By Order of the President

Chapter I

Quatro de Fevereiro Aeroporto Internacional

Luanda, Angola

1445 23 May 2005

As he climbed the somewhat unsteady roll-up stairs and ducked his head to get through the door of Lease-Aire LA-9021-a Boeing 727-Captain Alex MacIlhenny, who was fifty-two, ruddy-faced, had a full head of just starting to gray red hair, and was getting just a little jowly, had sort of a premonition that something was wrong-or that something bad was about to happen-but he wasn't prepared for the dark-skinned man standing inside the fuselage against the far wall. The man was holding an Uzi submachine gun in both hands, and it was aimed at MacIlhenny's stomach.

Oh, shit!

MacIlhenny stopped and held both hands up, palm outward, at shoulder level.

"Get out of the door, Captain," the man ordered, gesturing with the Uzi's muzzle that he wanted MacIlhenny to enter the flight deck.

That's not an American accent. Or Brit, either. And this guy's skin is dark, not black. What is he, Portuguese maybe?

Oh come on! Portuguese don't steal airplanes. This guy is some kind of an Arab.

The man holding the Uzi was dressed almost exactly like MacIlhenny, in dark trousers, black shoes, and an open-collared white shirt with epaulets. There were wings pinned above one breast pocket, and the epaulets held the four-gold-stripe shoulder boards of a captain. He even had, clipped to his other breast pocket, the local Transient Air Crew identification tag issued to flight crews who had passed through customs and would be around the airport for twenty-four hours or more.

MacIlhenny started to turn to go into the cockpit.

"Backwards," the man ordered. "And stand there."

MacIlhenny complied.

"We don't want anyone to see you with your hands up, do we?" the man asked, almost conversationally.

MacIlhenny nodded but didn't say anything.

Something like this, I suppose, was bound to happen. The thing to do is keep my cool, do exactly what they tell me to do and nothing stupid.

"Your aircraft has been requisitioned," the man said, "by the Jihad Legion."

What the hell is the "Jihad Legion"?

What does it matter?

Some nutcake, rag-head Arab outfit, English-speaking and clever enough to get dressed up in a pilot's uniform, is about to grab this airplane. Has grabbed this airplane. And me.

MacIlhenny nodded, didn't say anything for a moment, but then took a chance.

"I understand, but if you're a:"

Someone behind him grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. He started to struggle-a reflex action-but then saw out of the corner of his eye what looked like a fish-filleting knife, then felt it against his Adam's apple, and forced himself not to move.

Jesus Christ!

"You will speak only with permission, and you will seek that permission by raising your hand, as a child does in school. You understand?"

MacIlhenny tried to nod, but the way his head was being pulled back and with the knife at his throat he doubted the movement he was able to make was very visible. He thought a moment and then raised his right hand slightly higher.

"You may speak," the man with the Uzi said.

"Since you are a pilot, why do you need me?" he asked.

"The first answer should be self-evident: So that you cannot report the requisitioning of your aircraft immediately. Additionally, we would prefer that when the authorities start looking for the aircraft they first start looking for you and not us. Does that answer your question?"

MacIlhenny nodded as well as he could and said, "Yes, sir."

What the hell are they going to do with this airplane?

Are they going to fly it into the American embassy here?

With me in it?

In Angola? That doesn't make much sense. It's a small embassy, and most people have never heard of Angola much less know where it is.

What's within range?

South Africa, of course. It's about fifteen hundred miles to Johannesburg, and a little more to Capetown. Where's our embassy in South Africa?

"As you surmised, I am a pilot qualified to fly this model Boeing," the man said. "As is the officer behind you. Therefore, you are convenient for this operation but not essential. At any suspicion that you are not doing exactly as you are told, or are attempting in any way to interfere with this operation, you will be eliminated. Do you understand?"

MacIlhenny nodded again as well as he could and said, "Yes, sir."

The man said something in a foreign language that MacIlhenny did not understand. The hand grasping his hair opened and he could hold his head erect.

"You may lower your hands," the man said, and then, conversationally, added: "You seemed to be taking a long time in your preflight walk-around. What was that all about?"

MacIlhenny, despite the heat, felt a sudden chill and realized that he had been sweating profusely.

Why not? With an Uzi pointing at your stomach and a knife against your throat, what did you expect?

His mouth was dry, and he had to gather saliva and wet his lips before he tried to speak.

"I came here to make a test flight," MacIlhenny began. "This aircraft has not flown in over a year. I made what I call the 'MacIlhenny Final Test':"

"Is that not the business of mechanics?"

"I am a mechanic."

"You are a mechanic?" the man asked, dubiously.

"Yes, sir. I hold both air frame and engine licenses. I supervised getting this aircraft ready to fly, signed off on the repairs, and I was making the MacIlhenny Test:"

"What test is that?"

"It's not required; it's just something I do. The airplane has been sitting here for more than twenty-four hours, with a full load of fuel: at takeoff weight, you'll understand. I take a final look around. If anything was leaking, I would have seen it, found out where it was coming from, and fixed it before I tried to fly it."

The man with the Uzi considered that and nodded.

"It is unusual for a captain to also be a mechanic, is it not?"

"Yes, sir, I suppose it is."

"And did you find anything wrong on this final test?"

"No, sir, I did not."

"And what were you going to do next if your final test found nothing wrong?"

"I've arranged for a copilot, sir. As soon as he got here, I was going to run up the engines a final time and then make a test flight."

"Your copilot is here," the man said. "You may look into the passenger compartment."

MacIlhenny didn't move.

"Look into the fuselage, Captain," the man with the Uzi said, sternly, and something hard was rammed into the small of MacIlhenny's back.

He winced with the pain.

That wasn't a knife and it certainly wasn't a hand. Maybe the other guy's got an Uzi, too. A gun, anyway.

MacIlhenny stepped past the bulkhead and looked into the passenger compartment.

All but the first three rows of seats had been removed from the passenger compartment. MacIlhenny had no idea when or why but when LA-9021 had left Philadelphia on a sixty-day, cash-up-front dry charter, it had been in a full all-economy-class passenger configuration-the way it had come from Continental Airlines-with seats for 189 people.

Lease-Aire had been told it was to be used to haul people on everything-included excursions from Scandinavia to the coast of Spain and Morocco.

MacIlhenny knew all this because he was Lease-Aire's vice president for Maintenance and Flight Operations. The title sounded more grandiose-on purpose-than the size of the corporation really justified. Lease-Aire had only two other officers. The president and chief executive officer was MacIlhenny's brother-in-law, Terry Halloran; and the secretary-treasurer was Mary-Elizabeth MacIlhenny Halloran, Terry's wife and MacIlhenny's sister.

Lease-Aire was in the used aircraft business, dealing in aircraft the major airlines wanted to get rid of for any number of reasons, most often because they were near the end of their operational life. LA-9021, for example, had hauled passengers for Continental for twenty-two years.

When Lease-Aire acquired an airplane-their fleet had never exceeded four aircraft at one time; they now owned two: this 727, and a Lockheed 10-11 they'd just bought from Northwest-they stripped off the airline paint job, reregistered it, and painted on the new registration numbers.

Then the aircraft was offered for sale. If they couldn't find someone to buy it at a decent profit, the plane was offered for charter-"wet" (with fuel and crew and Lease-Aire took care of routine maintenance) or "dry" (the lessee provided the crew and fuel and paid for routine maintenance)-until it came close to either an annual or thousand-hour inspection, both of which were very expensive. Then the airplane was parked again at Philadelphia and offered for sale at a really bargain-basement price. If they couldn't sell it, then it made a final flight to a small airfield in the Arizona desert, where it was cannibalized of salable parts.

Lease-Aire had been in business five years. LA-9021 was their twenty-first airplane. Sometimes they made a ton of money on an airplane and sometimes they took a hell of a bath.

It seemed to Vice President MacIlhenny they were going to take a hell of a bath on this one. Surf amp; Sun Holidays Ltd. had telephoned ten days before their sixty-day charter contract was over, asking for another thirty days, check to follow immediately.

The check didn't come. A cable did, four days later, saying LA-9021 had had to make a "precautionary landing" at Luanda, Angola, where an inspection had revealed mechanical failures beyond those which they were obliged to repair under the original contract. And, further, that inasmuch as the failures had occurred before the first contract had run its course, Surf amp; Sun Holidays would not of course enter into an extension of the original charter contract.

In other words, your airplane broke down in Luanda, Angola. Sorry about that but it's your problem, not ours.

When Terry, who handled the business end of Lease-Aire, had tried to call Surf amp; Sun Holidays Ltd. at their corporate headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss the matter, he was told the line was no longer in service.

On his first trip to Luanda, MacIlhenny had stopped in Glasgow to deal with them personally. There had been sheets of brown butcher paper covering the plate-glass storefront windows of Surf amp; Sun Holidays Ltd.'s corporate headquarters, with FOR RENT lettered on them in Magic Marker.

In Luanda, he had quickly found what had failed on LA-9021: control system hydraulics. It was a "safety of flight" problem, which meant MacIlhenny could not hire a local to sit in the right seat while he made a "one-time flight" to bring it home. He had also found that most of the seats were missing. Parts-from seats to hydraulics-were often readily available on the used parts market, if you had the money. Lease-Aire was experiencing a temporary cash-flow problem.

Terry had wanted to go after the Surf amp; Sun bastards for stealing the seats and abandoning the aircraft, make them at least make the repairs so MacIlhenny could go get the sonofabitch and bring it home. MacIlhenny's sister had sided with her husband.

The cash-flow problem had lasted a lot longer than anyone expected, and the price or the needed parts was a lot higher than MacIlhenny anticipated, so thirteen months passed before he and four crates of parts finally managed to get back to Luanda and he could put the sonofabitch together again.

As he took the few steps from the cockpit door to the passenger compartment, MacIlhenny had an almost pleasant thought:

If these guys steal this airplane, we can probably collect on the insurance.

And then he saw the local pilot who had come on board LA-9021 expecting to pick up a quick five hundred dollars sitting in the right seat for an hour or so while MacIlhenny took the plane on a test hop. He was sitting in the third-now last-row right aisle seat. His hands were in his lap, tightly bound together with three-inch-wide yellow plastic tape. His ankles were similarly bound, and there was tape over his eyes.

"We will release him, Captain," the first man with the Uzi said, "when, presuming you have cooperated, we release you."

"I'm going to do whatever you want me to do, sir," MacIlhenny said.

"Why don't we get going?" the man with the Uzi said.

He stepped out of the aisle to permit MacIlhenny to walk past him.

MacIlhenny went into the cockpit, and, for the first time, could see the second man.

I guess there's only two of them. I didn't see anybody else back there.

The man now sitting in the copilot's seat looked very much like the first man with the Uzi, and he was also wearing an open-collared white shirt with Air Crew shoulder boards.

The right ones, too, with the three stripes of a first officer – formerly copilot.

The copilot gestured for MacIlhenny to take the pilots seat.

As he slipped into it, MacIlhenny saw that the copilot had the checklist in his hand and that there were charts on the sort of shelf above the instrument panel. MacIlhenny couldn't see enough of them to have any idea what they were.

And I can't even make a guess where we're going.

MacIlhenny strapped himself into the seat, and then, feeling just a little foolish, raised his right hand.

"You have a question, Captain?" the man with the Uzi asked.

"Am I going to fly or is this gentleman?"

"You'll fly," the man with the Uzi said. "He will serve as copilot, and you can think of me as your 'check pilot.' "

It was obvious he thought he was being amusing.

The man with the Uzi unfolded the jump seat in the aisle into position, sat down, fastened his shoulder harness, and rested the Uzi on the back of MacIlhenny's seat, its muzzle about two inches from MacIlhenny's ear.

The man in the copilot's seat handed MacIlhenny the checklist, a plastic-covered card about four inches wide and ten inches long. MacIlhenny took it, nodded his understanding, and began to read from it.

"Gear lever and lights," MacIlhenny read.

"Down and checked," the copilot responded.

"Brakes," MacIlhenny read.

"Parked," the copilot responded.

"Circuit breakers."

"Check."

"Emergency lights."

"Armed."

There were thirty-four items on the before start checklist. MacIlhenny read each of them.

When he read number 9, "Seat Belt and No Smoking signs," the copilot chuckled before responding, "On."

When MacIlhenny read number 23, "Voice recorder," the copilot chuckled again and said, "I don't think we're going to need that."

And when MacIlhenny read number 28, "Radar and transponder," the copilot responded, "We're certainly not going to need that."

And the man with the Uzi at MacIlhenny's ear chuckled.

When MacIlhenny read number 34, "Rudder and aileron trim," the copilot responded, "Zero," and the man with the Uzi said, "Fire it up, Captain."

MacIlhenny reached for the left engine engine start button and a moment later the whine and vibration of the turbine began.

"Ask ground control for permission to taxi to the maintenance area," the man with the Uzi ordered.

MacIlhenny nodded and said, "Luanda ground control, LA-9021, on the parking pad near the threshold of the main runway. Request permission to taxi to the maintenance hangar."

Luanda ground control responded twenty seconds later.

"LA-9021, you are cleared to taxi on Four South. Turn right on Four South right three. Report on arrival at the maintenance area."

"Ground control, LA-9021 understands Four South to Four South right three."

"Affirmative, 9021."

MacIlhenny looked over his shoulder at the man with the Uzi, who nodded. MacIlhenny released the brakes and reached for the throttle quadrant.

LA-9021 began to move.

"Turn onto the threshold," the man with the Uzi said thirty seconds later. "Line it up with the runway and immediately commence your takeoff roll."

"Without asking for clearance?" MacIlhenny asked.

"Without asking for clearance," the man with the Uzi said, not pleasantly, and brushed MacIlhenny's neck, below his ear, with the muzzle of the Uzi.

As MacIlhenny taxied the 727 to the threshold of the main north/south runway, he looked out the side window of the cockpit and then pointed out the window.

"There's an aircraft on final," he said. "An Ilyushin."

It was an Ilyushin II-76, called "the Candid." It was a large, four-engine, heavy-lift military transport, roughly equivalent to the Lockheed C-130.

The man with the Uzi pressed the muzzle of the Uzi against MacIlhenny's neck as he leaned around him to look out the window at the approaching aircraft.

"Line up with the runway, Captain," he ordered, "and the moment he touches down begin your takeoff roll."

"Line up now or after he touches down?"

"Now," the man with the Uzi said and jabbed MacIlhenny with the muzzle of the Uzi.

MacIlhenny released the brakes and nudged the throttles.

"LA-9021, ground control," the radio went off. The voice sounded alarmed.

The man with the Uzi jerked MacIlhenny's headset from his head.

MacIlhenny lined up 9021 with the runway and stopped.

A moment later the Ilyushin flashed over, so close that the 727 moved. It touched down about halfway down the runway.

The Uzi muzzle prodded MacIlhenny under the ear.

He understood the message, released the brakes, and shoved the throttles forward.

My options right now are to pull the gear, which will mean I will have my brains blown all over the cockpit a full twenty seconds before the gear retracts. Or I can do what I'm told and maybe, just maybe, stay alive.

"Will you call out the airspeed, please?" MacIlhenny asked, politely.

"Eighty," the copilot said a moment later.

Unless that Ilyushin gets his tail off the runway, I'm going to clip it.

"Ninety."

"One-ten."

"One-twenty."

"Rotate," MacIlhenny said and pulled back on the yoke.

"What you will do now, Captain," the man with the Uzi said, "is level off at two-five hundred feet on this course."

"That's going to eat a lot of fuel," MacIlhenny said.

"Yes, I know. What I want to do is fall off their radar. The lower we fly, the sooner that will happen."

MacIlhenny nodded his understanding.

Five minutes later, the man with the Uzi ordered, "Maintaining this flight level, steer zero-two-zero."

"Zero-two-zero," MacIlhenny repeated and began a gentle turn to that heading.

That will take me over the ex-Belgian Congo. I wonder what that means?

Ten minutes after that, the man with the Uzi said, "Ascend to flight level two-five thousand, and turn to zero-one-five."

"Course zero-one-five," MacIlhenny repeated. "Beginning climb to flight level two-five thousand now."

"Very good, Captain," the man with the Uzi said.

Not quite two hours after they left Luanda, the man with the Uzi said, "Begin a thousand-feet-a-minute descent on our present heading, Captain."

MacIlhenny nodded his understanding, adjusted the trim, retarded the throttles, and then said, "We are in a thousand-feet-a-minute descent. May I ask where we are going?"

"We are going to take on fuel at an airfield not far from Kisangani," he said. "Once known as Stanleyville. Kisangani has a radar and I want to get under it, so level off at twenty-five hundred feet."

"Yes, sir."

MacIlhenny checked his fuel. His tanks were a little under half full.

Kisangani is in the northeast Congo, not far from the border of Sudan.

We could have made it to Khartoum – almost anywhere in Sudan – with available fuel. Sudan has a reputation for loose borders, and for not liking Americans. So why didn't we go there?

If we keep on this northeasterly flight path, we'll overfly Sudan. And on this heading, what's next is Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

The Americans are all over Saudi Arabia and Israel with AWAC aircraft.

They're sure to see this one.

For that matter, it's surprising that there hasn't been a fighter – or three or four fighters – off my wingtip already.

You can't just steal an airplane and fly it a thousand miles without somebody finding you.

Where the hell are we going?

Lease-Aire 9021 had been flying at twenty-five hundred feet at four hundred knots for about fifteen minutes when the copilot adjusted the radio frequency to 116.5 and then called somebody.

Somebody called back. With no headset, MacIlhenny of course had no idea what anybody said. But a moment after his brief radio conversation, the copilot punched in a frequency on the radio direction finder and then pointed to the cathode display.

"Change to that heading?" MacIlhenny asked, politely.

"Correct," the man with the Uzi said. "We should be no more than 150 miles from our refuel point."

Twenty minutes later, MacIlhenny saw, almost directly ahead, a brown scar on the vast blanket of green Congolese jungle beneath him.

The copilot got on the radio again, held a brief conversation with someone, and then turned to MacIlhenny.

"The winds are negligible," he said. "If you want to, you can make a direct approach."

"How much runway do we have?"

"Fifty-eight hundred feet," the copilot said. "Don't worry. This will not be the first 727 to land here."

MacIlhenny brought the 727 in at the end of the runway. He could see some buildings, but they seemed deserted, and he didn't see any people, or vehicles, or other signs of life.

He touched down smoothly and slowed the aircraft down to taxi speed with a third of the runway still in front of him.

"Continue to the end of the runway, Captain," the man with the Uzi said.

MacIlhenny taxied as slowly as he could without arousing the suspicion of his copilot or the man with the Uzi. He saw no other signs of life or occupancy, except what could be recent truck tire marks in the mud on the side of the macadam runway.

"Turn it around, Captain, and put the brakes on. But don't shut it down until we have a look at the refueling facilities."

"Yes, sir," MacIlhenny said and complied.

"Now, here we're going to need your expert advice," the man with the Uzi said. "Will you come with me, please?"

"Yes, sir," MacIlhenny said.

He unfastened his shoulder harness, got out of his seat, and saw that the man with the Uzi had put the jump seat back in the stored position and was waiting for him to precede him out of the cockpit and into the fuselage.

"In the back, please, Captain," the man with the Uzi said, gesturing with the weapon.

MacIlhenny walked into the passenger compartment.

The local pilot was still sitting taped into one of the seats.

MacIlhenny glanced down at him as he walked past. It looked as if something had been spilled in his lap.

Spilled, hell. He pissed his pants.

At the rear of the passenger compartment, the man with the Uzi ordered, "Open the door, please, Captain."

MacIlhenny wrestled with the door.

The first thing he noticed was that warm tropical air seemed to pour into the airplane.

Then someone grabbed his hair again and pulled his head backward.

Then he felt himself being pushed out of the door and falling twenty feet to the ground. He landed hard on his shoulder, and in the last conscious moment of his life saw blood from his cut throat pumping out onto the macadam.

He was dead before the local pilot was marched-still blindfolded with yellow tape-to the door and disposed of in a similar fashion.

Then the rear door of Lease-Aire 9021 was closed and the airplane taxied to the other end of the runway, where a tanker truck appeared and began to refuel it.

[TWO]

Quatro de Fevereiro Aeroporto Internacional

Luanda, Angola

1410 23 May 2005

Quite by accident, H. Richard Miller, Jr., a thirty-six-year-old, six-foot-two, 220-pound, very black native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was not only there when what he was shortly afterward to report as "the unauthorized departure of a Boeing 727 aircraft registered to the Lease-Aire Corporation of Philadelphia, Pa.," took place but he actually saw it happen.

Miller, an Army major, was diplomatically accredited to the Republic of Angola as the assistant military attache. He was, in fact, and of course covertly, the Luanda station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency.

But, with the exception that his diplomatic carnet gave him access to the airport's duty-free shop, neither his official nor covert status had anything to do with his being present at the airport when the aircraft was stolen. He had gone out to the airport-on what he thought of as his self-granted weekly rest-and-recuperation leave-to buy a bottle of Boss cologne and have first a martini and then a late lunch in the airport's quite good restaurant. Since this was in the nature of an information-gathering mission, he would pay for the meal from his discretionary operating funds.

When he went into the restaurant, he chose a table next to one of the plate-glass windows. They offered a panoramic view of the runways and just about everything at the airport but the building he was in. He laid his digital camera on the table, so that it wouldn't be either stolen or forgotten when he left, and where he could quickly pick it up and take a shot at anything of potential interest without drawing too much-hopefully, no-attention to him.

A waiter quickly appeared and Miller ordered a gin martini.

Then he took a long look at what he could see of the airport.

Parked far across the field, on a parking pad not far from the threshold of the main north/south runway, he saw that what he thought of as "his airplane," a Boeing 727, was still parked where it had been last week, and for the past fourteen months.

He thought of it as his airplane because when he'd noticed it fourteen months ago, he'd taken snapshots of it and checked it out.

Without even making an official inquiry, he went on the Internet and learned that it was registered to the Lease-Aire Corporation of Philadelphia. From a source at the airfield-an air traffic controller who was the monthly re-cipient of a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill from Miller's discretionary operating funds-he had learned that the 727 had made a "discretionary landing" at Luanda while en route somewhere else.

Miller was a pilot, an Army aviator-not currently on flight status because he'd busted a flight physical, which was why he had wound up "temporarily" assigned to the CIA and sent to Luanda-and he understood that a discretionary landing was one a wise pilot made when red lights lit up on the control panel, before it became necessary to make an emergency landing.

Miller had begun to feel sorry for the airplane, as he sometimes felt sorry for himself. A grounded bird, and a grounded bird man, stuck in picturesque Luanda, Angola, by circumstances beyond their control, when they both would much rather have been in Philadelphia, where he had grown up, where his parents lived, and where one could be reasonably sure that 999 out of a thousand good-looking women did not have AIDS, which could not be said of Luanda, Angola.

Still, unofficially-although after a month he had reported to Langley, in Paragraph 15, Unrelated Data, of his weekly report, that the plane seemed to be stuck in Luanda-he had learned that Lease-Aire was a small outfit that bought old airliners at distress prices (LA-9021 came from Continental); that it then leased them "wet" or "dry"; and that LA-9021 had been dry-leased to a Scottish company called Surf amp; Sun Holidays Ltd. Just to play it safe, he'd asked the assistant CIA station chief in London, whom he knew, to find out what he could about Surf amp; Sun. In two days, he learned that it was a rinky-dink outfit that had gone belly-up shortly after leaving 153 irate Irishmen stranded in Rabat, Morocco.

That seemed to explain everything, and nothing was suspicious.

And so every time during the fourteen months that Miller took his R amp;R and saw the once-proud old bird sitting across the field, he had grown more convinced that it would never fly again. He was, therefore, more than a little surprised when-peering over the rim of a second martini just as good as the first-he saw LA-9021 moving.

He thought, in quick order, as he carefully set the martini glass on the table, first, that he had been mistaken, and, next, that if it was moving, it was being towed by a tug to where repair-or cannibalization-could begin.

When he looked again, he saw the airplane was indeed moving and under its own power.

How the hell did they start it up? You can't let an airplane sit on a runway for fourteen months and then just get in it and push the ENGINE START buttons.

Obviously, somebody's been working on it.

But when?

When was the last time I was here? Last Wednesday?

Well, that's a week; that's enough time.

The 727 turned off the taxiway and moved toward the threshold of the runway.

There was a Congo Air Ilyushin transport on final. Miller knew there were two daily flights between Brazzaville, Congo, and Luanda.

Miller had two unkind thoughts.

Prescription for aerial disaster: an ex-Russian Air Force fighter jockey, flying a worn-out Ilyushin maintained by Congo Air.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Please remain seated on the floor and try to restrain all chickens, goats, and other livestock until the aircraft has come to a complete stop at the airway. And thank you for flying Congo Air. We hope that the next time you have to go from nowhere to nowhere, you'll fly with us again."

And then he had another thought when he saw that the 727 was on the threshold, lined up with the runway:

Hey, Charley, the way you're supposed to do that is wait until the guy on final goes over you and then you move to the threshold. Otherwise, if he lands a little short he lands on you.

The Ilyushin passed no more than fifty feet over the tail of the 727 and then touched down.

Before the Ilyushin reached the first turnoff from the runway, the 727 began its takeoff roll.

Hey, Charley, what are you going to do if he doesn't get out of your way? What do we have here, two ex-Russian fighter jockeys?

The rear stabilizer of the Ilyushin had not completely cleared the runway when the 727, approaching takeoff velocity, flashed past it and then lifted off.

Well, I'm glad you're back in the air, old girl.

I wonder what kind of a nitwit was flying the 727?

Miller picked up his martini, raised it to the now nearly out of sight 727, and then turned his attention to the menu.

Thirty minutes later, after a very nicely broiled filet of what the menu called sea trout and two cups of really first-class Kenyan coffee, he paid the bill with an American Express card, collected the bags containing the newspapers, magazines, paperbacks, and the goodies he'd bought in the duty-free shop, and started walking across the terminal to get his car.

What I should do is go home, get on the ski machine to get the gin out of my system, and then spend a half hour at least on the knee.

But being an honest man, he knew that what he was probably going to do was go home, hang up the nice clothes, and take a little nap.

On impulse, however, passing a pay telephone, he stepped into the booth, fed it coins, and punched in a number that was not available to the general public.

"Torre," someone said after answering on the first ring.

Having the unlisted number of the control tower, and, if he was lucky, the right guy to answer its phone, was what the monthly dispersal of the crisp hundred-dollar bill bought.

" Antonio, por favor. E seu irmao, "Miller said.

A moment later, Antonio took the phone to speak to "his brother," and, obviously excited, said, "I can't talk right now. Something has come up."

"What's come up?"

"We think someone has stolen an airplane."