Tanner’s Tiger

Chapter 18

As our pilot pointed out, it wouldn’t be fitting to hover permanently in the air over the Cuban Pavilion. Helicopters buzzing to and fro were a common enough sight at Expo, but helicopters on stakeout duty might draw stares. We worked out a pattern of lazy, looping circles, dipping here, rising there, but contriving to keep the Cuban building constantly in view. Our pilot came up with a small pair of binoculars, and I kept them trained on the pavilion as well as I could. I wished I had thought to bring Claude’s field glasses along. These were less powerful and spotlighted a smaller field.

The pilot was giving us a surprisingly smooth flight, and I found myself almost relaxed. From time to time the memory of our near miss of the British Pavilion would set my nerves on end, but by and large the ride was far less harrowing than thoughts of what would happen if we missed them.

This watching and waiting was a pain in the ass. It seemed I’d been doing a lot of it lately. Sitting endlessly around the apartment while Arlette ran errands, crouching interminably on the crest of the hill waiting for the fireworks barge, and now circling eternally around the Cuban Pavilion waiting for-

Waiting for what? For a whole lot of people to leave it, and to do so in a secretive manner.

The pilot began shouting something. I couldn’t understand him at first, then realized he was offering me a drink. I wondered how it might affect me. The little voice in my head still blurted out some fool thing every once in a while, and I didn’t know whether liquor would oil its tongue or rust it. I decided to find out and accepted the bottle of McNaughton’s, tilted it, and let a gratifying quantity leap straight for my liver. The pilot gestured at the boys and I passed the bottle their way. When they sent it back, I returned it to the pilot and watched him pour an impossible amount down his throat. He didn’t even swallow, just tucked in his glottis and poured it down the pipe.

I said something about drinking and flying. “Don’t give it a second thought,” he said, and hiccuped. “Any bloody fool can fly this crate with his eyes closed. Want to try your hand at it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, come give it a try. I’ll show you what to do.”

“I’d better keep an eye down below.”

“How about you boys, then?” They came forward, and he had Seth sit at the controls while he and Randy watched over his shoulders. “A good skill for any man to know. Especially for you boys. Americans, are you? Now when you get over to Vietnam, you can be helicopter pilots. It’s the key weapon of the war, do you know. One lad at the controls like so, and another on the side potting away at the wogs with a tommy gun, and one more man to send the naphtha on its way. Pay attention while I teach you, now, and they’ll make officers of you.”

While the fair itself didn’t close until the small hours of the morning, most of the national pavilions began shutting down a few hours earlier. At 11:15 the doors of the Cuban Pavilion were closed. Not long afterward the lights went out – one by one, though, not all at once, as they must have when Arlette hit the switches.

“Won’t be long now,” I said. “There goes the building across the street from them. As soon as a few more shut down, it will be safe for them to start moving prisoners.”

“Good thing, too. We’re running a shade low.”

“We’re running out of fuel?”

“No, not that. Or yes, in a manner of speaking.” He held up the bottle of McNaughton’s. It was not the original bottle – that had plummeted into the canal after we’d emptied it. This was the second bottle, and not too much whiskey remained in it.

There had been a great deal of whiskey swallowed, and not all of it by our nameless captain. Not by any means. We all of us had achieved a precarious balance somewhere between happiness and sobriety, and with the alcohol working in our bloodstreams we had turned into rather a cheery little group. The four of us careened drunkenly through the summer skies, Seth and Randy leading us in such traditional pacifist anthems as “Halls of Montezuma” and “Those Caissons Go Rolling Along.” The pilot contributed “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary,” and I sang “If You Don’t Like Your Uncle Sammy Go Back To Your Home ’Cross The Sea.”

By this time we had all had a turn at piloting the copter. Of the four of us, I guess I was the worst at it. He was right, though; it was an extremely easy machine to manage, and it certainly did seem as though one could handle it better drunk than sober.

Randy was warbling “I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier, I Don’t Want To Go To War,” and doing so in a lamentably inadequate Cockney accent, when I saw something through the glasses and motioned at him to shut up. Several dark cars had drawn up at the rear entrance of the Cuban building. I shouted to the pilot to take us in for a closer look. There were four cars, identical black sedans with what looked like some sort of crest painted on the front doors.

“That’s how they move them,” I said. “Consulate cars. They even have diplomatic immunity going for them.”

We flew in a straight line, moving as far off from the building as possible while still keeping the cars in sight. I saw the doors open and told the pilot to move in closer again. A dozen people emerged from the building and entered the cars. Two men seemed to be carrying something heavy, something that looked as though it might be Arlette.

The car doors slammed shut and the cars moved out from the curb.

“Now we follow ’em, Mr. Tanner?”

“Right.”

“And no problem, that. Easier at night than in the daytime. With their headlights glowing, they look like a pack of fireflies now, don’t they?”

“What do we look like?”

“Could you let me have that again, sir?”

“We’ve lights of our own,” I said. “And with all due respects, this thing does make a hell of a racket. It’s one thing to fly back and forth over the fairgrounds. There are always helicopters doing that, and one looks like the next. But in downtown Montreal-”

“Then, you think they’ll” – burp – “head for the city, eh?”

“The city or the open road. Either way we’ll be pretty obvious in our pursuit, won’t we?”

He swung around to grin at me, showing more teeth than most families have under one roof. I still hadn’t entirely gotten accustomed to the idea that he could fly the thing without seeing where he was going. “I could turn our lights off,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

“’Tisn’t, but I could. Still, the noise is worse than the lights, wouldn’t you say? But there are tricks to every trade, don’t you know, and I can keep on a course with them and not let them know about it. Used to fly highway patrol out in Ontario” – burp – “bouncing radar at the bleeders. It was a rare one saw me quick enough to slow down. I’ll follow these Cuban rascals as sure as my name is – now what in the devil!”

So I didn’t find out his name then, either. “Something’s wrong?”

“Lost ’em for a minute,” he said. I winced; we hadn’t even left the fairgrounds yet. “But there they are, four little glowworms on parade. Can’t let that happen again, can we, now?”

A little while later I had to admit that he knew what he was doing. His trailing method amounted to guessing where the cars were going next, dropping back out of sight, then circling on ahead and getting there ahead of them. It wasn’t even necessary to keep them constantly in sight, just so long as we were able to guess where they would go next.

In built-up areas this still amounted to fairly close pursuit, since the motorcade might turn off onto another route at any time. We were still out of their sight almost all the time, and the generally high noise level in those sections, plus the screening effect of buildings, kept us concealed. The cars worked their way around the city and struck out northeastward. Once they hit open country, they were easier to follow than a juggler on the Orpheum Circuit. There was one main road and they stayed on it for miles. We would lay doggo behind them, make a wide sweep to the left or the right, hover until they came into view, then cut off to the side again. There was always the chance that they would pick up a side road, but our fearless leader assured us he could locate them easily enough if they did. The branch routes were few and far between, and the Cuban convoy, four identical cars doing a steady sixty-plus miles per hour and spaced five car lengths apart, would be virtually impossible to miss on a lightly traveled minor highway. Especially at night, with their lights visible miles away.

As it turned out, we didn’t even have to play hide-and-seek. We were in full view of them when they made their turn onto a narrow dirt road curving off to the northwest.

“And now we’d best play ’em a trifle tighter,” said our hero. “Pass the bloody bottle, eh?” Glug, glug; burp. “’K you. Don’t want to let ’em out of sight. That’s not a road they’d take to get to another road. They’ll be stopping somewhere along it, and once their lights are out on a road like that, we’d have not a chance of finding ’em. I’ll keep us about this far to the rear of ’em and… there, we’ll fly without lights. Been giving me a touch of a headache anyway. I shouldn’t think they’ll hear us at this distance. Keep the glasses on them, why don’t you? Once they cut their lights, it’ll be as though the earth swallowed them alive, and you’ll want to have the spot pinpointed.”

I nodded, watching the last car’s taillights through the binoculars. I wondered where the hell they were going. Before they skirted the city, I would have guessed they’d head straight for the Cuban consulate. Instead they were off in the woods, out in the middle of nowhere.

“I say, Tanner? What do you do when they go to ground?”

“Rescue Arlette and Minna, that’s the little girl, and get out of the country in a hurry. This thing’ll hold two more passengers, won’t it? The girl’s very tiny, she can ride in my lap.”

“The other can ride in mine,” he said, chortling. “How do you mean, rescue them?”

“When you go fishing, what do you use for bait?”

“Depends what’s in the water.”

“Uh-huh. What we do depends on what kind of setup they’ve got. I can’t tell until I see it.”

“Got a bit of firepower, have you?”

“Two pistols.” I had two seven-shot clips for the Marley. Claude’s revolver was a snub-barreled.38 with five shells in it. The chamber under the hammer was empty. We had nineteen shots, which didn’t constitute much under the heading of firepower.

“Handguns,” he said. “Look in the gearbox there and you’ll find a third one. About as accurate as spitting on a windy day, but hit a chap in the finger with it, and it’ll take his whole arm off.” I believed that when I saw the gun, a.44 Magnum with a muzzle hole big enough to walk through. “And take the shooter’s arm off with the recoil,” he went on. “Won it off a trapper up near Keewatin playing high, low, jack, and the game. Then, wouldn’t you know he’d have to insist on another game, staking this little Eskimo girl of his against the gun. Lost her to me and hadn’t a thing left to wager for her, and don’t you know he tried to welsh on the bet. No offense, by the way, I’m a fourth Welsh myself on my mother’s side.” Glug, glug. “So here I was with a gun I’d not owned for more than half an hour, and what could I do but blow his brains out with it? Never shot the ruddy thing since. That Eskimo girl” – burp – “the smell of her was enough to curdle reindeer milk, but warm as a fire on a cold night.” He smiled fondly at the memory. “But that’s three guns instead of two, for what small good it does. You’d do well to have a tommy gun.”

“I know.” If only there had been a way to bring along the Bertons’ machine gun.

“Still, when they don’t know you’re coming, they won’t have the table set, will they now? The old element of surprise. Sneak in fast and spirit out the woman and Devil take the hindmost. Then you’ll want me to put you over the border, eh? Would it do to set you down just over the Vermont line?”

“I think so. Will you have enough fuel?”

“Might or might not. Could be close, but if it runs tight, we’ll just set her down somewhere and fill up with gasoline. Silly thing doesn’t fuss about fuel. Would run on rock salt if you could get it to burn. Whoa, now, where have they gone to? Did you spot it?”

“Yes.” I pointed. “They swung left just past those trees and cut the lights.”

“Got it. Got the spot fixed firm enough and won’t forget it. Off we go.”

He took us around to the right, explaining that he would give them time to leave their cars and go wherever they were going before coming in tight for an aerial survey. We sailed off to the right, spun lazily around, and headed back. I had already lost my bearings, but he seemed to remember the spot I’d pointed to. He brought us down low and let the copter skim over the tops of the trees. For a while we saw nothing but trees. Then the trees came to an abrupt halt and we were out over a long, flat clearing. I made out the four cars, a truck, a long low building of concrete block with a flat roof.

“Well, now,” he said suddenly. “A flock of cars is one thing, but you can’t expect a little egg crate like this to trail one of those.”

I didn’t understand at first. I thought he meant the truck, and wondered if he might be making a joke, and if I perhaps ought to laugh at it.

Then I looked out at the clearing and got the joke but didn’t laugh. Because it wasn’t just a clearing. It was an airstrip, and there was one hell of a big silvery jetliner perched on it.

“Now in this particular sort of water,” said the Jolly Aviator, “I don’t know that I’d use bait at all. I think I’d drop some dynamite and see what came to the surface.”

“Shhh.”

“Did you see the size of that bird, though? You could put the chopper in its luggage compartment.”

“Shhhh.”

We had landed the chopper about a quarter of a mile from the landing strip, and now we were walking back along the dirt road in a reasonable facsimile of silence. Arlette’s entrance had shaken them up, all right. Unless I was very far off the mark, they were about to fill up the plane with all the people they had snatched and beat it out of the country in a hurry. If we didn’t do something, Arlette and Minna would be spending the rest of August in Havana.

It wasn’t surprising that they were shook up. Arlette and I had dropped in on them once when nobody was home, and whatever traces we had left behind was enough to put four men on guard duty all night. Arlette’s second visit, combined with the general hysteria we had created throughout Montreal, must have nudged them over the edge. They wouldn’t be kidnaping anybody else now. They’d just put the last load of prisoners on the plane and send all the evidence home to Fidel.

“We’ve got three guns,” I told them. “Mr… uh, the captain here, he’ll use his own. I’ll hang onto the thirty-eight. That leaves one of you fellows for the thirty-two automatic. It’s the lightest of the lot. Have either of you had any experience with handguns?” They hadn’t. “Well, which of you is best with a rifle? Who’s done the most shooting?”

Neither of them had done any shooting. Seth remembered that he had been fair with an air rifle at a shooting gallery on Times Square some years back. That put him one up on Randy and earned him the gun.

“There’s a lot to be said for basic training,” I told them. “If only there was a way you could do your eight weeks and then cop out-”

“They don’t approve of that,” Randy said.

“They call it desertion,” Seth said, “and frown on it.”

“It’s a shame. Maybe you won’t have to shoot anybody. If you do, just point the gun at the person you want to shoot. And squeeze the trigger. If you jerk it, you’ll hit something else. Here-” I took the clip out and showed him how to aim and fire while we walked along.

Randy, the unarmed one, must have read Mao’s book on guerrilla warfare. He bent over from time to time, picking up throwing-size stones and filling his pockets with them. He also got hold of a stick about five feet long, which he said would be useful for hitting people over the head. All in all, I figured he would be capable of doing more damage to the enemy than Seth, and perhaps as much as the rest of us, too.

We walked a little farther, and I put my finger to my lips, then motioned to the others to follow me in the rest of the way at twenty-yard intervals. We would make less noise that way. I picked out a cluster of trees on the perimeter of the landing strip, some thirty yards from the plane, perhaps twice that distance from the concrete-block structure. I crouched there in the shadows and waited until they joined me one by one.

I watched the plane and the building. The aircraft, as far as I could tell, was empty now. There were guards flanking the doorway of the building and three more guards, rifles slung across their shoulders, were smoking cigars down at the far end. I had no idea who was inside the building or what was going on there. It had no windows.

The guards were a far cry from the ones who had done duty at the pavilion. These were old line barbuda types, with full Fidelista beards and loose-fitting khaki fatigues. There was something extremely effective about those uniforms. The men gave off an aura of insolent competence, and I matched the four of us against the five of them, balanced our three guns (and one stick, and a few rocks) against their five rifles, and I hoped Minna would enjoy Havana. It would be hot as hell this time of the year, and they wouldn’t be likely to have air-conditioning, but the winters would be mild and pleasant and-

My mind was starting to do that again. I shook my head, hoping the motion might rearrange some of the cells. There had to be a way. If we could get the jump on one or two of the guards, that would make a big difference. We would have the use of their rifles and lower the odds against us. Arlette could call to them, coax them aside with the promise of sexual delight-

Not very likely. Arlette was inside the goddamned building.

I took a deep breath and plunged right back in again. One way or another, we could split up the guards and bump two of them. Then, armed with their rifles and our own pistols, and shooting from ambush, we could probably gun down the other three.

Then what?

Then we would have the building under siege, for whatever good that might do. With our guns pointing at the only door of a windowless building, we would at least be in a strong bargaining position. We couldn’t get in, but they couldn’t get out, and it would be to their obvious advantage to work a deal. At the very least, we could get them to release Minna and Arlette to us, and we could disable the truck and the cars so that they couldn’t come after us. We could even take one of the cars – that would be part of the terms of the deal – and we’d wreck the others and leave the one where the helicopter was parked.

I went on figuring out other minor details because they were more easily resolved than the major one – namely, getting to the first two guards to start the game. Or did we really have to do it in stages? We did have three guns, and we were hidden and they were in the open, and-

And we were sixty yards away from them. I wasn’t sure the.32 would carry thirty yards, not to mention accuracy. And I knew the Magnum, with all its power, could barely be sure of hitting the building, let alone the guard in front of it. The.38 came closest to what we needed, and if only it had a longer barrel, it might have been accurate enough for plinking at people sixty yards away. In someone else’s hands, that is. Not mine.

Then how-

Ah, I thought. Forget the guards on the door, because one couldn’t possibly sneak up on them. But how about the three at the far end of the building? They were goofing off, and they were within easy pistol range of what looked like fairly thick woods. We could get to them. It wasn’t easy, but it was feasible. We would have to stay in the woods and work our way all around the perimeter of the landing strip. A long walk, but we would have good cover all the way and for a large part of the trek we would be out of hearing range.

Then three quick shots, or as many as it took to dispose of the three loafers. We would be in the dark while the other two guards would be outlined against the walls of the building.

I liked the odds.

“Evan?” Randy was whispering into my ear. “Got anything?”

I nodded. Then the door of the building opened, and the two guards flanking it snapped to attention, and the three bearded loafers threw away their cigarettes and came forward.

“Tell me.”

A short, stocky type came through the door and headed for the jet. He was wearing a flying suit, heavy boots, goggles, and a crash helmet. He was either the pilot or a man looking for a masquerade party. He crossed over to the plane and climbed a flight of steps, disappearing into its belly.

Two more bearded types followed him from the building. After them came several clean-shaven men in close-fitting khaki slacks and blouses. Guards from the pavilion, I guessed.

“The plan, Evan.”

The big jet engines kicked in and the pilot began the warm-up. I tried counting the guards, but they were moving around too much. It looked, though, as if there were more guards than we had bullets. One of them came out of the building now, his left hand fastened upon the forearm of a tall man in a rumpled suit, his right arm around the man’s waist. He walked the man across the clearing to the plane. The man in the suit was a Negro. At first I thought the guard was leading him that way to keep him from resisting, but when they drew closer, I saw that it wasn’t that at all. The Negro trudged on like a zombie. Either they had him drugged to the eyes or else he was ninety-five percent dead.

“Evan-”

I clenched my teeth. “The plan just washed out,” I said. “It went down the drain.”

He passed this bit of information on to the rest of them, speaking in a thin whisper that couldn’t entirely hide his nervousness. I watched the guard lead the Negro up the steps and into the midsection of the big jet. Then more guards were following him, each with a man or a woman in tow. They would tuck their passengers into the plane and turn around and go back for more.

There were about four men to each woman. There were a few children, but not many of them. All of them, men and women and children, walked in the same robot fashion, shuffling along like the living dead. All of them had wide, glassy eyes and wore rumpled clothing.

And all of them, men and women and children, were Negroes.

I sat there watching this little parade without even trying to guess what it was all about. The Cubans were stealing Negroes. Male Negroes, female Negroes, juvenile Negroes. Fidel was starting a Negro collection. He wanted Cubans to develop a natural sense of rhythm. He-

Then they brought out Arlette and, a few Negroes later, Minna. It was easy to spot them. In that company they looked positively bleached. In other respects, however, they differed not at all from the rest of the plane’s passengers. Their eyes were every bit as glazed, their walk the same fumbling stumbling shuffle.

Minna-

Something happened when I saw her. I realized, for the first time since her disappearance, that deep down inside I had not expected to see her again. A part of my unconscious mind had quietly written her off as dead, even while I was rushing around searching for her. I felt this way without ever being aware of it, and now I was seeing her again, and she was alive.

There was sudden intense pressure behind my eyeballs. Then my eyes were wet, and tears spilled down my cheeks like raindrops on a windshield. I was not sobbing. I was sitting still, breathing normally, remaining quite calm while silently crying my eyes out.

My tears were still flowing when Minna disappeared into the plane. There were a few more Negroes, and then a youngish woman in a brown and white uniform. The stewardess? The idea was unlikely enough to stop the flow of tears. I saw that the woman was carrying a small black bag and decided she must be a nurse. Someone had to be giving those zombies their periodic dosages of drugs. She looked equal to the task. Her face somehow reminded me of Claude.

Of course they needed the nurse aboard the plane. Otherwise they would need a full complement of guards to keep the passengers tractable. This way they would slump in their seats all the way to Havana and-

I whirled around. I said, “The plane.”

They stared at me, the three of them. I swung my head around again. The clean-shaven guards were walking toward their cars. The barbudas had thinned out, most of them returning to the building.

I said, “They do it themselves all the time. They get on a plane going from El Paso to Kansas City and make the pilot fly to Havana. It’s about time somebody turned the tables on them.”

“You mean-”

“Right. We steal the plane.”

“How?”

“All we have to do is get on it. The place is crawling with guards, but they’re all staying on the ground. The airplane’s got a pilot and a cargo of Negroes and that’s all.”

“And that hatchet-faced bitch.”

“But no guards.”

“One or two may have stayed aboard-”

“I don’t think so, but so what? One or two we can handle. Once we’re inside, what can the yoyos on the ground do? Shoot us down?”

I looked at them, Randy and Seth and Baron von Richthofen. They were nodding in agreement. For my part, I wasn’t sure it would work out the way I told it.

Nor did I care. All we had to do was get on that plane. That was the only thing that mattered. Once we were aboard, I didn’t care if we got jumped by eight guards and an orangutan. Because all they could do was take us along to Havana, and if Minna and Arlette were going there, I wanted to go with them. As long as we were all together, we had a chance.

I kept this to myself, by no means convinced that the others would see it my way. I watched the plane and I watched the guards, waiting for the right moment. We had to time things so that we made our move at the last possible moment, just before they closed up the belly of the aircraft.

“Get ready to jump the minute I do,” I said. “I’ll lead, then Seth, then Randy, and you bring up the rear. Shoot anything that gets in the way. Any questions?”

There weren’t any, thank God. I kept waiting for the magic moment when all the guards would be gone. It looked as though that moment would occur a few minutes after takeoff. I braced my feet under me and got a good grip on the pistol.

I said, “Now!”

I could paint a more vivid picture of our charge across the field and up the steps and into the plane if I had been watching it from the sidelines instead of leading it. As it was, I had no real way of knowing what happened. There was some shouting. There were some gunshots – mostly ours, I think, and as far as I know, none of them hit anything. I fired the Marley three times and wasn’t even aiming at anything in particular. That’s what there was, shouting and shooting and running and climbing, all stuffed into a very brief segment of time.

And it worked.

They could not have been less prepared for us. I think a flash flood would have come as less of a surprise to them. There we were, blitzing their pretty plane, and there they were, standing around like morons with their rifles hanging around their necks. By the time they knew what was happening, it had already happened.

There were two guards on the plane, bearded ones, but they were even less prepared than the ones on the ground. They had holstered revolvers, and the flaps of the holsters were buttoned down, and they couldn’t un-button them because they had their seat belts fastened. I didn’t even bother with them. While they struggled with their belts I hurried forward to the pilot’s cabin. Seth and Randy took care of the guards, bopping them upon the head, Seth with a pistol butt, Randy with his stick. I slowed down long enough to knock the nurse’s head against the side of the cabin.

Captain Courageous was kneeling in the entrance-way, using the big Magnum to discourage guards from climbing in after us. I burst in upon the little pilot. I knew I couldn’t hit him. He was so profoundly insulated he never would have felt it.

“Qué pasa?” he demanded.

In rapid-fire Spanish I said, “Comrade, the imperialist police are upon us. For God’s sake close up the door! Throw the switch!”

He leaned forward, grabbed a lever, and tugged it. It stuck. He looked up at me and said, “But who are you? You are not-”

At least he had found the switch for me. I tugged it hard and it moved. I heard the steps draw up behind me, heard the flap slam shut. He was still babbling away and he didn’t shut up until I stuck the muzzle of the gun in his face, at which point he became very very quiet.

I said, “You are to fly to Havana?” He nodded. “No,” I continued, “I believe there will be a change in plans. You will not fly to Havana. You will fly to…”

To where? The States? We could have crossed the border in the helicopter, but if we landed this silver bird at a jetport, crowds would gather. And that wasn’t good. Seth and Randy would spend five years in Leavenworth and I would go on trial for kidnaping. And possession of an awful lot of heroin.

Where, then? Some other part of Canada? Hardly that. If the Canadians ever got their hands on me, there wouldn’t be enough left of me to bury. They would have to fill up the coffin with Arlette, who would certainly be sought in connection with the MNQ assault.

I turned to see the helicopter pilot enter the cabin, smiling like Ironjaw in the old comic strip. The plane was surrounded, he told me, and the guards were all pointing their rifles at us, but no one was shooting yet. The hatch was locked up tight and nobody could get in, the guards were out colder than Kelsey’s cojones, and the nurse had fainted.

I nodded, barely paying attention. Mexico? South America? There were countries down there on sufficiently bad terms with Cuba to welcome us, but I had a feeling they were also on sufficiently good terms with the U.S.A. to extradite us in nothing flat.

Europe, then. But could the plane get us that far? Maybe. And where in Europe? The nearest point, obviously. Iceland? They had one of the few European languages I didn’t trust myself in, and-

Of course.

“You will fly us directly to Shannon Airport,” I told the bug-eyed pilot. “That’s in Ireland, the west coast of Ireland.”

“But I know only to fly to Havana!”

“So you’ll learn something new. You’ll fly across the ocean-”

“It is impossible!”

I let him have another long look at the gun and told him a second time what I expected of him. He opened his mouth to say something, and a strange expression flashed briefly over his face, and then he nodded. “Sí, Señor,” he said. “Irlandia. Sí.”

A hand fastened on my arm. “I couldn’t make out all of that,” said our Eddie Rickenbacker, “but I saw the look on his face. The bloody greaseball’s going to shop us.”

I translated quickly, and he nodded. “He won’t fly to Ireland. He’ll head out over the water and put us on course for Havana and we won’t even know the difference. We’ll be in some Spic airport before the bleeding sun comes up.”

“We can watch him-”

“There’s a hundred ways he could put it to us. And I wouldn’t be quick to believe he could find Ireland if he tried. Tell him to take off his helmet.”

I translated the command. The pilot, puzzled, removed his crash helmet and set it upon his knee. He asked if I wanted him to remove the goggles as well, and I passed the question on.

“Just the helmet will do,” said the Flying Tiger. And he hefted his Magnum and dented the pilot’s skull with it. “That’s the ticket,” he said, hauling the little man out of his seat. “Direct methods are best, Mr. Tanner. Now I’ll fly the effing plane, and we’ll be in Shannon in eight hours flat.”

“You don’t know how,” I said.

“Ah, they’re all the same. Fly one and you’ve flown ’em all.”

“This is a jet. A large jet.”

“It goes up in the air like any other.”

“And comes down like snow. It’s not a helicopter.

“I’ve flown crates besides helicopters. A Piper Cub once, a Cessna-”

“This is different.”

“Bigger and faster, that’s the only distinction.”

“Can you, uh, find Ireland?”

“It’s east of here, isn’t it? We’ll go east until the ocean stops and then we’ll buzz down and look for it. It’s not such a small island we’d be likely to miss it.”

I started to say something else, but he seemed to be ignoring me. He was fiddling with different levers, playing with the control panel. I glanced at the pilot, who was in deep slumber in the aisle. It seemed we had little choice.

I said, “Look, Mr… dammit, what is your name, anyway?”

He hesitated. “James.”

“Well, Mr. James, or I guess it should be Captain James-”

“It’s my first name.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

A sigh. “James F. X. Corrigan.”

“Francis Xavier?”

“None other. Fifty percent Irish on my Dad’s side. County Cavan.”

“Well, then, you ought to… oh.” He wasn’t looking at me. “I get it,” I said. “That’s why you keep it a secret, huh? Corrigan. I bet you got tired of the jokes, didn’t you? I bet an awful lot of clowns called you Wrong-Way Corrigan-”

“No relation at all,” he said doggedly.

“Wrong-Way Corrigan,” I said, as the waves of hysteria began to build. “What else? Wrong-way Corrigan. And… and we’re heading for Ireland… and… oh, Christ, I bet we wind up in Los Angeles!”