Relentless

5

“Captain, you’ve got your tit in a wringer. I’m offering you a way out-enough money to go to Canada or Brazil and start your own bush airline. There’ll be a minimum of fifty thousand in it for you and it may come to more. All you’ve got to do is fly a couple of airplanes and drive a car twenty miles.”

“It’s too risky.”

“Nothing’s risky if the stakes are high enough.”

“What the hell do you want with all that money anyway?”

“It takes a lot of money to raise an army, Captain. Recruiting, training, equipping.”

“Jesus, the kind of money you’re talking about you could forget all that and just retire on it.”

“Some men could.”

It was terrifying to see a Green Beret type go bad. For all those years, in line of duty, he’d been breaking all the rules of civilized conduct, and it gave him a feeling of untouchable immunity from all those rules.

“Do you want me to go over it again, Captain?”

“No. I get the pitch. You’re going to rob a bank.”

“Not just any bank. A million-dollar cash bank.”

“And if we get caught?”

“This is a military operation, Captain. We’ll be prepared for every possibility. We’re not going to get caught.”

“Jesus, I don’t know. I never stole anything bigger than a pack of chewing gum.”

“Captain, it may be the last chance you’ll ever get at owning your own airline and flying your own plane.” Hargit was an astute and clever judge of weakness and of a man’s needs.

“I’m not asking you to turn to a life of crime,” he added. “We pull off one score and that’s all. It’s the habituals who get caught-the odds catch up to them.” And the Major unfolded the unsigned pilot’s license, put it on the desk in front of Walker, took a fountain pen out of his pocket, uncapped it, and handed it to him.

After a while Walker took the pen and signed at the tip of the Major’s finger.