycle.
It seemed to Tay that the whole idea of human flight was a fragile concept. When he was strapped into a seat in the middle of a huge commercial aircraft, he might feel cramped and it might be unpleasant, but at least those discomforts pushed the thought that he was suspended in the air several miles above solid ground well out of his mind. In this smaller aircraft with its plush leather seats and big windows, the idea that he was strapped into a narrow aluminum tube whizzing at great speed far above the surface of the earth came front and center.
After ten minutes or so the plane’s nose tilted down and Tay’s sense of balance told him they were leveling off. August unsnapped his seat belt, stood up, and stretched.
“No flight attendants, I’m afraid, Sam. If you
want anything, you’ll have to get it yourself.”
“How long is it going to take for us to get there?”
“You might as well get comfortable. It’s going to be a while.”
“A while?”
“We’re routing first to Chitose Airbase. It’s a Japanese Self-Defense Forces base on Hokkaido in the north of Japan that the Japanese government uses for its aircraft operations. That ought to take about seven hours. We’ll top off the fuel there, which will take an hour or two depending on how busy they are, and after that it’s another fourteen or fifteen hours to Washington. So that’s something like twenty-four hours all in, give or take. There are three pilots in the cockpit so they’ll take turns resting and we can go straight through.”
Tay was flabbergasted. Twenty-four hours on an airplane? That sounded crazy. He realized they were flying halfway around the world, and he supposed if he thought about it he’d realize that was how long it took to fly halfway around the world, but he had tried hard not to think about things like that before. And he really didn’t want to start now.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” Tay heard a woman say.
He glanced up and saw Claire standing in the aisle right next to him.
“How do you take yours, Sam?”
“Black is fine,” he said.
Claire smiled and disappeared behind a curtain at the front of the aircraft.
“You can smoke if you like,” August said. “That’s only one of many things that make this better than flying United.”
Tay looked at August and saw him lighting the little cigar he had been chewing on before takeoff.
He opened his bag and took out what was left of a crumpled pack of Marlboros and a box of matches. That was just his luck, wasn’t it? For the first time in more years than he could remember he could smoke on an airplane and he only had three cigarettes to last him for twenty-four hours. August must have seen him looking at the pack and guessed exactly what he was thinking.
