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!”