White Cargo

18

Cat spent considerable time on his flight planning that evening. The longest nonstop flight he had ever made as pilot-in-command had been a little over a hundred miles, a solo cross-country during his flight training. Cali was south, in the western part of the country, some five hundred nautical miles from Cartagena.

He checked the range of the aircraft in the owner’s manual and satisfied himself that the wing tanks held more than sufficient fuel for the trip. Using Bluey’s charts and books, he determined that Cali was in the mountains, and all he knew about mountain flying was what he had read during his training. He satisfied himself that he could find the city, in decent weather, simply by following the Rio Cauca upstream from where it branched off the Rio Magdalena all the way to Cali, should his radio navigation equipment fail.

He calmed his nervousness about the flight with attention to detail. He had been taught all the essentials of flight planning; all he had to do was to remember it and do it right. And he was not about to fly commercial. The airlines had metal detectors, and he wanted the weapons with him more than ever.

Meg called the airport for a weather forecast. “Good,” she said. “Only scattered high clouds at twenty thousand feet en route. Cali ceiling should be unlimited. We’ll have a ten-knot tail wind. Could hardly be better.” Looking over his shoulder, she pointed to the airport guide, open to Cali. “Here, this is the company I called to find out about the Gulfstream jet. Aeroservice. It says they have fuel, engine, and airframe repairs for Piper and Cessna aircraft and Lycoming, and Continental engines. It seems to be the only service for private aircraft on the field.”

“Well, at least we have someplace to start, and a legitimate reason for being there,” he said.

They took off at nine the following morning, into sunny skies and unlimited visibility. Minutes after departing Cartagena, they picked up the Rio Magdalena, Colombia’s principal river, which divides a wide, green plain that is swampy in many places. Cat was beginning to feel quite confident as pilot-in-command. He thought Bluey would be proud of him. In less than an hour they had found where the Cauca branched off. Cat climbed to ten thousand five hundred feet in order to have plenty of altitude when the mountains presented themselves. The land rose to meet them as they approached and passed Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, and after Medellín, a railway ran alongside the Cauca and further confirmed their position. Piece of cake.

Cat had calculated a time en route of just less than four hours. They were less than an hour out of Cali when the first clouds appeared. They were in and out of them, which, technically, was illegal when flying under visual flight rules, or VFR, but Cat pressed on. He had no intention of landing at some other airport, not when Jinx might be waiting in Cali.

When they were handed off from the Center radio operator to Cali Approach, the operator said, “Call is three hundred overcast, wind two six zero at six. Expect the ILS for two seven zero.”

Cat froze. ILS was an instrument approach. He had never flown an instrument approach and knew little about how to do it. He racked his brain for what his instructor might have told him.

“Turn right to zero nine zero,” the controller said suddenly. “Vectors for the ILS.”

Cat acknowledged the transmission. The controller was going to put him onto the approach. Now he remembered. The ILS was the instrument landing system, the one where you used two needles, one vertical and one horizontal, to stay on the approach. He tried to be calm. The autopilot was keeping the airplane straight and level in the cloud. He was all right for the moment, but he needed a radio frequency. He turned to Meg, trying to stay as calm as possible. “Say, look in that airport directory, will you, and give me the frequency for the ILS.”

Meg consulted the book. “It’s one, one, zero, point one.”

“Descend to seven thousand feet,” the controller said.

Cat started a descent with the autopilot, fighting panic. He dialed in the frequency for the ILS. As he did so he watched the instrument before him. The vertical needle swung sharply to the right, and the horizontal needle rose to the top of the dial.

“Turn right to two four zero degrees and intercept the ILS,” the controller said.

Cat quickly turned the autopilot control to the correct heading and watched as the airplane turned itself and the vertical needle, which represented the centerline of the runway, moved closer and closer to the center of the dial. He had to do something, abort this approach, land somewhere else. He wasn’t qualified to fly this airplane down to three hundred feet in cloud. He would kill them both. He was about to call the tower and abort when he noticed a button on the autopilot that read “APPR.” It was worth a try. He pushed the button. Immediately, the airplane turned left and the vertical needle centered. They were on the runway centerline, and the autopilot was still flying the airplane.

“Outer marker in two miles,” the controller said.

What the hell was the outer marker? Cat, frozen, watched the horizontal needle, the glide slope, move down toward the center of the needle. Suddenly an alarm went off, and a light flashed on the instrument panel. The airplane started to descend again, and both needles were centered. The outer marker must have been where the glide slope began.

Cat had just breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed that something was wrong. The airspeed had crept into the yellow arc on the dial and was headed for the red. Quickly, he eased the throttle back, and the airspeed returned to the green arc. He put in ten degrees of flaps, and the airplane slowed further. The needles were still centered. The autopilot would fly the approach, but it couldn’t control the throttle.

Suddenly, they were out of the cloud, and the runway centerline was a mile dead ahead of them. Gratefully, shakily, Cat reduced speed further and came to twenty degrees of flaps. He switched off the autopilot and began flying the airplane himself. A moment later, they were on the ground.

“Hey, that was a pretty slick approach,” Meg said.

“Thanks,” Cat managed to reply, between deep breaths. His shirt was wet under the bush jacket. He had just done something very stupid; he had, with no experience at all, risked their lives on a complex procedure. He vowed he would never do anything in an airplane again until he had been thoroughly trained to do it.

As the airplane rolled down the runway, he saw a hangar with the name “Aeroservice” painted on it. He turned off the runway at the next taxiway and headed toward it. As he approached the hangar, a lineman ran out and directed him to a parking spot. Cat cut the engine and looked up. Ahead of them and to their right, he could see inside the hangar. He tensed.

“Look,” he said, nodding at the airplane parked inside.

“Is it a Gulfstream?” Meg asked.

“Yes. I’ve seen a couple of them at the airport I fly out of in Atlanta. It’s the biggest private jet available.”

They climbed down from the airplane and unloaded their luggage. Cat asked the lineman for the office, and the man pointed to a glassed-in room inside the hangar. They walked slowly past the big jet, and Cat noted the tail number. It began with an N; that meant it was American registered. On the tail was a much larger version of the drawing of the snake in the tree on the matchbook in his pocket.

He made arrangements for tie-down and fuel with the young man at the desk, who seemed very friendly. “Say,” he said to the man, “isn’t that a Gulfstream out there?”

“Yes, señor. It is beautiful, no?”

“Yes indeed. I’ve never seen one up close. Who owns it?”

“A local business here in Cali.”

“But it has an American registration number.”

“Ah, yes. The company headquarters is in the States, you see.”

“I wonder if we could have a look inside her? I’ve never been aboard one before.”

The young man was shaking his head, but he stopped when he saw the hundred-dollar bill Cat was pushing toward him on the desk. “Just a moment, señor.” He left the office and had a careful look outside the hangar, then returned. “You may go aboard her for just a moment, señor,” he said. He led the way out of the office and toward the airplane. The door, incorporating a boarding ladder, was open.

Showing Meg ahead of him, Cat climbed aboard the jet, followed by the young man. They found themselves in a large cabin decorated in black leather and rosewood. The carpet was thick under their feet.

“See if you can occupy this guy back here for a moment,” he whispered to Meg.

She nodded. “Is this the bar?” she asked, pointing to some cupboards.

“Yes, señora.” The young man opened the doors to display a collection of liquor bottles.

“And where is the galley?” she asked.

“Back here, señora,” he said, leading the way.

Cat walked quickly through the airplane to the cockpit, which was a maze of dials and instruments. Breathing hard, he searched for something he knew must be there. A.R.R.O.W., he told himself. Airworthiness certificate, radio license, registration, Operator’s handbook, and weight and balance restrictions — the documents that had to be aboard every aircraft.

He found them in a plastic envelope fixed to a bulkhead and quickly went through them.

“Señor!” The voice was sharp behind him.

He slipped the documents back into their envelope and turned around.

The young man was irate. “You must not tamper with the cockpit!”

“I just wanted to see what it was like up front,” Cat smiled. “Gosh, there sure is a lot of equipment, isn’t there?”

The young man relaxed a bit. “Yes, I suppose so. We must leave the airplane now. Someone might come, and I would get into trouble.” He led them back down the boarding ladder.

“I’ve seen this symbol before,” Cat said, pointing to the tail.

“Yes, señor, the Anaconda Company. It is very big in Cali.”

“What business is it in?”

The young man shrugged. “Who knows? Whatever it wants to be in, I think. They own Aeroservice; they own me, you could say. Would you like a taxi?”

“Yes, thank you. What’s a good hotel?”

“The Inter-Continental is good. Shall I ring for you?”

“Yes, please, a suite, if they have it. The name is Ellis.”

He went to telephone.

“The airplane is registered to an outfit in Los Angeles, Empire Holdings,” he said to Meg. “Did you see anything else in the airplane that might be helpful?”

“Nope. Whoever owns it likes the best of everything, though. Do you want to show this guy the picture of Jinx?”

Cat shook his head. “I think we’re a little too close to the center of things here to start flashing a photograph around. If he has seen her, he might mention us to someone, and we don’t want to attract that sort of attention. Anyway, it seems pretty certain that she came to Cali on this airplane, from what Rodriguez and the flight plan told us. Maybe she’s still here.”

The young man returned. “Your suite is booked, and your taxi will be here shortly.”

Cali seemed a large and prosperous city, and the Inter-Continental was large, modern, and comfortable. The suite had a terrace overlooking a large swimming pool, and Cat began to itch for some laps.

“Listen,” Meg said, reading him easily, “I want to go to the local newspaper’s office and see what I can find out about the Anaconda Company. If they’re as big as they seem to be, there’ll be something in the business pages about them. Why don’t you go for a swim?”

“Okay, how long will you be?”

“A couple of hours, maybe.”

She left, and Cat started to undress, then changed his mind. He felt restless, being in the city where Jinx might be; it didn’t seem the right time for a swim. He called the concierge. “Can you find me a taxi driver who speaks English? I’d like to take a tour of the city.”

“Of course, señor. You may leave whenever you wish. The doorman will find you the right man.”

When Cat came downstairs, a man approached him. “You Mr. Ellis, who wanted an English-speaking driver?” He didn’t sound Colombian; he sounded like a New Yorker.

“That’s right.”

“My name’s Bill. I’m your man.”

They got into the cab and drove away from the hotel.

“Anything in particular you want to see?” Bill asked.

“Nope. This is my first time here. Whatever you want to show me. Are you Colombian?”

“Yeah, I was born here, but I lived in New York for a long time. Pushed a hack there.”

“What brought you back?”

“Well, I saved some money, and it goes a lot farther here than it did in New York. Now I own my own cab, and I live pretty good. Say, why don’t we start at the top of the city and work down, okay?”

“Okay, whatever you like.”

Bill pushed the taxicab higher and higher into the hills until he came to a large statue of a man looking out over the city. Both men got out of the car.

“This is the statue of Belalcázar, the guy who founded the city,” Bill explained. “He was a Spanish grandee.”

Cat took in the panorama, then his eye came to rest on a modern office tower. At the top was the Anaconda symbol. “Bill, what’s that building? Something to do with the Anaconda Company?”

“Yeah, that’s their headquarters.”

“What business is the company in?”

“Agriculture I think. I don’t know much about it, really. Tell you what, though, there’s a good restaurant at the top of the building. Terrific view of the city at night.”

“Are there a lot of drugs in Cali, Bill?”

“There’s a lot of drugs everywhere in Colombia. Listen, if that’s what you’re interested in, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’ll get you another driver if you want.”

“No, I’m not interested in buying drugs. Just in what goes on in Cali. I’d heard drugs were big here.”

“Come on,” Bill said, “I’ll show you something.”

He drove the cab a few blocks fom the statue, but not much downhill, then stopped. “The rumor is, the biggest drug dealer in Colombia lives right there,” he said, pointing.

Cat looked down onto the house, a hundred and fifty yards below them. He couldn’t see much except a lot of roof and trees and the corner of a tennis court. The place seemed to be contained in a walled compound that covered two or three acres. As he watched, a woman with a ponytail in tennis whites chased a ball to the edge of the court, then ran back to the part blocked by the trees. Just for a moment, Cat hoped, but the woman was shorter and stockier than Jinx. Quite masculine in the way she ran. He watched for a couple of minutes, but he could see no other human being. A street seemed to run completely around the house. It sat on a sort of island in a neighborhood of other large houses.

“Bill, drive me around the house, slowly, will you?”

“Sure thing,” Bill said, and put the car in gear.

As the taxi slowly circled the house, Cat rolled down the window and got a good look. It was built considerably above street level, a wall rising up from the streets to be topped by wrought-iron fencing all the way round. There were two gates, and large men in dark suits manned each of them. At one point a large Alsatian dog came to the fence near a gate and snarled loudly at the cab. The houses surrounding the compound all had iron gates, but he saw no guards or dogs at those.

“Looks like a regular fortress,” Cat said. “Let’s go around again.”

Bill shook his head. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. A friend of mine, another cab driver, got interested in it once, and they took his number. The cops called on him and gave him a hard time.”

“Local pull, huh?”

“You know it. You got the kind of money those guys got, you can buy just about anybody you want in this city.”

“You know the name of the guy who owns the house?”

“Nope, and it’s not the sort of thing I’d like to ask too many questions about. I need to stop for some gas. You mind?”

“Go ahead.”

Bill pulled into a service station a few blocks down the hill from the big house. As he stopped at the pumps, a large man got into a black Cadillac stretch limousine and drove away.

“Are there a lot of those in Cali?” Cat asked.

“Oh, yeah, a lot of Caddies; Rollses, too, but that’s something new, the first stretch job in town. That belongs to the house up the hill.”

Quickly, Cat memorized the tag number of the limousine and wrote it down in his pocket notebook, next to the tail number of the Gulfstream jet. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to the rest of the tour — the stadium where the Pan-American games were held during the early seventies, the cathedral, the shopping district.

When he got back to the hotel, Meg was sunning herself on the terrace of their suite. “You’re back early. Any luck?” he asked her.

“Yeah, they let me into their library, and I talked with the guy on the business desk, too. The Anaconda Company came to Colombia about four years ago and started buying up agribusinesses. They’ve got half a dozen offices around the country. In Cali, they’re big in sugar; in Medellín, they’re into coffee; other places, they’ve got holdings in cattle, bananas and flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Big Colombian export to the States.”

“Who owns the company?”

“This guy I talked to looked into it once. There’s no one big name on the corporate roster. Each office has its own manager. Whenever he asked too many questions of the company P.R. guy, he got a runaround. They’ve become a local power in Cali very quickly. Sugar is the big crop here, and they’ve bought a lot of holdings. Been pretty ruthless about it, too. They’re well plugged in with the local politicos, and the guy’s boss at the paper won’t have a bad word written about them.”

“Well, I find it hard to believe that the local manager has a Gulfstream at his disposal. Only a chief executive officer rates that kind of transportation. Maybe the big man is in town at the moment.”

He told her about his tour of the city and about the house and limousine he’d seen. “Anaconda has a big office building here, too. The cab driver says there’s a good restaurant on top of it. Why don’t we try it tonight?”

“Sounds good to me.”

He called the concierge and asked him to make reservations.

Bill drove them to the Anaconda building and agreed to pick them up in a couple of hours. There were four elevators in the marble lobby, but three of them were roped off, and a sign indicated the fourth was to be used to reach Le Caprice, as the restaurant was called. At the top of the building they entered a plush vestibule and walked to an equally plush dining room. They were shown to a small table by a large window and given menus. Cat ordered drinks for them and turned his attention to the view. Cali was spread out beneath them, a carpet of lights, and above them, the Belalcázar statue, spotlighted, gazed down. The menu was in French, and there seemed to be few Colombian favorites among the dishes. The wine list was outstanding, Cat thought, if extremely expensive. Most of the wines were French, and he ordered a good claret with their dinner.

They were on their first course when a large party entered the restaurant and were shown to a huge round table in a nearby corner. Cat counted twelve, and two of them were Anglo-looking women, elegantly dressed. The men seemed a mixture of Anglo and Latino, and all wore sober business suits. One of them interested Cat more than the others. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, and, in spite of his conservative suit, his hair was long, worn in a ponytail.

Cat nodded toward the table. “I have the oddest feeling that the man with the ponytail is the woman I saw playing tennis at the drug dealer’s house this afternoon.”

“Are you sure?” Meg asked.

“No, but I remember she ran in a masculine way. I think the hairdo may have clouded my judgment.”

Cat glanced frequently at the table. No menus were offered, but food and wine appeared as if the host had ordered everything in advance. As Cat and Meg were finishing, and as waiters were clearing away the dishes from the first course at the large table, the man with the ponytail rose and walked in the direction of the men’s room. Cat got up and followed him for a better look.

The man was smaller than Cat, and his pin-striped suit was closely cut, with double vents, a full skirt, and pinched at the waist. Cat had been buying clothes in London long enough to know a Savile Row suit when he saw one. He was about to follow the man into the rest room, when another, larger man stepped in front of him and said something in Spanish.

Cat shrugged. “I just want the men’s room,” he said.

“One moment, please,” the man said in heavily accented English.

Cat waited a couple of minutes, then the ponytailed man came out and walked past him back to his table, without so much as a glance at Cat. The larger man indicated that Cat could now enter the men’s room. He did so, etching into his mind the memory of the ponytailed man. He was small, five-seven or so, well-built, athletic-looking, fair skin, light brown hair, an intelligent face, with a wide, vaguely cruel mouth. Cat had never seen him before, but he would never forget him, he was sure of that.

Back at the table, Cat lingered over coffee and dessert, trying vainly to pick up snatches of conversation from the larger table. At one point the two women went to the ladies’ room and the bodyguard, who had been hovering nearby, followed them there and back.

Cat and Meg finished their dinner and left the restaurant. As they came out of the building, Cat saw the stretch Cadillac limousine waiting at the curb, and a few yards away, Bill’s taxi.

“Bill,” Cat said, as they got into the cab, “drive around the block and park where we can see the building entrance.” Bill did as he was told.

“What are you going to do?” Meg asked.

“I’m not really sure,” Cat answered. “I just want to see where they go. As he spoke two other, shorter, limousines drove up and parked at the building’s entrance. A few minutes later the party of twelve came down from the restaurant and spent a moment saying goodbyes out front. Two men got out of either side of the stretch limousine and waited as the ponytailed man got into the back seat. The others entered the smaller cars, and all three drove away in tandem.

“Bill, follow them at a discreet distance. If they split up, follow the big car.”

“Mister, you been seeing too many movies,” Bill said, but he followed his instructions.

After a few blocks, the big car turned left, while the other two continued. Bill obediently turned after it. It soon became obvious that they were headed toward the airport. The short road to the Aeroservice hangar turned off the main airport road and was darker.

“Turn off your lights and stop here,” Cat said as they came to the turnoff.

They could see the limousine as it continued toward the hangar. The big Gulfstream was sitting on the apron outside the hangar with its engines running. They could hear the noise over the two hundred yards of distance between them and the airplane. As they watched the two men in the front seat of the car jumped out and opened the rear doors, then two people got out of the car and boarded the airplane. Immediately, the door closed, and the jet started to move, its landing lights flashing over the taxi as the jet turned onto the main runway. A moment later the craft was airborne.

“Drive to the hangar,” Cat said, his voice tense.

When the cab pulled up, Cat got out and motioned for Meg to remain in the car. His heart thumping, he went to the office in the hangar and found the same young man who had showed them the jet that afternoon.

“Hi,” he said, “I just want to get something out of my airplane.”

“Of course, señor,” the young man said.

“I see the Gulfstream is gone,” Cat said. “Was that it I saw taking off as I drove up?”

“Yes, señor. She is off to Bogotá,” he replied. “She will be the last plane to take off tonight. Takeoffs are prohibited after midnight. Noise abatement.”

Cat made a show of unlocking the Cessna and rummaging inside it for a moment, then he went back to the cab.

“Bogotá,” he said to Meg. “We can’t take off until morning.”

“Right,” she said. “Cat, do you remember when the group came out of the office building and then got into their cars?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I thought the man with the ponytail got into the stretch limo alone. But at the airport, two people got out of the back seat.”

“I know,” Cat said. “One of them was a woman.”