Code of Honor

46

The Piper’s rear door hung open at the back of the aircraft, integral stairs extended. The only light inside came from the faint glow of cockpit instrumentation. The two pilots were already on board, while the rest of the loading crew had gone between the ramshackle metal buildings to see what all the noise was in front. Adara pointed out at least one long gun, which meant there were surely more.

Two seats faced aft, back to back with the pilots in the open cockpit, one on either side of a narrow aisle. The rest had been removed to make room for the cargo — which consisted of several dozen bales of something wrapped in black plastic bags and copious rolls of duct tape.

The Cheyenne IIIA normally carried only nine passengers with full seating, so Chavez was almost in the cockpit in one good bent-over stride from the time he breached the door.

The Indonesian pilots both turned as Chavez bounded up the steps, his pistol trained toward the cockpit. Adara followed close on his heels, lifting the door and folding stairs before the pilots realized what was going on. The one in the left seat, older than his copilot by at least a decade, raised his hands and grinned, giving an amused shake of his head.

“You won’t get very far if you shoot us.”

“I only need one of you to fly the plane,” Chavez said, dead serious. “Your copilot looks capable enough.”

He didn’t have a problem popping a drug smuggler. It would, in fact, not be a new experience for him. Any hint of bravado bled from the pilot’s face.

“I assume you are running from those people who are making all the noise out on the street?” he asked.

Chavez smacked the headrest with his free hand. This was a tricky time. In reality, the pilot held most of the cards. All he had to do was sit on his hands while the men he worked for stormed the plane. Chavez banked on the fact that the pilots were smart enough to realize they were highly likely to catch a few bullets themselves if their companions stormed the plane. Drug smugglers weren’t known for their discerning shot placement. Chavez leaned farther into the cockpit between the two seats, partly to check for weapons, but crowding the men in the process to keep up the tension.

“Let’s go! And no headsets. I want the radio on speaker so I can hear everything. And keep in mind that I know the transponder codes, so you can forget about sending a message that way.”

The pilot turned and looked at him full in the face, as if he’d been about to do that very thing.

Squawking 7700 on the transponder alerted air traffic control to an emergency. A squawk of 7500 meant the aircraft had been hijacked.

The pilot did as he was directed. The little airplane began to shudder as he fired up one Pratt & Whitney turbine engine at a time. He glanced over his shoulder as he let the props come up to speed.

“My name is Deddy,” the pilot said, an obvious attempt to humanize himself to the man who had a gun to his head. Chavez couldn’t blame him. He would have done the same thing if the situation were reversed.

He kept his voice firm and direct. “You’re doing fine, Deddy. We’ll get through this no problem as long as you do exactly what I tell you to.”

“But they are after you?” He half turned in the seat. “Those men?”

“They are,” Chavez said. “Eyes on the road, Deddy.”

“Okay,” the pilot said. “But to be honest, I think you may have killed us all. I am much more frightened of the man who owns what you are sitting on than I am of you.”

Adara peered out the back window, and then stooped in the aisle to duck-walk back to Chavez between the plastic and duct-taped bales. She leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Anytime now,” she said. “The guys with guns are coming back.”

Chavez gestured down the taxiway with the Smith & Wesson. “Get us in the air. No headsets. Keep the radio on speaker so I can hear.”

The pilot had already filed a flight plan, and the Cheyenne received rapid clearance to taxi the length of the single runway. They took off to the south, heavy with drugs, wallowing into the humid air. Climbing into the wind, the pilot followed Departure’s instructions and banked to the east. The lights of the runway and the island of Sulawesi fell away quickly, giving way to the blackness. Chavez felt the disconcerting clunk under his feet as the landing gear folded into place.

The copilot, a rumpled young man with longish, unevenly cut hair over the collar of his white uniform shirt, began to chuckle.

Chavez nudged the back of the right seat. “Something funny I don’t know about?”

The pilot shot a glance at his copilot and rattled off something in Bahasa Indonesian.

“Speak English!” Chavez gave the pilot’s headrest another smack.

“I am sorry.” Deddy craned his neck around to look over his shoulder at Chavez, as if he wanted to spare the copilot what he was about to say. “Men like you and me, we have been doing dangerous things like this for a while. My copilot is new. He laughs when he gets nervous. That is all. He took this job to feed his family. He did not even know what we were flying tonight.”

“Nice story,” Chavez said. “But a little hard to believe.”

The copilot was young, perhaps in his late twenties. Chin quivering like he might burst into tears at any moment, he maintained a white-knuckle grip on the yoke — though the autopilot was flying the airplane.

The pilot shrugged. “Believe it, don’t believe it. Neither makes it any less true. I only hope to calm his nerves. I told him that you had no reason to harm us, as long as we fly you to where you want to go.”

“That is true,” Chavez said.

Halfway between the cockpit and the door, Adara leaned over the plastic bales. She pressed her face against the side window to get a better look at anyone behind them. They had no headsets and the drone of the Pratt & Whitney engines forced her to shout.

“They’re not behind us.”

“They will be soon enough,” the copilot said, chuckling again, then catching himself and biting his bottom lip.

“My friend is right,” the pilot said. “Those men, they would not want to cause problems with authorities at the airport, not with the cargo we have on board. But there is another pilot in the group. I do not know if you noticed, but there was a fat little business jet parked on the tarmac beside us.”

“A Hawker,” Chavez said, not liking where this was headed. “I saw it.”

“That is right.” The pilot nodded, his eyes gazed beyond his instruments at the darkness ahead. “A Hawker 800 has a range of almost three thousand miles and a top speed of over five hundred miles per hour. Even at cruise speed it can outpace this Cheyenne by a hundred knots — and that’s if we weren’t loaded down with cargo. What’s more, it can fly almost as slow as we can, which will make it very difficult to evade.” The pilot leaned into the aisle between the two cockpit seats so he could make eye contact with Adara. “If you keep watching long enough, Habib will be there.”

The copilot’s face twitched. He chuckled, and then put a knuckle to his teeth.

Chavez gave the instruments a quick scan. They were flying almost due east at ten thousand feet above the ocean surface. Altitude above you was useless in an emergency, but Chavez wanted to keep them relatively low. The Cheyenne’s cabin was pressurized to around eight thousand feet, so a sudden loss in pressure at ten thousand would not pose a problem. If they went too high, the pilots might be tempted to reduce cabin pressure and oxygen to try and regain control of the aircraft. He snapped his fingers next to the pilot’s ears. “Give me those charts.”

The pilot complied, grabbing a stack of folded paper aeronautical maps from the upholstered pocket next to his left knee. Chavez passed them back to Adara. “You mind finding us a safe place to land?”

Adara gave him a thumbs-up. Chavez still found himself startled when he turned and saw her with dark hair instead of blond.

“On it,” she said.

“Pass me the mic,” Chavez said, snapping his fingers again.

The pilot did as he was told. “We must land soon,” he said. “The Hawker is probably already in the air. Habib is on his way. He knows people in the tower who will give him our position on radar.”

“Now set the frequency to Guard,” Chavez said. Guard was 243.0 MHz, an emergency frequency that was monitored by military aircraft.

Deddy glanced over his shoulder. “I tell you, Habib will find us. He will force us down and he will shoot you both. After that, he will kill me and my friend because we allowed you to steal this airplane.”

The copilot began to giggle uncontrollably.

“Nobody’s going to die today,” Chavez said, a little too grimly to believe. “Well, maybe this Habib guy, if he’s not careful.”